NP CLCL: Correcting a Lacuna in Conference at Louisville

[Anonymous]

When the obituaries appeared for William Gaddis a week before Christmas
1998, once piece of good news surfaced in those otherwise dismal
announcements, namely, that Gaddis had finished a new book shortly before
his death. This final book, with the rather ungainly title Agape
Agape, is a project he had been working on all his professional life.
Perhaps "struggling with" would be a more accurate phrase,
because it's a book that he abandoned decades ago as hopeless, beyond even
his superhuman abilities, and in fact he dramatized his struggle in those
pages of J R that feature Jack Gibbs working on a book with the same
title. The version that will eventually be published is considerably
different from the one Gaddis began writing five decades ago, so I'd like
to describe how this troublesome book evolved over the years.

It was when Gaddis was working as a fact-checker at the New
Yorker in 1945-46 that he first became interested in the player piano,
the subject of an article he was assigned to work on. He quickly became
interested in this musical contraption not for its own sake--I don't think
he owned one or played one--but as a popular manifestation of what he
considered a dangerous trend, namely, the growing use of mechanical
reproduction in the arts and a corresponding loss of the autonomy of the
individual artist. After he finished the assignment he decided to research
the history of the player piano further and to write something of his own
on the topic, which he hoped to publish in the New Yorker's
"Onward & Upward" column, only to have it rejected. By this
time, he had begun work on The Recognitions, so he set it aside, but
in 1950, while in Paris, Gaddis dusted off his essay and sent it to the
Atlantic Monthly, who, much to his delight (as he wrote in a letter
to Helen Parker), "offered to take an excerpt from it, or possibly the
whole." The following summer, Gaddis made his first appearance in a
national magazine with "'Stop Player. Joke No. 4.'" The fact that
this essay is only a few pages long suggests that it was indeed only an
excerpt from a longer work, and thus that longer work would be the basis
for what he eventually called Agape Agape.

Those of you who have read "'Stop Player. Joke No. 4'" know that it's 
a slight piece, just an anecdotal overview of the history of the player
piano, and yet its opening paragraph gives a clear indication of
Gaddis's concern: "Selling player pianos to Americans in 1912 was not
a difficult task. There was a place for everyone in this brave new world,
where the player offered an answer to some of America's most persistent
wants: the opportunity to participate in something which asked little
understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the
taking of time; and the manifestation of talent where there was none."
Previously, it took real talent and dedication to play the piano,
but with this invention anyone could "play." There was an ad in a
1925 Saturday Evening Post for the player piano (which Gaddis saw
and later quoted) that even elevated its operator above true pianists:
"You can play better by roll than many who play by hand," it
promised. "And you can play ALL pieces while they can play but a
few." It degraded Art to mere entertainment, and encouraged passivity
over activity. And if you're satisfied with a player piano, then what
becomes of the piano player? What part, if any, does an artist play in this
"brave new world"? Gaddis wasn't merely displaying an elitist
reaction to the democratization of the arts; instead, he was concerned
about the growing demand for immediate gratification and for the
willingness to accept a mechanical reproduction over the real thing. It's
the same trend towards the elimination of the human element that was going
on in assembly-line production, whose growth took place concurrent with the
heyday of the player piano. Mechanization of the arts ran parallel to the
mechanization of people by means of efficiency studies, standardized
testing, and various methods of measurement and evaluation more suited to
machinery than people.

Some of Gaddis's material on player pianos found its way into The
Recognitions. You may recall that at Esther's Christmas Eve party (in
part 2, chap. 7), she finds herself seated next to a rather pathetic
college friend of Benny's. This unnamed character first asks her if she
knows anything about player pianos, and when she answers in the negative,
he boasts that he's spent two years writing a history of the player piano,
and regales her with a list of famous people who owned them (579). Here
Gaddis treats the subject in a self-deprecatory way, and indeed a book
solely on the player piano would be of limited interest. But after The
Recognitions appeared, Gaddis returned to the subject and began
exploring more of the implications of mechanical reproduction. And that's
where he ran into trouble.

As you may or may not know, the player piano uses paper rolls with
rectangular holes punched in them. And as you certainly remember from your
youth, computers originally used cards punched in the same way. Now both
the player piano and the computer adapted this technology from the
automated loom invented by Jacquard at the beginning of the 19th
century, which also used punched cards, which were taken up in 1835 by
Charles Babbage for an early calculator, and further modified in 1890 by
Herman Hollerith for a tabulating machine, another forerunner of the modern
computer. As Gaddis realized the player piano was only a chapter in the
long history of mechanization and automation, his researched broadened to
the point where he was overwhelmed by the logistics of integrating all this
material into a coherent narrative.

He tried to organize his notes by year, starting with 1876, an
important date in American history: that was the year the earliest version
of the player piano was introduced to Americans at the Philadelphia
Exposition; it was also the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the
telephone, the year of Custer's Last Stand, and also the year (to quote
from Richard Powers's recent novel Gain) "that the fix robbed
Tilden of the Presidency and reduced the democratic process to
parody." It was also the year Willard Gibbs published his papers on
statistical physics, and the year Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung was
first performed in its entirety--all of which is highly relevant to Gaddis's
second novel J R, where much of Gaddis's research wound up. In fact,
a page of Gaddis's notes for the year 1920 is reproduced on page 587 of
J R, and one look at that and you can see what he was up against.

To go back a little bit, you must remember the late fifties were a
difficult time for Gaddis. He was crushed by the commercial failure of
The Recognitions in 1955, which he probably thought would set him up
in the same way that Ralph Ellison was set for life after the publication
in 1953 of Invisible Man. Gaddis got married later in 1955 and had
to get a job, and within a few years had two kids to support. When he did
begin writing again, he had trouble settling on the right project. He began
then abandoned a novel on business in 1957, then started a novel on the
Civil War, which he changed to a play entitled Once at Antietam,
then shelved it in 1960 after failing to find a producer for it. He then
decided to resurrect his work of a decade earlier on the player piano
because he continued to be obsessed (as he writes in a letter to John
Seelye) with "expanding prospects of programmed society &
automation in the arts." He worked on this version of Agape
Agape from 1960 to 1962, at which time he accepted a commission from
the Ford Foundation to write a book on the use of television in the
schools, which fell through the following year. Soon after this he decided
to abandon Agape Agape altogether and resume that novel on
business he began in 1957. In an attempt to salvage as much as possible
from the failed nonfiction work, he decided to put the Bast family in the
business of manufacturing player pianos, and created Jack Gibbs as an alter
ego to act as a mouthpiece for the material Gaddis had planned to
articulate in Agape Agape, and to dramatize his own
difficulties in bringing the book to completion.

In an oft-quoted passage in J R, Gibbs describes his project
as "--a book about order and disorder more of a, sort of a social
history of mechanization and the arts, the destructive element . . ."
(244). I assume that everyone here has read J R and recalls those
places where Gibbs reads aloud from his manuscript, which were intended to
be the opening pages of Agape Agape (pp. 288-89, 571-604).
Those selections are so dense and allusive that some readers may feel it's
just as well that Gaddis never completed the book, because even the few
pages included in J R are difficult enough that the thought of a
lengthy book written in that manner is enough to send even sympathetic
readers reeling.

Gaddis was able to incorporate most of his thoughts on mechanization and
the arts in J R, triumphantly if I may say so, and in later years he
seems to have become reconciled to this solution. In his letters he
continued to refer occasionally  to Agape Agape, offering
tantalizing glimpses of what it might have been. In a 1987 letter to critic
Gregory Comnes, Gaddis said that he had recently come across a book similar
to what he had intended to write, namely, Hugh Kenner's The
Counterfeiters, and felt "well damn! that settles it, mine will
never be done; though something still remains that drives me to tear out
and save anything I come across on mechanization & the arts to add to
the 30 year hoard."

Kenner's book, originally published in 1968, covers a lot of the same
ground as Agape Agape: mechanization and automation, closed
systems, computers,  the role of the artist, and of course counterfeiting
and the related theme of authenticity. It's a brilliant book, too
complicated to summarize here, but well worth seeking out for its own sake
as well as for an indication of what Gaddis was working toward. Another
book that Gaddis told Comnes resembled what he had planned to do is
Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948), an erudite,
far-ranging survey of how mechanization "has split our modes of thinking
from our modes of feeling." It too is highly recommended.

In the same 1987 letter to Comnes, Gaddis mentions a writer whom he had
not read yet, despite the relevance to his own work, namely, Walter
Benjamin, whose seminal essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" would seem to be right up Gaddis's alley. (It must be
remembered, of course, that Gaddis did most of his research on this topic
back in the late fifties and early sixties, before Benjamin had been
translated into English.) In a 1992 letter to Comnes, Gaddis reported that
he finally did read Benjamin's essay and jokes that he would
"certainly have been pilloried for plagiary" had he ever
completed his work, which became, he goes on to write, "a casualty of
overresearch; but then of course in my ignorance Benjamin had already
clearly, concisely, brilliant[ly] and briefly covered the ground."

The extent to which his own book was "overresearched" can be
gleaned from a letter Gaddis wrote to critic Joseph Tabbi in 1989; asked
about his sources for Agape Agape, Gaddis said they "were
very far ranging & having largely to do with organization (Hull House,
crime, John D Rockefeller &c); Hollerith, early punched card
innovations (from Jacquard's loom & Thos J Watson (pere) selling pianos
off a truck; Plato's warnings & exclusion of the artist; Babbage; von
Neumann (which I found largely beyond my comprehension); & I cannot
recall his wellknown name [F. W. Taylor] doing time/motion studies in the
very early 1900s for industrial efficiency: all these flood back but there
was far more however all this was done before (though
spilling a little over into) the composition of J R for the never to be
completed Agape Agape whose premises--measurement &
quantification as indexing thus dictating order & performance (cf.
McNamara's Vietnam body counts)--have long since caught up with us.
Alas it will never be realized but in massive notes & marked margins in
the hands of some beleaguered doctoral candidate, since I am now immersed in
an equally mad enterprise."

