William Gaddis: Below Deck On The Ship of Fools

The two-part season finale.

Detail from a self-portrait done by Gaddis, headless and anonymous.

3—

“Bad money drives out good.” — Gresham’s law

The years pass without most people noticing. If you knew what you were looking for, the century was broken in two, a distinct before and after, with the publication of a titanic novel that most people ignored. 

Despite an ever-growing number of people saying “no really this is the greatest book of all time you have to listen to me,” a second book failed to materialize. Its author seemed to have disappeared, at least as far as the world was concerned.

William Gaddis had returned to Long Island, where he grew up, a place that he resented immensely. Now a married man, and father of two children, he didn’t have quite the same amount of time that he used to just to mess around, go live in Panama for a while, hang out with the village art deadbeats, etc. He had to work, in the real, American sense of the word.

But on his desk, at night and on weekends, he was arranging and rearranging little slips of paper. Thousands of them, like ticker tape parade confetti.

Gaddis paid the bills for his middle-class American lifestyle by writing advertisements and instruction manuals. It was writing, sure, but it wasn’t the kind he really wanted to be doing. It did, however, provide him with something that nobody else had—his ear for modern America.

Along with the advertisements and instruction manuals, Gaddis began to write film strips for the U.S. Military, training videos and things of that nature. He became acutely in tune with meaningless bureaucratic terminology, technical terms, and acronyms. He referred to it in interviews as “the babble,” the overwhelming chaos and noise, all disparate and jarring, unending. As technology continued its exponential increase, entwining itself more and more with our daily lives, so increased the noise that it produced. Televisions compounded the noise produced by radios, companies like Muzak Inc., now synonymous with a kind of soulless 20th century modernity, existed solely to fill any corner of silence left in American life.

“The babble” joins art, money, and God as the fourth major theme in Gaddis’ body of work. Because after The Recognitions, William Gaddis became a writer who worked with sound.

4—

“It’s buried usually under paragraphs, but this is what America is all about.” — Gaddis to La Quinzaine littéraire

So we’ve established that life has been cheapened, that what Gaddis values most is authenticity, and that what he has received instead is commodity. The next question is obvious: how did that happen?

Money (what else?)

In the interview referenced above, with La Quinzaine littéraire, Gaddis refers to himself as “an injured party” when he offers his opinion on the perceived vacuousness of contemporary literature. He cites Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel as writers who get advances of millions of dollars for books that he thinks are “bad money.”

This refers to Grisham’s Law, an economic theory that also pertains to Gaddis’ fiction both figuratively and literally. Grisham’s law states that “bad money drives out good,” and in layman’s terms, this stems from the days when counterfeiting was a whole lot easier, or when there were multiple forms of valid currency. The idea is simple: if you have a worthless currency, and a currency that has real value, people will always be more willing to part with the worthless one, and therefore the economy is flooded with worthless junk. I don’t know how Bitcoin works (and I never will, that’s a promise) but I assume Grisham’s law is running rampant with the cryptocurrency people.

Metaphorically, the “bad money” is bad art. More literally, the “bad money” is, well, money. Tom Clancy gets several million dollar book deals a year for books that ghost writers will tackle anyway (which continues now, even after Clancy died!), while Gaddis has to apply for two different grant programs, and work full time, over the course of twenty years just to finish a single book.

That book is J R, an act of vicious satire, which takes aim at American capitalism, the explicit devaluing of the arts, the gutting of public education, and, well, Long Island. If it were up to Gaddis, they would sink Long Island into the ocean and never speak of it again. And for his patience, his perseverance, and his ire, he was given a National Book Award.

The Recognitions proved that Gaddis had an incredible eye for complex literary fiction, full of lengthy, acrobatic descriptions of places and people. He had an incredible eye for detail, and could construct beautiful, lyrical sentences on par with some of the greatest to ever do it. So naturally he threw it all out the window. Pronounced as individual letters, not as “junior,” J R was William Gaddis truly finding his voice (get it, because...)

J R is a real sink-or-swim kind of book. 700 pages of dialogue, mostly unattributed, in a single unending stream. No chapter breaks, no fades to black. This is what I mean when I say that William Gaddis was a writer preoccupied with sound. I suppose that it would have made sense for J R to have been a play, except that what little descriptive information does exist is still unbelievable—“sunlight, pocketed in a cloud, spilled suddenly broken across the floor through the leaves of the trees outside.”

Never again would he revisit the pages and pages of lengthy description that dominate so much of The Recognitions. Gaddis had found his muse, and it was American conversation. Gaddis, like Graham Greene with England, aimed to be the writer of America, even the unflattering parts. Except all that Gaddis seemed to find were the unflattering parts.

