W.
To John and Pauline Napper
[In April 1952 a version of the second chapter of R appeared in the first issue of New American Writing, for which he was paid $144.68 and which attracted the attention of agent Bernice Baumgarten, who negotiated a contract for the novel with Harcourt, Brace. The contract was signed 11 December 1952, and the advance allowed WG to work full-time on completing it.]
New York City
1 March 1952
dear John and Pauline—
[...] I am much where I was when I last wrote—except that the novel now is almost 100,000 words, and just barely more than half finished—it is turning out quite long which is going to be difficult with prospective editors. So far I’ve only been offered an option on a contract—2 or 3 hundred dollars, have not taken it since I’ve still enough to live on, and am still doing State Department writing, a piece every 4 or 5 weeks at 200$ a throw, which is just enough to live on in New York. But I do believe that within 4 or 5 weeks I shall really know what direction I am going to be going in for the next few years. And shall post you accordingly. One of these pocket paper book things is publishing an extract of some 5000 words of this novel—a lengthy attack on France, Paris, and the Holy Roman Church it turns out to be, pretentious and venal but I shall send one along when it is published, may entertain you.
Immediately the king died I wanted to write you—because it struck a very reponsive cord—what with Sir James Frazer—but how important it is that the king does die, most important part of the ritual; and the sense confirmed of death and resurrection, without recourse to that ghastly bloody mess of Golgatha 33a.d. —You know when you think about it what a business, pretty girls going about wearing a likeness of a tiny man nailed to a cross on their throats. Well I can not get started again on this. Yes, how I should like nothing better this very evening than being there, talking. Wait and pray. I immensely appreciate the Coronation invitation, and hope it will work out.
Well the swine was for the birth (not Christ but the sun—and 25 December dies invictus solus) and since the resurrection is in view (not Christ but the sun) another fragment of a corpse should be on its way to you now. Please tell me of anything from this land that you need. How happy I am to be able to do any such small thing you know. And I shall write better soon, when I find where I stand. Thank god for the work.
Every best wish and love,
W—
100,000 words: the published version of R is about 418,700 words.
king died: England’s George VI died 6 February 1952.
Sir James Frazer: author of The Golden Bough, which concerns kingship rituals.
dies invictus solis: Day of the Unconquered Sun, a holiday for the Roman sun god held on 25 December. Apparently WG sent the Nappers a ham (“swine”), as he wanted to earlier (5 April 1951).
To Mike Gladstone
[A lifelong friend (1923– ) from Harvard onward; it was in Gladstone’s rooms that WG got drunk on the night of the incident that led to his expulsion from Harvard. In later years, Gladstone worked in publishing, but previous to the time of this letter he had once sold miniature mobiles (hence the reference below). The “inarticulate Mayberry” is unidentified, but the Doria in the closing was Gladstone’s wife.]
Massapequa, L. Isld.
26 June 1952
dear Mike,
No need perhaps to say how pleased I was with your note; those are the things that count, make this continuous strain of lunacy worth it all, and believe me so much more important than miserable folk like the inarticulate Mayberry (the oddest sequitur I’ve come across in some time, his thing): and as for him, writers have the best weapons finally to drown out such bitter whining.
Whether it all does sustain I don’t yet know, and it is coming out to be extremely long, some 150 or 160 thousand words so far, and more to come before everyone is settled. That will be a problem; even though as I read it it seems quite tightly written. Well, I’m doing nothing else but work on it now, and can’t make much sense talking about it. This is the first letter I’ve written in some months; and am seldom in New York, have seen little or no one since early May.
These are hateful bits of intelligence, but re mobiles I saw in the local nightmare supermarket one with Rhngld beer tattooed on its several free faces, and thought of you, and thought God save us both.
But this was simply to thank you for your letter, which has made me very happy this evening, and will whenever I think about it.
All very best wishes to you and Doria,
W.
To Edith Gaddis
[WG spent the winter of 1952–53 in a farmhouse owned by the Woodburns outside the small town of Montgomery, west of Newburgh, New York, finishing The Recognitions.]
[Montgomery, NY]
22 November 1952
dear Mother,
This certainly isn’t crucial; but if convenient could you call Brentano and see if there’s any standard small edition of selections of the work of Bishop (George) Berkeley? There was one in Scribner’s Modern Student’s Library, the Philosophy Series edited by Mary Calkins. Better I suppose call Scribner’s then, that’s pretty much the sort of edition I want. But if there’s a question or confusion put it off. I’ll appreciate it greatly. And one of these 50¢ typewriter ribbons please?
Peace and quiet, and as yet no fire down below, though it will probably blizzard for Thanksgiving and I’ll take my dinner down there. Ooops! I manage an anemic version of Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott on the pipes. Also Greensleeves about up to the elbow.
love,
W
Bishop (George) Berkeley: Irish philosopher (1685–1753). In R, Wyatt studies his New Theory of Vision (81), dealing with optics, and Anselm mentions him in passing (532). WG’s library includes the book he requests: Essay, Principles, Dialogue, ed. Mary Calkins (Scribner’s, 1929).
Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott : “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” one of Martin Luther’s best-known hymns, adapted as a choral cantata by Bach.
To Edith Gaddis
[Montgomery, NY]
11 december 1952
dear Mother,
Rain, rain, —and temperatures like September, all very well except that the furnace of course feels slighted, not needed, senses I’m only coddling her for chills ahead, and is slowly pining away down there, the mere blush of life on her black cheek. She gets worse daily:(I think it must be the outside air’s so warm that an updraft’s wanting, and with the first chill of terror that descends on us she’ll rouse).
The work is going well, though the days are becoming confused with nights, to the point where I’ve been working until 5 and 6, and not getting up until mid-morning: but there, what’s the sense in being groggy and unworkmanlike at 9am, and asleep at 3? if time is, as it is here, a continuum . . . well, this goes on . . .
A glorious feat, fête, what have you, last night, I heard Handel’s Messiah, there is something to make us weep in exaltation. (Of course it came from Toronto, in entirety, not a Firestone rag-end, presenting a single chorus, And He shall feed His flock as though He were Harvey Firestone Handel’s patron . . . followed by O Little Town of ——as part of the Oratorio, —this goes on and on too as you know.) Nothing, you know, to do with Christmas as agreed but I think that after the holidays when prices and treatment in our great salons are more gentle I shall look around down there for some music-playing apparatus.
No; for Christmas I’ll greatly appreciate it if you can bring up a box of this paper. It is Southworth Paper 4-star plain 8½ by 13 number 402 D. 500 sheets is around 4$. I got this in the stationer across from the Harvard club, where I’ve been getting it for some time and don’t know another place. And another ribbon please? [...]
love,
W.
Harvey Firestone: American industrialist (1868–1938); his tire company sponsored The Voice of Firestone, a weekly radio program featuring classical music (1928–56).
To Edith Gaddis
[Montgome
ry, NY]
19 february 1953
dear Mother,
Did you get the McCarthy-trial programme? It is going on now, a few minutes after our call: God, that dead bullying voice of the senator from Wisconsin, and the way things can be twisted. This Voice of America business, do you wonder that our propaganda is lousy, and from now on, after this business, is going to be just plain pitiful. O, it breaks my heart, because this whole war is propaganda and what, what, what can you do.
Of course (as Elmer Davis mentioned) what can be better for, say, anti-Communist propaganda than using, but I mean using carefully and intelligently, not scattering broadcast, the work of known Communists, when it can be used to support our side? As taking things out of their original context (as, as far as this goes, and, as far as, like an idiot, I told the State Dept ‘Special Investigator’ cops could quite easily be done with my work to support their side (I mean this work I’m now on, the Dale Carnegie business for instance; not what I wrote for the State last winter)) is a common and an obviously effective ‘trick’, and that’s what propaganda is, you know. I mean falsifying to the extent of not telling the whole story (the way women lie). What advertising is, and that’s what’s risible at this point, that we’re being eaten out from the inside by advertising like no other nation in history (“selling”) and from the outside by this bullying voice on the radio now.
Good God, maybe Martin Dworkin’s a top-Communist, maybe Bill Haygood is, (this I suppose should be burned, you know how I mean it but those lines ‘out of context’: —Now Mr Gaddis, you do respect your Mother?/ Yes sir./ And I would assume that you usually tell her the truth about things which concern you and your affairs?/ Yes sir./ Is it true that you wrote her a personal letter dated 19 february 1953, in which you mentioned the possibility of two men whom you knew and worked with in the State Department being ‘top-Communists’/ Yes sir, but I . . ./ And did you use it in reference to these two men who had been your close associates?/ But I . . .
But I . . .
But I . . .
Well God knows, if we go under, I hope to be sitting right here in Blackberry Hill listening to the furnace bubble, even if I’m burning books in it, and books aren’t going to be much good much longer for anything else.
Nevertheless
Nevertheless
Nevertheless
I’m writing one and I’d better get at it, so it can be published, because it will have lots and lots of pages and each one a moment of heat.
Spain by Assumption Day. Spain or Belleview-vue. Or the attached.
de minimis non curat lex,
W.
McCarthy-trial programme: in 1953 Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was conducting highly publicized hearings that attempted by intimidation and innuendo to expose secret Communists among mostly innocent U.S. citizens.
Voice of America : the U.S. government’s official radio/television broadcasting service. Regarded by some as a vehicle for U.S. propaganda, McCarthy suspected it was influenced by Communists, and several VOA employees were grilled before television cameras.
Elmer Davis: American reporter (1890–1958) and a harsh critic of McCarthy’s witch-hunting tactics. As noted earlier, he hired WG to work on America Illustrated.
Dale Carnegie business: WG’s critique of Carnegie in R (498–503) could be misconstrued as an attack on American values.
Martin Dworkin: American writer and editor (1921–96), whom WG met while both were working at America Illustrated. Dworkin became a close friend and confidant of WG, and also took the author’s photo that accompanied some reviews of R. See Looks’s Triumph through Adversity.
Assumption Day: 15 August, in reference to WG’s hope of returning to Spain with Charles Socarides that summer.
