B007RT1UH4 EBOK (95 page)

Saml Butler: English novelist Samuel Butler (1835–1902); in his essay “Erewhon and the Contract with America,” WG quotes Butler on his books: “I never make them; they grow; they come to me and insist upon being written” (
RSP
86–87).

To William H. Gass

[
Typed on Washington University English Department stationery, with a handwritten note “running low on these” and an arrow pointing to the heading.
]

Piermont NY 10968

3 August 1979

Dear Bill.

Surprise! Surprise! I certainly was, to open the elegant 2vol. inscribed set of
Les Reconnaissances
(a catchy title too, as a Hampton friend lately mentioned her appreciation of my earlier book
The Recollections
); & I’m sorry to be so long acknowledging, but have been ‘away’ hiding, as I say, from the literary brilliance of the Hamptons in a town nearby there, since nobody invites me to pose in Tubingen, Munich, Berlin, let alone Paris where, ‘alert and intelligent’ as you may find them, it cheers my prejudice to know that through your kind gift one less frenchman will get his hands on me.* The story of that episode is, incidentally, one of the better publisher-horror stories, & better saved to retail over a bottle. All of which notwithstanding it was immensely thoughtful of you & Hawkes & you know I greatly appreciate it.

Not having been asked to T, M, B or even P, we** plan to leave in a few days for Haiti, not that I’ve been asked there either but the fare is cheap & I hope to sit down for 2 or 3 weeks & try to fill 2 or 3 pages with an idea, concept, synopsis, what have you, for what Larry McMurtry describes as ‘a thin flat book with a strong narrative line’ (ha!) for my agent to use as an instrument to deliver me from Knopf’s & extort money elsewhere, the usual scam.

Another advantage to Haiti (as I assume all the abovementioned spots) is that one will not encounter that ass John Gardner in print, voice or leis, though it is perhaps unfair to burden his demented ego with what is essentially the mercenary ignorance of the
NY Times
to which we have all at last become accustomed. Well, as the Arabs say (translated from the Spanish): Sit in the doorway of your house and watch the bodies of your enemies pass. Speaking of that, Stanley must thank the Lord for small blessings: only
think
what the Master of Moral Fiction could have wrenched from
The Living End
. It was certainly splendid to see Dutton out there advertising it replete with blurbs that count, if any does, from reviewers, among which I would surely have appeared as a hitch hiker on his fleet vehicle. Boys howdy, what a darb of a car that was! I only hope he got a good reprint sale.

* My prejudices are notoriously flexible, ready to turn on a dime for a return ticket & refreshments, witness my great fondness for Berkeley/California.

** This plural embraces (sic) a Lady named Muriel Murphy, a high class rediscovery from those days before my first marriage, whose encouragement of my callow infatuation then would have deprived the world of Sarah & Matthew, so perhaps Mother was Right, perhaps everything does happen ‘for the best’.

As I finish footnote ** above, the ’phone rings with Muriel from NY saying a cousin may be leaving a house (staffed) in London for a few weeks so should we consider London rather than Haiti. I tell you.

What I tell you is if she & I are still speaking back from Haiti/London by September, the one perilous certainty is that I will start again Weds.-Thursdays at Bard (through Christmas); that between us she & I will have available —at Piermont, Manhattan, Fire Island & Easthampton, sleeping quarters between us for 37 people; that I am not entirely in control of anything as must by now be apparent; that if you* are anywhere near NY in the fall let me know here by mail or telephone, or failing the latter at her number in NY: 212-988-1360; & that failing all of it I’ll write when I get work,

best greetings to Stanley & the best always to you & Mary,

Willie

* Stanley too of course—

Les Reconaissances
: the French translation of
R,
by Jean Lambert, was published in two volumes by Gallimard in 1973.

Tubingen [...] you & Hawkes: Gass, John Hawkes (1925–1998), and John Barth (1930– ) were on a reading tour of Germany.

Muriel Murphy: Muriel Oxenberg Murphy (see 23 November 1953), with whom WG would live for the next fifteen years.

