Recognizing Gaddis
By Louis Auchincloss
November 15, 1987

I first came to know William Gaddis at a writers’ conference in the Soviet Union in 1985. I had heard that he was shy and averse to publicity, but I found that this reputation was based only on his belief that a writer’s life and personality should be as little as possible associated with his work. As a conferee, he was both eloquent and precise.

Perhaps the most amusing contrast in our group was between him and Allen Ginsberg. Allen, shaggy and bearded, chanted his verse in loud, emotional tones as he pounded a species of accordion that he always carried with him. Will, on the other hand, reserved and quiet, impeccably clad, with the patient composure of a man of the world and the piercing eye of a wit, spoke in measured tones of the small sales that the serious novelist might expect.  If Danielle Steele counted her sales in the millions while he had to make do with a few thousands, he said, it was because she wrote books and he wrote “literature.” Asked for pointers as to future conferences, he glanced obliquely down the table at Allen and suggested that the novelists and poets be separated, so that the accordion would be heard only “down a long corridor, through a closed door.” Gaddis, who is considered by some critics to be the nearest thing to Herman Melville that our century has produced, who is almost a cult figure among students of English, is nonetheless not well-known to the wider reading public. His first two novels, “The Recognitions” and “JR,” published 20 years apart, in 1955 and 1975, frightened off many readers by their length, erudition and supposed “difficulty.” But this difficulty is much exaggerated by symbol and ambiguity hunters (“What can I do if people insist I’m cleverer than I think I am?” Gaddis asks with a shrug), and length and erudition become virtues when the stories are as interesting as his. Gaddis has more to say to American readers today than any other novelist  I can think of. Take just three fields in which his knowledge is significant: theology, painting and corporate finance. Then consider the space devoted by the press in the 1980’s to religious strife and revivalism, to art sales and art frauds, to stock-market chicanery and insider trading. Some critics have credited me as a novelist with a degree of familiarity in the last-named field, but I have treated it only in broad outlines and with a minimum of legal details. Gaddis could almost qualify as an expert witness in the trial of a malefactor. 

For all his relevance” (to use, with due apology, the sacred term of the 1960’s) to our time, Gaddis is something of an antimodernist. His novels contain much merciless satire of the pretentious double talk of literary cocktail parties and the inane pursuit of new art forms at any cost. Originality? Was that not what Eve was guilty of when she bit the apple?

Wyatt Gwyon, the painter protagonist of “The Recognitions,” quotes his old German teacher as saying: That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original . . . Even 200 years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.  When you paint you do not try to be original, only you think about your work.  And Stanley, the musician in the same novel, gives vent to a similar train of thought:  How could Bach have accomplished all that he did? and Palestrina? the Gabrielis? . . . And how? with music written for the Church. Not written with obsessions of copyright foremost; not written to be played by men in worn dinner jackets, sung by girls in sequins, involved in wage disputes and radio rights, recording rights, union rights . . . not written to be punctuated by recommendations for headache remedies, stomach appeasers, detergents, hair oil . . . O God!  

Yet Gaddis, for all the conservatism uttered by characters with whom he is in obvious sympathy, is one of the great innovative novelists of our age. “He comes very close to liberating his fiction (and one might even claim all fiction) from the nemesis of narrative, the Western mania for order and control,” wrote Joel Dana Black in “In Recognition of William Gaddis,” a volume of appreciative essays published in 1984.  The new reader of a Gaddis novel may initially suppose that he is being introduced to a chaos in which the parts have have little relation to one another or to the whole. But this is not the case. Each character and event is an integral part of a complex but interrelated whole. Does the whole compose an order that makes sense? The same question might be asked of our universe. The world that is subject to our senses, like a Gaddis novel, may be like a huge picture puzzle with no picture, in which a seemingly infinite number of pieces may be fitted together to form a glaze of white - or black.

Gaddis' parents were divorced when William, their only child, born in 1922, was three years old. From then on, the boy lived with his mother. She supported them by initially working as secretary to the president of the New York Steam Corporation; in time, she became an executive of the company. Because her work was demanding, Gaddis was sent from age five to 13 to a boarding school in Berlin, Conn. After that, he returned to the family home in Massapequa, L.I., where he attended high school until he entered Harvard College as a freshman in 1941.  Gaddis remained at Harvard for the four years of World War II, being exempted from military service because of a kidney disorder. He became president of the Lampoon, a humorous and satirical undergraduate magazine, contributing a large number of stories, poems, essays, playlets, theater and film reviews.

