Writer, Critic, Poet, Educator, Artist — Reflecting on the William H. Gass Centenary
I was invited to deliver this paper at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, Feb. 2025, but unfortunately a bout of influenza prevented my attending. I had written the paper ahead of time, so I post it here, as an undelivered address. I did not finely tune as I normally would (given my weakened condition).
This past year, 2024, marked the centenary of William H. Gass (1924-2017), who is perhaps best known as the author of the postmodern mega-novel The Tunnel, both revered and reviled by reviewers when it landed in 1995. Via conferences here in Louisville and the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, a day-long program at Washington University in St. Louis, and the forthcoming collection William H. Gass at 100: Essays, the many aspects of Gass’s literary contributions to both American and international letters were emphasized and examined. This paper will survey some of the most vital takeaways regarding Gass’s work, especially in areas not typically addressed, like Gass the poet, Gass the teacher, Gass the mentor, and Gass the photographer. The centenary made clear that William Gass has admirers around the world, and this paper offers a plethora of little-explored avenues for continued Gass scholarship. What is more, translations of various Gass texts are underway, and this paper will speak to some of that work as well (especially the project of translating Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas into the Greek language, detailing some of the specific issues raised by the translator).
Before talking about 2024 and beyond, I would like to go backward … to 2020, which marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Tunnel. That year was the abyss of the Covid pandemic, and nearly everyone was hunkered down in their homes. It occurred to me that the 25th anniversary should be noted, and it could be done online as well as during an in-person event; thus, I conceived of thetunnelat25.com, a website that would publish various contributions by Gass scholars, aficionados and fans regarding the 650-page, postmodern behemoth. Working with Mary Henderson Gass and Catherine Gass (the author’s widow and daughter), I assembled a list of “Gass people” and reached out via email. Responses were enthusiastic, although not everyone felt that they could contribute. Nevertheless, the project took shape. I was actually supposed to deliver a paper on The Tunnel at 25 project at this conference in 2022, but a conflict prevented my attendance. Let me take you on a quick tour of thetunnelat25.com, and highlight some material that is appropriate to our topic today. (You’ll have to tour on your own.)
One of the pieces I contributed to the project was “Stripping the Master of Kohler’s Rags,” and here is an excerpt:
[Begin excerpt]
“People, in my view, are many people. It’s not that we fall apart all the time into separate personalities, but under certain circumstances we display different values and feelings and modes of thinking” (Ziegler, “WHG in Germany” 115). Thus said William H. Gass when asked about the department colleagues of William Kohler, the narrator of The Tunnel. That is, Kohler’s fellow historians (Culp, Governali, Herschel and Planmantee) “each represents a theory of history, and each gets his own little story.” Like so much else in The Tunnel, it is not clear whether Kohler is describing actual colleagues, or, rather, projections of his own multifaceted personality. “I wanted to leave the ontological status of these characters in doubt,” said Gass. “Either these are real people in his world […] or they are simply aspects of his own personality mildly at war with one another” (115).
Given that one of the consistent complaints about The Tunnel when it appeared in 1995 was that its protagonist, Kohler, seemed uncomfortably similar to the author himself, the idea of multidimensional personalities is well worth exploring in a symposium that hopes to re-introduce the reading public to Gass’s magnum opus. There was the name, of course: the given name of William paired with a family name of German ancestry. There was the occupation: a professor at a Midwestern university, one quite like Purdue, where Gass was teaching when he began writing the novel. There was the affinity for many of the same writers: most notably the German poet Marie Rainer Rilke, perhaps Gass’s greatest influence. Over time, another similarity became the length of time Kohler took to write his magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany: thirty years, four more than the number Gass required to complete a book he imagined finishing in just a fraction of that time. These are only some of the correspondences between the author and his narrative creation, William Frederick Kohler.
The similarities became troubling for readers and reviewers because Kohler is, well, not nice. In fact, he’s something of a monster. He is mean-spirited toward essentially everyone who has the misfortune of inhabiting his sphere, and he’s downright hateful to his wife, Martha, whom he thinks of as a “guard” that is confining him within the prison of his unhappiness. She has become essentially a non-person to him: “Martha’s face fades as her torso solidifies, her Aryan blood surfacing like lard. I work on her features, but I’ve forgotten what they are[.…] Without a mouth she’ll still talk back, from her crack like as not” (150-51). Worst of all, Kohler’s scholarly work on the Nazis appears more sympathetic toward them than many would like, including the administrators at his university (“those shit-resembling administrators,” he calls them) who overlook him for promotion because they consider him a “Nazi-nuzzler” (133). If Kohler seems to have a soft spot for Nazis and refers flippantly to the Holocaust, he must therefore be anti-Semitic; and if Kohler is an avatar for Gass himself, then the author, too, must be … so went the logic.
Gass anticipated readers who didn’t know how to read well would conflate the persona of the protagonist with the person of the author: “The resemblances between myself and my narrator are wholly trivial, I think, but I did emphasize them in order to test the reader’s sophistication (a test many reviewers failed). […] Unfriendly reviewers delight in the opportunity to clothe me in Kohler’s rags.” Against such charges, Gass pushed back, saying, “[T]he record will show, I believe, that I do not belong in Kohler’s camp” (Ziegler, “WHG in Germany” 116). (You will find the Works Cited at project site.)
The distinction between the author and his creation is a vital one to make as we attempt to read The Tunnel afresh in 2020, on its twenty-fifth anniversary.
[End excerpt]
As you will see in today’s talk, The Tunnel remains a special focus of Gass scholarship and appreciation. In light of that I will also call your attention to another of my contributions to the website: “The Tunnel: A Chronology & Bibliography,” (link) which documents Gass’s progress from its conception in 1966 to its publication in 1995 and beyond. The novel has a complicated publishing history, and my hope is that I will save scholars time and trouble tracking when attempting to piece together and track down the scattered excerpts of The Tunnel. As a writer myself, I always found it interesting that Gass seemed to have concept of how long the writing of the novel would take; so I’ve included quotes from Gass over time as he continued to reassess where he was in the process. Even from the start, completion of the novel always seemed to him a few years away. A complimentary piece at the website is Joel Minor’s “The Tunnel: A Survey of Published Excerpts,” [link] which takes a more scholarly, strictly bibliographic approach to the same sort of information I provide in my “Chronology & Bibliography.”
Let me return to 2024 … or rather December 2023, which is when I posted my first “William H. Gass at 100: A Reading Journal,” [link] in which I describe how I first encountered Gass via his novella (or long story) “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” I begin by saying, “As a Gass scholar and devotee (disciple isn’t too strong of a word), I have various projects in the works to mark the Master’s 100th year — all part of my ‘preaching the Gass-pel,’ an evangelism I embarked on more than a decade ago. No doubt I will use this forum to talk about some of those Gass Centenary projects, which tend to be formal and scholarly. It occurred to me that I also wanted to do something less formal, and more personal. It is not an overstatement to say that William H. Gass changed my life. His writing, his theories, his example as torchbearer in the cause of literature: everything has impacted me in ways that I can name and, doubtless, in ways that I cannot.”
My intention was to post a new reading journal, including a new video, periodically throughout 2024. It didn’t quite workout that way (as I feared). I included my various contributions to the Gass Centenary as journal entries, although that isn’t what I had in mind back in December 2023. One such contribution was my paper delivered here a year ago: “William H. Gass at 100: Looking Forward, Looking Backward” [link], which focuses mainly on the backward part as I provide a biography of Gass and his most notable works for the majority of the paper. Sadly, I’ve discovered that Gass is not especially well known, even in literary circles, so describing his career and achievements is necessary.
After the Louisville Conference paper, the next significant event was a panel at the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago in May 2024. In the panel, Joel Minor presented his Tunnel bibliography from thetunnelat25.com project; Ali Chetwynd (American University of Iraq, Sulaimani) presented “Literary Theory Teaching: Founded on William Gass”; and I presented “Let Us Now Praise William Gass’s Greatest Work – And It’s Not the One You Think” [link]. While I am, of course, a fan of The Tunnel, and I’ve presented several papers and published a few on Gass’s magnum opus, I don’t believe it was the most masterful of the master’s work. Rather, artistically, I feel that Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas represents the pinnacle of his literary achievements. I’ll share the final paragraphs of that paper:
[Begin excerpt]
Though my catalog is incomplete, I’ll end where I began, with The (large, loose, baggie) Tunnel. Gass’s ambitions for the novel were epic, and it took him far longer—far longer—to write than he anticipated. He imagined, maybe, three years or so … let’s say, then, a publication date around 1970. But time marched on and the Master aged along with his aim for the book. He had about 600 manuscript pages in hand when, in 1991 (age 67), he went for an extended stay at The Getty Center in Santa Monica to devote himself fully to finishing the legendary book. Working into 1992, he doubled the size of the novel, completing it at about 1,200 manuscript pages. Begun in the sunny summer of literary postmodernism, the first half of the book displays many of the tropes and tricks that interested Gass in the 1960s and 70s—it resembles in many ways Gass’s wildly experimental novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968)—an experiment that Gass himself deemed a failure in retrospect.5 Though The Tunnel doesn’t quite conform to the chronology of its composition, the latter half doesn’t display the same fondness for postmodern play as the beginning sections do. Released at last in 1995, it was as if the postmodern novel had arrived at the party after practically all the guests had collected their coats and gone home to sleep it off.
Perhaps Gass wittily but unwittingly anticipated the fate of The Tunnel when he wrote the preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (revised 1981):
“I write down these dates, now, and gaze across these temporal gaps with a kind of dumb wonder … hodge against podge, like those cathedrals which have Baroque porches, Gothic naves, and Romanesque crypts; time passed, then passed again, bishops and princes lost interest; funds ran out; men died; … and because they were put in service while they were still being built, the pavement was gone, the pillars in a state of lurch, by the time the dome was ready for its gilt or the tower for its tolling bell …” (xxxii).
We still ought to attend service in William Gass’s great cathedral, but our warmest words of worship should be reserved for Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas.
[End excerpt]
Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, though he moved from there to Warren, Ohio, when still a baby. Nevertheless connections to North Dakota remained, and I attempted to organize some sort of event or conference in Fargo or nearby in the summer of 2024, ideally around Gass’s birthday, July 30. Unfortunately no one locally seemed to have the time or money or interest. Perhaps one day I’ll resume my efforts. Therefore, the next significant event was at Washington University in St. Louis October 3, “William H. Gass Centenary Celebration” [link]. The main event was a panel discussion that I had the honor of moderating. It included Patrick Davis (Unbound Press), Michelle Komie (Princeton University Press), and Gerhild Williams (Washington University German Department, retired). Much of the informal discussion focused on Gass’s founding and directing of the International Writers Center (1990-2000).
One of the more intriguing revelations from the panel discussion was that Patrick Davis, of Unbound Press, plans to republish The Tunnel in the form that Gass always had in mind: a loose collection of about 1,200 manuscript pages, and stuffed with things like paper bags, business cards, and crossword puzzles. Its publication may coincide with the novel’s 35th anniversary. I hope that it comes to pass.
Interest in Gass’s work persists, if not as robustly as enthusiasts like me would prefer. Last year I was contacted by Apostolis Pritsas, who was translating Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas into Greek, and he requested my informal consultation. I was happy to do it, and we exchanged a few emails over the summer and fall. The two novellas that generated the most questions were “Cartesian Sonata” and “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s”—both highly experimental works in terms of structure and narrative chronology. The Greek edition is slated for an early March release. Meanwhile, a Spanish-language edition of Cartesian Sonata appeared [link], which changes the order of the novellas, totally undercutting Gass’s concept of the collection.
Finally, I plan to edit, contribute to, and publish William H. Gass at 100: Essays later this year. Contributions include the following: “‘Inward Toward the Other’: The Dancing Minds of William H. Gass and Toni Morrison” by Jose Miguel Alvarado Mendoza; “In Search of William Gass” by Zachary Fine; “William Gass and the Power of Baroque Fictionality” by Yonina Hoffman; “The Meta-Novel as a Container of Self-Consciousness: Linguistic Order and Fascism of the Heart in William H. Gass’s The Tunnel” by Abbie Saunders; “Broken Windows and Dirty Mirrors: Metaphor and Mind in The Tunnel” by Jonathan Moreland; “Defying Form” by Nathan King; “To Create or Capture Consciousness: Reconsidering William H. Gass as ‘The Father of Metafiction’” by Alex Lanz; and “Medium-Specific Foundations: Teaching Literary Theory Across the Gass-Axis” by Ali Chetwynd.
