B007RT1UH4 EBOK (86 page)

“I’ve grown accustomed to her face”: a song from the 1956 stage version of
My Fair Lady
, written by Frederick Loewe (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics).

Professor Miyamoto: Yokichi Miyamoto, who published an account of WG’s visit in
Eigo Seinen
, 1 December 1976, 404–6; available online at http://www.williamgaddis.org/nonfiction/interviewmiyamoto.shtml.

John Gardner: American novelist (1933–82) whose insulting review of
J R
in the
New York Review of Books
(“Big Deals,” 10 June 1976, 35–40) is a recurring topic in later letters.

To Sarah Gaddis

[
In his first semester at Bard (and subsequently), WG taught both creative writing and a course on the theme of failure in American literature and culture, the basis for his essay “The Rush for Second Place” (1981).
]

Piermont

8 October 76

Dear Sarah,

I was very happy to have your letter—and word that the stereo arrived & got set up & ‘sounds great’—and was baptised with Chopin. No better choice.

Bard is fine although I still labour under silent stares, at me or at the floor. Nine people showed up for the writing ‘workshop’ & 27 for ‘Failure’, which should tell me something! As usual getting ‘writing’ to discuss is like pulling teeth. But why are they there then? On the other hand the Failure people I think are really doing the reading (I pared the number down to 21) & quite responsive in discussion, I hope it keeps up. At the end of each class I feel I’ve exhausted my material for the whole term. Also I now have 3 advisees (word?) working on senior writing projects, one of which is a short novel in which the author insists absolutely nothing happens. I’ve read 24pp. & so far nothing has. [...]

love from us all,

Papa

To Candida Donadio

Piermont NY

12 Dec. ’76

Dear Candida.

I think we agree we have about all the information, disheartening as it may be, that we are going to get; and there is little choice now but to move on it. After talking with you, and then going over the entire thing in detail with Judith, I’ve tried to clear my head of past hopes & irritants & make a completely fresh start. This is the approach I suggest:

1. Drop Silverman flat (unless forced to return to him as a last resort if step 4 below fails): he has at least served the function of providing us with a $25 thousand base figure.

2. Reconsider Knopf. This is a painful turn-around for me of course, since they are hardly my favourite house & I have little or no faith in Gottlieb’s performance. However in this case we are not after performance, but simply as much money in front as we can get.

Gottlieb has told you he is interested in my next book to the point of 50 or 60 thousand. He may have assumed another book of the weight & significance of
J R
& its predecessor when he named those figures, & what we do not know is whether he would consider the comparatively short & simpler western in those terms. He knows about the screenplay & presumably is aware that it remains unsold. Thus he might scale his offer on it down to the Silverman level or below if he is interested at all. On the other hand, I believe he thinks in terms of a fast buck & might be interested in that possibility which the western offers.

Therefore I suggest we approach him now on the western in terms of the above figures. If he is interested but backs off from those figures, go as low as 40 thousand if he will offer that (2-year delivery & otherwise same contract as on
J R
but without option clause).

This has two advantages. First, if he made the above offer he might also be willing to leave the $5 thousand in abeyance, which we would otherwise most likely have to repay him from any money from elsewhere. Second, if Gottlieb turns it or those terms down, we should be free to very openly go elsewhere.

3. This would mean you should be able to approach substantial firms like Random House, S&S, &c, rather than furtive moves among small independents.

4. If none of the above prospers & the best offer remains in the $25 thousand range, see if Aaron [Asher] is interested to that extent.

What do you think.

[unsigned]

Silverman: perhaps Jim Sil
b
erman, editor-in-chief of Random House.

To Ólafur Gunnarsson

[
An Icelandic poet and novelist (1948– ), several of whose books have been translated into English.
]

Piermont, NY 10968

18 March 1977

Dear Mr Gunnarsson,

Simply a note to thank you sincerely & very much for your letters & high opinion of my work, as well as for the poetry which I should have acknowledged long before this. Whatever may be happening to
J R
here in the US, which I think is not very much, it is really pleasing to know that I have a gratifying reader in Zaire, one in Manila, & now Reykjavik. Heaven knows when I may be passing by, over or through Iceland but I would certainly look you up —meanwhile go on & finish your ‘long long novel’ before you go out a window: you can imagine how many times I was ready to do just that in the course of those 2 books & so write you this from a ground-floor room.

with best regards,

William Gaddis

To Judith Gaddis

[
This portion of a longer letter to Judith in Key West concerns a writers’ conference at New College in Sarasota, Florida, that Rust Hills was organizing for June, which included William H. Gass and Vance Bourjaily (1922–2010), among others. See 28 June 1977 below.
]

Piermont

Fri p.m., 18 March [1977]

Dear Judith,

[...] And from the constantly changing Sarasota front: John Barth can’t make it so Rust Hills gets Susan Sontag, then she’s sick and Barthelme drops out so he gets Hortense Calisher & Vance Bourjaily (sp?); meanwhile I am shying from readings and panels and finally have a good & encouraging talk with William Gass coming with his wife, Hills meanwhile reshaping it into a no-lecture no-panel informal thing at least that’s how it stands now, but if Gass abruptly disappears I may be tempted to do the same. (Which of course is nonsense because for me it’s little or nothing to [do] with anything but the fee is it: Barthelme drops out because he’s already overbooked with just this sort of thing; Calisher is a star, Vance has got nothing else to do, Gass admires me because I’ve been able to stay out (till now), I admire him because he separates it all clearly & relaxedly in his head (‘my public & private selves haven’t even shaked hands for many years’); & from admire to envy, (Candida says) Puzo envies my status of which he feels he has none, I his money of which we know God damned well we’ve got none; & so much for the nickel-&-diming Hills & Plimptons where success isn’t except for Rust & George for that moment. I used to think it mattered.) [...]

with love always,

W.

Puzo: Mario Puzo (1920–99), best-selling author of
The Godfather
(1969).

To John Large

[
A student of WG’s at Bard College. The following accompanied a story by Large.
]

[postmarked Suffern, New York

13 May 1977]

John Large.

Fact these pages aren’t littered with red underlinings, question marks, stabs of punctuation, doesn’t mean I didn’t read them, & more than once. As I’m sure I’ve remarked before, it’s been refreshing to come upon someone for whom the language is a real live means of communication rather than an unfamiliar barrier in itself. Perhaps in fact it’s too easy? why you press it as far as you do? My own sense of all this I think comes down to this terrible search for something worth writing about, worth one’s talents (I’m not being facetious), almost the sense here sometimes of your frustration with the inadequacy of your material, & so making the writing itself the substance. Have you read anything of Joan Didion’s? do you need to? A marvelous sense of fragmented style & refusal to tell too much.

Go to Appalachia (sp?) & work in a mine? get a job in a brassiere factory? a morgue? on a tuna boat? I don’t know, seems what’s needed is a unifying kind of closed-end scene, or (&) a unifying closed-end obsession & watch it spread (I took, first, forgery; then ‘business’) but something, perhaps—& in contradiction of the dictum ‘write what you know about’—not too close in one’s own life. Dan Haas in our group for instance I think set himself a nice problem with his Boy Prophet, he certainly has the facility & has given himself something to solve. (I think of writing perhaps too much so as problem solving.) Point is not to get one’s self in a corner; & to try to settle for the fact—unlikely as it must seem—that there’s plenty of time.