Word: gwyon
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...been posthumous for 20 years," says William Gaddis. At 52, he sits uneasily on the edge of a delayed resurrection. It is not a bad place to be. Still, Gaddis agrees with Wyatt Gwyon, the hero of The Recognitions, who demanded, "What's an artist, but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it around...
...follow-the-hero level, the action of The Recognitions may seem simple. Wyatt Gwyon is the shy son of a New England preacher. His mother has died during a trip to Spain, and he is brought up under the gimlet eye and Puritan maxims of a crabby maiden aunt. In Paris, he holes up in a studio and paints, but he gets panned by the critics. Wyatt is soon back in a Greenwich Village flat with a draftsman's job and a possessive wife just out of analysis. He sheds his wife, and sells himself into esthetic and moral...
...Gwyon, Wyatt's father, finds gin more consoling than the Protestantism he preaches. When he is not hitting the bottle, he soaks up the rites of non-Christian faiths. One Christmas he comes unhinged, proclaims the gospel of Mithra from the pulpit after sacrificing a black bull. His horrified congregation packs him off to a sanitarium calted Happymount...
Four months ago the Reverend Gwyon, brooding upon his insignificance, made his will and hanged himself in the Old Rectory on Christmas Eve. Last week the will was probated, and immediately Bisley Church, Bisley village, and the late Dr. John Gwyon, achieved prominence entirely apart from the rifle butts. Ten thousand pounds ($50,000) was left by the strangulated cleric "to buy breeches for worthy boys of Bisley Village." None of the money can be used for any other purpose...
...Each lucky boy," so reads the will, "must have the words 'GWYON'S PRESENT' written in capital letters sewn in the lining of his breeches." Sports knickers are not allowed...