William Gaddis: The Letters of William Gaddis

William Gaddis may not have approved of this book, but I can’t imagine anyone interested in modern American literature agreeing with him.

Since the principal justification for publishing Gaddis’s letters is to enable greater insight into his work, I’ve favored those in which he discusses his writing, his reading, his views on literature (and related fields like criticism, publishing, and book reviewing), along with a few concerned letters to politicians and enough personal matter to give the volume continuity and to allow it to function as a kind of autobiography in letters. This selection represents less than a quarter of his extant correspondence.

Gaddis’s letters are transcribed virtually verbatim, including idiosyncratic punctuation, spelling, careless errors, and so on; only obvious misstrokes and insignificant misspellings have been corrected. I have occasionally supplied a bracketed correction, or a sic , but otherwise it can be assumed all irregularities are in the originals. (I’ve boldfaced that to catch the eye of readers and reviewers and preempt complaints that this book was poorly proofread.) Again, these letters were not written for publication — except for a few to the editors of periodicals — and a close transcription of the originals will keep that in the reader’s mind throughout. I’ve retained Gaddis’s preference for British orthography, his habitual misspellings (e.g., tho, envelop[e], compleat, thot, magasine), his habit of closing up phrases (as in “eachother” and “3000miles”), outdated contractions like “’phone,” abbreviations (“$ly” = “financially”), and other personal choices. (However, I have not replicated his occasional use of German-style quotation marks:,like so.”) In a few cases I’ve retained a deleted word to indicate Gaddis’s first thought, where interesting. Underlined words have been set in italics, except for a few places where the underline has been retained for emphasis, especially when Gaddis used a double underline. Gaddis wasn’t consistent in the treatment of book titles — sometimes he underlined them (especially when writing by hand), more often he used all caps, or nothing at all — but for clarity and consistency the titles of all books, periodicals, movies, artworks, and ships have been italicized. On the other hand, I haven’t italicized foreign words unless Gaddis did so. He used a variety of paragraphing forms — including subparagraphs within paragraphs, some of which I’ve run together — and likewise placed dates and addresses in a variety of positions over the years. Most often, his address and the date appear at the bottom of the letter, to the left of his signature. But for ease of reading and reference a consistent physical layout has been imposed on all the letters. (The dates are transcribed verbatim.) For those from the same address, the first gives the complete street and city address, but subsequent ones only the city. Closing signatures are verbatim; in some cases, one isn’t present, either because it’s a carbon copy or a draft. Some abridgments of mundane matters have been made — and they are merely mundane matters, no shocking secrets or libelous insults — indicated by bracketed, unspaced ellipses ([…]); Gaddis’s own ellipses are spaced (. .), and have been regularized thus. (Sometimes he used two periods… sometimes more……) Some postscripts and marginalia have also been omitted. Material deleted at the request of the Estate is indicated thus: {***}.

Finally, a word about the notes in this volume. My own relationship with Mr. Gaddis and some of his friends, as well as other critics of his work, necessitated a more prevalent use of the first person in the annotations than is usually found in collections such as this, which some readers may find intrusive and self-serving. I have tried to keep such incursions to a minumum, but felt that the syntactic acrobatics necessary to avoid them entirely would have resulted in equally objectionable stiltedness.

AA = Agap ē Agape

CG = Carpenter’s Gothic

FHO = A Frolic of His Own , the first American and British editions, not the repaginated paperback.

ODQ = The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (London: Oxford University Press, 1949, 6th impression). This often-used reference book was given to WG in 1950 by Ormande de Kay in Paris.

R = The Recognitions , sometimes cited by part/chapter (e.g., III.5)

RSP = The Rush for Second Place

WG =William Gaddis

WG at Merricourt, c. 1928, “that blond pageboy” second from left in the foreground (see letter of 9 November 1994).

To Edith Gaddis

[ WG’s mother, née Edith Charles (1900–69); see WG’s capsule biography of her in his letter of 14 March 1994. In 1922 she married William T. Gaddis (1899–1965), but they separated about four years later. WG’s earliest letters date from 1929, when he was attending the Merricourt School in Berlin, CT. Most are addressed to Mrs. Gaddis’s work address: 130 E. 15th St., New York, NY, the office of the New York Steam Corporation, which later merged with ConEdison. (Her work there was the subject of a feature in the New York Times : 6 April 1941, Society News, D4.) The first two are included because they refer to his first “book,” his earliest reading, and document his first creative effort. ]

Merricourt

Dec. 9, 1930

Dear Mother.

Our vacation is from Sat. Dec. 20. to January 4.

We are making scrapbooks and lots of things. We are learning about the Greek Gods.

I am making an airplane book.

With love

Billy

To Edith Gaddis

Merricourt

Jan. 23 rd, 1932

Dear Mother.

[…] We just came back from the library but I didn’t get any books.

I finished Bomba the Jungle Boy and I have started Bomba the Jungle Boy at the Moving Mountain . I wrote a poem and it went like this

Easter

Easter is on Sunday

But today is Monday

And Easter is 11 weeks away

At Easter the bunny hides eggs all over,

Some in the grass, some in the clover.

Did you like it

With love

Billy

Bomba the Jungle Boy […] Moving Mountain : the first two (both published 1926) in a series of boys’ adventure novels by the pseudonymous Roy Rockwood.

To Edith Gaddis

[ Most of WG’s early letters home are brief, cheerful bulletins about school activities, but the following one about the three-hour train-ride between New York City and Berlin conveys some of the anxiety that Jack Gibbs recalls of his boarding-school days in J R : “—End of the day alone on that train, lights coming on in those little Connecticut towns stop and stare out at an empty street corner dry cheese sandwich charge you a dollar wouldn’t even put butter on it, finally pull into that desolate station scared to get off scared to stay on [ … ] school car waiting there like a, black Reo touring car waiting there like a God damned open hearse think anybody expect to grow up. .” (119). ]