B007RT1UH4 EBOK (65 page)

New York City

15 April 1961

Aaron Asher: Here are the corrections Jack Green and I have dug up in
The Recognitions
. Let me know if you have any questions on them. Also your progress in garnering ‘names’ to send (what amount to) pre-publication copies to. (Si Krim knows a painter who has known Alexander King for 30 years, still a good bet I think.) And let me know when you’ve worked it out what arrangement you would propose for an English edition. (What are your connections like at Faber?) And any other news.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

Si Krim: Seymour Krim (1922–89), a literary journalist and magazine editor.

Alexander King: Austrian-born American artist, editor (at
Life
), and TV personality (1900–1965), author of several volumes of somewhat scandalous memoirs.

To Charles Monaghan

[
While in England Monaghan had spoken with Timothy O’Keeffe (whose name WG often misspells) of MacGibbon & Kee about the possibility of publishing
R
and apparently also spoke with WG’s U.S. publisher William Jovanovich—whom Monaghan called Joe Vanovich, to WG’s amusement—about some sort of co-production arrangement.
]

New York 3 NY

4 May 1961

dear Charles Monaghan.

I greatly appreciate your stirring interest in English publication possibilities for
The Recognitions
, it could hardly be more timely. Cost is the thing that has kept British publishers from it till now; but this may be largely mitigated by a recent development happy on other counts. Meridian paperbacks is to bring it out here around the end of the year or beginning of next, and we’ve talked of their having a press run larger than their own needs for this printing and selling by prearrangement the balance as sheets to a British publisher for publication there, which seems to me a fine possibility, since it would not have to be brought out there at the suicidal price it was here originally.

There was a British publication scheduled long ago by Secker & Warburg, by contract with the bogus Mr Fred Warburg in I believe Oct ’54, he convinced himself and his associates that he had the new American
Ulysses
, ran into some difficulties with Eng printers (‘obscene’) and used that as an excuse to back out of the contract 5 days before the book was surreptitiously released by Harcourt Brace here, when he’d learned, that is, that it was not going to be hailed on the front page of the NYT
Book Review
&c, tried to get me to cut it with embarrassing preachings on the ‘Artist’s duty’ &c no mention of cutting obscenities, he was suddenly scared of costs, very shabby the whole performance and of course he’d sat on it with his contract those 6 prepublication months when another British publisher of more integrity might have taken it. Forgive the spleen, but this has been rankling a long time, aggravated by that phony bastard’s poses later as a champion of literary freedom &c who’d been done out of his greatness by archaic British law.

At any rate a British firm is looking at it now with an eye to the abovementioned possibility with Meridian and I have to put off any other possibility waiting to hear what sort of terms they will offer. MacGibbon & Kee was curiously on my list for possible places to show it with this new possibility and T O’Keefe’s name had been given me by one of few straight people in publishing here; but for the moment as I say waiting on word from this other firm, and though I have a few copies of the book hoarded am in no position to intercede with Joe Vanovitch (very nice; did you see
his
New Years’ ‘book’
Now Barabbas
, very high flown Duties Of The Publisher jazz), they treat me rather like a posthumous author now and I wouldn’t ask them for air in a jug. The man to reach at this point I think is Aaron Asher at Meridian (now part of World Publishing Company, 119 West 57 street NYC 19), if O’Keefe wants to write him.

Many thanks again, by heaven the boil will bust eventually. I so greatly envy you London, 2 visits convinced me (10 years ago) it and the people the only place that makes sense for me; but supporting a wife-and-two on Fleet street pay . . . I’m too old I guess to dare it now.

Yours with best regards,

W. Gaddis

T O’Keefe: Timothy O’Keeffe (1926–14) is best known for rediscovering Flann O’Brien: he reprinted O’Brien’s
At Swim-Two-Birds
in 1959 and encouraged the Irish author to resume writing.

To David Markson

New York 3 N.Y.

5 May 1961

dear David Markson.

The secret police have done their work well—to date: Aaron Asher is bringing
The Recognitions
out in paper around the end of the year or beginning of next, probably at around $2
⁵⁰
, at last we can let the riff-raff in. A great relief to me though you may imagine the amount of money that changed hands was comically small (hands being Meridian-Harcourt of course—my share should, once Harcourt has taken out a long dead advance, be the price of a dinner, the whole thing has been a real parody of the beggar Shacabac at Barmecide’s feast). But it may also prefigure English publication which—again, money aside—should carry its own reward.

Thanks for the new
Epitaph
—I haven’t read it but it has started my wife off on a spree of mystery story reading which may be salutary. Otherwise peace reigns relentlessly.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

Barmecide’s feast: a tale from the
Thousand and One Nights
in which a prince of the Barmecide family in Baghdad spreads an imaginary feast for a beggar for sport. A “Barmecide’s feast” is therefore a nonexistent or negligible offering.

let the riff-raff in: Gaddis ascribes a version of this remark to Fred Allen in his letter of 19 August 1973 to John Leverence.

new
Epitaph
: Markson published his second detective novel,
Epitaph for a Dead Beat
, in 1961. Both were reprinted in a single volume by Shoemaker & Hoard in 2007.

To Charles Socarides

[Croton-on-Hudson, NY]

2 June 1961

Dear Charlie,

As a doctor you will see these explanations as mere manifestations of the lunatic norm, as a friend you must see them as attempts at apology for what has certainly appeared as rudeness, thoughtlessness, lack of interest in your proposal. But on every hand in the past year or so a despair of indecision has set in to a point of paralysis of the will, each indecision feeding the others, from writing to the job to moving to school for the children back to writing, a play of my own unfinished, a commissioned article scarcely begun, an overwhelming conviction of lack of competence, talent &c., unable to say a decisive yes but afraid to say no, afraid of missing the main chance, —“We spend our lives waiting for something to happen (says H G Wells) and then . . . it doesn’t happen.” Ecco.

Make it happen? This is where the paralysis of the will enters, but grounded in this case on more realistic considerations, as, the current deplorable state of Broadway theatre (as business, not art); and the severe (‘agonizing’) reappraisal of my own play-writing talents that followed on 1½ year’s intensive even enraptured work on a play which, until I finished it and reread it, seemed to me quite great. Now it reads heavy-handed, obvious, over-explained, oppressive, —there is a play in the work I’ve done but the vital problem remains, to extract it, to lift out something with a life of its own, give it wings, release it (this kind of block I think you know already medically, a kind of constipation of resentful satisfaction). And I go on like this here not (doctor) to parade psychical commonplaces, but (friend) only to say, somehow, why the show of lack of interest, why the rudeness, the neither yes nor no on the ‘Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl’. I did read both books, I did have difficulty casting it up in my mind as a scene-by-scene suspenseful development in any but a predictable direction, I did try to think but what I believe I did not do (in light of all the above) was to turn it loose in my mind, let it come alive with its own life, and whether I am capable of this, whether I have been fair to it, myself or you, I do not know, but I doubt.

Here again is an elemental consideration: the story of the girl, and as I understand your interest in it, is a positive affair, there is a cure &c, this by logical dramatic inference to say that life, the whole proposition, is so; whereas I feel fundamentally it’s not, there is no cure but the final one, the only redemption is well-contested failure: so much for fundamental feelings; the practical ones involve simply professional competence and Charlie I’ve no reason to believe I have it.