On Reading William Gaddis
essay by Robert Dumont
In the mid-1970s, when I first started living in New York City, I worked for Doubleday Bookstores. My first job was as Christmas help at their flagship store at 57th Street and 5th Avenue, and my last job was as an assistant manager of a smaller store on 49th Street and 3rd Avenue. Between those two positions I worked for nearly three years at the 53rd Street store, which had been featured in the film The Owl and the Pussycat, and was notable for its spiral staircase behind a two-story plate-glass facade. In those days a tie was required and the daily routine consisted of helping customers, ringing up sales, and stocking the shelves when the store wasn't busy. Celebrity customers were common. Mrs. Onassis was as pleasant and unassuming and down-to-earth as could be, in contrast to stiff-necked Tony Randall who affected a faux metropolitan hauteur, no doubt to compensate for the fact that earlier in his life he was known as one Leonard Rosenberg and had attended Central High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For a while Salvador Dali would come over from the St. Regis Hotel late at night, because he had taken a shine to a fellow named Andy who worked in the record department. Tennessee Williams appeared one rainy evening accompanied by a young, blond surfer-looking dude. While the night manager was fawning over the presence of the famous author, the surfer-dude took the opportunity to shoplift several books, only to be apprehended by the security guard.
I usually kept an eye on the fiction section in the second floor paperback department since that was my chief interest. I tried to keep it looking orderly and arranged in such a way that some sort of balance was struck between literary offerings and the usual fare of popular bestsellers, romances, beach novels, and other passive amusements. Mystery and Science Fiction had their own smaller sections. Everything else — highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow, no-brow at all — was arrayed along the entire left-side wall that constituted the fiction section. I was shelving books one day when a couple of copies of an enormously fat, otherwise pocket-sized book came in among a shipment of titles published by New American Library. Each volume was so thick that there was not room to display them face-out, one behind the other, without half of the 900-plus pages of the one in front hanging over the edge of the shelf and falling to the floor after the slightest vibration from the street or from the subway trains that ran beneath the store. So, I put one copy with the cover facing out, alongside the other copy with only its spine showing. The book was The Recognitions by William Gaddis, an author with whom I was not familiar. I at first thought it was William Gass, whose work I was somewhat familiar with, having read a number of his essays and some of his fiction. This Gaddis was a new one on me. I looked over the blurbs and the book description on the cover and determined that this was big-time literary stuff — some sort of experimental work having to do with art forgery, among other topics. I put it on my own personal list of books to get to when I got to them, at some point in the indefinite future, along with, say, Finnegans Wake, for instance.
The copies of The Recognitions remained on the shelf for months without being purchased. There was a little sticker affixed to the back of every copy of every book in the store that indicated when it had arrived on the selling floor. After 120 days or so, if a book had not sold, it was supposed to be removed from the shelf. There were some exceptions of course: Faulkner, Hemingway, Melville, Joyce, and all the other agreed-upon and exalted immortals who dwelled in literary Valhalla. I made it a point, however, to keep the Gaddis novel in the store as well, even though anyone browsing the fiction section who might actually take it in hand would probably put it back as soon as they cast their eyes on the hundreds of pages of dense type or sampled even a paragraph or two of the seemingly impenetrable prose. Because of their sheer bulkiness, and the fact that they were just mass-market paperbacks after all, the two copies became somewhat shopworn. The covers faded and lost their original gloss. While the pages didn't actually turn yellow, they no longer had the feel of freshness. The glue in the spine also started to decompose. Nevertheless, even after more than a year had gone by, whenever it was time to cull the shelves of unsold books, I always left The Recognitions alone.
