William Gaddis: Expanded Edition 9781628926453, 9781628926446, 9781501304941, 9781628926477

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Praise for the 1989 Edition “[Moore] reads Gaddis more carefully than any other critic and demonstrates throughout, but especially in his chapter on The Recognitions, how Gaddis’s seeming chaos of characters, allusions, and plots is a set of intricate orders. Moore’s commentary deftly synthesizes major interpretations and contributes new readings. … Anyone interested in Gaddis will obviously want to have William Gaddis. More important, anyone interested in seeing how the virtues of old-fashioned scholarship, close reading, and theoretical sophistication can be valuably combined should read this.” —Tom LeClair, Modern Fiction Studies “Moore urges us to read Gaddis as a satirist of extraordinary reach and commitment, a writer of obsessively crafted achievements in structure, one whose obsessions are perhaps only outmatched by the figure of an America that ridiculously reiterates the collapse of its idealism. Moore explores this thesis in a readable, jargon-free and humorous prose, always supplemented with bibliographic citations revealing new sources and contexts.” —Steven Weisenburger, American Notes & Queries “This is the first book-length study of Gaddis’s fiction, and it is a very good one: reading the novels intelligently, evaluating their sources, endeavoring to place Gaddis firmly within an American tradition. … Even Gaddis’s detractors … must respect his and his critic’s intellectual accomplishment.” —Morton P. Leavitt, Journal of Modern Literature

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William Gaddis Expanded Edition Steven Moore

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First edition published 1989 by Twayne Publishers Expanded edition published 2015 © Steven Moore, 1989, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moore, Steven, 1951– William Gaddis : expanded edition / Steven Moore. pages cm Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62892-645-3 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-62892-644-6 (pb) 1. Gaddis, William, 1922-1998--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3557.A28Z77 2015 813’.54--dc23 2014037446 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2645-3 PB: 978-1-6289-2644-6 ePub: 978-1-6289-2646-0 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2647-7 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

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Contents Preface to the Expanded Edition Preface to the 1989 Edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A Vision of Order The Recognitions: Myth, Magic, and Metaphor The Recognitions: The Self Who Can Do More J R: What America is All About J R: Empedocles on Valhalla Carpenter’s Gothic; or, The Ambiguities A Frolic of His Own: Ideas of Order Agapē Agape: The Self Who Cannot Do More In the American Grain

Bibliography Index

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vi viii 1 19 53 75 101 125 149 185 207 217 223

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Preface to the Expanded Edition The first edition of this book was published in 1989, four years after William Gaddis published his third novel, Carpenter’s Gothic. He went on to write two more novels, A Frolic of His Own and Agapē Agape, and after the latter was published in 2002 I thought of expanding my original book to cover Gaddis’s final two novels. Other projects distracted me, including the editing of Gaddis’s letters, but a burst of energy in November 2013 inspired me to finish the job I had begun back in grad school. I was in the doctoral program at Rutgers when I learned in 1986 that Firmin Bishop’s contracted book on Gaddis for Twayne’s United States Authors Series fell through, so I volunteered and was accepted. At the same time, I needed to write a dissertation to complete my PhD, so, without letting either party know what I was up to, I wrote a manuscript that could kill two birds with one stone. The requirements of the Twayne series necessitated a biographical introduction, which I would have skipped if writing only a dissertation, and the director of the latter suggested adding a conclusion that placed Gaddis in the larger context of American literature. I managed to write something that satisfied both parties: at Rutgers, Richard Poirier waived the usual oral dissertation defense (“What’s to ask?” he said after reading it), so I submitted one copy of the manuscript for my degree, awarded in June 1988, and mailed another copy to Twayne, who published it in May of the following year. I was in a crippling depression during that period, hence its rather subdued tone, which I’ve tried but probably failed to maintain in the new material for consistency. As the subtitle indicates, this is an expanded edition rather than a revised one. I’ve added chapters on A Frolic and Agapē Agape, and updated the introduction and conclusion, but I’ve left Chapters 2 through 6 basically alone, aside from a few minor changes and some additional matter in the footnotes. (I was tempted to tone down the extravagant conclusion to Chapter 5, which “claws for the heights of Greek tragedy” as Judge Bone in A Frolic would drily remark, but I let that too stand.) The one exception occurs near the end of Chapter 2, where I’ve inserted a streamlined version of the section on alchemy from the introduction to my Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions” (1982); in 1989 that book was still available, but it is long out of print, nor does the current online version include the introduction, so I wanted to preserve this key element of Gaddis’s symbolism. (That chapter makes The Recognitions sound weirder than it actually is, but the

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significance of its arcane imagery is less apparent than its other themes, and hence needed to be explicated, I felt.) The bibliography has been simplified, and limited to English-language materials: the original one was rather detailed, but the considerably more detailed and regularly updated bibliography on the Gaddis Annotations website eliminates the need for such a one here. I’ve also eliminated the chronology of Gaddis’s life that Twayne format’s required; in 1989, biographical information on Gaddis was sparse, but it is plentiful enough today thanks to the publication of his letters and Joseph Tabbi’s new biography, not to mention everything available online these days. Back in the 1980s, the Twayne requirements were uppermost in my mind: an introductory book intended mostly for undergraduates and general readers studying Gaddis for the first time, which remains the modest intention of this expanded edition. I’ve incorporated a few of my post-1989 writings on Gaddis herein: a paragraph or so from my 1984 review of A Frolic for the Nation appears in Chapter 7, and the opening section of Chapter 8 is based on a talk I first delivered at the conference “Reading William Gaddis” at the Université d’Orléans on March 25, 2000, at which time I’d read only the Torschlusspanik version of Agapē Agape. An updated version was eventually published in a collection of papers from that conference, also called Reading William Gaddis (2007), and again in Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shaver’s Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System, published earlier that year. It has been revised for this final appearance. To the list of acknowledgments in my original preface, I’d like to thank the following for helping (sometimes unwittingly) with this new edition: Stephen Burn, Victoria Harding, Christopher Knight, Brian McHale, John Soutter, and Scott Bryan Wilson. And thanks to Haaris Naqvi and Bloomsbury for the opportunity to pour this old wine into a new bottle.

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Preface to the 1989 Edition William Gaddis is in the paradoxical position of being one of the most highly regarded yet least-read novelists in contemporary American literature. Those who have taken the time to work their way through his massive, labyrinthine novels have usually emerged making extravagant claims on their behalf, but too many have been put off by the forbidding length and complexity of his work. His first novel, The Recognitions (1955), is nearly a thousand pages long and features a large cast, a dense plot, and a heavy cargo of erudition. His second, the National Book Award-winning J R (1975), is nearly as long, complex, and hugely cast, and has the additional challenge of being presented almost entirely in dialogue without a single chapter break. Only Gaddis’s third and most recent book, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), runs to conventional length, but even it packs into its 262 pages enough material for a novel twice its size. As daunting as these novels may appear, however, they are among the highest achievements of modern fiction and deserve far greater attention than they have hitherto received. The Flemish painter, says Wyatt in The Recognitions, did not limit himself to a single perspective in a painting but instead took as many as he wanted. I follow his example in this book by taking not one but several critical approaches to Gaddis’s novels. Thus Chapter 2 on The Recognitions is a Jungian analysis of its symbolism and mythic materials, while Chapter 3 is an old-fashioned set of compare-and-contrast character analyses. Chapter 4 on J R is a set of mini-essays on such matters as style, intellectual background, the use of children as spokespeople, the Freudian implications of money, mechanization metaphors, and the plight of the artist, while Chapter 5 studies the novel’s principal allusions to Wagnerian opera, Victorian literature, and Greek philosophy. Chapter 6 is a genre study of Carpenter’s Gothic, or, more specifically, of Gaddis’s adaptation of various genres within this novel. These chapters are preceded by an introductory chapter that skates on the thin ice of such topics as autobiography, influences, and intentions, and are followed by a conclusion that locates Gaddis in the various traditions of American literature he has both followed and enhanced. Mr. Gaddis looked over a draft of the first chapter and kindly gave his permission to quote from his published and unpublished writings. Richard Scaramelli read each chapter as it was written and offered innumerable suggestions for improvement; I thank him for those and for his moral support, and also thank our mutual friend Clifford S. Mead for continuing

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to send me materials I might otherwise have missed. Barry Qualls of Rutgers also read the manuscript and made many valuable suggestions. David Markson and Charles Monaghan provided useful background materials. Thanks also go to Miriam Berkley for her photograph of Gaddis’s “haggardly alert face” and for sharing the typescript of her interview with him; to Lucy Ferriss at Bard College for Gaddis’s course description; to Grace Eckley for permission to publish a letter Gaddis wrote her; to my editors Liz Traynor and Warren French, the first for her patience, the second for his warm encouragement; and to Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint the concluding lines of “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours,” from the Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, copyright 1924 and renewed 1952 by Robinson Jeffers.

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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 George Stade, review of Ratner’s Star by Don DeLillo, New York Times Book Review, June 20, 1976, 7. Reader’s report on my Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions,” July 31, 1980.

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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 Contemporary Authors, ed. James M. Ethridge, Barbara Kopala, and Carolyn Riley, vol. 19/20 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1968), 135. 4 The Recognitions (1955; New York: Penguin, 1993), 240, hereafter cited in the text, sometimes abbreviated R, and sometimes cited by part and chapter, as in II.3. (This corrected 1993 edition is the last Gaddis oversaw; it was reprinted in 2012 by Dalkey Archive Press.) Because Gaddis uses ellipses extensively, my ellipses are bracketed; for consistency, I follow this practice in all cited material. 3

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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 Interview with Miriam Berkley, June 17, 1985. A condensed version of this interview appeared in Publishers Weekly, but all of my quotations are from the unedited transcript, with a few corrections supplied by Gaddis. 6 In recent years, a few of those short stories have been published in magazines, but they give little indication of the talent that would blossom when Gaddis began writing his first novel. 5

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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, “‘The Ongoing Situation,’” 27. “American Fictions: The Mega-Novel,” Conjunctions 7 (1985): 248.

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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 Carpenter’s Gothic (1985; New York: Penguin, 1986), 59, 64; hereafter cited in the text and sometimes abbreviated CG. 10 Kuehl and Moore, “An Interview with William Gaddis,” 4.

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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 composition, but he has little in common with Oscar Crease other than authorship of a Civil War play and dashed hopes of its success. Gaddis has more in common with the ninety-seven-year-old Judge Thomas Crease, who expresses many of Gaddis’s own opinions in the elaborate language Gaddis loved. The most autobiographical character in Gaddis’s works is the narrator of Agapē Agape, but there is still enough of a difference to warrant calling him a character rather than Gaddis. This autobiographical impulse can likewise be found in the work of a number of Gaddis’s contemporaries, and his various self-portraits do have elements of Mailer’s egotism, Kerouac’s self-absorption, Roth’s defensiveness, and Barth’s playfulness. But the impulse probably owes more, in Gaddis’s case, to the sense in some lines from Robert Browning that Gaddis copied into a 1983 issue of Conjunctions that featured an interview with his friend William H. Gass: “This trade of mine—I don’t know, can’t be sure / But there was something in it, tricks and all! / Really, I want to light up my own mind.”12 During the 1980s and 1990s, Gaddis’s critical reputation grew as further books and articles appeared on his novels, and as translations of those works began appearing in many languages. He won a second National Book Award in 1994 for A Frolic of His Own, earned a number of other prestigious grants and awards—he was the New York State Author from 1993 to 1995—and he was especially celebrated in Germany during his final years as translations of his four novels were released. Illness forced him to decline a final visit there, and he spent the last years of his life writing his last, posthumously published novel, Agapē Agape. He died on 16 December 1998, two weeks before what would have been his seventy-sixth birthday.

Writers in Conversation 13: William Gaddis. From “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium,’” which Gaddis probably found in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1949), the source for dozens of quotations in his work.

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Influences The nature and extent of Gaddis’s reading has elicited an unusually large amount of speculation, especially by reviewers and critics eager to establish “influences” with which they can locate his work on the literary spectrum. Because of the allusions, quotations, and encyclopedic range of knowledge displayed in the novels, Cynthia Ozick’s front-page cry “Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything”13 echoes critics who assume he has read everything. For example, Tony Tanner confidently states, “Clearly, Gaddis has read Joyce (what hasn’t he read?),”14 but Joyce is the most glaring example of an author who did not influence Gaddis. Similarly, Frederick Karl praises Gaddis’s “extensive reading in and knowledge of religious literature, church fathers and historians, Latin works, church theologians, all sufficiently assimilated so that they can be regurgitated for parodic purposes,”15 although nearly all of the religious references in The Recognitions can be traced to a dozen rather mundane secondary sources. Delmore Schwartz was closer to the mark when he wrote to Gaddis’s friend and editor Catharine Carver, “he knows a lot more about sleeping pills than about the Church, despite the allusions.”16 This is not to denigrate Gaddis’s undeniable learning: he was obviously an extremely well-read man who researched his books thoroughly, and these uncritical claims for his encyclopedic knowledge are testimony to his artistry. Like most writers, Gaddis wears his influences most plainly on his sleeve in his first novel; with J R he clearly became his own man and “influences” all but disappear into the vast machinery of his work. (Instead, he began influencing others, as I will show in the concluding chapter.) In the 1980s he came under the influence of classic legal writing, and in the 1990s became so impressed by the novels of Thomas Bernhard that he modeled his last novel on them, but even those he adapted to his established style. Ultimately, “affinities” is probably a better word than “influences” when discussing Gaddis’s relationship to his literary predecessors and contemporaries. “I think writers work from their own energies, their own concepts,” he said in a 1986 interview, going so far as to add, “I don’t think there is any influence among us.”17 However, the nagging question “Fakery and Stony Truths,” 1. Review of the Avon reprint of R, 28. 15 “Gaddis: A Tribune of the Fifties,” in Kuehl and Moore’s In Recognition of William Gaddis, 176. 16 Letters of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Robert Philips (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 298. 17 Interview with Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, 67. 13 14

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of influences has been answered in so many misleading ways that a brief survey of Gaddis’s reading seems warranted.18 Gaddis majored in English literature at Harvard and regarded the program as solid and traditional: as he told Miriam Berkley, “we read Chaucer, we read Dryden and so forth, Elizabethan drama, Restoration comedy, all the things that a good education in that area gives you. And very little current. I mean, it was before the days of writing workshops, and discussing current novels, and so forth. It was much more … I can’t call it ‘classic’ education, because that was much more Greek and Latin, but it was more old-fashioned, which I’m delighted, I’m very glad of. I always have been very happy about that.” Among others, he studied under Albert Guerard, attended F.  O. Matthiessen’s lectures on Greek drama, and was tutored in Chaucer by Theodore Spencer. Gaddis looked at Spencer’s edition of Joyce’s Stephen Hero (1944), but was not impressed, nor did he look at much more of Joyce’s work. Yet of all the alleged influences on Gaddis’s novels, Joyce has been named most often. The first academic essay on The Recognitions was a detailed demonstration of the novel’s debt to Ulysses, “established in such minute detail,” Gaddis later joked, “I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses.”19 To this day the influence of Joyce is routinely assumed by many, despite several published denials by Gaddis. With justifiable impatience, he gave this emphatic answer to Joyce scholar Grace Eckley in 1975: I appreciate your interest in The Recognitions & have to tell you I’ve about reached the end of the line on questions about what I did or didn’t read of Joyce’s 30 years ago. All I read of Ulysses was Molly Bloom at the end which was being circulated for salacious rather than literary merits; No I did not read Finnegans Wake though I think a phrase about “psychoanaloosing” one’s self from it is in The Recognitions [183, 453]; Yes I read some of Dubliners but don’t recall how many & remember only a story called “Counterparts”; Yes I read a play called Exiles which I will limit myself to literary works, though it can be argued that nonfiction had a far greater influence on Gaddis’s outlook and themes; see his Letters for the deep impression made by such books as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Philip Toynbee’s Study of History, Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, Robert Graves’s White Goddess, books by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and so on. When writing his novels, Gaddis read more nonfiction than fiction. 19 The Letters of William Gaddis, ed. Steven Moore (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013), 278. Gaddis’s reference is to Bernard Benstock’s “On William Gaddis: In Recognition of James Joyce.” David Markson introduced Benstock to Gaddis in the early sixties; though impressed by R, Benstock felt that only by linking Gaddis to Joyce could he get his essay published. 18

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at the time I found highly unsuccessful; Yes I believe I read Portrait of an Artist but also think I may not have finished it; No I did not read commentary on Joyce’s work & absorb details without reading the original. I also read, & believe with a good deal more absorbtion, Eliot, Dostoevski, Forster, Rolfe, Waugh, why bother to go on, anyone seeking Joyce finds Joyce even if both Joyce & the victim found the item in Shakespear[e], read right past whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot &c, all which will probably go on so long as Joyce remains an academic cottage industry. (Letters 297)

Eliot and Dostoevsky are the most significant names here; none of Gaddis’s reviewers described The Recognitions as The Waste Land rewritten by Dostoevsky (with additional dialogue by Ronald Firbank), but that would be a more accurate description than the Ulysses parallel so many of them harped upon. Not only do Gaddis’s novels contain dozens of “whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot,” but The Recognitions can be read as an epic sermon using The Waste Land as its text. The novel employs the same techniques of reference, allusion, collage, multiple perspectives, and contrasting voices; the same kinds of fire and water imagery drawn from religion and myth, even from some of the same books; and both call for the same kinds of artistic, moral, and religious sensibilities. J R is not as Eliotic as the first novel, yet it too contains several quotations from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Hysteria,” The Waste Land, and Sweeney Agonistes, all done in different voices. Four Quartets, so important to the religious aura of The Recognitions that Gaddis at an early stage planned to weave every one of its lines into his text, is conspicuous in its absence in the profane world of J R and nearly invisible in the despairing one of Carpenter’s Gothic. Allusions to it and other Eliot poems resurface in A Frolic of His Own, where Judge Crease (speaking for Gaddis) refers to Eliot as “our finest poet of the century,”20 and near the end of Gaddis’s final and most personal novel—a last “raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating” (one of Gaddis’s favorite couplets from “East Coker”)—the narrator rejects the passive experience of listening to an orchestra in favor of an active one of participating in it: “what overwhelms the senses is Eliot’s ‘music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts,’”21 from the concluding section of “The Dry Salvages,” the third of Four Quartets. A Frolic of His Own (New York: Poseidon Press, 1994), 40; hereafter cited parenthetically and sometimes abbreviated FHO. Agapē Agape (2002; New York: Penguin, 2003), 91; hereafter cited parenthetically and sometimes abbreviated AA.

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Among novelists, Dostoevsky’s place is paramount.22 “How are we to write / The Russian novel in America? / As long as life goes so unterribly?” Robert Frost asked with uncharacteristic obtuseness in his poem “New Hampshire,” written around the time Gaddis was born. Life proved terrible enough by the 1950s to produce in The Recognitions the most “Russian” novel in American literature. Gaddis’s love for nineteenth-century Russian literature in general crops up in his novels, his letters, and in his few lectures, where references are made to the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (his plays as well as fiction), Gogol, Turgenev, Gorky, Goncharov, and Chekhov. Gaddis shares with these authors not only their metaphysical concerns and sometimes bizarre sense of humor (especially Gogol’s Dead Souls), but their nationalistic impulses as well. William H. Gass reported a talk of Gaddis’s in Lithuania in late 1985 where Gaddis insisted “he and the earlier Russian writers had the same target, and that he was attempting to save his vision of an acceptable country as they were endeavoring to redeem theirs.”23 Gaddis abandoned that missionary spirit shortly after, convinced his country was beyond help, but his love for Russian literature persisted. Agapē Agape especially abounds with references to Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. In each of his novels, moreover, Gaddis pursues what Edward Wasiolek has called “perhaps the most distinctive trait of Russian fiction, to trace out the extreme, but logically possible, reaches of a human characteristic.”24 Among western European writers, briefly, relevant works include ancient Greek drama, Dante, Sade’s Justine, Goethe’s Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther, Novalis, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, some Ibsen, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Broch’s Sleepwalkers, and Silone’s And He Hid Himself. Pirandello’s play Clothing the Naked influenced Gaddis’s conception of Esme in The Recognitions, but while he read Gide’s Counterfeiters when young, he later doubted it influenced his own novel about counterfeiting. In contrast, he read and admired Flaubert early in his career, and felt a closer affinity to him as he grew older, as his letters attest. Kafka’s The Castle is alluded to in J R, and Gaddis once admitted that when he first read Kafka in his twenties he was so stunned by what Kafka could do that he “sat down and wrote See Gaddis’s brief essay “Dostoevski’” in The Rush for Second Place, ed. Joseph Tabbi (New York: Penguin, 2002), 133–5 (and hereafter abbreviated RSP), written in 1996 for a German newspaper to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the Russian writer’s birth. “That man could do everything,” Gaddis said in one of his last interviews (with Paul Ingendaay). 23 “Some Snapshots from the Soviet Zone,” Kenyon Review 8.4 (Fall 1986): 15. 24 “Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilytch’ and Jamesian Fictional Imperatives,” in Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 154. 22

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some very bad Kafka, though I thought of it as good Kafka then.”25 He never read any Mann or Robbe-Grillet (though parallels have been noted) nor Proust’s vast novel beyond its “overture,” but he read Montherlant’s Bachelors and apparently The Girls trilogy. He kept up with some Middle European authors and, among Third World authors, spoke highly of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and, in Carpenter’s Gothic, quotes V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. The range of relevant British writers is much greater, extending from Langland’s Piers Plowman and the medieval passion play Harrowing of Hell through most of Shakespeare—As You Like It was his favorite—and other Elizabethan dramatists, Donne, Restoration and Augustan satirists, the major Victorians, to a number of twentieth-century writers. E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh, mentioned in the letter to Eckley, are discernible in Gaddis’s mordant social criticism and use of foreign locales in his first novel; he seems to have read and relished the bulk of these novelists’ work (especially Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a lifelong guide cited in A Frolic of His Own). “From Waugh I learned about economy,” Gaddis told interviewer Paul Ingendaay, “which sounds very odd from someone like me who writes a 900-page novel.” Frederick Rolfe’s name is as surprising as it is little known, but in the unique writings of the self-styled Baron Corvo can be found anticipations of the virulent satire, haughty elitism, and outlandish erudition so prevalent in The Recognitions. A more obvious influence is the work of Ronald Firbank, whose unexampled novels were enjoying a revival when Gaddis was at work on his first novel. From these witty, outrageous novels Gaddis may have learned how to use elliptical dialogue—especially for effects usually achieved in traditional exposition—and perhaps how to have campy fun at Catholicism’s expense. (Gaddis may have learned from other masters of the conversational novel, especially early Waugh and late Henry Green, but Firbank’s example is the most obvious.) Other British writers alluded to in Gaddis’s writings include Charlotte Brontë (whose Jane Eyre made it into Carpenter’s Gothic as a last-minute substitute for Lost Horizon, which James Hilton’s estate would not allow Gaddis to use), Butler’s Erewhon (see RSP 80–7) and The Way of All Flesh, much Conrad, some Wilde and Kipling, Norman Douglas’s South Wind, George Borrow’s nonfiction, C. M. Doughty and T. E. Lawrence’s classic books on Arabia, some Huxley and Maugham, much Robert Graves, and Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Among the poets, Browning, Tennyson, and Yeats are the most often quoted, after Eliot. Tomasz Mirkowicz and Marie-Rose Logan, “‘If You Bring Nothing to a Work … .’” The interview was conducted on June 26, 1981.

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Gaddis only belatedly read the British novel that most resembles The Recognitions: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), having earlier “found it coming both too close to home and too far from what I thought I was trying to do,” he told David Markson (Letters 237). But Lowry read Gaddis’s novel at Markson’s suggestion and, in a letter written to Markson shortly before his death, praised The Recognitions as “a veritable Katchenjunga, you know the mountain I mean anyhow, of a book, the ascent of some overhang of which can scarcely be made safely without the assistance, one feels, of both Tenzing and Aleister Crowley.”26 Despite his background in British and European literature, Gaddis was first and foremost an American writer working with traditional American themes. Two in particular stand out: the first is the theme of failure, a theme so prevalent that it can be overlooked, he writes, “only by overlooking the main body of American literature and the novelists who have been struggling with the bitter truths of conflict and failure in American life […]” (RSP 41). His reading list for his “Literature of Failure” classes at Bard consisted of such works as Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, Sinclair’s Jungle, Lewis’s Babbitt, Frost’s “Provide, Provide,” Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and later novels such as Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes.27 The theme of failure is one of the two most important themes in J R—both spelled out in the novel’s final line by J R himself as “success and like free enterprise”—and it is a thematic common denominator for all of Gaddis’s work. The vehicle Gaddis uses to convey this theme aligns him with another literary tradition, what D. H. Lawrence facetiously called “the great American grouch.”28 “Much of our fiction,” Gaddis declared in a 1986 address, going back well over a century, has been increasingly fueled by outrage or, at the least, by indignation. Curiously enough, this is often coupled with and even springs from the writer’s perennially naive notion that through calling attention to inequalities and abuses, hypocrisies and patent frauds, self-deceiving attitudes and self-defeating policies, Quoted in full in Letters, 239. Jonathan Raban used a similar image in his excellent review of FHO: “Scaling The Recognitions and J R, one keeps coming on the remains of earlier readers who lost their footing and perished in the ascent” (rpt. in Bloom’s William Gaddis, 163). 27 Among the nonfiction he used are James’s Pragmatism, Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought, Riesman’s Lonely Crowd, and Holt’s How Children Fail. For other titles, see the reproduction of Gaddis’s 1979 reading list in Review of Contemporary Fiction 31.1 (Spring 2011): 117. 28 Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; New York: Viking, 1964), 47. 26

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these will be promptly corrected by a grateful public; but the state is the public’s fiction, and gratitude is not its most prominent attribute. (RSP 123)

Satire intended to be as edifying as it is caustic is an American staple going back to the first big novel in its literature, Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792–1815). Gaddis probably didn’t know that work, but he did know the work of a good many later American satirists: Hawthorne (he read The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance, but not The Marble Faun, as has been suggested), Melville (Moby-Dick, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Pierre—or as much of it as he could stand [see AA 51]—and Billy Budd, but he never finished The Confidence-Man), some Emerson (mostly at second hand), Thoreau’s Walden,29 Crane’s Maggie and a few stories, Norris’s McTeague, Nathanael West, Cummings, and among his contemporaries, Heller, early Burroughs, and later Elkin. Chief among these satirists is Mark Twain, whose work he knew well, both the fiction and nonfiction. Gaddis regarded him as “the quintessential writer, really, both his work and his intransigence and his dark, late days, as a man, his whole career,” and praised him at length in interviews.30 Like Twain, Gaddis regarded himself primarily as a comic novelist, and like his predecessor, he became increasingly bitter and misanthropic in his later years. Other American writers, not necessarily Lawrence’s grouches, that Gaddis read include Djuna Barnes (her stories as well as Nightwood), Faulkner (only The Sound and the Fury and a few stories, he confessed), and like every writer of his generation, Hemingway. He seemed to have little interest in the novels of those contemporaries with whom he is most often associated (though he socialized with many of them): John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo (though he did like Libra), John Hawkes, David Markson, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pynchon, Gilbert Sorrentino, Kurt Vonnegut—many of whom admired his work. William H. Gass was an exception, whom he admired both personally and professionally. Instead, he seemed to prefer more traditional fiction over the kind of novels he himself wrote—perhaps because he considered his work more traditional than his critics do. He never finished Lolita or The Sot-Weed Factor (both on stylistic grounds) but alludes to Capote’s and Styron’s first novels in his work, and he recommended the work of such novelists as Cynthia Buchanan, See Tyree’s essay listed in bibliography for a brilliant investigation into Thoreau’s role in Gaddis’s work. 30 The quotation is from a 1988 interview conducted by Freddy de Vree for Belgian radio. Gaddis talks about Twain at length in his interview with Tom Smith on “The Book Show,” December 21, 1993, which Christopher Knight discovered, transcribed, and shared with me. 29

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Joy Williams, James Salter, Fernanda Eberstadt, and Stephen Wright. Saul Bellow’s novels were old favorites, and More Die of Heartbreak elicited from Gaddis his first book review since his Lampoon days (see RSP 73–9). In general he was more likely to pick up a novel like Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (which he found “very funny”) than novels as challenging as his own. But to conclude the question of influences, it is worth quoting Gaddis’s response to a query whether he thought Pynchon might have been influenced by him: “I haven’t read Pynchon enough to have an opinion either of his work or whether it might have been ‘influenced’ (perilous word) by mine, though I’ve understood he feels not & who’s to know if he’d ever read mine before V? Always a dangerous course.” (Letters 380)

Intentions The question of intentions is as dangerous a course to pursue as that of influences—some theorists argue that an author’s intentions are unknowable and/ or irrelevant, and warn against committing “the intentional fallacy”—but Gaddis’s intentions have likewise been too often misjudged to leave them unexamined. In one of his essays Edward Hoagland suggests “writers can be categorized by many criteria, one of which is whether they prefer subject matter that they rejoice in or subject matter they deplore and wish to savage with ironies.”31 Gaddis clearly belongs in the second camp, to the tradition of vitriolic satire fueled by moral indignation that goes back through the American writers named earlier to the great Augustan satirists of the eighteenth century, back through Voltaire, Ben Jonson, and the bitterly satirical Shakespeare of Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens (even King Lear), back finally to such Roman satirists as Juvenal and Persius. Yet charges of nihilism and pessimism have dogged Gaddis from his earliest novel by those who feel, as a reviewer of The Recognitions put it, his work is not based “on any but a narrow and jaundiced view, a projection of private discontent.”32 Such narrow and jaundiced views have been aired by those apparently unaware that satire is primarily a constructive, rather than destructive, artistic strategy, one that has as its quixotic goal the rejuvenation of society, not its ruin. Alexander Pope, for example, felt the satirist had a moral obligation to expose the faults of his society so that the necessary corrections could be made, and the same idealistic motivation spurred the Russian novelists Gaddis admired. Gaddis belongs to the company of “salutary The Courage of Turtles (New York: Random House, 1970), 160. Rugoff, 6—and quoted on p. 515 of J R.

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assassins,” as Gilbert Sorrentino placed him,33 and his first two novels can be read, in one sense at least, as crusades: in The Recognitions, against fraudulence and fakery at all levels (artistic, religious, intellectual, moral, etc.); in J R, against the abuses of capitalism, newfangled pedagogy, mechanization, and the farcical notion of corporate “democracy.” Like all satirists, Gaddis relies on humor to achieve his goals, encouraging the reader to laugh away the pretensions of all those he holds up to ridicule. The comic element in Gaddis’s work, however, has been consistently underrated. Instead, undue weight has been placed on Gaddis’s alleged negativity, much to the novels’ disadvantage. In 1981 he addressed this charge in his Mirkowicz/Logan interview with an answer that deserves to be quoted in full. Asked if he considered his novels “apocalyptic,” Gaddis replied: You mean looking to a bad end? I don’t know. A couple of reviews said about J R that everything in it is so negative, so bad, the artist is devoured by the business community, but I didn’t see it that way at all, I saw it in a much more positive light. In both books this community does very much represent reality, the life which is going on, what one has to deal with. This is the outer demand, while what the artist does is from the inner demand. So that collision of the outer and inner demand is what it’s all about. Many people have no inner demand, like J R. He is eleven years old, he is undeveloped, he has got nothing inside. The only values he knows are the ones he sees around him, which are: get ahead, succeed, make money, and so on. At the end, even though he has been put out of business, destroyed, he is still ready to go again and is looking for some new way to do it. He hasn’t learned anything.34 Whereas Bast, the composer, who at the beginning has these fantasies of composing a grand opera at twenty, then, colliding with reality, with the material– success–junk aspect of America, sees that he has to modify his demands. He spends 700 pages colliding with this world, and his ambitions go from a grand opera to a cantata, then he takes out the voices so he can write a suite, and finally there he is trying to write a solo piece for cello. But as he says at the end, “I’ve been making other people’s mistakes, now I’m going to make my own mistakes.” So he has in a way been purified, he has gone through the purgatory of material craziness, and now he says, “I’ve had it, now I’m going to do what I want to do!” That to me isn’t a negative message at all. If you get that one positive thread it is all one can hope for, because the world isn’t that friendly a place, really. Something Said (1984; expanded edition, Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), 209. See also Sorrentino’s perceptive review of J R in the same volume (180–3). 34 To see how little J R learned, see Gaddis’s sardonic “J R Up to Date” (1987; RSP 63–71). 33

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In The Recognitions you have a similar theme. When Wyatt starts out he is not a genius, but he is a very talented painter. But he has had a bad start with the critics and, disappointed, he turns to forgery, which is to say involvement with the material–money–junk world.35 But he comes out and at the end he is ready to start again. That is not negative at all. We live in a world of negative forces, but the message in both books is for me a very positive one. This eludes many readers who say that they’ve never read anything so depressing in their lives. Well, it’s enough to look around: bad things are there, you know. People ask, why don’t I write nice books about happy people. But what do you say about happy people.

That was in 1981, when Gaddis was at an early stage of writing Carpenter’s Gothic. Although that too could be described as a crusade against fundamentalism, sensationalist journalism, and every form of stupidity, the charges of pessimism have some validity from this novel onward. A positive message is conspicuously absent in his final three novels, even though (to quote again from Aldridge’s review of J R) Gaddis’s “awareness of what is human and sensible is always present behind his depiction of how far we have fallen from humanity and sense” (30). Asked shortly after the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic, “If your work could have a positive social/political effect, what would you want it to be?” Gaddis answered, “Obviously quite the opposite to what the work portrays” (Berkley interview). But Gaddis’s own outlook seems identical to that of McCandless, who reads his fate in a book he takes down from his shelf (Naipaul’s Mimic Men): “A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connexion between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right” (150, italicized in text). A vision of order had sustained Gaddis through his first two carnivals of disorder, but the final three novels project a vision of disorder as bleak as Pope’s at the end of his Dunciad, one that seems to proceed, as the narrator of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” puts it, “from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill.” Together, Gaddis’s five novels constitute one of the most searching critiques of “what America is all about,” a phrase that recurs regularly from J R onward. Gaddis, like Hawthorne and Melville before him, is the leading modern exemplar in American literature of what Leslie Fiedler would call a “tragic Humanist,” a writer “whose duty is to say ‘Nay!’, to deny the easy It is remarkable how closely this anticipated Gaddis’s own career: he too had a bad start with the critics and, disappointed, turned to publicity and corporate writing, “which is to say involvement with the material–money–junk world.”

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affirmations by which most men live, and to expose the blackness of life most men try deliberately to ignore. For tragic Humanists, it is the function of art not to console or sustain, much less entertain, but to disturb by telling a truth which is always unwelcome.”36 Like Twain in his final years, Gaddis continued to entertain as his pessimism deepened, but he gave up his crusader role for the one expressed by Judge Crease in Gaddis’s penultimate novel: “the artist comes among us not as the bearer of idées reçues embracing art as decoration or of the comfort of churchly beliefs enshrined in greeting card sentiments but rather in the aesthetic equivalent of one who comes on earth ‘not to send peace, but a sword’” (39).

Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. edn. (1966; Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 432.

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The Recognitions: Myth, Magic, and Metaphor

The length of three or four average novels, The Recognitions is many novels in one: a social satire, a pilgrim’s progress, an anatomy of forgery, both a bildungsroman and kunstlerroman (not to mention a roman à clef), a philosophical romance, even a mystery story. Similarly, it is narrated from not one but several points of view and in as many styles. Wyatt could be speaking for Gaddis when he boasts of his latest forgery, “—There isn’t any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there … I take five or six or ten … the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can’t include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes” (251). The first-time reader of The Recognitions faces a similar challenge. Ranging across three continents and three decades, evoking 4,000 years of cultural history, speaking half a dozen languages, and drawing upon fields of reference as diverse as alchemy, witchcraft, art history, mummification, medical history, hagiography, mythology, anthropology, astronomy, and metaphysics, The Recognitions threatens to overwhelm the hapless reader, who may be tempted to cry out with Wyatt, “—But the discipline, the detail, it’s just … sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear” (114). “—How ambitious you are!” his wife Esther responds, and it was Gaddis’s ambition in this first novel to do no less than to excavate the very foundations of Western civilization, to expose to the harsh light of satire the origins of its religions, social structures, epistemologies, sexual ideologies, and its art forms. To do so, he created a protagonist whose difficulty assimilating his cultural/religious heritage and achieving a state of psychic wholeness would parallel the rocky road civilization itself has traveled toward that illusory goal. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and in Wyatt Gwyon’s indecisions and difficulties we have a microcosm of the macrocosmic conflicts throughout history between patriarchy and matriarchy, God and Mammon, religion and the occult, the demands of the community and the imperatives of the self.

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“The most sensitive individual, although not the most normal,” Stephen Spender writes of Malcolm Lowry’s Consul, “may provide the most representative expression of a breakdown which affects other people on levels of which they may be scarcely conscious.”1 The breakdown in question, in The Recognitions as in Under the Volcano, is that of values, morals, standards. Gaddis’s novel is primarily an account of personal integration amid this collective disintegration, of an individual finding himself in a society rapidly losing itself. In stark contrast to the dozens of other characters in The Recognitions who are indifferent to (when not the cause of) any breakdown in values, Wyatt is tortured by personal and ethical concerns that strike others as chimerical. “—The boundaries between good and evil must be defined again,” Esther taunts him, echoing words Wyatt had used earlier, “they must be reestablished, that’s what a man must do today, isn’t it?” But Wyatt insists, “—this moral action, it isn’t just talk and … words, morality isn’t just theory and ideas, that the only way to reality is this moral sense” (590–1). Wyatt’s pursuit of “reality” is conducted primarily on a metaphysical plane. All religions and occult traditions have at their base a belief in another, higher reality that transcends sensory reality, and Wyatt—like every true mystic, alchemist, and magician before him—searches for a window on that transcendent state where suddenly “—everything [is] freed into one recognition, really freed into the reality that we never see” (92). Traditionally, this other reality (which “you can’t see freely very often, hardly ever, maybe seven times in a life”) has been literalized into such forms as a supercelestial heaven or a subterranean hell. But Wyatt is as convinced as Melville’s Ahab that all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks, and the novel dramatizes his progress through institutional religion and the jejune theatricality of the occult, past the realms conquered and codified by overconfident scientists, to the timeless state beyond the reach of those who would make of God a science, or of science a god. This ineffable state resists description and accounts to some extant for the vagueness of Wyatt’s final appearances and cryptic utterances; as Kafka told Max Brod, “You can’t write salvation, only live it.”2 This needs to be stated at the outset in order to make sense of the novel’s complex matrix of allusions, references, iconography, and iterative imagery. For even though the novel addresses timely questions regarding the artist’s place in the modern world—the one aspect of The Recognitions that has attracted the most critical attention—at its widest perimeters the novel is an Introduction, Under the Volcano (New York: Lippincott, 1965), xi–xii. Kafka’s reaction to Tolstoy’s Resurrection, quoted in Ronald Hayman’s Kafka: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 255.

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encyclopedic survey of the varieties of religious experience. In one sense, all of the novel’s major characters can be grouped into those “having, or about to have, or at the very least valiantly fighting off, a religious experience” (900), with the majority falling into the third category. Religious and mythic parallels and parodies, from the sublime to the blasphemous, abound in the novel. Not only does The Recognitions make extensive use of the primary colors of mythology’s palette—sun and moon imagery, the infernal descent, death and rebirth motifs—but Wyatt’s symbolic voyage from spiritual darkness to enlightenment follows (by way of quotation and allusion) in the wakes of such metaphysical wanderers as Odysseus, the Flying Dutchman, Faust, and Peer Gynt. Some indication of the scope of Gaddis’s preoccupation with religion in this novel can be gleaned from the range of sources he used in its composition: from the fourth-century theological novel wrongly attributed to Saint Clement from which The Recognitions takes its name, to the Apocryphal New Testament, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, the Pilgrim Hymnal, Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Phythian-Adams’s Mithraism, Lang’s Magic and Religion, Legge’s Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, Conybeare’s Magic, Myth, and Morals, Marsh’s Mediæval and Modern Saints and Miracles, Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Summers’s Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, Graves’s White Goddess, Hughes’s Witchcraft, and Saltus’s survey of atheism, The Anatomy of Negation. In addition, there are more than a hundred citations to the Bible as well as references to almost every major religious and occult tradition, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Druidic practices to the writings of the early Church fathers, the Quran, legends of Krishna and the Buddha, Gnostic speculations, Mithraic hymns, Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, hermetic alchemy, a calendar’s worth of saints’ lives, Christian Science, Fortean hypotheses, magic numbers, Zuñi prayer sticks, excommunication rites (both Catholic and Jewish), even a Satanic invocation.3 All this led some reviewers to complain that the novel was “shrouded in mysticism” and filled with “pagan mumbo-jumbo.”4 But Gaddis is not merely indulging in arcane name-dropping; like art, religion is subject to decay and counterfeit, and Wyatt’s obsession with authentic art is inextricably bound up with his obsession with authentic religious experience. In Documentation of Gaddis’s use of all these sources can be found in my Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions” (1982), online with new material at the Gaddis Annotations website. Gaddis’s initial inspiration to enrich his narrative with erudite references and allusions may have been Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land, which name some of the same books (Frazer, Weston). 4 See “the erudition cliché” section of Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!, 52–6. 3

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both realms, the genuine must be distinguished from the fake. Institutional religion receives little serious consideration in the novel, dismissed out of hand as an amateurish forgery or a poorly printed reproduction. Esme tells Otto that Wyatt once said “that saints were counterfeits of Christ, and that Christ was a counterfeit of God” (483), and most conventional forms of religion are ridiculed mercilessly in the novel. (Here, of course, Gaddis parts ways with Eliot, whose preoccupation with religion he otherwise shares.) Instead Wyatt finds in myth, magic, and mysticism a more authentic religious tradition, “religious that is in the sense of devotion, adoration, celebration of deity, before religion became confused with systems of ethics and morality, to become a sore affliction upon the very things it had once exalted” (311)—an attitude closer to the Pound of the later Cantos than to the Eliot of Four Quartets. But the novel does not merely advocate a retreat from rational religion to irrational mysticism, or dropping a rosary to pick up a Buddhist prayer wheel. The Recognitions does have its supernatural moments, but its immense network of references to myth, religion, and the occult is deployed chiefly for psychological purposes. Carl Jung found in such spiritual traditions the validation needed for his theories of the process of individuation, and Gaddis’s documented reliance on Jung’s Integration of the Personality—a psychological commentary on alchemical symbolism—allows the reader to interpret Wyatt’s “wild conflict” (247) in terms of the quest for psychic wholeness that Jung insists is at the heart of all mystical traditions. With Jung supplying the Ariadne’s thread, readers can make their way through Gaddis’s labyrinth of magic and myth with results that are as surprising as they are enlightening, perhaps even allowing The Recognitions itself to function as a heuristic, symbolic text in the tradition of alchemical tracts, and allowing Gaddis to succeed Melville as an “heir to the protestant tradition of New England, parodying with astonishing provincial vigour the old emblematic discourses of a Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards.”5 Gaddis accomplishes this by narrating Wyatt’s career on two parallel planes, the realistic and the mythic. The realistic concerns “a lonely little boy, getting upset over silly people” (118). Losing his mother at an early age, Wyatt is reared in New England by a distant father and mostly by a dour Calvinist aunt who discourages his talent for drawing in favor of a career in the ministry. Wyatt dutifully pursues the latter while secretly practicing the former, and after a year at divinity school sneaks off to Europe to study painting. Indifferent to the prevailing fashions in the art world of the 1930s, Wyatt works in the tradition of the Flemish painters of the late Middle Harold Beaver, introduction to Melville’s Moby-Dick (New York: Penguin, 1972), 26.

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Ages, but he allows an unsettling encounter with a corrupt art critic to discourage him from continuing his art. Drifting into a sterile marriage and a dull draftsman’s job in New York City, Wyatt lets his artistic talents go to waste until art dealer Recktall Brown, discovering him in the depths of despair, tempts him away to forge Flemish paintings that his associate, Basil Valentine, will authenticate in the art journals—with all three enjoying the profits. Increasingly prey to guilt and thoughts of damnation, however, Wyatt later decides to forsake forgery and resume his studies for the ministry, a desperate act that fails when he returns home to find his father deranged. He extricates himself from his counterfeiting ring only after witnessing Brown’s death and causing Valentine’s (or so he thinks), after which he flees to Spain, where his mother is buried. Drifting through Spain and North Africa, he winds up in a monastery in Estremadura where he is finally able to free himself from the feelings of guilt, loneliness, and depression that had been accumulating since childhood. Whether he resumes his art or simply returns to his Spanish lover to raise their child are possibilities suggested but not confirmed as Wyatt, now called Stephen (as his mother first intended), resumes his journey, with the monastery bells ringing him on.6 On the mythic plane, however, Wyatt’s career adapts several models: he is an adept of hermetic alchemy, a Faust figure, a modern saint, the priest in the ancient cult–ritual of the White Goddess and her Son, the Wandering Jew/Flying Dutchman archetype, a near-victim in the sacrificial killing of the royal son, a Christ figure, Dante and Orpheus in the underworld, even the New Year Robin out to kill his father the Wren. In this respect, Gaddis does indeed resemble Joyce: by “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,” Eliot felt Joyce had found “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”7 Gaddis pursues the same mythical method with equally intriguing results.

For a detailed plot synopsis, see pp. 29–48 of my Reader’s Guide. I was with Gaddis in 1985 when someone asked him how to pronounce “Gwyon,” and he said that until then he had never thought of it or said it aloud. In a 1988 interview, Gaddis pronounced it gwine, one syllable rhyming with “wine,” though the Welsh name should probably be pronounced gwin (cf. the modern surname Gwynne). 7 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 177. 6

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Masks and Mirrors “Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades,” The Recognitions begins, “of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.” But Gaddis is chiefly concerned with masquerades of the dangerous sort, where the mask has presumed itself as reality for so long that “reality,” as Nabokov remarked, requires apologetic quotes. “—It’s like a masquerade isn’t it,” Herschel exclaims during the novel’s first party scene; “—I feel so naked, don’t you? among all these frightfully masked people. Remember? de Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant of course, writing to that Russian girl, ‘I mask myself among masked people’” (177). Herschel, however, is one of the few in the novel who can still recognize a mask when he sees one; the rest have grown so used to theirs that only an accidental glimpse in the mirror can recall them to themselves. Masks and mirrors dominate the novel’s iconography and carry the psychological values Jung assigned to them in The Integration of the Personality: “The man who looks into the mirror of the waters does, indeed, see his own face first of all. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.”8 Wyatt, “that most dubious mirror-gazer of our acquaintance,” is shown throughout the novel troubled by “the intimacies of catoptric communion” (673), avoiding the confrontation with himself Jung warns of. For others merely a confirmation of what they want to see, the mirror for Wyatt shows that authentic self he hasn’t the strength to become, partially because of unresolved familial conflicts. “—They are mirrors with terrible memories,” Esme says of the ones in Wyatt’s studio, “—and they know, they know, and they tell him these terrible things and then they trap him” (221). The most terrible things they tell him are that he has dishonored his mother and wants to kill his father. Wyatt is painfully aware of the first charge, and admits as much; speaking of Camilla’s face in his forged Stabat Mater, Wyatt agrees with Valentine’s interpretation: “—Yes, the reproach! That’s it, you understand?” (548). But the Oedipal conflict emerges only with close attention to the novel’s avian symbolism, submerged in the text just as the conflict is submerged in Wyatt’s unconscious. Gaddis learned from Robert Graves that “in British folklore, the Robin Red Breast as the The Integration of the Personality, trans. Stanley M. Dell (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), 69.

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Spirit of the New Year sets out with a birch-rod to kill his predecessor the Gold Crest Wren, the Spirit of the Old Year, whom he finds hiding in an ivy bush. […] The robin is said to ‘murder its father,’ which accounts for its red breast.”9 Elsewhere, Graves identifies the Welsh Arianrhod (one of his White Goddesses) as “the mother of the usual Divine Fish-Child Dylan who, after killing the usual Wren (as the New Year Robin does on St Stephen’s Day) becomes Llew Llaw Gyffes,” a Welsh hero with whom Wyatt associates himself (545). “The child Llew Llaw’s exact aim was praised by his mother Arianrhod because as the New Year Robin, alias Belin, he transfixed his father the Wren, alias Bran to whom the wren was sacred, ‘between the sinew and the bone’ of his leg” in the manner of the Roman ritual of crucifixion.10 Wyatt is associated with the robin both via Llew Llaw and by way of his first work of art, the crude drawing of a robin so severely criticized by Aunt May. The young boy had killed a wren not on Saint Stephen’s Day—though his use of a stone recalls the stoning of this proto-martyr, after whom Wyatt was intended to be named—but, significantly, on his mother’s birthday (32). Too guilty at the time to confess the “murder,” he blurts it out during his illness a few years later, to which his befuddled father responds with anthropological lore from Frazer’s Golden Bough (47), indicating he is clearly aware of the symbolic implications of his son’s patricidal act. When the older Wyatt returns to his father in II.3 a few days before Christmas, the sight of a wren reminds him of his earlier transgression: —I’ll go out like the early Christian missionaries did at Christmas, to hunt down the wren and kill him, yes, when the wren was king, do you remember, you told me … When the wren was king, he repeated, getting his breath again, —at Christmas. The wren had flown, as he turned from the window and approached with burning green eyes fixed on Gwyon. —King, yes, he repeated, —when the king was slain and eaten, there’s sacrament. There’s sacrament. (430)

Wyatt’s eyes had burned green at his first confession of killing the wren as a child (47), and the repetition of this sign of anger during his return (his second coming, as the religious-minded servant Janet interprets it) follows Wyatt’s ominous quotation of Matthew 10:21: “and the children shall rise up The White Goddess (New York: Creative Age Press, 1948), 154. The quotation that follows is on p. 76. 10 Ibid., 261. When Wyatt examines the dead Recktall Brown he seizes the exposed ankle, seeking a pulse, and mutters, “—Yes, there’s where they nailed the wren, there’s where they nailed up …” (683). “—He was so kind and fatherly” Wyatt said earlier with drunken sentimentality (376), indicating Brown too acts in Wyatt’s Oedipal drama. 9

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against their parents, and cause them to be put to death” (430). The anger directed at Revd. Gwyon apparently springs from an unarticulated suspicion on Wyatt’s part that his father was somehow responsible for his mother’s death. All the young boy knew was that his father left for Spain with his mother but returned alone, and although the older Wyatt has learned the story of “the Spanish affair” (as his father calls it), the suspicion joins the other terrible things in the mirror. Wyatt is also acting in self-defense. Revd. Gwyon broods over the chapter “The Sacrifice of the King’s Son” in Frazer’s Golden Bough (23), and Aunt May relentlessly indoctrinates Wyatt with a religion that centers on a father’s deliberate sacrifice of his only begotten son. (The father’s threat is symbolized by the straight-edged razor Wyatt takes from his father when he leaves for Europe; Esther recognizes it as a castrating symbol [90], and Anselm will later steal it for that exact purpose.) Wyatt’s unconscious fears of death and/ or castration at his father’s hands surface for the last time when the Reverend Gwyon threatens to initiate him into the priesthood of Mithras, to whom the deranged minister is now devoted: “—Yes, at my hands, Gwyon said looking at him steadily, —you must die at the hands of the Pater Patratus, like all initiates” (432). Wyatt flees, but not without incurring additional guilt. Telling Valentine afterward of his trip home, Wyatt says, “—I fell in the snow, killing wrens” (545); and by abandoning his deranged father Wyatt can be held indirectly responsible for his confinement and eventual crucifixion in II.9, just as Llew Llaw the robin symbolically crucified his father the wren. The recurring references to the robin/wren conflict, to the killing of the king (“—My father was a king,” Wyatt/Stephen tells Ludy near the end of the novel [892]), to the various myths of “the god killed, eaten, and resurrected” (536), to Wyatt’s use of his father’s face in his early Memling imitation of The Flaying of the Unjust Judge, and to the significant juxtaposition of symbolically killing his father on his mother’s birthday—all point to a classic case of the Oedipus complex. By finally “eating” his father in III.5—Revd. Gwyon’s ashes were sent to a Spanish monastery and accidentally baked into the bread—the sacrificial act is complete, and by allowing his father’s painted face to drop on the ground unheeded (896), the conflict is resolved, the terrible voices from the mirror silenced at last. Frazer follows his account of mirror superstitions (on which Gaddis drew) with similar superstitions surrounding portraits, which “are often believed to contain the soul of the person portrayed.”11 Most of the novel’s major characters have their likenesses, if not their souls, captured on canvas or are compared to paintings. The Reverend Gwyon, as noted above, is The Golden Bough, abridged edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 193.

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flayed as the unjust judge in Wyatt’s apprentice painting; Esther resembles “the portrait of a woman with large bones in her face but an unprominent nose” that her husband restores (88); Recktall Brown’s ludicrous portrait is subjected to repeated ridicule; Anselm and Stanley resemble Käthe Kollwitz’s print of two prisoners listening to music (524); Esme not only “looks like she thinks she is a painting. Like an oil you’re not supposed to get too close to” (147) but models as the Virgin Mary in Wyatt’s forgeries, with Wyatt taking the role of Christ crucified, as the Son mourned over by the Mother. “Such pictures seem to have, for the patient, a psychological magic,” Jung writes of a patient who likewise used painting as a means of attaining individuation. “Because pictorial expression fixes certain unconscious contents and draws others around it, he can work magic by this means, but only upon himself ” (34). Wyatt’s conscious, aesthetic conflicts with art have been treated elsewhere in Gaddis criticism,12 but to comprehend his unconscious conflicts further, and the importance of his mother’s appearances in her son’s paintings, another pattern of mythic imagery must be unraveled.

A Fluctuating between Sun and Moon In choosing to open the novel with Camilla’s funeral, Gaddis draws attention to the character who makes the fewest appearances in the novel but nevertheless exerts the strongest influence on Wyatt: his mother. In fact, her only appearance in the temporal progression of the novel (thus excluding the flashbacks on pages 14 and 52) is as a wraith, appearing before threeyear-old Wyatt at the moment of her death at sea (20). The ability to see the ghost of one’s mother, says Aniela Jaffé in her Jungian study Apparitions and Precognition, “indicate[s] an intensified unconscious, or a relatively easy and rapid lowering of the threshold of consciousness,” and “points to a close relation with the unconscious, that is, a rootedness in the instinctual life,” for “we must not forget that the ‘mother’ is a long established symbol for the unconscious.”13 Wyatt can see her, but Camilla vanishes upon Aunt May’s entrance—just as the robin flees before her (40)—that is, before that which denies the unconscious, the instinctual, the emotional, and of course the irrational, thereby setting into motion a dichotomy active throughout See especially Joseph S. Salemi’s “To Soar in Atonement: Art as Expatiation in Gaddis’s The Recognitions” and Christopher Knight’s “Flemish Art and Wyatt’s Quest for Redemption in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions,” both reprinted in Kuehl and Moore’s In Recognition of William Gaddis, as well as Chap. 1 of Knight’s Hints and Guesses. 13 Apparitions and Precognition (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1963), 154, 32, 31–2. 12

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the novel: the opposition between the unconscious and conscious, mother and father, instinct and intellect, emotion and rationality, night and day, paganism and Christianity, and so on. Warped by Aunt May’s influence and only confused by his father’s, Wyatt will thereafter vacillate between two extremes represented by father and mother, like Wallace Stevens’s Crispin voyaging “between two elements, / A fluctuating between sun and moon,”14 until he learns that one extreme is not to be privileged over the other, but that the best qualities of each are to be integrated within. This skeletal psychological program obviously needs fleshing out. The necessity of integrating the conscious and unconscious is not a modern discovery but is rather of ancient provenance with a rich and exotic history. It is at the heart of such unusual disciplines as alchemy, witchcraft, Gnosticism, “true” poetry (as Robert Graves defines it in The White Goddess), and other assorted heresies, all of which can be found in the crowded first chapter of The Recognitions. Before the existence of the unconscious was posited by modern psychologists, its function was expressed in other terms by those who realized there is more to perception than what ordinary daylight consciousness allows. Most Platonic and Eastern philosophies, all occult traditions, and the mystical branches of institutional religions speak of this alternative consciousness, and countless are the ways adepts have sought to tap its unique powers. The most universal symbols for these two modes of consciousness have been the sun and moon; associated with the sun are the so-called masculine traits of rationality, intellectualism, order, separation, logic, etc.; the opposing “feminine” traits belong to the moon: intuition, emotions, tenderness, harmony, and so forth. It has become common, therefore, to speak of the opposition of solar consciousness and lunar consciousness: most intellectual activities and institutional religions employ solar consciousness, whereas most mystical and occult traditions, as well as artistic creation, pay homage to the moon. Nietzsche spoke of the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian energies, and twentiethcentury discussions have focused on the operations of the two hemispheres of the brain, the left half embodying the traditional masculine traits and the right the feminine. Though this line of investigation may eventually give greater psychological precision to the question, it is still useful to speak of solar and lunar consciousness because of its rich symbolic heritage, and all the more so because the most consistent and obvious pattern of imagery in The Recognitions is the symbolic equation of Revd Gwyon with the sun and Camilla with the moon. Making the equation early in the first chapter, “The Comedian as the Letter C,” in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 28.

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Gaddis proceeds to draw upon the immense religious and mythological connotations of the sun and moon, effectively enlarging Wyatt’s personal struggle for psychic wholeness to universal proportions by employing archetypal images that have influenced civilization, largely by way of religion, from the beginning of recorded history. The ubiquity of solar and lunar imagery in the novel not only converts even atmospheric conditions into telling indications of Wyatt’s psychological state, but also illuminates and justifies other patterns of arcane imagery and sundry references that otherwise might seem superfluous. The symbolic alignment of the sun with Revd. Gwyon is introduced and maintained chiefly by his involvement with Mithraism, a Persian predecessor and early rival of Christianity, in which the godhead was represented by Sol Invictus, the Invincible Sun. As early as page 8 the reader is informed, with the ironic foreshadowing so common with Gaddis, that at his seminary Gwyon “started the course in mithridatism which was to serve him so well in his later years.” We also learn that before he returned to New England after Camilla’s funeral he visited the Mithraic temple beneath the basilica at Saint Clement’s in Rome (which Gaddis himself eventually visited in 1984). Gwyon had squared his shoulders upon “coming forth from the subterranean Mithraeum” (61), convinced Christianity was a forgery of Mithraism, and dedicated himself thereafter not to the Son, but to the Sun. But before doing so he too receives a supernatural visit from Camilla, where she is symbolically equated with the moon for the first time. At the Real Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Otra Vez some two months after his wife’s death, he falls ill and develops a delirium: So he lay alone one evening, perspiring in spite of the cold, almost asleep to be wakened suddenly by the hand of his wife, on his shoulder as she used to wake him. He struggled up from the alcove bed, across the room to the window where a cold light silently echoed passage. There was the moon, reaching a still arm behind him, to the bed where he had lain. He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion. (11–12)

Revd. Gwyon too, then, is offered “passage” to lunar consciousness, but squanders his opportunity. Upon recovering, he resolves to forsake the bleak Christianity of his puritanical community to search for “persistent pattern, and significant form” (15), which he hopes to find in the study of comparative religion. It is enough, he seems to think, to break from the Calvinist tradition of Aunt May and her inane Use-Me Ladies and to regale

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his congregation with pagan parallels to their Christianity. But as regards Camilla, he can only hope there will be time (a frequent Prufrockian refrain in the text), and postpones the recovery of what he has lost until its recovery is finally beyond reach. What both he and his son lose in Camilla is the key to the feminine component of the male psyche, what Jung calls the anima. Revd. Gwyon married late in life and only after his own father died (14), suggesting his own upbringing was as stringent as Wyatt’s is under Aunt May—a paternal relative, be it noted. That Camilla was antithetical to the repressed life of that patriarchal environment is seen in the two flashbacks in which she appears. In both instances she is portrayed as vital, impulsive, daring, but most of all nourishing: when Camilla noticed her father had mounted the wallpaper upside down, “she threw her arms over his crooked shoulders and thanked him, and never told him” (52). Aunt May or Esther would have pointed out the error immediately. After Camilla’s death, however, Revd. Gwyon seems powerless to recoup his losses; he does not consider remarrying—perhaps in obedience to the Mithraic injunction against marrying more than once—and instead buries himself in his studies, apparently feeling things can be set aright if only he can expose Christianity’s imposture to his congregation. (Similarly, Wyatt will later assume he can redeem his misdeeds by exposing his forgeries at Brown’s party; in both cases, the unenlightened prefer to remain so—a tendency McCandless rails against in Carpenter’s Gothic.) The Reverend’s studies at this time focus on the discovery and exposure of antecedents and parallels to Christianity. But he remains impervious to the spiritual nourishment others have found in these same pre-Christian religious traditions. His preoccupation with the “accidents” of religion at the expense of its “substance” (to use, as Gaddis does, the terminology of the Mass) is the same fault, incidentally, that Wittgenstein found with Frazer, on whom Gwyon relies for much of his material. “What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer!” the Austrian philosopher complained. “And as a result: how impossible for him to understand a different way of life from the English one of his time!”15 An apposite example is Revd. Gwyon’s references to the ancient ritual of “drawing down the moon”; his interest in the rite is confined to the lurid pagan light it sheds on Matthew 16:19, reducing Jesus to the level of a Thessalian witch.16 But this rite, still in use by Wiccans today, Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” trans. A. C. Miles (Retford: Brynmill, 1979), 5e. Revd. Gwyon refers to “Thessalonian” witches, but as a classical scholar, he would not have made that error. One of Gaddis’s sources confused Thessaly, an alleged hotbed of witchcraft, for Thessalonica, and Gaddis repeated the error: see the annotation to 28.15 in the online version of my Reader’s Guide.

