William Gaddis - The recognitions

THE RECOGNITIONS

OTHER WORKS BY WILLIAM GADDIS

J R

Carpenters Gothic

A Frolic of His Own

Agap Agape

The Rush for Second Place

INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM H. GASS

The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Copyright 1952, 1955, Sarah Gaddis and Matthew Gaddis; Copyright renewed 1983, Sarah Gaddis and Matthew Gaddis. All rights reserved. First published in the United States of America by Harcourt Brace & Co. 1955, and subsequently by Penguin Books in 1985. A portion of Chapter II of this book appeared originally in New World Writing, 1952, in slightly different form.

Introduction copyright 1993, 2012 by William H. Gass

First Dalkey Archive edition, 2012

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gaddis, William, 1922-1998.

The recognitions / William Gaddis; introduction by William H. Gass. -- 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-56478-691-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-564-78696-8 (e-book)

I. Title.

PS3557.A28R4 2011

813.54--dc19

2011031304

Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

www.dalkeyarchive.com

Cover: design and composition by Danielle Dutton, photo by Martin Dworkin, courtesy of Bernard Looks

He had been a floorwalker at Bloomingdales. That was one rumor. He was presently writing under the nom de plume of Thomas Pynchon. That was another. He had had to pay Harcourt Brace to publish The Recognitions, and then, disappointed and peeved by its reception, he had the unsold stock destroyed. He died of dysentery or some similarly humiliating and touristy disease at forty-three and had been buried stoneless-in-Spain under a gnarled tree. Among the more absurd was the allegation that he had worked as a machinists assistant on the Panama Canal and served as a soldier of fortune for a small war in Costa Rica. He had no visible means. What he did do was traipse. He became a character in books which bore a vagrants name. No. He worked for the army and wrote the texts of field manuals. No. He scripted films. They told you/showed you how to take apart and clean your rifle. A rather unkind few suggested he had been a fact checker at The New Yorker. Not at all, argued others, he was born a freelancer. And became a ghost who moved corporate mouths while gathering material for a novel he would write one day about America and money. When John Kuehl and Steven Moore edited a collection of essays about him, the honored author turned artist and, for the title page, self-drew himself suitably suited and bearing a highball glass. The figure has no head.

In 1976, when his second novel, J R, won the National Book Award, his admirers, confused by William Gaddiss previous anonymity (very like the chary pronouns above), by the too sensibly priced fum blanc, and by the customary babble at celebrational parties, frequently miscaught his name, often congratulating a fatter man. Even The New York Times, at one low point, attributed his third novel, Carpenters Gothic, to that self-same and similarly sounding person. Yes. Perhaps William Gaddis is not B. Traven after all, or J. D. Salinger, Ambrose Bierce, or Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps he is me.

When I was congratulated, I was always gracious. When I was falsely credited, I was honored by the error.

These mistaken identifications turned out to belong to William Gaddiss book where reality already had been arrested; for what can be true in a world made of fakes, misappropriations, fraud, and flummery? Only this: that, if we had two doorsteps, on one would stand a hypocritical holy man, on another a charlatan dressed as a statesman; that among our most revered relics, if we had some, wed find out our local saints pickled thumb belonged originally to a penniless neighborhood drunk, that our museums most esteemed painting was a forgery, that the old coins wed collected were inept counterfeits, and the fine car wed just bought a real steal. What Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of Auguste Rodin is certainly true of the man in that headless sketch: Rodin was a solitary before fame found him, and afterward perhaps he became still more solitary. For fame is finally only the sum of all those misunderstandings which gather round a new name. In our oddly clamorous yet silent times, to be a famous author is to be unknown all over the world. Similarly, The Recognitions, the work which wrapped William Gaddis in the cloud of its carefully adumbrated confusions, remains widely heard about, reverently spoke of, yet narrowly read. It seems to lead, like an entombed pharaoh, an underground life, presumably surrounded by other precious things and protected by a curse.

Like Malcolm Lowrys great dark work, Under the Volcano, The Recognitions needed devotees who would keep its existence known until such time as it could be accepted as a classic; but a cult following is not the finest one to have, suggesting something, at best, beloved only by special tastesin this case, the worry was, a wacko book with wacko fans. In fact, a cult did form, a cult in the best old sense, for it was made of readers whose consciousness had been altered by their encounter with this book; who had experienced more than its obvious artistic excellence, and responded to its neglect not merely with the resigned outrage customarily felt by those who read well and widely and wish that justice be accorded good books; it was composed of those who had felt to the centers of themselves how much this novel was indeed a recognition and could produce that famous shock: how it revealed the inner workings of the social world as though that world were a nickel watch; how it combined the pessimisms of its perceptions with the affirmations of the art it, at the same time, altered and advanced; more, how its author, though new to the game, had cared enough about himself, his aims, his skill, to create greatness against the grain, and, of course, against the odds.

Begun in 1945 without really knowing what or why, and continued in bursts from 1947, The Recognitions was published in the middle of the fifties, a decade so flushed with success it could not feel the lines of morbidity which were its bones. A typesetter, its said, refused to continue work on the text and sought advice from his priest, who told him he was right to desist. Naturally the novel, when it appeared, won an award for its design.

Its arrival was duly newsed in fifty-five papers and periodicals. Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid. But the reviewers responses to the book confirmed its character and quality, for they not only declared it unreadable and wandering and tiresome and confused, they participated in the very chicaneries the text documented and dramatized. It was too much to expect: that they should read and understand and praise a fiction they were fictions in. You, too, can let your present copy rest unread on some prominent table. A few critics confessed they could not reach the novels conclusion except by skipping. Well, how many have actually arrived at the last page of Proust or completed Finnegans Wake? What does it mean to finish Moby-Dick, anyway? Do not begin this book with any hope of that. This is a book you are meant to befriend. It will be your lifelong companion. You will end only to begin again.

It was wrong in someone young to be so ambitious, the reviewers thought; the result was certain to be pretentious, full of the strain of standing on tiptoe. If the author works at his work, the reader may also have to, whereas when a writer whiles away both time and words, the reader may relax and gently peruse. Well,