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Home , A Frolic of His Own, William Gaddis

Last Words of

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 , 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, , 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. , 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 Rush for else. The publisher did very little for the Second Place, a collection of Gaddis’s essays book, and Gaddis later remarked, “They and occasional writings, edited by Joseph didn’t publish it, they ‘privated’ it.” Tabbi and published this year to coincide Journalists reviewed the book as if its author, with the appearance of Agape- Agape, pre- a relative unknown, were arrogant for serves several early expecting that forms of the player they’d skim even piano project, half its nearly including “Stop 1,000 pages, and Player. Joke No. 4,” the book, read an essay as learned and loved by the and witty as it is few who could compressed. Imag- find it, passed qui- ining the United etly out of print. States at the dawn The novel’s actual of the player piano reception was era, Gaddis writes, rather different “There was a place from what Gad- for everyone in this dis, in “the grand brave new world, where the player offered an intoxication of youth,” had expected. In an answer to some of America’s most persistent interview with The Paris Review in 1987 wants: the opportunity to participate in (interviews with Gaddis were rare), he said, something which asked little understanding; “Well, I almost think that if I’d gotten the the pleasures of creating without work, or Nobel Prize when The Recognitions was the taking of time; and the manifestation of published I wouldn’t have been terribly sur- talent where there was none.” prised.” Originally published in The Atlantic And so, after writing an important Monthly, “Stop Player. Joke No. 4” was novel once, Gaddis went to work, looking Gaddis’s first national appearance in print. But for a job that paid a bit more than he by the time the essay appeared, in July 1951, earned being the author of a book that he was already at work on The Recognitions some felt was the equal of Ulysses (and a few and no longer thinking about writing the believed was its better). He married and impossible book about the player piano any- started a family, living in the time soon. The Recognitions is a globe-span- area. He worked for Pfizer, Eastman ning comic novel about all manner of fake , and the U.S. Army. He did public things, deceptive people, fabricated emo- relations. He wrote speeches for execu- tions, cheapened values, and false gods, tives. He crafted corporate reports and including a fine-art restorer; a faker of paint- film scripts for educational movies (one ings by Flemish masters, and the businessman such script, about computer software, writ- and art critics who profit from him; a proud ten for IBM, is included in The Rush for counterfeiter of American money and Second Place). In the early 1960s, Gaddis

Autumn 2002 25 William Gaddis

"Make Some Money Just Like Anybody"

In J R, William Gaddis’s second novel, Ed- they send you all these different shoes which ward Bast, a junior high school music teacher you get to wear them around so people can see who’d rather be a composer, is walking home them, you know? See that’s how you sell them, from school with J R Vansant, an 11-year-old see? I mean not the ones you’re wearing right student who’d rather control a business off your feet but like you take their order and empire. On a field trip that morning, J R and then you make this commission, you know? his classmates participated in the country’s Like it says you can make a hundred dollars a free-enterprise economy, purchasing one share week in your spare time and you get to wear of a company. Flush with importance and these shoes around too, you want me to find it? inspiration, J R has a number of business ideas —No. to present to his teacher. —Okay but I have this other thing about have your own import export business right —Mister Bast? Could you wait up a sec- from your own home, you know? Maybe you ond? I just have to fix this here shoe- could do that . . . they crossed a rutted bog lace . . . he’d crouched jackknifed over his arm- opening on a dirt road. —Would you want to load, a sneaker mounting the curb that do that? Mister Bast? checked the rampant advance of grassgrown —Do what. cracks stemming from the empty concrete —This import export business right from shell of the Marine Memorial Plaza where a your own home. disabled French machinegun and a vacant —Import and export what. flagpole held off the sky. —Boy it looks like we —How do I know but I mean that’s not the both need shoes, right? he finished with an thing anyway, you know? he kicked a can up urgent tug—holy, shit . . . the highway’s unkempt shoulder kicking the —And look will you please stop . . . weeds for some remnant of sidewalk, —I mean —No but it broke again, you know what I the thing is just where you get to sell something was thinking on the train hey? he came on like, wait a second . . . righting his load, hurrying alongside—like I —Look I want to get home before it rains, have this thing which what it is is it’s this sell- I can’t . . . ing outfit where what you do is you send in and —No but anyway it’s just this other selling

