This is the theme he would come back to, obsessively, in the very last working papers and at the last page of Agapē: “Discover yr hidden talent,” “yr unsuspected talent,” “disc secret talent” all appear on one page of notes, along with “the self who could do more” (three times, with variations). The notetaking evidently continued weeks and months past the time when he’d declared the manuscript finished—confirming a lifelong habit he had of writing past a book’s end. That’s how it went with The Recognitions, which Gaddis completed half a century before, when he still had on his desk pages of “outlined notes . . . for spinning out the novel’s conclusion” (letter to Steven Moore, April 7, 1983). And the succeeding books each took off, in their turn, from the leftover drafts of work that preceded it until, at the end of his life, Gaddis determined to transform his accumulated research into one gemlike meditation without false illusions or consolations.
The player-piano history, had it been completed, would have been an impressive coda to the fiction. As scholarship, it would have put Gaddis belatedly in the tradition of those North American writers on media and technology—Lewis Mumford, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman—who could perceive technology’s aesthetic consequences and wellsprings. As literary criticism, much of what Gaddis intended had already been accomplished by Hugh Kenner in The Counterfeiters. As a conceptual work, the history could scarcely have rivaled Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Gaddis knew this; he knew that his contribution to the study of mechanization and the arts had already been accomplished, indirectly, with his novels. But the accumulated research of half a century weighed on him during these final years, demanding an outlet. He worked hard on the history through 1996 and early 1997, when he discovered that he would not have long to live. By that time, however, he had already decided to re-format the work as a fiction, having finally realized that his own raillery on the subject was more interesting to him than “a dim pursuit of scholarship headed for the same trash heap I’m upset about in the first place.”2
Once he had finally set aside the history, Gaddis used his boxes of snippets to create a character who had an obsession identical with his own, whose lived experience and efforts at composition could dramatize both the possibilities and “the destructive element” within an emerging technological order. Later, in 1998, when he was commissioned by DeutschlandRadio to write a play suitable for broadcasting, he responded with a fragment unlike anything he—or anyone else—had ever written: a one-act monologue entitled Torschlusspanik (the fear of doors closing, of opportunities lost, of staying single, and—not least—of going unread). The work was translated and broadcast on March 3, 1999, three and a half months after Gaddis died. At his death, a somewhat longer typescript of eighty-four pages, intended by Gaddis for posthumous publication, was sent to his agent under the same title he had used for the history: Agapē Agape. His last words sound and read less like a deathbed utterance than a posthumous one, from beyond the grave—less a lament, finally, for his own passing than an honest expression of fear at where technology is taking the world.
A Secret History of Agapē Agape
The voice Gaddis found for his last fiction is unique but not without literary precedent. In the early nineties, Gaddis had discovered the works of Thomas Bernhard, and he sensed in this near contemporary from Austria not only personal affinities but a model for his reconceived project, a minimalism that allowed him to transform (rather than abandon) his accumulated research. The shift from scholarship to fiction would be accomplished by giving musical form to the work itself. Rather than reiterate music history, Gaddis would invite the reader to experience the work’s musicality; his life-work would be understood not by following his labor and his logic, but through listening to his voice and its several modulations. Bernhard’s musicologist in his novel Concrete, writing a biography of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, aims at a “major work of impeccable scholarship” that would leave “far behind it and far beneath it everything else, both published and unpublished,” that he had ever written.3 Gaddis at a high moment may have felt the same about his player-piano history; most of the time he more likely suspected that his research would ultimately be left to “some beleaguered doctoral candidate”—as he said to me in a letter of 1989.
The Loser and Concrete are not only cited by Gaddis; they provide narrative models, or, as Gaddis’s narrator would say, plagiarisms in advance, “like my own ideas being stolen before I even had them.” Bernhard’s subjects were Gaddis’s subjects also—musicology, home-state excoriation, and Glenn Gould as the hidden talent who could do more than his fellow students, Wertheimer and Bernard’s narrator in The Loser, causing both of them to give up piano playing. Also, the brevity of Bernhard’s work was made to order for Gaddis’s reformatted fiction—this and the single narrative voice capacious enough to express subtle shifts in mood and occasional surges. More specifically still, this stripped-down style was consistent with the effects of prednisone—the drug that both Gaddis and Bernhard had taken for relief from emphysema. To his son Matthew, Gaddis would recall waking up singing after his first use of the drug, and its jag is consistent with the peculiar pacing of the narrative he left us—its meandering, hallucinatory quality that suddenly comes to a focus on one particular object, one item within the field of vision capable of absorbing attention and momentarily freeing the body from pain and breathlessness.
