B007RT1UH4 EBOK (137 page)

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To Clare Alexander

[
Publishing Director at the London office of Penguin Viking. The Bosch artwork WG suggests below was indeed used for the cover of the UK edition, which appeared in June 1994. The artwork for the US edition, a family in-joke, was a “painting” from Sarah Gaddis’s childhood.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

17 September 1993

Dear Ms Alexander.

I was happy to have your letter with word that you will be publishing
A Frolic of His Own
in Britain next spring, and your courtesy in consulting me about the cover.

Regarding the fax you speak of receiving of the US book jacket you may have seen an early & somewhat jumbled version (not to speak of the poor quality of faxed art in general) & I have asked Simon & Schuster to send you a fairly finished proof which I am quite pleased with.

Elsewhere I’m sure you’ve seen the really splendid covers on the new Penguin XXth Century Classic eds. of
J R
&
The Recognitions
, products of a frenzy of faxed exchanges between me & Michael Millman at Penguin New York, in fact looking over our rejections I come across the enclosed detail from H. Bosch’s gigantic
Garden of Delights
which* I have found rather haunting & may intrigue you for the moment; & as anything turns up elsewhere I shall surely let you know.

The good Lord only knows where I shall be next spring when you publish, I should certainly like going down to Kew in Lilac time better than anything but there are so many contingencies I daren’t think of them now. Meanwhile I look forward to continuing with this exchange.

with best regards,

W. Gaddis

*a point being to bring out the ironic rather than frivolous use of the fine word ‘frolic’ in cover art & lettering so it doesn’t promise just another damn silly book like those engulfing the market here.

H. Bosch’s gigantic
Garden of Delights
:
The Garden of Earthly Delights
, a triptych (87 x 153 inches) Bosch painted sometime between 1490 and 1510, which WG would have seen at the Prado in Madrid.

To Robert Creeley

[
American poet and critic (1926–2005), then teaching at SUNY Buffalo. The final paragraph refers to WG’s designation by Governor Mario Cuomo as the official New York State Author for 1993–95, which entailed a trip to SUNY Albany for a ceremony.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

20 September 1993

Dear Bob,

many thanks for your note & for taking interest in this agreeable plight we share: coming up with more $$ for the detritus than we ever did from the published work (Oh! to have the intransigent integrity of Justice OW Holmes ordering all his papers burnt & letting his Opinions stand for themselves nobody’s business how he got there . . . of course he left most of his estate to the US Treasury though with taxes what they are we are doing practically the same thing.)

I’ve had various ‘feelers’ regarding my ‘archives’ even a visit from one of those Santa Barbara dealers a few years ago but have wanted to finish this last 586pp novel
A Frolic of His Own
now in bound proofs for Jan 94 publication & get all that dead matter back before considering the next move, & had had in fact a feeler from this Minkoff (mentioning yours) a couple of months ago saying he thought it’s worth a good deal of money whatever that means, I responded with some estimate of the bulk of it (goes back complete to the MS &c of
The Recognitions
) but never heard again from him so heaven knows whom he’s got now ‘much interested’ in buying, he knows where I am.

You won’t happen to be in Albany around 10 November (I think is the date) will you? to see me canonized New York State Author (+ check) from the Governor? I’d be delighted if so,

best regards

Willie

Justice OW Holmes: Oliver Wendall Holmes (1841–1935), mentioned often with approval in
FHO
(23, 46, 109, 286, 429, 443, 472, and 574 [the quip about leaving his estate to the US Treasury]).

Minkoff: George Robert Minkoff, a New York rare-book dealer and writer (not to be confused with the Robert Minkoff who wrote his dissertation on
R.
) WG never did sell his archives during his lifetime.

To the Editors,
Iowa Review

Wainscott NY 11975

28 September 1993

Dear Editors.

Thank you for the distinction you so generously heap upon me in your recent letter regarding your forthcoming issue on ‘experimental fiction’. I fear however that in this deluge of critical approaches and categories—high modern, post-modern, deconstruction, post-structural, where I frequently see my work discussed at length—‘experimental’ is the one which I find specifically unsuited, due to my sense of the decline in the use and meaning of ‘experimental’ and ‘experiment’ from the blunt dictionary definition as ‘A test made to demonstrate a known truth’ to which I should happily subscribe, to the rather loose embrace of writing pursued willy-nilly in some fond hope of stumbling on those strokes of brilliance which that perfect poet Keats mistrusted even in himself observed with “It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.”

From the start almost a half century ago I have believed (& Keats to witness) that I knew exactly what I am doing: as ‘known truth’ for example, that style must match content, hence the fragmentation in
The Recognitions
; language and disorder, and authorial absence going back to Flaubert, in
J R
; exercising the cliche in
Carpenter’s Gothic
; language and order in
A Frolic of His Own
.

Thus it would be quite unseemly (not to say inflammatory) for me to name as ‘carrying the torch of the experimental movement’ writers who might well feel that they too know exactly what they are doing as I trust you will understand, as I trust you will further understand that I have no wish or intention of disparaging your enterprise, or of belittling your generous appraisal of my work. I have no short stories recent or otherwise, I do not wear T shirts, but can at least respond to your notion regarding ‘the work of new and established visual artists who use text in their works’ with the enclosed from Julian Schnabel’s
Recognitions
Series (there are a half dozen or so of them nicely reproduced in his catalogues &c) which you may find pertinent.

With best regards,

W. Gaddis

Keats [...] not the thing”: assessing himself in a letter to B. R. Haydon (8 March 1819), Keats wrote: “I am three and twenty with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing” (so reads
ODQ
, WG’s source; other editors read the last three words as “nothing”). Also quoted in
J R
(486).

Julian Schnabel’s
Recognitions
Series: a 1987 suite of paintings featuring words or phrases from
R,
published in catalogue form as
Reconocimientos Pinturas del Carmen/The Recognitions Paintings del Carmen
(Kunsthalle Basel, 1989).

To Donn O’Meara and William Carnahan

[
A fax sent to each of these old friends. It begins with the opening lines of Tennyson’s “Tithonus” (1859), a figure from Greek mythology who asked for and received immortality from his lover Eos, goddess of dawn, but forgot to ask to remain forever young. Now withered and decrepit “Here at the quiet limit of the world” (l. 7), he is transformed by Eos into a grasshopper. Cf.
AA
: “where immortality finds its home at last, where the voice has dwindled to the dry scratch of a grasshopper” (81).
]

19 November ”93

And here The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan . . . literally, literally; & did I ever mention that a ½ century ago I changed my middle name on Harvard’s transcripts from ‘Thomas’ to ‘Tithonus’ there conjuring the day when through Eos’ intervention I’d secure immortality forgetting, in our lust, to stipulate eternal youth, until the day comes round (Here at the quiet limit of the world) when, pitying, the Dawn to the rescue has him transformed into the grasshopper with its relentless immortal tdzzzk, tdzzzk, tdzzzk . . .