B007RT1UH4 EBOK (133 page)

Sidney Sheldon: American TV producer and best-selling novelist (1917–2007). In 1989, Sheldon and nearly a hundred other writers and publishers signed a pledge to use “acid-free paper for all first printings of quality hard-cover trade books.”

goodbye to all that: perhaps only coincidentally the title of Robert Graves’s early memoir (1929).

To Jack Green

[
After I sent Green copies of the Dalkey edition of
Fire the Bastards!
, he wrote me an insulting letter threatening legal action—to which I did not respond—and sent a copy of his letter to WG.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

20 November 1992

Well Jack Green,

long live intransigence! What are we dealing with: in a splendid (as always) phrase from Bill Gass ‘the high brutality of good intentions’? Hovering as I have always done between the limelight & obscurity this butterfly of the divided self (a basic theme of ‘another damned, thick, square book’* I am finishing now) pinned to the wall by Steven Moore’s attentions, 2 books past on my work & future threat of publication of my letters even & ‘biography’? which is dull stuff I would proclaim having just finished v. II of Stannard’s marvelous
Evelyn Waugh
.

You see by the enclosed that indeed I did receive copies of his publication as what he must have felt my curt note witnesses (I have not heard from him since) every letter of mine (Dear Miss Tillingast Thank you so much for your perfumed and generous estimate of my work, might I ask you to send me a snapshot of yourself naked) being worth $1 or so to the patrimonial archive, Lord! to have the thunderous integrity of Samuel Butler say (his fine novel published posthumously) or even Sir Richard Burton’s wife burning his papers (for all the wrong reasons) or what about Nietzsche’s crazy sister’s recreation, Hauptmann’s (& even Heidrich(sp?)’s) widows + Mary Hemingway’s uxorial rehabilitative efforts, on to Mme Pasteur (‘Oh Looie! all Paris is talking . . .’)

God knows how I got off on all this, not a glass of spirits in 3 years but a little wine for the stomach’s sake trying desperately to close out the * above now at 500++ 8½x14 pages much, in fact, dealing with copyright (a man’s illfated play stolen for The Movie) law but law law everywhere as usual over researched having been given the 84 vol.
AmJur
(next step down from
Corpus Juris
) hoping against hope (whatever that fine cliche may mean) to be done with it by year’s end & perhaps my own but otherwise expect to be in NY later in the winter & would be a tonic to see you again with fair warning.

best regards

W. Gaddis

Butler [...] posthumous novel: written in the 1880s,
The Way of All Flesh
was not published until 1903, a year after his death.

Sir Richard Burton’s wife: Isabel Burton burned many of her husband’s papers and manuscripts “to protect his reputation.”

Nietzsche’s crazy sister’s recreation: Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche published his writings in mangled form after his death in 1900. See
AA
77–78.

Hauptmann: after the death of German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), his widow kept his archives secret.

Heidrich: in 1951, the widow of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich (1904–42) turned down an offer by a Welsh writer to split the royalties 50-50 on a book about her husband.

Mary Hemingway: authorized the posthumous publication of novels that her husband Ernest (1899–1961) may not have wished to be published.

Mme Pasteur: holding rights to the French chemist’s name, his widow allowed another scientist to call his laboratory Institut Pasteur du Brabant.

To Muriel Oxenberg Murphy

[undated fax, 1992/1993?]

OR—accepting your good point that Ibsen has given us the 2nd act curtain only with Nora stamping out the door resolute? or in despair?—of course her (fictional ‘ideal’) husband Helmer is left in utter despair & confusion finally understanding “what has really happened” as GBShaw tells us “and sits down alone to wonder whether that more honourable relation can ever come to pass between them.” But she has, after all, “learnt to coax her husband into giving her what she asks by appealing to his affection for her: that is, by playing all sorts of pretty tricks until he is wheedled into an amourous humor” (and my! Claire Bloom certainly could in Joyce’s phrase make his mickey stand for him) . . . suppose, in his confused crushed angered self pity Helmer wonders whether she has taken a leaf from an egregious best seller of the 60s called
Games People Play
and is in effect daring him to come after her, invite her back, enlist family friends & seek ‘professional help’ shrinks & priests all to yield to the burden of the crippling proposition that it’s hardly over unless
he
wants it to be? Still mightily confused ‘after all he’s done for her’ trips he’s taken her on, gifts he’s tried to give her, friends and unspeakable practices & delights they’ve shared and all she has given him, does wretched Helmer left sitting there simply pour a glass of schnapps (it being Scandanavia)? or stand up and walk out the door himself up the country road breathing deeply on this beautiful day, same old squirrels, same old bunny rabbits scampering from his path, trying to clear his head thinking & hoping that with the help of the Great Script Doctor in the sky that this may be a 4 act play after all?

Ibsen [...] GBShaw: WG quotes from the conclusion of Shaw’s analysis of Ibsen’s 1879 play
A Doll’s House
in
The Quintessence of Ibsenism
(Brentano’s, 1928), 92.

Claire Bloom: the English actress (1931– ) played Nora both on stage and in the 1973 film version of
A Doll’s House
.

Joyce’s phrase make his mickey stand: a few pages from the end of Molly Bloom’s monologue in
Ulysses
.

Games People Play
: a 1964 book by Dr. Eric Berne on the psychology of human relationships.

To Saul Steinberg

[
Typed on the back of a rough draft of a paragraph on page 570 of
FHO
that cites lines from Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
.
]

Wainscott, NY

4 January 1993

Dear Saul,

it is not a paper shortage here that prompts this (overleaf) as my letter paper but it occurred to me you might be amused by these desperate notes for the morass I’m engulfed in out here trying perhaps unsuccessfully & surely unnecessarily to join up fragments of Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
with the tenants of a home aquarium in this last ditch effort to roll up this whole ball of wax (speaking of mixed metaphors) which keeps me from coming into town this week for not merely the pleasure but the happy need of your company at one of our simple dinners together which have meant a great deal to me as perhaps never more than now with the opportunity to thank you for your overpowering gift & so much else.

Muriel returns on Saturday from her London trip with her companion & I have the rather desperate but not entirely impossible hope of finishing the near final draft of this project which has oppressed our house like a contagious illness for so long ridden of course with the deep fear of its being too late to save the situation or any human part of it if I could ever have done so which you were subjected to in its latest & most painful manifestation at the Century: all I may have learned from it is that my daughter’s torments here on these occasions have blinded me to her own very perilous condition anywhere & that that must be my first assignment, especially given what have increasingly seemed to become my futile and too often intemperate efforts to resolve or at least to deal effectively with the domestic situation which now embraces this 3rd party ‘analyst’ to in my view a quite bizarre degree. Of course I may have got the whole thing backwards if indeed the topsy-turvy world we see on the evening news is the real one.*

Well enough for now of this burden on your generosity friendship which you have shown us both in so many ways over what have become so many years, I look forward to seeing you in a short time and in a better climate for my wishes to you for a ‘happy new year’,

with every high regard,

Gaddis

PS I have reread & still think Updike might have framed exactly the points he claims undraped by the ‘melancholy’ he himself inhabits.

*And so I go back where I came from, to reading Eliot,

To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual

Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:

And always will be, some of them especially

When there is distress of nations and perplexity

Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road

(1943)

the Century: the Century Club in Manhattan.

Updike: reference unknown.

To explore the womb [...] in the Edgware Road: from part 5 of Eliot’s “Dry Salvages.”