For an author who spent seven years writing “The Recognitions” (1955), a big, elbow-straining novel that most people didn’t read, and the next 20 years writing “J R” (1975), an almost-as-big novel that most people also didn’t read, it will come as no surprise that William Gaddis’s selected letters are consumed with worries about how little money his books are making, how few people understand them and how he plans to pay his bills until the next book comes along. As he writes his literary agent, Candida Donadio, in the mid-1970s, just when “J R” was failing to secure a much-needed paperback rights advance:

“America has odd ways of making one feel one’s self a failure. And looking over the fragments of our correspondence assembled, I am just terribly struck at the consistency, from my end, of howls about money, and from yours of reassurances, hopes, encouragement: of course this isn’t really news (and probably hardly unique in your file of writers), but seeing it so all at once did overwhelm me with a clearer sense of what I’ve put you through year after year, and I wish to Christ it had finally come up on the note of triumph you have hoped and worked so hard for.”

Like most sensible serious writers, Gaddis never actually planned for his “triumph” to be posthumous; nor was he trying to write books that would be considered unreadable (usually by people who hadn’t read them). “What pained me most about the reviewers,” he writes in 1960, referring to the notoriously inadequate reception for “The Recognitions,” “was their refusal — their fear — to relax somewhat with the book and be entertained.” To be fair, one can understand why your average reviewer might not have been able to “relax” when faced by a thousand-page novel packed with theological allusions, inventive (but consistent) punctuation, dense, tiny typography and huge, tree-trunk-wide paragraphs. It’s a daunting task just lifting one of Gaddis’s best novels — let alone reading it.

As he writes Frederick Exley, a fellow writer almost as fascinated by failure as he was: “Thanks ahead for your lectures on ‘The Recognitions,’ that again is the God damndest thing: I’ve got about 1/2 dozen Ph.D. theses on it also word that somebody at Univ of Nebraska Press is bringing out a book on it next year; latest royalty statement 5/5/81, $12.76, less 10% commission enclosed find our check for $11.48 . . . that should inspire them!” For Gaddis, inspiration was something of a curse — it drove artists to do great things, and those great things often made them incomprehensible to normal people.