B007RT1UH4 EBOK (108 page)

Are We There Yet?
: Brossard’s
Wake Up. We’re Almost There
was viciously attacked by Broyard in the
New York Times Book Review
, 4 April 1971, 51. Several letters of protest regarding this review appeared in the 2 May 1971 issue, 32.

Naftali Nottman: Gaddis later found out this doctor was associated with North Shore Books, a Long Island rare-book dealer.

Howard Nemerov: American poet and novelist (1920–91).

To Steven Moore

[
I was still verifying details (some from Koenig’s dissertation) for my introduction to
In Recognition
. I can’t remember what the first paragraph refers to, for I hadn’t been puzzled by that 1952 copyright notice, but the rest deals with the chronology and circumstances in which WG finished
R.]

New York NY 10021

7 April 1983

Dear Steven Moore.

For your sake this is I hope the last of these bulletins. re Koenig*: The MS was not copyrighted (or even finished) in 1952 (I thought I’d written you this); that confusion has arisen here & elsewhere because roughly chapter II was copyrighted that year in the first issue of
New World Writing
, thus the misleading copyright notice in the book.

It was not a New England farmhouse but one outside a small town called Montgomery west of Newburgh NY & indeed an isolated winter & a frugal one on my small advance. Finally, I wasn’t revising but finishing the book. This vivid memory confirms that & may also clear up some other of Koenig’s misapprehensions, tales of a far longer MS, different endings &c:

I worked there daily & well into the nights with my usual stack of notes, 2nd thoughts, outlines &c till finally very late one night, having intended only to try to get through the sequence of Stanley at the organ to my satisfaction—& with still outlined notes at hand for spinning out the novel’s conclusion—I sat back to look at that last ‘still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played’ (anticipating, of course, the fate of the novel itself: for played read read) & abruptly realized, both appalled & elated, that I’d reached the end of the book; that no matter my planning & intentions, & even that sense of loss overreaching any of fulfillment, there was no arguing it: the book ended right there.

{It occurred to me you might want to quote this ¶ directly & do so if you wish to}

And so it must have been that I started revisions that summer of 1953 on Long Island, met Ansen then & the San Remo/Kerouac forays in & out of New York & took his place over when he went to Europe in the fall for another largely isolated (but better heated & funded with books) winter of revision.

I trust my next book will be done or ‘nearing completion’ by the time yours appears but for the present there’s nothing to say of it except that it’s shorter than its predecessors, the title & even the tag (A Romance) are tentative.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

*Why would anyone bother to change his “Christian” name? or is that the point of it, fleeing the New Testament for the Old —but it was
Peter
who wrote the thesis, wasn’t it?

{It occurred to me [...] if you wish to}: this is handwritten in the left margin alongside the preceding paragraph. I did indeed decide to quote it (on p. 8 of my introduction).

(A Romance): the working title for
CG
was “That Time of Year: A Romance.”

To Patrick P. Moynihan

[
Democratic senator from New York (1927–2003) who criticized the Reagan Administration’s fear of Soviet-based plans for communist expansion in Latin America and its clandestine support of the terroristic Contras in Nicaragua. WG copied Senator Al D’Amato (see 27 May 1983) and Representative William Carney on this letter.
]

Wainscott, NY

11 April 1983

Dear Senator Moynihan.

Congratulations at last from one of your constituents on the stance you have taken regarding the legality of this Administration’s current pursuits of its policy in Central America.

It becomes more clear daily that no policy could be better calculated to spawn precisely those ‘Cuba-model states’ its espousers decry; that no pronouncements concerning this policy could serve further to isolate the United States in Latin America and indeed world opinion than those so insultingly and crudely offered by this Kirkpatrick woman in the United Nations; and that one can ask no finer irony, in this question of legality stemming largely from the 1973 War Powers Resolution passed following public disclosure of our secret assaults in Cambodia and Laos, than the part played in those incursions by the leading proponent and presumed architect of our current unsavoury and self-defeating approaches in Latin America, Thomas Enders.

