William Gaddis: Expanded Edition

Steven Moore

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781628926446
• eBook ISBN: 9781628926460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1989, Steven Moore published the first scholarly study of all three of William Gaddis's novels and since then it has been generally regarded as the best book on this difficult but major writer's work. This revised and expanded edition includes new chapters on the novels Gaddis published after 1989, the National Book Award-winning A Frolic of His Own and the posthumous novella Agape Agape, along with updated introductory and concluding chapters. This introduction offers a clear discussion of all five of Gaddis's novels, providing essential biographical information, two chapters each on his most significant novels, The Recognitions and J R, and a chapter each devoted to his later three novels. A concluding chapter locates his place in American literature and notes his influence on younger writers. Each chapter focuses on the main themes of each novel and discusses the literary techniques Gaddis deployed to dramatize those themes. Since Gaddis is an erudite, allusive novelist, Moore clarifies his references and explains how they enhance his themes.

1

A Vision of Order

The misjudgment of one generation is always a source of amazement to the next. It is hard to believe now that Melville was ignored by his generation of critics, that Samuel Butler was a literary pariah to his, and that Malcolm Cowley had to reintroduce Faulkner to his. William Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions, was published in 1955, remaindered a few years later, and largely ignored for a generation. Only after the publication of his second novel, J R, in 1975 did critics begin to realize that The Recognitions pioneered (among other things) the black humor of the 1950s and 1960s and the Menippean satire of the 1970s; only then was Gaddis recognized as “a presiding genius, as it turns out, of post-war American fiction.”¹ Even though Gaddis’s third novel, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), consolidated his place in the front rank of contemporary novelists, Gaddis remains one of the least read of major American writers. New critical studies of contemporary American fiction still appear that make no mention of his work, and a survey of any college’s literature staff would probably reveal that many professors have only heard of him, not read him. Yet one professor who has, Frank D. McConnell, went so far as to say in 1980 “that The Recognitions is the indispensable novel of the last thirty years in America, and that contemporary fiction makes no real sense without the presence of this strange, perverse, confusing, and ultimately sane book.”²

This discrepancy can be accounted for in several ways. The Recognitions, for example, was cursed with inadequate reviews and an indifferent publisher who kept it only intermittently in print. The sheer size of The Recognitions and J R has scared off many, and although these and Gaddis’s other novels have been kept in print over the last three decades, their reputation for difficulty intimidates many more. Nor did Gaddis make much effort to promote his work; until the last decade of his life (and even then, grudgingly), Gaddis gave few interviews, avoided the literary limelight, and kept even interested critics at arm’s length by insisting that the work must speak for itself.

The Man Inside

“I have generally shied from parading personal details partly for their being just that,” he once explained,³ and perhaps partly for the same reason, painter Wyatt Gwyon, the protagonist of The Recognitions, avoids showings of his work. Meeting him for the first time, the art critic Basil Valentine tells Wyatt:

—Seeing you now, you know, it’s answered one of the questions I’ve had on my mind for some time. The first thing I saw, it was a small Dierick Bouts, I wondered then if you used a model when you worked.

—Well I …

—But now, it’s quite obvious isn’t it, Valentine went on, nodding at the picture between them. —Mirrors?

—Yes, yes of course, mirrors. He laughed, a constricted sound, and lit a cigarette.⁴

Gaddis too worked from mirrors, drawing extensively on his own background for the characters and settings in his novels. Born in Manhattan in 1922, he was reared in Massapequa, Long Island, in the house that was the model for the Bast home in J R. Like the Basts, his mother’s people were Quakers, though he himself was raised in a Calvinist tradition, as is Wyatt, who nonetheless “looks like a Kwa-ker” to one observer (585). Like Otto in The Recognitions and Jack Gibbs in J R, Gaddis grew up without a father, who separated from his mother when Gaddis was three. Haunting all five novels, in fact, is the spirit of an absent, dying, or dead father who leaves a ruinous state of affairs for his children to grapple with, a situation that can be extrapolated to include Gaddis’s vision of a world abandoned by stable, credible authority figures and plunged into disorder.

His fifth through thirteenth years were spent at a boarding school in Berlin, Connecticut, which not only furnished Jack Gibbs with the bleak memories recalled in J R but also provided the unnamed setting for the New England chapters of The Recognitions. Returning to Long Island to attend Farmingdale High School, Gaddis contracted the same illness Wyatt does, which kept Gaddis out of World War II a few years later, much to his disappointment. Already enrolled at Harvard by that time, he stayed on and later edited the Harvard Lampoon until a minor run-in with the police required him to leave in early 1945 without a degree.

Moving to Horatio Street in Greenwich Village—the street on which Wyatt lives while painting his forgeries—Gaddis worked as a fact checker at the New Yorker for a little over a year, a job he later recalled as “terribly good training, a kind of post-graduate school for a writer, checking everything, whether they were stories or profiles or articles. I still feel this pressure of trying to make sure that I’ve got it right. A lot of the complications of high finance and so forth in J R—I tried very hard to get them all right. And it was very much that two years at the New Yorker.”⁵ He quit the job in 1946 to try his hand at commercial short stories, without success, then set off in 1947 for five years of wandering through Mexico and Central America, Europe (mostly Spain and France), and North Africa.⁶ He began his first novel during these travels, returning to America in 1951 to continue working on it, largely in isolation. From Long Island he occasionally came into the city to mingle in the Greenwich Village milieu so mercilessly recreated in the middle section of The Recognitions, and became acquainted with many of the emerging writers of the time, especially the Beats.