Much like The Recognitions, J R is difficult in the ways that real life is difficult. There are an enormous cast of characters, some of whom recur, some of whom do not, and it’s often tough for a reader to keep them all straight when the dialogue goes unattributed. To identify people, the reader often needs to pick up on characters’ speech patterns, their tics, or the characters that other characters associate with. And the incredible part is that it’s possible to do so. Gaddis proved himself to be such a virtuoso with dialogue, that it’s really all you need (an approach that he will boil down to its essence later.)

Plot-wise J R is relatively simple. It follows J R, an eleven year old, who, with the help of his struggling music teacher, builds an enormous empire out of largely worthless stuff (penny stocks, junk bonds, re-selling army surplus, etc.) The struggling composer seduced away from art and into the world of finance is, well, a little on the nose for a guy whose major preoccupation is authenticity in art. (SIDE NOTE: what is it with these postmodern male novelists writing a sprawling thing with a cast of complicated characters, and then following it up with a tighter book about money? Gaddis did it. DFW did Infinite Jest and The Pale King. Paul Murray did Skippy Dies and The Mark and The Void. I’m sure there’s probably more! Why!)

J R builds this fortune largely over the telephone, using Mr. Bast as a surrogate whenever a real adult is needed for something. Much has been made about the chaos of J R, and why he wrote so much of it as scraps that he re-arranged as he saw fit. This simulation of modern (in the 1970s) America was attempting to replicate the battering of people’s brains, done by televisions and radios and whatever. This is all true, but I also believe that a big reason for the unattributed dialogue is that J R builds his empire by phone, lying about his identity.

The unattributed dialogue in Gaddis’ novels also works in service of a larger, overarching societal commentary—namely that America is an individualist nation, where the traditional measures of success often reduce life to abstractions. You and I have no concept of how much a billion dollars actually is, and “billionaire” often refers to someone’s assets or holdings, rather than how much money is actually in someone’s bank account. Once the numbers get large enough, they cease to mean anything at all. This fatalism is a world view that follows into A Frolic Of One’s Own, which won Gaddis his second National Book Award. Frolic declares war on America’s standing army of lawyers, and the endless blizzard of stupid fucking pointless lawsuits that reduce people’s lives to “blank v. blank”

Frolic is essentially about intellectual property law, and copyright, and who actually gets to make money off of art. The suits compound endlessly, adding new layers, and countersuits, and appeals, until eventually everyone is miserable and nobody can tell what “justice” actually constitutes anymore. 

In all cases, Gaddis proved himself to be deeply prescient, almost prophetic, and nowhere has he been more vindicated than in his posthumous novella, if you can even call it that.

5 —

“So I mean listen I got this neat idea hey, you listening? Hey? You listening…?” — J R 

Once again, someone got paid to miss the point.

History repeats itself in the dumbest ways possible, and in 2021, a London Review of Books piece appeared, and it was… bad. So in the spirit of Jack Green, I will briefly state the problems I have with somebody whom I thought did a subpar job reviewing Gaddis’ work. 

This person read 1600 pages of book, covering the NYRB reissues of The Recognitions and J R, and walked away saying “lol this is boring.” What’s worse is that they dragged the endlessly brilliant Joy Williams (who might have the coolest author photo in the world) into the whole thing, citing her introduction to J R as proof that Gaddis “has appealed to at least one female sensibility in the 45 years since the book’s publication,” which is just the Infinite Jest critique—“only self-important white guys could possibly enjoy this,”—being leveled at a new target, now that pendulum has begun to swing back the other direction on Wallace.

Furthermore, the critic says that Gaddis’ writing is characteristically “awkward,” taking issue with both the grammar and the cadence. Now, I want to give this person the benefit of the doubt, maybe they just didn’t like the voice in which Gaddis writes, and to each their own, but that being said: this review was printed in the London Review of Books. In what universe do the British have the right to critique grammar and cadence? That’s a right funny thing, innit?

And finally, to say that Gaddis work is dry, or overindulgent, or bogged down by its ambition, or worst of all, boring, is to fundamentally miss the point of what Gaddis was trying to do.

Enter Agapē Agape, Gaddis’ final, and shortest, work. 

It was a failure, this little novella. A concession of defeat. For most of William Gaddis’ life, he had been collecting research for a book that never quite came together. It was supposed to be a “social history” of the player piano, an object that most of us rarely (if ever) think about, but an object that haunted Gaddis endlessly. Agapē Agape is, in essence, a direct appeal to the audience, which is always a risky move. It’s a blistering, barely fictional rant by an old man, sifting through scraps of paper on his deathbed (it was published posthumously), hurriedly recounting the general gist and thesis of this piano player book that never was.

Gaddis was always worried that people weren’t listening, and after the initial failure of The Recognitions, can you blame him? The quote that begins this section of the essay is the closing line of J R. And now, here he is, talking to the reader directly. He can’t risk people not listening to him any longer, because he has something very important to say. Agapē Agape is the bitter pill that we have to swallow, like it or not.