completed an introduction for a book he ed nothing more than to fob his troubles off had by then started calling Agape- Agape. on a character. Gaddis wrote a summary of the (The title combines the Greek noun for work in progress for his agent to shop around spiritual love with an uncommon English to publishers. The agent failed to sell the adjective that describes a mouth hanging book, and Gaddis went on to other things, open in awe and wonder. Together, the namely the writing of three wonderful nov- words convey Gaddis’s sense that the noble els: J R, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), and A concept has degenerated into merely (1994). dumb expression.) That introduction, which appears in the new essay collection and is sub- n the vicious shorthand that can titled “A Secret History of the Player Piano,” Ireduce entire books to the two or three describes a book that will be satiric in mode, things that they’re “about,” writers and rigorous in its historical investigation, and, reviewers frequently say that Gaddis’s nov- Gaddis figured, about 50,000 words in els are satires and that J R is about money, length. He had on hand at least 100 pages of Carpenter’s Gothic about religion, and A assorted drafts and notes; the project and his Frolic of His Own about the law. But predicament would come to resemble Jack satires, Gaddis knew, are not about what Gibbs’s in J R years later, as if Gaddis want- people devise or possess, their things.

26 Wilson Quarterly thing I got where it says you’ll never have to ductor look, music’s not a business like clean your toilet bowl again, see they send you shoes or... this here... —No I know, I mean that’s why he’s this —What makes you think I want to go here prominent conductor right . . . ? he came around selling things! I don’t even. . . hurrying alongside for the brief stretch of side- —To make some money just like anybody walk,—I mean where he makes some money I mean that’s what you wait up, I mean you’re being this conductor so he can go write this taking such long steps hey? Mister Bast? Did here music in his spare time he doesn’t make you ever hear that one about if much off, right? you need any money just ask —I suppose yes now look my father he’s got piles? I’m in a hurry . . . —No. —No that’s okay I can take —No but wait up hey, do bigger steps it’s just all this you get it? Just ask my . . . here stuff I can’t hardly . . . —I get it yes, look does —Well where are you your father know about all this going, where... sending away you’re doing? —No I’m just walking you —What? home, see I... —I said does your —Well you don't have to father... it’s practically dark, doesn’t —No but that’s just sup- William Gaddis, around 1970 your mother expect you to . . . pose to be this here joke see, —Her . . . ? the sidewalk where . . . ended abruptly —no she —I know it’s supposed to be this here joke! comes in all different ow! Holy, boy I almost it’s the, it’s one of the worst I ever heard, I said lost my . . . does your fa . . . —Different what. —No but hey Mister Bast ...? he came —All these different times see she’s like this pushing shoulder high through Queen Anne’s here nurse could you wait up a second hey? laces hemming him in behind,—like what My sneaker . . . he’d gone down to one knee business is your father in. where a pole of rust bore Doges Promenade in —Music. barely discernible letters over the rutted open- —What he writes it? like you? ing in the weeds. —Boy hey did you hear that? —He writes it and he’s a prominent con- that thunder? ❏

They’re about human nature and the peo- J R in particular. But the books are not ple themselves. Thus, A Frolic of His Own about how good artists are crushed by evil recounts how people appeal futilely to the commerce, an oft-told story, simple in its law to redress what it cannot possibly fix: design and attractive for the clarity of its hurt feelings, flagging self-esteem, a sense conflict, but far too simplistic for Gaddis. of diminished self-worth. (Gaddis trivializes In a Gaddis novel, the composer speaks of none of those conditions, for genuine stocks and net worth, while the businessman affection warms his most merciless satire.) waxes eloquent about the grace and digni- J R observes the frenzied activity on the ty of music, and each of them manages to floor of our vast human stock market, find a way to use the other. What drew where people buy and sell, trade, barter, and Gaddis to his failed characters, he said, bargain their selves, talents, and abilities for was “the evidence of their own appetite for money. If they acquire enough money, it destruction, their frequently eager will free them to pursue happiness and embrace of the forces to be blamed for develop their abilities, and that will make their failure to pursue the difficult task for them better people—or so the promise which their talents have equipped them.” goes. Artists of every stripe, most of them In 1997, a new agent sold Gaddis’s on- failed, populate all of Gaddis’s books, and again-off-again player piano book, and the

