B007RT1UH4 EBOK (146 page)

Such the pitfalls. I regret, once again, being so brief & perfunctory with this response to what I find around the top of works I’ve seen on mine, with on the one & happy hand reaching back to what you have made from our first encounter & I an agonized paranoid/shy (guest), to the opposite which I might have anticipated with some academic collisions under my belt now the inevitable sharp words that must emerge between those selling apples & those selling oranges.

I am incidentally heavily involved just now in a book on the player piano (the one Gibbs didn’t write in
J R
) tangled for the moment in contract difficulties (my work incidentally doing immensely well in Germany (where they
read
) and even should we all survive all (meaning
all
) the notes for the Pepsi-Cola-Episcopal case, God help us all & thank you again,

Warm regards

William Gaddis

our first encounter: WG had visited John Kuehl’s class at NYU when Knight was a graduate student there.

Matthew Gaddis, WG, and Sarah Gaddis, Key West, 1998.

To Gregory Comnes

East Hampton, NY 11937

17 July 1998

Greg,

The Plutarch on Herodotus Father of Lies is a sheer delight, how else would I have got hold of it & I do thank you (as well as followups) fits in so beautifully with my (also Plato’s in banishing Homer?) assault on/embrace of the ‘fictions’ adorning the naked animal; also & obviously I do enjoy a bit of malice & Plutarch is a marvel at it here . . .

More to follow eventually but I wanted to get this off at least, warm best to you both,

WG

Plutarch on Herodotus: in his essay “On the Malice of Herodotus,” first-century-
AD
Greek biographer Plutarch dismissed much of the history written by fifth-century-
BC
Herodotus, called by some the Father of History.

Plato’s in banishing Homer: in Plato’s
Republic
, Socrates says Homer would not be studied in his ideal state.

To Steven Moore

[
I had sent WG a copy of my essay “Sheri Martinelli—A Remembrance” (
Anais
16, 92–103), which was based on information supplied by his old Greenwich Village friends Vincent Livelli, Chandler Brossard, and Sheri herself (whom I knew for the last dozen years of her life before her death in 1996; she supplied the “mama’s boy” remark). He typed but did not mail this letter; it was found after his death in a copy of the magazine
Gargoyle
I sent him that summer, which contains a much-expanded version of my Martinelli memoir (#41, 28–54).
]

18 July 1998

Steven Moore

Thanks for sending your version of Sheri. I hadn’t known of the range of her later acquaintance & admirers, as Ginsberg whom I’d known over the years till he dropped but never heard they’d met, let alone all the other stars you mention I hope more accurately portrayed here than myself “quite smitten with her” (p99) certainly but that she “didn’t reciprocate (my) interest, regarding (me) as something of a “mama’s boy” hardly bares dignifying especially as backed by the similarly invidious “literally” since “my father left (my mother) when I was 3.” He did not leave her. They separated. Or is this plain carelessness as elsewhere (trusting you see the difference), hardly anyone’s business but in these times of internet easily entered as ‘information’ once it’s been introduced as ‘fact’ much enough like (p100) the mention of ‘revenge fantasy’ as the equally loaded alternative of Sheri’s ‘indifference’ to me (compare Plutarch’s ‘On the Malice of Herodotus’).

“You had to be there” as they say & as your Village scene illustrates the danger of having not: the under current of the drug ambience, Stanley Gould, Anton Rosenberg (dead a few weeks ago), Eddie Shu the heavy drug connexion, hardly the ‘rival’ you imply. No, no, you had to be there, hardly ‘indifference’ but life & book were Sheri being celebrated, that winter of ’47 I was perhaps unwisely contemplating some sort of permanent arrangement at her decision, instead a telegram among my papers signaling her nonappearance with ‘sister Judith is in town’ & I left that night for Panama, to Spain as you note the year following. No, those were youthful grand and often wild times. You had to be there. [...]

Ginsberg [...] dropped: the poet had died the previous year.

‘revenge fantasy’: in
R,
WG kills off Esme, the character based on Martinelli.

Anton Rosenberg: Village hipster, painter, and jazz musician (1926–98), called “Julien Alexander” in the same Kerouac novel in which WG appears (
The Subterraneans
).

Eddie Shu: jazz musician (1918–86) and Martinelli’s drug dealer; he appears in
R
as Chaby Sinisterra (called Gism in early drafts).

