The Letters of William Gaddis: Revised and Expanded Edition

by William Gaddis, Steven Moore (Editor), Sarah Gaddis (Afterword)

Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis (1922-98) shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding-school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and are all the more valuable because Gaddis was not an autobiographical writer. Here we see him forging his first novel The Recognitions (1955) while living in Mexico, fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica, and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award-winning J R (1975) amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter 's Gothic (1985); then teaches himself enough about the law to indite A Frolic of His Own (1994), which earned him another NBA. Returning to a topic he first wrote about in the 1940s, he finishes his last novel Agape Agape as he lay dying.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Literature, Memoir, Literary Criticism, American, Biography Memoir

600 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2013

About the author

William Gaddis was the author of five novels. He was born in New York December 29, 1922. The circumstances why he left Harvard in his senior year are mysterious. He worked for The New Yorker for a spell in the 1950s, and absorbed experiences at the bohemian parties and happenings, to be later used as material in The Recognitions. Travel provided further resources of experience in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Spain and Africa and, perhaps strangest to imagine of him, he was employed for a few years in public relations for a pharmaceutical corporation.

The number of printed interviews with Gaddis can be counted on one hand: he wondered why anyone should expect an author to be at all interesting, after having very likely projected the best of themselves in their work. He has been frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and especially Pynchon.

Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955) is a 956-page saga of forgery, pretension, and desires misguided and inexpressible. Critical response to the book ranged from cool to hostile, but in most cases (as Jack Green took pains to show in his book of rebuke, Fire the Bastards!). Reviewers were ill-prepared to deal with the challenge, and evidently many who began to read The Recognitions did not finish. The novel’s sometimes great leaps in time and location and the breadth and arcane pedigree of allusions are, it turns out, fairly mild complications for the reader when compared with what would become the writer’s trademark: the unrestrained confusion of detached and fragmentary dialogue.

Gaddis’s second book, JR (1975) won the National Book Award. It was only a 726 pages long driven by dialogue. The chaos of the unceasing deluge of talk of JR drove critics to declare the text “unreadable”. Reading Gaddis is by no means easy, but it is a more lacerating and artfully sustained attack on capitalism than JR, and The Recognitions.

Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. The continual litigation that was a theme in that book becomes the central theme and plot device in A Frolic of His Own (1994)—which earned him his second National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. There are even two Japanese cars called the Isuyu and the Sosumi.

His final work was the novella Agapē Agape which was published in 2002. Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York, of prostate cancer on December 16th, 1998.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My year of Gaddis is over, and i have now had the pleasure and the privilege to read everything he wrote. There was a deep sadness in reaching the final letter, knowing that was the last of his voice I would hear for the first time. But joy too, to have discovered a writer whose works I know I will revisit many times before I die.

For all of you who are yet to read him, put off perhaps by myths of his difficulty or by the shear size of the texts, do not be. He is warm and funny and full of life, each sentence is a pleasure. Read him, he deserves it.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Face facts, folks. I'm not likely to get a review done of this. Seriously, this is a goes-without-saying kind of book for readers of Gaddis's novels, and you ALL are that kind of readers so you'll find yourselves one day reading through this rather quite engaging collection of Letters which reads much like a Gaddis-scribed epistolary novel.


So, here's "‘The Letters of William Gaddis,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda," 01 May 2013, Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...


Some thoughts to follow eventually. {Still, eventually} [eventually yet. but you might think of this volume as Gaddis's sixth novel]


Meanwhile-some-more, Joseph Tabbi is working on a biography of Gaddis. Here's a little piece from him, "Nobody Grew but the Business": http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/post/...

__________________
Meanwhile, from the Gaddis Archive:
"Mysterious Skin: The Realia of William Gaddis"
April 22, 2013, by Matthew Erickson, The Paris Review
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...
Something about a zebra skin.


________________
How Gaddis got himself -- his J R -- inscribed in US Law:
from The Millions
"A Frolic of My Own: Meeting William Gaddis"
by James Cappio
18 March 2013
http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/a-...