Once when I was looking over the shelves, I noticed that both copies were not there. Amazing. After sitting there for all that time and not selling, now both of them were gone. But amazement turned to disappointment when I found out that the new paperback manager had gone through the section herself and checked the stickers on the back and placed the books on a truck with all the other books that were due to be removed. The truck was sitting in the back of the store next to a dumbwaiter. One of my jobs was to load the contents of the truck onto the dumbwaiter and then send it to the basement. The stockroom crew would empty the dumbwaiter and tear off the book covers so that the store could return them and receive credit on its account with the publishers, or more typically, with the wholesale distributors, or "jobbers," as they were called. The books themselves, without their covers, would simply be thrown away.
The truck had hundreds of titles piled on it, but the elements of the shelving system remained. It was easy enough to locate the copies of The Recognitions, retrieve them from the pile, and put them back on the shelf while nobody was looking. I suppose I could have bought them myself, employees did receive a 40% discount on all purchases, and I did intend to read the book, or at least hoped to read it, someday. It wasn't due to any perception of the high seriousness of this daunting novel that put me off at the time. But I was only a few years out of college and saw myself as still working my way through the canon of more famous works. There was so much Faulkner and Hemingway and Melville and Joyce I had not yet read, not to mention Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Fitzgerald and Dickens and Trollope and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Proust and Mann — the list was endless. I couldn't really see why this fellow Gaddis should be allowed to jump the line just because he was more or less my contemporary.
And then JR came out, the second of Gaddis's gigantic novels. JR received the full-blast, full-bore publicity machine treatment. Favorable reviews in the Sunday and daily editions of the Times. An expensive advertising campaign in Publishers Weekly. More reviews in Time and Newsweek and all the other magazines that reported literary matters. There were print profiles of the reclusive Gaddis. In the bookstores, we were ready with the product. The book was one of the only ones ever released simultaneously in a hardback and in a trade paperback edition. There was a JR available for every budget. And for a while — a matter of weeks? days? hours? JR was a bona fide bestseller, at least in New York City, at least on 5th Avenue. Even though the reviews, including those favorable, cautioned that this was a lengthy and difficult novel to get through, the efforts of the publicity machine were sufficient to keep a steady stream of curious customers coming into the store to pick up the book, and if they were not intimidated by its sheer heft, to purchase it and take it home. But word soon got around among the dabblers and dilettantes and casual readers that constitute the main market for hot titles and just-published books that are considered to be "good-reads." JR was anything but a "good-read." In fact, by their standards, it was an impossible-read. And there was no TV or movie tie-in for JR either. There wasn't even room for it on the wall in the regular fiction section, so a mostly unread pile of copies accumulated at the foot of the section alongside piles of other oversized trade paperbacks. The book was not totally unread of course. The critics had read it and reviewed it after all. A few literary types still came in and bought it and perhaps read it or attempted to read it. I didn't try to myself. I still had that long line of old masters to work my way through. At the time, I was reading War and Peace, mostly while riding the #4 bus back and forth to work, but I remained curious about JR. The plot had something to do with a kid who becomes a financial tycoon. A business novel of sorts. A satire on capitalism apparently. Well, maybe someday.
So, I now knew something about William Gaddis anyway, even if I had not read him. I knew for instance, that he was not William Gass—although for a long while the two of them remained somewhat confused in people's minds, even among people who had more than a passing interest in contemporary literature.
In 1978 I quit my job with Doubleday and started working at the 42nd Street Library, where I am still employed. I began reading Ulysses soon after I got there and on my breaks would sit at a long table in the reading room with both my copy of the novel and an accompanying volume containing commentary and notes to the text, that I had found on the open reference shelf. This proved to be a feasible method for me of wading through the long and complex work. Over the years I managed to read a number of the books that constitute the literary canon, authored by all those renowned big boys and girls with famous names. But I also reached a point that every reader inevitably arrives at — one which my old English professor at Tulsa University, Dr. Manly Johnson, described as "resulting from the realization that you're not going to be able to read everything. Thus you must begin to shape your tastes and plan your efforts." Even so, even if that line of unread books and authors was not necessarily infinite, it still stretched way beyond any literary Valhalla I would ever attain. But I kept Gaddis in mind.
