The Letters of William Gaddis by William Gaddis

Author:William Gaddis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Judith and WG in a scene from Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess, filmed in spring 1972 in Croton-on-Hudson.

Otherwise I think you are right, there hasn’t been a great deal written about the book though there may be some bibliography in a piece under my name in Contemporary Authors (Gale) vols. 19–20 (c. 1968). I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which The Recognitions’ debt to Ulysses was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses but that was a problem that seemed to dog the book from the start largely, I suppose, from a blurb on the back making the comparison on which most reviewers seized with glee in finding my book wanting. A young man named Koenig did last year write his doctoral thesis on it at New York University but I would imagine it being available only there and, of course, it is his interpretation as yours must be yours.

Otherwise I scarcely know what to say to your request for help on ‘more background’ first, I think, and I am not being facetious when I plead not that it’s so long since I wrote it but that [following a strikeover:] (I’ve been typing all day and getting a little bleary) so long since I read it. If I named a single influence it would certainly be TS Eliot who still takes my breath away as he did then (and as a fair number of his lines sprinkled through the book might attest). Regarding any ‘message’, perhaps that art abides and the artist is its tool and victim but despite that it is the only enterprise worth embracing in the attempt to justify life; that art executed without love is bad (false) art but such love is not easy to come by. There was a corollary there too with God (perfection, gold) and the driving impossibility of grasping it because of our finite condition but that attempt being all we have to justify this finite condition (page 689 at the top I suppose is the key to the book if there is such). And in taking it down just now to look for this reference I read a few pages at random and must confess found them quite entertaining. I suppose if there has been one immense frustration with the book’s often grudging acceptance it has been how few people seemed able to permit themselves, despite its so-called ‘erudition’, to simply enjoy it.

Thank you again for your interest and your good letter and I wish I could have been more help.

Yours,

William Gaddis

Wisconsin quarterly: see note to 21 August 1964 letter.

Koenig: Peter William Koenig, “‘Splinters from the Yew Tree’: A Critical Study of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions,” PhD diss., New York University, 1971.

page 689: fearing that his art career began with copying a forgery, Wyatt discovers that the Bosch painting he copied from was indeed the original, not a fake, so he

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