Autumn 2002 27 William Gaddis word went out: The published work would seminal literary works. All the various be nonfiction, it would still be titled Agape--extant states of Agape Agape, from pithy Agape, and it would still divulge the secret essay to polished introduction to well- history of the player piano. But, in fact, developed agent’s pitch to the rough and Gaddis, like Gibbs, did not write that sort fragmentary notes for the chronology, of book, which is likely to have been a make clear that Gaddis’s primary chal- long, wide-ranging, scholarly treatment of lenge was to devise a narrative that could the challenges technology raises for the accommodate his wealth of evidence arts and artists. That book exists today only (everything from Frederick Taylor’s time- in bits and pieces—in the notes and drafts motion studies to the primitive robots con- Gaddis left, along with the rest of his structed for the entertainment of nobility archive, to Washington University in St. to Jacquard punch-card looms, early IBM Louis, in the assorted pieces published in computers, and so much else). He needed the new essay collection, and in the hints a way to tell the story. and suggestions of a larger work that can be gleaned from the several dense passages fter so difficult a birth, Agape- Agape that Jack Gibbs reads to Edward Bast, who Amight well have arrived stunted or makes the mistake, the cardinal mistake blue in the face, with the signs of its long really, of saying that Gibbs’s book seems, to and fitful gestation all too evident. Or, him, a bit, well, difficult: worse, it might appear plainly unfinished. But that’s not the case. It’s not like Ralph . . . he slapped pages over in a heap. Ellison’s Juneteenth, Robert Musil’s The —here. The music of the world is free to all. Man without Qualities, or Marguerite Is that hard? Young’s Harpsong for a Radical. All those —Well no but . . . works were lifetimes in the making, and —The Pianola is the universal means of the end of the lifetimes left them not com- playing the piano. Universal, because pletely made. But Agape- Agape is not a there is no one in all the world, having the book that was finished only arbitrarily, by use of hands and feet, who could not learn Gaddis’s death. Which is not to say that it to use it that so God damned hard? Use of was completed in ease. Indeed, the pressures hands and feet...he got one of each on of life and of fighting to stay alive, pres- 12-38 Oz Btls Won’t Burn, Smoke or sures Gaddis shared with his narrator Smell coming down. according to Tabbi, are apparent from the novel’s opening lines: The Rush for Second Place concludes with a chronology of the player piano that No but you see I’ve got to explain all this Gaddis assembled while working in fits because I don’t, we don’t know how much and starts on the book. The chronology is time there is left and I have to work on the work of an avid, intellectually adven- the, to finish this work of mine while I, turous mind and covers the player piano’s why I’ve brought in this whole pile of invention, development, spectacular pop- books notes pages clippings and God ularity (260,000 pianos were manufac- knows what, get it all sorted and organized tured in 1904, of which only 1,000 were when I get this property divided up and player pianos; by 1919, player pianos out- the business and worries that go with it numbered all other pianos made), and, while they keep me here to be cut up and with the spread of the radio, sudden irrel- scraped and stapled and cut up again.[. . .] evance. Gaddis explored the development of automation in other industries and, like What follows this opening is a loosely a conspiracy theorist attentive to subtle punctuated, single-paragraph, monologue patterns and connections others miss, delivered by an author recovering in bed cross-referenced his chronology with polit- from an operation and trying to put his ical events, the births and deaths of financial and literary affairs in order. notable people, and the publication of Before he dies, he wants—no, needs—to get

28 Wilson Quarterly something down on paper that he’s been try- bruising, to blood from an unknown ing in various ways to write his entire life: wound spotting pages of notes, cut the “that’s what I have to go into before all my argument short and interrupt its develop- work is misunderstood and distorted and, ment. The narrator moves, or tries to and turned into a cartoon.” Like Joseph move, mostly to shift his position, but he Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old never leaves the room, or even the bed. Man (2000) and ’s This Is The overt drama is minimal at best—a Not a Novel (2001), two books about stack of books topples over; the narrator is writer-narrators completed under the unable to find the source, quotation, or sta- duress of poor health by authors (and tistic he needs in the materials with which Gaddis contemporaries) determined to he’s surrounded himself. All the activity in finish the work at hand—Heller died the novel is mental activity, and as the nar- before his book was published; Markson is rator’s thoughts speed ahead, they some- still alive—Agape- Agape was written by times outstrip his ability to relate them: Gaddis with the understanding that it “I’m, no, get my breath can’t get my would be his last published act as an breath,” he says. author. That crushing awareness of his own When the narrator catches his breath and end nearing is palpable on every page. As a feels comfortable enough to continue, when consequence, the writing is as deeply his body frees his mind to think about some- melancholic as it is direct. Thoughts are thing other than the sorry state of his body, two expressed without frills and with the utmost key ideas animate his thoughts. The first is his urgency. On more than one occasion, the frustration, and even anger, at people who narrator of Agape- Agape asks the reader, want to participate in the making of culture simply, “Can you hear me?” without expending any effort, who seek, as The narrator proceeds associatively, and Gaddis wrote in 1951, “the pleasures of cre- his monologue moves fluidly from idea to ating without work.” As if continuing the idea, skipping, for example, from a Leo same thought more than 50 years later, he Tolstoy quotation to remarks on the state writes in Agape- Agape, “it’s everything we’ve of contemporary movies and rap music to a been talking about from the start,” and then reference to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of riffs on an advertisement from a manufacturer Grass and, from there, to a discussion of of player pianos: the Pulitzer Prize, a quotation from a letter by Flaubert to George Sand, and back to the [. . .] discover your unsuspected talent, you Pulitzer Prize, then on to the sad state of can play better by roll than many who play book reviewing at The New York Times, by hand, the biggest thrill in music is play- then back once more to the Pulitzer Prize. ing it yourself even untrained persons can And that’s in just over two pages. do it, it’s your participation that rouses your emotions most, those phantom he story the narrator tells is, as hands. Tpromised, a kind of history of mech- anization and the arts. But between the Against this frustration Gaddis bal- allusions and quotations a smaller, more ances an acute despair and a belief that personal story unfolds, as the narrator people who discover their talents without attempts to summon enough life and suffi- effort and make culture without work are cient health to complete the project before capable of doing better and much more, but him. He feels his body, and, frankly, it does that they surrender, sometimes willingly not feel good. His skin, he says, is like and sometimes unknowingly, the parts of parchment, dry and brittle. Here, plainly, is themselves that might do so—surrender “the human shambles” still following the them, for example, to technology, with its work around. As the monologue carries the promises to do things for them—and make argument to some high and heated rhetor- a thousand other compromises besides. ical pitches, painful and glancing refer- This idea is by no means new to Gaddis. ences to stress and soreness, to aches and According to Tabbi, the phrase “the self

