20. Jun. 2001
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Every Box Bears a Pearl By Thomas Girst The Fortress is a nondescript, rather ugly yellow-brick complex in New York's Long Island City. It is sheltered from the wind by the disused Schwartz Chemical Factory, the four huge chimneys of which defy the towering Manhattan skyline across the East River. The Fortress is a high-tech warehouse with computer-optimized temperature, digital codes, identification checks and cameras. The heavy, turquoise steel doors at the entrance to Annex 32 open the way to the entire literary estate of William Gaddis (1922-1998), probably the most important postwar American writer along with Thomas Pynchon and J. D. Salinger. The recently published memoirs of Salinger's daughter reveal her relief on seeing her father's archives. She tells how everything is "labeled and organized so it wouldn't either be thrown out by stupid people or make things hellish for smart ones." The same goes for Gaddis -- except that his daughter Sarah fondly remembers how he would always refer to his personal archive as "my trash heap." This need not come as a surprise with Gaddis, seeing as he did, "the human shambles that follow the work around." Everything in Annex 32 has its place -- 31 numbered cardboard boxes, of which the majority originally contained alcoholic beverages. The boxes' labels read "Nikolai Vodka," "Moët & Chandon" as well as "Red Diamond: High Explosives -- Dangerous." Early drafts of his first novel, "The Recognitions" (1955) -- a 1,200-page account of almost everything -- are stored in a box titled "Löwenbräu Dark Special." A self-confessed collector of newspaper snippets, Gaddis amassed his archives with an almost obsessive degree of meticulousness. "He never threw away anything at all," recalls Sarah Gaddis of the mountains of paper her tireless father collected in his quarters in Key West, in the villa of his later partner Muriel Murphy in Wainscott or at home in the Hamptons. A Stroke Of Genius In addition to the manuscripts, drafts and reviews of his four novels, the archive also includes a large-scale work by Julian Schnabel, who painted a cycle based on motifs in "The Recognitions." There are also countless series of letters, often accompanied by drawings, that extend as far back as Gaddis' days as a boy scout; newspaper reports about the governor of Connecticut, whose cavalcade once hit young William; and cut-out photos of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, to whom Gaddis added his own words in balloons. There is also, however, evidence of everyday breadwinning, commercial writing jobs to finance his family's upkeep: Speeches for Kodak, IBM and the pharmaceuticals company Pfizer, film scripts for the U.S. Army, a book project for the Ford Foundation on the usefulness of television and a radio broadcast for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Then there is the box marked "Miscellaneous." "One Fine Day," which Gaddis worked on during the 1960s, is not far short of a stroke of genius. The short text, an outline for a western based on Goethe's "Faust," begins with a tribute to the genre: A stranger on the run, accompanied by a black dog and a Mexican, gallops into town. He makes a bet with an old general on the supposed incorruptibility of the local attorney, a young protégé of the former. The 19-page draft is awash with poker-playing, shoot-outs and tarring and feathering. Sensitive ladies fall in love and have the wool pulled over their eyes. Seemingly nonchalant and without ever drawing his gun, the stranger soon has one good soul after another on his conscience, eventually even that of the attorney he corrupts . A Mixture of Bitterness and Vaudeville As is typical for Gaddis, there is no happy end. "The Recognitions" also sees the Gordian-knotted plot conclude with the collapse of a church roof, burying a composer about to conduct the premiere of his magnum opus. In "One Fine Day," Gaddis evidently enjoys moving between literary heights and cinematic lows, a balancing act performed with consummate ease. Every cardboard box seems to bear a pearl. For example, Gaddis' enthusiastic critique of Saul Bellow's novel "More Die of Heartbreak," which appeared in a May 1985 issue of the New York Times Book Review. He collected all the reference material in a folder, which Gaddis labeled "Anatomy of a book review" in a note to his son Matthew. In the future, Gaddis said, he planned to resist all efforts to tempt him into writing more reviews and took delight in the New York Times paycheck made out to him for the review entitled "More Die of a Heart Attack." Sarah Gaddis never tires of talking about her father. The necklace she wears bears a miniature gold-plated typewriter with the words "I Love You" on its platen. "His gift for my high school graduation. I was just 10 when I was given my first real typewriter, and I still remember how much it irritated him when I sat down next to him and typed against him. He was a perfectly loving