I will draw from several of my Gass conference papers to put together a constellation of pieces, and I also will include a selection of Gass’s photographs. He was a serious photographer, but that aspect of his artistic life has received little attention.
William H. Gass at 100: Looking backward, Looking forward
This paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, held Feb. 22-24, 2024, at the University of Louisville. Another paper in the “Novel Focus” panel were “Emma Donoghue’s Hunger Aesthetic” by Carey Mickalites (University of Memphis). The panel was chaired by Marie Pruitt (University of Louisville).
• • •
Where to begin?
I suppose with this quote: “William H. Gass is not an easy man to grasp; and, like the man, his work is beautiful, formidable, and troubling all at once,” wrote Theodore G. Ammon in the introduction to Conversations with William H. Gass (2003). There is no shortage of opinions of and therefore quotes pertaining to him and his work, which, thankfully, is copious: fiction ranging from brief sketches to the epic novel The Tunnel; nonfiction in the form of essays, criticism, lectures, and reviews, much of which collected in ten volumes over more than forty years; plus translations, interviews, and the thousands of pages of letters, early drafts, publication proofs, teaching notes, and even his doctoral dissertation (archived at Washington University in St. Louis, where he spent the last 32 years of his professional life).
I like this quote from Ammon, though, to begin this paper because it’s in conjunction with the William H. Gass centenary. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924, Gass was a prolific author (despite the difficulty he always claimed to have in composing, and the slow pace by which much of his work—especially his fiction—emerged), toiling away with words almost until his death in 2017 at the age of 93. It seems to me that one of the goals of this year, 2024, and perhaps its chief goal, is to try to capture and honor the essence of Gass’s contributions to not just American literature but also to literature beyond the borders of the United States (Gass dedicated the last decade of his time at Washington University to founding and directing the International Writers Center). I’ll ape Ammon’s quote by saying that this Gass-focused goal is not an easy one to achieve.
I mean the title of this paper to be quite literal. I will devote a good deal of it to looking backward by outlining (if only superficially) Gass’s many interests and accomplishments over the decades; and I will end by looking forward, both in the short term (what else is happening this year as part of the Gass centenary) and the long term (where might scholarly energies be devoted over time). I apologize to anyone who is already quite familiar with Gass: the first part of this presentation may seem basic and unnecessary. However, I’m always a little ashamed to acknowledge that I was in my mid-forties when I first read Gass’s work, and I was not alone in my ignorance. For the past fifteen years I’ve devoted myself to what one of my students dubbed “preaching the Gass-pel,” and I have encountered many well-read scholars and devoted readers who have never heard of Gass, or who only have a passing familiarity with him and his work.
Looking backward.
Gass was always doing everything all at once. That is to say, he didn’t devote himself to a kind of writing for a certain period of his life; then to another kind for a time; then another and so on. Like so many of the writers that Gass admired—Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges—his interests were wide-ranging, and he was forever juggling multiple projects. For convenience, I’ll give an overview organized by kind of writing. His varying interests are illustrated by the journal that was the first to publish his fiction. Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature (published by University of Illinois, Urbana), included the short story “Mrs. Mean” and the opening section of what would become his debut novel, “The Triumph of Israbestis Tott.” In the same issue, Accent also brought out “The High Brutality of Good Intentions,” an essay on Henry James.
“Mrs. Mean” (Accent, winter 1958, later collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country) was reprinted in Best American Short Stories (1959), which may have begun the process of having Gass’s fiction read by a broader national audience. The 1961 edition of Best American Short Stories included Gass’s “The Love and Death of Henry Pimber” (Accent, spring 1960); and the 1962 edition included “The Pedersen Kid” (MSS [Mt. Shasta Selections], no. 1, 1961). Throughout this period, Gass was regularly publishing short fiction, scholarly essays, and book reviews in academic journals. However, it was the publication of his debut novel, Omensetter’s Luck, in 1966 (New American Library) that really put his name on the national literary map. The novel won high praise from a host of reviewers. The fact that it was published by New American Library was significant because it brought Gass to the attention of Theodore Solotaroff, editor of New American Review literary journal, which was published by New American Library and was launched in 1967. Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” was in the inaugural issue—the first of four appearances in the journal.
As you may know, New American Review was published as a mass market paperback, and distributed nationally via bookstores and newsstands, but also drug stores, supermarkets, and other places where literary journals were not commonly available. In the beginning (when Gass’s work was included), 100,000 copies of each issue were printed, and there were three issues annually. Gass’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, was appearing alongside writers and poets like Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, Russell Banks, Jorge Luis Borges, Marvin Bell and Louise Gluck.
Other important book publications were soon to follow: in 1968, both the wildly experimental novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (originally TriQuarterly in a limited edition, then reprinted by Knopf, 1971), and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (Harper & Row). Gass’s first collection of nonfiction was released in 1970 by Knopf, Fiction and the Figures of Life.
It was also during the late 1960s that Gass began writing The Tunnel. In fact, it first began to appear in print in New American Review, with “We Have Not Lived the Right Life” (no. 6, 1969). The novel would not be published until 1995, and over the more than quarter century that Gass worked on it, excerpts would appear in a host of noteworthy journals and magazines, including The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Salmagundi, and Esquire. Meanwhile, the excerpts were reprinted numerous times as part of “best of” anthologies and as Pushcart and Best American Short Stories prizewinners. Nevertheless, Gass said in 1971, half jokingly and half seriously, that he hoped The Tunnel “will be such a good book no one will want to publish it” (McCauley 12); and his wish nearly came true. The book had been under contract to Boston-based Ticknor and Fields, but once the manuscript was finally complete in 1992, they withdrew the contract. Dalkey Archive Press entertained the idea of publishing what Steven Moore described as a “huge manuscript, along with a lengthy set of design and typesetting instructions.” Ultimately Knopf brought out the first edition in 1995, only to let it go out of print shortly thereafter. Dalkey stepped in to publish a paperback edition in 1999.
The Tunnel won the American Book Award in 1996, and it had its fervent admirers, but it also generated many reviews that ranged from tepid to hostile. The Tunnel turned 25 in 2020, during the pandemic, so I initiated an online symposium, available at thetunnelat25.com. I encourage you to check out all of the site’s contributions, but since I’m focused at the moment on the novel’s publishing history I’ll highlight two pieces in particular: “The Tunnel: A Survey of Published Excerpts” by Joel Minor; and my own “The Tunnel: A Chronology & Bibliography.” The two papers have similar aims, yet contain different information. Joel’s important contribution focuses in great detail on the publishing history of the various excerpts, and cross-references them with material that is available at Washington University in the William H. Gass papers (of which Joel is the curator). My paper, on the other hand, is more interested in Gass’s writing process, and tracks the composition of the novel alongside Gass’s biography. For example, I’ve integrated some of Gass’s comments about the novel year by year, drawing from the many interviews he granted.
While Gass was writing The Tunnel, he was also working on a series of novellas that was ultimately published as Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (Knopf, 1998), but the title novella began to appear in 1964, as “The Clairvoyant” in Location, volume 1, number 2. During the same period that parts of The Tunnel were appearing in journals, being reprinted and winning prizes, bits and pieces of Cartesian Sonata were taking similar paths, coming out in places like Art and Literature, The Partisan Review, and the Iowa Review, being anthologized here and there, and winning a Pushcart Prize in 1976. As a side note, I feel like the Cartesian Sonata collection is Gass’s most masterful masterpiece (even though The Tunnel tends to overshadow the rest of Gass’s fiction in terms of scholars’ attention and cultural memory), and I’ll make my case when I deliver a paper at the American Literature Association Conference in May.
In the interest of time, I’ll summarize the remainder of Gass’s output of fiction: the novel Middle C (Knopf, 2013) and Eyes, a collection of novellas and stories (Knopf, 2015). Much of these final two works appeared in Conjunctions, which became an important outlet for Gass’s writing, both fiction and nonfiction, starting in the early 1980s and lasting until his death in 2017. He eventually became a contributing editor of the journal and was a central figure in several Conjunctions projects.
Fiction, of course, is only part of Gass’s legacy. For the remainder of my time I’ll discuss the “looking forward” aspect of my title—and in so doing also provide a sense of other facets of William Gass’s voluminous output and his far-reaching influence on the literary community, including the global literary community.
While Gass was writing stories, novellas and novels, he was also prolifically producing nonfiction in the form of essays, reviews, book introductions, and lectures. He published seven works of fiction, and he published ten works of nonfiction (if one counts the collection of interviews edited by Theodore Ammon in 2003). Moreover, he served as co-editor of three collections of nonfiction, including The Writer and Politics (1996) and The Writer and Religion (2000). Broadly speaking, Gass’s nonfiction has not received nearly as much critical attention as his fiction, even though his work was highly influential, including among his peers. We know, for instance, that Fiction and the Figures of Life—which includes several “craft” essays—was acquired by Cormac McCarthy while he was at work on Child of God, published in 1973, three years after the release of Gass’s essay collection (King 31).
In addition to the eight collections of nonfiction (here not counting the book-length essay On Being Blue), Gass’s vita lists about 100 uncollected essays, reviews, introductions, and lectures. Fortunately, Washington University in St. Louis started archiving Gass’s work even before he began teaching there in 1969. It’s difficult to say, but the Gass collection, begun in the mid-60s but reaching back as far as 1948, consists of thousands of items, and it keeps expanding as Gass’s widow, Mary Henderson Gass, continues the work of sorting and cataloging her late husband’s papers and contributing them to the archive in batches.
Besides the possibility of posthumous publications, there is limitless potential here for scholarly research and writing. William Gass has been the main focus of my scholarship for the past 15 years, and I’ve visited the Gass archive several times, which has proven to be the epitome of scratching the surface.
In addition to Gass’s fiction and nonfiction, other rich veins of scholarship could include the following abbreviated list:
Gass’s support and promotion of other writers, including and perhaps especially writers outside the U.S. For the final decade of his professional career, Gass directed the International Writers Center at Washington University, a Center that he founded in 1990. Its mission was to “build on the strengths of its resident and visiting faculty writers; to serve as a focal point for writing excellence in all disciplines and in all cultures; to be a directory for writers and writing programs at Washington University, in St. Louis, in the United States, and around the world; and to present the writer to the reader” (“William H. Gass”).
Gass’s frequent writing of book reviews. He penned both reviews of scholarly books (especially early in his career) as well as more mainstream books. He was a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, but also The Times Literary Supplement and other venues. Furthermore, Gass established a reputation as a writer of introductions for others’ books—perhaps most famously his introduction to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (Penguin Classics edition). Michael Millman, senior editor at Viking Penguin, wrote to Gass on January 21, 1993: “I can’t remember another time when we had an essay of this caliber as an introduction to one of our volumes. . . .” But the list is long and includes introductions to books by or about Gertrude Stein, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Gass as educator. Gass’s primary teaching posts were at Purdue University and Washington University, and he proved to be an award-winning educator at both institutions. Beyond that direct influence on countless students, Gass’s writings serve as teaching material for an untold number of educators. His fiction and essays have been widely anthologized (I first encountered Gass in an anthology), thus serving as models. Moreover, his essays—particularly his craft-focused essays—are the bases for others’ lectures and teaching notes. Plus Gass was a generous granter of interviews, nearly all of which contain discussion of tecnique that ranges from the practical to the theoretical. Fourteen interviews are collected in Conversations with William H. Gass, but this book represents the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There are many interviews online, as text, video and audio, in addition to copious uncollected interviews in print. All of these interviews are rich sources of material for teachers and students of writing.
I’ll end by mentioning that in this, Gass’s centenary year, I’ll be editing and publishing a collection of essays—and there is ample time to contribute to that project. See the CFP here. Also, this fall there will be a conference at Washington University in St. Louis. The specifics are still being worked out, but it will likely focus on Gass’s On Being Blue, which was re-released by New York Review Books in 2014. And as a footnote, another resource for Gass studies is this blog, where all of my Gass conference papers are archived. One can get hold of a significant chunk of Gass’s writing in The William H. Gass Reader (Knopf, 2018), writing that was handpicked and annotated by Gass before his death. For a detailed overview, see my rather lengthy review of the Reader at the North American Review website.
