I remember the name of Bernie’s clock is Thrill. And I should appreciate your sending me one very much. Yes the place is Tourneau—Madison at about 49th. (Lord how I miss New York!—You see what I am occupied with now is this whole business of the myth—tradition—where one belongs. And while disciplining myself to behave according as my intellect teaches me—that we are alone, and all of these vanities and seekings (the church, a wife, father &c.) are seekings for some myth by the use of which we can escape the truth of aloneness. Poor Bernie, he won’t accept it, nor Jake that more successfully. But that is the whole idea (message) of my novel. I’d rather talk with you about it, the letter is so unsatisfactory but I have to write it down. I am afraid my letters are getting worse, also handwriting.
Again many thanks for the check. And so happy to know you are having the pleasant (pleasant hell it sounds hilarious) winter you deserve.
Love,
Bill
Les Mouches: 1943 adaptation of the classical myth of Orestes and Electra avenging the death of their father; published in English translation by Stuart Gilbert in 1946 as The Flies.
Connie: probably Constance Smith: see note to 4 May 1948.
Fischer Hayes: called S. F. Hays in the next letter, apparently the painter “Sam Hays” mentioned earlier (9 March 1947).
Chandler’s: Brossard’s stories were however being published in little magazines at this time.
To Edith Gaddis
Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone
[19 January 1948]
dear Mother—
Just a note to say I have heard from S. F. Hays, with a prospectus of the new magazine, which looks highly creditible. And to entreat you, on your first trip to Massapequa, to pick up that M.S.—“The Myth Remains”. Now it must be in a large envelop with other stories, paper clipped. Not loose in a drawer—such might be an earlier version, and not to be shown. One of the other stories is “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.” Don’t bother with the other stories. I think the envelop has a large number 1 or I on the outside, and addressed to me from Harper’s Bazaar—almost certain it is on top of the desk. Will you please send it to:
Miss Cornelia P. Claiborne
153 East 48th Street, N.Y.C.—and meanwhile I have written her a note asking her to return it to you if she doesn’t want it.
Please pardon the outbursts I’ve been sending you. Now things are getting settled, I have a better system of time for myself. Coming in at midnight, I work on my novel until about 4 am—then sleep late. Tell G. S. B. to keep his shirt on. I am working hard, hope to have some money too when I show up there in the summer.
I am even drinking hot-water “lemon” juice when I get up! And have many good books from the library, and two new pairs of pants (not Chipp). The job isn’t bad, except for the often hours of inactivity which madden me, any wasting of time now does. But the new novel, with incredible slowness, pieces itself together. And worthwhile thought is rampant. If I can stay with this life for a few months, perhaps I can show up with first novel draft, but not dependent on its success—so if it doesn’t go I’ll have money next fall to go abroad and study and continue to write.
Now it is past noon—I must make my little lunch (ham sandwich, peanut-butter sandw., and onion sandwich) (I keep the food in a drawer of my dresser) and be off for the breadwinning.
Love to you,
Will
PS. Another favour, if this incarceration is to last. If you could put aside the book review sections of the Sunday Times, and send them to me every 3 or 4 weeks, I should appreciate it greatly. Haven’t seen it for so long, and get curious about current state of “literature”.
“In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madame”: an early version of Recktall Brown’s Christmas party in R (II.8). It was posthumously published in Ninth Letter 4.2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 113–17, and reprinted in Harper’s, August 2008, 29–32.
G. S. B.: unidentified.
Chipp: a men’s clothing store in Harvard Square and later in Manhattan.
To Katherine Anne Porter
[American short-story writer and novelist (1890–1980). WG wrote to praise her essay “Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait” in the December 1947 issue of Harper’s. (It was retitled “The Wooden Umbrella” in her Collected Essays.) He would write two more letters to her in April and May of 1948.]
Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone
21 january, 48
My dear Miss Porter.
A friend at Harper’s was kind enough to send me your address—I hope you don’t mind—when I wrote him asking for it, in order that I might be able to tell you how much your piece on Gertrude Stein provoked and cleared up and articulated for me.
To get this out of the way, I am one of the thousands of Harvard boys who never learned a trade, and are writing novels furiously with both hands. In order to avoid the mental waste (conversation &c.) that staying in New York imposes, I am here working on a crane on the canal and writing the inevitable novel at night.
I have never written such a letter as this—never felt impelled to (but once, in college, an outburst which I fortunately did not mail to Markova, after seeing her ‘Giselle’) —But your piece on Gertrude Stein—and your letter that accompanied it—kept me occupied for three days. And since I have no one here to talk with about it—thank heavens—I presume to write you. Having read very little of your work—remember being greatly impressed by ‘Pale Horse’—so none of that comes in.
How you have put the finger on Miss Stein. Because she has worried me—not for as long nor as intelligently as she has you certainly, but since I have come on so many acclamations of her work, read and been excited and cons[t]ernated, and not realised that emptiness until you told me about it. I read your piece just nodding ignorantly throughout, agreeing, failing to understand the failure in her which you were accounting. Expecting it to be simply another laudatory article like so many that explain and analyse an artist away, into senseless admiration (the kind Mr. Maugham is managing now in Atlantic). Toward the end of your piece I was seriously troubled—how far can a writers’ writer go? (V. “She and Alice B. Toklas enjoyed both the wars—”) —until I found your letter in the front of the magasine. Then I began to understand, and started the investigation with you again. Thank God someone has found her defeat, and accused her of it. And it was a great thing because it should teach us afterward places where the answer is not.
Certainly she did it with a monumental thoroughness. Now “Everything being equal, unimportant in itself, important because it happened to her and she was writing about it”—was a great trick. And: “her judgements were neither moral nor intellectual, and least of all aesthetic, indeed they were not even judgements—” which in this time of people judging people is in a way admirable. But that her nihilism was, eventually, culpable—and that her rewards did finally reach her, “struggling to unfold” as she did,
