William Gaddis: Below Deck On The Ship of Fools (pt. 1)

The two-part season finale.

“What’s tragedy to you is an anecdote to everyone else. We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are”. —The Recognitions

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We often begin without really knowing why. I started this newsletter as a way to practice, to talk in a longer-format about books and authors that I find interesting. What I began to notice, almost immediately, is my focus and fascination with artists that have a complicated relationship with fame. So we arrive, finally, at William Gaddis. 

I have begun to think about this as a sort of Season One finale for this newsletter, that after we finally escape the orbit of Mr. Gaddis, we can abandon fame as a through-line for this newsletter and move on to—something? I haven’t decided what comes next.

Gaddis is a fascinating figure to me, and hopefully, by the end of this newsletter, he will be to you as well. Scarcely, outside of myth and legend, has a person ever been so prophetic, so beloved, and so deeply, singularly, doomed.

But maybe Gaddis was a myth, or a legend. Much of what seems to surround him is rumor.

There was a rumor that he had paid his publisher to release his first book.

There was a rumor that all the unsold copies of this debut book had been destroyed.

There was a rumor that, after such a failure, he had taken on a pen name—Thomas Pynchon.

In truth, he had moved to Long Island and become a family man, writing ad copy and instruction manuals to pay the bills.

There was a rumor that he was working on a second book.

A second book that would take him twenty years to complete, and would earn him a National Book Award (his first) and a MacArthur Genius Grant. 

But before we can contend with the outer-limits of obscurity, we need to talk about The Recognitions. Gaddis’ debut, his worthless masterpiece. An enormous, decades-spanning novel that seemed to contain all of life itself, because, well, it probably does.

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“Such recognitions are not reversible.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

So then, we often begin without knowing why. Kicked out of Harvard after a nebulous “altercation with police,” a young man named William Gaddis found himself adrift. He hit the ground walking, moving from thing to thing, career to career, seeing a little bit of everything.

He worked, briefly, as a fact-checker for The New Yorker. He wandered across huge swaths of several continents, working as a dock-hand on the Panama canal, and admiring art and architecture throughout France and Spain. He materializes, thinly fictional, in the summer of 1953 as “Harold Sand” in Jack Kerouac’s novella The Subterraneans. 

This is the position from which Gaddis would begin—tantalizingly close to real success, watching it come for his contemporaries, but not for him. Then, after a decade-or-so slumming it, hanging out with the village art brats, brushing elbows with the Beats, traveling abroad, and always, always, always, writing, William Gaddis finally delivered a draft of his first novel, The Recognitions, to his publisher. A 480,000 word manuscript. A brick of a book whose size, ironically, made it easier to ignore. Multiple reviewers claimed not to have even finished it.

But as always, there is something happening in the periphery. 

Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro himself, was once given a copy of The Recognitions, and when asked what he thought of it, he famously said “you tell your friend that Joyce was an ending, not a beginning.” And while it’s a great line, and a fun historical anecdote, I think it sells both writers short. Because Ulysses, and Joyce’s work in general, wasn’t an ending as much as it was a point of no return. Once it was made clear what literature was really capable of, there couldn’t be a return to the way things had been before Joyce (and, of course, Virginia Woolf) and all of that restless experimentation. We were now aware that the shadows on the wall were, in fact, shadows.

In the case of The Recognitions, it’s perhaps more like the apes at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, finding themselves at the foot of a mysterious, imposing slab. We were gifted—and burdened—by its arrival.

To be totally honest, The Recognitions makes a terrible first impression. As a physical object, the book is unforgiving. Depending on the edition, it weighs between 2.5 and 3 pounds, and regardless of edition, it comes in somewhere just-shy of 1000 pages. The original hardcover, and the recent NYRB reissue (done in the same style) offer nothing in the way of cover art—just the author’s name and the title. The Recognitions is an outright hostile book, both inside and out.

Inside, the book is prickly and maybe even entitled. It's the work of an all-seeing curmudgeon. The guy on the outskirts, sitting at the fringes of the party, watching. A hater. A crank. A real sourpuss. The Recognitions is a book deeply out of touch with its current moment, and thank God for that.

Gaddis was, in detestable internet-speak, trad. He was maybe even a little conservative, though not in the sense of conservatism as we know it today. As we will come to see over the course of this entirely-too-long newsletter, what Gaddis valued most was authenticity. 

In his time spent traveling, he found that he liked countries where the church still exerted great cultural force. Where people participated in routines and rituals that were thousands of years old, sometimes doing so in buildings that were just as old. You can stand beneath the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel today, and they look the same as they would have in the 1500s.

