former friends and contacts while they were still accessible—he snapped “no one’s [letters] are written for publication (unless they are in which case they’re probably full of lies).”
Privately, however, he maintained his archives over the years and near the end of his life carefully prepared them for eventual sale to a university library, telling his children that he relished the idea of scholars poring over his papers and making all sorts of discoveries. At any rate, his letters are neither full of lies nor the mere detritus of his life; they do indeed offer glimpses of the “real” Gaddis, and rather than providing the means “to flay the writer & point up frailties in his work,” they foster a deeper appreciation of the writer and his work.
It’s ironic that Gaddis complained—in a 1948 letter to his mother after reading about dramatist Eugene’s O’Neill’s early vagabond days—that he was “furious that one can no longer live as he did—just wandering about, one job, one ship to another,” for Gaddis led what sounds today like an almost mythic young writer’s life. Born near the beginning of the Roaring Twenties (29 December 1922), he went off to boarding school at age five, learning to negotiate the trains between Manhattan and Berlin, Connecticut, and writing numerous poems while still a child. In high school he contracted a rare tropical disease that baffled his doctors and kept him home from school for a year and a half. During the summer before his senior year, he sailed to the Caribbean and visited Haiti and Venezuela, and in 1941 was accepted by the only college he applied to, but had to leave Harvard after a few months because of complications resulting from his earlier treatment. He sailed through the Panama Canal (the week the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) to California and stayed at a ranch in Arizona for a few months, wrangling horses and hitchhiking through the southwest before driving an old woman and her mentally unstable son to St. Louis, where he spent a month and a half living on a government ship on the Mississippi River “building a pipeline for a dredge in big hip boots,” then went back west to celebrate Cheyenne’s Frontier Days with enough gusto to get thrown in jail, then headed down to Colorado to work at a mine near Leadville before returning to Harvard in the fall of ’42, a few months before his twentieth birthday.
There he became president of the Harvard Lampoon, but after a minor public disturbance (drunk and disorderly) that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow today, he was asked to leave Harvard in January 1945. He quickly snagged a job as a fact-checker at the New Yorker and lived in Greenwich Village (at the same address where Wyatt Gwyon forges his paintings), writing stories and raising hell until the spring of 1947, when he and a friend drove down to Mexico in a Cord convertible, an adventure recounted in a long letter (9 March 1947) that reads like a comic outtake from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. A few months later he returned to New York for “grand and often wild times” amid “the drug ambience” of Greenwich Village (as he recalled in one of the last letters he wrote), falling in love with an enigmatic junkie/artist/Vogue model named Sheri Martinelli, until he hopped a plane for Panama City, where he worked on the canal locks for a few months and then left for next-door Costa Rica and participated in its brief 1948 revolution before returning to New York on a Honduran banana boat. He wasn’t there five months before he shipped out to Spain, where he lived on and off for the next two and a half years: staying a week in a monastery, trying out Paris for a year (avoiding the other expats on the Left Bank, whom he found pretentious), engaging himself to a fellow American named Margaret Williams, vacationing in Italy, spending a Christmas in England, visiting Robert Graves on the island of Majorca, and working on a film in North Africa before returning to the States in 1951 at the age of twenty-eight.
All that time, from Mexico in 1947 onward, Gaddis worked on what would become The Recognitions, and continued working on it until he finished it in 1954. Its publication the following year marks a low point in American book reviewing, for it was almost universally panned, sending Gaddis to look for freelance work and soon begin a five-year stint as a writer for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals to support himself and his new family. (He had married Pat Black in 1955, and they had two children: Sarah in September 1955, Matthew in January 1958.) He returned to freelance work in 1962—and would continue to take on projects until the late ’70s—and continued to travel widely in later years: to Germany in 1964 to work with the U.S. Army on a film about the Battle of the Bulge, through the Far East (Thailand, the Philippines, Japan) in 1976 on a speaking tour for the U.S. Information Agency, vacations in Haiti (1979) and Greece (1980), Italy in 1984, Russia in 1985 with a delegation of American writers (including his friend William H. Gass, who published an account of the trip), Australia, New Zealand, England, and Bulgaria for book promotions and conferences in 1986, and back a few times in the late 1980s and 1990s to Germany, where he was greeted with movie-star adulation unthinkable in his homeland. He even appeared in a blaxploitation vampire film with his second wife, Judith Thompson (Ganja and Hess, 1973).
The chief value of these letters is not their documentation of a colorful life but their revelation of how chaotic the composition of Gaddis’s novels were. The published works have such an aura of Olympian confidence and authority that it is startling to learn how hard Gaddis struggled to produce these novels. His vision for each of them was often clouded by self-doubts and periods of exasperated indecision, not to mention the distractions of financial hardship and the more enjoyable commitments to his family and friends. During the writing of The Recognitions, as these letters reveal, Gaddis moodswings between such excitement for his novel that he can barely get the words down (see the spring 1948 letter to Charles Socarides) and such disgust that he sounds like his worst reviewer. The composition of J R stretched over twenty years, interrupted by countless claims on his attention until he reached the point when he told his son Matthew that the most satisfying thing about finishing it was that he would “NEVER HAVE TO READ THE INFERNAL BOOK AGAIN!” After it came out in 1975, Gaddis never wanted to write another novel; and when he realized he had to for financial reasons, it took him four years to come up with the idea for Carpenter’s Gothic, and even then he had to struggle to find some aspect of it to challenge him. In several letters to legal advisors in the late 1980s while writing A Frolic of His Own, Gaddis confesses he’s over his head in legal complications and doesn’t know how to get out of the mess he’s created. After its triumphant appearance in 1994, winning Gaddis a second National Book Award (after J R), he cast about for something new to write about, and in 1996 decided to resurrect a book he had begun fifty years earlier, Agapē Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano, and struggled with that for a year or so (just as Jack Gibbs struggled with the same work decades earlier in J R) before deciding to convert it to a novel, finishing it just before he died on 16 December 1998, two weeks before what would have been his seventy-sixth birthday.
It’s interesting to see that most of Gaddis’s characteristic elements of style were in place at an early age: a rather formal tone—it’s difficult to believe a nineteen-year-old wrote the letter of 26 January 1942—a preference for British spellings, a fondness for literary allusions (especially to Eliot: he seems to have memorized Four Quartets), and the use of the European dash to indicate dialogue—not an avant-garde affectation, as some reviewers charged, but simply what Gaddis grew used to seeing in Spanish and French books while in Central America and Europe. In later letters there are long, tortuous, punctuation-free sentences that rival those in his novels, punched up with active verbs, colorful imagery, sardonic wit, and (toward the end) some touching whimsy and nostalgia. Though not written for publication, these letters offer many of the same linguistic delights as his published works.
His literary tastes and aesthetics were also in place from an early age: his lifelong love for the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, for T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh, for parody and burlesque (nurtured by the Lampoon), and his conviction that, once written, a work must stand on its own. In a 1949 letter to his mother Edith—who is the heroine of the first half of this book: his confidante, research assistant, financial benefactor, his everything—Gaddis says of one of his short stories: “Yes, it is supposed to end as you quote it—heaven knows if it should or not—but I can’t tell now, it is none of my concern now the thing is written I am through with it.” He would reiterate that point to every critic who approached him in later years.
