B007RT1UH4 EBOK (99 page)

To Fred Exley

[
American novelist and sports journalist (1929–92), best known for his memoir-novel
A Fan’s Notes
(1968), which WG greatly admired. Exley wrote WG 28 April 1981 to say he liked “The Rush for Second Place” and to thank him for mentioning
A Fan’s Notes
(
RSP
56). He cites “EW’s
[
Evelyn Waugh’s?
]
dictum—‘the thing is to outlast the sons of bitches’”; says he’s going back to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall and plans to give three lectures on
R
; reports David Markson’s facetious rumor that “you were incognito, wearing shades and sharing grocery expenses with Pynchon and Salinger, out on Long Island”; and asks about Judith Gaddis.
]

Wainscott, NY 11975

14 May 1981

Dear Fred,

Your note a nice surprise, also your kind words for the
Harper’s
piece which I’m still a little ambivalent about: a pal out here said I’d “tipped my hand” & that sums up the doubts though it did pay for 2 months of Mexico including carfare so it can’t be all bad.

Outlast them yes, that’s the only answer: my version a Spanish version of an Arab one &, having neither, an approximation in Eng: Sit in the doorway of your house & watch the bodies of your enemies carried by. Problem is you sit there so God damn long that when the time comes maybe you can’t get up. But (all aphorisms this morning) what we lose on the swings we make up on the roundabouts: fancy movie dreams collapse but a Guggenheim comes through! Never had applied before & O ye of little faith but there last month it was, so vast sighs of relief from the edge of the abyss once again.

No Pynchon or even Salinger (or even Salinger-true-believer support, see attached) here which is pretty much the tail end of L.I. & not quite a Hampton so will probably & unfortunately not be in town for your meteoric passage through (though if chance should have it so I’d signal one place or the other you mention), expect to be out here till the summer migration & escape that for God knows, possibly Mexico again, good clean air for a heavy smoker & a few more words on paper to cheer up the folks at Viking, where I fled from Gottlieb/Knopf; & am frankly relieved with the help of the Googs to go on with the book unbroken by teaching this fall, kind as Bard has been & again asked me back I’ve got to say teaching gives me the blues more often than it inspires.

You say ‘back to Iowa’ which must mean you’ve been there as I wasn’t aware. I was for 2 days once, felt further away than Mexico though from what I’m not sure. But thanks ahead for your lectures on
The Recognitions
, that again is the God damndest thing: I’ve got about ½ dozen PhD theses on it also word that somebody at Univ of Nebraska Press is bringing out a book on it next year; latest royalty statement 5/5/81, $12.76, less 10% commission enclosed find our check for $11.48 . . . that should inspire them!

Other news, all unclear. Judith last heard from in Key West though even that must be a year ago, I thought you’d likely heard she went down there must be 3 years ago for what I gradually realized was more than a visit, agony all around for she’s still among the best but finally there was no saving it.

Last but major congratulations on your 12-mile-a-day (& sobriety), cigarettes still my resident curse & I will try to take your Good Example to heart,

very best,

Gaddis

attached: unidentified.

12-mile-a-day: an alcoholic, Exley announced in a postscript that he was sober and walking twelve miles a day. In 1983 WG wrote a Guggenheim recommendation for him that reads in part: “I have held his writing in high regard since reading his first book
A Fan’s Notes
, and in fact made use of that book in teaching courses at Bard College both for its style and for what I found to be its painful grasp of numerous agonies which may be universal to youth but in this writer’s hands become uniquely American. I know few works of fiction—perhaps Italo Svevo’s
Confessions of Zeno
—that present so well our capacities for self deception.”

To Thomas Sawyer III

[
A professor at Northern Montana College who was writing an article later published as “False Gold to Forge: The Forger behind Wyatt Gwyon,”
Review of Contemporary Fiction
2.2 (Summer 1982): 50–54, concerning Han van Meegeren (1889–1947), the Dutch forger whose career WG adapted for Wyatt’s in
R.]

7 June 1981

Dear Mr Sawyer.

Some of the Wyatt material was drawn from the van Megeren case. The significant departure was this: in Wyatt’s case the talent short of genius was totally in tune with the work it produced; in that of van Megeren the vulgarity of his ‘Vermeers’, immediately apparent to the untrained eye, triumphed through the self-serving ‘experts’ bent on proving their own theses regarding influences &c in Vermeer’s career to the point that they simply could not see what they were looking at.

I’m glad you like the novel.

Yours,

William Gaddis

To Tom LeClair

New York, New York 10021

27 July 1981

Dear Tom LeClair.

Yours of 21 July & ‘no graceful way to ask about the interview’ must provoke no graceful way to decline it. Unfortunately the deadline of your publisher ‘who wants to schedule printing’ has got to be of less concern to me than mine.