Works Cited
Ammon, Theodore G., editor. Conversations with William H. Gass. UP of Mississippi, 2003.
King, Daniel Robert. Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author, The U of Tennessee P, 2016.
McCauley, Carole Spearin. “William H. Gass.” Ammon, pp. 3-12.
Moore, Steven. Dalkey Days: A Memoir. Zerogram Press, 2023.
“William H. Gass.” University Libraries, Washington University in St. Louis, 16 Feb. 2024, https://library.wustl.edu/spec/william-h-gass/.
In the Heart of the Heart of William Gass Country
For me 2024 marks a special year: the centenary of William H. Gass (1924-2017). As a Gass scholar and devotee (disciple isn’t too strong of a word), I have various projects in the works to mark the Master’s 100th year — all part of my “preaching the Gass-pel,” an evangelism I embarked on more than a decade ago. No doubt I will use this forum to talk about some of those Gass Centenary projects, which tend to be formal and scholarly. It occurred to me that I also wanted to do something less formal, and more personal. It is not an overstatement to say that William H. Gass changed my life. His writing, his theories, his example as torchbearer in the cause of literature: everything has impacted me in ways that I can name and, doubtless, in ways that I cannot.
Thus, “William H. Gass at 100: A Reading Journal.”
My intention is that throughout 2024 I will post to my blog impressions and musings regarding Gass’s works and words: his fiction, his essays, his reviews, his translations, his thankfully copious interviews. I probably won’t post as frequently as I would like (for one thing, those other Gass Centenary projects are going to be time-consuming and labor-intensive), but hopefully I will be able to share some of the wisdom and insights that have been so meaningful to me, and in the process reflect on how they have affected me: my writing certainly, my teaching definitely, and, most profoundly so therefore also most elusively, my thinking.
I don’t have a set agenda for these posts. The various foci will be organically chosen. Nevertheless, there are some topics that I feel deserve particular attention: Gass’s philosophy when it comes to composing narratives; his magnum opus The Tunnel, which took him more than a quarter century to write; the influence of the German poet Rilke on Gass’s work; his innovative prose techniques; his unflagging support of other writers; and the late work, which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves.
That’s a lot, and I will almost certainly fall short of my ambitions. If this reading journal has any success it will be measured in the number of readers who, because of it, have their curiosity piqued and as such will read the Master, perhaps for the first time.
For this journal, I will begin where William Gass began for me, with my almost accidental reading of his long story (some say novella) “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” I have told the tale elsewhere. The year was 2009, and I was in the process of amassing as many books as I could afford having to do with postmodernism. I was in the final stages of a Ph.D. in English studies at Illinois State University, rather late in life (46 at the time). Over the previous seven years, chipping away as a part-time student, I had completed my coursework, passed the comprehensive exams, and had my dissertation topic approved. I was looking at the psychological origins of postmodernism, and my plan all along had been to focus on the work of Thomas Pynchon and, especially, William Gaddis.
One of the many books I’d purchased was a (very) used copy of Norton’s Postmodern American Fiction. The well-worn book had recently arrived, and one afternoon, after a day of teaching high school, I decided to thumb through it, briefly. One piece in particular arrested my attention because it was heavily highlighted in yellow by a previous owner of the anthology. Upon further inspection, I saw that it had a strangely long and redundant title, and it was broken up into small sections, each with its own heading.
I began reading the opening, subtitled “A Place,” which starts more in the shape of a poem than a short story: “So I have sailed the seas and come . . . / to B . . . / a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.” I was instantly ensorcelled by the writer’s prose, and I think it was this early set of sentences that hooked me, and hooked me for life: “It’s true there are moments — foolish moments — ecstasy on a tree stump — when I’m all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for I’m the sort now in the fool’s position of having love left over which I’d like to lose; what good is it now to me, candy ungiven after Halloween?”
I quickly discerned that “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” didn’t have a plot per se, at least not in a traditional sense, and it barely had a central character. If it did, it was an aging poet who has come alone to this small Midwestern town, a place that is described in poetic bursts: “Where sparrows sit like fists. Doves fly the steeple. In mist the wires change perspective, rise and twist. If they led to you, I would know what they were. Thoughts passing often, like the starlings who flock these fields at evening to sleep in the fields beyond . . .”
Like so many readers, I knew this place. I’d grown up in the Midwest, and when I encountered “In the Heart” I’d been teaching in a tiny town that reminded me in so many (unpleasant) ways of the fictional “B.” Moreover, I knew these feelings, especially of “having love left over.” I’d been surviving a miserable marriage for two decades, and the plan was to divorce as soon as I completed my doctorate (an agreement we’d reached to put off the inevitable).
As I said, my intention that fateful day was to only skim through the book to get a sense of its contents and what may be of use (I probably mainly bought the book for its introduction). But I couldn’t stop reading “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In Gass I detected a kindred soul, and it was dawning on me that perhaps he would be a better focus for my dissertation than Pynchon and Gaddis. As good fortune would have it, within a week or two I attended the AWP Conference in Chicago. When I arrived at the hotel, late one frigid February night, I perused the conference program and discovered there would be a special program in honor of William H. Gass, a tribute, at which he would give a reading. What luck!
Again, this was 2009. Yet I recall the event and his reading with amazing vividness. It was in a ballroom that seemed suited for a thousand revelers, enormous chandeliers illuminated the room like a rugby pitch, revealing what appeared to be only a handful of audience members. I (im)patiently waited for three speakers to proclaim Gass’s greatness in frustrating detail. Finally the Master was allowed to speak. He had opted for an entomologically themed reading, beginning with his classic short story “Order of Insects,” followed by excerpts from other works that involve insects. I wasn’t yet familiar with Gass’s oeuvre, so I didn’t securely connect the passages to their works, but I know he read the swarm-of-grasshoppers scene from The Tunnel. Always self-deprecating, Gass joked that his reading demonstrated how little he had evolved as a writer over the decades.
Whatever had begun in me with the reading of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” it was amplified, intensified and made permanent by the Master’s serendipitous reading at the AWP Conference. I went about collecting all of his works of fiction (at the time), as well as some of the nonfiction; and I changed my dissertation’s focus to Gass. Fortunately my dissertation director, Bob McLaughlin, was quite familiar with Gass, which proved a great asset as I retooled my approach.
Thus began my mission to spread the word about our greatest writer, William H. Gass. My evangelism has mainly taken the form of conference papers (with the majority of them delivered at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900); but I have preached the Gass-pel elsewhere, including in Portugal and (in 2023) Singapore. Plus at the peak of the pandemic I organized an online symposium focused on The Tunnel, which turned 25 in 2020. For 2024, I plan to edit and publish William H. Gass at 100: Essays (currently just a Call for Papers).
I feel like I should say so much more about “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” Perhaps, instead, I will direct the curious to papers I’ve presented previously: “In the Heart of the Heart of the Cold War” (Louisville Conference, 2013); “In the Heart of the Heart of Despair” (American Literature Association Conference, Boston, 2017); and “From Tender Buttons to the ‘Heart of the Country'” (Louisville Conference, 2019). Note that this last paper includes images of early drafts of “In the Heart” from the Gass Papers at Washington University in St. Louis.
I’ll conclude by referring to the title of this post, “In the Heart of the Heart of William Gass Country.” What I mean by it, at least, is that Gass was known as a Midwestern writer. He was born in Fargo, North Dakota, but his parents soon moved to Warren, Ohio, where he graduated from high school in 1942. His undergraduate degree was from Kenyon College. His teaching posts were the College of Wooster (in Ohio), Purdue University, University of Illinois (Urbana), and Washington University in St. Louis. The settings of his stories, novellas and novels were consistently in the Midwest, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly.
Though it likely proved a barrier to his work being embraced by the New York literary establishment, Gass had a great appreciation for the Midwest and how it could function in his fiction. He said in 1997, “The landscape that I work with — the weather and the geography — are designed to be projections of the interior state of the individual or the meaning of the scene. The actual Midwest landscape is by turns cold and beautiful, and like fall here now . . . the leaves are just drifting down, and it’s 72 degrees and gorgeous.” Then he added, “But, of course, you know it may rain in the heart if it rains in the town. That’s the idea. So if my scenery is bleak, it’s because the meaning or the characters’ souls are. It doesn’t mean the Midwest is.”
Thank you for reading my first William Gass reading journal. If I’ve whetted your appetite, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is available in both the collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (1968) and The William H. Gass Reader (2018). Or, like me, the ambitious could track down a copy of New American Review No. 1, where the story first appeared in 1967.
Here’s a video I made in conjunction with this blog post:
Bridging Donne with the Digital Age: William H. Gass’s Devotion to Baroque Prose
(The following paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, held Feb. 23-26, 2023, at the University of Louisville. It was part of the panel “Some Forms of Postmodernism in American Fiction,” chaired by Hunter Augeri, Duke University. Other papers were “The Violence of Microscopy: Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Inverted Totalitarianism at the End of History” by Jonathan Vincent, Towson University; and “Susan Sontag’s Death Kit as Pre-Post-Fiction” by Charlie Bertsch, Independent Scholar.)
William H. Gass – master stylist and acclaimed author of novels, essays, criticism, and translation – passed away December 6, 2017, at the age of 93. In the last few months of his long life infirmity prevented him from writing, but not before he was able to bring his final work to completion, simply titled “Baroque Prose.” No doubt it wasn’t as fully rendered as he would have liked, nor as finely tuned certainly, yet it was a fitting end to a life devoted to language: absorbing it, analyzing it, diagraming it, and shaping it into some of the most artful forms ever spoken or read. William Gaddis considered his friend Bill Gass “our foremost writer, a magician with language” (507); John Barth admired Bill Gass the person, but “most of all . . . the writing: in the fiction, those inhospitable landscapes and typically pathetic-when-not-monstrous characters, marvelously rendered into language; in the essays, the play of mind and wide-ranging erudition lightly deployed. And in both the prose, the prose . . .” (72). Perhaps Watson L. Holloway, author of William Gass (1990), put it most succinctly when he refers to “Gass’s finely tuned word machine,” noting it is “the language that must be at the root of any appreciation of his work” (x).
Gass wrote and spoke about the supreme importance of the sound of language too many times to count. Just how much attention he gave the aural quality of language in his own work may best be seen in his comments about his friend William Gaddis’s writing. In Gass’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Recognitions, he says,
“[W]e must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master’s hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying, and now we are real readers, we are participating in the making, we are moving the tune along the line. . .” (ix).
Sadly, Gass is not as well known, even among academics and worshippers of the written word, as he should be, so here’s a biography in miniature. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924, Gass was educated at Kenyon College (A.B. in philosophy, 1947) and Cornell University (Ph.D. in philosophy, 1954). We mainly associate him with Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught from 1969 to 1990 and then established and directed the International Writers Center there until his retirement in 2000. He also taught at the College of Wooster (1949-54) and Purdue University (1955-1969). His fiction and other writings began to appear in the 1950s, and his debut novel, Omensetter’s Luck, came out in 1966, quickly followed by the collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), the highly experimental novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), and the essay collection Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970). He began writing his magnum opus, The Tunnel, in 1966, not finishing it until 1992 (pieces of it appeared regularly over the years, especially in the journal Conjunctions). Knopf released The Tunnel, all 650 postmodern pages of it, in 1995, and it won the American Book Award the following year, meanwhile accumulating an impressive array of both rose-tossing admirers and stone-throwing critics. This is a much-abbreviated description of his writings and awards over the decades.
As noted, Gass spent nearly three decades working on The Tunnel, which is unusual among novelists, but it was typical for the way Gass approached all his writing projects. He tended to work with concepts for years before considering them complete enough to appear in print. By his own admission, Gass wrote slowly and revised obsessively. For instance, characters that first appeared in 1968’s Willie Masters’ are further developed in 1998’s Cartesian Sonata & Other Novellas. The intricate structure of The Tunnel was an elaboration of the structure Gass invented for the long story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” first published in 1967. Gass’s final work is no exception. In fact, we can trace the origins of “Baroque Prose” all the way back to Gass’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor” (1954). (Happily, the dissertation and even its early drafts are part of the Gass papers archived at Washington University’s Special Collections Department – a treasure trove of Gass material.)
