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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