Gaddis in Fiction

One measure of William Gaddis’s influence on contemporary writers is the number of times he and/or his novels have appeared in other writers’ books. The following list is organized chronologically.
compiled by Steven Moore
with contributions from the
Gaddis Annotations Project members
and others.
Kindly report further sightings --
 

Chandler Brossard. Who Walk in Darkness
New Directions, 1952.
Reprint., with a foreword by Steven Moore, Herodias Press, 2000.

Gaddis knew Brossard in the late 1940s and was the basis for the character Harry Lees, a Harvard dandy who drinks too much.

Jack Kerouac. The Subterraneans
Grove Press, 1958.

After he returned from Europe in 1951, Gaddis became acquainted with all the Beats, and in 1953 made a trip to Alan Ansen’s house that is reported in Kerouac’s bluesy 1958 novel. Gaddis is called Harold Sand and he’s described as “a young novelist looking like Leslie Howard.” Ansen is “Austin Bromberg,” and in later years Gaddis said Kerouac’s account was very accurate.

David Markson. Epitaph for a Tramp
Dell, 1959.

Markson read The Recognitions upon its publication in 1955, wrote Gaddis a fan letter which he responded to six years later, and remained in contact with him until Gaddis’s death in 1998. A character in Epitaph for a Tramp is writing an essay on The Recognitions and Gaddis’s style is parodied in a few places.

The following passage (plus a reference to a long novel) --

echoes this one, about Otto, in The Recognitions:

 [Richard Oswald]

Richard Horn. Encyclopedia
Grove Press, 1969.

The protagonist of this innovative novel in the form of an encyclopedia has The Recognitions on his bookshelf, and on page 48, under the entry ELEVEN WEST HUDSON ST.,  "a big, unshaven man told a small, untidy man, "I used to think The Recognitions was the best in English since Ulysses."

.

David Markson. Springer’s Progress
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977.

The opening line of The Recognitions is quoted in a chapter of the protagonist’s favorite opening lines.

John Sladek. Roderick, or the Education of a Young Machine
London: Granada, 1980.

A science-fiction novel that names J R and imitates its style of dialogue.

Alan Ansen. “Epistle to Chester Kallman,”
from The Cell (privately printed, 1983). 
Reprinted in Contact Highs: Selected Poems 1957-1987. Introduction by Steven Moore. Dalkey Archive, 1989.

Ansen’s acquaintance with Gaddis is the subject of a quatrain in this long poem (page 156).

Stanley Elkin. The Magic Kingdom
Dutton, 1985.

Gaddis admired Elkin and made friends with him in the 1970s. For some reason, he named the 8-year-old geriatric in this novel Charles Mudd-Gaddis.

Charles Simmons. The Belles Lettres Papers
Morrow, 1987.

Gaddis’s name comes up in this novel about editors at the New York Times Book Review.

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Dalkey Archive, 1988.

Gaddis flits through the memory of protagonist Kate a dozen times in this sublime novel.

Sarah Gaddis. Swallow Hard
Atheneum, 1991.

A largely autobiographical account of Gaddis’s daughter’s relationship to her father, here called Lad Thompkins.

The NY Times review.

Don DeLillo. Mao II
Viking, 1991.

Gaddis, a friend of DeLillo’s, may have contributed to the character Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist.

Rick Moody, “Primary Sources” 
In The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven
Little, Brown, 1995.

Gaddis is included in the list of authors Moody most admires (pages 236-37).

David Markson, Reader’s Block
Dalkey Archive, 1996.

Quotes a line from The Recognitions regarding Sheri Martinelli (the basis for Esme).

Ethan Mordden,. Some Men Are Lookers
St. Martin's, 1997.

Two characters discusses the virtues of The Recognitions vs. J R on p. 43 of this gay novel.

Klaus Modick, German novelist, poet and co-translator of JR and Carpenter’s Gothic has the following passage in his novel Gone Was Gone, making an allusion to the end of Carpenter’s Gothic:

Die ganz Schlauen wie William Gaddis setzten heutzutage freilich nicht einmal mehr den allerletzten Schlußpunkt, sondern signalisierten mit einer hochtrickreich kalkulierten Satzzeichenleerstelle am Ende die prinzipielle Unabschließbarkeit oder unabgeschlossene Fragmenttragik ihrer Herzblutmomente, womit dann sogar noch Célines berühmte drei Pünktchen am Ende der „Reise ans Ende der Nacht“ als kümmerlicher Kompromiß im Leeren stehen.“ (p. 10)

("These days, of course, the very clever like William Gaddis don’t even put the very last full stop, but rather signal the basic impossibility of closure or the unfinished fragmentary tragedy of their most sacred moments with a highly calculated and trickery space instead of a punctuation mark at the end, and thus even turn Céline’s famous three dots at the end of Journey to the End of the Night into nothing but a poor compromise.") [AZ]

John Updike, Bech at Bay
Knopf, 1998.

Gaddis is mentioned a few times (pages 28, 71) in the context of his membership with the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.



 

Kurt Andersen, Turn of the Century
Random House, 1999

The character Bennett Gould's scheme to buy up the rights of contemporary fiction is described:

"Authors purchased are said to include A-list biggies Bellow, Updike, Roth, Salinger, Brit bad boy Martin Amis, movie-legit scribe Tom Stoppard, and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, as well as lesser-knowns William Gaddis, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Laurie Colwin, David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Robertson Davies, GOP speechwriter Mark Helprin, and porn-lit scribbler Nicholson Baker." (page 534)   [Peter Dempsey]
 

A story following the imagined adventures of three supposedly rich and famous collaborative writers on a mock book tour all over the world. In the course of that they also play pool with William Gaddis and he wins. "The Unknown" won the first price in the 1998 "trAce/Alt-X Hypertext Competition." In a chapter called "Remember to Read Gaddis" there is the following observation about what is going on in Gaddis's novels: "Voices do battle in a hyper-real space where orality, voices, statements and documents of various kinds, represent the sum and total possible understanding of experience. What is said by the characters is all that is known, and what is said is open to misinterpretation, or misdirection." [AZ] http://www.unknownhypertext.com/readgaddis.htm

Joseph Heller, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man
Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Gaddis mentioned on page 166 concerning his disappointment with his publishers.

David Markson. Vanishing Point
Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.

"If on a winter's night with no other source of warmth Author were to burn a Julian Schnabel, qualms?" (p.104) and "Tardily realizing---qualms after all. Author would undeniably be distressed at the loss of Schnabel's portrait of William Gaddis. (p.107) Also, "From Nightwood: Pray to the good God; she will keep you. From The Recognitions: Just ask God, baby, She'll protect you. (p.124) [JB]

Auster, Paul. The Brooklyn Follies
New York: Henry Holt, 2006

On page 58 narrator Nathan Glass meets bookshop owner Harry. While Harry is on the phone behind his desk, Nathan looks around:

"To keep myself occupied, I walked around the room inspecting the books on the shelves. By my rough count, there must have been seven or eight hundred volumes in that neatly organized space, with works ranging from the quite old (Dickens and Thackeray) to the relatively new (Faulkner and Gaddis). The older books were mostly leatherbound, whereas the contemporary ones all had transparent covers wrapped around their dust jackets." --Marija Stojanova