B007RT1UH4 EBOK (62 page)

To Pat Gaddis

[
While his wife and daughter were staying with friends, WG moved the family’s things from their former apartment to one at 82nd St., near Third Avenue. Thereafter—as Eigen and Gibbs do in
J R
—WG and a Harvard friend named Douglas Wood (1922?–66) split the rent on the 96th St. apartment for work and storage purposes.
]

New York City

14 March 1957

Dear Ladies,

Things happen every minute, I believe actually pointing in a direction. I went this noon up to the office of Mr Giaimo, with Douglas, and got all
that
straightened out (with D reassuring Mr G he wasn’t just going to use 96th st to bring girls up and have parties), and am even to get the $42 deposit back. I told Douglas to apply it toward the loan, he protested, and I thought we’ll see when the moment comes how badly it’s needed where. He asked me up there again this evening to watch something on
Playhouse 90
, but I think I’ll do better to go home and try to straighten things out there. [...]

all love,

W.

Playhouse 90
: a TV series featuring 90-minute plays. Wood worked in television, most notably on the acclaimed documentary series
Victory at Sea
(1952–53).

To Keith Botsford

[
American-European writer, teacher, and television producer (1928– ) whom Gaddis had known for several years. He approached Botsford in 1957 with an idea for doing a program about forgery for the short-lived series
The Seven Lively Arts
(CBS). The Keith Botsford Papers at the Beinecke Library contains Gaddis’s three-page proposal and three additional pages of notes. Botsford responded in a letter dated 8 May 1957 to say he didn’t think the proposal was viable, largely because of “the visual problem” WG mentions below. Botsford’s reply implies Gaddis proposed this idea largely as a way to earn enough money to quit his job and write another novel.
]

201 East 82nd street,

New York City 28

10 April 1957

Dear Keith:

I thought at some length about the program possibility we talked of a week or so ago. The visual problem persists, though it could I think eventually be worked out. What I enclose here is no desperate alternative, but an idea which is simply a better one, more tangible, more topical, more visual, one which I’ve spent years reading on and thinking about, as
The Recognitions
might show. I’m not proposing an adaptation of that book, incidentally, except to develop by exposition some of the ideas which it investigated in fiction.

The compelling thing about a program on forgery I think is the chance it offers to approach the arts with a light touch, without the self-conscious overseriousness and frequent condescension that is such a threat to ‘cultural’ programs. Once the unifying problem is established, the material is highly varied and practically inexhaustible, as I’m afraid the enclosed notes scarcely show. The chance for guests from among the critics, experts, and entrepreneurs, is almost alarmingly good. Let me know if there’s anything here you want to see extended, developed &c.

Yours,

Willie

To Charles Monaghan

[
A journalist, historian, and tireless advocate of R, as later letters will show. Born in 1932, he was working in New York University’s Office of Information Services at the time.
]

193 Second Avenue

New York City 3

16 May 1960

Dear Mr. Monaghan:

I appreciate your taking the trouble to send the mention in your
Commonweal
review. Even the dribs and drabs are gratifying and I wish often enough that they could be assembled somewhere loudly. You are right enough, the Hicks-Geismar combination was a pain, Geismar could be dismissed but I’ve never quite been able to accept the meanness (in the several senses of that word) of the Hicks. Thank you again.

W. Gaddis

Commonweal
: reviewing Richard Stern’s novel
Golk
, Monaghan cited
R
among “some of the finest writing of recent times” (
Commonweal
, 13 May 1960, 190).

Hicks-Geismar: Granville Hicks reviewed
R
in the
New York Times Book Review
(13 March 1955, 6), Maxwell Geismar in the
Saturday Review
(12 March 1955, 23).

To John D. Seelye

[
American critic (1931– ) and a professor in the English Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He mentioned WG in passing in a piece published in the
Berkeley Gazette
in 1962 and the following year wrote an essay for the special issue of
Prairie Schooner
that its editor Karl Shapiro planned to devote to
R
. That issue never materialized, but Seelye’s essay was eventually published in
In Recognition of William Gaddis
(1984).
]

New York City 3

25 November 1960

dear Mr. Seelye.

I greatly appreciate your letter and your comments on
The Recognitions
. Though such fine anecdotes as the Southern Pacific story always make me wonder how much damage the book has done.

What I most appreciate of course are your efforts proselyting for the book. I hear enough from different places to convince me that there is a real underground which may burst out and be heard any day. In this regard you might be interested in the efforts of someone here in New York named Jack Green who writes, duplicates and mails out his own publication
newspaper
, 3 or 4 current issues of it devoted to
The Recognitions
(Box 114, New York 12, N.Y.—$1. covers the cost of these issues I believe). And frankly I have better hopes of the success of such efforts as yours and his than all the
Esquire
symposia in sight—the point being really that you have read the book.

Even I of course begin to talk of it as an object, a commodity, since I am now trying to encourage someone here to bring it out in paperback and, hope against hope, finally English publication—though you might guess how such people are alarmed at costs. And then if there were some competent madman to translate it into French as a labour-of-love—

I am flattered by your final request concerning the manuscript but for no reason I can name feel no inclination to part with it. I should add though that it has been stored in an old Corn Flakes carton in a barn on Long Island, and your letter prompts me to go out and get it to a more secure place.

Yours,

William Gaddis

Jack Green: the pseudonym of Christopher Carlisle Reid (1928?– ), who published seventeen issues of
newspaper
in 1957–1965. Issue #11 (3 June 1961) was a thirty-two page “Quote-Précis of William Gaddis’s
The Recognitions
,” and issues #12–14, entitled “fire the bastards!,” appeared in February, August, and November of 1962. See my introduction to the book version (Dalkey Archive Press, 1992) for further details.

translate it into French: All three of these hopes were fulfilled: a paperback was published in early 1962, English publication followed that autumn, and a French translation (by Jean Lambert) appeared in 1973.

To Tom Jenkins

[
A journalist who wrote about detective novels; his friend David Markson (see headnote to 28 February 1961) recommended that he read
R
.
]