By Stuart Mitchner

Like everyone else, I’ve never gotten over The Recognitions. — Harold Bloom

When I told a friend who likes big, difficult novels that I was about to begin William Gaddis’s 956-page tour de force The Recognitions, which was published by Harcourt Brace 60 years ago, he wished me luck: “I’ve tried at least 4 or 5 times to crack that book, but without success.” In a later message, after hearing that I’d embarked on so daunting a journey, he said, “I’ll pray for you.”

Over the decades, for every person who told me I had to read The Recognitions, someone else told me it was unreadable. Yet people who had “been there” carried on as if they’d returned from the journey of a lifetime. Having arrived safely, if dazed and word-weary, I’ll tell you some of what I experienced on my four-month sojurn in Gaddis’s mid-century wasteland.

A Reviewer’s Nightmare

The hapless reviewers who had to deal with The Recognitions in March of 1955 have been mocked and reviled at length in Jack Green’s broadside Fire the Bastards, which is discussed on the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. Rightly anticipating what was in store, Gaddis mocks wouldbe reviewers in a scene near the end of the novel (“You reading that?” “No, I’m just reviewing it … all I need is the jacket blurb to write the review”). But what’s a busy journalist with a deadline supposed to do? Dip into the beginning, sample the middle, maybe read the last 50 pages? Or take a year’s leave of absence? In his New Yorker essay, “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard to Read Books,” Jonathan Franzen, who named his novel The Corrections as a nod to Gaddis (a piece of literary coattail-riding if there ever was one), says he read the book as “a kind of penance.” Like “somebody going out to score hard drugs,” he bought a copy of the Penguin edition, and “every morning for a week and a half … went from the breakfast table to a beige ultrasuede sofa module, turned on a lamp, and read non-stop for six or eight hours.”

Franzen describes the reading experience as “something like a fugue state, as if planting my feet on a steep slope, climbing …. There were quotations in Latin, Spanish, Hungarian, and six other languages to be rappelled across. Blizzards of obscure references swirled around sheer cliffs of erudition, precipitous discourses on alchemy and Flemish painting, Mithraism, and early-Christian theology …. I was alone and unprepared on a steep-sided, frigid, airless, poorly mapped mountain …. But I loved it. At the novel’s hidden pinnacle, behind its clouds of subsidiary symbolism, beyond its blind canyons of Beat anti-narrative, is a story about the loss of personal integrity and the difficult work of regaining it.”

What’s To Love?

I didn’t love The Recognitions. I mean, what’s to love? Did Gaddis create this monster expecting it to be loved? Did Picasso or Bosch expect people to love Guernica or The Garden of Earthly Delights? Any number of times I asked myself, “Why am I reading this? Do I really want to go on?” And of course I gave myself the Everest base camp answer, “Because it’s there,” a literary phenomenon, one of the least read “great books” in the world, the only work in its day large enough to inspire unthinkable superlatives, the mid-20th-century Moby Dick, the American Ulysses.

So, what would make The Recognitions worth braving all that learned and longwinded adversity? How about believable, interesting, sympathetic characters? Who’s to like in Gaddis’s world? Who’s to fear or hate or be in awe of? Where’s a Leopold Bloom? Where’s a Captain Ahab or a genially buoyant narrator like Ishmael? Your best bet would seem to be Wyatt Guyon, the novel’s fallen artist/protagonist who almost dies before he has time to live and who ceases to be explicitly referred to after page 118, remaining a nameless presence until he emerges under the alias Stephen Ashe some 500 pages later. With Wyatt drifting ghostlike in and out of the narrative, the reader has to make do with a crowded, hard to follow gallery of types like Otto Pivner, a born loser who is thwarted at every turn, love, life, and literature.

Stanley Steps Forth

Thomas Pynchon and Alexander Theroux, two authors for whom Gaddis helped lay the groundwork, respond to the character challenge by giving their requisitely one-or-two-dimensional players memorably quirky names like Slothrop and Eyestone. Except for a few cases like Sinistra and Agnes Deigh, Gaddis’s characters at least sound like “real people” with names such as Gordon, Ellery, Valentine, Esther, and Stanley, the musician who steps forth from the society of knaves and fools, wits and poseurs, killers and creators, to perform, literally, the novel’s denouement, playing his own composition on a “gigantic organ” in an ancient Italian church. Though the priest has warned him not to use too much bass (“non usi troppo i bassi, le note basse”), Stanley doesn’t understand Italian, goes heavy on the bass keys, pulls out all the stops, and brings the building and the novel down on his head: “The walls quivered. Still, he did not hesitate. Everything moved, and even falling, soared in atonement.”