But I had already decided that a case called Carl Marks v. USSR was too good to pass up. The clincher was my coming across the Russian Imperial Bonds passage in J R, which I was reading on my commute to the Judge’s White Plains courthouse. I worked surreptitiously, finally presenting the Judge with a 68-page fait accompli that used the Bast quote as a headnote. After he signed off on the opinion, I sent it to Mr. Gaddis. Why go to all that effort and not tell him? I never expected his response: the first letter reproduced in the book (January 10, 1988), inviting me to lunch and telling me of his “novel in the form of a network of lawsuits of every variety” — the book that would become A Frolic of His Own.

________________
New York Observer review of the Gaddis letters.
http://observer.com/2013/02/it-aint-e...

As hinted, this collection does have something of the biographical novel-in-letters to it. But, I will point out the way NOT to talk about Gaddis--DO NOT use the name Franzen except in the manner taught us by MJ, which is the sense of "Franzen was wrong." Disgusting that that name will for some time to come be attached to the name Gaddis.

From the review: "Broken into sections named for the novel Gaddis was working on during the given time period, and generously footnoted, the book is a treasure trove for Gaddis wonks and superfans. What it is or should be for the rest of us, however, is less clear." -- Let me again be clear: This book IS NOT for the rest of you. Read the novels if you are not a wonk or superfan. But that goes without saying in the case of any novelist and their letters or their bio or their journals. Not EVERYthing need be marketable to non-wonks.


A note from The New York Observer regarding the Gaddis memorial from 1999:
http://observer.com/1999/05/recognizi...

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gaddis troubles me. He also beguiles. He's a hyperobject in a certain sense and an arch-satirist in another. These letters offer a velvet brutality and I was especially touched by the symmetry between the letters to his mother (usually asking for money) and those to his daughter where he craved for her attention. I appreciate the details, the repeated quotes from The Four Quartets: Annotated and how significant Oblomov was for him.

Gaddis lived a rather incredible life although the debris of such is only alluded to with artful jump-cuts. His brushing shoulders with the publishing/literary establishment and then against it rather human. As noted I was struck by the missive sent to Oppenheimer. I didn't expect it. His friendships with Mary McCarthy and Don DeLillo only illustrate his capacity.

I am so glad I read this.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

В битой вселенной Керуака Гэддис — фоновый персонаж, статист из массовки, но по его письмам 40-х годов матери можно узнать (и понять, главное) о битниках больше, чем из романов Керуака. Я постараюсь избежать спойлеров, но это поколение выдергивало себя с корнями из тогдашнего американского «образа жизни» (война, конечно, помогала — сначала одна, потом другая), и по этим текстам хорошо видно, в каком состоянии ума пребывала 20-30-летняя молодежь. И что из этого получилось. Потому что битники — это не секта, как нам иногда видится, это сдвиг парадигмы, поворот сознания. Гэддиса же никто битником, насколько мне известно, никогда не считал (а было бы интересно взглянуть на него так — ну потому еще, и что корни Томаса Пинчона — там же; они, кстати, с Гэддисом никогда не встречались, вопреки распространенной легенде о совместной выпивке где-то в Лонг-Айленде), но его одиссея — скитания по Америкам, заработки, лечение загадочной «тропической болезни», переписка с мамой, бесконечные посылки с вещами, заметками и книгами и одержимая работа, стремление выплескиваться на бумагу (другой среды тогда просто не изобрели) — совершенный бит. Только Гэддис остался впоследствии гораздо более упорядоченным в доминирующем модусе высказывания (просодия у него не «боповая», иная, хоть и тоже музыкальная, а хаос и энтропию он запечатлевал на бумаге едва ли не убедительнее Керуака). Романы же его — такая же изнанка и развитие бита, как у Пинчона, хотя с Керуаком у Гэддиса гораздо больше общего, чем с Пинчоном, несмотря на похожесть с последним по дисциплине и наполненности высказывания, традиционно принимаемым за «трудность»).

