As for England!—I had a very pleasant dinner (pleasant, that is I was allowed to talk about my book for 2 hours) a few weeks ago with Mr Fred Warburg, we got on extremely well, & I believe he is going to take it for Secker & Warburg. So there is little more to do or think about.
But I’ve wondered how near the feeling of absurdity & bereavement which I’m coddling now may correspond to any you may have upon finishing (abandoning) & letting go a large painting which has taken possibly years? I spend days now wandering up & down this library, hearing a piece of music half through & change it for another; read 20 pages in one book, 50 in another, then sit down & read 4 novels straight through. I believe I could go on this way for some time were it not for that most usual cursed blessing which summons such vagrant minds to reality, & of course I mean money. Until now it has not greatly mattered, I mean I was bent on any ruse so long as I could work & getting that finished was the only importance. Now? Well, trying to turn my head to “creative” mercenary purpose seems quite a futile thing. But here! I don’t mean to sound plaintive: simply this curious sense of living in a vacuum, & a not uncommon one in these circumstances I imagine; but am constrained to wonder how long it will go on. Until I have got to the last penny of what I’ve recently borrowed I suppose. But this is a really idiotic convalescence.
Of course accompanied by the usual phantasies: the “Hollywood gives me $5000000 ” (a raving impossibility incidentally) & I set sail for Gibraltar, spend the summer in Spain, & thence to London to spend the winter studying at the University, &c. — — — The prospect of being here in New York when the thing is published is something I certainly hope to avoid, for all the best & the worst reasons, & presently, the prospect of wandering the pavements of that city begging work is something so unattractive that I cannot contain it long enough to do it. Though ultimately how idiotic to break one’s neck getting & keeping a 75$ a week job when it costs all of that to live—& not awfully well—in that city; while I can subsist on 20 a week in the country. Well, this is no new nor certainly unique problem; & with no piece of work on my mind I’m not even vaguely desperate, perhaps I should be? Not yet.
Does this all sound carping & complaining? Lord, I don’t mean it to. I’m really in good spirits, if undirected & indifferent just now, until those moments of Look, look! wenches! —Then (What we want is a bank account, & a bit of skirt in a taxi—) Meanwhile, I leave this house in 3 weeks or so & return to the barn in Massapequa (box 223), to pick up the usual childhood threads, though feeling rather chilly & grown old.
Nonetheless every warm & best wish to you & Pauline.
W.G.
7$–10$: R was priced at $7.50 at a time when most hardback novels cost between $3.00 and $5.00.
Fred Warburg: Fredric Warburg (1898–1991), one of the leading literary publishers in England. His initial enthusiasm for R waned, and it wasn’t published in England until 1962 (by MacGibbon & Kee).
Look, look! wenches!: from the epigraph to Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect” (1919), taken in turn from The Maid’s Tragedy by Beaumont and Fletcher (1619).
What we want [...] skirt in a taxi: line 10 of Irish poet Louis MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music” (1937).
To Fred Palmer
[An executive at Earl Newson & Company, a Manhattan public relations firm. The following is a corrected draft, not the mailed letter. WG was acting on a suggestion by William Haygood, who had returned from Spain and was now working in public relations, that he pursue a job in that field. WG eschews his usual British orthography.]
[April/May? 1954]
Dear Sir.
I have recently been told that your firm is interested in writers for work on fairly extensive projects. However, I did not learn the exact nature of the work, and should be very interested to talk to you about it. A few weeks ago I finished work on a long book, a novel, to be published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., and am now interested in continuing with the sort of work I have done in the past few years.
To give you a brief idea: I was born in New York City (1922), educated largely in New England, after three and a half years at Harvard College came to work for the New Yorker magazine (1945) where I spent about a year and a half in fact-editing. In 1947–8 I was in Central America, and after that spent a year in Spain. In 1949–50 I lived in Paris and wrote free-lance for the United Nations organization (Unesco) radio and news services. I returned to Spain for that winter, and the following spring went to Tunisia and Libya to work on a documentary film. Returned to New York the following winter (1951–2), I wrote pieces (in English) for the State Department’s Russian- and Arabic-language publication America. Since that time I have been entirely occupied with this novel, on which I had been working intermittently for five years.
Aside from this long book, the work I have done, and that which interests me the most now, is creative-fact writing with an interested purpose, similar to those alluded to above. The work in Paris was, of course, general. The film made in North Africa was for an English paper company. The pieces for America were of course propaganda, such things as (for the Russian edition) one on the play made from Melville’s Billy Budd; for the Arabic, one on racing cars in this country. I am unencumbered, speak and read French and Spanish, and if travel is involved should prefer Latin America, whose culture I am more familiar with than others.
If these qualifications interest you with relation to possibilities in the work your firm is doing, I should greatly appreciate talking with you, and shall telephone your office at the beginning of the coming week to find a time convenient to you for an appointment.
