William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide

Ali Chetwynd Joel Minor

William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide

by Joel Minor, Ali Chetwynd

by Ali Chetwynd Joel Minor

06-09-2024

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https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcen5-1

Included in the Gathering: William Gaddis at his Centenary

A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished prose fiction, particularly short stories from before The Recognitions and incomplete forerunner projects for his eventually published novels. Those include the two aborted novels that evolved into The Recognitions, notes toward a projected novel about filmmaking that provided foundational material for Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own, and more. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.

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/

In a late-career interview, William Gaddis clarifies that we should not think of him as a writer of prose fiction, but specifically of novels, which “are my craft, my calling, if you like. That’s why I’m not at all interested in anything else like stories” (in Ingendaay). At around the same time he demurs from work in any other genre: “I don’t want to do something half-heartedly that I don’t know anything about” (in “Eine Vorlorene Schlacht”). The short story form is something for which he claims no talent, and he abandoned it early. Gaddis’s comprehensive archive bears this out: there is no preserved short story that can be definitely dated to after 1956, in the year after he published his first novel.

1955, with The Recognitions at the publishers and no longer project yet begun, was perhaps the strangest and most multi-genre year of Gaddis’s writing life, as the archive reveals him working on popular non-fiction like an economics of mini-golf for Sports Illustrated, on proposals and scripts for short TV drama (see Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide), and—having seemingly attempted almost nothing in the form since 1947¹—a return to short stories. The preserved short stories from this era (notably “No Sale,” “The Coke Finish,” and an early prose draft of what became a TV proposal, “The Black King and the White Bishop”) are all distinctively commercial fiction modelled on what Gaddis seems to have thought was selling. His earlier short stories can each be triangulated between their three most common modes: taciturn Southwestern tales of rural epiphany, stories of fops or lightly occult eccentrics wandering New York until a cab hits them, or pseudo-existential recountings of numbly murdered strangers. By contrast, the 1954-5 stories are set in the present, in business contexts, and end with clearly stated morals delivered by characters winking as they say them. The difference from The Recognitions hardly needs spelling out. Submitted under Gaddis’s name, they are often accompanied by lists of potential pseudonyms to publish under (“John Trask” appears most often), implying that he saw them as hackwork not meant to tarnish his novelistic reputation. But these pandering stories were rejected wherever Gaddis sent them, just as had been his stories of the 1940s, and after these 1955 failures he seems to fully abandon the form. From here on, there would be attempts at dramatic work (much completed, all rejected), and there would be the novels, each of which grows (sometimes at decades’ remove) out of some distinct abortive prototype.

If Gaddis’s short fiction is mostly pre-Recognitions apprentice work, nonetheless there is a great deal of it fully preserved, and that archive offers both further understanding of his interests and development as a novelist-not-short-fiction-writer, and a useful sociological archive of what creative writing in the 1940s looked like, across the classroom, the working desk, and the publishing institutions.

The current document offers a comprehensive guide to Gaddis’s unpublished prose fiction (with the proviso that more undiscovered material may yet be lurking in the less item-indexed corners of the archive).² That includes extended description and analysis of four projects that eventually became The Recognitions, J R, and A Frolic of His Own (minor elements in each prefigure Carpenter’s Gothic and Agapē Agape, but—at least after Agapē became a planned fiction—neither absorbed a truly distinct project). It includes briefer information about and descriptions of almost fifty complete stories, and of nine stories with significant drafts and planning material that are either materially incomplete, or filed as “unfinished” (by Gaddis himself) even though the existing drafts seem self-contained.

We omit, however, any short story project for which no more than one complete drafted page exists. There are a number of such abortive note-plans or single-page fragments throughout the archive, most prolifically in folders 81.8 and 81.9 (Short Fiction: “Early-Loose”), 82:10 (Short Fiction: “Notes, Possible Projects Aborted”) and 82.27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”). These fragments have titles like “In Sickness and in Health,” “The First Papers of the Homarus Society,” “The Fortune Teller,” “The Bloody Horse,” “Paul’s Child,” and “The Junk Hustler,” and sometimes come with notes that explain thematic preoccupations even if they never became completed drafts. Sometimes, as with the single-page typescript that begins “Evidently they were on their guard,” the fragment seems to be either self-contained or the final page of a draft missing the rest of its pages. And these splinters may sometimes be of interest for their theme and style alone (the “on their guard” page, for example, is perhaps the most condensed epitome of Gaddis’s cod-existential mode, containing in ¾ of a page the fear of exposure, an all-saturating feeling of persecution, cold murder contemplated as the solution to a seemingly insignificant problem, and the absurdly uncommensurated choice between going out to commit that murder and staying in to read a stack of old newspapers). But whatever interest these fragments may have in themselves or as illuminations of the more complete stories, they are too many, disparate, and unmoored for us to usefully itemise here.

While most but not all of the fuller material of stories completed or significantly worked on is identified and located by the Gaddis archive’s recently updated finding aid, and most of the individual stories have their own dedicated folder, we also here identify stories with no archival index, and address instances where material for one story can be found in numerous different folders. We hope that the current guide will give potential researchers enough information to know which particular stories and documents they might want to consult, and where to find them. While we don’t attempt anything like a full literary or research analysis of any of Gaddis’s unpublished fiction here, we do aim to identify in each case the interest of themes, techniques, and explicit connections to his published work.

A separate document in this same special journal issue constitutes a comparable guide to Gaddis’s unpublished work for non-prose media: his stage drama, his screenplays, his proposals for TV and film, and his poetry (henceforth: Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).

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

When we say “unpublished,” we mean what Gaddis did not publish during his lifetime. Four of the stories addressed here have subsequently been published: Crystal Alberts compiled and edited three (“Jake’s Dog,” “The Rehearsal,” and “A Father is Arrested”) for a 2004 issue of Missouri Review, while Ninth Letter and then Harper’s published a version of “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam” in 2007 and 2008 respectively.

We do not attempt to address any of Gaddis’s Harvard Lampoon work: that was published, and remains 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’ Olin Special Collections Library contains copies of all this work.³ However, the methods Moore 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.⁴ In the absence of definitive information about what constitutes Gaddis’s full Lampoon oeuvre, and counting Lampoon publication as publication, we hold off from addressing any of it here.

For each entry here, we clarify the box/folder location of the material in Gaddis’s archive, attempt to date where possible, describe the basic plot of the story, and explain any significant thematic implications or writerly techniques. We then note any clear correspondence with the subsequent published fiction, or any references to the material in published criticism or Gaddis’s published letters.

We omit individual citation information for documents where the “Location in Archive” part of the relevant entry already contains sufficient Box/Folder information. We give page references only where the document itself has page numbers. References to relevant archival material without a specific entry here are 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. References to published letters are by page number of the Letters volume edited by Moore.

Individual entries contain information on how the text in question relates to Gaddis’s published work; the most relevant entries for each of the published novels are as follows…

Explicit or stipulated continuities of plot and project exist for the following:

The Recognitions: “Blague,” “Ducdame / Some People Who Were Naked,” “Arma Virumque” / “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam,” “Some People Living in a Hotel”

J R: “Sensation” / “Rose in Print”

Carpenter’s Gothic: “The Late Mr Slyke” / “Fictions”

A Frolic of His Own: “Fictions” / “Theatre” / “The Late Mr Slyke” / “Concentrate on the Real Story”

We establish looser or more general material and thematic connections for:

The Recognitions: “Art’s Place,” “At the Seawall,” “Evelyn Ex Libris,” “A Father is Arrested,” “Mr Astrakahn Says Goodnight,” “Much Virtue in If,” “Kotalik,” “No Sale,” “Social Life of a Single Man in New York,” “Where is Miss Horse?”

J R: “The Ambassadors,” “Art’s Place,” “The Coke Finish,” “Ernest and the Zeitgeist,” “The Rehearsal,” “Social Life of a Single Man in New York.”

Carpenter’s Gothic: “Concentrate on the Real Story,” “Rose in Print.”

A Frolic of His Own: “The Rehearsal.”

Agapē Agape: “Gorland at Large,” “Sensation.”

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

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

Below, we first address the novel-prototypes, then the complete stories, then the incomplete stories.

William Gaddis’s Superseded Prototypes for Novels (Chronological)

Title: Blague

Location in archive (Box.Folder): Fragments and notes throughout almost every The Recognitions folder. The major labelled folders that contain complete outlines and extended draft material specifically from Blague are in Box 20, folders 8 and 10.

Date: 1946-7: in an April 1947 letter to his mother Gaddis says that he is working on Blague, for which he had had the idea “about a year” before, his earliest notes having been stolen (Letters 69). He says he has done 5000 words (of a planned 50,000) that month, 10,000 a month later, with plans to send to a specific publisher. After this he talks with less commitment: it “will either be done or collapse” (Letters 78). Later he tells Katherine Anne Porter that “it took me five months to realize how pretentious it was” (Letters 103), indicating that he abandoned it by the end of summer 1947 and never completed it despite solicitation from an agent to do so.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: Five-page complete outline for shorter version, and 65 pages of continuous draft of first two chapters (second incomplete) in 20.8. In 20.10, a four-page outline (with more scenes described in less detail), draft forewords, over 100 typescript draft pages (longest continuous draft is 17 pages), most with manuscript revisions and additions, and over 50 pages of handwritten notes. In 82.27, title page and draft page. Fragments and draft pages throughout other folders.

Description & Analysis: The title Blague is French for a certain kind of frivolous and meaningless joke: Gaddis himself glosses it to his mother as “kidding […] But it is really no kidding” (Letters 69). In the story’s world, it names one of two chorus-figures: “Levi and Blague” drive around in a dual-control car, one dressed in black, one dressed in white, and give “lessons” and commentary to the story’s characters with a deliberately moral-existential flavour, talking of “moral responsibility,” “choice,” “decision,” and good and evil: the story’s explicit themes.

The fuller outline, specifying that “the action takes place in 24 hours, from the dusk of one day to that of the next,” gives us ten main scenes: Levi and Blague alone feature in a further prologue and epilogue. The story concerns a faltering love triangle: Charles is a bad-faith husband still in love with his old flame “Miss Horse,” a dancer (see entry on “Who is Miss Horse?” below), while ignoring his actual wife Madelaine. Madelaine “has always felt herself helpless” and drifts through life conscious of how inattentive Charles and her lover Ellery are to her, but doing nothing about it other than planning to write a novel in which she will vindicate her choices. Ellery, meanwhile, is merely selfish, “a person who feels no responsibility for anyone, anything” and has never given thought to good and evil. Losing his physical interest in Madelaine, he has no remaining care for her.

The first three planned scenes give us Charles and Madelaine’s perspectives either side of a party in which the misery and uncaring of this relationship become apparent to everyone in it. The fourth scene is a dream in which Madeline crucifies a figure she realizes is her son. Next, Charles takes her out to his family’s home in the countryside but the bad atmosphere there sends them each independently outside, whereupon he accidentally shoots her having thought she was an animal in the undergrowth. The chorus-pair in the dual-control car take her to the hospital, their existentialist “banter” establishing “that Madelaine (as is everyone) is wholly responsible for anything that has happened to her.” Ellery, meanwhile, seeks more violent excitement in his life and subsequently crashes his motorbike. The pair in the dual control car turn up, by a comic mishap twisting his neck and killing him in the attempt to save him: they flee the police.

At the hospital Charles sees Ellery’s body brought in, and also discovers that Madelaine can be saved at the expense of the baby she is carrying. Unsure whether the baby is his or Ellery’s, he seizes on this chance of a slate-clearing return to a simple two-person relationship. Having made that decision he then attempts to reconnect with Madelaine, but she, now awoken not only from sedation but to her true responsibility for her own life, turns him down and then “breaks into insanity.” Charles spills out into the street, where he is greeted by Levi and Blague in their black and white clothing, who invite him into their car for a lesson. He wants to know where to sit, they “encourage him to make the choice,” and finally he makes the decision to reach for the steering wheel, which, as they drive, is popped off and given to him, causing the car to lurch and bump his head.

He has a dream in which he sees people lined up into categories of good and evil, but unsure which is meant to be which he notes that one set is dressed in black, the other in white. Looking at his own clothes for guidance, he sees that he is “particoloured” in both. He thus wakes: “realising that good and evil must co-exist,” he gives the wheel back, but the car crashes. The epilogue sees Levi and Blague by the smoking car, bantering and walking off so that “the sound of laughter became the only real thing there was.”⁵

There is some kind of draft or serious note-taking for almost all of these scenes. The fully drafted chapter 1, titled “Where is Miss Horse?” bears little direct relation to the independent story of that title filed separately elsewhere (see entry below). The only sustained drafts beyond this are unstructured passages of party atmosphere and talk that grow out of the incomplete party-scene chapter 2, focusing in particular on the discussions between Charles and a party-goer called “Mr Kuvetli” (in the outline, “Mr Astrakhan,” a name seemingly salvaged from other story drafts – see entry below on “Mr Astrakan Says Goodnight”), an Egyptologist who discusses “the hidden prophecies I have come across in my work.” Shorter looser drafts exist of both Charles’s and Madelaine’s dreams, and of some of the “bantering” conversations the couple have with the men in black and white, which expand on the existentialist thematics of the story, as in Charles’s protests about control of the steering wheel: “Take the wheel” “you have chosen… You have made absolutes, and chosen between them” “Are there no absolutes?” “There was yourself” (7).

Blague seems to have been Gaddis’s first attempt to outline and write a novel-length project, after much apprentice work in short stories. The high proportion of the outline and drafts taken up with clunkily symbolic dreams and conversations that explicitly lay the themes out, rather than drafts of actual narrative events, reflects his struggles to make the long format work. That he turned to writing and rewriting apologetic forewords and many-epigraphed title-pages also indicates the difficulty of making the slender plot contain the various ideas Gaddis wanted his first novel to address. The comparative simplicity of the characterization and ideas—with everything finally reduced to impossibility and laughter—leaves the dreams doing all the imaginative work while the drafts tend toward shapeless capaciousness in the party scenes and fragmentation in everything else.

Blague thus seems to be a short story’s worth of imagination asked to bear a career’s worth of moral and existential interests, and there’s little indication that Gaddis was happy with much of what he wrote for it, hence the “Foreward” that contrasts it with good short stories and appeals to Gaddis’s own youth as excuse and as compensatory interest: hence too his retrospective explanation to Katherine Anne Porter that he had abandoned it for “pretentious”ness. There’s some mildly amusing characterization—“when she had loved her husband, the notion of anyone calling him Chuck offended her. Now she was offended at being married to anyone who could be called Chuck” (3)—and occasionally precise allegorical writing—“the car left the road and started through the trackless, empty air”—but not much that Gaddis could build a novel around. Elsewhere, in a note on Ducdame, he highlights “the hospital in Blague” as a valuable scene: something “histrionic, strictly theatrical” but that might be worth building on (“Why Ducdame Should…”). Most of the writing, though, is of the laborious over-explanatory kind that Gaddis, in that Ducdame note, identified as “my bad style”: within Ducdame drafts he would simply label whole pages “BAD.” The main interest in the Blague drafts is seeing Gaddis working in a more symbolical style than he would attempt again, the undigested influences of Nathanael West and French existentialism to the fore.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: As the sporadic filing of Blague material throughout the Recognitions drafts makes clear, there was a linear progression from Blague to Ducdame to the final novel. While Ducdame picks up Blague’s central relationship in various ways, the various irrealisms or surrealisms are dropped, along with the explicit existential thematizing. The long shapelessly-drafted party scenes are what survive: though they have little equivalent in Gaddis’s short fiction, such scenes become foundational to both Ducdame and The Recognitions.

Elements of Blague’s characters, meanwhile, gradually evolve into Ducdame figures who then become direct parts of The Recognitions: Ellery’s obnoxious self-exoticising on the basis of a brief trip to Mexico in the party scene drafts is an origin for Otto; Wyatt emerges from a combination of Charles and Mr Kuvetli; and Madelaine’s relationship situation becomes Esther’s, her passivity a characteristic of Ducdame’s Eva, who becomes Esme. Not until Carpenter’s Gothic, though, would Gaddis attempt another female focaliser.

One-off elements here, like the strange leap into insanity that follows from Madelaine’s assumption of her responsibilities, become more organizing elements in the final novel: half the cast of The Recognitions “break into insanity” by its later stages, and Blague helps reveal some of the intellectual underpinnings of that chaos: it stresses the impossibility of keeping hold of a workable worldview when you try both to take responsibility for yourself and to comprehend how much of what happens is down to cruel, ridiculous, blaguey chance. As Madelaine says pre-insanity, “suppose I had an accident?” “That, of course, would be your own fault… We [as driving instructors] cannot afford to assume such responsibilities” (61).

That The Recognitions grows from this initial attempt to write a short schematically organized existentialist love-triangle novel helps cast different light on the final novel: while the most commonly identified and analysed themes in The Recognitions have been its anti-modernity and concern with forgery and art, it turns out that these emerged initially as hooks around which to discuss more conventionally existential authenticity and responsibility.

Blague is thus also the paradigm case for a pattern notable throughout Gaddis’s writing, persisting at least as late as his immediate post-J R projects (see notes on The Blood in the Red White and Blue as discussed in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide). His early drafts for projects like Blague, “Ernest and the Zeitgeist” (see entry below) and others foreground an explicitly cited array of French-existentialist sources and thematics, but then, in revision, make less and less of them until their originary significance becomes illegible.⁶ In the case of the shift from Blague to The Recognitions this is surely an improvement: the explicit chorus-voicing and allegorizing in Blague would be unwieldy whatever the philosophy they voiced.⁷

The aim to make the plot cover exactly 24 hours shows Gaddis attempting to write within one of the classical dramatic “unities” (time): he eventually works within another (place) in Carpenter’s Gothic.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? As his published letters of 1947 convey (Letters 70, 79), Gaddis intended during his early drafting to have Blague illustrated, he hoped by the German caricaturist George Grosz. Joseph Tabbi’s biography of Gaddis consequently discusses Blague as being from a time when “his vision of Western society was closer to the art of George Grosz than to the mythography of Graves and Toynbee, the thought streams of Emerson and Thoreau” (107).

Letters about Blague are highlighted for mention in John Tytell’s essay on “The Oppositional Writer,” which builds on a review Tytell wrote of the 2013 Letters edition.

Kevin Brazil stresses Blague’s “Armageddon” concerns (as elaborated in Gaddis’s letter to Katherine Anne Porter) when contextualizing The Recognitions in relation to the Cold War (81).

At various times Blague seems to have had a number of intended subtitles, alternate titles, frame narratives, and so on, often all at once. Gaddis drafted many title pages in which he tried to compile these in different combinations. See for example the especially proliferative Figure 1, which brings together three titles, a series location, an epigraph, two qualifications, an attribution, and the faint heading “~everything~”.

A title page for a manuscript titled "BLAGUE, or what happened to thursday?" Yellowed pages and a qoute from T E Larence adornes the front. — Figure 1: Draft Blague Title Page

Gaddis also drafted a variety of forewords, most interestingly one in which meandering self-consciousness about the dreariness of forewords gives way to a direct recommendation to the reader to read something else:

Let me add only this. I have recently read a story called Mrs Razor, by a man named James Still. It is unpretentious, direct, honest, provocative, and direct. It deals with something beyond itself, which is implicit in itself: that is a small square of perfection. The author knew what he was doing.

I do not.

Neither do you.

“Mrs Razor” was published in the July 1945 edition of The Atlantic and concerns a six-year-old girl who tells her rural family she is married to an imaginary wastrel in the next village who has died and left her to raise her children alone. Her family humour her to varying degrees, but her belief outlasts their condescension. Written in simple sentences with vivid dialect and no authorial explanation of what is “implicit in itself,” it is indeed a direct contrast to Blague. Its concern with believing in self-made or contagious fictions beyond the point of usefulness makes it an intriguing early cipher for some of Gaddis’s later writing on the psychological function of fictions, most explicitly in Carpenter’s Gothic. But in form it resembles the realist regionalism to which some of Gaddis’s own short stories from his earlier time at Harvard seem to aspire: the Blague foreword highlights the extent to which this first longer project was a conscious venturing out beyond such templates into turf where Gaddis was less sure “what he was doing.”