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is actually a meditative exercise to enlarge lunar consciousness, “to pull the mother back into the psychological orbit of the individual.”17 It is not the silly superstition Lucan, Aristophanes, and other ancients took it for, but rather a spiritual exercise akin to Loyola’s meditations or the alchemical opus. It may be only an antiquarian curiosity to his father, but Wyatt will eventually recognize the benefits of drawing down the moon. A declining sun and rising moon are appropriately present at a key event in the first chapter: the teenage Wyatt’s cure by means of a ritual for the expulsion of evil in an animal scapegoat. Miriam Fuchs has suggested that Revd. Gwyon’s sacrifice of his Barbary ape during this ritual masks a sacrifice of Camilla herself, insofar as “this monkey had replaced Camilla” (32), as Aunt May suspected.18 The obvious parallels to Christ’s Passion suggest Gwyon sacrifices his wife that his son might live, as the Christian god sacrificed his that Christians might live eternally.19 Whether Camilla’s spirit transmigrates first into Heracles the ape and later into Esme, as Fuchs suggests, or more simply represents Wyatt’s anima, it is clear that the sacrificial act is Revd. Gwyon’s final break with Camilla. To sacrifice is to give up something dear, and he sacrifices his wife that their son might live. He had turned away from Camilla’s photograph at the beginning of the ritual, and afterward never speaks of her death (61). Like Roderick Usher burying his anima in the vault of his unconscious, Revd. Gwyon thereby draws ruin on himself and his house. What he loses in Camilla he hopes Wyatt may find. Shortly after his recovery, and now lodged in Camilla’s sewing room—where “she had come at the moment of death,” the narrator reminds us—Wyatt undergoes an experience much like his father’s in Spain. That which was offered his father and refused is now offered, indeed forced upon, Wyatt. Significantly, Wyatt begins two paintings at this time, each capable of leading him either to salvation or damnation, to Balima way or Oorooma way (268): a portrait of his mother, and a copy of Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins. The first is an attempt to redeem his mother’s memory and her rich symbolic heritage, the second a grim emblem of the Calvinist worldview Aunt May tried to impose on him (and eventually the painting that will initiate him into the world of forgery). Both will haunt him throughout the novel. Mel Farber, Modern Witchcraft and Psychoanalysis (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 96. See Fuchs’s “‘Il miglior fabbro’: Gaddis’ Debt to T. S. Eliot,” in Kuehl and Moore’s In Recognition, 99. 19 Heracles is “waving a piece of bread” when Gwyon comes for him—recalling the last supper—and the description of Heracles’ burial place (54–5) is taken from the Gospels (Mt. 27:60, Mk 16:4). Wyatt feels nails are being driven into his feet when he attempts to walk, recalling the crucifixion itself. 17

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The painting of Camilla is based on the photograph on the living-room mantel (57), and it is important to remember that this photograph was made before Camilla was married (19). Much is made of Camilla’s symbolic virginity in the first chapter: she is said to have “borne Gwyon a son and gone, virginal, to earth: virginal in the sight of man, at any rate” (14)—because Gwyon arranges to have her corpse transported in a white funeral carriage “ordained for infants and maidens.” For Wyatt, Camilla remains “his virgin mother” (19) and thus is not the impulsive New England girl who married his father, but rather the idealized figure Graves calls the White Goddess: at once girl, mother, and crone, and patroness of the white magic of art. At the end of the first symbol-laden chapter, then, Wyatt must choose between the Christian myth of the Father and Son—embodied in Revd. Gwyon, “for somehow his father and the Lord were the same person” (20)— and the ancient cult of the White Goddess and her son, the artist–priest. Instead of finishing the portrait of his mother, however, Wyatt first completes the Bosch forgery, which he sells to Recktall Brown to finance his trip to Europe to study art. Thereafter, the incomplete portrait of Camilla (until its destruction by fire sends him to Spain for the “original”), along with her Byzantine earrings that his father passes on to him, will be a reminder of his incomplete relationship with his mother/anima, which will in turn prevent him from having a complete relationship with any other woman. (“—Finish it,” Esther will plead. “—Then there might be room for me” [88].) There is no ruse Wyatt will disdain henceforth to avoid coming to terms with his mother and all she represents. Camilla will remain “in cold vigilance, waiting” like the moon (61) while her son squanders his inheritance and attempts to forge an existence in which she need not play a part, until he realizes only she can supply the missing part of him without which he has no real existence.

The World of Night Writing from Munich, Wyatt tells his father he cannot continue studying for the ministry because of guilt, and like a guilty criminal he goes underground. Much is made throughout the novel of the fact that Wyatt paints at night, evoking the traditional associations of night: death, sin, guilt, fear, crime, sex, and—not so traditional—artistic creation. In “the darkening room” of Wyatt’s Paris studio, the art critic Crémer reminds Wyatt of Degas’s remark “that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed” (71). When Esther surprises Wyatt in his New York studio years later, he stands “as though stricken, in the midst of some criminal commission” (87) and she wonders if “the music of Handel

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[would] always recall sinful commission, the perpetration of some crime in illumined darkness, recognized as criminal only by him who committed it” (98). Esther maligns “this crazy Calvinistic secrecy, sin” (129), but when Valentine makes the same charge, Wyatt defends himself: “—It isn’t so simple. […] It’s the same sense … yes, this sense of a blue day in summer, do you understand? It’s too much, such a day, it’s too fully illuminated. It’s defeating that way, it doesn’t allow you to project this illumination yourself, this … selective illumination that’s necessary to paint” (239–40). The recurrence of the word “illumination” in some of these quotations is significant, for the word implies intellectual enlightenment along with its root meaning, and reminds us that the paradox out of darkness comes illumination is a major premise of mysticism, alchemy, and (Wyatt insists) artistic creation. However, Wyatt’s defense has an air of rationalization about it, for he is prey to the very guilt and secrecy of which he is accused. Aunt May made it quite clear to him that artists are of the devil’s party, and Wyatt never does completely free himself from her influence; two pages before his final disappearance he is still quoting her on “the prospect of sin” (898, from 33). Young Wyatt’s earliest artistic efforts had to be carried out in secrecy— not only his drawings hidden in the midden heap but his first forgery as well—and the counterfeit nature of the older Wyatt’s work of course necessitates both secrecy and guilt, despite his rationalizations. Aunt May was Wyatt’s first and severest critic, and he has apparently never forgotten her reaction to his first drawing: “—Don’t you love our Lord Jesus, after all. He said he did. —Then why do you try to take His place? Our Lord is the only creator, and only sinful people try to emulate Him. […] That is why Satan is the Fallen Angel, for he rebelled when he tried to emulate Our Lord Jesus. And he won his own domain, didn’t he. Didn’t he! And his own light is the light of the fires of Hell! Is that what you want?” (34).20 Yet night is also the domain of the female, ruled by Goethe’s Mother Night, and associated in myth and psychology with the unconscious—an association the narrator spells out quite often (e.g. 12, 53, 69, 891, 955). Drawn to the night, Wyatt is also terrified of it, terrified of confronting the dark contents of his unconscious. The victim of nightmares, he often works at night to avoid dreaming, which entails entering “the world of night, [where] lost souls clutching guidebooks follow the sun through subterranean passages of gloom, corridors dark and dangerous: so the king built his The source of Aunt May’s harangue is respected Catholic apologist Denis de Rougemont’s The Devil’s Share, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Pantheon, 1944), 29, 38. Her comments, then, cannot be dismissed as simply the personal outrage of a soured fundamentalist. The injunctions against pictorial art in Jewish and Moslem traditions spring from the same belief that creation is a divine prerogative.

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tomb deep in earth, and alone wanders the darkness of death there through twenty-four thousand square feet of passages and halls, stairs, chambers, and pits. So Egypt” (388), and so the unconscious. Confrontations with the dangerous unconscious usually take the psychomythological forms of an infernal descent or vigil through the dark night of the soul. (One of the working titles for The Recognitions was “Vigils of the Dead.”) The number of works mentioned or alluded to in the novel that feature one or the other of these related themes is extensive: Goethe’s Faust (opening with the Doctor’s dark night of the soul and later involving an infernal descent to the Mothers), Dante’s Inferno, the Dark Night of the Soul of Saint John of the Cross, the apocryphal Acts of Pilate (the second part of which features the harrowing of hell), Homer’s Odyssey (book 11), Virgil’s Aeneid (book 6), Fichte’s Vocation of Man (book 2), the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the medieval passion play The Harrowing of Hell, and many others. In addition, numerous references are made to myths dealing with the underworld, which brings in another association: the equation of night with hell. As long as Wyatt’s psychological conflicts remain unresolved, he remains in hell, so to speak. Wyatt had been dwelling in an “infernal kingdom” (98) ever since his arrival in New York City, and numerous indirect, even casual references reinforce this symbolic equation, building upon the poetic tradition linking the modern city with hell (Milton, Blake, Francis Thompson, Eliot, Hart Crane, and later Ginsberg). The city is called “Dis” (696, the capital of Hell in Dante), “a chilly hell” (467), and the discovery of Wyatt’s two Bouts forgeries takes place, appropriately enough, in Hell’s Kitchen (288). Even expletives contribute: “—You look like hell,” Brown tells Wyatt at one point, who responds, “—That’s because I’m … I’ve been working like hell” (238). He seems on the verge of lamenting, like Milton’s Satan, “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (Paradise Lost, 4.75). Consequently, when he decides to return to New York from New England and expose his forgeries, he refers to it as “the harrowing of hell” (442). Escaping from New York, Wyatt leaves both the underworld and the world of night for Spain, a purgatory where night gives way to a succession of overcast, “sunless” days as Wyatt works through his guilt. “The even unchanging gray of the sky” (806) in these Spanish chapters represents a provisional union of bright day and dark night, a conjunction of the two extremes between which Wyatt had been fluctuating throughout the novel. Only on the final day does dawn bring a clear sky; throughout the novel Wyatt had been waking at dusk and mistaking it for dawn, but finally he wakes at dawn, mistaking it for dusk at first, but learning quickly “the sky

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wasn’t getting darker, it was getting light” (893–4). His long dark night of the soul over, the Pleiades signaling the beginning of a new sailing season (892), Wyatt/Stephen is ready for a new voyage; quoting Thoreau, he vows, “—Now at last, to live deliberately” (900).

This Pelagian Atmosphere In mythology, the movement of the moon across the sky was most often compared to a ship at sea, and illustrations of moon boats have survived from many early cultures. The sky has impressed many as an immense celestial sea, and even in our technological day, space exploration employs traditional nautical terminology. A third large pattern of mythic imagery in The Recognitions is generated from the metaphoric identification of the sea with the sky, which in light of the relationship between the lunar and nocturnal symbolism examined so far, can perhaps be best understood as yet another facet of what slowly emerges as a huge, interrelated system of cosmological symbolism, again extending to universal proportions the inner struggles of an individual. The night sea journey common to so many myths represents yet another confrontation with the unconscious, and more specifically with the anima (since the sea is a universally recognized feminine domain). Gaddis builds on this archetypal symbolism, augmenting it with a wide and colorful array of background material, to establish one of the major themes of the novel, that of voyaging. A voyage implies a homecoming (“—whoever started a journey, without the return in the front of his mind?” [898]), and Wyatt’s ultimate destination is the resolution of the interior conflicts preventing him from leading a fulfilling life. Gaddis wrote in his notes for The Recognitions, “I think this book will have to be on voyaging, all the myth & metaphor of that in modern times.”21 Indeed, a heavy cargo of “myth & metaphor” accompanies Wyatt on his voyage, largely through Gaddis’s multiplication of the metaphoric possibilities of the sea until it floods the novel with a “pelagian atmosphere” (553). The novel begins literally at sea, and the allure of voyaging and the conceit of a celestial sea are introduced as early as page 6 in a discussion of the constellation Argo and the Pleiades. (It is worth noting that the novel opens with the setting of the Pleiades and ends with their rising, symbolic of the Quoted in David Koenig’s “The Writing of The Recognitions,” in Kuehl and Moore, 23. But for a thorough discussion of the literal voyages and travels in R, see Chapter 2 of Russell’s Crossing Boundaries.

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general movement of the novel from death to rebirth, from the Day of the Dead to Easter Sunday.) Throughout the first chapter, there are many references to voyaging—especially from the eccentric Town Carpenter, Wyatt’s maternal grandfather—but also several deliberate blurrings of sky, sea, and land: the harsh plain of Castile is compared to the sea (7; cf. 770); the sky at the time of Wyatt’s departure for divinity school is described as “deep gray-blue, banded with the colors of rust seen under water” (60); in their awkwardness during this scene, both Revd. Gwyon and Wyatt are “caught, as a swimmer on the surface is caught by that cold current whose suddenness snares him in cramps and sends him in dumb surprise to the bottom” (60); and there is the first of many references to Gervase of Tilbury’s medieval tale of “the sky being a sea, the celestial sea, and a man coming down from a rope to undo an anchor that’s gotten caught on a tombstone” (28). Even the Town Carpenter’s interest in ballooning advances the conceit of a voyage in a celestial sea. But this traditional trope soon takes on a number of unexpected overtones. Young Wyatt associates the drowned sailor of Gervase’s tale with the martyrdom of Saint Clement via the anchor common to both stories (44), to which the older Wyatt adds a third element, namely Charles Fort’s wry speculation (in his Book of the Damned [1919]) that perhaps we are all at the bottom of a celestial sea and are occasionally fished for by aliens trawling overhead, a speculation that Wyatt (and Esme after him) will voice often in the novel. These three elements join in the general submarine imagery that accumulates (see 60, 79, 109, 115) until it is rumored that Wyatt “lives underground. Or underwater” (172). A number of similar references follow until, arguing with Valentine on the night he decides to return home to his father, Wyatt brings these references into a Christian prospective: —Now, remember? Who was it, “gettato a mare,” remember? an anchor tied to his neck? and thrown, caught by kelpies and martyred, remember? in the celestial sea. Here, maybe we’re fished for. […] Have you read Averroes? What I mean is, do we believe in order to understand? Or in order to be … fished for. […] Yes, yes, that’s it. Flesh, remember? flesh, how thou art fishified. He jumped to his feet. —Listen, do you understand? We’re fished for! On this rock, remember? and I shall make thee a fisher of men? (382)

Suddenly recalling Jesus’s promise to Peter and Andrew to make to make them fishers of men—salvaged from this mélange of medieval tales, scholastic argument, even a line from Romeo and Juliet (2.4.37) —Wyatt decides to return home to resume his studies for the ministry. A number of

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nautical references at home, however, indicate that Wyatt is still at sea, that is, no closer to salvation than he was before. Undersea imagery continues throughout Part II, especially at Brown’s palatial apartment, fancifully identified as the undersea domain of Ibsen’s Troll King. In Part III, Esme associates Wyatt both with the drowned sailor retrieved from the ocean during her and Stanley’s voyage to Europe (834) and with the drowned sailor of Gervase’s tale (912, 914). The first association is of vital importance, for it represents Wyatt’s symbolic death at sea, foreshadowed several times earlier in the novel. Wyatt’s “drowning” takes place in the chapter strategically placed between his abandonment of Sinisterra and their “mummy” as Stephan Asche in III.3 and his reemergence in III.5 as simply Stephen, the name originally intended for him by Camilla. An obvious parallel is the “Death by Water” section that appears at about the same point structurally in Eliot’s Waste Land, the symbolic death prerequisite to rebirth. “—I’ve been a voyage, I’ll tell you,” Stephen/Wyatt concludes at the end. “—I’ve been a voyage starting at the bottom of the sea” (895). In contrast to the lunar and nocturnal symbolism, both deployed in a fairly straightforward fashion, the marine imagery is developed through the novel in a variety of ingenious ways. An informative example is Gaddis’s extended pun on Pelagius/Pelagianism/pelagic/pelagian/Pelagia. Pelagianism is one of the heresies Wyatt asks his father about after his return from a year’s theological studies. One of the great heresiarchs, the British monk Pelagius (c. 354–420) not only denied the doctrine of original sin but insisted that people are free to do good or evil, as opposed to the Augustinian doctrine that people, without spiritual guidance, are instinctively drawn to evil. Revd. Gwyon minimizes Pelagius’s achievement: “—If it hadn’t been Pelagius it would have been someone else. But by now we … too many of us may embrace original sin ourselves to explain our own guilt, and behave … treat everyone else as though they were full-fledged … Pelagians doing just as they please” (58). Wyatt himself, as he confesses later, is a Pelagian (806), though that hardly means he simply does as he pleases. Rather, it means he takes personal responsibility for his own salvation, refusing to rely on Christ (or his ministers) to do it for him. Too confident a reliance on Christ, Pelagius argued, promotes “moral decline.”22 22

In The Heretics, Walter Nigg writes: “In his struggle against the declining morality of Roman Christendom, Pelagius made the significant observation that the degeneration could not be ascribed to the decay of the Empire, which at that time was undergoing its last agony. Moral decline, Pelagius held, was indirectly fostered by the doctrine which stressed man’s redemption through Christ too exclusively and ignored man’s own efforts” (trans. Richard and Clara Winston [New York: Knopf, 1962], 133–4).

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The name “Pelagius” is a Latinized form of the heretic’s Welsh name, Morgan, meaning “the sea”; Gaddis may or may not be playing on the connection between Pelagius and the sea when Wyatt puns on “Pelagic miles distant” (392), but he surely is during Basil Valentine’s harangue: —And what was it you said? A man’s damnation is his own damned business? It’s not true, you know. It’s not true. Why, good heavens, this suicide of yours? […] Look! Look there, in the sky where it’s still blue, that line? That white line the airplane’s drawn, do you see it? how the wind’s billowed it out like a rope in a current of water? yes, your man in the celestial see, eh? coming down to undo it, down to the bottom, and they find him dead as though drowned. Why, this … pelagian atmosphere of yours, you know. Homicide, was it? (553).

“A man’s damnation is his own damned business” is a clever if grim epigram summarizing the Pelagian heresy, but Valentine’s use of “pelagian” in reference to Wyatt’s celestial sea obsession suggests that Valentine plays Augustine to Wyatt’s Pelagius in the novel’s theological debate. Wyatt undertakes his own salvation by taking the part of sacrificial priest: Valentine had accused him a few times earlier of wanting to commit suicide by exposing his forgeries, but Wyatt had answered, “—Suicide? this? Do you think there’s only one self, then? that this isn’t homicide? closer to homicide?” (546). As Valentine recognizes a few lines later, the self Wyatt wants to kill is “the old man,” a New Testament locution (Eph. 4.22, Col. 3.9) that refers to the sinful self before baptism. (Otto and Sinisterra use this phrase as well.) Wyatt is both priest and sacrificial victim, pushing Pelagianism to a theological extreme that also includes his father and Christianity’s heavenly father among the old men he needs to kill to attain salvation. Pelagia is also the name of one of the courtesan saints Wyatt recalls during his interior monologue at the point when revulsion from the sins of the flesh is uppermost in mind (392, eight lines before “Pelagic miles distant”). This “bienheureuse pécheresse” (blessed sinner), as Gaddis’s source calls her,23 began her career as a different sort of fisher of men, a suitable figure in the woman-as-temptress theme of Wyatt’s meditations—a theme that finds expression in the novel’s mermaid motif, the most exotic element of its marine imagery. Ungallantly introduced with references to various “faked” mermaids (16, 65—anything can be faked in this novel), the mermaid next surfaces in a conversation between Wyatt and Fuller, Brown’s Montague Summers, ed. and trans., The Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger (1928; New York: Dover, 1971), 46b, note.

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West Indian servant and one of Gaddis’s great comic inventions (though the politically correct of the twenty-first century would probably call it racist). Contrasting his easy belief in mermaids to the difficulty of faith, Fuller ingenuously concludes: —It remain a challenge to believe, always. Not so simple to accept, like the mermaids. —The mermaids … the mermaids … —Yes, sar. —And you can … accept the mermaids, without much difficulty? —Yes, sar, though they remain the complication of the mermaid mahns. —Yes, there does. —But the mermaid womans … —Yes, the women … you can believe in the women … —Oh yes sar, Fuller said, and then after a pause, —Woman bring you into the world, you got to stick with her. —Wasn’t it woman brought evil into the world, then? —Sar? —Yes. When she picked the fruit from the forbidden tree; and gave it to the man to eat? —So the evil already there provided, and quite naturally she discover it. —Yes, yes, and she gave it to the man … —She share it with him, sar, said Fuller. —Thaht the reason why we love her. (348–9)

The idea of mermaids remains with Wyatt; after his fruitless discussion with Brown—in which he seems to identify his own difficulties with “the complication of the mermaid men” (361)—Wyatt tells Valentine he has been “consorting with mermaids in the bottom of a tank where the troll king lives” (375), conflating one legend with another (as we have seen him do before), this time Peer Gynt’s visit to the mountain fortress of the Troll King with the Frog King who lives at the bottom of a well in the Grimm Brothers’ tale Esme had read aloud to Wyatt earlier (273). I have already quoted Wyatt’s reference to kelpies (382), the Scottish branch of the mermaid family. In one sense, all of the women Wyatt consorts with are mermaids, sisters to the sirens of classical mythology, representing (according to Jung) the beautiful but dangerous aspect of the feminine, luring the male down into the watery unconscious and sensuality, away from solar consciousness and intellection. It is this misogynistic fear that causes Wyatt to flee the intimacy Esme offers to return to the patriarchal world of his father, only to discover that his father has gone mad. From two others on the border of madness, however,

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Wyatt receives valuable advice. “—Something amiss,” the Town Carpenter tells him, “—we must simplify” (441).24 And when Wyatt questions the stigmatic servant woman Janet on the meaning of damnation, she defines it simply, “—That is life without love” (442). With these words in mind, Wyatt boards the next train back to New York to expose his forgeries and to accept the love Esme had offered, hoping in both actions to escape damnation and find salvation. Wyatt’s evil angel, however, mocks him for thinking salvation can be found in a woman: Basil Valentine turned and laughed in his face. —Really, really my dear fellow. No he said, clutching the single gray glove before him. —The “somber glow” at the end of the second act, is it? the duet with Senta, is that it? … “the somber glow, no, it is salvation that I crave,” eh! “Might such an angel come, my soul to save,” your Flying Dutchman sings, eh? Good heavens! And up they go to heaven in a wave, or whatever it was? Really! And all that foolishness you were carrying on with the last time I saw you, that “I min Tro …” and the rest of it, that Where has he been all this time? and your Solveig answers In my faith? In my hope? In my, … good heavens! You are romantic, aren’t you! If you do think you mean all this? And then what, They lived happily forever after? (551)

This important concept of woman as the means for salvation was introduced as early as the second chapter in the first description of Wyatt’s wife, Esther: “Still, like other women in love, salvation was her original purpose, redemption her eventual privilege; and, like most women, she could not wait to see him thoroughly damned first, before she stepped in, believing, perhaps as they all do, that if he were saved now he would never need to be redeemed” (78). The concept is maintained with the identification of both Camilla and Esme with the Catholic goddess Mary, the Western archetype of salvation via the female; and as late as III.3, Wyatt is tempted to hang his hopes of salvation on Pastora and their possible daughter. Although endorsing Pelagius’s admonition against relying too heavily on Christ for personal salvation, Wyatt has slipped into the more romantic notion of relying on women for the same purpose—the danger of which is set out by Denis de Rougemont in his Love in the Western World, another of Gaddis’s sources. But by the end of the novel Wyatt/Stephen seems to have realized that the female promise of redemption is as illusory as a He echoes Thoreau, of course: see Walden, Chapter 2. Charles Banning considers the Town Carpenter “a haunting ‘reincarnation’ of Thoreau” (154n. 24). For Thoreau’s role throughout Gaddis’s fiction, see Tyree’s essay listed in the bibliography.

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mermaid’s promise of love to homesick sailors: both lead to destruction and the loss of self—or at the very least to a loss of independence and self-reliance, advocated in the copy of Thoreau that Wyatt carries around. Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt both perish as they find salvation in a woman’s embrace. “—Yes, the women,” Wyatt had said earlier in his discussion with Fuller, “—you can believe in the women” and apparently agrees that “—Woman bring you into the world, you got to stick with her” (348). But this cannot be at the expense of one’s individuality, one’s autonomy, which the female—in her destructive/unconscious aspect symbolized here by the mermaid—usually threatens. Gaddis’s sparse but psychologically precise use of mermaid imagery in the novel strengthens the identification of the sea with the unconscious and further defines the role of the female in Wyatt’s “voyage starting at the bottom of the sea.” As mentioned earlier, a “pelagian atmosphere” is maintained throughout The Recognitions not only with marine imagery but with dozens of similes comparing the land to sea and actions on land to actions on/in/under the ocean. And not only is the sea often compared to the sky, as we have seen, but there are several deliberate confusions of sky and land (e.g. 205–6, 790, 899), so that a symbolic equation of ocean = land = sky = ocean is made. (Gaddis would pursue a similar “confusion of realms” in A Frolic of His Own, as we shall see.) By deliberately confusing both the land and sky with the sea, Gaddis is able to give almost all of Wyatt’s actions the trappings of a sea voyage. Appropriately enough, none of Wyatt’s actual ocean voyages is dramatized; only those of the other characters are. Thus the symbolic nature of his voyage is emphasized over the merely literal. For even though he does indeed voyage in a literal sense, the novel is the story of his psychological voyage—like those of Peer Gynt, Odysseus, the Flying Dutchman, and the Wandering Jew across the world, Faust to the Mothers, and Dante, Christ, and Orpheus to hell—a voyage through the unconscious but dominant elements of his psyche. Thus a vast, interlocking network of maternal symbolism pervades the novel, all generated from the psychic havoc that resulted from Wyatt’s early separation from his mother (and paralleled historically, Robert Graves and some anthropologists would argue, in the conquest of matriarchal religions and sensibility by the patriarchal) and from his subsequent guilt over dishonoring her with his forgeries. Sea, earth, moon, night, sky, hell— all are feminine symbols conspiring against him. Graves, whose White Goddess made a tremendous impact on Gaddis (Letters 132), argues that the male must exist in an essentially female universe, and thus should pay homage to the Eternal Feminine (as Goethe calls it), not rebel with sterile masculine rationality. (And by “rationality” both Graves and Gaddis mean

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“thinking along prescribed lines without any thought for sensibility.”25) Wyatt is immersed in a world of female symbols, yet spends most of his life denying that world. But The Recognitions is not simply the story of a man with a mother complex. Rather, this confrontation and resolution with the feminine is the major obstacle in the larger struggle for what Jung called “the integration of the personality.” And it is here that we encounter the controlling metaphor of the entire novel, the opus alchymicum, which is important enough (and unfamiliar enough to most readers) to warrant a more detailed examination.

We Were Talking About Alchemy After a first reading of The Recognitions, the subject of alchemy, if remembered at all, would probably be classed with the large potpourri or arcane lore distributed throughout the novel and promptly forgotten. The two-page set piece on alchemy on pages 131–2 may be dimly recalled, but few readers would remember much else about it. However, after the references in the text are identified and Gaddis’s sources discovered, it becomes apparent that alchemy plays a role of major importance both in unifying the mythic/ symbolic elements and referential material in this erudite work and in providing a spiritual “plot” to complement (and justify) the main narrative of the novel. That the alchemists were concerned with more than simply discovering the chemical key to transmuting base materials into gold (the philosopher’s stone) is now granted, largely as a result of the extensive researches of Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung. There were, of course, a large number of credulous souls who did waste their lives and fortunes in the laboratory trying to do just that, but in his studies of the alchemical texts, Jung showed that alchemy was actually a kind of (heretical) Christian mysticism; like the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (which Basil Valentine is reading on page 330), the alchemical steps toward the philosopher’s stone were not lab procedures but meditative exercises broadening the scope of Catholic dogma, and thus heretical. Jung found a parallel between alchemical procedures and what he calls “the process of individuation”—a phrase introduced on page 108 of The Recognitions in a demeaning context—and it is in this light that Gaddis uses the tradition of alchemy. Jung writes, “What the symbolism of alchemy expresses is the whole problem of the evolution of personality […], the so-called individuation process,” and Gaddis found Graves, Difficult Questions, Easy Answers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 122.

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alchemy a useful (if arcane) extended metaphor for Wyatt’s personal development.26 The alchemical motif is introduced on the very first page of the novel.27 The epigraph from the second part of Goethe’s Faust is from the “laboratory” scene (ll. 6819–7004) in which Wagner creates Homunculus in an alchemical laboratory. This first of many references to Faust is significant for many reasons, not the least of which is Jung’s interpretation of Faust as “the last and greatest work of alchemy.”28 Ronald D. Gray, in his study Goethe the Alchemist, only partly agrees with Jung that Faust II is a “poetic representation of the alchemical work,”29 but Gaddis evidently welcomed this augmentation of his concept of Wyatt as Faustian man. A number of other references to alchemy occur in the first hundred pages of the novel: it is among the many subjects Revd. Gwyon introduces to his son (30), and some of the books on the Reverend’s desk—Philosophumena, Pistis Sophia, A Coptic Treatise Contained in the Codex Brucianus, Rosarium Philosophorum—are either alchemical tracts or works cited by Jung in connection with alchemy. The second chapter ends with an intimation that Wyatt is to follow in the footsteps of Raymond Lully, “one of the foremost figures in the history of alchemy” (77), but it is in the third chapter that the major references to alchemy occur; Wyatt’s Faustian pact with “the devil” is made in I.3, and his career as an alchemical “adept” begins. That alchemy is much on Wyatt’s mind during this chapter is evident from his reading. Among the alchemical studies in his library are Boyle’s refutation The Skeptical Chemist, Berthelot’s La Chimie au Moyen Âge, the anonymous Turba Philosophorum and The Secret of the Golden Flower, Silberer’s Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism, Spitteler’s Prometheus and Epimetheus (not an alchemical tract, but cited by Jung in that context), and the fifteenth-century Cantilena Riplaei. That he has discussed the subject with Otto (Wagner to Wyatt’s Faust) is obvious from Otto’s parroting Wyatt’s remarks: “—Yes but, I mean today we were talking about alchemy, and the mysteries that, about the redemption of matter, and that it wasn’t just making gold, trying to make real gold, but that matter … Matter, he said matter was Psychology and Alchemy, 2nd rev. edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 35. Henceforth I will be citing this later edition of The Integration of the Personality because it is fuller, better translated, and more accessible. 27 Actually, the first alchemical allusion is on the title page of the first and most subsequent editions (until the Dalkey Archive edition): the oldest and most common emblem for the opus alchymicum was the uroborus, the dragon eating its own tail. 28 “Psychology of the Transference,” in The Practice of Psychotherapy, trans. R. F. C. Hull, rev. edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), para. 407. This reading of Faust is common to all of Jung’s writings on alchemy. 29 Goethe the Alchemist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 219. 26

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a luxury, was our great luxury, and that matter, I mean redemption […]” (129).30 Two pages after this stumbling paraphrase comes a mini-essay on alchemy, beginning with a list of some of its practitioners, though it becomes obvious that Otto has no more of an understanding of the spiritual nature of alchemy than the average person. A short account of alchemy’s failure to survive in the modern, materialistic world concludes: “and once chemistry had established itself as true and legitimate son and heir, alchemy was turned out like a drunken parent, to stagger away, babbling phantasies to fewer and fewer ears, to less and less impressive derelicts of loneliness” (132). One derelict of loneliness for whom alchemy is more than a babbled fantasy is Wyatt. His abandonment of traditional learning for alchemy and magic parallels Faust’s in his opening monologue (which in turn parallels that of the young Goethe [Gray 5–7]). With his marriage failing, stuck in an unrewarding job, artistically blocked, beset by guilt, depression, nightmares, and loneliness, Wyatt is in a state alchemists called the nigredo. Jung explains: “The nigredo or blackness is the initial state, either present from the beginning as a quality of the prima materia, the chaos or massa confusa, or else produced by the separation (solutio, separatio, divisio, putrefactio) of the elements” (230). Elsewhere, Jung compares this state to the initial confrontation with one’s “shadow,”31 that is, the dark elements of the unconscious: “Confrontation with the shadow produces at first a dead balance, a standstill that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective or even impossible. Everything becomes doubtful, which is why the alchemists called this stage nigredo, tenebrositas, chaos, melancholia. It is right that the magnum opus should begin at this point, for it is indeed a well-nigh unanswerable question how one is to confront reality in this torn and divided state.”32 It is to this state Wyatt has fallen in I.3. “—Despair as a place to start from” (128), Esther reports Wyatt as saying at this time, and it is from this point the process of psychic self-purification must begin. Having made the alchemy parallel implicit in I.3, Gaddis makes only occasional reference to it during the rest of the novel. At Max’s party, for example, Herschel passes on the rumor that down at his Horatio Street basement studio Wyatt “—is mixed up with an international counterfeit ring, he makes gold down there, out of fingernail parings …” (173), a humorous For this reason, Wyatt says of Brown, “—What a luxury you were!” (684 and elsewhere); symbolically Brown = matter, as his name indicates. See note 34 below. 31 There is a certain amount of shadow imagery in The Recognitions that no doubt derives from this concept and/or its folklore equivalents (cf. the Jewish Yetzer hara on R 379). Jung associates the shadow with the anima. 32 Mysterium Coniunctionis, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 497–8. 30

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allusion to the unusual ingredients found in some alchemical recipes. Upon first meeting Basil Valentine, Wyatt remarks, “—I know your name. I’ve tried to think where” (261), but it is not until later that Wyatt places the name: “—The Triumphal Car of Antimony. Now I remember your name, Basil Valentine, the alchemist who watched his pigs grow fat on food containing stibium, wasn’t it […] you tried it on some fasting emaciated monks and they all died […] And so they named it antimony, anathema to monks …” (384). (Two pages earlier, Wyatt had identified himself and Valentine as “an alchemist and a priest.”) A final direct reference to alchemy occurs on page 639, where the music at Esther’s Christmas Eve party combines “with the smoke and the incongruous scents into a tangible presence, the slag of refinement rising over the furnace, where the alchemist waited with a lifetime’s patience […].” Gaddis clearly delineated in his notes the role alchemy plays in his novel: “First there is the ideal. Then the crash of reality; and chaos and death. Then resurrection, in which the two, working together, achieve redemption. Wyatt then is the alchemist; there’s no nearer parallel.”33 Great art had been the young Wyatt’s ideal; Recktall Brown is “the crash of reality”;34 “chaos” aptly describes Wyatt’s career as a forger, ending in his symbolic death at sea in III.4. All these stages have their counterparts in the alchemical opus, and for this reason John Leverence concludes: “Gaddis’s novel is explicitly and implicitly alchemical in theme, structure, and motif.”35 When we last see Wyatt/Stephen, it is implied that he has struck the proper balance between “the ideal” and “reality”; his assimilation of the two states is contrasted with their clash in Ludy in the incident of the captured bird, where Ludy finds distant (i.e. ideal) birds beautiful but shrinks from close contact (848, 897).36 It will be remembered that the common denominator of the lunar/ nocturnal/marine symbolism in The Recognitions is the psychomythological confrontation with the anima. “While the nigredo of the burial endures, the Koenig, “‘Splinters from the Yew Tree,’” 87, Gaddis’s italics. “—He does not understand reality,” Valentine says of his cohort, “—Recktall Brown is reality […] A very different thing” (244). 35 “Gaddis Anagnorisis,” in Kuehl and Moore, 43. The opus alchymicum, then, is to The Recognitions what Homer’s Odyssey is to Joyce’s Ulysses: a governing structural metaphor, but neither formal nor strict enough to limit the scope of the novel. 36 Ludy is the last of those to have a harrowing experience with white birds: a suddenly descending white bird causes Otto’s accident (729), and Otto’s friend Ed Feasley crashes a plane after hitting a flock of them. White birds figure in many images as well, including the mirror image of fragments of Wyatt’s letter blowing away “like a handful of white birds startled into the sky” (62), reversed as “the white birds, finding nothing, startled by the clap of the hull, fled coming up all together, and away, like the fragments of a letter torn up and released into the wind” (846). 33 34

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woman rules,” one anonymous alchemical tract has it,37 and such writings contain a great deal of feminine imagery in general—the conjunction of opposites (the goal of alchemy) was most often compared to the conjunction of male and female, which gave rise to some pretty racy pictures—and maternal imagery in particular, generated by the notion of spiritual rebirth. Instructive example can be found in several alchemical works cited in The Recognitions itself, such as the Cantilena Riplaei, the Rosarium Philosophorum, and the Turba Philosophorum, all of which (as Jung explains) align alchemical operations with Christian redemption via the mother. The similarity between the alchemist and the Christian concept of rebirth is both obvious and intentional; of Sir George Ripley, author of the Cantilena, Jung writes, “If we realize that the author was no layman but a learned canon, we can hardly suppose him to have been unaware of the parallels with certain fundamental ideas of Christian dogma” (410). In fact, most of the New Testament passages quoted in The Recognitions on the importance of spiritual rebirth—especially those concerning Nicodemus and the necessity of “putting off the old man”—are quoted in the alchemical tracts. Again and again, whether in alchemy, religion, mythology, or modern psychology, we see the need to return to the mother, to confront the feminine. Gaddis has piled up so many references to this concept from so many different fields of study that we realize there is more truth than one would have imagined in Herschel’s flippant remark that Wyatt’s problems stem from “—a father complex or a mother complex or something vulgar” (173). And it is just like Gaddis to bury this key to Wyatt’s personality among pages of silly chitchat, just as easily ignored as the disregarded jewel in the street in Spitteler’s Prometheus and Epimetheus.38 Virtually all the images associated with the confrontation with the anima—night, infernal descent, the moon, the sea, voyaging—have their counterparts in the symbolic language of alchemy. The connection between night and the state of nigredo is obvious from the name alone, and it is not surprising that the nigredo (or mortificatio) was sometimes compared in alchemical literature to a descent to hell. (Jung furnishes several examples, and relates it to the classical concept of katabasis.) After male and female, the most common emblems for the opposites whose conjunction would yield spiritual gold were the sun and moon. Gaddis instances the alchemist “Michael Majer, who had seen in gold the images of the sun, spun in the earth by its countless revolutions, then, when the sun might yet be taken “Liber Alze,” quoted in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 64. It is this anecdote from Spitteler’s 1881 epic to which Jung refers on the three occasions he cites the book in The Integration of the Personality.

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for the image of God” (131–2, adapted from Jung). As Leverence points out, “The fundamental alchemical premise is that all metals gestate toward the perfect state of gold” (41); this is yet another metaphor for the process variously described as the way of perfection leading to the Kingdom of God, progression through the seven heavens of Gnosticism, Aristotelian entelechy, the ideal embodied in Rilke’s Angel, or Jung’s integration of the personality. Similarly, alchemists invested the moon with various roles and properties; Jung contrasts male/solar with female/lunar consciousness, and it is easy to sympathize with Wyatt’s attraction to (and need of) the latter: “Its light is the ‘mild’ light of the moon, which merges things together rather than separates them. It does not show up objects in all their pitiless discreteness and separateness, like the harsh, glaring light of day, but blends in a deceptive shimmer the near and the far, magically transforming little things into big things, high into low, softening all colour into a bluish haze, and bleeding the nocturnal landscape into an unsuspecting unity” (Mysterium Coniunctionis 179). “—Separateness, that’s what went wrong, you’ll understand …” Wyatt confesses at the end of the novel, having attained lunar consciousness. “—Everything withholding itself from everything else …” (874). Wyatt’s goal, as was the alchemists’, is the conjunction and synthesis of psychic opposites, and Gaddis follows the alchemical writers in presenting the journey toward integration in terms of solar and lunar imagery, behind which lay the many opposites struggling to be united in Wyatt’s psyche: Revd. Gwyon/Camilla; sun/moon; sol (gold)/luna (silver); Logos/Eros; Christianity/paganism; consciousness (rationality)/ unconsciousness (irrationality); reason/intuition; separation/unity; activity/ passivity; intellect/emotion; day/night;39 and so on. The sea is another common emblem in alchemical writings, Jung tells us, sometimes symbolizing the prima materia (“the basis for the preparation of the philosophical gold” [159]), sometimes the nigredo, but always “the symbol of the collective unconscious, because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface” (48). Arisleus, one of the speakers in the dialogic Turba Philosophorum, elsewhere “tells of his adventure with the Rex marinus [king of the sea], in whose kingdom nothing prospers and nothing is begotten. Moreover there are no philosophers there. Only like mates with like, consequently there is no procreation” (“Visio Arislei,” Psychology and Alchemy 327). This Waste Land of the sea is alluded to “From India to the shores of the Atlantic,” one of Gaddis’s sources tells us, “though in the most varied forms, there is expressed the same mystery of Day and Night and a same mystery of the fatal struggle going on between them inside men”—Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 58.

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elsewhere in alchemical literature and parallels the world of The Recognitions (and accounts for its “pelagian atmosphere”) with its sterility, homosexuality, and noticeable lack of philosophers. (Faust too becomes the ruler of a kingdom of the sea.) The ocean, however, is also the means for purification, for regeneration; in Faust, Homunculus elects to join the ocean, representing the conjunction of male and female, thus ending his search for “substantiality,”40 just as Wyatt—the Homunculus of Gaddis’s “bop version” of Faust (661)—achieves his goal by symbolically drowning at sea in his confrontation with the feminine.41 Finally, it is not surprising that in their search for metaphors, alchemists compared their work to voyaging. This aspect of the opus alchymicum was referred to as the peregrinatio and is most closely associated with the writings of Michael Majer, mentioned on page 131 of The Recognitions, who “imagined the opus as a wandering or odyssey, rather like the voyage of the Argonauts in quest of the aureum vellus (Golden Fleece), so beloved of the alchemists, a theme that figures in the title of more than one treatise” (Psychology and Alchemy 370; the Golden Fleece appears on page 6 of The Recognitions). For Majer, as for Wyatt, “the goal of his journey lay in the attainment of [psychic] wholeness” (Mysterium Coniunctionis 210); coincidentally or not, Africa represented the fourth and final stage of Majer’s journey—the stage Jung associates with the unconscious (ibid., 210–11)—just as northern Africa is the last continent Wyatt visits before settling in Spain. That Gaddis would choose alchemy over religion as the main vehicle for the theme of redemption might seem needlessly obscurantist at first. However, as the countless derogatory remarks about Christianity throughout the work attest, Gaddis feels the church has lost sight of its original purpose and has degenerated into little more than a disciplined superstition (825). Thus Christianity is to the religious spirit what chemistry is to alchemy: a modern development devoid of true spiritual value. Jack Green points out that in The Recognitions “what, say, pagan religion & alchemy had over modern religiosity & chemistry is given as substance, significance, emotional passion.”42 So it is to alchemy rather than Christianity that Wyatt turns for aid in his search for salvation. An important distinction between the two modes is that in alchemy, “man [is] both the one to be redeemed and the redeemer,” by which Jung means: “The first formulation is Christian, the See Cyrus Hamlin’s comments on this scene in his Norton Critical Edition of Faust (New York: Norton, 1976), 333. 41 As noted earlier, Esme, crossing the sea with Stanley, mistakes Wyatt for a drowned sailor; at Bellevue hospital earlier, she had smiled “as one foretelling death by falling pillars, death at sea” (755), foreshadowing Stanley’s literal and Wyatt’s symbolic deaths. 42 Fire the Bastards! 32. 40

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second alchemical. In the first case man attributes the need of redemption to himself and leaves the work of redemption […] to the autonomous divine figure; in the latter case man takes upon himself the duty of carrying out the redeeming opus” (306), which recalls both the argument of Pelagius, who advocated the necessity of taking an active part in one’s salvation, and the Thoreau/Emersonian concept of self-reliance that Wyatt embodies (and that Esther misinterprets as selfishness). Basil Valentine would advise “—Willie that salvation is hardly the practical study it was” in the Middle Ages (372), but Gaddis evidently found salvation—even in its secularized form as the integration of the personality—of sufficient relevance to serve as the theme of his novel,43 and he found in alchemy the closest parallel to the work of redemption. The secularization of salvation in The Recognitions most successfully takes the form of the redemptive power of art; salvation through the love of/for a woman is at best an old-fashioned, ambivalent means of seeking redemption—Gaddis’s examples are nineteenth-century works like The Flying Dutchman and Peer Gynt—but the creation of authentic art seems free from such ambivalence. “The process of art is the artist’s working out his own redemption,” Gaddis states in his notes (Koenig 90), and it is for this reason that art is invested with religious importance in The Recognitions. Jung writes that “‘true’ alchemy was never a business or a career, but a genuine opus to be achieved by quiet, self-sacrificing work” (314), and the attitude alchemists took toward their work resembles that which the true artist, as Gaddis sees it, takes toward art. True alchemists “did not weary of enjoining on the novices of the art, that belief, scripture and righteousness were the most important requisites for the alchemical process,”44 and Wyatt himself quotes the dictum “Amor perfectissimus” (392), which, as Jung explains, was the term the alchemist Morienus used for the proper attitude of the adept to his work (273–4). In The Recognitions, the only artists other than Wyatt who take this attitude toward their art are Stanley and, problematically, Frank Sinisterra. Wyatt’s attitude, however, needs qualification. He becomes so obsessed with taking the proper spirit toward creation that he seems to forget he is producing forgeries. In fact he boasts to Brown of the extent to which he has become a fifteenth-century painter: As though to refute Valentine, Gaddis cites in The Recognitions other twentieth-century works concerning salvation: Eliot’s Four Quartets, Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy, and Firbank’s witty parody of the search for salvation, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. 44 Herbert Silberer, Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism, trans. Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1917), 146–7. This book is named in The Recognitions (98), but Gaddis probably took only the title from Jung’s Integration without actually having read it—as is the case with some arcane titles in his novel. 43

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—And … any knock at the door may be the gold inspectors, come to see if I’m using bad materials down there, I … I’m a master painter in the Guild, in Flanders, do you see? And if they come in and find that I’m not using the … gold, they destroy the bad materials I’m using and fine me, […] because I’ve taken the Guild oath, not for the critics, the experts, the … you, you have no more to do with me than if you are my descendants, nothing to do with me, and you … the Guild oath, to use pure materials, to work in the sight of God … (250)

Wyatt stresses the importance of using good materials, especially gold; the alchemists, too, warned against bad materials. “Wherefore all error in the art arises because men do not begin with the proper substance,” writes the author of the Rosarium Philosophorum,45 and Jung commends the thirteenthcentury alchemist Richardus Anglicus, who “rejects all the assorted filth the alchemists works with, such as eggshells, hair, the blood of a red-haired man, basilisks, worms, herbs, and human faeces. ‘Whatsoever a man soweth that also shall he reap. Therefore if he soweth filth, he shall find filth’” (260). Gold, in light of alchemy, possesses special significance and is used often in the novel as a symbol for authenticity. Noticing the forged Bosch tabletop painting (Valentine sent the original, which Wyatt sold to Brown, back to Europe), Wyatt despairs, “—Copying a copy? is that where I started? […] Now, if there was no gold? […] And if what I’ve been forging, does not exist?” (381). His only justification for indulging in forgery was a proper attitude toward his work and a kind of “mystical participation” with the artists whose authentic works he forged, which of course loses all force if he simply copies a copy. For that reason it is with lifesaving relief that, upon discovering he has indeed copied the original Bosch painting in his father’s possession, he exclaims, “—Thank God there was the gold to forge!” (689), which Gaddis later identified as “the key to the book if there is such” (Letters 278). In a rare moment of self-perception, even Otto uses gold as a symbol for authenticity: —And this, this mess, ransacking this mess looking for your own feelings and trying to rescue them but it’s too late, you can’t even recognize them when they come to the surface because they’ve been spent everywhere and, vulgarized and exploited and wasted and spent wherever we could, they keep demanding and you keep paying and you can’t … and then all of a sudden somebody asks you to pay in gold and you can’t. Yes, you can’t, you haven’t got it, and you can’t. (621–2) Quoted in Jung’s “The Psychology of the Transference,” para. 411.

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“—Where have you been asked to pay in gold?” Esther asks quietly, unaware of his relationship with Esme. The “recognitions” demanded in the novel’s title are the gold originals hidden beneath false art, false religion, and, especially in Otto’s case, false emotions. In spite of his good materials, proper attitude, and concern for the gold of authenticity, Wyatt remains only a forger during the bulk of the novel. Alchemists and forgers are lumped together in the same bolgia of Dante’s hell (cantos 29–30, which The Recognitions modernizes), and all of Wyatt’s rationalizations finally wither under the relentless reproach he feels from the portrait of his mother. Dishonoring her death, he finally realizes he must expose his forgeries, but with Valentine’s subterfuge closing that avenue of escape (and the painting’s destruction by fire), Wyatt leaves for Spain to make peace with his anima and, humbly, revise his aesthetic. “We must never forget,” Jung reminds us, “in the case of the anima, that it is a question of psychic facts which have never before been in man’s psychological possession; that hitherto were always to be found outside his consciousness in every possible form of projection” (79). Gaddis’s matrix of feminine symbols represents every possible form of projection of those qualities Wyatt keeps at arm’s length for so long: emotion, intuition, tenderness, even irrationality. Early in the novel, Esther often complains of Wyatt’s lack of emotion and his overreliance on intellectual matters. “—I wish you would lose your temper,” she tells him at one point, “—or something because this … this restraint, this pose, this control that you’ve cultivated, Wyatt, it becomes inhuman” (97). The only thing that excites him is Gypsy music, but even there what he admires is its “arrogance of suffering” and “self-sufficiency,” its “precision of suffering” and “the exquisite sense of privacy” (111–12). Complaining of Wyatt’s coldly rational reaction to Bach’s ebullient Suite No. 1 in C, she tells Otto, “—Yes but it isn’t human […]. It isn’t a way to live.” Otto comforts her with “—He can’t just go on, like this” (126). Nor does he. Wyatt himself realizes something is wrong, something is missing, symbolized by the missing mother. The unconscious presence of Camilla throughout the novel represents the lure of the irrational, of the need to balance the intellect with emotion, reason with intuition. In fact, it is significant that the only dramatic portrayal of Camilla in the book is in a flashback to the time when Revd. Gwyon’s archaeologist friend offered her a pair of Byzantine earrings, “not knowing Camilla, not knowing she would run from the room clutching the gold hoops, and surprised (though Gwyon was not) when she burst in again with wild luster in her eyes, wearing the gold earrings, blood all over them” (14). Marrying Camilla had been Gwyon’s attempt at tempering the intellect with emotion; he passes on this legacy to his son by giving him her earrings as keepsakes, which Wyatt keeps in a box,

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just as he keeps his emotions in a box. (The earrings represent the mother as the razor does the father; but as golden circles, they represent authenticity and wholeness, while the razor represents castration and conformity to Christian principles—see the Saint Wulstan anecdote [203]). Esme discovers the earrings and dons them, but Wyatt has already spurned her by that point. Not until the last page on which he appears does he realize the importance of the earrings; by intending to pass them along to his daughter, he demonstrates his recognition of the emotions and especially the strongest, most liberating emotion of all, love.46 Not the sentimental love of romantics, nor the lust of sensualists: the kind of love Wyatt embraces is less eros than agapē—charity, attentiveness, caring. “—Charity’s the challenge” Wyatt had admitted earlier (383), but not until the end of the novel is he psychologically prepared to commit himself to this challenge. It is crucial to note that the Augustinian motto Wyatt chooses reads “Dilige et quod vis fac” (“Love, and do what you want to” [899]), not the more popular form “Amo et fac quod vis”—that is, Wyatt prefers the verb meaning “to esteem and care for” over that meaning “to love passionately.”47 This is the kind of love recommended in Eliot’s Four Quartets; for Wyatt it represents a new beginning, not an end, for as Eliot argues, this form of love never ceases to be a challenge.

Stephen/Wyatt tells Ludy, “—They’re waiting for me now,” presumably referring to Pastora and the child she’s expecting. “—Her earrings, he said, —that’s where these are for” (900; cf. the child in the epigraph to this chapter). See Koenig for Gaddis’s original intentions regarding a daughter (in Kuehl and Moore, 24–5), and cf. R 127 for Wyatt’s longstanding interest in a daughter. 47 Both Latin forms are given in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Gaddis’s probable source. 46

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3

The Recognitions: The Self Who Can Do More

Although Wyatt’s quest is the center of attention in The Recognitions, he appears in only half of the novel’s twenty-two chapters, and even in some of those makes only fleeting appearances. As Gaddis stated in one of his notes, “the body of the novel has not been squarely about [Wyatt], it has been about the others, and he only insofar as he was the spirit they lost.”1 Just as Camilla, the spirit Wyatt lost, keeps “cold vigilance, waiting” (61) for Wyatt to rectify his imperfections, he does so for others. “—I wait,” he tells Valentine, describing his role in their hypothetical novel (a metafictional version of The Recognitions). “—Where is he? Listen, he’s there all the time. None of them moves, but it reflects him, none of them … reacts, but to react with him, none of them hates but to hate with him, to hate him, and loving … none of them loves, but, loving …” (263). Here Wyatt falters, aware of the absence of love in his life, but for the others he epitomizes what Valentine calls “this other … more beautiful self who … can do more than they can” (253). Each of the novel’s major characters sees in Wyatt what he or she might have become: “the self-who-can-do-more,” to quote again from Gaddis’s notes, “the creative self if it had not been killed by the other, in Valentine’s case, Reason; in Brown’s case, material gain; in Otto’s case, vanity and ambition; in Stanley’s case, the Church; in Anselm’s case, religion, &c. &c.”2 Like Rilke’s angel, with whom Wyatt is several times associated, he represents for these characters “a being in whom the limitations and contradictions of present human nature have been transcended, a being in whom thought and action, insight and achievement, will and capability, the actual and the ideal, are one.”3 As we have seen, Wyatt is no angel and has difficulties of his own reaching the Rilkean ideal, but he does possess enough talent to remind others of their shortcomings. Otto, for example, is lost in envy and Koenig, in Kuehl and Moore, 28. Quoted in Koenig’s “‘Splinters from the Yew Tree,’” 100. 3 J. B. Leishman’s notes to The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: Norton, 1939), 87–8. This is the translation Gaddis quotes from. 1 2

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admiration for him: “—I mean to know as much as you do, it must be … I mean you can really do anything you want to by now, I mean, you don’t feel all sort of hedged in by the parts you don’t know about, like I do” (134). “—It was like a part of me working, like a part of myself working there,” Wyatt’s former supervisor Benny reminisces. “—And I couldn’t do it. He could do it and I couldn’t do it” (606). This sense of failure and inadequacy dogs most of the novel’s other characters as well, driving them to madness, drugs and alcohol, inertia, suicide, or at best to what Thoreau calls lives of quiet desperation. These characters also provide a certain amount of comic relief from Wyatt’s grimly serious quest for redemption and authenticity. With the same kind of “calamitous wit” he ascribes to Saul Bellow,4 Gaddis may have intended a comedy of manners that deflates the lives and pretensions of the New York intellectuals, literati, artsy homosexuals, and assorted camp followers who make up his dramatis personae. But the ferocity of Gaddis’s satire, the contempt he heaps upon nearly everyone in the novel, betrays the stern moralist who doesn’t so much invite the reader to laugh at the foibles of his characters as to recoil in horror and inquire of them, aghast with indignation, “—But why do you do the things you do? Why do you live the life you live?” (923). This half of The Recognitions is less a comedy than a tragedy of manners. Gaddis accomplishes much more than an exposé of Bohemian life; instead, he offers a dramatization of the sociological pressures that drive people to don masks, to exchange “the things worth being for the things worth having” (499), to confuse the genuine with the counterfeit, and to reject “revelation for fear of examining the motives which conspired to breed it” (613). Gaddis’s own relentless inquiry into those motives makes wellrounded characters of what may first appear to be caricatures, mere butts of his satirical thrusts. “—How little of us ever meets how little of another” Agnes Deigh complains in her suicide letter to Dr. Weisgall (758), and how little attention has been paid to this intriguing gallery of characters.5

Otto In Gaddis’s “bop version” of Faust, Otto Pivner plays Wagner to Wyatt’s magus in the early part of the novel, but thereafter acts more as a comic In his 1987 review of More Die of Heartbreak (RSP 73). This has been rectified to some extent in Sheu’s recent essay “When Love Becomes Necessity,” 249–55.

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double, a funhouse mirror reflection of the “refugee artist” (661). Like the clown in a Shakespearean subplot, Otto functions as a ludicrous counterpart to Wyatt, aping his manner, stealing his best lines, parodying Wyatt’s quest as his does older models. Dozens of parallel situations link the two: Otto cuts his cheek (449) and asks his presumed father (515) the same question Wyatt, also with torn cheek, asks his father (427); a bartender calls after Otto to remind him of his abandoned newspaper (475) just as a French waiter had called after Wyatt about his (77); Otto’s hair starts burning (486) as Wyatt often dreams his does (87, 99, 586); Otto’s final conversation with Esther (609–13, 620–62) echoes Wyatt’s last conversation with her (585–92) so closely that Esther can prompt him; during those conversations both Wyatt (589) and Otto (620) remark that, looking around, there doesn’t seem much worth doing anymore; Otto’s last conscious act is to pound on a church door seeking sanctuary (729), just as Wyatt does before being turned away from his monastery (891); by the end of the novel each is called by a new name—Otto as Gordon, Wyatt as Stephen—and the final appearance of each is accompanied by the ringing of church bells (900, 950). These are only a few of the parallels, echoes, and parodies Gaddis scatters throughout the text, giving Otto’s actions the same kind of vague familiarity that nags the readers of his plagiarized play—whose title, appropriately enough, he stole from Wyatt. Otto’s stumbling progress is not played entirely for laughs, however. His troubles with identity and authenticity not only are mundane variations on Wyatt’s more metaphysical ones, but are closer to the plane most readers inhabit than the rarified one on which Wyatt operates. Similarly, his vanity may only be a more common version of the intense self-consciousness and introspection that characterizes Wyatt’s thoughts, who can even be said to be guilty of theological vanity when he demands of his father, “—Am I the man for whom Christ died?” (440). In his fumbling way, Otto even approaches the same “recognitions” Wyatt makes, often by way of the same metaphors from painting. In one of the most significant passages in the novel, Otto tells Esme: —a story I heard once, a friend of mine told me, somebody I used to know, a story about a forged painting. It was a forged Titian that somebody had painted over another old painting, when they scraped the forged Titian away they found some worthless old painting underneath it, the forger had used it because it was an old canvas. But then there was something under that worthless painting, and they scraped it off and underneath that they found a Titian, a real Titian that had been there all the time. It was as though when the forger was working, and

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he didn’t know the original was underneath, I mean he didn’t know he knew it, but it knew, I mean something knew. I mean, do you see what I mean? That underneath that the original is there, that the real … thing is there, and on the surface you … if you can only … see what I mean? (450–51)

In a later conversation with Esther, Otto employs the same metaphors from counterfeiting that have bedeviled Wyatt, using them in conjunction with the talismanic verb “to recognize”: “—And this, this mess, ransacking this mess looking for your own feelings and trying to rescue them but it’s too late, you can’t even recognize them when they come to the surface because they’ve been spent everywhere and, vulgarized and exploited and wasted and spent wherever we could, they keep demanding and you keep paying and you can’t … and then all of a sudden somebody asks you to pay in gold and you can’t. Yes, you can’t you haven’t got it, and you can’t” (621–2). These are two of several instances where Otto’s insights come close to matching Wyatt’s, but each time Otto backs off “with the brave refusal of one rejecting revelation for fear of examining the motives which conspired to breed it” (613). The kind of wholesale revision of one’s life that Wyatt/ Stephen makes is too drastic a move for most people, and yet even Otto may be ready to make such a change by the end of the novel: learning that Jesse has run off with his counterfeit money, Otto/Gordon reacts to the doctor’s injunction “—You’ll have to start all over again” by tearing off his bandages and laughing, with “a soft wind from the south, and the bells ringing a morning Angelus” (950) to suggest he too is ready to begin a new life. Before reaching this point, however, Otto traverses his own inferno. He is first seen in a Lexington Avenue bar gazing blankly at what will emerge as a symbolic triad: “staring at a dollar bill pinned on the wall, a sign which said, If you drive your father to drink drive him here, and his own image in the mirror” (101). Worrying about money, his father, and his image are Otto’s main concerns in the novel, and the ridiculous circumstance in which this symbolic triad is introduced sets the tone for most of his actions. Having recently arrived in New York City from Harvard, poor in pocket but rich in vanity and ambition, Otto enters the world of Wyatt and his wife with the first of many fabrications: overhearing a barfly yell at a man in a Santa Claus suit, “—Hey Pollyotch, don’t start singing your ladonnamobilay in here” (101), Otto revises this for Esther when telling her “he’d been at a party uptown, at some playwright’s house, he left when it got too noisy and some woman kept calling him Pagliacci” (105). Although Esther quickly sees through him as a “conceited pretentious boy” (106), she finds his attentions to her consoling as Wyatt withdraws further into himself.

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She grows annoyed soon enough, however, with his obsession with money and makes the acute observation, “—You seem to take not having it as a reflection on your manhood,” to which Otto replies, “—But money, I mean, damn it, a man does feel castrated in New York without money” (150–1). Later, Max taunts him, “—You have a real complex about money don’t you, Otto, a real castration complex without it” (463), which Gaddis brings to a comic apotheosis when Otto goes to meet his father for the first time since childhood. Panicking at the loss of his wallet while trying to pick up a blonde in a bar, Otto “felt for his inside breast pocket, as though the wallet must have been there all the time, its absence illusory, caused by witchcraft; and he glanced quickly at the blonde, as those medieval inquisitors, fingering the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum may have glanced at the witches who seemed to deprive men of their virile members, when they found that ‘such members are never actually taken away from the body, but are only hidden by a glamour from the senses of sight and touch’” (512). When his “father” gives him his “Christmas present”—actually forger Frank Sinisterra passing $5,000 in counterfeit twenties to his presumed contact— Otto keeps “the packet clutched against his parts” (520), and then rushes up to his hotel room to spread the money over his bed with the ardor of an impassioned lover, “counting the money, in various positions” (521). This money, of course, proves his downfall: learning of its counterfeit nature, he flees the country with it, gets wounded in earnest in a Central American revolution (after faking such a wound through most of the book), and finds the freedom of cathartic laughter only when he discovers the tainted money has been stolen from him. Otto’s search for a father is as hapless as his search for wealth, and in fact financial rather than filial motives lead him to arrange to meet the father he hasn’t seen since childhood. No explanation is given for the long estrangement, and Otto shows some trepidation at the prospect of meeting Mr. Pivner. “It was a problem until now more easily left unsolved; and be damned to Oedipus and all the rest of them. For now, the father might be anyone the son chose” (303). Needless to say, he chooses badly. Sitting in a hotel lobby awaiting his father, trying to guess if Mr. Pivner is among those present, Otto chooses a gentleman he later catches in bed with the blonde Otto had hoped to pick up, a woman who will later sag encouragingly in Mr. Pivner’s direction—all reflecting the Oedipal tension surrounding Wyatt’s relation to his father. With a Dickensian relish for coincidence and mistaken identity, Gaddis propels Frank Sinisterra into the lobby just as Mr. Pivner is being led away as a suspected junkie and both Otto and Sinisterra make the logical mistake, with hilarious results. (In Gaddis’s small world, Sinisterra not only is responsible for the death of Camilla but is the real father of Chaby

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Sinisterra, Otto’s seedy rival for Esme, who, unbeknownst to either of them, is hopelessly in love with Wyatt. A temporary father to Otto, Sinisterra will also become one to Wyatt later in the novel.) Sincere in his desire to be reunited with his son, Mr. Pivner returns to the hotel the following night, and finds himself in the lavatory standing next to a “figure his own height, near the same stature, […] when the whole face turned on him, turned bloodshot eyes in a desolation of contempt” (566–7). Mr. Pivner’s hopes flicker but quickly go out as no recognition takes place, and he soon finds a surrogate son in the affably fatuous Eddie Zefnic. Like “Oedipus and all the rest of them,” Otto is engaged in an archetypal quest, but as John Seelye points out, “the plotting of this incident recalls Restoration comedy”6 more than it does the spiritual quests of Oedipus, Hamlet, Ishmael, Stephen Dedalus, or, more to the point, Wyatt Gwyon. Otto’s motives for finding his father have nothing to do with love, atonement, or spiritual kinship, and in fact extend little beyond the anticipation of a generous Christmas present (preferably in cash) and listening to his patrician (if not regal) father speak of “his intimacies with opera stars, artists, producers, over breast of guinea hen and wine” (518). Similarly, Otto’s numerous encounters with mirrors are not numinous opportunities for the “intimacies of catoptric communion” (673) as they are for Wyatt and Esme, but vain attempts to prepare a face to meet the faces he hopes to meet: “He smiled at himself in the mirror. He raised an eyebrow. Better. He moistened his lips, and curled the upper one. Better still. The smile, which had shown his face obsequious, was gone. He must remember this arrangement: left eyebrow raised, eyelids slightly drawn, lips moistened, parted, down at corners. This was the expression for New York” (159–60). As Otto progresses through the novel, wrapping himself tighter and tighter in the web of deceptions, betrayals, and self-fabrications he has spun around himself, his mirror image records the assaults on his increasingly fragmented identity. Noting that Esme has finally put up a mirror in her apartment, he glances “into it to see his face shorn off at the jaw” (480). A few hours earlier, Otto has been seated in a bar staring “straight before him; but he did not see his face for the sign Franks and Kraut 20¢ was pasted on the mirror just above his collar” (474). The next time Otto stares into a bar mirror, it takes “him a good half-minute to realize that neither the stubbled chin, not the flattened nose, not the bunched ears, not the yellow eyes he stared into, were his own” (486). While Wyatt struggles toward psychic integration, Otto disintegrates so rapidly that his lack of cohesion resembles Esme’s schizophrenia by the middle of the novel as “he retired “Dryad in a Dead Oak Tree,” in Kuehl and Moore, 72.

