B007RT1UH4 EBOK (129 page)

Which I think, this juxtaposition of Douglas & Lad, gives your last line “. . . and almost drowned, and made a man a hero” such stunning effect because so suddenly & abruptly & believably it is all there; & I cannot imagine anyone reading it without feeling a blow to the pit of the stomach but at the same time an overwhelming & lingering sense of the inevitable beauty of it.

And thus all of this considered I think your original title that you’ve ended up with
Swallow Hard
is the right one, it’s sharp & intriguing when you pick the book up and continues to reverberate when you’ve finished reading it & put it down; & what else is to be said about it for now. Except what a pain to have to wait till February! But that, as we know, ‘comes with the territory’.

Except that you have a well earned Happy Birthday ahead! Because it will be one not of tinseled presents but one you have made yourself with all of your own courage & diligence & talent, & I know if anyone outside yourself can know the cost of all that to you, a pretentious thing to say but if not as aware perhaps at least aware of the part my own delinquencies & clumsy & so often futile attempts to keep the peace, have played. So you have every reason to be as proud of yourself as I am of you when you face the gang at Deauville & Lord knows some familiar faces, I have heard that Sidney & Pidie Lumet will be there, he is a warm fellow (despite my earlier annoyance with him for Matthew’s budding career speaking of my clumsy attempts) & Pidie is absolute tops, straight as can be. I forget who else but understand you may even get Gloria Jones, enough said, you can handle that.

The world prospects are something else now that they are spilling over into our own lives, USA was already becoming a financial nightmare but now with the millions a day Iraq adventure really alarming, my concern for your situation with the steady decline of the dollar if you are going to try to continue to carry that apartment yourself & my own situation when for the first time next January there will be no check from Simon & Schuster since the final one is due when I turn in the ‘finished’ MS which is (as always with my works) ‘not quite finished’, my Italian publisher silent on the $15 thousand he has owed me since spring & the movie prospects in the usual unresolved chaos but the Lord knows, looking back, we are certainly all much better off than we have been. There have been some rocky times here but I think we are straightening them out & Matthew is in very good form working away at his projects & the great good fortune of Katarina.

with my love as always, your proud

Papa

Marvin Cherney: American painter (1925–67), a family friend.

Peninghen: an artist’s colony located on a country estate in
Swallow Hard
.

Gloria Jones: see 9 June 1984.

Iraq adventure: President Bush began sending US troops to the Mideast shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990.

Katarina: Matthew’s girlfriend at the time.

To James Cappio

22 September 1990

Dear Jim,

I wonder how many times I have not written you (though you are at the top of a long list), appalled at the time that has passed & I cannot explain but can possibly recount. First I believe was my abrupt halt after your fine long detailed dissection of the Bone opinion reversing Oscar’s loss of his case on appeal, originality vs novelty &c. (I daren’t even look it up now for the date.) It was that I believe that made me stop and realise the immense morass I’d got myself into, the reams of material, of hundreds of marked passages in
AmJur
& Prosser & I thought, like Mr Gibbs in his (my)
Agap
ē
Agape
, what in God’s name did I think I was doing! [
J R
586] To be clear here: I was very aware of your sensitive & generous concern that I not feel you were correcting/ interfering with the work but were simply trying, as I wished you would do, to make me aware of any legal gaps in case I wished to amend them. And all along about that time other breakdowns came along, in threatened health, confidence, the ‘what use is any of it’ that apparently comes upon many enough writers late in their careers. Unproductive months, a bleak & grey winter spent out here alone largely, each day starting Now I shall get to it, ending Perhaps tomorrow, then.

Meanwhile to the work itself, my realisation that in my absorption with ‘the law’ & absurd notion of a novel almost entirely of legal memorandums briefs opinions &c my real attention & any surviving remnants of ‘talent’ should return to a novel’s real essentials: plot springing from character, character must be consistent but plot should cause surprise (Forster), what happens next? And in that desolate months-long search which should have taken a week gradually finding the clues in your Bone letter: Oscar’s (black) lawyer permits (or later says he did) the NYS law regarding originality (patents) to prevail intending to turn about & win on appeal (I haven’t got all that quite straight in my head yet, just how it will work), meanwhile it’s revelaed that he (the black lawyer Mr Basie) is a fraud, never passed the bar, learned law in prison &c, Oscar threatens his firm, finally his father the old Judge Crease reads the lower court’s decision & spots the flaws (which you spotted) steps in & directs the (successful) appeal (Bone recast) not out of love for Oscar whom he’s angry with for having exploited the family in his awful play but for love of the law; meanwhile having had his own troubles back with
Cyclone 7
struck by lightning which killed the dog Spot (negligence? Act of G*d?) &c about where I’m at now, sometimes a week for a paragraph when things are going well . . .