Title(s): Ducdame / Some People Who Were Naked

Location in archive (Box.Folder): Dedicated folder in 20.6 (“The Recognitions: Ducdame 1947-8”). Draft and notes in 31.6 (“The Recognitions: Notes”). Material in 21.5 and 21.6 (“The Recognitions: “Notes and Fragments Toward other projects: ‘Sensation,’ ‘Waste,’ etc”). Other material interspersed throughout Recognitions folders.

Date: 1947-8 – Gaddis first mentions “plans for another novel” (after Blague) in a letter to his mother in December 1947 (Letters 82). The change in title from Some People… to Ducdame comes after March 1948 (see below). No rigid date at which work on this becomes work on The Recognitions but no mention under the two titles here from 1949 onward.

Complete? No, but extensive drafts.

Extent of preserved material: Three extended section-drafts and roughly 100 pages of further notes and short drafts in 20.6. Hundreds of pages of notes, including “OUTLINE” and action-graphs (see Figures 2 and 3 below) in 31.6: all except one draft page of final novel’s opening seem to be from “Ducdame” era rather than Recognitions. Five pages of note-fragments filed separately in 21.5, four draft pages in 21.6. Many other fragments and draft pages throughout other folders.

Description & Analysis: Ducdame is essentially the Otto plot of The Recognitions, and at a certain point in its composition history Gaddis turns to writing that later novel out of Ducdame drafts, as his notes and drafts start to dwell more on Wyatt than prospectuses had intended and a whole new set of plots and themes emerge. Notes and fragments labelled “Ducdame” are found throughout the Recognitions folders of the archive, but extended drafts (discussed below) cluster together in a smaller number of folders. Some of the archivally preserved Ducdame material is directly revised into The Recognitions, but nothing in the final novel seems to survive in the exact form it was drafted for Ducdame. They should be seen as distinct projects rather than one simply being an early draft, even though the chronological and intentional dividing line between them is less clear than that between Ducdame and its immediate forerunner (and scavenged source) Blague.

Beyond the many pages of single-line fragment-notes, the archive preserves a number of character-lists, some visual sketches, and, as in the Blague archive, a number of draft sketch title-pages and frontispieces whose varying subheadings and epigraphs give a sense of Gaddis’s shifting priorities and intentions. Some of these he simply typed, others he diagrammed and then hand-inked in Gothic calligraphy. The likely earliest conception of Ducdame has the title (preserved on one such elaborate title-page) of Some People Who Were Naked (a reference to that version’s epigraph, from The Acts: “And the man in whom the evil spirit was leapt upon them and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded”). Gaddis mentions this title in a March 1948 letter to his mother (Letters 102). Ducdame is a nonsense-word from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and title-page drafts supplement it with two potential subtitles: “The Lie Called Circumstance” or “The Vanity of Time” (the latter eventually the name of Otto’s play-in-progress in The Recognitions).⁸ Epigraphs veer from the portentous to the gnomic to the self-conscious, as in a quotation from an LP Smith dialogue about the appropriate contents of “the modern novel.” As with Blague, the amount of material on each of these paratexts keeps expanding and proliferating, until one version ends up with title (Ducdame); alternative title (“called: The Vanity of Time”); subheading (“Three Suicides Fully Explained”); categorization (“being: a Novel”); and promise (“with footnotes, an index, and an appendix: and: illustrated similes in true photographic reproduction”). Not to mention an epigraph. Even subsections of the planned novel get their own header-pages and epigraphs.⁹

The titled subdivisions reflect Gaddis’s schematic conception and careful scene-division. The biggest distinction between Otto’s story in The Recognitions and in Ducdame is that initially he was set to emerge triumphant: the final novel sees him bumbling through the world with occasional opportunities for self-comprehension comically avoided, but the Ducdame archive reveals how gradually this characterization came to be. First, Otto would simply have returned to New York from his time abroad to expose the vacuity of the New York partyworld he has seen beyond (this is likely the version for which the Some People Who Were Naked epigraph provides the key). Then, Otto would have returned pretentious and vain, but undergoing a series of experiences—romance with Esther, interaction and disillusionment with Wyatt, disappointment in meeting his estranged father, and return abroad—that led him to improvement and self-actualization. The opening half “Intentions” would trace his disappointments on returning, the second half “Dispositions” the development of his superior self.

Gaddis’s actual drafts, however, dwell and expand on the character of Wyatt beyond what any of the explicit planning material had intended. A circled, underlined note asks “Have I lost Otto?” Drafts that make Otto truly hopeless and ridiculous then start to shade into early iterations of The Recognitions. It’s unclear exactly when this happened, but Gaddis does not refer to Ducdame as a current project in his published letters after 1948.

The clearest models of the Otto-redeemed narrative that is best distinctly identified as Ducdame rather than Some People (Otto as heroic scourge) or early Recognitions (Otto as increasingly silly foil to increasingly central Wyatt) can be found in a 15-scene “Outline” and in two graphs for the rise and fall of dramatic action and character fortunes. The first parts of this are very continuous with the Otto plot of The Recognitions, with only slight variations. For example, “Eva” who becomes Esme has a “frighteningly apparent” “need for meaning” here, rather than frightening Otto by her self-sufficiency, and while her forgetting that she has slept with him happens in both novels, in Ducdame it is swiftly overcome as they resume a relationship that only later founders. The second half, though, would have seen reputable Wyatt exposed as a forger before committing suicide (thereby teaching Otto to care less about false accusations of plagiarism), Otto meeting his underwhelming real father (and actually recognising him in all his mundanity, by contrast to the comedy of errors around fatherhood in The Recognitions), freeing himself from Wyatt’s surrogate “sort of father figure” shadow, and finally having a positive revelation about himself while reading theology on an aeroplane to Panama, ending the novel wiser and more self-sufficient out there while his play made its own way back in New York.

The arc of the novel would thus have traced a fall and rise—from disappointments scrutinised by others to a fully regained sense of self—as Gaddis diagrammed it on a graph (archived in 31.6) whose unlabelled y-axis presumably measures Otto’s contentment from scene to scene (see Figure 2).

A graph made in pencil, featuring a bottoming out until it reaches soaring heights — Figure 2: Graph of Otto’s Chapter-by-Chapter Development for Ducdame

Other characters, meanwhile, would not have fared so well: the initial subtitle “Three suicides fully explained” plays out in a similar graph that plots the fates of four characters—Otto, Wyatt, Esme (Eva), and Br (Recktall Brown)—on the same axes (see Figure 3).

Multiple graphs overlayed onto each other — Figure 3: Overlaid graphs of Otto, Wyatt, Brown, Esme developments for Ducdame

Brown would die as he does in the final novel (Ducdame thus incorporates the early stories on which this death was based, “Arma Virumque” and “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam”: see entry below), Wyatt would commit suicide after the exposure of his forgeries, and Esme would lose “identity without God.” Only Otto, despairing at these deaths on Christmas day, would chart his way back upward, thanks to his meeting with his father which, revealing them to have nothing in common, would establish “Otto is alone. He begins to understand that.” That understanding leads him to care less about the calumny against his play, to leave Esther and her “appeals […] to his vanity,” and to become serious by reading theology on a plane. He would then return “to the sun, to burn out rottenness, to be alone, to do heavy work.” A final scene would show him back abroad, “all vanity apparent in ch. 1 gone,” with an ear infection barring off the outside world and his self-sufficient inwardness complete. A note page in 31.6 suggests that “each chapter open with quote from Faust. // Brown—satirical(ly condemned) Mephistopheles. / Wyatt—a fateful Faust / Otto—a regenerate Wagner.” With the exception of a sketched version of the final scenes in Panama, though, the Otto-redeeming plot exists mainly in notes rather than in writing, stranding Otto before he can become the mature artist who Gaddis had planned.

The most continuous preserved Ducdame drafts are of three sections, all in folder 20.6. A typed draft labelled “Ducdame 1: Intentions” focuses on Otto before his return to New York: this is likely very early as it moves through various attitudes to pre-return Otto, from reverence to ridicule. The largest set—a continuous 35-page handwritten ink manuscript headed “ducdame II”—is extended shapeless party dialogue, filed after large amounts of single-page notes and drafts of party detail. The third, and closest to what ends up in The Recognitions, is a more linearly narrative 18-page handwritten ink manuscript headed “Ducdame III,” which follows Otto on the day after his first night with Eva, before he finds out she has forgotten it.

The most illuminating supplement to these is that brief sketch version of Otto matured abroad (also the focus of the couple of pages in 21.6). This unlabelled set of draft pages comes with the ink note “No commenting in this chapter,” which highlights the over-explicit tell-not-showing way that its pages currently handle thematic implications, and their resort to representing Otto’s thoughts by mental quotation of the “he thought to himself” kind. Gaddis was apparently dissatisfied with this, planning to redraft in a style more like the final Recognitions. Rather than do that, though, he actually moved on to writing that very different novel, in which Otto achieves none of Ducdame’s intended flowering. Otto’s reading-prompted religious ponderings here—“if I go on thinking this way, will I be forced to come to terms with God?” or the note that he “must see lamb of God in Cathedral”—do link this planned ending to the religious concerns of The Recognitions (there developed through Wyatt and his family, rather than Otto). Beyond this, Ducdame otherwise lacks the theological themes and references that saturate the final novel. Otto himself is described here in terms of coherence “his linen hung calmly, clean and without elegance, upon the quiet movement of his body,” by contrast to the “Ducdame 1” drafts in which his over-dressed self-consciousness and preening vanity are emphasised. Otto was, early in the novel, to be solicited by a local prostitute to whom he would say “I understand everything but your words, Senorita” while in the draft ending his ear infection renders him deaf and self-contemplating so that, greeted by a priest, he would repeat (with greater implication) “I understand everything but your words.” There the planned novel would end.

One undrafted plan for the ending would have contained a further revelation: a note clarifies that “His name is Otto Mims – Otto Mims. Not revealed until last part of book – time of arrest.” Where the name Otto Pivner later came from is unclear, but “Mims” seems to suggest mimesis, and link to Otto’s constant Ducdame characterization as absorbed in mirrors: the name’s revelation would coincide with his outgrowing that predilection.

The archivally preserved drafts, then, are more sporadic than Gaddis’s notes, but do give enough of a sense of what a completed Ducdame would have looked like to see how its focus on Otto would have made it a very different, much simpler, novel.

The folders also contain material clarifying Gaddis’s approach to his compositional process, and, in 31.6, a multi-page set of reasons “Why Ducdame Should Be a Play” that both indicates his thoughts about the novel form and illuminates his subsequent work in more dramatic media (see the dramatic works discussed in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide). The process-note shows how fully Gaddis worked on itemising the elements of his novel before writing it:

I: List

1. People – and relative importance
2. Information to be given about people
3. Conversation & exposition
4. Lines
5. Of sequential intentions

II go through all notes, both books

III Outline

This indicates that Gaddis saw his novels of the time emerging from character first: perhaps not surprising given that Otto is overtly based on him and critics have been able to identify many of the characters in the New York section of The Recognitions, which grows out of Ducdame, with specific people he knew at the time. His character-first working method might also, however, explain the disproportion between the proliferating amount of Ducdame-era notes and the lesser amount of revised narrative draftwork Gaddis actually achieved: with the exception of a few passages about Otto, most of the extended writing beyond notes is shapeless “conversation & exposition” in which party scenes give information about characters. “Why Ducdame Should be a Play” shows that Gaddis thought about these struggles to write actual plot-developing novelistic work as struggles with the novel form per se. Theatre, he suspected, might better fit his schematic intentions “Because of the architectural quality of a good play – and I have been trying to write fiction in an architectural frame, and having a bad time of it.” Another note identifies that “I have seen the whole of both novels as tableaux. As sequential and consequential scenes,” which is borne out in the shape of his outlines for both Ducdame and Blague, but also in the “bad time of it” that he seems to have had in turning either project from planned scenes into working fiction. The growing interest his drafts show in Wyatt and Brown, rather than in Otto, suggests that he finally resolved this not by turning to drama, but by changing the focus of his story.

These and other notes also give us some sense of Gaddis’s attitude to his own writing. In a published letter to his friend Charles Socarides, Gaddis had lamented that while he liked the idea and story he was working on, “I watch myself ruin it” through “bad writing” (Letters 97). The archive preserves him making comparable observations to himself. One page gets the note “BAD, must be light,” (p7 of a handwritten draft in 20.6), while “No commenting in this chapter” on the very didactic final-chapter draft indicates dissatisfaction with his tendency to editorialize and substitute thematic notes for developing narrative. “Why Ducdame Must be a Play” shares this straightforward self-judgment, lamenting “temptations to my bad style which has grown worse of late.” That “bad style” is most clearly glossed in the letter as “trying to be clever –this perhaps because I am afraid to be sincere.” The combination of strenuous attempts to be “clever” with a failure to be “light” results in lots of passages of clunking over-explained irony (and imbalanced counter-weights of pathos) that read like bad imitation of Nathanael West, an influence Gaddis acknowledges in a letter to Katherine Anne Porter around this era. The failure to manage West’s tightrope balancing of simple diction, jittery bleakness, and queasily deadpan hilarity leads Gaddis to identify his bad style with an affect as well as a prose: “the fetid air that hangs over me – the mean bitterness, the temptation to get even &c,” hoping that drama, in its natural removal of editorializing narrative voice, would free him from this tendency and “temptation.” The root of the problem, as he identifies it, is that “I trust an actor more than I do a reader,” explaining his heavy-handedness in much of the Ducdame draft work. Gaddis’s regular meta-evaluative comments on the quality, promise, and failings of this work make the Ducdame archive of particular interest, since they are less common and explicit in the archives of his subsequent novels.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Ducdame is obviously a direct forerunner for The Recognitions, generating one important thread of the final novel’s plot. It grows out from the social universe of Blague’s draft party scenes. Gaddis decided to send a version of himself into that world as Otto to “prevail[] against them, so that they fled […] naked,” then became interested in Otto’s own ridiculousness and what it might take to redeem it into seriousness, then “lost Otto” such that Wyatt became an increasingly central figure, at which point Ducdame as full Otto-novel was put aside, and Otto integrated into the new project. The Recognitions satirises authorial over-identification with protagonists, as Otto processes his real experiences through thinking what his own play’s heroic self-insert “Gordon” would make of them.¹⁰ This self-reflexive element is missing in Ducdame, in which “Gordon” is just the name of a minor party-goer.

Many figures who become important in The Recognitions are born as minor figures in Ducdame: the names Stanley and Agnes Deigh, for example, are given to minor party attendees: the former a poet translating TS Eliot’s French poems into English, the latter (whose name is pencilled in as a replacement for “Mrs Hillary”) a writer in professional competition with her husband and in social competition with Otto, having recently returned from “Porto Rico” as he has from Costa Rica. Very few of these same-named Ducdame figures are identical to their selves in the final novel: the least-changed survivor being Frankie (whose name becomes Chaby), Eva’s heroin-addicted pseudo-paramour. While most of The Recognitions’s New York figures have some origin in the party scenes of Ducdame, there is no obvious proto-Anselm, no proto-Hannah, no gang of homosexuals, and, despite the presence of Recktall Brown and Fuller, no Basil Valentine. The basic mechanisms of the first half of Ducdame’s Otto plot, from his being crushed by Eva’s failure to remember their night together, to his reporting Frankie to the police in retaliation, to the plagiarism controversy over his play, survive more directly than any exact characterization of minor characters.

The major figures differ in more precise and illuminating ways from their eventual forms in The Recognitions. The initial plan to have Otto himself become a wise and mature figure, close to fulfilling Wyatt’s Recognitions resolution “to live deliberately,” is one such distinction, and abandoning this plan meant that development had to come elsewhere in the novel at the expense of Otto’s comical stagnation. Esther is more genuinely besotted by Otto, making her decision between him and Wyatt into more of a genuine romantic triangle: her opinion of Otto (and his eventual ability to disregard it) is thus more central to his own developing self-conception. Eva/Esme is more straightforward in this version: a mere “nihilist” whose “frighteningly apparent” “need for meaning” shows her path as a flawed one, unlike the Recognitions version whose inner world never becomes comprehensible to the men who project their desires onto her. Wyatt—whose evolution does more to distinguish Ducdame from Recognitions than any other character’s—starts in early drafts as a more serious update from Blague’s quack prophetologist Mr Kuvetli. He is characterized above all in relation to alcohol, which “he confessed, had a similar effect on him to that of the fumes from the pit of Delphos upon the priestesses.” His air of mystery attaches to a controlled state of in-between drink—“In his sobriety there waited a kind of querulous intoxication; and when he had been drinking, a far-seeing sort of clear sobriety”—and his final confession about being a forger, which precipitates his collapse and Otto’s moving beyond his father-surrogate relation to him, comes when he “finally” gets uncontrollably drunk.¹¹ Alcohol becomes less defining of Wyatt’s character in The Recognitions than in Ducdame.

Thematically, meanwhile, Ducdame has differing, and far narrower, emphases but on its own turf a broadly shared palette with The Recognitions. The controversy over Otto’s play being seen as plagiarised is a much larger part of Ducdame, where it is meant to reflect the play’s genuine connection to the wellspring of tradition. The plagiarism accusation reflects worse artists’ envy of Otto, while by The Recognitions the plot serves to stress Otto’s derivative inauthenticity, by contrast to Wyatt’s authentic forgery. Wyatt’s forgeries here, meanwhile, only serve to help Otto see the significance of his own authenticity, rather than opening up the aesthetic and historical-cultural concerns of the final novel. The father-relationships in Ducdame would have been limited to Otto’s perspective and much more easily resolved, while religion would matter only as the missing end-stop for Eva’s “Nihilis[m]” and as a ratification for Otto’s seriousness in the final scenes. On the other hand, some emphases in Ducdame, like the stress on Otto’s changing relation to mirrors, or the saturating register of “certain”ty and doubt (doubt in Ducdame sometimes reflects thoughtless reflexive scepticism, sometimes embodies serious engagement with the world beyond certainty) drop out by the time of The Recognitions. Other elements, like the plan to have Otto gain interiority by losing his hearing, play a less obvious role in The Recognitions but illuminate Gaddis’s career-long paratextually-attested concerns, like the value of being “inner-directed.”

The “Why Ducdame Should Be A Play” document, similarly, casts less immediate light on The Recognitions—which ended up written in the same basic prose-forms as Ducdame, only less didactically handled—than it does on Gaddis’s later works which have less linguistic space for the psychological interiority prose fiction makes available and that a play must find ways to do without. As those later novels do more with the interaction of dialogue and external description, they follow through on Gaddis’s “Play”-insight that “words should be and are spoken and done.” This document is also a key for understanding his actual, generally unsuccessful, work in dramatic media (See Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).

Other small details and visible corrections simply raise spectres of very different potential Recognitions: Wyatt, for example, was initially planned to have spent time in Haiti, before a series of these references are crossed out and replaced with references to Spain, to little effect in Ducdame but with major influence on The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Gaddis refers to Ducdame in published letters to his mother in late 1947 and early 1948 (Letters 82, 85, 86 , 89): the first time to say that he is planning it, the second and third to describe his working conditions (unable to type continuously because of disturbing neighbours, and so writing by hand and making lots of notes), the fourth to describe the “incredible slowness” of his progress on it, working from midnights to 4am. He discusses further struggles with it months later in a letter to Charles Socarides: though it “fits so insanely well with facts of life,” “I watch myself ruin it” through “bad writing,” an example of which he extracts for proof (Letters 97).

The title comes from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (act 2 scene 5), where it is repeated in a song, and the fool Jacques glosses it (fantastically) as a “Greek invocation, to call fools into a circle.” Like Blague, then, the title may be a joke on the readers it brings into its own communicative circle,¹² or it might gloss the initial “Some People…” conception of Otto bringing knowledge of his crowd’s foolishness to them.

Potential subtitle “The Lie Called Circumstance” is the name of the symbolic-of-life-itself play in “The Rehearsal” (see entry below).

The extended handwritten meditation on “Why Ducdame Should be a Play” is briefly mentioned in Chetwynd, “Stylistic Origins,” in relation to J R’s formal qualities.

Titles: Sensation, & Rose in Print

Location in archive (Box.Folder): Sensation material in 21.5 and 21.6 (The Recognitions: “Notes and Fragments Toward Other Projects: ‘Sensation,’ ‘Waste,’ etc”), notes in 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”), two note pages in 80.2 (Agapē Agape: “Unsorted”), notes with Sensation characters moving into J R set-up in 40.2 (“J R or the Boy Inside Partial manuscript”). “Rose in Print” brief notes in 21.5 and 21.6, material otherwise in 80.2.

Date: Sensation work 1955 or early 1956, title earlier, plot possibly conceived earlier; “Rose in Print” later, possibly as late as 1961 (Sensation precedes J R, while some notes on “Rose in Print” indicate connections to J R figures who don’t exist in Sensation, and to Once At Antietam, written 1959-61).

Genre: Sensation a projected novel, “Rose in Print” to be a subsection of Sensation, then to be a text-within-the-text of Sensation, then possibly to become part of early J R. Its final resting place is as a briefly mentioned (Gibbs-authored) text-within-text of J R.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: Sensation, despite prospectively being the bigger project, survives in less material: a two-page prospectus plus character list in 21.5 plus separate notes to self on a relationship, headed “October,” which correspond to mentions of October in the “Rose” material. A brief note toward “PART III,” a page of notes on weather and setting, and notes on character of Dick in 21.6. Two pages of planning notes in 80.2, and two more in 82.27. More from this era, not explicitly labelled as Sensation, may exist elsewhere in the archive, especially the J R files, which are largely unsorted by date or section.

“Rose in Print” material comprises a variety of note pages and three draft sections of between three and six pages. A note page headed “ELISE: MY WISTFUL SYMPATHY, MY TENDER LIKING” is filed with “Rose in Print,” and mentions figures and plot points (“pheasant” “October”) from the Sensation notes and mentioned in the “Rose in Print” drafts.

Description & Analysis: “Rose in Print” seems to have grown out of—at one point to have been a planned subsection of—Gaddis’s first projected successor to The Recognitions, which was to have been called Sensation: “Rose” is the second name on a list of characters headed “Sensation” in 21.5. The bulk of the preserved draft writing on either project seems to be on “Rose in Print.”¹³

It’s unclear who Gaddis wrote his short prospectus of Sensation for, but it must have had an intended audience unfamiliar with The Recognitions since more than half is taken up with describing how the theme of “The Self Who Could Do More” works in that novel; this will be an interesting document for anyone interested in Gaddis’s own interpretation of his works. Sensation is offered as a contrasting approach to that same “central theme of THE RECOGNITIONS in an entirely different context, style, and treatment” (1). Projected to be less than 1/5 the length of Gaddis’s debut, Sensation would be about a family devoted to music across many generations, but only whose adopted son in the third generation actually has any genius, causing “the disintegration of a ~~small~~ family into whose midst a figure of the totally competent ‘Self who can do more’ is introduced” (1). In “treatment,” meanwhile, where The Recognitions “was a complex often abstract pictorialization of values and evaluations; SENSATION is quite straightforwardly a novel of human frailty” (1).

Notes indicate that the two most resentful brothers would be called “Jan and Earn,” and this is key to identifying a document in which the Sensation to J R transition seems to happen most clearly. In 40.2, a three-page series of typed notes pages indicate that a novel should start in a funeral scene, at which “Edward” raised as the son of successful musician James Bast (the object of Jan and Earn’s resentment) would find that “he is not fathers [sic] but uncles [sic] son” and have to decide whether he should give up on the musical destiny he thought he had inherited. The funeral scene would highlight the distinction between “inheritance of estate and talent.” This, then, is much of the J R plot grown out of Sensation and just awaiting the invention of JR himself to consolidate the shift in projects. All the surrounding material is about JR and J R. It’s likely that more early Sensation material is hidden away in the profuse and unsorted J R archive folders.

Despite the promise of a simpler, more “human” approach, the other document of continuous Sensation notes (in 82.27) hints that some version of the project might have gone in a more abstract direction than the musical-talent plot that became J R. These notes point to something even more surreal than anything in The Recognitions, as a dead patriarch conscious of being buried hears his children discussing what to do with his legacy: “Thud wakes him: vague sense who’s in the attic? after my books?” But it turns out they are not after anything of him as a person: “The brothers arguing about property &c. But neither of them wants his watch nor his books, ie the books he’s written, freethinking &c.” The old man is already being lost to the past, and, in a fairly direct “pictorialization of values,” this is because “He is Reason, 19sie dogmatism &c.” The sister of these brothers would be the one who attached some value to him rather than his “property,” asking the brothers to dig him back up.

The two loose pages of Sensation notes filed along with the “Rose in Print” material, meanwhile, are mainly to do with theme rather than plot: aphoristic notes like “we love people for the good that we do them and we hate them for the harm” and “I can endure my own despair, but not another’s hope” indicate the kinds of family dynamics Gaddis had in mind, with the few more plot-specific notes—eg, “he has been corrupted by his work […] why she loves the ‘success’ ie not because he is -, ie – not in the terms which the failure, the bete noir – interprets to himself in his self-pity”—relating to these overall issues of jealousy and mismatches in mutual valuation.

This “she” is likely “Rose,” the extra-familial figure whose judgment mediates between “success” and “failure.” Gaddis’s notes around the project seem to suggest that this was based on his experience with a specific woman, as they shift into the first person to contrast what he is doing in his work with the experience of an “I.” Most directly relating Gaddis and Rose to the Sensation plot, a note points to “my work: how it abruptly became her approval which was important, no matter mine, nor friends’, nor critics &c&c: only, what would She think of this word, this conceit, &c&c&c.” This all contributes to a fairly hostile characterization of the Rose figure: one page of notes opens with “Point Rose is a witch” and, presumably from the protagonist’s perspective “that she has castrated him, married Norman (power).” The fore-running here of the J R plot in which Stella, Bast’s cousin and Gibbs’s former lover, marries the businessman Norman Angel makes clear that Rose is a Stella prototype, though some notes suggest Rose and Stella could have co-existed in early plans for J R (see below). Notes also link her to DH Lawrence’s “cocksure” women: “she will behave independent, but, if she follows through (as she must […]) be laid low & need rescue.” These notes turn into drafts where Rose’s self-sufficiency is stressed—“Rose, young but no girl, beautiful out of context and aware of that, stayed out, entirely or until her late presence merely confirmed one she’d established of her own”—along with the harm this does to the men who think they can handle her: “she’d go on appearing to take each at his own evaluation, letting that build without her interference out of all proportion till when she side-stepped, and it fell, it came from such a height that there were a good many pieces.”

This theme of the damage done by mismatches in how we evaluate ourselves and how others evaluate us survives from the Sensation prospectus, but it’s notable how little plot there is to the various “Rose” drafts: they are either straight description or characters’ thoughts about or around Rose as they do menial things. The notes mention images and events to associate with Rose, and her relation to characters from the Sensation cast and the J R cast, but nothing directly states what the narrative of “Rose in Print” would be. Some of the draft pages have page numbers as high as 105, starting in the 90s, suggesting that Gaddis may have written much more than is currently locatable. In what’s preserved, though, the plot element that comes up most often is a pheasant hunt—“his country house / field in Oct / pheasant, stone wall, ec”—notable for its eventual use in the play Once at Antietam (where a pheasant is found cowering into the stone wall as if to avoid the horror of all violence). Antietam is subsequently reproduced as Oscar’s magnum opus in A Frolic of His Own, and Oscar takes great pride in—and greatest exception to the film-adaptation’s distortion of—the beauty and sensitivity of his pheasant scene, “that scene I wrote in all its classic simplicity turned into trash” (412).¹⁴ But even Gaddis seemed to struggle for a sense of how this would contribute to a Rose narrative: one note wonders “her pheasant hunt – but what significance has it?” Struggling for a narrative that could sustain this character outside her function in the superceded Sensation, Gaddis’s notes resort to overall atmosphere: “decline and death are the climate of this thing.”

Eventually, what seem to be the final few pages of consistent “Rose” draft solve this problem by turning “Rose in Print” into a text within a text, able to give us the character and contribute to “climate” without having to be a complete story. A character “McColl,” thinking at a friend’s apartment of his own Rose-like romantic encounters, “seeking refuge, found a magazine already opened to a story, Rose in Print, by Hyman Kleinowitz [pencil note] Grynszpan [/pencil note]” (draft page II 98). Hyman Grynszpan is a pseudonym used by Gibbs in J R. The Rose story then takes over McColl’s narrative until a side-note two pages later—after the passage from “Rose in Print” ends and we return to McColl—suggests that we “pick up next page later, he finds it under sofa ec- throughout.” In the final version of J R, Gibbs reads from his own story “How Rose is Read,” similar in style but without much overlap with this draft (see J R 584). Only one element is conspicuously re-used. In the “Rose” drafts, McColl’s own paramour (within his level of fictive ontology) is “no book heroine as they wanted.” In J R, this is part of Gibbs’s description of his heroine: Rose. A pencil note on the McColl passage says “How Rose is Read,” giving us the source of J R’s Rose-title, and foregrounding Rose’s relation to printing, reading, textuality in general.¹⁵ This emphasis survives into J R. As Steven Moore notes in discussing the Gibbs-reading passage, Gibbs throughout the novel has a tendency to “think of the women he meets in literary terms,” so that the way he writes about Rose belies his own distanced way of relating to people (Moore, “William Gaddis” 116). If initial “Rose” drafts frame her as a proto-Stella and eventually even Stella’s relation, in final J R she’s an explicitly fictive figure symptomizing Gibbs’s dysfunctional relation to women (including to Stella…). Had “Rose in Print” stayed an independent project to J R, it’s unclear whether Rose would have been “human” or “textual” in the story’s own ontological level.

“Rose in Print,” then, seems to have evolved from a character central to Sensation, into one connecting the Gibbs and Bast plots (like Stella does) in the earliest versions of J R, into a fictional heroine in whatever larger thing McColl was part of,¹⁶ into a passing one-off marker of Gibbs’s pathologies in J R. It’s unclear at what point Rose-as-actual-character dropped out of J R, but all the drafts of her story here are written in conventional prose that matches the novel’s earliest preserved material.¹⁷ At least one very early J R note gives her a key schematic relation to the novel’s two core characters: “Bast the romantic seeking ‘reality’ & Rose is unreal & JR is unreal.” But while the notes about her relation to Gibbs (who unlike Bast has no roots in Sensation) indicate that she kept a foothold as J R took over as Gaddis’s main project, she seems not to have survived far into the novel’s drafting.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Both texts earn a passing mention in a completed novel. Gibbs’s creation and reading of “Rose” in J R is mentioned above. In The Recognitions, amid the narration of Reverend Gwyon’s death and the transport of his ashes, someone is reading a novel called SENSATION.¹⁸

In the August 1956 letter-to-self that copyrights the basic idea for J R, Gaddis says that “the book just now is provisionally entitled both Sensation and J R” (Letters 269). He also notes that “I started to develop this idea into a short novel no later than March 1956.” As Elliot Yates’s contribution to the present special journal issue documents, February and March 1956 were when Gaddis did his first corporate writing with Textron and picked up an interest in the narrative possibilities of “diversified” corporate expansion. Since the Sensation prospectus draft makes no mention of young JR or the business world (even though its Bast material later merges with J R), this suggests that it dates to a time before the Textron work shifted Gaddis’s interest from the performing artist’s family to the business world. That the 1956 letter maintains Sensation as a possible title should not indicate that Gaddis still thought of J R as the same family-disintegration Recognitions-counterpart project that the Sensation prospectus describes. Similarly, that he had the title in mind early enough to include in The Recognitions doesn’t mean that he had already developed the prospectus’s prospective plot by then. The earliest the prospectus could date is to the immediate aftermath of The Recognitions’s publication, since it mentions the novel’s reviews; other planned notes might date slightly earlier, as some are filed along with correspondence and other material dated in later 1954. The “Rose in Print” material, by contrast, may well have been parallel to work on J R as late as the early 1960s, since it is only at that point that we find datable J R material really distinct from the “Rose” plans and drafts.

In the few Sensation notes filed with the “Rose” material, we find two important links between Sensation, “Rose in Print,” and the next two book projects for which Gaddis would actually get contracts: J R and Agapē Agape. The note on “Sensation Openings” mentions “Rose as it stands (& into Bast) […] Children at seashore & Body washed in […]Dream of Rose (& intimacy),” which suggests that some version of “Rose” has already been written and confirms that the name “Bast” was part of the Sensation plan. Meanwhile, a pencil note on the “Sensation a novel” page of notes says simply “Agape [sic] Agape,” which—if we date the Sensation project to before Gaddis sent himself the prospectus for the basic J R plot in 1956—may be the earliest use of this phrase/title in Gaddis’s archive.¹⁹

The obvious connections between Sensation and J R are supplemented by “Rose” material in which the Rose character was meant to interact with characters who exist in J R but not in the (Bast?) family-centric model of Sensation. A possibly later pencil note at the bottom of one page of “Rose” notes says “REVIEW this [out/cut] Rose situation, cf Stella; [illegible] & pheasants; Rose gbbs dghtr’ Gibbs & Aimée […] a final of apotheosis to it all in sx seq f VIII.” While this is mainly cryptic, it establishes that “Rose in Print” survived into the J R vision of characters like Gibbs and Amy Joubert, and that in casting about for a place to locate Rose in the newer project, Gaddis considered making her Gibbs’s daughter, leaving her to wreak her harms on other men, even as Stella continued to do this to Gibbs himself. By the time the novel is completed, those of Rose’s characteristics like her “witch”y charisma that do survive do so as qualities of Stella, such that it makes most sense to read Gibbs’s writing about “Rose” as sublimations of his attitude to Stella.

“Rose”’s pheasant scene, as mentioned above, is part of the unpublished Once at Antietam which was then repurposed in A Frolic of His Own and framed as a part that Oscar, the play’s author in that novel, is especially proud of. A scrap of paper in the files notes a connection to J R characters “Gibbs/Eigen cont. to pheasant sc. Which also appears in Antietam.” So it seems Gaddis was planning to use the scene across projects, and also dates this scrap to after he had Once at Antietam underway, so 1959 at earliest.

A pencil note on the final “Rose” draft (in which “Rose in Print” has become a text-within-the-text) mentions “Freya goddess of love” and some notes about the male norse gods killing each other, and links this to “B’s libretto” (II 100), presumably some indication of what music Bast in this early version would be composing. In J R, Gibbs compares Stella to Freya (282).

The figure of the “self who could do more” who serves as the explicit bridge between The Recognitions and Sensation in the prospectus is a crucial one throughout all of Gaddis’s novels, most often in the characters with most autobiographical relevance. It then becomes most explicit in Agapē Agape where Gaddis quotes the same line of Michaelangelo that he does in the Sensation prospectus (and which he had already quoted in The Recognitions).

Meanwhile, to round out the relevance of the fragments of “Rose in Print” to every subsequent Gaddis novel, a pencil note on the text-within-a-story draft suggests changing the character’s name from McColl to “McCandles” (II 99). “McCandless” then, 25 years later, becomes the name for a central figure in Carpenter’s Gothic.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The archives on these proto-J R projects compile a lot of evidence of what Gaddis read and wanted to cite in the mid-1950s, both in literature and in music. For example, in addition to the explicit sources and citations mentioned above, one single note-page mentions Hawkes’ The Cannibal and Svevo’s As a Man Grows Older as cases for the note-claim “Life is a Dream,” then “Dvorak’s 4th, Bthoven’s 6th” as musical conversation topics for a “dumpy catbird.” The archives here, however fragmentary, will thus be of interest to anyone interested in Gaddis’s influences, sources, and intertexts.

Title(s): Theatre / Fictions / The Late Mr Slyke / Concentrate on the Real Story

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

Genre: Projected at different times as novel or as play, about cinema and film-making.

Date: 1979-1981.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: Typed “synopsis” in two versions (incomplete 1-page called “THEATRE” and complete but annotated 2 pages headed “TITLES: THEATRE”). Ten pages of typed notes and fourteen pages of handwritten notes, some continued on reverses.

Description & Analysis: This disparate set of notes, with no extended drafts, concerns a potential play or novel that would orbit the making of a film, extending into something between a murder mystery, a meditation on collaborative creativity, and an exploration of the relationship between fiction and truth.

While none of the materials are clearly dated, it seems likely that this set of plans took shape after Gaddis’s second round of (failed) attempts to find a producer for either a J R film adaptation or his western screenplay, which was circulated under the name Dirty Tricks in 1977-8 (see entry in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide). Gaddis explains the planned project directly in a 1979 letter to his daughter, as “some bad news rich people making a movie […] an inept murder plot or 2” (Letters 425). By July 1980 a letter to Tom LeClair mentions “a book already but barely started” (Letters 435), which seems to be before there is any clear archival indication that what we now know as Carpenter’s Gothic was underway, but suggests more progress than is indicated by the lack of archived drafts for the “movie… murder” project. A page of notes containing the fragment “Again the entire corpus of US law as $oriented: the Ron Gillela case as PARASISITM [sic] utterly legitimated” dates at least some work on this project after the Gillela events of 1981. A late 1979 latter to John Napper refers to a novel rooted in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 “That time of year…” which does become a major source for Carpenter’s Gothic, so it’s unclear whether Gaddis was working on these two projects in parallel, or whether his “movie… murder” story also had the autumnal ruins of Sonnet 73 hovering over it before Carpenter’s Gothic came into being. While we can’t be certain about dates, this project seems to have derived from Gaddis’s own experiences with the periphery of the film industry while shopping Dirty Tricks, and to have been sidelined as he either invented or prioritised Carpenter’s Gothic beginning in the early 1980s. Elements of this “movie… murder” work then make their way into Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own (see below).

The archive traces at least four differing versions of the project, with differing prospective titles, and even different planned genres (play, or novel). The basic idea of a murder-mystery related to the film industry evolves, losing the murder focus, to become more about the process of film making. At some point, Gaddis decided that the machinations—whether these be of murder-motivating financial contracts, or film-production interest-wrangling—would be about the adaptation of a book into a film, and that the book in question would be one of his own unpublished drama projects: either the play Once at Antietam or the western screenplay Dirty Tricks (see entries in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide). The most definite articulation of the overall theme of the eventual project comes in a “synopsis” headed “(TITLES: THEATRE; TITLE OF THE MOVIE (NOT ANT),”²⁰ which sets out a project “about an attempt to create a coherent fiction—one with the logic of a beginning, middle and end— from the chaos of the conflicting interests, temperaments, and viewpoints of the characters of the book, all of which are dominated and distorted by money.”

The most coherent sequence we have been able to postulate for these four versions is as follows.

The (likely) initial model, in notes mentioning the title “Concentrate on the Real Story,” simply sees the film industry as a viable setting for a murder story concerning an unscrupulous producer taking advantage of the opacity of the various contracts on which the creation of a film depends. This corresponds to Gaddis’s summary in the 1979 letter to his daughter. Notes here treat the project as a play, which begins “K has taken girl to country house (lent him by writer?).” The “girl” in question would be called Liz, and the plot would partly revolve around abuse of her younger sister by this unilaterally exploitative producer figure.

The project then seems to evolve to concern the producer’s suicide, with the plot revolving around untangling his legal and financial legacy: the title “The Late Mr Slyke” (the name of the producer in this set of notes) corresponds to this era, also, for the first time, raising the issue of how reality and the works of fiction we treat as industries interact: “Point: is the woman’s covering for the man’s suicide in Real Life or the Fiction?” Somewhere within this era the interest of film as a collaborative artform and industry seems to have come to the fore, and we see plans and notes focusing less on Slyke’s viciousness and the murder plot, more on the contractual and artistic complexity of adapting works from single-author media into multi-maker film. Gaddis seems to have vacillated between whether his Faust Western or Once at Antietam should provide the source text in this model, but here is the germ of the way A Frolic of His Own eventually repurposes this old work.

