them an annoying distraction and putting off responding to incoming mail for months—or years, in the almost comical case of David Markson. (In later years, a good percentage of his letters begin with an apology for not writing sooner.) “Correspondence a good thing,” he conceded to his mother in January 1948, “though even it often seems a waste to me,” going on to rail against “the vanity of letter-writing” a few months later in a remarkable letter to Katherine Anne Porter (7 April 1948). In a 1967 letter to his future second wife, he counters Judith’s claim that she “can’t bear this letter writing business because mine are so marvelous” by insisting “they’re not, no, and I almost think it would be terrible if we became adept, exchanged sparkling & accomplished correspondence, things mustn’t get to that point! No, our letters have to stay awkward & just blundering around [...].” On the other hand, as he indicates in one to his friend Saul Steinberg, he sometimes welcomed the opportunity to write a letter in order to clarify his thoughts by setting them down on paper. And he certainly enjoyed writing to his children, as the brief selection included here should indicate. He took care over his letters: he would often write and correct a draft before sending one—no shoddy goods left his workshop—and favored friends received beautifully handwritten letters that are superb examples of calligraphy (see p. 269). In many cases, his letters contain “Material, one might say, for a novel,” as he quipped to his mother (28 November 1950): some of his early letters contain passages that went straight into The Recognitions, and in later letters there are many situations and sentiments that would be reworked in his novels. Watching how he transformed experience into art, recognizing the base materials that he alchemized into gold, may be the most rewarding aspect of this collection.
William Gaddis may not have approved of this book, but I can’t imagine anyone interested in modern American literature agreeing with him.
Since the principal justification for publishing Gaddis’s letters is to enable greater insight into his work, I’ve favored those in which he discusses his writing, his reading, his views on literature (and related fields like criticism, publishing, and book reviewing), along with a few concerned letters to politicians and enough personal matter to give the volume continuity and to allow it to function as a kind of autobiography in letters. This selection represents less than a quarter of his extant correspondence.
Gaddis’s letters are transcribed virtually verbatim, including idiosyncratic punctuation, spelling, careless errors, and so on; only obvious misstrokes and insignificant misspellings have been corrected. I have occasionally supplied a bracketed correction, or a sic, but otherwise it can be assumed all irregularities are in the originals. (I’ve boldfaced that to catch the eye of readers and reviewers and preempt complaints that this book was poorly proofread.) Again, these letters were not written for publication—except for a few to the editors of periodicals—and a close transcription of the originals will keep that in the reader’s mind throughout. I’ve retained Gaddis’s preference for British orthography, his habitual misspellings (e.g., tho, envelop[e], compleat, thot, magasine), his habit of closing up phrases (as in “eachother” and “3000miles”), outdated contractions like “’phone,” abbreviations (“$ly” = “financially”), and other personal choices. (However, I have not replicated his occasional use of German-style quotation marks: ,,like so.”) In a few cases I’ve retained a deleted word to indicate Gaddis’s first thought, where interesting. Underlined words have been set in italics, except for a few places where the underline has been retained for emphasis, especially when Gaddis used a double underline. Gaddis wasn’t consistent in the treatment of book titles—sometimes he underlined them (especially when writing by hand), more often he used all caps, or nothing at all—but for clarity and consistency the titles of all books, periodicals, movies, artworks, and ships have been italicized. On the other hand, I haven’t italicized foreign words unless Gaddis did so. He used a variety of paragraphing forms—including subparagraphs within paragraphs, some of which I’ve run together—and likewise placed dates and addresses in a variety of positions over the years. Most often, his address and the date appear at the bottom of the letter, to the left of his signature. But for ease of reading and reference a consistent physical layout has been imposed on all the letters. (The dates are transcribed verbatim.) For those from the same address, the first gives the complete street and city address, but subsequent ones only the city. Closing signatures are verbatim; in some cases, one isn’t present, either because it’s a carbon copy or a draft. Some abridgments of mundane matters have been made—and they are merely mundane matters, no shocking secrets or libelous insults—indicated by bracketed, unspaced ellipses ([...]); Gaddis’s own ellipses are spaced (. . .), and have been regularized thus. (Sometimes he used two periods.., sometimes more......) Some postscripts and marginalia have also been omitted. Material deleted at the request of the Estate is indicated thus: {***}.
Finally, a word about the notes in this volume. My own relationship with Mr. Gaddis and some of his friends, as well as other critics of his work, necessitated a more prevalent use of the first person in the annotations than is usually found in collections such as this, which some readers may find intrusive and self-serving. I have tried to keep such incursions to a minumum, but felt that the syntactic acrobatics necessary to avoid them entirely would have resulted in equally objectionable stiltedness.
Abbreviations
AA =Agapē Agape
CG =Carpenter’s Gothic
FHO =A Frolic of His Own, the first American and British editions, not the repaginated paperback.
ODQ =The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (London: Oxford University Press, 1949, 6th impression). This often-used reference book was given to WG in 1950 by Ormande de Kay in Paris.
R =The Recognitions, sometimes cited by part/chapter (e.g., III.5)
RSP =The Rush for Second Place
WG =William Gaddis
WG at Merricourt, c. 1928, “that blond pageboy” second from left in the foreground (see letter of 9 November 1994).
1. Growing Up, 1930–1946
To Edith Gaddis
[WG’s mother, née Edith Charles (1900–69); see WG’s capsule biography of her in his letter of 14 March 1994. In 1922 she married William T. Gaddis (1899–1965), but they separated about four years later. WG’s earliest letters date from 1929, when he was attending the Merricourt School in Berlin, CT. Most are addressed to Mrs. Gaddis’s work address: 130 E. 15th St., New York, NY, the office of the New York Steam Corporation, which later merged with ConEdison. (Her work there was the subject of a feature in the New York Times: 6 April 1941, Society News, D4.) The first two are included because they refer to his first “book,” his earliest reading, and document his first creative effort.]
Merricourt
Dec. 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
To
