Joyce’s Ulysses as a Catalog of Narrative Techniques for MFA Candidates
(The following paper was presented at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Feb. 26, 2022, moderated by Yasminda Choate, Seminole State College.)
I must say regarding the title of this talk: what it lacks in cleverness it at least makes up for in near-childlike self-explanation. I’m going to discuss why focusing an entire course on a single daunting text like Ulysses is worthwhile, at least in the setting of an MFA program; and I’m going to offer some specific suggestions for reading focuses and writing assignments. (It’s not one of those papers you run into at conferences sometimes, a paper that purports to be about how waxed fruit influenced the writing style of Gertrude Stein, and ten minutes in the presenter hasn’t yet mentioned waxed fruit, Gertrude Stein, or writing style, or, for that matter, writing.)
First some further context: I teach in an MFA in Writing program that has both on-campus and online courses of the two traditional varieties: workshop and literature. I teach online literature courses exclusively. Nevertheless, I do think this course, or this kind of course, could work just as well in-person. I have the luxury of designing my own courses. Maybe three years ago, I decided to pitch a course with a singular focus: James Joyce’s legendarily difficult novel Ulysses. My thinking was that it would be a great text for discussing a wide array of narrative techniques, all gathered together in one unruly place. Also, for people planning to be fiction writers (meaning probably novelists) and perhaps wanting to be college teachers themselves, being familiar with the book that many consider the greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century, if not of all time, would be beneficial—if for no other reason than to avoid embarrassment at some future department mixer.
I’ve now taught the course several times (four?), and it’s scheduled again for this summer. From my perspective it’s been a success, and also a blast to teach. Student evaluations support my perspective. (Pro tip: I call the course “Joyce’s Ulysses” to try to avoid confusion; nevertheless, I do get the occasional student hoping to take a deep dive into Homer—which would also be a great course.) The course attracts students with a variety of motives, but a common one is that they’ve tried reading Ulysses before—and have had to limp, defeated, from the field of battle (a nod to Ulysses’ first publishers, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson). Or, often, it sat on a shelf, untouched, glaring arrogantly at its owner for years. Now, with some guidance and the motivation of a grade hanging in the balance, they hope to slay the beast, or at least land a scratch.
I can relate. I’m among those who tried and failed a few times to read Ulysses before finally getting through the text in its entirety. So as a recovering Ulysses failure, I can speak to the students on their own level of self-loathing, and offer them the sort of encouragement they need to not drop the course after seeing the reading requirements. When I started teaching Ulysses we had eleven-week sessions; then the program was revised to offer eight-week sessions. The book was a bear to teach in eleven weeks, so eight is extra challenging. Yet doable.
We look at two episodes per week, and tackle an inhumane amount of material the penultimate week, episodes 16, 17, and 18; that is, Part III, “Eumaeus,” “Ithaca,” and “Penelope,” some 150 pages—which isn’t unusual in a typical grad course, but it’s 150 pages of Ulysses, capped off by Molly Bloom’s nearly punctuation-free, stream-of-consciousness monologue. To accommodate the move from eleven weeks to eight weeks, I basically cut Part I, the three opening episodes that focus on Stephen Dedalus, and begin in earnest with Leopold Bloom starting his day in Episode 4, “Calypso.” I provide a summary of those opening episodes and encourage students to read them even though they aren’t required per se.
I stress—again and again—that our purpose is not to unlock all the literary mysteries of the novel. Joyce specialists (of which I am decidedly not one) devote whole careers to the book, or only individual episodes. Rather, we want to achieve a basic understanding of what happens in the book, yes, but more importantly we want to lift the hood and see what Joyce was up to in individual episodes, and in the structure of the novel as a whole. In other words, we’re reading the novel as practicing writers, not as literary scholars. I hope to spark an interest in Joyce so that later in life students may feel warm and fuzzy enough about Ulysses to return to it, and to engage with other Joyce texts. Typically I do have a few students who’ve been bitten by the Joyce bug by the end of the session, and they ask for recommendations about where to go next, unaided. Finnegans Wake?, they sometimes ask. God no. I generally recommend Dubliners, and even more specifically “The Dead,” which is available in stand-alone critical editions if a reader is so inclined.
Another piece of advice I offer at the outset: The novel features a cast of thousands, and trying to synthesize all of the characters into your gray matter for easy recall later is probably one of the reading habits that leads to so many normally successful readers giving up in a hailstorm of self-condemnation. Instead, I say, there are just three main characters—Stephen, Bloom, and Molly—so keep an eye out for them. As long as you have a sense of what they do in the novel, from episode to episode, until you reach the Promised Land of “Yes” at the end of 18, then you’re doing just fine.
(We do get into some literary analysis, and one of the aspects we talk about is the novel’s unusually encyclopedic nature, and that Joyce didn’t intend, probably, for it to be read like a typical novel. There’s just too much data to try to hold in one’s head from start to finish. I will admit that in spite of reading the novel from stem to stern at least twice, and some sections multiple times, and even having published about it, plus taught it multiple times, it’s not uncommon for me to read an article or hear a presentation on the novel, and think, “That happens in Ulysses? Really? That sounds interesting.”)
Students are required to write weekly discussion posts based on the episodes, and I give them something concrete to glom onto. I share with them the famous Ulysses schemas, the Gilbert and the Linati, and ask them to write about how two of the elements operate in the week’s readings. Again, I don’t pretend that this an approach that will help them penetrate to the core of the novel’s meaning. Rather, as writers we’re looking at ways that Joyce tried to unify eighteen episodes, or chapters, that use increasingly experimental techniques of storytelling and shift point of view frequently. The schemas are one method, as are the running parallels with Homer’s Odyssey (which are often hard to spot even when one knows to look for them). Another unifying element is Joyce’s attention to chronology, with the narrative unfolding in more or less accurate time over 24 hours. Finally, there is Joyce’s attention to the point of obsession regarding the geography of Dublin in June 1904.
The novel is famous for its stream-of-consciousness narration, which nowadays isn’t exactly revolutionary. Joyce is, however, a master of the technique so a closer examination of almost any episode can lead to a fruitful discussion of how it’s working in detail. “Penelope,” of course, is the example par excellence of interior monologue. To mimic the randomness of one’s thought process, Joyce uses almost no punctuation for more than 30 pages, a section broken into only eight “sentences.” Nevertheless, we can isolate specific thoughts and images. How does Joyce manage it, without the traditional use of punctuation?
Every episode offers a multitude of techniques that could be of value to fiction writers, but in the interest of time here are some approaches that stand out to me.
Episode 4, “Calypso.” The opening three episodes, focused on Stephen Dedalus, establish a realistic chronological approach in the novel, from the start of Stephen’s day at the Martello tower to his meeting with Mr. Deasy to his walk along the strand. Then, abruptly, in this fourth episode time is reset to around 8:00 as we’re introduced to Leopold Bloom. From then on time in the novel unfolds consistently. The lesson: Don’t be afraid to break your own rules.
Episode 6, “Hades.” Bloom takes a carriage ride with three men who are also attending Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Bloom is both part of the group and yet set apart from his companions because of his Jewish heritage and being seen as a quasi-foreigner. This feeling, of being alone in a crowd, is exquisitely human and has obviously been explored by writers and artists throughout history, but no one does it better than Joyce in this iconic episode. The lesson: How to create a character who is both accepted into a social circle while simultaneously being excluded from it.
Episode 7, “Aeolus.” Bloom visits the Freeman newspaper offices, where he has a series of encounters, including with Stephen for the first time in the novel. This episode initiates Joyce’s more overtly experimental techniques as he breaks up the narrative with frequent headline-like insertions throughout. These headlines were a relatively late addition to the episode as it was published without them in The Little Review. Lesson: Don’t be afraid to play with narrative techniques and step from behind the curtain as the storyteller.
Episode 9, “Scylla and Charybdis.” Here Stephen expounds on his theory regarding Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the National Library with a group of fellow literati. His theory has been alluded to previously in the novel. Intertextuality—bringing other texts to bear on the narrative’s primary text—happens frequently in Ulysses. Indeed, Homer’s Odyssey serving as a structural apparatus is itself intertextual. But the use of Hamlet as a well-known literary figure (perhaps the best-known literary figure) to amplify the novel’s own concerns about parent-child relationships, among other issues, is worthy of careful study. Lesson: Bring other texts into conversation with your own narrative.
Episode 10, “Wandering Rocks.” In this scene our attention wanders between a host of different characters and objects. Very little happens in terms of advancing the novel’s plot, but Joyce brings together many of the characters and items of significance we’ve already encountered. Many see this odd episode—with its cinematically sweeping point of view—as a way to tie the earlier (more conventional) chapters of the novel to the later (more experimental) chapters. Lesson: Chapters can have principal objectives other than to advance the plot or evolve characterization; they can serve more purely artistic functions.
Episode 12, “Cyclops.” We join Bloom in Barney Kiernan’s pub, but from the point of view of a new anonymous, first-person narrator. Besides the switch in POV, Joyce also plays with various prose styles, including Irish mythological, legalistic, journalistic, and biblical. This episode, then, breaks two cardinal rules young writers often learn in workshop: to be consistent when it comes to (1) point of view and (2) voice. Without warning, Joyce switches from third- to first-person, and then injects some thirty different prose styles into the telling. Lesson: Know the rules so that you can break them; or, the only rule when it comes to telling a compelling story is that there are no rules.
Episode 14, “Oxen of the Sun.” Joyce takes the technique of Episode 12—the use of multiple prose styles—and goes even further by emulating the evolution of the English language, from its Latin/Germanic roots to Anglo-Saxon to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Defoe to Lamb, and many more. The plot advances at the Holles Street maternity hospital, but it does so via this history of the stages of the English language. Lesson: Have fun. Don’t be afraid to toy with voices and styles within the same piece.
Episode 15, “Circe.” We find ourselves in Nighttown, Dublin’s red-light district, but now the storytelling mode is dramatic. The episode unfolds as a play script, complete with character names and stage directions. The lesson: Go ahead. Begin in one mode and switch to another; then back again, or whatever you feel like doing.
Episode 17, “Ithaca.” Bloom and Stephen walk to Bloom’s residence, an important plot advancement, especially in light of the novel’s Odyssey subtext, but now it’s told via a series questions and answers, resembling, most say, either catechism or Socratic dialogue. Lesson: Why the heck not?
And like Bloom, we return to Episode 18 and No. 7 Eccles Street.
A quick word or two on other kinds of writing assignments one might assign, besides the weekly posts tied to the schemas. For their final project, I have students try their hand at one or more experimental techniques they’ve encountered in the book, creating their own original scene. It’s a two-part assignment. There’s the creative writing itself; then there’s an analytical element in which they identify the episodes and techniques they used as inspiration, quoting and citing from the novel as needed.
In the original eleven-week version of the course, I attempted an ambitious midterm paper. I had students access an episode as it first appeared in either The Little Review or The Egoist (using the Modernist Journals Project online), and compare it to the 1922 book version, identifying Joyce’s revisions and speculating as to why Joyce may have made the changes (almost always additions) that he did. That is, what did he gain through revision? I think it’s a terrific assignment, but, as I say, ambitious, and students were not terribly successful with it. It is perhaps too labor intensive when up against the amount of reading students have to do just to keep pace with the syllabus. So when we went to eight-week sessions, I dropped the assignment. My main purpose was to emphasize the importance of revision and how much care Joyce took in revising his work. I think it’s a potentially fruitful exercise, and maybe given a longer time frame and the right students, it could be a reasonable assignment. (By the way, I did the activity myself, based on Episode 9, “Scylla and Charybdis,” and the brief article was published at Academia Letters—if you want to see an example of what I have in mind with the assignment.)
It’s especially interesting to be teaching Ulysses during its centenary year—an event that will add even more resources from which one might draw (not that there was a shortage previously). If you teach in the right circumstances, I encourage you to consider a course on Ulysses. Or if not that large, loose, baggy monster, maybe another long, challenging text. I’ve thought about War and Peace, but in eight weeks that would be quite a battle. I welcome suggestions.
Preface to ‘Mrs Saville’–2021 Reboot
My novel Mrs Saville was published in 2018, although it had begun to appear two years earlier in serialized installments at Strands Lit Sphere. It was important to me that the book come out in 2018, the bicentennial year of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, because, as the cover makes plain, Mrs Saville is “a novel that begins where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ends.”
I thought it was appropriate homage to the novel, and the author, that inspired my sequel; and I hoped it would be a statement readers would find intriguing. In retrospect, tying Mrs Saville so overtly to Mary Shelley’s classic may have been a marketing misstep. Mrs Saville has been languishing without readers for going on three years — a situation I hope to ease in 2021.
I’ve been teaching Frankenstein for more than twenty years, and I always begin our study by noting that students probably think they know the basic story already, but in fact what they know is a greatly simplified misrepresentation of what Mary Shelley wrote as a profoundly depressed, yet highly motivated, as well as eclectically educated, teenager. The novel was published anonymously in January 1818. In spite of a small initial press run, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus caused an immediate stir among readers and reviewers alike.
Several editions soon followed, as did stage productions that proved highly profitable (not to Mary, however, as modern copyright laws did not yet exist). Beginning with the stage adaptations and continuing with screen adaptations almost the moment cinema was invented (Thomas Edison’s film company produced the first Frankenstein movie, a silent film, in 1910), the novel was reduced to a simplistic horror story about a mute monster terrorizing his creator and anyone unlucky enough to encounter him.