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from the image of himself which had stepped down from the mirror above the bar, to dwell apart and watch it move across the room toward the lobby, prepared to applaud this vacant being if things should go well, to abandon it tinted and penniless if things should conspire against it” (512; Gaddis would return to the concept of the “detachable self ” in Agapē Agape). Like the preternatural portrait in Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the mirror here as elsewhere in The Recognitions functions as an occult window on the soul and records with pitiless accuracy the shattering of Otto’s identity. After his accident and transformation into “Gordon,” the ideal self-who-can-do-more he had sought in so many mirrors, the loss of Otto’s sense of self is finalized by the conspicuous absence of all mirrors in his new surroundings, with the exception of the perforated one on the ophthalmoscope Doctor Fell uses to peer into Otto’s glazed, empty eyes.

Esther and Esme A romantic quadrangle links Wyatt and Otto with the novel’s two principal female characters, Wyatt’s wife Esther and his model Esme, both of whom tolerate Otto only because of Wyatt’s indifference. Both have additional lovers—Esther, Ellery; Esme, Chaby—making Otto even more superfluous, and many of the other male characters seem to have slept with Esther or Esme. But the promiscuity of Greenwich Village women is hardly Gaddis’s chief concern. Esther and Esme represent the two traditional forms of female salvation open to the mythic hero, and their inadequacies as suitable anima figures dramatize Gaddis’s critique of that very tradition. Though both women share initials and an avocation for writing, they are diametrically opposed: Esther is rational, big-boned, ambitious, and writes prose, while Esme is mystical, delicate, aimless, and writes poetry. Gaddis’s prose sharpens the contrast further: his introduction of Esther (78–80) is written in the well-balanced, logically ordered style of Henry James—an author Esther admires—while Esme’s equivalent introduction is fractured into two sections (276–7, 298–302) presaging her incipient schizophrenia, and written with the illogic of an interior monologue, punctuated with solipsistic questions and fragments of poems, fictions, and esoteric trivia. They are united, however, in their unrequited love for Wyatt and, after losing him, in their despair. Esther is the more aggressive of the two. An intelligent woman and a sympathetic character in many ways, Esther is too strongly committed to reason, analysis, intellectual matters, and social success to fulfill the emotional needs of her brooding husband. Complicating matters further,

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Esther deeply resents being a woman, “and having come to be severely intellectual, probing the past with masculine ruthlessness” (78), she expresses that resentment with a rapacious, castrating sexuality, “seeking, in its clear demand, to absorb the properties which had been withheld from her” (80). Too out of touch with her own femininity, she is hardly in a position to supply the feminine component Wyatt’s psyche lacks, and with problems of his own, Wyatt is in no position to help her find herself. Consequently, their marriage is a study in frustration, their temperaments nicely set off by Esther’s “thralldom to the perfection of Mozart, work of genius without an instant of hesitation or struggle, genius to which [Wyatt’s] argument opposed the heroic struggle constantly rending the music of Beethoven, struggle never resolved and triumphed until the end” (81). Too similar to Aunt May in her schematic outlook on life, Esther loses Wyatt to someone more like his lost mother. Gretchen to Wyatt’s Faust, Esme has been sent to him by the novel’s Mephistopheles, Recktall Brown. A promiscuous manic-depressive schizophrenic addicted to heroin, she nevertheless models as the Virgin Mary in Wyatt’s religious forgeries (“—No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now,” Brown reminds him [259]), but even outside his studio she is consistently described as resembling a painting (183, 193, 197, 306, 912). With so many keys to character to be found in mirrors and works of art in The Recognitions, it is worth noting the difference between the paintings with which Esther and Esme are associated. During his marriage, Wyatt works at restoring “a late eighteenth-century American painting in need of a good deal of work, the portrait of a woman with large bones in her face but an unprominent nose, a picture which looked very much like Esther” (88). Later, turning an ultraviolet light on the restored painting, Wyatt sees another Dorian Gray-like revelation of his wife’s soul: “in the woman’s face, the portions he had restored shone dead black, a face touched with the irregular chiaroscuric hand of lues and the plague, tissues ulcerated under the surface which reappeared in complaisant continence the instant he turned the violet light from it, and upon the form of Esther who had come, looking over his shoulder, and fallen stricken there on the floor without a word” (118). This remarkable passage, with its images from syphilis and disease, not only reveals Wyatt’s sexual revulsion from his wife, but more importantly places the blame on Wyatt for Esther’s subsequent decline, as though caused by the sympathetic magic of his voodooistic painting. Esme, on the other hand, is associated with Wyatt’s unfinished painting of Camilla, the other virgin of The Recognitions. If the spirit of Camilla was translated into the soul of the Barbary ape Heracles, it finds its present reincarnation in Esme by way of numerous parallels and verbal echoes: Esme

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is said to have a child four years old (96), the age at which Wyatt realized he had lost his mother; Esme has “a vague look of yearning, but that without expectation” (273), an echo of “the unchanging, ungratified yearning in the face of Camilla on the living-room mantel” (33); before her suicide attempt, Esme dons Camilla’s Byzantine earrings with the same bloody results as Camilla experienced (469–70, 14), and after the suicide attempt goes “over to a drawer, looking for something” (480) just as Camilla’s ghost had returned after her death to her sewing room, “looking for something” (20); Esme too becomes “an apparition” with a face “delicately intimate in the sharp-boned hollow-eyed virginity of unnatural shadows” (745), restored to a spiritual state of virginity as was Wyatt’s ghostly mother before her. Although Esme is associated with a wide variety of other female figures of salvation in addition to the Virgin Mary and Faust’s Gretchen—Dante’s Beatrice, Saint Rose of Lima, the Flying Dutchman’s Senta, Peer Gynt’s Solveig, Lucius’s Isis, Saint Francis’s Clare, even the king’s daughter in the Grimm Brothers’ “The Frog King”—she is elsewhere associated with succubae and sirens, and when Wyatt deigns to think of her at all, it is unfortunately in her role as temptress. Rebelling from Brown in his role as the Troll King, Wyatt comes to view Esme more as Ibsen’s alluring Green-clad One than as the maternal Solveig and at that point flees from her offer of intimacy to return to his father and take up the priesthood.7 Given the close association between Esme and Camilla, unconscious fears of incest also seem to be at work in Wyatt’s troubled mind. But after the destruction by fire of the Stabat Mater modeled on Camilla and Esme—Wyatt having found in Esme’s face the lines necessary to complete the old portrait—he realizes the mistake he made in spurning the one woman capable of offering him selfless love. Returning to New York to expose his forgeries and to find Esme, he bungles the first and fails at the second, then reluctantly abandons her a final time to travel to Spain and seek out his mother’s tomb to do penance. To some extent, Esme resembles another schizophrenic in American literature, Nicole in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. “Nicole, the goddess who failed,” Leslie Fiedler has written of her in terms applicable to Esme, “is postulated in the novel as a schizophrenic, in an attempt to explain her double role as Fair Lady and Dark, her two faces, angelic and diabolic, the melting and the grinning mask” (Love and Death 314). Both faces are turned toward Stanley during their ocean voyage after Wyatt disappears; by day he tries to convert her to Catholicism, but by night her “simulacra” assail him “immodest in dress and licentious in nakedness, many-limbed as some For Gaddis’s use of Ibsen’s play, see my “Peer Gynt and The Recognitions,” in Kuehl and Moore, 81–91.

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wild avatar of the Hindu cosmology […] full-breasted and vaunting the belly, limbs indistinguishable until he was brought down between them and stifled in moist collapse” (828). Ever the victim of male projections, Esme slips deeper into madness and religious mania as the novel nears its conclusion, her unrequited love for Wyatt causing her to waste away, “—so quickly as though she … she had no will to live,” as Stanley mournfully confesses, reporting her Firbankian death, a “staphylococcic infection […] from kissing Saint-Peter-in-the-Boat” (953). One of the strangest yet memorable heroines in contemporary literature, Esme betrays the absurdities of the role of romantic redemptress forced upon so many female characters by males who prefer virgins and whores to any more complex woman in between.

Recktall Brown and Basil Valentine Recktall Brown enters The Recognitions by way of the same Satanic invocation Goethe’s Faust uses to summon Mephistopheles—both based on the medieval Key of Solomon—and thereafter is usually seen wreathed in cigar smoke, basking in the infernal heat of his apartment, and surrounded by shadows. With greater relish for Grand Guignol than for subtlety, Gaddis arrays Brown in all the trappings of a twentieth-century devil, a Mammon of the modern world: “—A publisher? A collector? A dealer? Recktall Brown sounded only mildly interested. —People who don’t know me, they say a lot of things about me. He laughed then, but the laughter did not leave his throat. —A lot of things. You’d think I was wicked as hell, even if what I do for them turns out good. I’m a business man” (141). Playing upon Wyatt’s various frustrations and disappointments, Brown talks Wyatt into forging paintings for him, offering the motto, “—Money gives significance to anything” (144) in place of Saint Irenaeus’s motto at the beginning of The Recognitions, “God gives significance to anything” (as one might loosely translate “Nihil cavum neque sine signo apud Deum”). Just as the devil replaces the deity in Wyatt’s world, Brown replaces Revd. Gwyon to a great extent, and thereafter calls him “my boy” and watches over him like a gruff but protective father. As crass and vulgar as his raunchy name, Recktall Brown nonetheless harbors an ideal “self-who-can-do-more” that he betrayed in his pursuit of material gain. As with the others, that more beautiful self resides in works of art in his possession. One is a portrait of Brown when younger, before which he sometimes stands “with fond veneration” for “the youth he reverenced there” (228). But like the other uncanny paintings and mirrors in the novel, this too is symbolically accurate and unmasks his grasping greed by its disproportionately large hands until, “passing it hundreds of times in the

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years since, often catching up one hand in the other before him, his hands came to resemble these in the portrait” (228). “—Hands like that, on these beautiful things?” Basil Valentine will gloat over Brown’s corpse, going on to compare Brown to the Chancellor Rolin in Van Eyck’s Virgin and Child and Donor (689). But just as Rolin “combined rigid piety with excesses of pride, of avarice and of lust” (in the words of one of Gaddis’s sources),8 Brown does display some appreciation for the beautiful objects he deals in—especially for a suit of fifteenth-century Italian armor whose beauty proves his undoing. Early in the novel Brown admits, “—It’s my favorite thing here” (232), a preference he reiterates at his fatal Christmas Eve party (664). In that same early chapter, Valentine had engaged Wyatt in prescient banter, teasing him with “—Brown tells me you have another self. Oh, don’t be upset, it’s not uncommon you know, not at all uncommon. Why, even Brown has one. That’s why he drinks to excess occasionally, trying to slip up on it and grab it. Mark me, he’s going to get too close one day, and it’s going to turn around and break his neck for him” (253). Drinking to excess the night of the party, knowing Wyatt is no longer under his control and threatening to expose their forgeries, Brown makes a foolish attempt to climb into his beloved armor, which does indeed “break his neck for him” as he falls and clatters down the stairs. His death, like so many of the deaths in The Recognitions, is absurd but symbolically apt; watching him climb into the armor, a visiting member of England’s Royal Academy is reminded of an essay he once wrote: “—The devil, wearing false calves, do you recall? Mephistopheles, don’t you know, in mffft that ponderous thing by Goethe. Good heavens yes, wearing false calves, yes. Well my thesis, don’t you see, was that these things weren’t simply a disguise, to fool people and all that sort of thing, but that some sort of mffft … aesthetic need you might say, some sort of nostalgia for beauty, don’t you see, he being a fallen angel and all that sort of thing, […]” (676). Bending over the corpse of this fallen angel, “the heavy figure in perfect grace despite its distension hurled down among the roses” of the Aubusson carpet (681), Wyatt weeps for Brown as he does for no other character in the book, in quick succession associating him with the Grimm Brothers’ king, Tosca’s Cavaradossi, Graves’s crucified wren, “old earth,” Peer Gynt’s Troll King, and finally, however, as a “luxury,” the indulgent father who allowed Wyatt to play at Flemish painter for two years and protected him from the outside world. Despite his corrupt dealings, Brown admires Wyatt and has his best interests at heart. “—I want to watch out for you,” he once said with gruff Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), 240; the Van Eyck painting is reproduced opposite p. 141.

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sincerity (365). Not so his partner Basil Valentine, who appears at first to be more sensitive to Wyatt’s difficulties but who later exposes himself to be as predatory as Esther. Like Wyatt’s wife, Valentine is aligned with reason and analysis, and is likewise envious of Wyatt’s abilities. “—He’s jealous of you, my boy, can’t you see that?” Brown warns him (364), but Wyatt is initially seduced by the companionship of someone whose learning and aesthetic tastes match his own. Viewing Wyatt’s forgery of a van der Goes Death of the Virgin, Valentine murmurs, “—The simplicity … it’s the way I would paint” (334). Disturbed later by the damage Wyatt deliberately inflicts upon the face in this painting, Valentine surreptitiously restores the face himself (with results Wyatt finds laughably vulgar), perhaps from the same “nostalgia for beauty” the British R.A. member spoke of, perhaps from his vain desire to participate in Wyatt’s artistry: “—Because you’re … part of me … damn you” (692). Wyatt stabs him at that point and leaves him for dead, sensing enough truth in Valentine’s words to want to kill that part of him epitomized by the haughty aesthete. Graced with taste, intelligence, and “the best education money can buy” (364), Valentine uses these gifts to place as much distance as possible between himself and others, specifically “—the stupid, thick-handed people, […] whose idea of necessity is paying the gas bill, the masses who as their radios assure them, are under no obligation” (386). Valentine insists on obligations to church, state, culture, tradition. Consequently, he is involved (in addition to Brown’s art scam) in shipping works of art “back to Europe” where they “belong” (688–9), working to restore the Hapsburg monarchy to Hungary, and acting in the clandestine interests of the Jesuits—activities that make up the novel’s murky espionage subplot but that have in common an attempt to turn back the clock to an age of aristocratic privilege when the masses knew their place and kept their hands off art. Making his acquaintance late in the novel, Esme calls him the Cold Man and challenges him: “—But why do you do the things you do? Why do you live the life you live?” (923). Valentine defends his reactionary politics with an appeal to the same kind of aesthetic elitism that led Pound and Eliot (among others) to favor authoritarian governments: “—because any sanctuary of power … protects beautiful things. To keep people … to control people, to give them something … anything cheap that will satisfy them at the moment, to keep them away from beautiful things, their hands that … touch and defile and … break beautiful things, hands that hate beautiful things, and fear beautiful things, and touch and defile and fear and break beautiful things” (924). To achieve this end, Valentine is willing to forsake all humane obligations, going so far as to arrange for the assassination of his childhood friend Martin. Invited to join Valentine in this sterile ivory tower, Wyatt stabs him and flees

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from New York, immersing himself for the next few months in the simple arts of the people. In the novel’s religious scheme, Valentine is associated not only with Catholicism but with Gnosticism, the early Christian heresy that held matter to be evil and urged nonparticipation in a fallen world. In his notes, Gaddis wrote: “Basil Valentine, who is the Gnostic presumption […] is finally stricken down with insomnia, for his very refusal to realize and grant the worth of matter, that is, of other people. The essence of his gnosticism is largely an implacable hatred for matter. It is that element of aescetecism [sic] common in so many religious expressions turned, not upon the self, but upon humanity.”9 In a kind of parody of Agatha of the Cross—“the saint who didn’t sleep for the last eight years of her life” (365)—Valentine survives Wyatt’s attack only to lapse into an insomnia for which his Hungarian doctors can find no “reason,” and finally expires babbling Latin, which exposes the failure of his kind of Gnosticism: the penultimate word in his quotation “Aut castus sit aut pereat” (Be pure or perish) becomes “et pereat” (and perish) (949)—suggesting that any withdrawal to a pure realm of thought without the “impurity” of human relations will lead to sterility at best (note Valentine’s homosexuality), and at worst to death.

Stanley and Anselm That same Latin motto can be said to govern the life of Stanley, who likewise perishes from a mistaken notion of purity, a mistake for which he is taunted throughout by his frenemy Anselm. In the novel’s religious dialectic, Stanley and Anselm represent the two extremes of institutional Catholicism and primitive Christianity, respectively, both making explicit in their arguments some of the tensions implicit in Wyatt’s religious conflicts. Raised a Protestant but drawn in his extremity to the priesthood of Stanley’s church, Wyatt will finally settle for Augustine’s simple, almost secular injunction “Love, and do what you want to” (899; meaning any act motivated by charity and generosity is acceptable). But Wyatt’s movement from one to the other—with excursions into Calvinism, Satanism, mystical alchemy, and paganism—owes much of its theological depth to the religious debates held by Stanley and Anselm in their various Greenwich Village haunts. Koenig, “‘Splinters from the Yew Tree,’” 93. Basilius Valentinus was a fifteenth-century alchemist, but the name also evokes Basilides and Valentinus, second-century Gnostic theologians.

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Neither ever meets Wyatt, yet both are linked to him by numerous metonymic gestures, relations, and attitudes: both Stanley and Anselm know and love Esme (in their respective ways); both are artists—Stanley a composer, Anselm a poet—and Stanley in particular shares Wyatt’s religious obsession with authentic art and his preference for working at night; Stanley’s eyes burn green in moments of rage as Wyatt’s do, and he apparently lives only a block north of Wyatt’s Horatio Street studio; Anselm has Wyatt’s distrust of rationality and comes into possession of Wyatt’s father’s razor, with unmanning results; and the three of them, as Max points out, are “all mothers’ sons” (534) suffering from the psychological tensions between mothers and sons, between Mother Church and her wayward children. Reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin or Alyosha Karamazov, Stanley is the holy fool of The Recognitions, moving through its sordid scenes with unassailable purity and goodwill. But while Dostoevsky’s saintly characters are blessed with some degree of serenity, Stanley has an air of gloom and uneasiness about him. “A candid look of guilt hung about him” we are told at his first appearance (182), standing forlorn at a party attended by the three women who will assail that purity he so zealously guards: the literary agent Agnes Deigh, a lapsed Catholic he hopes to bring back into the fold; Hannah, a dumpy Village artist hopelessly in love with him; and Esme, his spiritual sister in many ways, whom he wants to “save” but who inspires in him feelings closer to eros than agapē. In addition, Stanley is haunted by the thought of his mother, moribund in a nearby hospital, and his unfinished organ mass, which he hopes to complete before her death, but which proves to be quite literally the death of him. Stanley shares Wyatt’s frustrations with creating sacred art in such profane times, and most of his aesthetic pronouncements could as easily come from Wyatt’s lips (cf. 186 with 89, 616 with 113–4). But he also shares Wyatt’s self-isolation and discomfort with human contact, a terror of intimacy that approaches cold-heartedness at times. Instinctively recoiling from the first of Agnes’s many loving gestures, “the consecrated mind thrust the vagrant heart aside” (193), a stance he maintains throughout the novel, all the while insisting that love and unity can still be found in the Church. Disturbed by “the gulf between people and modern art” (632), Stanley composes music in the Renaissance style of the Gabrielis and loses himself in nostalgia for those ages past when art and religion went hand in hand to bind communities together—much as Wyatt imagines fifteenth-century Flanders. He quietly opposes the easy cynicism of Max, Otto, and the others until Anselm, for one, can stand it no longer. Flinging Matthew 10:35–6 in Stanley’s face (“For I am come to set man at variance […]”), Anselm hisses, “—Yes, there’s your

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gulf, the hand of your everlasting Christ!” (632), then goes on to attack Stanley’s confidence in “spiritual love” with sputtering anger: —And stop this damned … this God-damned sanctimonious attitude, he cried, twisting free, and they stood face to face. —Stanley, by Christ Stanley that’s what it is, and you go around accusing people of refusing to humble themselves and submit to the love of Christ and you’re the one, you’re the one who refuses love, you’re the one all the time who can’t face it, who can’t face loving, and being loved right here, right in this lousy world, this God-damned world where you are right now, right … right now. (635)

Finally taunting him with a pornographic photograph of Esme, he pinpoints Stanley’s real fear, sexual intimacy, the repression that will return to haunt Stanley during his ocean voyage with Esme. Anselm challenges the fastidious, rather austere Christianity of Eliot (whose works Stanley can quote) in the spirit of Yeats’s Crazy Jane, who spurns her bishop’s “heavenly mansions” because she knows better that “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.”10 Concealing Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God within a girlie magazine, more blasphemous than pious, Anselm is an enemy not of the religious but of the religiose. He recognizes the New Testament for the radical document it is and is contemptuous of those who compromise or prettify its stringent call for humility and renunciation, a call he feels others should struggle with as intensely as he does. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” Paul counsels (Phil. 2:12), not with the smarmy confidence so many Christians exude. After his friend Charles attempts suicide, only to be abandoned by his mother because he won’t return to Grand Rapids and submit to Christian Science, Anselm turns on Hannah: —It’s the complacency I can’t stand, Anselm burst out. —I can’t stand it anywhere, but most of all I can’t stand it in religion. Did you see Charles’ mother? did you see her smile? that holier-than-thou Christian smile, […] I don’t blame Charles a God damned bit for flipping. God is Love! We’d all flip, taking that from your own mother and you’re lying there with your wrists slashed open. But love on this earth? Christ! … pity? compassion? That’s why I’ve got my balls in an uproar if you want to know, talking about some kind of love floating around Christ knows where, but what did she give him? When he wouldn’t go back to Grand fucking Rapids and be treated by Christian Science? She gave him one “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, rev. 2nd edn. (New York: Scribner, 1996), 259–60.

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of those eternally damned holier-than-thou smiles and left him here. She left him here without a cent, to let Bellevue kill him, or let him try it again himself. God is Love, for Christ’s sake! If Peter had smiled like a Christian Scientist Christ would have kicked his teeth down his throat. (531–2)

One moment quipping “—I envy Christ, he had a disease named after him” (534), the next moment proving the existence of God with citations from saints Augustine and Anselm (for whom he abandoned his given name Arthur) and tearing to shreds someone’s beatnik version of the Paternoster (536), Anselm veers violently between fierce blasphemy and a grudging respect for Christ’s teachings. As sensual as Stanley is chaste, however, Anselm cannot accommodate Christianity’s prejudice against sex: “—With all the … rotten betrayals around us, and that, that … that one moment of trust, is sin?” (526). But the sexual encounters he boasts of are acts of victimization, not trust, and may be a reaction against the apparent homosexual attraction to both Charles and Stanley that he throttles throughout the book. Unshaven, broke, his problems are compounded by frequent drunkenness and the rejection (by publisher Recktall Brown) of his religious poetry. He is the angriest character in this angry novel. “—Why do you fight it so hard?” (633) Stanley asks him, echoing Esther to Wyatt (118). Anselm shares with Wyatt and Stanley an incapacity for tenderness and, more important, a problematic relation to his mother. Anselm describes her as a religious fanatic who is more interested in dogs than in her troubled son, which accounts for his habit of crawling on all fours from time to time. It is after a hallucinatory encounter with his mother in a subway that Anselm castrates himself with the Reverend Gwyon’s old razor, stolen while he was at Esther’s party, in emulation of “Origen, that most extraordinary Father of the Church, whose third-century enthusiasm led him to castrate himself so that he might repeat the hoc est corpus meum, Dominus, without the distracting interference of the rearing shadow of the flesh” (103). As “screwed up with religion” as Stanley is (182), Anselm follows in Thomas Merton’s footsteps and retreats to a monastery out west to write his memoirs, much to Stanley’s amazement.11 Stanley doesn’t fare as well; as unworldly as Esme, he too perishes in the highly symbolic conclusion. In the last two pages of the novel, Gaddis evokes in compressed form all of the major tensions in The Recognitions: appearance vs. reality (the church at Merton’s Seven Story Mountain (1948) may be a model for Anselm’s career in some details; the reviews of Anselm’s book on p. 935 are quite similar to the ones Merton’s book received.

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Fenestrula is smaller than it looked at night); the ideal vs. the real (“there was nothing, absolutely nothing, the way it should be”); shadowy night vs. “the vast consciousness of the lighted sky”; American innocence vs. European worldliness (Stanley is dressed in red, white, and blue, playing an oversized organ donated by an American, and is unable to comprehend the Italian priest’s warnings about bass notes and dissonances); the demands of art vs. the need for love; human loss vs. artistic gain; the Church as “a private chapel” vs. “a public convenience” (both the same building, Stanley realizes); and religion as a refuge vs. a tomb. Church bells ring in a new life for Wyatt (and possibly for Otto and Anselm), but they toll the impending death of the novel’s most devout Catholic and most devoted artist, a martyr to both art and religion, “for the work required it” (956).

Frank Sinisterra and Mr. Pivner There are nearly as many fathers seeking sons in The Recognitions as sons fleeing mothers in search of spiritual fathers. No one in the novel confuses his mother with anyone else’s—“Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life,” as Stephen Dedalus suggests12—but a number of skewed father-and-son combinations link the older generation with the younger. Revd. Gwyon abandons his son first for the Son, then for the Sun; thus abandoned, Wyatt is taken up by father figures as diverse as Recktall Brown, Basil Valentine, Frank Sinisterra, the novelist Ludy, and the porter at the monastery where he ends up; Sinisterra, the natural but disappointed father of Chaby, is mistaken by Otto for his own father before becoming a father figure to Wyatt; Otto’s father, Mr. Pivner, misses his own son but finds one in Eddie Zefnic; Stanley briefly enjoys a father figure in Father Martin; Arnie Munk fails at becoming a father so regularly that his wife steals a baby in desperation, while the homosexual Big Anna the Swede becomes a legal father “—because the only way I can possibly get hold of little Giono is to adopt him” (825); and even the heavenly father Christians revere emerges as little more than a useful fiction, anybody’s or nobody’s father. Frank Sinisterra, another of Gaddis’s great comic creations, is as devout a Catholic as Stanley and as devoted an artist as Wyatt; he plays key roles both in directing Wyatt’s life and in clarifying his aesthetics. Introduced wearing the first of many disguises, Sinisterra poses as ship’s surgeon on the Purdue Victory and puts an end to Camilla’s life during an improvised appendectomy. Apprehended and sentenced to prison—which he resents “no Ulysses (1922; rpt. New York: Random House, 1986), 170.

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more than Saint Augustine resented the withdrawal he had made from the world when living near Tagaste” (488) —Sinisterra does not reappear until nearly 500 pages (and thirty years) later, but thereafter plays an increasingly important role first in Otto’s then in Wyatt’s life. Later masquerading as Mr. Yák, he runs into Wyatt at Camilla’s tomb in Spain and takes him under his wing, first because he sees this as an opportunity to make restitution for his earlier misdeed, and second because he finds in Wyatt the son he never had in Chaby. Despite all his fatherly efforts, Sinisterra has not been able to prevent his biological son from becoming a “bum”: —Whenever I was home to give him the benefit of my study and experience, I tried to teach him. I taught him how to spring a Yale lock with a strip of celluloid. I taught him how to open a lock with wet thread and a splinter. I taught him how to look like he has a deformed spine, or a deformed foot. Nobody taught me all that. I learned it myself. It was a lot of work, and he had me right there to teach him, right here, his own father. So what does he learn? Nothing. He’s never done a day’s work in his life. You think a bum like that I’d claim him for my son? (493)

But he knows Wyatt is no “bum,” as he often tells him, and he swells with paternal pride when he learns that Wyatt knows enough about Egyptian mummies to help him with his most ambitious counterfeit. Sinisterra rechristens Wyatt with the name originally intended for him, and by the time “Mr. Yák,” “Stephan,” and their “mummy” settle onto a train, they resemble “a weary and not quite respectable family” (812). Sinisterra takes Revd. Gwyon’s place by quite literally following in his footsteps: his approach to San Zwingli (776) contains numerous verbal echoes of Gwyon’s earlier approach (16), and both share the “glittering eye” of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (428, 794). Both watch the rain from the windows of their Madrid rooms and are chilled by the thought of leaving a window open or “something precious left out in the rain” (12, 821). Sinisterra sports “a light in his eye seldom seen today but in asylums and occasional pulpits” (776), Revd. Gwyon’s current and former location. But more importantly, Sinisterra provides Wyatt with the moral instruction his deranged father was incapable of giving: he sees Wyatt through his difficult symbolic death by water (a feverish delirium), and in their last conversation, as Wyatt/Stephan searches his face “as though waiting for some answer from him,” Sinisterra counsels, “—What you’d want to do maybe, he commenced, —you might like to go to a monastery awhile, you don’t have to turn into a monk, you are like a guest there” (816–7). Stephen follows his advice and there experiences the hillside epiphany that frees him into a new life.

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Like Stanley, Sinisterra dies a martyr to his art and is likewise guilty of hoarding all his love for his work (817). A parody of a genuine artist, Sinisterra lavishes on his counterfeiting projects all his technique and expertise, and “like any sensitive artist caught in the toils of unsympathetic critics” smarts from unkind reviews (5–6). A comic voice in the novel’s aesthetic debate, Sinisterra exemplifies the danger of overreliance on heartless virtuosity; while Wyatt is struck by the beauty of the Dama de Elche on a Spanish one-peseta note, Sinisterra dismisses it as “A cheap engraving job” (782). As Stanley insists, “—It isn’t for love of the thing itself that an artist works, but so that through it he’s expressing love for something higher, because that’s the only place art is really free, serving something higher than itself ” (632). Sinisterra works only for laundered cash, and his “art” is of course limited to slavish imitation with an intent to defraud, not to enlighten or to serve anything higher. Sinisterra studies and respects the “old masters” (519) as reverently as Stanley or Wyatt—by whom he means con artists like Johnny the Gent and Jim the Penman—but he erroneously considers “a craftsman, an artist” to be interchangeable terms (785), blind to the motives that elevate a craftsman to an artist. His career provides a ludicrous but illuminating dimension to the novel’s consideration of the artist’s role in society and the aesthetics that distinguish artistry from imitative craftsmanship. Neither artist nor craftsman, Mr. Pivner is the most conventional character in this unconventional novel, living a life of quiet desperation in the Age of Anxiety, practically a case study out of Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950). Trusting “there would be time” (292), Pivner has all of Prufrock’s doubts and misgivings but none of his romantic longings, and like Eliot’s dreamer he shrinks from asserting himself in any but the meekest way. Although he makes only a half-dozen appearances in the novel—each one a quiet vignette expertly poised between pathos and bathos—Pivner performs two important functions: first, he exemplifies the numbing conventional life most of Gaddis’s characters are reacting against; and second, he provides a mundane counterpart to the more exotic search for meaning and authenticity conducted by the others. As Revd. Gwyon has his books on myth and magic, Wyatt his alchemical tracts, Esme her Rilke, Stanley Eliot, Anselm Saint Anselm, Valentine Tertullian, and Sinisterra Bicknall’s Counterfeit Detector, Mr. Pivner has Dale Carnegie. He studies the best-selling How to Win Friends and Influence People with the same attention the others spend on their authors, although to his credit Pivner is more interested in winning friends than influencing people—especially the friendship of his estranged son Otto. Carnegie’s call for “a new way of life” (498) is a profane version of the more sacred calls made by Christ, Dante, and Rilke to which the other characters strive to

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respond. Although Pivner is largely unaware that he and Carnegie’s millions of other readers vainly pursue “the Self which has ceased to exist the day they stopped seeking it alone” (286), he too has moments of recognition, glimpses of the “self-who-can-do-more.” He is generally made nervous by such music as Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, for example, “but sometimes he was struck with a bar of ‘classical’ music, a series of chords such as these which poured forth now, a sense of loneliness and confirmation together, a sense of something lost, and a sense of recognition which he did not understand” (501). His fleeting impulses toward authenticity are conveyed with the same complex of alchemical/metallurgical/counterfeit imagery Gaddis uses throughout the novel: “the strain of perfect metal in his alloy cried out for perfection,” but under a relentless barrage of meretricious advertising, flattering self-help books, and the glib assurances of science and reason, “that perfect particle was submerged, again satisfied with any counterfeit of itself which would represent its worth amongst others” (293). While others in the novel rage against the dying of the lights of civilization, Pivner goes gentle into that benighted modern world. Pivner is arrested while listening with his surrogate son Eddie Zefnic to the famous aria from Handel’s Messiah that begins, “He was despised, rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ” (743), and is later duly “crucified” with a frontal lobotomy (at Eddie’s suggestion, who joins the novel’s ranks of Oedipal headhunters) after being sent to prison as a counterfeiter—on the slimmest of evidence, it should be noted, however appropriate the metaphor. (This was foreshadowed in one of the headlines Pivner had read earlier in the novel: “Lobotomy to Cure Man of Writing Dud Checks” [289].) The sense behind this outlandish turn of events is that Pivner is a victim of the same kind of anxiety neurosis that budding scientist Eddie Zefnic eagerly observes being inflicted experimentally upon “a whole bunch of kids (ha ha I mean little goats),” he writes, “which are hooked up so that when the light dims it gets a shock, so after a while then the minute the light dims the kid backs into the corner and gets tense but when we change the signals around on him then he gets the real anxiety neurosis” (933). The makers of postwar society have changed the signals around to the point where old values and certainties seem no longer appropriate, and new ones intent only on bringing “a good price in the market place” (502). Those like Pivner without the conviction to maintain the old values or without the courage to create new ones may as well agree to a lobotomy and have done with it. At the quiet center of the novel, Mr. Pivner is Gaddis’s Willy Loman, and his failure is a similar tragedy for the common man. He struggles to maintain values that seem curiously unreal in the brave new world of “the Age of

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Publicity” (736), values at odds with those of the unctuous radio announcer he listens to so politely: “What was this anomaly in him, that still told him that the human voice is to be listened to? the printed word to be read? What was this expectant look, if it was not hope? this attentive weariness, if it was not faith? this bewildered failure to damn, if it was not charity?” (502). Amidst the angst-ridden quests for philosophers’ stones and the will of God by the wild-eyed characters in the novel, Mr. Pivner’s failed quest for love and authenticity is blandly unromantic, and perhaps for that very reason all the more tragic.

Baedeker’s Babel Among the other characters in this well-populated novel is a young writer named Willie working on a novel called “Baedeker’s Babel,” to be based on the Clementine Recognitions. Gaddis’s own novel is a kind of Baedeker’s guide to the Babel of modern civilization and to the varieties of babble its citizens speak. “The decay of overripe forms of civilization is as suggestive a spectacle as the growth of new ones,” Huizinga writes of fifteenth-century Flanders (v), and in that spirit Gaddis aligns midcentury America not only with Van Eyck’s Flanders—“a world where everything was done for the same reasons everything’s done now […] for vanity and avarice and lust” (689–90)—but with “Caligula’s Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers every morning” (386), and even with Ikhnaton’s Egypt, as the British R.A. obligingly explains: “—Too much gold, that was their difficulty, gold kicking around all over the place, and vulgarity everywhere, eh? Yes, that’s what happens, that’s when the decadence sets in, eh? Same damn thing running around today from the look of things, eh? Wasn’t like this fifty years ago, eh? Good heavens no, people then who had money inherited it don’t you know, knew how to spend it. Some sense of responsibility to their culture, eh?” (658). This transcultural historical approach is similar to that in The Waste Land. Like Eliot, Gaddis dramatizes “the world of fire” (726) kindled by those for whom vanity, avarice, and lust have obliterated any sense of responsibility to their culture, much less to their god. There is indeed what one critic called “an odor of spoilt culture” hanging over The Recognitions,13 a stench given off by those for whom learning has deteriorated to fodder for cocktail-party chat: —Einstein … somebody said. —Epstein … said someone else. Watts 434.

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—Gertrude … —Of course you’re familiar with Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty. Have you ever observed sand fleas? Well I’m working on a film which not only substantiates it but illustrates perfectly the metaphor of the theoretic and the real situation. And after all, what else is there? —Who was it that said, “a little lower than the angels”? —That? it’s in that poem about “What is man, that thou art mindful of him.” That was Pope. —Which one? (600)

It is not surprising, then, that the novel’s most sympathetic characters—and the ones who offer Wyatt the best advice—are the mad, the uneducated, the disenfranchised: Janet, the Town Carpenter, Esther’s sister Rose (all of whom are crazy to some extent), Fuller, the peasant girl Pastora, and the old porter at the Real Monasterio. When Wyatt boasts he can lock out the world, it is Fuller who tells him, “—Seem like such a measure serve no good purpose, sar. Then the mahn lose everything he suppose to keep, and keep everything he suppose to lose” (347). It is Janet who defines damnation more succinctly than any Church father and who reminds Wyatt, “—No love is lost” (442). And it is the porter who will not allow Wyatt to lock out the world any longer by staying in a monastery. “—Go where you’re wanted,” he tells him (894), sending him back to Pastora. The Recognitions is not a repudiation of education and culture, of course, but an attack on its misuse by those who come and go speaking of “the solids in Uccello” and other matters with little or no understanding, counterfeiters of the intellect who drop names and botch quotations in their desperate attempts to win friends and influence people. These characters have a weary apologist in Agnes Deigh, whose extraordinary 3,500-word suicide note (757–63) delineates with nerve-shattered lyricism the complex difficulties and risks involved in allowing anyone a glimpse of the private self hiding behind that protective coloring of culture. “Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded,” she writes (quoting Gertrude Stein), and so Agnes and her flock skip over friendship and its perils and simply exchange the “flowers” of friendship—that is, empty civilities that counterfeit sincere friendship, exchanged “in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God” (103). Here Gaddis quotes from Eliot’s “East Coker,” but the world he dramatizes in his novel is the spiritually bankrupt one of The Waste Land, and like the poet before him, Gaddis weighs an entire civilization in the balance and finds it wanting.

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4

J R: What America is All About

“—We live in a country that never grew up,” Gaddis has Hannah complain in The Recognitions (748), and it is fitting that his second novel—a comic exposé of “what America is all about,” as one of its refrains goes—should be named after an eleven-year-old boy who epitomizes a society where stock options “mature” more regularly than people do, and where trucks drive by emblazoned with the slogan “None of us grew but the business.”1 Just as everyone in the counterfeit world of The Recognitions moves in relation to Wyatt, everyone in the paper world of J R moves in relation to J R Vansant, a slovenly but clever boy who transforms a small “portforlio” of mail-order acquisitions and penny stocks into an unwieldy financial empire, bringing the economy to the brink of ruin simply by dedicating himself with a vengeance to “the traditional ideas and values that have made America what it is today” (652). “—I mean like remember this here book that time where they wanted me to write about success and like free enterprise and all hey?” J R asks through a dangling telephone on the last page of the novel. In J R Gaddis provides one of the most searching analyses of “success and like free enterprise” in American literature and one of the funniest and most scathing critiques of those traditional ideas and values.

Money Talks The most radical feature of J R is its narrative mode: except for an occasional transitional passage in elliptical prose, the novel is composed entirely of dialogue: 726 pages of voices without a single chapter break or sectional space. Novels written primarily in dialogue have been done before—for example, by Ronald Firbank (whom Gaddis has read) and Ivy ComptonBurnett (whom he hasn’t)—but never to the extreme lengths Gaddis takes it. To make matters more difficult, his dialogue is not the literary dialogue R 741 and J R (1975; New York: Penguin, 1993), 719; hereafter cited in the text. “Nobody Grew but the Business” is also the title of a prepublication extract from J R that appeared in Harper’s in June 1975.

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of most novels, with completed, grammatical sentences helpfully larded with she saids and explanatory asides by the author on what the characters actually mean by what they say. Instead, J R reads like a transcript of real speech: ungrammatical, often truncated, with constant interruptions by other characters—and by telephones, televisions, and radios—with rarely an identifying (and never an interpretive) remark by the author.2 “It is the thesis” of Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, an important source for ideas for Gaddis, “that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and communication facilities which belong to it,”3 a thesis that Gaddis puts to the test by casting the entire novel in dialogue—a narrative mode that puts readers to the test as well. Such a mode makes extraordinary demands upon a reader; it demands active involvement and concentration on the reader’s part, not passivity. (This point seems unnecessary until one looks at Gaddis’s reviews: “Relax your attention for a single paragraph,” one reviewer complained, “and you’ve missed something crucial, and must reread”—as though a better novelist would make allowances for daydreaming.4) Jack Gibbs, a major character, pinpoints this problem during a drunken conversation with Edward Bast, a young composer: “—problem most God damned readers rather be at the movies. Pay attention here bring something to it take something away problem most God damned writing’s written for readers perfectly happy who they are rather be at the movies, come in empty-handed go out the same God damned way what I told him Bast. Ask them to bring one God damned bit of effort want everything done for them they get up and go to the movies” (289–90). That “pay attention here” is directed to the reader as much as to Bast; while any text benefits more from an active reading than a passive one, J R leaves the reader no choice. The passive reader will not last a dozen pages. The purpose is not to put readers off but to force them to participate in the fiction. Just as radio audiences must use their imaginations more than movie audiences do, Gaddis’s readers must join him in creating this fictional world. Noting Gaddis’s reliance on one-sided telephone conversations, Carl Malmgren pointed out that “the telephone conversation becomes an important metaphor in and for the novel […]; the text of J R presents readers with one-half of a phone conversation; they must supply the other Nevertheless, see Chénetier for a close analysis of the narrative phrases and passages in the novel, which he calculates adds up to 100 pages of material (254). 3 The Human Use of Human Beings, rev. edn. (1954; New York: Avon, 1967), 25. See Marsh for an excellent exploration of Gaddis’s use of Wiener. 4 This is actually from a review (by Bruce Allen in the Christian Science Monitor) of Carpenter’s Gothic, which is written in the same style as J R, but it echoes the kind of complaints made of the second novel. 2

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half if their experience is to have meaning or coherence. Gaddis’s point, of course, is that meaning and coherence are less properties of a text than they are products of activities performed upon it. J R takes a form which necessarily demands and fosters these activities.”5 In this way, the reader’s search for meaning and coherence parallels that of the novel’s characters— for meaning and coherence are less properties of life than the products of activities performed upon it—and as the attentive reader grows more and more giddy trying to keep track of the complications of the plot, he or she comes to experience the same degree of exasperation that Bast, Gibbs, and the others feel. Given the novel’s great length, it may not be immediately apparent how lean and economical J R actually is: a more conventional rendering of the same material would easily run twice as long. In his perceptive review, novelist D. Keith Mano cited a trivial exchange between Stella and Gibbs while in a car: —Do we need the radio? —Looking for the God damned lighter? (349)

“Yet note that it describes the action,” he points out, “while underlining his drunkenness, her arch prose. You’d need four narrative sentences to accomplish as much. Despite its length, J R is a condensation.”6 This point is more apparent when comparing the opening pages of the novel that appeared as “J. R. or the Boy Inside” (Dutton Review, 1970) with pages 3–44 of the published book. They appear more or less identical, yet a textual collation reveals that of the 600 or so changes Gaddis made, most were deletions, from superfluous punctuation to excess verbiage and most speaker identifications. The dialogue in the book version is usually more elliptical, making it harder to follow at times, but greater in verisimilitude and quicker in narrative pacing. Of course any comparison with a literal transcript of people speaking—see Andy Warhol’s tape-recorded “novel” a (1968), for example—will reveal that Gaddis’s characters speak with more variety, wit, and color than their real-life counterparts would. Gaddis’s real achievement lies in his ability to simulate vernacular speech close enough to ensure accuracy while avoiding its shortcomings. Finally, the exclusive use of dialogue adds to the novel’s dramatic vitality by closing the traditional gap between story-time and text-time, that is, between the amount of time an episode covers and the time it takes to read “William Gaddis’s J R: The Novel of Babel,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 2.2 (Summer 1982); 10–11. Mano 4. After he finished writing J R, Gaddis spent the summer of 1974 “cutting ruthlessly” to condense it as much as possible (Letters 294).

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that episode. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan writes that “a hypothetical ‘norm’ of complete correspondence between the two is rarely realized,” but much of J R maintains this correspondence.7 Never does Gaddis stop the narrative flow to indulge in a flashback or to examine a character’s motives, or move things forward with such temporal leapfrogging as “A week later… .” From Coen’s opening query “—Money … ?” to J R’s final “—Hey? You listening … ?” every day in the narrative is tracked by a sleepless narrative eye that pauses only when the characters sleep. (The ideal reader would rest only at those rare junctures: pages 75, 155, 234, 316, 414, 491, 580, 669.) As a result, the text quickly builds an irresistible momentum that functions as a formal analogue to the rapid growth of J R’s family of companies. By the time Bast cries out, “—No now stop, just stop for a minute! This, this whole thing has to stop somewhere don’t you understand that?” (298), there is a relentless inevitability driving both J R’s enterprises and J R itself that makes stopping at that point commercially and aesthetically unthinkable.

A Story of Wall Street Although its form and intricate convolutions are radical, J R’s story material is fairly traditional. It can be separated into five interwoven strands; given the wonderful complexity of the plot, these should be itemized: 1. An interfamilial dispute comes to a head with the death intestate of Thomas Bast, owner of the General Roll Company, and his survivors grapple with future ownership of the company (which may need to go public to finance the substantial death taxes). Half of Thomas’s forty-five shares in the company will be inherited by his daughter Stella, and with her husband Norman Angel’s twenty-three shares they hope to approach controlling interest in the company. But they face a challenge by the impending return of Thomas’s brother James, a composer and conductor, whose share of stock, combined with the twenty-seven shares belonging to his maiden sisters Anne and Julia, will give him close to controlling interest. There are two wild cards: Edward Bast, the illegitimate son of James and Nellie (Thomas’s second wife), who may be in a position to claim half of the shares Stella is expecting, thus tilting the balance toward James’s ownership; and Jack Gibbs, Stella’s former lover, once given five shares for helping the company out. Intent on gaining full control, scheming Stella sets out to prevent Edward from pressing his claim, to learn the location of Gibbs’s shares, and perhaps Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York: Metheun, 1983), 45.

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even to wrest Norman’s shares away from him. She is successful enough to emerge at the end of the novel with controlling interest in the company, her husband comatose in a hospital after an attempt at suicide. 2. The middle-class Bast family dispute out on Long Island has its upperclass counterpart in the Moncrieff family dispute in Manhattan. The former Amy Moncrieff has a bad marriage with Lucien Joubert, a Swiss fortunehunter who is attracted less to Amy’s stunning beauty than to her father Monty Moncrieff ’s company Typhon International, ruthlessly run by Amy’s great-uncle Governor John (“Black Jack”) Cates. Typhon owns many of the other companies mentioned in the novel—Diamond Cable, Nobili Pharmaceuticals, Endo Appliances—and has many of its assets invested (for tax avoidance reasons) in two foundations, one in Amy’s name, the other in her retarded brother Freddie’s. A substantial number of shares in Diamond Cable belong to Boody Selk, the rich teenage daughter of obnoxious Zona Selk (an old friend of the family), and just as controlling interest in the General Roll Company falls to Stella, controlling interest in Typhon comes into the hands of Amy and Boody by the novel’s end. 3. Amy Joubert, Edward Bast, and Jack Gibbs all teach at a junior high school on Long Island (modeled on Gaddis’s hometown Massapequa), whose principal, Mr. Whiteback (also president of a local bank: he’ll give up one or the other “—when I know which of them is going to survive” [340–1]), spends most of his time dealing with his eccentric teachers, with irate members of the Board of Education such as Major Hyde (an employee of Typhon’s Endo Appliances), superintendent Vern Teakell, local politicians and contractors (all with Italian surnames), the right-wing Citizens Union on Neighborhood Teaching (“—All women?” Gibbs asks [241]), and visitors from a foundation investigating the disastrous results of the school’s adoption of the latest education technologies. 4. Attending this chaotic school is J. R. Vansant, who doesn’t have a father and rarely sees his mother (a nurse). J R’s best friend, the nameless son of Major Hyde, shares his interest in writing away for junk-mail advertisements and career solicitations. “—See them in there together getting their mail you suddenly know what the industrial military complex is all about,” as Gibbs notes after spotting them in the post office (497). J R’s enthusiasm for tacky business opportunities is matched by the Hyde boy’s mindless patriotism (“a martial miniature” [33] of his fatuous father), but J R’s greater daring launches him on a career that parodies the Horatio Alger paradigm and demonstrates, as Richard Bulliett has written, “that ‘the market’ so beloved of economic theorists can be convincingly allegorized as an ethically innocent

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and none-too-bright sixth-grader.”8 Using the money he accidentally makes from one small business venture to finance a slightly larger one, borrowing against that for yet a larger one, J R quickly finds himself the unexpected father of the J R Family of Companies with his grubby fingers in nearly every aspect of the American economy, including the companies owned by the Bast and Moncrieff families.9 (Convenient summaries of J R’s acquisitions can be found on pp. 431, 529–30, and 656.) His paper empire collapses like a house of cards by the end of the novel, but he emerges unscathed and bursting with new ideas. 5. Trying their best to skirt the edges of all these business deals and family disputes are five artists engaged in desperate attempts to keep their heads clear enough to create art for an indifferent society. Jack Gibbs tries to find the motivation to finish writing a book he abandoned sixteen years earlier entitled Agapē Agape, which he describes as “—a book about order and disorder more of a, sort of a social history of mechanization and the arts, the destructive element” (244; see Chapter 8 for its relation to Gaddis’s last novel). His friend Thomas Eigen, who (like Gaddis) once wrote an ambitious novel dismissed by the critics, tries to finish writing a play set during the Civil War amidst the distractions of his enervating public relations work for Typhon and his disintegrating marriage. From Gibbs and Eigen the reader learns of the struggles of another writer named Schramm, blocked in his attempts to write about his traumatic experiences during World War II, and of a painter named Schepperman, whose work is hidden in Zona Selk’s country house to “appreciate” in value, to his immense frustration. A generation younger but facing many similar obstacles is Edward Bast, recently graduated from a music conservatory, who reluctantly agrees to act as J R’s “business representive” (as his card reads) in order to find time and money to finish writing an operatic suite based on Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” that expresses his unrequited love for his cousin Stella, a work later modified to a cantata and finally abandoned after his nervous breakdown in favor of simple piece for unaccompanied cello, written in crayon. Despite the absence of formal division markers, the novel falls roughly into three parts, with each third increasing the pace and complications of Gaddis’s pentahedral plot. J R begins with a society on edge: the stock market is troubled; Thomas’s death has renewed the Bast family conflict; Edward Bast, Jack Gibbs, and Thomas Eigen are feeling the pressures of their respective jobs; every marriage is in trouble; Amy fears her estranged husband will Letter to the editor, Columbia, January 1983, 36. See Clare for an insightful essay on the various notions of family in J R.

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abduct their son, while her father Monty is worried that the press will learn of the conflict of interest that jeopardizes his new government job; and tempers are flaring at J R’s school over an impending teacher’s strike and the possible loss of foundation funding. These and many other conflicts come to a boil a third of the way through the novel on the long Friday that occupies pages 234–86: Schramm commits suicide, Marion Eigen tells Gibbs she’s leaving Thomas, Schepperman tries to prevent Zona Selk from removing his painting from Typhon’s lobby, J R and his company are off and running after he wins a lawsuit against Diamond Cable for Moncrieff ’s transgression of a company by-law (settling out of court for damages based on 100 times holdings), and Bast finds himself stuck with a position as an executive officer for J R’s company, along with a commission to write two hours of “zebra music” for a wildlife film, and with a foul-mouthed teenager named Rhoda for a roommate in a small apartment Eigen and Gibbs rent for storage purposes. Around page 500, the novel reaches a second plateau: Gibbs has the good fortune to win big at the horsetrack and to enjoy a brief affair with Amy—a calm before the storm—and J R is doing well enough to move his operations to the prestigious Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan, with Typhon’s former public relations officer Dave Davidoff “on deck stamping out brush fires” for the boss he’s never seen. But Eigen has lost both his job and his family, Amy’s worst fears come to pass when she learns that her husband Lucien has abducted Francis to Geneva, and Norman Angel, faced with the loss of both his wife and business, shoots himself with a rifle. The storm breaks, and the final third of the novel races at breakneck speed as the J R Corporation spins wildly out of control (ruining a dozen other companies, thousands of careers, and even a town or two), Bast succumbs to nervous exhaustion, some Native Americans revolt, a civil war breaks out in Africa, and the stock market collapses.10 Asked by an interviewer in 1968 what his work in progress was about, “Gaddis answered, “Well … ah, just tell them it’s about money.”11 Money is In 1973 and 1974, as Gaddis finished writing the novel, the financial sector experienced the worst down market since the Great Depression: stocks declined almost 50 percent and there was a global recession. If the chronology I once constructed for J R were valid, the first third of the novel would occupy about two weeks, the following thirds about a week each: see my “Chronological Difficulties in the Novels of William Gaddis,” 88–9. Although I now see this time frame is too brief—Gaddis later wrote me “the novel’s technique demanded compressing time so, I was afraid I’d be called on it but no one did” (June 1, 1986)—the proportions are about right: Gaddis apparently intended the first third to occupy about a month or so, the second and third a few weeks each. Closer attention to other details suggests the novel takes place in the fall of 1972 rather than 1974, as in my article, though the absence of any reference to the presidential election that year makes even this date suspect. 11 Stanley P. Friedman, “Five Novelists at Work: A Grapeshot Interview,” Book World, March 10, 1968, 10. 10

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the first word in J R and it functions as the novel’s thematic center of gravity, trapping art, education, commerce, politics, and marriage in its pull. But the novel is more about the difference between “the things worth having” and “the things worth being,” as Gaddis wrote in The Recognitions (499)—or in J R’s financial vocabulary, the difference between tangible and intangible assets. During their final conversation together, an exhausted Bast pleads with J R: “—listen all I want you to do take your mind off these nickel deductions these net tangible assets for a minute and listen to a great piece of music, it’s a cantata by Bach cantata number twenty-one by Johann Sebastian Bach damn it J R can’t you understand what I’m trying to, to show you there’s such a thing as as, as intangible assets?” (655). It is this commitment to such intangibles as art, manners, and ideals that sets Bast, Amy, and the artists (in their better moments) apart from the rest of the novel’s characters. The contrast is not the trite one between hard-hearted businessmen and tender-hearted artistic types; rather, it is the difference between those who treat others and even themselves as marketable commodities, who measure the validity of any idea by what William James called its “cash-value” (Pragmatism, passim), as opposed to those who reiterate Aristotle’s “reproach to be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls” (571),12 those few people who would not only “rather hear a symphony than eat” (659) but who insist on the human use of human beings. While Bast and Amy intuit this position and try to share it with J R, it is the polymath Jack Gibbs who gives it historical breadth and intellectual fiber.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism When, in his drunken elation at winning the double, Gibbs facetiously invites Amy to join him in redeeming the Protestant ethic (477), he revives a concept Gaddis introduced in The Recognitions, probably by way of Max Weber’s classic study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (English trans. 1930). Weber attributes Puritanism’s success in capitalist Europe and especially in America to its work ethic, a kind of “worldly asceticism” that held one best serves the Christian god by laboring in a “calling,” and that the most reliable sign of belonging to the Elect (those predestined for salvation) is financial success in that calling. Its grimmest form was taken by Wyatt’s New England ancestors: “Anything pleasurable could be counted upon to be, if not categorically evil, then worse, a waste of time. Sentimental virtues had long been rooted out of their systems. They did not regard the poor as Here as elsewhere (289, 585), Gibbs quotes from Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Aristotle’s Politics.

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necessarily God’s friends. Poor in spirit was quite another thing. Hard work was the expression of gratitude He wanted, and, as things are arranged, money might be expected to accrue as incidental testimony” (R 13–14). F. Scott Fitzgerald memorably mocked this conviction in The Great Gatsby by noting his shady hero’s early conception of himself as “a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.”13 Although its religious nature has been lost sight of today by all but fundamentalists—who remain convinced that wealth is a sign of their god’s grace—the Protestant ethic continues to exert a baleful influence, of which Jack Gibbs is all too aware. “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling,” Weber writes, “we are forced to do so.”14 But the difficulty of finding a calling, of finding something worth doing, is a problem that plagues many of Gaddis’s characters. Wyatt raises this complaint in The Recognitions (143, 589)—as do Otto and his friend Ed Feasley (620 and 615, respectively)—but Gibbs locates the problem in a wider historical context: “—the whole God damned problem’s the decline from status to contract” (393, repeated on 509, 595), that is, “what happened when men moved out of the medieval society based on status to the modern society based on contract.”15 In a well-known essay on Tolstoy and Kafka, Philip Rahv sketches the implications of this shift: Status is synonymous with the state of grace; and he who has a home has status. The home, this cosmic security, this sacred order of status, is not a mythical or psychological but an historical reality. It persisted as a way of life, despite innumerable modifications, until the bourgeois era, when the organization of human life on the basis of status was replaced by its organization on the basis of free contract. The new, revolutionary mode of production sundered the unity of the spiritual and the temporal, converting all things into commodities and all traditional social bonds into voluntarily contracted relations. In this process man was despirited [sic] and society atomized; and it is against the background of this vast transformation of the social order that the meaning of the death of Ilyich and K. becomes historically intelligible.16 The Great Gatsby (1925; NY: Scribner, 1992), 104. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), 181. Gaddis cites Weber in “The Rush for Second Place” (RSP 51). 15 Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. edn. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 7; this book was on Gaddis’s reading list for his classes at Bard in the 1970s. The same concern with the change from status to contract can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels. 16 Image and Idea: Fourteen Essays on Literary Themes (Norwich, CT: New Directions, 1949), 122–3. 13 14

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It is against this same background that J R’s more perspicacious characters struggle. How many people today can dignify their job as a “calling”? Robbed of the security and sanctification of traditional occupations—where, for example, a blacksmith’s son inherited his father’s smithy—many people voluntarily contract themselves to do something hardly worth doing in the first place, much less doing well, leaving only company loyalty (as Hyde insists) in place of social and religious bonds. “—No no listen look,” Gibbs tells Amy, “—first time in history so many opportunities to do so God damned many things not worth doing” (477). Gaddis’s artists face the difficulty not only of finding something worth doing, but succeeding at the task. In their darker moments, Gibbs, Eigen, and Bast wrestle with the same dilemma that drove Schramm to suicide: “It was whether what he was trying to do was worth doing even if he couldn’t do it? Whether anything was worth writing even if he couldn’t write it?” (621). In an economy still driven by the Protestant ethic, artists labor under the Puritan prejudice against artistic creation—an invalid calling that was considered frivolous at best, at worst sinful and sacrilegious.17 The attitude toward artists held by Governor Cates, for example, is reminiscent of that attributed by Hawthorne to his Puritan forefathers in the “Custom-House” preface to The Scarlet Letter: “A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!” Compare this to Davidoff ’s admission to Bast that he once started to write a novel: “—maybe a little jealous of you boys with a knack for the arts luxury I can’t afford never finished it, couldn’t just sit on my butt and indulge myself like that” (540). Given a society where art is dismissed as a luxury, a knack, an indulgence, is there any wonder that Schramm is driven to suicide and the others to paralyzing self-doubts? If “Blessed is he who has found his work,” as Gibbs quips (116, quoting Carlyle), then damned are those who cannot work at the one thing they feel is worth doing—which gives the ubiquitous use of “God damned” by Gibbs and Eigen ominous theological overtones. Cates, Davidoff, Hyde, and many others in the novel view artists as disruptive neurotics and are convinced that if society could rid itself of these elements it could get on with business (see Cates on 693). Gibbs documents the contributions technology has made toward this goal by helping to eliminate “the offensive human element” (174) from the arts. These range from such unsuccessful ventures as that by “nineteenth-century German anatomist Johannes Müller [who] took a human larynx fitted it up with See Weber’s Protestant Ethic 168–70, but also Wyatt’s Aunt May (R 34, quoted earlier).

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strings and weights to replace the muscles tried to get a melody by blowing through it […]. Thought opera companies could buy dead singers’ larynxes fix them up to sing arias save fees that way get the God damned artist out of the arts all at once, long as he’s there destroy everything in their God damned path what the arts are all about” (288), to more successful inventions such as the player piano (“play by itself get to shoot the pianist” [604]), and in our own age, as Hyde boasts: “—Records of any symphony you want reproduced you can get them that are almost perfect, the greatest books ever written you can get them at the drugstore” (48). Cates insists that publishing is the worst-run business in America, but allows, “—cut out that ten percent royalty these scoundrels grab they might see a little daylight” (422). Yet “these scoundrels” alone are capable of redeeming the Protestant ethic, of restoring the human element to a society where “value,” “charity,” and “good will” exist primarily in their tax law connotations (201, 212, 213), where investment brochures are called “literature,” and where “the human machine” (30) is the most prevalent metaphor. Wearily assuring her lawyer Beaton that she knows preferred stock doesn’t vote, an exasperated Amy goes on: —Doesn’t sing doesn’t dance doesn’t smoke or drink or run around with women, doesn’t even … —Pardon? —Oh nothing Mister Beaton it’s all so, just so absurd so, lifeless, I can’t … —Please I, Mrs Joubert I didn’t mean to make an emotional issue of it, the … —Well it is! It is an emotional issue it simply is! because there aren’t any, there aren’t any emotions it’s all just reinvested dividends and tax avoidance that’s what all of it is, avoidance the way it’s always been it always will be there’s no earthly reason it should change is there? that it ever could change? (212)

Weber could be used to extend Amy’s reductive view to say that’s the way it’s always been after Puritanism saddled America with “a capitalistic way of life” that “turned with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer” (166), and there’s no reason it should change as long as artists remain excluded from America’s closed system. Gaddis introduces the second law of thermodynamics early into his novel (21) to remind readers of “nature’s statistical tendency to disorder, the tendency for entropy to increase in isolated systems” (Wiener 41). Recurrent infusions of energy and diversity are necessary to combat entropy and homogeneity, and art is the principal means of infusing them into a culture’s “system.” To continue

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the mechanical metaphor, socially conscious art such as Gaddis’s provides invaluable “feedback,” which Wiener defines as “a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance” (84). Gibbs’s historical survey Agapē Agape and Gaddis’s own novels assess the results of America’s past performance. “—Boy what a mess” (81) is one child’s succinct verdict.

Out of the Mouth of Babes Although Gaddis’s most informed social criticism is given to his adult characters, he follows an American tradition in giving his most trenchant criticism to children. If Hawthorne’s Pearl is American literature’s first underage critic of Puritan hypocrisy and its socioeconomic ramifications, she leads a children’s crusade that includes Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, several of James’s girls and Anderson’s boys, Salinger’s precocious kids, Lee’s Scout Finch, and Pynchon’s Spartacus Gang. Gaddis modifies and greatly extends the traditional literary use of a child as “the touchstone, the judge of our world—and a reproach to it in his unfallen freshness of insight, his unexpended vigor, his incorruptible naïveté,” taking up the tail end of that tradition Leslie Fiedler has so brilliantly analyzed when the innocence of the child is revealed “as a kind of moral idiocy, a dangerous freedom from the restraints of culture and custom, a threat to order.”18 Gibbs lectures his students that “—Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos” (20), and Gaddis’s children are intent on exposing the holes in the various kinds of order adults have tried to impose on society. Of the many advantages young characters offer, Gaddis is most interested in their blunt honesty, the candor of a child free enough from “the restraints of culture and custom” to point out the emperor has no clothes. Here, for example, is J R on banking practices: “—you know what they do there? Like they say they pay this lousy four and a half percent on savings what those cheap shits never tell you they pay it on your lowest balance the whole quarter so you put like this thousand dollars in for awhile then you take out like nine fifty so you get like a fourth of this lousy four and a half percent of like fifty dollars while they been out loaning this here thousand all the time” (169–70). Those sentiments may be held by Gaddis’s adult characters (and by Gaddis himself), but the breezy freedom of J R’s language reduces bankers to the level of loansharks and gives No! in Thunder (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 251, 290.