Но это — начало. Потом — жизнь вполне оседлого писателя (амплитуда его странствий была не так привольна, как у Керуака, но в СССР в середине 80-х он побывал, надо бы найти свидетельства), стремившегося к собственному литературному идеалу (и обретшему его в итоге) - Илье Ильичу Обломову, с финансовыми трудностями, техническими и корпоративными заказами, некоторой работой на ЮСИА (я не знал), непониманием безмозглой критикой, неприятием тупой публикой, паразитизмом и саботажем издателей. Все как у нас. Оторваться от этого эпистолярного нарратива, составленного ведущим гэддисоведом Стивеном Муром, невозможно, я пробовал. Дети, жены и друзья прилагаются. Алкоголизм тактично остается за кадром. Очень рекомендую: картина всей американской литературы после этих писем обретает еще большую связность и глубину.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to say a couple of things before getting serious here. First, although it might not be entirely accurate, I still say Gaddis when someone asks me who my favorite author is; and I still say The Recognitions when they ask about my favorite novel. Of course I need to re-read his stuff in order to check if this is true.

Second, if you're editing someone's letters, I would caution you not to say in your introduction, things like "it can be assumed all irregularities are in the originals", bold-facing "all... originals," and to clarify why you're bold facing these words "to catch the eye of readers and reviewers and preempt complaints that this book was poorly proofread." If you absolutely *insist* on such a hubristic statement, I would recommend that you proofread your book again because, duh, this book is filled with typos, both within the letters (even if Gaddis thanks Erika Goldman for "sening" him a book, it's hardly unreasonable to correct it to 'sending,' nor is it outrageous of the reader to expect 'hot' to be corrected to 'not' when necessary etc...) and in the notes to them(Mary McCarthy is many things, but a "crirtic" is not one of them; I haven't read Elkin's 'The Magic Kingdom', but I'm certain it does not feature an "eight-year old geriatric"; and most memorably of all, Mary mother of God is not a "goddess," and naming her such suggests either than Stephen Moore is i) an idiot or ii) an adolescent who can't really give up on religion, and so feels the need to guy Christianity by making it sound more ridiculous than its best thinkers admit that it already sounds--credo quia absurdam. Moore is surely neither of these, and the silliness of letting that claim slip by does him, and Gaddis, a disservice.)

Now, to important matters. In The Recognitions, Gaddis has his character ask what people want from the man that they can't get from the work; and his letters are certainly nowhere near as interesting as his novels. At worst they are replacement level writers' letters, all complaints about money, publishers, business etc., with little of Gaddis-the-novelist's brilliance.

But they do, at best, tell you something about the composition of the books--what Gaddis was reading, what he was trying to do at various points. He describes The Recognitions as an attempt to write a new myth, which I find interesting for literary-historical reasons (compare McCarthy's 'The Road'), and also notes his own desire to truly *believe* in a myth of some kind.

The most interesting thing about this book, though, is the way the letters let us see Gaddis's intellectual development: as a callow youth, he's viscerally disgusted by a socialist professor; as time passes he becomes highly critical of the U.S. and 'free enterprise,' without feeling that the latter is inherently flawed, but does start to mock anti-communism; ultimately he concludes that, on the evidence of his own work, perhaps capitalism just is inherently flawed.

More distressingly, for me at least, is a different 'development.' At 38, Gaddis wrote that, although forgery is inescapable in a finite world, "what is vital is the faith that the absolute... *does* exist," or that the attempt to grasp God/perfection is "all we have to justify this finite condition." At 51, he has become disgusted by Catholicism, but also feels that JR is "a secular version" of The Recognitions. At 59 (1981) he is writing letters about how his work is *not* purely negative, and the struggling artist is himself a kind of triumph. At 70 (1992) he responds to Gregory Comnes, a postmodern theorist, that although he sees himself "cited in a postmodern context" he "cower[s] in the notion of a traditional novelist"--but is starting to be apologetic about the fact. In an extraordinary letter to the Iowa Review (1993), he rejects the idea of himself as an experimental novelist, due to the mass of rubbish being produced under that moniker; insists that he has always "believed... that I knew exactly what I [was] doing."

