B007RT1UH4 EBOK (120 page)

To Donald Oresman

[
On the same day, WG sent a letter similar to this to his friend Judge Pierre Leval, for whom see headnote to 10 August 1993.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

6 August 1987

Dear Donald.

Since your kind letter in May I have finally got back to this item with a good deal of juggling around, and even wonder if some of it, in the interests of ‘technical correctness’ has made it a little the less ‘vivid’ (as you warn). Nonetheless there were some major points to be addressed such as ‘temporary restraining order’ and ‘preliminary injunction’ and ‘summary judgment’ which I think I’ve now got straight. By happy chance for the last of them (summary judgment) Saul Steinberg passed along to me a copy of his just obtained against Columbia Pictures promoters distributors & advertisers for copyright infringement using his well known
New Yorker
’s myopic view of America poster in promoting a movie called
Moscow on the Hudson
(Opinion by U.S.D.J. Louis L. Stanton) so lucidly written that I lifted those portions bodily.

Still I’m sure there are still enough errors for a reversal on appeal (as intended), particularly the citations (do they correspond to Virginia law? &c, a couple of lawyers suggested I get the Harvard
Blue Book
but I’ve refrained), but I did find a paperback (Scribner’s)
Law Dictionary
. And there’s still enough evidence of an aging judge who immensely enjoys the sound of his own writing, parody run-on sentences &c though whether he ‘takes judicial notice’ too often (& incorrectly) I’m not sure.

And why didn’t plaintiff’s lawyers claim
Cyclone 7
as a protected statement under the 1st Amendment? Well that will be the issue when it all gets to the Supreme Court (where this aged judge will just have been seated & a la Renquist refuses to recuse himself) later in the novel if we ever get there. (At that point Mr Szyrk
wants
the thing removed since he’s sold it to Holland for a Holocaust memorial, & the Village demands to keep it since it has become a big tourist attraction.) And so now I am simply trying to get down to the real novel itself for which this is simply an appendix though constantly tempted elsewhere, such as an action for defamation and infringement by the Episcopal church v. Pepsi-Cola claiming the latter is an anagram of Episcopal &c&c&c . . .

I hope you are well, meanwhile this may provide diversion and of course any blue pencilling would be a welcome, as you suggest & if so inclined.

warmest regards,

Bill Gaddis

Cyclone 7:
a steel structure by an artist named Szyrk at the center of these legal battles in
FHO
.

Renquist: William Rehnquist (1924–2005), seated on the Supreme Court in 1986. Judge Crease doesn’t make it that far in the novel.

Episcopal church v. Pepsi-Cola: unfortunately, WG didn’t finish this subplot for
FHO
.

To Steven Moore

[
I had sent WG a draft of what would eventually be published as chapter 1 of my
William Gaddis
, asking him to vet it for any factual errors regarding his biography and requesting permission to quote from his writings and letters.
]

[Wainscott, NY 11975]

2 August 87

Dear Steven Moore.

To yours of 17 July: yes, permission to quote the passages you note (though I think footnote 20 should be ascribed simply to Thos Mirkowicz, Miss Logan simply sat in, ‘observed’, later wanted to publish the whole thing in the US as I’d expressly ruled out.)

Other items from a quick scanning:

bottom of p3, I’d already entered Harvard when war broke out, simply stayed there

last line some 2 years for little over a year

p4 line 3, I still feel this pressure of trying . . . for I still have this trying below: What lines from
Junkie
?

p5 bottom, some raw material for the raw materials (really very little) p10 I should have said Elizabethan drama

p14 your interesting emphasis on Firbank; Henry Green yes but
not
CPSnow, the most wooden fiction I’ve ever encountered

p16 Hawthorne, better assumptions: the
Blithedale
(sp?)
Romance
and a story I believe called the Artist of the Beautiful. And quite a good deal more of Twain,
Christian Science
comes to mind, many short (journalistic) pieces as on King Leopold’s Congo, late story about a man unsure whether he’s on a ship dreaming of home or vice versa. Certainly
Tom Sawyer
.

p.18 why limit Shakespear to those 2 (& ‘perhaps’ even
Lear
!)? Most of Shakespear certainly, favourite is still
As You Like It
.

p22 I don’t recall the ‘none of us grew &c’ as J R
’
s company, simply saw it pass on a truck one day

I don’t know regarding quotes from the books, you might ask Viking’s Permissions dept (remind them I own rights to first 2 & give my permission). But I should think the ‘fair use’ rule must still apply provided the quotes aren’t too long, ie tending toward the body of the piece, & are for fair critical purposes.

