B007RT1UH4 EBOK (82 page)

To Charles Monaghan

[
Another response to the
Times
review by Lehmann-Haupt, whom Monaghan mocked as Schumann-Heink (the name of a European soprano).
]

[3 November 1975]

Dear Chas. —thanks for your condolence re Schumann-Heink, I’d like of course to think it’s simply one more sample of this tired bastard’s usual muddled mind. I mean it couldn’t have anything to do with my agent having recently declined a novel by his wife, now could it.

Attached is an item Judith ran up which I forbade her to send the
Times
(though I certainly wouldn’t object if others wrote them regarding his simple incompetence) & look forward to seeing your piece.

best regards

W. Gaddis (finished indeed!)

[
The enclosure was the following parody of Lehamnn-Haupt’s review of
J R
:
]

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt does book reviews. Endless, streamlined, compulsive book reviews. Day after day, week after week he does book reviews. He also does summaries, encapsulations, and lifts pages maniacally. Month after month, sometimes overcooked in the rare sense of the word, nitwittywise. And he does question marks, quotes, parentheses and meticulous lists. And so it is not surprising that his latest attempt to review a major literary work—
J R
by William Gaddis—comes down on us like a collapsed laundry line revealing Mr. Lehmann-Haupt’s washed out metaphors, bleached inadequacies, dangling shortcomings and nonbiodegradable babble.

And yet, extraordinarily enough, an exceptional book can be discerned through the overwhelming tumult of his ambiguities.
J R
is a hilarious audiovisual novel but it is apparent that Mr. Lehmann-Haupt has neither an eye nor an ear but merely a forked tongue. What he finds amusing and intriguing in one paragraph is qualified or negated in the next.

Does such paranoia seem all too obvious? No more so, I can assure you, than Mr. LehmannHaupt’s other recent thrusts at contemporary fiction and his love affair with tautology. Still he goes on and on, year after year, until we are almost crazy with the meaninglessness of his mindless meaning.

Can a book reviewer be taken seriously if what he gives with one hand, he takes away with the other? So much for C. L-H. He may be worth considering up to a point but I certainly wouldn’t recommend him to intelligent readers who are stupefied by tired book reviewers.

To Matthew Gaddis

Piermont NY

16 November 75

Dear Matthew,

Just in case you missed [an ad in] today’s
NY Times Book Review
. Of course we know that Gaddis is not a genius (I prefer the reviewer in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
who wrote: “
J R
is a devastatingly funny book. Reading it, I laughed loudly and unashamedly in public places, and at home more than once I saw my small children gather in consternation as tears of laughter ran down my face.”) But Knopf after all is trying to SELL BOOKS and you can imagine how pleased it makes me to see them advertising it this way! Who knows, it might even be seen by Movie People who can’t read books but can read ads . . . So generally we are still sitting with fingers crossed waiting to see what will happen, very nerve-wracking. [...]

All I am pretty certain of regarding our own plans is Sarah’s arrival here with Peter sometime on Friday [...] where you know you would be MORE THAN WELCOMED by all 5 of us if you can and want to come down, though as with Sarah, being able to spend some time with either of you at any point along the way is Thanksgiving enough for us. Whatever Knopf’s ad says, you each give me more to be proud of than
J R
. (Throw in
The Recognitions
too.) [...]

much love always,

Papa

Cleveland Plain Dealer
: Alicia Metcalf Miller, 9 November 1975.

To Robert Minkoff

[
A graduate student at Cornell who was researching a dissertation on Gaddis, later submitted as “Down, Then Out: A Reading of William Gaddis’s
The Recognitions,
” 1976.
]

Piermont NY

3 December 1975

Dear Robert Minkoff.

I’m sorry to be so long responding & regret more that I apparently can’t be of help on your reference questions: I look down the spines of books here & cannot imagine which if any of them supplied the line to Ananda 25 years ago (though I must say it’s too lovely a line for me to have originated). Nor can I recall the details of Valentine’s double-agentry, though I’m about certain there was no sun reference in my mind. (In the simple basic structure he was equated with ‘mind’ (thus dying of insomnia), Brown with ‘matter’, Wyatt with ‘creation and love’ (or their absence).) And Rose? I don’t recall having more on her, I think she was intended simply to personify innocence as a casualty (as possibly Esme’s purity was a casualty). And finally the only source I could imagine for the ‘Varé tava . . . &c’ would be George Borrow but have neither his
Lavengro
nor
The Bible in Spain
here and would not send you through them on what could very well be a futile search.

I did of course appreciate your detailed effort on
J R
’s behalf in the
Sun
there and hope he may provide some entertainment beyond the academic.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

line to Ananda: on p. 893 of
R,
Wyatt quotes the Buddha: “I was that king, and all these things were mine! See, Ananda, how all these things are past, are ended, have vanished away . . .” Gaddis’s source was William Richard Lethaby’s
Architecture, Mysticism and Myth
(1892).

