I date my acquaintance with Gaddis to 1961 when my friend, Stewart Richardson, editor of Doubleday, introduced us.  Gaddis, a speech writer with Pfizer, hoped for a better-paying job with IBM, where I was employed. I was unable to get him hired. Speech writers are literary valets of a sort and our value resided in how we handled the research and in-house information given us; Gaddis was superb, as I learned later when I was able to farm speech assignments to him after he left Pfizer and took part-time film-script work with the Army.    He told me that his wife, Pat, was increasingly unhappy with life with their two children in a walk-up brownstone in Manhattan and I persuaded him to move to my neighborhood in suburban Croton-on-Hudson.  We were friends closely in touch from the early sixties to the early eighties when he moved from Piermont, NY, to New York City. 

The requirements of writing Army films led to his frequent absences from home during 1963—usually to Europe. During his absences his first wife, Pat, proved vulnerable to the approaches of a married man, to whom my wife and I had introduced the Gaddises. Pat was a pretty woman with a soft-spoken North Carolinian accent. The threat of marital disruption added to William's already harried life.  The "other man" pressed his case and the Gaddises separated.   Soon, both the Gaddises and the other couple divorced.   During the strained weeks and months that followed, Gaddis, with a glass of Scotch, was a constant fixture in our living room.

My wife, a feminist, was torn, supporting Pat's right to a life of her choosing, but sympathetic to William, whom she admired and liked.  In the end she took William's side.  One of her theories for Pat's susceptibility to another choice of life style was that besides Pat's weariness with living a life so materially limited for years, with a man caught up in a concentrated and reclusive mission he was unable to share with her, his rival's neat business suits and purposeful-seeming commuting to and from the city contrasted with Gaddis's trade-mark shabby corduroy jackets and tieless shirts.  (I was surprised to hear of his "impeccable dress" at his memorial, but later learned that he had become a sartorial model during the twenty years he lived with Muriel Oxenberg, the socially prominent woman who adopted him after he left Piermont, NY. By then our friendship had become more a matter of phone conversations—usually sparked by the friendship of his daughter Sarah with my daughter Barbara, and his son Matthew's friendship with my younger daughter Joanne.)  Until then William underdressed in the winter, wearing no outer garment in the coldest weather.  He didn't spend 20 years writing JR , as I've read; he married the year after The Recognitions was published and quickly had a wife, two children and Juno, a lab retriever, to support.  Much of that time was spent earning a living on a nine-to-five basis, like so many of us. 

His divorced mother probably helped; she worked for GE in Manhattan and upon her death, Gaddis, only child, inherited the family home in Massapequa, Long Island, which his mother rented to others. Also a cottage in Saltaire, on Fire Island. (One week-end at the cottage, at cocktail time on the deck, William and I heard 9-year-old Sarah inside tap-tap-tapping on William's tiny portable (a Royal or an Olivetti). William by then had been under a book contract for several years, and said to me: "Sarah says she's going to be a writer, too, and sometimes I think, when I hear her typing, "Mercy! What if she finishes her book first." (Sarah has had a novel published and fiction in The New Yorker.)

William wasn't close to his father, who died in New Jersey when William was in Croton-on-Hudson. When he returned from the funeral and estate settlement, he had several pairs of his father's shoes that he found fit him, and a couple of jackets. I have no idea if the estate was worth anything more to him.

I gathered William had a lonely but not impoverished childhood. Pat, his first wife, once told me Gaddis had been given a set of trap drums--bass, snare, cymbals, sticks, brushes--by his parents, and a teacher at the private grade school he attended made him give several of the pieces to his classmates to teach him the values of "sharing," leaving the gift essentially useless to him. Maybe this turned Gaddis away from popular music. He always had classical recordings softly playing on the radio as he worked, a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Once at a party I gave for him and Judith, his second wife, I had put an album of Sinatra on the stereo. When the guests were down to the Gaddises and my date, the music still on, Gaddis said with some annoyance, "Harrison, you're not continuing to play that 'dancy' music for me, are you?"

