B007RT1UH4 EBOK (80 page)

like living with an invalid: see p. 603 of
J R
, where Gibbs compares sixteen years’ work on his manuscript to “living with a God damned invalid.”

like the good book says: John 5:8. Cf.
J R
603.

JFDulles (not to speak of Allen): John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State; his brother Allen was the head of CIA during the Eisenhower era.

bastard we have now: Richard Nixon; less than two weeks later, he resigned and was succeeded by Gerald Ford.

To Matthew Gaddis

Piermont

8 August [1974]

Dear Matthew ————here I am fighting Sarah’s electric machine, mine stopped abruptly with a strange whirring sound in the middle of a page and I am still not used to this one, touch a key and zing you’re typing, even when you don’t mean to be. And the sound of its engine running while one tries to think of the next word is a little nervewracking too. So I am being dragged by the heels into the 20th century . . . [...]

You can imagine I’m pretty sick of JR but spend every day with him and his friends and otherwise, the main comfort being that after this I’ll NEVER (except for galleys) HAVE TO READ THE INFERNAL BOOK AGAIN! Boy I can’t wait hey. Also maybe I can learn how to talk like an intelligent adult again.

But you can see that all this above pales before the attached letter and imagine Sarah is very proud as she’s certainly the right to be; and I was finally given the chance to read the story and think it is certainly good, very touching without taking advantage of any sentimentality and holds together so well and of course I’m very proud of her doing the whole thing on her own, as I am of you now the way you’re holding things together and most eager all of us to see you and have all your news. And views.

And much love of course

Papa

attached letter: from
Seventeen
informing Sarah she had won honorable mention in its short story contest for her piece “A Taffeta Dress,” along with a check for $50.00.

To David Markson

1206 Duncan Street

Key West, Florida 33040

24 Feb 1975

Dear David.

What ‘
PW
item about the book’! I didn’t see it, perhaps because I finally handed in page last to Knopf and fled forthwith pale, drained, and doubled with a cough—you may see to where, a place that’s been on Judith’s mind for 4 years (with my constant ‘not this year but I’m
almost
finished, certainly next . . .’) finally made it and now we both have real colour, get up in the am. without the daily tension of
years
of the God damned typewriter waiting like a terminal invalid in the next room for attention, don’t jump when the ’phone rings (since it’s almost always for Western Union whose number is 1 digit off ours—I didn’t even know people called WU anymore, am going to start to take messages).

At any rate of course you’re right, it is a vast weight removed, and not simply the book but at last being able to tell you and other kind wellwishers yes! when they ask that question . . . (though of course there’s a few things I’d like to squeeze in on galleys). That’s what I’m half doing here, mainly cosmetics to have ready when galleys appear so I can resist the obvious temptation to rewrite it from the beginning (“That is not what I meant at all . . .”). I assume galleys occur sometime in spring (speaking of the cruelest month) and we expect to be back sometime about then for a Fresh Start. Meanwhile thanks for your note and honestly your wellwishing throughout (curiously I had a charming letter in the same mail today from a lady in Venice thanking me ‘very much for writing
The Recognitions
’ —pried it loose from a friend of her son’s who’s 22 which is even more gratifying).

See you then?

best wishes to Elaine too from us both,

W.G.

PW
item: in the 10 February 1975 issue of
Publishers Weekly
(39) there was a short item noting that WG had delivered the manuscript of
J R
to Knopf and that it was scheduled for fall publication.

To Judith Gaddis

Piermont, NY

[6 April 1975]

Dear Judith,

I wish I could be as articulate as you even in your brief letter for simply getting things said in terms of the kind of love and remorseful sympathetic understanding and helplessness I feel for you or think I do, the thought of you desolate and despairing is just very painful. But I can at least say you must not add to it with fears of hurting or losing me or destroying what we have—I’m not pressing and in no hurry for anything except you mended for yourself and I would hope me mended a little for myself and all of you too. And you surely didn’t ‘send me home alone’, I was hell bent on it with the kind of pressures I get built up, I wish I were the kind of person who’d simply been able to say Let’s just go over to Santabel and hunt shells for a day or two, but of course if I’d been that sort of person all along it wouldn’t have mounted up so.

