William Gaddis was interviewed on November 4, 1986, in Budapest where he had stopped for a day on his way home from a conference in Sofia. The proposal of an interview survived his discouraging reputation for being reclusive and avoiding interviews. A gentle and genial man welcomed me in his Atrium Hyatt suite: grey hair; an absorbed and attentive, hard-featured, longish face with strict yet amiable, contemplative eyes; and a relaxed, unassuming manner. He had a ghastly cold and spoke hoarsely, coughing slightly, and sipping meditatively at his whiskey.

He listened to the questions with untiring patience. The remorseless logic as well as the profound care of his answers convinced me that this satiric chronicler of chaotic existence and entropic disintegration is indeed a fearful causal thinker deeply concerned about the human condition.

William Gaddis was born in 1922 in New York, where he lives now. In the mid-fifties he produced The Recognitions, an entropic, black humor, postmodern novel. Yet in spite of his books’ considerable artistic achievement, William Gaddis has still not received the degree of recognition that his talent and work deserve. Animated by a deep-seated humanism, he is a satirist who has no tolerance for stupidity and absurdity. With extraordinary erudition he examines man’s relation to the world in witty, sarcastic, often mordant social-epistemological parables. His novels are: The Recognitions (1955); JR, a National Book Award winner, (1975); and Carpenter’s Gothic (1985).

INTERVIEWER

Since over the years you’ve acquired a reputation for avoiding interviews, particularly those that address your work, let me ask why you are submitting to this one?

WILLIAM GADDIS

I suppose because I’ve got some illusion about finally getting the whole thing out of the way once for all. In the past I’ve resisted partly because of the tendency I’ve observed of putting the man in the place of his work, and that goes back more than thirty years; it comes up in a conversation early in The Recognitions. That, and the conviction that the work has got to stand on its own—when ambiguities appear they are deliberate and I’ve no intention of running after them with explanations—and finally, of course, the threat of questions from someone unfamiliar with the work itself: Do you work on a fixed schedule every day? On which side of the paper do you write? That sort of talk-show pap, five-minute celebrity, turning the creative artist into a performing one, which doesn’t look to be the case here.

INTERVIEWER

Thank you for the vote of confidence.

GADDIS

And so I’ve the hope of laying a few things to rest; an interview I can simply refer people to when the threat of another appears, without having to go through it again.

INTERVIEWER

You say a work has got to stand on its own. Isn’t it hard for a writer sometimes to adhere to this principle steadfastly? In other words, are you never annoyed by misinterpretations of your works?

GADDIS

What writer is not? And unless you’re writing “what they want”—I mean, some formula simply for the money—isn’t that our history, from Melville on? It comes with the territory, as the playwright said.

INTERVIEWER

Now that you have decided to step out of your reclusiveness—and before stepping back into it—perhaps you’re dissatisfied with the image that is in circulation concerning your life and personality and views that you’d like to correct?

GADDIS

I’d hoped this interview would clear up some of that—what can be cleared up, that is to say, because trying to correct one’s “image” is as futile as it is irrelevant. Of course, if your image is really all you’ve got going—which is hardly uncommon these days, take a Henry Kissinger, for instance—you’ll want to deliberately distort the record to make yourself look good. I’d go back to The Recognitions where Wyatt asks what people want from the man they didn’t get from his work, because presumably that’s where he’s tried to distill this “life and personality and views” you speak of. What’s any artist but the dregs of his work: I gave that line to Wyatt thirty-odd years ago and as far as I’m concerned it’s still valid.

INTERVIEWER

Here is another obligatory question. You have received recognition in the form of various grants and awards, including the substantial MacArthur Prize Fellowship. What is your feeling about that? How have they changed things?

GADDIS

Well, I almost think that if I’d gotten the Nobel Prize when The Recognitions was published I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised. I mean that’s the grand intoxication of youth, or what’s a heaven for. And so the book’s reception was a sobering experience, quite a humbling one. When finally help did come along, recognition as you say, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, they came in difficult times and allowed and encouraged me to keep on with the second book and start the third. Without them, I wonder if I might not just have dropped the whole damned business, though God knows what else I might have done, too late even to be any of the things I never wanted to be. There’s always the talk about feeding at the public trough, disdaining grants because you’ve never been given one. I mean we’d all wish to come out with the fierce integrity of Samuel Butler, say, who never wrote simply to publish or published everything he wrote—The Way of All Flesh was posthumous after all—and that has been the luxury of the MacArthur. But then I never was a fellow to rush into print.

INTERVIEWER

Could you say something about the genesis of your own novels? Can you reconstruct what was involved in your getting started with The Recognitions?

GADDIS

I think first it was that towering kind of confidence of being quite young, that one can do anything —“All’s brave that youth mounts and folly guides,” as we’re told in As You Like It. The Recognitions started as a short piece of work, quite undirected, but based on the Faust story. Then as I got into the idea of forgery, the entire concept of forgery became—I wouldn’t say an obsession—but a central part of everything I thought and saw; so the book expanded from simply the central character of the forger to forgery, falsification and cheapening of values and what have you, everywhere. Looking at it now with its various faults, I suppose excess would be the main charge. I remember Clive Bell looking back on his small fine book, Art, thirty-five years after it was published in 1913, and listing its faults, finding it too confident and aggressive, even too optimistic—I was never accused of that!—but still feeling, as he said, “a little envious of the adventurous young man who wrote it.”

INTERVIEWER

What moved you to write JR?

GADDIS

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

INTERVIEWER

Carpenter’s Gothic?

GADDIS

Well, that was rather different. I cannot really work unless I set a problem for myself to solve. In Carpenter’s Gothic the problems were largely of style and technique and form. I wanted to write a shorter book, one that observes the unities of time and place to the point that everything, even though it expands into the world, takes place in one house, and a country house at that, with a small number of characters, in a short span of time. It became really largely an exercise in style and technique. And also, I wanted to take all these clichés of fiction to bring them to life and make them work. So we have the older man and the younger woman, the marriage breaking up, the obligatory adultery, the locked room, the mysterious stranger, and so forth.

INTERVIEWER

To have a more detailed look at the novels now. The Recognitions takes its title from Recognitions, a work attributed to St. Clement of Rome. The Wyatt Gwyon of your novel is thus a Clement figure with a dispersed family—there are many more dispersed families in the novel—and with a story that becomes a dialogue between pagan and Christian ideologies, and becomes a search for salvation, to mention the most obvious parallels. What was your main intention in introducing a Clement figure into the twentieth century, in a story that starts a few years after the First World War and takes place mainly at the turn of the decades of the forties and fifties?

GADDIS

We come back to the Faust story and to the original Clementine Recognitions, which has been called the first Christian novel (I remember thinking mine was going to be the last one), about his search for salvation, redemption, and so forth. And I had these notions of basing The Recognitions on the constant presence of the past and of its imposition of myth in different forms that eventually come down to the same stories in any culture. I think they titled the Italian edition The Pilgrim or The Pilgrimage or something like that. In a sense it is that: a pilgrimage toward salvation.