George Borrow: the Hungarian-Gypsy phrase (quoted on p. 255 of R) is from Borrow’s
The
Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain
(1841). Gaddis drew on Borrow’s
The Bible in Spain
(1843) for other details used in
R,
but not
Lavengro
.

Sun
: Minkoff’s review of
J R
, “Is Valhalla Burning?,” appeared in the
Cornell Daily Sun
, 24 October 1975, 4, 12.

4.
Carpenter’s Gothic
, 1975–1985

To Candida Donadio

Piermont NY

8 December 1975

Dear Candida,

I’m spending the days going through masses of papers, notes, trash, clippings, correspondence, trying to figure out what to do with myself now: America has odd ways of making one feel one’s self a failure. And looking over the fragments of our correspondence assembled, I am just terribly struck at the consistency, from my end, of howls about money, and from yours of reassurances, hopes, encouragement: of course this isn’t really news (and probably hardly unique in your file of writers), but seeing it so all at once did overwhelm me with a clearer sense of what I’ve put you through year after year, and I wish to Christ it had finally come up on the note of triumph you have hoped and worked so hard for.

And instead we’re picking up the pieces, with nothing left to do but work with what we’ve got. I talked with Bob [Gottleib] late Thursday, and since he’ll be away for a week we should probably try to prepare for the situation we may face when he returns.

Bob said, first, that Bantam does not want
J R
—he thinks Jaffe has probably not read it (and I paranoically suspect the hand of that schmuck Solataroff)—leaving only Avon and Ballantine. He had heard nothing from Avon, which I imagine could only mean they have not been encouraged by their sales of
The Recogntitions
. Leaving only Ballantine, who he said have shown interest (he’d talked to them earlier in the day) but, though I gather no hard figures were mentioned, in the 30 to 40 thousand area, which Bob seemed to be considering if nothing better suddenly comes along, and apparently with the feeling it will not.

If this is the case, I can understand his wanting to cut his losses, especially where they involve my generous advances, and this last 5 thousand makes it even more difficult for me to withhold my consent; but if it does come to such a decision what is your feeling?

Obviously it’s as easy as it is foolish to second-guess the past, and suspect that if we had played it straight with a $12.50 hardcover edition a decent reprint sale would have followed those on-the-whole excellent reviews. I think Ballantine indicated they felt Knopf’s paperback had already cut into their potential market, though that may just be a ploy. So what I wonder now is whether, having taken this hardcover-softcover course, we would be wise just to stay on it for awhile.

Bob says that sales are good: not poor but not terrific either. Yet of a hardcover printing of 5000 they’d shipped about 4700, and more than 26,000 of the softcover printing of 35,000, which sounds (though I’m aware ‘shipped’ doesn’t mean ‘sold’) a bit better than good to me. I don’t recall the softcover royalty rate we agreed on, but say it is 5%, if they did now sell 30,000 softcover and 5000 hardcovers, my royalties on the former would come to $9000 and $7500 on the latter. Thus if I presently owe Knopf $65,000, minus these royalties of $16,500 and minus the $8500 from BOM, I would still owe them $40,000.

In other words, assuming those figures hold together, a $40 thousand reprint sale would still leave me owing Knopf $20,000—and is that worth letting
J R
’s future out of our hands, as
The Recognitions
is probably forever for the miserable sum it brought? And so it is my feeling that if
J R
brings reprint offers of only 30–40 thousand, we should shrug them off and wait it out. I remember—when hopes were brighter—what you thought Knopf would do if offered $100 thousand, you shrugged and said they’d turn it down. I hope you still feel that way, and that Bob will too. Though of course my grounds for asking your and his confidence in the book’s long term prospects, or in mine at this point, are hard to imagine.

[no signature]

Jaffe: Marc Jaffe, editorial director of Bantam, which had published the mass-market edition of Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
. WG and his agent hoped Bantam would pay a similar amount for rights to
J R
. In the end, no one bought the rights, a crushing disappointment to WG.

Solataroff: Ted Solataroff (1928–2008), American editor and writer. His literary journal,
New American Review
, was funded by Bantam.

$12.50 hardcover edition: instead, Knopf followed the
Gravity’s Rainbow
model and published a split edition: a small printing of a hardcover priced at $15 and a larger printing of a trade paperback.

BOM: Book-of-the-Month Club, which published an edition for their members (an alternate choice, not the main selection).

To John W. Aldridge

[
An American critic (1922–2007) who taught at the University of Michigan for most of his career. As WG notes below, Aldridge first wrote about his work in his 1956 book
In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity
(McGraw-Hill), where he lamented the poor critical reception of
R
(and Alan Harrington’s
Revelations of Dr. Modesto
) and wrote, “it is difficult to understand how the reward of reputation can ever come to the author of either novel, for there exists at present no agency able or willing to keep their names alive in the public consciousness until the time when they publish their next books. There is no assurance, furthermore, that when that time comes they will fare any differently, except that the chances are excellent they will run afoul of the prevailing hostility to second novels and be obliterated once and for all” (201). Aldridge’s positive review of
J R,
“The Ongoing Situation,” appeared in
Saturday Review
, 4 October 1975, 27–30, and was reprinted in his book
The American Novel and the Way We Live Now
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1983).
]

Piermont NY 10968

15 December 1975

Dear John Aldridge.

