Let Us Now Praise William Gass’s Greatest Work
This paper was presented at the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, May 2024, as part of the “William H. Gass at 100” panel. Other papers were “Surveying The Tunnel“ by Joel Minor (Washington University in St. Louis) and “Literary Theory Teaching: Founded on William Gass” by Ali Chetwynd (American University of Iraq, Sulaimani). The panel was chaired by Benjamin Seigle (University of Illinois, Chicago).
“I should like to return to my real love, the novella. I think that is what I should have been doing all along, writing storyless stories,” thus spake William H. Gass in 1995 in response to the question, in essence, what would he be working on now that his novel The Tunnel was out in the world, all 650 pages of it, after a legendary gestation of 26 years? Over those nearly three decades of its composition, Gass, as a writer of fiction, became identified with the project as excerpts of it appeared more than 30 times, between 1969 (New American Review, No. 6) and 1995 (Esquire, March), including as reprints in anthologies of award-winners, limited-edition books by boutique presses, and even as a stage play. When finally released in 1995, The Tunnel proved controversial, provoking as much condemnation as praise (as well as a sizable percentage of ambivalence). Nevertheless, its brilliance was recognized with the American Book Award and a nomination for the Pen-Faulkner Prize, both in 1996.
Gass seemed to take the mixed reviews in stride, content that “the past ha[d] been laid to rest,” as he expressed it to Heide Ziegler (119). He was free at last to focus on his real love.
Because of the infamy of The Tunnel—its seemingly never-ending composition, its accolade-earning surface-breaches, its much-anticipated publication, and its ire-inspired critiques—those who know William Gass as a fiction writer almost always connect him to his infamous magnum opus. My purpose here is to posit that of all Gass’s works of fiction—three novels, one stand-alone novella, and three collections—he ought to be known for, and lauded for, the book that came out in the shadow of The Tunnel, while the behemoth’s radioactive dust was still settling: Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998). Gass, who wore like epaulets the epithets stylist and experimentalist, was always in pursuit of the perfect book, the perfect work of literary art. I believe that Gass achieved that perfection, according to his own standards, in the four novellas brought together as Cartesian Sonata, a work that has not received nearly the attention of Gass’s first four books.1 By the end of the twentieth century, postmodernism had run its course, and there wasn’t a lot of critical attention being paid to its master practitioners (though Gass resisted the label postmodernist).
Fortunately for us, Gass also wrote copious amounts of nonfiction, much of which is devoted to narrative theory, either directly or indirectly. By indirectly, I mean that he was a masterful critic in how own right and wrote illuminatingly about numerous authors, like Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Malcom Lowery, William Gaddis—and of course Gass’s literary idol, Rainier Maria Rilke. He was also a generous granter of interviews, the subjects of which often turned to his thoughts and theories regarding fiction. So, between his essays, his analyses of other authors, and his interview responses, we have a significant body of material regarding his aspirations for a work of fiction.
First, though, some background on the Cartesian Sonata collection. It consists of the title novella (divided into three distinct parts), plus “Bed and Breakfast,” “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” and “The Master of Secret Revenges.” As Gass explained in 1998, “Cartesian Sonata” “was written a long time ago in rough draft” and “The Master of Secret Revenges” had been “an idea maybe 35-40 years ago,” while the remaining novellas “were much more recent and don’t appear to have had any lengthy sort of time in my unconscious” (Abowitz 143). Pieces of “Cartesian Sonata” appeared here and there beginning as early as 1964 (Location No. 2). In other words, the beginning and concluding pieces of the novella collection had been on Gass’s mind (and partly on paper) during the same years that he worked in fits and starts on The Tunnel (as well as many other writing projects). However, the middle two novellas were written after The Tunnel was completed. “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” first appeared in 1994 (Iowa Review 24.2)—before the publication of The Tunnel, but after its completed composition, in 1992. (For a bibliography and chronology of The Tunnel’s composition see this link.) I want to underscore, then, that when Gass was at last able to return to his first love, the fruits of that impassioned homecoming were the reworking of “Cartesian Sonata” and the writing of the other three novellas—all within the context of a clearly envisioned theme and tightly imagined structure.