A brief excerpt from “Baroque Prose” was published in Gass’s lifetime, barely, in the inaugural issue of LitMag, spring 2017; and a longer version of the same excerpt appeared posthumously in the online journal Socrates on the Beach, issue 4, 2022. Gass’s widow, Mary Henderson Gass, generously and graciously sent me the entire manuscript in anticipation of this presentation. To date, plans for publication of the work are undecided. My main goals for this paper are to provide a brief description of “Baroque Prose” and to try to communicate its essence. The latter is challenging for a short presentation. Anyone who has read Gass’s nonfiction recalls that it is both tightly structured and marvelously meandering within its parts, which are constructed of highly poetic prose, often with comic touches. If one has read Gass’s nonfiction, I would say “Baroque Prose” most closely resembles his book-length essay On Being Blue, which is a beautiful examination of all the things we may mean when we use the word blue. But the comparison is far from perfect.
First, there is the word that is at the heart of Gass’s last work: baroque. He spends a significant amount of time telling us what it is, and what it isn’t. We recall, of course, that baroque refers to a style most associated with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, frequently applied to European art, music and architecture. We are told by various sources that it was known for its grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, dynamism, movement, tension, and emotional exuberance. Gass does refer fleetingly to some of the art forms known for their baroque attributes, but as his title makes clear, he chiefly analyzes baroque prose, particularly of the seventeenth century as it was practiced in the pulpit by two master rhetoricians, John Donne (1571/2-1631) and Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667). I calculate the “Baroque Prose” manuscript to be about 35,520 words, but I do so without confidence. Gass gives us copious quotes from Donne and Taylor and others, often in single-spaced block quotes; and he indulges what was a lifelong pleasure by providing numerous detailed diagrams in the service of analyzing the passages. The manuscript is divided into three numbered and well-balanced sections of about 45-50 pages, each of which is wide-ranging and sometimes overlapping in scope. There is also a rough chronological organization at work, as Gass’s main interest in the first half of the book is Donne, and Taylor becomes the latter half’s primary focus.
Gass appears to have several purposes, including defining and describing what makes prose baroque; illustrating why it’s effective (when it is effective); describing its rise and fall in the historical context of Europe; providing biographies of principals like Donne and Taylor; arguing for our continued interest in the baroque style of prose; and telling an engaging story whose main character is baroque prose. Along the way, Gass is also entertaining us with his trademark style, not holding back at all in wowing us one last time with his signature metaphors and similes. And like all of Gass’s nonfiction (really all of Gass), “Baroque Prose” is both serious and funny.
As noted earlier, Gass always maintained that effective writing was meant to be heard, not just read on the page by the eyes, but spoken, even if only to one’s internal ear, which makes his attraction to the subject of baroque prose quite natural. Throughout the manuscript, he provides italicized statements about baroque prose, eye-catching insertions that focus the reader on a particular aspect of his central subject. The first italicized insertion says, “Baroque prose begins as prose prepared to be performed . . . a prose that is therefore far from the book or paper, living, if it lives, in the listeners’ ears” ([4]). In fact, continues Gass, “once [the prose] reaches print, it will no longer be pronounced, no longer heard, no longer fed its breath, so no longer in being.” Regarding Donne’s baroque performances from the pulpit (Donne was ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England in 1615 and made Dean of St. Paul’s in 1621), Gass tells us, “Later, when publication was considered, a good deal of polish would be applied, removing, like soil from a shoe, much spontaneity, accident, and improvisation. Reading him now we must imagine dramatic pauses, gestures, sudden changes of posture, a play of facial expressions, extemporaneous additions, and the drama of the whisper and shout” ([11]).
Gass breaks down Donne’s rhetorical strategy: “During his opening Donne is establishing, not his subject, or a textual interpretation . . . ; he is not springing an apothegm to satisfy the men or a sweet sentiment to please the ladies; rather he is gathering his ruling image and its materials as though he were a carpenter arriving at an important moment of construction. . . . Donne’s mind is always moving through the middle of a metaphor” ([15-16]). In this statement we can see that Gass is still working through an analysis that began with his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in the early 1950s. In his philosophical inquiry into metaphor, Gass turned to Donne regularly. Oftentimes the precise passages appear in both the unpublished dissertation and “Baroque Prose” (for example, passages from Donne’s The Lamentations of Jeremy). One of Gass’s concerns in his dissertation was how prose writers use language devices, like metaphor, compared to how poets tend to use them; and he returns to that comparison in “Baroque Prose,” telling us that “in poetry [] modifiers often lie around as loose as change, so that the reader is at a loss to know into which pocket the pence should go . . . whereas, in prose, number and relation, modification and consignment are to be connected, balanced, obeyed, in pursuit of a coherent and completed arrangement” ([16-17]).
Here is an abbreviated summary of some of Gass’s italicized insertions: “Baroque prose is written as if it were the libretto of an opera; as if it had to compete with an organ . . .” ([17]). Another: “The audiences of baroque prose admired a quick mind and the courtly flourish; they enjoyed it when their man in the pulpit showed a bit of wit and strut. There was a deep playfulness in this prose . . .” ([20]). And another: “Baroque prose loves the parenthetical, the marginal, the afterthought, the postscript, which it then inserts into the middle of things like herbs are stirred into a boiling pot . . . ” ([28]). Yet another: “Baroque prose is built on, and out of, conflict and chaos, paradox and bafflement. Its wish is for the harmony of dissident chords, the melody of dissenting lines . . . “([113]). In each case, Gass expands on the idea with explanation, quotations, and analysis.
In Part 2, Gass turns his attention primarily to Jeremy Taylor, who “does not seem to be as troubled a soul as Donne, and he is certainly, in every way, a more temperate man, liberal to a fault according to his peers” ([49]). Gass then provides a brief biography of Taylor, who was eventually made Bishop of Down and Conner Diocese, in Ireland, by Charles II. Gass points out that Taylor’s preaching was known for its “loose style,” but he goes on to assert that there is a complex rhetorical strategy at work, easily missed by the casual listener (or reader). Gass’s extensive analysis includes detailed diagrams to illustrate the mastery of Taylor’s baroque rhetoric. He again enters into a comparison of poetry versus prose: “Poetry calls out, through the dispositions of its lines, to be read as it requires; but the words that queue up to be prose are like subway passengers during rush: crowded hip to thigh, briefcase to umbrella, shoe to shoe” ([53]).
Gass’s detailed analyses of Taylor’s sermons continues into Part 3, as does his biographical narrative, which is a segue to discussing how the baroque style fell out of favor in England and Europe generally. Gass calls 1641 “[t]he dreadful year” as Taylor was briefly imprisoned and then removed from his clerical posts. Gass writes, “On the European continent the Thirty Years War had been killing people since 1618. Later scholars would declare the conflict in Europe closed in 1648. But England would have its own war now . . .” ([108]). With the rise of Puritanism, baroque’s ornate style of preaching would be out of step with the simplicity they sought. “Another enemy was length,” says Gass. “Sermonizers are likely to be strongly winded, as if their voices were to become themselves sturdy columns, built to last as eternally as a cathedral’s. The Puritan dictatorship had banned all public amusements [including entertaining styles in the pulpit]” ([108]).
Then came another blow to the baroque: the scientific ideal after 1660. Robert South, an opponent of the baroque, “began his attack on rhetorical preachifying by claiming that only the ignorant were impressed by verbal flourish” ([111-112]). In the remainder of the manuscript, the final 30 pages or so, Gass races through the history of the baroque style to the present, meanwhile cataloging with precision various characteristics that make it deserving of our appreciation today, like highlighting “what a little excess will do for you” ([70]). In sum, he says, “In the baroque, beauty begs for more beauty” ([119]). In the these final pages, Gass gives us baroque examples from more modern authors than Donne and Taylor, for instance a passage from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.
On the one hand, Gass is typically funny in this, his final work, but he has also come to terms with his approaching end. After talking about John Milton’s “flowery style,” Gass says, “I shall take a look at Milton’s use of adjectives later on. And adverbs even later”; then adds in a new paragraph, “A promise I shall probably break” ([33-34]). At first, one thinks he means he will not return to the topics in this book, but really Gass means he will likely never have the chance to write about them. Later we get another comment that, though humorous, underscores Gass’s sense of the inevitable. Following a full-page paragraph, Gass inserts in brackets, “I have decided to leave the foregoing paragraph as it first fell upon the page, as a warning to those who compose” ([82]). Gass, the relentless rewriter of his work, has run out of time and energy to wrestle a paragraph into perfection.
Midway through Part 1, Gass elaborates on the delight of repetition in the baroque and other nuanced techniques, drawing the conclusion, “The difference between writers we should study and admire, and those we may safely ignore, partly lies in their attention to such subtleties” ([21]). Here, it seems, Gass is subtly (or maybe not so subtly) making the case that his work should continue to be studied after his death as his own baroqueness is on full display in practically everything he published. I, for one, have never needed any such prodding. Gass will continue to be the main focus of my scholarship and a limitless source of inspiration for my teaching and writing.
Works Cited
Barth, John. “As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 11, no. 3, 1991, pp. 71-72.
Gaddis, William. The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.
Gass, William H. Introduction. The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, 1955, Penguin Classics, 1993, pp. v-xv.
––. “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor.” Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1954.
Holloway, Watson L. William Gass. Twayne, 1990.
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.
Modernism’s Last Gasp and the Architecture of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel
This paper, “Modernism’s Last Gasp and the Architecture of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel,” was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 on 23 Feb. 2017 as part of the panel titled “Imagining Space: Experiments in Narrative Form.” The paper veered from its original intent and perhaps a suitable secondary title may be “A Text Suddenly of Our Time.” The panel was chaired by Liana Babayan, Augusta University. Other papers presented were “Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant and Architectural Liminality” by Adam McKee, Queensborough Community College, CUNY; “Haunted Houses from House of Leaves to House of Fiction” by Amanda Davis, University of Chicago; and “Contrasting Spaces in Jean Genet’s Miracle de la Rose” by Maria Slocum, Missouri University of Science and Technology. Other papers on William H. Gass’s work can be found at this site by searching “gass.”
“For me a book tends to exist in a metaphorical relationship to a building. For me architecture represents best the basic metaphorical image of the way a text exists, say, metaphorically or philosophically” (Janssens 66). Thus spake William H. Gass in a 1979 interview, about midway through the composition process of his magnum opus The Tunnel, which was published in 1995 after a nearly thirty-year gestation. Sections began appearing in print as early as 1969 and continued off and on for almost two decades, garnering numerous accolades (for example, inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1980), and in two instances being released as stand-alone, limited-edition books by art presses. In 1996 Gass’s massive book (over 650 pages of dense prose, riddled with myriad experimental techniques, a host of fonts, amateurish doodles, and other graphic representations) won the American Book Award. Meanwhile, it spawned copious reviews which ranged from fawning to furious. Even some of the novel’s harshest critics, however, acknowledged that it would take decades of scholarly work to fully come to terms with Gass’s achievement—no matter whether one believes he achieved a masterpiece or a monstrosity. Sadly, that work remains largely undone.
This is at least the third paper I’ve presented at this conference chiefly focused on Gass’s The Tunnel. When his next novel appeared in 2013, Middle C, that much more manageable book led me away from The Tunnel for a paper or two; and I also did some work on Gass’s earlier publications: one of his earliest pieces of published fiction, the novella The Pedersen Kid, and then a paper focused mainly on Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and On Being Blue. Pondering possibilities for this year’s conference, I decided it was time to return to the excavation site and say something further about The Tunnel. I’ve been coming here for more than a decade, and I can only recall one other Gass paper being presented in that time (a Willie Masters’ paper). (When I first started attending the conference I was a William Gaddis guy; I hadn’t yet fallen under the Master’s spell.) My hope has been that by keeping the spark of scholarly interest alive others will join the conversation—and that hope has rested mainly on the book’s artistic merits. However, between the time that I proposed this particular paper topic and now, something historically monumental happened which makes The Tunnel vitally relevant: the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States (and the rise of the alt-right in general). That is to say, the overarching theme of The Tunnel—which Gass has described as “the fascism of the heart”—makes the book amazingly and unfortunately up-to-date. Perhaps an appropriate secondary title for my paper would be “A Text Suddenly of Our Time.”