This basic narrative was solidified in the cultural psyche with director James Whales’ wildly popular 1931 movie Frankenstein, and Boris Karloff’s portrayal of the creature (bolts in his neck and all) became emblematic of Mary Shelley’s novel, even though the movie and the monster have little to do with what she created on the page. In the film, Karloff’s creature is an inarticulate fiend, unable to control his emotions and his strength.
The Whales film, like the adaptations that came before and the majority to follow, misrepresented Frankenstein, the novel, as a story about a frightening, out-of-control monster. So, perhaps, my tying Mrs Saville directly to the novel may encourage would-be readers to think my book is just the further exploits of a monster running amok. Such an assumption about Mrs Saville would be as far from the truth as the stage and film adaptations have been from Mary Shelley’s original.
Readers who open the pages of Frankenstein soon find out just how watered-down the story has become in the popular imagination. Scholar Susan J. Wolfson covers the misrepresentation well in her introduction to the Longman Cultural Edition of the 1818 text. Frankenstein is
a vibrant intersection of interlocking cultural concerns: the claims of humanity against scientific exploration; the relationship between ‘monsters’ and their creators; the questionable judgments by which physical difference is termed monstrous; the responsibility of society for the violent behavior of those to whom it refuses care, compassion, even basic decency; the relationships between men and women, and parents and children (and the symbolic version in care-givers and care-receivers); and the psychological dynamics of repression, doubling, and alter egos.
Wolfson’s description accurately represents the novel for which I wrote a sequel. A lot is going on in Frankenstein, and (I like to believe) a lot is going on in Mrs Saville. That said, I don’t want to make my novel out to be a dry, introspective treatise. Far from it. Nor was Mary Shelley’s. Regarding her book’s genesis, she tells us in the introduction to the novel’s 1831 edition:
I busied myself to think of a story; . . . One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror–one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.
In writing Mrs Saville, similar goals were foremost in my mind as well. Otherwise, my sequel would be unworthy of its connection to Frankenstein, a book I have loved nearly all of my adult life.
When a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote that Mrs Saville is “a fantastically chilling psychodrama intelligently woven into literary history,” I felt that I had hit my mark. Moreover, in an unsolicited review, the novelist Spenser Stephens said of the book: “The author fits the pieces together with a seamless and terrifying logic. He shows a nuanced understanding of the darkness that lives within us all.”
I was gratified by these early assessments, and further gratified when Mrs Saville began to receive some critical distinctions. It was a quarterfinalist for the ScreenCraft Cinematic Novel Award in 2018, and the same year the novel was a finalist for American Book Fest’s Best Book Award. Then in 2020 Mrs Saville won the Manhattan Book Award in the category of literary fiction.
I felt that the accolades, modest though they be, vindicated the artistic risks I took with the novel. I wanted Mrs Saville to seem an artifact of the same time period and the same place as its impetus; that is, London at the dawn of the nineteenth century. I tried to achieve this effect primarily through two means. Like Mary Shelley’s original, I used an epistolary structure (a novel told via a series of letters). I also imagined Margaret Saville, my narrator, as a woman similar to Shelley in that she was largely self-educated via her own voracious reading.
My novel also needed to be in British English, as opposed to American English, meaning spellings, expressions, punctuation style, syntax, and so forth in the manner that Mary Shelley used in the early 1800s. I found that I had difficulty composing while keeping in mind British English’s differences from modern American English, so I decided to write the first drafts as I was accustomed to writing; then to convert my Americanisms into nineteenth-century British vernacular in the processes of revising and editing. I found, then, that the unfamiliar style didn’t impede my creativity.
In spite of the work I’d put into writing Mrs Saville, and its good reviews and modest accomplishments, finding readers for the book has proven a considerable challenge. I wasn’t able to capitalize on its winning the Manhattan Book Award to any great extent because I was notified of the prize in the summer of 2020, when the pandemic was peaking again. Furious debates were raging everywhere about opening up businesses, etc., and whether or not schools should open in August. Everyone, including me, was distracted by weightier matters than a novel’s winning a prize.
I promoted Mrs Saville on social media, and I purchased advertisements here and there (spending more money than I care to recall . . . in the thousands of dollars), but none of it accomplished much as far as attracting readers. Nearly every writer is facing this challenge. It is estimated that more than 3 million books are published each year, and yet only a handful of authors account for the vast majority of books sales, according to EPJ Data Science.
Writers trying to build a readership face a classic catch-22: Librarians and bookstore managers are reluctant to devote shelf space to an author that readers don’t recognize; and readers don’t recognize these authors because librarians and bookstore managers are reluctant to devote shelf space to them.
So, instead of relying on social media and costly advertising, for this promotional reboot I’m targeting book clubs in hopes of getting Mrs Saville directly into the hands of readers. From the start, however, there’s an obstacle. Book clubbers don’t tend to buy books, preferring to borrow them from libraries — therefore, if libraries haven’t acquired your title, book clubs will most likely pass.
To overcome this obstacle, I’m happy to send interested book clubs copies of Mrs Saville. I’d much rather spend money on getting my books out into the world, as opposed to buying a few meager inches of expensive and inconsequential advertising space. Moreover, I’ll be happy to speak with groups, in person or via Skype or Zoom, etc. I’m happy to do readings and interviews — essentially anything to connect with potential readers.
Here is the novel’s description:
Margaret Saville’s husband has been away on business for weeks and has stopped replying to her letters. Her brother, Robert Walton, has suddenly returned after three years at sea, having barely survived his exploratory voyage to the northern pole. She still grieves the death of her youngest child as she does her best to raise her surviving children, Felix and Agatha. The depth of her brother’s trauma becomes clear, so that she must add his health and sanity to her list of cares. A bright spot seems to be a new friendship with a young woman who has just returned to England from the Continent, but Margaret soon discovers that her friend, Mary Shelley, has difficulties of her own, including an eccentric poet husband, Percy, and a book she is struggling to write. Margaret’s story unfolds in a series of letters to her absent husband, desperate for him to return or at least to acknowledge her epistles and confirm that he is well. She is lonely, grief-stricken and afraid, yet in these darkest of times a spirit of independence begins to awaken. ‘Mrs Saville’ begins where Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ ends. The paperback edition includes the short story “A Wintering Place” and an Afterword by the author.
It’s important to note that even though Mrs Saville is a sequel to Frankenstein, it’s not necessary to have read Frankenstein in order to understand and (I trust) enjoy my novel.
Anyone interested in talking with me about using Mrs Saville for their book club or another literary function, please contact me through my website — tedmorrissey.com — or email me, jtedmorrissey [at] gmail [dot] com.
I’ve always written, and I’ve always written in the same state as most writers — largely without readers. I will always write, but some readers would be nice.
Preface to ‘First Kings and Other Stories’
I am delighted that Wordrunner eChapbooks has brought out First Kings and Other Stories, which functions on multiple levels. It is, as the title implies, a collection of stand-alone stories. The stories are interconnected, though, and work together as an independent novella. They also represent a work in progress–a novel that takes place over a 24-hour period in 1907 (as I am envisioning it now).
This larger work in progress is a further evolution of a concept I experimented with in my novel Crowsong for the Stricken (2017), in that each piece was designed to work on the microcosmic as well as the macrocosmic level, meaning that each piece could be read as a fully realized short story while also contributing a vital piece to the macrocosm of the novel. Crowsong was mainly set in 1957, in an isolated, unnamed Midwestern village, but the narrative structure is deliberately indeterminate. That is, my hope was that readers would encounter the twelve pieces in an order of their own choosing. The various possible combinations would change the reader’s experience of the novel as a whole. I called it a “prismatic novel” for this reason.
I am trying to take the idea further in this current work in progress. Similar to Crowsong, each piece is intended to function on both the micro- and macrocosmic levels, but the structure is much tighter, both in terms of narrative timing and in the number of interlocking pieces. It is challenging. Not infrequently, when writing, I think of a plot advancement or some other detail that would work quite nicely in the limited world of the short story, but it would throw off, or even contradict, something in the more expansive world of the novel of which it is also part. At the same time, the connective tissue I’m building within each piece so that it harmonizes with the whole must fit seamlessly in the short story, too.
So far it seems to be working. The title story, “First Kings,” appeared originally in North American Review and was reprinted in Sequestrum. The second piece, “Hosea,” was published by Belle Ombre. Quite honestly, it was the third story, “The Widow’s Son,” that prompted me to send the entire manuscript (as it stood at the time) to Wordrunner when they put out a call for novella-length submissions. “The Widow’s Son,” at just over 8,300 words, is about twice as long as either “First Kings” or “Hosea,” and its length would make it a difficult placement with literary journals. Once one writes beyond 5,000 words it becomes increasingly difficult to place. I had only just begun to circulate “The Widow’s Son,” to one or two places, when I saw the Wordrunner notice.
Wordrunner responded promptly, and publication was scheduled for December 2020. In the intervening months I continued the work in progress, mainly producing one new piece, “The Buzite.” I mentioned it to Jo-Anne Rosen, the editor with whom I was working at Wordrunner, but I felt trying to include it in the First Kings collection would throw the three pieces out of balance. I think I was right about that, so “The Buzite” is currently making the literary-journal rounds (as is another brand-new, somewhat fragmentary piece, “The Appearance of Horses”).
It has been a wonderfully rewarding experience working with Jo-Anne Rosen and Wordrunner. One issue we discussed has to do with the pieces’ titles, which are obviously derived from the Bible. Yet the connections between the titles and their stories isn’t crystal clear. Jo-Anne was in favor of adding epigraphs to each story in an attempt to connect the dots, so to speak, for readers. I tend to like epigraphs in my books, so I was open to the idea and tried to find some suitable quotes from the Bible. It proved harder than I imagined. I didn’t much like any of the quotes I came up with for their stories, but suggested a compromise whereby we would use one as an epigraph for the collection as a whole. Jo-Anne wisely, and diplomatically, demurred.
The problem, I discovered, is that the biblical associations are deliberately abstract and multifaceted, and trying to pin an epigraph to the stories forced a more limited and more concrete connection. I very much believe in the notion that interpreting a piece of writing is a partnership between writer and reader. When it comes to finding associations between the biblical references and the texts of the narratives, I prefer for readers to have free imaginative rein. I obviously have something in mind, but I believe readers could come up with cleverer and more interesting ideas. It’s one of the joys of reading, after all.
Writing a novel–or any long work, imaginative or otherwise–can be a lonely business. It requires countless hours of being alone, to write, to research, to think, to wonder. I like to have some human contact regarding the work along the way, which is why I send out pieces as a work progresses. The editors who see fit to publish them provide more encouragement than they can know. Wordrunner eChapbooks’ publishing First Kings and Other Stories has provided me a great deal of satisfaction as well as artistic fuel. It will be years yet before the larger work is complete, but all the editors who will have helped it along the way are invaluable to the process and truly appreciated
First Kings and Other Stories is available via Smashwords, Kindle, and at the Wordrunner site. Visit the book’s site at my author page, and access the sell sheet here.
Preface to ‘The Artist Spoke’
Like all novels, The Artist Spoke is about many things — some that I, as the author, am privy to, and some, as the author, I am not. One of the things it’s about (I know) is what it means to be a writer when the book, as an art form, is gasping its final breaths. Why labor over a novel, a story, a poem, an essay when you’re certain almost no one is going to read it?
It’s a question I’ve been contemplating, on various levels, for a number of years — as a writer certainly, but also as a publisher, a teacher, a librarian, and a reader. I have found solace in the words of my literary idol William H. Gass: “Whatever work [the contemporary American writer] does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward. . . . Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art.”
Gass shows up, explicitly, a couple of times in The Artist Spoke. I use most of the above quote as an epigraph for Part II of the novel, “Americana.” Then later, the two main characters, Chris Krafft and Beth Winterberry, visit a bookstore where they briefly discuss Gass’s iconic essay collection Fiction and the Figures of Life and specifically its concluding piece “The Artist and Society.” I read the essay often, as a reminder — a kind of mantra — that what I do, answering the call of the “reckless inner need,” is not only worthwhile but important.
Quoting the Master again: “[The world] does not want its artists, after all. It especially does not want the virtues which artists must employ in the act of their work lifted out of prose and paint and plaster into life.” Gass goes on to discuss these virtues, which include honesty, presence, unity, awareness, sensuality, and totality (that is, “an accurate and profound assessment of the proportion and value of things”).
Gass concludes the essay, written toward the end of the 1960s (the Vietnam era), by saying that “the artist is an enemy of the state [. . . but also] an enemy of every ordinary revolution [. . . because] he undermines everything.” That is, to be true to their art, artists must be ready to stand alone. As soon as they lend their voice to a cause, their art becomes something else, like propaganda, jingoism, a corporate slogan.
The Artist Spoke is a departure for me in several ways. For one, it has a contemporary setting. When I began writing the novel, in late 2015 or early 2016, I even intended for it to have a somewhat futuristic setting — but when it takes five years to write a novel nowadays, the future quickly becomes the now, if not the past. My other novels and novellas have been set in the past: Men of Winter (early twentieth century, First World War-ish), Figures in Blue (also early twentieth century), Weeping with an Ancient God (July 1842), An Untimely Frost (1830s), Crowsong for the Stricken (1950s, mainly), and Mrs Saville (1816 or 17).
