William Gaddis

Author

• Born: December 29, 1922
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 16, 1998
• Place of death: East Hampton, New York

Biography

William Thomas Gaddis is regarded as one of the most brilliant and difficult American writers of the twentieth century, the creator of works that are extraordinarily complex in design, language, and vision.

After graduating from Harvard University, Gaddis lived in Latin America, Europe, and North Africa between 1947 and 1955, and he was a freelance speech writer and screenwriter between 1956 and 1970. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation as well as several prestigious awards, including the 1976 and 1994 National Book Awards for fiction.

The Recognitions, nearly one thousand pages in length and dealing “with such matters as art forgery, counterfeiting, false religious rhetoric, ambidextrous sexuality, the fraudulence of political life, and the masquerades of intellectual and artistic society,” is a Menippean satire on the entire modern world. The largely comic novel is encyclopedic, dense in style as well as content, and it has little traditional plot. There are fifty characters whose lives—their pasts and presents, as well as their anticipated conversations—cross and parallel one another. The story, which covers a thirty-year period, takes place in France, Italy, Spain, New York, and New England.

The central figure, Wyatt Gwyon, rejects his father’s calling as clergyman and instead becomes an artist. Wyatt’s efforts at understanding art in relation to life and true art in relation to counterfeit art involve discoveries regarding the shams and counterfeits of modern life. At the end of his pilgrimage, he experiences an epiphany at a Spanish monastery, realizing that art and the preoccupations of the ordinary life are human structures created to save human beings from ultimate chaos. It is during this great spiritual and creative experience that Wyatt gains a recognition of the unity of all living and nonliving things and extends himself beyond the temporal and artistic to a sense of the intermingling of life and death.

Like The Recognitions, JR details Gaddis’s concern with the loss of value and criticizes the corruption of contemporary moneyed society, with its wasted human relationships and aborted creative energy. Lacking traditional form and overt description or characterization, the novel consists of fragments of unattributed dialogue. Gaddis tries to mirror in his writing the distortions of language and the decay of communication in a dying world.

The plot of JR deals with an eleven-year-old delinquent, JR, an outcast from his family and society, who is in the sixth grade at a Long Island school. JR becomes a representative of the ugly wheeler-dealer society when he brilliantly builds an enormous, corrupt paper empire that reflects the political, cultural, and social power bases of contemporary American society. Into JR’s life comes Edward Bast, a former composer and teacher, who becomes JR’s agent. At the end, JR gains an understanding of love and personal values, and Bast returns to the world of art.

In Gaddis’s 1982 essay “The Rush for Second Place,” he describes the fusion of Darwinism and Christianity in American business, which he maintains has turned the American dream inside out. The vision of human corruption and lovelessness surfaces again in Carpenter’s Gothic, where Paul Booth, an immoral and scheming veteran, acts as a public relations consultant for the fundamentalist clergyman Elton Ude. Booth aims to transform all events—no matter how unethical—into positive public images. His ends, money and power, justify any means. All the events of the book take place in a house rented by a mad geologist-novelist, McCandless, who summarizes the failure of faith, in personal, political, and religious terms. He is an intractable, disturbing incarnation of twentieth-century decadence.

In A Frolic of His Own, Gaddis turns his satirical eye to America’s runaway legal system. The protagonist, Oscar Crease, a history teacher and playwright, files countless frivolous lawsuits, at one point suing himself because he was run over by his own car, a red Sosumi. His hilarious machinations are exposed through fragments of legal discourse, including briefs, depositions, opinions, jury instructions, and an excerpt from Oscar’s play about the Civil War, which is evidence in a copyright infringement case. Meaningless lawsuits multiply as Oscar wields the law to the letter but without its moral spirit.

Gaddis’s final novel, published posthumously, was Agapē Agape. At only 128 pages, it is significantly shorter than any of his other works, but it compresses his philosophy of the world and of writing into a single distillation. The plot involves a dying writer attempting to complete his final work, a social history of the player piano, presented in a stream-of-consciousness monologue in which the writer’s concern about his work is intertwined with his thoughts on the process of work and the effects of technology—epitomized by the player piano, which does not need a pianist in order to create music—in stifling artistic creativity.