Our times have led to a rekindled interest in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopian books. For the same reasons it is worthwhile to descend into William Gass’s tunnel, a place whose squalidness has turned away many readers—but these, my friends, are squalid times. So, in the interest of truth in advertising, I am going to discuss (to some degree) the structure of The Tunnel and its relationship to architecture; but I’m also going to talk about the fascism of the heart and what the book has to say about the Trump phenomenon.
The basic plot of the novel is fairly straightforward (although plot doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Gass’s world as it does in most fiction writer’s): The first-person narrator, William Kohler, is a middle-aged history professor at a Midwestern university who has finally completed his magnum opus, prophetically thirty years in the writing, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. He has sat down in his basement office to write the book’s preface (the final nail in this towering edifice, so to speak) when he finds himself blocked and therefore begins writing, instead, a very personal memoir about his unhappy childhood, lackluster career, loveless marriage, lost loves, disappointing children, and irritating colleagues. He slips the pages of this tell-all autobiography in between the manuscript pages of Guilt and Innocence so that his wife won’t see them (having no interest whatsoever in his life’s work), and, meanwhile, he begins to dig a tunnel out of his basement—or at least so we’re told. Gass himself has written in the liner notes of the audiobook edition of The Tunnel (45 hours of listening pleasure) that his narrator is “wholly unreliable”: “That does not mean he never tells the truth. He may always tell the truth. He may never. But he can’t be trusted. So he may not be digging a tunnel out of his basement” (emphasis added). Either way, writes Gass, “[t]he pointlessness of this activity has to be stressed.”
Returning to my opening quote, Gass has said that “architecture represents best the basic metaphorical image of the way a text exists.” He has had a long-standing interest in architecture. It is difficult to say which came first, the chicken or the egg, as Gass married Mary Henderson in 1968. Mary Henderson Gass has had a distinguished career as an architect in St. Louis since moving there with her husband in 1979 when he accepted a professorship at Washington University. (He retired from the university in 2000.) Gass has found the experimental designs of architect Peter Eisenman especially akin to his own literary aesthetic. “He does crazy things in one sense,” said Gass, “but he is really a serious artist, first rank, I think. He is not just doing things to shock people, or surprise them or be different” (Janssens 68). Gass’s statement about Eisenman and his work sounds a lot like what defenders of Gass and especially The Tunnel have been saying for years.
In explaining how The Tunnel functions architecturally, Gass has contrasted his work to James Joyce’s, especially Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Gass said,
Now, the idea of a book as fundamentally or conceptually a structure in which you are being taken on a tour by the author—I think a lot of modern works are constructed this way, Joyce, for instance, makes Ulysses in such a way that it is not possible for you to conceive the book and hold it in your head at the same time, you have to go back and forth in it. He takes you through the first time; you may jump around in it later as you wish—and Finnegans Wake is certainly constructed that way. (Janssens 66)
Gass continued,
Joyce demands total recall, an ideal total recall. […] I am like I would be when I went through a building: I am putting the pieces together to compose the building which exists ontologically all at the same time, and which I can only know experientially one at the time, and therefore I can only conceive or conceptualize the way it actually exists; I can have an idea of how this house exists. (67)
In other words, when one reads Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, both of which are structurally linear (a second by second account of a single day in Dublin, Ireland, or the unconscious mind’s progression through a single night of sleep [perhaps]), one is at a different point on the overall timeline with each passing word, and one has to be mindful of that progression to make sense of the experience. In other words, how have we gotten from point A to point B . . . to point Z? Metaphorical connections must be made by recalling earlier parts of the text.
The brutally nonlinear construction of The Tunnel operates differently. To illustrate that difference, Gass referenced Eisenman:
Now in Peter Eisenman’s work, what he wants to do often is to make one experientially aware of other parts of the house at the same time [emphasis added]. So in one of his houses, called House Six, there is, for instance, in the second-floor bedroom a strip of glass that goes across the floor, from which you can perceive the living-room below, and vice versa. Similarly, there are holes in various parts, openings which allow you […] to look through the house. So I am always aware in that house of other parts. (67)
In the execution of this theory, Gass constructed The Tunnel in twelve parts (which he describes as phillipics, or bitter denunciations), and each consists of twelve “fundamental themes and a lot of minor ones would be sounded in different arrangements so that a central aspect or meaning of the text would emerge at the beginning; then sink down and be relatively innocuous or weak at a certain point”—all of which would be “superimposed on a completely different structure: the tunnel itself” (“William Gass”). Gass, incidentally, is simultaneously using a mimetic musical structure—Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system—but we don’t have time to go there too. Thus, while Gass’s narrator Kohler pinballs between his childhood, his career in the army, his grad school days in Germany, his various love affairs, his current life, etc., the author returns again and again to these major and minor motifs. In an artfully designed building each room, each hallway, each alcove, each stairway, and even outdoor spaces reflect certain colors, shapes, themes, and moods that tie them together as being parts of a consistently constructed whole. There are variations of course. A dominant color in the entryway may return as complementary accent color in the master bath, for example. A sailboat model in the library may be echoed by a nautically themed kitchen. So forth and so on. Thus it is with The Tunnel.
As illustration of this technique, I will focus on one of the novel’s major motifs and its juxtaposed doppelgänger: windows and mirrors. Gass seems to want us to pay special attention to windows as he titled the sixth phillipic “Why Windows Are Important to Me,” and it takes up the literal center of his book, pages 282 to 333 out of 652. Also, windows have been metaphorically important throughout Gass’s career. As H. L. Hix points out, “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 previous fiction” (124). Hix’s observation is a valid one, but I think Gass takes the metaphor further in The Tunnel by pairing it with almost equally numerous references to mirrors. More regarding that in a moment. What follows are only a few examples of window references in the text. The first comes just a few pages into the book when Kohler recalls a car ride with his lost love, Lou: “The window of the car would not roll up and Lou’s face looked warm from the cold wind as if freshly slapped or shamed or elsewhere loved” (7). This car ride, only briefly mentioned here, foreshadows an episode titled “A Sunday Drive,” which describes in detail a family outing from Kohler’s childhood that is referenced repeatedly in the novel and also prefigures the narrator’s own family outings when he becomes husband and father (always with Gass, repetition, variation, point, counterpoint).
In the central section of the novel, Gass compares a blackboard to a window, writing, “The board is at once the surface of a pit-black sea and a bleak opening onto all our inner spaces. It is the brink of what we are, and hence a horror. […] unlike a window which is always full of the flitter of images […]” (311). Discussing the blackboard’s “opening onto all our inner spaces” (in that professors, like Kohler, use the blackboard to broadcast their beliefs to their students), Gass also connects blackboards to mirrors—both being framed objects antithetical to windows in their own ways. The book’s final reference to windows is about as far from the end as the first reference is from the start, and it’s in an imagined scene with Kohler’s hated wife Martha wherein “[I] lead her to the window [hand in hand … and] put our gazes on together” (650). Kohler imagines trying to get Martha to see the world as profoundly as he does, “but she would interrupt me with a snort from her derision because she despises oratory, wants to slap cheeks when they puff.” We notice the mirror opposites of the first window reference being a recollection of Kohler’s lost true love, Lou, and the final reference being an imagined scene with Kohler’s despised wife. Further linking the two scenes are references to face slapping, one metaphorical, the other imagined but likely. These examples constitute just a tiny taste of the repetitions, echoes, foreshadowings, and prismatic reflections, complications and contradictions that appear in some form or another on every page of the novel.
What then of the mirrors? Again, there are a plethora of references, the first being on page 10 and it is immediately paired with a window (via negation), as Kohler describes his dingy basement work space: “I’ve no mirror, cockeyed or otherwise. One wrinkled window. Above: a worn lace curtain like a rusted screen.” I believe that the pairing of windows with mirrors (and Kohler’s professorial blackboard) is related to the overarching theme of the book as delineated by one of Gass’s most adept readers, Heide Ziegler, a long-time friend and collaborator of William Gass (next to Gass in the photo from a 1991 symposium on postmodernism in Stuttgart, Germany). In response to reviews of the The Tunnel that ran from lukewarm to hostile, Ziegler wrote, in essence, a defense of the book which appeared in Into The Tunnel: Readings of Gass’s Novel (1998). In the interest of my waning time, I shall cut to the chase of Ziegler’s reading, which unknowingly anticipated the novel’s connections to our own desperate times. The key to understanding the book is in the phrase that Gass identified as its “fundamental subject”: the fascism of the heart. Ziegler writes, “[G]iven the pervasiveness of his message […] it is dangerous to miss the point. His message is not that all of us are fascists, but that there is always the danger that the fascism that lurks in our hearts might erupt, that we will become fascists” (80). She suggests that the nostalgically tender (and rare) recollections from Kohler’s boyhood contribute to the idea that anyone is capable of being lured into the dark tunnel of fascism. That same boy—who relished dime-store candy and wanted nothing more in this world than a dog of his own to play with—became the young man who succumbed to the mob mentality of Kristallnacht in 1938 and threw a stone through a Jewish storekeeper’s window. I’ll supplement Ziegler’s fine reading by asserting that Gass’s frequent references to mirrors also emphasize Kohler’s (and everyone’s) potential for becoming the same sort of people he spent his academic life studying (gazing upon, if you will, as if through a window): the innocent German citizens who were transformed into the Nazis who were guilty of exterminating six million Jews. Ziegler writes further,
Given the right historical circumstances—economic insecurity, a time of depression—and given the right seducer […] your Everyman will follow that leader simply in order to flee his own loneliness, as well as what he believes to be undeserved misfortune. […] Since […] political agitators possess no true authority, they need to create scapegoats—the Jews in Germany, minorities all over the world. What Gass attempts, and obviously achieves, judging by the emotional responses to his book, is to change the Holocaust from a horrifying, unforgivable, yet singular European spectacle into a general historical possibility. That is the reason that The Tunnel is not about Germany or about Hitler. It is—potentially—about all of us. (80-81)
Referring specifically to the sort of finely tuned brainwashing the military is able to achieve but meaning more broadly the way anyone can be manipulated, Gass writes, “Eventually they compel you to act against your conscience, contrary to your nature, in defiance of every precept of morality and religion, until all that remains of you is your past, your prehensile tale [spelled t-a-l-e], your history. Then they begin on that” (242-43).
I hardly need to point out the parallels between Gass’s description of the Holocaust and our own time, with the rise of Trump and the rhetoric of the alt-right, especially their scapegoating of Muslims, immigrants, liberals, the press, and even the judiciary as reasons for our alleged decreased safety and floundering economy. What is more, on a personal note I’ll say how surprising and discouraging it’s been over the past year to view friends, neighbors and family via the window of Facebook and other social media and discover the fascism of their hearts—their willingness to believe Trump’s lies and to support his undemocratic, unpatriotic and unconstitutional schemes. How best to resist, other than simply by putting a hashtag in front of the word, is a question that millions have been wrestling with. Obviously political action is a necessary part of resistance to this wave of fascism. William Gass dealt with this question, too, in a powerful essay, “The Artist and Society” (first published in The New Republic, July 17, 1968). In it Gass suggests that the artist shouldn’t become involved in a revolution in the typical sorts of ways, but rather he must become involved through his art. He writes, “The artist’s revolutionary activity is of a different kind. He is concerned with consciousness, and he makes his changes there. His inaction is 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). Artists must resist, then, through their art. It is via their art that they can have a greater impact than a mere bomb’s momentary blast.
My original concept of this paper was to discuss how Gass’s techniques align his book with the intentions of aesthetically minded architects—how their conceived ideas, drafted as blueprints and 3D models, are transformed into lived physical spaces, and, similarly, how Gass attempts to make William Kohler’s surreptitiously written memoir materialize in the hands of the reader via the book known as The Tunnel. I planned to make good use of an interesting article coauthored by Gass and his wife, Mary, about the artistic principles of architectural design and their analogues in other forms of art, like writing. And I planned to talk about Gass’s hopes for the publication of his novel, what the publisher and printer were able and willing to execute, and what they weren’t. I also meant to explain my paper’s title regarding “modernism’s last gasp,” comparing, say, Joyce’s efforts to mimic a conscious or unconscious mind versus Gass’s efforts to create a consciousness. But alas those discussions will have to wait for another paper and another day. I encourage you, meanwhile, to risk a visit to The Tunnel, a book suddenly very much for our time.