I prefer writing in a past setting. My current project is set in 1907 (the first three episodes are going to be published by Wordrunner as an e-novella or abbreviated collection, First Kings and Other Stories). I like the definitiveness of the past, and I enjoy reading history — so doing research is one of the most pleasurable parts of the writing process. What rifle would the hunter have been using? When did electricity come to that part of the country? How were corpses embalmed?
Though a devout atheist, I’m fascinated with the Bible, as a narrative and as a cultural artifact, so I often incorporate biblical elements into my fiction. I did this to some degree in Crowsong for the Stricken, but in the current project all the stories (episodes?) are rooted in Bible stories and biblical imagery, which is reflected in their titles: “First Kings,” “Hosea,” “The Widow’s Son,” and (the newest) “The Buzite.”
Religious faith is explored in The Artist Spoke as well. For instance, the novel asks, is faith in literature — or devotion to a particular author — not a kind of religion, and one that could be more meaningful than a traditional religion? A faith’s liturgy, after all, is at the core of its beliefs (in theory). Are not Joyceans, then, a kind of congregation? People who consider life’s meaning through the lenses of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake or another Joyce text, like “The Dead”?
For me, though a fan and admirer of Joyce, my religion is rooted in the writings of William H. Gass. They help me to understand the world and to sort through my own opinions and feelings regarding what the world offers up to me, like a pandemic, like a country where many of its citizens refuse to take precautions against spreading the virus, believing it to be some sort of hoax or conspiracy. Gass said, “One of the themes of my work is that people certainly do not want to know the truth, and they construct all sorts of idiocies to avoid facing it.” Amen.
Reading Gass helps me to cope with what is going on in the country right now. I would want that sort of solace for anyone, for everyone — but one needs to read literature and read it well and read it often. And those days are quickly coming to an end.
Another way that The Artist Spoke is a departure for me is that I feel I have stepped from behind a curtain to acknowledge that the book is all me: I wrote it, I took the photographs, I designed the book, I designed the cover, I edited it. I have done everything. I have been slowly inching my way into full view. With my last book, Mrs Saville, I was essentially out but was perhaps not quite as vocal about it.
Self-publishing is still seen by many as “vanity publishing.” In other artistic fields, taking charge of your own art is viewed as rebellious and bold: musicians who create their own labels, fashion designers who found their own boutiques, visual artists who start their own galleries, etc. The simple truth is that commercial publishing houses are not interested in what I’m doing in my writing, thus literary agents aren’t either. Nevertheless, I still feel that “reckless inner need”; and, what is more, I enjoy the entire process. I love writing the stories and novels, and I enjoy designing the books and illustrating them.
By taking control of the whole process, I can shape the book into a unified artistic expression. The design can complement the words. I’ve had run-ins over the years with editors, and I’ve been disappointed by the efforts of graphic designers who didn’t seem to get my work (perhaps they didn’t read it, or comprehend it).
That said, I do have an ego, so I seek publication for pieces of my books as I work on them (perhaps I am more sensitive to the charge of vanity publishing than I like to let on). Most of The Artist Spoke appeared in print, here and there, prior to the novel’s full publication, in Floyd County Moonshine, Lakeview Journal, Adelaide Magazine, Central American Literary Review, and Litbreak Magazine. I say in the Acknowledgments, “I wrote this book in fits and starts, often losing my way, at one point abandoning it for nearly two years. The editors who saw something of value in the work and published pieces of it over time provided more encouragement than they can know.”
My ego also hopes at least a few people read and enjoy The Artist Spoke, but I didn’t write it for a mass audience. Ultimately, I suppose, I wrote it for an audience of one. In any case, I give it to the world, to take or to leave. Gass-speed, little book.
From Tender Buttons to the “Heart of the Country”: Gertrude Stein’s Structural Influence on William H. Gass
The following paper, “From Tender Buttons to the ‘Heart of the Country’: Gertrude Stein’s Structural Influence on William H. Gass,” was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, the University of Louisville, Feb. 23, 2019, as part of the panel Material Readers and the Dynamics of Reception, chaired by Mark Mattes, University of Louisville. Other papers in the panel were “A Publication ‘edited by its readers’: Representation and Materiality in the Working-Class Newspaper Correspondence” by Emily Spunaugle, Wayne State University; and “Thirty Thoughts on Little House on the Prairie and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” [revised title] by Amy Gilley, Arkansas State University, Queretaro.
The author “wrote densely and brilliantly and beautifully and perversely and with intense contrivance and deep care and . . . skill” (108). Those too few who are intimately familiar with William H. Gass may have written this description regarding his contribution to belles-lettres. In fact, however, this is how Gass described one of his greatest influences, Gertrude Stein, in his landmark essay “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence” (1973). Gass always emphatically credited Stein’s influence on his work. He discovered her in graduate school, he said, and made the study of her writing a life-long occupation. (He studied at Cornell in the late 1940s, taking the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1954; and he passed away in 2017.) Yet in all his many discussions of Stein he never expressly linked her experimental poem Tender Buttons (1914) to his experimental short story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” (1967). The purpose of this paper is to suggest that Stein’s early poem had a direct impact on both the substance and the structure of Gass’s story—a story that became the title piece in the collection which solidified his reputation on the national literary stage, and which became the prototype for his magnum opus, the novel The Tunnel, famously 26 years in the writing.
I’ve been presenting papers at the Louisville Conference for, I think, fourteen years, and for the last decade or so my papers have focused exclusively on William H. Gass. Since discovering the Master in 2008 I have become a self-described Gass scholar and disciple—the only one I believe. I must credit the conference specifically for this paper topic. I’m ashamed to admit that until this past year I hadn’t read Tender Buttons. It had been on my must-read list for decades, but last February while browsing the new books in their usual spot on the third floor of the Humanities Building, outside of conference registration, I happened upon a critical edition of Tender Buttons, edited by Leonard Diepeveen, and as soon as I flipped it open I experienced something like déjà vu. Simply, the look of Stein’s text on the page was uncannily similar to the physical appearance of Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” an odd plot-less tale carved up into sections, some brief, some longer, each with its own subtitle. Being well aware of Stein’s influence on Gass in general, I immediately became suspicious that Tender Buttons served as a model for “In the Heart,” and I’ve spent the past year investigating that belief (in fits and starts of course).
When I submitted this paper proposal to the conference committee last summer, I hypothesized that Stein’s influence on the piece was mainly structural—thus my title—but the further I’ve looked into it, I believe the connections are even greater.
A quick refresher on Tender Buttons, which was first published in New York by the avant-garde press Claire Marie in 1914. It is divided into three parts—Objects, Food, and Rooms—with each part being further divided into subtitled pieces, some as brief as a few words, others consisting of several paragraphs. At a glance, Tender Buttons appears to be prose, but Stein called it poetry (more on this to follow). It has the reputation for being all but incomprehensible—although many have taken a stab at unlocking its meanings, including Gass in the essay previously mentioned. Diepeeven states it plainly in the introduction to his critical edition: “For many readers, one could not read Tender Buttons, or understand what it was . . .” (10). I believe his for many readers is generous: most, nearly all would probably be more accurate. The trouble begins immediately with the opening section “A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass.”:
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. (33)
Similarly, Gass structured “In the Heart of the Heart of Country” as a series of small segments or vignettes, each with its own subtitle (some of which repeat). Among the subtitles are “A Place,” “Weather,” “My House,” “Vital Data,” and “My House, My Cat, My Company.” They vary in length from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs. The story’s first-person narrator is an aging poet who goes about describing his town, his neighbors, and himself; however, there is no easily discernible plot. As far as I know, I’m the only person to see the structure of Tender Buttons in “In the Heart,” and that may be because on the surface, and from the start, Gass invites readers to make comparisons to Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928). The story begins, “So I have sailed the seas and come . . . to B . . .” with “B” standing for both a small Indiana town, Brookston, and Yeats’s Byzantium. Moreover, Yeats’s poem is about old age and the struggle to keep one’s artistic flame burning while one’s body slowly deteriorates toward death. Gass’s narrator is an aging poet who is “in retirement from love.” He says, “I’ve lost my years. . . . 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 to me now, candy ungiven after Halloween?” (173). So, thematically, there are definite correlations between Yeats’s poem and Gass’s story, in addition to the overt clue Gass provides in the opening sentence.
What is more, critics have noted that there are the same number of sections in the story as there are lines in “Sailing to Byzantium,” a fact that Gass did not dispute. In an interview Gass said, “It was pointed out by some anal observer [Larry McCaffery] that the sections of the story and the lines of the poem are the same [thirty-six]. And that’s true . . . That’s a little kind of imposed formality that I did to help shape the work” (qtd. in Hix 48). However, Gass’s acknowledgment is troublesome for a few reasons. McCaffery’s counting is based on the version of the story which appeared in the 1968 collection of the same title, a version which has been subsequently reprinted on numerous occasions, including in The William H. Gass Reader this past year. Yet in its original published form, in New American Review in 1967, the story had significantly fewer sections, only thirty. It’s possible that the difference in the number of sections (and other differences) are the result of editorial intervention; that is, perhaps the changes were necessary for its inclusion in the journal, to pare it back, for example, due to space limitations. The definitive answer to that question may lie in the massive Gass archive at Washington University in St. Louis, an archive which contains tens of thousands of pages (or more) of manuscript drafts, letters, and other material. I have visited the archive a handful of times and have spent perhaps a dozen hours seriously reading through the material there, but suffice it to say I’ve barely scratched proverbial surface.
Nevertheless, the archive’s contents provide the other reason I’m dubious about Gass’s acknowledgment that the number of lines of Yeats’s poem provided a guiding structure for “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” Among Gass’s papers are myriad drafts of the story which suggest his initial writing of the piece was fairly conventional, meaning that he composed long chunks of text, and then later he cut up and rearranged these smaller chunks until the story achieved its final form (well, one of its final forms). What is more, Gass played with numerous versions of the structure that resulted in its having fewer than thirty-six sections, the number necessary to match Yeats’s number of lines. Gass made numbered lists and plugged in the various fragmented vignettes; then toyed with moving around the pieces. Some of these numbered lists suggest he had in mind twenty-four subtitled pieces (see figures 1, 2 and 3). Another list, more detailed and messier, reveals that Gass considered the pieces falling into four broad categories, A through D, (reminiscent of Stein’s three categories) of eight vignettes each for a grand total of thirty-two, four short of Yeats’s thirty-six lines (figure 4).
Fig. 1. Photograph of a handwritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
Fig. 2. Photograph of a handwritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
Fig. 3. Photograph of a handwritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
Fig. 4. Photograph of a handwritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
Fig. 5. Photograph of a manually typewritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
At this point in his career Gass wrote on a manual typewriter, so the rough drafts of “In the Heart” are on full-size sheets of paper; however, while revising he might rewrite the same paragraph, or part of a paragraph, multiple times on the same sheet (see figure 5, which became part of a long vignette subtitled “Education” in the latter half of the story, in both the 1967 and ’68 versions, section 21/32 and 16/30, respectively). Each of these pieces is suggestive of the index cards Gertrude Stein used to write, by hand, and arrange Tender Buttons (see Appendix B of Diepeveen’s critical edition). So it isn’t that their writing processes were similar while originally drafting their poem and story, but through the process of revision Gass seems to have pared down his longer chunks of text to crystalline bite-size bits of a similar heft to Stein’s index cards, at least in some cases. Gass invested a significant amount of time in considering and rearranging these bits of text, as evidenced by the numberings and revised numberings in the margins of the drafts (figure 6). Without further examination of his papers, I can’t say how pervasive this kind of paring down was in the process of writing “In the Heart,” but I can say it wasn’t wholly unique to this short story. His technique of isolating single paragraphs or parts of paragraphs and revising them again and again, often on the same sheet of typing paper, can be seen in the archive for other works. I can attest to the novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968) and parts of The Tunnel (1995). For that matter, a kindred technique became part of the published draft of Middle C (2013), whereby the protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, works on rewriting the same brief paragraph throughout the novel, rearranging sentences, substituting words, until he has it perfect. In fact, the reaching of the paragraph’s final form is a kind of climax in the novel.
Fig. 6. Photograph of a manually typewritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
I want to return to Stein’s profound influence on Gass, which he made no bones about. In his “Fifty Literary Pillars,” in which Gass identified the books (and authors) who were most influential on his development as a writer, he listed Stein’s Three Lives and said, “I knew I had found the woman my work would marry” (54). Anyone who knows Gass at all probably knows that his greatest influence was the German poet Rilke. It’s true that Rilke is everywhere in Gass’s work, and he wrote a book about the difficulty of translating Rilke (Reading Rilke, 1999), which he tried his hand at himself. Gass said that Rilke helped to solidify ideas he’d had for years which he’d gotten from other great writers, like Stein: “. . . I had certainly come across and become enamored of Gertrude Stein a lot earlier and Flaubert somewhat, also—they all came together; Rilke just brought them together. . . . He sort of coalesced it all for me.” In particular “Rilke discovers that the poet’s aim is to add something to reality rather than comment on it or express something, to be something” (Ammon 161). Ultimately, said Gass, “you have an [art] object sitting there which is the result of this big cycle from objects observed by the poet or painter and it’s not that the painting is about anything; it is a transformation and a new object in the world” (162).
