B007RT1UH4 EBOK (69 page)

We are supposed to go to Belgium this week—had planned to leave today (Tuesday) but equipment problems must be solved or everyone will mutiny. This time I would hope to get off ahead of others to look for locations there, since so much time has been wasted over that.

Darling I am so concerned over your vacation, whether you may have gott off even now & may not get this letter which I’ve tried for the last 4 days to write but things have been so hectic—page 1 of this letter written Sunday, page 2 Monday morning and now Tuesday 11 pm in bed I shall finish it some way [...]

Yesterday we finished, if you can imagine, about 10 pm in star light making a sound recording only—other equipment problems having delayed things till it was too late to film—deep in a German forest, an account by Manfred Gregor of being in the German army at age 16 (he wrote of it in a novel
The Bridge
, look for it in paperback) and now I understand even the recording is unsatisfactory! And Gregor won’t repeat, I don’t blame him. So much of the whole thing quite, quite unbelievable (I mean our experience, what you saw at Sands Point multiplied in awkwardness 100 times)—

3 of us did take time to go to Dachau—but such a memorial has been made of it that it is impossible to connect the place with what happened there.

The plan at the moment is that I shall leave tomorrow with 1 camerman, ahead of crew & director, for St Vith & Bastogne, Belgium, & only hope they arrive later with proper repaired & replaced equipment. We are sending a man to Heidelberg for mail which I should have end of week. I am concerned about you having a decent summer and the children a good one, and concerned about your health. I want you so well & happy, Statue of Liberty trip sounds as grueling as our[s] yesterday here. Finally I cannot believe that by the time you get this Goldwater may be Rep. candidate for president, appalling.

Pictures for children, and my love

W.

Eisenhowers: like Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), American general and president from 1953 to 1961.

Gen Blumentritt: Günther Blumentritt (1892–1967), German general, responsible for much of the planning to defend France against the Allied invasion.

Skorzeny: Otto Skorzeny (1908–75), a lieutenant colonel in the German Waffen-SS. His English-speaking troops participated in the Battle of the Bulge by infiltrating Allied lines and impersonating American soldiers. After the war he moved to Spain and started an engineering business.

General Bayerlein: Fritz Bayerlein (1899–1970), German panzer general who served under General Hasso von Manteuffel (Blaufinger in
J R
) in the Ardennes Offensive.

Manfred Gregor [...]
The Bridge
: pseudonym of Gregor Dorfmeister (1929– ); his autobiographical novel
Die Brücke
was published in 1958.

Dachau: the first Nazi concentration camp, located in southern Germany.

Goldwater: ultra-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater (1909–98) was indeed nominated by his party to run against Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election.

To John D. Seelye

Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

21 August 1964

Dear Mr Seelye.

I carried your note of 16 May all over southern Germany on a 58-day job which I hoped would give me some chance to answer it but never managed, and return to find yours of 16 June. I had—through Jack Green, I believe—seen a copy of the San Francisco publication which I must confess I found highly entertaining, the kind of mad ingenuity that I would never dream of ‘setting right’ by ‘facts’. (I’ve also in recent months seen copies of 2 academic papers which trace my sources in such convincing detail to
Nightwood
and particularly
Ulysses
that my intervention would seem as irrelevant and presumptuous as would my angry responses have been to the original reviewers.)

The Recognitions
goes slowly in England, is scheduled in Italy Germany & France, and I have no knowledge of the Nebraska situation. Regarding your query on the material cut from the original MS of the book, it is I would gather in one of a few cardboard cartons filled with notes, MS &c.; as I recall, I did the original cutting in one of the first rewrites (though this is imprecise since some parts were rewritten a number of times, some scarcely at all), the next following a list of suggestions (but not demands) from an editor, the final and most thorough (as, a dropped prefatory chapter) myself for reasons I felt convincing and would probably find even more convincing now. I appreciate the invitation of your friend Mr van Strum but have no wish at this point to see any of that material published.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

the San Francisco publication: Tom “Tiger Tim” Hawkins’s
Eve: The Common Muse of Henry
Miller and Lawrence Durell
(San Francisco: Ahab Press, 1963), a portion of which touches on
R
and Green’s
Fire the Bastards!
(pp. 14–18). Hawkins suspected Gaddis and Green were the same person. For more on Hawkins, see chap. 5 of Don Foster’s
Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous
(Henry Holt, 2000).

2 academic papers: the essay on Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood
(1936), later described as a Master’s thesis, is unidentified; the one on
Ulysses
was probably a draft of Bernard Benstock’s “On William Gaddis: In Recognition of James Joyce,”
Contemporary Literature
6 (1965): 177-89.

Italy Germany & France: only the Italian translation was published; the others fell through (though French and German translations did appear many years later).

the Nebraska situation:
Prairie Schooner
was (and still is) published by the University of Nebraska; the issue was abandoned in the summer of 1963, though apparently no one informed WG of this.

Mr van Strum: Stevens Van Strum is described in Seelye’s letters to WG as a young friend of his, a classics scholar living in Berkeley, who was “very interested in the book, and has turned up some fascinating things.” He cofounded Oyez Press in 1964.

To John R. Kuehl

[
A professor of literature (1928–98) at Princeton and later at New York University, where he directed the first doctoral dissertation on
R
. He invited WG to contribute to a book in which authors furnished rough drafts of their published work and commented on the process of revision. The book was published (without a contribution by WG) as
Write & Rewrite
(1967).
]

Croton-on-Hudson, New York

29 August 1964

Dear Professor Kuehl.

Thank you for your letter and your interest in
The Recognitions
in terms of your own project. I am sorry to be so long about answering you but I have been on a two-month job outside the country and am only now beginning to catch up.

Regarding your query, I doubt I could be much help to you even with the most willing spirit and all the necessary time. While I have boxes of redrafted writing and scraps of notes from that novel—parts of which were considerably rewritten, parts very little—I have neither looked at them nor in fact read the book for so many years that I scarcely think I could put my finger on any sequence and follow it through with much faithfulness to the process as it actually occurred, and your approach seems interesting enough that its real success (I don’t mean sales) must depend upon the exactitude with which these tangible aspects can be reproduced, in order to give some measure of those which cannot.

Though I weep for order I live still in a world of scrawled notes on the backs of envelops; and while I realise that you can no more wait upon my good intentions than any publisher will, without evidence, back yours, if I should have the time and luck to turn up anything that makes sense I shall let you know.

Yours,

William Gaddis

To Pat Gaddis

The Lawtonian Hotel

Lawton, Oklahoma

21 Nov. 1964

Pat. A new project started yesterday and the earlier part completed today though rewriting difficult in present state, roughly a day behind schedule—I know this doesn’t interest you (“
my
work”) but does bear on my hope to clear things up by Wednesday night next. I called my mother eve. of 19th to wish her happy birthday which she had had, and congratulate her on pulling off these 40 years. She said you’d called, told her about new house (she didn’t say what) and new job, on which you would hardly hear my congratulations since you know I’d wish it were for yourself, how good that w
^d
be, instead of as the means of escape that finally got you to it. But there—people compare my work to Joyce, when all that’s really comparable is the bourgeois level of our domestic
ambitions
aspirations.

Love to the children

W.