Works Referenced
Gass, William H. “The Artist and Society.” Fiction and the Figures of Life, Godine, 1979, pp. 276-88.
—-. The Tunnel. 1995. Dalkey Archive, 2007.
—-. William H. Gass Reads The Tunnel. [liner notes for the audio book written by the author] Clayton Studios, 2005.
Gass, William H., and Mary Gass. “The Architecture of the Sentence.” Conjunctions, 1999, pp. 93-108. [Available online]
Hix, H. L. “Twenty Questions on The Tunnel.” Understanding William H. Gass, University of South Carolina Press, 2002, pp. 76-139.
Janssens, G. A. M. “An Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 56-70.
“William Gass with Michael Silverblatt” (5 Nov. 1998). Vimeo, uploaded by Lannan Foundation, 2011, https://vimeo.com/12812717.
Ziegler, Heide. “William H. Gass: Is There Light at the End of The Tunnel?” Into The Tunnel: Readings of Gass’s Novel, edited by Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin, University of Delaware Press, 1998, pp. 71-83.
Accidental Poets: Paul Valéry’s influence on William Gass
The following paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, held at the University of Louisville February 18-20. Others papers presented were “The Poet Philosopher and the Young Modernist: Fredrich Nietzshe’s Influence on T.S. Eliot’s Early Poetry” by Elysia C. Balavage, and “Selections from ‘The Poetic Experiments of Shuzo Takiguchi 1927-1937’” by Yuki Tanaka. Other papers on William H. Gass are available at this blog site; search “Gass.”
In William H. Gass’s “Art of Fiction” interview, in 1976, he declared two writers to be his guiding lights—the “two horses” he was now “try[ing] to manage”: Ranier Maria Rilke and Paul Valéry. He added, “Intellectually, Valéry is still the person I admire most among artists I admire most; but when it comes to the fashioning of my own work now, I am aiming at a Rilkean kind of celebrational object, thing, Dinge” (LeClair 18). That interview for The Paris Review was exactly forty years ago, and viewing Gass’s writing career from the vantage point of 2016, I am here to suggest that, yes, Rilke has been a major influence, but Valéry’s has been far greater than what Gass anticipated; and in fact may have been even greater than Rilke’s in the final analysis. Assessing influence, however, is complicated in this case, I believe, because a large part of Gass’s attraction to Valéry’s work in the first place was due to his finding the Frenchman to be a kindred spirit. Hence it is difficult to say how much of Gass is like Valéry because of Valéry’s influence and how much is because of their inherent like-mindedness.
A quick survey of Gass’s work since 1976—which includes two novels, a collection of novellas, a collection of novellas and stories, and eight books of nonfiction—may imply that Rilke has been the greater influence, as Gass intended. After all, Gass’s magnum opus, The Tunnel (1995), for which he won the American Book Award, centers on a history professor of German ancestry who specializes in Nazi Germany (Rilke allusions abound); and his other post-1976 novel, Middle C (2013), for which he won the William Dean Howells Medal, centers on a music professor born in Vienna whose special interest is Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg; and, glaringly, there is Gass’s Reading Rilke (1999), his book-length study of the problems associated with translating Rilke into English. However, a more in-depth look at Gass’s work over these past four decades reveals numerous correspondences with Valéry, some of which I will touch upon in this paper. The correspondence that I will pay particular attention to, though, is that between the title character of Valéry’s experimental novella The Evening with Monsieur Teste (1896) and the protagonist of Gass’s Middle C, Joseph Skizzen.
Before I go further, a brief biographical sketch of Paul Valéry: He was born in 1871, and published two notable works in his twenties, the essay “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci” and Monsieur Teste; then he stopped publishing altogether for nearly twenty years—emerging from his “great silence” with the long poem “The Young Fate” in 1917 at the age of forty-six. During his “silence,” while he didn’t write for publication, he did write, practically every day, filling his notebooks. Once his silence was over, he was catapulted into the literary limelight, publishing poems, essays, and dramas, becoming perhaps the most celebrated man of letters in France. By the end of his life in 1945 he’d been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature a dozen times.
The title for this paper comes from Gass himself. In his 1972 review of Valéry’s collected works, in the New York Times Book Review, he wrote that Valéry “invariably . . . [pretended] he wasn’t a poet; that he came to poetry by accident” (The World Within the Word 162). By the same token, Gass has insisted in numerous interviews (and he’s given many, many interviews) that he’s not a poet, that the best he can achieve is an amusing limerick. Others, however, have asserted that Gass’s fiction is more akin to poetry than prose, that his novellas and novels are in essence extremely long prose poems; and in spite of his insistence on his not being a poet, he would seem to agree with this view of his work. In a 1998 interview, for instance, Gass said, “I tend to employ a lot of devices associated with poetry. Not only metrical, but also rhyme, alliteration, all kinds of sound patterning” (Abowitz 144). Moreover, about a decade earlier he said that “all the really fine poets now are writing fiction. I would stack up paragraphs of Hawkes, Coover, Elkin, or Gaddis against the better poets writing now. Just from the power of the poetic impulse itself, the ‘poets’ wouldn’t stand a chance” (Saltzman 91). Critics have tended to include Gass in the group of writers whom Gass described as poet-novelists.
For your consideration, from The Tunnel:
A smile, then, like the glassine window in a yellow envelope. I smiled. In that selfsame instant, too, I thought of the brown, redly stenciled paper bag we had the grocer refill with our breakfast oranges during the splendid summer of sex and sleep just past—of sweetly sweating together, I would have dared to describe it then, for we were wonderfully foolish and full of ourselves, and nothing existed but your parted knees, my sighs, the torpid air. It was a bag—that bag—we’d become sentimental about because (its neck still twisted where we held it) you said it was wrinkled and brown as my balls, and resembled an old cocoon, too, out of which we would both emerge as juicy and new as the oranges, like “Monarchs of Melody,” and so on, and I said to you simply, Dance the orange (a quotation from Rilke), and you said, What? There was a pause full of café clatter. (160-61)
And beyond Gass’s poetic prose, he has written actual poems, besides the off-color limericks that populate The Tunnel. In Middle C, for example, there is a longish, single-stanza poem written via the persona of the protagonist, Joseph Skizzen. It begins, “The Catacombs contain so many hollow heads: / thighbones armbones backbones piled like wood, / some bones bleached, some a bit liverish instead: / bones which once confidently stood / on the floor of the world” (337). And, perhaps more significantly, there are the translated poems in Reading Rilke. There was a celebration held at Washington University in St. Louis in honor of Gass’s ninetieth birthday, Passages of Time, and he read from each of his works in chronological order, except he broke chronology to end with his translation of Rilke’s “The Death of the Poet,” which concludes,
Oh, his face embraced this vast expanse,
which seeks him still and woos him yet;
now his last mask squeamishly dying there,
tender and open, has no more resistance,
than a fruit’s flesh spoiling in the air. (187)
It was a dramatic finale, especially since the event was supposed to be in July, near Gass’s birthday, but he was too ill to read then; so it was rescheduled for October, and the author had to arrive via wheelchair, and deliver the reading while seated. Happily, he was able to give another reading, a year later, when his new book, Eyes, came out. (I wasn’t able to attend the Eyes reading, so I’m not sure how he appeared, healthwise, compared to the Wash U. reading.)
My point is that, like Valéry, Gass has downplayed his abilities as a poet, yet his literary record begs to differ. The fact that he broke the chronology of his birthday celebration reading to conclude with a poem—and he had to consider that it may be his final public reading, held on the campus where he’d spent the lion’s share of his academic life—suggests, perhaps, the importance he has placed on his work as a poet, and also, of course, it may have been a final homage to one of his heroes. In spite of Gass’s frailness, his wit was as lively as ever. When he finished reading “The Death of the Poet,” and thus the reading, he received an enthusiastic standing ovation. Once the crowd settled, he said, “Rilke is good.”
Evidence of the earliness of Valéry’s influence or at least recognized kinship is the preface to Gass’s iconic essay collection Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), which Gass devotes almost entirely to the connection between the collection’s contents and the way that Valéry had assembled his oeuvre. Gass writes, “It is embarrassing to recall that most of Paul Valéry’s prose pieces were replies to requests and invitations. . . . [H]e turned the occasions completely to his account, and made from them some of his profoundest and most beautiful performances” (xi). Gass continues, “The recollection is embarrassing because the reviews and essays gathered here are responses too—ideas ordered up as, in emergency, militias are”; and then he describes his book as a “strange spectacle” in which he tries “to be both philosopher and critic by striving to be neither” (xii). So, Gass recognizes the parallel between the forces at work in Valéry’s literary life and his own. Gass has readily acknowledged the slowness with which his fiction has appeared (notably, it took him some twenty-six years to write The Tunnel), citing two reasons: the slowness with which he writes, and rewrites, and rewrites; but also the fact that he regularly received opportunities to contribute nonfiction pieces to magazines and anthologies, and to give guest lectures, and they tended to pay real money, unlike his fiction, which garnered much praise but little cash over his career.
This parallel between the circumstances of their output is interesting; however, the correspondences between Valéry’s creative process and his primary artistic focus, and Gass’s, is what is truly significant. In his creative work, Valéry was almost exclusively interested in describing the workings of the mind, of consciousness; and developing complex artistic structures to reflect those workings. T. S. Eliot noted Valéry’s dismissiveness of the idea of inspiration as the font of poetic creation. In Eliot’s introduction to Valéry’s collection The Art of Poetry, he writes, “The insistence, in Valéry’s poetics, upon the small part played [by ‘inspiration’ . . .] and upon the subsequent process of deliberate, conscious, arduous labor, is a most wholesome reminder to the young poet” (xii). Eliot goes on to compare Valéry’s technique and the resulting work to that done by artists in other media, most notably music composers: “[Valéry] always maintained that assimilation Poetry to Music which was a Symbolist tenet” (xiv). James R. Lawler echoes Eliot when he writes that Valéry “makes much of the comparison of poetry to the sexual act, the organicity of the tree, the freedom of the dance, and the richness of music—especially that of Wagner” (x).
The wellspring of music composition as a source of structural principles for poetry (or highly poetic prose) is arguably the greatest correspondence between Valéry as artist and Gass as artist. Examples abound, but The Tunnel and Middle C offer the most radiant ones. For the The Tunnel Gass developed a highly synthetic structure based on Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School’s musical theory of a twelve-tone system. Consequently there are twelve sections or chapters, and in each Gass develops twelve primary themes or images. He said, “[T]hat is how I began working out the way the various themes come in and out. It’s layered that way too. . . .” (Kaposi 135). In The Tunnel, Gass’s methodology is difficult to discern because Gass gave it a “chaotic and wild” look while in fact it is, he said, “as tightly bound as a body in a corset” (134). He achieved the appearance of chaos by “deliberately dishevel[ing]” the narrative with “all kinds of other things like repetitions [and] contradictions.” He said, “[T]he larger structure must mimic human memory, human consciousness. It lies, it forgets and contradicts. It’s fragmentary, it doesn’t explain everything, doesn’t even know everything” (134). For Middle C, the use of the Schoenberg system is much more overt, with Skizzen, its protagonist, being a music professor whose specialty is Schoenberg and Skizzen’s obsession with getting a statement about humans’ unworthiness to survive just right. Skizzen believes he is on the right track when he writes the sentence in twelve beats, and near the end of the novel he feels he has the sentence perfect:
First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive
The Professor sums up his perfect creation: “Twelve tones, twelve words, twelve hours from twilight to dawn” (352). Gass, through his narrator, does not discuss the sentence’s direct correlation to the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone system, but it does match it exactly.