But after all of this, a lifetime of fighting the good fight against philistinism and fashionable nonsense, the postmodernists finally got to him: in 1994 he writes to Comnes about how much he loves aporia/ indeterminacy/chaos etc..., and in a letter to Updike, of all people, he approves Comnes' claim that his (Gaddis's) work is a vision of "an essentially indeterminate landscape, a postmodern world with no absolutes."

I'll take Gaddis's early interpretation of his work--as a striving after some absolute, even if that absolute is out of reach--over his later interpretation, in which it's just pomo theory in novel form. If it turns out that it is just the latter, he'll cease to be my favorite novelist.

I think I'm safe.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a long-time fan of William Gaddis (1922-1998), I was eager to read these letters, and they don't disappoint.

Gaddis wrote two influential and important comic novels (I mean, hilarious), _The Recognitions_ (1955) and _J R_ (1975), that are also much more than comic. They are humane, inventive, they embrace high, low and middle sorts of humour, they are dynamos of energy, and they put in the shade many other novels, then and now. Gaddis also wrote the novels _Carpenter's Gothic_ (1985) and _a Frolic of His Own_ (1995), the novella _Agapē Agape_ (2002), and a collection of short pieces, _The Rush for Second Place_ (2002).

In the letters we can follow the route leading up to each book, as well as see the artistic, business and personal struggles Gaddis went through.

The letters are well edited with succinct notes by the well-read Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, with an Afterword by Gaddis' daughter Sarah. Indispensable for anyone who likes Gaddis or is just coming to him.

For a longer review of the book, go to:

http://www.winnipegreview.com/wp/2013...

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 5 out of 5]

прекрасне зібрання і чудовий коментар до його прози, хоч він і був інтровертом, але розкривався в листах до матері + безцінні пояснення деяких ідей з його романів і загалом - портрет звичайного генія.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began 2025 by finishing my re-read of Gaddis’s (first) masterpiece The Recognitions and dubbed this THE YEAR OF THE BRICK, making an effort to get through as many of the 600+ page doorstoppers that had been haunting my shelves as possible. I (mostly) made good on this resolution but quickly realized that it had been a mistake to start with Gaddis: I had finally moved past being intimidated by his work and was wholly absorbed with it, wanted to read nothing else, even found myself buying books of Gaddis criticism which is something I’ve never felt compelled to do for any other author. I still ended up banging plenty of BRICKS this year (yeugh!), but my main priority eventually became reading everything Billy G had written before the year was up.

Now as we reach December I’ve crossed the finish line (minus a slim collection of essays/assorted writings which I plan to save for a rainy day) and then some. I’ve never been much interested in reading writers’ correspondence but I had too many questions about Gaddis’s biography/research/literary friends to resist this extensive (650 page, thoroughly indexed) volume.

Steven Moore’s contributions here are just astounding. Assembling this amount of correspondence and deciding which letters make the cut are daunting tasks on their own, but truly invaluable are his biographical notes introducing most letters and his footnotes cataloguing every allusion made in the text. His work elevates the collection from curiosity to biography, providing the necessary context to understand the wealth of information presented.

I haven’t read any other biographies on Gaddis, but I can’t imagine anything feeling more intimate than this. We see him go from an ambitious (and highly pretentious) young man to a “failed” author (actually it was his public that failed him) struggling for 20 years to write another novel; watch his marriages fall apart; see the love and admiration he had for his children throughout his life; watch him make and lose friends, develop interests and stack influences; rejoice at the few financial windfalls his work brought him and rally at publishers for not devoting enough resources to promoting his books; repeat himself and use the same jokes time and again, grow old and scared and sick, watch him watching his writing take on a life of its own - books of criticism published about his work, fans prying for answers to questions he never meant to pose, his life become public record in the hands of people who never totally get the details right; feel his triumphs and disappointments and in the end die, die leaving an incredible body of work that ultimately feels unfinished despite its brilliance. And all of this viewed as a mirror image, everything gleaned from these letters to others, the self he chose to present to those to which he wrote.

