David Markson (from a 1989 interview conducted by Joseph Tabbi):

JT: you were proselytizing fairly extensively for The Recognitions too?

DM: I suppose you become addicted to a certain kind of writing. There's little enough of it extant, God knows. I'm not sure how much actual “proselytizing” I did for Gaddis, however. Except for practically buttonholing friends on street corners.

JT: But I understand you were very directly responsible for the first reissue of the book, also?

DM: Evidently I was. It’s a funny story, actually. I was living in Mexico, and someone—well, old Aiken, in fact—gave my address to Aaron Asher, who was editor of Meridian Books at the time. I picked him and his wife Linda up at their hotel and brought them out to where Elaine and I were living—outside of Mexico City—for dinner. And then spent approximately three solid hours talking nonstop about Gaddis. Finally Aaron threw up his hands in despair, telling me, “Please, please, I promise I'll read the darned thing as soon as I get home! But now tell us something about where to go and what to see in Mexico, for heaven's sake!”

JT: And then he did publish it. Did Gaddis himself know about the impetus?

DM: That's fairly funny too, as it happens. The Recognitions came out in 1955. I'd read it twice when it did, and then wrote Gaddis a letter. It's perhaps the only other letter I've ever written to an author I didn't know, but it was completely different from the one I wrote to Lowry. In this case I'd just been infuriated by the rotten reviews and simply wanted to tell the man the hell with them all, that there were some few of us out there who did see what he'd accomplished. I didn't get an answer, though I eventually heard secondhand that Gaddis had been too depressed at the time to send one. Or that he'd ultimately decided it was too late. But then sometime in 1961, not long after the Asher incident, I did hear. Six years after the fact, this was, a letter beginning with something like, “Dear David Markson, if I can presume to answer yours of June whatever, 1955”! Which went on to say that Asher was in fact about to do a first reprint.

JT: I know you became friendly with him subsequently?

DM: Back here in New York, yes. The period when we saw the most of each other would have been over the next ten or fifteen years.