A L S O+.T O D A Y

Waltzing the Cat
Reviewed by Paige Williams
Linked short stories, from the author of "Cowboys Are My Weakness," about a restless female photographer and her penchant for selfish, distant men

T A B L E+T A L K

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R E C E N T L Y

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(12/16/98)

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By Peter Kurth
(11/30/98)

From he-man to holy man
By Elaine Showalter
(11/12/98)

Ted Hughes, R.I.P.
(10/30/98)

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S A L O N
E M P O R I U M
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The best way to remember this uncompromising, darkly funny giant of American letters is to read him.

BY CARTER SCHOLZ | William Gaddis was esteemed by his peers like few other contemporary novelists, but his audience never matched his reputation. He wrote just four novels, but they are of such density, variety and accomplishment as to dwarf lengthier bibliographies. Each is an artifice of uncommon structural and moral integrity. Gaddis, winner of the National Book Award in 1976 and again in 1994 and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship in 1982, died Wednesday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 75.

Deeply concerned with the values by which people live, Gaddis filled his work with fierce anger and bitter humor at how people fail themselves and others, at all forms of laziness and greed and stupidity. His books overflow with bleak sorrow, outrage and a desperate laughter that provides the only refuge in a world where most people spend their best efforts on tasks not worth doing.

In his work, what is worth doing often goes unappreciated. The disappointed and neglected artists, writers and composers who inhabit his pages can be read, to some degree, as surrogates for Gaddis himself, from the saintly Wyatt Gwyon of "The Recognitions" to the obdurate Oscar Crease of "A Frolic of His Own."

"The Recognitions," published in 1955, daunted and angered reviewers with its 956-page length and its uncompromising aesthetic. Sterling North wrote in the New York World-Telegram: "What this sprawling, squalling, overwritten book needs above all is to have its mouth washed out with lye soap. It reeks of decay and filth and perversion and half-digested learning ... nowhere in this disgusting book is there a trace of kindness or sincerity or simple decency." Other reviewers were either distantly respectful or openly disdainful of Gaddis' ambition, but uniformly ignorant of his accomplishment, and the book sold poorly, although it gained a devoted underground following.

Gaddis was so embittered and set back by this reception that 20 years passed before the publication of his second novel, "JR." He was angered too by Harcourt Brace & World's lack of support for the book, saying, "They didn't publish it, they 'privated' it." In "JR," some of the more stinging reviews of "The Recognitions" are reproduced, and the novelist character Thomas Eigen has this exchange with an admirer:

-- But you must have known you were writing it for a very small audience ...

-- Small audience! his feet dropped, -- do you think I would have worked on it for seven years just for, do you know what my last royalty check was ...

Born in Manhattan on Dec. 29, 1922, Gaddis grew up in Massapequa, N.Y., a town that provided the model for the Long Island village "desecrated" by developers in "JR." His parents divorced when he was 3, and between the ages of 5 and 13 he attended boarding school. He entered Harvard in 1941 and spent the war years there, exempted from service for medical reasons, studying English literature and writing for the Harvard Lampoon. In his senior year, after a run-in with local police, he was asked to leave the college.

For the next two years he lived in Greenwich Village and worked as a fact-checker for the New Yorker. From 1947 he traveled through Central America, Europe and North Africa, settings that turn up in "The Recognitions." He returned to New York in 1952 and spent the next year finishing the novel.

N E X T+P A G E+| Talent in full swing with his debut novel

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