After Pfizer he took free-lance speech assignments from Kodak, film-script writing for the Signal Corps and, through me, a few speech drafts for IBM's executives, as well as a couple of articles for our employee publication, Think . He had an enterprising agent, Candida Donadio, who was able to sell his contract with one house to another, for several thousand more with each transaction. JR was under contract to at least four houses. He liked Gottlieb's laid-back editorial style at Knopf, telling me that when he delivered JR to the publishing house, Gottlieb accidentally met him in the corridor, sat down on the floor, back against the wall and began reading the huge ms. there. He never forgave Harcourt, Brace for its lack of support of The Recognitions and showed me a blistering letter he wrote to Jovanovich, perhaps over his refusal to advertise it or bring out a paperback . Once in NY we ran into a young-appearing, thin, intellectual woman who had been the spark behind The Recognitions at Harcourt, he told me. She was then with another house. She shared his disenchantment with Harcourt.

The break-up with Pat nearly put William out of business for a time. Pat Black wanted to be an actress, quit school when suspended from a prep school for smoking, had a brief marriage and was in New York City hoping to break into theater when William met and married her. She drank more than she could manage -- at a party attended by Edward Albee, she asked him if it was true, was he a homosexual? Albee politely told her, "I've never been with a man." After her divorce from Gaddis, her new husband soon took a new job for the Massachusetts government and moved Pat and children to the Boston area . The children's new life with the stepfather is partly revealed in Sarah's novel.

Before he had met Judith, in his brief, bachelor period he was nearly a social dependent of mine, which delighted me. Once I took him with me to a party given by my then-agent in Montclair, N.J., where we spent the entire evening offering one another drinks and talking to one another. We could easily have stayed home, for we apparently had decided our mutual company couldn't be improved upon on that occasion.

William missed the children and family life and as a single on the literary circuit in Manhattan met Judith, daughter of a well-to-do clothier in Briarcliff Manor: ("Yup, that's my corduroy," he told William, examining the inside of his beaten-up jacket.) Judith worked for a publishing house and was attracted to Gaddis at a literary party. "There was Norman Mailer putting an arm around this guy and calling him ‘Willie,' Judith told me. "I was impressed." After Pat had left him, he told me he was worried that he would wind up wearing checkered suits and driving to racetracks in a convertible with some woman with blond-dyed hair and bright lipstick. Actually, he did buy a used convertible, a large, old model--he hated Volks bugs and little cars and the newer, flashier models. He felt a bit foolish "courting" Judith, after years of marriage. As he said to me, "You wonder, well is now a good time to try to kiss her?" He was in his fifties.

William and I, I think, supposed that in the 1950s, when our children were conceived, we would live a staid Andy Hardy kind of soap opera domestic life, the children cared for by a doting wife, a world willing to subsidize the talents we both felt we had to offer. My wife's family had beach property at Ocean City, N.J., and the Gaddises and the Kinneys spent an off-season week there. William did go barefoot but never took off his trousers -- he had no swim trunks. He did sand-play with his children. More importantly, he treated children seriously. My former wife remains devoted to her memories of his careful attention to whatever questions our children asked of him. He was always a favorite of theirs, delighted when he continued to turn up on weekends after our move from Croton to Yorktown Heights. Returning from Ocean City in our two cars, we put into one of the New Jersey Turnpike fuel stops. Standing by the pumps, William regarded the passengers of his car and said, as if in disbelief, "I have a wife, two children and a dog. I find myself wondering how this could have happened." At the Pepsico exhibit at the 1964 World's Fair, both our families were floated in boats through the tunnel with a thousand dolls of all nationalities moving in rhythm to some tune called, I think, "It's a Small World After All." We still laugh remembering the incredulous, disdainful look on William's face as he floated by all this hokum. My children still remember him as important to their childhood. My daughter Joanne, who had been Matthews's best friend in Croton, telephoned "Mr. Gaddis" in the Hamptons to get his blessing on the marriage she was about to undertake. Muriel, by then his companion and protector, explained that William was busy writing and was not to be disturbed. Finally she agreed to tell him who was calling. William immediately came on the telephone to listen and talk to Joanne at length and with warmth and to wish her the best.