To Gregory and Judith Comnes

[
After WG decided to convert
AA
from a nonfiction study to a novella, he received a commission from Deutschland Radio to write a play for broadcasting, so he sent them the penultimate draft of
AA
as a one-act monologue entitled
Torschlusspanik
(which means the fear of doors closing, of
opportunities lost). It was translated by Marcus Ingendaay and broadcast under Klaus Buhlert’s direction on 3 March 1999, three and a half months after WG died. The book version of
AA
contains the Pulitzer diatribe mentioned below (60-62), the cover letter which accompanied a copy of the play.
]

East Hampton, NY 11937

1 Sept. 98

dear friends,

I could & might as well have sent this off a while ago but had hoped to get in a diatribe on Pulitzer (done but not the right pace) but more important this is as you will see a sort of compleat in itself, ie with a beginning middle & end, & since it now cast as the opening of the (book) the carryover from this to the continuation both character(s?)wise & features, the youth & mentor the history as lie (gossip) the &c&c&c is proving difficult so run through this if you wish for the time being,

WG

[
WG finished
AA
just as he was hospitalized in Southampton for a variety of ills. He died on the morning of December 16th, two weeks before what would have been his 76th birthday. A memorial tribute was held on 6 May 1999 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, at which Sarah Gaddis, Louis Auchincloss, William H. Gass, Joy Williams, Julian Schnabel, and D. A. Pennebaker spoke. The proceedings were published in
Conjunctions
33 (Fall 1999): 149–60.
Agapē Agape
and WG’s collected essays,
The Rush for Second Place
, were published in October 2002. Since then, new translations of his work continue to appear—
J R
in Chinese and Italian,
AA
in German, French, Spanish, and Italian—and a few of the stories WG wrote in the 1940s have been published in periodicals. When the first two novels came up for copyright reversion, the Gaddis Estate chose to move the books to Dalkey Archive, who enthusiastically offered a plan to reissue each title along with a new volume of Gaddis’s selected letters.
]

Afterword

It is a long journey to read a volume of letters, and so it has been for me with this one, a selection of my father’s correspondence that reveals his life in high times and low, sometimes in painful magnification.

Long before I knew his work, I knew my father’s writing through his letters—a use of language that involved control and precision and striking passages of beauty, whether observing the natural world or describing loss or how it is to grow up. And now that I have read the whole collection, I see that this beauty is present even when—perhaps especially when—he is angry, or feels abandoned or betrayed, and is wounded.

Included in the collection are thirty or so letters out of some three hundred that he wrote to me. He frequently addressed envelopes in his unique calligraphic hand, and these were startling to receive when I was growing up, almost medieval looking, a work of art; the result of time he spent convalescing from an illness in adolescence. His letters were handwritten or else he used a manual typewriter. I never received an e-mail from him, and don’t imagine he ever wrote one.

He wrote to me as early as 1964, while traveling; but his regular letters began after my parents divorced and my mother remarried and we moved to Massachusetts. Although they were to be a stabilizing force in my life, they were not easy for me to read and absorb early on. Rich in emotion and description, with an emphasis on values and the importance of being out in the world, the letters were serious in nature, difficult for a twelve-year-old girl growing up in another household. Their very existence underscored the fact of our living apart, and often I felt his anger at this, his frustration and helplessness, as much I did his devotion and concern and wisdom. He himself grew up without a father present in his life, and in one letter, he described his wistfulness taking the train back and forth to a small Connecticut boarding school when he was a young child. From this I knew how deeply it affected him to put my brother and me on a train after a weekend visit with him. He could have simply told me how he felt, but that would have been handing a child the burden of a parent’s loneliness. So instead he wrote about his boyhood experience of loneliness.

I knew his loneliness perhaps because I knew him through his letters; when he was low, he wrote about it. He drove convertibles after my mother left him: a navy blue Pontiac with a white top, a burgundy Chevy with a white top, a bronze Ford XL with a black top. Years later, he told me that owning those cars was a way for him to feel a bit of flash and dash to keep himself together and to make us think he was together, even as he was plagued with money worries, running out of advances while working on
J R
, taking jobs writing corporate speeches to pay tuitions, mortgages, child support.

During these years, he picked us up every other Friday at the train or bus station in New Haven or Stamford, Connecticut, and drove us back to Croton, later Piermont. After a weekend of cribbage and
Perry Mason
, perhaps a movie, and going over homework, he drove us back to the train on Sunday. Then he followed up on our visit with a letter—or else wrote a furious letter like the one he wrote to Jovanovich, his publisher, in April, 1970, which is staccato in intensity even with its run-on sentences.

