The Letters of William Gaddis

Начало книги

It’s hard to say whether William Gaddis would have approved of this book, hard to judge whether he was serious or joking when he wrote to his mother in 1949 to state, “Our correspondence should never be published.” Publically, he insisted that only a writer’s published work matters and “the rest is not our business” (as his revered T. S. Eliot wrote); he submitted to interviews reluctantly — and not until the second half of his career — gave no readings, and regarded biographical details as irrelevant. He planted his views early in his first novel, The Recognitions (1955), and thereafter directed inquiring critics and interviewers to reread this passage: “—What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work?” the reclusive painter Wyatt Gwyon asks his wife Esther. “—What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology” (95–96). He reiterated the point twenty years later in his second novel, J R (1975): when Rhoda, the teenage squatter at the 96th Street apartment, tells the composer Edward Bast that he’s not very “interesting,” he sputters, “—Well why should I be interesting! I mean, I mean I want my work to be interesting but why do I have to be interesting! I mean everybody’s trying to be interesting let them I’m just, I’m just doing something I have to do. .” (561).

Читать дальше →