Various materials from the Gaddis Archive by William Gaddis, Copyright © 2024 The Estate of William Gaddis, used by permission of the Wylie Literary Agency (UK) Limited.

Due to the copyrighted archival material reproduced here, this article is published under a stricter version of open access than the usual Electronic Book Review article: a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. All reproductions of material published here must be cited; no part of the article or its quoted material may be reproduced for commercial purposes; and the materials may not be repurposed and recombined with other material except in direct academic citation – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

William Gaddis thought of himself as a prose writer, and all that comes down to us in published form are his novels, some very occasional non-literary essays, and the works in various genres that he published, sometimes anonymously, at the Harvard Lampoon more than a decade before his debut novel was published. Yet his archive preserves a variety of works in poetry, stage drama, screenplay, and prospectus for short TV drama.¹It also preserves interesting unpublished nonfiction projects like articles on the economics of mini-golf (“When is a Sport not a Sport,” which went through three rounds of review before rejection at Sports Illustrated – mainly archived in Box/folder 81.8), memoirs of his time in Central America (“Cartago, 1948 July” – filed with “Short Fiction” in folder 81.2), a proposed documentary on Greek satirists during the Peloponnesian War (“The Old Comedy” – notes in box/folder 81.9), and so on. Neither of the archival guides in this special issue addresses Gaddis’s unpublished nonfiction projects, but they are worth someone properly studying.

Some of this has long been known about and was acknowledged or publicly promoted by Gaddis himself – most notably the play Once at Antietam (worked on from 1959-62) which resurfaced reproduced in parts throughout A Frolic of His Own as Oscar’s stolen work, and which Gaddis made no secret of having originally written himself with many of the same ambitions that Oscar has for it. On the other hand, the spate of proposals for television work that Gaddis put together throughout early 1955²During this time Gaddis established the closest working relationship with the drama department at CBS, where in 1957 the novelist EL Doctorow would start working as a reviewer for incoming proposals. History narrowly thwarted the tantalizing prospect of these two novelistic paragons meeting in the TV slush pile, however: Doctorow joined too late to give his verdict on any of Gaddis’s proposals, none of which appear in Doctorow’s archive of TV-pitch feedback, which is preserved with the rest of his papers at New York University (see Doctorow Archive, Box 57, Folder 036).—after the publication of The Recognitions failed to generate an income that could support his young family—was a part of his career that he retrospectively acknowledged even less than his time as a corporate writer. A Faust-Western screenplay initially drafted during the time of least progress on J R went similarly unacknowledged in public, even though Gaddis kept trying to get it produced over the course of a decade and initially (and more publicly) planned a prose-ification of it to be his next novel after J R (see entry on Dirty Tricks, below).

Gaddis makes sporadic reference to his thoughts on non-prose media in his letters, his corporate work, and other sources. While he never addresses the question of medium in extensive detail, nonetheless his work across other forms no doubt informed his use of prose in his successfully published work, and gave him the ability to pronounce (when other people raised them) upon topics like “the adaptation of ‘serious’ fiction for television” (Letters 354). In that 1980 letter, which Steven Moore identifies as a response to a student enquiry, Gaddis stresses that he thinks J Rwould be well-suited for television because its lack of interior psycho-narration would mean no need for the awkwardness of “extended voice-over,” while for The Recognitions he preferred “the larger format of a full length motion picture.” He clarifies, though, that versions of the same fiction in different media would not, for him, be versions of the same work: “An incisive & highly amusing television presentation could, for example, be drawn from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, but it would not be Butler & it would not be Erewhon.” This was the judgment of a man who had recently tried to adapt his own novel J R for the stage (see entry on The Secret History of the Player Piano, below) and energetically pursued someone else to make a film version for him: it did not concern him that this would not have been J R, and would not have been Gaddis. The various texts I address below raise the related question of how any of Gaddis’s non-prose works, none of which he managed to publish or get produced beyond the Harvard Lampoon, relate to “Gaddis” if we understand “Gaddis” as the author-figure associated with his five published novels.

At any rate, the archive reveals that William Gaddis often tried to make “William Gaddis” the name of more than a novelist. Researchers and scholars have written little on these documents and have remained unaware of their existence. In the present guide, I introduce these documents to the reading public, in many cases for the first time, with archival box/folder location information, date, brief descriptions and analyses, and indications of any clear relation to Gaddis’s published work or references to the material in published criticism or Gaddis’s published letters. Where possible, I include information on how his pitches to film-makers, theatres, and TV networks were received.

A separate document (co-authored with Joel Minor) in this same special journal issue offers a comparable guide to Gaddis’s unpublished prose fiction, from short-stories to prototypes of his novels: (Chetwynd & Minor, “William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide” - henceforth “Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide").

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A few clarifications about contents and method before the guide begins.

As with any project surveying an archive as large and loosely filed as Gaddis’s, I can’t claim to be totally comprehensive here because there is a good chance that relevant documents are still resting in their folders waiting to be found. While the TV proposals I discuss here all seem to date to late 1954 or early 1955, a draft letter from December 1955 in Box 21, Folder 5 mentions having sent a scene breakdown for a 1-hour TV play to NBC in August of that year, and asks for follow-up. I have not been able to find any other record of that TV proposal, but it may be preserved somewhere. Some of the single-page poems discussed here are not indexed or mentioned anywhere else in Gaddis’s archive, and were discovered only by chance in folders that make no other reference to poetry. No doubt other comparable documents await discovery, at which time the current document will need supplementing.

I do not, meanwhile, attempt to address any of Gaddis’s Harvard Lampoon work (excepting “The Laughing Boy – Blues” which he filed, for unclear reasons, with his other unpublished poetry – see entry below): Lampoon contributions were published, at Gaddis’s behest, and remain accessible wherever the Lampoon is archived. Steven Moore has usefully identified which of the Lampoon pieces from volumes 127 and 128 (1944) were written by Gaddis, even under a pseudonym, and Moore’s personal archive at Washington University in St Louis’s Olin Special Collections Library contains copies of all this work.³See the finding aid for Moore’s collection at https://aspace.wustl.edu/repositories/6/resources/430/collection_organization However, the methods he used to identify the pseudonymous authors in those editions were not possible with two other issues Gaddis was involved with (volumes 126 and 129) and so it remains unclear which pseudonymous contributions he wrote for those issues.⁴See the Lampoon section of the online William Gaddis bibliography at http://www.williamgaddis.org/bibliography.shtml#pri-c-lam In the absence of definitive information about what constitutes Gaddis’s full Lampoon oeuvre, and counting Lampoon publication as publication, I hold off from addressing any of it here.

I omit further citation for individual documents where the “Location in Archive” part of the relevant entry already contains sufficient Box/Folder information. I give page references only where the draft itself has page numbers. References to other relevant archival material are separately cited or endnoted. References to published interviews, studies, and so on are by author-name or parenthetical, and refer to a works-cited at the end of this document.

There’s a lot of material here and readers might not want to grind through it from start to finish. I suggest the following cross-genre Top Five as places to begin, for their combination of relevance to Gaddis’s published work and interest as independent (completed or proposed) artworks:

Faire Exchange No Robbery; Dirty Tricks; Unfortunately; Untitled Adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins; “MAJORITY.”

Readers and researchers interested in seeing any of these documents should contact Special Collections at the Olin library of Washington University in St Louis to arrange visiting times and item access requests.

I hope this guide will encourage more investigation of these materials and their implications for the understanding of Gaddis’s work.

I address first the screenplays and drama, then the TV-fiction proposals, then the poetry.

William Gaddis’s Unpublished Screenplays and Stage-Drama Scripts (Chronological)

Title: Cartes Sur Table

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.3 (“Drama: Cartes Sur Table”)

Date: 25 July 1943

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: 4-page typescript, hand-dated.

Description: Sub-headed “A harlequinade for our time in one scene,” this seems to be Gaddis’s most explicit topical engagement in fiction or prose with the ongoing second world war (see also “REASONS” and “MAJORITY” among the poems, below). The preserved copy seems to be final, with no further annotations beyond the date, though some stage directions are blacked out.

Against a painted backdrop of a city on one side and war scenes on the other, the set comprises a table with a glove, a wine glass, and a book on it. Three characters surround it: Columbine, Harlequin, and Pierrot, wearing masks, with Harlequin further costumed to imply a bon vivant, Pierrot an artist. They are returning to each other’s company after long parting, and stress their “need” for each other’s lovely company: “you do nothing, you think of nothing, but you are exquisite.” Pierrot promises to teach Columbine to read, but she demurs at such distraction from exquisiteness: “Must one know this to enjoy wine, to own the stars and be one of them?”

As the conversation progresses, though, both Pierrot and Harlequin become distracted by something they can’t see. Harlequin muses “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – yes, that’s the line […] he tears off his mask, revealing a stronger face, excited, inspired.” And having removed his mask, he vanishes. Pierrot and Columbine are briefly confused, but Pierrot himself looks to the back of the stage and intones “thousands waiting for a hand to help them, to help the climb, build… (he removes mask slowly, revealing a young inspired face).” And with this inspiration he too vanishes, leaving Columbine alone on stage. Initially dismissive—“Well, this is all very silly”—she turns to bitterness: “(she reaches up, slipping off her mask) le dessous des cartes… (the face we see is hard, almost cynical. Her limbs no longer seem lithe.”) Finally, though, she chooses to restore the mask, telling the audience “We are the only things that last [...] it is the outside that matters.”

Analysis: This harlequinade seems to be an aesthete’s argument against commitment, lamenting that in “inspired” mouthing of the slogans of war and subordinating their exquisite artifice to a collective project, what is beautiful in young men gets destroyed, leaving their women to keep the aesthetic flame burning, however abandoned and unable to recover lost innocence. Columbine’s contrastive pun on different “outside”s organizes the play’s conflict of values: the Wildean commitment to the sufficiency of a world of beautiful exterior surface, against the worldview compelled to find something practical or political to subordinate itself to “outside” mere beauty and friendship. The play opts for one of these over the other, even though “our time” has chosen the other way. That will not “last,” as the unmasked men vanish mortally, while the paradigmatic characters of their masks can persist. This unilateral aestheticism is rare even in Gaddis’s early writings, and “Cartes sur Table” is thus noteworthy as an extreme in his early oscillations between worldviews.

The French idioms here also bear some significance: Pierrot vanishes after murmuring “Tous songes sont desonges” (“all dreams are lies”), which quotes the legendary renaissance soldier Blaise de Montluc. On the one hand it’s an expression of materialist cynicism, the kind that might pressure an artist like Pierrot from his vocation into the world of politics and war, while on the other it critiques the elevation of war itself into an aspiration: like Harlequin’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”—which nods to a heritage of poetic disenchantment via Wilfred Owen and others—the anti-aesthetic fetishization of war-as-serious-reality may itself be just another deceitful phantom. Columbine’s lament to herself about “le dessous des cartes,” meanwhile, ramifies through a variety of meanings. In her context, it seems to translate idiomatically to “the subordinating of the world to maps”: that is, giving reductive external shape and direction to something that should have its own level of existence. It echoes the play’s French title: “cartes sur table” in this light (with “carte” as map) would mean “putting maps on the table,” or bringing maps to bear on the world. In its more idiomatic meaning outside the echo of Columbine’s words, though, it means simply “Cards on the Table,” which can indicate either the final moment of an endgame being resolved, or (in its idiomatic English sense) the revelation of a previously implicit attitude. This might refer to Gaddis himself staking out a very definite position in the dilemmas that pull Pierrot and Harlequin away from Columbine.

As well as its aestheticism, “Cartes Sur Table” also employs some clunkily proto-postmodern (or cod-Pirandello) stage metafiction,⁵Gaddis mentions reading Pirandello, seemingly for the first time, in a letter of March 1948, five years after he wrote “Cartes Sur Table.” Nonetheless, Pirandello’s reputation in the English-language drama world had been substantial since a tour of London in the 1920s, and his influence was long in the air by the time of Gaddis’s writing. along lines he returns to in 1947’s (posthumously published) prose theatre tale “The Rehearsal” (see entry in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide).⁶“The Rehearsal” is one of the three stories Crystal Alberts extracted from the archive for publication in the Missouri Review of 2004 (pages 99-108). Pierrot, speculating on what happened to make Harlequin vanish, ruminates “Do you know, Columbine, sometimes I think there is a force that controls us, that writes every line that we speak.” Blacked out stage directions (legible through the faded blackout) announce: “(DUE TO LACK OF SPACE, WE ARE FORCED TO REMOVE THE CHARACTER HARLEQUIN).” What “lack of space” might mean in the context of war and commitment, or what analogy might exist between the “force” of the creating playwright and the forces that draw the men away from Columbine’s exquisitely hermetic world, is not really pursued. But scholars interested in Gaddis as a metafictionist of technical artifice will find “Cartes Sur Table” salient.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The relationships between art and commitment, authenticity and surface, are important to The Recognitions. That novel’s Town Carpenter gives a lecture on the unfulfillable promise war makes to “committed” young men:

With no idea of a hero, you see, but they need them so badly that they make up special games […] they arrange whole wars which have no more reason for existing than the people who fight in them, and a boy may become a hero fighting for a life that’s worth something for the first time, threatened with loss of it, that or dying to save the lives of people who’ve no idea what to do with them (408).

J R implies that the writer-character Schramm’s World War Two experiences were a large part of his suffering and eventual suicide even as they played an important part in his creativity, and “Cartes Sur Table” offers an extreme early scepticism about war’s relation to good art, and war art’s compatibility with worthwhile living.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Given the play’s concern with what is real and what is delusion, you may hear in Columbine’s resigned “dessous des cartes” a nod to France’s primary philosopher of knowledge-rooted-in-self-knowledge: what it means to be Under Descartes in early Gaddis is something that philosophically inclined scholars might pursue.

Title(s): Faire Exchange No Robbery, or ‘Twere No Bargaine Either

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.5 (“Drama: Faire Exchange No Robbery”)

Date: Dated 1947 (and located to New York, where Gaddis lived that year) on handwritten title page.

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Three typescript copies, one cut in half down the middle.

Description: A ten-page, five-“Act” drama (each “Act” is a single short scene) in cod-Elizabethan iambic pentameter, with an ornately calligraphic and colophon-deviced hand-written/drawn title page (See Figure 1). This gives information about playwright (“Will Gades”), performers, contents (“With the death of Marlowe”), and publisher (“Wold Grunter,” Gaddis’s old dog: see Jeffrey Severs’s article on the play in the present special journal issue).

The play itself concerns the efforts of two anthologists—McSerff and McNorff—to secure the rights to the poems of their era’s leading poets and dramatists, from current celebrity Christopher Marlowe up to and including the then two-year-old Robert Herrick (who speaks his lines like an adult).

Act I sees the anthologists scheming to get rich by monopolizing the poetry audience and hence cornering the marker in poets’ reputations: (“So, but for us, // They might all go unknown”).

In Act II they seek out Marlowe at The Mermaid pub. They having introduced themselves as Anthologists, he calls over Ben Jonson whose vaunted knowledge of Greek helps identify them as “pickers of flowers.” Marlowe’s misgivings (“A gruesome word, in sooth, // And sounds presumption in its veriest tones”) dissuade Jonson from signing with them, but not Shakespeare who the anthologists note “would be popular, and that’s enough.” Marlowe, though, chases them away with threat of violence.

In Act III, word of this new “foreign race and creed” in “the literary world” has spread to other poets, and Walter Raleigh plans to sail to Anthologia to plunder it for his queen. The anthologists themselves arrive and a discussion ensues with the poets about the merits and risks of the proposed project: it may set you “next macaronic verse // of duller lights,” but would ensure “The heightening of popularity” and offer “An honor to accompany one another.” Shakespeare again is persuaded—“The mass I write for—dear dark human pie. // Where do I sign?” but Marlowe arrives late to issue dire warning against “signing down your names, and losing there // Th’identity you’ve worked so to declare.” He spikes the just-signed contracts on his sword and plunges them into a fire. The anthologists resolve apart to kill him.

Act IV performs the death of Marlowe, the anthologists having disguised themselves as common drunks in order to kill him in what looks like a spontaneous brawl. In stabbing him, they declare “Not that I loved thee less, kind cunning poet, // But even art must feel the tinker’s awl”: in other words, the creative poet in language must always be beholden to the physical process (and business) of book-making (and selling). Though shortest by word-count, this would have been the longest scene in hypothetical performance due to Marlowe’s stage direction “He drinks steadily for two hours.”

Finally, in Act V, the anthologists return upon the poets lamenting Marlowe’s death and bend the conversation to getting the anthology back up and running. They briefly look like succeeding before a change of heart among the poets. The anthologists are cast out—“nor ever show thy noses // where honesty finds trust, and truth reposes,” but not before they can give their ominous sign-off: “Your pricks of conscience will avail naught // against the onslaught that our race will make // upon the broken back of lit’rature.” They foretell a day when the names of almost every poet on stage (baby Herrick excepted) will be better associated with commercial products or slang. Anthologists banished, the poets note that it isn’t a proper play until a woman turns up, and with a blare of trumpets the woman they have all been hoping for appears. On her benediction the play ends.

Analysis: However simple and condensed, Faire Exchange does manage to sketch out a coherent worldview of commerce, contract, art, posterity. In this world, there are truly independent artists like Marlowe; there are sponges like Shakespeare who achieve what they achieve by a shameless openness to influence, source, and opportunity; there are artists who passively take cues from such charismatic figures; and then there are the covetous interlopers into the “world of literature” (a repeated phrase) whose ability to siphon off the material rewards of writerly labour depends on their ability to sell their parasitism as aid.

Gaddis’s writing here, though, is often more skilful than the parodic premise might suggest. For one thing, it shows that he has some grasp of the affordances of iambic pentameter whether coupleted or blank (see, for example, the mid-line rhyme above that contrasts the “naught” of poetic refusal with the “onslaught” of the anthologists, or the Ee Ar Ee Aw sound-patterns of “even art must feel the tinker’s awl,” which preserves the way much Elizabethan pentameter incorporates the 4-beat alliterative heritage it succeeded). Another of its merits is an occasional semantic density that also lives up to its Elizabethan models (and to Gaddis’s mature writing). The foregrounding of “anthologist”’s root in flower-plucking, to take a simple example, conveys that the flowers that are getting plucked will die torn from their roots, without the play having to spell this out explicitly. The anthologists’ killing line “Not that I loved thee less, kind cunning poet, // But even art must feel the tinker’s awl,” meanwhile, sums up the whole play with real precision: the anthologist calling the poet “kind” replicates the false claim to kinship and shared enterprise that Marlowe has already resisted, while “cunning” emphasises the contrast between perceptive intelligence (Marlowe’s) and the word’s origin in sharpness of blade (the stabbing anthologist). The tinker’s awl, meanwhile, is the tool by which holes were made in paper such that pages could be bound together in a book. Here Marlowe the artist is himself being pierced by such an awl, which emphasises that however airy and free of the material world literary “art” may be in its initial conception (Marlowe conceives his career as happening within the “world of thought” (Act III)), it always relies on physical embodiment if it wishes to reach a wide audience whose response makes it art (consider Gaddis’s many later pronouncements about the need for readers to play their part in making a work happen). And by this same metaphor, Marlowe himself (or at least his “art”) is one of these pages that the anthologists need to pierce with their awl (ie kill) if they want to usurp the right to anthologise his work. “What’s any artist but the dregs of his work?” (Recognitions 96) is one of the most widely cited summaries of Gaddis’s attitude to the relationship between the actual author and the finished artwork, but as this play suggests, the dregs of the physically embodied artist are an avenue of vulnerability for the art itself. The anthologist’s complex and astute metaphor, meanwhile, identifies his sword with the craftsman’s awl, and hence re-establishes the division (the lack of “kind” relation) between the “poet” who deals in “art” and the anthologist whose work is more comparable to that of a physical craftsman. This dense awl image further hints at the anthologists’ dependent lack of individual creativity since the very act they avenge by awl-stabbing Marlowe is his own awl-like piercing of their signed contracts.

Not all of the play is written with this level of fullness and precision (too much of one short act is taken up with an unilluminating anachronistic riff on drinking cocktails which is presumably meant to establish some kind of analogy between cocktail and anthology),⁷Severs suggests that it may simply be Gaddis’s take on the convention of publishers schmoozing potential writers over fancy drinks: perhaps the young writer Gaddis had been, or known someone, on the receiving end of such a pitch. but few of his other 1940s writings contain so many of the coherent signifying ironies that characterise his mature work (for another example, see Severs on the ramifications of the play’s repeated language of “trust”). It’s much less laborious and self-drowningly explicit about its themes than either Gaddis’s other projects of the mid-1940s (see the entry on Blague in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide) or his later efforts at full-length dramatic work (see entries on Once at Antietam and Dirty Tricks below).

Other ideas that receive complex treatment in the play’s short span include just what “identity” it is that Marlowe takes his peers to be risking by anthologization. He does not explain this directly, but addresses his fellow poets as if it’s obvious that “signing down your names” will destroy “identity” (Act III): presumably then, that identity is the name itself, “declared” by the long work of writing. Here we can see an early harbinger of Gaddis’s later discussion of how too many people want “terribly to be a writer” without “wanting to write” (Bard Q&A, 0:36), as Marlowe makes it clear that the identity follows from the action. But the unexplicated principle here is why that identity would be lost when giving the finished writing over to the anthologists, and what kind of identity would be substituted in its place. As the anthologists talk about their poets mainly in terms fungible with money, the implication seems to be that to give your work over to them is to trade being an artist for being a commodity (or at least a producer of commodities): a theme to which the mature novels will return.

Beyond this, the play illuminates Gaddis’s attitude to the Elizabethans, both in the affinity he shows for the whole era in his competent parody (and, as with the ending, affectionate ridicule), but also in the implicit value-ranking among the various poets. Marlowe is a figure of honour, Shakespeare—with his ear always out for something to write down and later claim as his own—gains the sort of affectionate respect for a guiltless game-player that Gaddis later claimed to have for JR, while Jonson’s stern pedantry is an important force only distantly aligned with “poetry.” The toddler Herrick, who gives the most vicious send-off to the anthologists and is the final figure left on the stage at the end, seems important for reasons that are not entirely clear, and it’s worth noting that he is the Elizabethan figure referred to in some of Gaddis’s other early poetry (see entry on “wait tears ill want you yet,” below). There Herrick’s particular commitment to high conceit and artifice seems important, but this isn’t much mentioned in Faire Exchange beyond his articulate-toddler stage presence being the play’s own main token of artifice and fantasy. There may be more to discover about Gaddis-on-Herrick.

Though Faire Exchange is short and frivolous, it nonetheless embodies coherent thought on topics Gaddis would subsequently do much more with. It’s competent parody rather than mere pastiche, consistently comic, and as formal poetry more fluent than a lot of Gaddis’s non-parodic poetry preserved in the archive. Indeed, no archived poem is clearly dated after it, so it may be his poetic swansong: a defence of poetry before giving it up.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The threat of commerce to art here, along with the question of how the artist’s work conditions their identity as an artist, prefigures plots and concerns in The Recognitions, J R, and A Frolic of His Own. As Severs discusses, the warning to be careful what you sign up for is especially central to Frolic but also important in the Bast and Schepperman plots of J R, and Wyatt’s work with Recktall Brown and Basil Valentine in The Recognitions. Questions of originality and authenticity that predominate in The Recognitions (and unpublished projects of the same era like “Unfortunately”: see entry below) appear here in the contrast between Marlowe’s jealously guarded individual muse and Shakespeare’s magpie appropriation of whatever language strikes his ear. In a moment that will interest scholars of Gaddis’s vision on originality and plagiary, Marlowe’s death is lamented by Thomas Nashe, who cries “Marlowe! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. // England hath need of thee!” (Act V). Nashe thus, in the world of the play, writes the form of Wordsworth’s lament for Milton 200 years early. While the citation’s literal meaning highlights Gaddis’s vision of decadence, its proleptic plagiary also suggests (like Shakespeare’s cribbing) that the entire poetic tradition is a matter of unattributed citation and appropriation, thus undermining the idealism that Marlowe otherwise embodies (or suggesting that with him gone it’s now eternal open-season: precisely why he “shouldst be living”).

Finally, as Severs discusses, the play is not alone in Gaddis’s work in attributing a particular repugnance to the anthologist figure. Recktall Brown, the most grotesque of The Recognitions’s many grotesques, has his genesis in draft stories like “Arma Virumque” and “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand Madam” (see entries in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide) where the relevant character being an anthologist is their defining quality. By The Recognitions his editing an anthology of poetry as a way to get close to Esme is a minor character feature, less important than his role in selling forged visual art. But Faire Exchange gives us a vantage from which to see the anthologising impulse as central rather than incidental to Brown’s character (from his rectalness to his money-minded instinct to “cooperat[e] with reality” (Recognitions 243)) and to his particular form of antagonism to Wyatt’s vision of proper art.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? In the current special issue Jeffrey Severs examines the play at length in relation to Gaddis’ personal and fictive dealings with contract throughout his life.

Thanks to Steven Moore for identifying that Gaddis likely encountered most of this particular grouping of Renaissance poets in an actual anthology: Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, edited by Joseph Quincy Adams, which Gaddis alludes to in a published letter of October 5th 1942, and continued to use as he worked on The Recognitions. That novel also cites Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus directly as part of its sustained intertextual engagement with the Faust myth.

Title: Once at Antietam

Location in archive (Box.Folder): Typescripts in folders 75.3, 75.4, 75.5 (“Once at Antietam”). Relevant correspondence in folders 75.1 (“Notes from Patricia Black Gaddis”) and 75.2 (“Correspondence Relating to ‘Once at Antietam’”). Summary of a projected prose version in 31.4 (“Leather Binder”). Notes on how to incorporate into A Frolic of His Own in 73.5 (“Antietam, Fragments after Frolic”).

Date: 1960-3 (per Gaddis’ own pencil note on an archived complete typescript). The prose version summary may date to 1959: it seems to be the contents of a preserved envelope addressed to Gaddis at his Pfizer work address (the summary is folded along lines that would fit the envelope), and the stamps on the envelope are 8-cent “champions of liberty: Ernst Reuter” stamps issued in 1959.

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Completed typescripts. Fragmentary notes appear in folders of other things Gaddis worked on at the time (Sensation, J R, proto-versions of Agapē Agape), but no dedicated folders of notes or drafts.

Description: Once at Antietam is a Civil War play, familiar to many Gaddis readers from its piecemeal but substantial reproduction in A Frolic of His Own. Gaddis’s own pencil headnote to the best-preserved of the archive’s typescript versions makes clear his judgment of it:

This is the complete last draft of the play written roughly 1960-63 – better judgment finally prevailing against any effort to see it produced or even circulated. It is not to be published in whole or in part, but seen simply as a rather severe example of an amount of work and high flown ambition gone quite off the tracks.(Plato, Camus, & finally Sophocles!) – and some of its essential relationships resurrected (unrealized at the time) reconstructed put to rest in ‘Carpenter’s Gothic’ some 20 years later. William Gaddis

This is the only piece of his archived creative writing to which Gaddis attaches an explicit “do not publish” note. Unwilling to let it stand alone, he made its raw material useful in the heavily ironizing and provisionalizing context of Frolic (to put it simply: within that novel’s world, the play was written by a fairly silly man). The archive, meanwhile, preserves almost no indexed working material beyond this final version. The summary in 31.4 confirms that it was conceived initially as a “novella, a narrative done largely in dialogue” (1), rather than as a play. Perhaps most interestingly some early letters seem to confirm that Gaddis actually sent out some drafts of this prose version: the 1960 letters responding to submissions refer to it as a “novel,” though the Antietam-labelled folders retain nothing of this apparent early prose form. By early 1961 it’s a “play” (see all letters in Gaddis Archive box 75 folder 2), which a few letters of 1961 discuss the prospect of performing. Gaddis himself describes a typical response to the initial script version from a producer in a 1961 letter: “hefting the script (without opening it), ‘Too long’” (Letters 237). Later drafts seem to have proven more appealing: Irwin Rose “ha[s] every intention of producing it” for January 1962, but needs to “line up a star for it== and raise the necessary capital.” But then he would “need a more finished script than I read a couple of months ago […] I trust you’ve made lots of progress with it since.” While Gaddis did end up with a “complete last draft” by 1963, there was no progress on performance.

The main interest in what is preserved—a complete three-act play of 180 typescript pages—is seeing what did not make it into Frolic. That novel mainly reproduces material about the play’s central figure Thomas from Acts 1 and 2, which still make the basic plot clear enough: Thomas has come back to his family’s disappointing inheritance after time abroad in France, and, forced from South to North by the inherited business role as the Civil War gets going, he ends up sending up substitutes to fight for him on both the Union and the Confederate sides. A young man who attacked Thomas in the street is one of the substitutes, while unknown to him his feeble brother William is the other.⁸William and Thomas were of course Gaddis’s own first two names. They die on the same battlefield at Antietam, and the delayed realization of this puts Thomas into an existential breakdown, whose terms have been conditioned throughout the play by his extended philosophical dialogues with Kane, a roving philosopher, and Bagby, his cynical opportunist of a subordinate. His mother and his paramour Giulielma endure and register his failings with passive lachrymosity. Their lamentations are one of the main elements (along with lots of North/South culture-theorising) of Acts 1 and 2 that Gaddis did not import into Frolic, where Giulielma serves mainly as a hinge to contrast Oscar’s claims for her delicate seriousness in his play with the film adaptation’s use of her character to get actress Anja Frika naked on screen.

The final Act 3 is referred to frequently throughout Frolic,⁹Including in Oscar’s consistent referring to it as “my last act,” a phrase whose significance is indicated by the French translation of the whole novel being published under the title Le Dernier Acte. but barely reproduced on the page. The most specific thing that the novel tells us about it is that Oscar is especially proud of the way he adapted “Crito,” the final Socratic debate, into the scene where Thomas comes to plead with Kane to escape prison. In the real play, this Crito adaptation is a perfunctory two pages with none of the original’s complex dealings with the limits of reason in the face of imminent death (which Gaddis does foreground in his other explicit citation of “Crito,” almost forty years later in Agapē Agape). The final act has four scenes: a longer one in which Bagby convinces Thomas to sign an oath of allegiance and distance himself from Kane (whose philosophical integrity has led him to be charged with treason), two shorter scenes, in which Thomas plays failing Crito to Kane’s resolute Socrates and then goes home to reconnect with his mother, and a final scene in which the discovery of the double substitute-death sends Thomas to the brink of madness, ending on his sense of being a ghost, which leads to him attempting to shoot his returning runaway slave with a decrepit shotgun that explodes at the breech and leaves him not only ghostly but blind.

The prose version’s projected plot differs slightly from what ended up in play form, and it gives a useful gloss on how Gaddis conceived of the story’s implications. In his view, it “develops and resolves a single point : what courage is in the life of a man forced by circumstances to make decisions for himself which, by involving others in what is really his own destruction, result in his spiritual suicide” (1). The narrative of substitutes for the same man killing each other in battle “makes it possible for the protagonist, Thomas, to in effect meet himself in battle and by his own hand be slain, in a plausible portrayal of man’s war with himself” (1). Its opening would have been very similar to the play, differing only in that the first substitute would not have been Thomas’s own brother but his wife’s. In the second half, though, Thomas would have spent the latter parts of the war stuck offshore because of split allegiances and port machinations. Kane would have been much less significant, and the ending would have seen John Israel return as the bearer of the news of William’s death, having buried him himself while working as a battlefield gravedigger. Thomas’s final blindness, meanwhile, would have been deliberately self-inflicted as a combination of self-punishment and insurance-money grab, as the $10,000 from his policy against such injury would set him up free of inheritance, able to go on and live his life on modest but more independent, less haunted terms.

Analysis: Gaddis gives a dismayed verdict on his first completed version in a 1961 letter: recalling “enraptured work on a play which, until I finished it and reread it, seemed to me quite great. Now it reads heavy-handed, obvious, over-explained, oppressive” (Letters 242). It’s unclear whether he thought his further work of 1962 had improved things, but “last draft” Antietam is indeed turgid reading, even more to read through as a whole than in the excerpt-contrastive setting of A Frolic of His Own. As Gaddis himself notes in his headnote, it contains a lot of undigested citation and working through of ideas from various philosophers (the sections on Rousseau and references to Plato and Socrates make it into Frolic, but there are long rehearsals of themes from Vaihinger, Camus, and others that don’t). Frolic makes this into a witty meditation on the legal status of originality: Antietam does not. Its main interest to Gaddis scholars will thus be not as a comparable completed artwork to his novels—despite its being (along with Dirty Tricks) the fullest-scaled of his unpublished works—but rather as an index of his reading and philosophical influences at a very specific time in his career.¹⁰We might also wonder why, at this time in his career, Gaddis developed an interest in the Civil War context and especially in Northern and Southern US culture-distinctions, longueurs on which drag out the first two acts. Gaddis’s own background was very New England, but in the early 1940s he had spent significant time in the rural Southwest. More proximately to the time Antietam was written, though, he married Patricia Black Gaddis, who had come North from the traditional South, and who did at least some research on the project for him (see below). Their daughter Sarah Gaddis’s novel Swallow Hard (1990) fictionalises much that was real in that relationship, and the heavy emphasis on North/South culture shock in the early parts of that novel gives a sense of how much it might have been on Gaddis’s mind at the time.

On a formal level, the excerpts in Frolic already convey most of what can be discovered from Antietam about how Gaddis’s dramatic work illuminates his innovations in prose. What most stands out upon restoring the play to its original place in Gaddis’s development (before its role in Frolic) is its almost total humourlessness: working on this in parallel with the early versions of J R may have helped Gaddis isolate, and see the value of, and hone, the relentless comedy of that novel.

Explicitness is another vice that Antietam embodies so fully that it helps reveal the virtue of Gaddis’s other work. The material on justice here paints in all the background for that theme’s workings in Frolic, while the material on doubt, freedom, responsibility, obligation, and so on provides a useful manual for identifying Gaddis’s consistent interest in questions of existential ethics throughout his fiction. When Thomas discusses “the… step in the dark, where chance becomes king. The… terrifying freedom of the blind…” (III-iii-6-169) one scene before he himself ends the play blind and with none of his old social structures to keep him anything but “free” in the “terrifying” “dark,” the writing is unsubtle enough to deaden the themes’ dramatic interest. It does, though, make clear the specific philosophical questions Gaddis cared about and that continued to animate his fiction even as he learned to address them without just stenographizing his favourite philosophers.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Almost half the play is reproduced in some form (seemingly unedited where reproduced) in A Frolic of His Own. As notes on the proto-J R novel project Sensation establish, some scenes of Antietam (most notably the memory of a pheasant shoot) were initially meant to overlap with scenes in Sensation, which featured prototypes for J R characters (see entry on Sensation in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide).

Elsewhere, I myself note the importance of the play’s frequent references to Rousseau for thinking about Gaddis’s fiction’s attitude to education (“Ford Foundation Fiasco” fn11), while in the present special journal issue, John Soutter touches on the way that its many allusions to Vaihinger (which unlike the Rousseau passages were not included in A Frolic of His Own) align it with Carpenter’s Gothic’s explicit themes of living by fictions and as-ifs. This theme also organizes the unproduced screenplay Dirty Tricks (see entry below).

Gaddis’s retrospective headnote, meanwhile, insists on a link he had not himself initially perceived between “some of its essential relationships” and Carpenter’s Gothic. The thematic connections of Vaihingerian fictionalism and “as-ifness” that Soutter’s work highlights don’t seem to cover character-level “relationships,” and so to identify the links Gaddis belatedly recognised can only be a speculative project. Three particular possibilities may be worth considering: the debates between fiction-wielders and thoroughgoing cynics at the start of Antietam’s Act 3 recur in McCandless’ arguments on the topic with both Liz and Lester. The family dynamics of thwarted inheritance play out in both texts through the figure of the passive brother persuaded too passively to go where he dies. And the fragile beautiful woman going catatonic from the neglect of a promising but self-involved man also organizes both texts, though Liz in Carpenter’s Gothic is a far more central and organizing figure than Giulielma.

Thomas’s proposed ending in the prose version seems aligned with The Recognitions’ emphasis on choosing to “live deliberately” as a viable narrative resolution. That the prose version was planned to be “largely in dialogue” indicates that Gaddis was already thinking away from the narrator-driven form of The Recognitions, toward the talk-heavy style of his later works, ratifying the connection between those and Gaddis’s drama work.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Gaddis’s letters record him considering returning to Antietam to turn it (back) into a novel in the aftermath of J R when for almost five years he was without a major project to work on. Letters in both 1976 and 1979 mention this plan, and that Gaddis had run it by J R’s publisher with unenthusiastic response (see Letters 314, 346). The plans to base Fictions (see entry in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide) around either Antietam or Dirty Tricks may have begun after Gaddis gave up on the idea of trying to straightforwardly novelise Antietam (as he also gave up on novelising Dirty Tricks). I have not found any archival trace of novelised Antietam drafts.

Jason Arthur identifies the root of Antietam’s double-death plot in “Gaddis’ ancestor Solomon Meredith” (fn18). The archive, meanwhile, preserves an undated letter from Gaddis’s then-wife Patricia Black Gaddis giving details of the case of Colonel Frank Coxe, which she has researched in the archives of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. She quotes:

The soldiers who served as substitutes for Coxe in the Union & Confed army were killed in the same battle & Mr. Coxe ever afterward considered himself responsible for their deaths. In later years he grew fanciful enough to imagine that the two killed each other.¹¹Though there is no indication of exactly when Patricia Black Gaddis did this research, where in the archives she found the language she quotes, and so on, it seems likely that the Pennsylvania Historical Society still has this material so that interested researchers might evaluate it for themselves.

This seems a direct source for the play’s basic plot. There is no indication that Gaddis himself saw any more of those archives than his wife reported to him.

Since so much of the play is reproduced in A Frolic of His Own, much criticism on that novel addresses the play material in some form or other. The fullest of these engagements is Johan Thielemans’s “Once at Antietam: A Lost Play Recovered: On A Frolic of His Own.” Judgments on the quality of the play (as it functions within Frolic) come from Arthur—“pallid”—Richard Eldridge and Paul Cohen—“self-important, emptily derivative” (47)—and Robert Weisberg: “melodramatic… at the very least, bad Faulkner… if Joyce were to capture a satirist capturing how Eliot, in his own homage to Dickens (‘he do the police in different voices’) would rewrite Absalom Absalom!” (447). This stress on parodic impersonation is ironic in the light of Gaddis simply reproducing a play that he himself had written with no parodic intent. The note debarring it from eventual publication suggests that when he reproduced it unedited in the very comical Frolic, he presumed readers would readily judge it the same way his note does: as accidentally comical material.

Title(s): Dirty Tricks / One Fine Day / Fawkes / The Blood in the Red White and Blue

Location in archive (Box.Folder): Full screenplays, extended “Film Treatment,” and notes, plus some correspondence, in 86.6 and 86.7 (Drama – “One Fine Day”); notes toward a prose fiction version in 82.10 (“Notes, Possible Projects Aborted”). Mentions in other correspondence about films.

Date: 1968-78 based on document dates, possibly starting earlier.

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: In 86.6, nineteen-page “Film Treatment” for One Fine Day, complete draft screenplay of Fawkes (a version attributed also to “H Bloomstein”—Gaddis’s agent Candida Donadio’s screenwriter husband—with a pencil note to his name specifying “bad draft with”), and correspondence with producers (mainly about One Fine Day). In 86.7, One Fine Day treatment again, and full screenplay (117 pages). Complete draft screenplay of Dirty Tricks (143 pages) in Steven Moore collection (also at Olin Library special collections: awaiting processing for box/folder number). 10-15 pages of notes for prose version to be called The Blood in the Red White and Blue in 82.10.

Description: In a 1978 letter to the producer Jack Gold about turning J R into a film, Gaddis notes that

despite the formats, the novel JR is essentially more cinematic than a screenplay I worked on called DIRTY TRICKS, which I think my agent has sent along to you to look at. It’s an idea I’m still quite attached to (a western parody of the Faust story), but as it stands now seems to me somewhat static in its development compared to J R. (letter to Gold)

This “parody” had been circulated to studios as early as February 1968 under the name One Fine Day (the title of the “Film Treatment” archived here), as indicated by archived rejection letters (some of which refer to it as a play rather than a screenplay). A further draft, titled Fawkes, with indications of co-writing and labelled as a “bad draft” (see above) is also filed, but without clear indications as to date. The fullest feedback in a letter comes from 1973, when it’s still referred to as One Fine Day. Dirty Tricks, then, was presumably a title invented between 1973 and the final publication of J R, which attributes a project by that name to the character Schramm, though there it “didn’t even have his name on it” (J R 396).¹²Per the Gaddis Annotations website’s entry for the novel’s mention of Dirty Tricks, J R’s galley proofs referred to “One Fine Day,” but the title was updated to Dirty Tricks for the final publication in 1975: see https://www.williamgaddis.org/jr/jrnotes6.shtml Gibbs’ brief description of Schramm’s film gives it a similar frame to Gaddis’ actual screenplay—“God damned general in there above the battle taking bets just like the Lord”—though Schramm’s is explained as an allegorization of his actual military experience being abandoned to defend a town alone.

The following description and analysis mainly refer to the archived screenplay titled Dirty Tricks, on the basis that it seems to date latest and so to be the closest to a “final” version. I have been unable to do a fine-grained comparison of the differences between Fawkes, One Fine Day, and Dirty Tricks but their basic plots all follow the same outline as the “Film Treatment” of One Fine Day, and there seem to be few substantially different scenes in each. Closer comparative study in future may allow for a more reliable composition history than I have been able to establish.

The final complicating version is a set of notes toward a prose version, under the title The Blood in the Red, White, and Blue. It is possible that this is where the project began, in the mid-1960s, but various plans here like “restore the jewel scene” or “turn all the sequences upside-down” imply that Gaddis is working from a prior version. A 1976 letter to his agent talks about selling the “comparatively short and simpler western” as the successor novel to J R (Letters 318). He also mentions in a brief interview in J R’s immediate aftermath that his next fiction project will be a western, since “every American writer should have a Western in them” (Sheppard). This would explain and perhaps date the archived notes: he does not seem ever to have progressed to a prose draft. In the absence of any evidence for work on a prose version before J R was published, it makes most sense to see The Blood… as an intended novelization (with many different emphases) of the earlier “parody” film-script.

Pre-J R letters, whether published or archived, rarely mention the project, and hence don’t clarify the chronology or version-history. It even remains unclear how Gaddis came to the project in the first place. It does seem to date to the mid-1960s when progress on J R was at a nadir, and the (likely early) collaboration with agent Candida Donadio’s husband on a draft suggests some degree of outside intervention in getting the project started. The timeline allows for this to have been something Gaddis worked on with his 1967 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. Compared to these mysterious origins, the archive clarifies Gaddis’s attitude and reasons for finally leaving the project behind. The final note on what is presumably his last page of Blood notes renders the verdict:

This is certainly not a book I would recommend to anyone of wit or intelligence; for the straight goods they should go direct to Bentham, Vaihinger, & Morse Peckham.¹³Morse Peckham, a literary professor of Gaddis’s own era, is the surprising name here, given Gaddis’s avowed disinterest in academia and contemporary literature. Two aspects of Peckham’s work (broadly a “behaviourist” theory of literary action, rooted mainly in the study of 19^th century Romanticism) may be the object of Gaddis’s emulation here: in Man’s Rage for Chaos (1967 - published around the time Gaddis started work on this project) Peckham contends that art can never achieve order (a long-term Gaddis preoccupation), while his later Explanation and Power (1979) is probably too late to have contributed to Gaddis’ thinking on the western, but concerns processes of manipulation in a way that might illuminate Slade’s methods. For the vehicle, my regard for the western as an inately [sic] juvenile form grew, through daily labouring its limitations, to a kind of loathing.

Referring to it as a “book” suggests more progress than the archive leaves visible, but Gaddis goes on to contrast this project’s effort unfavourably with even the struggle to finish J R: “I have approached my two longer novels with an enthusiasm bordering on obsession” but with this one he has had to fight through that loathing, and—for all that he told Gold he was “still quite attached to” the basic idea—he could not summon the “enthusiasm” to follow through to a drafted novel.

The plot, set in the unspecified American West in the wake of the Civil War, follows the outcomes of a wager between “Slade” (the story’s Mephistopheles) and “The General” (the story’s God) about whether Slade can, by promises and guidance alone, corrupt with ambition the General’s protégé Fawkes, chief lawyer in their frontier town. The General believes that men tend toward the good and a higher purpose, Slade that they all sink to the same level when it would serve their selfish ends. The General has predetermined that Fawkes will rise nobly to high office: Slade sets about the task of corrupting Fawkes by promising him that same destiny. After a demonstration of his manipulative powers by getting two local criminals who have escaped justice to kill each other in a fight over cards, Slade wins Fawkes’s trust, leading him into indulgences like the seduction of an innocent young girl called Margaret, and the pursuit of political influence that leads him to ignore the work of defending the innocent on which his reputation has been built. His lay preaching slides gradually into law-and-order stump campaigning.

Slade himself seduces Margaret’s mentor Ann while trying to stop Fawkes giving up his political striving for love with Margaret. When Fawkes’s negligence leaves his admiring young law clerk unable to stop the hanging of a child, the townspeople start to turn on Fawkes, and when he throws off the pregnant Margaret to focus on campaigning for an election, her brother Billy, a locally stationed solider, vows to kill him. Slade, fresh from contriving the death of one of the child-hanging jurors, is supernaturally cognisant that Billy won’t go through with it, but nonetheless leads the two into a confrontation that sees Fawkes kill Billy in “self-defence.” When Fawkes returns to Margaret, she seems insane and he must leave, but we find out immediately afterward that on Ann’s advice she has feigned madness to cast Fawkes off. Suspicious of Slade’s role in all this, and having heard that The General did nothing for his “mad” lover, Fawkes wins his election among an increasingly hostile public, but brings his gun to town on the day of his taking up the new role. On rumours of a showdown between Fawkes and Slade the townspeople assemble, but as Slade is standing near The General, when Fawkes fires, it is The General who goes down… Whether he meant it, whether this means Slade or The General won their wager, are left to be resolved, but Fawkes is killed. For resolution’s sake, Slade offers another wager on the same terms as he draws The General’s bleeding attention to the young idealistic law clerk.

While one of the rejection letters states that Gaddis adds nothing to the many extant pseudo-Fausts, the screenplay does make some notable departures from the Goethian source. For example, the original’s wager is between Faust himself and Mephistopheles, rather than the demon and God about Faust, and in the original Margaret’s madness is real rather than feigned. Between direct echo (a black dog that follows Faust/Fawkes into his rooms) and difference (Fawkes is a lawyer and preacher, not a scholar), the screenplay is clearly derived from its source material, but not coherent enough in its departures to achieve a distinctively angled commentary on it. The 1973 letter of feedback is mainly focused on ways to make it less derivatively Faustian (mainly to do with making Slade more heroic).¹⁴Most of the other archived feedback is simple rejection rather than suggested improvement. Scholars looking to parse Gaddis’s and Bloomstein’s distinct contribution to the collaborative draft have at least one page of the latter’s suggestions, which prioritises sexing up the relationship between Margaret and Fawkes by making her conspicuously younger to push the audience into discomfort. Future tracing of the exact relationships to Faust will be necessary to establish exactly how the screenplay builds on and modulates the Goethian ideas, but the basic shift in emphasis seems to be in the closer place of The General to the action than God in the original: close enough to not only be disappointed, but attacked, thus expanding the potential reach of human will, but also the degree to which it can transgress into distortion and corruption.

For all that Gaddis told Gold the screenplay was less “cinematic” than J R it is also not especially “literary.” There are extended philosophical conversations, but by contrast to Gaddis’s prior attempt at full-length drama in Once at Antietam the language is naturalistic, the pace more dynamic, and the visual staging elements far more fully worked out and dramatically essential. Indeed, one of the more unique departures here from Gaddis’s usual style are a number of low-dialogue scenes at a Brothel where the imagery is hellishly surreal to a greater degree than anywhere else in Gaddis’s fiction. See for example, the following passage of stage direction without dialogue:

EXTREME CLOSE SHOT OF FIRST WHORE, ALMOST IN REPOSE

Sound level recedes somewhat. Her hand enters shot, middle finger slowly wipes blood from her face, and is held before her lips as she stares fixedly downscreen at FAWKES. Finger slowly comes to her lips and she touches it with tip of tongue. CAMERA TILTS DOWN TO FOLLOW HER BOWING HEAD OVER DAZED FACE OF FAWKES STARING UP. She touches tip of finger to his lips. His hand rises, pulls her down. Her hair cascades over them filling shot. There is an ABRUPT HIGH-PITCHED YELP as we

CUT TO:

SHOT OF DOG WITH FIRST BOY CLINGING TO ITS HIND FOOT (WHICH BOY HAS JUST BITTEN). (47)

On a second visit to the brothel, we see that “DOG has been decorated as bride” (129). A combination of lurid cliché and genuine strangeness, the brothel-scene visuals show how Gaddis (perhaps in collaboration with his co-drafter Bloomfield) was occasionally working with visual direction alone, rather than just as a complement to dialogue.¹⁵As I and others have explored elsewhere, Gaddis was working for film in his corporate writing at the same time as at least some of his work on this screenplay, but the visual directions here are far more self-sufficient than anywhere in the corporate work.

The notes toward a prose version give fuller and more explicit thematic glosses than the screenplay, both in indicating the prose version’s own emphases, and how it might have to differ from the prior version to achieve them. For example, in the original the boy who gets hanged is part native part Mexican, helping to explain the town’s callous willingness to see him die, and Gaddis then makes early notes for the prose version that Margaret herself should be Mexican: “Great point this approach offers is the uncongeniality of her church & his […] so we have the whole contrast of Prot. ‘free will’ & responsibility vs. intervention (M can’t get it through her head why the Gen won’t intervene).” A number of notes thus refer to her as “Margerita.” Fawkes and Slade, meanwhile, would also have been characterised differently: rather than energetic and promising, Fawkes in this version would have been “an equivalent of a modern lost alienated man, burned out,” and have returned somewhat to his Goethian origins as a scholar: “that F has studied and come to the end of it (Knowledge V).” Slade would therefore not be misdirecting his natural ambitions, but restoring energy and vitality to him just to destroy him more fully: if Fawkes having studied his way to resignation could lament “how I ended up here,” Slade would promise rejuvenation: “Ended up? You’ve just begun.” The notes also suggest getting rid of the initial scene that explains the wager, and saving for the end of the novel the revelation that Fawkes's life has been ruined for a mere bet. The notes toward the prose version, then, give us a sense of where Gaddis found his screenplay thematically lacking, and point the way to a slightly more definite appropriation of Faust for Gaddis’s own argumentative purposes. As his final note indicates, though, his distaste for having to fit everything into the Western genre seems to have put paid to that ambition, leaving him to pursue some of his intended themes in Carpenter’s Gothic.

Analysis: Gaddis’s departures from his Faust source have their most coherent rhetorical and philosophical upshot in the screenplay’s treatment of free will. While much of its material under that heading simply rehearses existing ideas, Dirty Tricks makes a distinct contribution in exploring manipulation as a category that mediates between and exceeds the standard poles of “destination” and “individual will.” Notes toward the prose version show that Gaddis intended to centralise this further, with “S promoting this […] idea that you make yr own destiny while really he is making it,” while another note more openly questions “why have faith with possibility of failure when things can be manipulated and the end made certain (v V Means & Ends).”¹⁶Capital “V” in these notes seems to refer consistently to the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, whose The Philosophy of As If Gaddis’s work had explicitly engaged with from The Recognitions onward: see Soutter. Even before this planned prose elaboration, manipulation’s relation to will animates some of the screenplay’s most intriguing moments.

These mostly hinge on Slade’s manipulations distorting the destined paths that The General has laid. Their wager, after all, is not about whether or not Fawkes is ambitious for high office, but about whether merely by making him conscious of this ambition Slade can manipulate him to “rot” and turn against The General’s pre-laid destiny. The moral relation between destiny and will for the same end goal (here “high office”) is explained through the General’s “You’d ask me to change the course of things now? For a man who’s tried to step in and take them into his own hands? All that would have come to him anyhow” (127). Fawkes’s resort to his “own hands” represents such a betrayal to the General that he will not even defend Fawkes against Slade.

The language of “chance” is where many of these complexities are worked out. The General looks down on “A man who’s been given every chance! Suddenly seizing everything for himself, any way he could get it! Everything that was already there waiting for him, on the course I had laid out for him from the start” (128). “Every chance” is exactly what The General did not give Fawkes, and what Slade, in persuading him to act on human ambition, has given him: if anything he takes chance from The General, who wants to have it tightly owned and controlled. Yet despite the terms of The General’s blame, Fawkes himself seems unaware that he has chosen to enter the realm of chance: he breaks with Margaret (thus ratifying the moral corruption Slade has promised us) by insisting that “You can’t leave a campaign for high office to chance” (87). This puts his moral failing into the realm of choice rather than destiny, as he appeals to chance-reduction to deliberately but unconsciously put himself on the side of chance (outside of sure destiny). Slade’s manipulation pushes Fawkes to take chances and reduce fate, even as Slade himself sees this choice as an inevitability in any human given ambition. Slade’s irony even allows him to manipulate Fawkes precisely by appealing to the fixity of the General’s will: when Fawkes briefly contemplates intervening to save the boy from hanging (which would revert to the General’s conception of him and thwart Slade’s), Slade gets Fawkes to stay in the realm of choice by encouraging him to give it up: “And how do you know the General hasn’t already decided to extend it? Do you think you and this clerk can change his mind, whatever he’s decided? Has anyone ever? No” (101). These tightly-wound ironies represent a real refinement of the simple oppositions that usually govern free-will discourse.

The ironies grow outward from the central triangle along with Slade’s influence in the town: the jury that convicts the boy, for example, concur among themselves that judging before they hear evidence is better aligned with God's ordained plan for justice: “don’t you worry… He’ll get a fair trial, all right, then he’ll hang” (93): the trial is “our chance to” play a role in justice’s predetermined progress. Slade helps manipulate Fawkes’s popularity, meanwhile, by constructing falsely inevitable futures from false pasts, reorganizing the collective memory of the bar shooting scene so that those who were present believe it was Fawkes who set the action in motion. One such bystander says that Fawkes’s extra-judicial arranging of justice in those shootings is “The Lord’s truth” (a repeated phrase throughout the screenplay), whereas this memory is very specifically Slade’s (fabricated, Lord-spiting) truth. The bystanders then credit Fawkes for a great understanding of “human nature” in manipulating the killers, even as it is precisely Slade’s insight into their human cognitive biases that allows him to build their realities for them this way.¹⁷Which raises another of the screenplay’s term-flipping questions: whether Slade can claim certainty about “human nature’s” “ambition” and “rot” when he himself won’t leave it to play out unmanipulated.

Slade is even able to make religious belief itself a tool of manipulation: when he needs Fawkes to sign a form that will free Ann for marriage, Fawkes demurs because “I’ll be swearing to something I know nothing about.” But Slade persists: “How many times have you stood in your pulpit, preaching sworn sermons about God’s purposes, some great design? Things you certainly know less about” (65). Slade himself knowsThe General/God’s “design” and is able to manipulate Fawkes away from it precisely by appealing to its unknowability. This passage also highlights an ontological complexity that the screenplay doesn’t fully pursue, which is that for all that The General is fully analogized to God (stressing that there was nothing to this town before he created it, and so on), his town still contains a Christian church devoted to worshipping that God, and its people attribute everything that happens to that God’s design, even as they also acknowledge the General’s determining power. That the story’s allegorical God might be subject to the whims of his own God raises a further question about whether Slade’s victory over The General might still be within the intended destiny established by the actual Christian God beyond The General. Gaddis’s prose-version plan to add the wrinkle of a Catholic/Protestant conflict between visions of will by making Margaret into Mexican Margarita suggests that this multi-dimensional religious ontology could have become even more internecine, with even more complex consequences for the morality of will.

The scene of fullest irony about will and determination, and fullest departure from Faust, comes when Slade decides to arrange the death of one of the jurors. Seeing The General’s carriage approaching in the distance, he throws fool’s gold into the road and challenges the juror to collect: when the juror is run down by the carriage, Slade has successfully shown not only that he can manipulate humans and the paths they take, but also that he is thereby capable of making The General himself into a killer rather than a helper. The General is unable to stop the carriage, does not subsequently attempt to punish Slade, and can only offer a passive look of “angry rebuke” from the carriage window as he rolls on down his own predestined path. Thus Slade’s manipulation can make “chance” and “rot” of even The General’s own course, and so turns out to be a greater force than either human will or non-intervening predestination alone. The townspeople, of course, attribute the outcome to destiny: the General would never choose to hurt anyone, but “when the Lord calls, we come, and that’s all they is to it” (116). Yet again, the irony is that it is not The Lord who has been calling these shots.

The project also gives a distinct articulation of the value-system attached to Gaddis’s career-long interest in “what is worth doing?” The notes toward the prose version suggest that the burnt-out Fawkes would have to face that question as directly as Gibbs does in J R. Even in the screenplay with the energetic and ambitious version of Fawkes, Slade manipulates him away from his “natural” commitment to the underdog by giving him an alternative version of “worth”: “You simply haven’t the time now. You’ve handled enough of these lost causes. Winning one more won’t help, but losing one could destroy all the others” (83). “Destroy” here puts the question in terms of the hoary old opposition between deontology and consequentialism. To a deontologist one failure while trying to do the right thing could not destroy the value of other right things done; it would only be destruction if the earlier goods were valued only for their instrumental use in achieving some further end. On that consequentialist model, it would be more “worth” avoiding the risk of marring a usefully perfect track record than attempting to add to the cumulative amount of good. Slade thus implies that the kind of “active” that Fawkes should be might involve a deliberate moral passivity, which again further complicates the issue of will, activeness, and destiny. Gaddis’s notes toward the prose version then express its entire message in the language of destruction: that “we inner-directed go wrong and destroy ourselves when we despair and go to the outer for direction.” Again the issue is not so much of the inner will, but of outsourcing your own agency to the manipulative power of the outer-directed value system. This then plays into basic perspectives on orientation toward living, as Gaddis hoped the project might express “tyranny of hope vs. V’s pessimism as positive.”

The project is also notable for its handling of female characters: Ann and Margaret in the screenplay are mainly passive seducees and sufferers, but Gaddis’s notes toward the prose version imply that he wanted to make gender more important, “That WOMEN have eventually and intuitively total control of the FICTIONS that keep things working. They know intuitively (& use accdgly) what we try to reason (& fail accordingly).” The only scene in the screenplay that expresses such control is the revelation after Fawkes leaves “mad” Margaret that she was only feigning her madness to have an excuse to get rid of him. Gaddis’s early fictions often feature a female character going mad (see entry on Blague in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide), as does his source in Faust, and Margaret’s feigning here conspicuously revises this madwoman trope in terms of female agency. It’s one of the story’s rare examples of deliberate human will exerted but unpunished, and even Slade does not seem to have access to its revelation. Even the madness scene, though, is framed in terms of the discussion of inevitability and responsibility: one of the images Margaret rants about is “that little boy we saw hanged up there, like a sign to say here’s a fork in the road when he’d already passed it” (137). The dealing with fictionalism and gender here is still, finally, subordinate to the free will thinking about what is salvageable and what is “already passed.”

At any rate, especially in contrast with J R (which it was initially drafted parallel to, cited in, and then briefly conceived as a successor to), what the Dirty Tricks project most throws into relief overall is Gaddis’s persistent interest in existential humanist questions even as he was working on his great “systems novel,” with its long legacy of antihumanist or posthumanist critical interpretation. Gaddis at one point asks in a note why Slade, with all his devilish powers, would let the people beat and torture him in the opening scenes where his previous town runs him out on a rail. Gaddis imagines rewriting the scene to more fully stress Slade’s “scorn of the mob in the midst of this agonizing torment, his almost inhuman attempt to give them the satisfaction of seeing him suffer, his contempt for his companion’s howls and pleas, his glint of cunning broken by stabs of pain, his certainty that he will come through.” While “inhuman” is the word used here, what we actually get is a devil choosing to suffer as a human, deeming that to be something “worth doing,” and so starting the whole film off on a humanist note. If Dirty Tricks were to become part of the Gaddis canon, one of its effects would surely be to move the scale on the debates between humanist and posthumanist accounts of Gaddis’s oeuvre. Gaddis himself, though, had his eyes on more than just interpretive difference as he pondered this rewrite: the “inhuman” “suffering” scene “will instantly send a producer grabbing in his mind for. Bronson, McQueen, Bogart…”

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The direct adherence to the structure and dramatis personae of Goethe’s Faust shows that Gaddis’s inspiration from that source did not dwindle after The Recognitions: for scholars looking to pursue Gaddis’s Faustian influences, this film project will be as important as his first novel.

Although it was initially written while Gaddis had J R underway—and although Gibbs in J R refers to Schramm’s “Dirty Tricks” film as “same God damned thing as all this” (396)—the screenplay illuminates that novel more through contrast than affinity. For one thing, it takes little interest in the various matters that have generally been discussed in J R under the “systems” heading: the evolving economy, networked structures of agency and influence, thoughtless subjectivities, proliferating scale, communications media, and so on. Its concerns are mainly where humanist individual matters intersect with the metaphysical, rooted centuries earlier in Faust’s core relationships and making less effort to update them to a contemporary vantage than The Recognitions does. So conspicuous is this distinction from J R’s basic material that this film project might have functioned as a way for Gaddis to clear his head from that novel’s preoccupations, just as film work gave him some respite from literary composition.

Nonetheless, the notes do establish connections with J R, though more explicitly in those toward prose-version Blood… that likely came after that novel. One note, for example, brings together characters from each project under an existential banner: “the problem of indecision & eventual paralysis of the will // how Fawkes & Gibbs (what is (not) worth doing) relate.” “What is worth doing?” has long been acknowledged as one of the central questions that spans Gaddis’s career, and here he makes it something that Slade’s manipulation of Fawkes can play upon. If “indecision” and “paralysis” of the will are individual psychological matters, they still play an important part in J R, where they are ranged against the seemingly irresistible tide of forces that overwhelm individual agency, a dynamic thematised in the western as well, where the individual will is up against predetermination, manipulation, and (whether you agree with Slade or the General, they each think this matters more than individual character) “human nature.” When Gibbs identifies “all this” that Schramm was up against and that his western was about, the referent seems to be that Schramm was left on his own “holding the point” of a strategically important village while those who were supposed to help him abandoned him, and those with power stood “above the battle taking bets” like The General in the screenplay leaving Fawkes to face Slade’s manipulations undefended. What is Schramm defending, allegorically? The world of thought as valued by him, Gibbs, perhaps Eigen, and hardly anyone else they know. A note toward the prose-version further echoes J R in specifying that Slade’s attack on “we inner-directed” is “what America is going to be all about”: if Major Hyde in J R will frequently tell us that his rank materialism is “what America’s all about” in the mid-20th century, Gaddis’s “going to be” note figures his existential-metaphysical relocated-German-Faust western as in part a national origin story. This would identify the American lineage not as mere Hyde-style financial greed, but in the lineage of skilled manipulators turning ambivalent people toward ambition and greed out of sheer contempt for human nature. This concern with origins thus frames the western both as an ideological prequel to J R, and as part of the tradition of 1960s Western rewrites (in literature and film) that parodically reinterpret American origin-myths, running through the decade from EL Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times (1960) to Burt Kennedy’s Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969).

Frequent discussions of the role of fictions in living run throughout the script, and are an even more central and explicit concern in the notes toward the prose version. Gaddis wonders of Slade’s invigorating but misleading fictions “when does the fiction become a lie,” while some of the rare drafted dialogue for the prose version would have Slade himself making the case to Fawkes that “a hypothesis wants to be proved, is waiting to be proved […] a fiction doesn’t have to be proved: it just has to work.” These concerns are picked up directly in Carpenter’s Gothic. The association Gaddis makes in his notes between women who “control” fictions and the men who don’t and “fail accordingly” maps onto that novel’s alignment of McCandless against useful fiction and Liz in favour of it. These questions were also central to Gaddis’s superceded proto-project of 1978-81, Fictions, which evolved into Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own (see entry on Fictions in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide). As John Soutter’s contribution to the current special journal issue makes clear, Gaddis’s Vaihingerian interest in what role conscious fiction-investment should play in our lives is not isolated to his explicit mentions of Vaihinger in these notes, but runs throughout his career.

The black dog wandering through the hellish costumed brothel scenes, ending up “decorated as bride,” may be a cousin of the black dog with painted nails that wanders through Carpenter’s Gothic.

Meanwhile, as Slade’s undermining of Fawkes and The General happens through his manipulation and perverting of their institutional relations to the law and to religion respectively, there’s a forward look here to Gaddis’s sceptical institutional visions of religion and law in Carpenter’s Gothic and Frolic. The repeated vocabulary of “Justice” here also looks forward to Frolic. The contrast of Slade’s and The General’s earthly-hellish and Godly-ideal visions works as a quite direct gloss on that novel’s famous opening lines: “You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law” (Frolic 3).

The completed screenplay being Gaddis’s most extended work for the film format, it will be of interest for precise identifications of how his prose forms from J R onward engage with the influence of non-literary media.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Gaddis discusses the project in published Letters, on pages 297-98, 299, and 318. As discussed above, Dirty Tricks with elements of its plot intact is a film written by the dead writer Schramm in J R (396). The Blood in the Red, White, and Blue ends up as the name of the film that adapts (and travesties) Oscar’s (and Gaddis’s) play Once at Antietam in A Frolic of his Own. The novel’s film, unlike its play, bears no relation to the work Gaddis himself did under that title.

Title: The Secret History of the Player Piano

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86:8 (“The Secret History of the Player Piano”)

Date: Unclear, but after J R’s publication since it contains pages from published J R – filed with a presumably later Gaddis note saying “70s?” Peripheral filed material indicates 1977.¹⁸Thanks to Kate Goldkamp for identifying this: a ballot from the Authors Guild filed with this material specifies that it must be returned by February 24^th 1977.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: 150-ish pages chopped from J R with nondialogue elements crossed out. Brief undated correspondence regarding play. One-page cover note on what the material is and intentions for developing it. Typed and handwritten notes on extra plot ideas. Supplemental notes on what Gaddis would do to better suit the material to the stage. Three pages of “problems” in plotting and rhetoric that would need to be resolved in the process of creating a standalone script.

Description: As the folder’s preserved original heading makes clear, this was an “aborted JR play.” A cover note identifies it as “A play in 2 acts drawn from the novel J R, working title: The Secret History of the Player Piano.” It is debatable whether it counts as a distinct play at all, as it is sufficiently “drawn from the novel” that no new drama was drafted, and what Gaddis compiled (and seems to have submitted) was primarily pages from the actual novel, cut out, and with all non-dialogue material crossed out in pen.

Gaddis broke the “play” into two Acts of two and four scenes apiece, and also identified some “material for additional dialogue”: all are the novel’s scenes set at Schramm’s apartment. My thanks to Kate Goldkamp for retrieving the exact page-selections:

Act I Scene i: pages 273-290 (Gibbs and Eigen discover Schramm’s suicide)

Act I Scene ii: pages 363-400 (Bast and Rhoda meet at the apartment, lawyers discuss the Schramm Estate)

Act II Scene i: pages 549-564 (Bast and Rhoda have sex, then Bast writes music all night)

Act II Scene ii: pages 565-610 (Gibbs comes to the apartment, Bast and Rhoda leave, Gibbs works on his book, Rhoda returns and they have an exhausted/drugged conversation)

Act II Scene iii: pages 611-632 (Eigen arrives at the apartment and harasses Rhoda, Gibbs returns and process is served).

Act II Scene iv: pages 719-726 (Bast returns to the apartment to find Eigen taking Schramm’s papers, everyone moves on).

“additional dialogue” from 401-414 (Gibbs and Eigen discuss communication theory and “Divorce” board game).

Beyond this material, there are notes indicating that Gaddis knew he would have to do more than simply chop his novel up to make a play: in particular a 3-page list of “problem”s like “problem of Bast’s business difficulties – can it be reduced to problems with his broker?” or “What happens to Rhoda?” These apparent notes-to-self are supplemented by notes for readers of the proto-project, explaining things like “Amy Joubert does not appear in these scenes & the significance of her relationship with Gibbs will be sharply clarified in rewriting some of his dialogue with Eigen.”

Despite these hints toward a deepening and clarifying of some of the central relationships, though, the play was “aborted” after feedback from at least one potential producer: “The central idea is a knockout, his dialogue too, but the relationships are just not there for a play.”

Analysis: In boiling J R down for the stage, it’s notable that Gaddis substantially sidelines the novel’s eponymous business-boy. The stage version foregrounds Gibbs, Eigen, and Bast, in their struggles with the kind of anti-art pressure that killed Schramm, while Gaddis relegates to ominous background the wider economic, systemic, or educational themes. The title, with its Agapē-alluding focus on the wider history of dehumanizing mechanization, is thus a somewhat awkward fit for what would have been a more straightforwardly personalized story on stage. The notes about possible refinement to the narrative around the base dialogue help indicate what in the novel Gaddis didn’t think was self-sufficiently transferrable from page to stage. This leads, too, to some suggestion of what extra framing he thought might be needed in order to compensate for losing the novel’s narratorial voice. Many critics in the “726 pages of dialogue” school of characterising J R have treated its narration as so minimal as to be entirely ignorable: this “play” would have put that implication to the proof.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Entirely derived from J R, and while the notes, both to himself and accompanying the presumable submission for an external audience, indicate things that might have varied from the novel, it does not seem that Gaddis ever actually got around to making these revisions. The interest, therefore, is in seeing what elements of J R Gaddis found most apt for staging, and in the proposals he made to simplify and then fill out the narrative for the stage.

The loose connection that this project (especially its title) establishes between Agapē Agape and the stage, meanwhile, may cast some light on Gaddis’ various (eventually discarded) ideas for frame devices, King Lear backstories, and so on, as that nonfiction project evolved into a radio play or novella.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The title here was also at one point a working title for what became Agapē Agape. The excerpted pages include (in the play’s Act 2 scene ii) those in which Gibbs works on his Agapē project on page/stage.

William Gaddis’s Unpublished Prospectuses for TV and Film Projects (Alphabetical)

Title: The Black King and the White Bishop

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.2 (Drama: “The Black King and the White Bishop”), prose version drafts in 81.8 (Short Fiction: “Early - Loose”)

Date: Early 1955: rejection letter for proposal to CBS dated May 24, 1955

Complete? Only as prospectus

Extent of preserved material: In 86.2, a five-page synopsis-proposal typescript, and three pages of typescript draft for that proposal. Around fifteen pages of prose drafts in 81.8, the longest continuous one of which is six pages. Proposal correspondence with CBS in 81.8.

Description: Summarised in the proposal as “a half-hour suspense play for television,” Gaddis’s notes indicate that he envisaged sending this to “CBS story Dept for ‘Danger.’” Danger was a series of half-hour TV plays that ran from 1950 to 1955, suggesting that Gaddis just missed the boat: a letter dated 24 May 1955 rejects his proposal on the basis that “at the present, we have no one-half hour shows.”

The proposal, whose rejection dates it after fellow CBS pitches “WASTE” and “Unfortunately” (see entries below), is more cartoonish than either, with correspondingly less thematic relation to the novel he had just published. Mike is a salesman for a product called “Visoseal,” a preservative anti-decay coating which is extremely thin and transparent, thus allowing things to be frozen in visible “living” detail. On a cruise, he encounters Vahlbert, a former chess great now obsessed with “not playing chess, not the game itself, but collecting and owning chess sets”: he aspires to own the “only really perfect chess set in the world’” (1). Strangely, Vahlbert, and his tall silent “lascar”¹⁹A now-antiquated term for a south-Asian seaman assistant are familiar with Visoseal already, and Vahlbert relishes showing Mike a rat “so perfectly preserved in Visoseal that it looks still fiercely alive” (2). Vahlbert asks Mike to come and deliver his next batch of Visoseal to Vahlbert’s home in person. In the second half, Mike makes that journey, sees some of Vahlbert’s chess sets, and is drugged. When he wakes, he unmistakeably finds himself laid out for Visosealing. The lascar has already been Visosealed, becoming “the Black King of Vahlbert’s ‘only really perfect chess set in the world’” (3), and as it emerges that Mike was destined to become a “White Bishop,” he finds himself needing to escape, with only a large jade queen to wield as a weapon…

The prose drafts, meanwhile, focus on framing devices, mainly through Mike, in the first person, setting up the telling of his story to his “incredulous” but “humoring” friend Blake, and with Blake’s response. Some looser notes set out a slightly different plot and character-list with a changed title—“The White Queen and the Black Bishop”—and a more specifically Caribbean setting. The “White Queen” idea seems to correspond to a draft frame-ending in which Blake’s wife walks past and Blake says “It’s a good thing Vahlbert never saw her […] The White Queen?” The draft then ends (like other Gaddis prose stories of this era – see for example “No Sale” entry in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide) with a character winking to the narrator to reinforce their final line, a technique derived from TV which indicates just how cornily Gaddis was willing to inhabit the commercial fiction genre in his post-Recognitions quest for paid writing work. Relatedly, the writing itself in these drafts is a strange mix of the dull (Mike describes himself: “mild-mannered, benevolent: you’d hardly think a salesman, esp of plastics:: or a bishop?”) and the campily gothic cod-Poe, as when he must burst forth his tale because Blake is innocently listing things Visoseal can coat: “‘a rat,’ I muttered under my breath […] ‘A bishop?’ I whispered hoarsely” until finally “I burst into uncontrolled laughter, and then before he could stop me, or encourage me further, I started to pour out the images of horror which [insert] had [/insert] filled my mind.”

Analysis: That the prose draft is filed with the CBS rejection suggests that Gaddis tried to turn this into prose after it was rejected for TV, perhaps (given the campy prose) for a genre horror magazine. It’s impossible to be sure of the sequence in which TV proposal and prose were written, however. With no reason given for rejection other than Danger having stopped commissioning, this might have been a slightly better-suited TV pitch than earlier attempts like “Unfortunately” and “WASTE” which bulge at the seams with complicated thematic back-stories, proposed montages that compress lives-worth of offstage action, and so on. For its genre, it mainly seems to fail in terms of “suspense,” as the second half of the proposal, once the situation becomes clear, mainly involves a lot of running around and some exposition-heavy conversation.

Though lacking suspense, the story still conjures some intriguing thematic frameworks. It explores the mindset of the expert collector who to become a better collector must lose some affinity for the collected thing (the story version makes explicit that former master chess player Vahlbert is no longer “a good chess player at all. I beat him one out of every 4or5 games. He’d just become abstracted, sitting there handling the pieces. Chess certainly was his obsession, but he didn’t play well”). There’s the prose version’s pseudo-“Ancient Mariner” frame, which highlights the basic story’s preoccupation with what that poem calls “the nightmare Life-in-Death.” And it establishes for itself a distinctive axis where humdrum world (business sales), ancient tradition (chess), and technology’s threatening novelty intersect. In the very conventional horror monthlies of the time, it would—had Gaddis followed through on the prose version—have been notable for its combination of high-gothic prose and ideas with an unusually quotidian and daylit setting.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The gothic horror elements here do not really recur in Gaddis’s writing, though Carpenter’s Gothic of course makes significant use of gothic tropes (especially in its final Jane Eyre-framed form).

The mildly science-fictional element of Visoseal might be the first time in Gaddis’s archive of fictions that we find a forerunner for the mildly science-fictional elements that enter J R’s plot after Vogel and DeCephalis move from school employment into the technology field on products like “Teletravel.”

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? N/A

Title: The Eighth Step: A Politically Incorrect Screenplay

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.4 (Drama: “The Eighth Step”)

Date: unclear, likely at same time as other more formal TV proposals (early 1955).

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: Single-page description of an “episodic screen comedy.”

Description: This document fails to live up to its self-description, being no full screenplay but a loosely-sketched idea on one page.²⁰If the date is early enough, “screenplay” may refer not to a completed script but the basic genre of a fiction for one-off TV broadcast. The “step” in question is the Alcoholics Anonymous one, “make a list of all persons he has harmed and become willing to make amends to them all.” The plot will follow how “each such attempt end[s] in disaster” for “a recovering alcoholic named Jason.” There seems to be a mismatch between steps here, since this narrative focuses on problems with actually making amends, which is the ninth step, rather than the eighth which (as Gaddis accurately notes) is about itemising those harms and becoming willing to amend them. It’s possible the confusion is deliberate, since the plot concerns amend-making going wrong and bad intentions behind good amends: that is, it might be read as exploring the problem of skipping to the ninth step before you’ve really done the “willingness” part of the eighth.

Gaddis gives a short list of possible disasters (putting Jason back in touch with a paternity suit, a loan shark, political revelations). But the “background” is Jason’s real wish to impress his alienated wife, his “scheme to prove his constancy by setting her up for an accident or brief illness giving him the opportunity to prove his devotion,” and this going wrong and leading him to be “indicted for murder.” The page ends with “hahahahahahaoops!” split over multiple lines.

Analysis: This “screenplay” is much more loosely written than any of Gaddis’s actual proposals sent to television producers, which suggests either that it was never really intended to turn into a proposal, or that it was just the earliest sketch of an idea that Gaddis never found worth the effort of writing up and sending out.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Good intentions going awry—and the question of which intentions are actually good and which are just inhabited to help us pretend we’re good—are a concern for most of Gaddis’s fiction, the latter particularly in Carpenter’s Gothic. The plot touching on the domestic, the sexual, the political, the criminal, the legal all within a single page shows that, however frivolous his project, Gaddis imagined on a broad scale.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? See the Seinfeld episode “The Apology” (Season 9 Episode 9, 1997) for an “episodic screen comedy” about the ninth step of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Title: The End of the Tether (Joseph Conrad Adaptation)

Location in archive (Box.Folder): Almost all documents, drafts, correspondence filed in 81:8 (Short Fiction: “Early—Loose”), some in 81.9 (Short Fiction: “Early—Loose”).

Date: March 1955 (per dates on correspondence).

Complete? Only as synopsis.

Extent of preserved material: Eight-page draft synopsis, five pages of drafts and notes, two-page scene list, correspondence with CBS network executive.

Description: Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether (1902) is a novella, long overshadowed by his novels and by Heart of Darkness.²¹Which it was initially published alongside (along with the third novella Youth). Of the archived TV proposal material, this seems like the most straightforward of Gaddis’s projects. The eight-page synopsis is very thorough, but mainly as a retelling of Conrad’s novel rather than a place for Gaddis to do much thematising of his own.

The story concerns an aging ship’s-captain called Whalley, secretly going blind, who goes to sea for one last time to earn money to support his daughter, aboard a boat whose senior crewman Massey is looking to make money less honourably by cutting Whalley out of their initial contractual agreement. Massey discovers the blindness and attempts to sabotage the ship in such a way that Whalley won’t notice, which would reveal his blindness and hence establish his ineligibility for the contract. The ship consequently crashes, but Whalley discovers the trick, leaving him in a conundrum. If he exposes Massey’s deliberate malpractice, the ship’s damage will not be paid out of insurance, and their contractual bind will mean that he too gets bankrupted. But if he accepts Massey’s payoff, he will betray his principles… Gaddis’s synopsis simply breaks this into scenes, with explanations of the stakes at each point. Occasional suggestions about characterisation go beyond Conrad’s source language, but otherwise the adaptation is faithful.

The letters show that the TV network liaison, Florence Britton, was in favour of the basic idea, requesting the synopsis after approving an original outline, but that doubts persisted at the studio about whether filming such a mid-ocean story would be physically possible without health risks or too much location shooting on a limited budget. Less practical considerations include that the plot “may offend the television code which, as I do understand, prohibits suicide as a solution” (Gaddis to Britton), and that “I can see a fine and authentic tragedy here. Of course that is a word which unduly alarms our sponsors. Therefore would you minimise this aspect in outline form dwelling on man’s heroism and devotion primarily” (Britton to Gaddis). As the one item from this correspondence in Gaddis’s published Letters responds, “perhaps I shouldn’t have emphasised ‘tragedy’; I think you’ll find it here, as it is indeed in the original, pre-eminently a story of devotion and heroism, one of the most distinguished I’ve ever come across” (Letters 221). Finally, Britton’s letters in May confirm that she was unable to outweigh her network’s concern about practical considerations and budget. This seems to be the Gaddis TV proposal that got furthest in serious network consideration.

Analysis: With the correspondence mainly dated March 1955, this proposal comes after the bulk of Gaddis’s more fully worked-up original TV proposals (most obviously “WASTE” and “Unfortunately,” which, for all its larger archive of draft and planning material, was still rejected in February that year). Only “The Black King and the White Bishop” follows, of original material. This shift, and the huge difference in the amount of planning and note material necessary to get to the synopsis stage, suggests that Gaddis had decided adaptation might be an easier path to television success than original story-making.

The proposal is a straightforward organization of the original Conrad novel into separately filmable scenes. Fine details of adaptation and emphasis (as well as Gaddis’s comments on Conrad in the project’s letters, the most direct of which has already been published – Letters 259) will be of great interest to scholars of Gaddis’s influences, but otherwise the paratexts and correspondence around this document cast most light.

The story’s dilemma between money and integrity seems related to the very situation that had led Gaddis to seek television work in the first place, and while “Unfortunately” and “WASTE” both thematise that directly in relation to art, The End of the Tether addresses it at a slightly more comfortable remove from Gaddis’s own life.

Gaddis’s agreement that the story should be seen not as “tragedy” but as “devotion and heroism” seems sincere, and he was a lifelong fan and advocate of Conrad, quoting him in letters from the Recognitions era to the Frolic. As Gaddis’s synopsis stresses more even than the original text, Whalley is heroic as much in doing what he does for his daughter’s benefit as for commitment to his own principles: an emphasis that makes biographical sense given how clearly Gaddis’s letters establish that his post-Recognitions buckling down to non-literary jobs (or seeking more commercial genres to write in) had to do with his recently-born children. The most thematically loaded writing in the synopsis, though, relates not to Whalley, but to what he’s up against: Massey is a very Gaddisian villain, a plausible lackey for Recktall Brown or Governor Cates, “cunning, covetous, suspicious, obsessed with one idea, as though he could indeed reduce chance to predictable proportions.” The person who’s sure they have life under control is never sympathetic in Gaddis, and nor is the one whose single “idea” is materialistic.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Only Frolic of the published fiction dwells so centrally on questions of justice, and that novel going off to the printers is the occasion for a conspicuous Conrad citation in the Letters (491). The terrible consequences of too trusting entry into an exploitable contract are traced in all Gaddis’s first four novels (see also “Faire Exchange No Robbery,” above, and Jeffrey Severs’ work on the importance of contract in that play). Gaddis’s letter calls the ending (and the story’s moral resolution) a suicide, which sets this project alongside The Recognitions, which features a number of suicides, none plausibly heroic, and which are so central that in its initial conception as Ducdame, “Three Suicides” were to be part of the novel’s subtitle (see entry in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide).

The theme of a good man’s effect on cynics around him, meanwhile, relates to Gaddis’s next novel project after he gave up his televisual aspirations: the draft pitch for Sensation, also from 1955, frames it as hinging on the entry of genuine talent into a family of aspiring but mediocre musicians, through an adopted son (see Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide). Gaddis there explicitly contrasts this interest in genuine uncorrupted talent and goodness with the failure-narratives of The Recognitions. As well as consistently aiming at something more commercial throughout 1955, then, there’s indication Gaddis was also interested in developing something more hopeful, with a greater stress on nobility or achievement, than in his first novel. By the time he began drafting Once at Antietam and J R at the end of the decade this optimistic aspiration seems to have curdled.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? A letter from CBS confirms that while they finally rejected his proposal, Gaddis was still paid $100 for taking the time to write up the full synopsis after the positive response to his initial suggestion. I have not found any archival indication that Gaddis was paid for any other TV work.

Steven Moore traces a pattern of allusions to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (The End of the Tether’s co-novella on initial publication) throughout J R (see Moore, William Gaddis 118-121), and that novel gets a nod in Carpenter’s Gothic as well when Liz mixes it up with Faulkner.

Title: Unfortunately

Location in archive (Box.Folder): Synopsis and Outline in 81.9 (Short Fiction: “Early – Loose”) with a few notes, most notes in 82.27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”), rejection letter and a few notes in 81.8 (Short Fiction: “Early – Loose”).

Date: Early 1955, possibly late 1954 – rejection letter dated February 16 1955.

Complete? Only as full outline: even this possibly not the final version (see below).

Extent of preserved material: Ten-page scene-by-scene Outline; six-page incomplete Synopsis; one letter from CBS rejecting proposal; around 100 pages of notes, fragments, plans.

Description: A planned one-hour TV drama, “Unfortunately” has an unusually large archive of notes among Gaddis’s TV projects. The two extended documents here, the “Outline” and the “Synopsis,” are not clearly distinguished by chronology, and it may be that the Synopsis is an unfinished attempt at revising the Outline, or that the Outline takes over from the Synopsis. It’s also not clear whether the Outline here, which is complete at least in covering an entire plot, is what Gaddis submitted to the TV network CBS, as it contains crossings out, inserts, and a number of open/uncertain scene contents (see for example the end of Act II where he lists eight possible ways to get from a character discovering information to him leaving the scene). Given that the Outline is fuller and contains both a character—“The Professor”—and a narrative thread about the player-piano that the Synopsis does not mention at all, it is likely that the Outline is the final archived version of “Unfortunately,” even if CBS may have received a further-refined version of it, with some of its narrative indecision narrowed down.

The basic plot persists from Synopsis to Outline, as does what the Outline calls “the thesis of this play”: “that in rendering creative work the performer must love and be happy with the work, not fight it” (1). That is central character Jimmy’s problem: a young piano student, he is committed to an ideal of artistic seriousness that forestalls any pleasure, playing “so seriously that he appears to get no joy out of it, and consequently unlive performance” (5). This is apparent in the “scowl”s and “wince”s of anyone who hears him practice. His father Pop, by contrast, was once a “tin-pan alley” writer of pop tunes who had a hit decades before with a song co-written with his old partner The Professor, an arthritic African American who now composes by home-doctoring player piano rolls and who has been one of the unacknowledged funders of Jimmy’s musical education. Jimmy contemns everything their partnership has produced. One day, buying a Mozart practice-record to play along with, he is lecturing the salesgirl on serious music when he discovers that she, Heda, is the refugee daughter of the persecuted eastern European piano maestro Gaenser. Though a refugee, she is—as a note fragment tells us—“without the sombre aspects of this problem; instead light-hearted and happy to be in America where she is starting a new life.” Heda turns out to already live next door, and to get along well with Pop: gradually she becomes aware of his worries about how Jimmy’s grim seriousness and “belligerent precision” (3) are harming his music: as Pop says, “Jimmy’s playing Mozart, and Mozart’s losing” (8). When Heda says the word “unfortunately” in tune with the rondo (“from Mozart’s D-minor piano concerto (K. 466)” (2)) that Jimmy is distantly playing, The Professor starts scribbling and soon the songwriting team have a new hit, sung by Heda herself. But they can’t tell fragile Jimmy, as he’s building up to a recital and nothing must perturb him.

Eventually, however, as the song joins the throng of those that, through distant radio, oppress his attempts to practice, he discovers that Heda has been making pop music and smashes every copy of “Unfortunately” in the shop, running home to pull the rolls from The Professor’s player piano and confront them all for their frivolity. A gloom descends and time passes. Eventually, Heda confronts Jimmy about his maltreatment of family, a conversation which turns into a musical one as she re-emphasises that her father who Jimmy so reveres was a happy unsolemn person, that the kind of music she has made with Pop and the Professor gives people pleasure, and that Jimmy himself needs to learn to enjoy his playing. She gives him a ring her father had given her. But he pushes her away (keeping the ring) and she leaves. Eventually he comes home to Pop and the Professor, who castigate him for mistreating her, leading to another music conversation in which they show him on player piano rolls how the visible simplicity of Mozart compares to the shapelessness of a “tricked out” modern song. Value is in simplicity and perfection, and he should “not despise people their happiness but rather build his own through his work” (10). We end on a montage in which Jimmy’s recital, with Gaenser’s ring on his finger as he plays, goes well (“oh yes triumphal” (10)). As we see Pop, The Professor, and Heda all clapping with “great pride-pleasure-happiness” we finally see that Heda too is wearing a new ring: an engagement one. We end on Jimmy’s fingers at the keyboard.

The incomplete Synopsis, lacking The Professor and the player piano, has some different emphases. Above all, it spends more time on the tentative back-and-forth of romance between Jimmy and Heda, and seems to build toward a much more ambivalent ending, as Jimmy’s recital—despite the beginnings of an attitude change—would come before he could fully overcome his “belligerent” “serious” playing. The story and the path to his improvement would pick up from his acknowledgement of the bad reviews: this is where the synopsis breaks off, leaving unclear what the path to improvement would actually be. Jimmy himself in the synopsis is slightly less of a petulant caricature, though given some high-seriousness lines that (like those of Michael in “WASTE” – see entry below) seem like B-sides from Wyatt in The Recognitions: he seeks “somewhere we can be honest, honest, if only for a moment and in all this chaos” (Synopsis 5), and when Heda tells him he needs someone to be honest with, he rejects the human altogether since “I’ve found it only.. here (he gestures at piano), everything else, everything around us is lies, lies and pretence and vulgarity.” The Outline gets rid of this kind of talk, at the cost of making Jimmy’s rationale for his “seriousness” less clear.

Neither Outline nor Synopsis say much about the song itself beyond its roots in the Mozart rondo, but the notes contain various attempts at fleshing out its lyrics, of which the following is the one that gives the best sense of how the words might have fit the Mozart:

He thinks I’m like ice made of ice

or too nice

Can’t he see

That I’d be paradise? He just can’t

Unfortunately

If he’d snap off the light

Some dark night

Then he’d see

I could be dynamite.

He won’t,

Unfortunately.

Gaddis also makes a clear note to self to “(& copyright the song),” which gives an early indication of his later scrupulousness about potential avenues for moneymaking beyond a work’s initial publication.²²As with the J R archive’s record of his wish to keep that novel’s board game “Split” and imagined artwork “Cyclone 7” (as well as the title Agapē Agape) out of any adaptations so that Gaddis himself could pursue them himself with complete copyright control (see legal letters in Gaddis Papers box 54 folder 6).

Analysis: A note on a loose page clarifies that “Unfortunately” was a response to what Gaddis took to be a live question: “I can only work on things that interest me. (ie this is not hack work:) […] to me this is not a cute idea but a real problem.” If the “thesis” of this “play” was about the creative artist’s need for enjoyment, it is matched for centrality in the notes and Outline by another issue that he handled with more ambivalence: the relation and relative worth of the high-aesthetic and the deliberately popular. These were “real problems” Gaddis had to wrangle with in his own choices about what to do after The Recognitions. That included the possibility of seriously pursuing work, often work about the problem itself, in another medium. The materials are certainly conducive to autobiographical reading.

What we might call the “Pop problem” remains crucial to the project regardless of whether we read Gaddis’s own post-Recognitions career crossroads into it. The inescapable relation of any artist (“creative” or “rendering”) to the popular audience is highlighted here by the popular artist being a progenitor named Pop, while his “Professor” partner’s name frames work for popular audiences as analogous to a science as much as to art (a distinction literalized in the scene where The Professor is “doctoring the [player-piano] roll with tape and punch” to compose his new Mozart-appropriating song (7)). Jimmy by contrast treats popular composition “as if these were criminal occupations” (Synopsis 3), so shameful that he initially hides his father’s work from Heda. The idea of shame recurs when he sarcastically lashes out at Heda while snapping the records she has sung on: “your father would be very proud of you” (8). The combination of shame with father-judgments reflects his conception that working for a popular audience betrays the real heritage of artistic genius, the family “serious” people should elect themselves into: he can only envy a genuine familial connection to that genius, and resent a genuine familial connection to its counterpart.²³See Gaddis’s plans for Sensation (Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide), which would have been about familial resentment in the presence of genuine genius.

Jimmy’s reductive aspirations are undermined throughout, including in the rare moment where Heda’s foreignness is played on for linguistic insight. Jimmy, aiming to separate her from the pop shop she’s happy to work in, describes her father as “a serious musician,” only for her to respond to a different meaning: “He was not serious. He was a very happy man, especially when he was playing music he loved &c &c” (6). A particularly coherent thread of ambivalence-instilling images and set-ups comes when Heda is repeatedly shown throwing out “trash”: this is where we first see her in the Outline, and where she first meets Pop. From the anti-popular Jimmy perspective, we might make the ancient conflation between “throwaway” pop culture and rubbish. But as the play goes on the association is refigured such that Heda functions to sweep away Jimmy’s obstructive dogmas: in other words, his po-faced elitism is itself the “trash” that Heda cleans up by the end of the story, much to his benefit.²⁴Gaddis’s notes themselves get hung up on fine gradations of bad-popular and good-popular, for example in specifying “must get in that U is not jazz; & nothing wrong with jazz when it’s real; clarify between jazz: commercial popsongs.”

Heda’s foreignness and refugee status help stress the theme of “freedom” that the story conflates with “happiness” and enjoyment, and which here takes on a distinctly geopolitical light.²⁵The Synopsis’s slightly different wording of the Outline’s “thesis” stresses “this theme of freedom and happiness in the creative arts which is, largely, the theme of this play.” Jimmy’s attempt to shame Heda for her work leads her “as though not catching the derogation in his tone and words” to note “how wonderful it is to be in America where people can play and listen to anything they wish” (6), before noting that where she’s from genres like Hawaiian guitar music have been banned.²⁶A note about this line simply says “true.” To this, Jimmy simply says “good!” Notes stress the same contrast between Jimmy’s contempt for anything popular and “Heda’s happiness at being in America where people can play, sing what they like.” Gaddis, we’ve seen, didn’t want her being a refugee to have any “sombre” implications, and we never find out what it was that her father Gaenser did to get persecuted. This frames his mere happy musicality as sufficient for persecutable incompatibility with Soviet politics; by implication Jimmy’s “belligerent precision,” “unalive” artistry, and dogmatically hierarchical vision of aesthetic value align with a culture of political repression. Plenty of scholarship has traced this kind of cold war framing in US culture (pop and highbrow) of the era.²⁷See most obviously Schaub. How far you think “Unfortunately” ratifies this cold-war framing or cynically panders to it to maximise the chances of getting produced will likely hinge on how far you find the whole project itself to be dubious pandering to a pop audience, and how far a “serious” aesthetic response to a “real problem.”

In the difference between the Synopsis and the Outline, meanwhile, we can trace the difference between versions that try to derive a perspective on the “thesis”-“problem” from a properly complex romantic relationship, in one case, and that make personal relationships ratify pre-articulated positions, in the other. One fair objection to the rhetoric of the fuller Outline is that Jimmy is framed as so brattily petulant and doctrinaire about his artistic convictions, and characterised so little beyond them, that his eventual success in music and love (which all happens in a montage on the last half-page of ten) remains dramatically undermotivated. The whole story only makes sense if, for all his whining, record-snapping, and piano-bashing, we can allow that he is deep down talented and lovable. The Synopsis makes much more attempt to warrant this through greater focus on the human dynamics of the scenes between him and Heda, which is probably the best case for seeing it as a later document. Gaddis’s notes show him contemplating different ways for things to resolve:

girl gets boy?

Or, boy gets [insert] finds [/insert] work

he finds happy with jazz band?

The Outline, in which “girl”’s wishes and motives are scarcely touched upon (after a first encounter she is “not disposed to like him, though she is of course rather taken with his youthful serious mien” (5)), and “boy” gets “happy” in everything without a great deal of “work,” thereby gives us a very definite “thesis,” but correspondingly little warrant for it. After the complexity of The Recognitions’s wrangling with whether Wyatt’s path finally counts as achievement or failure, “Unfortunately” offers a simplified vision of success and desert in love and art, to the extent that this underdevelopment is arguably the main weakness of the full Outline version. The difficulty of handling the necessary obnoxiousness of initial Jimmy may be why the Synopsis version, which makes more effort at developing his appeal for Heda, doesn’t make much progress toward a coherent synthesis, and couldn’t be finished.

Of all Gaddis’s television proposals, “Unfortunately” gets the earliest-dated rejection letter, which in combination with its far greater amount of preserved notes and planning material suggests that this was likely his first and most laboriously developed project for television, with the later ones done more quickly and fluently (with less arduous “seriousness”) once he had got used to the proposal process.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: A note on the same page of loose notes as “this is not hack work” makes explicit that “My interest in plagiary &c; &, this is the same theme as my novel,” i.e., The Recognitions. The final versions seem less concerned with the “plagiary” dimensions of the Mozart-adapting pop song than the question of whether such adaptation must count as a crime against the original: the drama seems finally to argue that maintaining such a purist position can only reduce the amount of enjoyable art in the world. This certainly seems like a reaction against the kind of hardline classical aestheticism that The Recognitions often gives a heroic valence. “Unfortunately”’s pro-“happiness” manifesto thus seems to function as a deliberate revision of some of the worldview “my novel” had embodied, no doubt related to the kinds of dilemmas Gaddis himself was enduring after The Recognitions went to press and he had to decide whether to pursue something with comparable commitments and financial outcomes, or to switch tack to something more likely to be immediately remunerative.

The clearest connection to the later fiction, meanwhile, comes in the light the player piano’s conspicuous role casts on Agapē Agape. The large set of notes in 82.27 are filed right next to notes from the nonfiction player-piano project that would become Agapē. Jimmy’s luddite attack on the piano and its rolls aligns him with the later novel’s narrator, but “the thesis of the play” puts him clearly in the wrong. In the Outline version, The Professor uses the player’s particular suitability for “simple” “perfect” Mozart to persuade Jimmy to change his worldview. This project also contains what seems to be the original articulation of Agapē’s central image of decadence, the “musician” “playing” a piano with his feet. That sight’s initial counter-intuitiveness is not only key to multiple specified images in the TV drama, but also in a note for an even more convoluted set-up: “Pop changing postn frm pmpng w feet, lying on back, to pmpg w hnds. & vaccum clnr to wrk bellows.” A significant scene-ending image has the cameras “Fade on their pleasure at how it sounds, and keys working by themselves, playing” (7). Given the importance attached to the idea of art as “work” in The Recognitions and J R, this wording seems to align what the keys are doing with what the actual pop artists in this story are doing.

The player, then, would have featured in this story as a strange novelty, but not as the harbinger of cultural collapse that it is in various versions of Agapē Agape (from Gibbs’s in J R to the final published novella). This lends some weight to readings of Agapē that see its narrator as a flawed character like Gibbs or Jimmy, rather than simply a Gaddis mouthpiece. The player-piano in “Unfortunately” especially figures as a teaching device: The Professor, no longer able to play a real piano, still teaches students who do, and reveals that he himself learned how to play piano in the first place by following along with the keys on a player (10). In “Unfortunately”’s emphasis on the player as a pedagogical tool and prosthesis for The Professor’s physical ailments, and on how its rolls make genius more visible, it seems to place us at the point of Agapē’s player-history where the device promised to help train musical novices, rather than after it promised to obviate the need for talent altogether.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The archive of “Unfortunately” assembles a survey of Gaddis’s vision of 1950s pop culture. One idea that made it to the Synopsis but not the Outline was that a montage might reflect the growing popularity of the song by showing it go through cover versions in various genres: “a broadbottomed woman dancing to it in sambamomba-rhumba time &c; a spinning record playing a bop version; and an opportunity, if this is not too grandiose and cinematic, for parodies on such singer-styles as Johnnie Ray, Nellie Lutcher, even… Liberace” (synopsis 4). Those who wish to put Gaddis into broader non-literary context will find this an especially useful project-archive.

A note within the Outline suggests that “the light touch” could be an “alternate title” (1).

By way of justification, the rejection letter in 81.8 only mentions that “it was the theme that bothered the producer here.”

Title: Untitled Adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82:10 (Short Fiction: “Notes, Possible Projects Aborted”)

Date: Unclear, but between 1955 and 1966. The Mandarins was released in 1954 and translated into English the next year. This timeframe would coincide with Gaddis’s other proposals for television. However, since this is more of a full-length film project, and he worked on film screenplays (most obviously Dirty Tricks – see above – but also much of his corporate writing) as he struggled to make progress on J R in the 1960s, it may be from that later period. The notes on this project are filed with clippings about Beauvoir’s 1963 memoir Force of Circumstance (1965 in English), which documents the time of her life that The Mandarins corresponds to. It may be that that the release of the memoir brought about interest in adapting the novel.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: Three pages of typed notes, five-page scene-breakdown, one page of “conclusions”, three pages handwritten note. Clippings on Beauvoir from 1963 and 1965.

Description: The original novel (widely seen as a roman à clef) spans continents as it follows characters based on French existentialists, especially Beauvoir and Camus. Gaddis’s notes mainly concern the smaller part of the novel in which Beauvoir’s self-insert character “Anne” has an affair in America and Paris with the American writer “Lewis” (widely accepted to be modelled on Nelson Algren). The notes are clear that the interest of the project is in the clash of national cultures the relationship represents. The synopsised plot, seemingly intended for a feature length film despite being only a small proportion of the original novel, begins with Anne’s visit to Chicago and the commencement there of the affair. They part when she returns to France, meet up again in Mexico, then go to New York where success starts to change the Chicago man. Each time the relationship wobbles, it resumes with greater but briefer intensity. They split finally, for a year, and meeting next summer resume with only affection, not passion or love. After a day with awful New Yorkers, she returns to him with a sense of finality, knowing that the few days she has left before she goes back to France will be their last and so should be enjoyed.

What’s most striking in those notes, however, is Gaddis’s basic dislike of the book and of Beauvoir’s self-presentation in it. He finds the life the characters pursue “v. dull not to say squalid,” and judges that “[i]n the book nothing illuminates the futility and sterility of this affair but the woman’s cliché inner maunderings.”

As a result, his plans shift away from the source material’s essentially romantic presentation of the affair and valorization of what its characters stand for, toward something that would function as critique of their self-image. Gaddis brings a lens of existential bad faith to this putatively existentialist story, under the framing that everything they pursue is really “evasion” of the fact that they, and especially their aspirational idealised conceptions of male or female, Europe or America, are already passé. He particularly notes of his admirably tough-guy protagonist: “not that he is old or even that they are but that he and they both are obsolete.” For example, the main source of their self-impressed self-conception as rebelliously authentic transgressors is “Sex seen early in story as Solution becomes in course of it the (sterile) Evasion,” a point Gaddis intends to make by a constant background of children’s noise: “the point being to establish the fruitlessness of this union and the slippage between generations.” What’s really happening is that their egotism and denial is “devouring” them and everyone around them: “& where does it end? This whole juxt. Of who uses/of chagrin/devouring, of intellectuality/brutality, –in bed. Is this then, the bedded down, an evasion of the rest? Or the rest an evasion of this?” (Breakdown 3). Gaddis’s version of Beauvoir would have been a disillusioned existential questioning of what he seems to have thought of as a too philosophically complacent source text.

Analysis: There’s an intriguing contrast between Gaddis’s very sceptical approach to adaptation on this project (essentially hoping to maintain the plot but with a diametrically opposed perspective on its characters’ value systems), and his other archived adaptation project, The End of the Tether, which takes an almost reverent approach to exactly the source text’s own conception of “devotion and heroism” (see entry above). The conflict of visions here may proceed in part from Gaddis’s pre-existing interest in French existentialism (see the original-language citations from Camus in notes to projects like “Ernest and the Centipede” discussed in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide). Beauvoir’s roman à clef is not especially sympathetic to Camus, for example, who seems to have been Gaddis’s preferred source in that generation, while especially if this dates to the 1960s rather than the 1950s Gaddis may just have developed a distanced scepticism on all that generation’s thought since his affinities of the 1940s (this would explain his thematic stress on generational difference and obsolescence) even as their questions remained of interest.

His notes seem to suggest that his scepticism about the source material was not why he stopped work. Rather he was strained by too many external commissions and unchosen writing projects. He finally resolves that

Any work on speculation I do must be my own work; My recent time spent on this project has been fragmented by such immediate commercial writing projects as have cropped up, with definite terms, deadlines, delivery dates, financial arrangements &c. Lack of any such commitment on this project has kept it in a limbo of being half done, productive of senses, ideas, &c but not of a worked out project on paper.

The “senses” and “ideas” in question certainly included a nicely precise existentialist critique of performative existentialism, and the project also pushed him to some aphoristically precise diagnoses of national cultures, as in “Preserving order (Fr) as opposed to creating order (US).” The significance of these distinctions, though, he aimed to downplay thematically, since in the end the characters’ self-definition in relation to them would all be so much hot air, as history progressed without their identifications: “reality is not bothered by such, what is happening is what happens.” There is the germ in these notes of something properly coherent, even if a little too anxious to sweep away its own insights by its scepticism. Beauvoir herself would presumably not have endorsed it, but that’s what makes this an intriguing adaptation project.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Since The Mandarins is after all a novel about writers (as well as about existentialists and culture clashes), Gaddis’s notes make quite explicit some of the connections between the themes here and his own preoccupations as a writer. He laments that “it seems films books plays &c used to be by writers & directors, now they are about them: real moribund state of the arts,” which casts some ironic light on his later plans for Fictions (see entry in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide) and somewhat on A Frolic of His Own. Elsewhere he approaches the struggles of artists by a circumlocution through ideas on national pathologies in light of his career-long interest in failure: “Fr wish to be esteemed precisely in the area where they have conspicuously failed, militarily […] US attempt (&cf Russia) to eliminate failure(ie this is life as technology) […] for the artist, when you remove possibility of failure you remove possibility of success.” His intended critique of “Anne”/Beauvoir’s self-admiring radicality might thus be framed in terms of her being too sure that living according to her own ideals constitutes a success.

The national contrasts will be of interest to anyone interested in Gaddis’s attitudes to Europe, America, or their interactions: the project develops the kinds of contrastive ideas that Jack Williams analyses between European and American city-settings in The Recognitions elsewhere in this special journal issue.²⁸Indeed, as Williams relates these to the novel’s treatment of Latin American setting, so a Gaddis note muses on whether the Mexican interlude of Beauvoir’s novel really adds anything since it “merely extends sentimental squalor in space.”

There’s a pre-emptive interest here too in the (often physical) building-by-destroying that is central to J R’s spatial world. America, for example, is characterised through Anne’s eyes in terms of a gradual deepening of vision: “her images have been of vitality, building, a frontier, till she sees: destroyed blocks of buildings and houses, get the sense here of the brutal destruction involved in renewal […] and how it brutalizes the men who accomplish it.” The ravages of property developers, miners, local governments in subsequent novels follow through on these “senses, ideas” even as Gaddis never got his Beauvoir adaptation into a “worked out project on paper.”

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? This project is not mentioned in the published letters, and I have not found any further information in the archive that would explain who commissioned it. Gaddis’s notes do seem to indicate that this was a project he had developed himself (“on speculation”), without any contractual agreement. any contractual agreement to. But whether someone suggested it to him is unclear, and why he would have pursued it without such a suggestion equally so, given his clear distaste for the source material. Any future discovery of relevant correspondence in the archive will help make sense of his attitude to the project, as well as establishing currently mysterious basic information like when he worked on it.

One fairly disconnected note will be of particular interest to scholars of Gaddis and race, and his relations to his American peers, as he addresses “the [James] Baldwin attitude that it’s too late for peace & brotherhood, that’s his thesis whether or not he’d agree: decl of war.”

Title: WASTE

Location in archive (Box.Folder): Main material in 21.5 (The Recognitions: “Notes and Fragments Toward other projects: ‘Sensation,’ ‘Waste,’ etc”); Notes in 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”); document in 81.9 (Short Fiction: “Early – Loose”)

Date: Unclear but likely very early 1955 along with other TV proposals. Corresponding address listed as 210 East 26th street, NYC, which matches that era.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: In 21.5, a three-page prospectus, ten pages of draft dialogue (five the longest continuous stretch), and two pages of draft as prose narrative. Ten pages of disparate notes in 82.7. Two-page “Suggestions” document (unclear authorship) in 81.9.

Description: A proposal for a half-hour television play, “WASTE” picks up the topic of art’s social place, power, and value from The Recognitions. Set in the bowels of a ship, it concerns—per a summary note—“loneliness, art & the seas. & corruption, stupidity, vulgarity – also dirt, sweat.” The plot of the final synopsis orbits three workers on a ship: a world-weary veteran overseer, a stupid fat coward (Cleary), and a former art student who has fled the gallery world in a disappointed depression (Michael). Cleary mocks Michael’s delicacy but when he discovers that Michael used to work in art becomes surprisingly solicitous. Cleary has stolen a painting and wants to have it valued. When Michael sees the artwork, his love of art comes flooding back, and he makes plans to liberate it. After some conflict that turns into a fight, Cleary persuades him not to report the theft by promising not to report Michael’s frustrated violence.

The notes reveal that the plot was initially to be resolved not by moral compromise but by persuasion and the force of character: “the oiler, finally, becomes boy’s supporter when, in seeing art as this boy’s reality, (ie he’ll fight for it), recognises that art does have a validity.” At the other end of the process, the feedback suggestions document suggests two changes to render “WASTE” suitable for television: first to tighten Michael’s motivation by making him not an artist but a former art dealer who skipped out on that scene after seeing a superior getting involved with forgery, and second, to introduce a female character, girlfriend of Cleary, who would be the avenue for getting the picture off the boat by sewing it into her jacket. Complications in that logistic plot and a hint of romantic rivalry would apparently have helped get the story up to a half-hour’s worth, and satisfied advertisers by establishing a mixed-sex cast.

The synopsis and notes mainly concern plot and dialogue but include some specific visual images, as in the moment where the artwork that has been talked about is finally unfurled, “opening canvas so that its back is to audience, and we see the three of them over it.” The first scene too seems to have been very definitely imagined in visual terms, beginning with Michael’s “delicate but dirty” hands “pulling threads from handful of waste,” and shifting to a travesty as it pans to Cleary’s hands, “mimicking those above, holding up (imaginary) thread with mock delicacy: pull back to show Cleary assuming soulful expression, mimicking.” Beyond these, there is not much televisual specificity about image or camera work.

Analysis: The “suggestions” document highlights the impasse that “WASTE” was approaching, since having Michael be a former art dealer rather than an artist makes better sense of the proposed theft-plot, but also removes all the rationale from the kinds of lecturing dialogue by which Michael would have provided Gaddis’s intended gloss on “art” and “corruption.” These lines—as when Cleary asks initially about the price of a good painting, to be told “The price is loneliness and despair, and work. Work…”—are bound up in the figure of the artist unrewarded, not the auctioneer miffed at markets. Gaddis himself seems to have recognised the implausibility of his initial wish to have Cleary converted to respect by the force of such dialogue, hence his revision to a fight. Much of the fresher material in the proposal stems from Gaddis’ comic articulation of the “stupid” and “corrupt” perspective rather than the pure artist’s: Cleary is certain that the painting is not a forgery, for example, “because he himself stole it from someone who had stolen it” and, he “proudly” deduces, they wouldn’t have stolen it unless they knew it to be genuine. Gaddis’s sympathy in the story is all with Michael, but Cleary (who could have thrived among the philistines of The Recognitions or J R) is where the imaginative energy of this material lies.

Why frame all of this in terms of “WASTE”? It seems to hinge on an analogy with art itself, as Michael would have made explicit in his dialogue: “I used to study, to think I loved art, but now… like this waste, all these different coloured threads &c tangled up without a pattern &c.” In other words, artistic struggles had led him to associate art with an unorganizable protean chaos of materials and inspirations. But as he and Cleary together unthreaded the ship’s waste their unlikely partnership would have untangled his ability to engage directly and purely with art again. Whether in the version with Cleary’s own epiphany, or with them collaborating cynically to get the art out and sold, Michael’s personal relation to art would have been restored, making this an essentially optimistic drama.

“WASTE,” like the much more fully developed “Unfortunately” (see entry above)—(likely the two earliest of Gaddis’s 1955 TV proposals)—thus seems to have been an attempt to boil themes of The Recognitions down to the half-hour TV format, in this case straightforwardly from the idealized perspective of the suffering aesthete. The problem in this case is a lack of coherent dramatic conflict, which Gaddis’s more polished proposal and the suggestions document show him developing, but at the expense of the themes his notes find most important. It’s thus perhaps not surprising that receiving the suggestions document (which there’s no archival trace of him trying to build on) seems to have terminated work on the project.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The concern with art (and, in some drafts, forgery specifically) brings some obvious Recognitions concerns forward to the TV work.

The central image of art emerging from seeming chaos and waste to restore order and transmit transcendent feeling matches some of Wyatt’s vision in that novel and more directly fore-runs the entropy/order thematic that runs explicitly through J R.

Even more directly, the basic set-up by which Michael’s fervency about art would get Cleary to see the non-monetary value in what he has stolen is an early, more optimistic, iteration of the crucial scenes in J R where Bast and Amy try to get JR to expand his worldview beyond the material by showing him the moon or making him listen to Bach.

A loose note asking, “Does this hark back to ‘Rose’?” meanwhile establishes another J R connection, as “Rose in Print” and its witchy eponymous protagonist were part of a very early proto-J R draft project (see entries on “Rose in Print” and Sensation in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide). The connection here is not clear but may relate to the plans for Rose to be an artistically unresponsive love interest for a musician of genuine talent: very loose parallels, perhaps, with Michael and Cleary (or his girlfriend post “Suggestions”-document) here.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The particular stress on art as the product of unseen and unrewarded “work” and “loneliness,” disillusionment with the industry around art, and the impulse to throw everything in and retreat to sea might all be read as projections from Gaddis’s own exhaustion at the completion of, and disappointment with early responses to, The Recognitions. Another biographical speculation is that the TV work’s tight but heavily simplified continuity with that novel’s themes might even have been intended to function as a kind of advertisement to draw wider attention to that novel.

In one draft, there’s a deliberately vaguened nod to Melville’s Ishmael: “what somebody said about going to sea? That going to sea is the best substitute for suicide there is?” Ishmael talks about going to sea as a “substitute for pistol and ball.” The technique here of making the idea more explicit but the source conspicuously vague offers some insight into Gaddis’s maintenance of his novels’ allusive mode into his TV proposals, but also the kind of simplifications he was willing to put that mode through.

Thanks to Steven Moore for alerting me to the fact that Gaddis later proposed a non-fiction documentary about forgery to the television producer Keith Botsford (see Letters 272), with whom he had an extended professional relationship. No material for this seems to be preserved in Gaddis’s archive, but according to Moore Gaddis’s proposal and relevant correspondence can be found in Botsford’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library. This indicates that Gaddis’s interest in turning The Recognitions’s central preoccupations into television material survived his giving up on proposing TV drama after mid-1955.

William Gaddis’s Unpublished Poetry (Alphabetical)

Title: After Seeing the SCOUNDREL (a film)

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.8 (“Poetry”)

Date: Unclear: the film The Scoundrel was released in 1935

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Single page complete typed poem

Description: The only standard-format sonnet of Gaddis’ preserved poems (though see “no doubt wellrant,” below), this addresses a lover on the ancient sonnet-topic of love’s impermanence. The octet directs the lover to a future perspective from which they “shall remember, as a tale untold, // The man who was a god, when gods are few,” stressing that the current situation is inevitably soon to end and only seems otherwise to “that incipient madness that conceived // A lasting fancy.” The sestet, meanwhile, uses this awareness of temporariness to stress that the lover can, if only for now, be rightly called “breath of my breath.” The ending exemplifies the old paradox wherein we are told to forget the fact that the poem thereby brings to attention: “That someday I shall have forgotten you, // That the immortals have their ashcans too.”

The tone throughout is of condescending wisdom, from the mock-humble vantage of a speaker who knows their lover perceives them as a “god.” The syntax is often distorted to fit the very regular prosody. These elements could be charitably read as characterization of a distinct speaker, but are consistent with much of Gaddis’s early poetry.

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: Gaddis’s novels repeat scenes of love or sex that bring two disparate characters together in temporary harmony, but that take on a bleaker valence in the inevitable continuation of the narrative. Otto’s night with Esme in The Recognitions, which she turns out not to remember, is the paradigm: Liz and McCandless in Carpenter’s Gothic is another, while Gibbs with Amy in J R initially follows the pattern but seems to have been made re-salvageable by the novel’s end. If we take this poem as highlighting its speaker’s smug callousness in appealing to eternity while offering their partner only transience, Liz’s “I think I loved you when I knew I’d never see you again” (245) to McCandless’ attempts to recover their relationship gives a later-career retort.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The Scoundrel is not mentioned directly, and its relation to the poem is not direct. The tone of the poem seems like it might be spoken by the film’s titular character Anthony Mallare, a cruel cynic who aims to hurt and disillusion everyone he comes across. But the crux of the film is that after Mallare dies, it is he who risks damnation unless he can go back to earth and find one person who actually mourns his loss. In this light, however immortal any Scoundrel may think himself, it is finally the speaker of the poem, rather than the addressee, who has most to fear from post-life “ashcan”s, and from forgetting.

Title: exit laughing - a retrospection

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.09 (“Poetry”)

Date: unclear

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: two-page complete typed poem

Description: The titular retrospection is on a just-ended relationship with a charming but self-centred woman. “exit laughing” is the imperative the speaker gives to a general “you” before the poem shifts to address “i” and “my.” The speaker draws lessons from Shakespeare—“what’s done is done” (without noting the dubious wisdom of relying on Lady Macbeth for life-coaching and romance tips)—and resolves to laugh not “worry,” to just “live for today” because “he travels the fastest // who travels // alone.”

The longest of Gaddis’s preserved poems by line-length, this is also his loosest in form, with many single-word lines, the consistent use but inconsistent organization of rhyme, and no punctuation or capitalization. It has a prologue and epilogue, though it’s unclear where the labelled prologue ends – it may be just the first eight lines before we begin the poem proper with “mine is the story of a love ne plus ultra” or it may be the entire poem up until the final seven-line epilogue.

The poem’s loose form veers between some quite well-modulated sound-patterns (the poem-long recursion to rhyme-sounds “-st” and “-one”) and shapeless free association (“however // jamais triste // angry maybe // dejected // peeved”). The frequent use of strenuously casual French and Latin reflects the apparently conscious attempt to blend the registers of high melancholy and frivolity: “twas” and “entre-nous jocosity” side by side with “givvadam,” or whole lines like “for which no other dame can e er atone.” These formal blurrings of pastiched high and low register are matched, in their awkward anticipations of conventional “postmodernism,” by some more strictly “formal” experiment, like lines that, in the absence of punctuation, say “quote” or “exclamation point,” and the attempt to represent “her figure” by curving a “line” of poetry over the U-shape of 4 levels on the page.

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: The tone of mixed-up seriousness and frivolity, combined with the sense that not very much is actually being said, makes this one of the tightest embodiments in Gaddis’s writing of the kind of thing that The Recognitions’s party-scene attendees would have been reading, writing, and celebrating. How deliberate this is is hard to gauge. The typological and register-level play also anticipate Gaddis’s much more organized orchestration of multiple voices without attribution in the dialogue-heavy later novels.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Signed at end as “bill gaddis,” indicating some willingness to connect the actual author with the speaking persona: most of Gaddis’s poems are unsigned.

Title: [Handwritten Poem, illegible title: ‘And their Own’?]

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.15 (“Poetry Fragments”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? Seemingly

Extent of preserved material: single page handwritten poem

Description: A short, six-line poem on the logical relation of “pain,” “hate,” “sense,” “pause,” and, per the final line, “love.” Four stresses per line, in an irregular metre more like sprung rhythm, though the register of the first few lines is more Dickinson than Hopkins. In its short space, the poem’s basic argument is that “nothing comes without” hate, but that in order to be able to hate, it is necessary to “have, but once, completely loved.” The first four lines about hate’s base necessity are in a general third person, while the two lines about hate’s dependence on love are indexed to a speaking “I.”

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: Gaddis, like his friend William Gass, later described hate as a fair spur to writing,²⁹See, for example “[a]ll writing worth reading comes, like suicide, from outrage or revenge” (Agapē Agape 63), nodding to arguments in Gass’s essay on suicide and its motives and rhetoric, “The Doomed in Their Sinking.” and certain of his characters (most notably McCandless and the Agapē narrator) seem to share the perspective.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Pen note at top of page mentions “Ravels [sic] Spanish Symphony” and “Rachmaninoff”

Title: [Handwritten Prose-Poem, illegible title: ‘Do Away’?]

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.15 (“Poetry Fragments”)

Date: unclear

Complete? unclear

Extent of preserved material: single page handwritten prose-poem

Description: The least legible-on-the-page of Gaddis’s preserved poems, this short prose piece may not even be a poem, though it is filed with other handwritten poems (which unlike it have line breaks). Very short, the illegibility of numerous words makes it hard to parse: a speaker impels a listener to “cry out to God” and “ask why.” But, having felt “anguish, pain” and attained the ability to “know all,” the listener should not ask about the speaker’s apparently clear view of the listener’s own soul. The implication seems to be that to inquire into someone else’s suffering is an action that lays one open for threatening contemplation themselves.

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: Shares vocabulary of “hate” and “pain” with the unpublished “illegible title (‘And their Own’?),” which it is filed beside (see entry above): they seem to be companion pieces. The religious emphasis here distinguishes it. The tone matches some of Wyatt’s more overwrought attempts to push away those close to him in the first half of The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? n/a

Title: The Laughing Boy – Blues

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.10 (“Poetry”)

Date: Published (without title) in the Harvard Lampoon of January 1944.

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Single page complete poem

Description: “Blues” seems to identify the genre and rhythm of the poem rather than the condition of the laughing boy: it’s written in 3-beat ABAB quatrains. It addresses the standard blues situation of having lost everything: a new year dawns and the speaker has “Lost My Faith in Whiskey, // Haven’t got a God.” Wanting to “raze” Boston, the speaker gives a valediction to everyone else in the festive season—“Enjoy the glittering winter, // Break your legs upon its streets”—and proposes to run off to a standard romantic counter-society with “a band of vulgar gypsies, // And make my sordid songs.” The content is tied to the “New Year” season of the year Gaddis left Harvard, so 1944, and was published in the Harvard Lampoon in January that year, suggesting a tight turnaround.

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: The only piece of Gaddis’s writing that identifies “my” persona with poetry or “song” rather than prose-work or drama. The “glittering winter” context casts some light on the heavily Christmas-season setting of The Recognitions. The plan to “escape the alma mater” for conventional anti-institutionalism and forget “the courses that I’ve flunked” gives Gaddis some more agency in leaving Harvard than he actually seems to have had (he was expelled). And the association between “motion pictures” and “the great unwashed” helps frame both Gaddis’s later work for the film medium, as discussed elsewhere in this document, and the role that cinema plays as social context in A Frolic of His Own and as narrative framing in important scenes of Carpenter’s Gothic.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Signed at end as “wtg,” and hence aligned with the biographical Gaddis.

Thanks to Steven Moore for identifying that this was not only published in the Lampoon of January 1944, but also reprinted (still untitled) for the new year of 1946, after Gaddis had left the university.

Why Gaddis gave this one alone of his Lampoon contributions its own archive file with his general writing is unclear.

Title: MAJORITY

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.11 (“Poetry”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Single page complete poem

Description: Two short contrasting ABAAB stanzas on “men and death.” The first stanza tells of the poet’s perspective on witnessing a killing “[o]ne morning in a blue July,” while the second focuses on the present, on spring not summer, and takes a “we” perspective. The first stanza works with a tone of abstract horror—“I watched his shadow on the sky”—and suspended paralysis, while the second reflects a world that knows how to handle such things as a matter of callous course: “Wring // our hands, and count our dead.”

This is much more condensed and less verbose than Gaddis’s other surviving poetry, and while the tone is recognisable from contemporaneous modernist war poetry, it has much less of a sense of pastiche than his other poems. Pencil edits (significantly deepening the implications) to one line show that this was not entirely final, but it’s more fully wrought and makes much more of its internal poetic structure than Gaddis’s other poetry.

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: The “harlequinade” of “Cartes Sur Table” (see entry above) is another early-Gaddis perspective on the handling of far-off wars, while “Reasons” is a poem with similar preoccupations, though more focused on the motives than on the response. Later, in both J R and Carpenter’s Gothic, financially-driven machinations in the US lead to war and death in other continents, with those who die having no way to know about what has led them there. More generally, this is the poem whose tone is closest to the voice of the narration in The Recognitions, rather than to that of its characters, while the more imagistic elements—“shadow on the sky” or “dawn relumes another spring // of trees unleafed”—look forward to the tone and syntax of the visual narration in the later novels.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? n/a

Title: A Nite at Sea on a Tramp Steamer off the Coast of Haiti

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.12 (“Poetry”)

Date: Dated “8/31/40”

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Single page complete typed poem

Description: The earliest-dated of Gaddis’s archived poems, this one also seems to pre-date the cynicism and disappointment that animates many of them. In regular 4-line ABCB stanzas, the speaker on a ship at night sees far-off lightning illuminate the vast emptiness of the sea on all sides, turning attention to the even more “unending” “silent” sky above, which “seems […] to tell // of some unending faith, undying love.” This is mapped onto the speaker’s own relation to “my dear Lenore, to home and you.” As light begins to return to the sky, the speaker recognises the moment is passing, but holds on to the relationship’s temporary enchantment: “I shall keep on dreaming, dear, of you.”

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: Other early Gaddis poems like “After seeing THE SCOUNDREL” or “Only Yesterday” (see entries above and below) make the explicit argument that a moment of enchantment must be understood in the longer context of a disenchanting Time Afterward. “A Nite at Sea…” is more optimistic on this count, though addressing the beloved as “Lenore” deliberately puts the whole poem into the lineage of Edgar Allan Poe and his combination of high ideal and inevitably gory bodily undermining. As the only one of Gaddis’s poems set at sea, the tone and imagery here illuminate the significant seafaring passages at the beginning and end of The Recognitions, which concern themselves not only with love but with the context of death and the special darkness of death at sea.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Header at top left specifies:

as Bachus

Course N by NW

17’70’ n. lat.

73’60’ w, long

This location is in the sea about 25 miles south of the town of Les Cayes on the western extreme of Haiti.

Thanks to Steven Moore for drawing my attention to the published letter of August 24th 1940 (Letters 5), which describes Gaddis’s experience on the journey that led to this poem.

Title: Only Yesterday

³⁰May be title or just first line.
Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.14 (“Poetry”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Single page handwritten poem

Description: The poem is divided into three sections, each in lines of short (mainly one- or two-stress) blank verse, with minimal rhyme. The first and longest section identifies the strenuous attempts of an unspecified “they” to claim some continuity with the past, to say that since so little time has passed “we are the same as yesterday.” But the poem is clear that “yet they know” this isn’t true. The second section narrates an unspecified “he” vowing to “find you” again, but the promised recovery is lost to “darkness.” Finally in three short lines, the last section denies any future and locates each “fool” in “the everlasting day – of yesterday.”

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: No direct allusions or echoes, but central characters as various as Gibbs in J R, Liz in Carpenter’s Gothic, and Oscar in A Frolic of His Own can be found attempting to define themselves by holding onto a preferable past self. The end of Agapē Agape (and hence of Gaddis’s novelistic career) identifies the “self who could do more” as a past version of the narrator’s self and characterizes that figure as an “enemy.”

