Losing Friends, Influencing No One - Issue #2: The Road to The Recognitions
Blague, Banana Republics, Books, Books, Books
(George Gorsz (1893 - 1959), The Metropolis, one of the key artists in Gaddis’s visual imagination at the time and the artist Gaddis turns to whenever he ponders illustrations for either, Blague, or, The Recognitions.)
I know that I promised an in-depth deep dive into the work of William Gaddis and we’re currently two issues in and we haven’t started, The Recognitions, yet. While, James Joyce was correct when he proclaimed: ‘History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ It appears as though history is not done with you and I for the moment. I thought it would be useful for what is to come if I established the milleu that Gaddis was working in, the books he was reading, and the other projects which occupied his mind. The primary source for this, of course, The Letters of William Gaddis (NYRB, 2023), which proves to be a collection of first hand history that has been invaluable in allowing us insight into this pre-novel period. Of course, the aim is not to draw one-to-one comparisons between life and work, but to use this history to as a branching point to open up avenues of exploration into the work.
What I am primarily interested in here is the period between William Gaddis getting kicked out of Harvard and up until the publication of, The Recognitions, this plants us between 1947 and 1953. Over this time, Gaddis is a wanderer, by his own admission living the ‘truant life’, bouncing between physical, creative, and intellectual poles that often leave you wondering how he had time to do anything at all. He’s travelling the American south west, digging the Panama Canal, sequestered in Spanish monasteries, living the Bohemian lifestyle in Paris, rubbing shoulders with English artists, and arriving back home in New York a without growing the beard he had hoped. He mainly corresponds with his mother, Edith Gaddis, but he also sparks up unlikely friendships with British painter, John Napper and his wife Pauline, and sends fanboyish letters to the American novelist, Katherine Anne Porter.
Ultimately, what matters is the work. We want to ask questions of his work in this period. We want to understand how the novels came to be through the historical reality that produced them, especially through failure. And we want to ponder over his reading and make note of how it spills into the fiction. In this issue, we are going to take explore how one book’s collapse gave rise to the beast that grows and grows beyond all expectations. 50,000 words, Gaddis keeps telling us, 50,000 words is the goal. What sits in front of me now, as it did his editor some 72 years ago, physically exceeds that by tenfold. What starts out as two chapters in a briefcase written in a Panamanian apartment somehow becomes, The Recognitions, a tome of artistically infinite horizons.
What do you do with a problem like Blague?
In a letter to his mother, written from Mexico City on April 7th, 1947, Gaddis announces:
But now I am on it, and like it, and believe that it may have a chance. Right now the title is Blague, French for “kidding” as it were. But it really is no kidding.
Blague, (its full title oscillates between, Blague, Called the Lie With Circumstance, and, As You Lie It) is the great attempt at work whose failure defines this period in Gaddis’s life, and the catalyst which ultimately leads to, The Recognitions. What, precisely, Blague was is unclear. It changes over time, and, without access to Washington University’s (St Louis) Gaddis archive, I must take what Gaddis, and Gaddis researcher, Steven Moore, tell us at face value. From what I can gather, the novel would have resembled the New York Bohemian scenes present in, The Recognitions, but primarily centred around an allegory involving two drunk friends who give driving lessons in a dual control car (Bill Gaddis does Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth, if one could imagine such a thing). In another letter written that month, Gaddis tells a Harvard friend:
It is rather a moral book, and concerns itself with good and evil, or rather, as Mr. Forster taught us, good-and-evil
This is a direct reference to E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907), in which Forster writes: ‘For Ricky suffered from the Primal Curse, which is not - as the Authorised Version suggests - the knowledge of good and evil, but the knowledge of good-and-evil.’ Literary critic, Brian May, describes the Forsterian ‘knowledge of good-and-evil’ as a knowledge which is beyond the conventional notions of the idea of good and evil how, through an interrogation and rejection of those ideas, a new understanding can emerge. Thomas L. Jeffers, takes this further when he directly addresses the above statement and elaborates that this rejection of convention cannot be an inward facing silent withdrawal, but one which addresses questions about the material conditions of the world. This leaves us with a concept of good and evil which both, rejects the moral frameworks imposed through cultural institutions (church, schools, states, etc.), and which through material analysis of the world, comes to their own moral framework to be shared with the world. The difference between the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ and the ‘knowledge of good-and-evil’ is the recognition that the concept of good-and-evil is an entire unified ideological framework which is projected onto a person through the systems they have been processed through. If we accept this as a definition and we take William Gaddis’s letter at face value as an explanation of what he was aiming for, then we have found a core Gaddisean element hiding in the artist’s pre-history. Most important to us and our current discussion is that this is an idea which survives into, The Recognitions, but it is something that continues throughout the body of work. Whether we find it in the Reverend Gwyon’s complete rejection of his American Protestant teaching in pursuit of a more mystical, almost gnostic ethical frame work; or we recognise the same in JR’s Edward Bast’s complete disillusionment with free market world that appears to dominate and oppress his being, it appears again and again. This is, perhaps, what really is at the core of what often gets labelled as Gaddis’s Marxist tendencies. Gaddis, while never self-identifying as a Marxist as far as I am aware, does have that same drive to critique the systems, especially the interaction of capital and culture. Whereas blockhead conservative critics stop here in their assessment of Gaddis (whom no doubt, were they capable of reading, they would lump into their ‘Marxist postmodernist scheme to destroy civilisation’ conspiracies), what I think is happening is an arrival at a Marxist critique through an independent ethical one, one which Gaddis is directly thankful to Forster for teaching him.
