Spiegel: Mr. Gaddis, when you won the National Book Award in 1976 for your novel J R, will you explain what you meant when you said that a writer ought to be read and not heard?

Gaddis: Nowadays there is an obsession with the individual that's become a curse. No one's interested any more in the written word, but only in the author presenting himself in public. It's all just publicity and spin that hasn't got anything to do the work itself any longer.

Spiegel: There was a time when you yourself put up with the discrepancy between the demands of your work and the cool reaction on the part of the reader.

Gaddis: Yes, my agent told me once: "you have made the most peculiar literary career that anyone can imagine." Today I feel my own situation is a fascinating paradox. I don't worry too much about it.

Spiegel: In 40 years except for four bulky novels, you have published nothing else - no short stories or essays. Were you fully occupied as a novelist?

Gaddis: Yes, because that's what I do. And I don't want to do something half heartedly that I don't know anything about. Novels are my trade, my calling.

Spiegel: Earlier you worked in the Public Relations domain. Was this as a livelihood or as research?

Gaddis: Purely as a livelihood. When my first novel, The Recognitions, appeared in 1955, I was expecting it to be a success. But the book quickly disappeared from the market. I had recently got married, then along came two children. So I had to get a job. It had nothing to do with the pursuit of literature. I spent five years in a pharmaceutical company writing speeches and what have you and suffering for it as well. 

Spiegel: Nevertheless, you gained some inside knowledge of the business world for the roguish novel J R?

Gaddis: Quite a few. Especially the feeling that many men have, who have to support a family and keep a job that they hate. This is caused by our system: making men hate their job. 

Spiegel: So you gave this personal experience to your novelist character Thomas Eigen?

Gaddis: Yes, very much so. Eigen thinks he's an enormously important person, but must work in a job he hates. He has no respect for his job. To begin with, I identified with him, but then he developed into a character, who was constantly going about complaining. He really got on my nerves! It's a weird experience to have while you're writing.

Spiegel: J R originally appeared more than 20 years ago. Today it is still a highly up-to-date novel about the financial world and stock markets. Are you still astonished by their goings on?

Gaddis: Right. The novel predicted the 80s, the madness of Reagan's version of the free market, "Reaganomics". Today it's a lot worse. But no one has read the novel, and so no one's noticed a thing.

Spiegel: The main figure, J R, is an eleven-year old prodigy, who so to speak puts together a business empire on the telephone. Was there an actual model?

Gaddis: No. Maybe I just simply thought about how I was as an eleven-year old. The reason why I had him as an eleven-year old is so that he could be completely amoral ...

Spiegel: And completely innocent.

Gaddis: Right. That's exactly the difference between children and adults. They are aware of their amoral errors, the adults in contrast have to connive and ignore them. That's what America is all about: they still have to get on with it with their eyes wide open in order to be successful, and make money. J R looks around him and thinks: Aha, so that's how you do it. At times he just doesn't know where he's supposed to put a comma in a figure that's so important that it can make hundreds of people jobless. He builds up a paper empire that's worth millions and throws the stock market in chaos. He believes so to speak in his own myth.  

Spiegel: J R is also a novel about the breakdown of communication. But the book's noise and its chaotic speech are almost given a musical structure. Don't you believe in this decline?

Gaddis: Yes. I see it as a decline, entropy, breakdown. But a musical structure? Well I suppose deep down I'm a musician at heart.

Spiegel: The dialogues, which comprise the novel, at times seem to be recorded.

Gaddis: Right. The speakers don't realise what they're saying. But they simply aren't able to listen to what they're saying.

Spiegel: Your fourth novel A Frolic of His Own is a novel about justice, a courtroom novel. How did you get the idea to write about such a dry subject?

Gaddis: Well the idea came pretty much as a whole. To begin with language: law is language whether it be in the court or on paper. This fascinated me and I read books, legal commentaries and began to enjoy reading them. Basically, they aim at a precise use of language. Then came the question: what's wrong with America? What happens to a civilization, its undercurrents when it becomes legalistic?

Spiegel: It says in your novel that justice has the duty to impose order on the chaos of daily life. Is that not also the duty of literature?

Gaddis: No, even literature falls into chaos. Things fall apart, everything breaks down, even language. That's how I see it.

Spiegel: But your novels seem like rocks among breakers. Do you see them any differently?

Gaddis: Maybe that view's unavoidable. Yes, people like us still make the same attempt: We have this strong yearning for order. A lost battle.

Spiegel: What makes you so pessimistic?

Gaddis: I've always been so from the beginning. When I was twenty, I read Spengler's vision of deterioration and it overwhelmed me. In my four novels, hope is on the decline. America today? I am deeply convinced that no good will come of it. This terrible paradox that the rich will always get richer and the poor always poorer. And the race question - how is it going to be resolved? I don't see any way out.

Spiegel: Have you ever thought about living anywhere else than the USA?

Gaddis: No. Graham Greene said: England made me. The same goes for me and America. I am a product of America. I am somebody trying to understand this country, but observes an ever gloomier picture. What makes America matter? It's a land where one per cent of the population has at its disposal about forty per cent of the nation's assets - very interesting for a writer.

Spiegel: Satire, black humour, scenes reminiscent of slapstick, all of these make the gloomy prognosis of your books bearable. Humour as the last means against the absurdity of the world?

Gaddis: As far as I can see, yes. It's the only way out I can find. The whole situation is absurd: we still live in fictions and I like to put forward a view that fiction is the only possibility there is of getting us through the night.  

Spiegel: Is everything finally just a huge joke?

Gaddis: I wouldn't say that. The question "why all this?" has always been with me. Now as an old man, I've come to the conclusion that we haven't answered the question at all. I think Hans Vaihinger is relevant. He was a German philosopher, who wrote that pure morality must always be based on a fiction. We must act so too, as if our duties were imposed upon us by God, as if otherwise we would be punished for our misdemeanours.

Spiegel: Do you also read German literature?

Gaddis: Earlier at college, I was under the influence of the Romantics, especially Novalis. For The Recognitions, Goethe's Faust had been very important. And then Wagner's Rheingold for J R - almost too much so to tell the truth. A dwarf that grabs money and wants to renounce love for money, that I couldn't resist. I'm now very enthusiastic about Thomas Bernhard. He is excruciatingly funny. Besides he has a basic concept that I'm fascinated by: his own delusion is aimed at himself.

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