In his senior year, Gaddis and a drinking companion were asked to resign from the college following a fracas with the Cambridge police, an event perhaps anticipated by one of his Lampoon poems, in the style of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”: I’ll escape the alma mater, Rise above the madding throng; Join a band of vulgar gypsies And make my sordid song.  The next two years were spent in New York’s Greenwich Village while he worked as a checker on The New Yorker magazine. His mother subsequently rented out the house in Massapequa, giving him $100 a month from the proceeds. With that, plus income from temporary jobs, Gaddis was able to travel for the next five years.

He first went to Mexico, in the spring of 1947, and arrived in Panama City later that year, hoping for a job on the newspaper Panama-American.  When this failed to materialize, he worked as a machinist’s assistant on the overhaul of the Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal. In the evenings, clad in his white suit, he enjoyed the more elegant society of the Union Club. But there was adventure, too.  In 1948, Gaddis went up to Costa Rica during its two-week civil war, when Jose Figueres - a socialist landowner who was subsequently elected President - challenged the refusal of the ruling families to abide by the results of a popular election. Gaddis joined the insurgents and helped to keep open an air strip for the delivery of supplies from Guatemala.

In the fall of that year, he went to Spain, where he remained for two years, traveling and studying art and church history, gathering material for and working on his first novel, “The Recognitions.” He arrived in Paris in 1950. It was a city that never dazzled him quite as it did so many of his fellow Americans (“Age cannot wither, nor custom stale her infinite vulgarity”).

A year later, he made a short trip to North Africa before returning to New York to continue work on “The Recognitions.” An advance from Harcourt Brace & Company, plus fees from occasional writing assignments, enabled him to work through 1952 and 1953 to complete his big book. Its nearly 1,000 pages were published in 1955. Gaddis was 32. The reviews were not favorable, and the sales were small. There might have been some feeling in the literary establishment that Gaddis showed remarkable hubris in writing so long and difficult a work. In The New York Times Book Review, Granville Hicks complained that Gaddis “has so ostentatiously aimed at writing a masterpiece.” Most damning of all was Sterling North’s review in The New York World-Telegram: “If I were so naive as to believe in the devil I would say that young Mr. Gaddis had willingly sold his soul to achieve this Faustian first novel. What this sprawling, squalling, overwritten book needs above all is to have its mouth washed out with lye soap. It reeks of decay and filth and perversion and half-digested learning.” Poor Gaddis was almost crushed. Five years of work for that! In an interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy in the forthcoming issue of The Paris Review, he says of that time of his life: “I almost think that if I’d got the Nobel Prize when ‘The Recognitions’ was published, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised. I mean that’s the grand intoxication of youth or what’s a heaven for. And so the book’s reception was a sobering experience, quite a humbling one, real life.”

Wyatt Gwyon, the protagonist of “The Recognitions,” is the son of a Calvinist minister in New England who loses his mind in the intensity of his researches into pagan theologies. Wyatt escapes his ministerial calling and goes to Paris to paint. He marries Esther, a would-be writer, and returns to America, where he settles in Greenwich Village and becomes involved with a number of poets, playwrights, painters and musicians, all drinking and drugging their way through a wasteland of compulsive modernism.  Wyatt turns for his inspiration to the great masters of the past, particularly the Flemish: Roger van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck and Hugo van der Goes. Studying these painters with some of his father’s intensity, he achieves a sense of identity with them that takes him ultimately down the road to forgery.

But Wyatt is no vulgar forger. In “recognizing” the genius of his predecessors, he brings himself into a relation with the past that gives a degree of form to the meaninglessness of the present. The novel is filled with these recognitions, flashes of intuition by which different characters become aware of archetypes in the past of their own personal experiences.

But if T. S. Eliot finds only “inexplicable glory” in the past which he delights in contrasting with the tackiness of the present, Gaddis finds idiocy throughout the ages. Only in art, he seems to suggest, can man find redemption.