As essential to me as most of his fiction; more essential than some of it.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Gaddis, acclaimed author of The Recognitions and J. R. often wrote letters in the same obscure, circuitous, challenging prose style of his novels, especially so in his later years. They're marked by a curtness and by run-on sentences which side-step grammar and punctuation. With the exception of the loving letters to his daughter, Sarah, they're not at all conversational and to me displayed little warmth. This includes letters to those he considered friends or those in the publishing business to whom he needed to be polite. This doesn't mean he didn't intend warmth or politeness, only that the letters carry the same choppy style of the novels and read as if they're offhand.

They begin slowly. For many pages the only correspondent of the young Gaddis was his mother as he traveled Central America, Spain, France, and North Africa. But those letters are filled with the eager thinking of an intelligent young man traveling for experience and using what he learned in the novel he was already writing, The Recognitions, one day to be considered among the most influential of the 20th century. However, other than some frustrations displayed in the few letters written to his wives and the obvious love shown in those to his daughter, and an "Afterword" by her, there's little here to give a sense of what the man was really like.

Rightly, I think, Gaddis refused to offer explanation or meaning of his novels to critics or academics who requested it. He thought readers and writers interested in his work should interpret for themselves and that each interpretation would have some validity. Bur he does occasionally write a revealing comment about a novel which you want to remember. And the abundant footnotes accompanying each letter contain many insights about the novels. For me these are the nuggets of the collection.

[Chr*s Browning]

I've struck out on 2/5 Gaddis novels (The Recognitions remains on my shelf for some coming day), so of course I must be the most qualified person to read his collected letters (a compiling tactic on which I'm not always sold). That said, Moore does a good job of editing the volume (albeit including perhaps too much of Gaddis's correspondence with himself, a conversation that always seems laced with a slight bit of frost regarding Moore's apparent desire to be the pre-eminent Gaddis scholar, enough so that one wonders if the man would be pleased with this publication) into a coherent narrative arc - the repeated instances of a writer's life are rendered well, whether that be in the adolescent and young adult begging of money from his mother (no beating the mama's boy allegations introduced late in the text), decrying Joyce comparisons, or refusing (in some forty cases, it seems) blurbing of other author's works (which he does have a point about). More than anything though, these letters reveal the life of an acclaimed-but-undersold author in relation to money - doctoral disserations about oneself really don't pay the bills! That alone is compelling but the way in which a man's person comes through in his correspondence is oft intriguing and makes for the most enjoyment I've had out of a Gaddis "work" to date.

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Gaddis but this book is just absurd, there is zero reason to include 300,000 words of Gaddis's letters when most of them (particularly near the beginning) do not include anything of interest to his life or thought. The first 300 pages include probably 80 pages of Gaddis asking his mother for money via Western Union.

Moore claims in the introduction that he has included only about 20% of Gaddis's letters in this volume, but maybe he should have aimed for like 8%. It is certainly interesting to see Gaddis's opinions on Faulkner, Eliot, Joyce, Europe, Greenwich Village, etc., but there is no reason that this book needs to be so long.

[Aiden Heavilin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the letters here felt quite unimportant and trivial. However, Gaddis's warm, unpretentious personality bled through the pages, and it raised my estimation of THE RECOGNITIONS. I was afraid, while reading that 956 page monster, that Gaddis was a rather bitter unlikeable fellow, but these letters showed that the bitter, world-weary tone of THE RECOGNITIONS was entirely controlled, the man himself was witty, interesting, and humorous.

It was interesting to read his correspondence with Don DeLillo and Steven Moore. There's great stuff in here, but I think a great deal of it could have been cut.

[Leftjab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not quite sure you should give a rating to a book like this. I guess you’re reviewing the editing? Which would be 5 stars – to create a narrative out of someone’s letters. Gaddis lived all over New York – I think he managed to cross off Westchester, Nassau, Rockland, and Suffolk counties in a addition to some time spent in the city.

I’d be lying if I said I read the whole thing cover to cover – I was most interested in the sections on JR and Carpenter’s Gothic – mainly about what was going on during those lengthy periods in his life. The early sections with letters to his mother from Europe drag a bit. Then later letters to his children really show him letting his guard down in terms of his concerns and views on writing. In a way, even in the letters Gaddis holds his cards close to his chest – there is definitely a lesson about integrity and writing what the writer feels needs to be written as opposed to what sells. Gaddis repeatedly remarks about how little money he makes from his writing (especially the post-Recognitions years as he toys with JR and other projects) and the number of times he has to say that he’s not a big Joyce fan is kinda nuts. I guess the whole thing is if your book is long, then it owes something to Joyce. I could be making this up, but there’s something about Gaddis trying to evade style with his writing, but of course then it becomes a massive exercise in the style of no style, so its even more stylistic than if he tried to attempt some other sort of style or affectation.