He did what he felt he was supposed to do with a son. We once took our boys fishing off the dock at Croton Point. The river was then too polluted for the survival of much of anything, but Matthew once brought up an ugly, long eel. William promptly cut the line and dropped it back in the water. He was not athletic and I don't think even played catch with Matthew, which the rest of us fathers with sons considered mandatory. Every family's story is different, and of course children can subtract from a parent's life in ways that can make one feel cheated, given what's on the return belt, especially for a writer who works at home. But Gaddis would have been wonderful on the subject of how our own disillusions and failed self-expectations have subtracted from our children's lives in turn, perhaps. I rarely asked what he thought; it would have distracted him from what he wanted to say at the moment, and that was always what was worth listening to.

I gradually introduced William to the trades people in Croton whom one needs to survive in the suburbs, and one day he called to ask where he could get a car window replaced. I drove to his place and led him to Bill Chilemi's garage on Route 9. It was winter; the glass was gone on the driver's side. He said he had driven the children into Manhattan and had locked his keys in the car. "I found a hardware store," he said, "bought a hammer and smashed out the window. In any other place someone might have supposed it was an auto-break-in. In mid-town Manhattan, passersby didn't even look or slow down. We nearly froze getting home."

Another time, at a suburban party, a phone call he was expecting came through. I heard him on the phone speaking in hesitant but quite fluent French -- whether learned at Harvard or abroad I meant to ask but never did.

The Long Island house in Massapequa belonged to his mother while she lived, but was only occasionally visited by her. I recall how upset William was to get the news that teen-agers had broken into the place and vandalized it. I don't think he could dispose of the house until his mother's death. He rarely visited the place when I knew him. He also inherited from her the Fire Island cottage well into the 1980s . His mother lived in a New York City apartment. She often spent a week-end with William and Pat in Croton. (William got his prominent front teeth from her.)

The Piermont house (of Carpenter's Gothic ) was a doll's house version of a Victorian at 25 Ritie Street, mansard roof and all. One took a precipitous drop off Route 9W, a sharp left and followed the narrow, high-level street to its end, where it right-angled into Ritie and dropped in a ski-slope descent toward the town's center and the Hudson. The house was at the inside of that right angle. William (his first wife disliked his being called "Bill" or "Willie," so I still think of him as William, which was her name for him) acquired a row boat to take the children out on the river. The boat was burned at its mooring or lost through some accident: William always had some outlandish, domestic mishap to report to me in his partly amused "What more can happen to me?" attitude. The single-car garage was built into the house, helping to form the building's square ground floor. Either he transformed the garage into a study, or a previous owner had. After JR there was always a Gaddis male admirer turning up at the Piermont house, one of them apparently able to influence the selection of the book for the National Book Award. "I think I'm going to be able to get them to vote for JR ," one earnest young man once said to him in my presence. I never caught any of their names, but sensed that they were of the literary elite from William's days in the Village .

Just as Pat had hoped for more material rewards from The Recognitions , Judith put in eight hopeful years with William while JR was underway. Within a year after their marriage they moved from a rental in Croton to the house in Piermont, across the Hudson. When JR came out I gave a small book party for William in my apartment in Mt.Kisco, where the consequences of my own separation had landed me. He got instant and ample critical recognition this time but poor sales. He was teaching at Bard. College, up the Hudson. He explained "I'm resisting my students' tendencies to get inside their characters' heads -- you know -- go up and down the ladders of emotion internally. What their characters are thinking, what and who they are, should all be evident from their dialogue." Receiving the National Book Award for JR he simply told the disappointed audience, "I believe writers should be read and not heard or seen" and sat down. He disliked public speaking. He and William Gass appeared at the 92nd St. Y, where Gaddis, in the course of gesticulating nervously, kept pushing the mike away from him--perhaps unknowingly but perhaps not--leaving him inaudible to the large audience. Someone would emerge to swing the mike back towards him and in no time at all he would be inaudible again. Prior to his going on stage I visited him backstage with A Frolic of One's Own to be signed ("To Harrison, and the early days," he wrote). It was the last time I saw him, though we kept in touch by phone, usually engendered by our children. I remember during the Q and A period at the "Y", that evening, someone in the audience said he had read that a movie option might be offered for Frolic and what would Gaddis do to protect its literary integrity. William replied, "That's their problem; what they make of the book for film purposes doesn't concern me." By no means did he share Salinger's determined isolation; he proudly showed me clippings with references to him and his work and accepted every interview or public appearance he could -- though he disliked much of it.