This batch of notes seems closest to what finally became Frolic, as under the name “FICTIONS (NOVEL),” we hear of a character somewhat like Oscar: “The writer, at first elated at his book’s ‘second chance’ as a film, goes from fighting to reserve its integrity in the script to becoming as venal as anyone.” The writer’s concerns would have corresponded to many of Gaddis’s own archivally-preserved concerns about potential adaptations of J R: “Now they are going to ‘novelize ~~him~~ the movie, different title &c & no mention of him puts his novel out of business entirely where he’d hoped for big paperback sale.” The action here would have happened mainly on the film set rather than in the world around it, with conflicts and role-blurring among all the contributors to a film (for example the writer interceding to yell “cut” and leading the director to quit), the script being mysteriously improved from day to day with no one knowing who is making the changes, and so on. Gaddis’s interest in the relationship between fiction-making, the individual writer’s imagination, and the complex collaborations of a film project leads him to envision various unspecified formal blurrings of his own narrative levels. The differing fictions of the plots of source-text and film-adaptation, the fiction-building lives of the people around the film, and the ongoing fiction-reliant project of the film plot would increasingly saturate each other. Structural notes along these lines suggest “That the fiction must gradually take over [...] the end plays upon/resolves the beginning ie the end being the last rewrite” while in “the early part the real informs the fiction; as it progresses, the reverse sets in.” Gaddis had a final vision of the significance of this plot: “POINT: It must be the Fiction which prevails (but for being more true).” What that “prevailing” would look like, the archived documents do not show.

The longer fuller synopsis titled simply “THEATRE” would not involve suicide or complexities about collaborative fiction-making, but rather end up as a divorce story as the wife came to understand how Schnick had been defrauding her: “In the end, aware that if she puts up the rest of the money and the project succeeds, he will leave her, she refuses, destroys him finally but keeps the wreckage for her own: what she is saying is, unless his success goes with my success I don’t want it.” It may be an attempt to simplify away from the growing metafictional concerns.

Yet these come back in the incomplete “THEATRE: TITLE OF THE MOVIE” synopsis, where all the varying elements and emphases—from the highly metafictive to the psychology of marriage and manipulation—seem to be most resolved and balanced. It begins by establishing the character of “Schnick” (no longer “Slyke”) as “a man of numerous schemes gone wrong” who has “no experience whatsoever as a producer” but has the option on a book and needs to make it into a film. The novel would then concern the production of this film, itself not shot in sequence, leading to the difficulty of “creat[ing] a coherent fiction,” which would then spill out into the form of the novel itself, film-making being “the constant dislocating reference point for the real story, dislocating since the film constantly threatens to supersede the reality—as in the end it does.” This document thus contains all the elements that the various notes to the project touch on, and seems like the final synthesis before Gaddis moved on. A note at the top of the page impels—presumably to Gaddis himself— “Remember the purpose of this synopsis”—but its exact audience and purpose remain unclear: there is no indication that it was ever circulated to agents, producers, or anyone else.

The lack of dates, drafts, or anything on continuous pages in this part of the archive means that any such attempt to construe “the logic of a beginning, middle and end— from [its own] chaos” must be very tentative. The most plausible alternative timeline for the project’s development would see the “Concentrate on the Real Story” notes—about the murder mystery and a Liz at a borrowed writer’s house—coming at the end, not the beginning: dating to after the synopses (which do after all use the phrase “the real story”). The lack of a fully developed producer-character in these notes would then reflect a move away from the Schnick figure, rather than an early stage in his conceptualization, and a more immediate picking up of “Liz” and the borrowed house as Gaddis shifted his work to Carpenter’s Gothic and temporarily left the film-adaptation idea behind. A definitive chronology will require the discovery of further documents. Either way, this previously unknown part of the archive provides an early genesis for the basic ideas of A Frolic of His Own and, less substantively, Carpenter’s Gothic.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The plot idea concerning a character called Liz removing with an obnoxious male partner to a house possibly lent them by a writer of course foreshadows Carpenter’s Gothic. So, less directly, does the interest in “fictions” as a way of life: one of McCandless’s preoccupations in the eventual novel is the way that people cling to fictions no matter how absurd to get them through their lives, while Elizabeth Booth (the novel’s Liz) has a much more sympathetic attitude to this habit. Liz’s husband Paul, meanwhile, is certainly “a man of numerous schemes gone wrong,” so may have grown out of Schnick.

The more direct and obvious successor to this project, though, is A Frolic of His Own, in which the adaptation of Oscar’s Once at Antietam into a film embroils him in legal and artistic complexities far beyond his romantic conception of the relationship between a writer’s creative work and their rewards. This part of the archive shows that the basic idea of salvaging Gaddis’s own unproduced dramatic work for a plot about the complexities of adaptation actually precedes Carpenter’s Gothic. “[U]sing the WESTERN instead of ANTIETAM” might have led either to a very different version of Frolic, or to a companion-novel that salvaged his other lost feature-length drama work. Some of the fundamental interests of this earlier project—the dominance of the money-motive, the challenges to artistic self-conception that come from entering into a necessarily collaborative-industrial art medium, the proliferating nature of contracts and entanglements—become Frolic’s central themes.

Furthermore, various minor but specific plot points and images of the eventual Frolic have their origin in this early iteration of its themes. Schnick’s opening characterization, for example, would have been “in an argument with his wife’s trust office, over demands that Schnick fire his cook who has raped a neighbor’s maid,” a demand he refuses because “the man can cook” and he likes to play backgammon with him. This incident appears much less prominently in Frolic as a passing characterization of one of the vacuous socialite Trish’s social circle. A note for a carving with “‘praying hands’ ↘ taking a dive,” meanwhile, resurfaces in Frolic as a detail of setting in judge Thomas Crease’s office, remembered and remarked upon by numerous characters. From incidental images to characterizations of the moneyed social world to the complexities of transmedial adaptation to the basic idea of repurposing Gaddis’s own unproduced dramatic work for novelistic material, this archive shows that the foundational elements of what would become Frolic in the 1990s had been developed as early as the late-1970s and early 1980s.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The letter to Sarah Gaddis implies that the novel was intended to be “comparatively short & brisk & ‘accessible’ to the paperback audience reading level” (Letters 425). Carpenter’s Gothic ended up “comparatively short” and more “accessible” in terms of limited narrative elements,²¹ but perhaps not any more so than Gaddis’s other novels in terms of “reading level.” The aspiration to write something simple and accessible here may be comparable to the documented early plans for Sensation or J R to become “short” works.

William Gaddis’s Unpublished Fiction: Completed Stories (Alphabetical)

Title: The Ambassadors

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.1

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  A complete four-page draft on watermarked “COPY” paper with light pencil corrections. Folder also includes three pages of typescript fragments, typescript notes, and holograph notes.

The Story: The narrator’s two uncles from Indiana form a rivalry as cornetists in their father’s family orchestra before the older one, Earn, goes into the army (at fifteen) during the Spanish American War. The younger, Jan, joins a traveling musical show that features hound dogs and then to Boston to entertain inmates at an insane asylum. Earn ends up in Boston too and they reunite long enough for Earn to help Jan get better clothes. Jan ends up in London with John Phillips Sousa’s touring band where he encounters Earn again in fancy clothes with a sophisticated manner. They tour London together and end up at St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Jan realizes his brother is seeing for the first time.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Intra-familial rivalries around music were to be the narrative core of the superceded novel project Sensation, which evolved into J R (see entry on Sensation above). The Bast family of Sensation and then J R are thus the closest thing in Gaddis’s published work to the family of “The Ambassadors.”

The story might also be of interest to scholars pursuing Gaddis’s representations of trans-continental or urban life: The Recognitions takes Paris as the European counterpart metropolis to its New York setting, a parallel role to that played by London here.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Joseph Tabbi’s Gaddis biography frames its first chapter around the Family Orchestra history of Gaddis’s own family.

Title: Boy Meets Horn

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.18 (Short Stories: English A-4a)

Date: January 20, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Seven-page typescript with moderate corrections and notations and comments by instructor.

The Story: Chris Griffin is a successful jazz trumpeter who has amassed a large gambling debt which some thugs come to collect on. Meantime a young woman gets his autograph and swoons over him, making her boyfriend jealous. The next night the thugs take care of Chris.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? One of the stories written for Harvard class English A4a. Instructor gives this story a B.

Title: Castle in the Sand

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.3

Date: May 14, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: A complete six-page typescript draft with light corrections on last page. Title and author’s name in pen on first page. Also includes three pages of heavily corrected, unfinished typescript; five pages of an earlier complete typescript draft with grade, comments, light corrections, and dated "25 may ‘44”; and one page of typescript fragments.

The Story: A young boy named Davy is building a sandcastle around his sunbathing mother. He confirms with her that they will go to the parade tomorrow and to the top of the monument to see the ships coming in. His father is mentioned briefly. A sailor comes over to talk to the mother while Davy is getting more wet sand. He gets Davy excited by promising him a tour of a battleship for him and his mother tomorrow. She hurries Davy to go and after the sailor leaves Davy asks if Daddy was like him. She says his father was an officer and then informs him they won’t go to the parade after all, only to the monument. The story ends with him noticing her gazing out over the sea.

The implication, via the name “Davy” and its link to Davy Jones’s Locker, is presumably that the father died at sea. The castle-making thus functions as a metaphor for keeping people safe from dismaying knowledge.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: While the story is not strictly focalized through Davy (it is written in the third person and occasionally describes other characters’ perspectives), it is one of the fuller attempts to represent a child’s experience and worldview in Gaddis’s fiction before J R.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Given an “A” grade, and with presumably professorial comments: unlike some of Gaddis’s other preserved Harvard stories it’s not explicit what class this was written for.

Title: The Coke Finish

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.4

Date: early 1954, perhaps begun by late 1953

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Includes two complete but differing typescript drafts with light corrections, both with “Brandt & Brandt” folders. Folder also includes circa thirty pages of typescript and holograph fragments, draft pages and notes. Also includes four typed notes from Bernice Cozzens of Brandt & Brandt to Gaddis, with 1954 dates.

The Story: A “head filer” at an insurance broker is taking the elevator down for his lunch break and then stops to look at the bowler hat he admires every day in a store window, only to find that it has been replaced by something green with feathers. He ends up leaving work for the day and rides the subway home after apparently buying the bowler hat and then an issue of The Wall Street Journal. These subsequently result in him having something in common with Atkins, one of the partners at the firm. One day Atkins fights with Leak, the other partner, and quits. Transfixed by Bacon’s hat, Atkins encourages Bacon to join him in a new venture.

The Coke-advertising allusion in the title has less to do with specific plot events, and more seemingly with the story’s deadpan embodiment of the advertising promise that buying what you want can or will make you the kind of person who fate and advancement smile upon.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The office scenes and lightly satirical business machinations at the end offer commentary on corporate culture, which will of course come to dominate J R. Compared to earlier stories, some of the basic descriptive prose is beginning to approach the familiar extra-sensory style of the novels.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Filed with a rejection letter from This Week dated March 30 1954. Listed along with a variety of different pseudonyms: one of the two full drafts is attributed to “John Trask” (used for other projects of the era, like “No Sale”), the other is under Gaddis’s own name. Other partial drafts list potential pseudonyms like “A. Sinon” and “Philip Kanhed.”²²

The date here is significant: the set of “commercial” stories Gaddis wrote and sent out under pseudonyms in late 1954 and early 1955, as well as the bulk of his TV proposals, date to after he had completed The Recognitions and sent it off to the publishers. This, with substantial drafting done before final versions in March 1954, must have been started while Gaddis was still at work finishing his novel. So while the other stories reflect a need to find paying work after completing the novel, this one shows that even before the novel was finished he was considering the option of writing more conventional and presumably (though not actually) more easily publishable short work. The potential pseudonyms listed here thus likely reflect a deliberate attempt to avoid conditioning the release of “William Gaddis”’s debut novel by the simultaneous release of very different work under the same name.

Title: A Date with an Angel

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.5

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Complete seven-page typescript draft with no corrections except for one word “xx”-ed out with the typewriter.

The Story: Set in South Falls, North Carolina, the story is about Harry MacElvarr who showed up one day in a long, very low car—a spectacle at first for the residents of the small town. Harry was raised by a widowed mother and widowed aunt and did not require much from them or from life in general. He always wore the same ill-fitting tweed suit and fell in love with Laura Rhodes, a girl one year younger than him and opposite in appearance and demeanour. He had been hoping to marry her but they had a squabble over Tristan, which seemed to be the only thing in life (besides Laura) that had made an impression on him. A distant cousin (so she claims) then stops in on his way home from the service to Grand Rapids, and she disappears with him. Shortly thereafter is when Harry appears with the mysterious, strange car; we hear that seven months later he drove it off a dangerous but well-known curve after speeding down main street.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The opening image of someone turning up in a surprisingly fancy car aiming to make a splashy impression on the people of the hometown he left recurs in “No Sale” (see entry below). See also the shared car and car-crash plot elements of “The Myth Remains” (entry below).

Title: Desire Without Hope

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.6

Date: May 4, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Four-page typescript with minimal corrections and comments/grade written on back.

The Story: A satirical tale of the writer William Saroyan crossing the threshold of death, feeling very positive about life and the afterlife, and thinking he is entering heaven.

It’s unclear what motivated Gaddis to write about Saroyan. Saroyan is known now for pioneering a certain kind of minimalism, and his early stories available at this time have a certain fantastical editorialising sententiousness that would have annoyed the later Gaddis of J R or Carpenter’s Gothic, though many of Gaddis’s short stories of this era have this tendency themselves. There may even have been direct influence: a letter to Gaddis’s mother two years before this story was written concludes “have gotten a couple of W. Saroyan’s books—Wonderful!” (Letters 35).

What happened in the interim to make him more skeptical? Saroyan won an academy award for The Human Comedy in 1943, a screenplay based on a rejected novel.²³ Having rejected prizes for principled reasons in the late 1930s, Saroyan became a very public prize-gatherer from this award onward, and Gaddis’s story might be read as satirizing either the artist who tells tales of struggle to win a comfortable life, or those who plead artistic integrity until rewards are dangled. The afterlife, after all, is where our works are judged, and the story mocks blithe certainty about how audiences will receive us, as well as the cosy relationship with judges that lets some be so confident.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Written for class, and graded (A). Subtitled, “…upon the projected demise of William Saroyan”: the instructor’s grading note comments “I also dislike him but isn’t this a bit unfair?”

See “Fable of A Fabricator” (below) for another literary-afterlife story.

Title: Different Worlds

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.7

Date: [January] 13, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Six-page typescript with minimal corrections and comments in margins by professor.

The Story: Told in first person, set mostly at an all-night restaurant, with three characters: the narrator and Peter—two artists—and an unnamed woman who has contempt for them. They walk her home to protect her from a group of rowdy drunks in the restaurant.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The all-night setting and roving drunks are a feature of New York artist life in The Recognitions: this is the one of Gaddis’s short stories that most directly explores that setting.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Summary comments and “B” grade written on verso of last page

Title: Es Brillig War

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.11

Date: Undated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Fourteen-page typescript with minimal corrections.

The Story: Peter and Wendy return from a peaceful weekend in the Connecticut countryside to their home in New York and wish they were the only people there, only to wake up the next day to find that they are. They wander around enjoying the city all to themselves but by the end of the day worry it will be like this forever. A wrong-number phone call appears to signify that things are going back to normal, much to their relief.

The title is from the standard German Translation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”: it maintains the non-word “brillig” from the original, and the other two words of Gaddis’s title translate Carroll’s “‘twas.” The resulting use of English word “War” may give an interpretive cue, especially if this was written along with most of Gaddis’s other short fiction during World War Two. If others are away at war, it might briefly be pleasant to live in a less congested place, but the persisting absence can only be ominous.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A, though the proto-Recognitions Ducdame is another Gaddis project to draw its title from a deliberately nonsensical literary nonce-word.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Expanding on the Jabberwocky allusion to classic British children’s literature, the names Peter and Wendy come from Peter Pan, another story of temporary escape from the presence of others and the passing of time.

For another war-context story of disappearance, loss, pleasure, and persistence, see Gaddis’s unpublished play “Cartes Sur Table” (entry in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).

Title(s): Escape From the East / Some Shattered April / Roses are Green at Night

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.12 for “Escape,” 82.21 for “April” and “Roses.”

Date: Escape from the East revised between April and June 1944, earlier other-titled versions undated.

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  For “Escape From the East,” two complete, nineteen-page typescripts, moderately corrected with comments by professor. For the other-titled versions, an eight-page, single-spaced typescript with moderate corrections and no paragraph indentions or capitalization; a five-page typescript in the same format; a three-page, double-spaced incomplete typescript with no corrections.

The Story: In “Escape from the East,” a cowboy named Corry drives guests of a ranch near Tucson, AZ to Mexico for the day. Guest Flora insists Corry accompany them to the bullfight though he would rather not. They are both repulsed by the proceedings and go to a couple of bars, then around the town before they all drive back to the ranch. Flora, alone playing solitaire at the ranch house, goes outside and calls to Corry who has taken his bedroll to sleep outdoors, but no one except a horse in the barn and a rabbit in the grass hears her.

“Some Shattered April” and “Roses are Green at Night” are earlier versions of the same story (“Escape…” incorporates their corrections), with the driver called “Slim” rather than “Corry.”

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The experience of Latin cultures for visiting Americans is an important part of The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Both “Escape from the East” versions have extensive comments and grades on cover page. The “first draught / 20 april ‘44” version was given a “B” grade and the revised, "8 june ‘44” version an “A.” The latter version has “(HARVARD)” written in red ink at top. Comes with note, “Similar characters to The Final Interruption”

Title: Except Your Life Maybe

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.18 (Short Stories: English A-4a)

Date: November 4, 1943

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Five-page typescript with moderate corrections and notations and comments by instructor.

The Story: Mr. Vernor’s son Henry has died in the war and he waits to talk to his son’s friend George, who shows up but can’t bring himself to talk.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: With the breakdown of dialogue and limited interior psychological narration, the story proceeds through descriptive transitions that combine internal perspective and external world in ways that the later novels will develop.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? One of the stories written for Harvard’s English A4a. Graded B.

Title: Evelyn Ex Libris

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.13

Date: not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Two eight-page typescripts, one moderately corrected in WG’s hand, the other very lightly corrected.

The Story: A novelist recalls a young woman he knew who picked up novels and took on the persona of a character from them, but never actually finished a novel before getting distracted by a new one with a new persona.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Female characters in The Recognitions shift personae regularly, as, much more fundamentally and with name-changes, does the protagonist Wyatt.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Briefly mentioned in Crystal Alberts’s “Valuable Dregs,” which speculates that since Gaddis’s then-acquaintance Anatole Broyard later wrote of a similar character, there may be a real life source/model.

Title: The Exchange

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.14

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Eight-page typescript with very minimal typed corrections.

The Story: The narrator is sitting in his office in Aruba drinking and waiting to kill a man he does not know. He thinks back on the (possibly) coincidental events leading up to his present state, starting with meeting a man mysteriously his opposite.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Similar characters and doppelganger set-up to “The Final Interruption” (see entry below), which explains the doppelganger backstory more fully and lacks the killing plot.

Title: Fable of a Fabricator

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.15

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Two four-page typescripts, one with moderate corrections in WG’s hand and the other with none.

The Story: An afterlife tale of Pleach, a literary critic who faked his way to great accomplishments in life and now gets his wish to have written a novel of unprecedented originality only to discover he cannot share it with anyone.

The contradictory connotations of “fabrication” are important to the story: on the one hand, to fabricate is to be a real maker and doer (the “fabr” of the word’s etymology is in skilled creation), and on the other hand it has taken on the sense of unreal or deceptive, especially in the context of published untruths. The fable in this story is about the risk of flattering yourself by equivocating about what others mean when they describe you this way.

Regardless of the narrative framing of it as a supernatural punishment, meanwhile, the final situation of great achievement without a receptive audience shows Gaddis dealing imaginatively (likely in advance, though the story is undated) with what became his own self-conception and situation from the poor reception of The Recognitions onward at least until he won the National Book Award for J R.²⁴

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The fabricator is of course a consistent character/theme in all of Gaddis’s novels, with the complex relationship between fakery and real achievement especially central to The Recognitions (though it retains an organizing power all the way through to A Frolic of His Own).

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? See “Desire Without Hope” (above) for another literary-afterlife story,²⁵ and “The Rehearsal” and “The Fencing Academy” (below) for more on the problem of audiences.

Title: A Father Is Arrested

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.16, and material in 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”).

Posthumously published: see works cited.