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his criticism a force it would lack in an adult’s more tempered language. Teenage Rhoda is equally blunt on the kind of business mail J R’s “uptown headquarters” receives, especially the “literature” sent out by companies to their stockholders: —This reduced fully diluted shares outstanding by sixteen percent which had the effect after imputed interest on like you call that literature man I mean I call it bullshit … Paper tore, —here’s one will you chair this management symposium on healing the sick corporation I mean that must be some chair. […] you could like go chair that thing on healing the sick corporation with your heart batting for the poor they’d really be asthonised [sic] man like I never saw such sick companies, I mean that must be some fucking chair. (556–8)

This kind of comic reduction is also used to deflate the pretense of “corporate democracy” by which those same sick companies allegedly operate. Giving a student tour of Crawley & Bro., Davidoff begins the following discussion, which leads to an argument over the validity of corporate democracy between J R and his classmate Linda: —that’s what people’s capitalism is, isn’t it everybody. As one of the company’s owners you elect your directors in a democratic vote, and they hire men to run the company for you the best way possible. When you vote next spring … —With one share we get like one vote? —You certainly do, and what’s more you’re entitled to … —And like if I owned two hundred and ninety-three thousand shares then I’d get like two hundred and ninety-three thousand votes? —That’s not fair! [Linda objects] Like we get this one lousy vote and he gets like two hun … —What’s so not fair! You buy thus one share so you’ve got like this lousy twenty-two fifty working for you where I’ve got like six thou, wait a second … the pencil came up to scratch, —nought time nought is … —He couldn’t could he? —I could so boy I could even vote two hundred ninety-three thousand times for myself for a director if I wanted to couldn’t I? —I mean like that’s democracy? It sounds like a bunch of … (92–3)

Linda is cut off before she can give it a name, but J R sees that corporate democracy is actually a plutocracy, and his bullying enthusiasm for it underscores the greed for power at its heart, not to mention its sterility (“nought times nought is …”). It is worth noting that Linda and Rhoda join Amy in her condemnation of business practices, to be joined by Liz in Carpenter’s

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Gothic and Christina in A Frolic of His Own; Gaddis’s women are usually more humane than his men. Where Huck Finn spurns the corrupt civilization handed down to him, J R gleefully accepts it, wanting only to know how quickly he can get his share. By following the letter of the law in defiance of its spirit, he is able to engender a “family” of companies with the assistance and example of adults as bereft of humane values as he is. Such respected members of the business community as Cates, Moncrieff, and Crawley are shown to be the moral equivalents to an ambitious sixth-grader by way of dozens of demeaning parallels. J R and Cates share the same attitude toward lawyers (“—trouble with you lawyers, all you do is tell me why I can’t do something instead of how I can” [196; cf. 336, 467]), react to news of death with financial considerations foremost (J R on 299, 343, Cates on 691, 698, 709), and justify objectionable business deals on the grounds that if they don’t do it first someone else will (659, 693). Both even examine their snot after blowing their noses (109, 301). J R models his shabby family of companies after Cates’s and thus, baffled at Bast’s objections to his increasingly outrageous schemes, can legitimately claim he is following in the footsteps of a man Davidoff describes as “—one of your country’s outstanding Americans, […] one of the men who opened the frontiers of America as we know it today” (91). J R’s activities strike him not only as perfectly legal, but even patriotic, as he tells his shyster lawyer: “—Look I’m in a hurry but boy Nonny I mean don’t you ever say I told you to do something illegal I mean what do you think I got you for! I mean if I want to do something illegal what do I want with a lawyer I mean holy shit where do you think we are over at Russia? where they don’t let you do anything? These laws are these laws why should we want to do something illegal if some law lets us do it anyway?” (470). J R of course has his youth and the moral vacuum in which he lives to excuse his amoral behavior: “—holy shit Bast I didn’t invent it I mean this is what you do!” (466). The real targets of Gaddis’s satire are the politicians, lawyers, financiers, businessmen, and educators who invented and sustain “it”—which J R’s cynical school superintendent defines as “a system that’s set up to promote the meanest possibilities in human nature and make them look good” (463). Even though Gaddis’s children unwittingly provide a good deal of the humor in J R—Crawley’s Mannlicher rifle comes out “manlicker” in the Hyde boy’s ordnance-heavy school report (a sly dig at hunting machismo?)—they emerge as the real victims of modern society. Several children are shot, killed, or abandoned in the novel; schoolgirls are seduced by their teachers; and technological “enervations” (649) rob them of any chance at getting an adequate education. In this “novel about futures” (a subtitle Gaddis discarded), their outlook for the future is bleakly

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symbolized near the end of the novel in a newspaper account of “the brave little fourth grader trapped in the soaring steel structure” on a windswept Cultural Plaza that does indeed offer “a unique metaphor of man’s relation to the universe” (671–2). Weber had warned that the Protestant ethic could become “an iron cage” (181), but even he did not guess it would imprison children as well. The youngest victim is Eigen’s four-year-old son David; asked by his mother if he loves her, he replies in the only terms he understands: —Yes. —How much? —Some money … ? (267)

Filthy Lucre —Money … ? in a voice that rustled. —Paper, yes. —And we’d never seen it. Paper money. —And never saw paper money till we came east. —It looked so strange the first time we saw it. Lifeless. —You couldn’t believe it was worth a thing. (3)

The novel’s opening exchange reminds the reader that paper money—along with stocks, bonds, debentures, etc.—is lifeless, inert, having no more intrinsic value than the green leaves the little girl folds into her purse thirty pages later. But Gaddis invests money with a darker hue and important psychological implications by way of a pattern of imagery generated from Freud’s symbolic equation of money with excrement. Freud and his followers have traced the route by which a child’s anal-erotic satisfaction at producing feces is transferred and increasingly sublimated as he or she grows older: from such substances as mud, sand, tar, putty—all similar to excrement but odorless and socially acceptable—to stones and artificial products such as marbles and buttons, and finally to shiny coins.19 At this stage, coins appear to the child more valuable than paper money because more reminiscent of feces, as Dan diCephalis learns to his distress when his daughter Nora tells him that her younger brother sold his father’s folding money to some boys: “—He didn’t know, he thought the coins were better because the other’s only Sándor Ferenczi, “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” in The Psychoanalysis of Money, ed. Ernest Bornemann (New York: Urizen, 1976), 81–90. Freud first theorized the connection in his paper “Character and Anal Eroticism” (1908).

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paper” (314). By the time a child learns that, contrary to appearances, paper money is more valuable, the transference is complete and the anal-erotic basis of the interest in money is completely sublimated. However, such colloquial phrases as “filthy lucre” and “stinking rich” betray an unconscious memory of money’s antecedents,20 and in J R Gaddis rarely misses an opportunity to debase financial dealings by alluding to their excremental origins. He knew what he was about when he named the leading businessman-collector of The Recognitions Recktall Brown, but in J R he approaches Swift in the virulence of his use of scatological imagery to reduce financial dealings to “childish nonsense” (199). Switching in-school TV channels from Ann diCephalis’s resource program on silk production to Amy Joubert’s on corporate democracy, Hyde inadvertently introduces the excremental theme in his enthusiasm to give “—the youngsters a sense of real values, my boy there …” —when the silkworm starts to spin it discharges a colorless … that happens in the large bowel before … billions of dollars, and the market value of shares in public corporations today has grown to … (46)

This juxtaposition of excrement and money is the first in a series of increasingly blatant metaphoric associations: Hyde’s boy dismisses the contents of J R’s portfolio as “crap,” while J R prefers the expletive “holy shit,” an oath taken up in moments of stress by Bast and Davidoff (446, 540); J R’s first financial deal involves the removal of a pile of dirt in front of Hyde’s house— later dignified as “landfill operations” (529), but reminiscent of a child’s fondness for mud as a surrogate for excrement; J R picks up a number of tips for starting his business while eavesdropping in Typhon International’s executive washroom, and once again the Hyde boy can be relied upon to bring out the anal overtones: “—go ask that old fart [Cates] that caught us in the toilet you’ll find out you don’t own shit” (129); J R asks Bast, “—Did you ever hear that one about if you need money just ask my father he’s got piles?” (133), and one of J R’s companies makes novelty toilet paper rolls with the message “On the hole business is very good” (581, 681; “The top man in the company he had cases sent out to all the division heads, sort of an encouraging word when you’re in the middle of …” [682]). Numerous other examples could be piled up, ranging from casual obscenities to Crawley’s suggestion that Bast use his aunts’ old stock in Norma Mining for toilet

In A Frolic of His Own, after the pampered dog of filthy rich Trish defecates some expensive food, she asks “—What is that awful smell,” and Christina wryly replies, “—I think Harry would tell you it’s the smell of money, Trish. Harry’s read Freud” (365).

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paper (173) to J R’s plans to have a water tower painted to resemble a roll of toilet paper. Near the end of the novel, Gaddis brings his excremental vision of the American free enterprise system to an appropriately disgusting climax when, during Isadore Duncan’s hospital enema, the two terms in the symbolic equation money = excrement become one: —No such thing as free enterprise in this country since the Haymarket riots [Duncan says, reading a newspaper’s financial section], the minute something threatens this expanding capital forma ow … —That’s it lie still now [the nurse tells him], just try to keep it in as long as you can that’s it … —Threaten this expanding capital formation and they’re at the head of the line whining for loan guarantees against the, the taxes on those tips she’s sitting out there counting at night on her four dollar davenport to, to … —That’s it now just keep it in … —to bail them out because she’s the only one who knows failure’s what it’s really all, all I don’t know how much longer I … —Just a little longer you’re doing fine … —See the debt burden rising twice as fast as income the price of chemicals today see that in the paper? price of chemicals in the human body it’s worth three dollars and a half used to be ninety-eight cents when I, I can’t, good time to sell out try to slow down inflation the whole security market’s co, collapsing credit shrinkage forcing a, can’t … —Just a minute longer … —forcing a, a mass, massive outflow of … —Wait here’s the pan! here’s the pan! my … (684–5)

Excrement is the body’s waste, and by this point in the novel commerce should epitomize “what America is all about, waste disposal and all” (27; cf. 25, 179), a veritable wasteland where economic activity amounts to little more than “shitting around” (173) with paper trash.21 In this context, Mozart’s remark “believing and shitting are two very different things”—quoted in Bast’s lecture on Mozart (42) and often repeated by Gibbs—can be read as the bluntest of formulations on the difference between those committed to “intangible assets” and those obsessed with tangible ones. Davidoff names some basic texts of this latter group when he tells J R’s biographer “—go up to the library dig out some An excellent discussion of the waste motif can be found in LeClair’s “William Gaddis, J R, & the Art of Excess,” 591–3.

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of the President’s speeches whole Protestant work ethic head of General Motors on free enterprise whole utilitarian pragmatism angle what works, [J R] sees how things are not how they ought to be whole approach is what works” (530). But he betrays the anal character of the pragmatic approach when he describes his working relationship with his new boss as “—he does the grunting and we do the work” (526). In marked contrast to the shitters stand the believers who, like Gibbs, are “trying to believe something’s worth doing long enough to get it done” (492) and are unpragmatic enough to prefer envisioning how things ought to be. The working relationship between members of this group is memorably conveyed in a quotation not from Mozart but from Beethoven: “the better among us bear one another in mind” (290). If money = excrement, then J R’s repeated exclamations of “holy shit” during his financial dealings underscore the extent to which money has become sacred to his sort, the inevitable result of a Puritan ethic that could compare “the relation of a sinner to his God with that of a customer and a shopkeeper” (Weber 124). Christ had warned them against trying to serve two masters—“Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt. 6:24; cf. R 889)—so they ingeniously blended the two together, a figure for whom “holy shit” is a suitable invocation. (An allusion to another famous New Testament text against wealth [Mt. 19:24] is given an anal taint when Duncan tells Bast he’s reaching for the bedpan, “—Not the eye of a needle” [686].) During their last conversation, Bast rages at J R with all the anger of Christ driving the moneylenders from the temple: “—And stop saying holy shit! it’s all you, you want to hear holy you’re going to hear it” (655) and proceeds to play him an aria from Bach’s twenty-first cantata. Art is holy in the etymological sense of being whole, characterized by perfection and transcendence, a notion Gaddis introduced in his first novel and would revisit twenty years later in his last. Bast and the other artists know that such perfection can only be attempted, never fully realized, but also know, as Johan Thielemans has remarked, that “artistic perfection represents the only possible escape from entropic processes.”22 For them, as for Eliot in “East Coker,” “there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” To be sure, Gaddis’s artists have their faults and in fact bring most of their misfortunes on themselves. This is not a novel about saintly artists versus corrupt businessmen. Gibbs displays appalling insensitivity at times, even when sober, and can never seem to remember or to visit his daughter on their court-appointed days; Eigen is an insufferable egotist who turns every conversation his way, and like Gibbs is often quite sexist. “Art as Redemption of Trash,” in Kuehl and Moore, 144.

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From what we hear of the offstage actions of Schramm and Schepperman, they sound self-destructive and more often drunk than not. Gaddis is as hard on his artists as Melville is on the title figure of “Bartleby the Scrivener”—another story of Wall Street—and like Melville he illustrates the perils of “preferring not to” engage in conventional behavior. However, the artists are distinguished from the businessmen in their devotion to ideas loftier than profit margins and tax shelters. It is with them as with Richard Wagner, of whom Robert Donington has written: “With a genius—and not only with a genius—the very thing which goes most wrong with his outer life may often go most right with his inner life, in the sense that the deepest levels of his work show an appreciation of the very truths and realities which most elude him in his personal life-story.”23 Devoted to “the inner life,” artists will naturally be incomprehensible to those committed to “the outer life.” To plunder Eliot again, “Shrieking voices / Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, / Always assail them” (“Burnt Norton”), yet by listening instead to the voice inside, Gaddis’s artists can redeem their chaotic lives—and in works of genius, the chaotic lives that surround them—with something more memorable than a balanced stock portfolio.

The Soft Machine Duncan’s grim joke about selling out, as though his body were a share in Allied Chemical, recalls the self-alienating consciousness that Weber and Marx considered inevitable in a capitalist economy. Norman O. Brown summarizes their argument as follows: The desire for money takes the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent accumulation of wealth is really the impoverishment of human nature, and its appropriate morality is the renunciation of human nature and desires—asceticism. The effect is to substitute an abstraction, Homo economicus, for the concrete totality of human nature, and thus to dehumanize human nature. In this dehumanized human nature man loses contact with the pleasure-principle. And this dehumanized human nature produces an inhuman consciousness, whose only currency is abstractions divorced from real life—the industrious, coolly rational, economic, prosaic mind. Capitalism has made us

Wagner’s “Ring” and Its Symbols, 3rd edn. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 52.

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so stupid and one-sided that objects exist for us only of we can possess them or if they have utility.24

Amy has already been quoted on the abstract, dehumanized element in commerce, which J R uses to his advantage as he flaunts the “know your broker” rule with characteristic anal imagery: —like I mean this here bond and stock stuff you don’t see anybody you don’t know anybody only in the mail and the telephone because that’s how they do it nobody has to see anybody you can be this here funny lookingest person that lives in a toilet someplace how do they know, I mean like all those guys at the Stock Exchange where they’re selling all this stock to each other? They don’t give a shit whose it is they’re just selling it back and forth for some voice that told them on the phone why should they give a shit if you’re a hundred and fifty all they … (172)

The worst consequence of the “inhuman consciousness” Marx warns against is the tendency to treat people like machines, a tendency the educators in the novel display with frightening insensitivity and that J R displays in abundance with a naïveté that makes it all the more frightening. The encroachment of mechanization in modern society is viewed with alarm throughout J R, especially by Gibbs. In his Agapē Agape he derives the mechanization of man not only from such significant but predictable quarters as factories and assembly lines, but from Aristotle’s fanciful discussion of robots and automated machinery, E. L. Thorndike’s work in animal intelligence (which, as Gibbs points out, laid the foundations for public school testing), F. W. Taylor’s efficiency engineering, and B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism.25 The modern result is the tendency, as Hyde puts it, to —key the human being to, how did you put it once Dan? Key the … —The individual yes, key the technology to the individ … —Dan knows what I’m talking about, key the individual to the technology. (224)

Hyde’s inadvertent transposition of terms is the grounds for Gibbs’s complaint “—God damned things in the saddle and ride mankind” (400, quoting Emerson). The phrase “in the saddle” is used elsewhere in its sexual slang sense (155, 535), and Coach Vogel, for one, finds a sexual allure in Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 238. Brown is summarizing Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. 25 Gaddis shows his contempt for Skinner’s “infantile ideas” (485) by dividing his name between sleazy film producer B. F. Leva—whose initials Gibbs spells out (582)—and the philandering textbook salesman Skinner, subject of an obscene limerick (677). 24

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machinery. Regaling Dan with his observations on a nubile schoolgirl’s walk, Vogel comments: —Look at that rise and fall, just look at that! they came up on the corridor, —look at that reciprocating beam motion and you can see what got Newcomen started on the steam engine can’t you. […] Frightening thing how machinery can give you ideas like that about a simple schoolgirl. Start off with that steady reciprocating movement and the next thing you know you’ve got a bottom, round and droops a little but still good, nothing wrong with it at all. It’s when you add that socalled parallel motion James Watt introduced that you’ve got ass, push pull, push pull, quite an improvement, always sorry I never got a look at Mrs Watt. (318)

Encouraged by Principal Whiteback to “eliminate the offensive human element” from sex education, Vogel obliges with a hilarious electrical engineering model: —Micro Farad yes that’s, farad’s an electrical unit, his resistance at a minimum and his field fully excited, laid Millie Amp on the ground potential, raised her frequency and lowered her capacitance, pulled out his high voltage probe and inserted it into her socket connecting them in parallel, and short circuited her shunt […] bar magnet had lost all its field strength, Millie Amp tried self induction and damaged her solenoid [ …] fully discharged, was unable to excite his generator, so they reversed polarity and blew each other’s fuses … (329–30)

These examples suggest that satire can defuse the threat of mechanization, to some extent, simply by ridiculing it. But satire is an adult response largely unavailable to the child, the real victim of technology in J R. Dan’s daughter Nora likes to pretend her brother is a coin-operated machine (56) and J R sees no substantial difference between “wrecked up buildings and people” (300), and is in fact anxious to replace his employees with machinery simply because “—they let you like pretend it’s going to wear out two or three times as fast so you’re getting this big bunch of tax credits right off, they call it depreciated acceleration or something only the thing is you can’t do it with people see” (296). He is lost in admiration for an automat clerk who “throws out twenty nickels without she doesn’t even look at them? Like her fingers can count them like they’re this here machine” (113) and at school sits through resource films that make extensive use of “the human machine” analogy (30). As a result, it is hardly surprising that he would confuse vivisection with autopsy (77, 129) or believe Eskimos are stuffed for museum exhibits (475). So alienated from real life are J R and his classmates that Gibbs tells Amy,

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“—I could sit down over there shoot myself through the head they’d think I was dead and expect to see me in school tomorrow” (118). The economist F. H. Knight has written: “Economic relations are impersonal. […] It is the market, the exchange opportunity, which is functionally real, not the other human beings; these are not even means to action. The relation is neither one of cooperation nor one of mutual exploitation, but is completely non-moral, non-human.”26 For no one is the market realer than human beings than for Governor Cates, and his nonhuman relations with others is boldly literalized by his own increasing mechanization, in much the same way as Victoria Wren in Pynchon’s V. In and out of the hospital throughout the novel to be fitted out with more prosthetic parts, Cates is finally accused by Zona Selk of “impersonating himself ”: —he’s nobody, he’s a lot of old parts stuck together he doesn’t even exist he started losing things eighty years ago he lost a thumbnail on the Albany nightboat and that idiot classmate of his Handler’s been dismantling him ever since, started an appendectomy punctured the spleen took it out then came the gall bladder that made it look like appendicitis in the first place now look at him, he’s listening through somebody else’s inner ears those corneal transplants God knows whose eyes he’s looking through, windup toy with a tin heart he’ll end up with a dog’s brain and some nigger’s kidneys why can’t I take him to court and have him declared nonexistent, null void nonexistent why can’t I Beaton … —Well it, it would be a novel case ma’am I doubt if there are precedents and the time it would take to adjudi … (708)

Beaton’s legalistic response makes him sound as inhuman as his employer, but four pages later he unexpectedly emerges as one of the few victors in J R against the dehumanized world it dramatizes. Portrayed throughout the novel as a legalistically precise, rather prissy character (“—man he sounds like this real fag,” Rhoda reports [554]), the general counsel to Typhon International endures the often humiliating demands made by Cates, Davidoff, and Zona Selk with what may appear to be the spineless loyalty of a company yes man. But Beaton’s ardent admiration for Amy—to which he haltingly confesses early in the novel (214)—leads him to plot a devious course of revenge against his tormenters and of triumph for the woman he so admires, a double plot that Gaddis brings to an exciting climax near the end of the novel. Beaton is entrusted by Cates to keep an eye on the date on which the fourth dividend must be declared to retain control of the two foundations in Amy and her son’s names; control over both will revert The Ethics of Competition (1935), quoted in Brown’s Life against Death, 238.

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to Amy if the dividend goes undeclared, and throughout the novel Cates reminds him to notify him of the date. Beaton is also aware that one of the products of Nobili Pharmaceuticals contains an ingredient that can be fatal if taken in combination with such strong cheeses as Stilton (207–8); knowing both that the obnoxious Zona Selk is using that product (434) and that she enjoys Stilton cheese, Beaton invites her to Cates’s hospital room on the day the fourth dividend must be declared, and even provides her with both drug (690) and cheese (695). All of this comes to a head on page 712, the last day of the novel: as Zona begins gasping for water after taking the drug and cheese, Beaton calmly informs a dumbstruck Cates that he has allowed the fourth dividend to pass, and that Amy’s failure to sign over powers of attorney—another delaying tactic of his—means she is now in full control of the foundations and much of Typhon itself. While Cates and Zona suffer what appear to be fatal attacks, Beaton quickly leaves the hospital room for the nearest restroom and promptly throws up from the unbearable tension. There he meets Bast, who has also just thrown up; pale, shaken, and purged, the novel’s two unlikely heroes share a moment of quiet solicitude before Bast leaves to make his final trip uptown.

The Human Use of Human Beings Beaton’s heroic (if criminal) course of action needs to be spelled out because it can easily go unnoticed in the blizzard of financial talk that surrounds him. Bast’s victory is of a different sort: fired from the J R Corporation because of his insistence on what amounts to the human use of human beings (639), broken in health and spirit, he makes one final attempt at something worth doing by writing in the hospital a piece for unaccompanied cello “—because all they’ll give him is a crayon,” his roommate Duncan explains, “—he said he has to finish something before he dies” (675). But he loses all faith in his abilities after the poignant death of Duncan, who expires wishing only that he had been able to hear Beethoven’s “Für Elise” as it was meant to be played, having heard only the mangled version his daughter struggled with before her premature death at the hands of incompetent doctors (687). Even this crass, garrulous wallpaper salesman yearns for the perfection and wholeness art can provide, and Bast offers to play the piece for him before he realizes Duncan is dead. (Another victim, apparently, of medical negligence; all of Gaddis’s novels are filled with loathing for the medical profession.) In his fever, Bast had called Duncan his father (671), and there is a sense that with Duncan’s death he is freed from the lifelong pressure he felt from his father to excel at composing. At any rate, he stuffs his cello score into

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a wastebasket, in despair over “—the damage I’ve caused because they all thought what I tried to do was worth doing and I haven’t even done it … !” (715). But after his cousin Stella confronts him with “this fear you haven’t inherited James’ talent so you’ll settle for money” (716), Bast realizes his failure is not the result of insufficient talent but rather the misguided use of music to win the love of his distant father and destructive cousin (not to mention wasting his talent writing “zebra music” for Crawley’s film). Vowing “—No, no I’ve failed enough at other people’s things I’ve done enough other people’s damage from now on I’m just going to do my own, from now on I’m going to fail at my own here those papers wait, give me those papers” (718), he retrieves his cello music from the wastebasket. Beginning where he should have started originally—with a modest cello piece with no ulterior motive, rather than a showy opera—Bast purifies his art by abandoning hopes to win affection and approval (or fame or fortune) with it. Realizing he not only can write music but must write it (“—genius does what it must talent does what it can, that the line?” Gibbs had teased him earlier, quoting Bulwer-Lytton [117]), Bast is last seen, like Wyatt and Thoreau before him, resolved to live deliberately: “—God damn it will you just go do what you have to and …” Eigen tells him, to which Bast responds, “—That’s what I’m doing yes!” (725). “In Gibbs’ universe order is least probable, chaos most probable,” Wiener writes in The Human Use of Human Beings, referring not to his namesake in J R but to American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs. “But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency of organization to increase” (20–1). Beaton and Bast create such enclaves in their efforts to bring order to the corporate and artistic worlds, respectively, and do so by engaging in what Wyatt called “moral action,” which he insists “—is the only way we can know ourselves to be real, […] the only way we can know others are real” (R 591). Such action ensures the human use, rather than the mechanical use, of human beings. True to Beethoven’s dictum “the better among us bear one another in mind,” Beaton acts to remove financial control from the morally corrupt and heartless Cates and Zona Selk to place it in Amy’s hands. Bast acts morally when he rescues his music from the wastebasket (i.e., rescues art from the wasteland culture that surrounds it), realizing he owes it to himself, not to others, to pursue his music; only by being true to his art can he create art that will be true for others. The other artists in J R are last seen moving in a similar direction. Like Wyatt finding in Esme the necessary lines to complete his portrait of Camilla, the painter Schepperman sees in an old man what he needs to

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finish a portrait begun long ago. When the old model finally breaks away, his slammed door “brought down half the ceiling,” Eigen tells Bast, so now Schepperman is “down on his knees picking plaster out” of the wet paint (724–5). The roof may be falling in on art everywhere, but the artist persists, down on his knees if necessary. Eigen himself has taken up with Schramm’s father’s attractive young widow and seems intent on working up Schramm’s notes into the book Schramm could never write. Eigen represents a more compromised version of the artist enduring, with some unsavory implications: he pretends the notes are actually his, and there’s some truth in Rhoda’s blunt accusation “—you’re like some fucking graverobber aren’t you” (616); but the direction he has taken promises to heal two broken marriages, free his writer’s block, and, if he can finish the book, vindicate somewhat Schramm’s suicide. Gibbs’s case is vaguer. Promising Amy he will work on his book during her absence, he accomplishes very little in the 96th Street apartment (a microcosm of the chaotic world an artist must work in), justly complaining that writing a book is like nursing an invalid back to health (603–5). Convinced like Bast that he is going to die (on the basis of an incomplete blood test), Gibbs too dies to his old life by killing off his alter ego Grynszpan and begins anew at the end of the novel. Realizing his infatuation with Amy is as misplaced as Bast’s for Stella, he tells Amy over the phone (in the disguised voice of an old black retainer) that Gibbs has disappeared. He is last reported reading to Schepperman from Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers.27 Whether Gibbs will return to Agapē Agape or go on to incorporate it into a new, larger work like J R is unclear. (Gaddis of course did both.) But told by the doctor he’ll live another fifty years, his ex-wife off his back, his romantic idyll with Amy behind him, he too is ready to begin again to live deliberately. As with Wyatt, the new beginnings for these artists are tentative, not triumphant. As Wiener implies, art is only “a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase” and will always have to struggle against a universe running down and against people speeding up the process by viewing everything “at the corporate level,” as Hyde says. Gaddis’s J R is a damning vision of what America looks like from the corporate level, and thus a powerful argument for the necessity of recovering the human level.

See Comnes’s The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis for the relevance of this German novel to J R (13–14, 105–6).

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J R: Empedocles on Valhalla

The Recognitions draws extensively, even ostentatiously, on world literature and myth to provide structural analogues and colorful parallels to Wyatt’s progress and to give historical resonance to his struggles. J R uses a comparatively smaller yet equally significant set of literary allusions, deployed more sparingly and more realistically. While the bulk of the allusions in the first novel are to works of personal crises, largely concerning the salvation of the soul, those in the second novel are to works of cultural crises, concerning the salvation of a society. They fall into three groups: first and foremost is Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung, an epic response to the growing mechanistic materialism of the mid-nineteenth century that dramatizes the disastrous results of “loveless egoism and the desire for power and gold.”1 This sense of cultural crisis, shared by Wagner’s contemporaries Carlyle, Marx, and Thoreau—to name only those mentioned in J R—also animates the works by those in Gaddis’s second provenance of literary allusion, a set of Victorian writers consisting of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, and Joseph Conrad. A third matrix of allusions is drawn from the classical world: Empedocles’s cosmology, the darker elements of Greek myth (Typhon, Erebus, Charon, the Erinyes), and Philoctetes, who emerges as the model for Gaddis’s artist-hero. These allusions are small voices crying in the wilderness of J R’s financial discourse and consequently can easily go unheard during a first reading. But like Gibbs’s Agapē Agape they provide important cultural and historical underpinnings for the contemporary American crisis depicted in J R and fulfill Eliot’s punning prescription for a “historical sense […] not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”2 While many characters in The Recognitions can toss off nearly wordperfect quotations from a variety of texts, the characters in J R more L. J. Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction: Wagner’s “Ring” and the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 105. Gaddis was interested only in the story and themes of Wagner’s Ring, not the music; in later life, he told interviewer Paul Ingendaay that Wagner is “too theatrical for me […] a bit too overwhelming, too romantic, too Freudian, if you like. Screaming and orgiastic, climactic flights… .” 2 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose, 38. 1

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realistically mangle or misattribute quotations. Gibbs advises Eigen “—read Wiener on communication, more complicated the message more God damned chance for errors” (403). Literary culture is complicated enough that it too is subject to error, errors rarely corrected by anyone in Gaddis’s text. On one occasion Eigen does correct Gibbs’s misquotation from Hart Crane’s “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” (621), but it is left to the reader to correct Gibbs’s deliberately misleading attribution of the Greek motto over J R’s school to Empedocles (45; actually by Marx); his misquotations (usually because drunk) of Yeats, Donne, and others; Amy’s opinion that Carmen was initially a success (116; it was a failure); and other misattributed quotations that confuse Shakespeare with Marlowe (630) or Mark Twain with Cummings (684). Literary allusions, like everything else in J R, are presented in fragmented or elliptical form, shorn from their original contexts; but when pieced together, they display a remarkable thematic coherence and consistency that effectively allow a novel occupied with a few frantic months in the early 1970s to encompass, like Wagner’s Ring, the beginning and end of the world.

Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung Among the original reviewers of J R, only Robert Minkoff seems to have noted the presence of the Ring in the novel, and only a few critics since then have devoted any space to this crucial subtext.3 It would not be going too far to say, as Steven Weisenburger does, that Wagner’s Ring is to J R what the Odyssey is to Joyce’s Ulysses. Although Gaddis’s novel, unlike Joyce’s, lacks a scene-by-scene, character-by-character correspondence with its model, it alludes to Wagner’s work throughout on literal, symbolic, and formal levels. Bast is first introduced rehearsing a chaotic school production of the Ring at a Jewish temple(!), with tween Rhinemaidens and a Wotan played by a sulky young girl “freely adorned with horns, feathers, and bicycle reflectors” (33). J R has volunteered to take Alberich’s part to get out of gym and makes off with the makeshift Rhinegold (the sack of money for his class’s stock share) at the end of a scene that comically but effectively sets out the Ring’s basic conflict between love and greed. Thereafter, this literal production recedes (like the Rhine at the end of The Rhinegold’s first scene) and its young cast is replaced by more symbolic counterparts in the business world where, as Wieland Wagner once remarked, “Valhalla is Wall Street.” Minkoff, 4, 12; Steven Weisenburger, “Contra Naturam?”, 95–100; Comnes, The Ethics of Indeterminacy, 91–3; Anja Ziedler, “Mark the Music,” in Paper Empire, 217–20.

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Wagner himself was the first to underscore the modern economic implications of the Ring. Writing in 1881, five years after the first performance of the complete tetralogy, he argued: Though much that is ingenious and admirable has been thought, said and written concerning the invention of money, and of its value as an all-powerful cultural force, nevertheless the curse to which it has always been subject in song and story should be weighed against its praises. There gold appears as the demonic throttle of mankind’s innocence; so, too, our greatest poet has the invention of paper money take place as a devil’s trick. The chilling picture of the spectral ruler of the world might well be completed by the fateful ring of the Nibelung as stock portfolio.4

It was George Bernard Shaw who first developed the thesis that Wagner’s Ring is a critique of predatory capitalism and the morally corrupt status quo. His clever and insightful book The Perfect Wagnerite—the source of a memorable aphorism in The Recognitions (552) and perhaps the inspiration for Gaddis’s adaptation of the opera—argues from Wagner’s revolutionary activities and the philosophic nature of the opera itself that Alberich forswears love “as thousands of us forswear it every day” to establish a Plutonic empire that is Wagner’s “poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.”5 Opposing the dwarf are the gods—representing church and state—who have as little use for love as Alberich does (Wotan is willing to sacrifice Freia, the goddess of love, to finance his fortress Valhalla) and who have let themselves “get entangled in a network of ordinances which they no longer believe in, and yet have made so sacred by custom and so terrible by punishment, that they cannot themselves escape them.” Wotan relies on Loge, whom Shaw calls “the god of Intellect, Argument, Imagination, Illusion, and Reason,” to extricate him from his contract with the simple but honest giants who have built his fortress, and who likewise forswear love and agree to accept the gold in lieu of Freia. Sinking deeper into corruption, Wotan and Loge descend to Alberich’s Nibelheim to steal the gold Alberich has produced via the ring he fashioned from the Rhinemaidens’ gold. By the end of the first opera in the tetralogy, gold and/or its attendant lust for power has corrupted everyone but Loge—who expresses his contempt for the gods in a significant Quoted in Rather, 175. The poet is Goethe: see Faust, lines 6057ff. The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on “The Nibelung’s Ring,” 4th edn. (1923; New York: Dover, 1967), 10, xvii. The quotations from Shaw that follow are from pp. 11–25.

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aside—and the Rhinemaidens, whose lament ends The Rhinegold: “false and base / [are] all those who dwell above.”6 Shaw sees in this prelude “the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today,” dilemmas rooted in the exploitation by capitalists of a disenchanted working class, a subjugation supported by the political and religious structures still firmly in place by “the end of the miserable century” when Shaw published the first edition of this book. Shaw’s socialist reading of the Ring accounts for only one of its many levels, but it is this level that Gaddis uses to reinforce his characterizations and to give a mythic resonance to his novel. The parallels between J R and Governor Cates, for example, take on a greater subtlety when they are compared to those between Alberich and Wotan. Wagner’s god is a noble, tragic figure who is all too aware that his willingness to compromise his ethics reduces him to Alberich’s level of greedy powermongering and admits as much when he refers to himself in Siegfried as “Light-Alberich” to the other’s “Black-Alberich.” As Deryck Cooke notes, “Wagner made Alberich and Wotan opposite sides of the same coin, representing two complementary images of man-in-pursuit-of-power.”7 Cates shows none of Wotan’s self-awareness, but he does develop a grudging respect for J R as he learns more of his financial dealings (433) and unwittingly makes use of Wotan’s same light/black imagery with his mistaken assumption that J R’s company is run by a “couple of blacks” (431). Nor does Cates show any of Wotan’s shamefacedness as he works his financial deals; where Wotan turns away in dejection as he haggles with the giants in order to take possession of Valhalla (“Deep in the breast / Burns the disgrace”), Cates displays an amorality as empty as J R’s in pursuit of a goal suitably represented by a different kind of Valhalla: “—you saw the site of the new parent world headquarters building up the street, you saw the sign? Nothing but a big hole there now” (195) and a hole it remains at the end of the novel as Cates perishes as surely as Wotan does but with none of the renunciation that dignifies the god’s self-annihilation. Where Cates suffers in comparison with his counterpart in the Ring, J R wins some sympathy in his role as Alberich. Wagner’s dwarf is driven by revenge and malice to become the “sworn plutocrat,” as Shaw calls him: All translations are from Andrew Porter’s The Ring of the Nibelung (New York: Norton, 1976). I follow Porter’s English versions of Wagner’s proper names except for Valhalla, which I prefer over his Walhall. Gaddis’s source for the story, from which he borrows a few phrases, is the synopsis in Gustave Kobbé’s The Complete Opera Book, rev. edn. (New York: Putnam’s, 1935), 149–52. 7 I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner’s “Ring” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 159.

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after the Rhinemaidens spurned him, Loge explains, “the Rhinegold / he tore in revenge from their rock,” and once empowered by the ring, he uses it to enslave his fellow dwarfs and to threaten the gods themselves with enslavement. Although J R does cry out “Hark floods! Love I renounce forever!” as directed (36), love renounced him long before: he doesn’t seem to have a father, only a mother whose irregular hours as a nurse apparently leave him alone more often than not. He is indifferent to girls (like many eleven-year-olds), but he seems to have no friends other than the Hyde boy. Amy is the only one who notices “—There’s something a little touching about him, […] he’s such an eager little boy but, there’s something quite desolate, like a hunger …” (246–7) and the reader should share her sympathy for “that bleak little Vansant boy” (497). Where Alberich uses the Tarnhelm to make himself invisible in order to spy on and torment his workers, J R’s Tarnhelm is a telephone with a handkerchief stuffed in the mouthpiece, used in a ludicrous attempt to remain “invisible” to his business contacts. It should be noted that J R never buys himself anything in the course of the novel but is lavish in the (unwanted) gifts he bestows on Bast, not to mention well-meant tax advice and a foundation to enable him to continue composing. Alberich hurls curses and imprecations when he loses his empire; J R only sniffles and complains with some justification that he is a boy more sinned against than sinning. And although J R remains amoral and no wiser at the end—except that next time he’ll go after banks first—he never becomes immoral, as Alberich does by the end of Wagner’s opera. Amy Joubert’s sympathy for J R extends to Bast and Gibbs as well, and she moves between the well-propertied world of Typhon International and their grubbier world of Long Island much as Brünnhilde does between the supernatural and human realms in the Ring. “It is Brünnhilde,” George G. Windell writes, “the goddess transformed into a human being when her pity for Siegmund led her to disobey Wotan’s command, who serves as intermediary between the old, corrupt reign of the gods and the new world, which will be redeemed by human love.”8 Amy is more explicitly associated with Wagner’s Valkyrie in the Dutton Review version of J R’s opening pages: first described as a “high-bosomed brunette,” Amy has her counterpart in “a high-bosomed well-biceped Valkyrie bearing aloft a dead warrior on her pommel” in one of the visual aids to Bast’s lecture (the final text drops “high-bosomed”).9 The parallel is inexact—Amy is Cates’s grandniece, not his daughter as in the Wotan/Brünnhilde relationship—but Amy exhibits many of the same “Hitler, National Socialism, and Richard Wagner,” in Penetrating Wagner’s “Ring”: An Anthology, ed. John Louis DiGaetani (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), 225. 9 “J. R. or the Boy Inside,” 25, 67; cf. J R 18, 43. 8

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traits that characterize Wagner’s heroine. Brünnhilde receives Alberich’s magic ring as a love token from Siegfried and is indifferent to its capacity to wield power. Valuing love over power, she tells her sister Valkyrie Waltraute that she will not return the ring to the Rhinemaidens even to save the gods: “My love shall last while I live, / my ring in life shall not leave me! / Fall first in ruins / Walhall’s glorious pride!” (Twilight of the Gods 1.3). Amy displays a similar spirit of defiance, first in marrying Lucien Joubert against her parents’s wishes, then in turning her back on her failed marriage and debutante world to take up “—teaching school out in the woods somewhere just to have something to do,” she explains to Beaton, “—something alive to do even if it’s, even if I hardly know what I’m teaching them just following the lesson guide but it’s something it’s, something” (211). Amy likewise follows Brünnhilde in her willingness to marry beneath her class: “—if Daddy could just see the only men I’ve met I can imagine getting into, into anything with them he’d die, one’s probably Freddie’s age10 he drinks and plays the horses his face is like the, he laughs and his face is just torment and, and his hands and the other’s a boy, a composer and he’s just a boy just all, all radiant desolation and he’s dear” (213). Amy alone discerns these qualities (albeit somewhat romanticized) in Gibbs and Bast, as she alone is able to discern J R’s better qualities. Although she has a brief affair with Gibbs, she eventually marries neither him nor Bast but an associate of Typhon named Richard Cutler, a step she had earlier dismissed as absurd: “—that would be like, like marrying your issue of six percent preferreds […] avoidance payable semiannually” (214). Amy’s loveless marriage to Cutler at the end of the novel has its parallel in Brünnhilde’s “marriage” to Gunther, the foolish king of the Gigichungs, made under the mistaken assumption that Siegfried has abandoned her for Gunther’s sister Gutrune. Brünnhilde acts to avenge herself against a faithless husband; Amy apparently acts to avenge herself against a faithless family more concerned with its financial interests than the welfare of its children. Realizing that financial power is the only way to regain control over her life and the lives of her brother Freddie and her son Francis, Amy marries the deferential Cutler apparently to be in a better position to wrest financial control out of the hands of the men who have controlled her life for so long. At the end of the Ring, the Rhinemaidens regain the Rhinegold from the gods, dwarfs, and men who have misused it; at the end of J R, patriarchal hegemony is similarly overturned as women attain control over most Amy is unaware that Gibbs and her older brother Freddie attended boarding school together in Connecticut: see 498, 618. In Carpenter’s Gothic, Liz is likewise unaware that her younger brother and McCandless’s son Jack attended school together.

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of the assets fought over throughout the novel. Amy Joubert, Boody Selk, and Stella Angel are in this regard the Rhinemaidens of the novel, but there is little evidence they will use their “Rhinegold” more responsibly than their male relations. None of the three makes the heroic self-sacrifice that redeems Brünnhilde at the end of Twilight of the Gods, nor does love play a significant part in their calculations. By this point it should be obvious that Gaddis is as free in his use of the Ring as Wagner was in his use of the Nibelung legends. Gaddis identifies Stella with Freia, for example, but here he leaves Wagner and returns to the original Norse myths. Wagner’s Freia is weak and (along with her brother Froh) one of the blandest characters in the Ring, showing none of the pronounced sexuality of her Norse original. Such characterization is appropriate for Wagner’s purposes: Freia is little more than a cipher, Cooke explains, because she “stands as the goddess of love in a world which has rejected love. […] In the world of The Rhinegold, ruled over by Wotan, love does not exist—or rather, it has shrunk into the weak, helpless, hunted figure of Freia” (156). Unlike Gaddis, Wagner makes no mention of Freia’s famous necklace Brisingamen, a symbol of her rampant sexuality which a late account in the Icelandic Flateyjarbók says she won “by sleeping one night in turn with each of the four dwarfs who forged it.” H. R. Ellis Davidson goes on to add in a note: “Students of Freud will recognize the significance of a necklace for a fertility goddess (cf. the ring in Rabelais). It illustrates the familiar tendency to represent the sexual parts of the body by others higher up, and by ornaments worn on these.”11 Students of Gaddis will recognize all of these elements in J R, from the bawdy humor regarding Miss Flesch’s tendency to rub everyone’s face in her Ring (26–7, 313), to the necklacelike scar around Stella’s neck (from a thyroid operation) that also takes on sexual connotations. But it is Gibbs, Stella’s former lover, who makes explicit the identification of Stella with Freia. Learning from Bast that Schramm used to talk to the young composer about “Freya and Brisingamen,” Gibbs responds, “—Well Christ I could have told you about that Bast I told him about Brisingamen, seen the necklace around her throat I know every God damned link in it have to talk to you about her Bast” (282), but he saves his revelation for Eigen: “—Didn’t want to tell Bast […] cousin’s a God damned witch take you right off at the roots” (407). Like Venus, Freia/Freya is principally associated with eroticism, but she is also one of Graves’s dangerous White Goddesses associated with witchcraft and emasculation. Gibbs taunts Stella about this aspect by facetiously offering her the ingénue lead in his

Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), 115, 116n. 1.

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hypothetical comedy Our Dear Departed Member (74), book by the witchhunting authors of the Malleus Maleficarum (398, 407). All this learned wit at Stella’s expense is justified by her calculating efforts to gain control of General Roll, largely by captivating and then destroying her male rivals with her sexuality. “—There were beautiful witches after all,” Stella admits (61), but her sexuality is the sterile, destructive opposite of that represented by Wagner’s fructifying Freia. She apparently married Norman Angel only because he had earned a substantial number of shares in her father’s company, but they sleep in separate beds and have no children. Her sexuality is directed instead at Bast and Gibbs—both of whom she tries to seduce in order to win their shares in the company—and at a mysterious foreign lover who also teases her about Brisingamen (353).12 Bast welcomes her rather mechanical favors in fulfillment of his long-held desire for her, only to be interrupted by her unsuspecting husband. Bast doesn’t realize until the end of the novel that Stella has tried to destroy him and his music in revenge against Bast’s mother Nellie, who left Stella’s father Thomas for Bast’s father James, only to be spurned by the composer James because “he was afraid for anything to come between him and his work” (716). Stella had been blamed by the family for blurting out when younger the details of the scandal to a neighbor disguised as a Gypsy fortune-teller at a fair; her ambition to seize control of General Roll seems motivated less by an urge for power than by a desire to punish the family that has made her so unhappy for so many years. Wagner’s Freia is helpless when bartered away by her brother-in-law; Gaddis’s Stella means to take Valhalla in return for her mistreatment, and does indeed emerge in control of the company at the end of the book. However, her husband’s attempted suicide and subsequent coma seem to have broken her destructive pattern of behavior; Coen tells Bast that her “deeply exaggerated feelings of responsibility” for Norman’s attempt “led her to insist on being held by the police” (713), and Stella’s recommendation to Vida Duncan to plead for James’s return to save the New York Philharmonic suggests she is willing to be reconciled with her family. It is difficult to say for certain; as Coen warns, “—her appearance of cold calm I think may be deceptive” (713). Other characters in J R have only superficial resemblances to characters in the Ring. Stella’s husband Norman, for example, can be associated with the Other references during this brief scene (352–3) suggest that Stella has a sex life as active and perverse as Freya’s: “Loki accused her of taking all the gods and elves for lovers, while the giantess Hyndla taunted her with roaming out at night like a she-goat among the bucks” (Davidson 115). Stella’s lover lipsticks a design on her body that looks “like a cat with one large eye” (353), a mythologically relevant reminder that “Freyja’s chariot is drawn, not by goats, rams or bulls, but by cats” (Cooke 155). Freia/Freya/Freyja are all related to the modern German verb freien (to woo, to marry), the subject of a quip in The Recognitions (195).

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lovesick giant Fasolt, but his interruption of the love tryst between Stella and Edward also links him with Hunding, the hulking husband of Sieglinde in The Valkyrie. Her tryst with her long-lost brother Siegmund has its parallel in that between Stella and her cousin Edward, but even though the Ring is alluded to in this scene (142) the principal allusions are to the relationship between the cousins in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall.” Similarly, Beaton has a superficial relation to Wagner’s Loge, who despises the gods and promises to return the ring to the Rhinemaidens. Beaton likewise plots the downfall of the “gods” of J R to return financial control into Amy’s hands, but he lacks Loge’s wit, irony, and playful intelligence. The Hyde boy sounds like Alberich’s brother Mime at one point when he complains “—we used to have this neat time trading boy but now everything’s …” (172), and their schoolmates are consistently called a “horde” as are the Nibelheim dwarfs. Zona Selk squats on Schepperman’s paintings much as the dragon Fafner does on the Nibelung treasure, but whether Gaddis intended to push the parallels this far is doubtful. Conspicuous in their absence are any clear-cut counterparts to Wagner’s heroes Siegmund and Siegfried; Steven Weisenburger makes a tentative case for associating Bast with both on the basis of various incidental parallels, but aside from Siegfried’s naïveté, Bast has little of significance in common with either. Along with putting a number of Wagner’s characters into modern dress, J R imitates the Ring’s uninterrupted formal design. Wagner dispensed with traditional operatic divisions of arias, recitatives, and ensembles in favor of “a continuous, endlessly varied web of melody,” as one of Gaddis’s sources describes it,13 built on musical phrases called motifs that identify particular characters, places, objects, and dramatic ideas. Modernist writers such as Mann, Pound, and Joyce make extensive use of literary motifs in their works—a practice parodied by Wyndham Lewis in The Apes of God—but Gaddis’s J R is the most ambitious attempt to do in writing what Wagner did in music (to paraphrase Willie in The Recognitions [477]). Length is the first characteristic. The Rhinegold alone lasts two and a half hours without a single break, even during scene changes; the other three parts of the Ring have single acts as long as entire operas by other composers, and use their great length to impose their reality on the audience. Bast is especially appreciative of this point; discussing Wagner with Amy, he corrects her assumption that an artist is “asking” an audience to suspend disbelief: “—No not asking them making them, like that E flat chord that opens the Rhinegold goes on and on Ernest Newman, Wagner as Man and Artist, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1924), 349. Stella owns a copy of this book (146, 149), which is the source for the Wagneriana in Amy and Bast’s conversation (111–16).

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it goes on for a hundred and thirty-six bars until the idea that everything’s happening under water is more real than sitting in a hot plush seat with tight shoes on” (111). J R goes on and on for 726 pages of dialogue until the frankly unbelievable story of a sixth-grader’s overnight financial success seems more real than the plot of the most plausible novel. While Wagner’s lengthy operas are tolerated, however, Gaddis’s lengthy novels still meet with resistance, a point worth a brief digression. In his New Yorker review of J R, George Steiner complains, “All this could have been said compactly, and made accessible to the reader” (109), a complaint echoed by others who, one suspects, would likewise be satisfied with one of those anthologies that reduces the Ring’s twenty hours of music to ninety minutes of highlights. Both Wagner and Gaddis attempt a critique of an entire culture, and in Gaddis’s case especially the validity of his critique is largely dependent upon his specificity of detail. In this regard, Gaddis resembles Wagner’s contemporary Gustave Flaubert, who in his last, unfinished novel attempted to take stock of his culture in much the same manner. Lionel Trilling could be describing Gaddis when he writes of Flaubert in his introduction to Bouvard and Pécuchet: He was unique too in the necessity he felt to see the crisis [the death of culture] in all its specificity of detail. For him the modern barbarism was not merely a large general tendency which could be comprehended by a large general emotion; he was constrained to watch it with a compulsive and obsessive awareness of its painful particularities. He was made rabid—to use his own word—by this book, this phrase, this solecism, this grossness of shape or form, this debasement of manners, this hollow imitation of thought. […] What he wanted to do, he said, was nothing less than to take account of the whole intellectual life of France. “If it were treated briefly, made concise and light, it would be a fantasy—more or less witty, but without weight or plausibility; whereas if I give it detail and development I will seem to be believing my own story, and it can be made into something serious and even frightening.” And he believed that it was by an excess of evidence that he would avoid pedantry.14

What is lacking in more compact critiques of American manners and mores—Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, say, or Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49—is the breadth and density of detail that give J R its greater weight and plausibility, comprehensiveness and exactitude. Gaddis’s novel is as witty as Fitzgerald’s and as fantastic as Pynchon’s, but easily outdistances either as “Introduction,” Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. T. W. Earp and G. W. Stonier (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1954), v–vii.

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a critique of the American dream due to the “detail and development” that Gaddis, like Flaubert, pursues with such encyclopedic thoroughness. Gaddis develops his details in much the same way Wagner develops his musical ideas in the Ring. The entire opera, in one sense, is generated from the opening E flat pedal point and the arpeggio figure that represents the flowing Rhine, growing to ninety or so distinct motifs by the fourth part of the tetralogy, by which point nearly every bar contains elements of one or more of these musical ideas. Gaddis imitates Wagner’s method by opening with his own pedal point, the word “money,” qualified in the second line as “paper” (equivalent to the B flat that joins Wagner’s E flat after four bars), which continues to take on further qualities (Eastern, lifeless, worthless), to become associated with power (Father), contrasted to silver (i.e., authentic) money, and then implicated in the arts and education—all within fifteen short lines. The introduction of Julia and Anne’s father leads in similar fashion to his sons, their sibling rivalry, the father’s vindictive presence (his ashes blown back into the sons’s beards), and the inevitable entrance of law to mediate between the brothers and, later, between other conflicting parties. By the bottom of the first page, then, Gaddis has introduced all the thematic components of his novel in a way that both imitates and alludes to The Rhinegold. Gaddis’s first descriptive sentence—“Sunlight, pocketed in a cloud, spilled suddenly broken across the floor through the leaves of the trees outside”—seems to adapt Shaw’s description of the “green light” of the Rhinemaidens’ underwater playground, where the gold is initially “eclipsed, because the sun is not striking down through the water” (9). During the first scene of J R we also hear “a tone that seemed to echo the deep” (7)—another allusion to Wagner’s E flat pedal point—and the sounds of hammering (10, 16, etc.), recalling the hammering of the Nibelung dwarfs later in The Rhinegold. At this point Wagner is named for the first time (16), the Ring two pages later, and all of these allusions given a context when Bast leads his farcical rehearsal of the first scene of The Rhinegold later that day (32–6). The close parallel with Wagner’s opera is dispensed with after this rehearsal, but Wagner himself is kept in mind by numerous passing references to his work habits, family life, his other operas, and the tuba that bears his name, even references to Rheingold beer and its Miss Rheingold competitions in the 1940s and 1950s. One of the companies J R buys is the Wagner Funeral Homes chain—a witty allusion to Wotan’s Valhalla, a funeral home for dead heroes—whose gay spokesman Brisboy is quite entertaining on the problems incurred by such a name (545). The recurring references to Wagner remind the reader of the form Gaddis is using, the scope of his enterprise, and the ominous inevitability of the Götterdämmerung, which is punningly kept in the air as Gibbs and Eigen repeatedly “God damn”

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everything in sight. (A cellist once told me that musicians pronounce this title “God-damn-the-Ring.”) But most importantly, Wagner is evoked as that rarest of birds, the successful composer. In his radical lecture on Mozart, Bast cites example after example of composers who succumbed to the pressures upon them: “—like Franz Schubert dying of typhus at thirty-two yes or, or Robert Schumann being hauled out of a river so they could cart him off to an asylum or the, or Tchaikowski who was afraid his head would fall off if …” (43)—indicating that Bast is suffering less from the anxiety of influence than from the anxiety of survival, of whether he too will be destroyed by an indifferent society or be tempted to destroy himself. Noticing Bast’s earphone, Brisboy hopes Bast is not going deaf as Beethoven did and pleads with him not to take his life (547); this is a comic misunderstanding at one level (Bast is monitoring songs on the radio for reporting purposes), but at another refers to the same pressures that cause Schramm to take his life early in the novel and cause the other artists to wonder, as do Stanley and Wyatt in The Recognitions, whether art is worth creating for such an unresponsive, even hostile society. Of all the composers mentioned in J R, Wagner alone provides an example of an artist who survived, who created demanding, uncompromising art, and who persisted long enough to see a society that exiled him finally come to him on their knees. Just as Wyatt finally realizes that Titian is a better model than the Van Eycks and their followers, Bast attains something of the iron resolve that drove Wagner to create and stage The Ring of the Nibelung against formidable odds, a model that perhaps Bast will someday emulate as triumphantly as Gaddis does in J R.

The Victorian Heritage In the meantime, Bast struggles with setting to music Tennyson’s long poem “Locksley Hall,” one of four nineteenth-century British works alluded to with some frequency in J R. Tennyson’s poem, Kipling’s “Mandalay” plus Wilde’s “Impressions of America,” and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are associated with Bast, Gibbs, and Eigen, respectively, and are used by Gaddis to broaden the historical contexts of his characters’s personal problems. The four older works offer Victorian perspectives on the difficulty of fulfilling obligations to a culture not completely believed in, the temptation to forsake those obligations for unfettered freedom, and the tendency to make romantic fictions of women. Although a number of other Victorians are quoted or alluded to in J R—Browning, Bulwer-Lytton, Carlyle, Stevenson, Pater—these four warrant closer attention because of the extended use Gaddis makes of their work.

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Searching for a text to express his unrequited love for his recently married cousin, Bast remembers from school Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (1842), the dramatic monologue of a sensitive young man who, spurned by his cousin Amy, resolves to “mix with action, lest I wither by despair.” Tennyson’s speaker has difficulty, however, in maintaining his optimistic vision of his (and England’s) glorious future after his romantic hopes are dashed. Predicting a loveless future for submissive Amy, he predicts England too will have a bleak future: progress, he suspects, will be at the expense of the individual, and he expresses grave doubts over the advances promised by science, democracy, imperialism, and women’s emancipation. He is tempted to escape to a tropical paradise where “never floats an European flag” and where he can avoid progress altogether, but the true Victorian in him wins out (“I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time”)15 and he decides at last to join his lot with that of the “Mother-Age.” Bast identifies with Tennyson’s protagonist as strongly as most adolescents do when they discover a character who embodies their ambitions and frustrations. The parallels here are numerous: both characters have been spurned by a beloved cousin, both are orphans, both have a romantic, idealistic outlook on life incompatible with practical reality, and both are faced with that perennial Gaddis quandary: What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these? Every door is barr’d with gold, and opens but to golden keys. Every gate is throng’d with suitors, all the markets overflow I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do? (ll. 99–102)

Tennyson’s poem is introduced in J R at the end of its first frantic day, when Bast allows Stella to visit the converted barn behind the Bast house where he composes. In a scene fraught with sexual tension—conveyed partially by Bast’s unconscious manipulation of the cleft of a beer can, into which he stuffs an earlier intruder’s condom—Stella notices his work in progress on the piano, much to Bast’s embarrassment, but reacts with polite indifference to Bast’s broken confession of her part in inspiring the work (69–71). Stella returns a few nights later to look for some paperwork and discovers with Bast that his studio has again been broken into and ransacked. In what Stella later calls an effort to rid Bast of his “romantic ideas about himself and everything else” (148), she initiates a passionless sexual encounter, only to be interrupted (though not caught) by her husband Norman. Temporarily unhinged at the violation of his private studio and at the frustration of the This famous line is quoted twice in The Recognitions (290, 559), both times with ironic implications.

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interrupted tryst, Bast plays wildly from his operatic suite, taking a cue from the thunder outside and mixing with the Tennyson libretto a number of phrases picked up during a frustrating day in Manhattan with J R’s class (142). This mélange of lines from “Locksley Hall”—mocking Amy and her oafish husband and calling down the thunder on their mansion—reminds us that Tennyson’s speaker is by turns blustering, naïve, self-pitying, and spiteful (as is Bast in his worst moments) and that consequently his valid criticisms of the Victorian social order are undercut somewhat by his histrionic posturing. Bast, to his credit, does not indulge in social predictions as Tennyson’s protagonist does, but Stella is correct in thinking Bast would do well to abandon those “romantic ideas about himself and everything else.” When Gibbs learns of Bast’s operatic suite, he too chides him: “—Locksley Hall Christ, next thing you’ll shock us with a novel call it the Sorrows of Young Werther” (280). (Gibbs goes on to taunt Eigen with another quotation from “Locksley Hall”: “—ought to get yourself one Tom wed some savage woman let her rear your dusky …” [281].) Aside from modifying his operatic suite to a cantata, little is said of Bast’s musical project until near the end of the novel, largely because he is too busy writing two hours of film music for Crawley. Hospitalized with double pneumonia and nervous exhaustion—and in a delirium reciting to the nurse “some poetry about some ancient founts” and “some creepy poetry about the dreary moorland” (670–1, from “Locksley Hall,” ll. 188 and 40)—Bast comes close to renouncing Tennyson and all art, much as Tennyson’s protagonist comes close to renouncing England for the jungle. But both characters recognize these temptations to retreat and to withdraw as no more than the other side of the same coin of romantic delusion, equally foolish and selfdefeating. Both adopt instead a more existential willingness to act in the face of uncertainty and possible failure: Tennyson’s protagonist accepts “However these things be” and bids a contemptuous farewell to Locksley Hall and all it represents. Similarly, Bast declares, “—No, no I’ve failed enough at other people’s things I’ve done enough other people’s damage from now on I’m just going to do my own, from now on I’m going to fail at my own here those papers wait” (718), and retrieves his discarded cello sketches to begin his art anew on a more modest scale and on a more realistic aesthetic foundation. Old enough to know better, Gibbs likewise gives his beloved the trappings of a romantic heroine from literature and risks compromising his art by making it dependent upon a woman’s approval. Having long admired Amy Joubert from afar, he can hardly believe his luck when she welcomes an affair. He calls Eigen from her apartment to tell him of his good fortune, claiming he has “found a cleaner greener maiden in a neater sweeter land” (494), a tongue-twister repeated several times thereafter, though

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never accurately. The quotation comes from Rudyard Kipling’s once-popular poem “Mandalay” (1890)—coincidentally in the same trochaic octameter as “Locksley Hall”—a ballad filled with distaste for England and a nostalgic longing for the Far East: I am sick o’ wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’stones, An’ the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones; Tho’ I walks with fifty ’ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand, An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand? Beefy face an’ grubby ’and— Law! wot do they understand? I’ve got a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! On the road to Mandalay… . (ll. 35–42)

The same tropical paradise that Tennyson’s upper-class protagonist considered but rejected is here extolled by a lower-class Cockney soldier. Both Victorian characters are drawn not only to exotic lovers but to states of lawless freedom; compare Tennyson’s “There the passions cramp’d no longer shall have scope and breathing space” with Kipling’s “Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.” That Gibbs would cite Kipling is revelatory both of the nature of his short-term relationship with Amy and of the impossibility of its success. Amy is not a part of his world, intellectual or social, despite the fact she teaches at the same school as he. Instead, she is as exotic as Kipling’s maiden and just as far removed from Gibbs’s real needs and social obligations. During their week-long tryst he may as well be in Mandalay, for he quits teaching, sees none of his friends, and forgets to visit his daughter as usual. All of this becomes apparent to him only after she leaves. When Amy departs for Switzerland she extracts from Gibbs a promise to work on his book, but while looking through his notes he comes across a short story he once began, punningly entitled “How Rose Is Read” and heavy with literary allusion. The short fragment concludes: Mention her name and you’d see them, or their sharp edges, surface briefly in the young men’s eyes dropped quickly elsewhere once they’d learned how many times she’d read Go lovely Rose, in how many different hands, forcing her door with flowers, fleeing it home to books to flee her there. Elena in Turgenev’s On the Eve flung down at two am as elsewhere pages feverishly turned to find her serving tea to friends by one gone back to bed to toss alone till dawn came in another part of town where somebody else gave up importuning her shade through Gluck’s underworld with a twist of the dial to study in his own unsteady

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hand of the night before beware woman who blow on knots and then take all of an hour to find perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me downstairs? No book heroine as they wanted, this crowd who would not understand how much more human she was, like old Auda after battle and murder, heart yearning […] (584)

Within two and a half sentences, allusions to Waller, Turgenev, Gluck, the Quran, Isaac Bickerstaffe, and T. E. Lawrence crowd around to rob Rose of any real identity, reducing her to a book heroine of the most artificial sort. Gibbs displays a similar tendency to think of the women he meets in literary terms, to “read” into them qualities that tend to reduce them to literary stereotypes. We recall Gibbs comparing Stella to Freya and to a witch out of the Malleus Maleficarum; he associates Amy with Kipling’s maiden but first with the woman in Eliot’s “Hysteria” (117, 120, 130); after meeting Rhoda he compares her to a variety of figures ranging from a sorceress by painter Hans Baldung to “Bess, the landlord’s daughter” in Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” (388). (Eigen picks up Gibbs’s allusions to “Mandalay” and gives Rhoda the “beefy face and grubby hand” of Kipling’s Chelsea housemaids [615].) At one point Gibbs even resorts to a printing metaphor to describe a woman: “—Ann, she’ sort of you [Amy] in a cheap edition, twentieth printing of the paperback when things begin to smear” (245). On one hand, such remarks are just a playful habit on Gibbs’s part, the learned banter of a well-read man. But on the other, they betray a tendency to find excuses, justifications, and ideals in literary works for his own behavior, a tendency more excusable in someone of Bast’s age and temperament. Throwing his Tennyson back in Bast’s face, Stella refuses to take part in “—this whole absurd, her bosom shaken by a sudden storm of sighs this whole frightened romantic nightmare you’d put me into” (716); substitute Kipling for Tennyson and Amy would find Gibbs doing much the same thing were she not so preoccupied with her own problems. A confrontation like that between Bast and Stella is unnecessary; Gibbs soon sees he has been acting like a Cockney soldier pining away in useless regret and avoids Amy upon her return. Like her namesake in “Locksley Hall,” Amy decides to play it safe and marry dull Dick Cutler—a nice dovetailing of allusions—but by that point Gibbs has shaken off his escapist fantasy and thus is able to avoid the romantic agony that bedevils Bast. The other Victorian Gibbs most often quotes is Oscar Wilde, whose bantering lecture “Impressions of America” (1883) figures prominently in Gibbs’s Agapē Agape. The lecture is based on Wilde’s 1882 tour of the United States, where he promulgated doctrines that, as Richard Ellmann writes, “constituted the most determined and sustained attack on materialistic

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vulgarity that America had seen.” More important, “Wilde presented a theory not only of art but of being, not only a distinguished personality but an antithesis to getting on without regard for the quality of life.”16 This same annoyance at “getting on without regard for the quality of life” underlies Gibbs’s concerns, and he shares Wilde’s conviction that America is antagonistic toward art. Gibbs quotes Wilde’s opinion that America “is the noisiest country that ever existed” and his warning “All art depends upon exquisite and delicate sensibility, and such constant turmoil must ultimately be destructive of the musical faculty […]” (289). J R is the noisiest novel that ever existed, and the efforts of its artists to create amidst its continual turmoil painfully illustrate Wilde’s observation. Gibbs takes his epigraph to Agapē Agape from the notice Wilde saw posted above a saloon-hall piano in Leadville, Colorado: “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best” (288). Wilde playfully calls this “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across,” but Gibbs knows he lives in a shoot-the-pianist culture that destroys its artists, for in the arts “one’s best is never good enough” (604), as Wilde himself would learn when his country destroyed him. While Kipling informs Gibbs’s romantic urges, Wilde justifies his cultural and artistic fears. As Bast has Tennyson and Gibbs has Kipling and Wilde, Thomas Eigen has Joseph Conrad. Gaddis makes the same use of Heart of Darkness as Conrad makes of the Aeneid and the Inferno, putting as much ironic distance between Eigen and Marlow as Conrad does between Marlow and Aeneas or Dante. Although there are only two clusters of allusions to Conrad’s 1899 novella in J R, they help to illuminate both Eigen’s motives through the second half of the novel and his complicated relationship to his own Kurtz, the suicide Schramm. The first set of allusions follows Gibbs’s and Eigen’s meeting with the lawyer Beamish, who has come to see them about settling Schramm’s estate. Recovering the copy of the Malleus Maleficarum he had once loaned him, Gibbs discovers that Schramm kept a photograph of his young stepmother in its pages. Eigen is immediately taken by the photograph for reasons that Gibbs coarsely points out: —Real number Tom, really see how she made the old man’s mickey stand for him can’t you Beamish … —Well she, she was a good many years his junior yes, even younger than your friend Mister Schramm himself but … —See why Schramm felt like Hippolytus turned backwards can’t you, get a hand on that raw lung see how Schramm felt can’t you. (392) Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 205.

