B007RT1UH4 EBOK (128 page)

I suppose this strikes me especially right now because just as you abandon law school I have become entangled with another novel involving lawsuits of every variety—the one at the center embracing copyright infringement—through having been seduced by reading opinions which I find real gems in the use of the language proceeding on to the fine points of the law which seems to be nothing but fine points & find it a little late to be starting my legal education.

Good luck to us both,

Yours

William Gaddis

To Saul Steinberg

Wainscott

2 July 1990

Dear Saul.

Well, I have greatly missed seeing you, both for the pleasure & illuminations of the old comraderie fallen under the shadow of ‘unfinished business’ in these troubled times. It was a bleak winter out here adrift on a sea of doubts & the work not going well—barely going at all in fact—so much so that even with the entire spring passed taking the Academy with it only now the pall is lifting & that not by grace but force of will if it can be sustained. Clearly a part of all this has been that fragment of work on which I spent last summer and which, to my total & unhappy surprise, took painful shape as another in the series ‘the high brutality of good intentions’ from which I still earnestly hope we can be rescued, much less any ‘harm’ intended or so far as I can see even faintly implied as I am sure a reading of the entire 300-odd page MS to date would bear out if you are inclined to consider such a chore. At the least I should very much like for us to sit down together when it suits you, if it suits you, & hope to hear from you about such a possibility.

yours most sincerely,

Gaddis

To Howard Goldberg

[
Editor of the
New York Times
’s Op-Ed page. This cover letter accompanied WG’s essay “This Above All,” on the Silverado Savings & Loan scandal of 1990, which was rejected; published posthumously in
RSP
(110–13).
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

30 July 1990

Dear Howard Goldberg.

I think Mike Levitas warned you that this would appear on your desk.

You will see that something in me seems hellbent on getting US ex rel. Gerald Mayo in there but this time I think the flow from his in forma pauperis to the homeless to Reagan’s get-rich credo (to Keynes’ everybody getting rich/for foul is useful to S&L to &c &c) follows closely and earnestly hope you agree. So closely in fact right through to the end that it would be very painful to cut further* (as I have already done from the earlier notes and drafts even given up Ed Meese in the process) in trying not to take full advantage of Mike Levitas’ generous provisos regarding length getting up in the 12–1500 area (QED) though when the figure rose higher he did qualify with ‘since you trust Howard Goldberg’s editing’ as I do but obviously desperately hope that (what I read as) the tight coherency of the piece will stay your hand . . .

Holding my breath, I am

with best regards,

Yours

W. Gaddis

*I would yield the opening sentence if so pressed.

Mike Levitas: Mitchell Levitas, another editor of the Op-Ed page and former editor of the
Times Book Review
.

Gerald Mayo: the Satan-blaming plaintiff mentioned on p. 430 of
FHO
.

in forma pauperis: legal Latin: “in the manner of a pauper”; i.e., at no cost.

Keynes: economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), as quoted in E. F. Schumaker’s
Small Is Beautiful
: Speculating in the 1930s that someday everyone would be rich, Lord Keynes cautioned, “The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not” (Harper & Row, 1973), 24.

Ed Meese: Attorney General under Ronald Reagan.

opening sentence: “We will find justice in the next world; in this world we have the law”—paraphrased as the opening sentence of
FHO
.

To Sarah Gaddis

[
In response to reading the bound galley for her forthcoming novel, published the following January, in which WG is portrayed as Lad Thompkins, and his Harvard friend Douglas Wood (see 14 March 1957) as Douglas Kipps. Sarah was still living in France at the time.
]

23 August 1990

dear Sarah.

Well! I have just finished a slow reading of
Swallow Hard
. It’s no longer a book by a girl about a girl growing up but a real book written by a young woman about a girl, yes, but people and places and feelings and things I never knew you knew—I don’t mean ‘facts of life’ or family secrets but life’s secrets & secret places some of them quite touching and some of them quite painful & done with a sense & use of language that so exquistely suits & conveys them with never a bit of self indulgence, so clean, certain of itself & underivative of others’ styles so full & entirely itself in its haunting sense of desolation utterly uncluttered by sentimentality especially in those very last lines which are so spare & simply stunning.

I remember reading those last lines in your MS & commenting on their effectiveness but is this the same book I read? or am I the same or not the same person who read it? This latter I find very disconcerting because I’m quite aware that this past year or so in my various states of being there have been gaps, gaps of memory & attention & concentration all over the place but still, this book is so much more full than I remembered, not simply of people but of insights & fraught impressions & deeper glimpses & the staunch (‘Firm and steadfast; true’ as the dictionary defines it) quality that Marvin Cherney grasped in his painting & is there still.

All the Fire Isld part of course I remember but not the extent to which you evoked that village & house & the people careening around from room to room (all I see missing is the Monopoly under that paper lampshade) but the atmosphere of it is all there so marvelously yet never overdone which is as true of the rest of the book’s familiar scenes & places, & how curious we will be to learn what it evokes for ‘the reader’ who was not there but here again, all that is evoked by sheer invention so far as I know, I mean there never was a Peninghen was there? So for me throughout there is the repeated shock of recognition buffeted by that of fabrication & all of it running smooth & seamless. And the people. Your Douglas must be the most remarkable creation in the book, for turning a ‘real’ person into a character elaborated in your invention of who he was and who—for those of us who knew him—he might have been, so well might have been if he had soared on the wings you’ve given him, an utterly believable character for ‘the reader’ & was equally real a poignant evocation of the fellow we knew. And the way you have juxtaposed him with her father Lad (I remember most vividly when I was in the mad & drinking & yes, I admit self pitying throes of that prolonged divorce, Douglas saying in the blunt way you have captured so well: Did you think it was going to be easy? meaning of course not the divorce but life: it pulled me up short, & still does when I recall it not infrequently because I think I did & in some demented way still do). Thus the brooding smoking cut off Lad/father you’ve given us: again, so understated & unsentimentalized & unindulgently but there at the end (page 311) right to the core.