Bernhard is certainly a far cry from the meganovelists—Pynchon, Joyce, Melville—whom critics usually associate with Gaddis. But the fiction Gaddis cites with affection and admiration—du Maurier’s Trilby, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces—and his public expressions of admiration for the talkative novels of Saul Bellow and Norman O. Douglas should widen the literary context within which his own body of work might now be read and appreciated. What he particularly admired in Bernhard—and in writers as diverse as Joan Didion and Evelyn Waugh—was the economy of style, the ability to write expansively without wasting words. That stripped-down quality was just as important to Gaddis’s own aesthetic as the highbrow satire (in Douglas and Waugh), the entropic vision (in Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem), or the apocalyptic destruction in Yeats’s “Second Coming” (a favorite poem of Gaddis’s, whose high-toned mysticism he had once dismissed but then came to appreciate after reading Didion4). Unique as Agapē may be, it should attune readers to qualities of voice and economies of style that have largely gone unnoticed in Gaddis’s earlier work.
Where the continuities between the earlier and later fiction stand out most clearly is in Gaddis’s previous depictions of artists and writers—characters who, through their appetite for destruction and self-destruction, fail on their own terms. “Overwhelmed by the material demands” their art imposes, these characters—as Gaddis said in an interview in 1987—generally fail “to pursue the difficult task for which their talents have equipped them.”5 Most often they cannot focus their energies and—like Gaddis at work on the player-piano project—they have trouble finishing things. In his second novel, J R, Gaddis would show Jack Gibbs working fruitlessly on sections from Gaddis’s own early drafts for the project. Another character in J R, Thomas Eigen, like Gaddis has written an unpublished play on the Civil War, and this same play, entitled “Once at Antietem,” would be recast and worked into the structure of Gaddis’s fourth novel, A Frolic of His Own. Recycling his own work, and the work of others, was consistent with Gaddis’s overall aesthetic—he was, in many senses, an ecological novelist who at the end cringes to think of “what we destroyed” and who could not bear to see things wasted—not money, not talent, and certainly not the unpublished products of his own creative energies.
At the end of his life, by concentrating his epic research into a novella, Gaddis was following a pattern he had already worked out for still another persona in J R, the young composer Edward Bast. Unable to ward off the demands and distractions of life in corporate America—the
materialistic world of “brokers, bankers, salesmen, factory workers, most politicians, the lot”—Bast undergoes a gradual reduction of his musical ambitions. As Gaddis said in the 1987 interview:
Bast starts with great confidence . . . , that confidence of youth. He’s going to write grand opera. And gradually, if you noticed . . . , his ambitions shrink. The grand opera becomes a cantata where we have the orchestra and the voices. Then it becomes a piece for orchestra, then a piece for small orchestra, and finally at the end he’s writing a piece for unaccompanied cello, his own that is to say, one small voice trying to rescue it all and say, “Yes, there is hope.”6
In Bast, too, Gaddis concentrated “that romantic intoxication” at once ridiculous and wonderful which had seen him through the composition of The Recognitions—a book whose successful completion (and initial commercial failure) haunts the historical project that Gaddis returned to, fifty years later, in Agapē Agape.
Instead of a self-generated cosmos to place over against the material universe, Gaddis imagines this “one small voice”— although it is easily lost in so vast and noisy a novel as J R. Now that the voice has been isolated and made to speak out in Agapē Agape, readers might arrive at a fuller appreciation of what Gaddis was trying to do in his lifelong literary engagement with the materials, systems, and specialized languages of corporate America. The single voice that emerges out of competing voices and constraining media is not only the voice of “artistic individualism” struggling vainly against commodification by the capitalist machine.7 Gaddis does not fool himself into imagining that he can oppose his art’s power to the power of the material world. What he can do, however, is to coordinate his art with the vast systems and structures that now shape our world. And we, in turn, can fashion new images of ourselves within that world by reading, by listening, and by attending to how these multiple voices and worldly materials have been heard and organized by the author.
Rather than opposing an artistic individualism against an impersonal, collectivist technology, Gaddis investigates their common historical roots as creative collaborations. From Vaucanson’s mechanical loom for figured silks to Jacquard to the drum roll on the player piano to the punched data card in the first computers: in part, the digital age owes its existence to the arts. Yet Gaddis, who continued to tear out and save anything he came across on the subject, found scant acknowledgment of technology’s debt. The “frenzy of invention” that culminated in the player piano in 1876 seemed intent, rather, on removing the artist from the arts altogether, just as the century ahead sought to eliminate the very possibility of human failure as a condition for success in the arts. “Analysis, measurement, prediction and control, the elimination of failure through programmed organization”—Gaddis had set the terms and cultural context for a “secret history of the player piano” as early as the 1960s, when the double-take-inducing title, Agapē Agape, first appears in his papers. The title turns up again in J R, as the unfinished “social history of mechanization and the arts” that overwhelms Jack Gibbs by becoming what it’s about: “the destructive element.” Agapē—the community of brotherly love celebrated by early Christian writers—has come apart (agape) through mechanization and a technological democracy that reduces art to the level of light entertainment, a spectacle for the gaze of the masses. Ultimately, the “vast hallucination that’s everything out there and that you’re all part of”—Gaddis addresses his readers here directly—derives from nothing but little gaps, sprockets in a film strip, patterns of holes in paper.