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Beamish goes on to say he has some papers for her to sign and Eigen volunteers to take the picture and papers to her. Though drunk, Gibbs is able to point out the obvious parallel a little later that evening when he comes across a copy of Heart of Darkness at Eigen’s apartment and badgers him about it: “—Heart of Darkness, God damned cheerful reading Heart of Darkness, part at the end he takes her picture and letters back to her[, …] part she says you were his friend, part she says you knew what great plans he had something must remain wants his last words to live with, part you knock on the mahogany door take the papers up to Mrs Schramm wants his last words to live with believing and shitting are two very different things Mrs Schramm always remember that part” (408). But just as Marlow delays a year before returning her picture and letters to Kurtz’s Intended, Eigen forgets about the papers until he finds them in his pocket a few weeks later. This time a sober Gibbs more bluntly confronts Eigen with his carnal motive for seeing Schramm’s widow: —Meet her yes, probably be God damned grateful, shame you can’t take [Schramm’s] folder along too show her he was on the threshold of great things, might have kicked the world to pieces … —I don’t know what you’re, why you can’t give me this either can you any credit for, credit for any loyalty to his memory my God see him in that canvas sack it’s like being loyal to a nightmare … —Had your choice of nightmares go ahead you’ve got custody of his memory Christ, all you’ve done for it certainly got the right to sweep it up with the trash why not take that picture he had of her too, see you waiting there in the lofty drawing room her pale face floating toward you in the dusk takes both your hands in hers no chick but good Christ she’s survived hasn’t she, probably tell you she knew him better than you did want to hear his last words give her something to live with, dream the nightmare right through to the God damned end when you come out with it … —What with, what do you mean I … —Mean you’d better fix your trousers in front there first that’s all. (631)

All the allusions in J R to Heart of Darkness are to its final third, in which Marlow struggles first to comprehend what Kurtz represents to him, and then with the dilemma whether he should preserve or destroy the Intended’s naïve illusions about Kurtz. Eigen faces only the former struggle; the latter is inconsequential, for though Mrs. Schramm makes only one brief appearance in the novel (508–9), it is clear that she’s little more than an opportunistic young woman who only married the older Schramm for his money. She probably has no illusions about anything, and certainly lacks the Intended’s

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“mature capacity for fidelity.” Abandoned by his wife and tormented by sexual frustration, Eigen takes up with Mrs. Schramm (now a wealthy young widow) with basely pragmatic motives that burlesque Marlow’s more reverent approach to Kurtz’s fiancée. Marlow’s dilemma—which, as Gibbs points out by way of Mozart, amounts to choosing between “believing and shitting”—is one Eigen is spared. Eigen’s relationship to Schramm is more problematic. Like Kurtz (with whom he shares a monosyllabic German surname), Schramm left his native land to go abroad, not for Africa and ivory but for Europe to fight in World War II, and there underwent experiences that turned him against his country with as much contempt as Kurtz has for his Belgian company. “—The only time he was ever really alive was the war,” Gibbs tells Amy, “—he was a tank commander in the Ardennes and when it was all over he just never could quite, he has some bad periods that’s all” (246). But after his suicide Gibbs reveals that Schramm was taken prisoner by the Germans while trying to defend a small town after the rest of his division retreated without telling him (390–1).17 Schramm’s efforts to write a book about his experiences fail—partially because of paternal disapproval—though he does manage a screenplay for a western called Dirty Tricks that allegorizes the events. (Gaddis wrote such a screenplay under the title One Fine Day.) But Eigen takes as proprietary an interest in Schramm’s notes for this book as Marlow does in Kurtz’s papers. Although both Eigen and Schramm are writers, there is no professional rivalry: Eigen has written an important if neglected novel that surely overshadows Schramm’s western. He has had difficulty following up that first novel, however, and apparently sees in Schramm’s notes the means by which he can overcome his own writer’s block and, perhaps, expiate the guilt Gibbs has instilled in him for indirectly contributing to Schramm’s suicide. The scuffle for Schramm’s notes is as ludicrous as that for Kurtz’s papers: Gibbs comes across them in Schramm’s typewriter case and reads them, but lies to Eigen that he hasn’t seen them (595, 597); when Eigen arrives at the 96th Street apartment to look for them himself, he tells Rhoda the notes are “—some work I started” (613); Rhoda, Schramm’s last girlfriend and almost crude enough to compare to Kurtz’s savage concubine, tells Eigen he is lying (616), but he finally finds them stuffed under some boxes and is last seen bearing them to Mrs. Schramm with motives that are mixed, at best. Gibbs and Eigen, like Marlow before them, bear witness to the compromises, self-deceptions, and outright lying that paradoxically are sometimes In Gaddis’s version, “Saint Fiacre” is St. Vith, “Blaufinger” General Hasso von Manteuffel, and “General Box” perhaps General Fritz Bayerlein (see Letters 253–4). Coincidentally, several accounts of the Ardennes Offensive (aka the Battle of the Bulge) mention a Major Percy Schramm, a German historian who kept Hitler’s diary on the offensive.

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necessary to maintain a realm of ideals, that beautiful world Marlow feels Kurtz’s Intended epitomizes so well. She represents the moral imagination which, even if more of a curse than a blessing, is what separates her, Kurtz, and Marlow from the pilgrims, flabby devils, and the other moral bankrupts in Conrad’s novella. It is this same moral imagination that, with all their faults, distinguishes Eigen, Bast, Gibbs, and the better characters in J R from the rest, and Gaddis’s sparse but incisive use of Heart of Darkness underscores the precarious artificiality of this moral realm. The four works by Tennyson, Kipling, Wilde, and Conrad share this concern for the validity of cultural and moral ideals and the difficulty involved in pursuing them in the face of personal unhappiness and widespread corruption.18 Gaddis’s dramatic update of these concerns and difficulties reminds the reader that culture is always in a state of crisis, and will always demand the most from the minority still convinced culture is worth preserving.

The Classical Heritage The reference to Hippolytus in Gibbs’s discussion of Schramm’s family is one of many allusions to Greek myth and philosophy scattered throughout J R. Some of them, like this particular one of Phaedra’s love for her stepson, are casual and local in the sense they do not form a particular pattern other than evoking the darker corners of Greek myth. Thus we hear Amy compare the sound of the buzzsaws to the Erinyes (75) and have companies named after the hundred-headed monster Typhon, the Delphic priestess Pythia, and Erebus, the personification of darkness (and the name of a ship mentioned at the beginning of Heart of Darkness). Brisboy wanted to name his funeral chain after Charon, but his mother “found that a trifle recherché” (545). Plato is mentioned a few times, Heraclitus quoted once, and Gibbs cites Aristotle’s Politics often in his Agapē Agape, but the most important references are to the Greek philosopher Empedocles and to Philoctetes, the wounded archer who ended the Trojan War. The relative paucity of references to these two figures is in inverse proportion to their importance in J R. Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) also shares this theme and may be alluded to in J R: compare Gibbs’s description of his book as “sort of a social history of mechanization and the arts, the destructive element” (244) with the trader Stein on the difficulty of maintaining an ideal in a hostile world: “The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me—how to be? […] I will tell you! […] In the destructive element immerse” (Ch. 20).

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Empedocles is known to students of literature chiefly as the despairing suicide of Matthew Arnold’s poetic drama “Empedocles on Etna,” but Gaddis’s references are to the original poet-philosopher of the fifth century BCE and to the extant fragments of his cosmological poem On Nature. Empedocles posited a cosmic cycle in which two contrasting forces alternate in control over the world—Love (or amity, harmony, unity) and Strife (or hatred, disorder, division)—and believed that organic life evolves in four stages. The first generation of life consists of disunited limbs: “On it [the earth] many heads sprung up without necks and arms wandered bare and bereft of shoulders. Eyes strayed up and down in want of foreheads” (fragment 57). In the second generation, body parts join randomly with others, creating monsters: Solitary limbs wandered seeking for union. / But, as divinity was mingled still further with divinity, these things joined together as each might chance, and many other things besides them continually arose. / Shambling creatures with countless hands. / Many creatures with faces and breasts looking in different directions were born; some, offspring of oxen with faces of men, while others, again, arose as offspring of men with the heads of oxen, and creatures in whom the nature of women and men was mingled, furnished with sterile parts. (fragments 58–61)

The third generation produces “whole-natured forms,” androgynous beings of the sort described by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, and in the fourth and final generation these beings are sexually differentiated into the human race.19 Asked about the pseudo-Greek inscription over J R’s school—actually by Marx,20 a parting joke of Schepperman’s—Gibbs refers the writer Gall to “—Empedocles […] I think it’s a fragment from the second generation of his cosmogony, maybe even the first” (45) and proceeds to paraphrase the relevant fragments, much to Hyde’s annoyance: —I’m trying to have a serious discussion with these Foundation people on closed-circuit broadcast and you butt in with arms and legs flying around somebody’s eyes looking for their forehead what was all that supposed to be! John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd edn. (London: A. & C. Black, 1920), 214. Gaddis used a later reprint of this book (New York: Meridian, 1958). 20 Shorn of its curlicues, the Greek phrase on p. 20 reads “FROM EACH ACCORD …”— from Marx’s famous formulation in Critique of the Gotha Program (1875): “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” 19

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—He was asking about one of the preSocratics, Major, the rule of love and the rule of strife in the cosmic cycle of Emp … —They didn’t come here to talk about comic cycles […] (48)

The world according to Gaddis is ruled by Strife, a parodic or “comic” cycle in which fragmentation and division are rampant. In crowded Penn Station where “elbows found ribs and shoulders backs,” Gibbs mutters, “—place is like the dawn of the world here, this way … countless hands and unattached eyes, faces looking in different directions” (161). Although here as elsewhere Gaddis literalizes Empedocles’ image of random body parts (cf. 406–7), it pervades J R more in the metaphoric sense Emerson uses in “The American Scholar”: “The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.” Emerson is complaining not only of specialization but of fragmentation, of allowing oneself to diminish from Man to a thing, a function, and then treating others likewise. The result is the incomplete creatures who stumble through J R bumping into people, using them, misunderstanding others and being misunderstood in turn, each insisting on his or her narrow outlook, and coming together only in striferidden marriages, chaotic school systems, or monstrous combinations such as the J R Family of Companies that rival anything in Empedocles. Love, except in the person of Amy (amity), is conspicuous in its absence. Gaddis creates lexical equivalents to Empedocles’ limbs and monsters with his elliptical, fragmented dialogue and a heterogeneous discourse made up of incongruent diction, specialized jargon, mixed metaphors, and tortuous syntax. Examples are unnecessary: open any page of J R. What protects the novel from the charge of merely recreating the lexical chaos it deplores, however, is the selective ordering of the artist, where this particular idiotic comment is chosen from many others and placed next to that one, so that together they echo a remark made in a dissimilar context elsewhere, and in turn anticipate a line from Tennyson, and so on. J R does indeed look chaotic, but it is a “perfectly ordered chaos” (R 18) designed to fight Strife with strife with the strongest bow Gaddis can wield. Philoctetes, Gaddis once explained to an interviewer, “was the hero with the bow, the great champion of the Greeks, who goes into the sacred garden where he’s not supposed to be and is bitten by the snake, and has a festering wound and they get rid of him, they exile him. Then, when there’s trouble and they need him and his bow, Ulysses and the prince [Achilles’s son Neoptolemus] come and say, ‘Please, come and help us.’ And that idea has always fascinated me.”21 In J R, Philoctetes is most closely associated with Grove B10.

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James Bast, the composer of an opera called Philoctetes, and living abroad in self-imposed exile. He is called back at the end of the novel to save the ailing New York Philharmonic in much the same spirit as Philoctetes is called back to end the Trojan War. But in a larger sense, Philoctetes is the prototype of all of Gaddis’s troubled and troublesome artists; his limp is shared by both Schramm and Gibbs, and the latter especially manages to save a number of companies by the novel’s end despite (or perhaps because of) the “festering wound” of his bitter sarcasm. In The Recognitions, Basil Valentine offers Wyatt the epigram “the priest is the guardian of mysteries. The artist is driven to expose them” (261). The artist is accursed for profaning the sacred garden, and yet the insight and power gained from the transgression are sorely needed by the very society that curses him when those mysteries are used for fraud and oppression. Among artists in general, the satirist especially is driven to expose mysteries, an act that opens him to charges of disrespect, impiety, pessimism—further terms can be culled from Gaddis’s harsher reviews—and yet the health of any society is dependent upon the satirist’s corrective lash, as Pope argues so eloquently in his satires and epistles. (In interviews in later years, Gaddis half-seriously boasted of warning an unheeding society of the junk-bond eighties and the crash of 1987.) Sophocles makes it clear in his Philoctetes—which seems to be the basis for James Bast’s version (117)—that the wounded archer has himself to blame as much as anyone for his troubles. Gaddis’s artists are no better, frequently given to disruptive, self-destructive behavior, drunkenness, vanity, and callous selfishness. Pope’s satirist is a good citizen, but Gaddis’s artists are closer to Edmund Wilson’s conception of Philoctetes and the satirist as hero: I should interpret the fable as follows. The victim of a malodorous disease which renders him abhorrent to society and periodically degrades him and makes him helpless is also the master of a superhuman art which everybody has to respect and which the normal man finds he needs. […] It is in the nature of things—of this world where the divine and the human fuse—that they cannot have the irresistible weapon without its loathsome owner, who upsets the process of normal life by his curses and his cries, and who in any case refuses to work for men who have exiled him from their fellowship.22

This is the nature of the tension that exists between the artists and the businessmen in J R and was the subject of the concluding pages of the section on the Protestant ethic in Chapter 4. But Gaddis’s interest in this theme is obviously personal as well as professional. After his first novel The Wound and the Bow (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 294.

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was scorned and then ignored by the literary establishment, Gaddis must have felt like Philoctetes in exile while staring out the windows of Pfizer International in the late 1950s and early 1960s, trying to write speeches on balance of payments problems and the hazards of direct investment overseas while other, lesser talents were being lauded. In 1962–3 he had the same commission from the Ford Foundation that his character Gall has in J R, and a more fitting name for this alter ego cannot be imagined. (It also recalls the fact that Philoctetes’s arrows were dipped in the gall of the hydra.) Later in the 1960s, Gaddis was tempted to take part in protesting against the Vietnam War but realized that his work in progress would make a more permanent statement about the values that led America into the war, so he continued to work in isolation from the literary scene like Philoctetes on the isle of Lemnos. By the time J R was finally published in 1975, he had been absent from the publishing world twice as long as Philoctetes had been absent from Troy, but the novel’s National Book Award and his subsequent honors, grants, and critical accolades form an ironic parallel to the despised Greek hero’s later career that Gaddis must have relished. Philoctetes’ powerful bow brought an end to the Trojan War; Gaddis’s powerful J R—the greatest satirical novel in American literature—brings an end to the American dream of “success and like free enterprise and all” (726). Twilight has fallen upon the gods, and the romance of America darkens to Gothic.

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Carpenter’s Gothic; or, The Ambiguities

In the years following the publication of J R, Gaddis occasionally taught at Bard College, an experience he described as follows: My friend William Burroughs used to say that he didn’t teach creative writing, he taught creative reading. That was my idea in the Bard courses I taught, especially “The Theme of Failure in American Literature,” where we read everything from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People to William James’ Pragmatism to Diary of a Mad Housewife. What I was trying to do was raise questions for which there are no distinct answers. The problems remain with us because there are no absolutes.1

Carpenter’s Gothic is likewise a course in creative reading, a novel that raises questions for which there are no distinct answers, and one that counters absolutes with ambiguities. “There’s a very fine line between the truth and what really happens” is a dictum that echoes throughout the novel,2 but while half of the characters proclaim the truth and the other half expose what really happens, an ambiguity that neither half wishes to acknowledge prevents the reader from attaining an absolute certainty about many of the novel’s events and returns him or her to the air of uncertainty that is the chief climate of our ambiguous times. This much can be deduced: Carpenter’s Gothic concerns the last month in the life of Elizabeth Booth, “a stunning redhead former debutante from the exclusive Grosse Point area in Michigan” and “the daughter of late mineral tycoon F R Vorakers” (225). Former head of Vorakers Consolidated Reserve (VCR) in southeast Africa, her father committed suicide eight or Bard College Bulletin, November 1984. Gaddis originally wrote two additional sentences: “Keeping the questions open, as I did at Bard, is a difficult way to teach; it’s not like teaching mathematics. This puts a great deal of responsibility directly on the teacher’s shoulders.” 2 Carpenter’s Gothic (1985; New York: Penguin, 1986), 130, 136, 191, 193, 240; hereafter cited in the text and sometimes abbreviated CG. The paperback contains a few corrections to the first hardback edition, adjusts the paragraphing on pp. 1 and 25, and restores a line accidentally dropped from near the bottom of p. 110 in the first printing. 1

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nine years before the novel opens when his bribery practices were in danger of being exposed. At his funeral, Paul Booth, a Vietnam veteran and proud Southerner—actually an orphan of uncertain heritage—who “carried the bag” for the briberies, seduced Liz (as he calls her) and took her as his second wife. He quickly ran through much of her money in a number of ill-considered schemes to get rich; the rest of her money is tied up in a trust administered by “Adolph,” much to Paul’s frustration. Four years before the novel’s present, Liz survived an airplane crash, and four years later Paul is still pursuing a bogus suit for the loss of his wife’s “marital services.” Financial difficulties have led the couple to quit New York City for a rented house up the Hudson River—a ninety-year-old house in “Carpenter Gothic” style—whence Paul hopes to make it big as a media consultant. As the novel begins, his most promising client is the Reverend Elton Ude, an evangelical preacher from the rural South who with Paul’s help parlays an accidental drowning during a baptism into a providential call for a multimedia crusade against the forces of evil, aka the powers of darkness (namely communism, teachers of evolution, the “Jew liberal press,” and secular humanists everywhere). Using the house simply as a place “to eat and sleep and fuck and answer the telephone” (244), Paul spends most of his time elsewhere. Liz’s younger brother Billy pays an occasional disruptive visit, but she spends most of her time fighting off boredom and coping with an unending series of phone calls, many concerning the whereabouts of the house’s absentee landlord. Enter mysterious stranger. A man apparently in his late fifties, McCandless began as a geologist and in fact did the original exploration of the African ore field that is now up for grabs between VCR and Revd. Ude, who has a mission and radio station there. Disgusted at the increasing CIA involvement with the various movements toward independence in Africa beginning in the 1950s, McCandless drifted for years: he married and fathered a son named Jack (who once attended school with Billy), supported himself by teaching and writing articles for encyclopedias and science magazines, and even wrote a novel about his African experiences with the CIA. The first marriage ending in divorce, McCandless married a younger woman named Irene, but she left him two years before the novel opens. He is presently being hounded by both the IRS and the CIA, the latter in the uncouth person of Lester, a former colleague of his African days who is convinced McCandless retains vital information regarding the ore field under dispute. McCandless arrives one misty morning to reclaim some papers stored in a locked room. Coming to life at his appearance, Liz transforms McCandless into a wearily romantic “older man” with a mysterious past, and on his second appearance a week later takes him into her bed during one of Paul’s

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many absences. McCandless leaves the next afternoon in the company of Liz’s brother Billy, whose conversations with McCandless (there and later that night in New York City) strengthen his earlier resolve to go to work for his father’s company in Africa. Shortly after their departure, Paul arrives home in tatters (the victim of an attempted mugging) with all his media plans in tatters as well. Paul is $10,000 richer—keeping for himself a bribe Ude intended for Senator Teakell and the FCC—and has paid a black youth $100 to assassinate the minister. That night paid arsonists mistake another house for McCandless’s and burn it to the ground. A week later McCandless returns to find the house ransacked after a burglary and Liz griefstricken at the news of her brother’s death aboard an airplane shot down off the coast of Africa, a strike targeted for Senator Teakell who was ostensibly on a fact-finding mission “defending the mineral resources of the free world” but actually watching out for his own financial investments there. McCandless is preparing to leave the country—he has accepted Lester’s offer of $16,000 for his papers—but fails to persuade Liz to go with him. After he leaves, Liz receives a brief visit from McCandless’s first wife, both mistaking each other for the second wife Irene. Alone in the house after she leaves, Liz suffers a heart attack, symptoms of which were displayed throughout the novel, though dismissed by her doctors as high blood pressure. Because the house is still in disarray after the break-in that morning, the press mistakenly reports her death as the result of attempting to interrupt a robbery in progress. Paul believes this story, and though distraught at her death, he loses no time making sure both her and Billy’s money will come to him, and he is last seen on the way to their funeral using the same seductive line on her best friend Edie that he used on Liz many years before. As is the case with any summary of a Gaddis novel, this one not only fails to do justice to the novel’s complex tapestry of events but also subverts the manner in which these events are conveyed. Opening Carpenter’s Gothic is like opening the lid of a jigsaw puzzle: all the pieces seem to be there, but it is up to the reader to fit those pieces together. Paul’s refrain “fit the pieces together you see how all the God damn pieces fit together” (205) doubles as Gaddis’s instructions to the reader. The author doesn’t make it easy: the initials VCR are used throughout the book but not spelled out until thirtythree pages before the end; a letter from Thailand arrives on page 48 but its contents not revealed until two pages from the end; names occur in conversations that are not explained until pages later, if ever. Ambiguity is introduced in the very first line of the novel (“The bird, a pigeon was it? or a dove […]”), and though this particular ambiguity is cleared up at the end of the first chapter (“It was a dove”), the novel is rife with other ambiguities

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that are never resolved. Even after multiple readings, several events remain ambiguous, sometimes because too little information is given, sometimes because there are two conflicting accounts and no way to confirm either. As Paul complains later, “—pieces fit together problem’s just too God damn many pieces” (212). Such narrative strategies are designed not to baffle or frustrate the reader but to dramatize the novel’s central philosophic conflict, that between revealed truth versus acquired knowledge. Nothing is “revealed” by a godlike omniscient narrator in this novel; the reader learns “what really happens” only through study, attention, and the application of intelligence. The reader learns that McCandless has married twice, for example, by noting that Mrs. McCandless is old enough to have a twenty-five-year-old son (251), but Irene young enough to still use Tampax (150; cf. the handwriting on p. 31) and to have her youthful photograph praised by Lester (132). If several events remain ambiguous after such study, the reader must live with those ambiguities rather than insist on absolute certainty, much as the intellectually mature individual abandons the absolutes of revealed religion for the ambiguities of actual life. In his novel Gaddis plays not God but the philosopher who announced the death of God: “Objections, non-sequiturs, cheerful distrust, joyous mockery—all are signs of health,” Nietzsche insists. “Everything absolute belongs in the realm of pathology.” To his credit, Jesus never spoke of absolutes, but his followers in Carpenter’s Gothic do. The Reverend Ude insists that Christ “builded this great edifice of refuge for the weak, for the weary, for the seekers after his absolute truth in their days of adversity and persecution” (80). The same zealous certainty inspires the efforts of “—a charming Texas couple who keeps an eye out for schoolbooks that undermine patriotism, free enterprise, religion, parental authority, nothing official of course [McCandless explains to Billy], just your good American vigilante spirit hunting down, where is it, books that erode absolute values by asking questions to which they offer no firm answers […]” (184).3 The catalog of conservative values here is important: Carpenter’s Gothic is not simply a satire on fundamentalism but a critique of the ways such absolutist thinking can lead to imperialism, xenophobia, bad science, rapacious capitalism, and the kind of paranoid cold war ideology enshrined in a New York Post headline at the novel’s (and perhaps the world’s) end: “PREZ: TIME TO DRAW LINE AGAINST EVIL EMPIRE” (259). McCandless is quoting reporter Dena Kleiman’s article on Mel and Norma Gabler entitled “Influential Couple Scrutinize Books for “Anti-Americanism,” New York Times, July 14, 1981, C4.

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But none of this is new, as McCandless reminds both Billy and Lester in his harangues against Christianity. Just as Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness prefaces his tale of European imperialism in Africa with a reminder of Roman excursions into ancient Britain, McCandless several times sketches bloody moments in the history of Christianity (128, 142, 190–1, 236, 243) and locates this militant impulse in the Bible itself: the god of the Old Testament “is a man of war” (243; Exod. 15.3) and the son of god in the New Testament warns his followers “I come not to send peace but a sword” (142; Mt. 10.34). The fundamentalist fervor that McCandless lashes out against is not a topical subject that will date Gaddis’s novel, but rather the latest and potentially the most lethal manifestation of a religion that has caused more bloodshed than harmony in its 2,000-year history.4 The carpenter of “the profit Isaiah” (80, sic) and the carpenter’s son of the gospels together have created a Gothic nightmare of blood, guilt, persecution, righteousness, and intolerance—one meaning of Gaddis’s ambiguous title.

A Patchwork of Conceits, Borrowings, Deceptions A more important meaning of the title comes late in the book. At an awkward moment in his last conversation with Liz, McCandless welcomes the opportunity to discuss a neutral subject—the house’s Carpenter Gothic architecture: —Oh the house yes, the house. It was built that way yes, it was built to be seen from outside it was, that was the style, he came on, abruptly rescued from uncertainty, raised to the surface —yes, they had style books, these country architects and the carpenters it was all derivative wasn’t it, those grand Victorian mansions with their rooms and rooms and towering heights and cupolas and the marvelous intricate ironwork. That whole inspiration of medieval Gothic but these poor fellows didn’t have it, the stonework and the wrought iron. All they had were the simple dependable old materials, the wood and their hammers and saws and their own clumsy ingenuity bringing those grandiose visions the masters had left behind down to a human scale with their own little inventions, […] a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions, the inside’s a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale […]. (227–8) So I wrote in 1989. Islamic fundamentalism is now a greater danger than Christian fundamentalism, but both spring from the same absolutist thinking Gaddis criticizes.

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If one discounts the self-deprecating tone—Gaddis is no “country architect” with only “clumsy ingenuity”—this can easily double as a description of Carpenter’s Gothic itself. Gaddis found his “simple dependable old materials” in what he described to one interviewer as the “staples” of traditional fiction, and set himself a task: “That is, the staples of the marriage, which is on the rocks, the obligatory adultery, the locked room, the mysterious stranger, the older man and the younger woman, to try to take these and make them work” (Grove B10). In addition to these staples of plot, he depends on the staples of certain generic conventions. Gaddis’s “patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions” brings under one roof a number of genres: the Gothic novel, the apocalypse, the romance (in all senses), and the metafictional meditation, along with elements of Greek tragedy, Dickensian social satire, the colonial novel, the political thriller, documentary realism, the Vietnam veteran’s story, and what Roy R. Male calls “cloistral” fiction. Each is a room jammed into Gaddis’s house of fiction, a little invention (only in comparison to his first two novels) of great ingenuity. As McCandless says, Carpenter Gothic houses were meant to be seen from the outside and hence were designed with an emphasis on outward symmetry, even if it resulted in such deceptions as “twinned windows so close up there they must open from one room but in fact looked out from the near ends of two neither of them really furnished, an empty bookcase and sagging daybed in one and in the other a gutted chaise longue voluted in French pretension trailing gold velvet in the dust undisturbed on the floor since she’d stood there, maybe three or four times since she’d lived in the house […]” (226–7). (Note how perfectly this captures Paul and Liz’s relationship: united under one roof, they are nonetheless divided by a wall of differences, his intellectual bankruptcy and lust caught by the empty bookcase and sagging daybed, her moneyed background and pretense to culture exposed by the chaise longue, “neither of them really furnished” with culture, taste, or education.) The novel conforms to strict Aristotelian unities: the action occurs in a single setting over a short period of time, which internal references date October–November 1983.5 A near-perfect symmetry balances the novel’s seven chapters: the first takes place at sunset, the last at sunrise; the second and sixth begin with Liz climbing the hill from the nearby river; the end of the third is linked to the beginning of the fifth with verbal repetitions (cf. 94–5 with 151); the central chapter, the fourth, takes places on Halloween and features the long conversation between The only anachronism in the novel’s time scheme is the headline Liz notes on p. 28, which appeared on the front page of the New York Times on July 25, 1980, not 1983. However, in A Frolic of His Own, Gaddis postdates the novel’s activities to 1985 (see next chapter, note 4).

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McCandless and Lester that provides most of the historical background to the present-day events in the rest of the novel—the central heating of Gaddis’s Gothic, as it were. The Gothic novel is of course the most obvious genre Gaddis exploits in Carpenter’s Gothic, adapting as many of its stage properties as is feasible: the isolated “mansion,” the locked room, the endangered “maiden,” the mysterious stranger, even the witching time of year that allows for references to Halloween ghosts and a haunted house (148). The “unwavering leer” of the Masai warrior on a magazine cover follows Paul around as spookily as the moving eyes of an old portrait, and Liz has a dream premonition of death during the unholy hours between All Saints’s Eve and the Day of the Dead. A parody of older Gothic novels, Carpenter’s Gothic also incorporates long quotations from Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s parody of even older Gothic novels.6 The Gothic mode was not a new departure for Gaddis. Those chapters of The Recognitions set in New England creak with Gothic machinery: the heretical priest poring over curious volumes of forgotten lore, the deranged servant, supernatural statues, apparitions, the gloomy atmosphere that hangs over the desolate landscape, and the same attraction/repulsion felt by earlier Gothicists for Italianate Catholicism. Nor is the Gothic mode new in American literature; Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel goes to great lengths to demonstrate that Gothic is the most characteristic form of classic American fiction. At the fleeting disappearance of James’s and Wharton’s ghosts, the genre took two directions in modern American literature: the Southern Gothic of Faulkner, O’Connor, and early Capote; and the supermarket Gothic that Alexander Theroux has wittily described (in his great Gothic romance Darconville’s Cat) as “the genre of course of Hoodoo, Hackwork, and Hyperesthesia, the popular dustjacket for which always showed a crumbling old mansion-by-moonlight and a frightened beauty in gossamer standing before it, tresses down, never knowing which way to turn.”7 The New England Gothic tradition of Hawthorne and Melville had few followers among serious contemporary novelists aside from Djuna Barnes, early Hawkes, some Pynchon, and the occasional anomaly (like Kerouac’s Dr. Sax or Brautigan’s Hawkline Monster), though in recent years the so-called New Gothic genre has pumped new blood into the old corpus. As I noted in my first chapter, Jane Eyre was a last-minute substitution for Hilton’s Lost Horizon, but it’s clear from all the other references that Gaddis already had a Gothic parody in mind before he ran into that problem. See Letters 525, where Gaddis states his preference for the earlier Hilton version of his novel. 7 Darconville’s Cat (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 73. 6

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Why would Gaddis revive this outmoded genre in the technological 1980s? Partly for the challenge of reclaiming an exhausted genre (as Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, and Vollmann like to do in general, and as Joyce Carol Oates has done with the Gothic in particular), but largely because the “symbols and meanings” of Gothic, Fiedler points out, “depend on an awareness of the spiritual isolation of the individual in a society where all communal systems of value have collapsed or have been turned into meaningless clichés” (131). Liz’s physical and McCandless’s intellectual isolation underscore the extent to which both have lost that connection between themselves and the world that McCandless reads of in V. S. Naipaul’s novel (150, quoted at the end of my first chapter). With all of Jane Eyre’s restlessness but none of her independence, Liz is the persecuted maiden in a Gothic melodrama: “—when you feel like a nail everything looks like a hammer,” she confesses to McCandless (223), reversing one of his cracks about fundamentalists. Psychologically immured in her Carpenter Gothic tower, Liz’s choice between Paul and McCandless amounts to “being the prisoner of someone else’s hopes [… or] being the prisoner of someone else’s despair” (244). Liz finally perishes in that prison, subverting the happy ending (or return to normality) of most Gothic fiction. McCandless has much in common with the traditional Gothic herovillain, a mixture of Faust, Don Juan, and the Wandering Jew—all coming to stand, as Fiedler argues, “for the lonely individual (the writer himself!) challenging the mores of bourgeois society, making patent to all men the ill-kept secret that the codes by which they live are archaic survivals without point or power” (133). McCandless feels Christianity is just such an archaic survival, but his attempts to expose its ill-kept secrets of militarism, misogyny, and superstition have met with failure: called upon to testify at a creationist trial in Smackover—similar to one held in Arkansas in December 1981—he learned that fundamentalists are not simply ignorant (lacking knowledge) but stupid (hostile to knowledge), heirs to the antiintellectual tradition in America that Richard Hofstadter has written about. An intellectual hero of sorts, McCandless is also the villain of the piece, however. He hopes to put his house in order (226), like Eliot’s speaker at the end of The Waste Land, but he succeeds only in spreading disorder and chaos. Not only is he indirectly responsible for Billy’s death, but he is as responsible as anyone for the nuclear showdown that looms over the novel’s final pages. Possessing the facts about the ore field, he withholds this information, partly because he won’t be believed (239), partly because of the Gothic villain’s willingness to see his corrupt civilization go up in flames. During her longest and most powerful speech, Liz hurls exactly this accusation at him:

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—And it’s why you’ve done nothing … She put down the glass, —to see them all go up like that smoke in the furnace all the stupid, ignorant, blown up in the clouds and there’s nobody there, there’s no rapture no anything just to see them wiped away for good it’s really you, isn’t it. That you’re the one who wants Apocalypse, Armageddon all the sun going out and the sea turned to blood you can’t wait no, you’re the one who can’t wait! The brimstone and fire and your Rift like the day it really happened because they, because you despise their, not their stupidity no, their hopes because you haven’t any, because you haven’t any left. (243–4)

The references to apocalypse and Armageddon here toward the end of the novel indicate the Gothic overlaps with another genre, the apocalypse. While the Gothic developed out of late-medieval romance, apocalypse originates in older religious writings and mythography, bearing witness to the strange fact that cosmic catastrophe has been a fear and a hope of almost every society—a fear of extinction no matter how richly deserved, and a hope for purgation and another chance to start anew. The literary apocalypse is used by a writer to render judgment on society, a heretical desire to destroy that which God created. God said let there be light; the apocalyptic writer, like Melville at the end of The Confidence-Man, puts out the light. Unlike other modern literatures, American literature has a strong, almost obsessive tradition in apocalyptic. The first “best-seller” in its literature was Michael Wigglesworth’s long poem The Day of Doom (1662) and one of its first novels, Charles Brockden Brown’s feverish Ormond (1799), depicts an apocalyptic Philadelphia; since then, most of our major novelists have adapted the genre: Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, West, O’Connor, and among Gaddis’s contemporaries, Ellison, Barth, Baldwin, Burroughs, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Coover, Elkin, Markson, McCarthy, and DeLillo. It is tempting to divide these into the two traditional camps of apocalypsists— the hopeful and the despairing—but many of these writers display both tempers: Moby-Dick is hopeful (Ishmael survives the catastrophe), but The Confidence-Man is despairing (nothing follows this masquerade). Like Melville, Gaddis has written both forms: with Stanley composing a Die irae (322), Willie speaking of “the doctrine of last things” (478), and Kuvetli warning Brown’s party guests “—it is only last year we have entered the period of final woe” (662), The Recognitions is certainly an apocalypse, but because Wyatt survives the cultural collapse that destroys the rest of the novel’s characters, it can be called a hopeful one—hence Gaddis’s disavowal of apocalyptic intentions in the interview quoted near the end of Chapter 1. In Carpenter’s Gothic, however, both forms of apocalypse are set against

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each other: Ude and his followers are obviously banking on a hopeful apocalypse when they will be able to enjoy a “space age picnic in the clouds” while the rest of us are frantically consulting our Survival Handbook (135), and consequently they interpret all signs of cultural breakdown in terms of those foretold in the Book of Revelation. McCandless interprets those same signs in the despairing apocalyptic temper of the Twain of The Mysterious Stranger and other late works. And yet, McCandless is himself a mysterious stranger with a nihilistic vision as despairing as Twain’s devil. A Christian reading of Carpenter’s Gothic would expose McCandless as the antichrist of the novel, spreading despair and disorder everywhere he goes. (Christian readers might even find correspondences between the novel’s seven chapters and the seven seals in Revelation.) While signs and the interpretive contexts we place them in are themes in the novel, these particular ones are among the “deceptions” of the Carpenter Gothic style, and should not be seriously entertained. Both McCandless and Ude can be held partially responsible for the literal apocalypse that begins at the end of the novel—“10 K ‘DEMO’ BOMBS OFF AFRICA COAST War News, Pics Page 2” (259)—but McCandless’s sin is only one of omission; Ude’s is the more fatal one of commission. Like Tod Hacket in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (with which Carpenter’s Gothic has tonal similarities), Gaddis presents fundamentalists’ “fury with respect, appreciating its awful, anarchic power, and aware that they had it in them to destroy civilization.”8 Although American fundamentalists themselves may seem incapable of doing much more than shuttering abortion clinics, rewriting textbooks, and removing objectionable books from school libraries, they are associated throughout the novel with right-wing politicians whose paranoid style of politics (as Hofstadter named it) can indeed help fundamentalists satisfy their apocalyptic yearnings. Fundamentalism or paranoid politics is not unique to America; as McCandless tells Billy: —The greatest source of anger is fear, the greatest source of hatred is anger and the greatest source of all of it is this mindless revealed religion anywhere you look, Sikhs killing Hindus, Hindus killing Moslems, Druse killing Marionites, Jews killing Arabs, Arabs killing Christians and Christians killing each other maybe that’s the only hope we’ve got. You take the self hatred generated by original sin turn it around on your neighbors and maybe you’ve got enough sects slaughtering each other from Londonderry to Chandigarh to wipe out the whole damned thing […]. (185–6) The Complete Works of Nathanael West (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1957), 366.

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—all of which has only escalated in the thirty years since the publication of this novel. What the world and the novel need now to counteract this hatred and the polemical tone is love, or at least a romantic subplot. But the possibilities for love in both spheres are limited. Gaddis’s working title for Carpenter’s Gothic was “That Time of Year: A Romance,” and like the “Gothic” in the published title, “romance” here means many things. As a genre, it has much in common with the Gothic; in fact, the latter is largely the romance pushed to dangerous extremes. The romance does, however, place greater emphasis on the picturesque, the idyllic, and the more conventional forms of love. (Love in the Gothic tends toward lust or perversion.) Gothic and romance “claim a certain latitude” from such constraints of realistic fiction as verisimilitude and plausibility, as Hawthorne argues in his famous preface to The House of Seven Gables—another tale centering on a Gothic house and a debilitating family heritage—and Gaddis has always claimed this latitude. Carpenter’s Gothic displays the romance’s indifference to strict realism: as in J R, events move implausibly fast; its numerous coincidences strain belief; and there is an overwhelming emphasis on the negative that would be out of place in a more realistic novel. When Paul opens a newspaper “without knocking over the bottle” (203), the narrator draws our attention to this rare event, because elsewhere, no one can reach for anything without upsetting whatever glass is closest at hand; no one can cook anything without burning it; no one can turn on the radio without hearing a distressing news item; checks are delayed while bills arrive swiftly; cars and trucks are always breaking down, buses getting caught in traffic jams; clocks, newspapers, even dictionary definitions are unreliable; the novel is tyrannized by Murphy’s Law, where anything that can go wrong does so, and usually at the worst possible moment. Hawthorne insists that the romancer “may so manage his atmospheric medium as to bring out or mellow the light and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture,” and Gaddis has pursued the latter option with such a vengeance that Carpenter’s Gothic joins Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Sorrentino’s The Sky Changes as one of the darkest novels in contemporary American fiction. Even its humor is black. Only the brief affair between McCandless and Liz admits any light into the novel. Here Gaddis turns from the Hawthornian romance to sport with the Harlequin romance, using every cliché in the style book: the bored debutante-housewife, the older man with an exotic background, the inevitable adultery, the revivication of said debutante after one night in the older man’s arms, prompting her to sigh with a straight face, “—It’s an amazing thing to be alive, isn’t it …” (151). There is even the offer to take her away to faraway lands and the dutiful decision to stand by her man for reasons

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she cannot quite articulate; echoing Stella in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Liz can only say, “—It’s just, I don’t know. Something happens …” (89). Gaddis redeems these clichés by subjecting them to much more rigorous artistic control than is common, carefully integrating them with the patterns of imagery and literary allusion at work throughout the novel. Each genre Gaddis adapts has a reference point in a classic text: the Gothic in Jane Eyre, the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation (the most frequently cited biblical text in the novel), and the romance in the Shakespearean sonnet that provided Gaddis’s earlier title: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the deathbed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

When Liz echoes the sonnet’s concluding couplet by telling McCandless at the end of the novel, “—I think I loved you when I knew I’d never see you again” (245), she unconsciously completes a series of references to the sonnet that begins on the novel’s first page. In fact, much in the novel is encapsulated in the sonnet: the autumnal and predominantly nocturnal settings, the recurring references to empty boughs and yellow leaves outside and the fire grate inside— cold until McCandless arrives to rekindle it—and of course the relationship between the older man and his younger lover. Similarly, the poem generates much of the novel’s imagery. On those rare occasions when Gaddis’s characters stop talking, the text gives way to luxurious descriptions of the dying landscape, passages as colorful as the vegetation they describe, and imitative in their gnarled syntax of the intertwined vines, branches, and fallen leaves. The equation of autumn with late middle age in the poem’s first quatrain is spelled out with scientific precision by McCandless (who has quoted a few lines from the sonnet on p. 167):

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—all those glorious colours the leaves turn when the chlorophyll breaks down in the fall, when the proteins that are tied to the chlorophyll molecules break down into their amino acids that go down into the stems and the roots. That may be what happens to people when they get old too, those proteins breaking down faster than they can be replaced and then, yes well and then of course, since proteins are the essential elements in all living cells the whole system begins to disinteg … (228–9)

A page later, McCandless picks up the sunset image in the second quatrain of the poem: —Finally realize you can’t leave things better than you found them the best you can do is try not to leave them any worse but they [the young] won’t forgive you, get toward the end of the day like the sun going down in Key West if you’ve ever seen that? They’re all down there for the sunset, watching it drop like a bucket of blood and clapping and cheering the instant it disappears, cheer you out the door and damned glad to see the last of you. But the sun she looked up for was already gone, not a trace in the lustreless sky and the unfinished day gone with it, leaving only a chill that trembled the length of her. (230–1)

In this brilliant orchestration of images, Gaddis combines the literal setting of this conversation and the metaphors from sonnet seventy-three with an echo from Revelation, which Liz will pick up later in the same conversation (“—Apocalypse, Armageddon all the sun going out and the sea turned to blood” [244; cf. 185])—all leading to a symbolic alignment of organic decay (leaves, light, people) with cultural decay, and suggesting that fundamentalism is a malign but not unnatural cancer in the body politic, accelerating an otherwise inevitable process. As Cynthia Ozick was the first to point out, “It isn’t ‘theme’ Mr. Gaddis deals in (his themes are plain) so much as a theory of organism and disease. In ‘Carpenter’s Gothic’ the world is a poisonous organism, humankind dying of itself.”9 McCandless “doesn’t much like getting old,” his first wife will later say (250), nor does he much like watching the disintegration of civilization, but apart from raging against the dying of the light, there’s little he can do to halt either. “Fakery and Stony Truths,” 18. Cf. Robinson Jeffers’s use of organic decay to describe America’s decline in his poem “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1924), which Gaddis read while working on Carpenter’s Gothic. He briefly considered using a phrase from this poem, “thickening to empire,” as the title for his third novel. (All the alternate titles I mention come from a conversation we had in August 1984. He said someone sent him the Jeffers poem; it was not something he came upon on his own.)

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As Shakespeare’s sonnet is a seduction poem of sorts, the words “death” and “expire” probably carry their secondary Elizabethan meaning of orgasm. If so, the trope has its counterpart in Carpenter’s Gothic, where a description of Liz after sex (163) is used again to describe her position at death (253). Her death, of course, upsets the parallels with the sonnet—as it does the Gothic and romance genres—but it does fulfill the expectations of the dove imagery likewise present from the novel’s first page. Watching the neighborhood boys bat a dead dove back and forth, “a kind of battered shuttlecock moulting in a flurry at each blow” (1), Liz turns away, ominously catching her breath for the first time. Throughout the novel Liz is closely associated with doves and is clearly a kind of battered shuttlecock herself— literally in her relationship with Paul (9, 22), figuratively between Billy and McCandless. Once again braving the dangers of cliché, Gaddis invests Liz with all the symbolic qualities of a dove (peace, innocence, gentleness) and even has her bleat like a dove (163–4). The symbolism is self-explanatory, but again Gaddis manages to make the cliché work: when this “sweet bird” emits “a choked bleat” as she dies, even a reader hardened by the savage ironies of modern literature must feel that peace and innocence have indeed fled from this world for good. The dove of the Holy Ghost is treated no better by the novel’s militant Christians, and at the symbolic age of thirty-three Liz even has aspects of the sacrificed god the fundamentalists profess to worship. Most of the other genres that have rooms in Gaddis’s house of fiction can be treated more briefly. In its use of a single stage setting and small cast, its reliance on messengers (by letter and phone), and its adherence to Aristotelian unities, Carpenter’s Gothic has the formal design of Greek drama, a subject McCandless once taught (252). Like an adaptation by O’Neill or Eliot, Gaddis’s novel includes a dark heritage of paternal guilt, features continual offstage atrocities, and even has its Furies in the neighborhood kids always smirking through Liz’s windows. Reviewer Frederick Busch instead found several parallels to Dickens’s Bleak House, and rightly so. Gaddis’s social crusader instincts encourage the parallel, as does his use of Dickensian names for his unsavory manipulators (Sneddiger, Grimes, Stumpp, Cruikshank, Grissom, Lopots). In particular, Gaddis shares Dickens’s faith in the novel as an instrument for social improvement and his ability to make family disputes representative of larger social disputes. Gaddis goes so far as to correct von Clausewitz on this point: “—it’s not that war is politics carried on by other means it’s the family carried on by other means” (241). The African episodes reported at secondhand are reminiscent of those novels featuring Anglo-Americans abroad that run from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and several books by Forster and Waugh through later novels by Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, and Paul Theroux—not to

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mention the multinational political thrillers of more commercial novelists. Carpenter’s Gothic is also a textbook example of “cloistral” fiction, a genre centering on a mysterious stranger’s visit to a closed community and the moral havoc that results, epitomized by such stories as Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.”10 Of more interest is Gaddis’s contribution to the genre of Vietnam War fiction. Paul’s Vietnam experiences are referred to only sporadically in the novel, but by piecing together the clues his tour of duty can be reconstructed—though only after separating the “official” truth from what really happened. He somehow managed to win a commission as a second lieutenant, much to the contempt of his adopted father, who reportedly told him “that he was God damn lucky he was going in as an officer because he wasn’t good enough to be an enlisted man” (91). A platoon leader in the 25th Infantry, Lightning Division, he quickly alienated himself from his men by insisting on “All this military bullshit with these spades from Cleveland and Detroit in his broken down platoon out there kicking their ass to show them what the southern white officer class is all about” (193). After turning in his crew chief, a black nineteen-year-old named Chigger, for using heroin, Chigger “fragged” him: that is, he rolled a grenade under Paul’s bed in the Bachelor Officer Quarters. He was pulled out by Chick, his radiotelephone operator, and the Army covered up the incident by blaming an enemy infiltrator—the story Paul later uses. Paul is discharged at the same grade he entered, an indication of his incompetence, for as McCandless points out elsewhere, officers welcome a war for “—the chance to move up a few grades, peace time army they’ll sit there for twenty years without making colonel but combat brings that first star so close they can taste it” (238). Paul leaves behind a native mistress, pregnant with his child: “it was a boy” he learns at the end of the novel (260). Paul parlayed his bogus reputation as “this big wounded hero” into a job with Vorakers Consolidated Reserve, but years later, as the novel opens, he is still plagued by terrible memories of Vietnam: the machinegun fire (8), nearly crashing in a helicopter (83–4), and the aftermath of the fragging incident: “—you know how long I laid there? How many weeks I laid there blown right up the gut watching that bottle of plasma run down tubes stuck in me anyplace they could get one in? Couldn’t move my legs I didn’t know if I had any, God damn medic breaks the needle right off in my arm taped down so it can’t move can’t reach down, dare reach down and see if my balls are blown off, my balls Liz! I was twenty two!” (45). When a black See Roy R. Male’s Enter Mysterious Stranger: American Cloistral Fiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979).

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nineteen-year-old mugger attacks Paul late in the novel, he sees in the mugger’s eyes the same hatred he saw in Chigger’s and kills him, for “—They never taught us how to fight, they only taught us how to kill” (241). The difficulty Vietnam veterans experienced readjusting to society had already become a literary staple by 1985, and Gaddis’s vets (Chick and Pearly Gates, as well as Paul) have as difficult a time as any. But Gaddis once again subverts the cliché by portraying Paul as responsible for his own difficulties. Not only did he bring the fragging upon himself, but in a sense he joins the enemy—not the Viet Cong, but Vorakers, Adolph, Grimes, and the other power brokers. “—God damn it Billy listen! These are the same sons of bitches that sent me to Vietnam!” (242). Yet so strong is his lust for prestige and money that Paul willingly sacrifices his sense of moral outrage to join the very power structure that nearly killed him, thereby sacrificing any sympathy his Vietnam ordeal might otherwise have earned him. The generic text Gaddis uses here as a reference point, though unacknowledged, is Michael Herr’s brilliant Dispatches (1977), an impressionistic account of the two years (1967–8) Herr covered the Vietnam War for Esquire, and an aesthetic exercise in rescuing “clean” information from official disinformation and the vagaries of memory. Gaddis borrows one anecdote from Herr’s book (“never happened sir” [214])11 and perhaps found a number of his other Vietnam details there: Tu Do street, Drucker’s bag of ears, the raunchy language Paul uses on the phone with Chick, and some of the war jargon (sapper, ville, “the old man,” greased, BOQ). More importantly, Dispatches, like Gaddis’s novel, investigates the gap between the “truth” and what really happens, specifically, the Pentagon’s pathological allegiance to an official truth that had no basis in reality. The references to Vietnam in Carpenter’s Gothic act as a grim reminder that this theme is no abstract problem in epistemology but one that in this case left “130,000 American casualties dead, maimed, and missing” (RSP 55). Finally, it should be noted that another writer Gaddis borrows from in Carpenter’s Gothic is the author of The Recognitions and J R. Richard Poirier once described Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, as “more accessible only because very much shorter than the first [V.], and like some particularly dazzling section left over from it.”12 At first glance, the shorter and more accessible Carpenter’s Gothic might similarly look like a particularly dazzling section left over from J R; in fact, one reviewer went so far as to say “its main plot comes from pages 96–103 of J R; substitute Liz Vorakers Booth for Amy Cates Joubert, change the African locale from Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977), 26. Review of Gravity’s Rainbow, Saturday Review of the Arts 1 (March 3, 1973): 59.

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Gandia to somewhere near South Africa, and there it is. Even the names Ude and Teakell come from J R.”13 There are important tonal differences between the three novels, of course, but it is possible to hear other echoes from the earlier two: Liz may have actually read The Recognitions, for she refers to the passage where Arnie Munk got so drunk he folded up his clothes and put them into the refrigerator (13; R 175) and to Revd. Gwyon’s remark about “the unswerving punctuality of chance” (223; R 9), which appears in all five of Gaddis’s novels. For his third novel, Gaddis returned to some of his source books for the first: to the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica for the Battle of Crécy (147), the Pilgrim Hymnal for two militaristic hymns (142), Cruden’s Concordance for biblical citations, and Eliot’s Four Quartets for at least one line (“to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again” [155], from “East Coker”). Even McCandless’s novel has its echoes from The Recognitions, especially in his protagonist Frank Kincaid’s decision “to live deliberately” (139), the same Thoreauvian vow Stephen makes (R 900). From J R he borrowed Pythian Mining in addition to the other names enumerated above and hints broadly at a connection between J R and Paul Booth when Adolph dismisses the latter as knowing “as much about finance as some snot nosed sixth grader” (209). Much of this is little more than the kind of cross-referencing one finds in the novels of Faulkner, Barth, or Sorrentino. Carpenter’s Gothic’s relationship to its huge predecessors seems to be hinted at in McCandless’s description of his own novel: “—it’s just an afterthought why are you so damned put out by it,” he asks Lester. “—This novel’s just a footnote, a postscript” (139). That “this” can refer to both novels, and the fact this particular lines occurs in a real novel about an imaginary novel by an imaginary character who resembles a real author calls attention to the ambiguous status of fiction, blurring that fine line between truth and what really happens by offering fine lines that seem all the more true because they never happened. The ontology of all fictions—literary, religious, patriotic, and personal—emerges as one of Gaddis’s principal preoccupations in Carpenter’s Gothic and makes this novel not merely a footnote, a postscript to his earlier megafictions, but a virtuosic exercise in metafiction.

That’s All She Wrote The nature and production of fictions is a recurring topic in the dialogues that make up the bulk of Carpenter’s Gothic, ranging from Paul’s rather primitive notion of literary fiction (112) to McCandless’s more sophisticated attacks Sperone 43.

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on such “fictions” as religion, occult beliefs, and ethnocentrism. Gaddis’s use of fiction to explore the status of fiction is characteristic of metafiction, that genre that calls attention to itself as fiction and flaunts the artificiality of art.14 Though more realistic than such exemplary metafictions as Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds or Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, Carpenter’s Gothic takes full advantage of the resources of this genre to clarify the distinction between (and preferability of) ambiguity over absolutism and to warn against the dangers of mistaking fiction for fact. The Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (8th ed.) that Gaddis lambastes for inaccuracy each time Liz consults it (94, 248) gives three definitions of “fiction,” each amply illustrated in Carpenter’s Gothic. In fact, so many variations are played on this theme that it might be useful to resort to the sophomoric strategy of arguing directly from this dictionary’s definitions, especially since Gaddis may have looked at them. First definition: 1 a: something invented by the imagination or feigned; specif: an invented story b: fictitious literature (as novels or short stories) Gaddis has always shown writers writing: in The Recognitions, he dramatizes Otto’s struggles to concoct his play and Esme’s to write poetry, and Willie discusses his work in progress, a metafictional version of The Recognitions itself. In J R, both Thomas Eigen and Jack Gibbs work on and read from their respective manuscripts. Carpenter’s Gothic features two writers of fiction, both of whose works, however, blur the dictionary’s distinction between fact and fiction. McCandless’s novel is the object of Lester’s scorn, partly because it follows the facts of the author’s African experiences so closely that it doesn’t merit the name fiction. The only aspects “invented” by McCandless seem to be slanderous aspersions (129), romantic self-aggrandizement (136–7), and pompous rhetoric (passim). Similarly, Liz’s work in progress begins as autobiographical wishful thinking (63–4), but after McCandless’s appearance (and after she plagiarizes a line from Hilton’s Lost Horizon [95]) it begins to resemble a diary, reaching the point where her “fictional” account of an event is indistinguishable from the narrator’s (cf. 163 and 257). To modify Webster’s definition, this is fact feigning as fiction, but perhaps a necessary sacrifice of “what really happens” to the “truth,” that is, something closer to how the authors experienced an event than a strict I am indebted to Sarah E. Lauzen’s witty and informative “Notes on Metafiction: Every Essay Has a Title,” in Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, ed. Larry McCaffery (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 93–116. See also her essay on Gaddis in the same volume.

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recital of the facts would allow. This is why Liz objects to the fanciful notion of setting up a mirror on Alpha Centauri in order to see through a telescope “what really happened” earlier in her life: “—But you’d just see the outside though, wouldn’t you” (153). Uninterested in aesthetic distance, Liz feels a writer’s subjective sense of an experience is more important that the objective facts of the experience, a point she tries to impress upon McCandless, who prefers technical writing: “—I’m talking about you, about what you know that nobody else knows because that’s what writing’s all about isn’t it? I’m not a writer Mrs Booth I mean lots of people can write about all that, about grasshoppers and evolution and fossils I mean the things that only you know that’s what I mean” (168). McCandless counters with “—Maybe those are the things that you want to get away from,” a position similar to Eliot’s.15 He made a better objection to Liz’s point when he said earlier that too many writers “—think if something happened to them that it’s interesting because it happened to them” (158–9). The aesthetic debate here concerning subjectivity vs. objectivity and the legitimacy of autobiography in fiction began in The Recognitions, where Hannah complained of Max’s painting, “—he has to learn that it isn’t just having the experience that counts, it’s knowing how to handle the experience” (184). In his third novel Gaddis extends the debate by showing how the autobiographical writer can confuse the invention of fiction with the invention of self, using fiction as an actor uses makeup to create a new persona, even a new life. For Liz, writing fiction offers “some hope of order restored, even that of a past itself in tatters, revised, amended, fabricated in fact from its very outset to reorder its unlikelihoods, what it all might have been” (247). Writing gives Liz access to what Billy calls her “real secret self ” (193), the self Wyatt struggles to find in his quest for individuation, and the self Liz lost sight of “twenty, twenty five years away when it was all still, when things were still like you thought they were going to be” (154). Bibbs to her brother, Liz to her husband, Mrs. Booth to McCandless, “the redhead” to Lester, she resists this fragmentation of her identity by these men to insist “—my name my name is Elizabeth” (166), the stuttered hesitation underscoring the difficulty she is having recovering the name of her true self from the men in her life.16 Appropriately, her writing is conducted in secret; In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot writes, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (Selected Prose 43). 16 In his review of the novel, James Perrin Warren put it differently: “The names record the attitudes of the namers: Billy needs a sister locked in the childhood he has never escaped; Paul needs a secretary; McCandless needs an adulteress; and Elizabeth needs an Elizabeth” (192). 15

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hidden in her drawer, her manuscript is a metonymy for her secret self, itself hidden so far from her husband that he is numbed when he comes across it after her death, written “in a hand he knew spelling little more than bread, onions, milk, chicken?” (257). Her failure to write parallels her failure to live, both captured in the flip title Gaddis briefly entertained for the novel: “That’s All She Wrote.” Although McCandless completed and published his novel, it was published under a pseudonym; that, along with Lester’s verdict (“rotten”), suggests his novel lacks the honesty and integrity he strives for in personal conduct. In an impressive apologia, he explains that one’s life is a kind of fiction, to be crafted as carefully as a work of art: —All that mattered was that I’d come through because I’d sworn to remember what really happened, that I’d never look back and let it become something romantic simply because I was young and a fool but I’d done it. I’d done it and I’d come out alive, and that’s the way it’s been ever since and maybe that’s the hardest thing, harder than being sucked up in the clouds and meeting the Lord on judgment day or coming back with the Great Imam because this fiction’s all your own, because you’ve spent your entire life at it who you are, and who you were when everything was possible, when you said that everything was still the way it was going to be no matter how badly we twist it around first chance we get and then make up a past to account for it … (169; my italics)

If McCandless’s fiction is indeed rotten, it is because he failed to construct it with the same fierce integrity that he constructed the “fiction” of his self. Like Hemingway’s Frederic Henry, McCandless welcomes “facts proof against fine phrases that didn’t mean anything” (228), but from Lester’s quotations it sounds as though he preferred fine phrases when writing fiction. A better model would be Hemingway’s reclusive contemporary Robinson Jeffers, parts of whose poem “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours” McCandless quotes on occasion (127, 161). Jeffers managed to put the same fierce integrity into his life as into his work, a synthesis McCandless apparently aims for but falls short of. If Liz’s manuscript is a metonymy for her life, McCandless’s study serves as his—a dusty, cobwebbed, smoke-filled room of books and papers that he continually tries to clean up, but where he manages only to create greater confusion and disorder. Alone, apparently friendless, estranged from his son and former wives, he sells out to the CIA for $16,000 and is last seen heading for the tropics, where the only way you know where you are is the disease you get (246). Again, failure in art means failure in life.

