B007RT1UH4 EBOK (107 page)

To June R. Cox

[
American educator (1919–96), then Research Director of the Sid W. Richardson Foundation and researching her book
Educating Able Learners: Programs and Promising Practices
(Univ. of Texas Press, 1985), which quotes from the letter below on pages 18 and 27.
]

235 East 73rd street

New York, NY 10021

24 January 1983

Dear Ms Cox.

I am sorry to be so long about answering your inquiry regarding my educational background as it might relate to my MacArthur Prize Fellowship. I’ve postponed it with the usual excuses but also I believe for reasons which may become more clear below in what may still not be an entirely satisfactory response for your purposes. While it occurs to me, first may I ask that none of the following in its personal details be released for ‘biographical’ purposes elsewhere, which I assume is hardly your purpose anyhow.

Inhowfar the course of my formal education shaped my later work I cannot say; and I believe one must be very much on guard against disproportionate inferences and emphases. My own experience was rather the reverse of the usual: I went off to boarding school age 5 or 6, then to public schools from 7th through 12th grade and thence to college. The boarding school was a small one, in Connecticut, run along lines of what was then described as the ‘modified Dalton plan’ implying a good deal of freedom but very strictly within a New England framework of imbuing one with a matter of fact acceptance of simply trying to do well what needs to be done; and of taking the responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. Its informal affiliation would have been Congregational. (My mother’s family till her generation were Quaker.) My grades were so far as I recall good; but since the climate was a noncompetetive one this was not stressed. Similarly, sports were organized little beyond the point of making them possible to take part in, and with no more of the competetive element than called for by the rules of the game.

High school was the general run of prewar uncrowded New York state public education emphasizing grades insofar as all courses were subject to the state regents examinations. My grades were good and occasionally excellent. Throughout school I never questioned doing homework on a regular assigned basis. I don’t recall ever being what you call a ‘recognized achiever’ although, since I was admitted to the only college I applied to (Harvard) presumably some of that element was present.

Harvard stressed one’s taking one’s courses, assignments, attendance at lectures &c very much upon one’s self. My marks were generally good; I was occasionally on Dean’s List. My only extracurricular activity was editing the
Harvard
Lampoon
. I studied English literature and psychology. (At age about 14 I’d had a consuming ambition to be a chemist; it quite suddenly disappeared for no reason I knew, any more than why I’d been so consumed by it in the first place.) All out of the ordinary that coloured my high school experience was loss of about a year and a half with a severe illness. I was later obliged to take a year away from college with some after effects of the ‘cure’. My mother was especially supportive throughout; and right up the line I had to a very large degree supportive and generous teachers with none of whom I was especially intimate but remember many with great fondness. Taken together, it may well have been this atmosphere conducive to self regard—sometimes likely of course but not entirely deserved—which constituted the most fortunate aspect of my school years.

Reviewing the foregoing in the light—or perhaps rather the darkness—of the present day, it’s imperative to remain aware how those prewar days, the depression notwithstanding, were simpler times, before so many taken for granted values and obligations were sundered not to be recovered, or reinstituted today in my own strong opinion, in imitation of those earlier forms.

Next on the personal level, my college experience was clearly coloured by its taking place during the war where many or most of my friends were bound; my high school, by a long interruption of illness whose enforced isolation must certainly have indelibly coloured my private picture of the world and my place in it; and finally, private boarding school where by very definition the circumstances were as or even more formative than the teachers and curriculum.

May I say at risk of sounding rude—though the length of this response must belie any such intention—I’ve had a good number of lengthy questionnaires seeking most intimate (and often nonsensical) details in what I assume are well intentioned efforts to delineate by accumulation the ‘creative act’, ‘creative personality’ &c. I’ve tried to respond with a simple thank-you but never submitted to one partly, I’m sure, for feeling the futility of such enterprises but also out of concern for the fate of extrapolated information however well intended. Taken further, this could even apply to my experience of private boarding school and one of Congregational affiliation at that since, as we are well aware, both ‘private’ too frequently merely signifies exclusion of the disenfranchised (by reason of poverty, race &c); and ‘Congregational’, which is to say any cultural-religious designation, too often used to justify the perpetuation of entrenched beliefs and interests in face of the threat of inevitable change.

Thus in large part the education you inquire about has led me to feel, more strongly as I grow older, the futility—indeed, self destruction—of resistance to change as opposed to its painful embrace in an effort [to] help shape it rather than, all too human, control it. You ask ‘did school matter much one way or another?’ and of course it did: for an instance, the reading I did well out of college was more important than what I’d done in college but I should never have done it, or be doing it now, without all that had gone before. So it seemed to me then and it seems even more to me now that the main purpose of education from the start must be to stimulate questions—even those to which we’ve got no answer—rather than answering them; and to open every vista even those which are distasteful rather than closing them for that reason, only to see them gape open in their most destructive features later.