At this point, Gaddis’s philosophical framework is rooted in this Forsterian idea, but also in the work of: Epictetus, Pyrrho, and David Hume ‘whose style I find quite delightful’. How could any middle class boy in his twenties, compelled with a strong sense of adventure, read this sort of material and become anything other than a budding moralist? Now, I will admit to under equipped to explain, in serious depth, what exactly effect this had on Gaddis’s work and especially the impact it would have had on this unfinished manuscript which I have not had access to, but, we can make a note of this as an avenue to explore. One can imagine that the young Gaddis would have been compelled by Epictetus’s ‘volition’, meaning man’s capacity for choice being fundamental to the nature of our freedom. I have no doubt in my mind that the young Gaddis saw something of himself in Hume, the radical reformer of English philosophy, while living through, and engaging with, an era of radical reform in the arts and the broader culture. How this would have played into the wider content of Blague, I can’t say, but in another letter to his mother written that April, Gaddis firmly announces:
I believe Blague has something to say, If I can write it. If not, believe me, there is little else that interests me.
This claim, ‘I believe Blague has something to say’, combined with what we know about the thought Gaddis was immersing himself in points towards a novel that is more explicitly moral than what is to come later. This is the kind of earnestness that we do not see in Gaddis’s later discussions of The Recognitions, which he lambasts more than once for having the immaturity (by which he means the immaturity of thought) of a first novel. To state outright, after laying out plainly your current philosophical influences, that you believe your book has something to say is to admit that you are trying to say something with your book. Whether this book would function as Gaddis’s finished novels do with their critique through Swiftian satire without a definitive answer or solution to the questions that it raises, or whether it took the form of less complex, more idealistic morality tale, that I can’t say.
Had Blague been completed, the course of this entire project would have changed. We can’t know exactly how Gaddis’s literary life would have developed or, whether we would even have a career worth talking about at all. What the failure of Blague does tell us, however, is that The Recognitions did not simply emerge out of nowhere in 1953. It is a novel actually built upon the foundations of years of thought leading up to it. What is also significant is that Gaddis does not see this failure as apocalyptic, and, in fact, he anticipates it when he tells his mother:
I hope for a well regulated summer in which either Blague will either be done or collapse. (May 1947)
This then tells us that Gaddis understands that he is undertaking the development of a craft, a cause which he is committed to. The fact that he then almost immediately begins to work on a new novel reveals that he was driven by the same creative compulsion which drives his characters. To create is ultimately a process in which failure has to be a potential outcome for it to be worthwhile at all. As Joseph Tabbi states in his intro to The Rush For Second Place: ‘What blocks the literary imagination is precisely what stimulated Gaddis to further creativity. By setting himself challenges equal to the world’s own constraints and resistances, he could discover what freedom and autonomy might be possible, in the here and now, for an individual life and talent.’ Freedom and autonomy through challenge means that freedom and autonomy can only be achieved through the potential for failure. If you want to create a successful work of art then you can’t allow this potential for failure become a fear of failure. The artist is the person who so ruthlessly pursues this freedom that such a failure is merely the means to embark upon a new challenge.