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Second definition: 2: an assumption of a possibility as a fact irrespective of the question of its truth McCandless would argue that religions and metaphysical systems are possibilities (at best) assumed as facts by their followers, whose commitment to these fictions parodies an artist’s quest for permanence in art: —no no no, his voice as calming as the hand along her back, it was all just part of the eternal nonsense, where all the nonsense comes from about resurrection, transmigration, paradise, karma the whole damned lot. —It’s all just fear he said, —you think of three quarters of the people in this country actually believing Jesus is alive in heaven? and two thirds of them that he’s their ticket to eternal life? […] just this panic at the idea of not existing so that joining the same Mormon wife and family in another life and you all come back together on judgment day, coming back with the Great Imam, coming back as the Dalai Lama choosing his parents in some Tibetan dung heap, coming back as anything —a dog, a mosquito, better than not coming back at all, the same panic wherever you look, any lunatic fiction to get through the night and the more farfetched the better, any evasion of the one thing in life that’s absolutely inevitable […] desperate fictions like the immortal soul and all these damned babies rushing around demanding to get born, or born again […] (157)

McCandless twice uses “fiction” here in the sense of Webster’s second definition, as he does elsewhere: “—talk about their deep religious convictions and that’s what they are, they’re convicts locked up in some shabby fiction doing life without parole and they want everybody else in prison with them” (186). The crucial difference is that literary and legal fictions are recognized as fictions; religious fictions are not. Fundamentalists, he implies, are like poor readers who first mistake a work of fiction for fact, then impose their literal-minded misreadings on others—at gunpoint if necessary. Not only are fundamentalists “—doing more to degrade it [the Bible] taking every damned word in it [more] literally than any militant atheist could ever hope to,” he fumes—meaning they don’t understand the use of metaphor and symbolism—but they don’t even recognize the contradictions in the Bible any attentive reader would note (134, 136). The status of fiction and the validity of interpretation thus become more than academic matters for literary theorists; if the fundamentalist misreading of sacred fictions prevails, aided by politicians misreading their constitutions, a nuclear apocalypse will put an end to all fictions. All the world’s a text, Gaddis implies, and all the men and women merely readers. In Carpenter’s Gothic leaves from a tree become leaves from a

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book within half a sentence (197), and bed sheets still damp from Liz and McCandless’s lovemaking become in the next paragraph sheets of paper that will become damp with ink to describe the event (198). Gaddis’s characters are forced to read the world around them despite the general illegibility of the “text”: the clock is untrustworthy, the newspapers unreliable, the dictionary inaccurate, even words misleading: Liz and Madame Socrate founder on the French homonyms sale and sale (26; cf. the confusion over sale and salé on R 943), the two meanings of “morgue” confuse her (225), and half-listening to the radio’s account of “a thrilling rescue operation by the Coast Guard” (116) Liz is puzzled the next day about a “thrilling rescue by postcard” (158). Even single letters cause confusion, leading Paul to think Billy doesn’t even know how to spell Buddha (85). Ambiguity haunts the simplest words. Gaddis’s most brilliant dramatization of the vagaries of interpretation recalls the doubloon Melville’s Ahab nails to the mainmast of the Pequod. Anxious to give a distracted Liz “the big picture” of the various religious and political complications in which he is enmeshed, Paul draws a diagram showing these various groups and the interactions between them. The first to interpret this diagram, after Paul, is the narrator, who offers humorous asides on the shapes that grow beneath Paul’s blunt pencil (the presidential administration is represented by “something vaguely phallic”), cruel social innuendo (“—all his blacks down here … a smudge unconnected to anything”), and ending with the fanciful observation that Paul’s flowchart arrows “darkened the page like the skies that day over Crécy” (100–1, 107). When McCandless comes across this drawing, he only sees the scribbling of a child (118), as does Lester when he first sees it (124). But looking at it again (147), Lester realizes it does indeed resemble the Battle of Cressy (as he pronounces it), though he needs to adjust the figures in the drawing somewhat, much like a critic pounding the square peg of a thesis into the round hole of a text. In addition to foreshadowing the militaristic results of the Teakell–Ude–Grimes cartel—Armageddon promises to be the last use of firepower as the Battle of Crécy was the first—and exposing the childishness of it all, this example highlights the dangers of interpretation that surround all the characters, none of whom commands a vantage point from which “the big picture” can be seen (even Paul, the author of the drawing), but each of whom believes he or she holds the right interpretation of the text. A fable for critics. Gaddis’s own text quickly generated the same kind of contradictory readings; with at least seven types of ambiguity in it, this is not surprising, though a few of the readings are. The novel struck most reviewers as savagely pessimistic, but one felt Gaddis “makes his optimism plain enough on the surface. The book ends with no period, indicating continuation. It hints

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at reincarnation, if only as a fly.”17 No comment. More than one reviewer accused McCandless of being mad. There are a few teasing innuendos to that effect, but his “madness” is one more of the deceptions inherent in Carpenter Gothic architecture, one made by linking Mrs. McCandless’s remark that her former husband spent time in a hospital (250) with Lester’s taunting question “—you used to say I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy where’d you get that, that’s somebody else’s too isn’t it because you’ve got one” (140). But the clever line is only a gag tossed off by singer Tom Waits in the 1970s that made the rounds, and Lester’s accusation is strictly metaphoric; he goes on to say “—the figures on lung cancer right in front of you like the facts staring those primates square in the face out there choking on Genesis and you say it’s just a statistical parallel and light another.” Gaddis realizes (if McCandless doesn’t) that the choice between the truth and what really happens is not as easy to make as McCandless pretends it is, but rather owes more to the instinct to cling to what he later castigates as “any lunatic fiction to get through the night and the more farfetched the better, any evasion of the one thing in life that’s absolutely inevitable” (157). Faced with the inevitability of death, McCandless panics as easily as any fundamentalist, but that is hardly a sign of madness; the reader should not be misled by talk of lobotomies and lunacy into thinking McCandless was in that hospital for anything worse than malaria (152). Yet another critic suggested that Paul and Edie teamed up to murder Liz!18 Although there is some question who is telephoning as she expires—both Paul and McCandless know the prearranged ringing code (246)—there can be no question Liz is alone, hitting her head on the kitchen table as she goes down. Yet see how I resist the ambiguity, insisting on certainty; it’s a hard habit to break.19 Third definition: 3: the action of feigning or of creating with the imagination This activity thus emerges as both constructive and destructive in Carpenter’s Gothic, an action that can be used for self-realization or misused for self-delusion. At one extreme is the “paranoid sentimental fiction” of the American South (224) or the “serviceable fiction” of the African Masai that justifies their stealing cattle from other tribes because of “their ancient belief that all the cattle in the world belongs to them” (121). At the other extreme are such fictions as Heart of Darkness—which McCandless declares “an Richard Toney in the San Francisco Review of Books, though the rest of this review, like his earlier one of J R in the same journal (February 1976, 12–13), is quite insightful. 18 Thielemans, “Intricacies of Plot,” 617. 19 Enough reviewers and readers misunderstood the cause of Liz’s death that Gaddis has a character in his next novel explain what he intended: see FHO 381–2. 17

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excellent thing,” even though Liz ascribes it to Faulkner and confuses it with Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness—and Jeffers’s “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours.” Gaddis’s characters largely misuse fiction and are more often seen feigning than creating anything worthwhile. But Gaddis himself faced and overcame the same problems in writing this novel, one that exemplifies the proper use of fiction and achieves the ideal set out in the concluding lines of the Jeffers poem, the lines McCandless never quotes, perhaps because his creator has reserved them for himself: Ah, grasshoppers, Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made Something more equal to the centuries Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone, the people Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness, The mountains are not softened nor troubled And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.

McCandless’s Carpenter Gothic has stood ninety years, he boasts; Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic should stand at least as long.

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7

A Frolic of His Own: Ideas of Order

Asked in 1986 what profession he might have entered had he not become a writer, Gaddis answered, “The law.”1 Earlier that year he had been given an eighty-four-volume set of American Jurisprudence along with William Prosser’s Cases and Materials on Torts and was entranced by “the vistas of reason, language and rigorous speculation flung open by an otherwise inconsequential” event in one case after another (Letters 422). In these law books he found the inspiration and subject for his next novel, published seven and a half years later as A Frolic of His Own. It is both his darkest and funniest work, his closing argument on “what America is all about,” and a searing indictment not so much of the legal system as of disorderly people who sabotage the law’s attempt at “some kind of order” (12).2 The distinction is important. While “a legal satire” is an accurate shorthand description of the novel—and it’s one of the best of the genre, admired in particular by many lawyers for nailing their lingo and follies—Gaddis highlights the abuses of the law as only one symptom of the decline and fall of the United States, which, the novel implies, began when the country was torn asunder by the Civil War—it plays a major role in A Frolic—and jerry-rigged back together by the worst kind of people: opportunists, carpetbaggers, robber barons, crooked politicians, hypocritical evangelists, et al. ad nauseum. Slick lawyers too, but in A Frolic they are more accessories to crimes against civilized values than its perpetrators. There are a few good lawyers in A Frolic, but Gaddis’s admiration for the profession is reserved for eminent jurists in the tradition of Learned Hand, Benjamin Cardozo, and especially Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he makes such a judge the hero of his novel. Despite its preoccupation with the law, A Frolic has nothing in common with popular legal fictions of the sort John Grisham writes. There are no courtroom scenes: Gaddis isn’t interested in the histrionics of courtroom drama but rather in the role the law plays both in bringing out “Don’t Everybody Talk at Once! (The Esquire Literary Survey),” Esquire, August 1986, 100. 2 All quotations are from the first American and British editions (which end on p. 586). When Scribner issued a paperback edition a year later, they reset it to save paper, reducing it to 509 pages. 1

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the worst in some people, and in engaging others in timeless philosophical questions about the best way to live one’s life. Justice, order, money, and the law: each of these nouns appears on the first page of the novel and together they form its compass points. As in J R, the first page of A Frolic functions like an opera overture to announce these themes—in fact the word “opera” also appears on the first page—but justice, order, and the law are not synonymous terms, nor are they enough. The missing term, absent from the first page but surfacing later, is, simply, what is “right,” which preoccupies only a few people in this misanthropic novel. The novel is set between September and December 1990, and mostly takes place in a large, deteriorating house in the Georgica Settlement of Wainscott, Long Island.3 Several lawsuits involving the principal characters drive and complicate the narrative, which, like the interwoven strands of J R’s plot, might benefit from unraveling.

Legal Matters 1. As the novel opens, a cranky, middle-aged community-college history teacher named Oscar Crease is in a hospital recovering from a self-sustained injury: while attempting to hot-wire his car while standing in front of it, the owner was injured when the car lurched forward and ran into him. He wants to sue, but since he is both the negligent driver and the accident victim, the prospect of suing himself is entertained in his discussion with the visiting lawyer for his insurance company, Frank Gribble of Ace Worldwide Fidelity. (The Japanese car model is a Sosumi, as we learn in a Who’s on First? comic exchange; Gribble recently dealt with a case involving an Isuyu.) The lawyer would like to settle quickly under no-fault insurance provisions, but Oscar insists on “justice” and wants to sue the car manufacturer for damages. Oscar’s petition is granted for immunity from no-fault protection, so to avoid a possible and lengthy tort recovery case Ace Worldwide Fidelity offers Oscar $500 to settle, which he refuses to do, so it likewise pleads immunity from no-fault statutes. Oscar is later subpoenaed for a trial, and after the A legal document that appears a month or so into the novel’s action is dated September 30, 1990 (177), but that’s contradicted by an earlier document that gives September 30 as the date of an incident that occurred at the start of the novel (30), and further contradicted by a newspaper story also dated September 30, that appears a few weeks later (120). As in J R, Gaddis compresses the novel’s events into an unrealistically short amount of time to maintain dramatic tension, but these chronological discrepancies appear to be an oversight. Although Wainscott is not named, the house described in the novel is identical in all particulars to the one Gaddis shared with his companion Muriel Oxenberg Murphy (the novel’s dedicatee, who owned it) while writing the novel.

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insurance company impounds the Sosumi, the police investigate what sounds like a case of hit-and-run. (They wonder why Oscar didn’t report his accident.) After Oscar’s new lawyer (whom he found on a matchbook cover) sends him a bill for $1,600, his stepsister Christina taunts him, “—What did you suspect, you’re suing the hit and run driver who ran over you aren’t you?” and Oscar struggles as much as the reader to keep the proceedings straight: “—No I’m suing his, I mean my, I’m suing the insurance company for the owner of the car who are suing the, I think they’re suing the dealer, the original dealer who’s suing the car’s maker …” (440). Near the end of the novel, his Sosumi is returned, and Frank Gribble visits Oscar to offer another settlement, a hilarious scene that rises to metaphysical heights when Gribble summarizes the case as “a suit between who you are and who you think you are, the question being which one is the plaintiff and which one is the defen …” (544–5). (Earlier, after a newspaper story misnamed him Oswald, Christina had joked “—it might come in handy for telling you apart if you insist on suing yourself ” [314].) Gribble says the case is headed for the Supreme Court, and by the end of the novel, “that red eyesore that started the whole thing” (562) is still sitting in the driveway. The sequence is a comic variation on a serious theme in the novel, and one that runs throughout all of Gaddis’s novels: the divided self, which we will take up later. 2. While still in the hospital back at the beginning, Oscar reads what the narrator, announcing the novel’s grand theme, calls the document that has set things off or, better, that merely paced the events that follow, spattered as it was all over the newspapers, since it had nothing directly to do with them [Oscar, Christina, and her husband Harry Lutz], much less its remote participants, distant in every way but the historic embrace of the civil law in its majestic effort to impose order upon? or is it rather to rescue order from the demeaning chaos of everyday life in this abrupt opportunity, as Christina has it, to be taken seriously before the world, in an almost inverse proportion to their place in it […] (29)

Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount et al. (29–40) was the first portion of A Frolic to be written and published (New Yorker, October 12, 1987) and is a comic masterpiece of legal fiction. Written by Oscar’s ninety-seven-year-old father Thomas Crease, a federal judge for the Southern District of Virginia, it grants a preliminary injunction to a postmodern sculptor named R. Szyrk to prevent the folks in a Virginia village from dismantling his huge, towering sculpture in order to free a dog named Spot that became trapped in it. Entitled Cyclone Seven, it “is one of a series occupying sites elsewhere in

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the land, wherein among the four and on only one occasion a similar event occurred at a Long Island, New York, site in the form of a boy similarly entrapped” (33)—a reference to an incident in J R (671–2) and one of many intertextual links to Gaddis’s earlier novels. After giving his legal reasons for granting the injunction, Judge Crease concludes with historically informed observations on the antagonistic role artists often play in society, and the contumely heaped upon them by an unappreciative audience. All of Gaddis’s characteristic themes and concerns are here in compact form: the artist at odds with the community, the validity of art, the media’s role in shaping public opinion, the intellectual poverty of the South, chauvinistic patriotism, political chicanery, opportunistic marketeers, and of course the Byzantine complications of the law, which had driven many characters in J R to distraction. (The earlier novel opens with the attorney Coen weaving a web of legal fictions around the Bast sisters with such findings as “in the case of a child conceived or born in wedlock, it must be shown that the husband of the mother could not possibly have been the father of the child” [11].) The orotund periods and Olympian ironies of Judge Crease’s language do not conceal a crusty outlook of the sort one expects from Gaddis’s older protagonists. Crease takes a dim view of Szyrk’s postmodernist work, for example—his references to Shakespeare, Donatello, and Eliot (among many others) define his aesthetic sensibility— and he passes judgment on po-mo art and the faddish reviewers who extol it, denigrating the theory that in having become self-referential art is in itself theory without which it has no more substance than Sir Arthur Eddington’s famous step “on a swarm of flies,” here present in further exhibits by plaintiff drawn from prestigious art publications and highly esteemed critics in the lay press, where they make their livings, recommending his sculptural creation in terms of slope, tangent, acceleration, force, energy and similar abstract extravagancies serving only a corresponding self referential confrontation of language with language and thereby, in reducing language itself to theory, rendering it a mere plaything, which exhibits the court finds frivolous. (34–5)

But at the same time holding “the conviction that risk of ridicule, of attracting defamatory attentions from his colleagues and even raucous demonstrations by an outraged public have ever been and remain the foreseeable lot of the serious artist” (39), Judge Crease gives the back of his hand to critics and complainants alike and finds in favor of the plaintiff with one of the most eloquent and forceful defenses of venturesome art in our time: “the artist comes among us not as the bearer of idées reçues embracing

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art as decoration or of the comfort of churchly beliefs enshrined in greeting card sentiments but rather in the aesthetic equivalent of one who comes on earth ‘not to send peace, but a sword’” (39, quoting Mt. 10:34). After Judge Crease’s opinion is struck down on some technicalities, the Tatamount villagers become more determined than ever to tear the sculpture down, insulted by Szyrk’s insistence “his sculpture is site specific for the moral torpor and spiritual vacuity of the place” (114). The media plays up the case, and soon Szyrk joins the dog’s young owner James B. to sue the merchandisers who are hawking a Free Spot game, T-shirts, and cheap reproductions of Cyclone Seven, and are sued in turn by animal rights activists. The case attracts international attention, the sculpture remains in place due to the lack of a demolition permit, and Szyrk “tries to take it to the high court so now everybody who was suing him is suing the Village, James B. charging them with detaining and endangering Spot and now these animal rights people joining in with a writ for unlawful restraint, sort of a canine habeas corpus with some psychological expert testifying Spot’s having a nervous breakdown” (236) while “the insurance companies’ batteries of lawyers” descend on the village, merchandisers expand their tacky offerings, and James B.’s father, wanting a piece of the action, begins “fund raising in a public cause against Spot’s right to own, protect and commercially exploit his own name, likeness and persona …” (236). Szyrk, whom we never see, is “busied elsewhere defending a suit alleging wrongful death in the collapse of another of his creations …” (280). Spot’s rights are rendered moot when lightning strikes the steel sculpture and kills him, and the townsfolk riot and hang Judge Crease in effigy after he describes the electrocution as an act of God, which they take literally rather than in the legal sense he intended. (The narrator joins the fun by comparing the sculptor’s creation to “the one at Babel rising toward heaven till the Old Testament Sculptor up there was smitten to the point of sending down a confusion of tongues so that nobody knew what anyone else was talking about” [281].) They are further inflamed after the trial when he reverses the jury’s verdict (in favor of James B.) for misunderstanding that distinction, which has the locals calling for his impeachment after he instructs them in another masterful opinion that “belief in God has neither bearing upon nor any relevance to these earthbound proceedings. In short, He may enjoy as much room in your hearts as you can afford Him, but God has no place in this court of law” (293). All this attention has made Tatamount a tourist attraction—James’s father rebrands his junkyard as “a theme park featuring strolls among the artifacts of modern American history,” which he names “The American Way” (348, 496), so when Szyrk finally agrees to dismantle the sculpture—a “rusting travesty of our great nation’s vision of itself ” (271)—the townsfolk sue to

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retain it, which leads to further dizzying complications. The day before he dies, Judge Crease hands down a final opinion, James B, minor, v. Spotskin (one of the merchandisers), unfortunately not given in his own words, and the fate of Cyclone Seven is sealed “when two little kids drove a pickup truck into it” (496), which no doubt will initiate a new round of lawsuits. 3. While the Szyrk circus is in progress, Judge Crease takes on another case involving religion, this one dating back five years earlier to an event described in Carpenter’s Gothic: the Reverend Ude’s accidental drowning of young Wayne Fickert in the Pee Dee River during baptism.4 The boy’s father has decided to sue Ude for wrongful death—no explanation why he waited so long; one would think his case could be dismissed on the ground of laches—and the Reverend’s attorneys fail to win their demand “that Judge Crease be removed in light of his amply demonstrated antiChristian bias” (347). Despite that bias, Crease realizes Ude cannot be held responsible for such an accident; in his instructions to the jury, another hilarious set piece (426–32), he plays on the Christian bias of the hick jurors to insinuate that their god, not His employee Revd. Ude, is at fault. Even though “he practically indicted Jesus for manslaughter,” the courtroom audience “came out singing his praises for respecting their intelligence of course they hardly understood a word he said, throwing in a Latin phrase or two they thought he was speaking in tongues […]” (498). 4. For Oscar, both his personal injury suit and his father’s court cases are annoying distractions from his main concern, which also originates while in the hospital. He has a suspicion (quickly escalating to certainty) that a new Civil War movie entitled The Blood in the Red White and Blue is based on a play he wrote thirteen years earlier called Once at Antietam, about his grandfather Thomas Crease’s participation in the war. The play was sent to and rejected by a New York television director named Jonathan Livingston, who later went to Hollywood—changing his name en route to Constantine Kiester, for “I’m a Jew the minute I step off the plane in L.A.” (413)—who apparently used parts of Oscar’s play for his movie.5 Oscar is infuriated not only because of the copyright infringement, but because Kiester turned his intellectual play into a vulgar spectacular, which Oscar fears his father will This is said to have occurred on October 25, 1985, a puzzling date: internal references in CG place its action in October–November 1983, and the novel itself was published in July 1985. In his instructions to the jury, Judge Crease quotes from the same newspaper account of the drowning that Paul reads to Liz (CG 78). 5 This is never clarified. Christopher Knight suggests the screenwriter, John Knize, drew upon the same Crease family materials as Oscar did (Hints and Guesses, 216–7), but Judge Bone notes those materials lack several elements common to play and movie, and hence must have been plagiarized by Knize from the play (414).

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regard as his work. Kiester’s production company—Erebus Entertainment, whose CEO is Ben Leva (both from J R [471])—sends an insufferably clever lawyer named Jawaharlal Madhar Pai to take a deposition from Oscar (185–234), questioning the originality of Oscar’s play by noting the numerous ideas lifted from Plato, Rousseau, Camus, and especially Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, also set during the Civil War period. Oscar’s own lawyer, a black ex-con named Harold Basie, encourages him to reject Erebus’s offer of $200,000 to settle out of court, which he does only to lose his suit via a newly elected female judge. Basie told him not to worry, they’ll win on appeal; he disappears from the novel at that point (his criminal past catching up with him), and sure enough an appeal is filed under mysterious circumstances to Judge Bone of the Southern District of New York, who overturns the lower court’s findings and awards Oscar all of the profits from the successful film. (The reader later learns Judge Crease wrote the appeal, not from his love for Oscar but from his love for the law.) Madhar Pai is enraged at this reversal, which will later cost him his job, and connives to have Oscar’s share reduced to 20 percent of net profits, which is a little less than the $200K originally offered him but not enough to pay his enormous legal bills. Shortly after, Oscar finally watches the movie and is stunned by the visual effects and historical accuracy. Sure enough, the O’Neill Estate decides to sue both Oscar and Erebus Entertainment for copyright infringement “in what promises to be a rather prolonged course of litigation of sufficient importance to all concerned […]” (580).6 5. Christina’s new husband Harry Lutz (they’ve been married less than a year), an attorney for Swyne & Dour, can’t help Oscar with any of this because he is working himself to death on a decade-long $700 million case nicknamed “Pop and Glow” by the press: the Episcopal Church is suing PepsiCo, alleging that in devising the trade name Pepsi-Cola the defendants had deliberately contrived an obvious and infringing anagram of Episcopal hoping to profit from some subliminal confusion in the minds of the consumer public, thus enhancing the value of their worldwide bottling franchises and their marketing skills by exploiting the plaintiff ’s historical success in proselytizing its spiritual wares honed down through the centuries thereby defaming the venerable image of the Gaddis was genuinely startled at the similarities between Once at Antietam and O’Neill’s Mourning Became Electra when he reread the latter while preparing the novel. He had studied O’Neill in college and unconsciously borrowed elements from it fifteen years later when writing his play. He wondered if the O’Neill Estate would sue him after A Frolic appeared (Letters 516).

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church in attributing to it mercenary motives indistinguishable from the promotional campaigns for a soft drink […] (579)

This is one of the few cases in the novel that comes to a conclusion, largely due to Harry’s skillful handling of it and a concluding brief that a new lawyer at Swyne & Dour feels is “enough in itself to immortalize him in the annals of First Amendment law”; it is apparently written in the irreligious, bantering style of Judge Crease, citing Carson v. Here’s Johnny Portable Toilets and drawing a parallel with “the fierce marketing innovations for the New Coke forced to go back to Classic Coke, even to citing regional thorns like R C Cola with the Roman Catholic campaign to recover its faithful from the alienation brought on by the desperate effort of the Second Vatican Council […]” (580). Christina had warned her husband, “—These absurd Coke II and Vatican II Pepsi Generation Episcopals this idiotic case is destroying you” (243), and indeed the workload literally kills him—he dies shortly after Judge Crease does—but thanks to his efforts, PepsiCo and the Episcopal Church are now preparing to merge their marketing and evangelical divisions. 6. Oscar’s flaky young girlfriend Lily is also involved in a number of lawsuits—dealing with a messy divorce against her former husband Al, contesting her mother’s will—and threatens to sue both the jet-setting plastic surgeon Dr. Kissinger (another carryover from Carpenter’s Gothic) for her faulty breast implants as well as the Revd. Ude’s son Bobby Joe for wheedling her inheritance out of her dying father, convincing him that by donating the money to his church her father will seal his “contract for everlasting life.” She discusses the latter with Ace Worldwide’s Frank Gribble, a proselytizing Christian who soon entangles himself in the legal difficulties of suing God for breach of contract should He refuse her father admittance to heaven (551–3). 7. No character in the novel is more litigious than Christina’s ridiculous rich friend Trish Hemsley, thrice-married and looking forward to the next with a man named Bunker: “—I mean you only get married for the fourth time once” (519; she’s a fount of one-liners). She sues anybody and everybody for any and every little thing (but rarely pays her legal bills), the type—says Madhar Pai, who has a fling with her—“who litigate because they don’t know who they are and it makes them feel real, gives them an identity when they see their name on a docket” (363). She is sued in turn for “foetal endangerment” by a young gigolo who “figure[d] if he got her pregnant she’d marry him, the inevitable divorce comes along and he ends up with the child and collects a bundle for its support” (239; she aborts the fetus), but Trish spends most of her time suing others, too numerous and ludicrous to detail,

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sometimes legally depriving decent people of their well-earned money. The most heart-sickening line in the novel is hers: contesting her mother’s will, specifically the mother’s generous bequest to her poor but devoted nursecompanion of thirty years, the ridiculously rich woman manages (with Madhar Pai’s legal maneuvering) to transfer the bequest “—To me!” (359). The novel mentions other civil suits and threats—Harry dies before getting sued by a woman for a hit-and-run accident, Oscar threatens to sue Madhar Pai for battery after the lawyer pokes him too vigorously on his sternum—and as noted above, few of these suits come to an end, as Christina wearily realizes midway through the novel: “—Somebody will win, somebody will lose, somebody will appeal and it starts all over again doesn’t it? isn’t that what happens?” (244). These legal matters not only feature a variety of members of the profession— from ambulance-chasers and bottom-feeding lawyers who advertise on matchbooks, to “white-shoe” attorneys such as those who work for Swyne & Dour, to eminent judges like Crease and Bone—but also dramatize a variety of attitudes toward the law and attendant concepts like justice and order. At the lowest level, it’s a vehicle for greedy, vain people (and feral lawyers) to make a quick buck, like those who file nuisance suits against movie companies hoping “to get paid off just to go away” (17). As Harry tells Christina on the first page, “—The ones showing up in court demanding justice, all they’ve got their eye on’s that million dollar price tag. […] it’s always the money. The rest is nothing but opera, now look” (11). Christina suggests “—the money’s just a yardstick isn’t it. It’s the only common reference people have for making other people take them as seriously as they take themselves, I mean that’s all they’re really asking for isn’t it?” (11). Oscar puts it another way: you sue others for money “—because that’s the only damn language they understand!” (88). Others sue for revenge, as Lily admits (279) and as Basie suspects of Oscar (123), or resentment, as Harry suspects of Oscar (398), or for spite, or to fight family conflicts in civil court. (To alter the von Clausewitz aphorism mentioned in Carpenter’s Gothic, the law is war carried on by other means: civil wars.) Harry tells Christina that people in his profession “—don’t get to see much of the good side [of people], greed, stupidity, double dealing, a system like ours you expect it to bring out the best in people?” (44). Jack Preswig, who left Oscar’s matchbox firm out of disgust, puts it more forcefully, calling the law “—the biggest swindle ever invented, a regular cesspool of human greed, the side you see of people makes you ashamed of the human race” (565; a few pages later, he says the same about the real-estate and insurance businesses). A Frolic of His Own is replete with supporting evidence to justify that charge.

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In the novel, the law does occasionally fulfill its mundane function to adjudicate legitimate disputes, to redress wrongs, and to defend rights. Both Szyrk and Oscar have legitimate claims regarding copyright infringement and First Amendment rights, and Judge Crease rightly argues that the Revd. Ude does not deserve to be found guilty of wrongful death. Gaddis doesn’t deal with criminal law, for he is more concerned about the higher, theoretical purposes of civil law, specifically “its majestic effort to impose order upon? or is it rather to rescue order from the demeaning chaos of everyday life” (29). To impose, or to rescue; that is the question. Harry would argue that the law is “a vehicle for imposing order on the unruly universe” (527), but is smart enough to know that the “compulsion for order ends up” in fascism (11). Judge Crease, on the other hand, would argue that the law is an attempt to “rescue order from the demeaning chaos of everyday life,” for which the most important instrument is the precise and loving use of language. Harry agrees on that point with his father-in-law and tells his wife “—What do you think the law is, that’s all it is, language” (284), but Christina wonders “—what’s he trying to do down there, the whole world flying to pieces war, drugs, people killed in the streets while this brilliant Federal judge up for the high court spends his precious time on this piece of junk sculpture and some dead dog, what’s he trying to do!” Harry answers, “—Trying to rescue the language, Christina.” Judge Crease’s written appeal for Oscar’s copyright case is likewise described as a rescue mission. The law can be correctly applied only when it is correctly written—not grammatically correct, like Judge Bone’s dry opinion, but lovingly written, like Judge Crease’s own, with full appreciation of the resources and precision of language—which is why Judge Crease became enraged at the female judge’s sloppy opinion dismissing Oscar’s copyright infringement suit. It wasn’t for love of him, Oscar is told by his father’s law clerk, or for abstract justice: “—It was love of the law. When he got his hands on that decision he was mad as hell. He acted like the closest person in his life had been raped, like he’d come on the body of the law lying there torn up and violated by a crowd of barbarians, [… He spent two nights] patching up that appeals brief with them [citations] like bandages wherever there was a scratch on this body he held dearer than his own life, […] this love he had for the law and the language however he’d diddle them both sometimes because when you come down to it the law’s only the language after all […]” (559). It is significant that Judge Crease (like his creator) is an atheist, rightly accused of “throwing God out of the courtroom” (498), and equally significant that his and Harry’s cases deal with religion. For many in an increasingly secular society, the law has become a substitute for religion, an agency for

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justice formerly administered by a deity; instead of making appeals to a heavenly judge, one’s lawyer files appeals to an earthly one. Some benighted believers in A Frolic wave placards insisting “GOD IS JUDGE” (464), but for others a judge is god (as Gaddis implies when capitalizing “Judge”). In The Rebel, cited in the novel at one point (402), Albert Camus asks, “Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and its absolute values?” and a few pages later answers yes: “When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God.”7 Harry would probably agree—after his death, we’re told that when young he attended divinity school “during a phase looking for easy answers” (527)—as would Judge Crease, who insists Camus’s “rule of conduct” is to be sought in common law, not in sacred scripture. As he writes in Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount, ever since civil (or common) law began supplanting “the ecclesiastical courts through tort actions seeking redress for temporal damage rather than spiritual offense” (38)—which Judge Crease later traces back to Queen Elizabeth’s first chief justice—judges must “recall Lord Coke’s diligent concern for the common law over the ecclesiastical law then so prevalent in addressing ourselves to its vulgar version confronting the bench today in modern dress” (292). The language of the law must be as authoritative and revered as sacred scripture, which is why he can’t stand to see it violated by other judges and lawyers. Gaddis enters numerous exhibits of the misuse of legal language, ranging from Oscar’s formal Complaint (177–8), which he finds “muddy and repetitious,” to the ludicrous hyper-concern for procedure in his deposition (185–234), to its unctuous use of euphemism (“a lawyer’s delicate way of putting things” [445]), to its deliberately obfuscatory qualities, which drive Christina mad: —Legal language, I mean who can understand legal language but another lawyer, it’s like a, I mean it’s all a conspiracy, think about it Harry. It’s a conspiracy. —Of course it is, I don’t have to think about it. Every profession is a conspiracy against the public, every profession protects itself with a language of its own […] (284)

The opinions written by Justices Crease and Bone are challenging for the lay reader, for they are written for members of their own profession, not for the public. Yet they are leavened with so much wit, erudition, and reverence for The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1959), 21, 25

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the majesty of the English language that the reader should recognize them as valiant attempts at “imposing order on the unruly universe” (527). As Zachary Leader noted in his review of A Frolic, they “provide the novel’s only moments of stability, illusory flickers of presence, agency, closure, respite, justice even.” Oscar shares his father’s love for the English language and on the very first page “talks about order,” insisting “—that all he’s looking for is some kind of order” (11), but the word he most often uses is “justice,” the theme of the play at the heart of A Frolic of His Own.

Once at Antietam v. The Blood in the Red White and Blue Though based on the career of his grandfather Thomas Crease during the Civil War, Oscar’s play Once at Antietam dramatizes his personal obsession with the philosophical nature of justice. That justice is more a philosophical than legal matter is suggested by the novel’s opening line, spoken by the practical-minded Harry: “—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” But impractical Oscar regards his mundane car injury and copyright suit as the latest violations of an ideal discussed by philosophers stretching back to Plato, though as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear the “simple justice” he demands is only for himself, hypocritically ignoring the philosophers he cites in his play who argue that justice must be enjoyed by everyone or no one. Gaddis wrote this play from around 1959 to 1961—metafictionally dramatized in J R as Thomas Eigen works on the same play, reading a passage from it to himself (J R 262–3; cf. FHO 77)—intending it to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Antietam (1862), but he failed to find a producer. Undoubtedly he received rejection letters like the one Oscar quotes from: “The author makes it clear throughout that he does not trust the director, he does not trust the actors and he does not trust any audience he would be fortunate to have” (123; Eigen was told the same thing: J R 282, 288). No sooner did Gaddis finish it than he realized it was “heavy-handed, obvious, over-explained, oppressive” (Letters 242), but twenty-five years later he decided the stilted play of ideas would not only serve as the basis for the copyright infringement suit in his new novel, but could also provide a contrast—stylistically and philosophically—between the noble idea of justice and the ignoble legal battles waged in the work. A Frolic of His Own contains the bulk of the original prologue and first two acts of Once at Antietam, scattered over a hundred or so pages. (The

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third and last act is mentioned a few times and noticed in Judge Bone’s opinion [400–3], which provides a convenient plot summary of the play; “The Last Act” was Gaddis’s working title for the novel until shortly before publication.) As though he did indeed distrust his audience, Gaddis has his characters spell out the play’s themes on several occasions.8 Oscar admits he based his play on Crease family history: as Judge Bone explains, Thomas Crease hired “a substitute to take his place in the [Confederate] army, a not uncommon practice. Complications arising in the North obliged him to provide a substitute to serve in the Union army as well, and both were killed at ‘bloody Antietam.’ In later years Crease looked up the details of that battle and, discovering that the regiments in which both were serving had confronted each other in ‘the Bloody Lane,’ became increasingly haunted by the conviction that the two had killed each other and that he was thus in some fanciful way a walking suicide” (400), which seems drawn from Oscar’s admission in the earlier deposition that Thomas “survives haunted by a sort of sense of self betrayal, that he’s been slain by his own hand on the field of battle” (208). Unbeknownst to Thomas, his idealistic brother-in-law had taken his place in the rebel army, while Thomas knowingly hired a desperate coalminer described in the play as “brute force incarnate” (148) to take his place in the Union army. Together they represent the divided self, both in Thomas and in humanity in general: Oscar’s stage directions call for his actors to play two diametrically opposed roles in acts one and two (145), all set against a nation at odds with itself, a “house divided” in President Lincoln’s biblical phrase. In his first conference with Basie, Oscar tells his lawyer how obsessed his grandfather was with justice—and indeed the word “justice” appears For this reason, I’ll continue quoting the novel extensively; it really does explain itself as it goes along. Gaddis doesn’t seem to have trusted his scholarly audience either— understandably after thirty years of misreadings of his novels—for he has his characters identify the sources for the background materials and philosophical ideas in Once at Antietam. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract is named in the play, Oscar tells Basie he used George Fitzhugh’s 1857 book Cannibals All! for Southern attitudes toward slavery, and he expects his audience to recognize his homage/adaptation of the first book of Plato’s Republic, which interrogates the nature of justice. In his deposition with Madhar Pai, Oscar likewise says he expects “the theatre going audience” to realize the title of his play is an allusion to a line in Shakespeare’s Othello (“that in Aleppo once”) but that he did not intentionally lift any lines from Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, despite numerous similarities. In addition to Plato and Rousseau, Madhar Pai miraculously hears echoes of Camus, as does Judge Bone later: he probably has in mind The Rebel (1951): Thomas’s remark to his mother “it’s as though you … cherish injustice” (80) seems to echo Camus’s statement, “In one sense, Christianity’s bitter intuition and legitimate pessimism concerning human behavior is based on the assumption that over-all injustice is as satisfying to man as total justice” (trans. Anthony Bower [New York: Vintage, 1959], 34, my italics: Judge Bone refers to “Albert Camus on total justice” on 402).

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often in the play—“because that’s what it’s all about” (110). Judge Bone concurs: recognizing the “injustice” done to Thomas, he notes the slaveholding Thomas is “fully aware of the ethical fine points at stake in his demand for justice” (408). Eventually recognizing there’s no justice in the world, Thomas “realizes he has been used by those around him in their efforts to fulfill their own destinies, thereby robbing him of his own, and the play’s final scene claws for the heights of Greek tragedy” as Thomas, like Oedipus in Sophocles’ play, loses “his fight against insuperable odds” (403; Bone cites C. M. Bowra’s Ancient Greek Literature). That seems to be Oscar’s view (as well as that of the Gaddis who wrote the play in the late 1950s), for he agrees with the perceptive reviewer of The Blood in the Red White and Blue who intuits “the more profound implications at the heart of its story in the dramatic portrayal of man the microcosm of his nation’s history, of man against himself, of self delusion and self betrayal, of the very expediency at the expense of principle we see blindly laying waste to our hopes and our future today, of the great urgings of destiny, and the unswerving punctuality of chance” (54). Oscar himself describes his play in terms of “men a hundred years ago swept by the tide of events toward the end of innocence […] caught up in the toils of history, struggling vainly with the great riddles of existence, justice and slavery, war, destiny […]” (341). But the Gaddis who reread the play in the 1980s seems to have taken a different view. After reading the play carefully for the purpose of his deposition, Swyne & Dour’s highly educated Madhar Pai develops a compelling interpretation of Once at Antietam that justifies its inclusion in the novel. When he unexpectedly meets Oscar later in the novel, he insists “the real civil war” in his Civil War play is not the one fought on the battlefields but the one “raging inside your main character isn’t it? what’s tearing him to pieces from the minute he walks on?” (364). Thomas is both a slave-holding Southerner and a business-owning Northerner; his runaway slave John Israel is “a living reproach” to the Southerner’s ideals of justice (365), while the Northern mine manager Bagby represents (in Madhar Pai’s schematic) “The spoiler, the new man, the spirit of unbridled capitalism with his use versus own in the old Major’s lexicon, the triumphant absence of integrity up against Kane [a visiting philosophy professor and the Socrates figure in the play] who’s the lonely heart and soul of it” (369). Kane hounds Thomas “with his merciless logic about justice, manipulating all of his hollow high sounding claims to moral rectitude leading him deeper into his dilemma, […] blackmailing him with four thousand years of Christian guilt, he isn’t simply embattled, your main character. He is the battlefield […]” (370). Oscar protests, “—no it’s going too far, a play about the Civil War I don’t see how we got into all this”

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(371), resisting the implications of his identification with Thomas, but the counselor/critic drives home his thesis: —John Israel and Kane out there, both sides of your equation manipulating your hero’s profoundly hypocritical capacity for guilt, […] they’re not appealing to his conscience, they’re not even fighting each other to seize hold of his conscience Oscar they’re fighting for which one will fill this yawning sentimental churchgoing flagwaving vacant remnant of the founding fathers, which one will finally be the conscience of this exhausted morally bankrupt corpse of the white Protestant establishment and that! with an emphatic stab straight to the heaving chest —that’s the heart of it, the heart of the American dilemma. (371–2, Gaddis’s italics: the only one in the book)

While Bagby types have been running America ever since the Civil War—in the missing last act, he’s in Washington, DC, wheeling and dealing like a corrupt lobbyist—Madhar Pai associates Kane with a different type of new man: “—He’s a free spirit. That’s our friend Basie isn’t it? freed himself of these illusions of absolutes? [possessing] the courage to live in a contingent universe, to accept a relative world, he’s thrown out those Christian fictions that got his forebears through slavery” (378) like those Thomas’s mother fed John Israel. When Oscar protests he intended her as “a devout old Christian woman who’s been embittered by…” Madhar Pai breaks in to contradict and praise: “—A mean, lying old hypocrite, may have builded better than you knew, old man” (378).9 Oscar isn’t entirely convinced of this interpretation of his play—he continues to speak grandly of it (out of habit?) as a “spectacle of justice and war and destiny and human passion” (438), but an earlier outburst of his suggests Madhar Pai is close to the mark.10 During a group reading of the play, in which Oscar’s students hear of Bagby’s many wartime scams and Thomas’s mugging, their teacher lectures them in terms that anticipate Madhar Pai’s and that get to the heart of both the play and Gaddis’s later fiction: —All this crime, greed, corruption in the newspapers, you think they’re just part of the times we’re living in today? that our great Christian In his letters, Gaddis occasionally alluded to the line “He builded better than he knew” (from Emerson’s poem “The Problem”) to refer wryly to unintended achievements in his work. See Letters 404 and especially 424, where Gaddis uses the phrase to reevaluate his portrayal of capitalism in J R. 10 But not exactly on the mark: Elke D’hoker suggests (104–6) Gaddis is parodying the methodology of some critics, for Madhar Pai’s interpretation is tinged by racial theories, personal biases, and irrelevancies, not to mention his ignorance of how the play ends. 9

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civilization is breaking down here right before our eyes? It’s just the other way around. These petty swindles of Mister Bagby’s outfitting the Union army, the only difference is all that was in the tens and hundreds of thousands and today it’s in the millions and billions, false invoices, double billing, staggering cost overruns and these six hundred dollar toilet seats all wrapped up in the American flag? Pick up the papers and it looks like our defense industry’s one gigantic fraud, that nothing gets built without bribes and payoffs, that Wall Street’s nothing but a network of fraud? […] —It’s not the breakdown of our civilization that we’re watching but its blossoming, greed and political corruption it’s what America was built on in those years after the Civil War where it all got a start, so it’s not whether corruption’s a sign of decay but whether it’s built into things right from the beginning. (153)

Oscar goes so far as to suggest it is a shame the South didn’t win the war, “—two separate countries like we’ve got right now but I mean really separate, borders, passports, import duties, rural economy down there growing God knows what for the mills in the North and religion, God, talk about another country […]” (99). Gaddis underscores this continuing conflict by dividing the activity in his novel between the worst regions of the South and the cultural enclaves of the North. It is significant that between Oscar’s outburst and Madhar Pai’s later remarks about “the American dilemma” Oscar abandons his former scholarly pursuits to read gossipy best-sellers (James Fox’s White Mischief) and to watch nature programs on television, which occupies more and more of his time. “—No deer or bears or anything healthy no,” an exasperated Christina reports, “—no the ones he watches are all animals pretending to be flowers, deadly insects that look like twigs, harmless looking creatures simply seething with poison just lying in wait it’s all rather unwholesome […]” (272). Later programs feature sexual rivalry and duplicitous seduction strategies amidst “the interminable war between the animal and vegetable kingdoms” (506), kingdoms that closely resemble the human realm by way of Gaddis’s brilliant use of metaphor and enjambment. Oscar spends more time watching these problems as his legal difficulties deepen, and the reader realizes (if Oscar doesn’t quite yet) that the vulgarization and simplification of his play by the sex-and-violence filled movie The Blood in the Red White and Blue results in a more accurate depiction of the world than his overwrought idea-filled play. “—Talking about the real world out there old fellow,” Madhar Pai insists during his analysis of Once at Antietam, “—red in tooth and claw with ravin” (362), quoting a line from Tennyson’s

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In Memoriam that Gaddis first used in The Recognitions (412). If humans are essentially no different from carnivorous plants and duplicitous animals, if Oscar’s violent nature programs can segue seamlessly into violent news broadcasts (as they often do in the latter half of the novel), then the pursuit or even the idea of justice is unworldly and misdirected. (For this reason “order” is a more practical goal than “justice”; up North, Thomas begins using the former more often than “justice.”) It could be further argued that a movie like The Blood in the Red White and Blue represents not a “breakdown of civilization,” as Oscar implied earlier, but a breakthrough realization by the playwright that civilization has always been driven by deception, sex, and violence, which (like corruption) were “built into things right from the beginning” (153). The shock of this realization, compounded by his shock at how effectively the vulgar movie captures the reality of war and at the news of his father’s death, may be why he regresses to a childish state at the end of the novel, spellbound by his childhood favorite Hiawatha—a pre-Civil War work representing America’s lost innocence—and jumping out from behind a door at his stepsister as he did at age ten (foreshadowed as early as the third page [13]).11 At the conclusions of The Recognitions and J R, Wyatt Gwyon and Edward Bast have been purged of their unrealistic notions and are ready to make a fresh start, but Oscar lacks the motivation to move on. The rhetorical strategies Gaddis deploys to make this pessimistic case necessitates a broader discussion of what might be called his dramatic, or better, cinematic style.

A Confusion of Realms A Frolic of His Own is arguably Gaddis’s greatest rhetorical achievement, the grandest display of the full range of his linguistic resources and of his willingness to push his rhetorical strategies to the brink of incomprehension to achieve his goals. The style is an expansion of that used in J R and Carpenter’s Gothic: high-fidelity dialogue with all the rhythms, slips, stumbles, and solecisms of actual speech; telegraphic transitions and paratactic prosepoem nature descriptions, a style expanded in this novel to include portions of a play and imitations of a variety of nonfiction forms (legal documents, newspaper stories and obituaries, art and literary criticism, business letters, Gaddis somewhat overdoes the foreshadowing (another sign of reader mistrust?) by having Christina chastise Oscar on numerous occasions for acting like a child, reminding him of incidents like this one, however elegantly it bookends the novel. Oscar does indeed act childishly throughout, which Gaddis literalizes by giving him a child’s bicycle horn to mount on his wheelchair.

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brochures, even recipes).12 The multipurpose dialogue, which dominates the novel as in Gaddis’s previous two, alternates between direct, indirect, and internal (talking to oneself), often within the same paragraph, where the absence of closing quotation marks can cause initial confusion. “That the dialogue does not just advance the action of the play, but in large measure actually defines the characters” (213) is truer of the novel than it is of Oscar’s play. Gaddis’s dialogue does double-duty conveying things usually handled by expository prose, such as character descriptions and especially actions, as when Lily’s entrance into a room and her thoughtlessness are indicated during Christina’s exasperated conversation with Harry about the legal profession: “—All of it, the whole thing the whole atmosphere’s mistrust, every breath you take no put it down here Lily, give him his coffee he needs it, nothing but mistrust, mistrust, mistrust, did you bring sugar?” (485). Some transitional passages are marvels of wit and concision, as when Harry refreshes his drink while counseling Oscar: “—Fine but, running dry here just give me a minute? and he was gone rattling the ice cubes, safely afloat again when he came back to stand over the gasping figure with almost a sigh, —now what” (457). The shorthand transitions and minimal punctuation add velocity to the text, aided by the scarcity of section breaks, replicating the experience of watching a play or a movie in real time as opposed to reading a novel at a leisurely pace. (Gaddis plays with the theater conceit near the end when Christina and Lily form a seated audience as Oscar begins to recite lines from his play by the window, “framed there against the sky shattered with an exaggerated gesture turning upon them as though the footlights had just come up” [557].) Gaddis also provides a soundtrack to his novel, noting on the first page “the tinkling marimba rhythms seeping into the waiting room” at the hospital and frequently referring to sounds emanating from the television or outside. Gaddis quoted with approval fellow novelist Stanley Elkin’s remark “you hear [J R] with your eyes” (Letters 356), and the audiovisual style of A Frolic approaches the simultaneity of dialogue, sights, and sounds in plays and movies, appropriately so in a novel about a play and a movie. The narrative almost literally becomes a movie when Oscar delivers a frenzied voice-over during the television broadcast of The Blood in the Red White and Blue while we hear with our eyes the background music (apparently Boyce’s and Handel’s settings of Dryden’s “Secular Masque” and “Alexander’s Feast,” respectively). Style should always match content, Gaddis Gaddis originally intended for the novel to consist solely of such documents (Letters 469), a technical challenge with few antecedents (Bram Stoker’s Dracula being the most notable).

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insisted in various interviews, which makes “cinematic” the most appropriate adjective for the style of this novel. As the various lawsuits in A Frolic grow more complex, so does the language (another example of style following content). A useful example is a tortuous passage in the second half of the novel that Gaddis’s German publisher asked to have untangled. Oscar nods off while watching a nature program on a lackluster member of the Cistaceae or rockrose family, Helianthemum dumosum, more familiarly known in its long suffering neighborhood as bushy frostweed for its talent at surviving the trampling by various hoofed eventoed closecropping stock of the suborder Ruminantia, to silently spread and widen its habitat at its neighbors’ expense like some herbal version of Gresham’s law in Darwinian dress demonstrating no more, as his head nodded and his breath fell and the crush of newsprint dropped to the floor, the tug at his lips in the troubled wince of a smile might have signaled no more than, or better perhaps the very heart of some drowned ceremony of innocence now the worst were filled with passionate intensity where —we share something then don’t we, no small thing either [Basie had told Oscar earlier] —That’s good to know, demonstrating simply the survival of the fittest embracing here in bushy frostweed no more than those fittest to survive not necessarily, not by any means, by any manner of speaking, the best […] (304)

Apologizing to his beleaguered translator “(but not to the reader!),” Gaddis tried “to ‘shed some light’ which may simply confuse things further”: Overall, the ‘density’ is calculated to reflect the silent spread of bushy frostweed, here representing disorder & vulgarity (Ortega y Gasset’s ‘mass man’ proclaiming his rights to be vulgar) widening its habitat at its neighbors’ expense, i.e., Oscar’s elitism & search for order, as bad money driving out good in Gresham’s Law: thus the wincing defeat of Oscar’s (play=ceremony of) innocence as portrayed in Yeats’ poem The Second Coming wherein “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”, Yeats being the bond that brings Oscar & Basie closer (no small thing either as noted elsewhere (p.88) in the book). And so the metaphor of bushy frostweed for the worst full of passionate intensity (see Oscar’s diatribe on pp. 96–7) demonstrating here that survival of the fittest, rather than the best (‘plays of ideas’), means no more than those fittest to survive & quite possibly, as we see all around us, the worst. (Letters 518)

Gaddis pursues these parallels between the natural and human realms with a vengeance as the novel progresses, deliberately creating a “confusion of

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realms” (507, 509) in dense passages like the one above to support his thesis that most people act no differently than plants and animals. Resorting to fanciful personification and literalization, risking “garbled metaphor” (504) and “blowing the pathetic fallacy to shreds” (560), Gaddis uses the rhetorical equivalent of cinematic lap-dissolves and double-exposure to lower human activities to the level of flora and fauna, to expose the unflattering blind instinct for sex and survival beneath the veneer of civilized behavior. For example, the base motive for Oscar’s submission to physical therapy and his weakness for sexually alluring females emerge when he receives a massage from nurse Ilse (with “splendid thighs that could have swallowed him whole” [86]) while watching a nature program: “those strong thumbs pressing deep along the muscles of his neck and shoulders hunched intent on the world of carniverous plants in the warm marshy bog where dwelt Dionaea muscipula, the notorious Venus flytrap closing its barbed lips on a hapless victim and sticky doings in the milkweed occupied the screen” (256). A little later, Oscar watches a program about “a sea anemone which looks like a harmless flower but is in reality a carnivorous animal,” which segues to the evening news with “scenes of mayhem from Londonderry to Chandigarh” (268), again collating the violent natural and human realms. When Christina learns of Oscar’s desire to buy a fish tank, she wonders “But a fish tank? when they could better be watched in living colour and much wilder variety spawning and feeding, fin ripping and vacant staring glassy eyed […] right here on his nature program, [… and] best of all, where they could be summoned and banished in an instant like those hordes of his own species crowding the channels elsewhere” (321), equating aquatic and human activity.13 When randy Oscar is alone with flashy, promiscuous Lily, “his vacant gaze settled on the vacant screen both of them, a minute later, asparkle with the flashy hues and fleshy petals of the promiscuous farflung family Orchidaceae, its wiles arrayed in every deceitful variation of shape and odour, colour and design to target randy insects” like Oscar, who draws his floral-named girlfriend down on the couch “to allow her room enough there for his arm to fall over her shoulders as a male wasp harassed an orchid,” where the distinction between humans and insects dissolves as “floral dissemblers” tempt bees while Oscar unbuttons Lily’s blouse, until the point where the phrase “delving deeper to pluck at the blossoming pink cresting to their touch” unites Oscar and “bees stung with desire” (337). Even upright Harry evokes “the natural order of things” and “natural law in all After Oscar acquires an aquarium and populates it with fish, their increasingly violent activity fancifully recapitulates Middle Eastern history from the Jewish exodus from Egypt down to the Crusades (561, 574).

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its practicality and lack of sentimentality” as he dozes off into a sex fantasy about Lily (461), a page after reading in Judge Crease’s obituary of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “dedication to the reason and practicality of the common law in its lack of sentimentality” (460). One afternoon “the ultimate confusion of realms collided upstairs and down” as a tipsy Oscar collates a sex dream Lily had related to him with the memory of the earlier nature program about “sticky doings in that marshlike venereal bog where Dionaea muscipula closed the spined hinges of pudendal lips summoning up the legendary vagina dentata” and the myth of the Gorgon, only to come downstairs (where the television is located) and stand “as though turned to stone with horror at the screen” depicting a frenzied scene of sexual rivalry between gardner snakes, which a page later leads to “a brand new confusion of realms” as Oscar collates a gardner snake that imitates females with a transvestite who (according to his father’s law clerk) seduced a Southern senator, equating “sticky doings in that marshy venereal bog” with sticky doings in the bogs of politics (509–11). The “interminable war between the animal and vegetable kingdoms on the nature program” is followed by “Serbs slaughtering Croats on the evening news” (506–7), preparing the reader for a blackly comic sequence in which a Twinkie-munching Oscar watches televized scenes of savagery and deception in the natural world as Christina talks at him about the savagery and deception practiced by the lawyers and judges involved in his cases (564–5), followed by the even funnier scene in which the ex-lawyer Jack Preswig—unknowingly replying to the nature program’s rhetorical question “When the food supply runs out and the only ones around are your own species, why go hungry?”—savagely tears into the legal profession in such terms as “your best friends will eat you alive,” aided by “the bank and the loan people and the insurers after you they’ll have you for lunch […] they’re cannibals Mister Crease, they’re all cannibals” (565), unknowingly evoking Cannibals All!, Oscar’s slavery source for his play. “—All the same breed let them chew each other’s bellys out,” Preswig snarls, two pages after a snacking Oscar watched “the Australian red-back spider jumping into the female’s jaws in the midst of mating which he continued undismayed as she chewed at his abdomen, munching the last of the Twinkie” (564). Oscar himself compares reckless human activity to cancer, “—an expression of life gone wild, these exuberant living cells suddenly cutting loose, multiplying all over the place having a grand time they’re all metaphors for reality” (553). Even extensive quotation can’t do justice to the lengths to which Gaddis goes to collate human with animal treachery and violence, or to the ingenuity of the rhetorical devices he deploys to blend and equate the realms. He uses similar devices elswhere, as when Oscar dozes off to a car chase on

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the TV news to awake to one on a cop show “as fact blurred into fiction” (514), and later when a patrol car’s flashing lights on another late-night TV show are followed the next morning by “the red and blue lights” of a real patrol car in Oscar’s driveway. The unreal merges with the real as the novel progresses until Christina rightly exclaims “—the whole thing is like some wild dream […]” (575). On the final pages, Oscar’s story melds with that of Hiawatha—in which many of the characters are actual animals but with human names—and Gaddis’s own prose lap-dissolves into the trochaic tetrameter of Longfellow’s poem (537, 584–5), blurring prose and poetry as Oscar descends into a final confusion of realms.

Winning v. How You Play the Game There are a few characters in the novel who don’t act like animals: they have their faults, but they offer an edifying contrast to the dog-eat-dog behavior of the rest of the characters and lighten the dark view of humanity displayed in A Frolic of His Own. At the beginning of his 1981 essay “The Rush for Second Place,” Gaddis compares the ethical view that “winning mattered less than ‘how you played the game’” to the combative ethos of football coach Vince Lombardi, who insisted, “winning is not a sometime thing. It is an all-time thing. […] There’s only one place, and that’s first place” (RSP 40).14 The result, as Harry points out, is a “—country conceived in competition rivalry bugger thy neighbor, the whole society’s based on an adversary culture what America’s all about” (485), pursuing hyperindividualism, depredatory capitalism, and wielding the law as a sword instead of a shield. Near the end of A Frolic, a minor character lauds a private school “—where emphasis is placed not on winning but rather on how you play the game” (572), which is the criteria Gaddis encourages the reader to use when evaluating his characters. Madhar Pai, for example, cannot be taken seriously after Harry’s curt evaluation: “—He’d rather win than be right” (388). Nor can Oscar, who both plays poorly and loses the game. Gaddis positions Christina Lutz as the moral center of the novel. She comforts and counsels her stepbrother Oscar, her husband Harry, her schoolfriend Trish, and even Oscar’s girlfriend Lily (whom she teaches how The original author of the well-known adage, sportswriter Grantland Rice (1880–1954), couched it in theological terms, as Gaddis might have noticed in his well-thumbed Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: “For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks—not that you won or lost— / But how you played the game” (“Alumnus Football”).

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to cook), and if her center cannot hold as things fall apart in her anarchic world, it isn’t for lack of trying. Only a child when her mother married Judge Crease, feeling at the time “like an orphan” (466), she apparently did not marry until middle age, leading an “absurd pointless life” until she met Harry (396), and has been wed less than a year when the novel opens. The first few pages establish her as sympathetic, cultured, conciliatory, and giving: she believes “—there are two kinds of people in the world Harry, one of them gives and one of them takes” (16), and she is nearly the only giver among a cast of takers. While the men in her life complicate and intellectualize things, she seeks to simplify and clarify them, as in her intelligent discussion with Harry of Oscar’s legal case on pages 306–16. Though childless, she is maternal and nourishing: the first thing she does when entering her Manhattan townhouse is water the plants, and the first words usually out of her mouth upon greeting somebody are “Have you had anything to eat?” When Oscar gets carried away at what he calls the “delicious irony” that profits from The Blood in the Red White and Blue will finance the staging of his play, “this real spectacle of justice and war and destiny and human passion,” Christina pricks his bubble with “—Speaking of delicious irony, what are we doing about dinner” (438). She becomes exasperated moments later when Lily likewise gets carried away with hopes of reconciliation with her father (and financial settlement, though she insists “it’s not the money”), and brings them both back to basics: —Lily will you be still! Not about money my God, I mean you’re as bad as he is, all this handwringing and tears and carrying on about atonement and getting reconciled while he’s standing here trying to reconcile all the profits and you’re whining about that insurance on the death instrument the day tragedy struck of course it’s about money! That’s all it’s about, that’s all anything’s about, now we’ve got that small roasting chicken haven’t we? It ought to go in the oven unless we all plan to starve to death here nibbling the crumbs of Oscar’s delicious immortality, destiny and passion and the riddle of human existence what we need is a cook. (439)

Christina overdoes this obsession with mundane nourishment—perhaps a coping mechanism against all the craziness in her life—and is too dismissive of the intellectual concerns of her stepbrother and husband. When Oscar expresses his alarm at being sued by the O’Neill Estate, Christina cuts him off with “—I said I don’t want to hear about it! […] we’ll need to do some shopping. Have you had anything to eat? We need bread […]” (447), a straight line that Oscar should have countered with “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Mt. 4.4). Oscar misses another opportunity when Lily, who

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has picked up a few of Christina’s habits, answers his rhetorical question about Civil War military tactics with “—I don’t know Oscar, but we’re out of bread” (509). Christina shuts down temporarily at news of Harry’s death, but resumes her supportive role and is stoic at the further news that she’s financially ruined: she will get neither Harry’s life insurance (which goes to Swyne & Dour) nor their townhouse (which needs to be sold to pay the mortgage), or anything from Judge Crease’s will except co-ownership of the Wainscott house, a house beseiged by feral realtors and parvenu neighbors cutting down trees in what Gaddis admitted was a “screaming parody of The Cherry Orchard” (Letters 500). But she still has her wits about her while her stepbrother “looks half witted” (584) on the concluding pages of the novel, an ending rich in ambiguity.15 Harry Lutz both plays and wins the game fairly, but dies trying to do both. At the beginning of the novel he is already jumpy and agitated—in a word, harried.16 He has been working overtime on the “Pop and Glow” case for years and is in bad physical shape: his eyes are bloodshot, he has trouble getting an erection, is growing forgetful, and keeps himself going with a dangerous combination of prescription drugs, caffeine, and liquor. (As he did less successfully with Liz in Carpenter’s Gothic, Gaddis issues regular updates on Harry’s medical condition so that the reader isn’t surprised by his eventual death.) While not a giver like Christina, Harry does give legal advice to Oscar and, against his better judgment, to litigious Trish (who keeps misnaming him Larry), which causes problems for him at his law firm. He also gives Oscar a much-needed pep talk after Judge Crease dies, telling his brother-in-law that he too had difficulties with his father and was afraid he’d regard him as a failure, going so far as to lie to Oscar and say that his father died when he was in law school (490), which Christina rectifies later (528). The point is “—you’re free! All those years of being on trial, of fear of disappointment and betrayal and being judged he’s dead Oscar! The Judge is dead!” (490). A “screaming parody” of the conclusion of “The Fall of the House of Usher”? Note the “strange gloom” and the ominous earthquake caused by a “catastrophe in the underworld,” the blazing fire that leaps to life as Lily prods “the smouldering heap” in the fireplace with a manila folder containing the last act of Once at Antietam. Madeline Usher falls upon her brother Roderick at the end of Poe’s story, while Oscar leaps out at his stepsister and tickles her … to death? What makes it spooky (as Lily would say) is that as a child Oscar threatened to commit this act after his death (13). 16 Gaddis has punning fun with his name. Not only is Harry hairy, but a double entendre on “the hairy Ainu” of Japan leads to a triple when a young associate of his refers to “the Harry I knew” (119–20, 396, 582). Shakespeare’s Henry V joins the puns when a television broadcast of the play makes Christina long for “A little touch of Harry in the night” (act 4, chorus, l. 47) after her husband’s death (542). 15

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The word “right” is missing from the themes announced on the novel’s first page but is associated with Harry throughout the novel. Enumerating his fine points, Christina concludes with his “—patient, sad smile looking for what’s right, what you said once, not what is just but what is right?” (396), though earlier in their conversation she had halfheartedly complained, “—If you stopped thinking so much about being right maybe you could get off this Episcopal merrygoround they’ve got you on, living on pills and drink […] and we could both start living like human beings again […]” (388). When she learns she’s been “—done out of this half million life insurance that’s about all he left me with,” Christina protests “—it’s not even really the money, it’s what’s right. It’s simply what’s right that’s what Harry always, that’s what killed him” (531). The final indication that Harry is on the right side of the ledger comes when we learn that at the time of his death he was reading the 1854 novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens, “whom he had taken up [according to his New York Times obituary] with a view to becoming a novelist [… for] after working his way through law school and serving with a number of small public interest firms became increasingly disillusioned with the law as an instrument of justice and … to regard it as a vehicle for imposing order on the unruly universe depicted by Dickens …” (526). After Harry’s death, his young legal associate gushes over the brief Harry wrote for the Episcopal v. PepsiCo case, which from his glowing description not only resembles his father-in-law’s legal style but represents what Gaddis would have written had he pursued the suit.17 Harry dies prematurely, but he triumphantly wins his case with a brilliant piece of writing that should “immortalize him in the annals of First Amendment law […]” (578). If, like Oscar in his play, Gaddis “claws for the heights of Greek tragedy,” Harry Lutz deserves more than Thomas the verdict C. M. Bowra passes on Oedipus: “He is essentially tragic because in his fight against insuperable odds he shows all his nobility of character and is nonetheless defeated.” Harold Basie is a more complicated case: he does the right thing, but not always legally. Employed by the small firm Lepidus, Holtz, Blomefeld, Macy & Shea—Harry asked his law-school friend Sam Lepidus to assign a lawyer to Oscar’s copyright infringement suit as a favor—Basie is initially portrayed as a straightforward, plainspoken man, cultured enough to catch Oscar’s allusion to a minor poem by Yeats and to note the similarities between Once at Antietam and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. (Oscar is surprised at first that Basie is black, and among his semiracist faux pas is his suggestion that Basie play the title role in O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, Gaddis originally intended to make this suit more prominent, and even contemplated continuing to work on it after publication of A Frolic (Letters 516).