Let me return to another Valéry-Gass correspondence which I touched on earlier: their concern with the workings of the mind or, said differently, consciousness. Jackson Mathews, arguably the most herculean of Valéry’s translators into English, begins his introduction to Monsieur Teste with the statement that “Valéry saw everything from the point of view of the intellect. The mind has been said to be his only subject. His preoccupation was the pursuit of consciousness, and no one knew better than he that this pursuit led through man into the world” (vii). Valéry’s interest in the mind was present in his earliest published work, the essay on Leonardo’s method and, even more obviously, Monsieur Teste, that is, “Mr. Head” or “Mr. Brain as Organ of Observation” or something to that effect. However, it was during Valéry’s twenty-year “silence” that he delved into the phenomenon of consciousness most critically. Gass writes, “Valéry began keeping notebooks in earnest, rising at dawn every day like a priest at his observances to record the onset of consciousness, and devoting several hours then to the minutest study of his own mind” (“Paul Valéry” 163). As noted earlier, Gass fashioned The Tunnel, all 800 or so pages of it, to mimic the human mind in its intricate workings. In Middle C, Gass pays much attention to Skizzen’s thought processes, especially his copious writing, revising, critique of, and further revising of his statement about humans’ unworthiness for survival. Such concerns are everywhere in Gass’s work, including his most recently published, the collection of novellas and stories, Eyes. I would point in particular to the novella Charity, a challenging stream-of-consciousness narrative, all a single paragraph, that mercilessly bounces between the main character’s childhood and his present, and, chaotically, various times in between, all the while sorting through his feelings about the act of charity and how he came to feel about it as he does in the now of the story.
In the limited time remaining, I’ll turn to the correspondence between Valéry’s character Monsieur Teste and Gass’s Joseph Skizzen (though I think William Kohler, the narrator of The Tunnel, has significant Teste-esque qualities as well). The convention of The Evening with Monsieur Teste is that the narrator is a friend of Edmond Teste’s, and he goes about attempting to describe his friend’s character. There is very little action per se, and as such almost nothing in the way of plot, in a conventional sense at least (very Gassian in that regard). He tells us that he came to “believe that Monsieur Teste had managed to discover laws of the mind we know nothing of. Certainly he must have devoted years to his research” (11). In Middle C, Joseph Skizzen is obsessed with what he calls his Inhumanity Museum, essentially a record, largely in the form of newspaper clippings and personal notes, of humans’ ceaseless cruelty to one another. The collection is associated with his ongoing struggle to word just so his statement about humans’ unworthiness to survive. Monsieur Teste becomes almost a recluse, desiring little contact with other people. He is married, but the narrator suggests that Monsieur and Madam Teste’s relationship is more platonic than passionate, due to Edmond’s preference for the intellectual over the emotional. Similarly, Skizzen never marries in Middle C, and in fact never has sex—he flees as if terrified at the two attempts to seduce him, both by older women, in the novel. Ultimately he ends up living with his mother in a house on the campus where he teaches music history and theory, his few “pleasures” consisting of listening to Schoenberg, assembling his Inhumanity Museum, and revising his pet statement. What is more, Teste’s friend describe Edmond’s understanding of “the importance of what might be called human plasticity. He had investigated its mechanics and its limits. How deeply he must have reflected on his own malleability!” (11-12). Skizzen’s malleability is central to his persona in Middle C. He goes through several name changes, moving from Austria to England to America, and eventually fabricates a false identity, one which includes that he has an advanced degree in musical composition, when in fact his knowledge of music is wholly self-taught. One of the reasons he gravitates toward Schoenberg as his special interest is because of the composer’s obscurity and therefore the decreased likelihood that another Schoenberg scholar would be able to question Skizzen’s understanding of the Austrian’s theories. But over time Skizzen molds himself into a genuine expert on Schoenberg and a respected teacher at the college—though his fear of being found out as a fraud haunts him throughout the novel.
To utter the cliché that I have only scratched the surface of this topic would be a generous overstatement. Perhaps I have eyed the spot where one may strike the first blow. Yet I hope that I have demonstrated the Valéry-Gass scholarly vein to be a rich one, and that an even richer one is the Valéry-Rilke-Gass vein. A couple of years ago I hoped to edit a series of critical studies on Gass, and I put out the call for abstracts far and wide; however, I had to abandon the project as I only received one email of inquiry about the project, and then not even an abstract followed. Nevertheless, I will continue my campaign to bring attention to Gass’s work in hopes that others will follow me up the hill, or, better still, down the tunnel. Meanwhile, if interested, you can find several papers on Gass’s work at my blog.
Works Cited
Abowitz, Richard. “Still Digging: A William Gass Interview.” 1998. Ammon 142-48.
Ammon, Theodore G., ed. Conversations with William H. Gass. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.
Eliot, T. S. Introduction. The Art of Poetry. By Paul Valéry. Trans. Denise Folliot. New York: Pantheon, 1958. vii-xxiv. Print.
Gass, William H. Charity. Eyes: Novellas and Short Stories. New York: Knopf, 2015. 77-149. Print.
—. Preface. Fiction and the Figures of Life. 1970. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. xi-xiii. Print.
—. Middle C. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.
—. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. 1999. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
—. The Tunnel. 1995. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2007. Print.
—. The World Within the Word. 1978. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print.
Kaposi, Idiko. “A Talk with William H. Gass.” 1995. Ammon 120-37.
Lawler, James R. Introduction. Paul Valéry: An Anthology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. vii-xxiii. Print.
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass: The Art of Fiction LXV.” 1976. Ammon 46-55. [online]
Mathews, Jackson. Introduction. Monsieur Teste. By Valéry. Trans. Jackson Mathews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989. vii-ix. Print.
Valéry, Paul. Monsieur Teste. 1896. Trans. Jackson Mathew. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989. Print.
Notes on images: The photo of Paul Valéry was found at amoeba.com via Google image. The photo of William H. Gass was found at 3ammagazine.com via Google image.
The Celibacy of Joseph Skizzen and the Principles of “On Being Blue”
The following paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, Feb. 26-28, 2015, as part of the panel “Sexual Manners,” chaired by Mariah Douglas, University of Louisville. Other papers presented were “‘A world of bottle-glass colours’: Defining Sexual Manners in Subversive Spaces,” by Bonnie McLean, Marquette University; and “Sex as Border Crossing in Anglophone Labanese Fiction,” by Syrine Hout, American University in Beruit. For other Gass papers at this blog, search “gass.”
The Celibacy of Joseph Skizzen and the Principles of On Being Blue
One of William H. Gass’s first publications was the highly experimental novella (?) Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, which appeared as a special supplement in TriQuarterly literary journal in 1968 and was republished in book form by Dalkey Archive in 1989. The experiment revolves around the titular character Babs Masters, whose sexual history and growing sexual arousal are represented via a variety of signifiers, including bawdy and explicit diction, typographical features and nude pictures. In fact, the book’s cover features a neck-to-navel photograph of the nude model portraying Babs with the title and author’s name projected onto her pale chest: the word “Wife” is distorted in the cleavage between her breasts, and “BY WILLIAM H. GASS” runs in a straight line beneath them. Appropriately the back cover features a close-up of Babs’ nude backside above a paragraph-length synopsis of the book which reads in part: “Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice both her new lover and the reader.” Every page of the book features either an erotic photograph of Babs and/or sexually charged language, both explicit and implicit. (As an aside, earlier I called Babs the titular character. I don’t find that funny, but I wanted to point it out for those of you who are less evolved than I am.)
By Gass’s own reckoning, Willie Masters’ was for the most part a failure. “I was trying out some things,” Gass said in a 1976 interview. “Didn’t work. Most of them didn’t work. . . . Too many of my ideas turned out to be only ideas. . . . I don’t give a shit for ideas—which in fiction represent inadequately embodied projects” (LeClair 22). It so happens that 1976 was also the year that he published his novella-like essay (or essay-like novella) On Being Blue, subtitled “A Philosophical Inquiry,” in which he discusses at length various manifestations of the word and concept of blue, especially so-called blue language. It seems that one of the chief lessons he learned from writing Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife was that writers should avoid at all cost writing about sex:
Art, like light, needs distance, and anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that the writhings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content, that the intensity of that content quickly outruns its apparent cause, that the full experience becomes finally inarticulate, and that there is no major art that works close in. (19)
He concludes the section by saying “a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing” (20). What is more, “the sexual, in most works, disrupts the form; there is an almost immediate dishevelment, the proportion of events is lost” (16-17). In sum, according to Gass, an explicit description of sex is inherently unartful, and the insertion (sorry) of an actual sexual climax in a story counterbalances and therefore diminishes the plot’s narrative climax. (Since the Louisville Conference is devoted to literature and culture, I will make the rather low-brow observation that Gass’s analysis may be borne out by the number of television series that quickly fizzle after the flirtatious main characters finally have sex, dubbed “the Moonlighting curse.” Recent examples include Bones, Castle and New Girl.)
Allow me to raise my brow again to critic H.L. Hix, who has suggested Gass’s fiction writing since Willie Masters’ “can be read as an attempt to restore events to proper proportion” (72). Writing in 2002, Hix cites Gass’s mammoth novel The Tunnel in particular. I agree with Hix’s assessment. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that Gass’s most recent—and presumably his final—novel, Middle C, is an even more overt representation of the principles that the author delineated in On Being Blue. In 2013’s Middle C, the protagonist Joseph Skizzen has several opportunities to pursue romantic relationships with female characters, but in each case he retreats into his safely insulated academic life as a professor of music theory. What is more, Gass frequently alludes to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, and the sin-bearing serpent could be seen as sex attempting to slither its way into Gass’s narrative and corrupt the pristine text. Indeed, in On Being Blue Gass discusses the “five common methods by which sex gains entrance into literature . . . as through French doors and jimmied windows”; and the “commonest, of course” is “the direct depiction of sexual material—thoughts, acts, wishes” (10).
Middle C keeps its focus on Joseph Skizzen from his birth to retirement age, and twice in Joey’s youth older women attempt to seduce him. Joey’s reaction in both cases suggests perhaps the level of alarm serious writers ought to exhibit when their narratives begin to flirt with describing sexual scenes. The first such episode in the novel involves Joey’s college French teacher Madame Mieux, whose “laughter preceded her like a warning siren” (100). In the word siren, of course, Gass describes Madame Mieux as both a temptress and a warning. Joey’s grades are mediocre, but Madame Mieux invites him to her house on the pretense of listening to music, promising him a “trombone concerto,” and Gass writes, “He made a mistake. He accepted her invitation” (103). Madame Mieux beckons him into a room filled with pillows, where she is lying at its center smoking a joint. She invites him to make himself “comfy,” but instead he flees from her. Outside, “[h]e realized already that he was not embarrassed or repulsed, he was terrified, and that terror was not the appropriate response: amusement maybe, disdain perhaps, a sense of superiority or a feeling of pity” (104). Metaphorically, Joey is akin to the writer who is tempted to narrate a sexual scene but saves himself from the absurd—what Gass calls “Madame Mieux’s pillow party.”
Later, Joseph lands a job as a librarian at a public library run by Miss Marjorie Bruss, a middle-aged woman who also has a room to rent next to her house, so she becomes both Joey’s boss and his landlady. Marjorie gets in the habit of leaving milk and cookies for Joey in his room. One night, Marjorie comes to him wearing only a robe. Gass writes, “She seemed zipped into a towel, her wild hair terrible to behold, and sat upon the bed with the familiarity of one who has made it” (286). Joseph stares at her, “transfixed.” She rises from the bed, telling him that he is a “[g]ood boy . . . [who] deserve[s] a nice surprise.” She then bends over Joseph and puts her hands on his face. Joseph says, “Unhand me, Madame, you forget yourself, . . . frightened from the world into a novel; and Marjorie recoiled as though struck by the book from which he had unconsciously taken the phrase” (286-87). The comically melodramatic scene continues to unfold, becoming more and more ridiculous. Joey’s milk is knocked over when Marjorie is repulsed, and she begins screaming the cliché phrase “Unhand me” louder and louder. She goes outside in her robe and scuffs and removes the blocks from beneath the wheels of Joey’s beat-up car so that it rolls down the drive into a utility pole. At which point the humiliated woman orders him to leave, both his rented residence and his job.