No guesswork is needed when it comes to understanding Gass’s agenda for the collection. He spelled it out in a conversation with Michael Silverblatt for the Lannan Foundation reading on November 5, 1998 (happily available via video).2 Gass explains that “the conception was to take the Cartesian problem of the three substances—the uncreated substance, God, which has always existed, and then the created substances, mind and matter [and explore] the problem of Descartes metaphysics: How do you get mind and matter to interact, because they have nothing to do with one another . . . [Silverblatt interjects, ‘So it’s a failure of God …’] Yes.” The title novella is divided into three sections corresponding to the three substances. “Then,” continues Gass, “I decided to write three other novellas. Each would be parallel to that initial sonata. So this [first novella] is a sonata played this way [Gass gestures], then a sonata played that way [opposing gesture], as each one of these others lines up behind one of the sections” (starts around the 13:00 mark).
Like this:
“Cartesian Sonata”
—‘The Writing on the Wall’ [God]
—‘The Clairvoyant’ [Mind]
—‘I Wish You Wouldn’t’ [Matter]
“Bed and Breakfast” [Matter]
“Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” [Mind]
“The Master of Secret Revenges” [God’s opposite, “a tinhorn Lucifer,” says Gass]
Gass, for whom nothing was sacred,3 presents, as he explains, not “God the great and glorious” and not “God the dead and gone,” but “God the incompetent—the real God, in my opinion.” Taking a familiar self-deprecating posture, ‘The Writing on the Wall’ begins in a (familiar) metafictional mode with Gass, as narrator, speaking directly to the reader about the creation of the main character, Ella Bend Hess, who was a briefly mentioned character in Gass’s earlier novella, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (earlier, though contemporary with the original writing of this story). Gass writes, “Is it right or honest? After all—Ellla Bend—where is she? Isn’t she as much in all those scraps I threw away as in the scraps I saved? Threw away, mind you, when they held her name. Where else did she have her life?” Gass then goes about discussing Ella’s original description and how he is rewriting (recreating) her for this story: “I’d given her a long nose, I remember—no good reason why. Now her nose is middling” (4). So this incompetent God is the author: Gass, the creator of the text, the rearranger of matter from all those scraps.
The section continues in a metafictional mode as we are introduced to other characters in the story. Ella is the focus of the second section, ‘The Clairvoyant.’ Through the gift (or curse) of her clairvoyance Ella lives in a world of spiritual essence, seeing the dead, sensing the lingering presence of the past, and hearing the voices trapped inside inanimate objects: “She possessed an abnormal number of sensitive receivers. She was almost totally attention and antennae” (37). The final section, ‘I Wish You Wouldn’t,’ shifts the focus to Ella’s husband, Edgar Hess, who sees her as sick due to the clairvoyance he doesn’t understand. He becomes abusive, believing “[i]t helped her to hit her” (53), and “he solemnly prayed for his wife’s demise” (45). H. L. Hix describes the problem of Descartes metaphysics as represented in the novella this way: “His wish for her death arises between the disparity between their modes of being. She is almost pure spirit, and he almost pure body. . . . Her gift meant that he was far too material for her, and she was not material enough for him” (143).
In brief, the next novella, “Bed and Breakfast”(representing matter), is about an itinerant accountant, Walt Riff, who specializes in helping business owners cheat on their taxes by creating fraudulent records for them (an act of fiction not terribly far removed from the role of storyteller). However, Walt begins to see the error of his ways when he stays in a bed and breakfast and becomes enchanted by the innumerable homey objects therein. Put simply, Walt begins to see the value of real things, as opposed to the value of imaginary things, like the figures he writes in clients’ ledgers. In “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” (representing mind), the main character, Emma Bishop, attempts to escape her abusive and neglectful parents by not eating (thus making her material self disappear little by little) and by immersing herself in books of poetry, by Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, Emily Dickinson and others (feeding her mind while denying her body). Finally, “The Master of Secret Revenges” returns to the subject of God, but through the twisted theology of Luther Penner, who devises a philosophy and then a religion based on the fulfillment of retribution.
Though I have only provided the sketchiest of sketches here, I submit that in its form Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas is perfect (or as close to perfection as any work of art can achieve). It has a mathematical symmetry that is apropos to Descartes’ philosophy, which is based in mathematics. And form represented the pinnacle of artistic achievement for Gass: “The form. That is what the long search is for; because form, as Aristotle instructed us, is the soul itself, the life in any thing, and of any immortal thing the whole” (Preface xliv; italics in original). Earlier in his career, Gass expressed another guiding principle of his art to an editor who wanted him to consider revisions to a piece that would eventually become part of Gass’s first novel, Omensetter’s Luck. In essence, the editor’s notes were designed to make the narrative more readable, more traditional. Gass wrote, “[T]he writer [has no] responsibility to the reader. . . . He has a responsibility to the thing he is making. . . . [T]here is no story. There remain but words—the continuous exploration of concepts” (Saltzman 66-67). So even then, in 1958, Gass had decided what his chief objective would be as a writer of fiction: the continuous exploration of concepts, which is perhaps the best way to describe the four novellas that comprise Cartesian Sonata.
However, I hold up Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas as Gass’s greatest work not just because of its ideal form and its sustained exploration of Decartes’ metaphysics. The four novellas are woven together via the intricate repetition of images, ideas and language. A thorough examination would be the stuff of a doctoral dissertation, but perhaps I can give some sense of these kinds of connections here. For example, the corresponding Cartesian representations are reinforced by the names of the characters. The two narratives that explore the concept of mind feature the main characters Ella and Emma, both abused by men (Ella’s husband and Emma’s father). Early in ‘The Writing on the Wall,’ when we are introduced to Ella Bend, the narrator-writer becomes fixated on the letter m: “I wonder if you understand about that m. The other day I idly scribbled twelve of them in the margin of a canceled page: mmmmmmmmmmmm. . . . Look at them again: mmmmmmmmmmmm. Hear them hum. Isn’t that the purply dove? the witches’ mist? It’s Ella Bend in receipt of her gift” (5). But it also foreshadows the subtle shift in the alphabet from Ella to Emma, who will further explore the concept of mind later in the collection. Gass is similarly playful when it comes to the opening and closing novellas that delve into the two sides of the divine coin. The godlike author-narrator of “Cartesian Sonata” is set alongside tinpot Lucifer Luther Penner, who spreads his gospel of revenge via the written word, “The Moral Self Wears a White Shirt” and “An Immodest Proposal”—“his only public and published document[s]” (244).
Perhaps it goes without saying, but throughout the novellas Gass gives us his trademarks: stunningly superb sentences, magisterial metaphors, and similes whose smiles are as smooth as brie.4
To close, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of stating why Cartesian Sonata outshines, by a fraction, Gass’s other works fiction. Regarding the other collections, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (1968) offers five fabulous stories in an impressive variety of styles, which means that as a whole they do not proffer the cohesion, the continuous exploration of a concept that we find in Cartesian Sonata; and Eyes: Novellas & Stories (2016) is once again a fabulous gathering of fiction, but it is even more of a potpourri than the first collection. Gass had in mind a collection of three novellas that may have rivaled Cartesian Sonata in terms of artistic concept and execution, but one of the novellas grew beyond his expectation and was published as his third novel, Middle C (2013)—an incredible book and winner of the William Dean Howells Medal. However, its creation almost by accident seems to disqualify it as a masterwork from conception to completion.