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about a man who goes to prison for murder, an unwitting allusion to Basie’s past.) He’s rather cool, as well as thoughtful: he asks about Harry’s health, and after Christina mentions the Japanese Ainu in conversation, he brings her a newspaper clipping about “your hairy Ainu,” to her flustered embarrassment. He knows the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure inside-out, well enough to rattle the snooty, better-educated Madhar Pai during Oscar’s deposition.18 After hearing about the way Basie handled the deposition, Harry says he’s smart and may be recruited by his law firm “to dress up its image with a few more minorities before some loose cannon comes up with an antidiscrimin …” (242). Christina is also impressed by him, sexually as well as intellectually. But Basie disappears halfway through the novel after filing his deliberately flawed brief on Oscar’s behalf (a daring trap to win on appeal), and then it comes out that Basie had been jailed “for something that would curl your hair” and had studied law “in the prison library looking for ways” to spring himself and, generously, his fellow convicts (278, 306). He succeeded, but then falsfied his bar exams application, as Harry later learns, “—falsified the document affirming he had a degree from an approved law school, he may have altered some inadmissable correspondence school diploma in the same state where the prison was and falsified the affidavits they require attesting to his good moral character all adds up to a Class A misdemeanor, a fine or a year in prison and they revoke his license to… .” Basie’s on the lam, Harry continues, and prejudicially predicts, “—He’ll turn up sooner or later, back in county jail or someplace else, a man like that can’t stay out of trouble. He’ll turn up” (307). We never learn his fate, but we do learn how much others admire him in retrospect, “attesting to his good moral character.” As he lectures Oscar on his play, Madhar Pai admits Basie probably isn’t his real name—attaching no more importance to a name than Hermogenes does in Plato’s Cratylus, he reminds Oscar—but no matter, because he’s a “free spirit”: “—freed himself of these illusions of absolutes? takes the name Basie because he likes the swing of it even if it was someone else’s with more claim as its essence, the courage to live in a contingent universe, to accept a relative world, he’s thrown The snooty, anonymous reviewer for the Harvard Law Review concluded his brief notice with, “If nothing else, Gaddis delivers the rare spectacle of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure used as a comic device” (108.6 [1995]: 1421). In contrast, Robert Weisberg began his lengthy review for the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities with: “A Frolic of His Own is not merely the finest novel ever written about the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure …” (445; his ellipsis). The novel has been generally well-received by legal scholars: see the entries in the bibliography by Ekelund, Porsdam, Posner, and Wertheim. For a legally informed interrogation of the theme of justice in FHO, see chap. 4 of Knight’s Hints and Guesses.

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out those Christian fictions that got his forebears through slavery” (377–8), exactly those qualities that Gaddis praises elsewhere in his writings.19 While in bed with Harry, Christina slips into a reverie about Basie (“he was so sure of himself, this marvelous energy just seething to break loose, this real appetite he had, his skin glistening in the sun and his hands […]”) and fantasizes about him when she and Harry have sex (389). Dreaming about Basie after Harry’s death, Christina wakes with a realization of how clever his legal strategy was, which she explains for Oscar’s (and the reader’s) benefit, but more importantly that “—He wasn’t just a smart lawyer and a sweet natured man a real man, he was our friend!” which Oscar ignores while absorbed by another of his cannibalistic nature shows (565). This makes Oscar’s earlier dismissal of Basie all the more odious; after he assumes he has won all the profits from The Blood in the Red White and Blue—thanks in no small part to Basie—he dismisses him from his thoughts and couldn’t care less if he’s in prison by this point doing manual labor. Christina finds her stepbrother’s heartless indifference “revolting”: —While he sits in prison somewhere making brooms for a dollar a day and you think that’s all right? —I didn’t say it was right. It’s the chance he took isn’t it? Lying for his bar exam he knew he might get caught sooner or later didn’t he? It’s not my … —He chanced it for you! […] My God what he put up with, because he cared about it Oscar, listening to you, reasoning with you he had more faith in it than all the rest of … […] —Well I can’t help it! It’s just the way the whole system works, there’s nothing I can do about it is there? […] Nothing I can do, why should I think about it. —Because he was your friend! —But, no listen Christina don’t get so upset, I … —He was your friend Oscar! She found a wad of tissue somewhere, clearing her throat —I mean my God, how many have you got. (419–20)

None, according to the novel, for reasons that should be obvious by that point (if not earlier). No wonder he disappointed his father. In his Paris Review interview, Gaddis praised the “courage to live without Absolutes, which is, really, nothing more than growing up, the courage to accept a relative universe and even one verging upon chance” (77). See also Gaddis’s remarks on the rift “between a world of Absolutes and a contingent universe” in his tribute to Dostoevsky (RSP 134) and his bantering letter to his college friend John Snow (Letters 502, misattributed to Updike). For more on Basie’s important role, see Comnes’s “The Law of the Excluded Muddle,” especially 35–8.

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Judge Thomas Crease never actually appears in the novel; we know him primarily from his published writings—the only thing a writer should be judged by, in Gaddis’s opinion—and secondarily by newspaper reports and some hearsay evidence, which would be inadmissable in his court. Unlike most novels, background information is withheld until late in the narrative, when Christina and Harry take turns reading (aloud and silently) his New York Times obituary spread over pp. 443–65. Instead he’s introduced early in the novel via his Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount opinion, which reveals the essentials of his character: his insistence on facts and clarity, his dislike of the South and of the media, his deep knowledge of the law, his mastery of English prose and love for what his obituary calls “the elaborate language with which he framed his judicial decrees” (460), his wide erudition and learned wit, his sense of humor—by turns sardonic and juvenile (gratuitously citing a Boston newspaper headline allegedly written by a Harvard wit in 1944 that read PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE), his atheism, his individualism, his elitism, his mistrust of patriotism, and his scorn for postmodern artists and theory-addled critics who reduce “language itself to theory, rendering it a mere plaything” (34–5), though this is tempered by his “conviction that risk of ridicule, of attracting defamatory attentions from his colleagues and even raucous demonstrations by an outraged public have ever been and remain the foreseeable lot of the serious artist” like Szyrk, who therefore deserves the full protection of the law (39). Like the other three moral exemplars in the novel, Judge Crease has his faults: he was apparently not a good husband to his two wives, Oscar complains that he was distant and disapproving—like the god of the Old Testament, he implies (432)—and far from sparing the feelings of others, Christina explodes: “—Harry he never spared anyone a thing in his life! He was the most, one of the most selfish men who ever lived, the law was the only thing that was alive for him people were just its pawns […] Father was always coldblooded right to the end ordering up this cremation [in his will] without even a fare-thee-well?” (487). His approach to the law might also be called coldblooded: an admirer of Crease’s opinions, Harry says his fatherin-law takes after Oliver Wendell Holmes, and tells a popular anecdote about “—Justice Learned Hand exhorting Holmes ‘Do justice, sir, do justice!’ and Holmes stops their carriage. ‘That is not my job,’ he says. ‘It is my job to apply the law’” (285). We learn that Judge Crease overindulged in whiskey and cigarettes, and was eccentric enough to arouse suspicions of madness. But he is clearly on the side of right, and shares so many of Gaddis’s own views, habits, and love for “elaborate language” that he can be regarded as a portrait of the artist as an old man.

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A Frolic of Gaddis’s Own When Gaddis began writing his fourth novel, he suspected it might be his “last act” (as he originally entitled it). Shortly after turning sixty-five, and not in the best of health, he wrote to his old friend Mary McCarthy to admit, “I am pressing my luck here signing up for another (& I trust mercifully last) novel” (Letters 450), so Gaddis took advantage of the occasion to work in many of his personal beliefs and biases, as expressed elsewhere in letters, essays, interviews, and conversation. As he explained in an interview with French critics Marc Chénetier and Brigitte Félix on 15 February 1993, a few weeks after submitting the manuscript to his publisher, in this new book, I felt I could just do what I want, the author comes and goes; if there’s something, some little anecdote, or metaphor that appeals to me, I put it in for my own pleasure, and then the reader may think, Is he being cute again? The name of it has been “The Last Act,” for this book, and I mean it, I’m not going to do this again, get involved with a contract, and 600 pages, and so forth.20

The title Gaddis decided on instead is telling: after Harry first uses the phrase “a frolic of his own” to describe Oscar’s play—Baron Parke coined the phrase in 1834, explaining that an employer is not liable for any non-work-related torts committed by an employee “going on a frolic of his own”—Christina admits, “—he’s done something nobody’s told him to, nobody hired him to and gone off on a frolic of his own I mean think about it Harry. Isn’t that really what the artist is finally all about?” (398–9). While attending to the serious work of his novel, Gaddis often goes off on frolics of his own, indulging (like Judge Crease) in nonessential but entertaining asides, and entering into the record his last word on certain topics. These frolics give Gaddis’s grim, despairing novel the same sense an unnamed art critic finds in Szyrk’s Cyclone Seven, which stands “defiantly alone in its solitary monumentality, restless and domineering, even menacing […] with an intimidating authority but also a sense of informality and fun […]” (280). Like Oscar honking his wheelchair’s horn, we often hear Gaddis “fusing despair with a note of defiance, of hazard, even merriment, envisaging the rakish tilt of that careening bicycle rounding the blind corner, toot! toot! toot!” (118). A frolicsome tone is sounded near the beginning as the narrator announces in an avuncular, Victorian voice: “And so we may as well begin this sad story with the document that has set things off ” (29), an A brief portion of this interview appeared as “Entretien avec William Gaddis,” La Quinzaine littéraire no. 620 (March 16–31, 1993), 7.

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authorial intrusion he would never have made in his earlier novels. (Later he melodramtically calls it “a dark tale” [344].) His tongue remains in cheek during the document in question: Gaddis’s low opinion of modern art—both its creators and its (un)critical supporters—has already been noted by way of Judge Crease’s judicial opinion (and whose opinions are Gaddis’s in every sense of the word). To express his traditionalist’s view that some modern art looks like something a child could do, Gaddis mischievously chose for the book jacket’s cover art a modernist-looking “painting” that his five-year-old daughter Sarah made at the Jack and Jill Nursery School.21 There is another in-joke near the beginning of Oscar’s Civil War-era play in the reference to a friend of Thomas’s father “from back in the old whaling days, they called him the Sage of Sag Harbor” (75), which actually refers to Gaddis’s friend and neighbor John Sherry. Similarly, Frank Gribble’s flubbed reference to “the ancient Greek philosopher Socarides” (548) is a wink at Gaddis’s Harvard classmate Charles Socarides, later a prominent psychiatrist and author. Taunting those reviewers and readers who insist Gaddis was influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses, despite his numerous avowals, Gaddis has Oscar recall as Ilse displays her breasts “the abrupt image of milking her into the morning tea, where might he have read that?” (256). Answer: in the final chapter of Ulysses, the only portion Gaddis read back in college, “which was being circulated for salacious rather than literary merits,” as he wrote the Joyce critic Grace Eckley (Letters 297). In the same letter, he denigrates myopic literary source-hunters—“anyone seeking Joyce finds Joyce even if both Joyce & the victim found the item in Shakespear[e]”—which seems to be echoed when Oscar assumes his play is the source for a New Testament item in Judge Crease’s “Instructions to the Jury,” and Christina has to explain “—It’s faintly possible he’s read the Bible himself Oscar” (432). Gaddis uses transparent names for people, books, and especially actors he dislikes—Trish Hemsley, Jonathan Livingston Siegal, Robert Bredford, “Clint Westwood in his first role since A Hatful of Sh*t”—and as in J R and Carpenter’s Gothic, Gaddis indulges in crude acronyms for ridiculous groups like Christian Recovery for America’s People (429). He had used this particular one in Carpenter’s Gothic (78), one of many intertexual references Gaddis makes to his earlier novels. Knowing that many readers and reviewers misunderstood the circumstancs of Liz’s death in Carpenter’s When members of the online Gaddis list were asked whose work Sarah’s painting resembles, Scott Zieher suggested Clifford Still, Cy Twombly, and Mark Tobey. To Gaddis Annotations webmistress Victoria Harding, it looked like “(possibly modern) Asian painting/calligraphy, the effect supported by the seemingly aged paper it’s drawn on, and its placement in a round cartouche. The splashes suggest the calculated abandon of Zen painting” (emails December 17, 2013).

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Gothic, Gaddis explains via Christina (an old schoolfriend of hers) what he intended (381–2). Lily says she got breast implants at her former husband Al’s request “so he could play telephone with them” (537), an offer Agnes Deigh makes to Stanley in The Recognitions (382). Lily’s plastic surgeon was Doctor Kissinger, one of many characters carried over from Carpenter’s Gothic (whose original title “That Time of Year” is evoked a few times), and other characters (Szyrk, Mohlenhoff, Siegel, Leva) date back to J R, as though Gaddis wanted to trace “proximate cause” as far back in his work as possible. He has himself in mind when Judge Crease refers to “that special breed of novelist driven by despair to embrace ‘the unswerving punctuality of chance’ (cit. omitted)” (292), that parenthetical kicker keeping Gaddis’s own source-hunters in the dark as to the origin of a phrase Gaddis used in all five of his novels (posthumously identified as a line from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel). He names or alludes to the literary stars by whom he has been steering all his writing life—Plato, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Goncharov,22 Tolstoy, Conrad, Housman, Yeats, Eliot, Forster—and apparently had Charles Dickens specfically in mind as a model, mentioned only in passing previously in his work (J R 118). “—I mean it’s almost Dickensian,” Christina says of the latest comic complication in Gaddis’s plot near the end (562), and the earlier reference to Hard Times is highly relevant: not only did Dickens, like Gaddis, regard fiction as “a vehicle for imposing order on the unruly universe” (527), but Hard Times in particular is a harsh indictment of certain aspects of Victorian culture written in what might be called a frolicsome style.23 Gaddis makes light of his own packrat archiving tendencies when Christina brings her hospitalized stepbrother “—these notes, it’s all I could find the way you’ve piled things up in the library, those stacks of old newspapers why you can’t simply clip something out instead of marking it with a red pencil and saving the whole paper” (21), later complaining to Basie of “—what Oscar’s pleased to call his archives, every piece of paper Though not named, the title character of Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), Gaddis’s favorite novel, resembles Oscar in many ways. In a 1993 letter, Gaddis playfully referred to his Wainscott residence as Oblomovka-by-the-Sea (Letters 490). 23 It is significant that Gaddis would cite this Dickens novel rather than the more obvious legal satire Bleak House—which he read in college and which “seemed to go on interminably” (Letters 50)—because FHO is not merely a legal satire but a larger cultural critique (like Hard Times) of materialism, heartlessness, and overly rationalized/legalistic thinking. There is also an allusion in FHO to A Christmas Carol: Judge Crease’s law clerk arrives in Wainscott looking like a “frayed apparition of Christmas past or, worse, one to come” (493). When Gaddis visited England in 1996, he told interviewer Malcolm Bradbury he was halfway through reading Our Mutual Friend, a later, more pessimistic indictment of money and corruption among the upper classes. 22

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he’s ever had his hands on, letters, old Playbills, invitations, papers written by his illiterate students, recipes he’s never tried […]” (123), as evident from Gaddis’s archives at Washington University. His career-long animosity toward book reviewers is voiced by Madhar Pai during Oscar’s deposition when he calls Plato’s Thrasymachus a “proud hack like the book reviewer instructing the great unwashed in the works of other professional hacks,” and when Basie objects to this digression on book “critics,” Madhar Pai cuts in: “Excuse me old sport, I did not say book critics I said reviewers, there’s a world of difference although the reviewers are delighted to be referred to as critics unless they’re on the run, then they take refuge in calling themselves journalists” (216). Madhar Pai’s strong feelings are undermotivated, a sign that Gaddis is indulging himself somewhat (though it’s not totally out of character for the lawyer), and the same can be said for other ventriloquist acts in the novel, such as: MM

MM

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On contemporary publishing and the artist as a media attraction: “—they said I was too old to market, not the book but me, to market me! Talk shows, book tours all the rubbish that publishing’s turned into, not marketing the work but selling the author in this whole revolting media circus turning the creative artist into a performer in this frenzy of publicity […]” (97–8). On Gaddis’s hometown: “—did I ever say it wasn’t about money? You want to live in a place like Massapequa and drive around in a broken down Japanese” car (308). On the English language: “—the finest language in man’s history, God what they [English writers] could accomplish with the simplest of lumber, the mansions they had built: Now he belongs to the ages!24 Maintenant il appartient à l’histoire, sheer tissue paper. Jetzt der gehört er der Welt? Geschichte? like a cow backing into a stall” (346). On author readings: “—The whole thing is ridiculous. If you’re a writer you write, why do you think people learned to read in the first place. All this tramping around giving talks and readings, are they all illiterates? You read stories to three year olds, if you’re a writer you stay home and write” (352). On the novelist’s goal: “—You remember Conrad describing his task, to make you feel, above all to make you see? and then he adds perhaps also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask?” (363). On money: “—for some people it’s credit, for some people it’s a way to make more, buy stock… . Some of them just use it to create envy, some

Spoken by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at the deathbed of Abraham Lincoln, which Oscar then translates into French and German.

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of them pile it up as a bastion against death itself, read Tolstoy’s Master and Man but she’s right, listen to Freud these days and it’s like diarrhea. [… Madhar Pai] straightened up holding away the wadded toweling [of dog poop], —the lawyers they bring in to clean up the mess. Money’s become the barometer of disorder […]” (365–6). On the Pulitzer Prize: “—The Pu, good God talk about being famous for five minutes the Pulitzer Prize is a gimcrack out of journalism school you wrap the fish in tomorrow, talk about the great unwashed it’s got nothing to do with literature or great drama it’s the hallmark of mediocrity and you’ll never live it down […]” (369).25 On the politics of gun control: “—these pygmies in your congress haven’t got the appetite for it, can’t even stand up to this sleazy gun lobby can they?” (373). On American politics: “—Can’t expect to have a national policy on anything can you? Every national goal you set up there’s some particular region or lobby or private interest out there to thwart it, that’s what American politics are all about […] it’s a melting pot where nothing’s melted, what can you expect” (373–4). On religion: “—it’s madness […] the worse the human condition the greater the madness and your revealed religion simply comes along to channel the madness, give some shape to it […]” (375). On American politicians and their staffs: “—What you see in the headlines out of Washington every day isn’t it? caught redhanded destroying evidence, obstructing justice, committing perjury off on frolics of their own and when they get off on some technicality, everybody knows they’re guilty but there’s not enough there to prove it so they can proclaim they’ve been proved innocent, wrap themselves in the flag and they’re heroes […]” (399). On the difference between literary and popular art: “Where the play has in mind to edify, the picture sets out to entertain” (409). On drafts, collectors, and manuscript studies: “This disposition found similar expression elsewhere in his habit of destroying early drafts of his judicial opinions threatening to place him at the mercy of collectors and biographers, echoing Justice Holmes in his wish to be known only by the final product with the observation that how he got there was his own affair […]” (443–4). On commercial movies: “—not an art form it’s an industry […]” (453). On televized news: “—it’s not news it’s entertainment […] what this whole country’s really all about? tens of millions out there with

Gaddis never won a Pulitzer. There’s a similar attack on it in AA (60–2).

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their candy and beer cans and this inexhaustible appetite for being entertained?” (468). On failure: “—there was nothing worse for a man than failing at something that wasn’t worth doing in the first place” (529), taken almost verbatim from “The Rush for Second Place” (44) and one of the most important themes in American literature, in Gaddis’s opinion, including of course his own. On the superiority of reading Shakespeare over watching a performance: “—Because it’s on the page! he suddenly erupted, —it’s always been that way, the silent beautiful words coming off the page together to stop and listen to them to, to savour them without some vain fool in a costume prancing around up there just getting in their way, any of them!” (542).

It’s not necessary to identify the speakers of those lines; they all speak for Gaddis, and they all contribute to his vision of a world in disorder.

Closing Argument The encyclopedic impulse that led Gaddis in his first two novels to include anything and everything relevant to his themes takes on an urgency in A Frolic, where Gaddis marshals all his arguments to make his case against America as a failed culture, as an “exhausted morally bankrupt corpse of the white Protestant establishment” (371). As Gaddis wrote Judge Crease’s obituary, he surely realized his own was waiting in the New York Times’s morgue—Harry explains to Lily how that works (461)—and thus wanted to make sure his novel-length obituary for these United States included as many details as possible to fully explain “what America’s all about,” a phrase that occurs as often in this novel as in J R. While A Frolic of His Own proved not to be Gaddis’s last act, he seems to have intended it to be a final, bravura display of his signature themes and techniques. Although a valedictory air hangs over the novel, a bitter farewell to a country that betrayed him by betraying its own vaunted values, Gaddis refused to be lugubrious, and in fact A Frolic (as its title suggests) may be the funniest novel he wrote. It opens in a hospital where U.S. citizens are dying—symbolic of the Protestant culture at large—yet the scene reads like a madcap comedy, and Gaddis can’t resist indulging in what Christina calls “morbid nonsense”: a shady character is trying to scam grieving people into paying fifty dollars to have a dying patient carry their messages “to the other side” (20). A Frolic contains more laugh-outloud moments than Gaddis’s other novels, despite its pessimistic, despairing content. Or perhaps because

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of such content: in interviews Gaddis admitted that his first two novels were animated by a missionary spirit, a naïve belief that a chastised but grateful culture would take his criticisms to heart and correct society accordingly. He abandoned such quixotic notions by the time he began A Frolic, approaching his dark materials with the kind of outraged hilarity popularized in recent years by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Gaddis turns his pessimistic outlook into comedy gold: recalling his one visit to Judge Crease’s chambers, Harry wonders about “—that Christ awful life size plastic praying hands thing of Dürer’s standing there on the window sill upside down like somebody taking a dive, think that’s his idea of a joke? […] If it is it’s a pretty good one” (46). A Frolic of His Own is Gaddis’s most stylistically diverse novel. In Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Sloppy’s mother praises him for his dramatic readings from the newspaper: “He do the Police in different voices” (1.16). Gaddis displays his matchless talent for mimicry in doing the voices of everyone from simpleminded Southerners to vacuous WASPs, in imitating legal writing and sections of the New York Times, and in adapting Plato’s Republic and Longfellow’s Hiawatha.26 As noted earlier, the novel is formally diverse, including a playscript and imitations of a variety of nonfiction forms, often set apart in a different font. When not doing the voices of others, Gaddis’s own voice is a rushing river of scenic descriptions, fanciful imagery and bold personifications, painterly weather reports, glimpses of television broadcasts, bantering asides, literary allusions, and deliberately confusing pronouns, where snippets of dialogue surface then disappear back into a stream of consciousness, a river of prose swelling at times to yes Joycean density and causing the reader to feel like little Wayne Fickert being carried away by the Pee Dee River. The purpose is not to baffle or frustrate the readers (as some allege) but to force them to participate in the activity of the novel, to encourage them to cry out “—Everything so damn complicated wherever you look” as Harry does (392), to experience rather than merely observe the complications that drive Gaddis’s characters to distraction. He is not so much a realist as a virtual realist, enveloping the reader in an artificial environment that replicates real life much more closely than most realistic novels do. Defying what literary theorists call the imitative fallacy, Gaddis felt a novel about complicated lives should itself be complicated, and rendered in complicated langage, yet another example of melding style and content. At the same Gaddis’s use of Hiawatha has been examined by D’hoker (123–30) and Rounce (in Félix’s Reading William Gaddis, 79–85). Given FHO’s theme of literary borrowings, it is worth noting that Longfellow’s poem resembles the Finnish epic Kalevala in spirit as well as in numerous particular passages.

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time, as Patrick O’Donnell appreciates, “it is this very flow of syntax without punctuation or line break that causes one to slow down and pay attention to the language,”27 which is finally what literature, like the law, is all about. But his old nemesis the review media reacted as though nothing had changed in the forty years since The Recognitions was panned. Once again, the main charge was “difficulty.” In her review for the daily New York Times, the usually hardy Michiko Kakutani said the novel made for “laborious reading” and that “Mr. Gaddis’s provocative vision of modern society is purchased at a price, the price of hard work and frequent weariness on the part of the reader.”28 In the Sunday New York Times Book Review, Robert Towers also felt compelled to warn the unsuspecting reader that “One must not underestimate the obstacles that lie in the way of the appreciation, to say nothing of the enjoyment, of this remarkable novel,” going on to call some of the obstacles “gratuitous, even perverse.” Sven Birkerts used the d-word in his New Republic review, though he was sharp enough to note that the neglect of Gaddis because of his alleged difficulty “somewhat indicts us as a culture.” But he makes Gaddis sound like the strictest kind of taskmaster: “let the attention slip for a second and you pay by having to work back to get it all straight.” Frank McConnell in the Boston Globe warned of “the holy arrogance of the demands it makes on the reader. The book dares you to struggle with it, and on every page taunts you that you may, after all, not be up to the fight.” Toward the end of his review, McConnell says, “This is a very hard book to read, but it works,” though by that point most readers had probably been scared off. Fortunately, most other reviewers read the novel in the spirit in which it was written and wrote positive, perceptive reviews, and in November 1994 A Frolic of His Own garnered Gaddis his second National Book Award for fiction. Gaddis had rest his case against America and could have rested on his laurels, but soon decided to return to the fray for a parting shot.

“The Reader’s Frolic,” in Profils américains, 169. This and the rest of this paragraph are quoted from my review written a few months after publication, “Reading the Riot Act,” The Nation, April 25, 1994, 569.

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Agapē Agape: The Self Who Cannot Do More

When the obituaries appeared for William Gaddis a week before Christmas 1998, one piece of good news surfaced in those otherwise dismal announcements: namely, that Gaddis had finished a new book shortly before his death. This final book, with the rather ungainly title Agapē Agape, is a project he had been working on all his professional life. Perhaps “struggling with” would be a more accurate phrase, because it’s a book that he abandoned decades ago as hopeless, beyond even his superhuman abilities, and in fact he dramatized his struggle in those pages of J R that feature Jack Gibbs working on a book with the same title. The version that was finally published in the fall of 2002 is considerably different from the one Gaddis began writing five decades ago, and far from concealing signs of struggle, as Gaddis’s other novels do, it foregrounds them. Gaddis’s struggle to find a suitable form for his project became the plot and theme of the novella, and consequently a textual history of its development is more pertinent than it would be for his other novels. It was when Gaddis was working as a fact checker at the New Yorker in 1945–6 that he first became interested in the player piano, the subject of an article he was assigned to work on. He quickly became interested in this musical contraption not for its own sake—Gaddis didn’t own or play one, and in fact admits in the published novella “I can’t read music and can’t play anything but a comb” (90)—but as a popular manifestation of what he considered a dangerous trend, namely, the growing use of mechanical reproduction in the arts and a corresponding loss of the autonomy of the individual artist. After he finished the assignment he decided to research the history of the player piano further and to write something of his own on the topic, which he hoped to publish in the New Yorker’s “Onward and Upward with the Arts” column. Two early drafts survive, both apparently dating from 1946. The first anticipates its acceptance by Gaddis’s employer and is thus called “Onward and Upward—A Partial History of the Player Piano,” and is subtitled “You’re a Dog Gone Daisy Girl—Presto.” This is a twelve-page typescript of about 3,500 words, and after a typically raffish New Yorker opening paragraph, it

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gives a straightforward account of the development of the player piano, with special attention to John McTammany’s account in The History of the Player (1913). It’s a workmanlike account, rich in details but otherwise undistinguished, and it’s easy to see why the New Yorker rejected it. Undeterred, Gaddis then expanded it to a thirty-page essay entitled simply “You’re a Dog Gone Daisy Girl—Presto.” This song (“presto” is a tempo marking), which is mentioned in Agapē Agape (14), ludicrously underscores the paradox of deploying immense technical ingenuity for frivolous ends, a theme Gaddis would expand upon in later versions of the work. Opening with an account of the use of the player piano in a William Saroyan play, the expanded draft is much better than the first, moving beyond a mere recital of the instrument’s history to discuss other media like film, radio, and the recording industry. The style is already recognizably “Gaddisian,” and he does a fine job animating the technical details, but the essay couldn’t find a publisher at the time (nor later: unfortunately it was not included in The Rush for Second Place). By this time, Gaddis had begun work on The Recognitions, so he set the essay aside, but in 1950, while living in Paris, Gaddis decided to send it to the Atlantic Monthly, who, much to his delight (as he wrote in a letter to Helen Parker), “offered to take an excerpt from it, or possibly the whole” (Letters 173). The following summer, Gaddis made his first appearance in a national magazine with “‘Stop Player. Joke No. 4,’” taken from pages 20–3 of the typescript. As published, it’s a slight piece, just an anecdotal overview of the history of the player piano, and yet its opening paragraph gives a clear indication of Gaddis’s concern: “Selling player pianos to Americans in 1912 was not a difficult task. There was a place for everyone in this brave new world, where the player offered an answer to some of America’s most persistent wants: the opportunity to participate in something which asked little understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the taking of time; and the manifestation of talent where there was none” (RSP 2). Previously, it took talent and dedication to play the piano, but with this invention anyone could “play.” There was an ad in a 1925 Saturday Evening Post for the player piano (which Gaddis saw and quotes on AA 15) that even elevated its operator above true pianists: “You can play better by roll than many who play by hand,” it promised. “And you can play ALL pieces while they can play but a few.” It degraded art to mere entertainment, encouraged passivity over activity, and threatened to break the bond between artist and audience: if you’re satisfied with a player piano, then what becomes of the piano player? What part, if any, does an artist play in this “brave new world”? Gaddis wasn’t merely displaying an elitist reaction to the democratization of the arts; instead, he was concerned about the growing demand

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for immediate gratification and for the willingness to accept a mechanical reproduction over the real thing. It’s the same trend towards the elimination of the human element that was going on in assembly-line production, whose growth took place concurrent with the heyday of the player piano. Mechanization of the arts ran parallel to the mechanization of people by means of efficiency studies, standardized testing, and various methods of measurement and evaluation more suited to machinery than people. Some of Gaddis’s material on player pianos found its way into The Recognitions. At Esther’s Christmas Eve party (II.7), she finds herself seated next to a rather pathetic college friend of Benny’s. This unnamed character first asks her if she knows anything about player pianos, and when she answers in the negative, he boasts that he’s spent two years writing a history of the player piano, and regales her with a list of famous people who owned one (579). Here Gaddis treats the subject in a self-deprecatory way, and indeed a book solely on the player piano would be of limited interest. But after The Recognitions appeared in 1955, after he began and abandoned a business novel in 1957, and after Gaddis failed to find a producer for Once at Antietam, Gaddis returned to the project, now envisioning a book entitled “Agapē Agape: A Secret History of the Player Piano.” He began exploring further implications of mechanical reproduction, and that’s where he ran into trouble. The player piano uses paper rolls with rectangular holes punched in them, and computers originally used cards punched in the same way. Both the player piano and the computer adapted this technology from the automated loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which also used punched cards, which were taken up in 1835 by Charles Babbage for an early calculator, and further modified in 1890 by Herman Hollerith for a tabulating machine, another forerunner of the modern computer. As Gaddis realized the player piano was only a chapter in the long history of mechanization and automation, his research broadened to the point where he was overwhelmed by the logistics of integrating all this material into a coherent narrative. He tried to organize his notes by year, starting with 1876, an important date in American history: that was the year the earliest version of the player piano was introduced to Americans at the Philadelphia Exposition; it was also the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, the year of Custer’s Last Stand, and the year (to quote novelist Richard Powers) “that the fix robbed Tilden of the Presidency and reduced the democratic process to parody.”1 Gaddis’s friend Gore Vidal wrote an entire novel set in (and Gain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 221.

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titled) 1876, likewise recognizing it as a watershed year in America’s history. It was also the year Willard Gibbs published his first paper on statistical physics, and the year Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung was first performed in its entirety—all of which is highly relevant to Gaddis’s second novel J R, where much of Gaddis’s research wound up.2 In fact, a page of Gaddis’s notes for the year 1920 is reproduced on page 587 of J R, and one look at that reveals what he was up against. (The chronological notes printed as an appendix to The Rush for Second Place are considerably cleaned up, abridged, and lack Gaddis’s cryptic, abbreviated references.) Obsessed (as he wrote in a letter to John Seelye) with “expanding prospects of programmed society & automation in the arts” (Letters 246), Gaddis worked on this version of Agapē Agape until 1962, at which time he accepted a commission from the Ford Foundation to write a book on the use of television in schools, which fell through the following year. Two crucial documents survive from that period that were eventually published in The Rush for Second Place: Gaddis’s proposal for the book—presumably shopped around to publishers by his agent—and its opening pages. The proposal is the clearest articulation of the ambitious project, and it’s surprising to learn that Gaddis intended the book to be only 50,000 words (i.e., about half the length of Carpenter’s Gothic) given the immense amount of material he had on hand. He intended the book to be not an earnest history but instead a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology and of the place of art and the artist in a technological democracy. As “The Secret History of the Player Piano,” it pursues America’s growth in terms of the evolution of the programming and organizational aspects of mechanization in industry and science, education, crime, sociology and leisure and the arts, between 1876 and 1929. That half century embraced the development, dominion and decline of the player piano, which at once anticipated—and, only slightly magnified, may appear to have brought about—both the patterned structure of modern technology and the successful democratization of the arts in America. In brief, the player is credited with introducing (1) punched-card programming of “information,” which is the basis of modern automation communications and control systems, and (2) the possibility of “creative participation” in artistic endeavor, at a time when leisure was becoming available to those with the desire but neither the skills nor talent for such expression. (RSP 142) $18.76 is the cost of Wayne Fickert’s baptismal suit in FHO, another frolic on Gaddis’s part.

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Finding no takers, Gaddis decided to abandon Agapē Agape altogether and resume that novel on business he began in 1957. In an attempt to salvage as much as possible from the rejected nonfiction work, he decided to put the Bast family in a business that once manufactured player pianos, and created Jack Gibbs as an alter ego to act as a mouthpiece for the material Gaddis had planned to articulate in Agapē Agape and to dramatize his own difficulties in bringing the book to completion. On pages 288–9 and 571–604 of J R, Gibbs reads aloud from those opening pages, which are so dense and allusive that some readers may feel it’s just as well that Gaddis never completed the book. Expository writing wasn’t his forte. Gaddis was able to incorporate most of his thoughts on mechanization and the arts in J R, and in later years he seems to have become reconciled to this solution. In his letters he continued to refer occasionally to Agapē Agape, offering tantalizing glimpses of what it might have been. In a 1987 letter to critic Gregory Comnes, Gaddis said that he had recently come across a book similar to what he had intended to write, namely, Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters, and felt “well damn! that settles it, mine will never be done; though something still remains that drives me to tear out and save anything I come across on mechanization & the arts to add to the 30 year hoard” (Letters 443). Kenner’s book, originally published in 1968, covers a lot of the same ground as Agapē Agape: mechanization and automation, closed systems, computers, the role of the artist, and of course counterfeiting and the related theme of authenticity, all an indication of what Gaddis was working toward. In the same 1987 letter to Comnes, Gaddis mentions a writer whom he had not read yet, despite the relevance to his own work, namely, Walter Benjamin, whose seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” would seem to be right up Gaddis’s alley. (It must be remembered, of course, that Gaddis did most of his research on this topic back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before Benjamin had been translated into English.) In a 1992 letter to Comnes, Gaddis reported that he eventually did read Benjamin’s essay and jokes that he would “certainly have been pilloried for plagiary” had he ever completed his work, which became, he goes on to write, “a casualty of overresearch; but then of course in my ignorance Benjamin had already clearly, concisely, brilliant[ly] and briefly covered the ground” (Letters 477). The extent to which his own book was “overresearched” can be gleaned from a letter Gaddis wrote to critic Joseph Tabbi in 1989; asked about his sources for Agapē Agape, Gaddis said they were very far ranging & having largely to do with organization (Hull House, crime, John D Rockefeller &c); Hollerith, early punched card innovations (from Jacquard’s loom & Thos J Watson (pere) selling pianos

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off a truck; Plato’s warnings & exclusion of the artist; Babbage; von Neumann (which I found largely beyond my comprehension); & I cannot recall his wellknown name [F. W. Taylor] doing time/motion studies in the very early 1900s for industrial efficiency: all these flood back but there was far more however all this was done before (though spilling a little over into) the composition of J R for the never to be completed Agapē Agape whose premises—measurement & quantification as indexing thus dictating order & performance (cf. McNamara’s Vietnam body counts)—have long since caught up with us. Alas it will never be realized but in massive notes & marked margins in the hands of some beleaguered doctoral candidate, since I am now immersed in an equally mad enterprise. (Letters 454)

This “equally mad enterprise” was of course A Frolic of His Own, which was eventually published at the beginning of 1994. Afterwards, he toyed with the idea of expanding a legal opinion that he had left out of A Frolic, but in the fall of 1995 decided—despite everything he had said over the years—to revive Agapē Agape in a final attempt to complete it. His new agent, Andrew Wylie, sold the proposal to editor Allen Peacock at Henry Holt, who offered a $150,000 advance. Publishers Weekly reported the sale in its January 6, 1997 issue, stating that Agapē Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano was a nonfiction work that Holt hoped to publish in the fall of 1998. There are several possible reasons why Gaddis chose to return to an unfinished work rather than begin something new. First, he was seventy-one years old and in poor health when A Frolic of His Own was published, so the idea of starting a new novel, especially given his slow working methods, probably struck him as unrealistic. Second, he may have been uncomfortable with leaving unfinished work behind. He had been able to salvage his Civil War play Once at Antietam for use in A Frolic of His Own, and a similar desire to get Agapē Agape into print in one form or another may have appealed to him. He didn’t really want to leave it in the hands of “some beleaguered doctoral candidate” in the future, despite what he had told Tabbi. And since he had continued to amass material for this project, perhaps he felt he had a fresh perspective on it and could finally complete the work. At any rate, he worked on it from 1996 through 1997. It must have been strange for Gaddis to take up in old age the notes he had compiled as an ambitious young man a half-century earlier; one can imagine him saying, as Gibbs does when he confronts his old notes, “—Christ how did I, look at that what did I think I was doing! […] ANI, LEM abbreviated all these God damned references can’t remember what they, go through every book in the place again Christ, how I worked on this …” (J R 586). And then history repeated itself. Just as twenty-five years earlier he decided to convert much of his research into a novel, he decided to reformat Agapē Agape from nonfiction to fiction.

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In a valuable document that accompanied the manuscript when searching for a new publisher—after Allen Peacock left Holt no one there took much interest in the book—Matthew Gaddis gives an account of the project’s metamorphosis from nonfiction to fiction. (It was later published as the afterword to the French translation.) After deciding that a nonfiction book interested him less than his own “raillery” on the subject, Gaddis first planned a monologue by an ailing man with cultural concerns identical to his own, then thought of adding more characters for a novel based on Shakespeare’s King Lear: a wealthy historian/philosopher decides to divide his property among his three daughters, resulting in familial strife. The Goneril and Regan characters are lawyers, and the terminally ill man wants them to sue a large computer company for stealing his patent on a form of digital technology he developed in the 1920s while working for a small company that manufactured player pianos and cash registers (the same art/business nexus common to Gaddis’s novels). The daughters humor his wishes in order to gain their promised inheritance, though they suspect the suit will be dismissed, and also suspect he’s giving away his money not out of love but in order to qualify for Medicaid. A third daughter, uninterested in the lawsuit or the money, wants only to be with her father through the writing of his final book. He calls her his “honeyed muse,” Socrates’ sarcastic personification of insidious poetry in Plato’s Republic, though he suspects her devotion conceals a desire to cut out her sisters and obtain all his money. (Gaddis also thought of reversing the situation, making the Cordelia figure the true villain while the other sisters try to protect their father from her.) The attorneys challenge each other’s claims in the courts, and the old man is then confined to a rundown nursing home on Long Island with a counterpart to Lear’s Fool as a companion. The legal complications suggest the result may have been a novel along the lines of A Frolic of His Own, which contains a hint of this plot.3 But Gaddis rejected most of this as “too literal” and returned to his original idea for a monologue. Some critics have drawn a parallel to J R’s Edward Bast, who scales down his ambitious plans for an opera to a cantata and finally a solo piece for cello, but for him that represents a new beginning. For Gaddis, the final work would be an ending, as he knew, a parting shot summing up his half-century inquisition of American culture. Vestiges of the Shakespearean plot remain in the published book: on page 5 the narrator admits to “dividing the properties three ways one for each Christina says of Harry and his sisters “—his father lives like a king out there [Lake Forest, Illinois] he’s never made less than a million a year and when we got married those two vultures moved right in like a, talk about Regan and Goneril poisoning the old man so they’d split the inheritance two ways instead of three sucking up to him …” (528; there’s an earlier reference to Lear on p. 373).

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daughter,” and on page 79 there is a reference to the Cordelia counterpart among his daughters, along with a direct quotation from King Lear (“my sometime daughter”—from Act 1, scene 1). The “you” addressed from page 79 through the end might be the Fool figure, silently listening to this monologue, though it could be the Cordelia figure.4 What Gaddis also took from King Lear is its rage. Like Lear on the stormy heath, Gaddis thunders against the iniquities of our time, “because the rage is there at the heart of it, the sheer energy, the sheer tension the tinge of madness where the work gets done, the only reality, the only refuge from the vast hallucination that’s everything out there, and that you’re all part of […]” (85). That “you” might also refer to Gaddis’s old friend and mentor Martin S. Dworkin, who died in 1996 as Gaddis was at work on the nonfiction version of the manuscript.5 As Joseph Tabbi first pointed out in his afterword to Agapē Agape (and discusses at greater length in his recent biography), Gaddis regarded Dworkin as an example of “the self-who-can-do-more,” a concept that had obsessed him in his first novel and that would become the theme of his last one. As Tabbi writes, “In notes Gaddis made while concluding his final fiction, Dworkin appears as both an ‘enabler’ and an ‘accuser,’ an intense teacher whose intellectual generosity exacted a psychic toll: ‘that was always his thing, the accuser, you’ve let me down, you’ve betrayed me’ …” (Afterword, 110). Echoes of this conflicted relationship can be heard in the published novella when the protagonist worries that after he’s dead people will say “that I have betrayed them [his daughters] and you […]” (80). As he was working on this streamlined version of his novel, Gaddis received a commission from DeutschlandRadio to write a play for broadcasting, so in the summer of 1998 he sent them the penultimate draft of Agapē Agape as a one-act monologue entitled Torschlusspanik (meaning the fear of doors closing, of opportunities lost), which is essentially the novella minus its last dozen pages.6 At that time he still had fairly ambitious plans for the work; in an undated document in his archives entitled “Outline for the remainder of ‘Torschlusspanik’, Book One of Agape Agape”—which mostly concerns the role of the Dworkin figure—it is apparent Gaddis intended The retention of the three daughters is virtually the only thing that distinguishes the narrator from Gaddis himself, and it’s naïve to pretend otherwise, despite the dictates of literary theory. I’m tempted to call the protagonist “Gaddis,” those quotation marks indicating the negligible difference, but instead I’ll refer to him as the writer. (Matthew Gaddis said his father called him “the man in the bed.”) 5 For more on this important figure in Gaddis’s life, see Bernard Looks’s online essay “The Novelist and His Mentor” (http://metacog.org/dworkin/article.html) and his memoir Triumph Through Adversity (Xlibris, 2005). 6 It was translated by Markus Ingendaay and broadcast under Klaus Buhlert’s direction on March 3, 1999, three and a half months after Gaddis died. 4

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considerably more than those dozen pages contain (to say nothing of the designation “Book One”). In The Recognitions, Basil Valentine asks, “—what was Valéry’s line, that one can never finish a work of art? one only abandons it?” (334), and all evidence suggests Gaddis’s medical condition forced him to abandon the work shortly before his death instead of finishing it to his complete satisfaction. Three years after Gaddis’s death, the manuscript finally found a publisher at Viking Penguin, was copyedited by Joseph Tabbi and myself in late 2001, and was typeset in early 2002. Unfortunately, between the first stage of proofs produced March and the bound galleys that were issued at the end of April, the text was censored. From pages 65–6 three sentences (about 70 words) were cut concerning John Kennedy Toole’s efforts to get his novel A Confederacy of Dunces published, apparently in deference to the still-living editor who encouraged but ultimately abandoned Toole, even though the story had been known for years and even detailed in a biography of Toole published in 2001. (Gaddis didn’t name names, but I will: it was Simon & Schuster’s Robert Gottlieb, who later became Gaddis’s editor at Knopf and who Gaddis later felt had likewise abandoned J R after publication.) Apparently those responsible for expurgating Gaddis’s work were untroubled by the passage a dozen pages later in Agapē Agape on Nietzsche’s sister’s “editing” work, where Gaddis objects that it “wasn’t that she betrayed the man, the artist, sold him out no that’s to be expected, he’s expendable, just the vehicle or the husk of it for the work that’s what she betrayed, that’s our immortality and that’s what she corrupted […]” (77). Agapē Agape was finally published in October 2002 in a form the twenty-four-year-old who began it in 1946 wouldn’t have recognized. That ambitious young man had hoped to write something that would appeal to the New Yorker’s wide audience, but the dying old man who completed it a half-century later must have known he was once again “writing for a very small audience” (R 478), principally for what Flaubert called “a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch” (83). Like the excavated city of Troy, the published novella reveals its various stages of development.7 From Gaddis’s earliest research for the “Onward and Upward” draft comes the basic history of the player piano, including the ill-fated John McTammany. In one of the finest essays written on Agapē Agape to date, Brigitte Félix prefers the image of a palimpsest: “Textual clues are ambiguous, notably because the novel is a palimpsest that bears traces of the various stages or layers of its composition … . Although Gaddis finally gave up his imitative pattern [King Lear], which he found too ‘literal,’ there are textual, palimpsestic signs of its prior existence that he chose not to erase but simply to push back in order to foreground the monologue of the dying writer.” See her “William Gaddis’s Agapē Agape, or Steinway vs. Welte-Mignon,” in Reading William Gaddis, 100, 106–7.

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(He spent much of the second half of his life embroiled in lawsuits defending his claim to have invented the instrument.) The reading he did in the late 1950s as he expanded his interest from the player piano to the larger area of mechanization can be tracked, from Sigfried Giedion’s monumental book Mechanization Takes Command, Arthur Loesser’s brilliant Men, Women and Pianos, and Alexander Buchner’s illustrated survey Mechanical Musical Instruments (all of which are quoted more often in Gaddis’s notes than in the final novella) up to Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that he read in the late 1980s. The social implications of mechanization that preoccupied Gaddis the longer he worked on the project are drawn from writings that stretch from Norbert Wiener’s 1950 study The Human Use of Human Beings up to the press coverage of Dr. Ian Wilmut’s cloning experiments a year before Gaddis died. Gaddis’s lifelong engagement with philosophers like Plato and Nietzsche finds its fullest expression here, and his abiding interest in the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga—whose Waning of the Middle Ages (1924) was an important book for The Recognitions—led to several quotations from his Homo Ludens (1938) as well as an imagined dialogue with Walter Benjamin. Oddly enough, almost nothing from the version of Agapē Agape that Gibbs reads from in J R survives, except for the Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis (83), misspelled Millis in J R (575). Old favorites like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are cited—the latter mostly by way of Henri Troyat’s 1965 biography—and new favorite Thomas Bernhard is represented by three novels (to be discussed below). Gaddis evokes several kindred spirits in literature—Hawthorne, Melville, Flaubert, Eliot, Jeffers—and even gives a surprising nod of approval to John Kennedy Toole, surprising because Gaddis absolutely hated A Confederacy of Dunces when it first came out (Letters 374). And although Gaddis resented inquiries into his personal life, he loved reading biographies, several of which are quoted here: in addition to Troyat’s Tolstoy, Otto Friedrich’s biography of Glenn Gould and W. A. Swanberg’s of William Randolph Hearst are praised.8 In one sense, Agapē Agape can be read as a highly compact intellectual autobiography. But of course it is neither an autobiography nor a memoir but a novel, which requires a different focus.

Details on all these can be found on the Gaddis Annotations website: http://www. williamgaddis.org/agape/aanotes.shtml

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Finding a Form If Agapē Agape were a film, it would run a little over two hours. Setting: an airless, lightless room in a private residence furnished only with a bed and a night table. Alone in the room, propped up in the bed and wearing a coarse muslin collarless shirt, is an obviously ailing old man, recently released from the hospital, surrounded by piles of books, notes, clippings, legal documents, and unopened mail. For the next two hours, he talks about his desperate need to finish writing a work long in progress before it’s too late. As he rehearses what he wants to write, he pores over his materials in a frantic, haphazard fashion, quoting some from memory, reading passages aloud from books or his notes, and commenting on it all as he goes along, as well as on his deteriorating physical condition. Only seven minutes in, he almost spills his piles of papers, and seven or eight minutes later he scrapes his wrist on the night table drawer edge while reaching for a book, his skin so dry and thin that he bleeds easily (due to the prednisone he’s taking, which also alters his mood). After about twenty minutes, he starts referring to the “self who could do more” and alter egos in folklore and literature, concepts that preoccupy him to the end. Forty minutes in, he accidentally spills a glass of water all over his papers. He looks for his pencil, then loses it, then pricks himself when he rolls over on it, and about fifty minutes in, he imagines a chummy conversation between Benjamin and Huizinga. During the second hour, his arm bruises from too much pressure on it, and around the ninety-minute mark he attempts to sit up, slowly sliding one leg, then the other, to the side of the bed, which takes about ten minutes, and then his tottering piles of books and papers finally spill on to the floor. By this time someone has entered the room, and the writer asks for his clothes so that he can get out for some fresh air, also asking the person to pull down the shade because the sun’s in his eyes. The writer’s disgusted but not surprised to see bloodstains on his bed. At the two-hour mark he enters into an argument— with himself or with the visitor is hard to say—and a few minutes before the end he once again complains of having trouble breathing. Unable to do anything, he concludes his rambling monologue expressing jealous anger at his younger self, “that Youth who could do anything.” It wouldn’t make much of a movie, but it’s an effective dramatization of a writer’s fear of failing to achieve his vision; there’s little physical activity, but there’s an electrical storm of mental activity, lighting up the writer’s well-stocked mind, “where the work is done” (84). Near the end of J R— which featured several artists at an early stage of such fear and introduced the concept of Torschlusspanik (393)—the painter Schramm completes a

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painting he’d been struggling with for years, only to “shout look! if you could have seen what I saw there!” (724). The narrator of Agapē Agape still knows what his work on mechanization and the arts could be, but he can now only give a rambling, near-incoherent account of what he can tantalizingly see but not get down on paper, due to his age and deteriorating physical condition. It’s not his ideas but his dramatic struggle with them, building to a bittersweet swan song to his lost youth, that makes this a novel.9 The reader doesn’t need to know the particulars of all the references he makes, nor even to follow his complex argument completely (though the gist of it is clear enough); the reader need only feel what the character is going through, to sense how important his work would have been, and to empathize with his inability to complete it. All of Gaddis’s previous novels have been partly about failure; this one enacts failure. In J R, Gibbs had compared his aging Agapē Agape manuscript to an invalid, which is literalized in Gaddis’s novella in the person of the aged writer, whose skin resembles “dry old parchment” (11). Gaddis dramatizes his failure to write the nonfiction book he contracted for in 1996, candidly detailing his own medical problems during that period, and succeeds brilliantly at novelizing that failure. Gaddis could boast, as Ezra Pound does near the end of the career-long work he failed to complete, “it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere” (Canto 116). When Gaddis realized he could not finish the nonfiction book he envisioned in the 1960s and decided he’d prefer to rework it as fiction, he cast about to find the proper form. The dramatic monologue he settled upon was apparently inspired by the novels of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931–89), which his friend Saul Steinberg had recommended to him in the early 1990s and which Gaddis took a great liking to. “You may see where I have found my Cicero for all future engagements” he wrote to Gregory Comnes in 1996,10 introducing a passage from Bernhard’s novel The Lime Works about the difficulty of transferring one’s thoughts onto the page without making them seem ridiculous (Letters 511). A year earlier, before Gaddis had even decided to resuscitate his old project, he wrote a letter to his companion Muriel Oxenberg Murphy entitled “In the Style of Thomas Bernhard,” continuing on from Bernhard’s passage to explain their break-up as though it were an episode in The Lime Works (Letters 512–3). In his review of Agapē Agape, novelist Rick Moody recalls visiting Gaddis in 1997 while he Reviewing it for the New York Times Book Review, Sven Birkerts claimed, “Agapē Agape is not, even by the most generous allowance, a novel. A thinly veiled autobiographical rant does not a fiction make” (15), a claim repeated in his introduction to the Penguin paperback edition (xxii). But as I have argued elsewhere, the novel is a much more variegated genre than some critics realize. 10 Traditionally, readers took comfort in Cicero’s essay on old age, De senectute. 9

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was working on it and learning “Gaddis had read a lot of Bernhard, knew the work inside and out, and we talked about this at some length.”11 It should be noted, however, that the dramatic monologue wasn’t an entirely new departure for Gaddis: Wyatt’s interior monologue on the way to the parsonage is a denser antecedent for the style of Agapē Agape, and of course those pages of J R in which Jack Gibbs reads from his version of the book (571–604) are even closer. In fact, it’s easy to imagine an elderly Gibbs as the narrator of the published novella, returning to his notes after yet another long hiatus and panicking over recent publications that cover the same ground. Nor did Gaddis forget Gibbs’s threat to make Agapē Agape “—Difficult as I can make it” (244); it’s as though Gaddis decided at the end to become the difficult postmodernist that critics had always claimed he was. Gaddis paraphrases and quotes from three Bernhard novels, whose narrative situations appealed to him as much as their form and style, offering a solution as to how to approach his nonfiction material and to dramatize it as fiction. Formally, all three of them—Correction (1975), Concrete (1982), and The Loser (1983)—are monologues, and like Agapē Agape are unparagraphed, nonlinear, repetitious, allusive, and paratactic in sentence structure. As the translator of The Loser explains, “Bernhard’s sentences are very long, even for a German reader accustomed to extended, complex sentence constructions. Further, the logical transitions between clauses (‘but,’ ‘although,’ ‘whereas’) are often missing or contradictory, and the verb tenses are rarely in agreement.”12 Agapē Agape is more frantic and compressed than Bernhard’s prose, more dramatic and diverting, but formally it closely resembles the Austrian’s relentless novels. They share an elitist outlook and an adversarial relationship with their countries: Bernhard despised Austrian culture as much as Gaddis did American culture, maybe more, and both used their novels to express their contempt in the harshest, most insulting terms. The protagonists of these three Bernhard novels are engaged in projects similar to the writer’s in Agapē Agape. In Correction, the unnamed protagonist struggles to make sense of thousands of notes and writings left behind by his childhood friend Roithamer, a troubled genius who committed suicide. Burying himself in his friend’s literary remains to understand the reasons for his suicide, the narrator “finds himself dominated by the thoughts of another man” and fears he “is in constant danger of doing himself in by his constant thinking of the other man’s thoughts, in danger “Roll Playing,” 25; Moody also recalls their meeting in his introduction to the Dalkey Archive edition of J R. 12 The Loser, trans. Jack Dawson (New York: Knopf, 1991), v. 11

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of deadening himself out of existence,”13 which Gaddis paraphrases on page 22 of Agapē Agape as his writer begins brooding on alter egos and the “self-who-can-do-more.” The protagonist of Concrete, a musicologist named Rudolph, resembles Gaddis’s writer even closer as he struggles to begin writing the Mendelssohn biography he has been researching for ten years, sensing he will never finish it. The writer is alarmed to see this mirror image of his own situation, noting that Rudolph is even on the same medication he is (prednisone), and goes so far as to accuse Bernhard of “plagiarizing my work right here in front of me before I’ve even written it!” (12).14 The writer realizes his plans to create two piles of research materials is also anticipated in Concrete, and Rudolph’s memory of running through the streets of Palma (in Majorca) when younger recurs several times to the writer as he recalls his own youth (and the author’s: Gaddis visited Palma in September 1950). The theme of failure, as prominent in Agapē Agape as in any of Gaddis’s works, is evoked in The Loser, about an excellent pianist named Wertheimer who is so overwhelmed by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s genius that he gives up his own career as a pianist and eventually hangs himself. The sympathetic narrator, endlessly revising an essay on Gould, likewise gave up his musical career because “to belong to the best wasn’t good enough for me, I wanted to be the best or not at all, and so I gave it up” (85), which Gaddis quotes on page 37. The two geniuses in particular, Roithamer in Correction and Gould in The Loser, represent a figure that had fascinated Gaddis all his life: the superior being who reminds others of their shortcomings and compromises.

Self and Other Agapē Agape is a bravura cadenza on a theme Gaddis developed with countless variations in his four earlier novels, “the self who can do more.” As I wrote at the beginning of Chapter 3, Gaddis meant by this “the creative self if it had not been killed by the other”—by a drive, obsession, or weakness that prevents one from becoming one’s true or ideal self. Beginning with The Recognitions, Gaddis depicts characters either striving to recognize Correction, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Knopf, 1979), 25. Joseph Tabbi, the first to write of the Bernhard connection (in his afterword), notes that both Gaddis and Bernhard took prednisone for relief from emphysema, and that the drug influenced the texture of Agapē Agape: “its jag is consistent with the peculiar pacing of the narrative he left us—its meandering, hallucinatory quality that suddenly comes to a focus on one particular object, one item within the field of vision capable of absorbing attention and momentarily freeing the body from pain and breathlessness” (104).

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and live up to their authentic self or, more often, settling for a false self that conforms to cultural expectations, “a mask [that] may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality” (3), betraying their superior Other—as it’s often capitalized in Agapē Agape—to pursue inauthentic, socially constructed ideals instead. While preparing to return to the States from Central America, Otto prepares an idealized version of himself both in the character of Gordon in his play and in his mirror, preparing a face to meet the faces he will meet in New York, and the rest of the novel charts the clashes between who he is and who he thinks he is. Frank Sinisterra, who dons and doffs a number of disguises and personae, thinks he is an artist, not a smalltime counterfeiter. Mr. Pivner tries to construct a new, improved identity with the help of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Stanley, on the other hand, senses something is blocking him from becoming his ideal self, dramatized when he attempts to translate the Michelangelo poem from which Gaddis took the term “the self who could do more” (322), a poem that plays a key role in Agapē Agape as well. Quoting Montaigne’s “Of the Inconstancy of Our Actions,” Basil Valentine tells Wyatt, “—There’s as much difference between us and ourselves as between ourselves and others” (553), a line that will be repeated in J R (486, misattributed to Pascal) and in comic circumstances by Oscar Crease, of all people (FHO 545). The grubby young protagonist of J R envies the version of himself he reads about in the media, a bulldog-jawed alter ego wheeling-and-dealing out in the business world while he’s conducting business from a phone booth. Jack Gibbs frequently changes personae as he avoids confronting his true self, while Thomas Eigen doesn’t have the drive to recover his creative self, and Edward Bast learns to readjust his unrealistic version of himself. In Carpenter’s Gothic, McCandless—like Gibbs and Eigen, yet another of Gaddis’s personae—listens as his nemesis Lester needles him on the differences between who he really is as opposed to who he thinks he is, idealized in the protagonist of the novel he once wrote, and idealized further by Liz, who finds his alter ego in a character in Hilton’s Lost Horizon who, unlike McCandless, felt “that he was still a part of all that he could have been” (95). A Frolic of His Own rings numerous changes on this theme, sometimes seriously (in Once at Antietam, Thomas’s split personality is embodied by the two substitutes he sends to war, symbolizing the two halves of the country then at war), and more often comically, as when someone steals Lily’s purse and she laments the difference between her straitened financial circumstances and those of her “self-who-can-do-more”: —this woman that stole my purse is out there someplace pretending she’s me with all my credit cards and everything where she used my

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bank credit card before I could stop it so these other real checks I wrote bounced, I can’t even identify myself and she’s buying these plane tickets she could be in Paris right now being me and I don’t even know what I’m doing there till I get this bill for these lizard skin shoes I bought at some store in Beverly Hills where I always wanted to go, and it’s spooky. (26)

And of course in Oscar’s case there’s a yawning gulf between who he is—“a civilized man! … maybe one of the last ones left” (334)—and who he really is, a point driven home often in the context of his personal-injury case, which his lawyer sums up as “a suit between who you are and who you think you are” (544–5). Oscar in fact provides the best formulation of the concept when he describes the escaped slave John Henry as being “suspended, between what he is and what he can never be” (105). Rifling through his notes at the beginning of Agapē Agape, the writer comes across a Saturday Evening Post ad for a foot-pumped player piano that “breaks your heart,” holding out the promise to the nonmusician to “participate” in the creation of great music, “discovering his unsuspected talent with his feet, this romantic illusion of participating, playing Beethoven yourself that was being destroyed by the technology” of recordings (17), which reduced him to the role of a passive consumer rather than an active participant and weakened his relationship to the artist. Hence the novella’s title: participation resembles “agapē, that love feast in the early church, yes. That’s what’s lost, what you don’t find in these products of the imitative arts that are made for reproduction on a grand scale” (37), like movies, where the individual joins “the herd numbed and silenced agape at blood sex and guns […]” (55). This loss is another example of “the creative self if it had not been killed by the other,” to quote again from Gaddis’s notes for The Recognitions. Suddenly the writer remembers “O God, O God, O God, Chi m’a tolto a me stesso that’s Michelangelo, that’s from my book, Ch’a me fusse più presso O più di me potessi that’s in my book, who has taken from me that self who could do more …” (17–18; cf. R 322). The writer then returns to his player piano material but henceforth keeps returning to this concept of an other self, finding in his books and notes examples ranging from ancient d(a)emons to cutting-edge clones. Twenty-five hundred years of culture and science are sucked into the black hole of the writer’s encyclopedic mind as he broods on all the metaphors for altered egos and disconcerting others that writers, philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, and psychologists have created to characterize this concept: “it’s the savage doing the magic ritual kangaroo dance he is the kangaroo, one of them has become the

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other” (19), but not a double as in Dostoevsky’s novella of that name, or the two souls in Goethe’s Faust trying to separate from one another (20). It’s closer to the way the narrator of Bernhard’s Correction melds his thoughts with Roithamer’s (20–1). It’s that youthful self that is still within, not an outside doppelganger like the one in The Double or the Austrian plagiarist who anticipated his thoughts (22). The writer searches for his copy of E. R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational, where he remembers reading of the ancient Greek “belief in a detachable soul or self, which by suitable techniques can be withdrawn from the body even during life, a self which is older than the body and will outlast it,” and where he read of Pythagoras’s idea of an eternal soul, later taken over by Christian theologians.15 The same source informed him of “these dangerous demons with lives and energies of their own according to Homer was it? [yes, in the Iliad] that aren’t really part of yourself since you can’t control them but they can force you to do things you wouldn’t do otherwise before we get to the belly-talkers you hear about from Aristophanes and Plato […] This second voice inside them they had conversations with and predicted the future in hoarse belly-voices […]” (23). The notion of detachable selves leads him by way of free association to automatons, to Frankenstein’s monster, dybbuks, demonic possession, the mind–body problem, to repressed selves revived by psychotherapists, even to Tolstoy stalking Turgenev like “some monstrous, some detachable self, some dangerous demon not really part of you since you can’t control it but it can force you to do things […]” (66).16 This reminds him of the sex drive, of the independence of the body from the mind; at the beginning of his monologue the writer remembers “coming out of the anaesthesia down in the recovery room tried to raise my leg and it suddenly jumped up by itself ” (3), which leads to the religious notion of the “body as the soul’s prison” (26), leading a pleasure-seeking life at odds with the aspirations of the self who can do more. He thinks of clones, of Glenn Gould’s wish to become the piano in the same way the savage becomes the kangaroo, of Wagner as Nietzsche’s Other, of Svengali training Trilby to become his Other, his self who could more in du Maurier’s once-popular novel. The writer even evokes Roland Barthes as he follows Flaubert into “the embrace of the death of the author whose intentions have no connection with the meaning of the text which is indeterminate anyway, a multidimensional space where the modern scriptor is born with this, this detachable self this second voice inside predicting the future in its hoarse belly-voice” (49), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951, 146–7, 144. For an analysis of this phenomenon (with references to Goethe and Dostoevsky), see Todd E. Feinberg’s Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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a notion he finds as ridiculous as a fortune-telling tummy.17 Realizing he has become his Other, the writer becomes so befuddled by all these manifestations and metaphors that he claims he bought a house not for himself but for his creative self: “this Other I bought it for was a fiction kangaroo” (68). The zaniness of some of the crosscultural connections, which recall some of the bizarre metaphorical connections made in The Recognitions, indicates Gaddis hadn’t lost his comic touch, including his willingness to indulge in a silly pun on the penultimate page, a moment of high seriousness: “says one pupa to the other as a butterfly passes, you’d never get me into an outfit like that” (95). The Tolstoy–Turgenev and Nietzsche–Wagner pairings seem to remind the writer of a similar self-who-can-do-more in his own life, who is apparently the “you” addressed in the writer’s outbursts during the climax of the novel (pp. 79–91), apparently based, as Joseph Tabbi first suggested, on Gaddis’s mentor Martin Dworkin. (It’s possible some of these “you”s are addressed to the reader as well, as in the final line of J R: “—Hey! You listening … ?”, which is echoed here: “Can you hear me? Listen?” [91].) But during the novella’s denouement, the writer realizes that someone else is the Other he feels he has betrayed. Near the end he returns to the Michelangelo passage and attempts to translate it: O Dio, o Dio, who has taken the one closest to me who could do more than no, not it’s not that pedestrian it’s fifteenth, sixteenth century Italian nearer poetry, Who nearer to me Or more mighty yes, more mighty than I Tore me away from myself. Tore me away! che poss’, what can I do? I’ll tell you che poss’ io! Get him back, whoever took this Other, tore away the closest to me who could do more […] (94–5)

He realizes his Other is his younger self, whom he feels he has betrayed. Cicero invented the term “alter ego,” by which he meant “a second self, a trusted friend”: in his Letters to Atticus he writes, “I am reproaching myself far more than you, and if I do reproach you it is as my alter ego; also I am looking for someone to share the blame.”18 But Gaddis’s writer feels he has Even without the demeaning reference to Barthes’s “Death of the Author” essay in Gaddis’s “Old Foes with New Faces” (RSP 97), it’s obvious that Gaddis, like Judge Crease, would find the French theorist’s notion “frivolous.” On the other hand, Barthes’s definition of a text in “The Death of the Author” suits Agapē Agape: “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” See Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146. 18 Letter 60 (III.15) in Letters to Atticus, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 2:33. 17

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betrayed that trusted alter ego: “That old friendship between myself and myself broken by age coming on, left my ideas and opinions to suit public opinion and be part of it a, a yes a nonperson looking back at the arrogant self-made self ” he used to be, the “arrogant youth” who possessed “the rage and energy and boundless excitement” to write a book like The Recognitions, a book that is now his enemy (95). He shrinks from his younger self as from a Rilkean angel, and realizes he will not be able to complete his book, for he is not the same person he once was. In addition to the careful positioning of the Michelangelo madrigal as formal bookends (pp. 17–18, 94–5), the iterative imagery, and the traditional structure of rising action, climax, and denouement, the heart-rending conclusion is the strongest indication that Agapē Agape is indeed a novel rather than “a thinly veiled autobiographical rant.” The writer emerges at the end as a character distinct from Gaddis himself, despite their nearly identical views and background, just enough to nudge Agapē Agape into the category of fiction. Though Gaddis did relax his previously rigid antipublicity stance from Carpenter’s Gothic onward, he could hardly be said to have relaxed his artistic rigor or left his “ideas and opinions to suit public opinion,” as the writer accuses himself; they in fact became harsher, darker, even more opposed to public opinion. In one of the last interviews he gave, Gaddis was asked how he felt about his first book: With extremely mixed feelings. It’s rather like going back to a place you’ve known from childhood. Everything is familiar, but still strange. A few years ago I went to Madrid, where I started writing The Recognitions in 1948. I tried to look for the small boarding house where I stayed at the time, but I couldn’t find it. This made me very annoyed, until I eventually realized that I wasn’t being nostalgic for the actual place, but for my youth. The same thing happens to me whenever I return to this book. But when all’s said and done, I’m left with a feeling of sympathy— if not for the book, then for the young man I once was, and for the intentions that I set myself with that book.19

That’s a far cry from considering the book his “enemy,” nor do the writer’s claims during the second hour of his monologue that “I’ve been wrong about everything in my life it’s all been fraud and fiction, let everybody down except my daughters maybe” (48) sound like the Gaddis of his letters, interviews, and conversation. Like anyone, Gaddis had moments of self doubt, but they are exaggerated for the purpose of the novel, fictionalized. On a bad day Gaddis may have felt that “I’m forgotten that I’m left on the Scheck, “Das amerikanische Virus,” trans. John Soutter.