This concept is key to understanding Gass’s work. His stories, novellas and novels are not interested in advancing a plot via narration—as one would normally think of as the defining feature of fiction—but rather his stories, novellas and novels are interested in being works of art. The characters and their actions (the term plot doesn’t really apply) are a means to an end, and that end is to create a unique piece of literary art. This core artistic aim in Gass can be traced to Gertrude Stein’s philosophy of aesthetics, and Tender Buttons may be her most pure expression of that aesthetic. By the same token, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” may be Gass’s starkest example of the sort of fiction he would become infamous for, fiction which downplayed the typical foci on character development and plot, and instead emphasized stylistic components and thematic repetition.
Stein spoke of her narrative philosophy on numerous occasions, but her second lecture at the University of Chicago in 1935 zeroed in on this aspect of her writing process most directly. “Lecture 2” deals with the distinction between prose and poetry as they had been evolving in the modernist movement after the First World War, a movement of which Stein had been the vanguard for more than twenty years by the time she delivered her Chicago lectures. She said, as only she could,
When one used to think of narrative one meant telling of what is happening in successive moments of its happening the quality of telling depending upon the conviction of the one telling that there was a distinct succession in happening, that one thing happened after something else and since that happening in succession was a profound conviction in every one then really there was no difference whether any one began in the beginning or the middle or the ending because since narrative was a progressive telling of things that were progressively happening it really did not make any difference where you were at what moment you were in your happening since the important part of telling anything was the conviction that anything that everything was progressively happening. But now we have changed all that we really have. (17)
If I may, before modernism prose was defined by the narrative quality of cause and effect, of one event leading to another and then another and another in a story or novel, say. In modernism, however, prose has become like poetry in that there is “not a sense of anything being successively happening” (19). Prose is no longer “being a successive thing but being something existing. That is then the difference between narrative as it has been and narrative as it is now,” explained Stein (20). Or as Liesl M. Olson paraphrases the key idea in her foreword to Narration: “A ‘modern’ narrative need not have an event, according to Stein; nothing need ‘happen’” (ix-x). Thus, Stein called Tender Buttons poetry because even though it has the outward trappings of prose (sentences and paragraphs), ontologically it is poetry in that each piece stands alone as a carefully crafted, multilayered thing of linguistic art. There is no traditional narrative substructure of things happening to characters via cause and effect.
In his essay “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence,” Gass said that Tender Buttons is written “in a kind of code . . . a coding which dangerously confounds the surface . . . [which often] effects a concealment.” This concealment, though, is key to understanding Stein’s genius, “because the object of art is to make more beautiful that which is, and since that which is is rarely beautiful, often awkward and ugly and ill-arranged, it must be sometimes sheeted like a corpse, or dissolved into its elements and put together afresh, aright, and originally” (105). This objective of art was embraced by Gass throughout his career as he frequently tried to make the ugly beautiful via the beauty of his language. In The Tunnel, the centerpiece of oeuvre, for example, Gass wrote beautifully about the Holocaust, and attempted to redeem his deplorable first-person narrator through the loveliness of his language.
Gass’s emphasis on language over plot, on style over characterization has made some readers consider his novellas and novels long prose poems, placing them in the same arena as Tender Buttons. Unlike Stein, however, Gass insisted he was not adept at writing poetry. He did say, though, that the best poets of his generation were writers of fiction, naming in particular John Hawkes, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin and William Gaddis (Saltzman 91). It would’ve been the height of egotism to list himself, but his was a name that often appeared among them. He readily acknowledged his frequent use of devices more typically attached to poetry. Among his “quirks” he listed in his essay “Retrospection” are “whoring and metaphoring” and “jingling,” which includes his love of alliteration and limericks.
I’ll end where I began. One of the reasons it’s worth considering if Tender Buttons was a model of sorts for “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is because Gass stated explicitly that the short story’s structure led him to his most ambitious work, The Tunnel. He said in an interview with Bradford Morrow, “[The Tunnel] also elaborates the structure of the story in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. [The novel’s] in sections roughly seventy pages long, instead of paragraphs. These are musically organized. There are sections within sections: It’s sectioned up like an insect or a worm.” I believe there is much more to learn about the story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by reading it alongside Stein’s techniques in Tender Buttons; therefore, by extension, Stein’s enigmatic experimental poem may also whisper some clues in our ears, sibyl-like, to help us better comprehend the many levels of The Tunnel.
Works Cited
Ammon, Theodore G. “Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 149-170.
Gass, William H. “Fifty Literary Pillars.” A Temple of Texts, Dalkey Archive, 2007, pp. 29-60.
—. “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence.” The World within the Word. Basic Books, 1978, pp. 63-123.
—. “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. Godine, 1981, pp. 172-206.
—. “Retrospection.” Life Sentences, Knopf, 2012, pp. 36-55.
Hix, H. L. Understanding William H. Gass, U of South Carolina P, 2002.
Morrow, Bradford. “An Interview: William H. Gass.” Conjunctions, no. 4, 1983, pp. 14-29. Available online http://www.conjunctions.com/print/article/william-h-gass-c4.
Olson, Liesl M. Foreword. Narration by Gertrude Stein, The U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. vii-xii.
Saltzman, Arthur M. “An Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 81-95.
Stein, Gertrude. Narration. The U of Chicago P, 2010.
—. Tender Buttons. Edited by Leonard Diepeveen, Broadview, 2018.
Jailbreak!: William Gass’s Lifelong Work to Free Himself from the Imprisonment of Print
This paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, University of Louisville, on February 23, 2018. Due to a last-minute change, I chaired the panel, Temporalities of Revision. Other panelists were Kelly Kiehl, University of Cincinnati; and Sarah-Jordan Stout, Rice University. The paper is dedicated to William H. Gass, who passed away December 6, 2017.
In the annals of American experimental fiction, William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife holds a place of reverence due, mainly, to its ambitious (some may say, excessive) experimentation: nineteen different typefaces (varying in point sizes, with unusual placements and movements on the pages), and copious graphic elements, including several photos of a nude model. The odd little novella first appeared in 1968 as TriQuarterly supplement No. 2 – in its most experimental format, which included a variety of paper stock in addition to its other eccentricities – then in a hardcover edition from Knopf (1971) and later a paperback edition from Dalkey Archive (1989). The Knopf and Dalkey editions maintained the original design, minus the use of various paper stock.
Willie Masters’ occupies a place of infamy in Postmodern circles: No one faults Gass’s ambitions. However, the odd little book hasn’t garnered much, well, affection over the years either, which I think is a crying shame. Even Gass himself wasn’t overly generous regarding the end result. In the Art of Fiction interview (1976) he stated,
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. (Conversations 22)
He was, I think, a little too hard on himself. I am moved by the book; it affects me, but perhaps not quite as Gass would have hoped. And Gass may have changed his opinion of Willie Masters’ success over time. In the essay “Anywhere but Kansas” which first appeared in The Iowa Review in 1994 (nearly thirty years after writing Willie Masters’ and on the cusp of The Tunnel’s publication, which required a gestation of nearly that length of time and which makes use of many of the techniques in its infamous predecessor), Gass discusses the importance of experimentation: “An experiment, I would learn much later, . . . had to arise from a real dissatisfaction with existing knowledge. There was a gap to be filled, a fracture to be repaired, an opening to be made” (29). The public at large, he says, only admires experiments that work; however, for the experimenters themselves, an unsuccessful experiment may bring its own kind of success. “In the lab,” writes Gass, “a ‘no’ may not elicit cheers; it is nevertheless a bearer of important information” (30). He may, then, have learned some important narrative lessons from Willie Masters’, lessons he took to heart during the three decades he labored on The Tunnel, which shares some of Willie Masters’ techniques, but significantly toned down.
What is more, three decades later, Gass felt just as strongly about the need for writers to engage in experimentation for the sake of their art: “[I]t is . . . repeatedly necessary for writers to shake the system by breaking its rules, ridiculing its lingo, and disdaining whatever is in intellectual fashion. To follow fashion is to play the pup” (Conversations 30). Gass may not have achieved the aesthetic affects he was aiming for in Willie Masters’ in 1968, but, in retrospect, he seemed to value his own efforts — though he doesn’t say so explicitly.
As wildly experimental as Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife turned out to be, it was tamer than Gass had in mind1. A visit to the Gass Papers at Washington University in St. Louis, where Gass taught philosophy from 1969 to 1999, can give us some sense of what the author had in mind from the start, working only with a manual typewriter, pen or pencil, straight edge, scissors and glue, plus other objects like fabric and newspaper clippings. In part what Gass was trying to achieve was bridging the gap between writer and reader by making the narrative come to life, so to speak, in the reader’s hands. That is, rather than simply describing things — that is, providing symbols for things — which evoke intellectual and (hopefully) emotional responses in the reader, Gass wanted the thing itself to become part of the reader’s world. In essence, the book itself becomes a performance piece in the reader’s world — akin perhaps to the playwright’s task in moving from script to performed play. One writes of a pistol on the page, which becomes a real pistol on the stage, one which discharges so that the audience members can actually hear its bang and actually smell its smoke.
Gass may encourage this comparison by including a play as one of the multiple narratives at work in Willie Masters’, whose overarching narrative is Babs Masters’ seduction of the reader into her lonely text. One of the best examples of Gass’s attempt to move from manuscript into the reader’s reality is via a set of coffee-cup rings that appear on several pages. A new section of the novella begins, “The muddy circle you see just before you and below you represents the ring left on the leaf of the manuscript by my coffee cup” ([37]). But just as the theatrical pistol is only a prop, Gass immediately acknowledges that the dark-brown circle is not actually a ring from his cup: “Represents, I say, because, as you must surely realize, this book is many removes from anything I’ve set pen, hand, or cup to.” The author attempts to enter the reader’s reality more corporeally than authors typically do, but, ultimately, that gap can only be bridged so far.
We can see that the coffee-ring idea was an early one in Gass’s conception of the book, and, in fact, was created no doubt by actual coffee.2 The circle returns later in the novella, but in a more metaphorical role according to the text it encircles: “This is the moon of daylight” ([52]). The circle multiplies to appear as five circles on the final two pages of the book, in two cases highlighting the inserted phrases “HERE BE DRAGONS” and “YOU HAVE FALLEN INTO ART — RETURN TO LIFE” ([58]). The final coffee-like ring appears on the facing page, which is a close-up of the female nude’s breasts and navel, with the ring encircling the latter.3 Others have noted that there are (at least) two female models used for the book: one whose image appears on the cover, and another whose images appear (possibly) eight times throughout the book. The final coffee ring appears on the torso of, it appears, the cover’s model. The interior version of Babs Masters is more, well, voluptuous than the cover and final coffee-ring Babs. Yet there is a striking difference between the cover and the final image: The nude on the cover has no belly-button; it’s been airbrushed out. The final coffee-ring encircles and emphasizes the belly-button, however, maybe making us take note of its absence on the cover.
Is it in fact, then, Babs represented on the cover of the book, or is it Eve? Gass would go on to use Eve as a metaphor with regularity in his fictions. Michael Hardin makes some provocative observations about Willie Masters’ in an article in Short Story, discussing both Gass’s novella and Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979. Hardin notes, for example, that on the first page of the book Babs’s hand reaches toward the title just as the reader does in a rather hand-of-God sort of way:
The extended arm references Michelangelo’s Creation of Man, where God is extending his hand to spark life into Adam’s extended hand. The reader must decide whether Babs (the wife) is in the space of the creator or the created. . . . [G]iven the nature of the sexual politics of the text, one might argue that Babs is the creative spark passed between author (whose hand reaches out with the pen) and reader, God and Adam. (80-81)
Perhaps Hardin didn’t notice the MIA belly-button because he doesn’t bring Eve into the analysis even though it seems rife for her inclusion. By encircling Babs’s navel at the conclusion of the book (and returning to the cover model for the image), Gass signals that Eve/Babs is now only Babs, making the statement “You have fallen into art—return to life” especially provocative. It may be that our sojourn in the complicated text of Willie Masters’ – which Gass overtly parallels with our having sexual intercourse with Babs – is akin to the Fall, and when we reach the final page we are expelled from the textual Paradise, like hapless Adam and Eve; however, like Adam and Eve we have acquired a unique experience for which we are the richer, even if that richness is colored by sin. But since sin in this metaphor is art/sex, Gass implies sin ain’t such a bad thing, and, in fact, it (art, experiencing it, creating it) is the only thing that makes life worth living: An idea which Gass returned to again and again in his fiction, his essays, his criticism, and his interviews. In addition to being a voracious and eclectic reader, Gass said, in 1971, that he enjoyed “all” the arts, “especially perhaps ballet (when pure and not mucked up) and architecture. I was an opera nut when young. . . . I haunt museums when I can. In one sense, painting has influenced my theory of art more than almost anything, music my practice of it” (9). Gass’s interest in the visual is obviously reflected in his merging of text with pictorial elements. As a writer, he was about what all writers ought to be about, he said: “You are advancing an art—the art. That is what you are trying to do” (26).
One of Gass’s ambitions in Willie Masters’ is to seduce the reader into reading the text carefully and thoughtfully – that is, deeply. Already in 1966, when he began work on the novella, Gass recognized that too many readers were impatiently speeding through texts, and (worse perhaps) too many writers were providing them material that enabled such shallow encounters. Gass said, “A lot of modern writers . . . are writing for the fast mind that speeds over the text like those noisy bastards in motor boats. . . . They stand to literature as fast food to food” (25). Whenever one begins unpacking a Gass metaphor, the act, by necessity, becomes reductive. Nevertheless, for illustration’s sake, I’ll work my way through Gass’s attempted seduction of the reader in Willie Masters’ via his use of metaphor, wordplay, and imagery. I will force myself as best I can to hold onto a single strand and resist the text’s Siren song which could lead us in myriad directions (not to our doom, however).