Once when little Matthew asked his father about some violent happening being reported on TV, I remember William explaining, "You have to remember, Matthew, it's a wild world out there." The wildness and incongruities of life nourished his approach to fiction, I always thought. A news story of some outrageous scam or scandal amused him, leading him to give that choked-back chortle or snicker, as if to say he knew he shouldn't be laughing, in view of the victims, but it seemed to support his search for that part of life that was so often mismanaged into something laughable. He contributed a skit at a Democratic fund-raising dance in Croton (the anti-Nixon years); his theme: "Let's put a man on the sun." He was impatient with what he saw as squandering finance and brainpower on more planetary room for mankind's folly. He was much a part of our Croton group that was vehemently anti-Vietnam. He, Matthew, my son John, and I spent a week camping in the FDR National Park in the Shenandoah with my then-brother-in-law and his four sons. Norman was with the State Department and a firm supporter of our foreign policy. The quiet wilderness rang with our arguments, Gaddis as forceful as I had ever heard him. He never forgave Johnson for the deceit and foolish presidential pride that kept him sending more and more youngsters to die in a war we couldn't afford to win and are still paying for. Gaddis also bristled at social snobbery. At a party of Reader's Digest editors (one of whom I was dating at the time), a young, conservative stock broker thought he was being liberal for our sakes by explaining that he "even represented members of the lower classes" in the stock market. Gaddis angrily wanted to know what he meant by the lower classes. He had the young man gasping and floundering.

A braver amateur psychologist than I would state with some self-assurance that Gaddis's work includes a great deal of score-settling. There was some element of hostility in all his wisdom and humor. There had been a defiant wildness in his youth, abetted by booze. He was expelled from Harvard in his senior year after getting into trouble with the local police. After Harvard he took a trip to the southwest and told me he spent a couple of nights in jail -- over what he either didn't say or I've forgotten. Once he and a group of friends were drinking in a Third Avenue bar -- perhaps Clark's; he told me he had what he thought was a friendly discussion with a stranger at the bar. When the group proceeded on to a nearby party, one of them told him the stranger had afterwards referred to William as "a queer." William immediately returned to the bar, took his place alongside the stranger, bought a drink and threw it in his face. The bouncer grabbed him by the collar and the seat of the pants and literally threw him on to the sidewalk.

William was welcomed into our "liberal" Croton group of the 60s and 70s. There were those in the group who began to wonder if the book Gaddis seemed to be forever working on ( JR) would ever be completed. I heard that the long-awaited book had became a subject of quiet ridicule. The book's publication did follow The Recognitions by 20 years--but William's--and my -- moment of revenge was when JR emerged and, by happenstance, the whole Croton contingent was on hand at my eldest daughter's wedding reception the day after William was awarded the National Book Award. He was there, modestly accepting crow-eaten compliments, with his new wife, Judith. I was so proud of him I kissed him on both cheeks.

Once I was discussing the departure of one of my speechwriters at IBM to become an Episcopalian priest, for a quarter of his IBM salary. "But," I remarked to William, "if you think about it, all money really buys is privacy, and if you're willing to give that up, a large salary doesn't really matter." When "The only thing money buys is privacy" appeared in JR , I telephoned him delightedly. He couldn't remember our discussion from some time before but said, "I'm sure you're right; one must gather one's flowers where one may." He was fond of Samuel Butler and quoted him frequently. He read the better books of literary history constantly and his creative and apt references to them were reasons I enjoyed being around him. He was the first I heard to say "Life is what happens to us while we're making plans." And upon my telling him of the death of a friend's young child, he quoted someone with characteristic aptness: "Death prefers a shining mark."