father, but he was afraid of competition. He supported me, of course, but always warned that there was not a single cent to be made in writing." When she first examined his archive, she was delighted to discover a copy of her novel "Swallow Hard" (1990). Gaddis ordered that one small box in his archives always be stored horizontally. It contains an abstract watercolor by his daughter that was used for the U.S. cover of "A Frolic of His Own" (1994). "I painted it in around 1960, at kindergarten. Pops loved the indignant comment from visitors of modern art museums that such works could have been done by 'any little kid.' So he just took my painting, and I even got paid for it." Where are all the boxes to go? Certainly not to Harvard, which Gaddis termed a "commercial corporation." The archive has, of course, attracted potential buyers who would flog off his work piece by piece. Matthew Gaddis sees the Internet as a way out, providing an opportunity to scan all the documents and make them accessible to everyone at the click of a mouse. This does not mean, however, that the writer's son, himself a film director, does not have precise concepts of real spaces as well. Gaddis Jr. took a comprehensive series of photos of the study and library while his father was still alive so as to be able to bring everything back to life in no time at all. Toward the end of his life, Gaddis lost his notorious shyness of interviews, finding in Germany -- of all places -- the recognition that had been denied him for decades in the United States. His 1997 visit to Cologne is legendary -- radio shows, red carpets and podium discussions. Even a local Cologne tabloid reported the arrival of the "critically ill cult writer." Gaddis treasured the mementos of his fame in Germany, especially the big, white plastic bags with his image on them advertising the 1998 publication of "The Recognitions" by a major German publishing company. The planned sequel to "J R" (1975), a novel composed almost entirely of dialog that told the story of the financial empire of an 11-year-old, never materialized. Seduced by the anagrammatic connection between Pepsi Cola and the Episcopalian Church, Gaddis for a time toyed with the idea of writing another satire on the legal system along the lines of "A Frolic of His Own," which illustrated the fine distinction between law and justice. "Offend more people!" was how the author outlined his plan. His obituary in the New York Times, on the other hand, claimed that before his death Gaddis had completed his fifth novel, "Agapé, Agape," a history of the origins of the mechanical piano. German-language reviewers agreed on another variant, claiming that Torschlusspanik (Last Minute Panic), a radio play co-produced by German radio stations that was first broadcast about four months after the author's death in 1998, was Gaddis' true literary legacy. In fact, large parts of the 84-page manuscript "Agapé, Agape" are identical to the unpublished version of Torschlusspanik, which was shortened to about half of its original size for the 90-minute radio play. Gaddis was too sick to make "Agapé, Agape" the substantial novel it could have been. What remains is the monologue of a dying man, who in a mixture of bitterness and vaudeville speaks his mind one last time about player pianos and all the foolishness of the world. In his opinion, only the great writers can show mankind a way out: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev and Thomas Bernhardt. Still, "Agapé, Agape" is a finished work. Matthew Gaddis wants it that way, and Joseph Tabbi agrees, a professor of literature from Chicago who puts Gaddis' tomes to his classes as if there never had been a widespread contempt for the "dead white males" in literature. Now, Gaddis' children have commissioned Tabbi to sift through the writer's legacy and prepare "Agapé, Agape" and other scattered writings for publication. "Naturally Gaddis just couldn't stop writing until the very end," Tabbi says. "Apart from "Agapé, Agape" he wrote a long essay about the origin of the player piano. Only fragments have come down to us, but Gaddis used it for his story like a quarry. He was working on the final version of "Agapé, Agape" when he realized how little time he had left and managed to finish it. To me, this is the most personal work Gaddis ever wrote, and I am glad that he concentrated on this one single soliloquy." Fallow Potentials, Miserable Failure An intended "King Lear" subplot was eventually dropped, Tabbi says. The dying protagonist was originally meant to have three daughters. They would receive their heritage only on the condition that they start proceedings worth millions against a computer company that illegally used his patented invention of digital technology, which he had thought up in the 1920s for use in player pianos and cash registers. But as this typical Gaddis story develops, two of the protagonist's daughters sue each other instead of joining forces against the company. The third daughter prefers to look