Wyatt’s recognitions of his predecessors, then, go deeper than copying details. He studies van der Goes until he virtually becomes van der Goes. Like an ancient alchemist, he seeks to create gold out of baser metal, though he must have some gold to start with. He paints the pictures that the old masters ought to have painted. But when he falls into the hands of villains -Recktall Brown, the dealer, and Basil Valentine, the Jesuitical esthete - and appends a false signature to a picture, he is hopelessly contaminated.  Wyatt goes mad at the end of the novel and sets about to destroy, under pretense of cleaning and restoring, the works of art in the monastery to which he has retreated. Does this cast doubt on the power of art to atone for the falsities of the world? Perhaps not altogether. 

Right after the publication of “The Recognitions,” Gaddis married Pat Black, a young woman from North Carolina who had come to New York with the idea of a stage career. Their two children, Sarah and Matthew, were born in the next three years. But the poor reception of the novel, plus severe financial problems, exacerbated by the repeated vandalizations of the converted barn in Massapequa where he had done much of his writing, darkened what would have been a happy period of his life.  As literature would not provide a living for him and his family, Gaddis turned to commerce. From 1957 to 1961, he worked in public relations for Pfizer International, the pharmaceutical company, a job he despised.  His next job was more interesting. He worked for the United States Army, preparing documentary films for training and public relations. In 1964, however, with America’s involvement in Vietnam intensified, Gaddis severed his Army connection. He did freelance writing for industrial films and speechwriting for Eastman Kodak.  Reading one of these - a smooth, expertly prepared address on the utility and utilization of video aids in parochial school - and contrasting it with the savage satire on the same subject in “JR,” his second novel, one marvels at the different functions to which Gaddis could adapt his skills.

The critical reception of “JR” in 1975 was gratifyingly different from the one that had greeted its predecessor. There was perhaps a note of contrition that the literary establishment had not recognized Gaddis’s earlier book as a literary work of the first importance.  Even those critics who still found him on the lengthy side conceded his stature. He was described as a novelist “of Swiftian fury,” “wildly satiric,” “dazzling.” The following spring, “JR” was given the National Book Award.

“JR” is indeed worthy of Swift. The sixth grade of a Long Island grammar school goes on a field trip to Wall Street, where the children are to be given the sensation of “investing in America” by being allowed to purchase one share of stock. JR, a scruffy 11-year-old, demonstrates his financial acumen by cheating his classmates out of the share and using it to win a stockholder’s suit.  With lease-backs and write-offs and tax deductions, he puts together a crazy but formidable corporate empire of junk merchandise and used-up properties that is a paradigm of the jumbled chaos of American financial life.

Irving Thalberg, the genius of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was said to have sat alone in a darkened room while he trained his mind to become that of a 13-year-old - the mental age he deemed closest to that of the average American adult. Gaddis puts the level even lower.  In The Paris Review, he says of JR: “The reason he is 11 is because he is in this prepubescent age where he is amoral, with a clear conscience, dealing with people who are immoral, unscrupulous, which implies that they realize what scruples are but push them aside, whereas his good cheer and greed he considers perfectly normal. He thinks this is what you’re supposed to do, and he is not going to wait around. . . .” But how, even in a satire, could an 11-year-old put together so gigantic a fortune? If it were all magic and fantasy, it would soon become a bore, particularly in a 726-page book. This is where Gaddis’s knowledge of business affairs (unrivaled among American novelists except by Michael Thomas) stands him in such good stead. In turning the American dream inside out, he wanted to have his facts right.  JR, he explains in The Paris Review, “buys defaulted bond issues simply because they’re cheap - it says $1,000 up in the corner, but selling at 7 cents on the dollar, so he’s getting them for $70 apiece. So it’s simple, cheerful greed. Then, when finally the corporation is thrown into bankruptcy, and he emerges as the largest bondholder, and they wipe out all of the stock, all the equities, he becomes, then, the largest holder of preferred stock and takes control pretty much by default.” And so it goes, through a dozen or more fantastic but basically credible deals. The capitalist system, which is so often oblivious to sensitive morality, operates with the enthusiasm of a child. Gaddis would preserve it. He believes that free enterprise is the least-dangerous economic system yet devised by man, but he would regulate it. He might make an excellent member of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  That he knows the voice of the investment counselor is shown in this dialogue between Edward Bast and his financial adviser about the portfolio of the former’s maiden aunts who simply want a little income to live on:

