B007RT1UH4 EBOK (118 page)

WG in Paris. Top: with his daughter Sarah on the Île St.-Louis, Quai de Bourbon, 1985 (photo © Mellon Tytell).

Bottom: at Odile Hellier’s Village Voice bookstore, with Ivan Nabokov, actress Dominique Sanda (who read from
CG
), and Christian Bourgois, 1988 (photo by Flavio Toma).

To John and Pauline Napper

12 April 87 (can it be?)

Dear John & Pauline.

Well we are back from all things Australia whence perhaps you had a picture postcard? & New Zealand which is quite stunning especially perhaps after Australia, I don’t for a moment mean to be unkind everyone treated us splendidly & we didn’t after all see such great attractions as the Great Barrier Reef &c but the sheer green of NZ & the people with a little of Maori showing through rather more seductive than Australia’s good white cheery USA brawn: what it was all about was our US govt information agency sending me out to talk for USA as I wished & did about “writing”, the dissident tradition in American literature (my theme) &c &c to a point I never want to hear my voice in public again, ready to drop out with the Trappists or better perhaps get back to this damn typewriter where I belong. [...]

But at any rate the rather gorgeous news from [Sarah] is that all this while, 3 years? that she’s been working at her degree from Parson’s design school there in Paris she has also (really) been working at a novel on the sly, I hadn’t a word of it though I knew she was trying at stories but here she comes to my agent (again without my interference) who is very struck thence to a publisher ready to “make an offer” as they say, imagine! All I know of it is that it’s somewhat ‘autobiographical’ (as all first novels but mine?) so may read myself into a doddering well meaning drinking & smoking old fellow on the boardwalk—perhaps I hope for too much?—at any rate something of
hers
done quite her own & what better for that vital self regard, any money (though never) aside: point is it is really damned difficult for a ‘young person’ (how she hates that description) to get a first novel up front & for the ruthlessness of NY publishing I know no favour to me, the connection may simply have got it read faster but that’s all. [...]

Our immediate next steps are quite unclear but for the 90% likelihood of renting out the Long Isld stylish/Oblomovka place for the summer, Muriel’s asthma not at all good there last year + the endless round of cocktail/dinner ++ the rental itself which cannot be discounted especially with the end of my MacArthur, I can’t believe the 5 year term of it has passed! So I must get down to another damned book trying to echo Sam’l Butler’s —I do not look for them, they come to me wanting to be written . . . for which I’ve got plenteous notes but no Page 1 Chapter I so for June–September must seek a place for that hope & having heard myself chatter in the antipodes some silent peak in Darien all yet to be resolved, which may even end up right here in Manhattan with a terrace & all air conditioning that people kill for hardly that bad after all though glimpses of peace over the bay at Wellington & sheep of Christchurch lead one astray where Butler after all got his first breath, as against the glimpse from our pedestal of how much time is left where I must say your both example of courage & good cheer sets me a mark. (I have just now been drinking whisky & reading again
Howards End
which may account for something?)

love & all the rest,

Willie

working at a novel: her novel
Swallow Hard
was published by Atheneum in January 1991.

Oblomovka: the title character’s estate in Goncharov’s
Oblomov
.

silent peak in Darien: the final line of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816) finds him, like Cortez, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

Butler: in his twenties Butler immigrated from England to New Zealand to set up a successful sheep run.

Howards End
: E. M. Forsters’s 1910 novel.

To Donald Oresman

[
Accompanied by a draft of “Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount et al,” published in October in the New Yorker, and eventually in
FHO
(30–40).
]

Wainscott NY 11975

6 May 1987

Dear Donald Oresman,

Barbara W. gave me your home address with word that you haven’t been as well as might & certainly should be, & I thought you might be diverted by the trouble I’ve got myself into with the LAW.

All innocently—as anyone confronting the law cries out—drawing upon (not as a co-conspirator such as we read about these days) your generous Case Book and Prosser as well as my 250 lb.
AmJur
, I set out on this troubled sea where the artist’s small boat arrogance rows against the tide of sentimental greed with the distracted results attached.