Though my catalog is incomplete, I’ll end where I began, with The (large, loose, baggie) Tunnel. Gass’s ambitions for the novel were epic, and it took him far longer—far longer—to write than he anticipated. He imagined, maybe, three years or so … let’s say, then, a publication date around 1970. But time marched on and the Master aged along with his aim for the book. He had about 600 manuscript pages in hand when, in 1991 (age 67), he went for an extended stay at The Getty Center in Santa Monica to devote himself fully to finishing the legendary book. Working into 1992, he doubled the size of the novel, completing it at about 1,200 manuscript pages. Begun in the sunny summer of literary postmodernism, the first half of the book displays many of the tropes and tricks that interested Gass in the 1960s and 70s—it resembles in many ways Gass’s wildly experimental novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968)—an experiment that Gass himself deemed a failure in retrospect.5 Though The Tunnel doesn’t quite conform to the chronology of its composition, the latter half doesn’t display the same fondness for postmodern play as the beginning sections do. Released at last in 1995, it was as if the postmodern novel had arrived at the party after practically all the guests had collected their coats and gone home to sleep it off.
Perhaps Gass wittily but unwittingly anticipated the fate of The Tunnel when he wrote the preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (revised 1981):
“I write down these dates, now, and gaze across these temporal gaps with a kind of dumb wonder … hodge against podge, like those cathedrals which have Baroque porches, Gothic naves, and Romanesque crypts; time passed, then passed again, bishops and princes lost interest; funds ran out; men died; … and because they were put in service while they were still being built, the pavement was gone, the pillars in a state of lurch, by the time the dome was ready for its gilt or the tower for its tolling bell …” (xxxii).
We still ought to attend service in William Gass’s great cathedral, but our warmest words of worship should be reserved for Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas.
Notes
- Chapter 7 of H.L. Hix’s Understanding William H. Gass focuses on Cartesian Sonata as a whole, but it is a relatively brief chapter. Hix’s emphases are on comparing the novellas to previous Gass fiction, and on the Christian elements found throughout the collection. Otherwise, there are noteworthy discussions of individual novellas (or their genitive pieces). In The Metafictional Muse (U of Pittsburgh P, 1982) Larry McCaffery includes early versions of “Cartesian Sonata” in his analysis of Gass’s work. Another interesting article is “About Reading” by Sally Ball, who makes the case that William Gass is more like Emma Bishop (of “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s”) than William Kohler (of The Tunnel). See The Review of Contemporary Fiction 24.3 (Fall 2001), pp. 40-45. This note is not intended as an exhaustive list of sources.
- For the Lannon Foundation reading, Gass primarily drew from the The Tunnel. He did, however, also read an excerpt from “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s.” This part begins at about the 4:30 mark. Of the four novellas in the collection, Gass seemed to think most highly of “Emma.” It was published in Conjunctions No. 30 accompanied by photos by Michael Eastman; and it is the only novella from Cartesian Sonata that Gass included in The William H. Gass Reader (Knopf, 2018).
- In the interview with Richard Abowitz, speaking of hostile reactions to The Tunnel, Gass said, “I don’t think anything is sacred and therefore I am prepared to extol or make fun of anything” (144).
- Due to the necessity of brevity, I am not discussing in detail Gass’s literary techniques in the collection. It must be noted, however, that it is not just the book’s form and continuous exploration of concepts that elevate its status to the most masterful of the Master’s works. Throughout the four novellas, Gass’s virtuosity with the written word is on full display: the metaphors, the similes, the catalogs, the playfulness with typography, and what Gass described as “jingling”—a poetic use of language that emphasizes alliteration, rhyming, repetition and other aural techniques that are not usually so enthusiastically employed in works of prose.
- See Gass’s interview with Thomas LeClair in Conversations, in which he said about Willie Masters’, “I was trying out some things. Didn’t work. Most of them didn’t work…. Too many of my ideas turned out to be only ideas—situations where the reader says: ‘Oh yeah, I get the idea,’ but that’s all there is to get, the idea. I don’t give a shit for ideas—which in fiction represent inadequately embodied projects—I care only for affective effects” (22).
