B007RT1UH4 EBOK (143 page)

So here I sit among relics: the small lazy susan from scrabble days at the Saltaire dinner table, chipped survivors of Quimper from the hooligan children’s raids in Massapequa 40 years ago . . . it all wrenching, wrenching, wrenching as you say, in every case it seems traceable to my own delinquency in the name of a writer’s obsession with finishing a book, & another book, at the agony & expense of everyone around him. I’m glad at any rate that that mortgage check helped to close out these dim latter Piermont days & leave us both with a good many many sunlit memories there together all, really, as tangible in their way as furniture & of far greater value, sunt lacrimae rerum (there are tears for things) notwithstanding. [...]

Of absent friends, I just gradually lost touch with the Nappers (he’d be well in his 80s by now & probably is), Martin I finally simply gave up on, he had alienated everyone he knew in terrible bitterness & I finally realized he is really quite mad. And then there are the obituaries, Otto Friedrich, Stanley Elkin, Terry Southern, & back to (mad) Barney Emmart & whose last words were these?: Si ça c’est la morte, ce n’est pas drole . . . (errors forgiven, not my language though I’ve been invited to Paris next May by some Pompidoux people if I’m still in 1 piece), who knows?

Meanwhile (Life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans) I am trying to embark on another project (book), a new agent after a generation with Candida whose health has badly sagged all quite a painful scene, but that is not a note I cared to end on, better your being “excited about finally being a grown-up” (though I’m not sure I can wholly recommend it, was it Hemingway who said ‘growing up is a very difficult thing and but few survive it’)? Always the encouraging word,

love

W.

sunt lacrimae rerum: a phrase from Virgil’s
Aeneid
(
ODQ
).

Si ça c’est la morte, ce n’est pas drole: “If this is death, it isn’t funny.”

Pompidoux people: the Centre Georges Pompidou, a cultural complex.

a new agent: Andrew Wylie.

Life is what happens [...] other plans: usually ascribed to John Lennon (from his 1980 song “Beautiful Boy”) but since it appears on p. 486 of
J R
, either the ex-Beatle got it from WG or (more likely) they both found it elsewhere.

Hemingway [...] few survive it’: another one of Jack Gibbs’s epigraphs (
J R
486) but untraced.

To Larry M. Wertheim

[
A lawyer (Kennedy & Graven) and adjunct professor of law at William Mitchell College of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He sent WG a copy of his essay “Law as Frolic: Law and Literature in
A Frolic of His Own
,”
William Mitchell Law Review
21.2 (1995): 421–56, to which the page numbers below refer.
]

East Hampton, NY 11937

12 March 1996

Dear Larry Wertheim,

(predictably) failing best cellardom, the time effort hopes &c that go into a piece of work like this last frolic of mine may however rarely provoke rewards a good deal more substantial than
Today Show
celebrity & this law review article of yours certainly ranks. It is a delight to me in its seizures on detail & nuance, width of its grasp & peripheral reading both in my earlier work & elsewhere & I suppose paramount to the novelist (or should be) believing & feeling for the characters.

That said, running through it item by item as they leap forth, in fact (423) despite reviews headlined Scathing Indictment of Law & Lawyers in the current mode, it’s been more warmly & happily embraced by lawyers which of course I’d intended & hoped for.

Your mention (425) that ‘the plot can largely be retold as a series of lawsuits’ recalls an initial notion I had of making it simply that, no narrative dialogue &c but the story emerging from an entanglement of complaints depositions brief[s] &c which thank heavens I abandoned, already stigmatized as ‘difficult’ as I am.

Curiously (427, 438, 443) the Eugene O’Neill entry was kind of a post hoc affair. I’d long since worked out the substitute/self murder equation, & even such details as the stiff father/major a judge, the cheek scar/head wound &c &c; then late along the way reread the O’Neill play which I (like Oscar) found contrived awkward stilted & altogether pretty bad BUT was honestly really startled at the correspondencies (‘substantial similarities’) with
my
tale: unconscious plagiary (but still culpable?) that Hand mentions? Because I had written papers in college & diagramed O’Neill/Greek drama/Freud. And then at the last minute it occurred to me that obviously the O’N. estate would sue Oscar & even, once the deed was done, wondered if (in ‘real life’) they would sue me. And so (443) while Oscar’s homage apologia embraces Plato I don’t think I meant it to O’Neill.

Regarding (428) the Episcopal/Pepsico suit: I’d originally intended it to be a prominent, if ancillary, feature of the book & had-&-have collected the vast amount of ammunition for this reductio-ad-absurdum version of rendering unto Caesar &c but was finally so overwhelmed by this additional prospect (as also realizing I could push the reader just so far) that I finally escaped it as the ‘lost’ brief at the end but God knows if I’m around for long enough it may yet surface as so rich with implications for our ridiculous times.

