Doing my part to support the Dalkey Archive

Yesterday, on the way to an n+1 shindig, about which perhaps more later, I ducked into a bookstore off Market, thinking that it might have some of David Markson's recent work.  It did not, but it did have Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat in a single volume, which I purchased, and which is how I came to know how the former begins.  This evening, having read about half of Epitaph for a Tramp, I decided that I should get a copy for my mom, since she likes crime novels and whatnot, and it would be up her English major alley, so wandered up the street from Bittersweet into a different bookstore.

But there were no Epitaphs to be had, not even for ready money: instead, all of Markson's more experimental offerings were lined up on the shelf, not very far to the left of many of Harry Mathews'.  O cruel fate! I lamented, unable to stop myself from purchasing This Is Not A Novel, Reader's Block, and Wittgenstein's Mistress by Markson, and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium and Singular Pleasures by Mathews.

That is not all, though.  In chapter 3 of Tramp, Harry Fannin discovers his wife cheating on him with someone who, in his judgement, is a grad student; at any rate, he's taking a class in comparative literature, for which he has written an essay whose fourth page begins thus:

And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that…

Epitaph for a Tramp came out in 1959, a scant four years after The Recognitions was issued to almost entirely extremely negative notices, and Jack Green's Fire the Bastards! wouldn't appear until 1963.  G.P. Cranley was one prescient guy, though if Fannin's impression of the dives he hangs out in is anything to go by, he's also the sort of person that Gaddis mocks pretty scathingly in his novel.  And on the bus, what should I encounter when opening Wittgenstein's Mistress to a random early page (27) but this? I would say it was in The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, except that I do not believe I have ever read The Recognitions by William Gaddis..

One begins to suspect that Markson esteems The Recognitions (by William Gaddis).

Comments

[ogged]

Indeed.

Harlin: There's also William Gaddis.

Markson: I thought The Recognitions was—Lowry being English—the great American novel of that period. That's the only other letter I wrote to a writer, but it was different from the Lowry one. When The Recognitions came out, it was shat on by every reviewer. They said, "How dare he write so long a book? How dare he deliberately try to create a masterpiece?" I wrote this casual letter, saying, "Screw them. Some of us out here know what you did." When my wife and I went to Mexico for three years, an editor came down there, and Aiken had given him my name. We had him to dinner, and all I did was talk about The Recognitions. And this guy said, "Shut up already. Tell me about Mexico. I'll read it when I get home." And he did. The Recognitions came out in 1955, and this would have been about 1961. One day I get a letter there: "Dear David Markson, If I may presume to answer yours of"—whatever it was—"May 16, 1955." It turned out that this editor, Aaron Asher, had come home, read the book, and decided to resurrect it. There had never been a paperback, and he put it in print, and it brought Gaddis back to life.

[ben wolfson]

One of the characters in Epitaph for a Dead Tramp has a copy of Under the Volcano on his shelves.

Lots of classy literature running around that book: the Fannin's been reading The Magic Mountain when it starts ("I had been slogging through it for weeks and was having a rough time") and is prepared to invoke Proust and parody Macbeth (possibly because of his dictionary of quotations), met his wife not long after sitting down with The Waste Land, and so on.

[ben wolfson]

Markson doesn't think much of graduate students.

[Wrongshore]

which Markson to start with?

[ogged]

The late "experimental" series begins with Reader's Block.