B007RT1UH4 EBOK (64 page)

This intervention by Tom Jenkins was indeed a happy accident (though, to exhaust the above, there are no accidents in Interpol), and I was highly entertained by the page-in-the-typewriter in your
Epitaph for a Tramp
. I of course had to go back and find the context (properly left-handed), then back to the beginning to find the context of the context, and finally through to the end and your fine cool dialogue (monologue) which I envied and realised how far all that had come since ’51 & 2, how refined from such crudities as ‘Daddy-o, up in thy way-out pad . . .’ And it being the only ‘cop story’ (phrase via Tom Jenkins) or maybe 2nd or 3rd that I’ve read, had a fine time with it. (And not that you’d entered it as a Great Book; but great God! have you seen the writing in such things as
Exodus
and
Anatomy of a Murder
? Can one ever cease to be appalled at how little is asked?)

I should add I am somewhat stirred at the moment regarding the possibility of being exhumed in paperback, one of the ‘better’ houses (Meridian) has apparently made an offer to Harcourt Brace, who since they brought it out surreptitiously in ’55 have seemed quite content to leave it lay where Jesus flung it, but now I gather begin to suspect that they have something of value and are going to be quite as brave as the dog in the manger about protecting it. Though they may surprise me by doing the decent and I should not anticipate their depravity so high-handedly I suppose. Very little money involved but publication (in the real sense of the word) which might be welcome novelty.

And to really wring the throat of absurdity—having found publishers a razor’s edge tribe between phoniness and dishonesty—I have been working on a play, a presently overlong and overcomplicated and really quite straight figment of the Civil War: publishers almost shine in comparison to the show-business staples, as ‘I never read anything over 100 pages’ or, hefting the script, (without opening it), ‘Too long’. The consummate annoyance though being that gap between reading the press (publicity) interview-profile of a currently successful Broadway director whose lament over the difficulty of getting hold of ‘plays of ideas’ simply rings in one’s head as one’s agent, having struggled through it, shakes his head in baleful awe and delivers the hopeless compliment, ‘. . . but it’s a play of ideas’ —a real escape hatch for everybody in the ‘game’ (a felicitous word) whose one idea coming and going is $. And I’m behaving as though all this is news to me.

Incidentally—or rather not incidentally at all, quite hungrily—Jenkins mentioned from a letter of yours a most provocative phrase from a comment by Malcolm Lowry on
The Recognitions
which whetted my paranoid appetite, I am most curious to know what he might have said about it (or rather what he did say about it, with any thorns left on). I cannot say I read his book which came out when I was in Mexico, 1947 as I remember, and I started it, found it coming both too close to home and too far from what I thought I was trying to do, and lost or had it lifted from me before I ever resolved things. (Yes, in my case one of the books that the book-club ads blackmail the vacuum with ‘Have you caught yourself saying Yes, I’ve been meaning to read it. . . .’ (they mean
Exodus
).) But I am picking up a copy for a new look. Good luck on your current obsession.

with best regards,

W. Gaddis

Dr Weisgall: a dentist in
R
who receives several unwanted letters from Agnes Deigh after she mistakenly reports him to the police.

letterhead: Pfizer International.

the perfect book as, inevitably, the perfect crime: in
R,
an art critic quotes the French painter Edgar Degas’s remark “that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed” (71).

‘the people [...] gas bill’:
R
386.

‘Daddy-o [...] pad’: a beatnik version of the Paternoster appears in
R
(536).

Exodus
and
Anatomy of a Murder
: best-sellers of the time:
Exodus
(1958) was by Leon Uris,
Anatomy of a Murder
(1958) by Robert Traver.

leave it lay where Jesus flung it: an old saying WG occasionally uses (later ascribed to a woman).

Lowry on
The Recognitions
: Markson sent Lowry a copy of
R
in 1956; see below for Lowry’s response.

WG with David Markson, New York, 1964.

Edith Gaddis at Massapequa, early 1960s. (Photo by Curtis Reider.)

To Robert M. Ockene

[
Apparently an editorial assistant at Meridian Books at this time. Ockene later became an editor at Bobbs-Merrill; his enthusiasm for
R
is described by Victor S. Navasky in “Notes on the Underground,”
New York Times Book Review
, 5 June 1966, 3.
]

[New York City

15 March 1961]

From a letter from a fellow named David Markson in Mexico, an early admirer of
The Recognitions
, and at this point I suppose simply For Your Information since Harcourt is still sitting on that ‘modest’ offer, figuring I suppose that they may have something after all. Have you seen Mr Jovanovich’s little New Year book Now, Barabbas? Curiouser & Curiouser, Inc.

Yours

WG

[
The enclosure is Markson’s transcription of a letter to him from Malcolm Lowry dated 22 February 1957; the bracketed interpolations are Markson’s. The letter was eventually published in
Sursum Corda
!
The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, vol. 2: 1946–1957
, ed. Sherrill E. Grace (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), 875ff.
]

My very dear old Dave: It is quite unforgivable of me not to have replied before, especially when I had so much to thank you for: but this was paradoxically the reason, first William Gaddis’ The Recognitions isn’t exactly the kind of book (a veritable Katchen Junga, you know the Mountain I mean anyhow, of a book, the ascent of some overhangs of which can scarcely be made safely without the assistance, one feels, of both Tanzing and Aleister Crowley) possible to return figuratively or in fact the next day, as happened once with Ulysses, with the comment, ‘Very good!’ I’d wanted both to thank you for this and write something intelligent upon it worthy of the book in the bargain. . . . [I’m cutting several lines here, re other news of his own—about the Vintage edition of
Volcano
, by the way] . . . I’d been working so hard I’d forgotten I’d received any [news] and for the same reason I have not yet finished The Recognitions (which was delayed incidentally by the Christmas mails and The Demon Oleum—that word is Oleum—oil anyway perhaps): what I can say is that it is probably all you claim for it, a truly fabulous creation, a SuperByzantine Gazebo and secret Missile of the Soul and likewise extraordinarily funny: much funnier than Burton (who has me gathering borage out of the garden to heal the melancholy his laughter induces, also a spoonful of vinegar at bedtime helps) though Burton’s a good parallel. I can only read a little at a time, however, because I have to watch my eyesight, which begins to get strained round midnight after having spent the day since 7:30 a.m. scratching out the previous day’s work; so that it may be somewhile yet before I can give you a full report on The Recognitions
;
. . .

[
Markson ends there and points out that Lowry died a few months later, never making that full report.
]

Now, Barabbas
: a sixteen-page essay in booklet form by the president of WG’s publishing house, William Jovanovich (1920–2001)—whose surname WG consistently misspells “Jovanovitch” in later letters—concerning “the propensities of publishers,” issued in 1960 “in a limited edition as a New Year’s greeting to friends of Harcourt, Brace & World” (1). “Curiouser and curiouser” is Alice’s comment on events in Wonderland.

Tanzing and Aleister Crowley: Tenzing Norgay (and Sir Edmund Hillary) ascended Mount Everest (Chomolungma in Tibetan) in 1953; Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was a notorious English magician who wrote many books on the occult.

Burton: Robert Burton (1577–1640), author of
The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621).

To Aaron Asher

[
An editor (1929–2008) then at World Publishing Company, whose trade paperback line, Meridian Books, would reissue
R
in March 1962. David Markson was the one who brought
R
to Asher’s attention. The corrections mentioned were separated from the letter by the time I saw it.
]