B007RT1UH4 EBOK (87 page)

good luck with it

W. Gaddis

Joan Didion: American journalist and novelist (1934– ); WG often assigned his students her
Play It as It Lays
(1970) in his creative writing classes.

our group: Large remembered the group as including Dan Haas, Shari Nussbaum, Joshua Greyson, and Mary Caponegro. Only the last went on to achieve any critical acclaim as a writer.

To Rust Hills and Joy Williams

[
For Hills, see 15 February 1961. His wife Joy Williams (1944– ) is the author of
State of Grace
(1973), a novel WG greatly admired, and other books of fiction. The following is a “memo” typed on stationery from “The JR Family Of Companies.”
]

28 June 1977

TO:     Rust Hills

Joy Williams

Management wishes to express its profound thanks for your many successful efforts to feed, comfort, entertain, blandish, and otherwise distract our recent representative at your conference.

This is doubly appreciated in light of the fact that we do not let him out often in his present somewht unstable condition for fear he may embarrass both the corporate image and his hosts, to say nothing of himself or anyone within reach. From press accounts recently received at our office here we are grateful that this occurred only to a limited degree and the kind but firm restraint you appear to have exercised to that end is appreciated accordingly.

Finally, we are of course exceedingly pleased at the circulation given our Product insofar as this may influence sales which, as you are aware, is our only reason for remaining in business.

For the Management, cordially

Willie

and kindest personal regards from Mister Gaddis.

To Joy William and Rust Hills

Piermont

7 July 1977

Dear Joy & Rust,

Thanks for your good letters. Of course I would love to come up to Stonington. At the moment I am girding my loins to face a Univ. of Rochester version of the Sarasota meeting, up this Sunday the 10th & back the following Saturday, I did it last year & it’s considerably more frenetic than the Florida version, under direction of a madman named LJ Davis; but it won’t have Gass, won’t have yourselves, won’t have a Karen. I think it is rotten you didn’t bring her back up with you. Why didn’t I rent your cottage down there?

Yes I was sent the press assaults from Tampa, never been treated so artily as that cover item but why am I always the Best Unknown Writer in America? As for that woman in
St P Times
. . . !

Honeyed rum voice indeed!

I’ve just got back from an R&R weekend out at Sag Harbor, many friends out there (not including the Easthampton contingent) & wish I’d bought a house there 12 years ago when I visited in a similar abandoned state, still a temptation if I can figure out what to do with this white elephant on Fire Isld, haven’t even been able to rent it for August & don’t especially want to spend August there myself just to get my taxes’ worth, this going back & forth between empty houses is conducive to nothing but drink & still no word at all on the future being planned or more likely unplanned for me & God knows what August will bring.

At any rate I’ll be in touch with you when I get back from Rochester & as I say greatly look forward to the visit you suggest, & really again thank you both so much for all in connection with the Sarasota episode, I’m glad it worked out as well for everyone else as it did for me, really helped.

best regards

Willie

LJ Davis: American novelist (1940–2011), then director of the writing seminar at the University of Rochester.

To Sarah Gaddis

Piermont

8 August 1977

Dear Sarah,

I immensely appreciated your long letter—and the ‘day off’ time you took to write it—even though it’s taking me this long to respond. And for your solicitous concern for me & Judith & all your generous suggestions of help. She stopped over here last week & I read what you’d said & it all did reach her, as it did me, but I think also simply through its generosity helped drive home to each of us a rather opposite point, which is at this point not only you can’t help us, & she & I can’t really help each other—patching things up after a domestic ‘spat’—until she & I separately get clearer grasps of who we want to be & what we want to do with what time we’ve got left in this world besides eat drink grow older & lean on each other.

So while I can hardly say that I’m that pleased by what she’s done, in a sense she had good reason to call a halt to things as they were going day to day & much of it the cumulative result of the position I took a long time ago when I got out of the 9–5 job circuit. In this, it’s got to do with what sociologist David Reisman labeled as ‘inner-directed’ vs. ‘outer-directed’ people, & very much what
J R
is all about: JR is the outer-directed, takes unquestioningly as his own goals all those material ones he sees others around him striving for as ‘what you’re supposed to do’. Whereas Bast, as the incipient artist, is trying to develop the inner-directed capacity of the artist against all the odds it holds: doubts & lack of confidence in one’s talents (that what one is doing is really ‘worth doing’), worldly pressures of money, ‘success’ &c. And Gibbs, the book’s ‘failure’, is the man destroyed by the conflict between these forces.

Well, there’s my morning lecture. I only got off into it because a lot of the present problem here I think has got to do with the peril in that inner-directed course when it suddenly seems to lack direction, & (certainly from the experience of other writers) not that unusual when one has finally finished a long inner-directed project. Probably obviously, the only thing approaching a solution to this dilemma is some intelligent mixture of the 2 approaches, which is why there was a certain satisfaction in doing the Kodak speeches but there seems to be very little such work around these days. At any rate with Judith or without that’s the one I’ve got to solve again—because (unless one is Mozartian genius) it’s never solved once for all. (As Auden said: True wars are never won.) [...]

meanwhile thanks you know, and much love always

Papa

David Reisman: (1909–2002); Riesman’s classic study
The Lonely Crowd
(1950), which discusses these concepts, was on WG’s “Failure” reading list some semesters at Bard. The syllabus for one semester of this course was published in
Review of Contemporary Fiction
31.1 (Spring 2011): 116–17.

Auden [...] never won: actually, the concluding line of poem 30 in e. e. cummings’s
1 x 1
(1944). A decade later WG contemplated using this line as the title of his fourth novel.

To Cynthia Buchanan

[
American novelist and screenplay writer (1942– ). Her quirky novel
Maiden
appeared in 1972 (William Morrow); her right arm was cropped from the author’s photo on the back cover, hence WG’s final sentence.
]

Piermont, NY 10968

17 August 1977

dear Cyndy,

thanks for sending the copy of
Maiden
, Sherry had already recommended it & it was on my reading list. By all means give my name to the Guggenheim people, I don’t know the politics there & only wish I could feel that my word would do that much good since your credentials certainly appear to be all they could ask—though I find it hard to believe you don’t know lots of writers of ‘serious fiction’.