One of several storylines Gass juggles in Willie Masters’ is a playscript featuring Ivan and Olga wherein Ivan finds a penis baked into his breakfast roll. At this point in the novella the carnival ride hasn’t become too topsy-turvy for the reader, but it’s about to begin spinning (nearly) out of control. Gass starts interrupting the playscript with footnotes which engage the reader in academic-sounding notes related, it seems, to the main narrative. The first footnote is signaled by an asterisk, and the second by two asterisks (just as Gass is using asterisks to represent other things in the text besides footnotes, so are these footnotes after all? — Or is Gass toying with us?). The second alleged footnote references John Locke’s Concerning Human Understanding (ha!) and discusses how “ideas” are “take[n] in,” “masticate[d]” and “swallow[ed] down” ([15], my emphasis on down). The footnote-like interruptions continue on the following pages, except on page [17] the footnote itself is interrupted with yet another typeface, in bold, which says, “Now that I’ve got you alone down here [i.e., at the bottom of the page], you bastard, don’t think I’m letting you get away easily, no sir, not you brother; anyway, how do you think you’re going to get out, down here where it’s dark and oily like an alley . . . ?” Suddenly “down here” is not the bottom of the page, but rather it’s Babs talking to us about her dark and oily sex, which she says is as “meaningless as Plato’s cave.” We, the blissful readers, have been lured there, in between Babs’s waiting legs, and there’s no easy way out.
The complexities mount, so to speak, for twenty or more pages before we come (ugh) to the section that introduces us to the “muddy circle” — whose dark shape, like the opening of Plato’s cave perhaps, has even more symbolic weight than mere coffee-cup ring. We also note that the section begins with Babs’s bare leg and foot knocking down the enlarged “T” in “The” with which the paragraph starts, thus echoing the earlier seductive “footnote” ([37]). Gass’s playing with the convention of the footnote, a standard feature of annotated texts, appears to contradict its function, at first, but upon further contemplation (and multiple readings) it does not contradict it. That is, normally a footnote aids in clarifying a reference, and thereby maybe an entire passage, but the footnotes in Willie Masters’ seem to only muddy the narrative waters, obscuring instead of clarifying. However, we later realize that the footnotes are aiding our understanding of the novella as a whole, contributing to the convention that Gass is attempting to seduce us into a complex relationship with his book. Intercourse with Babs Masters cannot be a mere one-night stand; she gets into your head and won’t let you go — à la Fatal Attraction. (Luckily I don’t have a pet rabbit.)
Earlier I said that I am affected by Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. I must acknowledge that its characters do not engage me on an emotional level, but the book itself – Gass’s ambitions and his achievements –are inspirational to me as a creative writer. A black-and-white photo of the Master hangs on the wall next to my desk; a line drawing, too, on the wall of our master bedroom, next to the door where it will be viewed most frequently; I have acquired 51 books either by Gass or which include his writing (among them first editions, rare books, and several bearing his autograph), and this isn’t counting the books about Gass’s work. I have surrounded myself by the Master and his words, including this literary call-to-arms at the end of Willie Masters’: “It’s not the languid pissing prose we’ve got, we need; but poetry, the human muse, full up, erect and on charge, impetuous and hot and loud and wild like Messalina going to the stews, or those damn rockets streaming headstrong into the stars.”
Amen, Master. Rest in peace, and in the knowledge some of us will carry on the good fight.
Notes
1. See “‘The Text Is Oozing Out’: William H. Gass and Transliteracy” by Clarence Wolfshohl, Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 26, no. 4, 1989, pp. 497-503, in which Wolfshohl shares some of his personal correspondence with Gass regarding Willie Masters’ and its production.: “The stains and the nude photos are as close as Gass comes to bringing the outside physical world into the hook, but he wanted much more. He also thought of having cloth tip-ins and a condom bookmark, and, in his own words, ‘lots of other nutty things.'”
2. I’d like to thank Joel Minor and the other archivists in the Special Collections Department of Olin Library at Washington University in St. Louis for their assistance in examining the manuscript drafts of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Visit William H. Gass: The Soul Inside the Sentence.
3. The photography in Willie Masters’ was by Burton L. Rudman. Gass had hoped for an older model to portray Babs, according to Wolfshohl (see note 1). The images of Gass’s original manuscript pages are by the author.
Works Cited
Gass, William H. “Anywhere but Kansas.” Tests of Time, The U of Chicago P, 2002, pp. 28-36.
—. Conversations with William H. Gass. Edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003.
—. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Dalkey Archive, 1998.
Hardin, Michael. “Desiring Fragmented Bodies and Texts: William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979.” Short Story, vol. 11, no. 2, 2003, pp. 79-90.
Interview with Brady Harrison: The Dying Athabaskan
I’ve long been interested in the long story and novella; that is, literary work that falls in the gray-area length between a typical (nowadays) short story and a full-length novel — let’s say, about 5,000 words and 50,000 words. That’s an awfully large gap separating what most literary journals will consider and what most agents and commercial publishers will look at for book publication. Yet this is a fairly recent development in the publishing biz. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century it was commonplace for national magazines to publish longer pieces (often serially) which would then be picked up by a commercial publisher for book publication.
Think Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Joseph Conrad, resulting in works like A Christmas Carol, Cranford, The Cossacks, The Turn of the Screw, Ethan Frome, The Awakening, and Heart of Darkness, among many, many other great works that are powerful even though — or maybe because — they are not full-length novels.
My interest in the form led me to design a course on the long story and novella for Lindenwood University’s MFA in Writing program (online), which I’ll be teaching for the third time in summer quarter; and it led me to create the Publisher’s Long Story Prize via my literary press, Twelve Winters. The first calls went out in the summer of 2016, and the response was immediate. We appeared to strike a rich and largely untapped vein.
From that initial round of submissions, we eventually culled our first winner: The Dying Athabaskan by Brady Harrison, a complex narrative about a freelance writer who embarks on discovering the inspiration for a famous sculpture, The Dying Athabaskan. We recently released our first Long Story Prize winner in paperback and digital editions, and author Brady Harrison generously agreed to be interviewed about his book, his writing process, and today’s literary landscape, especially as it pertains to these in-between-length works of fiction. Here are Brady’s unedited responses.
TM: Even though my main literary love interest is William Gass, by the transitive property of literary love I’m also a fan of James Joyce, and I seem to see a lot of Joycean influence in The Dying Athabaskan: experimenting with varying forms; alluding to other books and artwork, often within the context of working-class drinking establishments; playing with language in the service of lyricism; and even your treatment of dialogue is very Joycean, from a mechanical perspective especially. In particular I’m seeing a lot of Ulysses. Am I projecting that onto your text, or would you count Joyce among your influences?
BH: Joyce: absolutely, and for all the reasons you indicate: the restless mind, the interest in experimentation and blending different genres, the love of language and how it sounds, and the love of books, music, art. And, the love of bars, of course. In addition to Joyce, my favorite writers are the anatomists, those writers of big, all-over-the-place narratives that refuse to settle on one storytelling mode or style, but that keep experimenting, keep trying out new ideas and ways of expressing them. I’m thinking here of those great comic, yet serious writers like Melville, Sterne, Diderot, Flann O’Brien, Flaubert (in Bouvard and Pécuchet), Woolf, Stein, and Sebald, among many others. Oh, and Gass, though I know you’re a bigger fan than I am. For language, the same folks, and Faulkner, too. A list of my literary heroes. (For the record, I’m also a big fan of Margaret Atwood, despite O’Keevan’s dig.)
In a relatively brief narrative you offer a variety of perspectives and forms. Is this typical of your style, or is The Dying Athabaskan a departure in some ways?
Left to my own devices, this would be my style, but over the years I’ve found it’s easier to place stories that don’t change gears so often, that don’t mix forms, but rather that rely on a consistent point of view and more straight-forward narrative strategies. And, I’m mostly ok with that: the straight-forward story imposes a kind of discipline that I need, and reminds me that I’m not just writing for myself. I remember something that was going around on the web: “Shakespeare wrote for money.” Whenever I find myself wanting to experiment, to turn a story into a play or a letter or a tale from the Arabian nights, and then turn it back and then into something else again, I usually have to reel myself back in. In the case of The Dying Athabaskan, however, I think it works because Ritu, in the process of trying to understand whether or not a thing can mean, tries out any number of forms and approaches. She’s also trying to find out about herself, about her own powers and mind.
Mainstream publishers — even mainstream literary publishers — aren’t inclined to embrace narrative experimentation. Yet you wrote a long, experimental story, perhaps doubling the difficulty of finding a publisher. Can you speak to your interest in experimentation?
After working on stories for a few years, I wanted to try something longer, and wrote a novel about a real-life French poet-explorer set in North Africa in 1930, and I wrote it in the form of an explorer’s journal. It began realistically — what would it be like to travel in the Western Sahara, about the only place in the world that’s not a country, while trying to avoid capture by Berbers and Moors? — but soon enough the journal begins to mutate into other narrative forms and the narrator begins to meet other writer-adventurers who died before he was born, or were born after he died, and at least one of his guides keeps changing shapes and sizes. The narrator, disguised as a woman, begins to turn into a woman. Of course, I thought it was great, comic yet serious, and a number of publishers asked to review the ms.: no takers, and one perhaps made plain what the others were thinking: how could we possibly market so strange a novel about a gender-shifting Frenchman to American readers? Oh, and some sections were written in French, and much of the plot turned around a letter written and mailed to the un-hero before he was born. All to say, I learned my lesson: experimentation and a sort of wildness, at least as I managed them, seem not to be suited to the contemporary marketplace. Or, maybe it wasn’t any good.
The Dying Athabaskan is the title story of a collection you’re shopping. How would you describe the other stories and their relationship to Athabaskan?
For a long time, the working title of the collection was “Sever,” and most of the stories turn around key moments when the protagonist breaks or severs ties with others or with themselves, usually through an act of emotional or physical violence. In The Dying Athabaskan, Brion wants desperately to sever himself from Sister, Briony breaks rather violently with Neil, and O’Keevan seems to want to push almost everyone away. In another story, a no-longer-young man has finally resolved, at his mother’s urging, to leave his parents’ failing farm; in a third, a successful engineer abandons his family while on vacation. In a one page story, two friends follow through on a long-ago promise to murder, if a certain thing ever happens, a third buddy. And, then, having severed ties, how does a person go about reconnecting, reconciling, making peace? Some of the stories are about trying to repair the damage done, or about trying to make meaningful connections where they seem unlikely. In one way or another, they all turn around that very human problem of loss and what to do about it. But I should add: they’re not all as grim as I might be making them sound; some of them, I hope, are funny, and I’ll call the one about the brothers-by-choice killing their buddy a black comedy.
One of your pub credits is the journal The Long Story — a journal I’ve admired for years, decades perhaps (its editor has rejected my work several times) — which suggests that Athabaskan isn’t your first piece of long narrative fiction. Is the long story/novella a length/form you find yourself especially drawn to? And if so, why? (William Gass felt that the novella was his natural medium, and he was at his best writing in that in-between length, or perhaps his most comfortable.)
If I love the long, baggy, all-over-the-place anatomies (except Pynchon: can’t stand his work, save for The Crying of Lot 49, and have no idea why he’s so celebrated), I also love, equally, the novella, and routinely teach courses on the genre. My lure to students: “If, as Randall Jarrett famously remarked, a ‘novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it,’ and if, as some readers protest, short stories simply cannot offer the richness and complexities of longer works, then what could be more perfect than the novella, that rare, gem-like form somewhere-in-between?” Really good novellas seem to achieve a degree of perfection — I’m not making that claim for myself! — that novels cannot, and seem to offer a richer tapestry than can usually be achieved in stories.
And, some writers, I think, achieve their best work in the form: I think, for example, that Joyce Carol Oates does some of her best work in the novella, and she’s one of the few contemporary writers who works consistently in the genre. Same thing for Stephen King: while I find his novels way too long, he seems best when he self-edits yet gives plenty of character and just enough plot in works like “Stand by Me” or “The Mist.” The truly sublime novellas: there are many of course, but I would say, Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, and any short novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. In the latter case, every time I read one of her short works, I wonder, How does she do it? Oh, and many of Georges Simenon’s roman durs, outstanding.
Ok, to sort of get back to your question! I was really lucky (and really honored) to place a story in The Long Story, a journal that, like you, I’ve admired forever. “The Guest” is a really tough thing to read: it’s about a driver hitting a homeless person, who then sails through the front windshield, and the driver, rather than calling the police and ambulance, drives home and parks in the garage. When I first wrote the story, it was about twice as long: I wanted to honor the tradition in the novella of a frame narrative, and I told, alongside the story of the accident and its aftermath, the story of the narrator, an investigative journalist, and how and why he was dying. Suffering a traumatic injury of his own, this will be his last work as a reporter. In the end, I cut the frame, and while the story certainly gained in intensity and focus, it also perhaps lost something, too. All to say, I hope to keep working on the long story: call it the best of both worlds, novel and short fiction.
Long stories are so difficult to place these days, did you think about that as you were writing it? Did you consider restraining the narrative to try to keep it within a more publishable length? How difficult was it to find a publisher for Athabaskan?