Years in the Wilderness and Coming to The Recognitions
After, Blague, collapsed in September of 1947, Gaddis hits the road. That year he heads down to Panama in order to pursue a career as an English language journalist. In a turn that might come to remind one of Otto in, The Recognitions, this falls through down the line and he finds himself living in a rundown apartment and picking bananas for the United Fruit Company’s Panamanian subsidiary, The Chiriqui Land Company. Yes, William Gaddis temporarily got himself wrapped up in the Banana Republics. This, and the subsequent time he spent working on a crane around the Panama Canal, begins to have an effect on Gaddis’s relationship to America’s cultural colonisation of the world. As he writes to his mother on the 23rd of January, 1948:
One thing though: to keep away from America. Except for New York and Long Island, but America I have such pity for, fury at, why are Americans so awful, their voices, everything. You can’t imagine Pedro Miguel, what the Americans have done in “civilising” this strip called Canal Zone, how they have sterilized it. And why do they feel it incumbent upon them to behave with rudeness every where away from home? Barren ignorance is most horrible when it is in power - the picture of the American soldier abroad will never cease to make me shudder.
The moralist Gaddis appears again. This time he’s critiquing America on two levels. One, the obvious individual ‘rudeness’, and the much more broader cultural tendency towards sterilisation. These two instincts emerge from the same source, America’s power on the global stage. From this power, Gaddis claims, the United States (using the same justifications as the old world colonial powers) is imposing its barren ignorance onto the world through a rejection of the old world’s manners and customs so that it may impose upon it civilisation in its own image. In focusing on this image of ‘the American soldier abroad’, Gaddis evokes the image of the US as an international occupying force, one which is enacting this colonialism explicitly through violence. Where else is this more true than in Latin America, and, specifically, in Panama? The very canal which Gaddis finds himself working on is explicitly for the benefit of the United States military and economic complexes. Gaddis sees this first hand and, through these comments, we can see a flowering stem of a cynicism towards the 20th Century American project that weaves its way throughout his work for the rest of his. The critique shifts with the morphing ideological form of America as the decades roll onwards, but this core remains present throughout; America seeks to sterilise the world through the twin evils of its own stupidity and its own power.
During this time in Panama, however, is also where we happen to see the very start of, The Recognitions. Under the title: Ducdame, Called: Some People Who Were Naked (and later, The Truth About The Past), there are two chapters which exist by January of 1948. Although he complains a great deal about the conditions he is writing under, this appears to be the project which sticks. Around this time he also makes note of diving into a number of works. Including:
The Golden Bough (Frazer)
A Study of History (Toybene)
The works of St. Anselm
The Vocation of Man (Fichte)
Les Mouches (Satre)
And, of course, an endless amount of re-reading the works of T.S. Eliot.
It seems obvious, in retrospect that this is the milieu Gaddis is creating while working on, The Recognitions. He is covering all of the bases you might expect, religion, pre-Christian ritual practice, grand narratives of history, the question of freedom and responsibility, faith, doubt, and knowledge.
When Gaddis travels to Europe in 1949, it is easy to see how a chance encounter with the work of Hieronymus Bosch would explode his imagination outwards. Bosch is the painter who puts a visual to all of these questions. Bosch provides a vision of the complexity of man’s relationship to mystery, to himself, and to history. Throughout this period, Gaddis finds himself living in Spanish monasteries and Parisian apartments. Gaddis would never admit it, but I do think that this kind of continental journey is an attempt to channel the novelists of the 1910s and 20s. Paris and Spain were the places to be for Hemingway and for Stein. For any budding American novelist proceeding them to take part in that must be aware that they are walking in those footsteps. His ultimate rejection of Paris is possibly a part of that too. He turns away from the left-bank bohemian lifestyle. Yet he can never do this to Spain, Italy, or England (home of his beloved Eliot). In an act of serendipity, on a beach, while writing The Recognitions, he meets the English painter, John Napper and his wife, Pauline. He remains friends with them all throughout this period and both Nappers encourage his literary pursuits. Around this time he struck up a friendship of letters with the American novelist, Katherine Anne Porter. Enamoured with her essay, ‘Gertrude Stein: A Self Portrait’, he reveals a great admiration for her work and even sets her up on lunch dates with his mother while he remained in Europe. The more one explores this wilderness period (which it truthfully is, Gaddis seems to be doing all he can to avoid getting married and settling down), the more one one believes that the plot of, The Recognitions, is not a thing which has been imagined but something which has been experienced in some way. Not, obviously, a one-to-one roman-a-clef narrative, but something that has emerged from life. Gaddis is not (as some have claimed of his class of writers) some aesthete professor in a high tower embarking on masturbatory experimentation. Gaddis is as much a ‘boots on the ground’ novelist, in this moment of his life, as any writer you can think of. It is no coincidence that, in 1948, Gaddis wrote:
There is such an accumulation. Did you have the feeling, early when you were writing, a novel, say, that you must get everything in? Everything. And where will it fit?…and this? Idea, and incident, and image. It is as though […] one were in deep water, and this accumulation bobbing all around, as far as can be seen but all within reach; and that one may grab at any of them to present…
He is internalising everything he reads and everything he experiences and everyone he meets into a database to pluck from, to twist, and to extrapolate. This continues up through his exploration of North Africa in the first half of 1951, a place he explores alongside Robert Graves’ enigmatic essay on mythology, The White Goddess. Gaddis becomes enamoured with a mysterious, mystical, old-world hiding in the heart of the modern Europe and Africa. This is the world which haunts The Recognitions. Even as the novel would only truly be completed when he grounds his life firmly to American soil. It is without a doubt a product of the time he spends away from his homeland, a time he spends watching his home reflected in the world it had begun to cast its looming shadow over.