For now then, all I can do is recall to you some lines I wrote 30 years ago in
The Recognitions
(p. 106 in the careless little Avon edition) asking what they want from the artist they didn’t get from his work? & why must one repeat this & repeat it when that is what the whole damned thing is about? If it didn’t come through in the work then what use or interest is an ‘interview’? All the purposes such interviews can serve seem to me, on the one hand, to say ‘this is what I really meant to accomplish’ or, on the other, some definitive statement from the writer regarding his ‘interest in making some statements about fiction and (his) work’ as you say; whereas this is precisely what his work constitutes for better or worse when he offers it, in the best & most final shape he can give it at the time, the final statement in ‘interview’ terms being, of course, his obituary, & the real final statement no more than the sum of the work itself, its fictions offering probably fewer opportunities for misinterpretation even than the interview’s that isn’t what I meant (at all).

So for the moment at any rate your notion of publishing any transcribed version of our talk edited, disclaimed or whatever is unacceptable, as a condition of your original proposal. I appreciate your time and effort spent on it but it was very much the petulance of an afternoon.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

To Steven Weisenburger

[
A professor at the University of Kentucky who contributed an essay entitled “Contra Naturam?: Usury in William Gaddis’s
J R
” to
Money Talks: Language and Lucre in American Fiction
, edited by Roy R. Male (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 93–109.
]

Wainscott, N.Y. 11975

18 September 1981

Dear Steven Weisenburger.

I ordered (prompted by A Broyard’s most grudging mention in his
NY Times
review), finally received & have just read your piece on
J R
in
Money Talks
. Generally I have resisted responding to reviews or critical pieces with notes either of thanks or indignation, but in this case feel obliged to let you know that I read yours with pleasure and appreciation. Self serving as this must inevitably sound, given your bias for the book, I did find your approach, your informed analysis & exploration of the themes, & your conclusions, (& a most coherent style), to be extremely gratifying, & confirming that what I thought I had put there is really there.

This last I suppose provoked by this cursed word inaccessible which has haunted both these Big Books & far worse in the case of
The Recognitions
25 years ago. Oddly enough things seemed to be reversed with
J R
, where what one might have feared as ‘provincial’ reviewers—from the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
to the
Hibernian
—sailed right through & had a marvelous time whereas a ‘serious critic’ such as Steiner seemed to take the whole thing as a personal affront &, finding it unreadable from the outset, went right on to review it anyhow to prove it was unreadable: some sort of contradiction, or non seq, or oxymoron there somewhere. The only piece that really annoyed me was John Gardner’s thoroughly dishonest job in the
NY Review
: jauntily challenging Steiner’s charge & finding the book immensely readable in order to set it up for his own sloppily contorted conclusion (a common stunt of his) as totally negative, Art (pure) the victim of (dirty) Commerce &c &c. (Ah Bartleby! Ah moral fiction!)

I only mention Gardner here because his egregious pose in seizing the wrong end of the stick is too typical of the simplistic stupidity that has found my work entirely negative (incidentally, as you may have noticed the titles on p. 515 of
J R
are anagrams of
The Recognitions
& all of the blurbs (except for delicately evocative & yummy read) are from reviews it received); whereas your grasp of the Art/Commerce relationship, & of seeing Bast shaped as triumph, are of course what the whole damned book is about. Just as (your p. 95) everything outside Art diminishing in worth, the counterpoint of Bast’s diminishing vision of his talents from grand opera to cantata to suite to finally the lonely piece for cello is refinement rather than the defeat that carelessness reads in, & the fact that this is all the triumph needed. In this whole area I find your insight immensely heartening.

Now what follows may be simply carping but I hope, in the light of my appreciation of what is of real importance in your piece, that you’ll see these items supplied simply should you ever want to reprint or expand it. Clearly they also reflect my own constant concern that it is my fault when such details are mis-taken when I’d thought them clear to a serious reader.

Ergo: foot of p. 95, a Long Island (not a Brooklyn) school; 96, 97 Amy Joubert is the daughter of Moncrief [sic]; Cates is her great uncle; 97 he buys picnic forks from the Navy (
J R
169) not Air Force, sells to Army; 98 (& I’ve always regretted that I didn’t make this more clear) last lines
J R
on the phone, I don’t understand where you got J R anticipating a tour of college campuses; what he’s really got in mind is some undefined career ‘in public life’, ie politics in which Bast again presumably will ‘help him out’, though how he could manage such a thing is purposely left unclear: point is J R has ‘learned’ in terms of shifting his view of where the power lies in this junk world which is to say he’s learned nothing, and will persist.

One item I apparently made clear to no one unfortunately since, while a prank like
The Recognitions
anagramed, contained more than that but I don’t believe anyone saw it there so clearly my fault, & damn. It’s this: the lettering over the school entrance, proposed by Schepperman, was Marx’ FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY &c; when the school learned this ‘communist’ they were alarmed & Gibbs stepped in to the rescue by simply having the letters altered to ‘look’ Greek, as here: