William Gaddis, dead at 75.

[Mark A. Douglas]

-Thought this might be of interest to some of the listers.



>from the new york times web site,
>http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/121798obit-gaddis.html:
>
>
>William Gaddis, 75, Innovative Author of Complex, Demanding Novels, Is Dead
>
>By MEL GUSSOW
>
>William Gaddis, author of "The Recognitions" and "JR," and a novelist of
>immense range, complexity and satiric humor, died Wednesday at his home in
>East Hampton, N.Y. He was 75.
>
>The cause was prostate cancer, said his daughter, Sarah Meares Gaddis.
>
>Gaddis was one of the most innovative and demanding of writers. His four
>published novels stand tall and totemic in the field of modernist
>literature. For "The Recognitions," his first novel, in 1955, he was
>compared to James Joyce. With other books, critics drew parallels with
>Malcolm Lowry and Herman Melville. Aspects of all three and others figured
>in his work, but most of all he was, in Cynthia Ozick's words, "an American
>original."
>
>Reviewing Gaddis's 1985 novel, "Carpenter's Gothic," in The New York Times
>Book Review, Ozick looked back on "The Recognitions" as "the most
>overlooked important work of the last several literary generations." It
>was, she said, "a vast fiction about fabrication and forgery, about the
>thousand faces of the counterfeit, and therefore, ineluctably, about art
>and religion."
>
>"Carpenter's Gothic," Ozick said, was an "unholy landscape of a novel -- an
>extra turret added on to the ample, ingenious, audacious Gothic mansion
>William Gaddis has slowly been building in American letters." In her
>judgment the book marked a turning point in his career; admirers hoped that
>it would bring him a wider audience.
>
>Despite rapturous reviews and a covey of awards (including two National
>Book Awards and a MacArthur "genius" grant), he was not destined to have a
>popular readership. He was often considered one of the least read of
>important American writers. But his books have become contemporary
>classics.
>
>As his reputation grew, he was surrounded by academics seeking symbols and
>offering deep analyses of his work. He maintained his equilibrium, saying,
>"What can I do if people insist I'm cleverer than I think I am?"
>
>Observing Gaddis at a writers conference in the Soviet Union in 1985, Louis
>Auchincloss said that he was "reserved and quiet, impeccably clad, with the
>patient composure of a man of the world and the piercing eye of a wit," and
>that he spoke "in measured tones of the small sales that the serious
>novelist might expect."
>
>Gaddis was born in Manhattan on Dec. 29, 1922, grew up in Massapequa, N.Y.,
>and went to boarding school in Connecticut and Farmingdale High School on
>Long Island. He studied English literature at Harvard University, and wrote
>stories, poems, essays and reviews for the Harvard Lampoon. In his senior
>year, he was asked to resign from the college after he and a friend were
>involved in an altercation with the police.
>
>In New York, he worked as a fact checker at The New Yorker, and spent his
>free time in Greenwich Village with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other
>writers of the Beat Generation. Leaving New York, he traveled through
>Mexico and Central America, joining insurgents in Costa Rica during a brief
>civil war. Subsequently he went to Spain and Africa, gathering experience
>and material while working on "The Recognitions."
>
>He continued work on the novel through the early 1950's. Published in 1955,
>it weighed in at a hefty 956 pages. It received generally unappreciative
>reviews. In a brief one in The New York Times Book Review, Granville Hicks
>said that the author had "ostentatiously aimed at writing a masterpiece,"
>but had written a book that was "no more than very talented or highly
>ingenious or, on another level, rather amusing." Gaddis said the book's
>reception was "a sobering experience."
>
>It was 20 years before he published another novel, but during the interval,
>"The Recognitions" was reprinted in a paperback edition and was published
>abroad, and it began building an underground reputation for the author. To
>continue his fiction, Gaddis supported himself by teaching and writing
>nonfiction on assignment. For four years, he worked in public relations for
>the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. In 1963 he won a National Arts and
>Letters grant and, four years later, another from the National Endowment
>for the Arts.
>
>In 1974, "The Recognitions" was reissued in a mass market paperback. Tony
>Tanner took that occasion, in a review in The New York Times Book Review,
>to extol Gaddis, ranking him alongside Thomas Pynchon as an
>experimentalist: "In its scope, its witty-serious use of erudition, its
>endless exploitation of the resources available to a modern text, its
>brilliant use of language, and, not least, its marvelous humor and range of
>tone," the book seemed to him "one of most important American novels
>written since the last war."
>
>By the time "JR" was published the following year, Gaddis had achieved the
>recognition that had been denied him upon publication of his first novel.
>In The New York Times Book Review, George Stade characterized the theme of
>"The Recognitions" as "the multiple and paradoxical relations between
>recognition and forgery," and said the book had raised the question whether
>"all human products and activities are each no more than items in a series
>
>of copies for which there is no original."
>
>The reviewer continued that "as much, and more" could be said about "JR,"
>and concluded that "no recent novel I know of with anything like the
>fullness or accuracy of 'Jr' is at once so inventive and subtle in the
>structure of relations among its parts."
>
>The title character of "JR" is an 11-year-old who becomes a wizard of Wall
>Street. In a Paris Review interview, Gaddis explained why the character was
>so young. "He is in this prepubescent age where he is amoral" and "dealing
>with people who are immoral, unscrupulous," he said, "whereas his good
>cheer and greed he considers perfectly normal."
>
>Praised by William H. Gass and other writers, "JR" won the National Book
>Award. "Carpenter's Gothic" followed in 1985. At 262 pages, it was Gaddis's
>shortest work. At the time of the book's publication, the author said in an
>interview that there was no underlying scheme to his novels.
>
>"There is an obligation not to bore or be bored yourself in doing your
>work," Gaddis said. "If a writer is bored, the reader will be too." For "A
>Frolic of His Own" in 1994, a book about plagiarism and intellectual
>property, he won his second National Book Award.
>
>In addition to his daughter, a novelist who lives in Asheville, N.C., and
>Sag Harbor, N.Y., he is survived by a son, Matthew Hough Gaddis, a
>filmmaker in Manhattan.
>
>In "JR," the writer Jack Gibbs is trying to finish a book titled "Agape
>Agape." Before his death, Gaddis finished his fifth novel, also titled
>"Agape Agape." It is, said his son, an extension of that original idea in
>"JR," a novel about "the secret history of the player piano." The player
>piano was an early obsession of the author, who considered it to be an
>example of a "a nonparticipatory art form." In other words, the new Gaddis
>will be about the destructive elements of mechanization and the arts.
>
>