Judith's family never helped them financially. Her mother took her to Florida for a vacation one winter after her seventh or eighth year with William, and Judith stayed there, getting a job as waitress. She, too, was disappointed to find their life was still financially hectic after JR 's publication. William was beside himself again over her departure, worrying that she had taken up "with some sailor." He had made her co-owner of the Fire Island house and had to buy back her share under the divorce agreement. He rented out the Piermont house (the model for Gothic ) after meeting a woman he had dated in college, Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, and moved in with her in New York City. She was divorced, or widowed, was wealthy, lived in a large apartment on 73rd Street between Second and Third Avenues on the upper east side with a grown daughter who was into some Far Eastern cult. An amused William told me that some Far East Indian, head swathed in a turban, was always walking through the living room. Muriel had a big house in East Hampton, Long Island, which she also shared with William. She liked to give parties and William was the centerpiece, attracting patrons of the arts to her dinner table in NYC and the Hamptons. She was protective of him, often curt with me when I would call, as, William said, she was with many of his friends. I would ask him why she always sounded so nasty on the phone; he would simply sigh and say, "I know, I know."

As Frolic got going he began staying in the city apartment in the summer and the big, sparsely heated Hampton house in the winter – less to avoid her than to find the isolated time to work, it seems. I visited him one December weekend when he was alone in the Hamptons and nearly froze – inadequate fireplaces and electric heaters only. Dedicating Frolic to Muriel seems to have been his final payment to her. With a large monetary advance he bought a small house in East Hampton right after its publication, but then discovered Key West.

Sarah says that with his last illness in Florida, Judith looked him up and offered solicitous attention. As a literary artist he was a driven man and, I've no doubt, often hard for a woman to live with; Judith was a bright, pretty young woman--who wasn't? -- who may simply have wearied of living in his shadow with little to show for it materially or what she needed to supply her own self-esteem and future.

William, Sarah, and Matthew called me from Florida the evening of his 75th birthday. Matthew said my name came up because his father had found him reading my Thurber book [ James Thurber: His Life and Times ].

The call was usurped by my daughter Barbara, Sarah's close friend over the years, and Sarah. Matthew is described as a filmmaker and has put in work on a documentary of his father. And good for that, for it meant taping a great deal of Gaddis which we may one day hear.

As I mention in my Thurber book acknowledgements, William took the time to read the Columbus, Ohio, portion of my ms. and wrote me a page or two in his lovely calligraphy, commenting on Thurber's relationship to his father. I've wondered why of so much of the Columbus material I gave him to read he selected Thurber's relationship to his father as the principal subject to comment on. I wasn't able to work Gaddis' comments into the book but I retain it as a collector's item. His elegant handwriting was always a bonus delivered with his messages and more the worth preserving for it. He was generous with it. Friends of the Croton-on-Hudson days, Peter and Janet Pratt, opened a restaurant in an 18th century house in Yorktown Heights, NY, and William cheerfully wrote their menus in his old-world script, including the subsequent revisions.

When my publisher sent him a copy of my Thurber book he at once telephoned Bill Strachan, Henry Holt's editor-in-chief, praising the quality production job and for "having the guts" to publish a fine book, rather than "a quick best-seller by some basketball player." He telephoned me a few days after receiving the book from me to say he had been talking to the artist Saul Steinberg at a party and did I know he had been influenced by Thurber? I had read it in an interview--it wasn't mentioned in the NY Times obit of Steinberg, however.

William retained an arrogance toward many writers, some of whom I liked. After JR 's publication we visited a bookstore in White Plains, its counters stacked with Ragtime , the newly published JR hard to find. "Can you imagine!" he exclaimed scornfully. " Ragtime !" He was the only writer I've met who didn't think E. B. White worth reading. Perhaps he wearied of all the White hero-worship during his brief tenure as fact-checker on The New Yorker. The anecdote of Harold Ross asking if Moby Dick was the captain or the whale has appeared in print innumerable times, but no one seems to have realized that the fact-checker he asked was Gaddis. As I write in my Thurber tome, "Ross's limited knowledge of classical and current literature was always a matter of office gossip and amusement. One noon he stopped by his checking department to ask a surprised young man if Moby Dick was the man or the whale. ("I was so startled, I had trouble for a moment remembering," says the novelist William Gaddis, who put in a brief stint as a fact checker in the 1940s.")

