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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.