Date: 1947-8: archive copies not dated, but Gaddis mentions in a 1948 letter to his mother that he wrote this the previous summer, and was continuing to circulate it, perhaps with further revision (Letters 132).²⁶

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  In 81.16, untitled six-page typescript with light corrections. In 82.27, about twenty loosely filed pages of draft material and notes, plus 6-page continuous draft filed separately.

The Story: Jimenez, a 68-year-old man living on the streets of a smaller remote city, is caught up in the civil war of Costa Rica. His two sons both fought, though whether for the government-communist alliance or for the “people’s army” he is never certain, and, he comes to believe after hanging around near the people’s army barracks for long enough, must be dead. Reduced to begging for shoes and food, he eventually takes on some work for the army, and when the war subsides he heads to the central city of Cartago. There, the focalization shifts to a young recently installed functionary, who, in a communication mix-up over where Jimenez got his shoes, mistakes the old man for a communist straggler and has him arrested. A visiting U.S. photojournalist captures the arrest, and shares it for an audience of millions as the capture of “a leading communist.” All dialog is rendered in Spanish, though with occasional glosses of English meaning as characters think about what they’re hearing.

Jimenez is baffled throughout: he is introduced as a model of “Christian quiescence” whose “passive intentions had been interrupted by a sudden series of events [incomprehensibly] certain in their violence.” This extends to his confusion over which side his sons fought on (he assumes that comunistas are against the Government, but the narrative explains the political alignments outside his focalization). The emphasis throughout is on the political situation as vacuous, cynical, and temporary, with Jimenez’s docile religiosity sympathetic but unequal to the task of handling such a world. As a note on a draft page in 82.27 has it, “Point: he is catholic – cannot understand intra-Catholic war.” The political skepticism and straightforward humanism is interesting in light of Gaddis’s earlier letters which rail performatively against the very mention of communism (as with a 1942 letter about a teaching assistant lending him a book on history that “turns out to be […] Marxism—enough to make me actively ill […] am going to tell him what I think of his lousy piggish socialism &c—sometimes I think he’s turned that way” (Letters 34)).²⁷ “A Father is Arrested” has none of this caricature aversion, but is more identifiably in the lineage of Gaddis’s unpublished wartime play “Cartes Sur Table,” which laments the wartime loss of beautiful enjoyable company to the dreariness of abstract political “commitment” (see entry in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide). When Jimenez joins the removal of refugees on the first train out after the war’s conclusion, his being pressed up high among the crush of train riders “made it look as if he was being abducted.” The overall implication is of the war and political conflict as a harm to the sympathetically “passive” bodily human.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: A clear source and influence for Otto’s experiences in Latin American political conflicts in The Recognitions. That novel abandons the local’s perspective as far as possible, and plays up the figure embodied by the photographer here: that of the overconfident actively interpreting foreign interloper.

Crystal Alberts judges this “the most mature—and most like his published work” of the three stories she brought out of the archives for Missouri Review (94). There are some notably well-handled formal elements worthy of the later novels (the increasingly abstracted passing of days, or the shift in perspective and pace that brings Jimenez to his fate and us to the context and vantage of the wider English-speaking world). But the painstakingly mimetic narrative of Jimenez before he takes the train, with its performatively reticent but functionally didactic narratorial interventions, is something more like an extreme of Gaddis in traditional realist mode, from which he would row back as he worked on The Recognitions.

As the story seems to have been drafted at the same time as Gaddis was abandoning work on his highly symbolic and stylized novel-project Blague, the strict realism on show here may have functioned as a kind of palate-cleanser and helped lead to the more realist novel-project Ducdame, which then regained some strangeness and non-mimetic elements as it evolved into The Recognitions. What “A Father is Arrested” has more in common with Blague than with either subsequent evolution is an explicitness about its message. Thus, with its shared material with early scenes of Ducdame, it might best be understood as one extreme (Blague at the other) of the formal-mimetic polarities between which Gaddis swung on the way to The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? One of the stories Crystal Alberts brought out of the archive for publication in the Missouri Review of 2004 (pages 109-116). It has not subsequently been discussed in other academic work.

Letters of 1950 mention annoyance at Gaddis’s agent for not trying hard enough to publish it: one reason Gaddis will sever that relationship (Letters 190, 193).

A detail in Jimenez’s temporary accommodation of “the pictures on the walls, one of a brunette girl holding a tray of American bottled drinks with a calendar three years old, and another of a blond with an armload of daffodils, for Carr’s English Biscuits” matches notes toward another story of a man out of place in Latin America, “At the Seawall” (see entry below).

Title: The Final Interruption

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.18

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Two six-page typescripts—one moderately corrected in pencil with additional notes at end; the other with very minimal corrections in pencil.

The Story: Henry Schloss is about to move from NYC to Curacao when he gets a visit from a man named Eltsac (Castle backwards: Schloss is German for castle) who is interested in his apartment and who has requested from a local bookstore the exact same obscure books that Schloss had just sold him. He also just bought the same car that Schloss had. After the man leaves, Schloss immediately feels the need to speak to him further, and runs out to find him only to be accidentally run over by him. Eltsac then veers into a pillar, killing himself. A policeman investigating the events notices a coincidence in the names.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: None of the published fictions work with so literal a model of the doppelganger myth, but mirrorings and pairings are crucial organizing devices in The Recognitions, and less determinately in the later novels too.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Comes with note “short version of The Exchange” (see entry above), but beyond the shared doppelganger trope is different in framing, characters, story, and also differs by being in third person prose.

Title: Gorland at Large

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.1

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: A five-page lightly-corrected typescript, plus an earlier draft of five pages, heavily corrected and with other holograph notes.

The Story: Gorland as a boy of nine shoplifted cheap fishing tackle, and then his cousin stole a pocket knife from him. This sense that even those who steal for fun can be stolen from fills him with disappointment. As an adult in the narrative present, he meets a young woman who tells him that her friends are of two kinds: those who feel shame when they steal and those who don’t: Gorland feels sadness at this vision of a world of thieves. Gorland as an adult is a collector of books and finds out that an unpleasant bookshop owner has somehow stolen some of his, making him wonder if all the books in her shop are stolen. He thinks of different ways to shoplift a book, and takes a new standard edition of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love on his way out as she is distracted.

Works of Love is Kierkegaard’s most direct engagement with the concept of love-across-humankind: that is, agapē. The relevance is presumably that the model of human relations in which everyone steals from everyone else as a way of getting even and balancing their debts is a purely inverted counterpart to an Agapeic world of interaction through love.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Ends with direct reference to a theorist of agapē, and hence a relevant text for Agapē Agape. A character in the shop asks for a book of poetry by WH Auden, whose early poems (eg “A Summer Night” or “Lullaby”) often suggest the precedence of love for all people over love for individuals.

Also a mention of central character “felt for a moment like Raskolnikov” (3), so another source for Gaddis’s explicit reference to the 19th-century Russians.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? N/A

Title: Gunsmoke Bride

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.2 and 81.9 (Short Fiction: Loose - Early).

Date: Not dated, but cover page indicates an address (79 Horatio St) where Gaddis lived from late 1945 to early 1947

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: A 19-page typescript with very minimal corrections, plus (in 81.9) a 16-page draft missing its first page.

The Story: Part I: A cowboy named Led is sleeping in an Arizona hotel room near the Mexican border when he’s awakened by another person getting in his bed asking where Tom is. The other man is drunk and won’t budge so Led moves to the room next door, falls asleep again, but is awakened by another man entering this room thinking he is someone named Quent, but seeing he’s not, leaves immediately. Then at near dawn the sheriff pounds on the door and informs Led there’s a dead man in his rightful room next door.

Part II: Led is in a jail cell wondering about Quent and Tom. He tricks the guard and escapes and goes to a local bar to see what he can find out to help clear his name. He happens to meet the “Tom” who entered his room second: after meeting Tom’s daughter, Led talks to him about his backstory in Wyoming, where he was similarly framed for a murder. They hatch a scheme to save Tom’s ranch (and daughter) by signing it over to Led.

Part III: Led and Tom go to see the ranch then to the notary to sign the deed over. The next day Led gets apprehended by the sheriff. With his daughter Betty’s help Tom tricks the sheriff and the greedy landowner Ebright and busts Led out, securing his freedom indefinitely. Led and Tom ride out to the river where the ranch land is.

Part IV: Led and Tom get to the ranch house, and as expected Ebright and his henchmen lay siege. Tom eventually gets fatally shot and Led gets hit in the shoulder. As he loses consciousness, he is still trading shots with Ebright, who has lost all his henchmen in the fight. Then an unexpected further volley of shots is accompanied by with someone demanding Ebright surrender.

Part V: Led wakes up in the back room of the bar with Betty and Jeff Adkins looking over him. He says he needs to go travel to his father but they convince him to stay on at his new ranch. Jeff will send for Led’s father and he can make it down for Led to marry Betty! Yee haw! The End

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A for published works, though this is the most fully developed conventional western in Gaddis’s oeuvre until his screenplay Dirty Tricks (see entry in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide, especially Gaddis’s 1970s comments on his exhaustion with the western genre).

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Attributed to pseudonym “Robert Younger” but with a cover page with WG’s name and address (79 Horatio St. / N Y C), and with an agency’s (Long, Bloch & Long) front and back cover.

Title: Henry is Back

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.3

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes, though perhaps not revised.

Extent of preserved material: Eleven pages of corrected typescript (paper watermarked COPY), seemingly divided between six of a complete draft, and five more of holograph and typescript fragments.

The Story: Mrs. Parks is laid up in bed with an injured knee. Mrs. Kranz is keeping her company while they wait for Henry, Parks’s son and a WWII bomber machine gunner veteran, to return. Then Tommy and Bruce (Henry’s friends?) arrive with a stuffed baby seal about which they debate whether it is real or fake, alive or dead.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Thanks to Steven Moore for the information that the names here are drawn from Gaddis’s social circle: “Henry Parke was a high school friend of WG’s […] Tommy and Bruce were the sons of Helen Parker ” (personal email from Moore to Ali Chetwynd, Sept 30 2023). Helen Parker was a romantic interest of Gaddis’s in 1946, her sons old enough to read: this may have been written for them.

Title(s): In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam / Arma Virumque

Location in archive (Box.Folder): “In Dreams…” has its own folder in 82.4, “Arma Virumque” is in 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”).

“In Dreams…” was posthumously published (see works cited).

Date: “Arma Virumque” dated 10 feb ’47, “In Dreams…” August 1947

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: “In Dreams…” is an Eleven-page typescript with minimal corrections and a dated cover page; a further five-page typescript draft with corrections, plus one discontinuous typed draft page, are in 82.27.²⁸ “Arma Virumque” preserves a complete three-page draft, and seven pages of fragmentary drafts, some of the annotations to which are adopted in the three-page version. The three-page draft has name, address, and date.

The Story: An early self-contained version of Recktall Brown’s death-scene in The Recognitions, though without “Brown” as a character. At a party, a young boy and a woman called Christine Ludington (loosely characterised in “Arma Virumque,” in “In Dreams…” more overtly the beautiful and sophisticated object of men’s desire) are refusing to drink martinis while the men of the party get drunk and push the boy to discuss paintings in the antique-furnished room. He tries to identify figures in each painting that might correspond to Faust and Mephistopheles. The host, drunkenly encouraged to put on an antique suit of armour from his collection, reaches the top of the stairs, and then crashes down them to what seems to be his death. The spectacle of his face behind the open visor is the ending of “Arma Virumque”: “It was as if they had all expected to see the slim face of an Italian knight, his battle interrupted by a fall from his horse, and were being mocked by a thick and bleeding face which none of them knew” (3).

The longer draft of “Arma Virumque” includes germs of the Faust discussion that is more extended and important in “In Dreams…” as well as discussion about theatre, and how the tangled strings of a “fly” might link stage people to marionettes.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: This story obviously prefigures the Recognitions scene in which Recktall Brown dresses up in his antique suit of armour and crashes down his stairs to his death. Details like the German feet on the otherwise Italian suit of armour survive directly into the novel.

The early date of “Arma Virumque,” when contrasted with the dates at which Gaddis moved through Blague and Ducdame to The Recognitions, suggests that this scene/image may have been the originary germ of the entire Brown/Valentine plot. Ducdame in its fullest versions does have the character of Brown, though mainly figured as a sociable anthologist rather than a forger (Wyatt’s forgery career happens almost entirely offstage as Ducdame operates through Otto’s point of view). Nothing else in the archive seems to date an image or character from the Recktall Brown plot earlier than “Arma Virumque.” Gaddis thus seems to have had this short scene in mind even before he made real progress on Ducdame, and then to have found a place for it in his forger-patron plot of Recognitions, building much of Recktall Brown’s place in the novel outward from the setting of this story. The introductory discussion about Faust in the longer initial draft, meanwhile, also helps flesh out Gaddis’s frequent comments about the Faustian roots of The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand Madam” was posthumously published in Ninth Letter in 2007 and republished in Harper’s in 2008.

“Arma Virumque”’s main draft is headed with a note to “Index to The Recognitions.”

The Latin title translates as “arms and the man.”

Title: An Interview

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.5

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Three-page typescript with light corrections.

The Story: A man wants to buy a gun permit for self-defense but is refused and he worries that now he won’t be able to get one “in secret” because they will be watching him.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? N/A

Title: Jake’s Dog

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.6

Posthumously published: see works cited.

Date: Not dated, but cover page indicates an address (79 Horatio St) where Gaddis lived from late 1945 to early 1947

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Five-page typescript with undated cover page.²⁹

The Story: Mrs. Fournier and her husband Jake have lived with many dogs, but on moving to retirement (away from Jake’s “native climate” of British Columbia, or wherever it was that he had made his money in lumber”) they take only one with them, the vast young great dane Boxer. Jake swiftly dies, leaving his wife and dog to co-exist in the house, she feeling no affinity with this dog compared to the others they have owned. Many ominous mentions are made of Boxer’s huge mouth. Time passes—“[e]ach of them grew older alone”—until, with Boxer past the age most great danes die, Mrs Fournier brings a small “unattractive” stray dog called Biddie into the house, feeding it unwisely from Boxer’s dish.

Boxer’s deliberateness eventually turns to murder, and he is left under threat of shooting, but uncaught roams the night where he is “practically unseeable, except for his eyes, which glowed in answer whenever any light was near.” This ending both stresses Boxer’s essential embodiment of a certain kind of “answer”ing loyalty (persisting beyond death or the age of expected death, incomprehensible to outsiders however close they may get), and conjures the supernatural visions from Celtic myths of immortal bad-news-harbinging night-dogs with glowing eyes.

A tightly written story with a sure consistent tone, limited but coherent characterization, and a lot of implication packed into its few pages, “Jake’s Dog” is well worth its posthumous publication.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The Recognitions and J R contain memorably characterised cats, but it is not until Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own (with a comparably supernatural bit-part in the western screenplay Dirty Tricks) that Gaddis will write significant dogs again. Alberts notes that the story has some relation to “elements of the Faust myth” (“Three Early Stories…” 94) which are also the obvious source of the black dog in Faust parody Dirty Tricks.

A rare female central consciousness in Gaddis’s work, and hence of some relevance to Carpenter’s Gothic, which also features a mysterious dog whose presence Liz finds no good omen.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? One of the stories Crystal Alberts brought out of the archive for publication in the Missouri Review of 2004 (pages 96-98). It has not subsequently been discussed elsewhere.

A rare Gaddis story to stress Canadian location.

Title: A Matter of Necessity

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.9 (Short Fiction: “Early – Loose”); draft material in 82:27 (Short Stories: “Unfinished”)

Date: Fullest draft dated 25th July 1947, rejection letter July 31st.

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Complete six-page typescript in 81:9; three draft pages and rejection letter in 82:27.

The Story: A woman has a horse shot for being hard to ride and having once thrown her off. She would like the killing bullet extracted to adorn a necklace. She asks for another horse to be brought out for her to ride, and while she’s getting ready she flirts with a seemingly unresponsive worker. The throwing horse is dispatched in unsentimental detail. As the woman goes back out after her flirtatious dressing, she backs into the door of another horse that leans out and bites her shoulder. Her action seems unwise as it’s stipulated that everyone knows that this horse nips whoever he can. She claims to be very hurt, though it seems her jacket wasn’t pierced. She demands that the worker she was just flirting with drive her back to her house so she can recover, and we end on the supervisor watching them drive easily off together, thinking that he won’t get that worker back until after lunch and wondering how to cover.

The story works through what is not said, as it raises the likelihood that the woman deliberately got harmlessly bitten as a pretext to get the worker back to her house. This doesn’t explain his own lack of response when they were alone as she donned her equipment. Which raises the possibility that the bite may have been a genuine accident that she quickly took advantage of. The title, drawn from her demand to be taken home immediately, seems to link the story’s sexual underpinning to its treatment of that great necessity death, with both the killing of the horse and the return home being contrivances of this woman’s whim, raising the question of whether the whim itself has any relation to biological necessity.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: A rare early example of a Gaddis story substantially focalized around a female character (though it ends watching her depart through her male employee’s eyes), so may be of interest to readers of Carpenter’s Gothic, which also conveys Liz’s perspective without any first-person and with very limited free-indirect interiority.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The draft materials in 82.27 have differing titles. The original title is “Three Horses, Two Men, and a Woman” crossed out and pencilled to “A Case of Necessity,” which is itself crossed out for “A Matter of Necessity.” That title comes from a dialogue line (the woman’s description of her need to be driven home) pencilled onto an initial typed draft on p3 here.

Rejection letter from The New Yorker dated July 31, 1947.

Title: Mona You Shall be Free

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: Unclear: see below for possibilities.

Complete? The preserved draft seems self-contained. However, it’s filed among “Unfinished” stories, and its episodic nature suggests that it could have gone on.

Extent of preserved material: Six-page typescript draft with manuscript additions and notes on first three pages.

The Story: The first-person narrator has returned to the U.S. Southwest at the age of 20 after time working in Mexico. He takes a job in a loading pen, then as a horseback sheep-herder, seeking at each stage for a field where “work is the order and reason of existence.” His human companion is the taciturn Vic, admired for his “dexterity.” The narrator initially has a closer relationship with his horse, Mona, at once alien in “the spectacle of this wild wonderful animal under me” and notable for her workaday excellence: “if I had been there alone I should have climbed a fence and let her do the whole thing herself.” On one occasion, his interference sets Mona off and she tramples a small kid goat, with the narrator unable to calm her and Vic having to intervene. At dinner with Vic, he then sees the burns on Vic’s hands from the rope with which he got Mona back under control. Vic seemingly contemns the narrator’s failures to embed himself within this world of work, but the narrator’s implicit acknowledgment of this brings them closer together.

The narrator aims to get more involved in his work, which leads him to increasingly frequent failure, from bad gardening to bad bread-making, at each step consolidating Vic’s sense of his uselessness, but establishing an increasing intimacy on that basis. Finally, the discussion of failed bread ends with Vic saying “a man gets lonely […] and he picked up the [only, shared] lantern and took it into his room.”

The following day, with everything in between conspicuously omitted, the men and their horses come across a flight of wild horses, with which Mona briefly gets swept up, but “still uncertain with me on her back, [Mona] was no match for their freedom,” and she drops out of the chase. When the narrator later gives her freedom to pursue her own course after the working day, “I lay the rein over her neck and she turned, down the other side of the hill toward home.” “Wild and wonderful” Mona opts finally not for the open plain and further freedom but for the familiar comforts of her place of work.

A lot of themes intersect in these six pages: the story begins with a stress on time and matter—“no matter how you think about time […] you still have to experience it for yourself” and “if all this happened a long time ago, –it ~~hardly matters~~”—but hardly recurs to these concerns, as it instead focuses on the intersection of work, companionship, freedom, and agency, and exercises in significant understatement and narration by apophasis. Most striking of these is the question of what happens after Vic takes the lantern. Does this leave the narrator in the dark alone, dismissed and lonely because he has failed to prove himself Vic’s deserving equal, or is the implication that the “lonely” that a man gets is addressed by forcing the narrator to come into Vic’s room to stay in the light of Vic’s companionship, with whatever sexual implication this threshold-crossing would involve. The immediate and unelaborated narrative leap to the next working day makes Mona’s subsequent failure to keep up with real freedom, and retreat to work and home, our only interpretive cue.