After The Reception That Was Handed
The Recognitions
twenty years ago, I almost felt that if the time ever did come when further work of mine was well received I’d resist notes of thanks as firmly as I had writing any of indignant dismay that first time out. But at this point, with J R finally off on his own and the flurry of reviews past, it would be plain bad manners of me not to send you some expression of the real appreciation I do in fact feel.

I’m afraid I’m still not (as Bast blurts out) “running around thanking everybody” for what has seemed to me
J R
’s very fortunate reception, tempered by some somewhat disheartening but honestly arrived at dissent but I think short of the usual quota of guile and incompetence with only a couple of prominent (I should say prominently placed) exceptions—so I’m not writing this to thank you for a ‘favourable review’. What I did appreciate was its informed quality that I felt reflected your long concern for what I have tried to do. You can have for instance no idea how many times that paragraph from
In Search of Heresy
, asking if there were any reason under prevailing conditions to believe I might fare better a second time around, has rattled in my head these years since, pulling me up short and then pushing me along to keep believing the thing real for long enough to finish it, and so it was extremely gratifying to see that you felt I came through.

Yours with best regards,

William Gaddis

To Robert Minkoff

Piermont N.Y.

7 January 1976

Dear Robert Minkoff.

Had I been more prompt with my response to your earlier letter and queries I might have saved you a lot of trouble on this last one which practically crossed it in the mail, since I did try to make clear that after more than 20 years I haven’t the sort of detailed recall for sources you assume, or either the time or inclination to immerse myself in this project to the degree you appear to require. Undoubtedly there is material here in boxes of discarded notes which will probably eventually be dumped on some college library but if I tried to go through them now for your queries I would be doing nothing else; the more cogent point though is that the alertness goes on during the writing & when the book’s done I’m pretty much finished with it, it becomes its own argument open to any attack or interpretation & whether you feel it’s ‘symbolically unified’ interests you a great deal more than it does me, or Mr Koenig. Regarding the so-called ‘unpublished introduction’ to
The Recognitions
for instance, that business about ‘my roses are not roses but splinters from the yew tree’ was discarded simply as pompous nonsense which it is, and the reason that that is an ‘unpublished introduction’ is that it never was an introduction at all but simply one more wrong direction one pulls up short on seeking the right ones. Doodling. Since the very act of writing a novel is selection, the peril of academic approaches that go beyond the published work to the unpublished which has probably as much value or less as the myriad unselected approaches never put on paper. Why didn’t Mark Twain ever write the book about Tom and Huck aged 60 talking over old times.

The Yew tree reference only recalls to me that one book I read when I was working on
The Recognitions
was Robert Graves’
The White Goddess
& in this way other random sources come to mind: Edgar Saltus, Andrew Lang, Denis de Rougemont’s
Love in the Western World
, Montague Summers’
Physical Phenomena of Mysticism
(possible for your cruz con espejos query) but you see the random nature of the reading involved.

Elsewhere, I think I recall coming on ‘inherent vice’ as an accepted term for unprepared canvases & chemically unsympathetic paints but don’t know where. Talitha cumi, Mark 5:41 (damsel, arise). Mary B Eddy probably has the error of matter someplace in
Science & Health
. The K Mansfield quote I think was in a review she wrote of a book by E M Forster, may be in her
Notebooks
. Maní, Sp. for peanut (chorus of The Peanut Vendor). Bishop Whutley is Whately (wrote
Christian Evidences)
but I don’t recall the reference. Those are the easy & immediate, you’re certainly free to do what you like with the
Flying Dutchman
,
Peer Gynt
references & mythic parallels, why I write big novels & what they reflect and no, to a question I think you asked me at some point, what I write you isn’t for publication or inclusion in a paper but an attempt at a courteous effort to detour you from exactly that back to your own approach to what you’re up to.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

[
In a postscript, Minkoff asked, among other things, if Gaddis knew of anyone else writing on his work and about
J R
’s sources, to which WG responded in a postscript:
]

Regarding this I have no idea.

I don’t offhand think of any books business or otherwise that seminal to
J R
. I recall such incidents as the Moncrieff-smelter deal being based on an unsavoury heist by Eisenhower’s Treasury secretary Geo Humphrey and involving, I believe, Freeport Sulphur, in the ’50s; the Gandia ‘civil war’ on something similarly brazen pulled by Union Minière in the Congo probably early 60s; but I’ve finished and finished with
J R
for the time being at any rate don’t wish or plan to get into it again but simply leave it lay where Jesus flung it as the woman said, so trust you will not take the time to a questionnaire. Good luck with it,