I’ll be blunt: I’m damn lucky you created the Publisher’s Long Story Prize! Like most folks, I’d like to see my work into print, but at the same time I’m just perverse enough to also want to write what I want to write and the market be damned. But you’re right: I was taking a chance in writing that weird in-between length. At the same time, the long story or novella has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in the last decade or so. I’m thinking of Melville House’s Art of the Novella series (though of course they mostly republish the “classics”) and a few literary journals have novella contests every other year or so. There seems to be a modest market for the form, and it’s not unusual for collections by big guns like David Gates or George Saunders to include a long story. And, as I say, Joyce Carol Oates (who’s a force of nature) routinely does her part to keep the form alive and well.
As you know, the Press publishes Grant Tracey’s Hayden Fuller Mystery Series, and Hayden is Grant’s alter ego ex-NHL star turned detective, gumshoeing his way through the mean streets of 1960s Toronto, where Grant grew up. Hockey is a major element in Athabaskan as well. Can you talk about hockey’s influence on your creative psyche growing up in Canada?
Grant! The G-man! I love Cheap Amusements (and Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe) in no small part because of the hockey connections. And, I remember vividly the hard-boiled short films Grant made while we were in grad school: in the Fuller mysteries, we get two of Grant’s passions, two-fisted action on and off the ice. More on Grant in a moment.
Hockey? I guess you could say I’m about as Canadian as they come. I still play hockey two nights a week, skate in as many pond hockey tournaments as I can, and will often hang around after our games to watch other buddies play; I still count the Montreal Canadiens as my favorite team (the arch enemies of Grant’s beloved Toronto Maple Leafs) and try to catch their games on TV. I love everything about hockey: the speed, the way skates work on ice, the team play, the sheer thrill of scoring a goal. I also love weird things about the sport: I love the sounds of the game, and I’m fascinated by the way players talk to one another in mid-play. I’m a true rink-rat, for sure, always have been.
Ok, that’s a long preamble to a question that I probably can’t answer: hockey’s always been a big part of my life, but The Dying Athabaskan is my first story to include the game. Winter: that has shaped my imagination in every way possible, and hockey is a part of my winter mind: I find in so many of my stories that the cold creeps into the action, that snow and ice and how it feels to be out in winter creeps into the characters and how they move and perhaps even think. There’s a certain caution that comes with winter, but also a genuine exhilaration. I’m rambling: I know and love winter, I can say that much.
After selecting The Dying Athabaskan for the Publisher’s Long Story Prize, we learned that you and Grant have more in common than both being from Canada and writing about hockey. You actually went to grad school together. Can you dish a favorite grad school story on Grant?
Ok, this is the question I’ve been waiting for! Grant was such a big part of my life in those days, and we’ve remained friends over the years. Back in the day, Grant had a punk rock show on the local public radio station, and he was kind enough to invite me, on several occasions, to sit in and have some time on the mic talking about the music and the history and evolution of punk. I remember the hot, cramped little booth at WEFT, and most of all I remember Grant’s passion and encyclopedic knowledge. What a blast it was: the Clash, Patti Smith, the Ramones, MC5, Iggy, X-Ray Spex, the Pistols, real old school turned up to 11. Grant was such a great host, and the show was on late, and who knows who was out there, listening, but we had such a brilliant time. (G-man: if you’re reading this, hit me with your ultimate Spirit of ’77 playlist: now that the smoke has cleared, what’s the one, perfect show’s worth of songs?!)
One other story: one day, we hopped in his explode-able Pinto and drove from Champaign-Urbana to Washington, D.C., to see, at the Library of Congress, an alternative ending to Kiss Me Deadly a noir starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer. We were just kids, and we had the time of our lives: Grant was doing research on hard-boiled films, and I had never seen the capital, and we talked music and movies and books for hours and hours. Did the alternative ending actually exist? That’s a secret.
You’re also attracted to the poetry and essay forms. Is one your strength, would you say? What are some of your current projects?
I enjoy trying out all forms, but I’m really committed to two: one of my heroes is that great wildman of American letters, Leslie Fiedler (who wrote many of his masterpieces while at the University of Montana), and when asked if he preferred writing articles or stories, he remarked that he saw no difference between writing stories and writing about stories. I’ve taken that as my cue (as perhaps you have!), and these days I seem to divide my time about equally between fiction and scholarly research and writing. In terms of “creative writing” — truth be told, I can never understand why scholarly writing is not considered “creative” when, to my mind, it’s absolutely as creative as writing, say, stories, poems, or personal essays — I’m interested in narrative. So, I hope to find a good home for the collection of stories I’ve put together, and if that works out, I have a couple of ideas for novels. We’ll see. In my day job, I’m currently writing a book about, of all things, quantum physics and literary interpretation. I’m really enjoying the research—quantum physics is just so damn strange, even comic, at least to me—and hope to finish the book in the next year or so. I’m also co-editing a collection of essays on teaching Western American literature in colleges and universities. I can say this: I’ve been lucky: I’ve had the opportunity to work on things that interest me.
Brady Harrison’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Cerise Press, J Journal, The Long Story, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, Serving House Journal, and Wascana Review, among literary journals others. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and recent poetry appears in the anthology, Poems Across the Big Sky II. He is also edited two books on Montana literature, These Living Songs: Reading Montana Poetry and All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Approaches to Montana Literature. His most recent book is Punk Rock Warlord: The Life and Music of Joe Strummer. He lives in Missoula, Montana, and teaches at the University of Montana. (Photo credits: Brady Harrison / David Baumstark; Grant Tracey / Mitchell D. Strauss)
In the Heart of the Heart of Despair
“In the Heart of the Heart of Despair: Seclusion in the Fiction of William H. Gass” was presented at the American Literature Association annual Conference on American Literature in Boston, May 25-28, 2017. It was part of the panel “The American Recluse: Contesting Individualism in Narratives of Isolation and Withdrawal,” chaired by Susan Scheckel, Stony Book University. The panel was organized by Matthew Mosher (Stony Brook), and he presented his paper “‘Our Inviolate Realm’: Self-Reliance and Self-Destruction in E. L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley.”
First of all, I’d like to thank Matt Mosher for inviting me to join this panel on recluses in American fiction. His invitation encouraged my wife Melissa and me to attend this terrific conference for the first time, and visit Boston for the first time. More important, however, Matt has opened my eyes to an aspect of William H. Gass’s work that is so obvious and so foundational I never quite saw it in spite of spending the last decade of my scholarly life focused primarily on Gass (aka, “the Master”). From his very first fiction publication, the novel excerpt “The Triumph of Israbestis Tott” (from Omensetter’s Luck) in 1958, to his most recent, 2016’s collection of novellas and stories, Eyes, Gass’s protagonists have almost always been solitary souls, withdrawn from their various social spheres: in a word, reclusive. In various papers and reviews of Gass’s work, I have nibbled around the edges of this realization, discussing the loneliness and/or isolation of individual characters—but I’ve never noticed the pattern, a proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room of Gass scholarship.
As the title suggests, my main focus for this paper will be Gass’s early experimental story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” (published independently and as the title story of his seminal collection in 1968); it’s important to note, though, that I could have tossed a dart at my William H. Gass bookcase and whichever spine it came to rest in would have provided ample material with which to write this paper. According to the law of probability, I likely would have landed my dart in The Tunnel, and it would have been an especially fruitful stroke of fate. I say it would have been likely because Gass’s American Book Award-winning novel tips the scales at more than 650 pages, and I have three copies (plus the audiobook) among the volumes in my Gass bookcase. I describe the dart’s prick as fruitful because the first-person narrator William Kohler (a sort of William Gass doppelgänger) spends the entire 650 pages of the book sitting alone in his basement writing a highly personal and ego-centric memoir, which is The Tunnel itself.
I’ve chosen to focus primarily on Gass’s earlier work, however, because it’s more manageable given the context of this paper, and also it provides ample insights to what I believe is at the core of this phenomenon: this pattern of isolated characters in Gass’s fiction. (As I write this paper, I’m anxious to hear what Matt and my fellow panelists have to say on the subject of reclusive characters and see if it complements or contradicts my ideas about Gass’s characters.) I shall leave you, for the moment at least, in deductive suspense regarding my theory.
Earlier I referred to “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” as an experimental story. “Experimental” is certainly true; for “story” one must broaden one’s sense of the word. A story is normally something with a plot, that is, a discernible conflict and at least a nod toward resolution. Not so with the Master. “In the Heart” features 36 sections with subheadings. The sections vary in length from just a few sentences to several pages, and their styles range from coldly clinical to lusciously lyrical. There is no central conflict, at least not in a typical sense. The story was somewhat inspired by William Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927)—in fact, it begins by more or less quoting from the poem’s second stanza, “So I have sailed the seas and come . . . to B . . .” —and its structure is loosely based on the ottava rima form that Yeats used for his 32-line poem. It is their kindredness in theme, though, which is of greatest importance to our purpose here.
Yeats begins by lamenting the deterioration of his physical self due to old age (he was in his sixties when he wrote “Sailing to Byzantium”), but ends with the understanding that the physical is fleeting while the soul that aspires to a higher artistic ideal is immortal. In Gass’s story, the unnamed first-person narrator is an aging poet who has come to B, a small town in Indiana, and is reflecting on his life in this mundane Midwestern locale, season upon season, year upon year. “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is not merely a prose interpretation of Yeats’s poem, which ends on a more optimistic note than it began. On the contrary, Gass’s story starts bleak and only grows darker. Repeatedly the narrator refers to his own isolation and loneliness, as well as to the isolation and loneliness of his Hoosier neighbors. Early in the story, he tells us that he is “in retirement from love,” and “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?” (173). The story concludes, 28 pages later, with the narrator’s sense of isolation at Christmastime in the town, a time which represents the pinnacle of the town’s communal life. He finds himself (or merely imagines himself) in the deserted downtown, which has been bedecked for the holiday: “But I am alone, leaning against a pole—no . . . there is no one in sight. […] There’s no one to hear the music [“Joy to the World”] but myself, and though I’m listening, I’m no longer certain. Perhaps the record’s playing something else” (206).
Meanwhile, in the heart of the story, the narrator describes, here and there, his various fellow townspeople, especially his neighbor Billy Holsclaw, who “lives alone” (179). The narrator paints a sad picture of Billy (unshaven, dirty with “coal dust,” dressed in “tatters”), and ends the initial section about him with the statement “Billy closes his door and carries coal or wood to his fire and closes his eyes, and there’s simply no way of knowing how lonely and empty he is or whether he’s as vacant and barren and loveless as the rest of us are—here in the heart of the country” (180). We note that the narrator describes Billy’s actions inside of his house even though it is not possible for him to know what goes on after Billy shuts the door; thus, the narrator seems to be assuming Billy’s behavior based on his own, alone in his own house. This point brings up an important issue in the story: How does the narrator have access to all that he describes in B? H. L. Hix asserts, “He does not wander out into the world, so the reader gets not a picture of B, but a picture of the narrator’s confinement, the view from his cell” (49). Not literal cell of course: the cell of his isolation, his loneliness: the cell from which he projects everyone else’s isolation and loneliness.
Referring to the narrator’s view underscores what would become a major motif in Gass’s fiction: the window. There are numerous references to windows and what the narrator sees framed in them in “In the Heart.” He describes the windows of his house as “bewitching [. . . with] holy magical insides” (179). Through his window he views vivacious young women and fantasizes about them: “I dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river. I’d follow a vein with the point of my finger, hold your bare feet in my naked hands” (179), and “[Y]our buttocks are my pillow; we are adrift on a raft; your back is our river” (188). However, he knows he is well beyond the point when any such contact could reasonably take place. This realization makes especially poignant his later observation that rather than interacting with the world directly he has “had intercourse by eye” (202). That is, he has lived mainly through observation of his fellow human beings, not by talking to and connecting with them directly.
As I said, references to windows are everywhere in Gass’s oeuvre. The story “Icicles,” also collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, begins with the main character, Fender, sitting down to a lonely dinner eaten from a tray in his living room and looking through his picture window: “[H]is gaze pass[es] idly along the streets in the wheel ruts and leaping the disorderly heaps of snow. He was vaguely aware of the ice that had curtained a quarter of his window . . .” (121). Here the ice emphasizes the coldness of this sort of existence, an existence void of human warmth for Fender, even though his profession as a real estate agent requires him to interact with people all the time. Unlike the narrator of “In the Heart,” Fender does engage with people, but this engagement does not lessen his isolation; it only amplifies it. This is an important variation on the theme of isolation in Gass’s work. Often, Gass’s characters are not literally alone, but they feel isolated and lonely nevertheless. William Kohler in The Tunnel is married, but to a wife he hates and who has no interest in his life’s work as a historian. As the title suggests, Babs, the wife in the novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, is isolated, lonely and horny in spite of her marital status, or perhaps because of it. The ironically named, antisocial Mr. Gab of the novella “In Camera” spends his dreary days inside his shop that sells black-and-white photographic prints, with only his assistant Stu (short for “stupid”) for company. The boy-narrator, Jorge, in “The Pedersen Kid” is living among his family on a farm in North Dakota but is as desperately lonely as a boy can be thanks to his bellicosely alcoholic father, brutalized and traumatized mother, and live-in farmhand Hans, who may be molesting Jorge. The list goes on and on. (The Master is a real feel-good kind of author.)