Gaddis said he worked hard to uphold the department's reputation for accuracy. He was not interested in sports. ("This Roger Angell--he spends his time writing about BASEBALL!" -- in a tone of incredulity.) Once, in his fact-checking days, he changed Penn State to The University of Pennsylvania (he thought one was the abbreviation of the other) in one of Roger Whitaker's columns on college football, resulting in low-level trauma for the magazine. Taking the galleys of an Edmund Wilson book review to Wilson's temporary office at the magazine, to be sure Wilson was satisfied with the copy, he found Wilson looking through the last issue. "I only read the magazine occasionally, usually in the baaath," Wilson told Gaddis, in his strange accent, almost by way of apology at having been caught reading it. William told me he and the other checkers really did make a strong and--he thought--successful effort in researching the facts in the magazine's non-fiction--and fiction, if facts were involved. I thought of that when I visited him in the Hamptons. He was, he estimated, about 65 pages from finishing Frolic ; still stacked on his desk were law journals. However flippant his approach, or however comic, he was determined that his legal discussions in the book be authentic. He did more research for his fiction than most fact-writers.

His other anecdote from his days on The New Yorker was of the exuberant new hire, a young lady fresh from college, who was showing her parents through the magazine on a Sunday when the place should have been empty. The prickly Wolcott Gibbs, however, was in his office and when she heard his typing the young woman triumphantly flung open his door and announced to her parents: "And this is the famous Wolcott Gibbs!"  She was fired the next day.

After Frolic , he dropped his agent, Candida Donadio, who, he told me, was "simply too old," and went with the high-powered agent who had stolen Martin Amis away from another agency unethically. I was a bit surprised at the indifference William seemed to show toward a woman whose skill at getting one publisher to buy the Gaddis contract of another for more money had helped keep Gaddis afloat during the hard years. But William was unsentimental about business relationships; he always felt his books should have sold better and would have with the right promotion. The intransigence of the publishing industry frustrated him. He was fond of the woman editor handling Frolic for Poseidon Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint that was suddenly folded before his book came out but too late to avoid the Poseidon label. His editor, who had worked closely with him, took a job with Crown. When Frolic won the National Book Award, he was met at the ceremony by S&S's fiction editor, a woman he didn't know and who had never worked on the book but was there to share in the glory -- and to take the brunt of his sarcasm: "It seems that you CAN win one of these things without the least bit of advertising or promotional help from your publisher," he told her acidly. "She said nothing in response," Gaddis told me. "Your books sell steadily over the years without advertising," another S&S executive had told him. S&S had given him $200,000 after Carpenter's Gothic and, with a MacArthur grant, he made it from Gothic to Frolic 's publication. And then there was Muriel who helped house him, whom he honors in the dedication of Frolic but was severing relations with, even as he finished the book.

He talked of a book stemming from the player piano as long as I knew him—the idea that technology needed to record the work of an artist only once and the artist could be ignored ever after. I always thought Kurt Vonnegut had done a book on the subject but didn't dare mention it. William also wanted to write a play about the Civil War, and I felt that that would have been next.

I didn't trust one or two of the memorial testimonials to Gaddis at the Academy. He never used vulgarities in his conversation, as one of the speakers quoted him. And "She writes books; I write literature," doesn't sound like the non-boastful Gaddis. More likely, he quoted someone -- he was always quoting others; perhaps he had said something like: As so-and-so once said, when asked if he resented that his books didn't sell as well as so-and-so's, "The difference may be between writing books and writing literature. I'd like to think that applies in my instance.'" Something like that would be much more the Gaddis I knew.

He's gone, but there he is and will be on our book shelves where we can continue to enjoy his remarkable mind, his humor, and his wonderful revenge on the world he was given to deal with. Wordsworth, wasn't it, who explained that a literary classic is determined by "a passionate few" who keep it alive? The full worth of Gaddis hasn't been established, in my opinion. He needs readers, still, and the right ones. He would be delighted, as I am, to know that "the passionate few" on the internet will help see to it that his work and its importance to our culture continue to grow.

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