Letters of William Gaddis. William Gaddis

to seem presumptuous, to put a return on a letter, presuming an answer) because I intend to have none for a while. Because I do not wish to say here why I am going to San Jose, because anything I should say would be intentions, and those I will not trust.

      With it all, if things go as I ‘intend’, I hope to be back in New York June or July, and if I could meet you, and talk, not chatter, perhaps you would talk.

      Cordially, and sincerely,

      William Gaddis

      Jimmy Durante: (1893–1980), American comic actor and songwriter.

      Goethe’s [...] Freude: “Only one who yearns knows what I suffer, alone and separate from all joy”—the opening lines from a once-famous song in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96).

      Rilke’s Who if I cried: the opening line of the first of his Duino Elegies (1923), quoted a few times in R.

      Auden’s The Age of Anxiety: book-length poem published in 1947.

      I am no prophet [...] upon a platter: from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), though lines reversed.

      ‘not big enough for tragedy’ [...] Forster: in his Aspects of the Novel, Forster writes: “For we must admit that flat people are not in themselves as big achievements as round ones, and also that they are best when they are comic. A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore” (Harcourt Brace, 1957, 111).

      Pirandello [...] Clothing the Naked: Vestire gli ignudi, a 1923 play by the Italian playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) about a young woman named Ersilia Drei and five men who try to “strip” her of the romantic fantasies she has created about herself as well as “clothe” her in their own fantasies about her. WG read Arthur Livingston’s translation of Naked (as he titled it) in Each In His Own Way and Two Other Plays (Dutton, 1926).

      Glenway Wescott: American novelist and journalist (1901–87).

      Rebecca West: English novelist and journalist (1892–1983); she reported on the Nuremberg Trials (1945–46) for the New Yorker.

      Katherine Mansfield’s [...] spirit unbroken: New Zealand short-story writer (1888–1923). As WG notes, the quotation is from her collection Novels and Novelists (1930); a favorite line of his, it is mentioned thrice in R (125, 304, 716) and once in J R (486).

      When the mountain fell (Ramuz): English title (1947) of the 1937 novel Derborence by Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz (1878–1947).

      kind fellow at an agency: Don Congdon (1918–2009), a well-known literary agent.

      H. G. Wells [...] “A Dream of Armageddon”: a 1901 story about a man who has premonitory dreams about the destruction new advances in technology will enable in the future.

      prophesies in the Great Pyramid: in Worth Smith’s Miracle of the Ages: The Great Pyramid, mentioned earlier (7 April 1947). Smith predicted, “The final ‘woe’ will begin August 20, 1953. That will be a period during which the whole earth is to be ‘cleansed of its pollutions,’ and which will prepare the people of earth for the actual beginning of Christ’s Millennial Rule” (chap. 9).

      “That is not what I meant at all”: another sentence from Eliot’s “Prufrock.”

      Women in Love: in the final chapter of D. H. Lawrence’s 1921 novel, Gerald cries, “‘I didn’t want it to be like this—I didn’t want it to be like this,’ he cried to himself. Ursula could but think of the Kaiser’s: ‘Ich habe as nicht gewollt’” (I didn’t intend this [World War I] to happen).

      I have heard the mermaids singing: the finest couplet in Eliot’s “Prufrock.”

      Mann: the German novelist and essayist Thomas Mann (1875–1955).

      To Edith Gaddis

      Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone

      [7 April 1948]

      dear Mother.

      I am sorry that this will be just a note, to say that I am going up to San Jose tomorrow, and sorry that I haven’t managed to reach you on the telephone. [...]

      Now. Do you remember when we talked about Seabrook, the one who involved himself with the Arabs and travelled where there were no PostOffices? And your saying that you could picture me wanting to do just those things. No Arabs here, but my point is simply that I am going to Costa Rica, where they are having some disruption, and there may be postal problems, or I may get out of San Jose—because I do want to look at the country after being shut up in this sink—and may not have a mail-box at hand. That I shall try to write, and Please don’t be concerned (I know from my psychology books that this is idle pleading) if there are not many letters. Of course we both know that I shall probably be shipped out of the country the moment I appear. And then again I may not. One must prepare for eventualities. There.

      And I am an American, I know that. It is a damn’ lot of work being one. And grave responsibility? I had a splendid and long letter from Katherine Anne Porter, she the writer. I have filled her cup for her though, sent her five pages of my vagaries to ponder. I feel fine, am healthy, teeth and bones and eyes, shoes shined, slightly nervous (you see I am being honest), full of food. Also (also indeed! Eminently:) I have a little money and when I have to go there you’ll have to take me in.

      Will write—and love,

      W.

      Seabrook: William Seabrook (1884–1945), author of Adventures in Arabia (1927).

      some disruption: The Costa Rican legislature’s annulment of the results of the 1948 presidential election resulted in the 44-day Costa Rican Civil War (12 March–24 April 1948), in which rebel forces led by José Figueres defeated government forces (with the tacit approval of the U.S.) and took control of the capital, San José. About 2,000 people died in the conflict.

      when I have to go there you’ll have to take me in: from Robert Frost’s memorable definition: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in” (“The Death of the Hired Man,” 1914).

      To Edith Gaddis

      Gran Hotel Costa Rica

      San José, Costa Rica

      8 April, 1948

      Dear Mother.

      Just to say that San Jose is quiet, and cool—about like NY in September—and the only signs of trouble here in the city are truckloads of soldiers who seem to me to be smiling and waving at the girls most of the time. It is a comparatively new city, and so there is none of the temptation to stand about gawking at ancient cathedrals &c, and the mountains around it fine and still not especially alarming as mountains so often are (I can imagine looking out of a window in Interlocken and seeing the Jungfrau!); simply a cool quiet city, with a great sense of dignity about it.

      And I have just come in (it is 7:30am) from three cups of splendid cafe-conleche, so rich that one hardly needs sugar. The exchange is around 5 to 1, which sounds fine except that everything seems quite 5 times its price for this foolish American, though of course things are always so on arrival. Am glad to have got out of Panama, still as fond of it, but there is something hurley-burley and hot about that city which was beginning to set me a little on edge. Made my plane here with 7minutes to spare (one is suppose to arrive 1hour early) and of course managed to lose a notebook on a bus, those are the sickening things. But Juan Diaz was such a friend, such a kind fellow; he writes (is 32, the lawyer I have