Jack Green - william gaddis's the recognitions was published in 1955, its a great novel, as much the novel of our generation as Ulysses was of its. It only sold a few thousand copies because the critics did a lousy job

Jack Green, Fire the Bastards!, Dalkey Archive Press; 2nd ed., 1992. [1962.]
This work is in the Public Domain. No rights reserved. First published 1962.


"Fire the Bastards! "is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel "The Recognitions "as a case study.


There are many malign influences that have been injurious to modern literature. The greatest scourge is, no doubt, translation -- few worse fates can befall a book than to be "translated" (a vile corruption all the worse because it is so common, so widely tolerated, and so uncritically accepted). Near as bad is what that terrible breed, "book reviewers" inflict on modern literature. Jack Green's book is one of the more famous rants against the profession.
       His call is to fire the bastards. Green uses the critical reception of William Gaddis' The Recognitions in 1955 to show that book-reviewers aren't doing their job. Accusing them of incompetence, laziness, and worse he too easily can cite a multitude of examples supporting all his charges. It's an angry, damning book -- but no less fun for that.
       Gaddis' book, published by Harcourt Brace, was actually reviewed by a large number of newspapers and magazines (55 at the first go round). As Green shows most of the coverage was superficial, misleading, wrongheaded, and filled with mistakes. Leaving aside questions of the book's literary merit, Green convincingly shows that most of the critics were in no way even qualified to make any sort of judgment regarding the novel. Two boasted of not having finished the book, others merely embellished the cover-blurb. Mistakes and misunderstandings crop up all over.
       Gaddis' fat book (near a thousand pages) is an ideal subject for an attack on the critics. Not the simplest of novels, it is very long (near 400,000 words) and quite demanding. In addition, Gaddis was a newcomer to the literary scene -- an unknown. The book mystified the book reviewing guild. As Green convincingly shows few actually did their job. All they had to do was read the book carefully and then review it, but that was clearly beyond them.
       Green's extensive quotes, comparisons, and lists of mistakes ("boners") are both entertaining and maddening. A student of the book itself, Green also offers a fairly useful discussion of how The Recognitions might properly be seen.
       Of how much interest can a book about reviewing practices in the 1950's be ? Actually, it stands up remarkably well. Steven Moore's excellent introduction, explaining the history of the pieces (including their publishing history and how the Dalkey Archive Press came to publish this volume), is also particularly useful in reminding readers of the value of Green's work.
       Early on Green acknowledges that "the worst review is no review". As Steven Moore points out, this is exactly the problem modern literature faces: serious new fiction is no longer widely reviewed. There were 55 reviews of The Recognitions -- an astonishing number. "A similar novel published today would be lucky to get a fourth of that number," Moore suggests. All the bastards were apparently fired -- and no one competent hired in their places. The lack of fora for serious literary discussion is one of the most pressing problems in the contemporary art world, and many an author will look wistfully at the list of reviews in Green's book and wish that their work would be similarly (mis)treated.
       As to the quality of the reviews, Green's complaints ring familiar. Only some of the bastards were fired, and those still doing the reviewing rarely rise above the level of mediocrity or outright incompetence that Green criticizes.
       Well presented, and with the happy-ending vindication of finding Gaddis' book universally acclaimed as one of the major American post-war novels, Jack Green's book makes for an excellent read. Our only suggestion/wish: an updating, showing how (and trying to understand why) the critical reception has shifted so towards acceptance and acclaim -- see for example The New York Times' continued revisionism, for example in Tony Tanner's 1974 re-view (when The Recognitions was re-released as a paperback), calling it "one of the most important American novels written since the last war", as well as in Cynthia Ozick's 1985 review of Carpenter's Gothic, in which she called The Recognitions "the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations."
       As to a book reviewer reviewing a book so damning of the undertaking ? One argument would be to claim absolute professionalism, several cuts above the mediocrities Green deals with. The complete review might claim to have fired all the bastards and stuck only with those willing to do the job as the job should be done. But we won't delude ourselves, or try to delude our users. We don't and we can't give all the books all their due (though our failure tears us up in inside every day). In our defence we'll feebly claim that we are not your usual review forum, and that our purpose is as much informative as it is critical. We're a stepping stone and, given the number of books and authors under review which you'll find hardly a word about anywhere else, except in the deepest recesses of the largest libraries, we do seem to serve some purpose. Yes, we judge the books under review -- harshly, too, with those terrible grades, reducing long works to a single letter -- but it should be clear to all that our judgments are relative, not absolute. They are guides to help our users.
       But, given Jack Green's well-founded outrage we promise: we'll try and do better.
       Note that the complete review is one of the few review sites or publications that provides as many other opinions as possible -- a practise that regrettably often reaffirms Green's basic contention of general incompetence among reviewers. But, as in Green's book, it does have entertainment value .....
        Fire the Bastards ! is certainly recommended, a valuable and entertaining commentary on a very sad state of affairs, one that hasn't improved much in the decades that have passed since the work's initial publication. - http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/gaddisw/recogs2.htm


William Gaddis, in the closing pages of his colossal 1955 novel “The Recognitions,” inserts a brief scene that manages to be at once rancorously funny, brazenly self-referential, and spookily prescient about the critical fate that lay in store for his work. A book reviewer and a poet meet in a tailor’s shop; both are sitting pantsless while they wait for their respective garments to be adjusted. The poet notices an unusually thick book under the critic’s arm and asks him if he’s reading it. No, says the critic, he’s not reading it, “just reviewing it.” He complains that he’s getting paid “a lousy twenty-five bucks for the job” and that “it’ll take me the whole evening tonight.” He then tells his acquaintance that he hopes he hasn’t gone and bought the book. “Christ,” he says, “I could have given it to you, all I need is the jacket blurb to write the review.”
Though the name of the book is never mentioned, it’s fairly obviously “The Recognitions.” It’s as though Gaddis was already convinced, before he even completed his nine hundred and fifty-six-page début, that the novel was going to be treated with contempt or indifference by the literary press, and had decided to work in this gag as a sort of futile, preëmptive revenge on the critics who would never get far enough into the text to notice. His apparent pessimism was borne out: the book was reviewed quite widely, but the overwhelming majority of reviews were either dismissive of its blatant ambition or frustrated by its length and frequent impenetrability. As the novelist William H. Gass put it in his introduction to the 1993 edition of the book, “Its arrival was duly newsed in fifty-five papers and periodicals. Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid.”
The tone of Gass’s introduction might seem unusually truculent, but it’s more or less the standard when it comes to the topic of “The Recognitions” and its treatment by American critics. Upholders of the book’s honor tend to be unambiguous about its status as a criminally underrated masterpiece; the literary establishment of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, they argue, slept on a classic (in some cases perhaps literally). Over the last half-century or so, however, the book—a vast exploration of the themes of fraudulence and authenticity in art and human relationships—has come to be regarded as a foundational postmodern novel. Rick Moody, for instance, called it “one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century,” claiming that he “read it and reread it with the same reverence I reread ‘Moby-Dick’ or ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” In an essay for the magazine in 2002, Jonathan Franzen described it as “the ur-text of postwar fiction,” and acknowledged that he’d named “The Corrections,” his own third novel, “partly in homage to it.”
With this history, “The Recognitions” has just been reissued by Dalkey Archive Press, a small independent publisher that specializes in innovative fiction. In particular, the press has a strong association with the American postmodern avant garde, having published the likes of Gass, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Barth, David Markson, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Given the importance of “The Recognitions” for so many of these writers, it’s arguable that Dalkey Archive has always been a kind of spiritual home for Gaddis anyway.
The press has also republished a book called “Fire the Bastards!” to coincide with the Gaddis reissue. It’s a unique text. Originally published in 1962 under the name Jack Green, the book is essentially a seventy-nine-page harangue against the critics whom he saw as having utterly failed to recognize the greatness of “The Recognitions.” Green was the publisher of, and sole contributor to, a literary periodical called “newspaper” (the aversion to capital letters is carried over into the text itself). Green was the pseudonym of a New Yorker named Christopher Carlisle Reid, who apparently quit his job as an actuary after reading “The Recognitions” in order to become a freelance proofreader—a pungent irony, given his approach to the written word (there’s a piece about Green and the confusions around his identity at the Paris Review Daily). He dedicated three whole issues to attacking the novel’s reviewers, both as a group and as individuals, and it’s these indictments that make up the text of “Fire the Bastards!” Here’s how the book opens:

william gaddis’s the recognitions was published in 1955    its a great novel,
as much the novel of our generation as ulysses was of its    it only sold a few
thousand copies because the critics did a lousy job -

• 2 critics boasted they didnt finish the book
• one critic made 7 boners others got wrong the number of pages, year,
  price, publisher, author, & title
• & other incredible boners like mistaking a diabetic for a narcotics addict
• one critic stole part of his review from the blurb, part from another review
• one critic called the book “disgusting” “evil” “foul-mouthed,” needs “to
  have its mouth washed out with lye soap”    others were contemptuous or
  condescending
  -2 of 55 reviews were adequate    the others were amateurish &
  incompetent
      failing to recognize the greatness of the book
      failing to convey to the reader what the book is like, what its    essential
      qualities are
      counterfeiting this with stereotyped preconceptions-the standard cliches about a book that is
     ”ambitious,” “erudite,” “long,” “negative,” etc
  -constructive suggestion: fire the bastards!