To John Napper
Box 223
Massapequa, Long Island
16 September 1954
dear John,
I trust you and Pauline are by now back from that tour of Titians and Moselles? and thanks for the tormenting picture card; how many years must go by finding these temptations in my mail and returning to sit and “plan”—waiting: this present waiting is perhaps the worst so far, the book due out not until February, and I’ve no plans nor inspirations for the winter. Certainly not, at this moment, to sit down to construct another half million word anagram. But I have just got word that Fred Warburg (Secker & Warburg) are taking it, and though his plan sounds fairly ill-starred (to make it a 35/ book, and my royalty on the first 2 thousand copies about 1/8d!): but the payment of £200 on publication, a sursum corda indeed and one which lets me at least consider coming to England this winter. (For I don’t especially relish being here to make a fool of myself in February.) —So at least it is possible. Though there is a considerable amount of living to be got through before that.
Here I might say with Thoreau “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well” but still you see there is no news. And believe me since at this point the only kind of news which would have significance would be news of money, you will be among the first to hear it, for one of the first expenditures will be a passage on some tramp moving vaguely in yr direction. It is strange, with the chill of the year setting in which always means I must move in some direction (going where the climate suits my clothes), to be quite totally unemployed, spiritually, “gainfully”, amorously, or even the real work. But as careful in all these fields not to accept employment simply for employment’s sake, I see too much of that around me here. Well, read this only as a sort of preface to something more decisive within the next few months. And how I hope that it may be a move in that direction if only for the winter. I do so look forward to seeing and talking with you both again even if not Chantry Mill’s flush of youth (I feel chilly and grown old) nonetheless all love and best wishes and hopes to see you both.
W.
Titians and Moselles: the Italian painter (c. 1488–1576) and presumably Moselle, a region in northeast France. 35/ [...] £200: 35 shillings, around $50 in today’s terms; £200 = around $6,000 today. sursum corda: Latin, “lift up your hearts.”
Thoreau [...] as well: from the opening page
of Walden (1854).
To Patricia Thompson Black
[WG’s future wife (1928–2000), a model and actress who had come to New York from North Carolina to break into theater. Insatiability, a 1930 novel by Polish novelist Stanislaw Witkiewicz, features “Murti-Bing” pills that sedate previously unhappy people, especially intellectuals; Czeslaw Milosz discussed both Insatiability and the Murti-Bing pill (a symbol for communism) in “The Happiness Pill” in the Partisan Review (1951), which WG read (as he told me when I inquired about the reference to Murti-Bing on page 569 of R; he never read Witkiewicz’s novel). The piece was reprinted as the first chapter of Milosz’s The Captive Mind (Knopf, 1953).]
[New York, NY]
29 October 1954
dear Pat,
Here it is: I mean the letter in yr mailbox which you mentioned. But also, if you are going to wade into that book, I had meant to give you this pamphlet: I think the two worlds are much the same, that & Insatiability, though I wasn’t clever enough to devise anything as splendid as Murti Bing—
I didn’t mean to keep you out listening to that fool piano last night so late (that’s not true, of course I did) at any rate I hope you did get things arranged & settled & prepared for this Brunswick stew, without too many recriminations, because I enjoyed so much being with you. But there! Pluto, I believe, will soon be out of the ascendent, and we can all get breath, possibly to find it not all totally absurd after all.
Your fashion photographs were very impressive, & I wish you the best weather for yr jaunt on Sunday. Meanwhile it is strange indeed on this quiet & beautifully grey afternoon, to think that you are somewhere, at this very instant, being real.
W.G.
To John Napper
(this winter:) 210 East 26th Street
New York City
15 December 1954
dear John
Of course, I am not on board anything bound in that direction, and heaven knows when I ever shall. These I am afraid are the moments one suspects that youth is gone indeed, & it is time at last to settle down to something with an income attached. But you may imagine the suspense, with this book due for publication in March here, and copies of it already spread out among “critics” &c, so that I am constantly hearing fragmentary reports & remarks kind & otherwise of course, but even the kindest ones haven’t a penny attached, and that, certainly, is one of the oldest problems of the artist.
But I must tell you, that in spite of my insignifance with my publishers now the thing is done (though they insured my life when I was working on it!), I did prevail upon them to send you an advance reading copy (paper-bound), and I hope you will——what? not, I’m afraid, “enjoy” it, for in spite of my own feelings about its entertainment value, I gather it is not a book people will “like”. And there are mistakes, I mean aside from grammar, or historical accuracy: aesthetic mistakes. The bulk could have been cut down greatly, and some of the tiresome sophomorics which betray it as a first novel removed (& some of [them] were in fact written 4 or 5 years ago). But I knew that if I settled down to do that, it might well end up the MS in the bottom bureau drawer. And so best to get rid of it, with all its mistakes, and set forth with the Iron Duke’s admonition, Publish and be damned, ringing in one’s ears from the outset——And what sense would there be here in writing an apology for a book which took 7 years trying to explain itself to me? So at last I suppose not fare well but fare forward——[...]
W.