This "equally mad enterprise" was of course A Frolic of His
Own, which was eventually published at the beginning of 1994.
Afterwards, he toyed with the idea of expanding a legal opinion that he had
left out of A Frolic, but in 1996 decided--despite everything he had
said--to revive Agape Agape in a final attempt to complete it.
His new agent, Andrew Wylie, sold the proposal to editor Allen Peacock at
Henry Holt for a rumored six-figure advance. Publishers Weekly
reported the sale in its January 6, 1997 issue, stating that Agape
Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano (to give its full title)
was a nonfiction work that Holt hoped to publish in the fall of 1998.

Now, there are several possible reasons why Gaddis chose to return to an
unfinished work rather than begin something new. First, he was 71 years old
and in poor health when A Frolic of His Own was published, so the
idea of starting a new novel, especially given his slow working methods,
probably struck him as unrealistic. Second, I suspect he was uncomfortable
with leaving unfinished work behind. He had been able to salvage his Civil
War play Once at Antietam for use in A Frolic of His Own, and
a similar desire to get Agape Agape into print in one form or
another may have appealed to him. I'm sure he didn't really want to leave
it in the hands of "some beleaguered doctoral candidate" in the
future, despite what he had told Joseph Tabbi. And since he had continued
to amass material for this project, perhaps he felt he had a fresh
perspective on it and could finally complete the work.

At any rate, he worked hard on it through 1997 and early 1998, and then
history repeated itself. Just as 25 years earlier he decided to convert
much of his research into a novel, he decided to reformat Agape
Agape from nonfiction to fiction. The model he decided to use was
Thomas Bernhard, whose works Gaddis discovered in the early nineties and
took a great liking to. Many of Bernhard's novels--I'm thinking of ones like
The Loser, Concrete, Woodcutters, and The Lime Works--are
first-person narratives by brilliant but pessimistic men at odds with
society. Just as Gaddis used Jack Gibbs in J R to dramatize his
difficulty in completing Agape Agape, he decided once again to
dramatize the process of writing such a book rather than publishing it in
nonfiction form. Whether this was a deliberate, inspired artistic choice,
or yet another attempt to salvage something from an uncompletable work, I
don't know. As it happens, he received a commission about this time from
DeutschlandRadio to write a play for broadcasting, so he sent them the
first 43 pages of Agape Agape as a one-act monologue entitled
Torschlusspanik (which means the fear of doors closing, of
opportunities lost). It was translated and broadcast on March 3, 1999, 3
months after Gaddis died.

This brings us, finally, to the novel that will be published soon. I
don't know what percentage of the final work the 43 pages of
Torschslusspanik represent, nor have I seen the rest of the novel. I
understand it's a short work, perhaps only a novella, which would bring
the Thomas Bernhard parallel even closer, for many of the Austrian
writer's works are little more than novellas. But this is what I can
tell you:

The novel is a first-person monologue in stream-of-consciousness style
by an unnamed man in bed recovering from surgery and trying to finish a
book on mechanization and the arts. We learn that he has three daughters on
whom he has settled his estate and that he has arranged to take turns
staying with each of them. Now, we all know where that came from,
and it doesn't suggest a happy ending. But this borrowing from King
Lear seems to be the only fictitious element. (Gaddis has a son and a
daughter, not three daughters.) In every other way, the novella is an
account of the last days of William Gaddis--not some fictional persona but
the man himself--attempting to organize his 30 year hoard of material and
raging like Lear on the heath about contemporary society. In the late 1990s
Gaddis was in and out of hospitals for a variety of reasons, and the
problems and medical procedures the narrator recounts are the same Gaddis
underwent. The narrator is basically thinking aloud about his material,
which encompasses everything and everyone from Hero of Alexandria's water
organs to Dolly, the cloned sheep that was in the news right before Gaddis
died. There are more examples of Gaddis's lifelong study of Plato and the
great 19th-century Russian novelists--two crucial influences, by
the way, that still need to be addressed by Gaddis scholars. There isn't
any duplication of the material Jack Gibbs reads aloud in J R, but
it has the same density, the same encyclopedic allusiveness, the same
twisted syntax. Consequently, it's very challenging to read even if you're
already familiar with Gaddis's characteristic themes and references.
When Gibbs described Agape Agape to Amy Joubert in J R, she
says, "--It sounds a little difficult, is it?" and Gibbs replies,
"--Difficult as I can make it" (244). The charge of
"difficulty" is one that plagued Gaddis all his career, and one
that he felt was unfair. But in Agape Agape, it's almost as if
Gaddis said to himself, "They think I'm difficult? I'll show them
difficult!" As a result, I don't think the general reader will get
very far in this book, and I'm afraid Agape Agape may get
reviews as harsh as any he received for The Recognitions.

But for Gaddis fans, it promises to be exhilarating, one final
impassioned outburst from one of the greatest novelists of our time. It's
bitter, offensive, unapologetically elitist, politically incorrect, atheistic,
pessimistic, and contemptuous of almost every aspect of modern life.

--
a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating
whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of
spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system