FW: eGAD: trainspotting again

[Richard Romeo]

from the gaddis-list: 

-----Original Message-----
From: victoria harding [mailto:vharding at harding-giannini.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 1999 7:59 AM
To: gaddis-l at list.sirius.com
Subject: RE: eGAD: trainspotting again


Dear All --

"Cult Fiction:  a reader's guide" (1999, Contemporary Books, a division of
NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group, Inc., under license from Prion Books
Limited, London, UK.) by Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard, contains the
following entry.

-----------

William Gaddis
1922-1998
The accountant of counterfeit culture

Born in New York, Gaddis was educated at Harvard but left without
graduating.  He lived and travelled abroad in Mexico and Central America
until in 1945 he started his first, epic novel, The Recognitions, which was
eventually published in 1955.  From that point on, rumour alway[s]
surrounded Gaddis (in many ways, even more of a recluse than J.D. Salinger).
Critics have from time to time suggested he is the alter ego of fellow
recluse Thomas Pynchon.  But then, they also thought he was a floorwalker at
Macy's department store, or possibly a mercenary in a war in Costa Rica, or
maybe a labourer on the Panama Canal.  He has in fact supported himself
through his lengthy literary silences by, among other things, writing public
relations material for corporate clients.  Gaddis has also worked as a fact
finder for the New Yorker.

When his second novel JR (1975) won the National Book Award in 1976
(following its 20-year gestation period), Gaddis was confused at the awards
ceremony with his friend, the critic and author William Gass, to the extent
that, on the publication of  Carpenters Gothic, a mere ten years later, the
New York Times even attributed the book to Gass, not Gaddis.  In 1984
acolytes John Kuehl and Steven Moore edited In Recognition of William Gaddis
and, according to Gass:  'The honoured author turned artist and for the
title page, self-drew himself suitably suited and bearing a highball glass.
The figure has no head.'

Each of Gaddis's novels consisted almost entirely of dialogue, and each
brilliantly lambasted different aspects of contemporary America:  from the
self-centered and superficial New York intellectuals in The Recognitions,
through the corrupt business world of JR, and Carpenters Gothic's
fundamentalist hysteria and all-consuming greed (1985), to A Frolic of his
Own (1994), with its masterly indictment of America's legal system and the
country's mania for litigation.  As Mary McCarthy said of Gaddis's work:
'His novels are massive in construction and dazzling in execution.'
Experimental and difficult to categorise, they are encyclopedic works with
meticulous, labyrinthine plotting and endless roll calls of characters.  The
characters are always without agency, enmeshed in some great unquantifiable
system.  In Gaddis's paranoid and conspiratorial fictional worlds everything
seems to be counterfeit, hiding some elusive, never-to-be-found truth.

MUST READ:  Carpenters Gothic, The Recognitions
READ ON:  Robert Coover, Don Delillo, William Gass, Thomas Pynchon.

[All but Gass are included in the volume.]

The Authors

Former record producer Andrew Calcutt in a lecturer, journalist and
broadcaster whose previous publications include Arrested Development:  pop
culture and the erosion of adulthood,  Beat:  the iconography of victim
culture from the Beat Generation of Princess Diana, and White Noise:  an A-Z
of the contradictions in cyberculture.

He fronts a 'free and easy listening trio,' The Smokers, and never spends
enough time with his family.


Richard Shephard was born into a literary family; his mother worked as a
researcher in the London Library and then at Foyles bookshop.

He co-edited the Waterstone's Guide to Crime Fiction and is currently
managing editor of the Waterstone's website.

-------------------

Other authors included range alphabetically from Kathy Acker to Rudolph
Wurlitzer, and besides rounding up the usual suspects, includes Joyce, the
Marquis de Sade, Gide, Henry Miller, Nabokov, and other school reading-list
authors.  An eight-page introduction (little pages:  this is a paperback
gift book) is titled Just what is cult fiction? and concludes that it is
some form of "deviance."

regards,
Victoria

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-gaddis-l at list.sirius.com
> [mailto:owner-gaddis-l at list.sirius.com]On Behalf Of DEMPSEY Peter
> Sent: Thursday, July 22, 1999 0815
> To: gaddis-l at list.sirius.com
> Subject: eGAD: trainspotting
>
>
> dear all. i'm writing this away from the source, so please excuse
> the errors in advance.
>
> some of you will have come across anatole broyard's memior of ny
> in the 40's,
> (kafka was all the rage(?)) which mentions gaddis. in a collection of
> his essays from the new yorker (thirteen ways of looking at a black man)
> henry louis gates, jr has a fascinating piece on broyard. gaddis gets 2
> mentions in the piece, one which acknowledges the greateness of TR. if i
> remember aright, the references to gaddis are on pages 198 and
> 212, but check
> the index.
>
>
> pete dempsey
> england
>
>