Finally, some ten years after JR, he published a book that was something less than gargantuan. It was his third novel and it was called Carpenter's Gothic. This one checked in at a modest 262 pages. You could even read it in bed or a chair without fear of injury should you fall asleep. And this book proved to be my entrée into Gaddis's fictional world. For a reader who may be daunted by the longer works, Carpenter's Gothic will provide a fine introduction to Gaddis's incomparable style and a sense of his comical and at the same time despairing vision. The novel offers a reader, or it did for this reader, a foretaste of the other works. It features Gaddis's distinctive use of multiple voices and unattributed dialogue set off by dashes. It includes a series of interrupted rants by a hapless protagonist whose madcap, grandiose schemes and daily rituals are constantly in the process of unraveling. It also contains the music-like repetition of words, themes, obsessive thoughts, and descriptive phrases that are a hallmark of Gaddis's fictional technique. What plot or story there is, emerges almost as an after-thought. At times it feels like one is traversing a dark winding road while being led on by the sheer fascination not at what comes next, but at how and where one will eventually arrive.
When his next book, A Frolic of His Own, came out in 1994 to reviews that excelled even those of JR, I was ready to take on this longer work. At 586 pages it was not quite the length of the first two novels, but certainly dense and challenging enough. And what a book! As the dust jacket states — "a whirlwind of a novel"; again with a totally fixated central character, one Oscar Crease, a man in a perpetual snit whose manic energies are expended on the various lawsuits he has filed against any number of individuals and groups, and even, absurdly, against himself. The title is a phrase taken from English law. Frolic displays the usual Gaddis riffs and pyrotechnics along with numerous interpolated passages consisting of legal briefs, judgments, renderings, as well as the complete text of a play that Crease has written about the role his grandfather played during the Battle of Antietam, which he claims, in a lawsuit of course, has been pirated by a big-time Hollywood film company and turned into a blockbuster movie. Justice, and in continuance of JR, money, are two major thematic concerns. As Oscar says on page one:
— The ones showing up in court demanding justice, all they've got their eye on's that million dollar price tag.
— It's not simply the money, no, what they really want...
— It's the money, Christina, it's always the money. The rest is nothing but opera, now look...
And so the opera begins. But imagine an opera rendered in super slow motion and without music, consisting entirely of words on a page. Whose words? It depends on the context. An opera that flows and melds together in a torrent of entropic energy that turns on itself and once again defeats the despairing Gaddis protagonist who is driven by a kind of manic conviction and an abiding sense of injustice, surrendering only when the real world causes his whole house of cards to come crashing down.
With the publication of A Frolic of His Own, Gaddis, who by now had been the subject of numerous critical studies and the recipient of a McArthur grant, became more of a public figure — even granting interviews in the press. The novel also won the American Book Award in 1995 and was something of a popular success in addition to being a critical one. Myself included, most of those who picked up his books were very much aware of what they were getting into with Gaddis, and more than willing to make the effort to experience the deeply pessimistic yet hilarious fictional world that he had created.
Some more years went by and I decided I was ready for JR. I set aside some time for it and resorted to trolling the Internet for useful secondary sources and background reading. The website: williamgaddis.org is an invaluable resource for all things Gaddis. It features not only extensive biographical materials and critical introductions to the Gaddis oeuvre, but a group of readers and scholars and enthusiasts has taken on the task of preparing complete scene by scene, chapter by chapter, annotations and outlines of each of the works. Armed with this, one can launch off into any of them with something of a skeleton key to the cacophony of voices and characters and events that comprise the novels. I certainly recommend this approach to reading JR, because within its 726 pages, even with the aid of extensive notes to the text, one is still likely to be overwhelmed by the book — by turns befuddled, arrested, lost and then found—and in several parts, laughing out loud. Like the other novels, JR is a satire. A large part of it results from the years Gaddis spent writing advertising copy and film scripts in corporate America. The cast of characters ranges from pinstriped Wall Streeters to lost suburban souls to a crew of artist-types and cynical writers who cannot flourish in the world of commerce and money. Even J.R. himself, a 12-year-old kid from Long Island, who does flourish for a while in just such a world, and is able to run a multi-million-dollar business empire from a phone booth at his school, is brought down by the inhuman, indifferent laws of capitalist economics. The humor in this novel is as fierce and dark and funny as it is in the others. It is probably not the best book to start with when reading Gaddis, which is no doubt why there were so many disappointed readers back in the 70s, but it's definitely one to work towards.
