J R Read online

  J R

  Other Works by William Gaddis

  The Recognitions

  Carpenter’s Gothic

  A Frolic of His Own

  Agapē Agape

  The Rush for Second Place

  J R

  WILLIAM

  GADDIS

  with an introduction by Rick Moody

  J R by William Gaddis. Copyright © 1971, 1974, 1975, 1979, 1993, Sarah Gaddis and Matthew Gaddis.

  All rights reserved. First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1975, and subsequently by Penguin Books in 1985. Portions of this book were first published in The Dutton Review, Antaeus, and Harper’s magazine, June 1975 issue.

  Introduction © 2012 by Rick Moody

  First Dalkey Archive edition, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gaddis, William, 1922-1998.

  JR / William Gaddis; new introduction by Rick Moody. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56478-433-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Free enterprise--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.A28J2 2011

  813’.5’4

  2011031306

  Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  Cover image: Letter from William Gaddis, copyright to The William Gaddis Estate.

  Design and composition by Danielle Dutton.

  Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America.

  For Matthew

  Once more unto the breach, dear friend, once more

  INTRODUCTION

  J R is a novel like no other novel, a singularity, a hands-down astonishment, an inferno, a Big Bang, a masterpiece. This introducer, asked to confine himself to a reasonable brevity, can in the pursuit of his introductory task do nothing but throw up his hands and assert the above—that the novel is a novel like no other, a singularity, a Big Bang, a masterpiece. In wrestling with the sheer expanse of the thing, in fact, modalities thereof, the introducer despairs of giving the flavor of J R, of its polyphonies and musicalities, its myriad intertextualities (all of which are meticulously cross-referenced at The Gaddis Annotations, online, a resource that the man himself would probably have found admirably, if outrageously, comprehensive). The introducer can but despair here, accept defeat, and retreat in the process to the safe haven of personal experience, because, when faced with the scale of critical exegesis that swirls around Gaddis, the personal is rarer. And so: My personal experiences—it must be said—do in fact involve episodes in which other writers warned me away from J R, owing to its occult and unjustified reputation for difficulty. J R is too difficult, too demanding, someone or some several someones reductively remarked to this introducer. Or: if one had to read a Gaddis novel, one should read The Recognitions. I did, I read The Recogntions, I devoured it, loved it in an unrestrained and slightly evangelical way, and yet in the completion ofthat reading experience, that encyclopedic reading experience, I rooted around for another challenge, J R, however, sat on the shelf for a while longer, until, in my early twenties, I elected to disregard all advice, and opened a paperback edition of J R and began. And why exactly? Because a challenge is a satisfying thing? Well, even more potently, I had consumed a Writers at Work interview with Gaddis, in which the author was asked by a Hungarian critic (I am reconstructing), a critic bent on a certain prismatic distortion of the work, What does J R stand for? To which Gaddis responded briefly, It’s an abbreviation for Junior. This exchange moved me in profound and significant ways, the admirable plainness of the response, likewise Gaddis s general resistance to simplistic interpretation and influence-peddling. And this was not all that moved me. I was also moved by J R himself, as described by Gaddis in the interview and in other public settings, J R, whose pre-pubescent malfeasance, whose moral bankruptcy, is wholly charming and oddly admirable and perfectly adolescent. J R Vansant could not seem more plausible and emotionally satisfying and true these days, in this Madoff-esque present. The author’s love for his creation, likewise the sense of committedness as to the scale of J R, and to making work that is resistant to easy reading and conventional expectations, all of this was enough to induce the introducer to overcome his cowardice and open the novel you have before you, only to find—immediately, instantaneously, in even the first pages—that J R was not, in particular, difficult at all. J R was, and is, hugely, riotously entertaining. I would like to reiterate this point as it is my most legitimate idea here—the book is entertaining and not difficult at all. It is entertaining because it is hilarious in ways both high and low, because it has found a route into the rotting heart of all that is American, which is to say American capitalism; it is entertaining because it strains against realism’s limitations with cunning and malice aforethought; it is entertaining because in addition to its anarchy it has a certain dystopian justice lurking in it. And whereas these themes—money, powerlessness, and the importance of art in bad circumstances—would turn up in later works by Gaddis—in, for example, A Frolic of His Own, which mainly concerns the legal apparatuses of American life—in no other work of Gaddis is the lancet as sharp as here. I, who (like you) loves to read because I love to read (and this is life enough for me), consumed J R as if life were happening nowhere else. I consumed it, in great preoccupied fits, fifty or seventy-five pages at a clip, and I was very ecstatically happy doing so, and the dialogue, the slew of voices swept over me, the operatic mayhem of J R’s method. I was, in those weeks, in aesthetic bliss, though I had a job at which I was meant to be reading other things, manuscripts by other writers. I, the introducer, can therefore attest that if you make as to replace food, sleep, and society with J R, you can in fact be satisfied with the result, not because it is some web of intricate literary allusions that will gauze up your consciousness, but because the book is so overstuffed with invention as to be an act of great joy, even as it despairs about money and the influence ofthat evil. Yes, the action at J R’s core is by now well-known: an eleven-year-old boy with modest prospects and a challenging home life creates a gigantic stock- swindling financial empire. And around him, meanwhile, circumambulates a number of other failed personages, such as the professionals of his school, and the family of one particular music instructor, whose struggles with money serve as a foil narrative to J R’s own. And yet plot summary will do little to suggest the comic scale of J R Vansant’s attendant rise and fall, however, nor will it do justice to the richnesses of character in this work, much broadened and deepened in the exacting particularities of voice. If, next to God, Shakespeare created most, Gaddis runs a strong third, with especial skill in reproducing what is completely personal, particularly human, in the speech of men and women, so that the surface of J R is composed of just that, the music of individual tongues, each distinguishable (despite the legendary lack of attributions) through the syntactical habits of the person in question, except where it is unimportant who is talking, which is occasionally the case, because in truth it is the community that is doing the talking, it is the nation talking, it is the money talking. Still, you can always pick up (for example) the slangy Long Island cherub talk of J R himself, and in our deracinated present, in which the contemporary voice of fiction has a certain sound, a certain present-tense reliance on simple sentences, on noun verb noun verb noun verb noun verb, Gaddis’s route forward, in J R, away from the encyclopedic third person of The Recognitions into the riot of colloquialisms of J R himself, feels far more contemporary, far more illustrative of the language in all its riches, than the cool veneer of contemporary naturalism. As always, methodologically, Gaddis was way ahead of his time. How did the boo
k come to be composed in this way? It would be possible to posit so many arguments! It is not exactly the case that The Recognitions readily attained the literary reputation it deserved during its early life (see Fire the Bastards by Jack Green for more here), and yet Gaddis managed somehow to follow that astounding achievement with one equally arresting, despite neglect. It took him fifteen years. The reading public was not clamoring for J R, the author himself noted. Solvency necessitated odd jobs, many in the corporate realm, in order to finance Gaddis’s assault on the notion of finance. (How different a writer Gaddis might have been if instead he’d resorted to a tenure-track job in a writing program.) Gaddis’s travels in the underworld, which is to say the world of international corporate capital, made J R the book it became, a getting-even with the business world, as well as a surpassing of what he’d done already, in which the suppression of the narrator in favor of the play of voices is a sort of sly commentary on the literature of the seventies (Donald Barthelme was also experimenting in works composed mainly of dialogue in the same period, as was a younger writer called Raymond Carver), on the supposed certainties of a panoptical narrator. Still, what is so hard to fathom is that Gaddis was doing what he did mainly apart from the mainstream of American letters, with a confidence in his vision that set him distinctly apart.

  It bears mentioning, perhaps, now that the introducer is nearing the end of his allotted space, that he did also dine with Gaddis once, though the author was already somewhat slowed by illnesses that eventually shortened his term. Having a reverential attitude about the books in question, J R above all others, the introducer was awed to the point of not necessarily having enough to say to Gaddis. The dinner took place on Long Island, as it ought to have done, a place I do not often visit. The dinner was negotiated by an intermediary, a splendidly generous and mildly acerbic woman from Manhattan who seemed to know a lot about literature (also about money and society), and who referred to the author of J R as “Gaddis” both in the abstract and, as I recall it, to his face. She was chopping vegetables for some kind of pasta something-or-other (reconstructing!), throwing it together at the last minute though this in no way made the dinner less excellent, and it was early summer, and Gaddis’s common-law step-daughter was visiting the next day, and I knew her, so I was going to make a twenty-four hours of it, often in Gaddis’s company, and this included, I don’t remember why, seeing a portrait of Gaddis by a certain painter-turned-film-director, and sitting in the parlor of Gaddis’s modest little house, the house to which he had retired in his last years, the upper floor of which, if I remember correctly, he had never seen, despite living in it, and all of this was of great interest, though the introducer did not himself much register on Gaddis’s screen except as someone who, like him, also favored the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Still, the hostess determined, that first night, that the important thing was for Gaddis and this introducer to spend a few minutes together in close conversation, so a screened-in porch was proffered, and there Gaddis and I sat for a while, and Gaddis seemed both brilliant and lugubrious, slightly world-weary, disinclined to allow a younger man to observe him in anything less than tip-top condition, and, at the same time, much possessed of layers not entirely visible. This introducer does not think that Gaddis appreciated having acolytes or perhaps utterly distrusted such things, and the introducer would have foresworn the word had he been able to think of a way to do so without invoking it. The whole night seemed, as it ought to have seemed, stripped from the milieu of Gaddis, the pages of Carpenter’s Gothic, let’s say, or A Frolic of His Own, or from the pages of J R, where the action is all built upon the contradictions of Long Island, the rural idyll of the place, the stark vulgarity of its moneyed precincts, the nightmarish suburban encampments creeping across. I felt lucky to be at the dinner, and I remember it as one of the high points of my life, though I have not often had occasion to say so, but, still, that should not distract from the business of introducing, and so let it be said that this material, this dinner, and the slightly personal tone of this introduction, these are to make clear additionally that the big wondrous dream of J R, the unparalleled commedia of the whole, seems to this writer to emerge reliably from the life and experience of author William Gaddis, as fictive material almost always does, even in its most fanciful or imaginative or pyrotechnical circumstances. Gaddis, the man, seemed to know a great deal about a great many things. And this is a book that demonstrates how knowing a great deal about a great many things—about music, and finance, and Long Island, and American history—is one way to make an American novel comprehensive, vital, timeless, great. Gaddis would never be quite this unrestrained again, and while he would use dialogue in similar ways in Carpenter’s Gothic, he would never capture quite voices quite so numberless, nor would he shoehorn in so many economic and cultural landscapes at once. Perhaps because the environment was different in 1975. Maybe there were fences to be swung at then. Maybe readers could better tolerate an experiment. But who cares why, finally? These historical issues are for critics. The book itself is meanwhile here before you, and it is not difficult. It is like no other novel, a singularity, a hands-down astonishment, an inferno, a Big Bang, a masterpiece, etc. So be glad you have made this purchase, be glad you have spent a little of your hard-earned money—

  Rick Moody, August 2011

  J R

  —Money . . .? in a voice that rustled.

  —Paper, yes.

  —And we’d never seen it. Paper money.

  —We never saw paper money till we came east.

  —It looked so strange the first time we saw it. Lifeless.

  —You couldn’t believe it was worth a thing.

  —Not after Father jingling his change.

  —Those were silver dollars.

  —And silver halves, yes and quarters, Julia. The ones from his pupils. I can hear him now . . .

  Sunlight, pocketed in a cloud, spilled suddenly broken across the floor through the leaves of the trees outside.

  —Coming up the veranda, how he jingled when he walked.

  —He’d have his pupils rest the quarters that they brought him on the backs of their hands when they did their scales. He charged fifty cents a lesson, you see, Mister . . .

  —Coen, without the h. Now if both you ladies . . .

  —Why, it’s just like that story about Father’s dying wish to have his bust sunk in Vancouver harbor, and his ashes sprinkled on the water there, about James and Thomas out in the rowboat, and both of them hitting at the bust with their oars because it was hollow and wouldn’t go down, and the storm coming up while they were out there, blowing his ashes back into their beards.

  —There was never a bust of Father, Anne. And I don’t recall his ever being in Australia.

  —That’s just what I mean, about stories getting started.

  —Well, it can’t help repeating them before a perfect stranger.

  —I’d hardly call Mister Cohen a stranger, Julia. He knows more about our business than we do ourselves.

  —Ladies, please. I haven’t come out here simply to dig into your intimate affairs but since your brother died intestate, certain matters will have to be dealt with which otherwise might never come up at all. Now to return to this question of . . .

  —I’m sure we have nothing to hide. Lots of brothers don’t get on, after all.

  —And do come and sit down, Mister Cohen.

  —You might as well tell him the whole story, Julia.

  —Well, Father was just sixteen years old. As I say, Ira Cobb owed him some money. It was for work that Father had done, probably repairing some farm machinery. Father was always good with his hands. And then this problem came up over money, instead of paying Father Ira gave him an old violin and he took it down to the barn to try to learn to play it. Well his father heard it and went right down, and broke the violin over Father’s head. We were a Quaker family, after all, where you just didn’t do things that didn’t pay.

  —Of course, Miss Bast, it’s
all . . . quite commendable. Now, returning to this question of property . . .

  —That’s what we’re discussing, if you’ll be a little patient. Why, Uncle Dick, Father’s older brother, had walked all the way back to Indiana, every step of the way from the Andersonville prison.

  —And after that business of the violin, Father left home and went to teaching school.

  —The one thing he’d wanted, all his life, was to own as far as he could see in any direction. I hope we’ve cleared things up for you now.

  —We might if he came back here and sat down. He won’t find anything gazing out the window.

  —I had hoped, said Mister Coen from the far end of the room, where he appeared to steady himself against the window frame,—I expected Mrs Angel to be with us here today, he went on in a tone as drained of hope as the gaze he had turned out through evergreen foundation planting just gone sunless with stifling the prospect of roses run riot only to be strangled by the honeysuckle which had long since overwhelmed the grape arbor at the back, where another building was being silently devoured by rhododendron before his eyes.

  —Mrs Angel?

  —The daughter of the decedent.

  —Oh, that’s Stella’s married name isn’t it. You remember, Julia, Father used to say . . .

  —Why, Stella called earlier, you told me yourself Anne. To say she was taking a later train.

  —That name was changed from Engels, somewhere along the way . . .

  —I’m afraid I’ll miss her then, I have to be in court . . .

  —I scarcely see the need for that, Mister Cohen. If Stella’s husband is so impatient he’s hiring lawyers and running to court . . .

  —You’re losing a button here, Mister Cohen. Thomas had the same trouble when he got stout. He couldn’t keep a crease in anything either.