B007RT1UH4 EBOK (97 page)

Again, I very much hope we’ll see you when you’re through here in late summer. I know your schedules are tight ones, while mine anticipates little more than getting up and staring at another blank page every morning so it would be entirely at your convenience. And there’s no need to answer this (unless, of course, anything blossomed from the financing possibility you spoke of, which would be Good News indeed for everybody).

very best regards,

Bill Gaddis

Hunt brothers: two Texas financiers who in 1973 began to buy up silver as a hedge against inflation, thereby contributing to the collapse of the silver market in 1980, which created countless losses for other speculators as well. They declared bankruptcy and in 1988 were convicted of conspiring to manipulate the market.

To John R. Kuehl

New York NY 10021

24 May 1980

Dear John Kuehl.

I have got to write you at least this note of my appreciation for your constancy regarding that old book of mine. I look back on it but at it too as a project that only ‘youth may mount and folly guide’ (youth could/can mount? I haven’t the source here) but the insistent fact remains—my ‘royalty check’ from Harcourt B. last week of $5.56 notwithstanding—that, as the book itself insisted it would do, it exists. I have got letters from Tromsø (Norway?) & even a cult in Poznan, students mainly & the point here being its apparent abiding reality for the young which is ($5.56 notwithstanding) the most gratifying essential a novelist can dare to ask. The point being of course that without such concern as yours they mightn’t ever have seen it let alone read it, let alone found its concerns their own, as some papers your student Deborah Rossi was kind enough to forward to me surely demonstrate.

Easy enough to take all this as homage, which is directly not the case—present as that may be—& why this note. I simply haven’t the time to respond to the inquiries that come along in the detail they both deserve and presume, & your generous understanding of that makes me doubly appreciative.

very best regards,

William Gaddis

your constancy: Kuehl regularly taught
R
at New York University during this period, and once invited WG to speak to his class.

‘youth may mount and folly guide’: often (and usually inaccurately) quoted by WG from Shake-speare’s
As You Like It
: “But all’s brave that youth mounts and folly guides” (3.4.48–49).

To Tom LeClair

[
This and several later letters to LeClair concern the interview they did in the spring, which WG never allowed to be published. It appeared posthumously in Tabbi and Shavers’s
Paper Empire
, 17–27. The Wainscott address was Mrs. Murphy’s home in the Hamptons, and became the setting for Oscar’s house in
FHO
.
]

PO Box 549

Wainscott NY 11975

11 July 1980

Dear Tom LeClair.

I’ve finally gone over the material you sent me & don’t see any way we can proceed with haste on it (or what I consider haste). My responses seem rambling, too much reference to ‘explaining’ published work &c & as a whole I don’t think does either of us great credit.

I say ‘gone over the material’ & mean just that, rather than the careful scrutiny called for to make it presentable, for the very simple reason of the time that would be involved quite as I feared. You say for instance that you’d like an interview ‘close to consistent with others in the collection’ but I thought it was clear before you came up that I saw it brief at best, perhaps 1/3 their length. And as I think I said at some point in our conversation a major problem in responding with any serious care to the variety of well meant questionaires that appear in the mail is that these simply beget more questions till it becomes another day or days’ very real distraction from work already postponed for dealing with such worldly insistences as preparing a house for rent, breaking an arm, meeting trains. So a dozen inserted yellow sheets both EXP[AND] & NEW are hardly promising, each by its very nature some fresh consideration (the ‘abuse of the system that particularly affect the artist?’ ‘what kind of fiction is worth doing?’ verisimilitude? realism? &c &c) amounting altogether to an essay I would write (cut, revise, rewrite) if at this point I were so inclined for a clear & supported statement without such flippant references as Judith Krantz, Gardner, even Solzhenitsyn, in place of those that stand up close & real, as Samuel Butler.

I know you’ve already spent a good deal of time on this but I right now simply cannot afford to spend even more on it myself as would be required, since I am trying to make a concerted effort to get down to work again on a book already but barely started, which demands this opportunity (time unfragmented) to grasp & believe its atmosphere rather than reconsider that of work gone before & now off on its own so far as I’m concerned, or perhaps better to say must be concerned since my responses to your questions already given hardly appear to support that position.

With your care to seeing the writer plain I hope we can put this aside for a while until its prospects look more satisfactory to us both.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

Judith Krantz, Gardner, even Solzhenitsyn: mentioned on pp. 22, 26, and 19, respectively, in the published interview.

To William H. Gass

Wainscott, NY 11975

25 August 1980

Dear Bill.

Attending a stylish Hamptons opening of a very good painter out here—most of her pictures of rumpled pillows & bedclothes (I like a picture that tells a story)—imagine my surprise, & delight, at seeing the cover of a familiar book lurking among the sheets. Well! Next to reading, this is about the neatest tribute I’ve come across, though of course she’s read it too which is, of course, why it’s nestled in the sheets. Her name is Polly Kraft (wife of columnist Joe Kraft), serious & most competent in her own right as you will I think agree when you hold the enclosed slides up to the light. I inveigled them from her on grounds of your sterling generous & rowdy character & Mary’s good looks.

I write this on the assumption that you are all still alive, after day after day reports of 114
^o
in St Louis (my recollection being –10
^o
); but in all likelihood you got away. I saw Georges Bourchardt’s nifty looking wife at a restaurant & she told me that Stanley with full family complement had passed through Breadloaf-bound & in high spirits & good health, glad to hear that. I am mainly simply loaf-bound: escaped from Knopf for Viking (a move I’d encourage you in, if you ever consider such, enthusiastic leaves-you-alone (so far) editor named Elizabeth Sifton, dghtr of a prominent theologian), & am trying by weak force of will alone to start another book, no damned thick square book this time but I hope simply a ‘romance’ but trouble still coming up with the fueling indignation, the only thing that rouses me these days all these God damned born-agains & evangelicals.

Again, if you or you all should possibly come through I’d hope for a call, though I see the academic year (I’m skipping it this time round) is at hand; & we’ll probably stay out here on Long Island’s end into the fall.

best always,

Bill Gaddis

Polly Kraft: American artist (1932– ) who worked in watercolor and oil.

Georges Bourchardt: Borchardt and his wife Anne, literary agents.