B007RT1UH4 EBOK (106 page)

Jovanovitch had taken over as President of HB as I recall barely weeks before the book came out in 1955; Eugene Reynal (sp?) who’d been trade books editor left, so did Robert Giroux. Jov. put in a dolt from the business side as trade editor & any effort for the book ceased. Despite his lack of any effort on the book’s behalf in the decades since, Jov. takes great pride in having been its publisher (it was of course practically in the stores by the time he took over), & his loyalty (=clinging to the rights) to it. Our correspondence ended a good many years ago, his on a fatuous, mine on an acrimonious note.

Now it’s faintly possible that something will be resolved (ie a reversion of rights) by the time your book is done & finds a publisher; for now however you may see that it’s not in my interest either to recall my rancour to Jov’s attention, or to stimulate—despite my gratitude for you & Kuehl’s efforts—enough interest in the book to prompt anyone to make a decent reprint bid to Harcourt thereby perpetuating my enslavement. (While Avon’s contract with HB licensing its reprint has expired they go right along peddling it, though changes at Avon too may let it drop.)

Yours,

William Gaddis

Devlin: at my request, John Devlin at Harcourt, Brace answered numerous questions regarding R’s publication history.

Tony Tanner’s long review: the eminent British critic Tony Tanner (1935–98) reviewed the Avon (not the Meridian) edition of
R
in the
New York Times Book Review
, 14 July 1974, 27–28.

how large the Meridian printing was: there were two printings, a first (March 1962) of 8,000 copies (with 2,000 unbound sets shipped to MacGibbon & Kee), and a second (September 1963) of 2,500.

la Pereze
: i.e.,
Le perizie
, which doesn’t mean “The Pilgrim” but “The Appraisals” or “Expert Testimonies.”

BOMC ed.: a Book-of-the-Month Club edition of
R
was remaindered in the late 1970s.

QPB: The Quality Paperback Club offered a paperback edition of
J R
.

Santa Barbara: probably Joseph the Provider, a rare-book dealer located in Santa Barbara and known for their high prices. (Due to financial necessity, I sold them this and my other Gaddis letters in the summer of 1991, much to WG’s chagrin.)

1 ad: Harcourt’s ad appeared in the 16 March 1955 issue of the
New York Times
, 31.

To Steven Moore

[
Per his request, I sent WG a draft of my biographical introduction to
In Recognition of William Gaddis
. The page numbers and the phrases WG puts in quotes below are from this draft.
]

Wainscott NY 11975

3 January 1983

Steven Moore: thanks for the look at your draft, here are some corrections & elaborations:

Page 4. Also the inevitable rumour that one is dead. Regarding the Pynchon reference (which may be what you refer to), there was a column by a well disposed man whose name I can’t recall, for years he wrote syndicated book reviews for AP, speculating that
Gravity’s Rainbow
might well be the long novel I’d been rumoured working on, & Pynchon & I the same person (but, Pynchon “as a young man”?).

8. “minor misunderstanding” might better be fracas, even frolic; about January ’45, & I did not stay on. Rather, since college regulations forbade anyone on probation taking part in extracurricular activities, it was the custom at the
Lampoon
to take a pseudonym in this situation (look at the mastheads, you’ll see some very odd names); thus I’d been on probation since the first time Ravenkil(l?) W. appears, and left promptly after the above incident not “anxious to develop talents &c” but simply to get a job. That was incidentally not as a ‘trainee’ but a ‘checker’; the checking dept at the
NYer
was (& is) serious stuff there.

9. top, a brief memoir? then, I honestly question that I wore my ‘unimpaired right arm in a sling’, but Vincent’s image is lively enough that I won’t argue. Incidentally again: nothing libelous in he ‘introduced her to drugs’? or ‘attempted suicide many times’? I don’t know that it really was many, or how real even those attempts were.

10. top, that printing press relegation seems to me quite far fetched. #2 that year in a monastery cell belongs back with the legends on p.4. I did indeed go out to the place with all sorts of dour & self absorbed intentions only to discover that they were well prepared for such intrusions: a comfortable room & meals at modest price & arm’s length from their devotions, I stayed about a week: thus Ludy (parody of a
Readers Digest
piece by AJ Cronin) & his ‘religious experience’.

11. That 1952 copyright notice has misled everyone. It should refer really only to the
New World Writing
extract; the book itself wasn’t copyrighted till publication. Then this: Catharine (not Catherine) Carver worked at Harcourt in some such capacity as copyreader but it was she who went through the MS exhaustively with meticulous queries &c. & fought for the book. You might check the
PR
masthead for whether she was formally their fiction editor, I know she did most of the drudgery work there & never got much credit for it. David Chandler was a college summer trainee, he did carefully review the MS with intelligent queries but quite secondarily to C.C. (The ‘editor’ in your note 19 is of course she.) Whether you want to hedge the typesetter item as ‘a story told’ is of course up to you, I had it as I say 2nd hand.