Through all his research on the player piano, Gaddis relentlessly documents an American culture of simulation in which technology has become the only imaginable solution to problems it created in the first place. The same demonic circularity that can sometimes put computer operators “at the mercy of the systems they’ve designed” would inform his narrative of a mind devouring itself in endless self-reflection. But something happens near the end of Agapē that enables Gaddis to imagine an escape from the technological hall of mirrors. Hurried by the sense of his impending death, and finally unable to avoid identification with the biological, abject, material “Other” of his imagination, Gaddis risks a direct personal address—to the reader, and to the ghosts, demons, philosophers, and fictional characters he holds in conversation. This identification with his “detachable selves” makes possible the astonishing final pages, when the man in the bed speaks, evidently without irony or satirical intent, of what he has been able to hold in belief: “Finally I really don’t believe any of it,” except for the evidence of the senses and memory and now, when they are to be lost, in the reality of the youthful “self who could do more,” and its work.
“The self who could do more”: this phrase from a verse by Michelangelo appears in every one of Gaddis’s books: “O Dio, o Dio, o Dio, / Chi m’a tolto a me stesso / Ch’a me fusse più presso/ O più di me potessi, che poss’ io?” Rejecting the standard translation 8 as pedestrian, Gaddis near the end of Agapē offers a version of his own: “It’s fifteenth, sixteenth century Italian nearer poetry, Who nearer to me Or more mighty yes, more mighty than I Tore me away from myself. Tore me away!” Everything depends on the language, on the living author’s struggle with a past artist’s words and on the future reader’s ability to hold in mind two opposed meanings—O Dio and odium, heaven and repugnance. A capacity for imaginative projection into the lifeworld, thought, and language of another person, whether living or dead, through music, literature, the visual arts, or conversation—this is the ethical burden of agapē in the arts.
The Self Who Could Do (No) More
The theme of a nearer, “more mighty” self had a grip on Gaddis, obviously. And although he cites many models in history and in literature—Socrates, Michelangelo, Glenn Gould, Tolstoy, Wyatt Gwyon in his own novel The Recognitions—at the end of his life he was preoccupied with one “exalted friend”9 and mentor, who had been crucial to his work on The Recognitions. Martin S. Dworkin was in the fifties a widely published critic, photographer, and editor who pushed Gaddis, himself unpublished, to a higher standard. Those who knew Dworkin and Gaddis estimate that as many as thirty-eight of their conversations found their way into The Recognitions. 10 The conversations continued, on paper, a full two years after Dworkin’s death in 1996.
In notes Gaddis made while concluding his final fiction, Dworkin appears as both an “enabler” and an “accuser,” an intense teacher whose intellectual generosity exacted a psychic toll: “that was always his thing, the accuser, you’ve let me down, you’ve betrayed me; my ‘dialogues’ with him (he talked) were so important to me to feeling able to do what I did (REC) unafraid.” Dworkin was always older—only by three or four years but “an overwhelming difference” in the prime of creative development: “Those years were packed with his mind, his lust for knowing everything.” This one-sided dialogue finds its answering voice in the fiction. The intensity of a lifelong conversation gets carried forward into old age, and the shared thoughts promise to survive death, because these men really believed—they were creatively driven by the faith—that literature and the arts were the place where a few unique minds could meet in a kind of fellowship.
Although the material on Dworkin never found its way into the final draft of Agapē Agape, Gaddis preserved a conversational impulse similar to what had seen him through the composition of The Recognitions. Feeling a “need to speak with those no longer here” (as he wrote in his notes), Gaddis this time channeled his thoughts into a series of imaginary conversations—Walter Benjamin in dialogue with Johan Huizinga, Nietzsche communing with himself in his final mad days spent mostly improvising on the piano, and the man on the bed in direct conversation with various characters from fiction: Svengali (from Trilby), Hoffmann (from Offenbach’s posthumously published Tales), Pózdnyshev (from The Kreutzer Sonata). In each case music, the art most conducive to unspoken fellowship, is the medium and occasion for the conversation. Its appreciation is best expressed by two people listening and keeping
quiet for as long as the music lasts. But the agitations that such listening might cause were understood by Tolstoy, an author whose role as a secular prophet dismayed Gaddis but whose work he never ceased quoting. Music in The Kreutzer Sonata is a source of dangerous emotional and physical connection. Tolstoy’s narrator, Pózdnyshev, complains that piano recitals initiated “the greater part of the adulteries in our society.”11 But music is also recognized as creating a separate place where one experiences emotions and sensations that are less easily defined:
“How can I put it? Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. . . . Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into another, but why this happens I don’t know.”12