To Cynthia Buchanan

Piermont

Aug. 4, 1979

Dear Cyndy,

I guess I never really believed you would actually do it: move out there [Arizona] I mean; but here’s your card from Cottonwood (& really postmaked ‘Cottonwood’) so it must be. I’ve got to say Wupatki national monument on the obverse doesn’t look like a place to cheer up anybody but I do rather long to see it all again someday —more than 30 years now since I rode that blue roan through those incredible desert nights up outside Tucson—but heaven knows when that chance will offer itself. [...]

Currently & as always confusion reigns, plans to get away for 2 or 3 weeks & try to get 2 or 3 pages together on a (shudder, gasp) new book at least as an instrument to escape Knopf & try to seduce a new publisher to make the same grand costly error 2 others have made. The only thing approaching certainty a renewal of the 2-day weekly stint at Bard in September, my heart rather sinks at the prospect as it always did when that chill month came round & sent me off to boarding school but it is, after all, income. [...]

love & best to you always,

Willie Gaddis

To Sarah Gaddis

‘Cormier Plage’ (Haiti)

13 August 1979

Dear Sarah, and Peter.

Well! if you ever want an inexpensive (for these days) vacation (though 12–330 pm the heat is simply sweltering) with nothing but the palm trees one way & the sea the other way (& we won’t have to catch any trains, & we won’t go in when it rains), a large room with terrace overlooking the water 40feet away (& the sound of the coral sea), hibiscus & bouganvillea (sp?) & everything immaculate, excellent food served in an open pavillion (sp!) or at a table under trees on the beach or indeed on one’s own terrace &, since it was once a French colony, ici on parle francais & the other guests are mainly french which lends it a somewhat even more remote elegance (if you can call topless ladies wearing only ‘le string’ elegant), beaming black Haitian faces on the maids & the boys hopping about in orange jackets, & above all PRIVACY . . . well this is it. We’ve been here only about 5 days but it’s like weeks.

Muriel is just splendid. We decided 4 days ago that it might be high time for us both to start a regimen of simple morning setting-up exercises, so I dutifully followed her directions 2 days in a row & of course my back went. So I am moving around like your great grandfather—though nothing as hair-raising (yet) as the entertainment I managed for you both on that Thanksgiving visit!—sitting right now on the terrace in a rocking chair a la Jack Kennedy & his back while she makes the trip into town. This is no joke: the ‘road’ between here & Cape Haitian is often no more than a path of jagged rocks & blind turns, every one of them threatening a jubilant Haitian at the wheel from the other direction, up the mountain & down. There’s no phone here so she had to go in to call NY & see whether her cousin (by marriage, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia who is rather a number, one of these high class exiles between London, NY & Richard Burton) has arrived in NY to stay in her apartment. Also to check on her daughter Julia & her gross husband Philip (God! how fortunate I am as a father-in-law!), who are in a mounting tizzy over the imminent (Sept 5) arrival in NY of the Dalai Lama, another high-class exile since China appropriated Tibet: M’s NY apartment generally acrawl with monks shut in a bedroom doing mantras or whatever they do (as someone remarked, A good mantra is hard to find) & so, what with Bard, & our summer house rentals ending, & even the chance of your appearance, September is quite a rousing prospect.

Meanwhile I am set up here working on this 3-page or so proposal for a new novel to give to Candida when I go back, discuss with her & submit to a publisher—still unsure which one but very sure which one not—for a new advance & a fresh start by the end of the year when Bard (& its salary) ends. The novel involves some bad news rich people involved in making a movie, money & trust funds & an inept murder plot or 2, the main point being that it be comparatively short & brisk & ‘accessable’ to the paperback audience reading level (or at least appear so till they’ve bought it & it’s too late), I’ll send you a copy of the proposal when it’s done, as fair warning.

At the moment we plan to spend another week here, be back in NY around the 21st when I know it will seem we’ve been gone the entire summer, up to Piermont to see that it’s all in one piece & prepare my head for fall. We think & speak of you both often & I hope it’s all still going well. I have thought in terms of trying to get out of there at Thanksgiving but heaven knows what lies between now & then.

love from us to you both,

Papa

nothing but palm trees [...] the other way: from Eliot’s
Sweeney Agonistes
, “Fragment of an Agon”: “Nothing to see but the palmtrees one way / And the sea the other way.”

we won’t [...] when it rains: also from
Sweeney Agonistes
, “Song by Klipstein and Krum-packer.” Also quoted in
J R
(479).