Surrounding JR is a huge cast of adult characters, who are lured to his corporate empire by the hope that there may be something in it for them. It is not always just money that they seek. It is understanding, appreciation, acceptance. But the society in which they live has few rewards to offer them but money, and not very much of that - just enough, often, to corrupt them.  JR himself, wistful, likable, essentially well-meaning, is the only one not contaminated by the avarice of the corporate operations, but that is because he is totally insensitive. When one of his teachers, Amy Joubert, who comes as close as any of the adult characters to being a person of good will, tries to make him see something other than profit in the world around him she fails. 

As is said in David Madden’s anthology “Rediscoveries,” the most frightening implication of this massive comedy is that JR is the sanest character of the novel. Perhaps that is because he is the simplest - one might actually hope to make something better of him. It is admittedly a frail hope to put in the rushing path of the entropy of our civilization.

 Gaddis’s techniques to express his terrifying conception of this entropy - the tendency of a system to disorder - is to create his novel almost entirely by conversations in which the speakers are not immediately identified. The reader must make do without the usual exposition of facial expressions or mental reactions. He has no way of verifying whether a character is speaking falsely or sincerely or sarcastically, except by what the character actually says.  However, this makes it sound much more difficult than it is. One soon picks up the style, certainly the cliches, of the individual speaker, and after a bit one reads the dialogue almost as easily as if it were accompanied by the “he said” or “she said” of conventional fiction.  What then, it will be asked, does Gaddis gain by putting his reader through this exercise? He gains the eerie effect of identifying our civilization with all of its jargons.

Reading “JR,” I feel at times as if I were lying alone on a desolate plain under a dark cloudy sky from which come the mumbles and throbs of human speech in every sort of dialect and slang, replete with self-pity, smugness, officiousness, swagger - in short, every banality the brain of man can devise to evade thought.

In "Carpenter's Gothic” (1985), the third and last, to date, of Gaddis’s novels, he has limited himself to a mere 262 pages and has set himself the task of observing the dramatic unities of time and place. The action occurs within the span of a few days in a Victorian house on the Hudson, rented by Paul and Elizabeth Booth. She is an heiress, but her fortune is tied up in endless litigation, much to the disgust of her glib, hucksterish husband, a public-relations agent who is helping his only client, Reverend Ude, a tele-vision preacher, to develop an evangelical movement in Africa.  The plot embraces much of the madness of the modern world: exploited African mines and natives, corrupt politicians, popular religion, unscrupulous intelligence agents, a murderous search for concealed geological surveys and, finally, Armageddon. It is the grimmest of Gaddis’s novels, being concerned, though always comically, with the tragedy of human stupidity. 

Gaddis shatters the silence and isolation of the old house on the river with the sounds of telephone, radio and television, so that it seems at times more like a bunker at the front than a secluded villa. The violent death that comes in the end to the heroine is a horrific comment on the illusion of immunity that she had desperately sought.  


Gaddis's first marriage ended in divorce, in 1967, as did his second, to Judith Thompson, a decade later. He blames these failures on the terrible pressures of trying to earn a living while writing two monumental novels, and on the frustration of his small sales, which continued even after all the awards and plaudits. It made him, he frankly admits, a difficult person to live with. If this was so, there is little sign of it today.

His children, to whom he has remained very close, are successfully occupied: Matthew works in motion pictures in New York, and Sarah, who lives in Paris, is completing a novel for Alfred A. Knopf. Based in New York and Long Island, Gaddis and his charming and brilliant companion, Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, seem to enjoy immensely each other and a life of work and wide traveling. Ms. Murphy worked with the curator Robert Beverly Hale in founding the department of American painting and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Gaddis’s work in progress (God help us lawyers!) is a novel about the explosion of litigation in the world today.

Louis Auchincloss’s latest collection of short stories is “Skinny Island.”
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