The Return to America and Publishing The Recognitions
Gaddis returns to New York in the second half of 1951. He takes a job writing for American Illustrated and locks himself away in New York’s public libraries researching forgeries. I haven’t been able to pin down exactly what he was reading at this time, but he is very clear on the subject. This must have been when the notion of the forgery really takes hold on the consciousness of, The Recognitions. Forgery is, for all of these mystical or metaphysical or philosophical discussions, the concrete core of, The Recognitions. It is the element from which all of these other interests are allowed to flow forth. By this point, the production of the novel was a rolling train without breaks. There would be no collapse at this point. The Recognitions, would not suffer the same fate that, Blague, had before it. In fact, the novel only grows and grows by the day. In March of 1952, Gaddis complains that the novel was at one hundred thousand words and still not finished. Compared to what the novel ends up being, the 100k pages represent a novella. And yet, he keeps going with no stop. One can only imagine the terror in the heart of the poor editors at New World Writing when they optioned the novel in the December of 1952.
When the completed manuscript of, The Recognitions, was submitted in May 1953, it was five hundred thousand pages long. Gaddis couldn’t bring himself to edit it. He thought that a serious dedication to self-editing the work would only make him hate it and scrap the whole novel. This is perhaps why, after completing, The Recognitions, Gaddis tells multiple friends that he had no interest in writing another novel immediately. It was as though something had been drawn out of him, something which must have been there in the original instinct to write, Blague, which he had now exorcised and from which he now had to recover. Whether he necessarily knew that it would be another twenty years before he would write a second novel, that is hard to say, but it is clear that he could not bring himself to wrestle with the ordeal again just yet. When you read his descriptions of the writing process, you can hardly blame him. In 1950, he writes:
And the constant feelings of pleasure at it going well, disgust and depression when I read it and it looks ridiculous, pretentious, sophomoric, imitative, what-have-you (Aug 15, 1950)
What I think this exploration of the path towards, The Recognitions, keeps circling around is this idea that the act of writing a novel is a dangerous act. Perhaps not in an overly grandiose notion implying that writing a novel is life or death, but in the sense that the creative act involves putting oneself on the line in a way that you have to commit to fully or not attempt to do it at all. If you are going out to pursue the knowledge of good-and-evil, whatever that means to you, then you are going to undertake a task which will place a tremendous strain on you, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and so on. It may be true that, when you have something to say about the nature of the world as you see it, then you have a responsibility to share that with the world, and it’s easy for us as a readership to demand that, but you have to be prepared for the toll that will take. The Recognitions, is a labour of love written over five years and multiple countries. It is the product of an intense intellectual and formal project which began the minute Gaddis stumbled out of Harvard and into the world at large. It is a novel written the way it is because without the danger of challenge, without the threat of failure, then what Gaddis put into the world would have no true purpose. Without such a purpose, the art has no value. I think it would be for the best, as we approach the end of this issue, to allow the man to explain his process in his own words:
I wrote every one on a bit of paper, and have spent the afternoon sitting like a simple child making a village of confetti, trying to arrange them in order that will satisfy Aristotle’s theory of dramatic unity, William James’s of pragmatism, the Boston Watch and Ward Society, for Morals, the Catholic Index, the publisher’s for Something New, the reader’s prolepsis and my analepsis. Some must suffer. Boston and the Index first. Then Aristotle. I sometimes imagine cutting it down to myself and the reader. (Sep 7 1950)
I hope this issue has helped to establish the production history of, The Recognitions, and has helped you to get into the into the correct mindset for undertaking the gargantuan task which lay before us. Over on the Patreon you will find all of the research notes used for this essay and a members-only essay on the relationship between William Gaddis, Katherine Anne Porter, and the essay which piqued his interest enough to reach out. In the next issue we will finally be exploring the first chapter of, The Recognitions. Thank you for reading and I hope to hear from you soon.
Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip/insta:teawithzizek)
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