Hope is dying in Gaddis-world, and there is a very clear-cut cause: people no longer value art. Art to Gaddis (and to me!) is a sacred thing. It’s supposed to be our connection to something larger than we are, the vehicle by which we understand ourselves and the world around us. You can go all the way back to things like cave paintings, or the oral tradition of storytelling before things were written down. Art was supposed to be a way for people to document themselves, to say “I was here, and this is what the world was like.”

And nobody gives a shit anymore!

Through the gutting of the American public school system, which happens slowly, and agonizingly, in J R, people simply aren’t taught how to interact with art anymore.  The average American reads at a middle school level or below. Arts programs the world over have been devalued and strangled, had their funding cut, or otherwise had people’s access to them reduced in some way. And all we had to replace art was entertainment, or God forbid, content.

The reason that Gaddis was so fixated on the player piano, was that it marked the exact moment when the devaluing of art began, and thus the exact moment that society went into decline. You simply plunk in your quarter, and the machine plays itself, removing the human element entirely. No longer do you have any need for the artist—the musician who actually sits there and plays the song, who has shown dedication and drive, and given up their time for their art—you just get the song. On demand. Whenever you want it.

To look at a painting is far, far different than to look at a jpeg of said painting on your phone or computer. The making of plans, traveling to the museum, traversing the space, taking in (even unconsciously) the architecture, sharing the rooms with other people, and then finally standing in front of a piece of art are part of what makes the painting special. It’s an event. It’s memorable. It’s an experience, and experiences are what enriches our life. But with the advent of the player piano, the idea shifted, and people didn’t want to have to have the whole experience. Why go to the symphony if you can hear a machine play the same songs, perfectly, whenever you want?

And it’s a problem that has only gotten worse. Streaming services, for example, are detrimental to art. They take what should be an experience, or an expression of a person’s life, and often reduce it to background noise. It’s the endgame of the player piano—a kind-of Nietzschean Last Man, seeking only comfort. People want to be able to just put something on while in transit, or while eating, and only half pay attention. The algorithm feeds it to you, and you don’t have to think about it at all. 

It manifests itself as yearly superhero movies and their Disney Plus spinoff tv shows, churned out by screenwriters for actors standing in front of greenscreens (because digital effects people don’t have a union, and are therefore exploited easier than anyone else in the film industry.) Ian McKellen has been an actor for seventy years, starting on stage and then transitioning into film and TV. He famously broke down crying on set of the Hobbit movies, having become so frustrated and infuriated by the isolating process of cheap, digital moviemaking.

It manifests itself as Netflix garbage, direct-to-streaming nothingness that people will watch once, if at all, and then never watch again. Sit down, spend six hours of your life staring at a screen, briefly be a part of the conversation (or discourse), and then move on.

It manifests itself as teenagers on Twitter saying “anyway, stan Lana” or “stream Good Ones,” reducing music to numbers, a contest to see who can rack up the higher score.

It manifests itself as a culture where everything is a subscription. Where you pay for things forever, but never own anything.

Because as always, money is at the root of it all. With the current systems in place, artists don’t make art, they make merchandise. Art has become a way to pass the time, and it has damaged our ability to live in a fulfilled way. Don’t ask questions, just consume product, and then get excited for next product.

Agapē Agape is a painful book with a simple desire—to be heard. It’s the last will and testament of a man whose moment never came, and whose warnings have gone unheeded. It’s as if a machine were aware of its own obsolescence, and he can’t shake the feeling that maybe he just needs to get with the times, old man, because this is what people really want.

And that’s the ultimate tragedy of Gaddis’ life, and his body of work. He saw the futility of it, of struggling against an exponential current. He could tell that people were growing less interested in maybe having something meaningful, if it could be traded for the guarantee of having something that’s merely fine. Cassandra-like, he saw where things were headed, but was powerless to do anything about it. Nobody cared about The Recognitions, and J R & A Frolic of His Own may have been critically well received, they are frequently included on lists of most difficult books. 

Fittingly, part one of this essay, my newsletter setting up the fact that nobody cared about William Gaddis, was the least popular one I’ve ever done.

He knew, almost from the beginning, that he was going to lose (after all, the title of his one book of nonfiction is: The Rush For Second Place). In every single one of his books there is an author stand-in character, and every single time, the character is seen as a loser, a hack, or a poser. They universally fail at what they set out to achieve. And clearly that’s what Gaddis thought of his own work, at least a little. Yet he continued to do it. He aimed to say “I was here and this is what the world was like.” He went down fighting, writing for people who shared in his wounded idealism, people who believe that art still matters. He was buoyed by the solid core of people who understood what it was that he was doing, but from Otto to the nameless narrator of Agapē Agape, Gaddis knew that the joke was ultimately on him.

And it was. William Gaddis is buried in Sag Harbor, way out at the end of Long Island, and there’s a typo on his tombstone (The Recongitions). A final joke at his expense—exactly how he would have written it.