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Last Words of William Gaddis Last Words of William Gaddis William Gaddis, a great American novelist, never found the wide readership that his satiric, socially astute, and, ultimately, humane books deserve. Before he died in 1998, Gaddis wrote his fifth novel, Agape- Agape, which has just been published. The narrator of the book, an author on his deathbed, asks the reader more than once, “Can you hear me?” It’s a question Gaddis might well have asked his own readers. by Paul Maliszewski ack Gibbs, a character in William reworks it. He writes without discipline, in JGaddis’s second novel, J R (1975), is try- spurts, when the will seizes him, and his ing to finish writing a history of the player emotions, in particular his anger at the piano. Gibbs works on his manuscript in a mechanical player piano’s eclipse of the cluttered fire hazard of an apartment, a dis- human piano player, run high. When asked orderly place always on the verge of slipping what he’s working on, he describes his book into chaos. The rooms are stacked high with in a halting manner familiar to anyone who boxes and littered with mops, cookie tins, has not yet completed something creative an inoperable stove, and the unopened mail but still risks talking about it. “It’s more of a of previous tenants. There’s a radio some- book about order and disorder,” he says, where, perhaps in one of the boxes, from “more of a, sort of a social history of mecha- which bursts of music and talk erupt. nization and the arts, the destructive ele- Nobody can find the radio, though many try. ment. .” As his words trail off, his descrip- The frustrated author shares this cramped tion of the book, like so many sentences in space with Thomas Eigen, “who wrote an J R, is left incomplete. His thought, like so important novel once” and who now works many characters’ thoughts in the novel, is a in business, and Edward Bast, a junior high fragment spoken hurriedly between another’s school music teacher with ambitions to words and occupying a space too small for its compose an opera, ambitions that, over the full expression. course of the novel, he gradually and grim- The woman listening to Gibbs picks up the ly downsizes, until, by the end, he’s writing thread of conversation, which is more than a piece for an unaccompanied cello. In this most of the cross-talking characters in overcast climate of artistic frustration, J R manage to do, and asks, “It sounds a little deferred dreams, and life’s innumerable difficult, is it?” Gibbs answers, “Difficult as I small compromises, and against the mad- can make it.” Meanwhile, the phone in the dening background of advertising patter apartment rings, people drop by, someone coming from the buried radio, Gibbs spo- arrives to deliver 10,000 plastic flowers (a radically writes and revises his book, works and shipment for a witless, penny-stock business 22 Wilson Quarterly Bill Gaddis (1987), by Julian Schnabel empire captained by J R Vansant, age 11, years after Gaddis left Gibbs to his sprawling that’s spinning out of control). And yet some- undertaking—a project that seems in J R less how Gibbs lays out his argument as best he can, a book-to-be than an assortment of paper, sentence by painfully wrought sentence: that notes, and undigested research, with some the effects of automation on the arts have rhetorical flourishes in the margins. In some been deleterious; that technology, over the ways, Agape- Agape is not unlike the book years, has removed the artist from the art and Gibbs struggles with, though it’s really more eliminated the elements of labor, revision, of a highly condensed novel, on 96 generously and failure (necessary elements, Gibbs and spaced pages, than it is any sort of social his- Gaddis would say); and that the player piano tory. Its themes, as Joseph Tabbi, a professor is a perfect case in point. The interruptions are at the University of Illinois at Chicago, finally too many and too distracting for Gibbs explains in the afterword, occupied, fasci- to persevere. The pressures of life and the nated, and bedeviled Gaddis his entire writ- material demands it makes overwhelm him, ing life. and J R concludes before Gibbs comes close Gaddis was routinely compared with to completing his manuscript. Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Butler, and although efore he died in 1998, William Gaddis such comparisons with other writers are Baccomplished what Jack Gibbs could arguably made too often and too carelessly not: He completed a book about mecha- in book blurbs, Gaddis richly earned every nization and the arts. That book, called one of them. He was those writers’ peer. He Agape- Agape, has just been published, 27 sought in all his books to capture the ener- Autumn 2002 23 William Gaddis gy of American speech, the sweep of New another, better-known author who was his York City out across Long Island, the cease- contemporary became for him). In an age of less moving and restless shaking of the city’s publicity, reading tours, and book signings, people, and the fundamental contradic- Gaddis politely declined them all, and he tions and competing desires in Americans’ expected, or at least hoped, that readers hearts. He wrote with sharp wit (for exam- would follow his example and focus on the ple, about the myriad lawsuits that arise work, not the man. Although he received from a dog’s being trapped inside a piece of many awards, including two National Book public sculpture) and an eye for the per- Awards and grants from the National fect detail (in the cardboard buttons on a pair Endowment for the Arts and the Guggen- of pants he sees “all of false economy’s heim, MacArthur, and Lannan foundations, drear deception”). A painter in his first Gaddis never won the wide recognition, read- novel, The Recognitions, published in 1955, ership, and appreciation his books deserve. says that what distinguishes Flemish mas- He remains, in the words of one of his obitu- terpieces from other work is that “every aries, “America’s unknown great writer.” detail reflects . God’s concern with the Gaddis frequently quoted with approval most insignificant objects in life, with Gustave Flaubert’s view that the artist everything, be- should “appear in cause God did his work no more not relax for an than God in instant.” On ev- nature.” It’s a trick, ery page of his the ultimate trick, books, Gaddis for an artist to reflects a simi- make posterity larly relentless believe he never concern for his existed, but it’s a characters and tragedy for the for life’s least artist’s work to van- objects. ish along with Characters him. In the final such as the man scene of The in The Recognitions who asks his wife why she Recognitions, Stanley, a composer, organist, so urgently wants to meet a certain new and true believer (in a world that mistakes poet. “What is it they want from a man that belief for naiveté), enters a cathedral in Italy they didn’t get from his work?” he asks. to practice the piece he’ll play for Easter “What is there left of him when he’s done his Mass. He begins to pull out the stops on the work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his instrument, but a priest who has escorted work? The human shambles that follows it him to the organ bench pushes them back. around. What’s left of the man when the The priest says something in Italian— work’s done but a shambles of apology.” Stanley doesn’t understand Italian—and Gaddis himself gave everything to his work. walks away. Stanley, now alone, pulls out Details of his various remunerative but the stops, one by one, and begins to play. mind-numbing ways of making ends meet, “The music,” Gaddis writes, “soared around descriptions of places and homes where he him.” And the cathedral, set vibrating by the lived, and the experience, at times harsh, at music, comes crashing down atop him. The times sobering, of being an uncompromising novel memorializes Stanley this way: “He writer living in the 20th century all found their was the only person caught in the collapse, way into his books. But however much his life and afterward, most of his work was recovered informed his work, the books never became too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, advertisements for himself (as the books of with high regard, though seldom played.” >Paul Maliszewski’s writing has appeared recently in Harper’s, The Paris Review, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and The Wilson Quarterly, and he edited McSweeney’s 8, a collection of writing that explores the border between fact and fic- tion. Copyright © 2002 by Paul Maliszewski. 24 Wilson Quarterly Gaddis’s novels should be not merely Antiguan stamps who’s disappointed, like spoken of but played—and often. most any father, that his son, a heroin addict, hasn’t taken an interest in his vocation; addis picked up and put down his Hieronymus Bosch’s tabletop Seven Deadly Gbook about the player piano many Sins and its careful imitation; a plagiarized times, finding the project as endlessly inter- Rilke poem; a play everyone swears must be esting, and ultimately frustrating, in real life plagiarized but is just cobbled together from as Gibbs does in fiction. Steven Moore, a the chatter overheard at the parties the char- Gaddis scholar and tireless annotator of the acters attend; a playwright so swollen with van- novels, suggests that Gaddis first became ity and dragged down by insecurity that he interested in player pianos around 1945, affects an injury and wears a sling around his after leaving Harvard and taking a job as a fact arm for the sake of conversation; and much checker at The New Yorker.
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