To Gaddis, the continued existence of something old seemed to prove its quality. Modernity, by contrast, is shoddily made. Nearly everything in the United States—buildings, roads, machines, art—was made within the last 100 years, and done so by whoever promised that they could do it for the cheapest. It’s more than just a case of “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore.” It’s indicative of a larger, cultural ailment. Modern life is a perpetual undercutting, a bet against the future, and it weighed on Gaddis.

The “main character” of The Recognitions (as much as this monster of a novel has a main character) is Wyatt Gwyon. The son of a Calvinist minister, Wyatt displays an artistic talent from an early age. This artistic talent ostensibly has something to do with the sacrificial death of a monkey in the book’s prologue, because among 1000 other things, The Recognitions is also a re-telling of Faust, because sure, why not?

Wyatt, in his adulthood, is working as an architect. He designs bridges for a firm, but he’s not just some civil engineer, working hourly. No, Wyatt is gifted. His bridges are beautiful, they are works of art, and they catch the attention of his supervisor, Benny. There’s always a bigger fish, however, and Benny  needs to impress his own supervisor, so he begins to put his own name on Wyatt’s blueprints. This doesn’t bother Wyatt, because Wyatt’s real interest lies in painting.

As a child, Wyatt honed his artistic talents by re-creating the paintings of old masters like Brueghel and Van Eyck. He finds in these old paintings a beauty that the rest of the world seems to lack, and he wants to capture it himself, to tap into whatever well of sublime creativity the old masters drew from. Eventually, this old-school approach captures the attention of a fatally capitalist art dealer named Recktall Brown, who offers Wyatt a deal.

But as always, there is something happening in the periphery.

The Recognitions establishes the themes that will run throughout the entire body of Gaddis’ work, namely: authenticity, capitalism, and art as a sacred connection between human beings and the world around us. 

We are suddenly transported to a banana plantation in Central America, and it is here that we are finally offered a reprieve from the old-world drama that dominates the first 200 pages of the book. There’s a lot of, for lack of a better word, pretension, on display in The Recognitions up until this point. Gaddis has lots of thoughts on art, and religion, and knows intimately the layouts of New York, and Paris, and Panama, and he wants to demonstrate that knowledge to you. It can, at times, feel like sitting through a lecture or a sermon.

And then we meet Otto.

Otto is a playwright—and a plagiarist. Otto is in Central America for no particular reason. He has just been traipsing around the continent while working on a play that he calls “The Vanity of Time,” which was one of the working titles for The Recognitions. (Side note: The R had several working titles, my favorite of which was Three Suicides, Fully Explained—because there are three of those in the novel, and so boy howdy does he mean FULLY explained.) If all of this is starting to feel a little familiar, it’s supposed to. Consider Gaddis’ own history, the recycling of his own working title, and most on-the-nose, the fact that “Otto” sort-of sounds like “author.”

Otto returns to America wearing a sling, nursing a completely made-up injury that he has no real explanation for—he simply thinks it’ll make him seem more interesting if he returns unshaven and wounded. He ends up shrugging off lines of questioning, telling people something like “oh you know how it is in Central America there’s always revolutions happening down there,” which is objectively pretty funny.

And here is where The Recognitions begins to shine. One, in its humor. For all of its allusive richness, its old-world sensibilities, its tradition, the book is funny. It’s brilliant, pitch-black comedy, equally likely to make you cringe as to make you laugh. The book begins to have fun, at least for a while, following Otto (and his contemporaries) in their misadventures. Remember Wyatt, from earlier? Neither does anybody else. Wyatt is almost entirely absent for something like 2/3rds of the book, and when he does re-appear, nobody ever refers to him by name.

The target of this humor, of course, are posers, whom Gaddis takes every opportunity to completely eviscerate. Hanging around with the Beats in the early 50s, Gaddis sets multiple scenes in Greenwich Village, parties full of struggling, wannabe artists. Fake bohemians, saying meaningless art-world things like “I’m really more of a positive negativist” (and then later, “I’m really more of a negative positivist.”) Characters mistake a Big Unshaven Man for Ernest Hemingway with no proof (even though he may just be someone experiencing homelessness, as Big Unshaven Man reads BUM as an acronym) and they buy him drinks all night. Ernie, he tells them to call him. People begin to question Otto and his play, because Otto takes smart things said by his friends and writes them down as his own. Everyone likes his play, but it just sounds so familiar, it’s weird.

