This business of owning an idea, a line, an image. For instance, I remember finding the notion that some people are ‘not big enough for tragedy’, and believe me I have worked it out in a wonderful number of useless words: and then found it in Forster, in one sentence. (That was four or five years ago, I was in college.) But even now it has happened again, this time not a notion but a line, the title I had settled on for this work I am at now is Some people who were naked, that is what I want, it is the whole idea. And then I have just had recommended to read, and finally had the courage to read, a play by Pirandello, the title of course is Vestire gl’ignudi, Clothing the Naked. That was a start. Then, his heroine, Ersilia, says (with infinite sadness, but with a smile nevertheless) In that case, I shall not be the woman I was, nor the woman I am, but still another! (My Esme (even the name, you see) was one who was uncertain as to her identity, finally could not stand to be alone (knowing though that aloneness is essential) because without a witness she could not know if she had really done things, and finally loses all concept of being anyone at all) (Ersilia finishes the P—play with, —that I am dead . . . yes, and that I died naked!) My elder protagonist to be one who (exactly in the same manner of Faust, paraphrasus of the circumstances, dog and all) sells himself to the devil (a publisher, entrepreneur) to forge paintings. And to find P—’s protagonist sending the letter to Ersilia signed Faust. Well.
But you will see the whole thing clearly enough to understand that it cannot be simply this disconcerting discovery and relinquishing of ideas. Because there they are anyhow, and not new. And so one is forced to say ‘style’? That word! And what ridiculous arguements, wasteful discussions it brings forth. I remember one, in which I had commented on what a fine style in David Hume; my antogonist started immediately with saying that Hume did not try to write in a style, but the style came about as he wrote writing to say what he had to say. You see where this arguement is going. Two people without style arguing on the same side against eachother; still I would try to say that, now that Hume is through, one reads him and sees an excellent style, after the fact. Glenway Wescott a fine stylist; and Rebecca West extraordinary: (so extraordinary, that once during the most recent war I was working on the New Yorker, and one of her pieces, a report on a trial for treason, described with such wondrous style a room in Lords, &c &c, that we could not eventually make out which room she meant: she did not once say, the fact simply wasn’t there in all of that style.) And a preoccupation with style for itself is admittedly ruinous.
Penned in, in your letter (of writing): but it is fun, isn’t it . . . well that was compleatly disconcerting, effacing, happy, infuriating. I don’t know, when it begins to be fun then I know myself badly enough to immediately hold it suspect. You know, the temptations? Well, to be clever, for one. That is one of the worst, and how it kills. Then to preach and prophesy (Remember, it was I who told you this . . .); the tangent of going off and having fun for its own sake, no matter that it contributes nothing (though some do it infuriatingly well); and then the absolute necessity of making a characters’s experience his and not one’s own, and that is certainly one of the most difficult requisites. To discriminate, perhaps that is the most important. Here is a line of Katherine Mansfield’s, you may recognise it, from a book review of about 25years back: —These are moments that set the soul yearning to be taken suddenly, snatched out of the very heart of some fearful joy, and set before its Maker, hatless, dishevelled and gay, with its spirit unbroken. (Now allow this presumption, simply for the sake of the hypothesis) That if I had written that I can imagine being very doubtful about it; but here I found it (the collection of reviews called Novels and Novelists) with fantastic pleasure, could not put it down, was troubled that it should be buried in an old book review. Or if I had been sure of it, should have wanted it published prominently, as mine, perhaps a little edition by itself. You see how ‘lamentable’ this is, will not do.
It is enthusiasm that I mistrust.
Presumption may not be the worst of sins (though it is when I think of it) but it is pretty bad. So there is the worry of pretentious and presumptious work. But I could no more sit down and write When the mountain fell (Ramuz) than . . . well, the usual things people say, ‘fly’ for instance. Do you know the trouble I am in, right now, that any part of this letter may sound pretentious? I started a novel in Mexico last winter, it was an allegory, and Good and Evil were two apparently always drunk fellows who gave driving lessons in a dual-control car. Well, writing that was fun, so damn’ much fun that it took me five months to realise how pretentious it was, and there is a kind fellow at an agency in NY (Harold Matson’s) who wanted me to finish it, he wanted to sell it. Thank God a couple of publishers said no thanks &c and I came to Panama, to write an honest novel. Right now that is what he thinks I am doing. Oh dear.