Looking back, what finally did strike me heavily was this sense of really how little you’ve asked and how much you’ve given over these whole 10 years: planning a detailed trip to Europe or Mexico and then saying it’s as good as having taken it when it doesn’t work out, but of course gradually it’s got to seep in that it may never—and then when something as small by comparison as Key West is as important to you as it was and I’m finally aware that apparently I couldn’t even really let you have that, all the while thinking that I did—well, you say I take your problems and turn them into my own but this does seem to be one of my problems and I hope I’ve learned something. (I have to add here though that I do have very fond memories of us in Key West, of all the rooms in that house and quiet drinks we had and cycling down for the paper, the postoffice, Anderson staring glazed over the hybiscus and twenty years of his life that have just gone by.) [...]

I’ve wondered if perhaps, with all our uncompleted projects, we’re both spoiled in an odd way. I’ve wondered how much your reading
J R
, after these years of it dwelling in the back room there suddenly exposing itself and myself, has had to do with dormant problems abruptly stepping forth. I’ve wondered at the success of these stage and screen revivals of Ibsen’s
Doll’s House
written something like 75 years ago to lie around in college drama courses all that time now suddenly right on. I certainly look at Thorvald with a painful twinge of recognition. [...]

And in the outside world—well, I’ll already have spoken to you of my obvious disappointment, to put it mildly, over this English offer of £750 for
J R
, I mean Christ that’s less than
Harper’s
is paying for 30 pages of it! Candida professes to be undiscouraged and does make the point, which I knew, that English publishing is having a very hard time, but she is pressing forward. I spent a Mafiaesque afternoon with her yesterday and all I can say is wait and pray: she is just going to have no nonsense with this book (insofar I suppose as the economy will allow). I’d been over to see Bob Gottlieb whom I do like a lot but he is really skittish as hell for New York’s (US’s) most prominent and successful publisher—I mean you think
I
have doubts and abrupt negative glimpses, well . . . his of course are clothed in a certain excitement which must make them more attractive than my weary insights, so {***} you see? Life is not all bad. But there is an excitement there at Knopf about the book and I stood Janet Halverson’s jacket up against a book on his wall of them and it really knocks them all out, much more impressive with the colours than the xerox I sent you just to give you an idea. I’d said (as with
The Recognitions
) I felt that black red and white in hard colours has the most class and weight, so Janet (just as with
The Recognitions
) gave me black red and white and added gold, and I mean gold not yellow. I hope you will like it.

I just talked with Lewis Lapham on the ’phone, they’re not simply putting my name on the cover they’re making it the cover illustration, sawing back and forth whether it’s to be the corporate tenement or Rhoda in the Bath with a Rembrandt painting to illustrate, he wanted a larger or perhaps more precise title than I’d given and now has 6 or 8 to choose from and for background (‘what the book’s “about”’) I told him to talk to Knopf where they’re now writing the jacket copy and can be more objective (saleswise that is to say) than I: now what more could a publisher want in the way of propaganda! [...] I do want very much I think starting tomorrow morning to start on changes I want to make in the book’s last 20 pages which I’d like to have done when the proofs come through so as not to drive everyone (you) else (myself) up the wall of “William’s writing . . .” in May. [...]

Judith I just love you, I know not entirely satisfactorily but at the least where I can’t back your fantasies I will try and even more your realities even not understanding them but knowing they are real, I love you undiminished and that’s the un-understood reality of mine.

W.

Santabel: i.e., Sanibel Island, off the coast of southwest Florida.

Anderson: Bob Anderson, retired New York City lighting director then living in Key West.

revivals of Ibsen’s
Doll’s House
[...] Thorvald: the women’s liberation movement inspired stage revivals and two films in 1973 based on Ibsen’s 1879 drama. Thorvald is the husband of the play’s heroine, Nora Helmer.