Letters of William Gaddis. William Gaddis

short-story writer and novelist (1890–1980). WG wrote to praise her essay “Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait” in the December 1947 issue of Harper’s. (It was retitled “The Wooden Umbrella” in her Collected Essays.) He would write two more letters to her in April and May of 1948.]

      Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone

      21 january, 48

      My dear Miss Porter.

      A friend at Harper’s was kind enough to send me your address—I hope you don’t mind—when I wrote him asking for it, in order that I might be able to tell you how much your piece on Gertrude Stein provoked and cleared up and articulated for me.

      To get this out of the way, I am one of the thousands of Harvard boys who never learned a trade, and are writing novels furiously with both hands. In order to avoid the mental waste (conversation &c.) that staying in New York imposes, I am here working on a crane on the canal and writing the inevitable novel at night.

      I have never written such a letter as this—never felt impelled to (but once, in college, an outburst which I fortunately did not mail to Markova, after seeing her ‘Giselle’) —But your piece on Gertrude Stein—and your letter that accompanied it—kept me occupied for three days. And since I have no one here to talk with about it—thank heavens—I presume to write you. Having read very little of your work—remember being greatly impressed by ‘Pale Horse’—so none of that comes in.

      How you have put the finger on Miss Stein. Because she has worried me—not for as long nor as intelligently as she has you certainly, but since I have come on so many acclamations of her work, read and been excited and cons[t]ernated, and not realised that emptiness until you told me about it. I read your piece just nodding ignorantly throughout, agreeing, failing to understand the failure in her which you were accounting. Expecting it to be simply another laudatory article like so many that explain and analyse an artist away, into senseless admiration (the kind Mr. Maugham is managing now in Atlantic). Toward the end of your piece I was seriously troubled—how far can a writers’ writer go? (V. “She and Alice B. Toklas enjoyed both the wars—”) —until I found your letter in the front of the magasine. Then I began to understand, and started the investigation with you again. Thank God someone has found her defeat, and accused her of it. And it was a great thing because it should teach us afterward places where the answer is not.

      Certainly she did it with a monumental thoroughness. Now “Everything being equal, unimportant in itself, important because it happened to her and she was writing about it”—was a great trick. And: “her judgements were neither moral nor intellectual, and least of all aesthetic, indeed they were not even judgements—” which in this time of people judging people is in a way admirable. But that her nihilism was, eventually, culpable—and that her rewards did finally reach her, “struggling to unfold” as she did, all wrong somehow and almost knowing it. Her absolute denial of responsibility—and this is what always troubled me most—made so much possible. And how your clearly-accounted accusation shows the result.

      It must have been a fantastically big talent—and I feel that we are fortunate that she used it as she did, teaching by that example (when understood, as your piece helped me to do)—for in our time if we do not understand and recognise the responsibility of freedom we are lost.

      I should look forward to a piece on Waugh; though mine is the accepted blithe opinion of “a very clever one who knew he was writing for a very sick time.”

      Thank you again, for writing what you did, and for allowing this letter.

      Sincerely,

      William Gaddis

      Markova [...] ‘Giselle’: Alicia Markova (1910–2004), English ballerina, known for her starring role in Adolphe Adam’s ballet standard Giselle (1841).

      ‘Pale Horse’: in Porter’s short-story collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939).

      V.: an old scholarly abbreviation (vide: see) that WG occasionally uses.

      Mr. Maugham: W. Somerset Maugham: English novelist and playwright (1874–1965). In 1947 Maugham began publishing a series of appreciative essays on classic authors like Flaubert, Fielding, Balzac, et al.

      your letter: Porter explains that she has read virtually all of Stein’s books and that Stein “has had, I realize, a horrid fascination for me, really horrid, for I have a horror of her kind of mind and being; she was one of the blights and symptoms of her very sick times.”

      Waugh: Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), English novelist (see letter of January 1949). Porter writes in the aforementioned letter in Harper’s that long ago she read Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932) and felt “that he was either a very sick man or a very clever one who knew he was writing for a very sick time.”

      To Edith Gaddis

      Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone

      [23 January 1948]

      dear Mother—

      Thanks, thanks again. And for having been so good as to take care of June Kingsbury. I must write them a letter. But can’t think of them at the moment, somehow makes me nervous to do so.

      If your letter sounded lecturish certainly it was warranted by the outbursts I’ve been sending you. For which I apologise. I think I am getting hold now: the job, though still at times maddening when I am unoccupied, goes on with a minimum of difficulty. And the novel (in the most excruciating handwriting you have ever seen) is now two unfinished chapters, but I think good, and am comparatively happy about it—when it goes well I am fine, when not; unbearable. A black girl in the place where I eat occasionally accuses me of looking “vexed”—which in this West-Indian dialect means angry. So I tell her I’m vexed at the small portion she has put on my plate, and she tries to make up for it.

      Two good letters from John Snow, to which I sent a rather excited answer—he probably thinks me insane by now. Also Eric Larrabee at Harper’s sent me the address of Katherine Anne Porter, a modern writer of some repute, and I have written her to say how much I enjoyed her piece on Gertrude Stein in the recent Harpers. Never done such a thing before, but that article certainly warranted it. Correspondence a good thing, though even it often seems a waste to me.

      Please excuse my haste—my “lunch” (a munificent affair—one ham-cheese, one onion-cheese, one peanut-butter-marmalade sandw., all made by my busy hands) hangs from the light cord, so the ants won’t get it—and I must pull it down and be off.

      Love

      Bill

      June Kingsbury: wife of WG’s Merricourt’s headmaster.

      Eric Larrabee: (1922–90), managing editor of Harper’s from 1946 to 1958; WG met him at Harvard.

      To Edith Gaddis

      Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone

      [29 January 1948]

      dear Mother.

      I have got the clock. What a charming little thing it is! to have the onerous duty of rousing me from good sleep or a good book—and I am finding so many—to send me out to the enclosed scene. And many thanks for sending off that story. Yes, it is supposed to end as you quote it—heaven knows if it should or not—but I can’t tell now, it is none of my concern now the thing is written I am through with it.

      The lemon juice is me trying to see if there is anything in this world or the next that will make or let my face be itself without those horrible ‘things’—and at the