J R
took my father twenty years to write—my childhood and adolescence. I particularly remember the summers, when he loaded cartons of the manuscript into the car, and we drove to Bay Shore and boarded the ferry to Saltaire, Fire Island. He managed to hold onto that house for over fifteen years, rebuilding it when it was condemned following a severe storm in the sixties that brought it down off its pilings.

In person, my father was quiet, deliberate, with a dry sense of humor. He was thoughtful, gentle. He listened. He encouraged me to write. He planned ahead and was rarely impulsive. Yet he could be impatient and short-tempered. He was a driven man, intense in what he demanded and what he gave. He eschewed sentimentality, yet he quoted from Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town,
telling me to live “every, every minute.” In terms of the world, he wanted to belong, yet stubbornly remained an outsider. Even in good times, he had that cautionary sense of “waiting for the other shoe to drop,” using that expression.

In addition to letters, I received birthday collages, valentines, cartoons of political figures made from photos clipped from the
New York Times
. As I grew up and made my own life, his letters, handwritten or typed single-spaced, sometimes on the backs of discarded manuscript pages, reflected back to me things I said in my own. They were now part of an exchange, became a correspondence we both counted on and enjoyed, except for periods of upheaval in his life, when for me they were cause for worry.

Having kept track of my trove of letters for years, letting go wasn’t easy. Before packing them off to the archive at Washington University, I organized and catalogued them. Some I matched with envelopes, but some didn’t have dates, or postmarks on envelopes were illegible, which meant that a few thick packets of empty envelopes went along as well. Envelopes are curious things, with their stamps and postmarks. They are documents; artifacts. In this case a record of my father having lived in New York State his entire adult life, and for me, a long list of addresses in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, France, and North Carolina.

It is deeply moving to see my letters in the context of this book. But I was most affected by the first section, my father writing to my grandmother. I had read some of these letters, but didn’t realize the scope of them, how they charted my father’s travels as a youth abroad. And having met Margaret Williams, I was riveted when reading about my father’s hopes to marry her. I hadn’t known it was so serious between them. I found myself worried for this callow adventurer who was so sure of himself as a writer, but who (it was clear from the letters before he knew it himself) was going to lose the girl.

His voice early on sounds familiar to me, as do his concerns. In his twenties, in a letter from 15 January 1948, he is already using the word “Lord,” (“Lord how I miss New York”) as if he were an old man looking back. Writing from the Canal Zone at twenty-six years of age, he is conscious of time passing and defensive when my grandmother says his plans sound “glorious.” He is “disconcerted” by this word, and says he is”(1) earning and saving (2) thinking reading and writing—which is not time wasted dreaming.” Anxiety and self-denial—these traits were with him throughout his life.

Other letters were a revelation. I hadn’t known of Pop’s correspondence with Katherine Anne Porter; and though I knew growing up that the British painter John Napper and his wife Pauline were close friends of ours (we went to John’s exhibitions in New York, and I visited them on my 1978 honeymoon), I didn’t realize what a very long and intimate dialogue they maintained over the decades through letters.

When life got complicated, he wrote letters to get under control situations that were out of control; and regarding publishers and scholars, to set the record straight. I found his letters to scholars interesting, considering he was known for being unwilling to discuss his work.

During the last three years of my father’s life, my brother Matthew and I alternated caring for him, at Boat Yard Road in Easthampton and in Key West, where Pop and his second wife Judith had rented a house once, and where we were reunited with Judith again. Key West was a magical, sunny world where he worked on his final novel, where doctors and friends were in close proximity and old friends came to visit. We were set to go down there for a third winter in the fall of 1998, when he began to decline definitively.

I was based in Asheville, North Carolina, during those years, flying north or south every month or two to be with my father. In December, my fiancé, John Twilley, and I rented a house in Sag Harbor to be near him. We arrived on December 15th. He was in the hospital, Matthew there with him, and his old pal, John Sherry. His condition had worsened, and that evening, we were permitted to take him home to Boat Yard Road. He died early the next morning, December 16th, 1998.

As one grows older, photographs become important, for themselves and for the memories they bring. Martin Dworkin’s photographs document the period of
The Recognitions
; and for me, the years my parents were together. Martin came to Massapequa and to Croton and to Fire Island, where I remember him following us on the boardwalks in his sandals and socks, several cameras around his neck. Chelsea Pennebaker photographed her father, my father, and John Sherry, at Penny’s birthday party. It is difficult to see my father looking so frail, but wonderful to remember how his friendships sustained him. As for the photo Mellon Tytell took of us in Paris, it was a winter day and we walked around the Île Saint-Louis, and she caught exactly what it was like to have him visit me there.

Sarah Gaddis

June 5, 2012