Truman Capote pronounced Joy Williams’ first book, State of Grace, “the best novel of the year.” Harold Brodkey called her “the most gifted writer of her generation.” The Paris Review gave her a lifetime achievement award. So why don’t more of us know her work?
Williams has written five collections of short stories; four novels (reaping nominations for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award); and two works of nonfiction. But she doesn’t schmooze or self-promote; she focuses on seeing, very clearly, the world around her; selecting details and dialogue charged with meaning; and weaving all those bits of experience into something so true and so finely crafted, it will come alive in a stranger’s mind.
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In her archives are not only manuscript drafts but also wry observations, a curiosity cabinet of index card jottings, and reams of letters exchanged with some of the century’s finest writers. She’s one of the last writers to compose, edit, and correspond offline, so we can trace her own impatient revisions (taped onto the pages with cellophane now aged orange) and her editors’ reactions.
Her draft for “Nine Essential Attributes of the Short Story” has “Nine” crossed out and “Eight” scribbled as replace-ment. She distills. Among her criteria are “a clean clear surface with much disturbance below”; “an animal within to give its blessing”; “a certain coldness.” The short story “is not a form that gives itself to consolation,” she writes, “but if consolation is offered it should come from an unexpected quarter.”
What Williams’ work offers is not simple consolation but instead devastating truth—and it finds its way inside you because you’re laughing, and dazzled, and you forget to mount your defenses.
In a black plastic box, the index card jottings under a tab for “Words” include “benignant kindly or gracious ina patronizing way”; “you got a high amnesia threshold”; “weakest noodle”; “to wall oneself off architecturally from the unassimilated poor.” Tyche, Greek for luck or chance, she decides, “should be a girl’s name. blind personal and malevolent.”
Flipping through the box has the thrill of espionage—yet it’s humbling. She sees so much, gathers constantly, dives deep. Reading the correspondence, on the other hand, is pure gossipy fun: Here’s Annie Dillard inviting Williams to Montana, praising her charred tostadas, noting that her daughter is “slogging through 3rd grade, and Brownies.” Christopher Buckley writes from the White House press secretary’s office, lamenting the “genuine hatred” he heard in the voice of Williams’ husband, L. Rust Hills, fiction editor at Esquire, whoapparently thought Buckley“‘betrayd’ my Esquire friends by taking this ‘twerpy job.’” Ann Beattie invites Williams to visit, adding, “If it’s as hot as today, we can sit on the back porch in our underwear, complaining.”
The writers commiserate about domestic trials, debate the merits of Prozac, roll their eyes over editors. (On one of Beattie’s letters, I HATE MICHIKO is printed in a child’s labored, crooked letters, the E and K backwards. It’s hard not to think of the powerful New York Times Book Review critic Michiko Kakutani.) The normalcy in these letters humanizes such literary gods as Richard Ford, James Salter, Raymond Carver, William Gaddis… Gordon Lish writes, “Lookit, Williams, I want this inscribed—and…I want something I can show at parties. I want love is what I want. And make it snappy.”
The correspondence with William Gass, one of Washington University’s most acclaimed writers before his death in 2017, is a short story unto itself. They met at Yaddo, the legendary writers’ retreat, in 1968, and parting was hard: “Dearest Joy: I saw you lope off toward the Buick, and that was that,” Gass writes. “Wrapped in metal afterward, I poured alcohol inside.” He goes home to a social whirl, “handshakes which flew from one branch to another like nervous birds,” yet keeps Williams “wrapped around my wrist” literally and metaphorically (she’d given him a leather bracelet.) His marriage is unhappy, and he is lonely in his crowded life: “How much space there was in that jammed living room,” he writes after a party in his honor. “A seabird, floating alone on the ocean, knows a more intimate relation.”
The intimacy between Gass and Williams is obvious: He’s euphoric, floating on infatuation, polishing every image for her eyes only (and now ours). “Please send the photographs,” he urges. “I need you that way, too; I need you every way I can.”
Two weeks later, their ambitions come to the fore: “I am delighted about The Paris Review,” he writes, then proceeds to spoil it just a bit: “You see, you are on your way, though I am no longer sure what that phrase means having presumably ‘arrived’ myself, and finding I am no where.” One month after Yaddo, he asks, “Are our feelings too painful to open, so the matter is best left closed, sewn up like a wound?” Now, instead of sending lyrical images, he says he can’t write at all.
Six weeks later, when his wife has formally asked for a divorce, his tone has changed: He says he loves Mary, too! (He eventually married Mary Henderson; Williams married Hills.) But Gass remained a staunch friend: “Joy, the damn stuff always looks awful in galleys; it always, set in type, has that worried unreal fussy look, and please don’t make meals of your hands, but make them write.” Unlike the romance, the respect endured.
Joy Williams was in St. Louis April 6 to speak at Gass’ memorial at Washington University.
