Status Updates From The Letters of William Gaddis

Decent chance I’ll finish this today.

I certainly feel for the man.

The letter Gaddis wrote to Oppenheimer moved me unexpectedly. Damn

Easily amongst the best collections of letters I’ve had the fortune to encounter. Gaddis in Paris should have provided a shelf of secondary literature by now.

Certainly enjoying these. Washed out of Harvard he’s in the East Village perhaps pondering authenticity and evangelical forgery.

Nearing the end of this one - the prospect of finishing it and running low on “new” Gaddis material to discover is very sad.

Reading correspondence between Gaddis and movie producers - at first the idea of a JR film seems insane, but the more I think about it, some of Gaddis’s stuff might actually work on screen. The Recognitions in particular could make sense as a 4-5 part miniseries if handled by someone with the proper talent and respect for the material. Well, a girl can dream.

Interested to see how Carpenter’s Gothic came about since I’m not a big fan of that book and I think context might help me appreciate it a bit more.

As expected, these letters become infinitely more interesting after The Recognitions is published and Gaddis’s disillusionment grows. Steven Moore’s footnotes throughout are truly invaluable; the context he provides completes this as essentially an autobiography.

Gaddis’s mother was a saint, replying to some of these.

Mostly letters to his mother up to this point, regaling her with his various South American and Western excursions. Interesting stuff.