after her father rather than respond to his hopeless demand, which leads to the suspicion that she does not want to risk her inheritance on a lawsuit with an unknown result. In the end, the impoverished father waits for his death in a senior citizen's home without having achieved anything. Matthew Gaddis explained that the Lear idea was also a result of the cruelty of the American health system. His father got a strong taste of it when his lawyer told him that he risked losing his house and all his savings in the course of two years should he decide to take advantage of intensive care services. The abbreviation "MSD" that comes up time and again on the last pages of the manuscript refers to another major topic that Gaddis was able to include only in part. "MSD" is his code for "the Self that could do more," a desperately striving Self, fallow potentials, miserable failure. The letters "MSD" denote the initials of Martin S. Dworkin, possibly the author's closest friend since the 1950s. The two young men came to know each other through Dworkin's job at the United States Information Service. "The Recognitions" was about to be published, and Dworkin was writing essays, poems, short stories and movie reviews at the time. He was an acclaimed photographer and propagated the importance of popular culture in general education. Dworkin was a permanent source of inspiration for Gaddis. He was his mentor and an ideal reader of his first novel, which are said to have nurtured 38 discussions between the two. When in 1975 Gaddis won his first National Book Award for "J R," his friend lost his job at Teachers College. The world seemed to have conspired against him; he quarreled and eventually broke with colleagues and superiors. From this moment on, he hardly worked at all. A milestone, the book he constantly talked about, was never realized. Dworkin died from leukemia in 1996, embittered and childless. Gaddis never got over the loss of his best friend. "During the last six months of his life my father went through a writing crisis," Matthew Gaddis says. "He was in need of new voices on paper, and Pops felt guilty because he was at the height of his career with 'A Frolic of His Own' when Martin died." In Gaddis' opinion, failure is a central aspect of every artist's existence. "Art itself always falls short of the artist's visions, as it must, because we are all mortal. All the arts should aspire to the condition of music. Music is the most sublime of the arts, as near to perfection as we will ever know in this world. That is a romantic concept. But it all comes crashing down," he said in an interview with French lecturer Emmanuelle Ertel in 1994. Failure presupposes attempts made, and this is exactly what distinguishes Gaddis from Dworkin. "It means fighting a losing battle, but one worth taking part in," Gaddis once said. Dworkin was refusal personified to him, but in himself he saw a continuous lack of creative power. "Lucifer's original sin is trying to take the place of the Creator, and so he is cast out of heaven. Wanting to be the creator of the beautiful puts one at odds with the world we see around. Feeling trapped in these moral coils, the artist wants to break out of them. Art is an attempt for a liberation from this mortal world that we go through day after day." Feeling Trapped in Moral Coils On the night before his death Gaddis demanded to be taken home from Southampton hospital to his "little refuge" on Boatyard Row in the old fishing village Three Mile Harbor. The small house has since been sold. "He immediately asked for some Scotch, wanted a strictly prohibited cigarette in spite of his emphysema and took one draw after the other, as if he were inhaling pure oxygen," Sarah Gaddis remembers. The daughter sensed that her father was going to die, not only because he forgot to watch his favorite television show, "Law and Order," that night. Matthew Gaddis was sitting with his father when he died in the early morning hours of Dec. 16, 1998. In his wheelchair and later in bed, Gaddis had raised his arms to conduct a big imaginary orchestra. Soundless music, for hours. There is no headstone in the small Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, only a small metal plate to mark the grave. By the end of next year at the earliest, four years after Gaddis' death, Viking Penguin finally plans to publish "Agapé, Agape." We should probably be glad that a publisher has been found at all. In the meantime, Patsy Black died in New York. She was Gaddis' first wife and the mother of his children. The expert in art from the American South suddenly dropped dead while rearranging her collection of paintings. No biographer had ever asked her for information on the writer William Gaddis. May 16, 2001
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 One of America's most important postwar writers: Despite his success, William Gaddis saw in himself a continuous lack of creative power. (Photo: Gaddis estate)
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