Works Cited
Abowitz, Richard. “Still Digging: A William Gass Interview.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 142-148.
Gass, William H. Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas. 1998. Dalkey Archive, 2009.
—. “A Revised & Expanded Preface.” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. 1968. Godine, 2007, pp. xiii-xlvi.
Hix, H. L. Understanding William H. Gass, U of South Carolina P, 2002.
Saltzman, Arthur M. “William H. Gass: Selected Correspondence.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 11, no. 3, fall 1991, pp. 65-70.
“William Gass with Michael Silverblatt: Readings and Conversations.” Lannan Foundation, 5 Nov. 1998, https://lannan.org/media/william-gass-with-michael-silverblatt.
Ziegler, Heide. “William H. Gass in Germany.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 111-19.
Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C
My paper, “Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C,” was presented Feb. 20, 2014, at the Louisville Conference on Literature Culture Since 1900 as part of the panel “The New Adventures of Old Debates: Postmodernism and the New Sincerity,” chaired by Nick Curry, University of Louisville. Other papers presented were “‘Everything is ending but not yet’: Post-Modern Irony and the New Sincerity in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Katherine Leake Weese, Hampden-Sydney College; and “Liminality and Dialogism: Dreamscape Narratives in Donald Barthelme’s Postmodern Paradise” by Nicholas Sloboda, University of Wisconsin-Superior. (A much abridged version of this paper appeared as a review in North American Review, 298.4. Search this blog for other Gass papers.)
Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C
by Ted Morrissey, University of Illinois Springfield
A long and complex novel, or series of novels . . . may present us with a world complete through every principle and consequence, rivaling in its comprehensiveness the most grandiose philosophical systems. (Gass, “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” 9)
With the release of Middle C in 2013, William H. Gass’s third novel, one imagines that Gass has attempted to do just that: present us with a world complete. For the past half century, William Gass has been one of America’s most prolific essayists and literary critics, as well as one of its most receptive interviewees. Consequently, his ideas about writing, especially about writing the novel and what makes a great one, are well documented, and they’ve remained amazingly consistent decade after decade. Middle C, even more so than his previous two novels, is a praxis of his most heartfelt theories—which makes it a deliberately challenging read, deliberately aimed at a rapidly disappearing readership. What is more, given Gass’s age, Middle C may prove to be the final argument in his legendary debate with John Gardner in which aesthetics was pitted against morality as the rubric for assessing great literature.
Gass, who was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924, is a self-acknowledged slow writer of his own fiction. Therefore, his novels have appeared with great gaps of time in between: Omensetter’s Luck (1966), The Tunnel (1995), and now Middle C—with an iconic collection of stories, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), a highly experimental novella (?), Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), and a collection of novellas, Cartesian Sonata (1998), rounding out his books of fiction. Meanwhile, the professor of philosophy, retired from Washington University in St. Louis, has published ten collections of essays and criticism between 1970 and 2012. Conversations with William H. Gass, a compendium of just some of his copious interviews, was released by University Press of Mississippi in 2003.
This paper will deal with Gass’s concept of narrative structure that he refers to as layering, his views on characterization, and his sense of morality’s proper place in fiction.
In Middle C, via the novel’s singular focus, music professor Joseph Skizzen, Gass demonstrates the narrative elements he believes to be essential to great fiction, but also the ones that have prevented him from being a best-selling author—though they have garnered him numerous honors and accolades, including the American Book Award for The Tunnel, a ponderous novel twenty-six years in the writing, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Though not a musician himself, Gass has long been fascinated with musical composition and has tried to structure his novels as if they were orchestral arrangements. More important, Gass’s nonlinear structural technique that he refers to as layering mimics musical composition, he believes, because the goal of a great novel is to affect the reader as a whole creation: “[T]he linear element in fiction is inescapable and must be dealt with, used just as it is in music, but there are other elements too, equally important. So I have a kind of view of a work as being layered: certain layers, or certain aspects of it, are nonlinear and certain aspects are linear. Then what becomes interesting is the tension, the contrasts, contradictions between the layers” (Janssens 60-61).
