B007RT1UH4 EBOK (28 page)

Music sch. fire: perhaps a reference to his uncle Ernest’s music school in Brooklyn.

Puerto Limón: large city on the Caribbean Ocean, 75 miles east of San José. It appears to be the model for the Central American town where Otto stays (
R
I.4).

To Katherine Anne Porter

Pto Limón, CR

May 1948

My dear Miss Porter.

Now I presume to write you again; and I say presume because I cannot tell but that after my last letter you may have wearily shaken your head and said, —There must be some way to put an end to this. But it is a rather unfair game I have been playing with people recently, to write a letter and then finish it saying, —I am sorry but can give no address . . . Well; and if the letter asks questions they have no way of answering, and know I am somewhere making the answers—the wrong ones, but better ones—myself. Or they cannot return argument about some wrong assumption; or they cannot say, —Please stop bothering yourself writing these things to me. No: the postman always rings twice and there is the letter, he must read it and be futilely provoked, or bored without recourse. Or is it instead presumption to assume that the people want to answer the letter? (That business of ‘owing someone a letter’ is horrible.)

Anyhow there are some things I have tried to think about recently, or been provoked over, and wanted to communicate them to you. I am in an Atlantic port waiting for some kind of boat that I can work back to the states on, and fortunately I suppose have not much to read and so I read what I have read and also get a little work done. It has been raining for four days, it rains outside and in one corner of my room, but the bed is in the other corner; but they cannot load bananas and so the days go. It is a place like that lazy man WS Maugham wrote about all the time, where the days dissolve into each other and one is suddenly surprised that it is Tuesday, or Sunday, though there is no reason to be surprised, it does not matter. I have thought about Maugham of course right from the word ‘rain’, and Sadie Thompson was a good story. But do you know what I mean about lazy? Like in that
Razor Edge
book (a story he has told so many times) we finish with the revelation that the hero was ‘good’. Well good, what good. All I could make out was that he was a rootless American, a life I know well enough. But good? Because he was disinterested; that is fine, but I don’t remember his doing any acts of disinterested goodness; he wanted to marry the girl who had turned up a whore—that saintly complex, but it has been done so many times and better explained as such than simply shown as a picture of goodness. And what girl who has gone that far wants to be ‘saved’ by being married, none that I have known, they usually have their futility pretty well in hand. Certainly the picture of the whore and salvation is one of the most tempting, excitingly symbolic to play with (and Maugham did it well that once, when Sadie Thompson said —Men, they’re all alike. Pigs, all of them.) But it has been done with such maudlin stature by the Russians, I don’t think anyone could out-do Sonia and Raskolnikov.

But here is something, in this picture of goodness as an attribute of ‘simplicity’. And this falls in with what you said in your letter, the business of —Yes, but he was
smart
, &c. And also with the ruction I was (am) in over being ‘anticipated’. I had made a note, perhaps with your words subconsciously in mind, that today the general attitude is that anyone can be Christian, it is ridiculously easy and rather foolish—I think of that word ‘sucker’ which is such a worldly condemnation—and that the only way to gain respect is to be worldly, sophisticated (in acts not just words or cigarette-smoking) ‘smart’. Well, after that revelation I came on this, written by a Bishop Butler in 1736 (quoted in Toynbee’s (abridged)
Study of History
):

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if in the present age this were an agreed point among all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.

Well; to not only be anticipated by 200years, but by one with such style as Bishop Butler! It was very disconcerting. And one goes back to the attempts that have been made to show the Christian goodness personified in an ‘idiot’, Dostoevski’s greatest attempt, and the foolish father of the young man in Tolstoy’s
Power of Darkness
. Still there seems to be a great rift between them and Bunyan’s Pilgrim. Now there is a man called Silone, I think you must have read his
Bread & Wine
and
And He Hid Himself
, who fascinates me, because I do not make out where he stands with himself, as regards the problem of Communism and Christian practice. Did he disown the former in
Bread & Wine
? I believed so, and certainly even in the Communist preaching he did do there he contradicts himself. And where that may have been vague, there was nothing vague about the finish of one character as a (the) Crucifixion. And one remembers Nathaniel West throwing away the political hope of Communism (in
A Cool Million
) and embracing the Crucifixion (—Each of us is Christ, and each of us is crucified.
Miss Lonelihearts
(?))

For reading, I must say again all of my allegiance to this work of Toynbee; if it is it not the most triumphant work of reason in our time. I have finally finished the abridgement, which I think is magnificent, and am wondering if I have the nerve to start the original work, or rather to start and finish it. Such perception is to my confused accumulation of mind fantastic; for instance, that he can find Spengler as quickly and cleverly (but never cleverness for its own sake) as this: [“]Spengler, whose method is to set up a metaphor and then proceed to argue from it as if it were a law based on observed phenomena . . .[”] And since I feel the verge of fatal enthusiasm, I do not want to say more of this work, it has been so busy teaching me, articulating so many things that I have been suspecting and almost thought.