I hope that this will be of some use to you. Last week incidentally I met with Mr Champion Ward, who said he had discussed your project with you and was interested in the responses you have had, and so I trust you’ve no objection to my sending a copy of this along to him.

Yours,

William Gaddis

modified Dalton plan: a concept developed by the American educator Helen Parkhurst (1887– 1973) in 1920, in which the curriculum is tailored to each student’s interests and abilities, and aims to develop social skills.

Champion Ward: F. Champion Ward (1910–2007), an educator who helped the MacArthur Foundation establish its “genius” awards.

To Steven Moore

[
I had just learned from Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee’s
Jack’s Book
(St. Martin’s, 1978) that WG was the model for Harold Sand in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel
The Subterraneans
, from which I sent WG the relevant pages. (I also asked if he would autograph my first edition of
R
).
]

New York NY 10021

19 March 1983

Dear Steven Moore.

Thanks for the Kerouac excerpt. No I didn’t know about ‘Harold Sand’ & haven’t read the Gifford/Lee book. And I was quite as unaware—at the time & till now—of Kerouac’s generous regard for me as it appears in these pages. I remember our acquaintance as very much the way he presents it right down to the old car (a black wounded 1941 Chevrolet) & centered very much around Alan Ansen. Kerouac’s picture of him (Bromberg) is right on. Ansen was an extraordinary fellow, marvelously without ‘consciousness of his fantastic impact on the ordinary’, & I’ve always felt it in a way unfair—though perhaps I’ve simply missed the reading—that he’s had so little credit given him as the mentor he was for this whole group, a man so hungry to share all he had. I cannot recall how we met but I spent many enough evenings (though I knew him only for approx. that year) of heavy talk & drink till 7am in that ‘library’ Kerouac describes; & with the date in place I believe this is how things went: with all his blinding erudition Ansen saw few happy prospects till, his father having died & then his remaining aunt quite abruptly, he came into that hideous house in Hewlett & a small income but one just large enough to allow him to visit Europe, something he was as hungry for as he was apprehensive about despite his thorough command of languages. I had
The Recognitions
in what I considered a finished draft but had ‘a little more work’ to do on it; & so, that fall of 1953, Ansen went to Europe (Venice) & I, for a ridiculous rent (I think $35 a month) & tending his mail, banking, bills &c, spent that winter alone in the house practically rewriting the entire book. I’d finished just as he returned in spring & remember him sitting down barely off the boat in that ghastly diningroom & reading it straight through in a day and a half. Like the others I’m in his unacknowledged debt. (Soon after, having got his confidence in handling expatriation, he rented or sold the house & returned abroad, settled on the Athens–Tangiers axis, has scarcely been back & I’ve never seen him since.)

Now for appearing as a character in the book of others, this may amuse you: a bit before the above, may even have been the late 40s, Chandler Brossard published a book titled
Who Walk in Darkness
which I recall as one of the earliest existentialist novels attempted here (New Directions) or such was my estimate. I seem to have been the model for a young Harvard drinks too much character who is finally mugged—not so kind a portrait as Kerouac’s but I’ve been fond of Chandler & it never upset me—I’ve no memory of that character’s name; but the model for the book’s protagonist, ‘Henry Porter’ I believe (he goes around calling everybody ‘old sport’), Anatole Broyard, was incensed indeed, & got his own back many years later reviewing a rather chaotic book of Chandler’s (I haven’t it at hand, had a title like
Are We There Yet
?) in a hatchet job the likes of which I’ve never seen but may well when my next appears for God knows what reason.

Use any of the above or not however you wish, of course ‘without attribution’. I’d be glad to sign a book, didn’t start early enough (as vs writing blurbs) with a policy against it & have now got a rich doctor named Naftali Nottman who’s sent me 3 or 4 with notes on Gucci stationery & a $10 bill for a drink, says he paid $130 for the last one & I’ve finally put a stop, recalling Howard Nemerov to a similar supplicant: Ah! you have one of the rare unsigned copies of the
Collected Poems
of Howard Nemerov!

Yours,

W. Gaddis

Alan Ansen: see headnote to 4 January 1954.

‘consciousness [...] ordinary’: a phrase from
The Subterraneans
.

Hewlett: a village on Long Island, though Ansen’s mailing address was Woodmere, a mile southwest of Hewlett.

Who Walk in Darkness
: Brossard’s novel appeared in 1952. The character named Harold Lees has some of WG’s traits, though Brossard told me the character was a composite of several people he knew then. See my foreword to the Herodias edition of the novel (2000).