Finally no to taking time for a short critical piece & for now don’t especially want the PEN reprinted.

Also have got to tell you that when in Budapest last year an interview with an American Literature scholar named Zoltan Abady-Nagy which turned out well & has filled the hole for the nagging
Paris Review
, next spring perhaps? Not critical as your work but informed & got the thing out of the way.

Yours,

WG

2 years for little over a year: his time at the
New Yorker
. The magazine’s personnel department had informed me that WG worked there from 26 February 1945 until 29 April 1946.

Junkie
: in
R,
a character identified only as the “attractive girl with the Boston voice” recommends Benzedrine in the exact same words as the character Mary in William Burroughs’s novel
Junkie
(1953). Cf.
R
631 and 640 with the Penguin edition of
Junky
(1977), 14.

raw material: I had written that WG’s jobs in industry in the late 1950s and 1960s provided the raw materials for
J R
.

Elizabethan drama: he had said “Jacobean” drama in his interview with Miriam Berkley, from which I was quoting.

CPSnow: I was listing British writers whom WG had
read
, not necessarily those who influenced him.

better assumptions: I had speculated on what Hawthorne WG may have read (
The Scarlet Letter
and
The Marble Faun
have been cited by other critics). The rest of this paragraph refers to my listing of other American writers WG had read.

Shakespear: as a result of his “quick scanning” WG misread this paragraph: I was not listing all the Shakespeare plays he had read, but arguing that his work belongs to the same tradition of vitriolic satire that included (among Shakespeare’s works)
Troilus and Cressida
,
Timon of Athens
, and perhaps
King Lear.

short critical piece: I was guest-editing a special issue of the
Review of Contemporary Fiction
entitled “The Novelist as Critic” and invited WG to contribute an essay, or—if he couldn’t take the time to write something new—to allow me to publish his 1986 PEN address “How Does the State Imagine?” (
RSP
123–26).

To Louis Auchinloss

[
For his
New York Times Magazine
piece, WG sent him
In Recognition of William Gaddis
, Aldridge’s
American Novel and the Way We Live Now
(which reprints his
J R
review), other reviews, a corporate speech, and “Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount et al.”
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

23 August 1987

Dear Louis.

If you haven’t tossed out the whole noble notion of rehabilitating
J R
for the ‘general public’, I risk discouraging you further with this self serving bundle where you may find something useful.

Item: book of essays, the first 19pp with more biographical material than I’d have wished, essays 8, 11, 12, 13 may be the most pertinent.

Item: book by critic John Aldridge, pp 46–52.

Item: batch of reviews, from the scathing reception of
The Recognitions
through the kinder welcome given the next 2 books (though see ‘George Steiner’ in the
New Yorker
).

Item: the only corp. speechwriting I’ve come up with for Eastman Kodak reproduced in this brochure (& they always paid within ‘5 business days’).

Item: simply for your own passing entertainment, as I would hope, a crude tribute to your other profession in the form of a judicial Opinion, one of many projected for my present novel in the works; also for the fact that the part justifying summary judgment (pp 3,4) is lifted bodily (I understand these Opinions are ‘public property’? though perhaps it should have a citation?) from the case of artist Saul Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures et al. for pirating his
New Yorker
’s well known myopic view of the USA in advertising a dumb movie, found for plaintiff by U.S.D.J. Louis L. Stanton & I now learn to be your cousin! (The
New Yorker
interested in taking it.)

Back to
J R
which incidentally came out 2 or 3 years before the desecration of television’s
Dallas
in J.R. Ewing’s vicious greed, as contrasted to (with?) the original
J R’s cheerful innocent hunger. He may incidentally reappear on the scene in a fall
NYTimes Book Review
business book issue, these years later now age 23 working for the Department of the Budget explaining this Administration’s policy to a Congressional Hearing committee. His was after all the original ‘Reaganomics’.

Have you still an appetite for this most generous proposal? and especially in the light of a hoped for minimum of ‘human interst’ (ie about ‘me’) as opposed to the books themselves—though I suppose there’s something to be said for my teaching a course at Bard College in the late 70s on The Theme of Failure in American Literature . . .

warm wishes to Adele from us both,

W G

Dallas
: popular TV series that ran from 1978 to 1991.

fall
NYTimes Book Review
: “Trickle-Up Economics: J R Goes to Washington” appeared on p. 29 of the 25 October 1987 issue; reprinted in uncut form under its original title “J R
Up to Date” in
RSP
(63–71).