William Gaddis - The Letters of William Gaddis

Überhoff also asked what kind of “rockets” were used in the Civil War. ]

East Hampton, NY 11937

12 May 1996

Dear Mr Überhoff.

Thank you for your inquiry: no question that that is about as dense a sentence as I have ever written, for which I apologize to Mr Stingl (but not to the reader!). I shall try to ‘shed some light’ which may simply confuse things further.

Overall, the ‘density’ is calculated to reflect the silent spread of bushy frostweed , here representing disorder & vulgarity (Ortega y Gasset’s ‘mass man’ proclaiming his rights to be vulgar) widening its habitat at its neighbors’ expense , i.e., Oscar’s elitism & search for order, as bad money driving out good in Gresham’s Law: thus the wincing defeat of Oscar’s (play=ceremony of) innocence as portrayed in Yeats’ poem The Second Coming wherein “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”, Yeats being the bond that brings Oscar & Basie closer ( no small thing either as noted elsewhere (p.88) in the book). And so the metaphor of bushy frostweed for the worst full of passionate intensity (see Oscar’s diatribe on pp. 96–7) demonstrating here that survival of the fittest , rather than the best (‘plays of ideas’), means no more than those fittest to survive & quite possibly, as we see all around us, the worst.

Well! have I simply compounded our difficulties? It may be the most expeditious course just to translate the whole passage word-for-word and leave it all for some brilliant graduate student to decode in his doctoral PhD dissertation.

The ‘rockets’ you ask about were probably to illuminate targets (or incendiaries?) from “the rockets’ red glare” in our Star Spangled Banner written during the War of 1812 (vs. Britain).

And finally, I am quite stunned by your “little brochure for the booksellers”, it is extremely handsomely done, I’d never seen that picture in the overcoat before & needless to say my vanity runneth over, could I presume to ask you to send me ½ dozen more copies? (The design of the book’s jacket is also marvelous but of course vanity prevails), you may imagine how I look forward to publication!

With warm regards,

William Gaddis

Ortega y Gasset’s mass man: see his Revolt of the Masses .

Gresham’s Law: named for Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579); an economic principle cited in several of WG’s writings and interviews.

To Alice Mayhew

[ An editor at Simon & Schuster who had sent WG a galley of James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett to solicit a blurb. The last paragraph reveals that WG had decided to resurrect his player piano project from the 1940s; his new agent Andrew Wylie sold the proposal to the ever generous Allen Peacock, then at Henry Holt, for a $150,000 advance. It was to be a nonfiction work entitled Agapē Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano , and tentatively scheduled for publication in the fall of 1998. ]

East Hampton, NY 11937

21 June 1996

Dear Alice,

many thanks for sending me the Beckett book; however having tried these 40 years to get the word around that I’ve never & don’t do or solicit blurbs, here again to save you further trouble. As opposed to (already published) quotes from responsible critics & reviews I just don’t believe these blurbs help much, too often obvious as doing pals a good turn or returning a favour or hitching a ride on someone else’s bandwagon.

So we appear directly opposed: S&S favouring blurbs & (in my own recent experience) disdaining advertising, whereas I’d disdain the former & embrace the latter, not that an ad goes out & sells books but I do think that, appropriately placed, it announces one to those who have missed initial reviews; reminds those where good reviews have slipped their minds in the weekly avalanche of new books; but perhaps most important — as I indicated to that enigmatic cipher assigned as my S&S “editor” following A Frolic ’s widespread splendid reviews to which he deigned a reply some 5 weeks later — it tells potential readers and booksellers that the publisher is pleased even proud to be publishing this book and that he stands behind it.

Our Germans seem to agree as you see from the attached prepared for its imminent publication there mailed to critics &, can I have heard them right? to 8000 booksellers!

Thanks again for the Beckett , I look forward to it but will take time to give it the attention it obviously deserves since I’m almost totally occupied right now on a project exactly 50 years in the gestation only now moving its slow thighs &, as I hope, its hour come round at last.

with best regards

W. Gaddis

moving its slow thighs […] at last: the “rough beast” of Yeats’s classic poem “The Second Coming” (1921).

To John Updike

[ WG attached a letter by Ormonde de Kay in response to a harsh review of the Everyman omnibus edition of Updike’s Rabbit novels by Harvard professor Robert Kiely that appeared in “The Browser” column of the July/August 1996 issue of Harvard Magazine . A number of letters to the editor condemning Kiely’s piece were printed in the next issue, but not de Kay’s. ]

East Hampton, NY 11937

5 August 1996

Dear John,

should ‘they’ ( Harvard Magazine ) fail to print this I thought you might be cheered by the outcry attached from a classmate & Lampoon activist as appalled as was I at “Browser”’s jeremiad not for what was said there — we must be inured to those by now — but where, those of your own house as Matthew has it somewhere. It is arrogantly not a general circulation magazine but one addressed to an exclusive audience: those alums who buy Harvard chairs & Veritas cocktail sets, have prospered sufficient to sail the Aegean in comfort & swell the class gift buoyed up by puff pieces on colleagues’ wizard works in astrophysics, butterfly pinning &c, all of it underscored by those canons of decency which 3 centuries of Harvard have essentially been all about, & every one of which this episode violates. But this today is not the Harvard College we took in; rather some $6billion multinational conglomerate flailing about in a corresponding ethical vacuum (for I’d indict the editor(s) as or even beyond Bowser himself), though I’d never faintly imagined the extent of the motley invasion that Ormonde documents here.

Auguri!

and best regards,

W. Gaddis

your own house as Matthew has it: Matt. 10:36: “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”

Auguri!: Italian, “best wishes.”

To Miriam Berkley

[ A professional photographer who had interviewed WG for Publishers Weekly in 1985 and shot several photos of WG over the years. The one he praises below was reproduced on the jacket of Peter Wolfe’s A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis (Fairleigh Dickenson Univ. Press, 1997). ]