B007RT1UH4 EBOK (93 page)

Dear Sarah,

[...] Speaking of Academia, a really confused land. Bennington you recall months ago sounding quite excited at the possibility of my coming up there; a week, a month, 2, I hear nothing; finally they call, would like me there the bulk of the week (March–June) with a heavier course load than I have now & at substantially less money. Elegant, expensive Bennington & doesn’t even get near little Bard’s terms. So I said I’d think about it & am going around the house muttering when the mail brings a letter from Washington Univ in St Louis (where Bill Gass is), asking me out for 3 weeks either Feb or April at half the fee Bennington offers for a full term, & with far lighter duties mainly consorting with graduate students as much or little as I like plus a talk or 2, furnished apartment office & (new) typewriter. Plus, the letter itself terribly hoping I’ll accept was from a writer named Stanley Elkin who I think is marvelous (novel called
The Dick Gibson Show
) who teaches there. So of course I accepted immediately for Feb, when one would rather be anywhere else than where one is even if it’s St Louis, & partly of course for the fee & situation, but in a way mostly for the prospect of rowdy time with Elkin & Gass & I’m really looking forward to it. I think we’ve all 3 got similar views on what good writing’s about plus highly compatible senses of humour. So for those brief 3 weeks I’ll go from being Distinguished Visiting Prof at Bard to being Hurst Professor at Washington U, then the Lord knows what since being the Hadley Fellow at Bennington sounds less than heaven though if it’s a question of that distinction money or none . . . well we’ll see. I’ve also been trying to think seriously about thinking seriously about starting another book & think I may have an approach. [...]

Meanwhile Bard goes very well, better each year really as I accept that identity, my only problems being the same ones: those who write nothing, those whose names I don’t yet know, added to all that the thrown together new course & its new reading list which means my reading not only the books assigned but 4 or 5 others for related material & coming in in a marvelous condition of confused overpreparedness. Compounded this week by my lightheartedly having assigned Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
, which I haven’t read for 20 years & suddenly find it’s 800 pages. Poor kids! Poor me! Got up this morning to page 329 & still must read, reread
Sister Carrie
& D’s biography, plus a little of Zola &c. . . . Well I asked for it. Panic every Monday evening & then roll back here Wed eve drained but pleased that it does all seem worth it to me & to them. [...]

Love to you both—Papa

Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
[...]
Sister Carrie
: published 1925 and 1900, respectively. The biography was W. A. Swanberg’s
Dreiser
(Scribner’s, 1965).

Zola: Émile Zola (1840–1902), French novelist and critic.

To Sarah Gaddis

Piermont

Sunday morning 3 Dec 78

Dear Sarah.

How many letters do you suppose you’ve had from me opening: Well, I’m finally settling down & starting to get things together . . . Well I was just settling down & getting things together when Mathilda the Dutchess arrived in town so for reasons of old time friendship not Art I went with her down to some confused & I thought all quite unnecessary number at the old Phoenix Theatre, some sort of tribute to William Burroughs with readings some nonsense music & Allen Ginsberg all of it the avant-garde which is suddenly just old hat. That was Friday night, they had a big number last night scheduled to end up at Studio 54 the big disco everybody wants to go to because you can’t get in, but I thought I’d had enough so skipped that, probably it all ended up with lots of artistics & Ginsberg taking off his clothes which may have been a romp 20 years ago but would hardly be an edifying sight now. Anyhow with promise of awful weather later today I’m going in to have lunch with Mathilda before she leaves for Scotland tonight, why can’t people stay put?

What of course was odd was standing out in front of that theatre at 2nd Avenue & 12th street & looking up at the windows of our old apartment building & remembering, Christmases & that cage elevator & old Henry in his cap. This of course is the season for such things & for so many people a hard one to get through, rather than being able simply to look back & realize how marvelous it all was & how lucky to have it, something to do with that ‘living every minute . . .’

I’m glad I did make the San Francisco trip but somehow it was all rather unsettling & I don’t know exactly why, part to do with the sheer jamming it in between Bard classes & exhaustion of the trip itself but also with that entire week under the cloud of the Jim Jones nightmare in Guyana (his ‘People’s Temple’ a S.F. product) & their mayor shot the day I returned: it is one of the most attractive cities I’ve known & everyone seems attractive & relaxed & pleasant, none of that hostility in the air one feels in New York, but still there is something unsettling about the place. Matthew as I said seems fine but to tell the truth I think I will be quite relieved when he puts the place behind him.

So since coming back I’ve just been trying to catch up, Bard & dentist, Bard & dentist & a piece for IBM’s
Think
magazine which will thank heavens pay the dentist though apparently I’ve got to rewrite it because it’s as usual a little too much of my density for their audience: why can’t I just write simple sentences? But all of this to be over & done by December 20th; et puis? [...]

I long to see you, much love always & best to Peter,

Papa

Mathilda the Dutchess: Mathilda Campbell, Duchess of Argyll; see note to 28 November 1950.

2nd Avenue & 12th street: the Gaddises lived at 193 Second Avenue in 1960–61.

Jim Jones nightmare: on 18 November cult leader Jones convinced his followers to commit mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.

their mayor shot: Harvey Milk, an openly gay politician, was assassinated on 27 November. et puis?: French, “And then?”

To William H. and Mary Gass

Piermont NY 10968

12 March 1979

Dear Bill & Mary.

You were right in your assurances before the fact back in January: it was High Old Times & I’m only now descending to the dismal cheer of home, correspondence & preparing high-blown fictions for the IRS.

Even more, various impatient egregious elements were whetted for the spree at Notre Dame toward the logical notion of abandoning the lonely drudgery of writing for the parade circuit, fictions of ‘modesty’ left behind it is nice to
hear
the applause, & youth claps harder. More soberly, N.D. also offered a meeting with Larry McMurtry whose informed counsel on movieland convinced me to try to go through with the London producer prospect T shirts, comic strips, money 2 years distant & all; also informed thoughts on selling one’s ‘papers’ which I wouldn’t have anticipated, as it would never have occurred to me to put a rare book dealer &
The Last Picture Show
together in one man. (Apparently all the big MS money that was in Texas is now in Tulsa, which should tell us something.) So that, plus a nice note from Herb Yellin, may contain some hope against the daily horror from my front windows: a tarnished silver Senior Citizens’ van emptying 3 of them on their feet from hot lunch & God knows what God knows where (do you hear me, diapered John Dewey on a Key West roof?).

But all this is quite beside the point of this note which is thanks first of course for all the generous academic courtesies & private hospitalities but far more importantly the spirit from which it cheers me enormously to feel they sprang & will endure.

Again, extending my own rather more constrained hospitalities if you are east & not being put up at the Plaza by your publisher (
our
publisher?), I am now offering striped bass from the Hudson laced with PCBs from General Electric far up the river, all an unpredictable schedule which could, if it fell together, even accommodate children with a cat to torment; one way or another though I do very much look forward to getting together before too long again.

with all kinds of best wishes to you both,

Willie Gaddis (Capt.)

spree at Notre Dame: WG participated in the Notre Dame Sophomore Literary Festival in early March 1979.

Larry McMurtry: novelist and rare-book dealer (1936– ), whose novel
The Last Picture Show
(1966) was made into a successful movie by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971.

Herb Yellin: book collector and publisher of Lord John Press, which specialized in literary limited editions.

John Dewey on a Key West roof: the philosopher/educator (b. 1859) spent his final days there enduring a number of ailments before dying in 1952.