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shelf with the dead white guys in the academic curriculum that my prizes are forgotten … try[ing] to hide the failure of everything I’d promised there left stranded, like some maiden aunt’s Torschlusspanik at being left unmarried on the shelf ” (48, 80–1), but that doesn’t sound like the Gaddis of his final years, when all his novels were in print and new translations underway, when several new books and essays on his work were coming out, and when the German reading public treated him like a movie star. It’s during passages like these when the previously overlapping image of writer and author separate slightly, the fictional writer panicking at the thought that people will say he betrayed everyone, “that I betrayed even myself from the fear of trying to carry the unforgiving burden of the real artist” (80), while the real author calmly types this up while considering its rhythm and diction. The dramatic arc of the narrative demanded a deviation from autobiography at that point. The two slightly separated images merge back into one on the final page as both the writer and author evoke “Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things are possible pursued by Age where we are now,” but part ways again in the closing lines regarding that Youth: the writer resents him, the author sympathizes with him. This is speculation, of course; Gaddis’s notes indicate he had other intentions for the conclusion, which makes it difficult to assess the published work with much confidence. Sensing the rapid approach of a literal deadline, Gaddis finished off the novel as best he could. I’m reminded of the conclusion of his old friend David Markson’s last novel, likewise featuring an elderly, lonely writer surrounded by cultural fragments. Two pages before the end, Markson’s protagonist writes: “Als ick kan. Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating, even while not even sure in what language— is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up by van Eyck’s use of it. That’s it, I can do no more? All I have left? I can go no further?” Two pages later, the novel ends: “Als ick kan.”20 If Gaddis still had the source books he used for the van Eyck material in The Recognitions, back when he was the self who could do more, he may have been tempted to use the same line to conclude his last novel. Agapē Agape was published in October 2002 along with The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings, whose material on player pianos and the mechanization of the arts was useful to reviewers assessing Gaddis’s final novel. Most of them wrote positive notices, though in some cases the emphasis was more on Gaddis’s lifetime achievement than on this dark, knotted novella. The most notorious was novelist Jonathan Franzen’s The Last Novel (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), 188, 190.

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essay-review “Mr. Difficult” in the New Yorker (reprinted the following year in his essay collection How to Be Alone), where the emphasis was more on his conflicted feelings about Gaddis and difficult fiction than on the books at hand.21 It in turn generated essays by Cynthia Ozick, Ben Marcus, and others debating the nature of difficulty in fiction that continues to this day, in which Gaddis’s name usually turns up. There’s no denying Agapē Agape is Gaddis’s least impressive, least satisfying work, “a wooden shack compared to the elaborate mansions of the past,” as Michael Ravitch put it in his review (152–3), and which recalls the architectural imagery of Carpenter’s Gothic. Gaddis’s final novel better deserves the metafictional reflections he had made on his third: “—a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions, the inside’s a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale,” and he may have hoped that readers would take the same attitude toward it that McCandless does toward his novel: “—it’s just an afterthought why are you so damned put out by it. This novel is just a footnote, a postscript […]” (227–8, 139). A footnote, a postscript to his earlier novels is probably the best way to regard Agapē Agape; and yet, just as that premature evaluation turned out to underestimate the durable Carpenter’s Gothic, perhaps Gaddis once again builded better than he knew.

See Michael Ravitch’s late review of Agapē Agape in the Yale Review for a smart, detailed rebuttal to Franzen’s review.

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In the American Grain

Despite the Central American and European settings and mythic dimensions of The Recognitions, despite the references in his later fiction to everything from the African origins of humankind to recent “scenes of mayhem from Londonderry to Chandigarh,” it’s clear that America has always been Gaddis’s great subject. The theme of personal failure he identified for his lectures on American literature is subsumed in his own work by the larger theme of the failure of America itself. Throughout his novels, as in many of Kerouac’s and Pynchon’s, there is a feeling of disappointment at America’s failure to fulfill its potential, to live up to the magnificent expectations held for the New World ever since Columbus declared it the Terrestrial Paradise predicted by Scripture. Instead, we find a country in the first novel so immersed in counterfeit it can no longer tell the difference between the genuine and the phony, except to prefer the latter; in the second, people talking themselves to death in a country running down from cultural entropy; and in the third, America at its last gasp, facing the yellow dead-end sign planted at the foot of the novel’s first page. “—It’s too late to try to …” Liz murmurs at one point, only to be interrupted by Paul’s more final “—Too late” (216). Carpenter’s Gothic, like The Great Gatsby sixty years before it, suggests that it is too late to reverse the tide, to restore the promise of the American dream. In fact, as McCandless points out in a valedictory speech late in the novel, the dream has become a nightmare: —Two hundred years building this great bastion of middle class values, fair play, pay your debts, fair pay for honest work, two hundred years that’s about all it is, progress, improvement everywhere, what’s worth doing is worth doing well and they [“the new generation”] find out that’s the most dangerous thing of all, all our grand solutions turn into their nightmares. Nuclear energy to bring cheap power everywhere and all they hear is radiation threats and what in hell to do with the waste. Food for the millions and they’re back eating organic sprouts and stone ground flour because everything else is poisonous additives, pesticides poisoning the earth, poisoning the rivers the oceans and the conquest of space turns into military satellites and high technology where the only

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metaphor we’ve given them is the neutron bomb and the only news is today’s front page … (230)

The only survivors in Carpenter’s Gothic—Paul, Edie, and the smirking neighborhood kids—hint at an even bleaker future, dominated by moral jackals and hyenas: the world of A Frolic of His Own, which finds the country getting louder, stupider, greedier, and more litigious. In the fifth and final novel, the dying writer not only symbolizes the dying nation, but his lost youth evokes the lost potential of the country-that-could-do-more. It’s a mercy Gaddis didn’t live a little longer; the America of the first decades of the twenty-first century would have sickened him to death. Even though Gaddis’s novels have contemporary settings, he avoids the historical amnesia McCandless complains of in his last line above by associating each of his novels with specific aspects of the American past: in The Recognitions, the Calvinist tradition of New England, nineteenthcentury Protestantism and anti-Catholicism, twentieth-century expatriation, and even Columbus’s voyage of discovery; in J R, late-nineteenth-century social and educational reform movements, robber barons and unregulated capitalism, and the Protestant work ethic of Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger; in Carpenter’s Gothic, the anti-intellectual religious tradition that has bedeviled America every other generation since the Great Awakening in the 1700s, the legacy of the South’s defeat in the Civil War—which created “this cradle of stupidity where they get patriotism and Jesus all mixed together because that’s the religion of losers” (224), and the legacy of the more recent Vietnam War; in A Frolic of His Own, the Civil War itself, social Darwinism, and the development of legal thought from Oliver Wendell Holmes onward; and in Agapē Agape, the mechanization of the arts from the Civil War to the end of the twentieth century. Although Gaddis did not write the kind of historical fiction favored by Barth and Pynchon (and, among younger writers, Powers and Vollmann), he joins them in trying to correct that fault William Carlos Williams complained of to Valéry Larbaud in his documentary history In the American Grain: “It is an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a source in America for everything we think or do.”1 Gaddis’s work is also anchored in America’s literary traditions. The criticism of puritan/fundamentalist religion in his first and third novels looks back to Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and Melville’s harsh critiques of Christianity, but also to Mark Twain (Christian Science as well as In the American Grain (1925; New York: New Directions, 1956), 109.

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mainstream Christianity) and to such works as Harold Frederic’s Damnation of Theron Ware and Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry. Gaddis’s use of apocalypse is firmly rooted in an American tradition that R. W. B. Lewis has traced back to Melville’s Confidence-Man, which he considers the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subsequent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and The Mysterious Stranger, for example; and more recently, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Faulkner’s The Hamlet, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Thomas Pyncheon’s [sic] V. Melville bequeathed to those works—in very differing proportions—the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders […].2

Gaddis’s satire of the abuses of capitalism in J R joins a long tradition of American antibusiness novels running from such nineteenth-century novels as George Lippard’s The Quaker City, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s Elsie Venner (which Gaddis owned), and William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silus Lapham, through Theodore Dreiser’s Cowperwood trilogy, more Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt and Dodsworth), to novels by Gaddis’s contemporaries Vonnegut and Heller. In fact, John Brooks grumbles that Gaddis may have killed off the genre: “With ‘J R’ we have the American business novel, as to form, coming to the sort of dead end that the novel in general came to with James Joyce.”3 I prefer to see J R as capping that genre and disproving Henry Nash Smith’s complaint that “serious writers seem unable to take an interest in a system of values based on economic assumptions,” and further disproved by any number of novels published after he made that rather shortsighted remark in 1964.4 A Frolic of His Own caps the genre of legal novels, or novels that wrestle with legal issues, that has been a staple of American fiction ever since Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, one that includes several works by Melville (“Bartleby the Scrivener,” Benito Cereno, Billy Budd), Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Barth’s Floating Opera, Oates’s Do with Me What You Will, De la Pava’s A Naked Singularity, and numerous popular novels like Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Afterword to The Confidence-Man (New York: New American Library, 1964), 263. “Fiction of the Managerial Class,” New York Times Book Review, April 8, 1984, 36. See also Emily Stipes Watts’s The Businessman in American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), whose half-dozen references to J R are similarly unsympathetic. 4 “The Search for a Capitalist Hero,” as quoted in Watts, 3.

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Finally, Gaddis’s allegiance to the comic tradition in American literature should not be overlooked, despite the gravity of his themes. As Lewis points out, even the Apocalypse can be enormously comic, and all of Gaddis’s work is animated by a comic brio that adds a kind of desperate hilarity to his grim themes. From the Marx Brothers shenanigans in J R to more subtle examples of learned wit, Gaddis’s novels, like Janus, wear the masks of comedy and tragedy simultaneously, a strategy that prevents them from becoming ponderous or depressing, and one that relies on the comic as much for its entertainment value as for its philosophical stance. Gaddis’s favorite review of J R, for example, appeared not in any of the prestigious New York journals or literary quarterlies but in the “provincial” Cleveland Plain-Dealer, where reviewer Alicia Metcalf Miller admitted: “If Gaddis is a moralist, he is also a master of satire and humor. J R is a devastatingly funny book. Reading it, I laughed loudly and unashamedly in public places, and at home, more than once, I saw my small children gather in consternation as tears of laughter ran down my face.” Literary critics may consider that inconsequential praise, but Gaddis’s fellow writers would be green with envy.

A Writer’s Writer In fact, writers rather than critics were the first to recognize Gaddis’s importance, as witnessed by the surprisingly large number of contemporary novels in which Gaddis and/or his novels appear.5 His early association with the Beats led to his becoming the model for Harry Lees in Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness (1952) and for Harold Sand in Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans (1958). (In turn, Gaddis lifted a few lines from William Burroughs’s Junkie [1953] for his own demi-Beat novel.) David Markson, acquainted with the Beats but closer in spirit to his mentor Malcolm Lowry, refers to The Recognitions and parodies Gaddis’s style of dialogue in his detective novel Epitaph for a Tramp (1959). He continued to refer to him in his later novels: the opening line of The Recognitions is quoted (in a chapter of opening lines) in his delightful Springer’s Progress (1977); Gaddis flits through the memory of mad Kate in Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988); and there are further allusions to Gaddis and his characters in Markson’s final four “assemblage” novels. In Joseph McElroy’s first novel, A Smuggler’s Bible (1966), a character tries “to go on with a one-thousand-page novel I was reading, but, as usual for the past few months, I got caught in one of the See the “Gaddis in Fiction” page on the Gaddis Annotations website (which was adapted from this portion of my 1989 book) for more detailed accounts.

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author’s closet observations. I call them that because they close me into their suggestions, and before I know it my suspicions of the author are so many and shifting that I’m cut off from the book and have to stop reading,” which further clues confirm as a reference to Gaddis’s first novel. The Recognitions appears on the bookshelf of the protagonist of Richard Horn’s innovative novel Encyclopedia (1969), and J R is named and amusingly imitated in John Sladek’s science fiction novel Roderick (1980). Gaddis’s friend Stanley Elkin included in his novel The Magic Kingdom (1985) an eight-year-old geriatric named Charles Mudd-Gaddis—which bothered Gaddis at first but that he later came to appreciate (Letters 509)—and an editor named Virginia Wrappers (“the guardian of standards”) in Charles Simmons’s jeu d’esprit The Belles Lettres Papers (1987) includes Gaddis on her list of the twenty-five best writers in America. Sarah Gaddis’s novel Swallow Hard (1991) features her father under the name Lad Thompkins, and Bill Gaddis probably contributed to Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist in Mao II (1991) by Don DeLillo, who was friends with Gaddis by that time. His younger admirer Rick Moody included Gaddis as one of his favorite writers in “Primary Sources,” the most unconventional fiction in The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven (1995), and in Ethan Mordden’s gay novel Some Men Are Lookers (1997), two characters briefly compare the virtues of Gaddis’s first two novels. Gaddis’s fellow Harvard alum John Updike refers to him a few times in Bech at Bay (1998) in the context of his membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and after his death Gaddis continued to be mentioned in such novels as Kurt Andersen’s Turn of the Century (1999), Frederick Busch’s Don’t Tell Anyone (2000), and Joseph Heller’s posthumously published Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2002). Gaddis seems to be the model for Richard Whitehurst in Kurt Wenzel’s Lit Life (2001), and the title of Gaddis’s first novel is echoed in that of The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen, whose best-read character uses the e-mail address [email protected]. At least a dozen lines from Gaddis’s novels appear in Carter Scholz’s Radiance (2002), a brilliant novel about the nuclear-arms industry. Scholz, who wrote the Salon obituary of Gaddis (and earlier in his career used “Wyatt Gwyon” as a pseudonym for comicbook stories), recreates Gaddis’s style with uncanny accuracy, down to his characteristic punctuation. Gaddis is pretty obviously the model for the novelist Joshua Fels in the “Author” chapter of Stephen Dixon’s autobiographical novel I (2002), and is mentioned in passing in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies (2006). Gaddis’s time in Mexico in 1947 is fictionalized in Drew Johnson’s story “Edson to 1958” (2009), and in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot (2011), set in 1982, three college students mention The Recognitions. One of them, Leonard Bankhead, seems to be modeled

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on David Foster Wallace, whose posthumous novel The Pale King was published the same year; in the “Author’s Foreword”—a metafiction placed 68 pages into the novel—Wallace’s narrator writes of his early ambitions: “My specific dream was of becoming an immortally great fiction writer à la Gaddis or Anderson, Balzac or Perec, &c.” Though some of these are trivial, they attest to Gaddis’s cult-like appeal. A Wisconsin-based rock group called itself Gaddis in homage—“We sound like a Gaddis book reads,” they claimed—and the J R Family of Companies even inspired a small press: in 2009, Gaddis-admirer Scott Bryan Wilson founded JR Vansant, which has published six chapbooks as of this writing, with J R’s personal stamp on the copyright page, as in: “This here chapbook is JR Vansant #2.” Gaddis’s stylistic influence on contemporary writers is more difficult to assess. I noted his general contribution to black humor and the revival of Menippean satire in my first chapter, and his direct influence on certain novelists is obvious. Some novels mentioned above, like Sladek’s Roderick and Scholtz’s Radiance, show explicit signs of influence, while in others, like Markson’s Going Down (1970), the influence is implicit. In a letter to me dated January 11, 1988, Markson wrote: There is no question in my mind that The Recognitions is the monumental American novel of the century. And, having read it twice when it came out, and then again perhaps five years later, I’d find it a miracle if I hadn’t been influenced. Certainly in writing my novel Going Down, not only with a good deal of the intellectual materials I felt licensed to use, but also in the way I used them, I found Gaddis inescapable. I mean quite literally in what I allowed my central character to “know,” for instance. But probably “inescapable” is the wrong word, since I believed the influence to be liberating more than anything else.

Other novelists have likewise testified to Gaddis’s influence on their work: McElroy acknowledged the role The Recognitions played in shaping his first novel,6 and Harry Mathews told me he modeled the title of his first novel, The Conversions (1962), on that of Gaddis’s first novel, though he didn’t actually read it until sometime in the 1970s.7 Robert Coover’s first novel, a religious satire entitled The Origin of the Brunists (1966), has much in common thematically and stylistically with Gaddis’s first, which “Neural Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts,” TriQuarterly 34 (Fall 1975): 205. 7 In addition to Franzen’s Corrections and Mathews’s Conversions, Adam Levin’s 1,000page novel The Instructions (2010) echoes the title of Gaddis’s 1,000-page novel, but perhaps it’s only a coincidence. Levin’s novel is closer in tone to George Saunders and David Foster Wallace than to Gaddis. 6

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he read in 1960—his 2014 sequel is even longer and more blasphemous than The Recognitions—and later novels like Gerald’s Party (1986) have the same overwhelming, sometimes claustrophobic feel of Gaddis’s later novels. Robert Shea reportedly had The Recognitions in mind when he wrote the Illuminatus! trilogy with Robert Anton Wilson (1975), but the result more resembles Pynchon’s paranoid fictions than Gaddis’s. Some of Donald Barthelme’s dialogue-stories resemble pages from J R, but the resemblance may be as misleading as that with Gilbert Sorrentino’s dialogue-novel Crystal Vision (1981), which was not inspired by J R (which he reviewed) but by William Carlos Williams’s A Novelette. Another perceptive reviewer of J R, D. Keith Mano, went on to publish a long novel called Take Five (1982) that has the same narrative energy and outrageousness as Gaddis’s second novel, and likewise relies heavily on demotic dialogue. Peter Wolfe argues persuasively that Gaddis influenced the dialogue-heavy novels of George V. Higgins,8 and Tom LeClair was right to bring up The Recognitions in his review of Evan Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook (1996), which, like his subsequent novels, has sheets of Gaddisian dialogue, though this is only coincidental .9 Gaddis’s novels have also earned the praise of Don DeLillo, Stanley Elkin, William H. Gass, Paul West, Samuel R. Delany, Alexander Theroux, and Sergio De La Pava, among others, but it would be safer to say these novelists share affinities with Gaddis rather than show his influence.10 The novelist most often linked with Gaddis by way of both influence and affinity is Thomas Pynchon. V. especially has struck a number of critics as reminiscent of The Recognitions in many ways: structurally, both consist of dual narrative lines that occasionally intersect; both indict masculine principles for a variety of modern ills and feature motherless sons attempting to restore the balance by aligning themselves with feminine principles; both alternate between Greenwich Village scenes and European locations; both are wildly allusive, often to the same authors; both use comical names for some of their characters; and so on. Similarly, Gaddis’s J R resembles Gravity’s Rainbow in some ways: both often allude to Wagner and Weber; both hold Western economic policies chiefly responsible for the deteriorating quality of modern life; both indict American and European exploitation of Third Havoc in the Hub: A Reading of George V. Higgins (Landham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 62. 9 “Voices from an American Nightmare,” Washington Post Book World, June 9, 1996, 11. Asked about Gaddis’s possible influence, Dara told me that while working on The Lost Scrapbook he heard that J R was a novel in dialogue and checked it out from the American Library in Paris: “Took the novel home, plunked it open, tapped it shut— didn’t want the influence” (email January 19, 2014). 10 See “William Gaddis: A Portfolio,” assembled by Rick Moody for Conjunctions (2003), for further testimonies to Gaddis from various fiction writers. 8

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World nations; and both make demands upon the reader unheard of since Finnegans Wake. With the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic, the pattern seemed complete: several reviewers noted Gaddis now had a counterpart to Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, another short work featuring a neglected housewife haunted by ambiguities. The pattern falls apart after that: Gaddis’s final two novels have little in common with the novels Pynchon published from Vineland onward, though Gregory Comnes detects a reference to Gaddis’s third novel by way of a “Carpenter Gothic outhouse” in that novel, and further suggests that a character’s remark about not being “out there doing the world’s work”11 becomes “an oblique allusion” by Gaddis to Pynchon’s fourth novel in his fourth novel when Madhar Pai tells Oscar, “—We don’t all have the talents to be poets, writers, most of us have to be content to do the world’s work” (FHO 361).12 But the “world’s work” is a common phrase, and of no more weight than the reference to Gravity’s Rainbow in Agapē Agape regarding its Pulitzer Prize nomination (61). In an essay on this particular topic, I found that the similarities between their works looked more like a case of what Leni Pökler in Gravity’s Rainbow, using electrical imagery, would describe as “‘Parallel, not series.’”13 The resemblances between V. and The Recognitions are of the duplicitous sort that led many reviewers to assume Gaddis’s novel was an imitation of Joyce’s Ulysses, and the thematic similarities between the later novels obscure the pronounced tonal differences and cultural allegiances that separate the two. As Pynchon critic Thomas Moore noted, Gaddis’s work “lacks Pynchon’s delight in the varied, zany, countercultural aspects of popular culture. It also lacks Pynchon’s scientific and occult interests, his brilliant colloquial style (though Gaddis is a better and thoroughly damning mimic of spoken colloquial voices), and Pynchon’s warmth”14—which has been growing ever warmer from Vineland onward. What can be said, however, is that Gaddis shares Pynchon’s disappointment that America didn’t live up to its democratic rhetoric, as David Cowart said of the latter,15 and that Pynchon is Gaddis’s only rival as the greatest American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century. Along similar lines, Gaddis has been often named as an influence on David Foster Wallace, and while Wallace owed more to Pynchon, Barth, Vineland (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 26, 291. “The Aesthetics of Improvisation in A Frolic of His Own,” in Profils américains, 196, 197n. 11. 13 “‘Parallel, Not Series’: Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis” (1983). 14 The Style of Connectedness: “Gravity’s Rainbow” and Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 20–1. 15 Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 127. 11 12

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and DeLillo, there are traces of Gaddis to be found in Wallace’s novels. His biographer notes that Wallace took a copy of The Recognitions with him to Yaddo in 1989, but also makes that period sound too hectic to assume Wallace did more than dip into it.16 But by 1992, when he finished his wellknown essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (published a year later), he was sufficiently familiar with Gaddis’s first two novels to make intelligent, if only passing, remarks on them.17 I’ve noted a few apparent borrowings from The Recognitions in Infinite Jest; Greg Carlisle has found several parallels between the two huge novels; and Stephen Burn has shown how Wallace’s dialogue resembles Gaddis’s.18 (One further parallel: Gaddis regarded The Recognitions as a comic novel and was surprised everyone took it so seriously; Wallace intended Infinite Jest to be a sad novel and was surprised so many found it funny.) As Burn notes, Wallace taught Gaddis’s novels from the mid 1990s onward, specifically J R and A Frolic of His Own, and the corporate and legal worlds of those two have something in common with the IRS office setting of Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King. I’ve quoted its foreword above, and Wallace praised Gaddis on many earlier occasions, but he differs from Gaddis in exactly the same ways Pynchon does per Thomas Moore’s remark above. Rather than pursue further possible borrowings, it is better to conclude that Gaddis didn’t so much influence Wallace as provide a model of the kind of literary stature and artistic integrity he hoped to achieve as a member of “the commercial avant-garde.”19 Gaddis’s body of work may have a superficial resemblance to the output of other writers, but it displays an organic form all its own. Speaking in 1987, Joseph McElroy likened it to the contracting universe: “the big bang” with the thousand-page first novel “and the slow evolution out of that” with J R, “then down to what is almost a paradigm, or a pensée” with Carpenter’s D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 126. See A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 45, 66. Around the same time (1992), I sent Wallace Judge Crease’s opinion from the New Yorker, which Wallace described as “stellar.” 18 “The First Draft Version of Infinite Jest” (May 2003), http://www.thehowlingfantods. com/ij_first.htm; Greg Carlisle, Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2007), 154–5; Stephen Burn, David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” 2nd edn. (New York: Continuum, 2012), 30–1. 19 In a 1996 interview, Wallace made a distinction between writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, who belong to the “commercial avant-garde,” and “extreme avant-garde shit” like “Beckett, and Fiction Collective 2, and Dalkey Archive” (Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen Burn [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012], 71). The “conservative avant-garde” is the term William H. Gass used (in “The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde”) for writers like Gaddis; see Rone Shavers’s “The End of Agapē” (in his and Tabbi’s Paper Empire) for the applicability of this term to Gaddis. 16

17

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Gothic.20 The metaphor would have to be expanded to include Gaddis’s last two novels—a supernova with A Frolic of His Own, then the collapse into the black hole that is Agapē Agape—but I prefer to see his five novels as cultural soundings corresponding to various stages of adulthood as Gaddis passed through them: youth and expansive idealism in The Recognitions; middle age and evasive idealism under siege in J R; late middle age and the loss of idealism in Carpenter’s Gothic; one last frolic in old age in Gaddis’s fourth novel; and a deathbed confession in the posthumous one. Even though all of the novels (save the last) teem with characters of all ages, the men corresponding to Gaddis’s own age during the time of composition dominate the principal moral viewpoint and the darkening pessimistic outlook. In any case, Gaddis’s work reveals an organic continuity elegant in its progression, masterful in its linguistic virtuosity, and relentless in its engagement with the major issues of Western civilization.

Bradford Morrow, “An Interview with Joseph McElroy,” Conjunctions 10 (May 1987): 151.

20

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Bibliography A. Books by William Gaddis The Recognitions. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. Rpt. with an introduction by William H. Gass. New York: Penguin, 1993. Rpt. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. J R. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Rpt. with an introduction by Frederick R. Karl. New York: Penguin, 1993. Rpt. with an introduction by Rick Moody. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. Carpenter’s Gothic. New York: Viking, 1985. Rpt. New York: Penguin, 1986. A Frolic of His Own. New York: Poseidon Press, 1994. Rpt. New York: Scribner, 1995. Agapē Agape. Afterword by Joseph Tabbi. New York: Viking, 2002. Rpt. with an introduction by Sven Birkerts. New York: Penguin, 2003. The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings. Ed. Joseph Tabbi. New York: Penguin, 2002. The Letters of William Gaddis. Ed. Steven Moore, with an afterword by Sarah Gaddis. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.

B. Books and Colloquia on William Gaddis Alberts, Crystal, Christopher Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck, eds. William Gaddis, “The Last of Something.” Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Bloom, Harold, ed. William Gaddis. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Brunel, Jean-Louis, and Michel Gresset, eds. William Gaddis. Profils américains 6 (Autumn 1994). Comnes, Gregory. The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Félix, Brigitte, ed. Reading William Gaddis: A Collective Volume of Essays on William Gaddis’s Novels, from J R to Agapē Agape. Orléans: Presses Universitaires d’Orléans, 2007. Green, Jack. Fire the Bastards! 1962. Rpt. with an introduction by Steven Moore. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992. Johnston, John. Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s “The Recognitions” and Postmodern Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Knight, Christopher J. Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Kuehl, John, and Steven Moore, eds. In Recognition of William Gaddis. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984.

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218 Bibliography Moody, Rick, ed. “William Gaddis: A Portfolio,” Conjunctions 41 (2003): 373–415. Moore, Steven. A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. —William Gaddis. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. O’Brien, John, ed. William Gaddis / Nicholas Mosley Number. Review of Contemporary Fiction 2.2. (Summer 1982): 4–56. Tabbi, Joseph. Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. —and Rone Shavers, eds. Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Wolfe, Peter. A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.

C. Other Gaddis Materials Cited Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán. “The Art of Fiction CI: William Gaddis.” Paris Review 105 (Winter 1987): 54–89. Aldridge, John W. “‘The Ongoing Situation.’” Saturday Review, 4 October 1975, 27–30. Banning, Charles Leslie. “The Time of Our Time: William Gaddis, John Hawkes and Thomas Pynchon.” PhD diss., SUNY at Buffalo, 1977. Benstock, Bernard. “On William Gaddis: In Recognition of James Joyce.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6 (Summer 1965): 177–89. Berkley, Miriam. “PW Interviews: William Gaddis.” Publishers Weekly, 12 July 1985, 56–7. Rpt. in slightly different form as “Credo of a Shy Author: ‘What’s any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles?’” Chicago Sun-Times, July 31, 1985, “Book Week,” 20–1. Birkerts, Sven. “Down by Law.” New Republic, February 7, 1994, 27–30. —“Parting Shots.” New York Times Book Review, October 6, 2002, 15. Bradbury, Malcolm. Writers in Conversation 13: William Gaddis. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1986. Videocassette originally distributed by the Roland Collection, Northbrook, IL. Bush, Frederick. “A Bleak Vision of Gothic America.” Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1985, “Bookworld,” 28–9. Chénetier, Marc. “‘Centaur Meditating on a Saddle’: Fabric and Function of the Narrative Voice in William Gaddis’s J R.” symplokē 14.1–2 (2006): 252–70. Clare, Ralph. “Family Incorporated: William Gaddis’s J R and the Embodiment of Capitalism.” Studies in the Novel 45.1 (Spring 2013): 102–22. Comnes, Gregory. “The Law of the Excluded Muddle: The Ethics of Indeterminacy in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own.” In Powerless Fictions? Ethics, Cultural Critique, and American Fiction in the Age of Postmodernism. Ed. Ricardo Miguel Alfonso. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 25–40.

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D’hoker, Elke. “Order and Chaos: A Critical Analysis of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own.” Licentiate thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1996. Ekelund, Bo G. “Recognizing the Law: Value and Identities in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own.” In Folkways and Law Ways: Law in American Studies. Ed. Helle Porsdam. Odense: Odense University Press, 2001, 113–38. Franzen, Jonathan. “Mr. Difficult.” New Yorker, September 30, 2002, 100–111. Gaddis, Matthew. “Postface,” 119–24. In William Gaddis, Agonie d’agapè. Trans. Claro. Paris: Plon, 2003. Grove, Lloyd. “Harnessing the Power of Babble: The Rich, Comic, Talkative Novels of William Gaddis.” Washington Post, August 23, 1985, “Style,” B1, B10. Ingendaay, Paul. “Agent of Change: An Interview with William Gaddis.” Unpublished translation by John Soutter of “Agent der Veränderung. Ein Gespräch mit William Gaddis.” Rowohlt Literatur Magazin 39 (1997): 64–92. Kakutani, Michiko. “A Novel’s Plot: A Plot to Steal a Plot.” New York Times, January 4, 1994, C20. Koenig, Peter William. “‘Splinters from the Yew Tree’: A Critical Study of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions.” PhD diss., New York University, 1971. Kuehl, John, and Steven Moore. “An Interview with William Gaddis.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 2.2 (Summer 1982): 4–6. Lauzen, Sarah E. “Gaddis, William (1922– ).” In Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986. 373–7. Leader, Zachary. “Jarndyce U.S.A.” Times Literary Supplement, June 3, 1994, 22. LeClair, Tom. “William Gaddis, J R, & the Art of Excess.” Modern Fiction Studies 27 (Winter 1981–2): 587–600. Malmgren, Carl D. “William Gaddis’s J R: The Novel of Babel.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 2.2 (Summer 1982): 7–12. Rpt. in his Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985, 116–23. Mano, D. Keith. “Gaddis’s House Rules.” Harper’s Bookletter, 2.6 (October 27, 1975): 4–5. Marsh, Nicky. “‘Hit Your Educable Public Right in the Supermarket Where They Live’: Risk and Failure in the Work of William Gaddis.” New Formations 80–1 (2013): 179–93. McConnell, Frank. “Difficult Visions.” Boston Globe, 6 January 1994, B44–5. Miller, Alicia Metcalf. “It’s Gaddis and Great.” Cleveland Plain-Dealer, 9 November 1975, sec. 5, 14. Minkoff, Bob. “Is Valhalla Burning?” Cornell Daily Sun, October 24, 1975, 4, 12. Mirkowitz, Tomasz, and Marie-Rose Logan, “‘If You Bring Nothing to a Work …’: An Interview with William Gaddis.” Unpublished translation by Julita Wroniak of “‘Kto do utworu przychodzi z niczym …’ Z Williamem Gaddisem rozmawiają,” Literatura na Świecie 1/150 (1984): 178–89. Moody, Rick. “Roll Playing.” Bookforum 9.4 (Winter 2002): 25.

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220 Bibliography Moore, Steven. “Chronological Difficulties in the Novels of William Gaddis.” Critique 22.1 (Fall 1980): 79–91. —“‘Parallel, Not Series’: Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis.” Pynchon Notes 11 (February 1983): 6–26. —“Reading the Riot Act.” The Nation, April 25, 1994, 569–71. Ozick, Cynthia. “Fakery and Stony Truths.” New York Times Book Review, 7 July 1985, 1, 18. Rpt. as “William Gaddis and the Scion of Darkness” in her Metaphor & Memory. New York: Knopf, 1989, 16–22. Porsdam, Helle. “American Law and the Search for Cultural Redemption: A Discussion of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own.” Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Posner, Richard A. Law and Literature. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009, 45–51. Raban, Jonathan. “At Home in Babel.” New York Review of Books, February 17, 1994, 3–4, 6. Reprinted in Bloom’s William Gaddis, 163–72. Ravitch, Michael. [Review of Agapē Agape.] Yale Review 92.2 (April 2004): 151–63. Rugoff, Milton. [Review of The Recognitions.] New York Herald Tribune, March 13, 1955, “Book Review,” 6. Russell, Alison. “Baedeker’s Babel: William Gaddis’s The Recognitions.” In Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern Travel Literature. London: Palgrave, 2000, 25–49. Scheck, Denis. “Das amerikanische Virus.” Tages-Anzeiger, December 6, 1998. Unpublished translation by John Soutter. Scholz, Carter. “Remembering William Gaddis, Neglected Master.” Salon, 18 December 1998. http://www.salon.com/1998/12/18/feature_19/ Sheu, Chingshun J. “When Love Becomes Necessity: The Role of Epiphany in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions.” Critique 55.3 (May 2014): 237–59. Sperone, Al J. “Mr. Gaddis Builds His Dream House.” Village Voice, August 13, 1985, 43, 45. Steiner, George. “Crossed Lines.” New Yorker, January 26, 1976, 106–9. Tanner, Tony. [Review of the Avon Recognitions.] New York Times Book Review, July 14, 1974, 27–8. Thielemans, Johan. “Intricacies of Plot: Some Preliminary Remarks to William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic.” In Studies in Honour of René Derolez. Ed. A. M. Simon-Vandenbergen. Ghent: Seminarie voor Engelse en Oud-Germaanse Taalkunde R.U.G., 1987. Toney, Richard. [Review of Carpenter’s Gothic.] San Francisco Review of Books, Fall/Winter 1985, 8. Towers, Robert. “No Justice, Only the Law.” New York Times Book Review, January 9, 1994, 1, 22. Tyree, J. M. “Henry Thoreau, William Gaddis, and the Buried History of an Epigraph.” New England Review 25.4 (September 2004): 148–62.

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Warren, James Perrin. [Review of Carpenter’s Gothic.] Southern Humanities Review 21 (Spring 1987): 191–3. Watts, James. “William Gaddis.” In Great Writers of the English Language: Novelists and Prose Writers. Ed. James Vinson. 2 vols. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979, 2:433–4. Weisberg, Robert. “Taking Law Seriously.” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 7.2 (1995): 445–55. Weisenberger, Steven. “Contra Naturam?: Usury in William Gaddis’s J R.” Genre 13 (Spring 1980): 93–109. Wertheim, Larry M. “Law as Frolic: Law and Literature in A Frolic of His Own.” William Mitchell Law Review 21.2 (1995): 421–56.

D. Internet Resources The Gaddis Annotations. http://www.williamgaddis.org/ The Gaddis List. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/gaddis-l/info

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Index Acts of Pilate 34 Agatha of the Cross 65 alchemy 21, 22, 23, 28, 33, 42–51 Aldridge, John 3–4, 16 Alger, Horatio 79, 208 Allen, Bruce 76 American Jurisprudence 149 Andersen, Kurt 211 Anderson, Sherwood 86 Anselm 68, 71 apocalyptic literature 15, 130, 133–4, 136, 209, 210 Apocryphal New Testament 21 Apuleius 61 Aristophanes 31, 201 Aristotle 47, 82, 94, 120, 130 Arnold, Matthew 121 Augustine 37–8, 52, 65, 68, 70 Auster, Paul 211 Averroes 36 Babbage, Charles 187, 190 Bach, Johann Sebastian 51, 82, 92 Baldung, Hans 116 Baldwin, James 133 Banning, Charles 40n. 24 Barnes, Djuna 13, 131 Barth, John 6, 13, 132, 133, 141, 208, 209, 214 Barthelme, Donald 13, 213 Barthes, Roland 201, 202n. 17 Beethoven, Ludwig van 60, 92, 97, 98, 112, 200 Bellamy, Edward 12 Bellow, Saul 14, 54 Benjamin, Walter 189, 194, 195 Benstock, Bernard 8n. 19 Berkley, Miriam 8 Bernhard, Thomas 7, 194, 196–8, 201

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Berthelot, Marcellin 43 Bible 21, 25–6, 30, 31n. 19, 36, 38, 46, 67, 92, 129, 134, 136, 137, 145, 153, 178 Bickerstaffe, Isaac 116 Birkerts, Sven 184, 196n. 9 Bizet, Georges 102 black humor 1, 4, 135, 169, 212 Blake, William 34 Borrow, George 11 Bosch, Hieronymus 31–2, 50 Bouts, Dierick 2, 34 Bowra, C. M. 162, 173 Boyce, William 166 Boyle, Robert 43 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry 13, 209 Bradbury, Malcolm 5, 179n. 23 Brautigan, Richard 131 Broch, Hermann 10, 99 Brontë, Charlotte 11, 131–2, 136 Brooks, John 209 Brossard, Chandler 210 Brown, Charles Brockden 133 Brown, Norman O. 93 Browning, Robert 6, 11, 112 Buchanan, Cynthia 13 Buchner, Alexander 194 Buddhism 21 Bulliett, Richard 79–80 Bulwer-Lytton, Robert 98, 112 Burgess, Anthony 138 Burn, Stephen 215 Burroughs, William S. 13, 125, 133, 210 Busch, Frederick 138, 211 Butler, Samuel 1, 11 Camus, Albert 155, 159, 161n. 8 Cantilena Riplaei see Ripley, George

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224 Index capitalism 85, 87, 93–4, 99, 103–4, 128, 162, 163n. 9, 170, 208, 209 Capote, Truman 13, 131 Cardozo, Benjamin 149 Carlisle, Greg 215 Carlyle, Thomas 84, 101, 112 Carnegie, Dale 12n. 27, 71–2, 125, 199 Carver, Catharine 7 Chaucer, Geoffrey 8 Chekhov, Anton 10, 172 Chénetier, Marc 76n. 2, 177 Christianity 21, 22, 26, 27, 29–32, 37n. 22, 46–7, 48–9, 65–8, 92, 128–9, 132, 134, 138, 145, 154, 162–3, 201, 208–9 Christian Science 21, 67, 208 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 196, 202 Civil War 149, 155, 160–5, 199, 208 Clare, Ralph 80n. 9 Clausewitz, Carl von 138, 157 Clement I 36 Coke, Edward, Lord 159 Colbert Report, The 183 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 70 Columbus, Christopher 207, 208 Comnes, Gregory 99n. 27, 102n. 3, 175n. 19, 189, 196, 214 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 75 Conrad, Joseph 11, 101, 112, 117–20, 120n. 18, 129, 138, 147–8, 179, 180 Conybeare, Frederick 21 Cooke, Deryck 104, 107 Coover, Robert 13, 132, 212–13 Coptic Treatise Contained in the Codex Brucianus 43 Cowart, David 214 Cowley, Malcolm 1 Crane, Hart 34, 102 Crane, Stephen 13 Cummings, E. E. 13, 102

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Daily Show, The 183 Dante Alighieri 10, 23, 34, 41, 51, 61, 71 Dara, Evan 213 Davidson, H. R. Ellis 107 Degas, Edgar 32 Delany, Samuel R. 213 De la Pava, Sergio 209, 213 DeLillo, Don 13, 133, 211, 213, 215 D’hoker, Elke 163n. 10, 183n. 26 Dickens, Charles 57, 130, 138, 173, 179, 183 Didion, Joan 12 Dixon, Stephen 211 Dodds, E. R. 201 Donatello 152 Donington, Robert 93 Donne, John 11, 102 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 9, 10, 66, 179, 194, 201 Doughty, Charles M. 11 Douglas, Norman 11 Dreiser, Theodore 12, 209 Dryden, John 8, 166 Dürer, Albrecht 183 Dworkin, Martin S. 192, 202 Eberstadt, Fernanda 14 Eckley, Grace 8, 11, 178 Eddington, Arthur 152 Edwards, Jonathan 22 Egyptian Book of the Dead 21, 34 Einstein, Albert 73 Eliot, T. S. 9, 11, 64, 67, 138, 152, 179, 194 Four Quartets 9, 22, 49n. 43, 52, 74, 92–3, 141 “Hysteria” 9, 116 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” 9, 30, 71 Sweeney Agonistes 9 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 101, 143n. 15 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” 23

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Index Waste Land, The 9, 21n. 3, 34, 37, 73, 74, 132 Elkin, Stanley 13, 133, 166, 211, 213 Ellison, Ralph 4, 133, 209 Ellmann, Richard 116–17 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 13, 49, 94, 122, 163n. 9 Empedocles 101, 102, 120–2 Engels, Friedrich 83n. 15, 103 entropy 85, 92, 98, 99, 207 Epstein, Jacob 73 Eugenides, Jeffrey 211–12 Exley, Frederick 12 Faulkner, William 1, 13, 131, 133, 141, 148, 209 Feinberg, Todd E. 201n. 16 Félix, Brigitte 177, 193n. 7 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 34 Fiedler, Leslie A. 16–17, 61, 86, 131–2 Firbank, Ronald 9, 11, 49n. 43, 62, 75 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 61, 83, 110, 207 Fitzhugh, George 161n. 8, 169 Flaubert, Gustave 10, 110–11, 193, 194, 201 Forster, E. M. 9, 11, 138, 179 Fort, Charles 21, 36 Fox, James 164 Foxe, John 21 Franklin, Benjamin 208 Franzen, Jonathan 204–5, 211 Frazer, James George 8n. 18, 21, 25–6, 30 Frederic, Harold 209 Freud, Sigmund 89, 90n. 20, 107, 181 Friedrich, Otto 194 “Frog King, The” 39, 61, 63 Frost, Robert 10, 12 Fuchs, Miriam 31 Gabler, Mel and Norma 128n. 3 Gabrieli, Andrea and Giovanni 66 Gaddis (band) 212 Gaddis, Matthew 191, 192n. 4

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Gaddis, Sarah 178, 211 Gaddis, William awards 4–5, 6, 124, 181n. 25, 184, 204 biographical details 2–6, 8, 123–4, 125, 185–9 critical reception 1, 3–5, 6, 14, 123–4, 146–7, 180, 184, 204–5 crusading spirit 10, 14–17, 138, 183 encyclopedic range 7, 21, 111, 182, 200 failure theme 4, 12, 91, 98, 125, 144, 182, 196, 198, 207 humor and 13, 15, 39, 54, 69, 71, 95, 182–3, 202, 210 influences on 7–14 intertextual references 140–41, 178–9 Russian literature and 10, 14, 179 Gaddis William, novels Agapē Agape 6, 59, 80, 92, 99, 185–205, 214, 216 autobiographical elements 6, 196, 198, 200, 203–4 composition history 185–94 form 185, 195–7, 202n. 17, 203 sources and literary references 9, 10, 189–90, 191–2, 194, 196–8 title 200 Carpenter’s Gothic 1, 9, 16, 30, 76n. 4, 87–8, 106n. 10, 125–48, 154, 165, 172, 178–9, 199, 205, 207–8, 214, 215–16 autobiographical elements 5 chronology 130, 154n. 4 form 129–31 J R and 140–1 metafictional elements 130, 141–8 sources 11, 131, 140–1 Recognitions, The and 141

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226 Index A Frolic of His Own 9, 11, 17, 41, 88, 90n. 20, 147n. 19, 149–84, 190, 191, 199–200, 208, 209, 214, 215n. 17, 216 autobiographical elements 6, 150n. 3, 176, 178–80 chronology 130n. 5, 150 sources 149, 161n. 8 style 165–70 J R 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 9, 15, 75–99, 101–24, 135, 142, 150, 152, 160, 163n. 9, 165, 166, 179, 189, 191, 193, 194, 195–6, 197, 199, 202, 207–8, 209, 210, 215–16 autobiographical elements 2–3, 4, 79, 80, 124, 185, 190 chronology 81n. 10 form 75–8, 80–1, 109–10 influence on other fictions 211, 213 sources 7, 10, 76, 82, 101, 104n. 6, 107, 112, 188, 190 The Recognitions 1–4, 9, 12, 14–16, 19–74, 75, 82–3, 90, 92, 98, 99, 103, 112, 113n. 15, 123, 133, 142, 143, 165, 179, 193, 194, 197, 198–9, 200, 202–3, 207–8, 215–16 autobiographical elements 2–3 Gothic elements 131 in other fictions 210–13 player pianos in 187 references and sources 7, 8, 10–11, 20–1, 29, 34, 40, 43, 101 secondary characters 26–7, 39–40, 53–74 symbolism 21–52, 60, 72 Gaddis, William, other works “Dostoevski” 10n. 22, 175n. 19 “How Does the State Imagine?” 12–13 “An Instinct for the Dangerous Wife” 14, 54

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“J R Up to Date” 15n. 34 “Old Foes with New Faces” 202n. 17 Once at Antietam 6, 80, 154, 155n. 6, 160–64, 173, 187, 190, 199 One Fine Day 119 Rush for Second Place, The 186, 188, 204 “Rush for Second Place, The” 4, 83n. 14, 170, 182 “‘Stop Player. Joke No. 4’” 186 Torschlusspanik 192 Gass, William H. 6, 10, 13, 213 Gervase of Tilbury 36, 37–8 Gibbs, Josiah Willard 98, 188 Gide, André 10 Giedion, Sigfried 194 Ginsberg, Allen 34 Gluck, Christoph 34, 115–16 Gnosticism 21, 28, 47, 65 Goes, Hugo van der 64 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10, 21, 23, 33–4, 41, 43–4, 48, 54, 60, 61, 62, 103, 114, 132, 201 Gogol, Nikolai 10, 179 Goncharov, Ivan 10, 179 Gorky, Maxim 10 Gothic genre 131–3 Gottlieb, Robert 193 Gould, Glenn 194, 198, 201 Graves, Robert 8n. 18, 11, 21, 23, 24–5, 28, 32, 41–2, 63, 107 Gray, Ronald D. 43 Greek drama 8, 10, 130, 138 Greek mythology 101, 120 Green, Henry 11 Green, Jack 48 Greene, Graham 138 Gresham’s Law 167 Grisham, John 149 Guerard, Albert J. 8 Hand, Learned 149, 176 Handel, George Frideric 32, 72, 166

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Index Harding, Victoria 178n. 21 Harrowing of Hell, The 11, 34 Hawkes, John 13, 131 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 13, 16, 84, 86, 131, 133, 135, 194, 208 Hearst, William Randolph 194 Heisenberg, Werner 74 Heller, Joseph 13, 209, 211 Hemingway, Ernest 13, 144 Heraclitus 120 Herr, Michael 140 Higgins, George V. 213 Hillis, Newell Dwight 194 Hilton, James 5, 11, 131n. 6, 199 Hoagland, Edward 14 Hofstadter, Richard 12n. 27, 83n. 15, 132, 134 Hollerith, Herman 187, 189 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 149, 169, 176, 181, 208 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. 209 Holt, John 12n. 27 Homer Iliad 201 Odyssey 21, 34, 41, 45n. 35, 102 Horn, Richard 211 Housman, A. E. 179 Howells, William Dean 209 Hughes, Pennethorne 21 Huizinga, Johan 73, 194, 195 Huxley, Aldous 11, 49n. 43 Ibsen, Henrik 10, 21, 34, 37, 39–41, 49, 61, 63 Ignatius of Loyola 21, 31, 42 Ingendaay, Paul 11 Irenaeus 62 Jacquard, Joseph Marie 187, 189 James, Henry 59, 86, 131 James, William 12n. 27, 82, 92, 125 Jeffers, Robinson 137n. 9, 144, 148, 194 John of the Cross 34

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Johnson, Drew 211 Jonson, Ben 14 Joyce, James 7, 8–9, 23, 45n. 35, 58, 69, 102, 109, 178, 183, 209, 214 Jung, Carl G. 22, 24, 27, 30, 39, 42–51 Juvenal 14 Kafka, Franz 10–11, 20, 83 Kakutani, Michiko 184 Kalevala 183n. 26 Karl, Frederick R. 4, 7 Kaufman, Sue 12, 125 Kenner, Hugh 189 Kerouac, Jack 6, 131, 207, 210 Key of Solomon 62 Kipling, Rudyard 11, 101, 112, 114–16 Knight, Christopher 13n. 30, 154n. 5, 174n. 18 Knight, F. H. 96 Kollwitz, Käthe 27 Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger 21, 57, 108, 116, 117 Lang, Andrew 21 Langland, William 11 Larbaud, Valéry 208 Lauzen, Sarah E. 142n. 14 Lawrence, D. H. 12 Lawrence, T. E. 11, 116 Leader, Zachary 160 LeClair, Tom 91n. 21, 213 Lee, Harper 86, 209 Legge, Francis 21 Lethaby, William 21 Leverence, John 45, 47 Levin, Adam 212n. 7 Lewis, R. W. B. 209, 210 Lewis, Sinclair 12, 209 Lewis, Wyndham 109 Lippard, George 209 Loesser, Arthur 194 Lombardi, Vince 170

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228 Index Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 165, 170, 183 Looks, Bernard 192n. 5 Lowry, Malcolm 11, 20, 210 Lucan 31 Lully, Raymond 43 Mailer, Norman 6 Majer, Michael 46–7, 48 Male, Roy R. 130 Malleus Maleficarum see Kramer, Heinrich Malmgren, Carl 76–7 Mann, Thomas 11, 109 Mano, D. Keith 77, 213 Marcus, Ben 205 Markson, David 8n. 19, 12, 13, 133, 204, 210, 212 Marlowe, Christopher 34, 102 Marsh, George P. 21 Marsh, Nicky 76n. 3 Marx, Karl 83n. 15, 93–4, 101, 102, 121 Masefield, John 49n. 43 Mather, Cotton 22 Mathews, Harry 212 Matthiessen, F. O. 8 Maugham, Somerset 11, 49n. 43 Maupassant, Guy de 24 Maurier, George du 201 Max, D. T. 215 McCarthy, Cormac 13, 133 McCarthy, Mary 177 McConnell, Frank 1, 184 McElroy, Joseph 13, 210–11, 212, 215–16 McInerney, Jay 14 McNamara, Robert 190 McTammany, John 186, 193–4 mechanization 94–5, 185, 186–9, 194, 204, 208 Melville, Herman 1, 3, 13, 16, 20, 22, 58, 93, 131, 133, 139, 146, 194, 208–9

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Memling, Hans 26 Mendelssohn, Felix 72, 198 Menippean satire 1, 212 Merton, Thomas 68 Michelangelo 199, 200, 203 Miller, Alicia Metcalf 210 Miller, Arthur 12, 72 Milton, John 34 Minkoff, Robert 102 Mithraism 21, 26, 29 Montaigne, Michel de 199 Montherlant, Henry de 11 Moody, Rick 196–7, 211 Moore, Thomas 214, 215 Mordden, Ethan 211 Morienus 49 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 60, 91–2, 112, 119 Müller, Johannes 84–5 Murphy, Muriel Oxenberg 150n. 3, 196 Nabokov, Vladimir 13, 24 Naipaul, V. S. 11, 16, 132 Neumann, John von 190 Newman, Ernest 109n. 13 New Yorker 3, 110, 151, 185–6, 193, 205, 215n. 17 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8n. 18, 28, 128, 193, 194, 201, 202 Nigg, Walter 37n. 22 Norris, Frank 13 Novalis 10, 34 Noyes, Alfred 116 Oates, Joyce Carol 132, 209 O’Brien, Flann 142 O’Connor, Flannery 131, 133 O’Donnell, Patrick 184 Oedipus 25n. 10, 26, 58, 72, 162, 173 O’Neill, Eugene 138, 155, 161n. 8, 173–4 Origen 68 Orpheus 23, 41

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Index Ortega y Gasset, José 167 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 6n. 12, 52n. 47, 170n. 14 Ozick, Cynthia 7, 137, 205 Parke, James, Baron 177 Parker, Helen 186 Pater, Walter 112 Peacock, Allen 190, 191 Pelagia 38 Pelagius 37–8, 40, 49 Persius 14 Philoctetes 101, 120, 122–4 Philosophumena 43 Phythian-Adams, W. J. 21 Pilgrim Hymnal 21, 141 Pirandello, Luigi 10 Pistis Sophia 43 Plato 120, 121, 155, 161n. 8, 162, 174, 179, 180, 183, 190, 191, 194, 201 player pianos 85, 185–9, 193–4, 200, 204 Poe, Edgar Allan 31, 172n. 15 Poirier, Richard vi, 140 Pope, Alexander 14, 16, 74, 123 Pound, Ezra 22, 64, 109, 196 Powers, Richard 187, 208 Prosser, William 149 Protestant ethic 82–5, 89, 92, 123, 208 Proust, Marcel 11 Puccini, Giacomo 63 Pushkin, Alexander 10 Pynchon, Thomas 13, 14, 86, 96, 110, 131, 133, 140, 207, 208, 209, 213–14, 215n. 19 Pythagoras 201 Quran 21, 116 Raban, Jonathan 12n. 26 Rahv, Philip 83 Ravitch, Michael 205

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Recognitions, Clementine 21, 73 Rice, Grantland 170n. 14 Richardus Anglicus 50 Riesman, David 12n. 27, 71 Rilke, Rainer Maria 10, 47, 53, 71, 203 Rimbaud, Arthur 10, 34 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 78 Ripley, George 43, 46 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 11 Rockefeller, John D. 189 Rolfe, Frederick 9, 11 romance genre 135–8 Rosarium Philosophorum 43, 46, 50 Rose of Lima 61 Roth, Philip 6 Rougemont, Denis de 33n. 20, 40, 47n. 39 Rounce, Adam 183n. 26 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 155, 161n. 8 Russell, Alison 35n. 21 Sade, Marquis de 10 Salinger, J. D. 12 Salter, James 14 Saltus, Edgar 21 Saroyan, William 186 satire 12–13, 14–15, 95, 123, 149, 188 Saunders, George 212n. 7 Scholz, Carter 211, 212 Schopenhauer, Arthur 8n. 18 Schubert, Franz 112 Schumann, Robert 112 Schwartz, Delmore 7 Secret of the Golden Flower 43 Seelye, John 58, 188 Selby, Hubert 135 Shakespeare, William 9, 11, 14, 36, 58, 102, 152, 161n. 8, 172n. 16, 178, 179, 182 in Agapē Agape 191–2 in Carpenter’s Gothic 136–8 Shavers, Rone 215n. 19 Shaw, George Bernard 103–4, 111

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230 Index Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson 213 Shelley, Mary 201 Sherry, John 178 Sheu, Chingshun J. 54n. 5 Silberer, Herbert 43, 49n. 44 Sillitoe, Alan 11 Silone, Ignazio 10 Simmons, Charles 211 Sinclair, Upton 12 Skinner, B. F. 94 Sladek, John 211, 212 Smith, Henry Nash 209 Snow, John 175n. 19 Socarides, Charles 178 Sophocles 123, 162 Sorrentino, Gilbert 13, 15, 132, 135, 141, 142, 213 Spencer, Theodore 8 Spender, Stephen 20 Spengler, Oswald 8n. 18 Spitteler, Carl 43, 46 Stade, George 1 Stein, Gertrude 74 Steinberg, Saul 196 Steiner, George 110 Stevens, Wallace 28 Stevenson, Robert Louis 112 Stoker, Bram 166n. 12 Styron, William 13, 148 Summers, Montague 21 Swanberg, W. A. 194 Swift, Jonathan 90 Tabbi, Joseph 189–90, 192, 193, 198n. 14, 202 Tanner, Tony 7 Taylor, F. W. 94, 190 Tchaikovski, Piotr 112 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 11, 80, 101, 109, 112–14, 115, 116, 164–5 Tertullian 71 Theroux, Alexander 131, 213 Theroux, Paul 138

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Thielemans, Johan 92 Thompson, Francis 34 Thoreau, Henry David 13, 35, 40n. 24, 41, 49, 54, 98, 101, 141, 179 Thorndike, E. L. 94 Titian 55, 112 Tolstoy, Leo 10, 67, 83, 179, 181, 194, 201, 202 Toney, Richard 146–7 Toole, John Kennedy 193, 194 Towers, Robert 184 Toynbee, Philip 8n. 18 Trilling, Lionel 110 Troyat, Henri 194 Turba Philosophorum 43, 46, 47 Turgenev, Ivan 10, 115–16, 201, 202 Tutuola, Amos 11 Twain, Mark 13, 17, 86, 102, 133, 134, 139, 208–9 Tyree, J. M. 13n. 29, 40n. 24 Uccello, Paolo 74 Updike, John 175n. 19, 211 Valentinus, Basilius 45, 65n. 9 Valéry, Paul 193 Van Eyck, Jan 63, 73, 112, 204 Vidal, Gore 187–8 Vietnam War 124, 139–40, 208 Virgil 34 Vollmann, William T. 132, 208 Voltaire 14 Vonnegut, Kurt 13, 133, 209 Wagner, Richard 93, 201, 202, 213 The Flying Dutchman 21, 23, 40–41, 49, 61 The Ring of the Nibelung 101, 102–12, 188 Wagner, Wieland 102 Waits, Tom 147 Wallace, David Foster 212, 214–15 Waller, Edmund 115–16 Wandering Jew 23, 41, 132

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Index Warhol, Andy 77 Warren, James Perrin 143n. 16 Wasiolek, Edward 10 Watson, Thomas J. 189 Watt, James 95 Watts, Emily Stipes 209 Waugh, Evelyn 9, 11, 138 Weber, Max 82–3, 85, 89, 92, 93, 213 Weisberg, Robert 174n. 18 Weisenburger, Steven 102, 109 Wendell, George G. 105 Wenzel, Kurt 211 West, Nathanael 13, 133, 134, 209 West, Paul 213 Weston, Jessie L. 21 Wharton, Edith 131 Wiener, Norbert 76, 98, 99, 102, 194 Wigglesworth, Michael 133 Wilde, Oscar 11, 59, 60, 101, 112, 116–17

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Williams, Joy 14 Williams, Tennessee 136 Williams, William Carlos 208, 213 Wilmut, Ian 194 Wilson, Edmund 123 Wilson, Scott Bryan 212 Windell, George G. witchcraft 28, 30–31, 107–8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 30 Wolfe, Peter 213 Wolfe, Thomas 179 Wolfe, Tom 209 Wright, Stephen 14 Wylie, Andrew 190 Yeats, William Butler 11, 67, 102, 167, 171, 173, 179 Ziedler, Anja 102n. 3 Zieher, Scott 178n. 21

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