In the Canal Zone I have done a great deal of ‘thinking’ (I want it to be) about our country, which depresses me but must not to the point of simply saying oh dear. (And then I came on this, in James, 1:23,24) For if any be a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. And Paul to the Corinthians, 8:11 Now therefore perform the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to will, so there may be a performance also out of that which ye have.) At any rate, this Zone is all wrong, a transgression because of its sterility. Now (for a while) I am free of the concrete-buster and the air-hammers shaking me to pieces, and the crane, though all of that was good, to do work, it was the enforced idleness that was bad, being paid to be idle was horrible. It is terrifying that people can live here and for years, they bring up their children here and the children are empty boxes too, they usually stay, and so many of them are pale and I cannot love pale people in a sun country. Bloodless somehow, the Panamanians have blood, and the west indians who are niggers and are held off with disapproval and low wages but the Americans have radios, you can walk up a street past the house after house the same colour (that is the regulation, they are grey) and hear every radio playing the same programme, the mechanical-laugh programme from the States, the movies do well also new cars running around like crazy with the wives who are also some of them the young pretty ones pretty slick articles, but not when they stay and stay, then they are dumpy and sad and all the same colour but no one has told them they are sad so they do not know they are but talk to eachother instead. And no one goes into Panama except he is a man and then for the reasons that any sailor is glad to make a port, and as wearily ready to leave it.
To get to the war. Two years ago I wrote (badly) a story of a man who is devastated by a dream of Armageddon—with no idea that H. G. Wells had written a (bad) story called “A Dream of Armageddon”—and I have been worrying it since. Reading the prophesies in the Great Pyramid, or Nostradamus, and in Ezekial and Revelation. And have been obsessed with the idea of Armageddon coming in 1949. That we will live to see Good & Evil defined in battle? And then to have followed (with the lazy layman’s eye, I confess) the developments in political geography since, and now. This thing (it is still just a thing) that I am trying to work on now ends with that; and so I have put myself under this insane press of time, that it must be done before, just before, this final violence comes. That we must choose, there is the trouble. And how are we equipped? All of the thesis of despair in “That is not what I meant at all” (and the Kaiser, after the other war—as Lawrence quotes him in Women in Love—This is not what I meant, this is not how I meant it to come out at all . . .) That intentions are most wasteful of the energies we spend, I believe. Except perhaps bitterness, somehow bitterness is the worst, the least pardonable, the most culpably wasteful.
When there was a civil war in Spain, the young Americans who wanted to fight the Good Fight went to fight Fascism, beside the Communists. And now see us. What is it? that in these countries without a middle class there is material only for the extremes, and that only the extrem
es war? Here is Costa Rica. Where does one fight? Or is it two evils, which will not abide one another? These are not precious thoughts, and the precious will have to think them and choose. And after there will not be one small voice saying, That is not what I meant.
There is such an accumulation. Did you have the feeling, early when you were writing, a novel, say, that you must get everything in? Everything. And where will this fit? . . . and this? Idea, and incident, and image. It is as though (I thought last night, thinking how should I say to you what it is like) one were in deep water, and this accumulation bobbing all around, as far as can be seen but all within reach; and that one may grab at any of them to present, to say Look, does this not prove me worthy? and another to swim firmly past them, through the water, while another still (and this somehow a woman) not for a moment recognising the water, but at intelligent leisure take this, and that, perfectly chosen, while further on one may float among it all on his back and the eyes closed, while his considerate (civilised) neighbor drowns with silent dignity. And as though I were in the middle of mine, beating the water into a foam but not waves, shouting Whoopee, Look! Look! at all these things of mine, they are mine, take any that you want. (They are mine.) And then, with Mr Eliot, the moment of silence, I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing for me.
I have tried to write you honestly. And have justified the lengthiness by believing that you will read it all, if you were good enough to spend the time for me that you did in the letter you sent to me. Of course, there are other things, of vulgarity and reason, and Salvation wearing a political face (mostly stolen from Mann). And if it has seemed upset, I have quit the Canal Zone and if I can get papers and this money together am going to fly to Costa Rica in the morning. I have not put down an address (and even that has come 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 t
here 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 mentioned) and I so hope that there will be some way I can repay his kindness.
Anyhow don’t write to this address; I am paying 6$ a day (without meals) and don’t plan to hang around this lobby much longer. Today hope to go out into the country for a further look at Costa Rica, and shall probably soon enough send you an address. If my letters have sounded distraught about coming up here, you know how one gets all kinds of disturbing word about a country in such a state as this one is; but they seem to regard the little war as simply another piece of necessary business which is being negociated by the proper authorities, and with, as I say, a nice dignity about it.