12 Winters Blog

For me 2024 marks a special year: the centenary of William H. Gass (1924-2017). As a Gass scholar and devotee (disciple isn’t too strong of a word), I have various projects in the works to mark the Master’s 100th year — all part of my “preaching the Gass-pel,” an evangelism I embarked on more than a decade ago. No doubt I will use this forum to talk about some of those Gass Centenary projects, which tend to be formal and scholarly. It occurred to me that I also wanted to do something less formal, and more personal. It is not an overstatement to say that William H. Gass changed my life. His writing, his theories, his example as torchbearer in the cause of literature: everything has impacted me in ways that I can name and, doubtless, in ways that I cannot.

Thus, “William H. Gass at 100: A Reading Journal.”

My intention is that throughout 2024 I will post to my blog impressions and musings regarding Gass’s works and words: his fiction, his essays, his reviews, his translations, his thankfully copious interviews. I probably won’t post as frequently as I would like (for one thing, those other Gass Centenary projects are going to be time-consuming and labor-intensive), but hopefully I will be able to share some of the wisdom and insights that have been so meaningful to me, and in the process reflect on how they have affected me: my writing certainly, my teaching definitely, and, most profoundly so therefore also most elusively, my thinking.

I don’t have a set agenda for these posts. The various foci will be organically chosen. Nevertheless, there are some topics that I feel deserve particular attention: Gass’s philosophy when it comes to composing narratives; his magnum opus The Tunnel, which took him more than a quarter century to write; the influence of the German poet Rilke on Gass’s work; his innovative prose techniques; his unflagging support of other writers; and the late work, which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves.

That’s a lot, and I will almost certainly fall short of my ambitions. If this reading journal has any success it will be measured in the number of readers who, because of it, have their curiosity piqued and as such will read the Master, perhaps for the first time.

For this journal, I will begin where William Gass began for me, with my almost accidental reading of his long story (some say novella) “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” I have told the tale elsewhere. The year was 2009, and I was in the process of amassing as many books as I could afford having to do with postmodernism. I was in the final stages of a Ph.D. in English studies at Illinois State University, rather late in life (46 at the time). Over the previous seven years, chipping away as a part-time student, I had completed my coursework, passed the comprehensive exams, and had my dissertation topic approved. I was looking at the psychological origins of postmodernism, and my plan all along had been to focus on the work of Thomas Pynchon and, especially, William Gaddis.

One of the many books I’d purchased was a (very) used copy of Norton’s Postmodern American Fiction. The well-worn book had recently arrived, and one afternoon, after a day of teaching high school, I decided to thumb through it, briefly. One piece in particular arrested my attention because it was heavily highlighted in yellow by a previous owner of the anthology. Upon further inspection, I saw that it had a strangely long and redundant title, and it was broken up into small sections, each with its own heading.

I began reading the opening, subtitled “A Place,” which starts more in the shape of a poem than a short story: “So I have sailed the seas and come . . . / to B . . . / a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.” I was instantly ensorcelled by the writer’s prose, and I think it was this early set of sentences that hooked me, and hooked me for life: “It’s true there are moments — foolish moments — ecstasy on a tree stump — when I’m all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for I’m the sort now in the fool’s position of having love left over which I’d like to lose; what good is it now to me, candy ungiven after Halloween?”

I quickly discerned that “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” didn’t have a plot per se, at least not in a traditional sense, and it barely had a central character. If it did, it was an aging poet who has come alone to this small Midwestern town, a place that is described in poetic bursts: “Where sparrows sit like fists. Doves fly the steeple. In mist the wires change perspective, rise and twist. If they led to you, I would know what they were. Thoughts passing often, like the starlings who flock these fields at evening to sleep in the fields beyond . . .”

Like so many readers, I knew this place. I’d grown up in the Midwest, and when I encountered “In the Heart” I’d been teaching in a tiny town that reminded me in so many (unpleasant) ways of the fictional “B.” Moreover, I knew these feelings, especially of “having love left over.” I’d been surviving a miserable marriage for two decades, and the plan was to divorce as soon as I completed my doctorate (an agreement we’d reached to put off the inevitable).

