B007RT1UH4 EBOK (63 page)

New York City

30 December 1960

dear Mr. Jenkins.

I appreciate your writing me about
The Recognitions
. I had got your earlier letter (forwarded by Harcourt) but simply had not managed to answer it.

Ch. Rolo was one reviewer I felt at the time who had seriously tried to behave in a responsible way: first, he read the book (which proved more rare among reviewers than I had anticipated). And the summary statement of his which you quote is probably quite accurate as far as it goes; however it does stop short of Wyatt’s lines on page 898–9—and the revelation “love and do what you will”. This however does inevitably bring up the problem of
grace
, which I felt uncertain about then and I believe my uncertainty shows. (I am more uncertain about it now, more dubious.) What might be appended to Rolo’s statement too is the fact of the inescapableness of forgery as a part of the finite condition—if you will allow forgery to include necessarily imperfect representations of eventually inexpressible absolutes (in Plato’s sense of the ‘ideals’), but that this is the best we have, the best we can do: what is vital is the faith that the absolute—the ‘perfect’, etc.—
does
exist (thus Wyatt’s “Thank God there was the gold to forge”—top of page 689), gold=perfection=absolute=love, in an alchemical scheme where Brown=matter (to be redeemed), Valentine=mind, Wyatt=creative spirit without love, Esme=love. That is a fragment of one undercurrent of interpretation, at any rate.

You might be interested in the project of someone here in New York who has spent the past year or so on the book (without any assist from me) and who is currently doing some pieces on it in a publication which he writes, duplicates & mails out himself. He is: Jack Green / newspaper / box 114 / New York 12 / NY. And I think he will send you the 4 issues as they come out if you send him $1.

As for time spent writing the book, it went on over 7 years, 1 or 2 of which were entirely fallow, 2 of which were on the other hand dawn-till-night periods of quite isolated, I might even say obsessed intensity. I can’t say how much research I did for the book; most of it was specific or started out being so and then of course led on to other possibilities and insights. Certainly I did not sit down, envision, and write the book simply drawing on (what reviewers insisted upon calling) “vast erudition”, though what pained me most about the reviewers was their refusal—their fear—to relax somewhat with the book and be entertained.

Yours,

William Gaddis

ps. My only work recently has been on a play which in present draft is too long & complicated.

Ch. Rolo: Charles J. Rolo (1916–82) reviewed
R
in the
Atlantic Monthly
(April 1955, 80–81). Jenkins had quoted his belief that “Wyatt has arrived at a doctrine somewhat akin to Gide’s—a doctrine which holds that salvation lies in scraping away the consolatory deceits and secondhand values of the counterfeit personality and in obeying the promptings of the real self, the soul, in the full awareness that man is ‘born into sin’ and that sin must be ‘lived through’: all efforts to escape from the burden of imperfection are a denial of humanity and therefore lead to spiritual and emotional forgery.”

“love and do what you will”: St. Augustine’s advice, from
On the First Letter of John
.

a play:
Once at Antietam,
portions of which were eventually published in
FHO
.

To Rust Hills

[
Hills (1924–2008) was soon to become fiction editor for
Esquire
, a post he would occupy on and off for the next thirty years.
]

New York City

15 February 1961

Dear Rust Hills.

Thanks for your note on the Houghton-Mifflin award, is it? There were I’m afraid no entry blanks enclosed. But I do know a “good new writer” I’d be glad to recommend if you want to send the blanks along.

The Civil War chapter has become a full-in fact over-length play and I am involved in cutting it now. But lunch of course is more than welcome, any time you choose.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

Civil War chapter: after
R,
WG had begun a novel on the Civil War that he later converted into the play
Once at Antietam
.

To Tom Jenkins

New York 3

16 February 1961

Dear Tom Jenkins.

Thanks for your letters, especially the material on/by/about David Markson, a persistently guilty area of mine where I may now expiate if you will be good enough to send me his Mexico address. I was highly entertained by the Comp. Lit. piece discovered in the typewriter in
Epitaph for a Tramp
, had to go back to find the context and thence, whetted, from start to finish, probably the first ‘cop story’ I’ve read and had a fine time with it, envying Markson the character who wound it up, the musician type whose exacting dialogue impressed upon me how refined all that has become since I struggled with Anselm and the Viareggio crowd 8 and 9 years ago, it seems half a century.

And of course I am most intrigued by the Malcolm Lowry references, I was in Mexico when his book came out, read part of it, the copy disappeared, I got another when I came back but I regret haven’t (yet) returned to it. Even that initial brush was a good 14 years ago; and once I got involved with
The Recognitions
a year or so later read little or no fiction, a habit I haven’t entirely broken since.

And finally, for Chas. Rolo . . . he’s not stupid but quite gone on what’s fashionable, what fits, as people who make their livings that way have to be. It often seems to me the driving quality of those people, reviewers, publishers &c, is curiosity, little more. And in their attempt to turn the creative arts into performing ones (the current measure of success) are hungry for us, for writers, to share (dignify) their values. I suppose it’s never been any different though, we must carry them on our backs, the editors, anthologizers, like the hounds they are running for their lunch, while the writer of any substance like the fox is running for his life.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

Epitaph for a Tramp
: first published in 1959; early in the novel, the detective protagonist is in a student’s apartment and reads in the typewriter the conclusion to an essay: “And thus it is my conclusion that
The Recognitions
by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since
Moby Dick
, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007, 32).

Malcolm Lowry: Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
(1947) has some similarities to
R.

To David Markson

[
David Markson (1927–2010), later to become an esteemed novelist, had written a Master’s thesis on Malcolm Lowry in 1951 and had begun writing fiction by 1955. He read
R
twice when it first came out and wrote to WG in June of 1955 to express his admiration, but received no answer until this letter of 1961, at which time Markson was living in Mexico. He and WG would continue to correspond, and occasionally see each other, until WG’s death.
]

New York City

28 February 1961

Dear David Markson.

After lo these many (six) years—or these many low (sick) years—if I can presume to answer yours dated 11 June ’55: I could evade embarrassment by saying that it had indeed been misdirected to Dr Weisgall and reached me only now, but I’m afraid you know us both too well. In fact I was in low enough state for a good while after the book came out that I could not find it in me to answer letters that said anything, only those (to quote yours again) that offered ‘I just loved your gorgeous book and I think Mithra is so charming. . .’. Partly appalled at what I counted then the book’s apparent failure, partly wearied at the prospect of contention, advice and criticism, and partly just drained of any more supporting arguments, as honestly embarrassed at high praise as resentful of patronising censure. And I must say, things (people) don’t change, just get more so; and I think there is still the mixture, waiting to greet such continuing interest as yours, of vain gratification and fear of being found out, still ridden with the notion of the people as a fatuous jury (counting reviewers as people), publishers the police station house (where if as I trust you must have some experience of being brought in, you know what I mean by their dulled but flattering indifference to your precious crime: they see them every day), and finally the perfect book as, inevitably, the perfect crime (the point of this last phrase being, for some reason which insists further development of this rambling metaphor, that the criminal is never caught). So, as you may see by the letterhead on the backside here, I am hung up with an operation of international piracy that deals in drugs, writing speeches on the balance of payments deficit but mostly staring out the window, serving the goal that Basil Valentine damned in ‘the people, whose idea of necessity is paying the gas bill’ . . . (A little frightening how easily it all comes back.) But sustained by the secret awareness that the secret police, Jack Green and yourself and some others, may expose it all yet.