Taking advantage of the first-person voice to develop a focus both on interiority and the unsaid or unprocessed, “Mona You Shall Be Free” has a far surer and more distinctive voice than most of Gaddis’s unpublished fiction, even as it veers between differing thematic glosses and doesn’t seem to have been important enough to him to archive in its own file. This comparative maturity suggests that it may date later than the bulk of Gaddis’s horse-and-man Southwestern tales, which otherwise proliferate during the time he was riding a cowboy persona through Harvard. Its tight reliance on the significance of the unsaid and willingness not to gloss everything for the reader aligns it with “A Matter of Necessity” (see entry above), another unfiled but fairly complete, cohesive, and sure-toned story that is concretely dated to 1947.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The plausible homosexual subtext makes this one of the few potential forerunners for the gay-culture aspects of The Recognitions, though the setting is more Brokeback Mountain than Greenwich Village.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The freedom-thematics align this with some of Gaddis’s more explicitly existentialist stories. The stress on unsaying as a narrative method makes this an unpublished ratification for the “apophatic” reading of Gaddis’s technique and concerns most fully developed by Christopher Knight.

Title: Mr Astrakan Says Goodnight

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.7

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Nine-page typescript, no corrections, with undated cover page.³⁰

The Story: Mr. Astrakan has stopped over in Houston on his way from New York to Mexico City and is passing the time by reading names of stops in a railroad timetable. He can’t wait to leave America but is held captive by Houston somehow, as he stays in an apartment-hotel and contemplates what it would take to become a prominent but inconspicuous local. He has always been a mild-mannered man but by the end of the story he is about to crack and bite a café waitress on the leg.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Plot-wise there is little connection to the later published work, but his published style is starting to show here: surreal and humorous descriptions of a character caught up in a mundane but strange existence.

The name “Mr Astrakhan” reappears in Blague, for a party-scene figure who survives under a different name into Ducdame where he begins to shade into the characterization of Wyatt (see entries on Blague and Ducdame above). So the story has a very tenuous through-line into The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Written during Gaddis’s own brief time living in Houston. He mentions in a March 1947 letter to his mother that this is the only story he has written since he moved there, and its “merits I find less each time I think of it” (Letters 68).

Title: The Myth Remains

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.8

Date: July 1947

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Two complete typescripts: one (seemingly earlier) single-spaced, seven pages, with light pencil corrections; the other fourteen pages plus dated cover page,³¹ with a few typographical corrections.

The Story: The surreal story of an old woman, Anna G—, who lives with her invalid sister in her house with a cupola. She has a quiet, transfixing presence. The backstory is about the doctor who married her sister, built the house, and whom Anna also loved. He dies after his wife gives birth to (and Anna delivers and co-nurses) his son. The story then shifts to life with Anna, her sister (who remains nameless), and the sister’s son, Nathan. Anna tends to Nathan while her sister languishes. Nathan eventually, when he is about to leave for college, brings a girl he plans to marry to the house. While he is away at college she writes to him. On a spring recess he visits and then buys a new car which he shows off to her. He visits more frequently but then comes home bloody from a fight. He leaves despite her protestations and then presumably dies in a car accident. A letter arrives at the house, presumably from the girl, but Anna does not open it.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A, but see the shared car and car-crash plot elements of “A Date with an Angel” (entry above).

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? A note in folder 82.27 says “The Myth Remains has been to Harper’s and to Harper’s Bazaar”

This is one of the short stories that Gaddis made a determined effort to publish: a letter of January 1948 to his mother says “Whatever the circumstances I should like to publish that story almost anywhere” (Letters 87), and that it has been “considerably revised” since last being sent out: these may be the revisions corresponding to the difference between the two preserved typescripts.

Another letter immediately afterwards then asks his mother to send this and “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam” (and not any other stories that might be lying around) to a Cornelia Claibourne (Letters 89).

A later letter of 1948, to Katherine Anne Porter, mentions that it was rejected at the Hudson Review (Letters 118).

Title(s): The Night a Star Went Out

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.9, and 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  In 82.9, a complete eighteen-page typescript with very minimal typescript corrections. In 82.27, three manuscript draft pages, separately filed.

The Story: A boy named Mario lives on a cloud with his mother and father. Mario often leaves the door open, letting the cloud into the house so that no one in the house can see anything. This angers his father. The family all pine for when they can sell their cow to have money to move to the valley. Mario starts climbing the mountain that goes through the cloud so he can see the stars at night. He names one of the stars Alfieri and talks to it (it blinks back like it understands). One morning he accidentally forgets to bring the cow home. In the evening he figures out he can fool his parents into thinking he is taking care of the cow even though he isn’t. Then he discovers Alfieri is missing. He finds another star to ask about what happened, and it advises him to climb the stars to find Alfieri. Doing so, he eventually discovers that Alfieri is not shining because he is sad at how dishonest and lazy Mario has become. Mario feels ashamed and goes to look for the cow to make things right. He eventually finds it just in time for father to announce they can sell her and move to the valley. Once they do so, Mario notices Alfieri twinkling brighter than ever!

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: A rare pre-J R instance of a child protagonist in Gaddis’s fiction, though the story is as different from that novel as it’s possible to be.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? A note [seemingly by library staff, not Gaddis himself] says ‘Children’s Story.” This would be the only archivally preserved instance of Gaddis writing deliberately for children (though for obvious reasons much of his earliest juvenilia, which is also archived, is modelled on fiction for children: see Goldkamp).

Title: No Sale

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.8 (Early Stories – Loose); one draft page in with “Rose In Print” material in 80.2 (Agapē Agape “Unsorted”)

Date: Rejection letter from Brandt and Brandt (in box 21 folder 5) dated Dec 16, 1954. The story is filed along with post-Recognitions TV proposals written throughout 1955 and a draft page in 81.8 has a draft of Gaddis’s letter to Robert Oppenheimer on the back, which was also written in early 1955. This indicates he may have revised after the initial rejection.

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Nine-page complete typescript, ten pages of notes and drafts.

The Story: A shopkeeper repeatedly rings up a hundred dollar bill to take change in smaller denominations for a young man who we later discover is his son. This young man, we see, is going around paying with his hundred dollar bill for various things in the town to give the impression that he has lots of them to spend. In his flashiness, he catches the eye of a town dignitary with whom he has a past of mockery and vandalism. This dignitary then goes round each place the young man has paid at, wanting to catch out what he thinks must be fake hundreds. The story ends without a confrontation, as the father lectures his son to work hard and become a real success, “not the kind you measure in hundred dollar bills” (8). He finally nods to Ben Franklin on the note, quoting “Experience keeps a dear school […] but fools will learn in no other.’ And he winked at his son” (9).

Despite its composition date, the prose style here bears almost no relation to that of The Recognitions, let alone Gaddis’s later work. This is even more true of the heavy-handed didacticism that grows to consume the story (the final message reinforced with a wink also turns up in the prose early drafts of the eventual TV proposal “The Black King and the White Bishop” (see Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide)). This (like “The Coke Finish”: see entry above) seems to have been Gaddis’s idea of what a saleable short story was in the market of 1954-5, rather than the final Franklin moral reflecting any particularly compelling insight or affinity of Gaddis’s own. Nonetheless, like some of the 1955 TV proposals (most obviously “Unfortunately” (see Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide)) the story does deal with pressing issues for the Gaddis of 1955 (issues that apply to its own existence): what’s worth doing, what counts as a good reputation, where the money for a worthwhile life will come from.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The concern with authenticity, as the many “fake” notes turn out to finally be one true note repeatedly used, retains a connection to the forgery plots of The Recognitions. Nonetheless, the rejection letter compares the story unfavourably to The Recognitions. This suggests that Brandt and Brandt were aware of Gaddis’s novel and its distinctive qualities as early as late 1954, and that his fairly transparent attempts to write something more saleable throughout the year after it went to print were working counter to his actual talents and appeal. A dialogue line that “Sometimes you find that people hate you more for the harms they’ve done to you” matches a note toward “Rose in Print,” which eventually went on to play some part in J R. Somewhat out of place in “No Sale,” it establishes that Gaddis’s commercial-minded work of 1955 and his more private plans for the next big project were never entirely separable.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere: The rejection letter suggests passing the story on to film people, which if it dates to 1954 may be the catalyst for Gaddis’s various attempts to propose TV and film projects throughout early 1955 (see Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide). Unlike “The Coke Finish” and early drafts of “The Black King and the White Bishop,” there are no lists of possible pseudonyms with “No Sale,” despite it seeming to be of the same genre of what he seems to have (wrongly) seen as quickly saleable hackwork.

Title: November Evening

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.18 (Short Stories: English A-4a)

Date: 1943

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Five-page typescript with instructor’s comments and corrections.

The Story: John and Peter, two college friends, talk about Peter’s imminent move to New York for medical school. John puts on a tuxedo after Peter leaves the apartment, goes to a party, then gets hit by a cab.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Received a “B” grade

Title: The Orchard and the Fence

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.11

Date: March 30, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Five-page typescript with light holograph corrections, and one page of a fragment.

The Story: Reminiscence of childhood at a small Connecticut school run by “Uncle John.”³² He sends the narrator and two classmates to deliver a care basket to a sick teacher. Her sons send them back with a basketful of turnips.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Includes “B” grade and comments by instructor as well as a typed note: “**** I know that that here is something terribly the matter in this story; but there is something I want to write, a style I tried to emulate here which, if this is too lacking, I want to try again. / wtg."

Gaddis himself was at a boarding school in Connecticut when he was around the age of the children in the story.

Title: A Poet in New York

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.12

Date: Undated

Complete? Likely, though extra material suggests expansion may have been planned.

Extent of preserved material:  A moderately corrected four-page typescript; a one-page, one-paragraph clean typescript; a lightly corrected two-page typescript.

The Story: In the longer typescript, a magazine editor is at a bar and the bartender describes a mysterious man who left a pebble on the bar as payment the week before. It reminds the narrator of a weird guy named Smith who worked at the magazine for a time but was oblivious to everything around him and one day, after a revolving door accident, left without a trace. The other two drafts are focused on Smith’s experiences rather than the first-person recollections of the narrator.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The one-page typescript is a stream-of-consciousness description of Smith becoming less real to himself as he goes about his day interacting with people—the style and theme are particularly similar to dissociative experiences of Wyatt and Esme at different points in The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? All three drafts are on thin paper with “COPY” watermark.

Title: The Rehearsal

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.14

Posthumously published: see works cited.

Date: October 1947

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Clean twelve-page typescript with dated cover page.³³

The Story: In the present tense, a play rehearsal is being watched by the Director and the Producer, the latter of whom is seeing it for the first time and lords over the proceedings. No one seems to have copies of the script. Everyone squabbles as the narrative goes in and out of the script, the stage setting shifting between a boat’s deck and a domestic interior. Another character, the Prompter, is key because it turns out the actors are not acting but re-acting to his cues—he is the only one with the script. When actors object about the badness of what they’re being asked to play, the Director threatens them on behalf of the Producer. No opening day is scheduled. The Producer hears more and more about how little the rehearsal might progress toward a final performance, and eventually leaves with the Director, discussing whether he might be “withdrawing your support” and “would they know it, any of them at this point, if I did?” As they move toward the exit, the staging catches fire, and the actors must work out whether to continue acting, just as the Producer must decide whether to withdraw.

The story is not shy about its allegorical equivalences, with the rehearsal aligned with “real life,” the Producer a figure for a withdrawing God, and the dialogue serving entirely to establish these analogies, though it never states them directly. The cast, for example, are told “The lines have no significance at all. It’s up to you to give them significance. You have no significance either, without the lines. Without them, you’re nothing.” This broadly existentialist antifoundationalism also shades into metafiction, as the actors are told they have no existence beyond their lines (given to them and spoken by them within their ontological level, read by us—and so bringing their world into imaginative existence—only at ours). The story pursues this in relation to audience too, as the characters discuss “an audience, what does it do. It sits out there, up straight and stiff in its seat, staring, defying you to give anything significance.”

This can all seem laborious, and from today’s vantage it’s easy to forget that this comes almost a decade before the classic Beckett or Ionesco plays of which it can seem like a pale prose facsimile.³⁴ As with Gaddis’s earlier play “Cartes Sur Table” the most historically plausible theatrical debt is to Pirandello (or to the popular understanding of Pirandello, since Gaddis first mentions actually reading him in 1948 – see the entry on “Cartes…” in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).³⁵ While none of the existentialism, the absurdity, the metafiction are very fully developed, and the story is only occasionally strange enough in its irrealism to get a phrase or image to stick, this is nonetheless an important pivot text for many subsequent developments in Gaddis’s writing.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The epic play’s performance intertwined in the story of the theatre around it provides a strikingly direct anticipation of the use of embedded play excerpts in A Frolic of His Own almost fifty years later. Similarly, Gaddis’s abandoned proto-novel Theatre / Fictions (see entry above) would have been a feature-length attempt to tell a story through representing the making of a film, and surely drew on “The Rehearsal” in conception. There are anticipations of the story’s metafictive questions about the relation between drama, real life, and prose fiction in both of Gaddis’s unpublished plays of the 1940s: the earlier “Cartes Sur Table” and “Faire Exchange No Robbery,” from the same year as “The Rehearsal” (see entries in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).

More immediately, though, this story seems to have been an important pivot point in the development of projects toward The Recognitions. At the time this is dated, Gaddis had just abandoned his symbolist existential romp Blague, while the earliest attested mentions of its less fantastical successor Ducdame don’t come until letters at the end of the year. The play in “The Rehearsal” is named The Lie Called Circumstance, which the archive confirms was an early subtitle for Ducdame and close to one on title pages for Blague (see entries and Figure 1 above). In some ways, “The Rehearsal” seems like a last self-contained gasp for the Blague model of thesis-led existential premise dressed up in explicit symbolism and didactic metafiction. In prose form, it anticipates not only Frolic (by its blending of dramatic rehearsal and present action) but also J R, since it is written entirely without interior psychological narration. The em-dashes for play dialogue here become the default tool for presenting dialogue in all Gaddis’s novels (and are very rare across Gaddis’s short stories before this).

Even disregarding the symbolism, its engagement with theatre, audience, and metafiction also make it an intriguing companion-document for the note (from no more than a year later) on “Why Ducdame Should be a Play” that reveals so much about Gaddis’s approach to fictive form (see entry on Ducdame above). Crystal Alberts, in her introduction to the story’s posthumous publication, notes its Recognitions-related engagement with “the question of originality in art” (“Three Early Stories…” 94). Its existential questions, despite the move away from Blague’s style, persist throughout Gaddis’s career. Even the figuration of an earthly character who has the exact role of a reticent, withdrawing God recurs in the unpublished western screenplay Dirty Tricks (see entry in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).

“The Rehearsal,” then, seems to have been an important crux in Gaddis’s career, not only in the immediate pivot from Blague to Ducdame and thence onward to The Recognitions, but for the forms of much of what was to come later. If, of the three unpublished stories Alberts provided to the Missouri Review, “Jake’s Dog” is a tight self-contained achievement with very little reverberation in the rest of Gaddis’s fiction, “The Rehearsal” is an almost exact counterpart: something of a mess on its own terms, it provides some germ for almost everything that would go on to define Gaddis’s published work.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? One of the stories Crystal Alberts brought out of the archive for publication in the Missouri Review of 2004 (pages 99-108). It has not subsequently been discussed in other academic work.

Title: The Rising of the Moon

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.15

Date: Undated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Eighteen-page typescript with very light holograph corrections.

The Story: Jord jumps onto a train as it passes through a tunnel but soon gets caught by the brakeman. When the train stops at a station he is arrested and sentenced to work on the local farm. He and other laborers are treated roughly, particularly by a guard named Laph who takes pleasure in beating and whipping him for not working hard enough. One night Jord hears Laph talking to someone (the warden?) who says he wants Laph to get Jord out because he’s too much trouble. Jord walks and rides to the state line. He hops another train and meets two girls who are desperate to eat, so he gives them sandwiches from his pocket.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Title and “by William Gaddis” written at top of first page in WG’s hand.

Title: Roll and Go

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.18 (Short Stories: English A-4a)

Date: Circa 1943-44 (written for Harvard courses)

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Five-page typescript with marginal notes by instructor and by Gaddis

The Story: “Little Joppin” is working on a freighter ship and the story simply describes his experience. Nothing of note really happens.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Received a B grade.

See entry in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide on Gaddis’s 1955 TV proposal “WASTE” for a later attempt at the ship-work setting.

Title: Roses are Such Pretty Flowers

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.16

Date: March 6, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Four-page typescript with light corrections and marginal notes by instructor and Gaddis, and grade plus commentary by instructor. Folder also includes a page of typed notes and rough fragments.

The Story: Rizzo visits the sick daughter of his boss who is in the hospital. He orders a spray of flowers be delivered to her room and he visits again to make sure she got them. The parents act appreciative and don’t mention that it is a funeral spray, which he doesn’t realize.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Received a B grade.

Title: Round Robin

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.17

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Three-page typescript, no corrections.

The Story: Evelyn privately struggles with her husband who continually tells stories to others or to her that she had told him herself, and with how to tell him that she is pregnant. Instead she waits for it to come out when their friends the Bishops visit them.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Does not seem to be any relation to the Evelyn of “Evelyn Ex Libris” (see entry above). The couple is young and sociable and they like to gossip, reminiscent of similar characters in The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? N/A

Title: The Social Life of a Single Man in New York

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.19

Date: Before June 1946

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Six-page typescript with light holograph corrections.

The Story: First-person narrative of a man who lives alone in an apartment that has a view into a dentist’s apartment. The man spies on him and loathes him but cannot stop watching until the dentist stops and looks back up at him, making him sick. He thus leaves to find a party. He follows a girl around at the first party he finds, then is himself followed by an unknown man, so he escapes to go home again, whereupon he starts spying on the other neighbors: a group of young women.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: In The Recognitions, Agnes Deigh becomes intrigued by the dentist whose family activities she can see through the window across the street, but her attempt to intervene when she sees him beating his daughter leads Agnes herself into trouble with the law. J R also contains scenes in which characters observe others, or are themselves observed, though windows from other apartments: it seems a key part of Gaddis’s vision of “social life” in a city, and this story condenses it.

The broader question of vicarious sociability contrasted with the need to feel unobserved and alone organizes some of The Recognitions’ early contrasts between the ways that Otto and Wyatt live in New York.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? A rejection letter from The New Yorker in folder 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”), dated June 4, 1946.

Title: The Soldiers

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.20

Date: March 23, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Five-page typescript with moderate correction, notes and commentary by instructor.

The Story: Written for a Harvard class. A man comes home to his wife and young son. She accuses him of drinking and carousing and the son keeps asking if he brought the soldiers. The man tells his wife he is going to join the navy but she doesn’t believe him.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Received a “B” grade

Title: Some People Living in a Hotel

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: Unclear: but after Gaddis arrived in Panama (December 1947 - see below), and pre-Recognitions (note indicates it should be “index[ed] to Final Scene of The Recognitions”).

Complete? Likely

Extent of preserved material: Two pages of draft.

The Story: A surreal and explicitly hellish description of a scene and its eternity: a twelve-storey hotel windowless on the bottom six, from the upper windows of which occupants cry out for someone to “lower their needs to them in buckets.” Electric lamps are hung out of the windows, and sometimes the occupants must lean out bodily and look up to call for these “needs.” There is no way to tell whether the people of the windows and of the top of the hotel understand each other, leading to great anxiety for those below. What these buckets are being filled with and from where is not explicit, but some phrasing hints it may be the hotel’s own cloaca, or worse. This sense of circularity extends to what happens when one of the lamps is observed drooping without motion: “a port is opening in the top of the Hotel, and the crew waits until a heavy bundle is delivered up to them on a stout rope which they have let down inside. This they carry off to the place where the buckets are constantly being turned in and refilled.” The hint is of cannibalism. The windows, we are told late on, only look out upon the walls of identical hotels. There is speculation about other hotels, “but that is idle thought, because we are here.” Hellish, as if Heironymous Bosch had grown up on the outskirts of a USSR city, yet the narrator tells us to judge otherwise: all this “is a reassuring scene, if one, in these uncertain times, is inclined to fear for order.”