As with Nabokov’s Pale Fire, there’s no “aha!” moment from reading Gaddis’s letters – the biggest aha moment I had was when Gaddis clearly states that the death at the end of Carpenter’s Gothic is not a murder. I re-read those last few chapters multiple times to try to make sense of what was happening and I felt the protagonist was murdered – either as a break-in or as some sort of convoluted assassination attempt by her husband staged as a break in. As the death occurs off-camera, I guess the conclusions drawn by the reader are the reader’s own. And similarly, trying to find the writer from his novels or his letters even paints a picture, but an incomplete one. Now that Gaddis has passed away, we only have his novels and letters (and there’s the whole voyeuristic aspect of reading an author’s personal letters that he did not intend to have published in his lifetime) and it would seem that the closest one would ever come to a Gaddis autobiography would be these letters, which reminded me of his fiction in their exterior chronicling of Gaddis’s voice.

[Daryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a Gaddis junkie but didn't anticipate hoovering this one up as I did. I had thought I might pick at it over a long period, maybe on the toilet or in dribs and drabs at bedtime. But I read every word of it over the course of about a week and enjoyed it a great deal. Plenty of it is routine, perhaps even outright boring, as a young Gaddis writes his mother dozens of letters to briefly report his location and ask for books or money, but there's plenty besides that, and even seeing the progression as Gaddis grows and struggles and publishes and struggles some more is fascinating.

Writers of great books have always seemed in a way untouchable to me, erudite, talented beyond the grasp of mere mortals, maybe even almost vatic. As a sometime-scribbler, I've read work by the likes of Gaddis and felt simultaneous despair ("I could never do what he's done") and inspiration ("I should try!"), but in the end I've always come around to feeling like it must be somehow easier for such among the elect as Gaddis than it has felt for me. Reading his frustrations and false starts shows me that he is human and that putting out work like his is a task of staggering difficulty (which I knew, of course, but that, in fits of laziness, it's easy to forget). Reading the letters makes me feel, well, yes, still as if Gaddis is light years beyond me in intelligence and talent and work ethic, and, no, I could not do what he did in writing his great books... but maybe it's not as far out of my reach as it's easy to roll over and feel. So then there is a kind of hope in these pages for the sometime-scribbler.

I especially enjoyed letters from the time during which he was writing J R (my favorite of his books by a mile), and a few letters to his children are tender and lovely.

Probably this would be a snooze for anybody not already pretty well wrapped up in Gaddis.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real treat to savor decades of letters from one of my favorite writers. The earliest ones Gaddis sent his mother are often exasperating, though - not that the prose is baroque or scenarios maddening like most of J R and A Frolic of His Own - because he's always asking for money and can't stay put in one place. He was all over the United States as a young man, then abroad for years in Central America, Western Europe, and North Africa, and when at some point it becomes clear that The Recognitions is really beginning to take shape, it's amazing. Letters from his last years are also among my favorite, because he had befriended a few lawyers who turned him onto the labyrinthine yet lucid style of civil law writing, which Gaddis blended with the delirious monologue style of the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard to produce his funniest novel, A Frolic of His Own. Of personal interest, I loved that he and William H. Gass became best buds, that he and Katherine Anne Porter corresponded in the 1940s, and that he considered (but ultimately turned down) moving to Baton Rouge to direct the writing program at LSU. That said, lots of these letters are difficult to read, because they're about his two marriages that ended in divorce, the dissolution of a long third partnership, commercial failure, money woes, and rapidly declining physical health. There are also those about the business and political sides of the writing profession - publishers, scholars, critics, and reviewers - that can be tedious and frustrating. I'm not sure this is a must-read for Gaddis devotees, to be honest; the correspondence isn't as luminous as the creative work, of course. If you do find yourself with this tome ("another damned thick square book") in hand, however, you'll likely read it all, and wish there was more.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually currently dipping and diving throughout, but this is a first-rate treatment and editing job of WG's letters by WG expert Steve Moore (see his guide to The Recognitions--truly indispensable).

