B007RT1UH4 EBOK (83 page)

WG

‘unpublished introduction’: this was published first in Koenig’s dissertation (pp. 156–57), and then as an appendix to my
A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s
The Recognitions (University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 298–99.

Edgar Saltus: author of
The Anatomy of Negation
(1886), a sardonic survey of atheism.

Lang [...] Summers: see
Reader’s Guide
for WG’s use of the works by Lang, de Rougemont, and Summers.

Science & Health
: by Mary Baker Eddy, 1875; the standard book on Christian Science.

Mansfield quote: from a review of a novel by E. V. Lucas, rpt. in Mansfield’s posthumous
Novels and Novelists
, ed. J. Middleton Murray (Constable & Co., 1930).

The Peanut Vendor: a song Otto hears in part 3, chapter 1 of
R.

Whately: Archbishop Richard Whately (1787–1863) published the handbook
Christian Evidences
in 1837, but it does not include the anecdote recounted on p. 764 of
R.

Geo Humphrey [...] Freeport Sulfur: in 1957, Humphrey was involved in a multimillion-dollar contract for Freeport Sulphur, a large copper producer, to buy nickel and cobalt from Cuba, which came under investigation by the Justice Department.

Union Minière: a Belgian mining company, which in 1961 (according to Wikipedia) “supported the secession of the province of Katanga from the Congo and the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister after Belgian colonial rule. Upon the province’s secession, the Union transferred 1.25 billion Belgian francs (35 million USD) into Moïse Tshombe’s bank account, an advance on 1960 taxes which should in fact have been paid to Lumumba’s government. On December 31, 1966, the Congolese government, under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, took over the possessions and activities of the [Union Minière], transforming it into Gécamines (Société générale des Carrières et des Mines), a state-owned mining company.”

To John W. Aldridge

[
Typed on mock stationery from “The JR Family Of Companies,” under which WG typed “(Now in Receivership).” Aldridge had written to thank WG for his letter of 15 December 1975, all the more surprising given WG’s reputation for being “elusive,” and to suggest getting together in New York later that spring. As WG notes, reviewers outside New York found
J R
more accessible than their big-city counterparts did.
]

Piermont NY 10968

28 January 1976

Dear John Aldridge.

Thanks for your note. I wish I could say that by spring we would expect to be in Athens, or Venice, even Key West—but as things stand that looks hardly likely so by all means if you wish, let me know here in Piermont if you are in the NY neighborhood. It’s not terribly far and I’d be happy to come in for a drink.

I’ve got tagged elusive I guess by generally trying to avoid what I’ve felt to be rather egregious forces constantly ready to put the man in the place of his work—self defeating perhaps, I don’t know. Like the notion that
J R
is generally accessible, till assured otherwise by the New Yorker; Cleveland, Kansas City, Chattanooga yes even Grand Rapids to the contrary notwithstanding. Was it Gertrude Lawrence? who said —What we lose on the swings, we make up on the roundabouts.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

Gertrude Lawrence: English actress and musical-comedy star (1898–1952). The quotation is a British fairground metaphor.

To Sarah Gaddis

Piermont

30 January 1976

Dear Sarah,

Thanks for your and Peter’s letter, mainly for all its vitality and cheer in this post-publication limbo. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, but whatever it was hasn’t. Simply gleaning late reviews: ‘Joyous’ says Chattanooga Tennessee, ‘Millionaires in the Sky’ says St Louis . . . ‘unreadable’ says my old favourite
New Yorker
and goes on along those lines in the most gratuitously vicious way (what did I ever do to them?). Glad to know there are 2 copies of
J R
contaminating Ireland (I sent one to Marc Brandel), at any rate.