If as it now appears neither morality nor common sense can prevail in either this woefully obstinate Administration, or a Congress where the burden has been shouldered by so few courageous and outstanding men, perhaps your demand for a legal accounting is the most realistic and I urge you to pursue it with every bit of vigour, before the poor opinion of this country’s antagonists and bewildered friends alike is made fully justified.

William Gaddis

this Kirkpatrick woman: Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006), the fiercely anti-communist U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at this time.

Thomas Enders: American diplomat (1931–96), at that time Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.

To Elaine B. Safer

[
A professor (1937– ) at the University of Delaware who often taught
R
in her classes. In the letter below, WG responds to her essay “The Allusive Mode, the Absurd and Black Humor in William Gaddis’s
The Recognitions
,” which first appeared in
Studies in American Humor
1.2 (October 1982): 103–18, and later became the basis for chap. 4 of her book
The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey
(Wayne State Univ. Press, 1988).
]

New York, New York 10021

19 April 1983

Dear Ms Safer.

Thank you for sending me your essay on
The Recognitions
: a book ‘about false resurrections’ is one of the better encapsulations I’ve come across.

Should you plan to reprint it, you might wish to consider this correction (p. 115, #1): the actual inscription on the Bosch table at which Wyatt as a child ‘trembles’ is Cave, Cave, Ds videt (page 25); the
caveat emptor
(p. 693) elaboration is Wyatt’s later commentary in the light of the way the sacred character of the original has been corrupted by forgery & its having been reduced to an item of commerce. (My page references here are to the original Harcourt, Brace ed. of the book, ie its 693 corresponds to the Avon 740–1 &c; I haven’t the Avon at hand, for which you might note that Steven Moore in his
A Reader’s Guide to
The Recognitions
(Univ. Nebraska Press, 1982) lists 13 pages of errata).

Regarding your query, my mother’s maiden name was Edith Charles, her mother’s family name Williams who were Quakers & who in turn had some forebears among, as I recall, Nantucket Husseys (or Hussy). Unfortunately a small book by a deceased great great aunt tracing all this is off with papers stored elsewhere but I expect to have access in the next month or so & have put your address aside for a note to you when I do get this more precise.

Yours,

William Gaddis

To Steven Moore

[
The “abrupt & startling possibility” raised by this letter was a false alarm. I did send WG about two dozen suggested corrections, most of which were later used for the 1985 Penguin reprint of
R
. WG never did write the preface he mentions below; after
In Recognition
came out, he said he felt I had covered the ground sufficiently in my introduction.
]

New York NY 10021

25 May ”83

Dear Steven Moore.

An abrupt & startling possibility & more: word that Harcourt B—perhaps even in small or large part because of your efforts—plans to reissue
The Recognitions
.

I had talked to a woman there last year, largely in an effort to either squelch the Avon or get a few dollars from it, & got into the errata. Thus when she (is Irene Skolnik who handles reprints) learned of the above intention to reprint (of which of course the author is seldom if ever notified) asked them to hold off in order to incorporate corrections. I’d thought they would simply offset the Meridian + possibly a few of your corrections but—still all somewhat unclear—they simply wanted list of errata in the original ed. so I’ve dug around & unearthed all of Jack Green’s I could find in old correspondence & hope I have all of them. I have as you’ll see added a few of yours from
Reader’s Guide
though let some ‘irregularities’ stand (as the Steenken
Madonna
).

I think I’ve already alarmed them somewhat with my enthusiasm but am sending you here the list I sent them in case you have come across any more glaring horrors in your more recent investigations. If so could you send them to me & I’ll send on to them (them now being in San Diego)? so that there might at last be an ‘authorised version’. (Though some questionable items I think should remain such as the above, when the Picasso
Night Fishing
was first hung &c since these are explored in your annotations & I don’t want to
sanitize
it.)