Autumn 2002 29 William Gaddis who could do more” appears in each of small audience.” “—Small audience! His the novels. It originates in a poem by feet dropped, —do you think I would have Michelangelo, which the narrator of worked on it for seven years [. . .]” Else- Agape- Agape translates, “Who nearer to where, though, when Willie, a character in me Or more mighty yes, more mighty than The Recognitions and the closest of many I Tore me away from myself. Tore me surrogates for Gaddis, describes the book away!” In his last book’s moment of black- he’s writing, his friend says, “—Good lord, est despair, Gaddis writes, “it’s madness Willie, you are drunk. Either that or it’s all madness thank God I’m not living you’re writing for a very small audience.” now[. . .] yes thank God I’m not living Ever undeterred, Willie answers, “So . . . ? today.” Shortly after completing Agape- how many people were there in Plato’s Agape, Gaddis died, at the age of 75, of Republic?” prostate cancer and the complications of emphysema. here’s no point in trying to recon- Tcile the various views Gaddis ll too frequently the books Gaddis expressed about “difficulty,” as if we might Aleft us are described as difficult, but then determine what, in the end, the man like the falsely reported death of another behind the work really believed. Better to great American writer, their difficulty is remark on what sets Gaddis’s writing apart: greatly exaggerated. What distinguishes his willingness to inhabit so many points of his novels from most other fiction is the view, his determination to keep them dis- degree to which Gaddis asks readers to tinct, his sense that dialogue in a novel participate, collaborate, be active and can represent sides of vital social argu- involved in each book. The novels after ments, and his faith that readers are more The Recognitions consist almost entirely of than capable of following and evaluating all dialogue, and narrators have gone the way the various lines of thought—capable, in of God in a philosophy class after other words, of doing more. It’s worth Nietzsche: They are absent. There are few remarking, too, on what sets Gaddis’s final indications of who’s speaking, few descrip- novel apart from his other work, at least at tions of clothing, landscape, or weather, first glance: the absence of any dialogue. and almost no omniscient glimpses into a Aside from wholly fantastic conversations person’s thoughts. “He said” and “she between two authors whom the narrator said” are endangered species, descriptions cites, Agape- Agape is a monologue, in the of manner—“quietly,” “urgently,” “with a course of which the narrator poses a num- curt nod”—are extinct. So it’s true that ber of direct questions to the reader. “Can readers need to concentrate. But Gaddis’s you hear me?” he asks, and later, quoting characters tend to use each other’s names the Michelangelo poem and echoing a more frequently than most writers’ char- question that haunts many of Gaddis’s acters do, and their voices are as distinctive frustrated characters, “Who more mighty as birds’. Through their speech they reveal tore me away from myself?” their character. The questions hang there on the page, Gaddis expressed deep ambivalence suspended and, for now, unanswered. But over the supposed difficulty of his books. if books are conversations carried out When asked by an interviewer whether he across time and cultures, as Gaddis wanted readers to like what he did, he believed they were (with the optimism replied, “Heavens yes.” In J R he coun- required to produce any good writing, tered Jack Gibbs’s apparent bluster about really), then his final book, like all his pre- making his player piano book as difficult as vious work, poses one elegant side of a he possibly could with the novelist long-running discussion that will surely be Thomas Eigen’s clear dismay at an admir- continued by others, dedicated readers er who suggests that “you must have and writers alike, in numbers that, howev- known when you were writing it, you must er small, will never allow Gaddis’s work to have known you were writing it for a very go unrecognized. ❏

30 Wilson Quarterly