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Donnerstag, 13. September 2018

The Time a Bitter Rival Stole a Manuscript From William H. Gass / Nick Ripatrazone. In: Lit Hub Daily September 13, 2018

William H. Gass was teaching when someone stole his novel manuscript. It was the summer of 1958, and Gass was working on the final chapter, “glaring” at a book that he struggled to finish. For years, his short fiction had been rejected by literary magazines. He’d become a “cross and bitter person.” The final chapter of his manuscript contained “lines chewy as cheap caramels.” Junk. He wished “every word would disappear as if set down in lemon juice.” He went to class, and left his office door in room 202 of Purdue Hall unlocked. When he came back, the manuscript was gone, “disappeared like dew does on a warm morning.” Gass was furious, confused, paranoid.
He put a notice in the Lost and Found section of The Journal and Courier newspaper: “Novel Manuscript, 80 single-spaced typed pages in black spring binder. Title—’Omensetter’s Luck.’ Of no value but to author. Reward.” His dean sent a memo to each department at Purdue: “Bill Gass has lost the nearly completed copy of a novel, on which he worked for four years . . . We can only hope that someone picked it up out of accident and will be glad to rectify his error if he can find the owner.” The dean asked professors to survey their classes. Nothing turned up.
It was his only copy of the manuscript. Gass hated the “smeary results” of carbon copies: “I would write what would seem to me an appealing line, but beneath my Underwood’s boldly hammered page, the same words slunk—weak and pale, fuzzy and fake.” Back then, Gass rode his bike to work, and would keep the manuscript in his basket. Maybe it fell out? He retraced his route. His wife searched their home. It was gone, without a trace.
Or was it? Gass knew the culprit, although “I hadn’t a shred of evidence.” It was Edward Drogo Mork, a new professor in the English department, who had oily hair and wore starched shirts and shiny black shoes. “Solicitous as a salesman,” Gass wrote in his afterword to the 1997 re-issue of Omensetter’s Luck. Mork was “snooty” with everyone except for Gass. He hung around Gass “because he was a brain picker. Did I rather like being picked?”
Gass would pause the story here—he did like to open the curtain of a sentence and smirk. Edward Drogo Mork? Gass said that a man named Edward Drogo Mork stole a novel manuscript from his office. The name sounds like one crafted by Thomas Pynchon, or Gass himself. The pseudonym remained for years, until Gass began using the man’s real name during interviews: Edward Greenfield Schwartz.
Schwartz and Gass shared an affinity for Katherine Anne Porter. A young and ambitious scholar, Schwartz had compiled a bibliography of Porter’s writing. His request to write her biography, though, was rejected. In 1956 she told him “I think the blood pressure of your interest is not really high enough for a biography.” Her decision was firm: “you show almost no understanding of my character or temperament; and there is plainly to be seen though under the surface, your own determination to fit my life into your own idea of what it should be or you think it should be, instead of making an attempt to discover what it really was.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-time-a-bitter-rival-stole-a-manuscript-from-william-h-gass/

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