I'm reading this mainly to see how WG handled the dark time he went through after his brilliant novel The Recognitions was savaged by the ignorati of his day, a bunch of Christ-killers who didn't even read the book before reviewing it (see Jack Green's Fire the Bastards!).

The result? WG had a hell of a time getting R released in paperback, or in the UK, or translated into French. It should've been a bestseller and immediately lauded as the masterpiece that it is.

WG was thus forced into 9 to 5 corporate-writing servitude (which I ID with big-time) to feed his family, and had to take the next twenty years (!) to produce his second novel, JR, another masterpiece, but not up to the great heights of the R.

Just imagine: literary apocrypha has it that at the R's publication WG quietly thought--and I think truly without hubris--that he wouldn't have been surprised if he'd been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature because he knew his book was that damn good. And then it was mercilessly skewered by ignorant literary insider fops who didn't understand it or bother to read it, forcing his exile to corporate writing instead of justly reaping the rewards of his work with enough compensation to write freely.

His much later recognition hardly makes up for the injustice. But perhaps see the opening of WG's A Frolic of His Own for the answer to this injustice:

"'Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.'"

Too true.

[Jack Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very emotional finishing this.

One of his first letters, and one of his last:

12/9/1930:

“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”

11/9/1994:

[Stanley Elkin’s 1985 novel The Magic Kingdom features a character named Charles Mudd-Gaddis, an eight-year-old geriatric who "dreams of his first birthday. He dreams the cake and dreams the candles, dreams the balloons and dreams the streamers; he dreams the toys, he dreams the clapping. And dreams he's three, the little boy, who would have been a man by now —twenty, twenty-one. Then dreams the girl, six, to him a woman. And now he's five and pushing forty. Ah, to be thirty-four again! he dreams. And dreams he's seven and confusion comes, that white aphasia of the heart and head. And dreams in awful clarity it's now, and can't recall how old he really is" (Dutton, 1985, 80).]

“Dear Stanley,
I had been vaguely troubled by Mudd-Gaddis since first stumbling upon him & seeing you again in such fine fettle thought to get back & give him a closer look. And was stunned. How do you do it? How . . . did you know! Staggers. Though perhaps 10 years ago it mightn't have fit so well, but prescient my God it's I, it's me today that brief touching elegant agonizing profile believe me real age 72 is daily more infringed by that blond pageboy off to boarding school age 5 & the confusion does come, "that white aphasia of the heart and head" sheer poetry . . .”

[Hal Hartley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Certainly for anyone who is a writer, who aims to write professionally—this is very useful. But also engaging and moving for anyone who simply likes reading. The care Gaddis took in writing even a simple postcard to a friend is impressive. The juxtaposition of formal letters to publishers, agents and educators, up against those to his mother, children, and his ex-wife expand upon the concerns of his five brilliant novels. Steven Moore presents this selection of correspondence in a clear chronological narrative that amounts to a kind of autobiography (presented by somebody else!).

[M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good to get a glimpse into the author's life, with a few interesting bits. It's incredible to think of the span of years he lived and in which he wrote letters, and it made me think of the fact that soon we won't have these resources when studying the next generation of writers, as well as of the fact that it provided so much practice for them to write and tell events of thier lives.