All fictive writing is autobiographical to some degree, but Gass has never been one to make the veil especially opaque. The autobiographical elements flash neon in his work, and in his copious interviews he has been happy to connect the dots for readers and critics. In The Tunnel (his magnum opus) and Willie Masters’ he’s given the main characters his own name, or variations of it. The tunnel-digging William Kohler is a university professor, as was Gass, with a history and a list of interests quite similar to Gass’s. Eerily similar; disturbingly similar for some readers. Joseph Skizzen of the novel Middle C is an isolated music professor who specializes in Arnold Schoenberg, the composer whose twelve-tone system Gass used to structure The Tunnel. Like Jorge in “The Pedersen Kid,” Gass was born in North Dakota and grew up an only child in a family devastated by alcoholism and hatred. The list goes on and on.
Understanding the extremely close—at times, uncomfortably close—connection between Gass himself and his characters is especially important when viewed alongside his fascination with windows. Hix explains: “The window, which represents the ambiguity of our connection to the world, our looking out on a world from which the very looking out separates us, has appeared as a metaphor regularly in Gass’s […] fiction” (124). Windows, then, and their representation of separation through observation, seem to be a commentary on Gass’s own sense of isolation: that is, Gass the writer, Gass the intellectual, Gass the artist. It is the artist’s job—their curse perhaps—to observe the world around them, closely; to think about it, deeply; and share their interpretations with the world, honestly. It is a vital function, but one that requires and creates distance from one’s family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. In a 1984 interview, Gass identified himself as “a radical, but not one allied with any party. Parties force you to give up your intellect” (Saltzman 92). In other words, he was, in essence, a lone-wolf radical. To clarify, Gass has not seen himself as a writer with an overt political agenda, but rather one with a loftier, more ethereal, more profound goal: the alteration of his readers’ consciousness. [About the photo: William H. Gass painted by Philip Guston for his lecture at Yaddo, “Why Windows Are Important To Me,” 1969.]
In his landmark essay “The Artist and Society” (1968), Gass writes that the artist is “[naturally] the enemy of the state” and “[h]e is also the enemy of every ordinary revolution” (287). Moreover, he “cannot play politics, succumb to slogans and other simplifications, worship heroes, ally himself with any party, suck on some politician’s program like a sweet. […] He undermines everything.” Again, the artist/writer as lone-wolf radical. The payoff, though, can be sublimely effective. Gass writes, “The artist’s revolutionary activity is of a different kind. He is concerned with consciousness, and he makes his changes there. His inactions are only a blind, for his books and buildings go off under everything—not once but a thousand times. How often has Homer remade men’s minds?” (288). In other words, to be the sort of artist, the sort of writer, the sort of radical Gass admires most—the sort whose work will be worth reading a century from now, or a millennia—he must be solitary and isolated: the observer behind the window encased in ice.
If this paper were to be extended, I’d try to make the case that Gass’s philosophy may be traceable to one of his idols, the French writer Paul Valéry, of whom he said, “He dared to write on his subjects as if the world had been silent . . .” (Fiction and the Figures of Life, xi). Known mainly as a poet and essayist, Valéry also wrote the novella “The Evening with Monsieur Teste” (1896), whose title character is an isolated intellectual very much akin to many of Gass’s fictional creations, especially William Kohler and Joseph Skizzen. In the Preface to his novella, Valéry describes the philosophy which led to the creation of the character Monsieur Teste (or, in English, essentially “Mr. Head”), and I think at this point we can see that it could have been written by his devotee, William H. Gass. I shall let Valéry’s translated words be my final ones here:
I made it my rule secretly to consider as void or contemptible all opinions and habits of mind that arise from living together and from our external relations with other men, which vanish when we decide to be alone. And I could think only with disgust of all the ideas and all the feelings developed or aroused in man by his fears and his ills, his hopes and his terrors, and not freely by his direct observation of things and himself. . . . I had made for myself an inner island and spent my time reconnoitering and fortifying it. . . . (4-5)
Works Cited
Gass, William H. “The Artist and Society.” Fiction and the Figures of Life, Godine, 1979, pp. 276-88. [The complete draft, from William H. Gass’s papers, is available online via Washington University.]
—. “Icicles.” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories, Godine, 1981, pp. 120-162.
—. “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories, Godine, 1981, pp. 172-206.
—. Preface. Fiction and the Figures of Life, Godine, 1979, pp. xi-xiii.
Saltzman, Arthur M. “An Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 81-95.
Valéry, Paul. Monsieur Teste. Translated by Jackson Mathew, Princeton UP, 1989.
Interview with Jim O’Loughlin: Dean Dean Dean Dean
I met Jim O’Loughlin, in person, in September 2011. My first novel Men of Winter had come out at the end of 2010, and our mutual friend Jeremy Schraffenberger (also, a colleague of Jim’s at University of Northern Iowa) helped arrange an invitation for me to read from the novel at Jim O’Loughlin’s long-running Final Thursday Reading Series at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Jim was the consummate host, both from a literary standpoint and a personal standpoint.
Time passed (as it does), and in April 2015 I was delighted to do another reading for Jim and Final Thursday — this time a group reading of my story “The Drama of Consonants” (part of my forthcoming book Crowsong for the Stricken). It was great fun. Each paragraph in the story focuses on a specific character. I read the narrator part. Jim pitched in and read a part, as did Jeremy Schraffenberger, as did my wife Melissa, plus some conscripted graduate students, and even Jim’s mother, who was in town for a visit.
Afterward, a group of us went to Whiskey Road in downtown Cedar Falls for refreshments and to talk shop. One of the news items we discussed was the fact that Jim’s collection of flash fiction, Dean Dean Dean Dean, had been picked up by a small press and would be out in the next year or so. I didn’t know Jim had a collection; for a brief moment I entertained the idea of trying to poach Jim’s book away from the competitor press, but it was patently unethical. (I’m blaming my wobbly ethics on the refreshments.) That summer I invited Jim to read from his forthcoming book at an event I co-hosted in Springfield, Illinois. It was a terrific reading, and Jim even got his daughter and son in on the act. The next day my wife and I had the opportunity to do one of our favorite activities: play tour guides for the O’Loughlin family as we visited various Abraham Lincoln sites in Springfield.
Time continued to pass — and the press that intended to bring out Dean Dean Dean Dean collapsed (as small presses will). I never like to see such things happen, but it afforded Twelve Winters Press the opportunity to pick up the book in its stead. In summer 2016, Jim worked with TWP editor Pamm Collebrusco to finalize the collection for publication. In the fall I stepped back into the process to create the book, working closely with Jim, who also directs Final Thursday Press in conjunction with the Reading Series.
I’m pleased to announce the publication of Dean Dean Dean Dean, a collection of flash fiction by Jim O’Loughlin, available in print and digital editions (Kindle and Nook).
It’s become a tradition that when the Press releases a new title, I interview the author about the book and writing-related issues. The posted interviews attract a considerable amount of traffic on the Web. I sent Jim some questions, and here are his emailed responses.
What do you find attractive about the flash form?
Here’s the thing: you will often find people who reluctantly admit that flash fiction is okay, maybe, because young people have such short attention spans now. What people? The generation that grew up reading the Harry Potter series, even the will-break-your-toe-if-you-drop-it fifth book? Readers don’t have a problem with long works. The issue is that many readers now process information quickly and have less tolerance for windy prose. Flash fiction speaks to that audience, and it is not afraid to fight for them in the arena of contemporary media.
Have you also been working on longer creative work as well?
I write both flash and traditional length stories, and I have a novel I’m currently revising, so I feel all kinds of fiction have a place.
Tell us about the Final Thursday Reading Series. How it began, how it has evolved, how you’ve been able to maintain it for so long … that kind of thing.
I started FTRS not long after I moved to Iowa. There was a local used bookstore, Bought again Books, that had just started a coffeehouse in an attached space, and they were open to new programming ideas. The monthly series started there in a room that comfortably fit a dozen people and broke fire code at about 40, and we hit both extremes over the eight years we were there. When the owner, David Crownfield, developed health issues and had to close the bookstore, the series moved to the Hearst Center for the Arts, a community arts center located in the former house of poet James Hearst. In this new location and with the support of the Hearst Center, the series has grown in popularity, attracting anywhere from 40-70 people each month. It’s in its 16th season now, and it has become an important part of the local literary culture. First, there’s coffee. Then, there’s an open mic. After that, a regional author takes the stage. Sometimes we wind up at a bar afterward. Occasionally there’s bowling or billiards. No one has gotten hurt yet.
My sense is that many of the flash pieces, if not all, were written with the open mic part of the Reading Series in mind, with your wanting to have a short piece or two you could read as time allowed or necessitated before the featured author’s reading. Is that true?
I typically start off the open mic each month, and I try to come up with a new piece each time. When the series first started, the open mic attracted some really dour poets — don’t get me wrong: I love dour poetry! I just found it was good to give the audience permission to laugh at the beginning of the night. Over time, having a humorous opening story to lead with became a conscious goal. Also, having a deadline I have to hit each month keeps me honest. It’s been good training, and the vast majority of the stories in Dean Dean Dean Dean got their start as performance pieces.
Who are some of your favorite writers of humor or satire? Do you see your work in this collection as being in the tradition of a specific author or group of authors?
I regularly teach a class on Mark Twain, Dean Dean Dean Dean riffs on Joseph Heller’s character Major Major Major Major, and I’m currently working on a critical book on Kurt Vonnegut, so those are clear influences on me. But I’m also influenced by writers like Louise Erdrich, who is a master of the short scene, and Jennifer Egan, who can create complex characters concisely (I claim the alliteration for myself).
Was it Edmund Gwenn who said “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard”? Do you agree? Is humor writing especially challenging? Do you begin by trying to write a humorous piece, or does the humor work its way into the narrative organically?
Maybe Edmund Kean? Google is divided on the attribution. Humor writing, like cilantro, free jazz, and the films of Baz Luhrmann, is not for everyone. But it is something that you can get better at over time, particularly if you get to see how an audience reacts to your work.
In terms of organizing Dean Dean Dean Dean, what was your thought process in terms of which pieces should be included, which excluded, and how did you arrive at the final order?
My main goal was to have the stories in the collection not be predictable, so I tried a range of different approaches and styles. I hope that keeps readers on their toes and eager to see what’s next.
What are some other projects you’re working on?
I’m currently revising a science fiction novel called The Cord. The book is set in the future on either end of a space elevator connecting the Earth with an orbiting station. No punch line: That’s really what I’m doing. If you don’t believe me, ask me a question about apex anchors or carbon nanotubes.
Jim O’Loughlin is an associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, where he teaches courses in American literature, creative writing and digital humanities. He is the director of the long-running Final Thursday Reading Series and Final Thursday Press. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his wife and children. Dean Dean Dean Dean is his first collection. (Author photo by Carole Fishback)
Interview with Grant Tracey: Cheap Amusements
When I started Twelve Winters Press in 2012, I modeled it, spiritually at least, after the Hogarth Press, the legendary press operated by Leonard and Virginia Woolf (founded in 1917). Hogarth became known as a publisher of groundbreaking work, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1924), for example, and the Standard Edition of the translated works of Sigmund Freud, as well as Virginia Woolf’s own experimental modernist novels.What many people don’t know, however, is that the Woolfs also published detective fiction. (See Diane F. Gillespie’s essay on the subject.)
Hence I considered it not only serendipitous but a downright good omen when I discovered that Grant Tracey had written a detective novel. The Press brought out Grant’s story collection Final Stanzas in 2015, and in the biographical note he sent me he mentioned that he was writing a crime novel set in 1960s Toronto. Mindful of the Woolfs, I was intrigued, so I asked if I could read the manuscript. He promptly sent me Cheap Amusements, featuring Hayden Fuller, an ex-hockey player turned private eye. What a wild ride! I was determined that Twelve Winters would bring out this hardboiled detective novel that manages to pay homage to the classics of the genre while also bringing something fresh and very contemporary to the form.
The book was released in hardcover as well as Kindle and Nook editions on August 11. I sent Grant some interview questions, and here are his unedited responses. Grant’s lively and insightful remarks are almost as much fun to read as the novel itself. Enjoy!
You’ve had a long love affair with detective stories. Who are some of your favorite writers, and when did you first discover you had a taste for the hardboiled?
My favorite hardboiled writer is Raymond Chandler. I first discovered him in high school. I started with Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest), but when I read Chandler I knew something special was happening with the language, a guarded romanticism tinged with sadness. His prose was poignant; his hero, Philip Marlowe, had heart, nobility, and dignity. I liked him. I wanted to be like him. He wasn’t an anti-hero. He was a decent person. And those similes: “He had a face that looked like a dried lung.” Love it. Needless to say my early forays into the hardboiled were somewhat derivative. I think I even wrote a ridiculous overripe description that went something like: “He had a past pluperfect face.” Whatever that means. The PI stories I wrote at seventeen, eighteen and nineteen were all set in Cleveland, of all places. What did I know about Cleveland? And my PI was housed at the Rosevelt Hotel. Yes, spelled with one “o”. I didn’t know anything about American history either, apparently. But those stories were a start and I had to begin somewhere.
Can you point to any particular authors whose influence you can see in your own writing? Have you consciously adopted any technique from a beloved author or book?
Definitely Chandler in terms of plotting, and my own sense of hopeful optimism. Richard Stark in terms of lean prose and toughness. Donald Westlake for comedy and a lighter tone. Mickey Spillane for pure emotional violence. I love the energy of Spillane. In terms of appearance I see Hayden, in his 1950s crewcut, looking a bit like a Jewish Mickey Spillane. In terms of literary writers, who isn’t influenced by Hemingway? His style lends itself to the hardboiled. But two bigger influences on my voice are Steven Schwartz, especially his emphasis on interiority, narrative telling, and the inner story, and Bernard Malamud, my all-time favorite writer, with his emphasis on suffering, mourning, and the struggle to do the right thing. Like Malamud’s family, my mom’s family ran a corner Variety store and lived above it. At the risk of sounding preachy, I think of myself as a moral writer. Schwartz is a moral writer. So’s Malamud. I was born in 1960 and grew up on American television: The Defenders, Naked City, Combat, Star Trek, and The Loner. These stories presented weekly morality plays, and what I gleaned from their writers is an underlying feeling of optimism. If you treat people with respect and dignity and equality, then those people in turn will accord the same respect to others and have a stake in and contribute to society. I still have that feeling of hopeful optimism about what this country is and where it can go. I’m not big on dystopic narratives, even though most detective stories, in the American tradition are pyrrhic, the detective dies a little under the weight of the case and violent crimes he’s enmeshed in. Hayden Fuller is a fallen figure, but he empathizes with others, has a big heart, and tries to do right. He doesn’t always succeed, but who does?
Anyway, three other influences. Film Noir. I love the look and feel of the 1940s and 1950s and my PI’s name crosses tough guy actor Sterling Hayden with ultra-cool director Samuel Fuller. A lot of my painterly images are inspired by jazz album covers, the fashion of TV shows like The Green Hornet and Honey West, and the look and vibe of such masters of painting with light as directors of photography John Alton (check out The Big Combo) and Joe MacDonald (Fuller’s Pickup on South Street is essential viewing). The whole idea of the “third face” in Cheap Amusements came from Samuel Fuller, a former corporal in The Big Red One. Jazz. The novel was composed listening exclusively to hard-bop jazz of the 50s and 60s: Hank Mobley, Sonny Clark, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the greatest drummer of them all, Art Blakey. I love that music. It resonates urban angst and urgency and when I feel jazz I see images. I don’t think about words, lyrics, or the words I’m trying to write. Instead, the sounds give me an improvisational feel and I trust my instincts. I don’t worry about plot or my plot outline; I just follow the flow and go wherever the character and the mood dictates. Like jazz musicians leaving the core of the chart for tangential free floats, I float and float in random images, and then return. Hockey. I’m a Canadian, a Toronto city kid, and hockey’s in my blood. It was the way my immigrant grandparents became Canadian and they and my parents, in turn, passed down a love of the game to me. I’m also an avid historian of the Original Six: the NHL from 1942–1967, so all of the hockey details come from imagined probabilities and stories that have been passed on from my father and mother. Recently, T. T. Monday has published two noir mysteries involving a relief pitcher, and I figured let’s have a PI who’s an ex-NHL’er. Ross Macdonald was one of the first hardboiled writers to have his hero (Lew Archer) feel fallen for being a “divorce” detective and slinking about in the dirty skinny of “cheaters.” So I gave Hayden a similar backstory, one that got him ousted from the good old, secret-handshake society of the Original Six NHL.
Obviously the mystery or detective story has a long history–many attribute the modern detective story to Edgar Allan Poe in the mid nineteenth century–so how have you tried to put your own spin on the genre in Cheap Amusements?
I guess my spin is to combine the old with the new. I want to return to those writers I love: Chandler, Spillane, Stark, Jim Thompson, but with a literary emphasis. Literary writing is all about character-to-character interaction. What do these counter points, opposites, draw out from each other? It’s not about following a plot. Detectives follow the plot string, yes, but to get the answers they need they read people and this is what most literary writers do (character over plot). Moreover, I wanted to have heightened lyrical moments, to allow the language of the story to take me places. There are a couple of such moments in Cheap Amusements. In one, Hayden slips into “pockets of silence,” zones of stillness, where he’s transported into being a kid at a fair; in another moment he slips into the transcendent contemplations that ice skating can bring.
I also, again at the risk of sounding preachy, want to distance myself from the somewhat sordid tradition of salacious sex and sexism that abounds in the hardboiled tradition. I travel in those areas (the femme fatale, pornography, sexual exploitation), but I try to place the emphasis on bad male behavior, men exploiting women, as opposed to Eve-like women asking us to join her in eating the apple. I try not to be too titillating about the sex. I try to right some of the past wrongs of the hardboiled tradition, but like Hayden I don’t always succeed.
We are billing Cheap Amusements as a literary detective novel. In your mind, what does that adjective mean in this case (ha), and how does it make your book different from, say, a more run-of-the-mill detective story?
Detective stories are often restricted to first-person or limited third point-of-views and I have both. I begin the novel with a brief, surreal limited third point of view because I wanted the past event that haunts Hayden to almost feel unreal, as if it’s not being remembered correctly. But the rest first-person, pretty traditional. However, as I said earlier, the emphasis on detective fiction needs to be on character and character-to-character interactions, what the detective observes and surmises. That’s literary. Moreover. Language. I hate invisible flat prose, the kind that abounds in bad genre writing. I want to engage readers with my language, characterizations, and plotting. I want to keep giving them the unexpected within the expected, the defamiliar within the familiar. I want the plot to take them on a journey where the answer to the central question makes sense but still surprises in some way. There’s also a lot of comedy in Cheap Amusements from the dialogue zingers to some of the situations. At least I kept cracking myself up while writing it. And I see that as investing in the absurdist, literary tradition.
Some early readers of the book have noted the main character’s similarities to you. How much of Hayden Fuller is you? How is he different from his creator?
Hayden is a 1950s cat in a 1960s world and I feel the same way. I’m a retro guy in the new millennium. My glasses, a kind of mask, are Malcolm X or Vince Lombardi inspired. I wear white socks. With everything! I just finally got a smart phone! Hayden sports a porkpie because I like them and I wear them too. Like me, he cares deeply about people, has a passion for hockey, is sexually shy, and is somewhat of a wise-ass (very confident in his comic touches that he likes to drop in any moment). He’s not me in the sense that he’s tough. I run, I mean a ten-second 100 meter dash, from conflict. And Hayden can skate! I was hopeless on skates, my weak ankles always nicking up the ice’s surface. I played two years of house league, was a defenseman, and my coach always had me playing one zone back. So let’s say the puck is in the other team’s end. My D-partner was parked at their blue line and I was parked at the checkered center line! However, I was a great road hockey player or ball hockey as we later called it. Played forward and goalie. But me and Hayden, we both believe in the goodness of people. We both aspire to be professionals and do our jobs the best we can. We want other people to succeed.
You’ve published more than fifty short stories and four collections. When did you decide to try your hand at a detective novel? Did the character of Hayden Fuller come to you fairly early in the creative process, or did it take awhile to develop him?
As I said previously, crime novels were my first love. When I sent my sister the Twelve Winters trailer for Cheap Amusements she said, “Broheem, this is what you’ve always wanted. I remember all those detective stories you wrote in high school and college. Film Noir, hot cars, and PIs.”
After getting my MA from K-State in English with a creative writing emphasis, I became totally committed to literary fiction, for years, publishing stories in small magazines, but I was always reading crime books. Noir, or mystery tropes figure in some of my literary stories: “Faraway Girl” and “Used and Abused” from Final Stanzas are indebted to those sensibilities. Anyway, a few years back I got hooked on the Hard Case Crime series edited by Charles Ardai and I enjoyed his mixing up of reprints with new arrivals, his retro blend of the old and new, and I thought what the fuck, I can do this, there’s a market for non-CSI crime stories. And between October–November 0f 2014, in 40 days, listening to jazz, I wrote the first draft of Cheap Amusements.
Hayden Fuller emerged very quickly. I didn’t have to think about him at all or create him. He was just there. It was so strange. The porkpie, the attitude, the passion for hockey. I could totally see him and be him. It was a perfect fit. And the voice was there. Right from day one. It was magical. Only about a quarter of all the stories I’ve written did plotting or characterization flow as easily. Usually, I have to do substantial rewrites or tweaks. With Cheap Amusements and Hayden it was a smooth ride, like I was behind the wheel of a ’63 Ford Galaxie. It was as if all the other detective stories I’d written as a kid were a warm-up for the novel I was always meant to write.
You’ve created some strong and independent female characters, which tends to run contrary to the classic detective noir. I know this was a conscious choice on your part. Why so?
Like I said before, I want to be a part of and apart from the earlier hardboiled tradition of salacious sex and sexist portrayals of women. I have three daughters. I believe in Title IX and the rights of women. Future Hayden Fuller stories will feature even stronger female characters.
Your daughter Effy is one of your closest readers, and biggest fans. How important to your process is her reading your work? Does anyone else influence your work in progress?
Effy’s writing is very bright. By that I mean her stories, characters, burn with passionate energy. They speak boldly, take risks, allow themselves to be vulnerable. They are always interesting. Her YA novels are amazing because Effy is totally committed to her story world and her characters. She cares so deeply about all of them. And I want to make sure that I’m equally committed, equally vulnerable, so I seek her guidance in making sure I’m being honest and fair. There’s a scene in the novel where Hayden cries. Is that part of the hardboiled tradition? I don’t care. It felt right and the honesty in Effy’s work encouraged me to pursue the same honesty in my own. She loved that moment, by the way. Effy also raises great plot questions and doesn’t let me skate by with nonsense. Hopefully she’ll soon find an agent for her work. It needs to be out there in the world. It’s that good. And if any agents are reading this, her name’s Effy Traicheff and she’s the real deal.
Mitchell D. Strauss, my all-around best buddy, is an avid crime noir reader (big fan of Harry Bosch) and after reading my first draft he told me I needed to toughen Hayden up a little bit. Take a little of the Grant Tracey out of Hayden Fuller. He also helped me create greater urgency in the overall narrative arc and pushed me to come up with a “splash” opening to draw readers in. Caitlin, my oldest daughter, reads all the time (fifty books this summer), and she loves all kinds of crime stories from Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels to Cheap Amusements. She helped with rewrites and replotting and honing in on Hayden’s sensibilities.
You’re frequently drawn to historical periods in your fiction, and Cheap Amusements is set in 1965. What’s the attraction of historical settings, and why the Sixties for this book?
I love the Sixties. So much optimism and a time of societal change: the Civil Rights Act, and the overall questioning of authority and patriarchal privilege. The era brought about the fight for gay rights, women rights, and war protest movements. I also just love the fashions, the look, the music (Dylan, Cash, the Stones), the TV shows.
Hockey is obviously a great love of yours. How does your passion for the game fuel your fiction?
In some ways the scaffolding for Cheap Amusements places elements of hockey into Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. My Marlowe is an ex-NHL’er. The Sterwnood sisters are the Stabulas girls, hockey fans, and Eddie Mars, the gambler, is now Babe Migano, a crime kingpin with links, gambling and otherwise, to Maple Leaf Gardens. My story takes us into a demimonde of gangsters and sports, centering around Canada’s obsessions with hockey, and how such obsessions encourage reporters to look the other way, rather than at the institution’s flaws. Some hockey players did beat up their wives in the 1960s and the media didn’t address it.
I also loved writing all the hockey stuff, the inside info about the game’s history and sensibilities, and the novel does end with a hockey metaphor.
I know you’re thinking of the next Hayden Fuller mystery. Any hints about what that story may be about?
I’ve already started working on a sequel, “A Fourth Face.” Bobby Ehle, ex Leaf rear-guard, is accused of killing his ex-wife (she was stalked by him and beaten badly, but did he kill her?). He asks Hayden to find the real killer while Bobby contemplates fleeing to Cuba. Hayden’s journey leads him to a confrontation with Lennie Cassel, a Detroit mobster, Cliff Airedale, a plastic surgeon, and a host of other mobsters and corrupt businessmen and hockey scouts. Cheap Amusements supporting characters Babe Migano, Dawn Stoukas, and Sal Lambertino make their presence felt in this new two-fisted tale.
Readers have described the cinematic quality of your writing. How does your love of film and your passion for teaching film affect your narrative style? Who are some directors and/or screenwriters that you think have influenced your storytelling techniques?
In terms of straight-ahead literary writing, John Cassavetes and many of his films: Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), and Husbands (1970) is a prime influence on my work. I like his emphasis on characterization and the shifting tonalities that occur in his scene work as conversations move from one mood to another, directing the story. He always places characters first. And in my own writing I want the dialogue to move like a Cassavetes film. In terms of Cheap Amusements, my influences are painterly: hard-bop jazz records, 1960s muscle cars, and noir visuals, the Nighthawks-like nightscapes of Alton and Macdonald and the irrational chaos of Samuel Fuller, and how you can’t trust what you see. The world is a swirl of confusion. I want my visuals to create a mood of urgency and, at times, alienation. In terms of my liberal leanings and sense of hope I’ve got to go with the TV writers: Paddy Chayefsky, Gene Roddenberry, Reginald Rose, and Rod Serling.
Grant Tracey, thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has published more than fifty short stories and four collections of his fiction, including Final Stanzas (released by Twelve Winters Press is 2015). He teaches courses in creative writing and film at the University of Northern Iowa, where he also serves as fiction editor of the prestigious North American Review. In addition to his writing, teaching and editing, Grant has performed in over twenty community theater productions. Visit Grant’s Amazon page. (Author photo by Mitchell D. Strauss.)
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