Chekhov's Mistress
Tyree article at the Gaddis Annotations Site
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J.M. Tyree, whose latest work can be seen in the June Believer, published an article on William Gaddis in the New England Review that has now been posted on the invaluable Gaddis Annotations Site (It was Genevieve who originally found the NER article and wrote about it on the Henry Thoreau, William Gaddis, and the Buried History of an Epigraph, as Genevieve said in her post, “muses over the connection via an exchange Thoreau had with Emerson about family and creative work, and draws a long if tantalising bow over the fact that Thoreau, like Gaddis, was miserable in the city when he worked there, though probably for different reasons.”
Jumping off from this quote:
What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.
-Thoreau, to Emerson
Tyree discusses Gaddis’s work and puts Thoreau convincingly into context with Gaddis’s thoughts:
All this seems so thoroughly contemporary that one is left initially baffled by Gaddis’s longstanding general interest in Thoreau, and by his repeated use of the passage from Emerson’s eulogy in particular. What has Gaddis to do with Thoreau, the compulsive woods-walker of the American Renaissance, Concord ‘s self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and waterer of wild trees, the naturalist of Walden and Walden ? One may begin to answer the question by placing Gaddis’s epigraph back into its original setting. It turns out that Thoreau’s saying, read in the wider context of Emerson’s Atlantic essay, was part of an argument. Emerson is recalling the experience of walking with Thoreau:
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great . . . Presently he heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird that sings indifferently by night and by day. I told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. He said, “What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.”
Tyree asks:
But what exactly did Thoreau mean? The observation recorded by Emerson, it must be admitted, is not an easy one to decipher. One finds the object of a long quest, quite suddenly, at the family dinner table. But in the moment of discovery, something seems to go wrong; rather than capturing the truth, one becomes its prey. Clearly, the conversation here has expanded beyond night-warblers. Thoreau is now speaking of truth and its relationship to the family dinner table…
Before we even get to the conclusion, Thoreau’s words already resonate more clearly (Well, I say more clearly, but in fact I wouldn’t have given the connection much thought without this essay) despite the vast differences between the two men in time and place. Tyree says: “That Thoreau would have so much to say to Gaddis is surprising, and that the debt would bear on the most experimental and modern aspect of Gaddis’s work is more surprising still.”
Since the article is freely available on-line, I’ll let you discover the rest, but I will say that when thinking about an author, this sort of tangential thinking is particularly interesting to me; like pondering over the meaning of one word in a long poem, it lets the text speak for itself while bringing you ever closer.
J.M. Tyree’s blog is Ocracoke Post.
Read widely, think well, and write often
comments
Good to see Tyree’s article up there. It was interesting at the time to see how little came up in the databases, albeit with a perfunctory search. (Seems Gaddis really did write that astonishing first novel for a small audience after all.) I’m sure he deserves his own ‘cottage industry’ though.
– genevieve (06/28 at 09:46 PM)
Very generous response, thanks a million for the feedback. I enjoy this site a great deal.
– J. M. Tyree (06/29 at 07:08 PM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: June 27, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:2
- Links to this Post: Technorati
