JR
by WILLIAM GADDIS 726 pages. Knopf. $15 hardcover;
$5.95 paperback. “Money,” said Gertrude Stein, “is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.” Stein, who did not have much to say about roses either, apparently meant that money—like gravity and magnetism—is so pervasive and anonymous that it needs no human inferences. Does a fish talk about water?
William Gaddis’ long, satirical novel JR could well be a model of such a gestalt theory of money. For 726 pages, the reader is bathed in the sounds of voices talking mostly about loot and business—but actually saying nothing.
Gaddis, however, has much to say.
Twenty years ago, he published The Recognitions, a major postwar American novel that is still largely unknown and unappreciated. In nearly 1,000 pages, the then 33-year-old author took on the godless 20th century. Through his hero, a man who turned from the priesthood to become an artist and then an expert forger of old Flemish masters, Gaddis spun the platonic metaphysics of reality and imitation into exciting fiction.
His message to an age obsessed with the vanity of creativity was actually a disturbing reminder: art is not invention but the recognition of eternal patterns.
Picnic Forks. In JR, the patterns are again discernible, this time in a world where means have few ends—only the creation of more means; where the techniques of doing things have become more important than the things themselves; where language is debased in the service of such perversions. The book generates a cacophony of banalities and corruptions that drown out love, art, and whatever other human activities can be heard struggling beneath the din. At such moments, JR seems derivative of Thomas Pynchon’s V and Gravity’s Rainbow. But it is more likely that Pynchon was influenced by Gaddis’ earlier Recognitions.
JR can be excessive. A hospitalized businessman expounds on capital accumulation while receiving an enema.
Gaddis’ prose occasionally shows strain:
“Her brassiere strap hung errant and anomalous.” But these lapses are overwhelmed by the novel’s bitterly comic vision: a world in which an eleven-year-old boy known as “JR” parlays a bid to supply the Army with 9,000 gross of wooden picnic forks into a multinational conglomerate. Barely literate, he works out of a telephone booth and gets his leads by subscribing to dozens of commercial magazines and catalogues.
JR is that most mysterious and nimble of all entrepreneurs—the middleman. The forks he sold to the Army were actually purchased from Navy surplus.
As he explains: “I got it right out of that spot bid catalogue I traded off you to send in for where the Navy got all these new plastic ones so they like spot bid these here wooden surplus ones real cheap for anybody that wants.”
From wooden forks, his business metastasizes wildly through the acquisition of bankrupt companies. By making salvaged assets jump through tax loopholes, the juvenile tycoon gains control of a brewery, a film studio, an untold quantity of frozen pork bellies, an entire New England mill town, a factory that manufactures player-piano rolls and condoms, and much more.
JR rises on the failed and the obsolete. His employees include a blocked novelist, a composer of baroque music and a professor of dead languages. All are embittered by a society that ignores or trivializes their art. The story of Mozart’s life is turned into an inane fairy tale for a film strip. The novelist—who might well be echoing Author Gaddis’ own disenchantment about the fate of The Recognitions—notes that his last royalty check was for $53.52. For the lover of ancient languages, there is an “educator” saying, “In terms of the ongoing situation to tangibilitate the utilization potential of this one to one instructional medium in such a meaningful learning experience that these kids won’t forget it for a hell of a long time.”
JR does not follow normal lines of plot or characterization. It is not always easy to tell who is saying what to whom—or why. At times the experience is like sitting in a cheaply constructed apartment and hearing snatches of neighbors’ conversations or the eruptions from their TV sets. The form of the book constantly threatens to become the very chaos it is criticizing. But it holds. If JR were simply a literal send-up of Horatio Alger stories, Gaddis’ ironies would be heavy and obvious. But his conception is pure and highly original. The dung-beetle logic of the young JR, the rationalizations of the go-getters and the stifled rage of the gotten echo long after the last line of this profoundly indignant novel.
“I’ve been posthumous for 20 years,” says William Gaddis. At 52, he sits uneasily on the edge of a delayed resurrection. It is not a bad place to be. Still, Gaddis agrees with Wyatt Gwyon, the hero of The Recognitions, who demanded, “What’s an artist, but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it around.”
As the author of one of America’s authentic and enduring cult novels, Gaddis still receives midnight phone calls from devotees attempting to pin down unintended literary allusions. Salingeresque rumors have grown up around this publicity-shy man. According to one, he was so disappointed about The Recognitions that he bought up all the copies and burned them. Another ludicrously casts him as a floorwalker at Bloomingdale’s.
Part of the truth about the early novel is pathetically simple: with classic mistiming, Gaddis’ publishers (Harcourt, Brace) changed management, and the momentum so necessary at a book’s coming out was broken.
Restless Group. A new paperback edition of The Recognitions was published last year by Avon ($2.95), but as Gaddis notes, “For some strange reason, my royalties for the book have always been about $100 a year.” During those years he has earned his living as a freelance, writing speeches for top corporate executives, scripts for industrial films, public relations for a drug company. He maintains his headquarters in a small Victorian house overlooking the Hudson River in a village north of New York City. Gaddis has two grown children from a previous marriage.
He was born in New York City in 1922, schooled in Connecticut and Long Island. At Harvard he earned a reputation as a humorist when, in 1944, he edited the Lampoon. A small, wiry man with graying hair, Gaddis still prefers the old collegiate look of Shetland sweaters and buck shoes.
He left college without a degree to work as a checker at The New Yorker. After the war, the young writer joined that restless group of expatriates who traveled to Mexico, Paris and Spain in search of experience and inexpensive living. Gaddis’ varied background has served his fiction well, especially in JR. At present he is working on a western screenplay. “Every American writer,” he insists, “has a western in him somewhere.” But in a world that offers so many choices and distractions, the big problem, as Gaddis sees it, is “to decide what is worth doing.”
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