Elsewhere, characters smoke a brand-new substance called marijuana, and speculate endlessly on the sexual orientation, and sexual relationships, of other characters. There’s Esme, the art scene’s collective muse, an opium addict, and a sort of anti-Manic Pixie Dream Girl long before that was ever a thing. There’s Anslem (who’s name is purely coincidental, and not a nod to German painter Anslem Kiefer, although it would be fitting.) Anselm is an asshole, for too many reasons to state.There’s Agnes Deigh (like agnus dei, get it?) a socialite whose entire social sphere is based on shallow, meaningless friendships. 

And then there’s Stanley. Stanley is wonderful. A composer, and the only halfway-decent person in the entire goddamn book.

But as always, there is something happening in the periphery.

Recktall Brown has made Wyatt (who is now nameless, for reasons you’ll soon see) a deal. Having displayed considerable talent, Brown decides that Wyatt is his man, and they are going to forge paintings by the old masters, marketing them to art collectors as the genuine article. 

Throughout the misadventures of Otto and co., we hear references to this. In newspaper headlines, and passing conversations at parties and bars, we start to hear that all these lost paintings are being rediscovered. It’s one of the most interesting things that The Recognitions does, and part of the reason I keep reusing that line, from above. The characters do not enter some kind of suspended animation when a chapter is not about them. Wyatt disappears, he goes off the grid, but that doesn’t mean he’s not living. His story is playing out in the wings, as would happen in real life.

The other reason for Wyatt’s namelessness, is that he’s nobody. Wyatt is an objectively talented artist, his work is taken as that of some of the greatest painters of all time, but he’s just some guy. This is where Gaddis begins to play on one of the other major themes of the book—the ways in which capitalism destroys art.

Wyatt produces masterpiece after masterpiece, a pitch-perfect Jan van Goyen triptych, or something like that, but Wyatt is not Jan van Goyen. It doesn’t matter how good his painting is, he could surpass Bosch, or Brueghel, or whoever, but nobody will care because he’s Wyatt Gwyon. Think about it, when you go to a museum, you’re more likely to spend time in front of a painting by an artist whose name you recognize, someone that history has decided is “good.” When we begin to rate art on some kind of value-scale, taking into account things like fame, we begin to pay less attention to the actual objective quality of the thing and more to the name on it. When an art collector pays millions of dollars for a painting, they’re paying for the signature, for the privilege of saying “I own an original by [X].” (It’s like the conception of modern art being all about who got there first. “My kid could do that!” yes, but your kid’s not Jackson Pollock.)

Capital corrupts everything in The Recognitions. The Pope stops to read advertising copy for sliced bread during his benedictions, which is a proto version of the hyper-capitalism that dominates Infinite Jest. Money is the root of all societal ills. Gaddis is trying to warn us that we have cheapened our entire existence in pursuit of material wealth.

Out of a cast of hundreds, Stanley is the only character who receives a happy ending, as much as a happy ending can exist in a bitter, plotless book like this. Stanley is (finally) performing one of his compositions, at a cathedral in Europe, when the pipe organ at which he sits collapses, burying him beneath the rubble. Though it kills him, the book ends, in its final words, by saying that Stanley lives on through admiration for his work, even if it is seldom performed. The same can’t be said for Wyatt, or Brown, or anyone else involved in the counterfeiting ring. Only someone who has produced something real and true will be remembered.

The same might have been said for William Gaddis—buried beneath what he had created, and forgotten by almost everyone.

But as always, there is something happening in the periphery.

William H. Gass, in his spectacular introduction The Recognitions, talks about how this is a “wacko book with wacko fans.” Though the fans were few, they were fevered in their adoration of the thing, endlessly discussing and quoting many of the book’s brilliant, profound, and profane lines (Like everyone’s favorite, the best depiction of anxiously watching a too-loud drunk stumble onto public transportation, just knowing they’ll be trouble. “Merry christmas! the man threatened.”)

Modern critics almost always use the term “Janus faced” to describe The Recognitions. While Gaddis may have had the old masters (dude loved Dostoevsky) in mind when he was writing, what emerged was a simmering cynicism that was forward thinking, and maybe too-much so. Gaddis’ work is infused with a bitterness toward the world at large, and a sense of ironic black comedy that would be latched onto by writers like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo in the decades to come, influencing the next round of literary titans as Gaddis himself was, again, passed over.

So art and religion have failed us. The opportunists, the lawyers, and the posers have won. How? Why? And what is to become of us? All of those questions, and more, will be answered, if only we are willing to listen. 

As Gaddis told Der Spiegel in 1996, two years before his death:

“Today it's a lot worse. But no one has read the novel, and so no one's noticed a thing.”