As I said, my intention that fateful day was to only skim through the book to get a sense of its contents and what may be of use (I probably mainly bought the book for its introduction). But I couldn’t stop reading “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In Gass I detected a kindred soul, and it was dawning on me that perhaps he would be a better focus for my dissertation than Pynchon and Gaddis. As good fortune would have it, within a week or two I attended the AWP Conference in Chicago. When I arrived at the hotel, late one frigid February night, I perused the conference program and discovered there would be a special program in honor of William H. Gass, a tribute, at which he would give a reading. What luck!

Again, this was 2009. Yet I recall the event and his reading with amazing vividness. It was in a ballroom that seemed suited for a thousand revelers, enormous chandeliers illuminated the room like a rugby pitch, revealing what appeared to be only a handful of audience members. I (im)patiently waited for three speakers to proclaim Gass’s greatness in frustrating detail. Finally the Master was allowed to speak. He had opted for an entomologically themed reading, beginning with his classic short story “Order of Insects,” followed by excerpts from other works that involve insects. I wasn’t yet familiar with Gass’s oeuvre, so I didn’t securely connect the passages to their works, but I know he read the swarm-of-grasshoppers scene from The Tunnel. Always self-deprecating, Gass joked that his reading demonstrated how little he had evolved as a writer over the decades.

Whatever had begun in me with the reading of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” it was amplified, intensified and made permanent by the Master’s serendipitous reading at the AWP Conference. I went about collecting all of his works of fiction (at the time), as well as some of the nonfiction; and I changed my dissertation’s focus to Gass. Fortunately my dissertation director, Bob McLaughlin, was quite familiar with Gass, which proved a great asset as I retooled my approach.

Thus began my mission to spread the word about our greatest writer, William H. Gass. My evangelism has mainly taken the form of conference papers (with the majority of them delivered at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900); but I have preached the Gass-pel elsewhere, including in Portugal and (in 2023) Singapore. Plus at the peak of the pandemic I organized an online symposium focused on The Tunnel, which turned 25 in 2020. For 2024, I plan to edit and publish William H. Gass at 100: Essays (currently just a Call for Papers).

I feel like I should say so much more about “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” Perhaps, instead, I will direct the curious to papers I’ve presented previously: “In the Heart of the Heart of the Cold War” (Louisville Conference, 2013); “In the Heart of the Heart of Despair” (American Literature Association Conference, Boston, 2017); and “From Tender Buttons to the ‘Heart of the Country'” (Louisville Conference, 2019). Note that this last paper includes images of early drafts of “In the Heart” from the Gass Papers at Washington University in St. Louis.

I’ll conclude by referring to the title of this post, “In the Heart of the Heart of William Gass Country.” What I mean by it, at least, is that Gass was known as a Midwestern writer. He was born in Fargo, North Dakota, but his parents soon moved to Warren, Ohio, where he graduated from high school in 1942. His undergraduate degree was from Kenyon College. His teaching posts were the College of Wooster (in Ohio), Purdue University, University of Illinois (Urbana), and Washington University in St. Louis. The settings of his stories, novellas and novels were consistently in the Midwest, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly.

Though it likely proved a barrier to his work being embraced by the New York literary establishment, Gass had a great appreciation for the Midwest and how it could function in his fiction. He said in 1997, “The landscape that I work with — the weather and the geography — are designed to be projections of the interior state of the individual or the meaning of the scene. The actual Midwest landscape is by turns cold and beautiful, and like fall here now . . . the leaves are just drifting down, and it’s 72 degrees and gorgeous.” Then he added, “But, of course, you know it may rain in the heart if it rains in the town. That’s the idea. So if my scenery is bleak, it’s because the meaning or the characters’ souls are. It doesn’t mean the Midwest is.”

Thank you for reading my first William Gass reading journal. If I’ve whetted your appetite, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is available in both the collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (1968) and The William H. Gass Reader (2018). Or, like me, the ambitious could track down a copy of New American Review No. 1, where the story first appeared in 1967.

Here’s a video I made in conjunction with this blog post: