Letters of William Gaddis. William Gaddis

      

      THE LETTERS OF

       WILLIAM GADDIS

      Edited by Steven Moore

       with an Afterword by Sarah Gaddis

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

      Photographs

      Introduction

      Abbreviations

      1. Growing Up, 1930–1946

      2. The Recognitions, 1947–1955

      3. J R, 1955–1975

      4. Carpenter’s Gothic, 1975–1985

      5. A Frolic of His Own, 1985–1994

      6. Agapē Agape, 1994–1998

      Afterword by Sarah Gaddis

      Acknowledgments

      Index

      About the Authors

      Copyright

      Books by William Gaddis

      PHOTOGRAPHS

      p. 14: WG at Merricourt, c. 1928

      p. 17: WG in the Caribbean, 1940

      p. 17: Edith Gaddis, 1941

      p. 27: WG in Arizona, 1942

      p. 54: WG at Harvard, 1944

      p. 75: WG and Ormonde de Kay, late 1940s

      p. 111: WG sailing for Spain, 1948

      p. 138: WG and Eulalio Abril Morales, 1949

      p. 151: WG and Margaret Williams in Paris, 1950

      p. 164: WG in Spain, 1950 and 1951

      p. 197: WG back in the USA, 1951

      p. 198: WG, Margaret Williams, Charles Eagan, and Kathleen Costello, 1951

      p. 207: Sheri Martinelli

      p. 220: WG, 1955

      p. 229: WG with wife Pat and children, 1955 and 1958

      p. 238: WG and David Markson, 1964

      p. 238: Edith Gaddis at Massapequa, early 1960s

      p. 252: WG in Germany, 1964

      p. 259: WG on Fire Island, mid 1960s

      p. 261: WG and Judith Gaddis, late 1960s

      p. 277: WG and Judith in Ganja and Hess, 1972

      p. 324: WG’s carpenter gothic house

      p. 360: WG and Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, 1980

      p. 398: WG and Frederick Exley, 1983

      p. 398: WG with John Sherry and Donn Pennebaker, 1995

      p. 425: WG with Mario Vargas Llosa and William H. Gass, 1986

      p. 425: WG and Steven Moore, 1987

      p. 430: WG with Sarah Gaddis in Paris, 1985

      p. 430: WG in Paris, 1988

      p. 445: WG with Donald Barthelme and Walter Abish, 1987

      p. 524: WG’s house on Boat Yard Road

      p. 524: WG with Saul Steinberg and Judith Gaddis, 1997

      p. 526: WG with Matthew and Sarah Gaddis, Key West, 1998

      Introduction

      It’s hard to say whether William Gaddis would have approved of this book, hard to judge whether he was serious or joking when he wrote to his mother in 1949 to state, “Our correspondence should never be published.” Publically, he insisted that only a writer’s published work matters and “the rest is not our business” (as his revered T. S. Eliot wrote); he submitted to interviews reluctantly—and not until the second half of his career—gave no readings, and regarded biographical details as irrelevant. He planted his views early in his first novel, The Recognitions (1955), and thereafter directed inquiring critics and interviewers to reread this passage: “—What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work?” the reclusive painter Wyatt Gwyon asks his wife Esther. “—What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology” (95–96). He reiterated the point twenty years later in his second novel, J R (1975): when Rhoda, the teenage squatter at the 96th Street apartment, tells the composer Edward Bast that he’s not very “interesting,” he sputters, “—Well why should I be interesting! I mean, I mean I want my work to be interesting but why do I have to be interesting! I mean everybody’s trying to be interesting let them I’m just, I’m just doing something I have to do . . .” (561). Gaddis admired Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes for “ordering all his papers burnt & letting his Opinions stand for themselves nobody’s business how he got there,” as he writes in one of the letters in this volume, and in another marveled at Faulkner’s “ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save for the printed books.” I can imagine what he would think of strangers reading his mail.

      And yet, he did not burn his papers. As essays, PhD theses, and then books on his work began to appear, Gaddis resigned himself to becoming the subject of a biography someday and to seeing his letters published after his death. He addressed the latter “threat” (as he called it) in the letters themselves; when I wrote to him in 1984 requesting permission to view some letters held by the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library (University of Alberta), he reluctantly granted permission, although as you’re surely aware it’s an entire area I’ve never condoned. Some of my reasons have been noted in relation to my reticence re interviews though here they go further: like many fledglings, my early letters were many times written with the vain notion of eventual publication & thus obviously much embarrassing nonsense; & of the later ones, those of substance will probably never be seen for equally fortunate if exactly different reasons. (I don’t know if you happened upon a review of Hemingway’s letters by Hugh Kenner, might have been in that same Harpers with my piece 2 or 3 years ago, but he does use them to flay the writer & point up frailties in his work as glimpses of the ‘real’ Hemingway, I think really these things go quite the opposite, the letters are the detritus &c).

      Later that year, when I was stepping up my efforts to collect Gaddis’s letters—both for my own work and to secure those to former friends and contacts while they were still accessible—he snapped “no one’s [letters] are written for publication (unless they are in which case they’re probably full of lies).”

      Privately, however, he maintained his archives over the years and near the end of his life carefully prepared them for eventual sale to a university library, telling his children that he relished the idea of scholars poring over his papers and making all sorts of discoveries. At any rate, his letters are neither full of lies nor the mere detritus of his life; they do indeed offer glimpses of the “real” Gaddis, and rather than providing the means “to flay the writer & point up frailties in his work,” they foster a deeper appreciation of the writer and his work.

      It’s ironic that Gaddis complained—in a 1948 letter to his mother after reading about dramatist Eugene’s O’Neill’s early vagabond days—that he was “furious that one can no longer live as he did—just wandering about, one job, one ship to another,” for Gaddis led what sounds today like an almost mythic young writer’s life. Born near the beginning of the Roaring Twenties (29 December 1922), he went off to boarding school at age five, learning to negotiate