B007RT1UH4 EBOK (90 page)

About ready here to end up like Edw. MacDowell himself, sitting on the floor & cutting out paper dolls —but then that’s why his widow set your refuge up isn’t it, after nursing the results of the way America treats its artists. (And Sweet Briar, heavens! my mother’s college, what’s it come to . . . ?) Problem here right now though is less one of art than ‘reality’, agonies of divorce emptying the house (though after a year’s separation for practice) & however unique & all-absorbing to one’s self less news than a wedding to anyone else & God knows let’s not have another novel about that! An editor I once knew said that any book worth reading had been written out of indignation; & while that’s rather too sweeping (think of how many bad ones for the same reason) it does have an appeal that—from the sound of your letter—should hurl you right back to the typewriter. A difficulty I suppose with a bit more age & a bit more experience is summoning that indignation to surface yet once more & for long enough to sustain a fiction to embrace it, so the problem’s to get one’s head together & onto what will ‘reach more people’ now the vein of sex has been so exhaustively (& exhaustedly) mined, politics done in by ex-politicos cashing in from prisons, the evangelistics (& God go with them) (& stay) done up long since & once for all by
Elmer Gantry
& even death itself yielding right & left, madness & suicide to a fare-thee-well. What remains? Obscenity had for centuries been the dependable component (for ‘reaching more people’) in our Protestant Ethic but now that it’s been robbed of sexual content by the beaver-shots littering every news stand where does it turn? Maybe J R was right. From the present lumber room jammed with nothing but debt, real estate, lawyers, stock certificates, gas bills—maybe money really is the last obscenity & one we’re so used to handling it never occurs to us to wash, again v. J R but perhaps (for ‘reaching more people’) offered at somewhat less length & complexity than that dear boy felt pressed to carry it.

Forgive the lecture, I am just continuing to try to sort out my mind & here at your expense. I hope you can resist letting the pressures of time which you seem to feel so strongly drive the real pressures of what you are trying to do & think worth doing up the wall. Thanks again for your letter & kind wishes especially appreciated right now; I’d already enjoyed you on John Wayne in
Cornell Review
, a really steller issue: you, Gass, & Joy Williams who I think is awfully good.

My mailbox just blew away. I hope that is not a portent.

more affection,

W.G.

trip through the Far East: in 1976; see 21 February 1984.

man who wouldn’t have it with the mouse: joke about a man who finds a mouse floating in his beer, which he won’t drink even after it’s been removed. Jack Gibbs uses the line in
J R
(404).

Edw. MacDowell: this detail of the final years of the American composer (1860–1908) is mentioned in
J R
(43, 225). His widow founded the MacDowell Colony for artists, where Buchanan was staying at the time.

Sweet Briar: a women’s college in Sweet Briar, Virginia.

Elmer Gantry
: Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel about a Midwestern evangelist; nevertheless, evangelism plays a part in WG’s
CG
.

Cornell Review
: issue 2 (Fall 1977) of this short-lived journal includes Buchanan’s essay on myths of the Old West, “Oh, Won’t You Come Home, John Wayne?” (91–111) along with an essay by Gass and a story by Williams.

To Judith Gaddis

Piermont

Sunday 5 March [1978]

Dear Judith.

Freddie trudging up the hill in a snowstorm to leave in the box (which has blown down) your letter of kind endearments among the bills & a preliminary copy of settlement from Weinstock which he’d sent to your lawyer: & they tell me that irony is outmoded in fiction. But I was terribly relieved from your letter that you are getting into better shape than when you left here, I’d called your mother in fact a week or so ago to find out since I’d never really known whether you’d driven down with her or flown or gone on to KW [Key West] or what.

No nothing ‘promising’ has occurred here since you left. I finally put the stairs back together realizing I badly needed just to do something even if only that, painted the panels dark green, mothballed the cubby closet, took laundry & your things to the Thrift Shop. A call from Berkeley asking me out there for a week in June but that is June & this is barely March. I finally gave in to a fellow who’d been calling me from the
Times
Op-ed page to write something & called it in but like everything I do it was overlength & if they do want it I don’t know if it’s even worth cutting, done again like the stairs just for something to do certainly not the money: $150 which doesn’t even approach the gas bill. I never heard anything more on that Ohio film project or from a couple of people I’d hoped would come through, am now working on a switch which if it works out would at least get me out of this immediate hole I’m in that’s just got deeper every day, though of course it will get me into another one.