[Todd Krohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s about as close to seeing “the man behind the curtain” as you’re likely to get. I would have appreciated a bit more organization by topics (novels, parenting, social issues, etc) rather than just a chronological presentation. But it had its effect… it was a book I didn’t want to finish because you know how it ends. Gaddis remains a towering figure in literature.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew William very well (considering my age.) My father and he went to school in Farmingdale Long Island and hence was able to document many of my Fathers and Williams stories. He showed up many times at my house after his long drinking binges. Twice he showed up with Alice Denham and once with my Grandfathers good friend Ethel Merman. These events demonstrated a spoiled rich kid at times and also a person suffering from their time. Carpenters Gothic gave me pause and Williams relationship with Kurt Vonnegut even more. While seemingly elusive and soft spoken he could easily be brought to temper of fight and or the ability to knew when he would lost and apply retribution at a later date. As I grew I became disgusted and in reading this fictional image of Gaddis from simple letters I have to say while the book was intriguing it left me wondering even more how involved Gaddis was in his own flop, his family connections and friends flop and his own alcoholic demise which amazed when coupled with his intelligence. I knew his best of friends and that has left me all the more amazed. His avoidance of the war yet his involvement in it was another unexplainable event that did not match his health issues. Further his health issues seems more that ever to have been manufactured by some who knew the looming war was at hand. In all the letters are well worth reading with a realization that a true picture would be lacking. A further note about his writings is paragraphs or lines removed even after publishing that show more insights to him than his letters. Good luck finding those missing items...Maybe it was part of his game. He also was friends with William Burroughs while in his High School years, and those stories cannot be forgott0n as well as what Burroughs wrote about his high school friends... who often came to visit Burroughs. I know they remained close after the War.

[Jordan Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I often find my geek boy love for the big black humor novels a little embarrassing, I started these in lieu of a real biography after finally finishing JR. Of all the novelists that we lump together, you know the ones groaning under the weight of their importance and sardonic humor, i keep finding Gaddis as secretly the funnest and most relevant of them all. These letters have plenty of the money worries, zen frustration with reviewers, and the musings of young Gaddis as he is trying to shape the Recognitions. The letters have more than their share of fantastic distillations of Gaddis' ideas, and they are lovingly and masterfully framed by the editor. It was an especial joy to see how long things like his idea on the player piano have been floating around, not to mention delightful motifs like his constant rearticulation of a response to the Joycean parallels in letters and reviews.... Something along the lines of "i swear i think I only read the Molly chapter because it was supposed to be dirty and i like Dubliners but can't remember which ones I read. A delightful set of letters to take a frolic through...

[jeremiah]

Desiccating to see the man behind "the work itself." Do the letters contravene Gaddis' old saw that one is to read the works themselves and look to the author to go following his work explaining what he meant? I don't think so. Meaning doesn't really have a part in the letters. Doctoral students would ask him about certain parts and the sources for his books, and Gaddis explains them (much less so with the sources; he was too lazy go back and check, seeing the students as not worth the time). But the explanations, seldom given by Gaddis, don't give away the books.

These letters serve as Gaddis' autobiography and scholar Steven Moore's biography of Gaddis, since it's all here: Harvard days, traveling, genesis of the Recognitions, Fire Island, JR, the kids, divorce, money trouble, money replenishing awards, Joyce mix-ups, etc. What boggles my mind is the gap between Gaddis as the "mother's boy" traveling and asking for money, seeming without a thought in his head, and the 32 year old who had just completed the Recognitions.

[Graeme · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only intended this to be background reading whilst I read other stuff, but this ended up taking over most of my reading time in the same way that JR and The Recognitions have both done in the past 6 months.

Reservations (clearly wanting to find out about things that I failed to get from his work) about reading a volume of letters written by Gaddis were first overcome by being curious, then by being entertained, then by written instruction from Gaddis himself - in one of his later letters to Candida Donadio he suggests that people should have the opportunity to read their correspondence on publishing/critics and what not on the grounds of education and entertainment. He was correct and Steven Moore's done a grand job compiling, citing, and summarising pertinent responses to, his letters.

Well done to all involved.

[Roberto Pinchas · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much as Gaddis himself hated this sort of thing, and as voyeuristic as the act of reading a lifetime's worth of someone's private letters is, this book is essential for anyone who wants to get acquainted with the man behind the books. Though he was loath to admit it, William Gaddis was far more than the "dregs" of his work or the "human shambles" following it around as Wyatt put it in The Recognitions. He was, and still is, not just an author but a man worth remembering.

[D. W. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good stuff.

[Stosch · Rating 1 out of 5]

garbage