B007RT1UH4 EBOK (89 page)

Inflamed at the moment perhaps by 2 friends of 30 years, each in his 50s in a second marriage to younger women (2 small children in one case & 3 in the other) who are pulling out to ‘find themselves’ & honestly, both these men are attractive, generous, just so essentially hard working & decent & going through what I did 12 years ago over Sarah & Matthew but don’t think I could handle it a second time at this age as they are faced with doing. I mean God damn it John did the word ‘fairness’ disappear from the language when John Kennedy aptly observed that ‘life isn’t fair’: isn’t it one’s place here then to try to redress that unfairness insofar as one can rather than join it? join the the forces of Chaos in other words?

I know it is absurd even insulting to be writing such things to you whose capacities for generosity decency &c I’ve known all these years beyond most, know it isn’t their (Judith’s) fault, know that it is a part of a major historical readjustment for which no single victim or knife-wielder can be blamed, ‘blame’ itself having gone out the window with the bath water. But with it I’ve got to say sympathy too. Notice of course that my ‘responsibility’ references to Sarah & Matthew above both take the shape of money; but I know & you know, perhaps more forcefully here than in England but really throughout the West, that this in these situations & those that follow is the prevailing, recurring, constant reality; that at our ages it means weariness, debt & starting again, & being plainly expected on all hands to start again, to follow through on the responsibilities one has in all good faith taken upon one’s self. So frankly John I’m a bit sick & tired of people stepping out to ‘find themselves’ coming up at last with too often, in Cyril Connolly’s exquisitely harsh phrase, ‘a cheap sentimental humanism at someone else’s expense’.

Extreme cases, extreme judgments (another hand-me-down from the Judeo-Christian mess), I still feel strongly about it all though most of the agony of my situation with Judith is exhausted, she writes that she feels she can’t come back till she can ‘be very sure she can return my love & give me all the things I want & need & deserve &c &c’, each of us fearful of letting the other down which is finally pretty ridiculous & the last roe of shad, as my mother used to say, regarding the Protestant Ethic. At this point I can see it going either way right to the grave, the real problems here—& those which brought all the foregoing to a head I think—being my anxiety-ridden outlook for any income whatever after this teaching stint ends at Christmas approximately; & really worse that I have no work of my own & haven’t for a year so the 4th or 5th whisky doesn’t get that down since it’s not there, simply not one damned idea after the terminal obsession of
J R
that holds enough interest, enough passion, for me to sit down to it with any sense of sustaining these things for long enough to complete it, to resolve it. Though perhaps looking back up the lines of words I’ve dumped upon you here there may be something, a latter-day American version of Waugh’s
Handful of Dust
perhaps which I’ve always admired & may now be mean enough to try to write.

Thanks for your letter, and again for your efforts on Matthew’s behalf. As Graham Greene said, It’s a battlefield. But not Conrad’s ‘The horror. The horror . . .’ Not yet,

with love to you both,

Willie

‘The windows [...] with rain’: a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, first recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1967 and by many others thereafter.

Connolly’s exquisitely harsh phrase: see note to 4 May 1948.

Waugh’s
Handful of Dust
: 1934 novel about the breakdown of the marriage between Brenda and Tony Last, the latter concerned with maintaining Hetton Abbey, an example of Victorian Gothic. This is the earliest reference to what would become
Carpenter’s Gothic
.

It’s a battlefield: title of an early novel (1934) by the British writer. ‘The horror. The horror’: Kurtz’s dying words in Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
(1902).

To John Napper

Piermont

17 January 78

Dear John.

[...] —bad news seems simply to dwindle into worse. Judith is firmly bent on getting out, but not empty-handed; is, in fact, right now upstairs packing up bits & pieces of heaven knows what 10 years accumulated, still seems to have some notion of a ‘separation’ rather than a ‘divorce’ though I can’t put in another year of this sort of life & so everything—as everything must in a property-oriented capitalistic culture—seems coming down to property settlement which promises to leave me with even less than I thought I had. I’d hoped I could simply unload the Fire Isld house, take the money & pay off some of the worse debts & make a fresh start but of course it is suddenly not that simple at all &, on the other hand, totally time consuming for all its utterly unproductive aspects so needless to say not word 1 of anything written, let alone another ‘novel’, or obviously any income at all. I suppose it’s simply got to go its course here & must come out one way or another in a matter of weeks.