The Recognitions appeared in 1955 as the leading, controversial literary title on Harcourt, Brace’s spring list (or so they treated it), but the novel had little immediate success, as was the case with Moby-Dick a century earlier. A few readers recognized its significance and provided Gaddis with a cult following, but most reviewers were put off by this gargantuan novel by an unknown writer. Looking back in 1975, critic John Aldridge, an early champion, gave this explanation:

As is usually the case with abrasively original work, there had to be a certain passage of time before an audience could begin to be educated to accept The Recognitions. The problem was not simply that the novel was too long and intricate or its vision of experience too outrageous, but that even the sophisticated reading public of the mid-Fifties was not yet accustomed to the kind of fiction it represented. […] The most authoritative mode in the serious fiction of the Fifties was primarily realistic, and the novel of fabulation and Black Humor—of which The Recognitions was later to be identified as a distinguished pioneering example—had not yet come into vogue. In fact, the writers who became the leaders of the Black Humor movement had either not been heard from in 1955 or remained undiscovered. […] Their work over the past 20 years has created a context in which it is possible to recognize Gaddis’s novel as having helped inaugurate a whole new movement in American fiction. Rereading it with the knowledge of all that this movement has taught us about modern experience and the opening of new possibilities for the novel, one can see that The Recognitions occupies a strikingly unique and primary place in contemporary literature.⁷

When it became apparent the novel was not going to supply him the kind of success he had envisioned—after Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man three years earlier, he was set for life—Gaddis began a series of jobs in industry that would later provide some raw material for his second novel. After working in publicity for a pharmaceutical firm, he wrote film scripts for the army, and later, speeches for corporate executives—as does Thomas Eigen in J R, who has likewise published an important but neglected novel. With the appearance in 1970 of “J. R. or the Boy Inside” in the Dutton Review, which would later become the opening pages of his second novel, Gaddis broke his fifteen-year literary silence, and in the fall of 1975 J R was published to much stronger reviews than his first novel had received. Yet even though it won the National Book Award for the best fiction of the year, there are grounds, unfortunately, for Frederick Karl’s complaint that J R remains “perhaps the great unread novel of the postwar era.”⁸

Throughout the seventies Gaddis continued freelance writing and performed brief teaching stints, usually in creative writing. At Bard College he developed a course on the theme of failure in American literature, a central theme in his own fiction and the subject of his brilliant essay “The Rush for Second Place” (1981), the best of his relatively few nonfiction pieces. Meanwhile, Gaddis’s first two novels attracted more and more attention: essays began appearing with some regularity in scholarly journals, dissertations proliferated, all culminating in the summer of 1982 with the first book on his work, a special Gaddis issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (the so-called genius award). In 1983 the first Modern Language Association panel on Gaddis’s work was held, and the following year a second book on his work appeared, Gaddis was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and he finished his third novel.

Like its predecessors, Carpenter’s Gothic abounds in autobiographical elements. Not only does it take place in the same Victorian house Gaddis owned in Piermont, New York—where his papers were stored in the same garage-converted locked room that excites Liz’s curiosity—but the house’s absentee landlord, the geologist McCandless, offers yet another mirror image of Gaddis: “His face appeared drained, so did the hand he held out to her, drained of colour that might once have been a heavy tan […] his still, sinewed hands and his … hard, irregular features bearing the memory of distant suns, the cool, grey calm of his eyes belying … belying?”⁹ Belying Gaddis, perhaps, for the second half of this quotation is Liz’s fictionalization of McCandless’s appearance, and she later takes the process one step further away from its original by completing her description from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933):

she seized the pencil to draw it heavily through his still, sinewed hands, hard irregular features, the cool disinterested calm of his eyes and a bare moment’s pause bearing down with the pencil on his hands, disjointed, rust spotted, his crumbled features dulled and worn as the bill collector he might have been mistaken for, the desolate loss in his eyes belying, belying … The towel went to the floor in a heap and she was up naked, legs planted wide broached by scissors wielded murderously on the [television] screen where she dug past it for the rag of a book its cover gone, the first twenty odd pages gone in fact, so that it opened full on the line she sought, coming down with the pencil on belying, a sense that he was still a part of all that he could have been. (95)

The obvious lesson here is that we are dealing with fiction, not life, and that despite the encouraging fact that McCandless shares Gaddis’s appearance, marital history, political outlook, speech habits, even his pets, he is no more to be strictly identified with his author than is Otto, Gibbs, or Eigen. “No,” Gaddis warned, “characters all draw on some contradictory level of their author’s life,”¹⁰ and sometimes even change in the course of composition. In a television interview with Malcolm Bradbury, Gaddis illustrated this point with reference to Thomas Eigen:

I started him out as being, sort of getting my own back, as it were. He starts out being quite a good fellow who has had bad luck, but as it went on he became very unpleasant, and finally by the end of the novel, he was thoroughly unpleasant, thoroughly, because this is the way he developed in the novel. I gave up identifying with him, and started to hold him at arm’s length. But I saw this really was who the man was; he was not just a man who had had bad luck, but his embittered state had turned him into a really … not anybody you’d want to know.¹¹

Gaddis gave the name Gall to another even more embittered alter ego in J R.

Most of A Frolic of His Own takes place in the same house in Wainscott, Long Island, Gaddis lived in during the years of its...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Expanded Edition
• Preface to the 1989 Edition
• 1. A Vision of Order
• 2. The Recognitions: Myth, Magic, and Metaphor
• 3. The Recognitions: The Self Who Can Do More
• 4. J R: What America is All About
• 5. J R: Empedocles on Valhalla
• 6. Carpenter’s Gothic; or, The Ambiguities
• 7. A Frolic of His Own: Ideas of Order
• 8. Agapē Agape: The Self Who Cannot Do More
• 9. In the American Grain
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page