B007RT1UH4 EBOK (130 page)

But I will be back in touch after the above low hurdle.

best regards,

W.G.

a (divinity?) that shapes our ends:
Hamlet
5.2.10.

To Sarah Gaddis

14 March ’91

Dear Sarah.

This morning I decided to approach it all differently: daily I’ve got up, tea & come straight to the typewriter to take up where I left off yesterday’s frustration, thinking Work Must Come First, then letters &—but what this has led to over what’s now weeks is neither letters nor the work; I have never that I recall been so stuck, a day or 2 on 3 or 4 lines & even those unsatisfactory. So now at 8 am I’ve reversed things, at least will get one letter off to you before the day collapses. [...]

Well not being practical folk sitting down to apply our talents to sex greed & violence best seller success in the American Way, we have chosen an odd path for ourselves, me complaining at this end over these frustrations entirely of my own making & you there having done an honest piece of work in the so far as I know silent aftermath. Individually you get very good grades: Helen (Mrs E.L.) Doctorow with many words of praise for your book (she having written a novel), Karen Saks, all impressed by your work & want to see you Move Onward. Louis Auchinloss the most teacherly: Well Will, I have just finished reading your daughter’s book, she is most certainly a writer & now that she has exorcised you, having killed you off at the end, I hope she will go on to the wider world. And so, now given your proven talent & ability, that does seem to be the next challenge, getting away from, out of one’s self to create entire fictions & characters (although these inevitably are made up of bits & pieces of one’s self & one’s own observations), but necessarily plot & story, where as Forster says, plot arising from character, that character must be consistent but plot should cause surprise. It has always seemed to me, though I have never really managed it, what a treat to get hold of an essentially simple situation & then watch the story write itself. For instance the one of
Gaslight
, the man marries the wealthy woman & then sets about driving her crazy, convincing her fearing & convincing herself that she is going mad & he is trying desperately to help, the only one she can trust & turn to &c. Well maybe all this is going too far but you see what I mean. A Plot. Something Matthew and I have talked about regarding his own work & medium, the movies, where it is more especially important I think, not just for suspense but that suspense must always be present (not necessarily the murder mysery sort) but simply What will happen next? To create characters the reader will, first, believe, & second, care about what happens to. Why so many movies are so ridiculously bad, the character scarcely believable but even if so you really don’t give a damn what happens to him as in most of these violence prone shoot out movies, who cares?

Also this business of character & plot as of particular importance at the stage you are at now if you wish to be: having proved that you can write, publish, & get Sunday
NYTimes
reviewed, to work out & outline a ‘story’ & write a chapter or 2 for an advance on another novel. Not a reflection on your work but simply the times we live in that whereas a few years ago there were almost immediate paperback offers when a novel came out, now (according to my editor at Simon & Sch) far far fewer. (Any day now both
J R
&
The Recogntions
OP, out of print.) Well it’s the world we’ve chosen & not an easy row to hoe as yr grandmother would have said. [...]

I just learned that Mark Twain took 3 years off between halves of finishing
Huckleberry Finn
, some comfort.

much love

Papa

Helen [...] a novel: as Helen Henslee, Mrs. Doctorow published a novel entitled
Pretty Redwing
(1982).

Karen Saks: correctly Keren: second wife of stage and film director Gene Saks (1921– ).

Forster [...] cause surprise: “characters, to be real, ought to run smoothly, but a plot ought to cause surprise”—
Aspects of the Novel
(Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 137—a phrase cited by Judge Bone in
FHO
(411).

Gaslight
: the 1944 film directed by George Cukor, as well as the 1940 screen adaptation directed by Thorold Dickinson, both share this plot, which originated in the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton.

To Griselda Ohannessian

[
Managing Director of New Directions (1927– ). After Stuart Klawans’s “Out of Print, but Not Forgotten” appeared in the
Voice Literary Supplement
in April 1991—expressing outrage at the “out of stock indefinitely” status of WG’s first two novels—WG received several inquiries from publishers. (WG wrote Klawans a thank-you note on 7 May 1991.) This letter acknowledges the importance of New Directions’s avant-garde titles to writers of WG’s generation .
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

7 May 1991

Dear Ms Ohannessian.

Thank you for your inquiry regarding reprint possibilities for my 2 novels discussed in the
VLS
article, which has provoked a good deal of interest. I have put the whole matter in the hands of my agent Candida Donadio & eventually we will work out some resolution; meanwhile looking back to my reading in the late ’forties I recall among the best, such things as
The Wanderer
, Kafka’s
Amerika
&c, under the New Directions imprint & whether or not we may work out anything in this current instance find your interest gratifying.

Yours,

William Gaddis

The Wanderer
[...]
Amerika
: Alain-Fournier’s
The Wanderer
(
Le Grand Meaulnes
) was published by New Directions in Françoise Delisle’s translation in 1946, and Kafka’s unfinished novel in 1940.

To John Napper

Wainscott, New York 11975

Hallowe’en 1991

Well! dear John,

what a treat & a pleasure & a confirmation your news brings that you’re both still with us but, with the Albemarle catalogue, triumphantly so! as the pictures themselves express in just these terms; their (your) clarity & vitality but (as I read them) underneath lurking something awfully wrong.

My own plods on at the usual glacial pace (426pp to date) but with What’s Dreadfully Wrong out there for all to see. I got far far deeper into ‘the law’ than intended, enough research for 10 books as usual & now struggling to surface once I at last realized that perhaps The Reader is not so utterly entranced by the mad elegance of a well written court Opinion as I, to say nothing of the intricacies of the (this is all) civil law itself; I mean I’d rather read Prosser on
Torts
than most novels (except of course the 19
^sie
Russians . . .

Imagine: I was actually in England for a couple of days in the spring. By misadventure. I hadn’t seen Sarah for some long time so heard about a $199. round trip to Paris, by ‘stand by’ & indeed I did: getting there was easy, spent 4 fine days, then 2 days ‘standing by’ at deGaulle; finally got on a plane to Boston but ‘we stop in London’ & indeed we did, all put off the plane at Heathrow, in to a minute bed&breakfast nr Victoria, another day standing by at Heathrow, another bed&breakfast night nr Victoria & quite unable to see anyone so of course ended up spending the simple return trip fare on these shenanigans & really got back to my own bed vowing never to travel again, preferring “a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad, and to travel for it too.”

Now, regarding the enclosure, if you are prepared to be amused? appalled? My ‘portrait’ done on a large expanse of broken crockery by Julian Schnabel: could anything be more remote from your
Recognition
(#11)? Well. He wanted to do it, having dipped into
The Recognitions
& simply gave it to me, a large forthright generous fellow I got quite fond of but his other & much heralded (others say ‘hyped’) ‘abstracts’ are utterly beyond me as is all of what’s going on in the galleries these days. To say nothing of ‘poetry’.

So we’ve no choice but to persist & know that we will last. Your spry photo in the elegant Albemarle is most heartening. I haven’t had a glass of spirits for more than 2 years though a little wine for the stomach’s sake, still fight the tobacco back & forth & its toll is apparent (especially dragging a bag through the endless corridors of Heathrow). Congratulations!