B007RT1UH4 EBOK (56 page)

To John and Pauline Napper

Massapequa, L. Isld. N.Y.

10 August 1953

————Nessun maggior dolore

Che’ ricordarsi del tempo felice

Nella miseria,

dear John and Pauline,

forgive that, but such a card as yours this morning, giving as do all your cards and letters do, this combined consternation and pleasure, makes misery of present circumstance whatever it might be. And the happy time on the Costa Brava this view recalls makes the uncertainties of the moment wearying and dull indeed.

Not that news from you is necessarily to bring all this, or you, into mind: no, quite the other way, really, I find myself too often looking back on it all with the motionless stare of an old man on youth. Do you know, I can almost say, nothing has happened since last I wrote you, however many months or years it may be. In a worldly way everything is the same, which is I’m afraid why I haven’t written. Is it, I suppose, that I’ve waited, and waited, for the most vain reasons, to be able to send some roaring news of my own success? though if that’s so, it’s only because of your good faith in all this time.

Now it is as difficult as it is dishearting to believe that we are in mid August; because the work, yes, the same project you remember, was to be done once for all before the fall set in, and now I greatly doubt it. After a winter spent alone in a farmhouse in upstate New York, I came out to greet the spring with
The Recognitions
finished: a half million words! I had already got an advance of a thousand dollars from the publisher (Harcourt Brace, who are tied up with your (and T S Eliot’s) Faber & Faber), and you may imagine their dismay at the length of this manuscript. And so now we are all concerned with what work they think it still needs; though thus far the editors have been very lenient with me, very mild in their suggestions, and very pleased about it generally. But slow! I had fully intended to spend all of this summer on it; but day after day passes in impatient unemployment while I wait for them to finish whatever editorial reading they appear to find necessary. All of this badly complicated by there being only one copy. The nerves slip, slide, perish, as the fall’s cold weather approaches and the bank account disappears.

What the winter will bring I cannot imagine; this novel, my life for so long, will be done; and, at the rate of payment of $1000 for 5 year’s work, I am not inclined to start another immediately. O! if I could say, —I plan sailing from here in October, to go direct to madrid . . . or Liverpool . . . Algiers . . . Bangkok—though I don’t really try to think about it, and won’t, until I’m finished with Harcourt Brace, for this time at any rate.

How often I thought of you during Coronation time, and regretted missing it; especially if it was, as a paper quoted here, “one hell of a boozer”? while here I sit, knowing that in the most ordinary of circumstances there were the best of drinking companions across the ocean: let alone a Coronation. Even now you’re sitting in Boodle’s—well, speaking of good drinking companions, Barney Emmart is usually available for that profitable pastime, usually spent between us in the standard American way (figuring out how to make a million dollars), or figuring a way to get back across the Atlantic Ocean—obviously we haven’t managed either solution yet. Just quietly winding up old men (if one can wind up an old man quietly). Our lost youth: lost somewhere between London and Tripoli—Lord! if you see us selling pencils in the Edgeware Road don’t be surprised.

Do you ever see David Tudor Pole? It’s as long that I’ve been out of touch with him, and again for these reasons of uncertainty, and the constant hope that in my next letter I shall be able to say, I’m on my way—and am sending along a copy of my novel . . . give him my best if you do see him, though these things aren’t yet true. And to both of you; though it seems strange not addressing you at Chantry Mill, what happened to it?

Palamós next summer? (Though I have believed for some time there will be war before this month is out, and do still.) Otherwise, let me know more of you, I so enjoy any word.

and love to you both,

W Gaddis

Nessun [...] miseria: “There is no greater sorrow / Than to recall a time of happiness / In misery”—from Dante’s
Inferno
(5:121–23).

advance of a thousand dollars: equivalent today to around $8,500.

slip, slide, perish: another reference to section 5 of Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”: “Words strain, / [...]

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish [...].”

winding up: British slang for annoying/taunting.

Edgeware Road: i.e., Edgware, a major street in London.

To Muriel Oxenberg

[
Born into a wealthy family, Muriel Oxenberg Murphy (1926–2008) graduated from Barnard with a degree in Art History and in 1949 joined the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, cofounding its American painting and sculpture department. She later married Charles B. G. Murphy and became a renowned salonnière; after he died, she reunited with WG in 1979 and was his companion for the next sixteen years. (
FHO
is dedicated to her.) For more on her life, including her relationship with WG, see
Excerpts from the Unpublished Files of Muriel Oxenberg Murphy
, ed. L. Evan Goss (Xlibris, 2008).
]

23 November 1953

Dear Muriel,

Late, with no news; and by now you’ve probably no use for a brief bibliography on time. But neither I nor Barney (who just ’phoned) has suggestions on the order of Dunne’s
Experiment with Time
of the twenties, which I gather was the sort of thing your friend was interested in?