Agapé Agape is Gaddis's last published work of fiction. He died in 1998. It is a novella-length dramatic monologue written in the style of, and under the influence of, the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. It bears the same title as a book that one of the characters in JR was attempting to write, concerning the history of the player piano and the "mechanization of the arts." It touches on and draws from numerous works, including Dostoyevsky's The Double and The Kreutzer Sonata, by Tolstoy. There are allusions to Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Wagner, and numerous others, including an E.R. Dodd and a Johan Huzinga about whom I know nothing. There are some of the familiar fictional elements from the earlier books — most notably the frenzied narrator in a fit of energy attempting to tie all sorts of disparate ideas and projects together. In this case, it is a final bit of frenzy as the writer/narrator lies in a hospital dying, and the piles of notes he consults in order to complete the grand literary work literally keep toppling into a disordered heap, and become spotted with pus and blood from the suppurating sores and oozing wounds that afflict him.
"Whole thing coming to pieces here, just to get it over with but, with what? Over with what? Prepositions make all the trouble but you can't really explain anything to anybody why I've got to explain all this because we don't know how much time's left to finish this work of mine...."
It's a final but not entirely hopeless attempt to rein in the chaos of the universe, or of America, or of the character's inner psyche. The result may be a failure but the effort is necessary, and in this book even ennobling. Not as many laughs in Agapé Agape. This is a deathbed exegesis after all — with the darkness closing in.
When I was reading the final pages of Agapé Agape on the F train recently, I noticed a young man get on the subway in Brooklyn, who after sitting down took out a thick book from his bag. It was a copy of The Recognitions. There is now an attractive trade edition available published by Penguin. No doubt it is much easier to handle than that pocket-sized but enormously fat New American Library edition I used to shelve when working at Doubleday. He was more than three-quarters of the way through it. As he sat there reading he seemed thoroughly engrossed. I continued with my book. He continued with his. After awhile, somewhere in Manhattan, I looked up and he was gone. And then strangely enough, I encountered him a few days later, again on the F train, while we were both heading home to Brooklyn. He was standing and listening to a Discman this time and not reading. Perhaps his morning commute was dedicated to literary pursuits while in the evening it was an opportunity to mellow out. But then at West 4th St. he got a seat. He put away the headphones and the Discman and brought out his copy of The Recognitions. He appeared to be at least 25 years younger than me. Maybe he's read some of Gaddis's other books, or maybe not. No doubt he's further along with the literary canon than I was at the same age. I was reminded that I still hadn't gotten to The Recognitions myself. But I resolved to do so in the near future, and after that, will then be faced with the difficult but pleasurable task of re-reading Gaddis, if not all of him, at least as much as I can in the time I have left. Perhaps Carpenter's Gothic would be the best place to start and end with Gaddis, and that will be Valhalla enough.
© 2004 Robert Dumont
Robert Dumont was born in Oklahoma in 1947. He is a graduate of Tulsa University. In 1974 he and his wife settled in New York City, where they remain, residing in the borough of Brooklyn with their two children. His fiction has appeared in Telephone, Innisfree, and Caprice. His collections of short stories, Borough of Churches and New York Transit(s), are available from Xlibris.
One of Dumont's short stories can be read here.
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