Sounds like all the negative thinking you fled here & stacking it up I guess one could hardly blame you. But right now it’s just quite difficult to grasp long-term alternatives with the relentless distraction of these immediate pressures dictating the good chance of using poor judgment, as this switch I’m trying to work out may prove to have been. All this because it finally got through my head what a real watershed between past & future this is: that if I can just surface from this current mess, get up Matthew’s tuition & get Sarah through her Event [wedding] just 3 weeks hence that abruptly & all at once, with you gone & Sarah under new management & Matthew well on his way, for the first time in 22 years I shall have no one for whom I’m directly responsible. Or even to. That then once I sit down & try to sort out how to pay off the banks & you & the dentist & find out whether these pains are kidneys or liver or both it’s all totally altered; as I say it took me a while to grasp but considering the proportions of it I can’t be surprised since those ties & responsibilities have been the day & night fabric of my entire adult life, & here’s the glimpse that comes as a man grows older of entire freedom on the one hand & not being needed anymore on the other, what life eventually appears to be all about, & that it’s something to grasp & act on rather than letting it creep up. All this I suppose too why I was so relieved from your letter that you’re getting health & housing & work together down there because oddly from the habit & guilt of a decade even though you walked out on me the marriage the house a year ago I was still ridden with the sense that somehow it was I who had abandoned you. I know a lot of this you’d been trying one way & another to tell me but in the recent agonies & monstrous circumstances it’s taken me this long to put the pieces together, in ways Matthew and Sarah have been trying to tell me the same thing I think & maybe getting the elements of the disturbance together are a first step to resolving it. [...]

W.

Times
Op-ed page: “In the Zone” appeared on March 13, 21 (
RSP
33–37).

as a man grows older: since WG admired Italo Svevo’s
Confessions of Zeno
(see note to 14 May 1981), this may be an allusion to the Italian novelist’s
As a Man Grows Older
(1898)

To Cynthia Buchanan

Piermont, NY 10968

2 April 1978

Dear Cyndy,

Well I read the Guggenheim list in the morning’s paper & was terribly disappointed—though certainly far less than you—at not seeing your name there, kept looking back at the B’s as though to force it into existence. Cold comfort I know, but I found only one novelist at all —do they think it is an outmoded form? too chancy? Does Ned Rorem really need money? Do we really need another critical biography of Mozart? The only 2 people I know on the list both live down the way here in Sneedon’s Landing, hardly a ghetto area. Well again, these lists never make much sense unless one’s own name appears in them but I am sorry really that yours didn’t. [...]

What a hell of a winter this one has been & how enchanting that first warm day. Sum total nothing, though I think a glimpse of returning sanity. Briefly I thought I was escaping Knopf, where I’ve shown nothing (nothing, dear, to show), but my refuge fell through just, of course, as a hungry young type on the coast wrote for possibly optioning
J R
for a (television I think) movie, all that beginning to look quite sketchy just, of course, as a call came from someone in London named Jack Gold, sounds like a bookie but checked out he really is a producer so we’re trying to sort that number out now, small enough option money but at least money, and perhaps even something ‘real’ happening at last. That’s been the damned trouble, fiction being crowded out here by real-life dramatics while I pursue the cat asking What is worth writing a novel about these days? Even money has paled (in proportion I suppose as its intense demands have increased). So I went up to Boston & got my daughter married, all aglitter & now she’s under new management my son’s coming through this week on his way, I understand, to California with a companion named Carol whom I haven’t met. As Sherry says, Life never lets you down. Otherwise no plans but a week at Berkley in late June where they asked me for one of these workshops you loathe, as I may have mentioned in an earlier letter, but there’s no way I won’t need the money by then & a chance to see why the other half lives. [...]

great affection always

Willie Gaddis

Ned Rorem: American composer and diarist (1923– ).

Jack Gold: British movie producer (1930– ). There is a Mister Gold involved in a scam on Elizabeth Booth in
CG
, perhaps a meaningless coincidence, perhaps not, for no movie version of
J R
ever materialized.

see why the other half lives: a sardonic witticism uttered by a character in
R
(753).