Now in the doctrine of res ipse loquitur (misused on p. 2) it should be clear that the octogenarian Judge Crease is 1) somewhat senile, 2) enjoys writing opinions for the sheer writing of them, and that 3) in the course of the projected novel—in which this is very much of a subplot—his decision must face, indeed invite reversal on appeal. Well I’ve shown it to a couple of lawyers and even a county judge & clearly in its present form the judge should not only be reversed but certified. Making matters worse, as matters can only be made, I light heartedly showed (not submitted) it to someone at the
New Yorker
who, with a little ‘fixing up’ (literary not legal, to make it a ‘story’) at the end, is enthusiastic for its possible publication. Oh Lord.

Because heaped upon this our month’s trip to Australia, and the accumulated trivia that has devoured time since, leaves me now trying to get back to it thoroughly muddled over the generous critical suggestions by these lawyers & judge: not a temporary injunction but restraining order; “the standard for preliminary relief must first be addressed”; the infant James B cannot be sued but must have a guardian (ad litem?); get copy of Harvard
Blue Book
for rules of case citations etc; the disorder of dismissal of charges related to the case itself and the order of procedure from the original complaint, the hearing (is this judgment the result of a hearing?) to trial, appeal & God knows what, (speaking of co-conspirators).

Do you know that John Irving for his novel
Ciderhouse Rules
involving abortion actually took a course at Yale on obstetrics? A sobering thought in this context but for the moment I send this along to you for as I say some kind of diversion, disruption of equally absurd oppressions.

with warm regards,

W. Gaddis

AmJur
: the set of
American Jurisprudence
Oresman had sent him.

res ipse loquitur: legal Latin (should be
ipsa
), “the thing speaks for itself.”

ad litem: a person appointed by the court to act “for the lawsuit” (
ad litem
) on behalf of another.

Harvard
Blue Book
:
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation
, compiled by the Harvard Law Review Association et al.

To Candida Donadio

Wainscott NY 11975

19 July 1987

Dear Candida.

Here is the card that of course never quite got mailed at its source, the stunning island where some farmer dug up the Venus de Milo (the Milos Aphrodite they call it); but then all the islands were stunning, Naxos, Thera, Kea, must have been 8 or ten Cyclades we called on, if ever I went 1st class all the way it was this trip, the only curse my short breath climbing ruins & the shipboard cough, got to do something about it as I’ve been saying for 10 years.

It was another 2 weeks away from the typewriter but worth anything even though I haven’t a place for it in ‘the work’ (but may of course always squeeze one in); & now, in this clean simple tree-surrounded air-conditioned-if-I-want-it studio there remains
no
excuse but laziness for my not finally really getting down to work. Of course the Sifton/Knopf number adds spice doesn’t it! added to Mehta’s enthusiasm for the last book at Picador to say nothing of Sarah’s loyal diligent efforts, if only she & I had the current high taste for vulgarity just picture the DAD & DAUGHTER photo feature in
People
magazine . . . But it does, touch wood, look like everything is falling into place after those God knows how many years of tormented uncertainty every step of which you were painfully aware & never gave up.

Maschler! Well splendid, good news,
always remembering
his handling of the
J R
cash & contract to which Sarah herself was of course privy at the time as I pounded the deck at FIRE ISLD shouting for money to pay the grocery bill as the pound sterling fell, and fell . . . so however good his offer if accepted we must keep him on a short leash. Marvelous. (And Deutsch? Picador?)

As I get my work in hand here this next month or so I will let you know & we can plan ‘strategy’—I’m probably worth more to Elisabeth at Knopf than I would have been at Viking? &c&c&c . . . (& just to crown everything, Gottleib OUT).

Love from the catbird seat,

Willie

a place for it [...] squeeze one in: WG squeezed in a reference to the Melos Aphrodite (as it’s more properly spelled) on p. 34 of
FHO
.

Sifton/Knopf number [...] Mehta: in 1987 publisher Sonny Mehta lured Sifton away from Viking to join him as executive vice president of Knopf. “A self-described perfectionist,” writes Thomas Meier, “Sifton alienated some of her colleagues almost from the start by sending a memo at Mehta’s suggestion to then chairman [Robert] Bernstein about the inefficient ways that manuscripts passed through Knopf” (
Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, and Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It
[St. Martin’s, 1994], 219). The British paperback edition of
CG
was published by Picador, which Mehta headed before he went to Knopf.