Agape Agape

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Separating a writer from his work is difficult under any circumstances. With a novelist as personally reticent and artistically challenging as William Gaddis, it’s almost impossible. There is no purchase. Legend and hearsay move into the crevices usually saved for biography. And how readily the man recedes into an image — a grainy mug shot, perhaps, as befits one so mysterious and threatening. After Thomas Pynchon, he is the most elusive of our masters, more a literary cipher than a known voice.

The Gaddis of my fantasies exerts a powerful and shadowy appeal: the gaunt figure with his frayed patrician-cum-Jack Palance looks; an updated Ahab in doomed assault on that most persistent of chimeras, the great American novel. Call it romantic twaddle, but these imaginings play no small part in the manufacture of reputations, and Gaddis’ is all the more charged for his being so enigmatic.

I’m not sure, though, that reading the novels dispels the mystique so much as changes it, grafting upon the image of the charismatic loner that of the ambitious maker, the artist who would draw his compass line around the vast theme-a-turgy of contemporary American life. Indeed, from his first book, The Recognitions (1955), his monumental cosmopolitan epic of forgery and fate, to JR (1975), his utterly sui generis voice-portrait of American enterprise, to his more accessible recent novels, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985) and A Frolic of His Own (1994), Gaddis declared himself unapologetically serious, a man on the way to the big synthesis.

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