(Incidentally: for the sort of small prank I sometimes cannot resist & to keep my interest from flagging, I doubt any reader noted but picture his treat if he did, the confusion of the young lawyer & the lost brief (446) over the 2 Harrys (“That’s not the Harry I knew”
Frolic
paper ed. 506) harks back to the rather salacious exchange between Christina & Basie (id. 107 & 206) regarding the hairy Ainu, which finally sends Christina over the edge.) And speaking of Mr Basie I meant him as a man with a good deal of dimensions, cunning & compassion, saves Oscar from himself as it were, & ‘living’ parallel to the finally hunted down John Israel in the play.

Oscar’s lawsuit was well in (my) hand researched, outlined, determined outcome &c some time before Buchwald (434) & (as you note) distinct from it as breach of contract rather than plagiary though I did at the end pick up from Buchwald the ‘creative accounting’ details for Oscar’s ‘pyrrhic victory’ (444). (Incidentally I believe Paramount even had the gall to claim that the ‘idea’ for that really lousy movie was EMurphy’s.)

In light of the above & all of your marvelous insights, summation & care I hate to point out that it is Tatamount (id.29) not Tantamount (426) & not Frickert (428) but Fickert (id.373) I believe I stole from an old routine of Jonathan Winters. Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

My thanks to you again, with warm regards

William Gaddis

the O’Neill play:
Mourning Becomes Electra
(1931), based loosely on the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Oscar’s lawyer Basie calls it “a clumsy warmed over schoolboy parody of Euripides with a few vulgar Freudian touches thrown in for good measure” (
FHO
96).

Buchwald [...] EMurphy’s: as noted earlier (first letter of 21 January 1990), Eddie Murphy’s
Coming to America
was the subject of a lawsuit brought by journalist Art Buchwald. Jonathan Winters: one of the stand-up comedian’s many personas was a grouchy old woman named Maude Frickert [
sic
], a recurring character on
The Jonathan Williams Show
(CBS, 1967–69).

Ah [...] for?: the most quoted line from Robert Browning’s poem “Andrea del Sarto” (1855).

To Thomas Überhoff

[
Editor at Rowohlt Verlag who was overseeing Nikolaus Stingl’s German translation of
FHO
(
Letzte Instanz, 1996
). In a rare explication of his own prose, WG attempts to untangle a long sentence on page 304 as Oscar nods off while watching a television nature program on

a lackluster member of the Cistaceae or rockrose family, Helianthemum dumosum, more familiarly known in its long suffering neighborhood as bushy frostweed for its talent at surviving the trampling by various hoofed eventoed closecropping stock of the suborder Ruminantia, to silently spread and widen its habitat at its neighbors’ expense like some herbal version of Gresham’s law in Darwinian dress demonstrating no more, as his head nodded and his breath fell and the crush of newsprint dropped to the floor, the tug at his lips in the troubled wince of a smile might have signaled no more than, or better perhaps the very heart of some drowned ceremony of innocence now the worst were filled with passionate intensity where—we share something then don’t we, no small thing either [Basie had told Oscar earlier] —That’s good to know, demonstrating simply the survival of the fittest embracing here in bushy frostweed no more than those fittest to survive not necessarily, not by any means, by any manner of speaking, the best [...].

Überhoff also asked what kind of “rockets” were used in the Civil War.
]

East Hampton, NY 11937

12 May 1996

Dear Mr Überhoff.

Thank you for your inquiry: no question that that is about as dense a sentence as I have ever written, for which I apologize to Mr Stingl (but not to the reader!). I shall try to ‘shed some light’ which may simply confuse things further.

Overall, the ‘density’ is calculated to reflect the
silent spread
of
bushy frostweed
, here representing disorder & vulgarity (Ortega y Gasset’s ‘mass man’ proclaiming his rights to be vulgar)
widening its habitat at its neighbors’ expense
, i.e., Oscar’s elitism & search for order, as bad money driving out good in Gresham’s Law: thus the wincing defeat of Oscar’s (play=ceremony of) innocence as portrayed in Yeats’ poem The Second Coming wherein “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”, Yeats being the bond that brings Oscar & Basie closer (
no small thing either
as noted elsewhere (p.88) in the book). And so the metaphor of bushy frostweed for
the worst full of passionate intensity
(see Oscar’s diatribe on pp. 96–7) demonstrating here that
survival of the fittest
, rather than
the best
(‘plays of ideas’), means
no more than those fittest to survive
& quite possibly, as we see all around us, the worst.