The result of layering is a narrative that shifts relentlessly between Skizzen’s childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and beyond to nearing retirement age, forcing readers to acquire their temporal bearings with each new section. It is useful that each phase of Skizzen’s life tends to take place in a distinct setting with different casts of characters (except for the professor’s mother, Miriam, as she is a constant throughout). Gass also provides some assistance in how he references Skizzen as either Joey or Joseph, but ultimately the two names appear side by side in the novel as if the young and old versions of his character become conjoined twins and experience the world through dual perceptions.
The merciless shifting in time is due to the thematic elements in the book. Gass writes in “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” “But there are some points in a narrative which remain relatively fixed; we may depart from them, but soon we return, as music returns to its theme” (49). In The Tunnel, Gass employed a twelve-part structure suggestive of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone pattern. “That is how I began working out the way for the various themes to come in and out,” said Gass. “It’s layered that way too” (Kaposi 135). In Middle C, Gass has returned to the concept of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system but even more overtly. For one thing, Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, like Alan Berg and Anton Webern, are discussed at various points in the novel via Professor Skizzen’s lectures; and Skizzen himself effects the aura of a Viennese intellectual, reflective of Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School of musical composers. Also, throughout the novel Skizzen wrestles with a sentence, or series of sentences, having to do with the destructive nature of the human race, as he continually composes the thought, critiques it, and revises it. Skizzen believes he is on the right track when he writes the sentence in twelve beats, and near the end of the novel he feels he has the sentence perfect:
First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive
The Professor sums up his perfect creation: “Twelve tones, twelve words, twelve hours from twilight to dawn” (352). Gass, through his narrator, does not discuss the sentence’s direct correlation to the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone system, but it does match it exactly. The twelve-tone system has four parts, described as Prime—Retrograde—Inverse—Retrograde Inverse. As such, the primacy of “First Skizzen felt” is represented literally with the word First, while “mankind must perish” suggests the retrograde movement of the species from existence to extinction. “Then he feared” marks the inverse of Skizzen’s initial impression, and “it might survive” is the retrograde inverse because it reverses his belief that mankind will become extinct and concludes that it will actually persist.
In a microcosmic sense, Skizzen’s capturing of the perfect expression of his fears about the human race reflect Gass’s overarching strategy of novel composition, which he expressed in a 2012 Tin House interview: “You want to organize and make sense out of it on a conceptual level as well as a physical, or musical, level. And indeed, a spatial level. Like a parking garage, there are a bunch of levels” (Gerke 41). On the page, Gass, as he often has, uses typographical features to suggest the multilayered nature of Skizzen’s expression, by indenting, tabbing and boldfacing the words, so that visually they draw attention to their deeper meanings and associations. This evolving thought about humanity is associated with another reoccurring element in the novel, Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum, which is a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings, and handwritten notecards that detail horrific human actions:
The gothic house he and his mother shared had several attic rooms, and Joseph Skizzen had decided to devote one of them to the books and clippings that composed his other hobby: the Inhumanity Museum. . . . Sometimes he changed the [name] placard to an announcement that called it the Apocalypse Museum. . . . Daily, he would escape his sentence to enter yesterday’s clippings into the scrapbooks that constituted the continuing record. (55)
And just as Gass returns to the evolving sentence throughout the novel, he also references the Inhumanity Museum and its growing record of atrocities. Hence, the motif of humans’ inhumanity to other humans demonstrates one of Gass’s other important theories about fictional narrative: that anything can be a character and people don’t make for the most interesting ones. He writes, “Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached. [. . . A]nything, indeed, which serves as a fixed point like a stone in a stream or that soap in Bloom’s pocket, functions as a character” (“The Concept of Character” 49, 50). Perhaps Gass’s interest in developing ideas as characters and not people stems from his most fundamental affections. In the Tin House interview, he acknowledged that he “hate[s] the species” and aligns himself with Spinoza’s advocacy of “lov[ing] ideas” (Gerke 33, 36). People, he says, are less trustworthy than objects, and the singular focus of Middle C, Joseph Skizzen, reflects that lack of trustworthiness in that the music professor is a complete fraud who constructs his career, and his very life, from forged documents and fabricated CVs.