More and more prompted by those lines in
Four Quartets
where the words slip slide perish will not stay in place, where it’s all been done before better & elsewhere such a stunning passage I can’t believe I don’t have it here at hand but you certainly know it.

I heard, again how long ago! that you were no longer with Cahill but that’s all, I hope this reaches you. And getting hold of myself again I will write, at latest when I have
James B. (Infant) v. Village of Tatamount
, Crease, J. in some sort of shape. [
FHO
285–93] Perhaps starting tomorrow.

with thanks always for your time and patience,

I hope things are going well—W Gaddis

To Judith Gaddis

[1 October 1990]

Dear Judith,

no I don’t “think one ever can” get one’s life in order, at least in my experience of it so far (& most of those I see around me) though they strive: here’s Matthew living up near the GW [George Washington] bridge in a bloodthirsty neighborhood working at movie scripts, I keep telling him he’s too nice a person to get mixed up with that bunch (“I know, Pop”) and he is, compassionate’s the best word & with a kind of wisdom, just very decent though (or because of) these qualities don’t provide great financial returns; & Sarah still trying to get things in place has been living in Paris these 5 or 6 years after her escape-marriage collapsed (like going to live with the Shaws dinner-at-6) but speaking of Fire Isld she’s written a novel titled
Swallow Hard
which about sums it up, you & Matthew are not included but the ‘father’ appears in old tennis shoes, smoking, writing books that don’t sell too well, but touching & distant both, to be published in February & the early Saltaire days house full of drinking friends quite vivid as you’ll see. And the drinking I think looking back was a great part in “what went wrong”, I only realized recently what a large part it played in a good 40 years of my life, now haven’t had a scotch & soda &c for 1½ years though a little wine along the way, & the smoking & its effects still the on-again off-again plague. I can no more imagine that I’m approaching 70 than you as 50 & I find time goes more quickly & is harder to understand, part of it I know is approaching the end of a 4year book contract with of course the thing not at all near delivery, I suddenly got fascinated by the law for a novel in which everybody is finally suing everybody else & it took me a couple of years to realize the mess I’d got myself into, books & books & judicial opinions briefs depositions & marked passages piled high now trying to work my way out of it all so we don’t have another aborted Secret History of the Player Piano but the law is a very complicated & often comic scene or at least I hope to make it so.

Well, your word of Paz—that most unacceptable event we are obliged to accept, Barney Emmart gone, Bernie Winebaum—but beyond her ‘eccentricities’ the moment I think of Paz is with a lift of spirits & thank heavens for such an abrupt & simple end how touched I am at her last thought for me. Lord we all did try, how we tried! & you I believe most of all till it simply became untenable & it took me a long time to understand that & to grasp your courage. And of course I think of you not infrequently & all our good days & always with the hope you are well because you so deserve well & even the ‘contentment’ you sought from the start & I could not grasp, your letter was generous & so like I always remember you & I will let you know as things prosper or at least go on,

W.

Paz: see 16 July 1974.

James Cappio

[
Enclosed was a draft of the second Crease opinion, mentioned in WG’s last letter to Cappio. In a postscript he adds: “The
New Yorker
declined, having had enough of Spot—”
]

3 Nov. 90

Dear Jim,

many thanks for your letters & new treatise. I have read that some 40 thousand enter law school each year, about the same number leaving the profession over stress, distress, &c&c & so much I suppose for your departure from Cahill but it is a shock that you haven’t landed elsewhere, or is there a (divinity?) that shapes our ends rough hew them how we may? For now I just hope that you’ll stay around town a bit longer to keep an eye on me.

So to keep the lines of communication back in operation I attach the attached for your entertainment. Having drafted it I’ve now taken a step back to lay the ground for it in the novel’s terms, just a few but tortured pages then on to the Main Action again.

Looking at the attached I red underlined a couple of phrases unsure if they are correct usage, otherwise the same madness prevails (having got into ‘bailment’ when a tenant here reneged & left possessions I was ready to sell or destroy but was warned we were inadvertant bailees, thus we learn).