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Written on an unfilled template “return receipt” for “NEW YORK STEAM CORPORATION”

Title: POEM (1st line “Wait tears, I’ll want you yet”)

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 21.5 and 21.6 (“Notes and Fragments Toward Other Projects”)

Date: Unclear: possibly 1953-4. One of the draft versions in 21.6 is on the same page as the title “The Coke Finish by John Trask”: this is a story Gaddis wrote (planning to use that pseudonym) in 1953 or 1954 (see entry in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide). If poem and story were composed at the same time, this would date this poem later than most of Gaddis’s poetry.

Complete?: Yes

Extent of preserved material: Single page typed poem in 21.5, heavily edited draft version and two other typed versions in 21.6.

Description: Another of Gaddis’s laughter-themed early writings, this is also the most explicit (“She laughed. I thought, She’s out of Herrick”) of his Renaissance-toned pastiches. In blank verse of unstandardised line-lengths, Gaddis’ speaker expresses some doubt about a woman’s valorization of laughter (“she: It makes the present // and distinguishes a man from beasts”), telling his tears that while he’ll temporarily go along with her riant presentism, he’s sure he’ll be back to weep them soon. The poem thus works as a caution against “Letting a moment take the place of time.”

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: A number of Gaddis’s other poems (see especially “After Seeing THE SCOUNDREL” – entry above) deal with the impossibility of maintaining the feelings and commitments of a joyous moment through the subsequent conscious return to a wider timeframe. Disappointing recontextualizations of what had seemed like happy moments happen throughout the novels, perhaps most extendedly and explicitly in Liz’s gradual understanding of what her night with McCandless adds up to in Carpenter’s Gothic, and Otto’s realization that Esme doesn’t remember their night together in The Recognitions.

Gaddis’s early short stories and poems often concern themselves with laughter as a value (see especially the poems “exit laughing” and “The Laughing Boy” – entries above, and the short story “Joy” – entry in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide). “Wait tears…” is the most explicitly sceptical of these. Situating this poem in the renaissance tradition of Herrick highlights its reliance on self-conscious artifice and conceit (especially in addressing the poem to one’s own tears), which aligns it with the theatrically self-conscious “harlequinade” of the play “Cartes Sur Table” with which it shares a tone of arch melancholy (see entry above). Most obviously, it shares cod-Elizabethan framing with the play “Faire Exchange No Robbery” (see entry above), which has the writers of that era as central characters (Herrick appears as a 2-year-old child). There is, however, little obvious connection between the play’s concerns (writerly originality, credit, contract, and posterity) and the poem.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Also contains explicit riffing on the children’s nursery rhyme “Hey diddle diddle,” in which a dog laughs: here Gaddis’s speaker sets that against the woman’s association of laughter with humanity to ask whether it’s “an excess of abuses” to thereby make animals into figures of solemnity: “Did the little dog cry? To see such fun…”

Title: POEM (1st line “Whatever the love that April lent”)

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 21.5 (“Notes and Fragments Toward Other Projects”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? Possibly mid-draft – some lines introduced with a “(” seem to be alternates for the unbracketed lines.

Extent of preserved material: single page handwritten poem

Description: Written all in capital letters, this seems to be a 4-line poem but the first three of the lines are followed by alternate lines—opened with a “(” bracket but never closed—of similar topic and vocabulary but different phrasing. It’s possible that the poem is presented in a 7-line final version for which this semblance of revision is a deliberate device. The grammar and final rhyme are loose, but the main thread is that winter, personified, was responsible for “Whatever (the) love that April lent,” but that with all energy spent on “lining his burrow,” Winter ends in “exhaustion.” The main interest is in the complex role that Winter plays, both being the threatening cold and building for himself the burrow against it, as well as what this burrow-building process might have to do with “love”: no one but winter himself (or, cf Kafka, his burrow) is mentioned as a candidate object for that “care” or “love.” The poem thus seems to be a parable on the emptiness of self-concern.

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: A rare Gaddis-poem entirely narrated of nature, without any specifically human figures or voices; the allegorical figure of Winter thus bears all the potential relation to characters in Gaddis’s later novels who exhaust themselves in the building up of defences.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? n/a

Title: REASONS

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.16 (“Poetry”)

Date: Unclear, likely first years of (US involvement in) World War II.

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Single page poem

Description: In two six-line stanzas made of couplets, eight syllables per line except the final 5-syllable lines of each stanza, Gaddis raises the common lament that the people who die in war have often been “led” there for reasons they don’t themselves have access to. After beginning with a blankly affirmative “Aye!,” the first stanza in its final couplet turns to vagueness: “Something’s being vindicated // That’s worth fighting for.” The second stanza, which refers to “boys” in contrast to the first stanza’s “men,” brings in the emphasis on ambiguous or multivalent external imperatives—“launched in blessings, partly curses”—and finally ends on “Never ask them why.”

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: A more complex (or just convoluted) perspective on the destruction of far-off wars and enthusiasms emerges from the likely contemporaneous short play “Cartes Sur Table.” Later, in both J R and Carpenter’s Gothic, financially-driven machinations in the US lead to war and death in other continents, with those who die having no way to know about what has led them there. The line here about what’s “worth fighting for” prefigures Gaddis’ career-long concern with what’s “worth doing.”

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Signed “william gaddis”: Gaddis usually signs his more personal poems, so doing so for a more public-themed one in this case seems like an official endorsement of its judgments.

Title: Untitled (1st line “a bottle is a lovesome thing, god wot”)

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86:13 (“Poetry”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Poem shares single typed page with “no doubt wellrant about the world.”

Description: A seeming celebration of drinking, this begins with descriptions and imperatives (“just drink // don’t york”), which are then set up as a refutation of “the fool” who would experience the pleasure of drink and yet still “contend[] that god is not.” The bottle in question is defined in terms of “cork” so presumably addresses wine or at least alcohol. The final lines grant that the niceness of the bottle and its contents establishes the existence of a god, but introduces some uncertainty as to which god, and what that god gets from the process: “‘Tis never sure but what god drinks from mine. // god, what?” The poem is punctuated, but uncapitalized.

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: Shares a pro-alcohol evangelism with “no doubt wellrant…,” and a more ambivalent approach to the relationship between alcohol and religious spirit than “The Laughing Boy,” whose speaker has “Lost my faith in whiskey.” A less specifically Christian approach than in the other poems that mention God or gods: the Bacchic Gaddis.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The opening line comes under an x-ed out version of itself where the only difference is “lovely” for the less common “lovesome.”

It is unclear whether an indented line at the bottom of the page—“vague protestations of delight”—is meant to be part of either poem on this page, to embody or prescribe a response to them, or to be a note for something else.

Title: Untitled (1st line “no doubt wellrant [sic] about the world”)

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 86.13 (“Poetry”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Poem on single page, along with “a bottle is a lovesome thing, god wot.”

Description: A grim prognosis of the over-standardized future, the poem is divided into two sections, possibly an inverted sonnet of sestet then octet. The first suggests that people will keep ranting about the world even as the advent of preservatives, helicopters, or “machine sown pockets” makes everything a convenience (though separating people such that “neighbors” are “leagues away”). The second section clarifies that this world, in which “science will arrange it so that there shall be no night” is one that “will be sheer hell to live.” But the poem concludes that people in that hell will still “drink gin when we give in.” The stress on “still” in this final section may proffer ranting, drinking, smoking as a kind of remnant of human resistance to the coming nightless world, but “we give in” suggests that this putative survival or resistance is really part of a fuller acquiescence. Ranting, drinking, smoking are thus framed as a kind of bread&circuses compensation for something lost: the parts of the current world that can be clung onto without making a difference as it decays.

Relation to Gaddis’ Other Writings: This is the Gaddis poem that most foretells his interest in the threat of hyper-standardization—and possibilities for evading or resisting it—that will animate J R. More specific in its scepticism of “science” and “processed beans” than The Recognitions’s general dubiousness about modernity, the poem raises the question crucial to the later novels and embodied in characters like Gibbs, McCandless, and the Agapē narrator: is merely ranting about the changing world one of the things “worth doing” as that world swallows up whatever used to define or embody worth?

The mention of hell, meanwhile, puts this in relation to Gaddis’s use of Faust from the early work on The Recognitions to the explicitly Faust-modelled screenplays of Dirty Tricks (see entry above), and to some of his more imagistic and nightmarish short stories, like “Some People Living in a Hotel” (see entry in Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide).

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? n/a

Works Cited (beyond specified archival folders)

Alberts, Crystal. “Three Early Stories by William Gaddis.” The Missouri Review 27.2 (2004)

Arthur, Jason. “William Gaddis, the US Army, and the Unwriting of an American War Novel.” College Literature 49.4 (2022): 711-739.

Black Gaddis, Patricia. Letter to William Gaddis, undated. William Gaddis Papers, Box 75 Folder 1. Olin Library, Washington University in St Louis. Missouri.

Chetwynd, Ali. "William Gaddis’ ‘Ford Foundation Fiasco' and J R's Elision of the Teacher’s-Eye View." Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 8.1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.3

Chetwynd, Ali & Joel Minor. “William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide.” Electronic Book Review (June 2024). https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcen5-1

E.L. Doctorow Papers, MSS 056. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, New York.

Eldridge, Richard, and Paul Cohen. “Art and the Transfiguration of Social Life: Gaddis on Art and Society.” in Powerless Fictions?: Ethics, Cultural Critique, and American Fiction in the Age of Postmodernism, ed. Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso. Brill, 1996: 41-51.

Gaddis, William. The Letters of William Gaddis, ed. Steven Moore. Dalkey Archive Press, 2013

—. Letter to Jack Gold, Box 54, Folder 4 (“JR film project with Jack Gold Productions”). Olin Library, Washington University in St Louis. Missouri.

—. Recording of Q&A at Bard College. 1981. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb7FJoiPuBk

—. Agapē Agape (1998). Dalkey Archive Press, 2002

—. J R (1975). New York Review Books, 2020

—. The Recognitions (1955). Dalkey Archive Press, 2012

Gaddis, Sarah. Swallow Hard. Atheneum, 1990

Gass, William. “The Doomed in Their Sinking” (1972), in The World Within the Word, Dalkey Archive Press, 2014: 3-38.

Moore, Steven. William Gaddis: Expanded Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015.

Steven Moore Collection of William Gaddis Research, MS-MS-ms156. Olin Library Special Collections, Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

Peckham, Morse. Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior. U of Minnesota Press, 1979.

—. Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts. Schocken, 1966.

Rose, Irwin. Letter to William Gaddis, April 3rd 1961. William Gaddis Papers, Box 75 Folder 2. Olin Library, Washington University in St Louis. Missouri.

Schaub, Thomas H. American Fiction in the Cold War. U of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Severs, Jeffrey. “Faire Exchange No Robbery: Critiques of Anthologies and Contracts in an Unpublished Gaddis Play.” Electronic Book Review (April 2024). https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcent3-8

Sheppard, RZ. Review of J R. Time Magazine (13 October 1975).

Soutter, John. “Vaihinger’s Not So Fleeting Presence: Gaddis, Ballard, and DeLillo.” Electronic Book Review (March 2024). https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcent3-7

Tabbi, Joseph. Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis. Northwestern UP, 2015.

Thielemans, Johan. “Once at Antietam, a Lost Play Recovered. On A Frolic of His Own.” Profils Americains 6 (1994): 173-184.

Weisburg Robert. “Taking Law Seriously (review of A Frolic of His Own)”. Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, 1995: 445-55.

Williams, Jack. “‘A long and Uninterrupted Decline’: Accumulation, Empire, and Built Environments in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions.” - Electronic Book Review (March 2024). https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcent3-2

Williamgaddis.org. “J R annotations, scenes 51-60.” https://www.williamgaddis.org/jr/jrnotes6.shtml

Cite this Essay:

Footnotes

• 1
  It also preserves interesting unpublished nonfiction projects like articles on the economics of mini-golf (“When is a Sport not a Sport,” which went through three rounds of review before rejection at Sports Illustrated – mainly archived in Box/folder 81.8), memoirs of his time in Central America (“Cartago, 1948 July” – filed with “Short Fiction” in folder 81.2), a proposed documentary on Greek satirists during the Peloponnesian War (“The Old Comedy” – notes in box/folder 81.9), and so on. Neither of the archival guides in this special issue addresses Gaddis’s unpublished nonfiction projects, but they are worth someone properly studying.
• 2
  During this time Gaddis established the closest working relationship with the drama department at CBS, where in 1957 the novelist EL Doctorow would start working as a reviewer for incoming proposals. History narrowly thwarted the tantalizing prospect of these two novelistic paragons meeting in the TV slush pile, however: Doctorow joined too late to give his verdict on any of Gaddis’s proposals, none of which appear in Doctorow’s archive of TV-pitch feedback, which is preserved with the rest of his papers at New York University (see Doctorow Archive, Box 57, Folder 036).
• 3
  See the finding aid for Moore’s collection at https://aspace.wustl.edu/repositories/6/resources/430/collection_organization
• 4
  See the Lampoon section of the online William Gaddis bibliography at http://www.williamgaddis.org/bibliography.shtml#pri-c-lam
• 5
  Gaddis mentions reading Pirandello, seemingly for the first time, in a letter of March 1948, five years after he wrote “Cartes Sur Table.” Nonetheless, Pirandello’s reputation in the English-language drama world had been substantial since a tour of London in the 1920s, and his influence was long in the air by the time of Gaddis’s writing.
• 6
  “The Rehearsal” is one of the three stories Crystal Alberts extracted from the archive for publication in the Missouri Review of 2004 (pages 99-108).
• 7
  Severs suggests that it may simply be Gaddis’s take on the convention of publishers schmoozing potential writers over fancy drinks: perhaps the young writer Gaddis had been, or known someone, on the receiving end of such a pitch.
• 8
  William and Thomas were of course Gaddis’s own first two names.
• 9
  Including in Oscar’s consistent referring to it as “my last act,” a phrase whose significance is indicated by the French translation of the whole novel being published under the title Le Dernier Acte.
• 10
  We might also wonder why, at this time in his career, Gaddis developed an interest in the Civil War context and especially in Northern and Southern US culture-distinctions, longueurs on which drag out the first two acts. Gaddis’s own background was very New England, but in the early 1940s he had spent significant time in the rural Southwest. More proximately to the time Antietam was written, though, he married Patricia Black Gaddis, who had come North from the traditional South, and who did at least some research on the project for him (see below). Their daughter Sarah Gaddis’s novel Swallow Hard (1990) fictionalises much that was real in that relationship, and the heavy emphasis on North/South culture shock in the early parts of that novel gives a sense of how much it might have been on Gaddis’s mind at the time.
• 11
  Though there is no indication of exactly when Patricia Black Gaddis did this research, where in the archives she found the language she quotes, and so on, it seems likely that the Pennsylvania Historical Society still has this material so that interested researchers might evaluate it for themselves.
• 12
  Per the Gaddis Annotations website’s entry for the novel’s mention of Dirty Tricks, J R’s galley proofs referred to “One Fine Day,” but the title was updated to Dirty Tricks for the final publication in 1975: see https://www.williamgaddis.org/jr/jrnotes6.shtml
• 13
  Morse Peckham, a literary professor of Gaddis’s own era, is the surprising name here, given Gaddis’s avowed disinterest in academia and contemporary literature. Two aspects of Peckham’s work (broadly a “behaviourist” theory of literary action, rooted mainly in the study of 19^th century Romanticism) may be the object of Gaddis’s emulation here: in Man’s Rage for Chaos (1967 - published around the time Gaddis started work on this project) Peckham contends that art can never achieve order (a long-term Gaddis preoccupation), while his later Explanation and Power (1979) is probably too late to have contributed to Gaddis’ thinking on the western, but concerns processes of manipulation in a way that might illuminate Slade’s methods.
• 14
  Most of the other archived feedback is simple rejection rather than suggested improvement. Scholars looking to parse Gaddis’s and Bloomstein’s distinct contribution to the collaborative draft have at least one page of the latter’s suggestions, which prioritises sexing up the relationship between Margaret and Fawkes by making her conspicuously younger to push the audience into discomfort.
• 15
  As I and others have explored elsewhere, Gaddis was working for film in his corporate writing at the same time as at least some of his work on this screenplay, but the visual directions here are far more self-sufficient than anywhere in the corporate work.
• 16
  Capital “V” in these notes seems to refer consistently to the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, whose The Philosophy of As If Gaddis’s work had explicitly engaged with from The Recognitions onward: see Soutter.
• 17
  Which raises another of the screenplay’s term-flipping questions: whether Slade can claim certainty about “human nature’s” “ambition” and “rot” when he himself won’t leave it to play out unmanipulated.
• 18
  Thanks to Kate Goldkamp for identifying this: a ballot from the Authors Guild filed with this material specifies that it must be returned by February 24^th 1977.
• 19
  A now-antiquated term for a south-Asian seaman
• 20
  If the date is early enough, “screenplay” may refer not to a completed script but the basic genre of a fiction for one-off TV broadcast.
• 21
  Which it was initially published alongside (along with the third novella Youth).
• 22
  As with the J R archive’s record of his wish to keep that novel’s board game “Split” and imagined artwork “Cyclone 7” (as well as the title Agapē Agape) out of any adaptations so that Gaddis himself could pursue them himself with complete copyright control (see legal letters in Gaddis Papers box 54 folder 6).
• 23
  See Gaddis’s plans for Sensation (Chetwynd&Minor, Fiction Guide), which would have been about familial resentment in the presence of genuine genius.
• 24
  Gaddis’s notes themselves get hung up on fine gradations of bad-popular and good-popular, for example in specifying “must get in that U is not jazz; & nothing wrong with jazz when it’s real; clarify between jazz: commercial popsongs.”
• 25
  The Synopsis’s slightly different wording of the Outline’s “thesis” stresses “this theme of freedom and happiness in the creative arts which is, largely, the theme of this play.”
• 26
  A note about this line simply says “true.”
• 27
  See most obviously Schaub. How far you think “Unfortunately” ratifies this cold-war framing or cynically panders to it to maximise the chances of getting produced will likely hinge on how far you find the whole project itself to be dubious pandering to a pop audience, and how far a “serious” aesthetic response to a “real problem.”
• 28
  Indeed, as Williams relates these to the novel’s treatment of Latin American setting, so a Gaddis note muses on whether the Mexican interlude of Beauvoir’s novel really adds anything since it “merely extends sentimental squalor in space.”
• 29
  See, for example “[a]ll writing worth reading comes, like suicide, from outrage or revenge” (Agapē Agape 63), nodding to arguments in Gass’s essay on suicide and its motives and rhetoric, “The Doomed in Their Sinking.”
• 30
  May be title or just first line.