Gass said that Skizzen was based on a real history professor at Wooster College in Ohio who was living under a false identity and on the run from both the English and Canadian authorities. Gass remarked, “I want to talk about—or deal with—somebody who’s a counterfeit of that sort. Professor Skizzen obtains his position with false CVs [. . .] but he gradually expands his dreamland to include the classes he starts to teach” (Gerke 37-8). Skizzen’s falseness even extends to his supposed admiration of Schoenberg, whom he chose as a pet topic because no one knew much about him. Perhaps Skizzen’s irreverent strategy reflects to some degree Gass’s own choice of Schoenberg’s twelve-part system to use as a controlling structure for his fiction. In writing criticism, Gass had to stay within the boundaries of expectation, he said, but for his fiction, which has been more important to him, “there are no expectations, there is no job to fulfill,” allowing him “to be more outrageous, or daring” (32).
Gass’s emphases in Middle C on inhumane behavior and on Skizzen’s profound falseness represent another of his theories about artistic, versus popular, writing. On the one hand, Gass has said that significant novels need to be about significant themes. In the essay “Fiction and the Figures of Life,” Gass writes, “[T]he form and method of metaphor are very much like the form and method of the novel. . . . [T]he artist is able to organize whole areas of human thought and feeling, and to organize them concretely, giving to his model the quality of sensuous display.” He goes on,
[T]hen imagine the Oriental deviousness, the rich rearrangement, the endless complications of the novel conceived as I suggest it should be, as a monumental metaphor, a metaphor we move at length through, the construction of a mountain with its views, a different, figured history to stretch beside our own, a brand-new ordering both of the world and our understanding. (68-9)
Yet this world-altering effect must be executed via mundane plot details. Gass said, “. . . I want to avoid as much as possible situations, extreme situations whose reality is strong because then the reader is reading it like a newspaper or something. If you’re going to write aesthetically about it, you have to defuse its power in order to get anybody to pay any attention to the nature of the prose” (Gerke 42-3). He said that “ninety percent of bad literature” was due to writers focusing on the sensational act itself, the part of real life that is “quite shattering, or pornographic, or whatever. And it isn’t art” (43). As such, Professor Skizzen’s achievement of the perfect twelve-part sentence about humans’ inhumanity acts as a kind of climax for Middle C, and Skizzen’s feared defrocking, which occupies the final pages of the novel, is a sort of anticlimax juxtaposed against the truly climactic narrative event.
This avoidance of the extreme situation has been practiced by Gass ever since his very first written narrative, from about 1951, the novella “The Pedersen Kid,” which carefully sidesteps descriptions of child abuse, molestation, kidnapping, rape and murder, leaving them merely implied on the fringes of the plot. And in The Tunnel, Gass’s most ambitious work, the Holocaust remains in the background while the novel’s protagonist secretly digs a hole to nowhere in his basement.
Gass is in his ninetieth year, and it’s all but certain that he will not write any other novels. He’s said that more novellas, stories, essays and literary criticism could be forthcoming, so Middle C may well be his closing argument in his famous debate with John Gardner, who died in 1982. Gass and Gardner’s debate regarding the chief aim of fiction was often carried out in private, but it also became very public, being transcribed in various interviews and even fictionalized by Larry McCaffery in The Literary Review as a Point-Counterpoint-style “confrontation” (135). At the risk of oversimplifying their positions … Gardner believed that literature’s highest calling was to put forward a moral, life-affirming message, while Gass believed that literature’s highest calling was to be something beautiful, a work of linguistic art. Gass said in a 1978 interview, “There is a fundamental divergence about what literature is. I don’t want to subordinate beauty to truth and goodness. John and others have values which they think are important. Beauty, after all, is not very vital for people. I think it is very important . . .” (LeClair 55). Gardner’s view was that “you create in the reader’s mind a vivid and continuous dream . . . living a virtual life, making moral judgments in a virtual state” (49-50).
More than a decade after Gardner’s death, with the publication of The Tunnel, whose narrator, history professor Frederick Kohler, seems to sympathize with the Nazis, Gass was still clarifying his position on morality versus art in literature. He said that his “position [had] been frequently misunderstood, almost invariably” (Kaposi 122). He went on,
Ethical, political, and social concerns will be present in every writer’s work at every point. The question is not that; the question is how you write about them. . . . My view is that you don’t judge a work to be beautiful because it’s morally uplifting or tells the truth about things. And it’s perfectly possible for a work to be beautiful and not tell the truth, and in fact to be morally not a very nice thing. Ideally of course it would be all these things at once. (122)
Unlike Kohler, Joseph Skizzen is clearly appalled by human behavior, like the Holocaust. In his lectures on Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron, Skizzen contemplates how Jews were able to reconcile “the Almighty’s malevolence . . . a punishment long in coming and therefore most deserved” (209). Thus, in the context of a novel in which nothing much happens, certainly nothing earthshattering, Gass interjects significant moral issues, especially involving humakind’s inhumane treatment of itself. In The Tunnel, Gass created a character and a book who were “morally not a very nice thing,” and it seemed to distract many readers from its artfulness, its literary beauty. In a 1998 interview, Gass responded to critic Robert Atler’s assertion that The Tunnel was an immoral book because of the way it treated the Holocaust by saying that it must be “to some sorts of reader an immoral book. I want it to be for them. I want it misread in a certain way by certain people. It’s for me the proof in the pudding” (Abowitz 144). Gass said that he considers Middle C “a much lighter” book (Gerke 38), even though he deals with many of the same issues as in The Tunnel. What makes it seem lighter, perhaps, is the first-person narrator’s posture toward atrocities like the Holocaust.
In the end, then, Gass has found a way to create a work of literary art while also taking the higher moral ground that his friend John Gardner advocated. Gardner said in 1978 that his “ambition in life is to outlive Bill Gass and change all of his books” (LeClair 55)—maybe he managed to change Gass’s final novel from beyond the grave.
Gass is adamant that he’s written his last novel as a matter of practicality—after all, eighteen years elapsed between The Tunnel and Middle C (“I can’t live forever,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)—but he’s working on a collection of essays, a collection short stories (alluded to in the mid-1990s and still not complete apparently), and he’s planning another novella or two.
Let me end on a personal and professional note: I’m planning to edit a series of books on Gass’s work through Twelve Winters Press, and about a week ago I put out a call for submissions (of abstracts) for the first anthology, titled Critical Perspectives on William H. Gass: The Novellas. Please visit TwelveWinters.com/submissions for details and to access the submissions portal. You can also follow my 12 Winters Blog and ReadingGass.org for updates on the project.
Works Cited
Abowitz, Richard. “Still Digging: A William Gass Interview.” 1998. Ammon 142-48.
Ammon, Theodore G., ed. Conversations with William H. Gass. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.
Gass, William H. “The Concept of Character in Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 34-54. Print.
—. “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 55-76. Print.
—. Middle C. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.
—. “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 3-26. Print.
Gerke, Greg. “Many-Layered Anger: A Conversation with William Gass.” Tin House 14.2 (Dec. 2012): 30-45. Print.
Janssens, G. A. M. “An Interview with William Gass.” 1979. Ammon 56-70.
Kaposi, Idiko. “A Talk with William H. Gass.” 1995. Ammon 120-37.
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass and John Gardner: A Debate on Fiction.” 1978. Ammon 46-55.
McCaffery, Larry. “The Gass-Gardner Debate: Showdown on Main Street.” The Literary Review 23.1 (fall 1979): 134-144. Print.
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