William Gaddis.

In 2002, Jonathan Franzen published an essay in The New Yorker titled “Mr. Difficult,” in which he detailed his changing readerly relationship with William Gaddis—who had died in 1998—over the course of his own coming of age as a novelist. For a time, Mr. Franzen wrote, he was infatuated with writers who “shared the postmodern suspicion of realism” that he himself felt—or rather, felt obliged to feel—in the late ’80s and early ’90s. (Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover are just a few of the names checked alongside Gaddis’s.) A marathon reading of Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions got Mr. Franzen through what sounds like a fairly serious depression. Mr. Franzen titled his novel The Corrections partially in homage to The Recognitions, but when he later tried to read other Gaddis novels, he found that he didn’t want to, and—more importantly, at least to Mr. Franzen—he couldn’t bring himself to care that he didn’t want to. Older, perhaps wiser, and certainly more world-weary and pressed for time, he wasn’t interested in the brick-thick novels of mostly unattributed dialogue that constitute Mr. Gaddis’s other major works, JR (1975) and A Frolic of His Own (1994), both of which won the National Book Award. “Mr. Difficult” concludes with a bitter dismissal of The Rush for Second Place, a nonfiction collection, and Agape Agape, a very short novel, both published posthumously in 2002. For a younger generation of readers, it’s likely that Mr. Franzen’s epic kiss-off to “Mr. Difficult” was the first and only thing they ever heard about him.

Last year, Dalkey Archive Press reissued The Recognitions and JR in paperback editions with adulatory introductions by William H. Gass and Rick Moody, respectively. Now they’ve followed that up with The Letters of William Gaddis—a doorstopper in its own right, and in hardcover, no less. The collection is edited by Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, who writes in his introduction that he has favored letters in which Gaddis “discusses his writing, his reading, his views on literature ... and enough personal matter to give the volume continuity and to allow it to function as a kind of autobiography in letters.” Broken into sections named for the novel Gaddis was working on during the given time period, and generously footnoted, the book is a treasure trove for Gaddis wonks and superfans. What it is or should be for the rest of us, however, is less clear.

The collection begins with a letter that Gaddis wrote from boarding school in 1930, when he was 8 years old, and concludes with one written mere months before his death. The longest section covers the years 1947-1955, when Gaddis was between 25 and 32, which is to say approximately the same age as the readers in whose blind spot he presently abides. Gaddis spent his 20s traveling the world, taking jobs when he had to, but preferring to live cheaply and write a lot. He spent time in the American Southwest, Mexico, Paris, Italy, Costa Rica, Algiers, the Panama Canal Zone, New York and several cities in Spain, all the while working on the book that would become The Recognitions. His main correspondent in these years was his mother, Edith, with whom he enjoyed a lively and sophisticated friendship, and whose regular checks and wire transfers kept him afloat. Mr. Moore, an eager and genial host, keeps a running tally of the places, people, ideas, readings and experiences that would later find their way into Gaddis’s fiction. This careful tracking of sources helps undergird Mr. Moore’s claim for the book as “a kind of autobiography,” even as it lays waste to the claim that Gaddis “was not an autobiographical writer.”

In fact, the Letters constitute a telling self-portrait, one that reads like a powerful if admittedly difficult (that word again!) novel, in which much of the action takes place outside of the narrative proper, and is only revealed belatedly, by Mr. Moore in a footnote, or by reading between the lines. The William Gaddis of the letters is a long-suffering, hard-working artist, perpetually beset by troubles with money and love. The Recognitions is a critical success but a financial disaster; it gains a small but devoted cult following while the author himself has to support his family by working as a corporate PR hack and occasional college teacher. Financial concerns seem to have been the main reason two decades passed between The Recognitions and JR, a novel Gaddis himself described as “the American dream turned inside out.” (Its eponymous protagonist is an 11-year-old boy who becomes a titan of industry via the pay phone down the block from his elementary school.) Gaddis shunned all publicity—refusing to give interviews, readings or blurbs—but was an active custodian of his own legacy, meticulous in his responses to students, professors, scholars, translators and other writers who contacted him with questions about his work or theirs. The reader finds himself rooting for Gaddis, cheering for him when he gets a hefty fellowship or a good review.

Then there’s the other William Gaddis—a kind of ghost Gaddis, haunter of the Letters—a hard-drinking, self-involved pain in the ass who wears out several wives and who knows how many girlfriends and mistresses, a pig-headed elitist who insists his impenetrability is the hallmark of his genius and is ever indignant at the “injustice” of having to actually work for a living. This William Gaddis, though harder to root for, is more interesting to read about, and one wishes he had a larger role in the Letters—though of course it is ludicrous to fault Gaddis for failing to describe his own worst selves to his own closest confidantes, who doubtless hardly needed to be told.

When Gaddis makes wounded reference, in a 1993 letter to Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, to her having dismissed their globe-trotting middle-aged love affair as a “mere decade alcoholic haze,” one sees the two William Gaddises reconciled. On the one hand, the couple probably did spend 10 years plastered. On the other, the reader has actually read the letters from those years and so knows that Gaddis’s love was at least as strong as the booze that fueled it, and that Ms. Murphy must have known it, too. One can’t help but root for a man being kicked when he’s down; it doesn’t matter whether somebody pushed him or he fell out of his chair.

editorial@observer.com

How bad? Well, the successful applicant will "not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with their work at the Press (family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio, etc.)," be willing to put the survival of the Indie Press before their own for a very low salary, "look forward" to a "rigorous and challenging probationary period."

And what would constitute grounds for dismissal? Great question! Just about anything, apparently:

Any of the following will be grounds for immediate dismissal during the probationary period: coming in late or leaving early without prior permission; being unavailable at night or on the weekends; failing to meet any goals; giving unsolicited advice about how to run things; taking personal phone calls during work hours; gossiping; misusing company property, including surfing the internet while at work; submission of poorly written materials; creating an atmosphere of complaint or argument; failing to respond to emails in a timely way; not showing an interest in other aspects of publishing beyond editorial; making repeated mistakes; violating company policies. DO NOT APPLY if you have a work history containing any of the above.

Well, we certainly won't be applying. Nor will anyone with night or weekend plans, Twitter feeds or a history of ever expressing opinions. But even in these tough times for the aspiring literary assistant, there are limits. The job posting provoked an understandable backlash.

But it turns out, the posting was not completely serious. It wasn't not serious. It was more a tribute to the type of Irish literature that Dalkey publishes.

“The advertisement was a modest proposal. Serious and not-serious at one and the same time," John O’Brien, the American director of Dalkey Archive Press wrote in an email exchange with Irish Times. "I’ve been swamped with emails (I wish they’d stop: I’ve work to do), and with job applications. I certainly have been called an ‘asshole’ before, but not as many times within a 24-hour period."

But all those people calling Mr. O'Brien an asshole are missing out on something. Dalkey Archive Press is hiring. And they are letting interns prove themselves.

“Strangely, no one (except the applicants) seem to have noticed that jobs are being offered: when does this happen with internships?" Mr. O'Brien wrote. "In brief, I take internships very seriously, and take on only people I think might be a future employee."

While Mr. O'Brien may have a point about our flawed internship situation, does that make his job posting any less abusive sounding and unrealistic? No, no it does not.

“So, the tongue-in-cheek advertisement was a call to apply for the internships (and the two possible positions) if you’re going to be serious and are ready; if not, then let’s not waste each other’s time. Usually this is couched in the sanitised language of ‘must be deadline-oriented, well-organised, ambitious’, etc," said Mr. O'Brien. "But as I think we’ve known for a long time, the age of irony is dead, and I’m a fossil."

No euphemisms here! We don't really understand what the death of irony has to do with anything. But the most terrifying part of Mr. O'Brien's response is his assertion that he has been flooded with job applications.

There has to be another way, aspiring literary assistants!

Stein.

John O'Brien, the publisher at Dalkey Archive Press in Chicago, has seen steady sales of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans for the past sixteen years.

"Given the size of the novel (925 pages) and its 'difficulty,' it has always sold relatively well (perhaps with an emphasis on 'relatively')," wrote Mr. O'Brien in an e-mail to The Observer. "We know that there are 450 hearty souls out there who find it every year."

Then Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris came out, starring Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, earth mother to a petulant Hemingway and a time-traveling Owen Wilson.

"It's not going to break any records except for Dalkey Archive's own," said Mr. O'Brien, "But it is on a pace this year--all due to the movie--to sell approximately 4500 copies."

That's a tenfold increase! Stein's magnum opus is difficult indeed, but Mr. O'Brien counts himself among those who have weathered its syntax and found enlightenment:

I am one of those hearty souls who not only read it but also took my life in my hands by teaching it several years ago in an undergraduate course. Though it took students a while to get their bearings, they wound up loving it, perhaps most manifested by the fact that they started writing in the book's hypnotic style. The temptation with Stein is usually to try to parody the style, but these young people were entirely sincere in their half-aware homage. Stein gets into one's bloodstream, even with this rather challenging work, or perhaps especially with this one work. It is her version of America as experienced through the life of a family.

Mr. O'Brien also took a moment to "genuflect eastwards towards Woody Allen," writing that he eagerly anticipates the day that Vintage puts Mr. Allen's fiction out of print so Dalkey can publish it instead.