Belleview-vue: Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in Manhattan.
de minimis non curat lex: Latin, “the law does not concern itself with trifles”: a legal maxim, and the implied punchline for a limerick in R (523).
the attached: a brief newspaper clipping about a colonial-era Harvard janitor who drank himself to death.
To Edith Gaddis
[Montgomery, NY]
13 March 1953
dear Mother,
Very glad with your call last night, & to know that everything is in order again down there; it took me a couple of days to recover.
This isn’t of course imperative, but if you could manage without searching at length a libretto of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman—you know I’ve had it on my mind for some time and should have sought it out myself by now. And only if you come upon a cheap paper copy (like those in Massapequa)—otherwise I can get hold of it in a library I should think.
Peaceful here as I said, thank heaven, and chapter 18 taking up, though it is so difficult because it takes place in Spain, and by now the mere thought of Spain, let alone trying to write of it, drives me wild.
Rain here, which is to the good, keeps me indoors.
love,
W
Wagner’s Flying Dutchman: the German composer’s first major opera (1843) and alluded to often in R (93, 393, 550–51, 895). In a letter dated 17 April 1953, WG thanks his mother “for Flying Dutchman and Tosca, very much what I wanted, though the first is as bad as the second is good. & so I go on, singing Vissi d’arte; o dear yes, and stewing the chicken bones.” Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca (1900) also plays an important role in R, especially Tosca’s aria beginning “Vissi d’arte” (“I lived for art”).
chapter 18: these chapter numbers don’t correspond to the published novel.
To Helen Parker
[Montgomery, NY]
13 April 1953
dear Helen.
It goes on, except for turning cold, wet, the furnace out, the fireplace wood wet, and everything quite commensurately springlike, now that we’ve got through the lilies of purity and the resurrection, and must get along with the afterlife. You were sweet to call, and I must apologise for my doltish end of the conversation, though I think my plea of being but half wakened, and rather chilled at that, must be acceptable?
Otherwise things remain severely peaceful, and until recently, when woodchucks appeared, no distraction from writing novels but reading them. Whether recent choices have been happy ones I’m still unsure: Oblomov first, which remains as wondrous as it was those years ago, though conducive to the worst temptations of laziness. Next, de Sade’s Justine, and that I believe definitely not the thing to manage in such solitude sustained, the only cure a good long walk, chopping up a tree, or firing a shotgun at woodchucks—but the winter’s about done, and I’ve not gone off my head, or drunk myself to death either, I drink very little here in fact, except when Mrs Woodburn and my mother appear, then the cocktail hour comes instead of the coffee.
The work goes on, God knows how long or how much longer, it weighs almost as much as its master now, and I am afraid Harcourt Brace is going to fall off the Christmas tree when they see it. Christ, Christ how I dread that.
But I’ve put Justine aside and am keeping warm one flank with kerosene, and back to work on “Chapter XX” —O God. A Day with the Pope, D.V., and in silence, since AM radio in this country is a total loss as far as I can see. No music, words, words—(while I like Carlyle busily assemble the golden Gospel of Silence “effectively compressed in thirty fine volumes”).
And so this evening being spent in Spain, and Good God! the sadness of that, of going through notes made there, even Baedeker’s stiff prose on it brings a lump to the throat. But there!
love to you, and you all,
W.
Oblomov: the 1859 novel by Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov (1812–91), whose title character is the embodiment of physical and mental laziness.
Justine: Sade’s porno-philosophic novel (1791) is cited several times in R.
A Day with the Pope: a picture book by Charles Hugo Doyle, published by Doubleday in 1950, and cited twice in R (546, 827).
Carlyle: the ODQ quotes this line from John Morley’s biography
of Thomas Carlyle: “The whole of the golden Gospel of Silence is now effectively compressed in thirty-five volumes” (sic: not “fine,” as WG has it).
To Sheri Martinelli
[American artist and writer (1918–96); WG fell in love with her in 1947, and based R’s Esme on her. This undated draft was found among Gaddis’s papers; it is unclear whether it was copied and mailed, but it’s too lovely to omit.]
Massapequa
[Summer 1953?]
Sheri, what a great happiness it was, seeing you again; though there were enough moments of feeling young again, and too young again, and though other people seem to want to be young again I do not, once was enough. So we all go not changing just getting more so.
But you again, is something else, and still beautiful, yes: even then I could not under-stand other people taking your presence for granted and still I cannot, nor understand, no one weeps looking at you, I will. So, such a recognition, seeing you again: but to be grateful, right before God and everybody, for your being happy to see me again, take that for granted! no, no that could not be for granted, too kind a gift. Or, if the present is every moment reshaping the past, so that any instant is liable to come up with the verdict, I was wrong all the time! or, I was right all along—there: I was right all along? Not being a scientist who by measurement attempts prediction, it is a very dangerous way to live today. So gifts asked from the most selfish motives are the humbly received. And considered upon retirement. Knowing you go right on now, every minute being, thought of and loved you know. My selfish motives, my humble gratitude, then always the retirement for finally there is only the work. And all the while you are loved.