Iron Duke’s admonition: one of the “sayings of Great Englishmen” recorded in WG’s mid-December 1950 letter to Napper.
not fare well but fare forward: the concluding lines of part 3 of “The Dry Salvages.”
To J. Robert Oppenheimer
[American physicist (1904–67), known for his work on the atomic bomb. On 26 December 1954 he gave a lecture entitled “Prospects in the Arts and Sciences” at Columbia University’s bicentennial anniversary celebration, reprinted in his book The Open Mind (1955). The following letter is a corrected draft.]
New York City
4 January 1955
Dear Doctor Oppenheimer.
I have already taken a greater liberty than this, asking your attention to my letter, in having called Harcourt, Brace & Co., who are publishing a long novel I have written, to ask that they send you a copy. You must receive mail of all sorts, crank notes and fan letters of every description, but few I should think of half a million words. And since I can also well imagine that you seldom if ever read novels, if only for not having the time, it is an added imposition to have sent you such a bulky one.
But for having read your recent address at Columbia’s anniversary, I should never have presumed to do so. But I was so stricken by the succinctness, and the use of the language, with which you stated the problems which it has taken me seven years to assemble and almost a thousand pages to present, that my first thought was to send you a copy. And I do submit this book to you with deepest respect. Because I believe that The Recognitions was written about “the massive character of the dissolution and corruption of authority, in belief, in ritual and in temporal order, . . .” about our histories and traditions as “both bonds and barriers among us,” and our art which “brings us together and sets us apart.” And if I may go on presuming to use your words, it is a novel in which I tried my prolonged best to show “the integrity of the intimate, the detailed, the true art, the integrity of craftsmanship and preservation of the familiar, of the humorous and the beautiful” standing in “massive contrast to the vastness of life, the greatness of the globe, the otherness of people, the otherness of ways, and the all-encompassing dark.”
The book is a novel about forgery. I know that if you do get into it, you will find boring passages, offensive incidents, and some pretty painful sophomorics, all these in my attempts to present “the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue” as I have seen them: I tried to present the shadowy struggle of a man surrounded by those who have “dissolved in a universal confusion,” those who “know nothing and love nothing.”
However you feel about the book, please allow my most humble congratulations on your address which provoked my taking the liberty of sending it to you, and in expression of my deepest admiration for men like yourself in the world you described.
To John Napper
[Napper wrote to say how much he enjoyed R, which was officially published on 10 March 1955. For a complete, inquisitorial account of the book-review industry’s negative response to WG’s first novel, see Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards! (Dalkey Archive, 1992). In this letter WG also reveals his engagement to Pat Black.]
New York City
2 March 1955
dear John,
Enough of the foolishness has started to give some idea of what things may be like; and so you may, or possibly you can’t really imagine how much your congratulatory words mean, how deeply appreciated since I realise I was getting into your world, I mean painting; while mine it begins to appear is writing. But friendship (and chapter I at Chantry Mill) all aside, imagine how much more your understanding appreciation means than what is in prospect here. I think I meant it when Wyatt says that the artist is the shambles of his work, but here it’s those shambles they want to devour. One (women’s of course) magasine which considered publishing one chapter finally demurred (in frightened awe) but wanted my “picture” and what of my life I cd spare: if you are a writer, they don’t want to buy and print yr writing, but rather a picture and what you eat for breakfast, &c. But then good God! that’s what the book’s about—It’s difficult not to strike a pose, for being “eccentric” enough to try to get across that: What do they want of the man that they didn’t find in the work?—without insulting them all. Already before the thing is even out (10 March) the requests for radio appearance! And no is the only thing there. I’ve seen a couple of advance reviews, they promise to be good, qualified that is by uncertainty, fear of being committed. (I think so far Time magasine takes the prize for double-talk, and suc
h gems of idiocy as finding Mr Pivner an attempt to re-do Joyce’s Bloom! I knew this sort of thing would happen but Lord! it does stop me in my tracks when I actually see it in print). But this is enough of all this for the moment; I think before the month is out there will be some real monkey business, which I’ll report.
Meanwhile like Manto I wait, time circles me; and since I’ve done nothing all winter but run into debt, I might as well hang on and see what the next few weeks bring in the way of “opportunity”. Meanwhile (very confidentially to you and Pauline) managing to get married and looking forward to being a “real” father by fall (early fall). Well here we are; and you may see scarcely in position to pick up and go [to] Africa (unless Sidi-bel-Abbès). At the moment cleaning up and hunting a clean shirt to lunch with Fred Warburg, which I’ll be doing about the time you read this,
to you and Pauline and best wishes and love,
W.
WG at the time of the publication of The Recognitions. “For some crotchety reason there was no picture of the author looking pensive sucking a pipe, sans gêne with a cigarette, sang-froid with no necktie, plastered across the back” (R 936). Photo by Martin Dworkin.
Wyatt [...] shambles of his work: “—this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour . . . what is it?” Wyatt asks his wife Esther. “—What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology” (95–96). WG will cite this passage often in future letters and interviews.