Then, you’ve likely forgot this, or indeed our entire conversation; still I enclose it, for whatever interest it may recall for you (and however Manichaean the choice may appear: which it certainly cannot be for such dualism is too easy; and surely evil is self limited?) It was Peter, speaking in the Clementine
Recognitions
:

“First of all, then, he is evil, in the judgment of God, who will not enquire what is advantageous to himself. For how can anyone love another, if he does not love himself? In order, therefore, that there might be a distinction between those who choose good and those who choose evil, God has concealed that which is profitable to men.”

Every good wish,

W. Gaddis

Dunne’s
Experiment with Time
: Anglo-Irish engineer J. W. Dunne’s 1927 study of how consciousness perceives and distorts the simultaneity of time.

Clementine
Recognitions
: an anonymous religious novel of the fourth century (falsely ascribed to Pope Clement I) in which a young Roman named Clement joins Peter’s entourage as he preaches in Phoenicia. Gaddis learned of it from Graves’s
White Goddess
and not only named his first novel after it, but uses the passage above (from book 3, chapter 53) as the epigraph to
R
I.3.

To John Napper

[
In late 1953, WG’s friend Alan Ansen (1922–2006)—formerly Auden’s secretary, friend to the Beats, later a poet—rented his home to WG for a small sum and left for Europe, not to return until April of 1954. See 19 March 1983 for his assessment of Ansen, and my introduction to Ansen’s
Contact Highs: Selected Poems 1957–1987
(Dalkey Archive Press, 1989) for more on this remarkable character. This letter is typed except for the final paragraph, which was added by hand.
]

816 Bryant street

Woodmere, L. Isld. N.Y.

4 January 1954

dear John,

[...] And so Ivan Morris and I and Barney Emmart, who had bounced in for a few days from Carolina, where he is all mixed up with Extra-Sensory-Perception, levitation, card tricks, thaumaturgy, &c at Duke University, had a few quiet and very pleasant beers (and a good occasion, happening on my birthday so [29 December]), and I had some details of a spree you all went on to Spain. Even to the point of yourself playing jotas was it? or flamenco? in a Catalan village plaza. O I tell you, this paying 250ptas for a 20pta bottle of coñac cramps me badly here, I never sing abroad anymore, or clap my hands in the street. I was sorry not to see more of Morris; but after dinner that evening came back here, and aside from some broken glass and a nameless blue-eyed girl on Thursday night, have been sticking pretty close to this infernal machine.

By now you may well think that if our correspondence continues I’ll still be writing you in five more decades, that I’m still working hard on the same thing, same damned book, same parade of megalomania, for I still am scrabbling along on the thing you read ch. I of so many years ago at Chantry Mill. Last winter in an empty farmhouse was to be the end: I emerged in May with the woodchucks and a 15-pound manuscript, which dampened Harcourt-Brace’s spirits more than somewhat, but they’ve given money, money, all of it gone now and nothing to show for it but a bowler hat and a fourteen-&-three-quarter pound MS. They think I’m cutting it, but what I seem to be doing is to take out something I thought was amusing 4 years ago, and put in something equally idiotic which I find amusing now. At the moment it’s spread all over the floor, and is quite impressive if only in square feet. But honestly, it’s about over, the whole extravaganza. Another 6 or 8 weeks, they want the thing and I wish they’d take it, I am so tired of it, have entirely lost interest in every bit of it, and being quite assured that I’m never going to make any more money from it, would so happily forget the entire evidence of wasted youth. Such low spirits have persisted for some months now; but I look for a change of some sort when I do get this thing off my hands, and start looking around to see what I’m going to be when I grow up. (And not as the Duke of Gloucester had it, —Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?)

Though this residency is the most curious yet. A friend who went abroad for the winter rented me his house, a real suburban house with country Cadillacs squeezing past, a house that is just the definition of a suburban house, undistinguished, everything works, gas, heat, carpets, stairs, everything but the immense television set which broke in protest of my moving in after three days here, and I haven’t got it fixed. But there is a vast and very select collexion of books, and a battery of records and machines to play them, and by now I’m almost mad enough to be at home only in an empty house, so it should work out well, when this piece of present lunacy is done and I can contrive some means of making a cool million to support myself in the manner to which my landlord is accustomed.