B007RT1UH4 EBOK (70 page)

To Lyndon B. Johnson

[
A Western Union telegram. Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright opposed President Johnson’s plans to expand American involvement in the Vietnam War.
]

Croton-on-Hudson, NY

17 June 1965

PRESIDENT JOHNSON

RESPECTFULLY BUT VEHEMENTLY URGE REALISTIC
FULBRIGHT ALTERNATIVE TO PRESENT FUTILE MILITARY
COURSE IN VIET NAM

WILLIAM GADDIS

To Arthur Heiserman

[
American literary critic (1929–75) and a professor at the University of Chicago. Heiserman wrote to WG on 19 August, and responded to the letter below (which lacks a closing signature) on 29 September.
]

Croton-on-Hudson, NY

[September 1965]

Dear Mr Heiserman.

My being so long about answering your invitation to appear is a fact of such simple rudeness that I can at this point only apologise, since my reasons for putting it off all this time have been real only to me and so scarcely mitigating. If this invitation still holds, in the shadow of the above and what follows and your own obvious need to work out a schedule, I should like to accept it, if not I shall certainly understand.

I have in fact turned down other such invitations, and the variety of my reasons for doing so becomes at this moment all I can think of as material for an acceptance, ranging from prejudice against what seems to me our current tendency to transform the so-called creative artist into a performer, to my own total inexperience of any sort of public appearance and saturation of self-doubts in —What have I to tell them? to teach them? outside the book I have written and those I am writing now? until the doubts themselves are almost all that remains undoubted and so, logically extend even to not accepting.

Should all of this seem to you gratuitous over-complicating (“A simple yes or no answer will do”), I risk that further in my awareness that I must sound all too preciously retiring in the face of your familiarity with these activities, much in the way I’ve thought publication of a first novel at the hands of the book reviewers is like the first time one is hauled into a police station on what for the desk sergeant is an old and tiresome story but for the novel offender a unique audacity (if you will excuse my parlaying the metaphor and be assured that the inclusion in it of book reviewers is not meant to be invidiuous). But I am neither arrested often nor as mad as the above might indicate, nor with work of my own I should wish to try to read at this point in its progress, though I would hope to rescue from that some thesis, possibly chaos, that might be of interest to you.

If you are not yourself overcome with doubt at this point over this invitation, and if I am not so late in answering as to upset your schedule, would you let me know in a little more detail what sort of group? and how large? and a date as late this year as you can conveniently manage, the December possibility you note so that I can arrange some notion of what I am doing if only to myself. I do regard your invitation most highly, and again will understand completely if at this point you can no longer conveniently extend it.

To Alice Denham

[
A fiction writer and model (1933– ), and a former
Playboy
centerfold (the July 1956 issue, which also included a short story by her). David Markson introduced her to WG, who had separated from his wife by then, though their divorce would not be finalized until 16 May 1967. The following letter appears in her memoir
Sleeping with Bad Boys: Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties
(Book Republic Press, 2006), in the chapter “A Week with Willie Gaddis.”
]

Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

[30 September 1965]

Dear Alice,

In one recent evening I ‘direct dialed’ 4 numbers, 3 in N.Y. and yours in Washington—and got a service on each one of them. So much for the telephone company.

My own household has finally collapsed, my effort of the past 2 years to hold it together unavailing & Pat moved out with the children & so now the long bloody scene involving lawyers, my demands for ‘rights’ regarding children etc., none of it new but all of it new to me and to them and seeming so damned unnecessary, aren’t there enough problems without adding new ones?

And regarding books, writing—the second book seems scarcely easier than the first, harder really—God save us from the 3rd!—but I have a good publishing contract now and so no need for other work.

Are you ever in New York? Let me know.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

To David Markson

[
Markson published his first “serious” novel—his three earlier ones were written for money—in early 1966, entitled
The Ballad of Dingus Magee
. The specific review Markson sent WG is unknown.
]

[February? 1966]

Dear David—

As stupid & cynical as it may sound,
may
be, I hope you’ll understand my congratulations on a review and not the book itself, at this point anyhow—but that review, in
that
“influential organ”, well—I’m sure I am interrupting a ’phone call from Joe Levine or Daryl Zanuck (
not
Harry Joe Brown jr), I hope so at any rate, and the book itself will follow quite separately, though I guess my real congratulations are on finishing it, and on, apparently, keeping your sense of humour. Thanks for sending the review, I’ll
buy
the book.

Yours,

W Gaddis

Levine [...] Zanuck: Joseph E. Levine (1905–87) and Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–79) were prominent film producers of the time.

Harry Joe Brown jr: film producer (1934–2005); cf. WG’s postcard to Markson of 5 October 1989.

WG at the beach at Saltaire, Long Island, mid-1960s.

The house at Saltaire (photo by WG).

To David Markson

[
Markson sold film rights to
Dingus Magee
for $100,000 (equivalent to $700,000 today), which allowed him and his family to go to Europe for a few years.
]

7 March 1966

David—my response (prompt as always) to your splendid piece of news which anyone who knows you can be delighted at, knowing that you know where it fits in the scheme of things (“Jimmy Breslin” notwithstanding) and how to make sense of/with it.

(Do you recall some time ago sending me a carbon of a letter to a publisher w/ the superscription “Doesn’t anyone care?”—well this experience should prove in the very best sense that no one does, and)—what is the line? —“Not fare well, but fare forward”—

best regards all round

W. Gaddis.

Jimmy Breslin: popular New York columnist and author (1930– ). “Not fare well, but fare forward”: from the end of part 3 of Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages.”

To Judith Thompson

[
WG’s future second wife (1940– )—they would marry in June 1968—whom he met in 1965 via his friend Mike Gladstone. She was Associate Travel Editor for
Glamour
at the time, and later freelanced and worked in the antiques business.
]

3 August 1966

How strange this is the first ‘letter’ I have ever written you, & can’t begin “Dear Judith” with a straight face, dear girl, dear Judith, dear heaven how long ago only this time yesterday already has become.

And you may imagine how much news there is here since our telephone call—and how you haunt this house—and that downstairs room where I hope to move tonight if the children can be persuaded to move into theirs, Sarah quite entranced with hers, mirrored dresser &c—and how this letter is merely a device to see if mail really works between here and there, and so you will have something in the mail, and know I have mounted a pencil sharpener on a kitchen wall and once more spread out work.