14. You will be interested to see Aldridge on
J R
in a forthcoming book
The American Novel and the Way We Live Now
, Oxford Univ. Press for April 83 publication.

15. bottom, leave Cowley in there as presenter if you want to, he did indeed hand me the envelop but I’m sure he hadn’t a clue who or what either I or the book was & don’t recall his reading the citation.

19. bottom, rather than ‘(mis)quoted by Gibbs’ you might want to say ‘drunkenly misquoted by Gibbs’; that’s where Steiner got to me, quoting some of Gibbs’ ranting as dialogue without mention he was drunk.

22. It was in fact McCarthy & Gass over Dolbier’s objections (he I believe wanted the Woiwode, even went so far as to dissociate himself from the decision in his provincial (Providence?) column).

22. I haven’t that acceptance at hand but am sure something, the latter part that makes contrast sense of it, has been dropped from the quote on Gorky, ie what happened
after
1880.

23. middle, also in the Notes: I’m sure it’s Peter not David Koenig?

24. No offense, but to me ‘in-depth’ is right out of Whiteback’s lexicon along with ‘ongoing’.

NOTES: 13. For ‘short shrift’ you might see his reference in his review of Bert Britten’s (sp?)
Self Portrait, Writers drawing themselves
(& while at it, glimpse his drawing in the book).

23. I’m certain that Gill wrote not in
Time
(I don’t recall who did) but the (unsigned) item in the
NYer
’s Briefly noted fiction, a condescending dismissal reference to Shawn the Penman (Joyce apparently).

From your letter: I gather your request to publish items from my letters refers to those quoted in this text which is okay with me (Lord knows what I’ve written to others elsewhere); I’ve no objection to your publishing the essay (nor of course control) & don’t think any notice of either permission or disavowal is necessary.

Yours

William Gaddis

rumour: I had gathered many of the rumors circulating about WG, including the one that, after “failing” with
R,
he began writing under the pseudonym of Thomas Pynchon.

“minor misunderstanding”: I had thus described the circumstances under which WG had been asked to leave Harvard. Gaddis used the pseudonym Ravenkill Woodplumpton in the September and December 1944 issues of the
Harvard Lampoon
.

“a brief memoir”: I had used a different description of “In the Zone,” WG’s account of his days in Panama. The rest refers to his old acquaintance Vincent Livelli (1920– ), who sent me several letters recording his memories of WG, Eddie Shu’s influence on Sheri Martinelli’s drug use, and her attempted suicides.

printing press: Martinelli had a small printing press in her apartment, which reminded me that the retarded serving girl Janet in
R
also has her own press, on which she prints religious tracts. #2 refers to WG’s visit to a monastery in Spain.

AJ Cronin: See A. J. Cronin’s “What I Learned at La Grande Chartreuse,”
Reader’s Digest
, February 1953, 73–77.

PR
:
Partisan Review
, where Carver was managing editor at the time.

Aldridge: pages 46–52 are a revision of his
Saturday Review
review of
J R
.

Cowley: the eminent critic Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) presented WG with a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters on 22 May 1963 (see letter of 10 May 1963 for the citation).

McCarthy & Gass: concerning
J R
’s National Book Award. Dolbier wrote an account of the NBA proceedings for the
Providence Journal
, 2 May 1976, H-33.

acceptance: I must have mistranscribed WG’s NBA acceptance speech: see
In Recognition
, pp. 15–16, for the complete (and accurate) text (rpt. in
RSP
122).

Peter not David Knight: Peter Koenig, sometime after writing his dissertation on
R,
changed his name to David. (See WG’s asterisked note in his 7 April 1983 letter.)

‘in-depth’: my introduction ended somewhat abruptly, leading John Kuehl to add a concluding phrase using “in-depth,” a favorite adjective of Principal Whiteback in
J R
.

‘short shrift’: I believe I had echoed the postscript to WG’s letter to Steven Weisenburger of 18 September 1981 (which he had shared with me) and said Anatole Broyard gave short shrift to something or other of Gaddis’s. In his review of Britton’s
Self-Portrait,
Broyard wrote of WG’s line drawing: “William Gaddis is headless, his privacy either inviolable or inaccessible to him” (
New York Times
, 30 November 1976, 37).

Gill: I had carelessly written that Brendan Gill reviewed
R
in
Time
rather than the
New Yorker
, where he concluded: “this novel challenges the reader to compare it with Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’ So challenged, the reader is obliged to say that while Mr. Gaddis has been very brave, Shem the Penman has won the day.” (Shem and Shawn are brothers in
Finnegans Wake
.)