In addition to this visionary grimness, there are brief meditations on the unnecessity of language in such a world. Overall, this is notable as perhaps the most purely visionary of Gaddis’s works.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Accompanied by a note to “Index to Final Scene of The Recognitions” but without any clear explanation of why. Unlike “Arma Virumque” (the other “index to Recognitions” story) “Some People Living in a Hotel” contributes no direct scene or setting to the subsequent novel, but seems to motivate some of the tone. The grim joke about “order” matches Gaddis’s various later paratextual claims about his interest in the conflict between order and chaotic disintegration, while the miserable tall-building setting corresponds with The Recognitions’s late Paris joke about artists living “in a suburb called Banlieu” (944).

The story has an epigram from Faust: “(Faust II ii 270) Mephis.(Whispers)What is it then? /Wagner( at furnace)—a man is being made.” This then becomes an epigram for the opening section of The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Another note states the exact dimensions of “Miraflores Locks” “from watching the men painting the inside of the lock gates at night.” These locks are a stop on the Panama canal, which Gaddis describes working near in a letter to his mother of January 1948 (Letters 85).

Title: Something You Got To Remember

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.18 (Short Stories: English A-4a)

Date: November 18 [1943]

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Six-page typescript with light corrections and notations and comments by instructor.

The Story: A group of Harvard college students—staff of the Lampoon—await the arrival of an actress who used to be a burlesque dancer. They are all nervous and star-struck, offering drinks and cigarettes. She chats with them and signs their comment book then leaves.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? One of the stories written for English A4a. Instructor gives this story a C.

Title: The Sorrel / What Is There to Wait For?

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.22 (Short Fiction: “The Sorrel”) and 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: December 2, 1943 (The Sorrel)

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: “What is There to Wait For?” is a complete seven-page draft of the basic story, filed in 82:27. “The Sorrel,” submitted for a class assignment, consists of a complete six-page typescript with instructor’s corrections and commentary as well as a grade, and a five-page incomplete typescript likely with the instructor’s corrections.

The Story: Jesse and Lorin are herding horses on the range. They run into a rattlesnake which they try to kill, then another, resulting in Jesse’s horse buckling and Jesse going to the ground. The horse gets bitten and back at the ranch house Jesse’s uncle Bill removes the poison; they wait to see if it will live.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Received an A grade.

Title: Time in Hand

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.25

Date: May 18, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Five-page typescript with light corrections, notes and comments by instructor.

The Story: Old Ike is an 86-year-old down-and-out man in NYC constantly trying to peddle an alarm clock he carries around with him in a bag. He finds his way to the mission for shelter but ends up being hit by a cab.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Received an A grade.

Title: Uncle Thurman Surrenders His Sword

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.26

Date: Not dated, but cover page indicates an address (79 Horatio St) where Gaddis lived from late 1945 to early 1947

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Two five-page typescript drafts—one with cover page and minimal corrections;³⁶ the other with moderate corrections.

The Story: Uncle Thurman claims to remember every face after seeing it once. He scans the newspaper for a new movie to see and when he announces his choice the whole family drives with him to see it. Then he gets confused by a movie he thought he had seen before but doesn’t remember.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? N/A

Title: Visitors

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.18 (“Short Stories: English A-4a”)

Date: January 6, 1944

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: Five-page typescript with very minimal corrections and commentary at the end by the instructor.

The Story: Mrs. Lafferty and her son Robert are at home wondering why they haven’t heard from Roy, Robert’s older brother, who left for the Army but would not have been sent overseas yet. Two men in uniform come to the door. She feeds them and they start asking rude questions about Robert. Mrs. Lafferty sees them out and Robert suspects they are from the nearby asylum.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: As the central Blague plot of its heroine “break[ing] into insanity” epitomises (see entry above), an interest in madness runs through Gaddis’s stories up to The Recognitions, and the asylum frame here is a slightly different deployment of that preoccupation.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? One of the stories written for English A4a. Instructor gives this story a B.

Title: Where is Miss Horse? / Still Alive at Twenty-Two

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.28 (Where is Miss Horse?), 82.23 (Still Alive at Twenty-two).

Date: Not dated

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material: For “Miss Horse,” a six-page typescript lightly corrected, watermarked “COPY.” Also includes three fragment typescript pages on same paper. “Still Alive…” is an earlier draft of Miss Horse, also six pages, whose moderate on-page corrections are incorporated into the latter story. The folder also contains a page of holograph notes.

The Story: A college student in Boston who works for its “humorous magazine” meets a dancer stage-named Frances Henderson (the real name of a Gaddis paramour – see below). He is engaged at the time so does not pursue a romance with her. After being expelled but still engaged he looks her up in NYC. She now goes by “Mrs. Horse.” When his fiancée Katherine is gone he calls up Frances, they meet up, and he kisses her. He never sees her again, but at a later event with his wife the name “Miss Horse” comes up.

“Where is Miss Horse?” is written in the first person, “Still Alive at Twenty-Two” in third person, about a male character called Wim. A note page for the latter stresses “THIS IS A LOVE STORY.” Its incomplete drafts only concern their first meeting, up to a kiss, and mainly stress that the dancer is taller than Wim. A draft page in the file contains two alternativetitles – “What Happened to Miss Horse?” and “Whos is Miss Horse?”

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: “Who is Miss Horse?” is the title of Blague’s first chapter (see entry above), and notes toward that project repeatedly mention the name. The Frances/Katherine/student axis here is a forerunner for Blague’s romantic triangle, which then through Ducdame evolves into the Otto/Esme/Wyatt/Esther partner-complexity of the first half of The Recognitions.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? A note in the “Where is Miss Horse?” folder explicitly states that it shares setting (Boston theatre-world) and character-types with “Still Alive at Twenty-Two,” indicating that Gaddis may have seen them as different works rather than an earlier and later draft.

Steven Moore identifies the real-life model for the Miss Horse dancer character as Frances Henderson, a romantic interest for Gaddis until she left to dance in Hollywood and got married (Letters 100). The two maintained a sporadic correspondence through to the 1970s.

Title: Who is R?

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.29

Date: Not dated but prior to 1949

Complete? Yes

Extent of preserved material:  Two six-page typescripts: one with minimal corrections and the other with light corrections on “COPY” watermarked paper.

The Story: A man enters a waiting room full of women talking. He sits down awkwardly as they resume talking about a woman they know who just got married. From a back room, Mrs. Bradley summons them one by one until she gets to the man last. He goes into her room with the crystal ball. She asks him a series of questions with letters: “Who is J?” “Who is M?” and “Who is R?” The last of these he does not place until the end when he reveals himself in relation to the M of the story.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The finished draft has a cover letter dated January 6, 1949 from a literary firm that is returning his stories due to it being in the process of dissolution.

William Gaddis’s Unpublished Fiction: Incomplete and Unfinished Stories (Alphabetical)

Title: Art’s Place

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

Date: Unclear, likely pre-Recognitions, but elements match certain 1955 projects that immediately followed on that novel.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: Six over-sized typescript pages of scene-by-scene planning, with annotations by hand, and further notes on some reverses.

The Story: A rich woman, Mrs Bawd, buys up the whole show of an otherwise unsuccessful painter. She is then angered by seeing one of his paintings on show at her bank. She threatens the bank that she will dump all of the artist’s work on the market at once, crashing its sale value, if they keep his work on show. Elsewhere, a female art-student has a friend who is a “Bum” and who is starting to make money sitting for painters. She sees an exhibition of a newly discovered Goya and is struck by how much it resembles him. As she investigates further, she, the artist, and the bum all get into increasingly life-threatening scenarios, which the market-cornering rich lady seems persistently connected to. Various romantic possibilities for the art-student emerge, if her potential paramours can stay alive…

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: A rare unpublished story (or planned story) that may have contributed direct material to more than one of Gaddis’s novels. The market-cornering plot is a forerunner for Zona Selk’s treatment of the artist Schepperman in J R, as well as matching the less central plot-point in The Recognitions for how Wyatt’s original work is all burned at once in the same storage, freeing him to pursue his career in forgery.

The “Art’s Place” forgery plot of old masters turning up with recognisable living models, meanwhile, also matches Wyatt’s use of Esme as a model in The Recognitions. Depending on the dates, it may have been a forerunner for that, or may be a later extrapolation of Recognitions themes and material in the vein of 1955 TV proposals like “WASTE” and “Unfortunately” (see entries in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? There are not many prose stories in Gaddis’s archive that exist only as fully planned scene-by-scene proposals, with no apparent record of his having tried to write even a page of actual story. This state of preservation has more in common with the state of his TV proposals of 1955. Thus “Art’s Place” may date from that era, and even have been conceived for TV, but we list it here with the prose stories since unlike the other TV proposals there is no explicit indication here of a televisual intent.

Title: At the Seawall

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: Five continuous pages of typescript, breaking off mid-sentence.

The Story: A dishevelled man, “coming from the country of Venezuela […] going back to the United States and in no hurry to get there,” turns up in a seaside town in an unspecified country where people have hispanic names and are from the first lines identified (for contrast with him) as “coloured” and “black.” Two teenage girls approach him and “wonder[] who he was, why always alone, certain that he was… sad. But why?” Communicating across broken Spanish and English, they eventually get around to swimming naked together, and the girls peel dead skin off his back. He agrees to meet one of them again, but gets stuck inside for a few days of heavy storm. Even within his hotel, he can contrast the blond girls of advert posters with the darkness of the girls he has met, and of the whole town. Here the typescript breaks off.

It’s unclear how the story would have developed from here. The man is not especially sympathetically portrayed, and a note above one of the typescript pages says “to set some warped part of his own body in order,” suggesting that the plot might have developed in some healing direction. One of the man’s perceptions of the older girl’s behaviour stresses her “uncertain, smiling with uncertainty, unable quite to relax. It was the freedom she hesitated to take, more used to being pummeled the moment the last of her clothing was dropped on a chair in a darkened airless room”: it’s hard to know how authoritative this projection of her backstory is supposed to be, but again sets up something that the plot may have been meant to fix and resolve.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The return-from-Latin-America plot was central to The Recognitions as early as its proto-form Ducdame (see entry above), in which Otto’s movements between continents were far more central than they became in the final version. The note about “order” also aligns it with much of Gaddis’s attested concern around this period of his writing.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The combination of concern with “freedom,” of a plot about returning from Latin America, and of work (“he did not mind work and did not like to work for money”) aligns this unfinished story with “Mona You Shall Be Free” (see entry above). The two stories take distinct forms, though they both concern conscious outsiders, with “Mona” being first-person and “Seawall” a very reticent third.

Title(s): Ernest and the Zeitgeist, or, The Centipede with the Wooden Leg

Location in archive (Box.Folder): draft material in a dedicated folder, 81:10 (Short Fiction: Ernest and the Zeitgeist); and more material in 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”).

Date: between 1950-2.

The story is substantially based on Gaddis’s work for UNESCO from 1949-1951, and Gaddis drafted enquiries about it to William Huie as editor of the New American Mercury, a position Huie held until 1952: the tone of Gaddis’s draft letters, as well as the filed “Credo” page from the first issue of the magazine, suggest that this was early in Huie’s tenure, so likely late 1950 or early 1951. The letter also suggests that Gaddis had been working on the story for some time before composing this letter.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: eight-page discontinuous, incomplete draft in 81:10, about twenty discontinuous typed draft pages and twenty-ish pages of notes and relevant clippings in 82:27.

The Story: The basic plot of “Ernest and the Zeitgeist” was to revolve around a young employee of a thinly fictionalized version of Gaddis’s own employer, UNESCO. Ernest is an aspiring writer, taking on UNESCO work to subsidise his work on novel or play, and navigating the institution’s absurd bureaucracy. Having alienated his employers by taking visiting Islamic delegates to see The Lost Weekend at the cinema, he wins them back by giving a speech about a centipede with a wooden leg (Gaddis drafted the speech, which is preserved on a loose typed page in 82.27).

That would not have been the end of the story, but Gaddis’s drafts only get this far, and his notes and plans are too disparate to indicate how it would have gone on.

In part, this seems a symptom of confusion on Gaddis’s own part. The story seems to have been conceived originally as a way to address the explicitly existential questions of responsibility, action, personhood that always pepper his notes (in this case, accompanied by many typings out of musings by Camus and co in the original French), while becoming much less explicit in his published work. In this case, though, the more Gaddis wrote the more he seems to have come to conceive of the story as a less metaphysical and more strictly critical “satire” of the institutional absurdity and moral vacuity he saw in his UNESCO work. His letter to potential publisher Huie, filed along with the story, frames it in these terms, and the notes and drafts proliferate with examples of potential fictional exaggerations of the real work.

The closest we get to a full map of what was to happen comes on one of those pages of French-existentialist quotations and notes on how “Ernest differs from the Existentialist man”:

“Goal: hard work to gain it.

Goal reached. Defeat by (logical) trick.

Recommencement.

(Same) Goal: hard work, with

Preparation for trick: to not be caught.

Goal reached.

Defeat by (same) trick”

What these tricks were to be remains unclear, but the structure seems to have intended a punishment for un-existential bad faith and the descent into cynicism.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Although this was written during Gaddis’s work on The Recognitions, and its concern with hapless Americans working internationally has some equivalent in Otto’s plot of that novel, the closer connections are to J R. As Ali Chetwynd has noted elsewhere, the “Ernest” material, like J R, attempts to “adapt[] real bureaucratic structures into stories with wider rhetorical goals” (“Fuller History” 8), and the structure of certain absurdities like marketing budgets outweighing creation budgets or Ernest being “hired” to do what he has already done outside the contract “foreshadows J R’s report-cards to which pupils must conform, press-releases that precede events, misspelled business cards that prompt legal name-changes, and other cart-before-horse promulgations of bureaucratic norm” (7).

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? With its anti-do-gooding message and scorn for the “universal effort to offend no one,” “Ernest” is Gaddis at his most politically conservative. On this project, that attitude intersects very directly with his ongoing existential interests. While it was never finished for these elements to be properly synthesised, the proliferating draft materials provide a valuable snapshot of Gaddis’s writing at a time of transition between projects and visions.

“Ernest” is discussed in relation to Gaddis’s corporate writing in Chetwynd, “Fuller History” (6-9), which analysis is then further addressed in Joseph Tabbi’s Gaddis biography.

Title: The Fencing Academy

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.17 and 82.27 (Short Fiction: Unfinished)

Date: Not dated

Complete? Unclear: potentially self-contained.

Extent of preserved material: In the folder that bears its name, a barely-more-than-one page typescript, with occasional correction by typewriter. In 82.27 a half-page of titled manuscript draft, with notes on the symbolic valence of differing swords.

The Story: Hardly a story so much as a description of the different types of fencing swords and how they reflect a fencer’s style. Mr. Peroy is the master of the Academy and when he says “Engagez!” the fencers attack the other sword types and even the audience.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: N/A

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The attack on the audience has something in common with dramatic breaking of the fourth wall, as featured in “The Rehearsal” (see entry above).

Title: Joy

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? Seemingly, but filed as “Unfinished”

Extent of preserved material: two typed pages, both with seemingly unrelated handwritten drafts on reverse.

The Story: Charles & Winifred are talking about getting psychoanalysed, listening to music with their friend Gordon. When asked if he has ever been “analyzed” he announces that he “had hoped, and rather definitely planned” to “keep his problems to himself” but now needs to talk about himself. It turns out that he is under-motivated, does not accept that “you have to work” since “I just haven’t got a reason,” and while he thinks matrimony is “the only thing worth while,” his intended paramour Joan left him and so he can never pursue another marriage. Rejecting also the value of “doing things for people,” he feels his outburst making him a burden and anticipates that his friends will start to make kind-hearted interventions, and so

said ‘Look, here’s what I want to do—I want to run outdoors, outside—I’m glad to be alive, not grateful, but glad. I want to run across the face of the world and laugh, and let them all know,’ which, as a metter [sic] of fact, is exactly what he did.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Gordon is the name of the hero of Otto’s play in The Recognitions, and Otto engages with the world by wondering what his hero would have done and imagining himself so effortlessly successful. As the Gordon character in “Joy” seems to be presented as entirely sympathetic, Gaddis may have had his own relation to this story in mind as he characterized Otto.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? Opposing freedom to work or domestic duty is common to postwar US fiction, and ending on a directionless running as an expression of pseudo-existentialist freedom is a feature of the endings to John Updike’s Rabbit Run (1960) and Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959) (as well, in parodic form, of Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963)). If “Joy” is from the same 1940s era as the bulk of Gaddis’s other unpublished work (and the one its anti-seriousness has most in common with is “Cartes Sur Table,” from as early as 1943: see entry in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide) then he beat these more canonical counterparts to the punch by a decade and a half.

Title: Kotalik

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: Unclear, but before 1947 due to mention in a Ducdame note. Likely early due to handwritten drafting and university setting.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: About 25 manuscript pages, and two of typed notes. The manuscript pages include distinct drafts of four and 4.5 pages each, and a four-page set of discontinuous passages. The rest of the manuscript pages are notes and fragments.

The Story: The material under the “Kotalik” heading seems to involve at least two very different stories, linked only by foregrounding the unremarkableness of their central character.

The less developed, likely earliest, notes, give two subtitles: “A Most Indifferent Man” and “K Interrupted.” The latter comes just with one draft line “I really intended to write about K…” suggesting that Gaddis was more interested in the narrative idea of a story notionally about someone that never actually gets to their story than he was in anything particular about a character Kotalik. This approach survives into some of the draft material. The “Most Indifferent Man” notes, on the other hand, list Kotalik as “A scoutmaster, trouble over preaching to children,” setting up a religious contrast between him and the narrator: Kotalik “Masturbating over O.T. passage,” while Clearson (the narrator’s name in at least one iteration) gets the notes “N.T” and “Christ is Come.” None of the draft material much develops this biblical opposition, or the sexualized aspects.

The other story under the “Kotalik” heading sees Clearson as the well-bred editor of a university writing journal, and Kotalik as the midwestern interloper hoping to get involved as a writer and on the editorial board. One of the drafts introduces this dynamic, in another there’s an extended discussion between them about why Kotalik may struggle to get involved and whether Clearson can help him. A single-page introduction recounts Clearson waking up with a bad hangover in a Catholic church and promises that he (presumably we) will find the whole story out from Kotalik two days later.

Perhaps the most intriguing draft work here is an extended 4-page introduction that seems to come from somewhere between the two versions, as it stresses that it is failing to tell us about Kotalik as promised, but also concerns writing and publishing. Over the course of a didactic three-page longueur, the narrator tells us

There are so many people writing nowadays, that one wonders who there is left to criticise; still, if one looks at the list of critics—and there is no corner where they will not find you—one wonders even more vainly who can be left to write. […] everyone who has heard the language spoken feels it his right, nay his duty, to recount the distant events of his childhood.

From this, there’s the implication that this state of affairs means everything published strikes every reader with the same idiom of “seems reminiscent of… […] recalls to me… […] have seen this done before…” Kotalik’s name is finally introduced on the fourth page of this introduction, as figuration of one of these many undistinguished and undistinguishable writers, but the passage breaks off before we discover any more.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: There are two notable anticipations of The Recognitions among these fragments. The passing mention of everyone feeling that what they read must have been done before or plagiarised, as well as an editorial conversation about a journal submission possibly plagiarising “the Holy Bible” but no one wanting to read the Bible to check, anticipates the “scandal” of Otto being accused of plagiarism, which is a minor issue in The Recognitions and a central crisis in its prototype Ducdame (see entry above). The “Christ is Come” note, aligned as New Testament against Kotalik’s Old Testament onanism, may be the root of the scene in The Recognitions where Stanley is appalled by a pornographic Christmas card captioned “Christ has Come!” (326).

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The extended introduction on everyone wanting to be a writer seems to be the earliest identifiable expression of Gaddis’s repeated later objection that too many people want to “be a writer” and not enough actually want to write (“Bard Q&A”).

In a note toward Ducdame, Gaddis mentions a scene with a broken leg in “Kotalik” as one of the pieces of prose writing he is happiest with (“Why Ducdame Should Be a Play” – see Ducdame entry above). This does not seem to be part of the preserved Kotalik archive, but the note implies it was actually drafted. The likeliest relation to the preserved material is as part of the story Clearson would hear from Kotalik after waking memory-lost in the Catholic Church.