There it is, possibly the most memorable conclusion in post-modern American literature and the majority of readers who embark on this journey, however hopeful and determined, will never get there.

And then there’s the last paragraph — “He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.”

Rereading that passage I begin to think that maybe this book can be loved, after all. Because the journey that ultimately matters is taken by the author who knows “seldom played” means “seldom read.” The heart of The Recognitions is beating in that last sentence. That may be what Robert Graves meant when he praised Gaddis for keeping “his head clear and his heart warm.”

Why Read It?

Whatever you may think of it, Gaddis has put a world between the covers, or, as Harold Bloom phrased it, “an epic of consciousness,” where “the inexplicable is marvelously omnipresent in an almost Dickensian way.” Stuart Gilbert, the author of the Skeleton Key to Ulysses, compares it to The Wasteland, which “was only a small corner of the wilderness so observantly and successfully observed by Mr. Gaddis.” William Styron calls Gaddis “a virtuoso of great charm” while another novelist of the time, Harvey Swados, sees “an army of the snazziest grotesques this side of the Inferno.” Robert Graves’s praise for the author’s clear head and warm heart follows a reference to “the mountain of filth, perversion, falsity, and boredom revealed in The Recognitions.”

There are passages throughout that are both savagely and subtly hilarious. Though the narrative is bookmarked by episodes in Europe, Gaddis has created what may be the most crazily, viciously, satirically unrelenting vision of post-war Manhattan literary-bohemian society ever written. Each of the deliriously interminable New York/Greenwich Village party scenes, which between them must occupy at least a third of the novel, is a phantasmagoria of black comedy-of-bad manners. In Tim Page’s biography of novelist Dawn Powell, who reviewed The Recognitions in the New York Post and was unfairly skewered for it in Fire the Bastards, he notes that she must have realized that Gaddis’s “hustlers and poseurs” were “not so dissimilar” from those in her novel, The Wicked Pavilion. Powell’s review makes an on-the-money comparison of Gaddis to the Ancient Mariner waylaying the reader with lectures on the Church Fathers while the “ever-defaulting hero” hurries “in his many guises through bordellos and monasteries.”

C.K. Williams 

The book sharing my bedside table with Gaddis is C.K. Williams’s 2012 collection Writers Writing Dying, which I’ve been rereading in the month since he died, along with The Recognitions, which he mentioned admiring in one of our last conversations.

Late one night, reading by the little booklight, I was moved to find this line in a poem called “Prose”: “Sometimes I give up even on it and drag myself out to the streets like Wyatt in Gaddis’s Recognitions.” In case I ever doubted that Gaddis was capable of creating a character “real” enough to believe in, here was poignant evidence from a poem about a crucial period in the life of a great poet’s work. Prose, he writes, has been keeping him sane “in the wretched blot of being nineteen” and wanting to write poetry but not knowing how to begin. And so, when even prose doesn’t work, he drags himself into the streets “from that miserable Paris hotel” with his alter ego, Wyatt Guyon.

You don’t have to read far in The Recognitions to understand the appeal that Gaddis’s style would have for a young poet who would eventually become known for his long, prosy lines. It’s easy to imagine Williams being struck by sentences like this one: “Undisciplined lights shone through the night instructed by the tireless precision of the squads of traffic lights, turning red to green, green to red, commanding voids with indifferent authority: for the night outside had not changed, with the whole history of night bound up in it had not become better nor worse, fewer lights and it was darker, less motion and it was more empty, more silent, less perturbed, and like the porous figures which continued to move against it, more itself.”

I wish I could email C.K. Williams that sentence, to see if he agreed that his work eventually had something in common with the articulated consciousness, the play of mind, stop and start, interrupted, turned back on itself, the way the line “with the whole history of night” comes up against “fewer lights and it was darker” and then, at the end, as the author of Writers Writing Dying might have had it, “more itself.”