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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 will eventually be published is considerably different
from the one Gaddis began writing five decades ago, so I’d like to
describe how this troublesome book evolved over the years.
It was
when Gaddis was working as a fact-checker at the New
Yorker in 1945-46 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—I don’t think he owned one or played one—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 & Upward” column, only to have it rejected. By this
time, he had begun work on The
Recognitions, so he set it aside, but in 1950, while in Paris,
Gaddis dusted off his essay and sent 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.” The following summer, Gaddis made his first appearance
in a national magazine with “‘Stop Player. Joke No. 4.’” [Click
here
for this article.] The fact that this essay is only a few pages
long suggests that it was indeed only an excerpt from a longer work,
and thus that longer work would be the basis for what he eventually
called Agapē Agape. “‘Stop
Player. Joke No. 4’” is 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.”
Previously, it took real 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 later
quoted) 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, and encouraged passivity over
activity. And 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 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. As you
may or may not know, the player piano uses paper rolls with rectangular
holes punched in them. And as you certainly remember from your
youth, computers originally used cards punched in the same way.
Now both the player piano and the computer adapted this technology
from the automated loom invented by Jacquard at the beginning of the
19th 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 researched 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 also the year (to quote from
Richard Powers’s recent novel Gain)
“that the fix robbed Tilden of the Presidency and reduced the democratic
process to parody.” It was also the year Willard Gibbs published
his papers 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. 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 and you can see what he was up against. To
go back a little bit, it should be remembered the late fifties
were a difficult time for Gaddis. He was crushed by the commercial
failure of The Recognitions
in 1955, which he probably thought would set him up in the same way
that Ralph Ellison was set for life after the publication in 1953
of Invisible Man.
Gaddis got married later in 1955 and had to get a job, and within
a few years had two kids to support. When he did begin writing
again, he had trouble settling on the right project. He began
then abandoned a novel on business in 1957, then started a novel on
the Civil War, which he changed to a play entitled Once at Antietam, then shelved it in 1960 after failing to find a
producer for it. He then decided to resurrect his work of a
decade earlier on the player piano because he continued to be obsessed
(as he writes in a letter to John Seelye) with “expanding prospects
of programmed society & automation in the arts.” He worked
on this version of Agapē Agape from 1960 to 1962, at which time he accepted a commission
from the Ford Foundation to write a book on the use of television
in the schools, which fell through the following year. Soon
after this he 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
failed nonfiction work, he decided to put the Bast family in the business
of manufacturing 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.
In an
oft-quoted passage in J R,
Gibbs describes his project as “ -- a book about order and disorder
more of a, sort of a social history of mechanization and the arts,
the destructive element . . .” (244). Several places in J
R Gibbs reads aloud from his manuscript (pp. 288-89, 571-604),
which were intended to be the opening pages of Agapē
Agape. Those selections are so dense and allusive that some
readers may feel it’s just as well that Gaddis never completed the
book, because even the few pages included in J
R are difficult enough that the thought of a lengthy book written
in that manner is enough to send even sympathetic readers reeling
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