On some pages subtitled “Paraphrasus Such.”

Almost none of Gaddis’s other preserved short fiction is drafted by hand and not typewritten: it’s unclear why “Kotalik” is an exception, but this may suggest that it is a very early story.

Title: Much Virtue in ‘If’

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: Unclear, seemingly pre-Recognitions.

Complete? No

Extent of preserved material: Seven typed pages of draft, no clear sequence, some restarts.

The Story: There’s less of story here than the establishing of a situation. It is narrated from the perspective of one speaker among a collective “we,” who pride themselves on being “self-exiled, one might say, from the bourgeois […] loyal to each other’s interests and work.” This self-aware voice notes that “None of us, as yet, has accomplished anything. That is because we are all too interested in what we are doing to actually get anything done.” A few differently-drafted openings establish that the plot is to hinge on the intrusion of a character called “Arnold,” named thus (after Benedict Arnold) for the group’s sense of his treachery to something within their worldview (the name thus might also perhaps point to Matthew Arnold for embodying an alternative, more tradition-venerating model of culture). Arnold fails to play along with the central mood of irony and cynicism in the group, “smiling his foreignly unsarcastic smile,” and hence becomes reviled as a “liar,” “hypocrite,” and sometimes “schizoid” (though since they see this as a term of approval, they are reluctant to bestow it on him).

Beyond this set-up, the drafts do not progress.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The plight of insiders and outsiders to a world of gossipy parties, especially the question of how someone ingenuous and sincere can navigate such a world, is behind the many long party scenes in The Recognitions. The particular form it takes here—with that heavy stress on someone’s ingenuousness treated as an outrage—establishes parallels between those scenes and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

We’re told that when people wanted to attack Arnold, the vagueness of their hostility means “they could only settle back on calumny” as a way to attack him. In Ducdame, the forerunner of The Recognitions (see entry above), the unnamed character whose planned plot-points will eventually correspond to Max in the novel is referred to throughout planning notes as “calumnist” (a pun on this word also comes up in J R 657). Thus “Arnold” seems to be the victim of whatever social forces Max later comes to stand for.

In the story, a person’s absence from a gathering is explained away as their death while mountain-climbing. In The Recognitions, the young Otto (inspired by the real 1934 death of Belgium’s King Albert) explains the absence of his father from his life by inventing the story that he died climbing a mountain.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The title evokes Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If, which is referred to at such party-scenes in The Recognitions. Its relation to Gaddis’s work has been elaborated in articles by John Soutter including in the present special journal issue.

Crossed-out alternative titles on draft pages include “The Meaning of Meaning,” and “Mr Carnival says Goodnight,” which seems to link it to “Mr Astrakhan Says Goodnight” (see entry above).

Title: On the Road to the Citadel

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82:27 (Short Fiction: “Unfinished”)

Date: Unclear

Complete? No complete drafts, but across them a coherent whole can be constructed. Filed as “Unfinished.”

Extent of preserved material: Three incomplete typed drafts with manuscript corrections: five pages (two- and three-page chunks), three pages, and one page.

The Story: A woman riding a horse up a path in Haiti thinks about the love triangle in which she finds herself with her anxious overbearing husband and her passively distant lover. In one of the drafts, this contrasts with her sense of serenity on the ride, which expands, as she casts her thoughts back over her life, to saturate that entire life-vision with comparable serenity.

As she rides, the citadel at the top of the hill sporadically appears through the foliage. Gradually, in light of such a persisting figure, it dawns on her “[f]or how long it had gone on, and then she knew [that] she must choose; she could not stand the tension which both of them showed her, and in the odd moments when she was alone, that she showed herself.” Contemplation of the citadel brings on a minor revelation: that it was built “to repulse,” and seeing the guides lolling without interest around its feet, “[d]o Greeks behave this way on the steps of the Parthenon, she wondered […] they did, she knew.” With that understanding, she turns to see “Her husband was guiding his slower animal toward her, and she stood, her feet planted apart, to meet him. He was smiling. How well he looked in the sun [pencil addition – “and she smiled [illegibly overwritten] him, and with him.]” With this moment of apparent epiphany the story ends.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Early notes toward Ducdame say that Wyatt will travel to Haiti, with Spain only pencilled in as a replacement. This is Gaddis’s most fully Haitian-set story. The love triangle’s dynamics match that of Blague (see entry above).

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? A rare classic-modernist-epiphany kind of story among Gaddis’s oeuvre, and also one of his rare stories entirely focalised through a female character.

Title: Untitled three-page dialogue – starting “I wasn’t sure you’d come”

Location in archive (Box.Folder): 81.8 (Short Fiction: Early – Loose)

Date: Unclear, but likely between late 1954 and 1956 (see below).

Complete? possibly.

Extent of preserved material: Three pages typescript dialogue. May incorporate a page of pencil notes filed immediately afterwards about “girl (flat chested) […] taking it as compliment a man wants to fuck her” which otherwise has no obvious correspondence among Gaddis’s draft stories.

The Story: Entirely in dialogue, a man and woman who seem to have previously been in a relationship meet up again for a drink, agreeing “no harm in supper after all this time.” Their conversation circles awkwardly around people previously known, and they establish the faultiness of each other’s memories of their prior interactions. By the end, they agree to go to her place so he can pick up his old things. However, before they leave, they agree to have another martini (martinis having been one of the things they had crossed memories about: he having thought she liked them, she saying she never did).

The story thus leaves open-ended whether this is a final ending, with them never to meet again once he has taken his old things, or a chance to begin afresh.

Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: The attempt to generate story entirely from the unspoken implication within overheard dialogue may link this to the eventual preponderance of dialogue in J R, a connection also hinted at by the likely dating (see below). It’s the only prose work in all of Gaddis’s archive that actually lives up to the common but misleading “entirely dialogue” description of his post-Recognitions work. It has none of the chaos or humour that come from J R’s relentless overlapping talk, but still generates a coherent narrative.

Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? The draft note about “girl (flat chested) is on the back of a draft letter to Robert Graves dated 16 December 1954. If this note and this dialogue/story are connected, this would date the story to the same era as the material it is filed with: primarily post-Recognitions TV proposals of early 1955.

The book the male character has previously lent the female character is DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow – this may connect this material to the notes toward “Rose in Print/Sensation” (see entry above), Gaddis’s very earliest proto-J R projections of 1955-6, which allude to and quote Lawrence’s work (specifically on male-female relations). This story/dialogue may even have been planned to become part of “Sensation,” which would mean it itself bears some indirect relation to J R.

Works Cited outside the archive

Alberts, Crystal. “Three Early Stories by William Gaddis.” The Missouri Review 27.2 (2004): 91-95.

—. “Valuable Dregs: William Gaddis, the Life of an Artist,” in Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System, eds Joseph Tabbi & Rone Shavers. University of Alabama Press, 2007: 231-255.

Brazil, Kevin. Art, History, and Postwar Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Chetwynd, Ali. “Friction Problems: William Gaddis’s Corporate Writing and the Stylistic Origins of J R.” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 8.1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.2

—. “William Gaddis’s Education-Writing and His Fiction: A Fuller Archival History.” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 8.1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.1

—. “William Gaddis’s Unpublished Screenplays, Stage-Drama Scripts, Prospectuses for Film & Tv, and Poetry: An Archival Guide.” Electronic Book Review (June 2024). https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcent5-2

Gaddis, William. The Letters of William Gaddis, ed. Steven Moore. New York Review Books, 2023

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

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

—. “A Father is Arrested.” The Missouri Review 27.2 (2004): 109-116

—. A Frolic of His Own. Scribner, 1994

—. “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam.” Ninth Letter 4.2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 113-7

—. “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam.” Harper’s, August 2008: 29-32

—. “Jake’s Dog.” The Missouri Review 27.2 (2004): 96-98.

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

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

—. “The Rehearsal.” The Missouri Review 27.2 (2004): 99-108

Goldkamp, Kate Michelson. “Juvenilia in the William Gaddis Papers.” Electronic Book Review (May 2024) https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcent6-1

Ingendaay, Paul. “Agent of Change: A Conversation with William Gaddis,” trans. John Soutter. 1995. WilliamGaddis.org. http://williamgaddis.org/nonfiction/intingendaay1995.doc

Knight, Christopher. “Trying to Make Negative Things do the Work of Positive Ones: Gaddis and Apophaticism,” in William Gaddis: ‘The Last of Something,’ eds Crystal Alberts, Christopher Leise, Birger VanWesenbeeck. McFarland and Co, 2009: 51-68

LeMahieu, Michael. Fictions of Fact and Value: the Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945-1975. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Moore, Steven. William Gaddis expanded edition. Bloomsbury, 2015.

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

Tytell, John: “The Oppositional Writer.” In Writing Beat and Other Occasions of Literary Mayhem. Vanderbilt University Press, 2014. 149-178.

“Eine Vorlorene Schlacht” (interview with William Gaddis). Der Spiegel 43, 1996: 266-9. https://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/pdf/9102837 (English translation by John Soutter: https://williamgaddis.org/nonfiction/interviewspiegel.shtml )

Still, James. “Mrs Razor.” The Atlantic, July 1945: 52-3 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/mrs-razor/655951/

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

Yates, Elliot. “Gaddis at Textron: from Fruits of Diversification to Financialization.” Electronic Book Review (May 2024). https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcent3-3

Cite this Essay:

Chetwynd, Ali and Joel Minor. “William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide”, Electronic Book Review, June 9, 2024, https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcen5-1.

Readers wishing to respond to an essay in ebr may send ripostes or short glosses to the journal’s Managing Editor, Anna Nacher.

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Footnotes

1
Although it bears clear relation to Gaddis’s travels of 1948, letters indicate the origin of “A Father is Arrested” in 1947. “Some People Living in a Hotel” must date after 1947, but is filed with a note linking it to The Recognitions (see entry below). The uncompleted “Ernest and the Zeitgeist” is the one short story clearly and fully dateable to after 1947, coming from somewhere between 1950 and 1952. See relevant entries below, plus footnote 27.
2
Steven Moore, for example, has notes from an initial itemisation of the archive that list (without recording locations for) short stories we don’t address: “‘Carthage’; ‘Ask Him Where the Princess Lives’; ‘Dramex’; and ‘Joe Maganec’” (personal email to Ali Chetwynd, September 30 2023). Of these, “Ask Him Where the Princess Lives” is Sarah Gaddis’s first published story (a copy preserved in Gaddis archive box 100, folder 12); “Joe Maganec”is not fiction but a set of notes toward a non-fiction idea for TV. From 1955, when Gaddis was pitching fictional TV ideas (see Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide), it would have been part of a “projected series of short films on American folk heros,” of whom the semi-mythical Maganec is one (see material in 82.24 “Short Fiction – The Story of Joe Maganec); Dramex is a textured paint that Gaddis took significant notes toward creating a TV advert for, seemingly in 1954 or 1955 (materials in 82.24 along with “Joe Maganec”). “Carthage,” though, we have not identified, and other stories may lurk hidden somewhere we haven’t uncovered.
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
The combination of French-existential thematics and car-driving-to-final-crash plot aligns this with the later novel Travesty (1976) by Gaddis’s Harvard near-contemporary (and eventually, admired fellow novelist) John Hawkes: who knows but that they may have discussed these projects.
6
The process is something like that identified by Michael Lemahieu in US fictions of the 1950s and 1960s, by various authors across various texts, whose draft-archives reveal how the initially explicit inspiration of logical positivist questions about the fact-value distinction is gradually made less and less explicit through successive drafts.
7
The reliance on religiously-themed grotesque dreams seems to relate to the influence of Nathanael West, who Gaddis discussed in letters with Katherine Anne Porter (see Letters 117-8). As with the existentialism, there’s a good case for seeing West as a significant influence throughout Gaddis’s career, though much better integrated after Blague.
8
The Recognitions attributes the phrase to the theologian William Law: it comes from his An Appeal to All Who Doubt the Truths of the Gospel (1740): chapter 1, App 1-22. The Gaddis Annotations website suggests that Gaddis came across the passage either in Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945) or Stephen Hobhouse’s 1948 selection from Law’s work (see annotations for Recognitions p41: https://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/I1anno3.shtml). Ducdame was mainly drafted in 1948, so both sources are possible.
9
The planned first section of the novel, called “Intentions,” has a header-page with the planned epigraph “Knock. Knock. Knock. – T.S. Eliot.” A character in one of the draft party scenes “sells quotations from the Bible and TS Eliot to writers who can’t think of titles for their books” (Ducdame ii 9). Nor epigraphs for their subsections, presumably.
10
Even as he satirised such investment by the time his novel project became The Recognitions, Gaddis did keep the name “Otto”—which critics like Joseph Tabbi have persuasively identified with auto-biography—for his buffoon.
11
For context on the semi-mystical role alcohol plays in characterising Wyatt here, see Gaddis’s various poems about the transcendent value or limitation of drink, which seem to date from during or immediately after his Harvard days: from “a bottle is a lovesome thing, god wot” to “Laughing Boy – Blues” (see entries in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).
12
Blague’s ending leaves us on the sound of laughter at the futility of everything that has just happened.
13
Since Sensation as described in Gaddis’s prospectus has a fairly clear relation to the Bast family backstory in J R, it may be that some of the early J R material preserved in the archive’s J R folders (which are not organized by date and have identifiably “early” material shuffled in among close-to-final draftwork) is from the Sensation era: neither of the present guide’s authors have been able to revisit the full J R material in depth since discovering and identifying Sensation and its relation to the novel, so we leave the potential discovery of more identifiably Sensation-era material to future archival investigators.
14
The pheasant scene is also flattered and over-interpreted by the pompous aesthete lawyer Pai (Frolic 317).
15
The pun relating how the fictional character Rose is read to the ontological or perceptual way in which any real rose is red foregrounds Gaddis’s concern with textuality and fiction-within-fiction.
16
This applies whether McColl himself was a dropped character from early J R or the hero of something of his own that would have found a final place for “Rose in Print.”
17
Unlike the dialogue-heavy, interiority-displacing prose of its eventual published form. See Chetwynd, “Stylistic Origins” for archival evidence relating to the history of this shift, and an argument that it stemmed from Gaddis’s experience as a corporate writer.
18
See the Gaddis Annotations site for Gaddis’s explanation of this reference: he already had the title in mind (Annotations to p716 - https://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/29anno1.shtml)
19
The player-piano project had this title by the time Gaddis got a contract for it in the early 1960s. Neither we nor any of the Agapē-archive adepts we consulted (Steven Moore, Joseph Tabbi, David Ting) can attest an earlier-dated mention of this phrase in Gaddis’s player-project notes.
20
“Not Ant” here likely indicates “Not Once at Antietam,” in other words that though the film being made in the story would be an adaptation of Once at Antietam, it would have a different name in the story. This is the case eventually in A Frolic of His Own, where Once at Antietam was the title of Oscar’s play, but the film adaptation is called The Blood in the Red White and Blue, a title Gaddis himself had considered for a later rewrite of his screenplay Dirty Tricks (see entry in Chetwynd, Nonprose Guide).
21
Joseph Tabbi’s biography lingers on this choice in relation to Gaddis’s experience teaching in—and wish for his own work to be assigned in—university creative writing classes after J R.
22
The latter, given the story’s title, is presumably a coke-can pun connoting “Fillip (or fill up) Can-Head” – recall that our hero is “head filer.”
23
Steven Moore’s note on the letter about Gaddis reading Saroyan says that Saroyan was “at the peak of his fame in 1942” (35), but that peak surely came with the Oscar in 1943: a plausible tipping point for Gaddis’s attitude.
24
Though he did not abandon the self-conception after that one prize.
25
The similarities are enough to suggest that the undated “Fable…” likely dates to the same era as dated “Desire…”: 1943.
26
Crystal Alberts’s notes introducing the publication of the story date it to 1948-9, likely because Gaddis spent much of 1948 in Costa Rica where it is set. But the letters seem to indicate Gaddis had worked this up from more remote material the year before, and he refers to it in letters, if Steven Moore’s identification of references is right, as “the story from Madrid” (Letters 190). Hence, perhaps, the ending’s particular focus on how American reporting distorts events for remote readers.
27
It’s worth noting that while this is a decade before the peaks of McCarthyism, Gaddis might still have had practical reasons to be performatively anticommunist on the wartime Harvard campus, even in his notionally private correspondence.
28
Cover page: “fiction

IN DREAMS I KISS YOUR HAND, MADAM

William Gaddis

Massapequa, L Isld.
29
Cover page: “JAKE’S DOG

William Gaddis

79 Horatio St NYC”
30
Cover page: “fiction

MR ASTRAKAN SAYS GOODNIGHT

William Gaddis

950 First Avenue NYC”
31
Cover page: “Fiction

THE MYTH REMAINS

William Gaddis

Massapequa, L Isld.

July, 47”
32
Thanks to Steven Moore for pointing out that “Uncle John is how Gaddis and others referred to John Kingsbury, director of the Merricourt School [Gaddis] attended” (personal email from Moore to Ali Chetwynd, Sept 30, 2023
33
Cover page: “fiction

The REHEARSAL

William Gaddis

950 First Ave NYC

October, 1947”
34
Crystal Alberts’s introduction to the published version of the story suggests that it might reflect Beckett’s influence (“Three Early Stories…” 94). Though it precedes the production of any of Beckett’s plays, it certainly has elements of tone, insistent allegorization, and godly-maker metafiction in common with Murphy or even parts of More Pricks than Kicks.
35
Of course it’s possible that Gaddis was influenced here by some of the then less globally celebrated experimental drama writers Pirandello or Beckett were themselves influenced by (like Pirandello’s collaborator Evreinov, the ideologically un-Gaddisian Brecht, and so on), but Pirandello’s plays had been the English-language theatre-world paradigm for this kind of medium-aware experimental drama
36
Cover page: “fiction: Uncle Thurman Surrenders

His Sword

William Gaddis

79 Horatio St NYC”

William Gaddis’s Superseded Prototypes for Novels (Chronological)

Title: Blague

Title(s): Ducdame / Some People Who Were Naked

Titles: Sensation, & Rose in Print

Title(s): Theatre / Fictions / The Late Mr Slyke / Concentrate on the Real Story

William Gaddis’s Unpublished Fiction: Completed Stories (Alphabetical)

Title: The Ambassadors

Title: Boy Meets Horn

Title: Castle in the Sand

Title: The Coke Finish

Title: A Date with an Angel

Title: Desire Without Hope

Title: Different Worlds

Title: Es Brillig War

Title(s): Escape From the East / Some Shattered April / Roses are Green at Night

Title: Except Your Life Maybe

Title: Evelyn Ex Libris

Title: The Exchange

Title: Fable of a Fabricator

Title: A Father Is Arrested

Title: The Final Interruption

Title: Gorland at Large

Title: Gunsmoke Bride

Title: Henry is Back

Title(s): In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam / Arma Virumque

Title: An Interview

Title: Jake’s Dog

Title: A Matter of Necessity

Title: Mona You Shall be Free

Title: Mr Astrakan Says Goodnight

Title: The Myth Remains

Title(s): The Night a Star Went Out

Title: No Sale

Title: November Evening

Title: The Orchard and the Fence

Title: A Poet in New York

Title: The Rehearsal

Title: The Rising of the Moon

Title: Roll and Go

Title: Roses are Such Pretty Flowers

Title: Round Robin

Title: The Social Life of a Single Man in New York

Title: The Soldiers

Title: Some People Living in a Hotel

Title: Something You Got To Remember

Title: The Sorrel / What Is There to Wait For?

Title: Time in Hand

Title: Uncle Thurman Surrenders His Sword

Title: Visitors

Title: Where is Miss Horse? / Still Alive at Twenty-Two

Title: Who is R?

William Gaddis’s Unpublished Fiction: Incomplete and Unfinished Stories (Alphabetical)

Title: Art’s Place

Title: At the Seawall

Title(s): Ernest and the Zeitgeist, or, The Centipede with the Wooden Leg

Title: The Fencing Academy

Title: Joy

Title: Kotalik

Title: Much Virtue in ‘If’

Title: On the Road to the Citadel

Title: Untitled three-page dialogue – starting “I wasn’t sure you’d come”

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