Given the sustained intensity of Green’s rage and his Spartan abstention from any indulgence in punctuation, it’s tempting at first to write him off as a lit-crit crank, a slightly unstable fanboy with a thriving colony of bees in his bonnet. But what is striking about the book is the way in which the deliberate, aggressive sloppiness of its style belies the extraordinary sharpness of its perceptions. Reading “Fire the Bastards!,” I found myself continually thinking of that scene in Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road” in which Frank and April Wheeler, the pretentious bourgeois couple at the center of the novel, have their self-delusions violently punctured by John Givings, the unbalanced but ruthlessly insightful son of their next-door neighbors. (In the unlikely event of a William Gaddis biopic, Michael Shannon—who played John in the 2008 film adaptation of “Revolutionary Road”—would make an excellent Jack Green.)
In the opening pages, Green mentions that he first learned about “The Recognitions” from a “Briefly Noted” review in The New Yorker. He calls the review “vicious,” but that’s a characteristic overstatement. The anonymous New Yorker critic was clearly not impressed, and compared the novel unfavorably to “Ulysses,” as did many early critics. Green remarks that the review motivated him to seek out Gaddis’s novel on the grounds that “a book could fall short of ulysses & still be pretty good.” It is his contention throughout, however, that “The Recognitions” does deserve to be considered alongside “Ulysses,” and that the “literary parasites” and “enemies of art” he’s attacking here would have been just as dismissive of Joyce’s masterpiece had they been charged with reviewing it in 1922. Green goes on to methodically and forensically examine review after “criminally negligent” review, exposing the shoddiness, laziness, and (in many cases) casual plagiarism of Gaddis’s critics. At one point, he does a line-by-line analysis of a review that appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal, reading it alongside the jacket copy of the first edition of “The Recognitions.” It is wincingly apparent that the former is almost a straight transcription of the latter, and that the critic hasn’t read the book he’s reviewing.
“Fire the Bastards!” is a fascinating document of a quixotic campaign against the entire U.S. critical establishment of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, a literary “J’Accuse” composed in a hot sweat of savage indignation. It’s less a defense of an underrated novel per se than it is an attack on that novel’s critics. He responds to descriptions of it as a “difficult” book (an incontrovertible claim, surely) by facetiously suggesting that “poetry should be translated to ny times style so you get the literal meaning without difficulty.” This is pretty typical of Green’s argumentative style; he is forever hastily constructing straw men in order to shove them down slippery slopes, yet this somehow makes for a compelling intellectual blood sport.
If “The Recognitions” had been published fifty years later, “Fire the Bastards!” would probably be a Tumblr, and Green would be all over Twitter like a bad rash, trolling critics to within an inch of their lives. It seems to me that he overstates the case for the novel’s greatness—he refers to it at one point as “one of the most entertaining books ever written,” which is one thing it most certainly isn’t—but that doesn’t diminish the thrill of reading this broadside. The copyright page of “Fire the Bastards!” attributes the book to “Green, Jack, 1928 -”, so Green (or Reid) is apparently still with us. It’s not inconceivable that he checks in on this magazine’s Web site every now and then. So I anticipate, with equal parts terror and delight, the appearance of an unpunctuated and devastatingly effective character assassination in the comments below. - Mark O’Connell
www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fire-the-bastards-the-great-defender-of-william-gaddis


A unique and passionate work of literary criticism is now fully available on the web (and may have been for a while): Jack Green's Fire the Bastards!, a 50,000-word essay published in three issues of Green's underground zine newspaper in 1962. It's about William Gaddis's first novel, The Recognitions and the reviews it received upon publication in 1955. (For a full history of Fire the Bastards, see Steven Moore's introduction to the print edition.)
Fire the Bastards! is written with, for the most part, spaces instead of periods at the ends of sentences, very little capitalization, internal punctuation only when absolutely necessary (or when present in a quotation), and a freewheeling, informal prose style. It makes for compulsive reading if you're interested in how badly a book can be reviewed, and in revenge on those reviewers. For instance, here's Green on how reviewers use the term "ambitious" as a quiet criticism:

but "ambitious" novels are not usually failures a guide for the lazy
but wellmeaning critic, how to recognize good books exclude the
commercial trash, take the big "ambitious" novels & theyre usually the
good ones dont read them just weigh them once in a great
while such a books empty, phony like goodman's the empire city.
but most often its the good writer who takes the trouble to make a big
structure the bad ones like to down tools early

i forgot, tho, the critics job is to make the good novels seem bad & the
bad ones good he should say the good "ambitious" books fall short
of something & the mediocre "pleasant" "modest" "appealing" books
succeed in something & hope the reader wont see the 2 "some-
things" are worlds apart

note: the formatting is better at the site

I'll leave you to read the rest. It's worth the work to get through Green's stylistic oddities, because it gives a picture of a particular book's reception. As The Complete Review noted, it would be worthwhile to have a companion volume explaining how Gaddis's novel ultimately came to be seen, despite continued dissent, as a landmark of American literature. (I should note my own status: I have read The Recognitions once, though I must confess to having skimmed parts. Much amused and thrilled me, just as much bored and confused me. I read it over too long a period of time, thus forgetting things I needed to remember. Some day, when I have about six weeks to devote to it, I will reread it, because there was enough that captured my interest to make me think it's worth the work.)
- http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/06/fire-bastards.html




william gaddis's the recognitions was published in 1955      its a great
novel, as much the novel of our generation as ulysses was of its      it
only sold a few thousand copies because the critics did a lousy job—

—2 critics boasted they didnt finish the book—one critic made 7 boners       others got wrong the number of
    pages, year, price, publisher, author, & title—& other incredible boners like mistaking a diabetic for a narcotics
   addict—one critic stole part of his review from the blurb, part from
   another review—one critic called the book "disgusting" "evil" "foul-mouthed,"
   needs "to have its mouth washed out with lye soap"      others
   were contemptuous or condescending—2 of 55 reviews were adequate       the others were amateurish
   & incompetent

failing to recognize the greatness of the book failing to convey to the reader what the book is like, what its
essential qualities are counterfeiting this with stereotyped preconceptions—the
standard cliches about a book that is "ambitious," "erudite,"
"long," "negative," etc counterfeiting competence with inhuman jargon

—constructive suggestion: fire the bastards!

i 1st heard of the recognitions from a review in the new yorker      the
reviewer said the book was like ulysses but not as good      in his own
anonymous condescending & selfdamning words:

In form, content, length, and richness of imagery, as well as in
syntax, punctuation, and even typography, this novel challenges the
reader to compare it with Joyce's "Ulysses." So challenged, the
reader is obliged to say that while Mr. Gaddis has been very brave,
Shem the Penman has won the day.

(posing as "the reader" instead of "i" is a trick to pretend modesty
while assuming an undeserved impersonal authority       he means his
opinion as a mere human being       or mine or yours or anyones      is
sneerable at       but after "the reader" is hired by Authority, paid a few
measly bucks for a few spotty hours reading, "the reader" becomes
     god?      objective?      full of rich status?      or still the same idiot,
playing it safe)
i was lucky not to read a dead indifferent review but a vicious one that
caught my interest       mulish i figured a book could fall short of
ulysses & still be pretty good      so i got itlike the imbecile critics i was rattled at 1st by the length of the book,
over 400000 words       so i started skipping around & reading back-
wards & forwards from the middle       after a few days i was quite
confused       "whats this guy trying to do" id ask my friends      "is he
nuts or has he really got something?"       a balanced, judicious viewi was still getting into the book & getting used to the toneddown
narrative style, new to me       but suppose i was a hack reviewer,
educated by years of fakework to think no books worth reading
carefully unless everyones already read it       condemned to review
heaps of mediocre books in less than no time       wouldnt i have had
to       wouldnt i have seized the opportunity to write at the moment of
maximum confusion       wouldnt my inner magician force me to rush
the job without waiting to come to terms with what was new to me
      disguise my ignorance with yawny jargon & clever remarks about
whatever i didnt understand      & for safety, the latest catchphrases
from the Frightened Philistines of the times & saturday review      &
what if i more or less secretly hated good books?not being a hack reviewer i could go on reading the recognitions
instead of forgetting it amid the 10 most worthless books of the
month       years after, i was still drawn by its fascination & kept re-
reading it      & i swear by all the work ive done & will do that the
recognitions is a great work of art       before the mass public i know of
no great novel that was permanently defeated by the enemies of art.
but it is now possible, in this indifferent decadent time, and it must not
happen       for years after the fake reviewers forced gaddis's book into
the remainder piles it was as forgotten as if we had no glorious
publishing industry with glorious receptions rooms & big money for
everyone except writers
http://www.nyx.net/~awestrop/ftb/ftb.htm