I do wish I had something more resembling cheer to offer, of course it is dead of winter (my neighbor’s ice-covered tree just crashed through my terrace fence out here but I believe his insurance company doesn’t countenance ‘acts of God’ —Christ, where will He strike next?), a storm just taking shape outside now & I’m sure the stars are in their most vengeful configuration. [...]

Willie

To Sarah Gaddis

Piermont

31 January 78

Dear Sarah.

[...] I liked very much your line you tossed off (meaning as something you really simply
know
, rather than a bright revelation) that ‘praise does nothing after a while except generate frustration’. So you know I’m not just being false-modest cynical when all I really feel is frustration when I read in a piece on Mailer in the
Partisan Review
(v. highbrow intellectual mag): “For all his (Mailer’s) bravura so far he has become our main man of letters. But he is not the first novelist of his generation. That title belongs to William Gaddis; Joseph Heller is a contender, and Ralph Ellison has been a promising challenger for twenty years. These men do not write novels in a couple of months, or even a couple of years . . .”

But maybe I’d better sit down & try to write a novel in a couple of years. Just once, as I keep saying, once I get the fragments of “real life” reassembled. I quoted to Matthew something that Douglas Wood said once (in fact it was during the agonies of your mother’s & my separation involving you both) & Douglas said “Did you think it was going to be easy?” Meaning life; & I had to admit that yes, I probably had. Progressing now, 12 years later, to John Sherry’s rather more wry comment on each new catastrophe, “Life never lets you down.” A sense of humour is, as I’m also sure I’ve said a thousand times, really a sense of proportion. [...]

love always & best to Peter,

Papa

piece on Mailer: George Stade’s “Mailer and Miller,”
Partisan Review
44.4 (October 1977): 616– 24. (WG quotes from p. 623.) Stade had reviewed
J R
for the
New York Times Book Review
.

To Cynthia Buchanan

Piermont NY 10968

7 February 1978

Dear Cyndy,

What I loved about your long letter is its sheer energy & excitement with what you’re doing & trying to do—what
we’re
trying to do—in this absurd ego pastime we’ve chosen & even still appear to expect to make a decent living at, it’s an excitement I’ve just started to try very hard to recover & I wish to heaven you were here today & I could actually again see & hear that intensity your letter brings to such life in an empty house in a blizzard with only the damned silent cat’s illiterate gaze for encouragement.

I should say at the outset what I should really have said back when you mentioned that you planned to read
J R
over Christmas; but was pleased enough & flattered as I simply didn’t think the next step, which is that I think it’s really not a novel for anyone to read who’s closely involved with writing one, as I suppose can be said of any book with an extreme style which
J R
has to a greater extent than I really realized when writing it, just thought: set myself a problem & see whether I can solve it (the only way I could sustain

my own interest in it long enough to finish it), & the devil take the hindmost. But surely it makes sense too that in creating & pursuing & living day & night with characters of one’s own, the last thing one needs (or should need?) is a raft of them dumped in one’s lap by someone else in a style either so impressive (Didion) it invites frustration, or so miserable (J Suzanne &c) it excites envious ($) contempt, none of which helps when one sits down to the blank page in the morning.

I’ve got to say I think it’s a shame you came out only $1500 ahead in the move to Knopf, I encouraged it & of course the reason I did so was I just assumed that the money would be a really substantial rise, so I do hope at the least that that’s the case when you do turn it in. Aside from that—the $ I mean—I don’t think you should let it get to you when a publisher presses you for the finished work. It’s finished when you’re finished with it & if he can’t wait, with as good an agent as yours [Lynn Nesbit] there are always other houses, each move assuming you’ve got more of it done so there may be more money which, as we know, may be all you’ll ever see. I don’t mean you specifically, this bloody problem of high praise on the one hand & wanting really, aside from the royalties if one can ever honestly make that aside, ‘to reach more people’, is the real one. When
J R
won the National Book Award my son said, —Well you know Papa, what the NBA means to most people in America is the National Basketball Association . . . & how right he was. It was even said that the NBA could give the book an elitist seal of approval that would keep the ‘common reader’ away in droves & Christ, how
J R
cries out to be heard by the mob, not just doctoral students. Well hell, it’s an old complaint isn’t it. After all it did get me a trip through the Far East (& even recent mention in the
Partisan Review
as ‘the first novelist of his generation’) so I guess I am like the barmaid’s view of the man who wouldn’t have it with the mouse & wouldn’t have it without the mouse.