In his novels, each filled with echoes from classic works of literature, Gaddis depicts a corrupt America driven by stupidity and greed. His characters search for redemption through individual control, love, and art, but it is uncertain that their efforts are equal to the grim environs in which their battles are waged.

As Gaddis was a more private individual, scholars and fans of his work appreciated the posthumous publication of a collection of letters that he had written throughout his life. The Letters of William Gaddis was published in 2013.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Recognitions, 1955

JR, 1975

Carpenter’s Gothic, 1985

A Frolic of His Own, 1994

Agapé, Agape, 2002

Nonfiction:

The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings, 2002 (Joseph Tabbi, editor)

The Letters of William Gaddis, 2013 (Steven Moore, editor)

Bibliography

Beer, John. “William Gaddis.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 21 (Fall, 2001): 69–110. A very thorough overview article and a good introduction to Gaddis’s body of work. Focuses on Gaddis’s satirical style.

Bradfield, Scott. "Man of His Words." Review of The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore. The New York Times, 17 May 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/books/review/the-letters-of-william-gaddis.html. Accessed 31 May 2017. Offers a review of the edited volume that compiles several letters that Gaddis wrote throughout his life, including some correspondence with his literary agent.

Gaddis, William. “The Art of Fiction, CI: William Gaddis.” Interview by Zoltan Abadi-Nagy. Paris Review 105 (Winter, 1987): 54–89. An extensive interview with Gaddis, conducted during a 1986 visit to Budapest, Hungary. The author talks in detail about his sources, reputation, principal themes, and work in progress. He dispels a number of misconceptions, especially those linking his work to sources in Joyce, and discusses how the writer must ignore pressures of the literary marketplace.

Green, Jack. Fire the Bastards! Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992. A series of three essays originally published by the pseudonymous author in 1962, indignantly attacking the reviewers of The Recognitions for failing to appreciate its greatness. Green cites numerous factual errors in the reviews and excoriates the reviewers for being unwilling to make the effort to understand the book. In contrast to the academic tone of later studies, this book is written in tones of rage with eccentric syntax and capitalization.

Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940-1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. An important essay on Gaddis’s place among contemporary writers such as Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, focusing in particular on Gaddis’s satires of counterfeit art, fake sensibility, and empty values in American civilization. Includes useful discussions of Gaddis’s narrative techniques, especially his development of scenes and characters in his first two novels.

Keuhl, John, and Steven Moore, eds. In Recognition of William Gaddis. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984. Gathers six previously published essays alongside seven new ones. Particularly useful is David Koenig’s discussion of Gaddis’s early career and his sources for The Recognitions, and other essays on Gaddis’s satire of the monetization of art and love in contemporary culture.

Knight, Christopher J. Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. A good study of Gaddis’s oeuvre. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Moore, Steven. A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. An indispensable, line-by-line guidebook to Gaddis’s difficult first novel, providing concise annotations of his extratextual allusions and quotations, as well as the novel’s intratextual developments of character and events. Also includes a useful introductory essay and reprints three previously published but rare early pieces by Gaddis.

Moore, Steven. William Gaddis. Boston: Twayne, 1989. The first full-length study of the writer’s career and principal works, from The Recognitions through Carpenter’s Gothic. An opening biographical chapter provides extensive information about his childhood, his education, his work, and his affiliations leading up to the first novel. A readable and critically incisive overview.

Review of Contemporary Fiction 2 (Summer, 1982). A special issue, one-half of which is devoted to Gaddis’s work. Contains a rare though brief interview with the author, as well as seven original essays on The Recognitions and JR. Most of the essays concentrate on the bases of form in novels still regarded, in 1982, as too formless and sprawling.

Wolfe, Peter. A Vision of His Own. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. A thoroughgoing study of Gaddis’s first four novels, emphasizing such themes as the role of the artist, language and law as efforts to assert meaning and order in the face of entropy, and the soul-destroying aspects of twentieth-century American culture.