William Gaddis: The Letters of William Gaddis

‘vida sin amigo, muerte sin testigo’: “life without a friend, death without a witness” ( R 112).

the Easter Bunny Who Overslept: title of a children’s book cowritten by the Friedrichs (1957), often reprinted and reillustrated.

Ted Morgan: French-American historian and biographer (1932–), whom WG had known for years.

Locust Valley: the Friedrichs’ residence on Long Island.

Emerson on Friendship: an 1841 essay.

BBC adaptation of Galsworthy Forsyte Saga : a twenty-six-part serial broadcast in 1967 adapted from John Galsworthy’s trilogy of novels (1906–21).

To Don DeLillo

East Hampton, NY 11937

21 September 1997

dear Don,

the ‘physics’ of baseball is an astounding piece of work & as though served up for my nefarious purpose, many thanks for going to the trouble of getting it to me; as for the generously signed copy of your new grand entry I think you know the measure of my appreciation,

very best regards,

Gaddis

the ‘physics’ of baseball: The Physics of Baseball is a 1990 book by Robert K. Adair, a Yale professor of physics, and is cited in AA (47). “Your grand new entry” is DeLillo’s eleventh novel, Underworld (1997).

Top: WG’s final home on Boat Yard Road.

Bottom: Saul Steinberg, Judith Gaddis, and WG, Key West, 1997.

To Christopher Knight

[ A critic (1952–) who contributed to In Recognition of William Gaddis , Knight sent WG a copy of his book Hints & Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997). The following typed letter begins with a handwritten note at top: ]

My letter carefully written to you almost a month ago, and then as carefully packed with other papers for the journey home at any rate here it finally is

Key West, Fla.

25 April [1998]

Dear Christopher Knight.

I am sorry being so long about thanking you for sending your Hints & Guesses & for the work itself. I won’t go into the somewhat bizarre circumstances that have contributed to the long delay but rather the great pleasure & rewards I had on first examining it, & have even now not yet read it thoroughly through.

However what is immediately evident is your readiness (nay, appetite!) for pursuing situations beyond their appearances (as background of American Gothic (pp. 165fol.) even if contradictory; or better perhaps the citations of cases, pursuing outside references; or picking up on small but vital details consistently missed by ‘reviewers’ (as Cruickshank/Lester (obvious) leap from CIA to industrial espionage); also my attempt at the Holmes/Crease///Hand marvelous collision. Those for random starters.

Incidentally I thought it might amuse you (177fol.) Jane Eyre sequence, my attempt to find a writing style to conjure up a reading/visual style in such total contrast to the actual bed scene: this attempt to impose her fiction upon the reality almost coming to grief through editor’s failure to get permission for the already written sequence using Lost Horizon only to be denied (didn’t like the sex-context) at the very last minute by Hilton’s estate so I broke my neck rushing through every public-domain distinctive prose passage & think it worked (though not so well as the original).

Such the pitfalls. I regret, once again, being so brief & perfunctory with this response to what I find around the top of works I’ve seen on mine, with on the one & happy hand reaching back to what you have made from our first encounter & I an agonized paranoid/shy (guest), to the opposite which I might have anticipated with some academic collisions under my belt now the inevitable sharp words that must emerge between those selling apples & those selling oranges.

I am incidentally heavily involved just now in a book on the player piano (the one Gibbs didn’t write in J R ) tangled for the moment in contract difficulties (my work incidentally doing immensely well in Germany (where they read ) and even should we all survive all (meaning all ) the notes for the Pepsi-Cola-Episcopal case, God help us all & thank you again,

Warm regards

William Gaddis

our first encounter: WG had visited John Kuehl’s class at NYU when Knight was a graduate student there.

Matthew Gaddis, WG, and Sarah Gaddis, Key West, 1998.

To Gregory Comnes

East Hampton, NY 11937

17 July 1998

Greg,

The Plutarch on Herodotus Father of Lies is a sheer delight, how else would I have got hold of it & I do thank you (as well as followups) fits in so beautifully with my (also Plato’s in banishing Homer?) assault on/embrace of the ‘fictions’ adorning the naked animal; also & obviously I do enjoy a bit of malice & Plutarch is a marvel at it here. .

More to follow eventually but I wanted to get this off at least, warm best to you both,

WG

Plutarch on Herodotus: in his essay “On the Malice of Herodotus,” first-century-AD Greek biographer Plutarch dismissed much of the history written by fifth-century-BC Herodotus, called by some the Father of History.

Plato’s in banishing Homer: in Plato’s Republic , Socrates says Homer would not be studied in his ideal state.

To Steven Moore

[ I had sent WG a copy of my essay “Sheri Martinelli — A Remembrance” ( Anais 16, 92–103), which was based on information supplied by his old Greenwich Village friends Vincent Livelli, Chandler Brossard, and Sheri herself (whom I knew for the last dozen years of her life before her death in 1996; she supplied the “mama’s boy” remark). He typed but did not mail this letter; it was found after his death in a copy of the magazine Gargoyle I sent him that summer, which contains a much-expanded version of my Martinelli memoir (#41, 28–54). ]

18 July 1998

Steven Moore

Thanks for sending your version of Sheri. I hadn’t known of the range of her later acquaintance & admirers, as Ginsberg whom I’d known over the years till he dropped but never heard they’d met, let alone all the other stars you mention I hope more accurately portrayed here than myself “quite smitten with her” (p99) certainly but that she “didn’t reciprocate (my) interest, regarding (me) as something of a “mama’s boy” hardly bares dignifying especially as backed by the similarly invidious “literally” since “my father left (my mother) when I was 3.” He did not leave her. They separated. Or is this plain carelessness as elsewhere (trusting you see the difference), hardly anyone’s business but in these times of internet easily entered as ‘information’ once it’s been introduced as ‘fact’ much enough like (p100) the mention of ‘revenge fantasy’ as the equally loaded alternative of Sheri’s ‘indifference’ to me (compare Plutarch’s ‘On the Malice of Herodotus’).