Your saying that you are investigating writing among young people and students brings a question to my mind: I am exceedingly curious about how much of the influence of the
NewYorker
you are finding. You know, there are a lot of people in NewYork who have a war with that magasine finally that they simply live on the bitterness their experiences with it has engendered. They are older ones, but I know so many younger who have lived under its shadow for years; and I speak for myself, because from my college work on it was there. And since I do not want to waste any of my energy in bitterness, what greater waste, I have drawn a line through it. But I do think about it, remember how much time I spent assaulting it. After college I worked there for something over a year, and when I quit it was with the sole idea of selling them something written. Starting with a tragedy of youth, an exhaustive history of the Player Piano, which I still have and treasure as I am told mothers do their strangely-shaped children which the world derides. But the influence on those trying to write fiction. One thing: certainly the
NewYorker
does not ask it of anyone; simply there it is and if anyone wants to waste his life trying to sell them something he may, that is not their concern. Is it because there are so few places that publish good fiction and pay well? I wonder that I have never seen anything of yours in that magasine, I wonder if it is simply by chance or if you have dark reasons too. The point is that their influence seems so horribly disproportionate; have you found it so?

For magasines, I see your name on the prospectus of something called the
Hudson Review
. I gather that the magasine itself is out by now, someone sent me this prospectus months ago, and I sent them a story which was returned with a very kind letter, I don’t care it was a good story, it will be re-written.

But is the magasine as good as it sounds it could be? “. . . will not open its pages to those whose only merits lie in their anguish, their fervour, and their experimentation,” how wonderful to read that. (And I find the comments highly entertaining: yours is fine, Mr Blackmur’s ‘It looks like the place where one can put one’s work’ makes me burst out in laughter: who is this ‘one’? I love that.) It sounds like a very positive step for our side.

The revolution here has been over for some time. I got up here in time to get out to Cartago, and be there fighting in the fighting. There is too much to say to chatter here. But of the disinterestedness of all of the people, the almost entire absence of grasping, of self-promotion. It was a real people’s revolution; and now I have a great admiration for the CostaRicans; you cannot imagine the kindness they have showed me. But still the self-sufficience: that they were pleased that I should come and volunteer with them, but you know still they did not need me, and in the kindest most genuine ways they showed this. Because CostaRica is still traditional—and largely I suppose due to the hold of the Church—and the family is still family, and it is splendid and interesting to see the hospitality that such a traditional society can afford, as to one rootless, which our (eastern) society cannot because it is rootless itself. And it brings more and more of questions: is it presumptuous to fight in other people’s revolutions? &c &c.

And so I wait for a boat; it is a very peaceful feeling. I cannot work on US boats because I am not Union, God knows how one gets into the Union, it is very strong; and so hope to get a CostaRican, they run small banana boats up to Tampa and I think it can be managed. Meanwhile the girl who has been cleaning my floor with half a cocoanut has finished telling me a long story, it was highly adventuresome but I am not sure what about since it was in Spanish, I think it was about a flood, it started out with the news that once recently it rained here day and night for a month; she is very cheering. And from Mr Eliot, —It won’t be minutes but hours, it won’t be hours but . . . days? years? I don’t remember.

Sincerely, my best regards to you,

William Gaddis

the postman always rings twice: title of the crime novel by James M. Cain (1934), as well as its first English-language screen adaptation (1946), dating from the days when mailmen rang one’s doorbell when making a delivery.

Maugham [...] Sadie Thompson: see 9 March 1947.

Razor Edge
: Maugham’s philosophical novel
The Razor’s Edge
(1944) concerns a young World War I aviator who rejects Western values and travels to India to search for new ones. It’s mentioned in passing in
R
(638).

Sonia and Raskolnikov: in Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
.

‘idiot’, Dostoevski’s greatest attempt:
The Idiot
(1868–69) is quoted on pp. 937–38 of
R
.

Tolstoy’s
Power of Darkness
: an 1886 play, quoted on p. 640 of
R.

Bunyan’s Pilgrim: the protagonist of the English preacher’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678).

Silone: Ignazio Silone (1900–78);
Bread and Wine
(1937) is his most best-known novel, and
And
He Hid Himself
(1945) is a play about a leftist agitator who rediscovers his religious belief and dies like a Christ figure. It is mentioned on pp. 590–91 of
R.

West [...]
Miss Lonelihearts
: Nathanael West (1903–40);
A Cool Million
(1934) is a parody of the Horatio Alger paradigm, and
Miss Lonelyhearts
(1933) is about a desperate advice columnist. Although the quotation sounds like something from the Christ-ridden novella, it doesn’t appear there. Perhaps WG was thinking of Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio
(1919): “everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified” (end of “The Philosopher”).

Spengler: Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose
Decline of the West
(1918–22) argues that every culture grows, peaks, then declines like a living organism, and that the West had reached the point of decline. WG quotes from p. 248 of Toynbee’s book.