Not the highest spirits right now, in great part certainly because yesterday another funeral —you remember us talking about Tony Harwood, old friend and classmate and a real exotic married to the 70-or-so year old Princess Mdvani of Russia’s Tsarist days, we were to go in and have dinner with them this evening & instead went to his funeral yesterday. What’s absurd of course is how selfishly one takes these things, feel that someone so really rare and odd and kind and devoted to Judith and me has simply been stolen from us (heart attack talking on the phone & probably never really knew what was happening to him); and equally absurd to be surprised, such things do happen every day after all, why are we always so startled? And a certain envy creeps in for the Catholic Latin nations like Spain where death is a part of life; here the reaction is, Dead? but he can’t be. We were to have dinner Thursday . . .

I don’t mean to dwell on it, on the other hand it is something that we in America tend to exclude from our thoughts & so are inevitably unprepared when it occurs close to us, all bouncing along as though we were immortal. Yesterday Matthew’s 18th birthday and certainly not the way I’d expected to spend it (you see? selfish again . . .) So at any rate with these things in my mind I take down Plato’s
Crito
, which is the dialogue describing Socrates going to his death, and there folded in the book is a yellow page with this message covering it:

DEAR FAIRY I CANNOT FIND MY TOOTH IT CAME OUT FROM THE LOWER ROW TODAY I SHALL NOT EXPECT ANOTHER DIME LOVE SARAH

All which I suppose goes back to Wilder’s message about living ‘every every minute’ and all the joy of your and Matthew’s lives have given me since that is what you are both doing. Better I think sometimes than I am. Though perhaps my age is a time one pauses and tries to sort things out, thinks suddenly good Lord! When Mozart was my age he’d been dead for seventeen years!

The point of all this rambling to you being a kind of gratitude I guess for the affirmation in your life, in your and Peter’s lives and Matthew’s —even though sometimes I get impatient and uncertain about its direction, their directions, damndest thing is people saying I’m negative whereas it’s these affirmations of life amidst its appalling uncertainties and setbacks that I most admire.

End of next week I’m going up to Cambridge for this rowdy
Lampoon
affair (complete with fireworks they promise (also ‘Torchlight Processions, and other Delights too humorous to mention’) . . . then I may spend a night with Barney Emmart up at Salem & return Monday to see Matthew and try to get some notion of his next step —and he being now 18 it may be a large one. He has talked about France but as I recall in terms of growing vegetables there and I hope to be able to bring up some other possibilities —though I’ve got to say at this point in life I look around and think perhaps one nice eggplant is worth four of Plato’s dialogues after all. [...]

love and best wishes to you both.

Papa

New Yorker
: George Steiner’s review appeared in the 26 January issue, pp. 106–9.

Marc Brandel: British-born novelist, journalist, and screenplay-writer (1919–94).

Tony Harwood: after Harvard, Anthony Harwood became secretary to Dennis Conan Doyle (son of Sherlock Holmes’s creator), then married to Nina Mdivani (?–1987), a Georgian princess who had fled to Paris in 1917 after the Russian Revolution. After Doyle’s death in 1955, Her Highness married Harwood.

To Benjamin Reeve

[
A student at Princeton who later submitted a thesis entitled “The World of Imagination and the Imagination of the World
”
for his B.A.
]

Piermont NY

23 February 1976

Dear Benjamin Reeve.

Your thesis relating
J R
to
Don Quixote
sounds sufficiently unique that I would certainly hesitate to intrude on it (I’m not being facetious). I doubt there is more to JR himself than appears in the book but even were this not so, and I could tell you more about him, or on the other hand explain who and what I meant him to be, I should feel I’d pretty much failed my attempt to give him the only existence he has claim to, which is to say as he emerges from the book itself. And that must go for the rest of the book’s characters too, even with the writer’s wishes notwithstanding. Gibbs for instance I’d meant not as a failed writer, but as a man who might have been capable of almost anything if he’d found it worth doing but ends finding it too late even to be any of the things he’d never wanted to be, returns to writing as last resort and fails even at that; but reviewers have by and large found him a failed writer. So while few lines have haunted me longer than Eliot’s —That is not what I meant at all . . . I can’t see a writer following his books around trying to say what he did mean, if the book failed to convey it. And further, if
J R
has the dimensions I would hope, it may well be open to approaches quite different to those originally envisioned, as yours would certainly seem to indicate.