Again, Joseph Skizzen’s extreme reaction to a woman’s attempt to seduce him reflects how authors might best respond when their characters try to seduce them into writing a sexual scene. In the case of Madame Mieux, Joey was invited into her pillow-filled boudoir, whereas Marjorie Bruss invited herself into Joey’s room. In both cases they are women who have power over him, his teacher and his employer/landlady, suggestive at some level perhaps of the strong draw toward the sexual in fiction. In On Being Blue, Gass points out that other extreme acts which are often the stuff of fiction can be controlled by the author—but not so with sex once that path is chosen. He writes, “As writers we don’t hesitate to interrupt murders, stand time on its tail, put back to front, and otherwise arrange events in our chosen aesthetic order, but how many instances of such coitus interruptus are there in the books which speak to us so frankly of the life we never frankly lead?” (20). The comedic nature of the scenes that result from Madame Mieux’s and Miss Bruss’s attempted seductions are deliberate on Gass’s part, but perhaps no more comedic than if he had attempted to render serious sexual scenes—or maybe it would be more accurate to say Gass would find such scenes tragic as far as his success at fashioning them into literary art.
Combining the sexual with the comic has been typical for Gass since the writing of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. In particular, he’s interested in the writing of bawdy limericks. His ponderous novel The Tunnel is filled with limericks of the bluest sort. For example,
A nun went to bed with a sailor
Who said he had come from a whaler.
It was like Moby’s dick—
His blubberous prick—
with which he promptly assailed her. (172)
There’s a second verse to this particular limerick, but I imagine you’re trusting me on this point. Gass has said that he writes limericks because he’s unable to write longer poems. He told LeClair in the 1976 interview, “I can get away with a limerick because it is a very short form. I can turn out couplets, too, but not enough of them to make a whole poem” (31). More significantly, the limerick encapsulates Gass’s attitudes toward writing that involves sexual language. In another interview, Gass said that he’s not interested in writing about sex, but he’s very interested in “the language of sex”: “[T]here’s very little sexuality in my work, but there are a lot of sexual words. I have very few steamy sexual scenes, if any. The metaphor is fundamental, sure. But my interest in the subject and my use of a character’s sexuality are almost invariably either symptomatic or metaphorical, whereas for a great number of writers sex is the direct object” (Brans 107-8). By symptomatic he means that the sexual references represent “some larger quality in the character that isn’t directly sexual at all—dominance, power, or what might be called the verbal sexualization of the mind” (108). These statements were made nearly thirty years prior to the publication of Middle C, but his approach is clearly represented by Joseph Skizzen, who finds himself the locus of female domination throughout the novel: Madame Mieux, Marjorie Bruss, his sister Debbie, his mother Miriam, among several other female characters. In fact, Joey dreams of a pre-Eve Eden, an Eden before the Fall. Gass writes, “He did dream of strolling naked as Adam through a garden [. . .] No . . . rethink that . . . he would be more naked than Adam, leafless as a winter tree, untroubled by any companion, Eve or angel. [. . . H]e’d be free to do whatever he chose to do, to his blame or to his credit [. . .]” (254). Joey’s Edenic daydream ends, and he returns to the real world in which every woman in his life is the cause of some sort of anxiety. He ticks off a list of them and the troubles they cause him.
The prelapsarian world that Skizzen fantasizes about would be one free of the absurdity of sexual situations, and he creates the closest thing he can manage, eventually living with his mother in a rambling and poorly maintained house on the college campus where he teaches. Here, free of any opportunity for a romantic encounter, Professor Skizzen pursues two of his favorite hobbies: collecting newspaper clippings and making notecards that record the daily atrocities of humankind, and writing and revising a sentence regarding the human race. Gass, via his main character, returns to the sentence he is composing and reworking repeatedly throughout the novel, which he finally perfects near the end: “First Skizzen felt mankind must perish, then he feared it might survive” (352). The evolving sentence is in fact a sort of central character in Middle C, which reflects one of Gass’s unusual theories regarding writing fiction: that anything can be a character and people don’t make for the most interesting ones. In his essay “The Concept of Character,” he writes, “Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached. [. . . A]nything, indeed, which serves as a fixed point like a stone in a stream or that soap in Bloom’s pocket, functions as a character” (49, 50). Skizzen’s finally perfecting his sentence about the inhumanity of man serves as a kind of climax for the novel. It is obviously an understated sort of climax compared to most works of fiction, and one can see that scenes of sexual climax would certainly tend to eclipse a music professor’s perfectly worded, perfectly balanced sentence—thus bearing out H.L. Hix’s observation that since Willie Masters’ Gass has been working to “restore events to proper proportion.”
Given the subject of my paper and its timing—with all the hubbub in recent weeks about the release of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey—it seems appropriate to refer to E.L. James’s mega bestseller, which has a sexual scene on virtually every page. Last fall, I read through most of Fifty Shades in about an hour in anticipation of teaching a workshop on writing about sex—or rather on not writing about sex—and based on that experience I was loathe to return to the book for this paper, so I’ll rely on Anthony Lane’s review of the movie in the February 23 issue of The New Yorker. In comparing the film to the novel, Lane writes,
Above all, we are denied James’s personifications, which are so much livelier than her characters. . . . No new reader, however charitable, could open “Fifty Shades of Grey,” browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth. There are poignant moments when the plainest of physical actions is left dangling beyond the reach of [James’s] prose.
Beyond the vapid prose, James’s problem, according to Gass’s theory, is that it is impossible to create an effective narrative climax when there is a sexual climax described in detail on every other page. As Gass said in one of his most recent interviews, “[T]hat’s what ninety percent of bad literature is. It’s just referring to these scenes in so-called real life that would be quite shattering, or pornographic, or whatever. And it isn’t art” (Gerke 43). Sadly, more than a hundred million people have bought copies of Fifty Shades of Grey (Andrew Lane’s figure)—which helps to explain why it’s so difficult to publish a literary novel in the United States, and if one does, it’s a challenge to get a hundred people to read it, let alone buy a copy.
Middle C will almost certainly be William Gass’s final novel, but the ninety-year-old author has a new collection of novellas and stories coming out in October, titled Eyes, which will no doubt include material that he said he was working on in the mid-1990s. In fact, Middle C was titled that in part because it was supposed to be the second of a trio of novellas, all with titles beginning with “C,” but the story of Joseph Skizzen kept expanding until Gass had a complete novel on his hands. Presumably the novellas included in Eyes will be the companion pieces to Middle C. Very little of that work has seen the light of publication, so not much is known about it. One can rest fairly certain, however, that it will feature sexual language but no sexual scenes—unless they are absurdly comedic ones.
Works Cited
Ammon, Theodore G., ed. Conversations with William H. Gass. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.
Brans, Jo. “Games of the Extremes: An Interview with William Gass.” Ammon 96-110.
Gass, William H. “The Concept of Character in Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 34-54. Print.
—-. Middle C. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.
—-. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. 1976. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 2007. Print.
—-. The Tunnel. 1995. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2007. Print.
—-. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. 1968. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1998. Print.
Gerke, Greg. “Many-Layered Anger: A Conversation with William Gass.” Tin House 14.2 (Dec. 2012): 30-45. Print.
Hix, H.L. Understanding William H. Gass. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Print.
Lane, Anthony. “No Pain, No Gain: Fifty Shades of Grey.” The New Yorker. 23 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 Feb. 2015. [link]
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass: The Art of Fiction LXV.” 1976. Ammon 17-38. [link]
Note: I would like to thank Craig Saper, who sent me a pdf of his art book On Being Read, published in a limited edition by Diane Fine in 1985, as it was inspired by Gass’s On Being Blue.
Interview with J.D. Schraffenberger: The Waxen Poor
I don’t recall the exact year that I met Jeremy Schraffenberger (2005? — give or take), but it was definitely at the University of Louisville during its annual literature and culture conference. I chaired a critical panel on which Jeremy was presenting a paper. As the day progressed and we ran into each other here and there, we discovered that while we both enjoyed academic writing, creative writing was our true passion — mine, specifically, fiction, and his poetry. Over the years we often met up in Louisville, and when my first novel, Men of Winter, came out in 2010, Jeremy was kind enough to help me set up a reading in Cedar Falls, Iowa, as part of Jim O’Laughlin’s Final Thursday Reading Series. By then Jeremy (who publishes and edits under the initials J.D.) was on the tenure track in the English Department at the University of Northern Iowa and part of the editorial masthead of the North American Review. In the summer of 2013 I was able to return the favor and arranged for Jeremy to come to Springfield, Illinois, to be a “Poet in the Parlor” at the historic Vachel Lindsay Home; while he was in town, he also gave a fascinating talk on the history of the North American Review and its fast-approaching bicentennial (in 2015) — the talk was hosted by Adam Nicholson at The Pharmacy Art Center.
In 2012, I established Twelve Winters Press with the intention of using it to bring out my books, or keep them in print, and to bring out the literary work of others. Last winter I contacted Jeremy about possibly working with the Press on some sort of project under his editorial direction — and much to my delight he informed me he had a collection, The Waxen Poor, that he was interested in publishing. He sent me the manuscript, which I was able to read (again, much to my delight) before meeting him in Louisville for the conference this past February. After his reading in the beautiful Bingham Poetry Room in Ekstrom Library, we sat down to cups of coffee in the Library’s Tulip Tree Café and discussed his collection and made plans to bring it out this summer.
I’m happy to report that The Waxen Poor is indeed out. See Twelve Winters Press’s Poetry Titles page for full details.
I interviewed Jeremy via email about his intriguing collection, which includes poems published in such notable journals as Brevity, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Notre Dame Review, and Prairie Schooner, among many others. What follows are his unedited responses to my questions. When I had the honor of introducing Jeremy at the Vachel Lindsay Home, I said that I always enjoyed his readings because he was the sort of poet that I respected most: one who takes his poetry seriously but not himself. I believe this engaging combination of qualities is apparent here.
What’s the time span represented by the poems in The Waxen Poor? That is, how early is the earliest poem and how recent the most recent?
The earliest piece in the collection — and the one that really sparked this whole project — is the prose poem “Full Gospel,” which was originally published in the summer of 2006 in Brevity and was later reprinted in Best Creative Nonfiction. I bring this up only because I find the question of genre interesting. I originally wrote “Full Gospel” as a poem, but then as I started to revise, I became less and less interested in lines and line breaks and more and more interested in segmentation or braiding as a way to craft the piece. I can’t say that I was consciously blurring generic boundaries — I was just trying to write something true — but I’m still not quite sure how to categorize it. Is it an essay? A poem? A prose poem? In the end, I suppose, that’s not terribly important, but insofar as it might reveal something about the composition process — in this case, I think, how memory is organized — I think it’s an intriguing question.
Two other early pieces are the first one in the collection, “Brother Tom,” and the last, “Born for Adversity.” It was important, I think, that I knew where I was heading as I wrote and revised. I would certainly not consider The Waxen Poor a novel in verse, but I did feel that there was something of a narrative arc, if not an actual plot — even if it remained subtextual — that guided me along as I worked. I had a clear sense of the beginning and I knew the end, and so the challenge became what to do with the long expansive middle. As Margaret Atwood wrote, “True connoisseurs … are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.”
The most recent poem in the collection is the sequence of “Judas” poems, which came as something of a surprise to me as I wrote them. I hadn’t expected to cast “Brother Tom” as a Judas character, but there it is. Sometimes you can’t — and maybe you shouldn’t — control your characters. You can see that I’m trying to complicate Judas/Tom, though, by calling him “A man of tradition, assassin of the ages, / My translator, my traitor, my Judas, my friend” — the same kind of complication I’m attempting to bring to the entire collection. These “Judas” poems came to me about three years ago, and so The Waxen Poor represents five years of work.
Did you set out to write a collection around the topic of “Brother Tom,” or did the concept of collecting them develop over time? Either way, can you describe the thought process behind the collection?
In my mind The Waxen Poor was always a cohesive project. After “Full Gospel” I began organizing individual pieces around the character of “Brother Tom.” I wanted to explore this fraught relationship between two brothers, each of whom is like the other but also quite different — one a poet, the other struggling with mental illness. The poems are meant to be both personal and more broadly mythological, and I’ve tried to balance (or “harmonize” might be a better word) the experiential with the imagined, the everyday with the elevated. You could also say that the project is in some ways a coping mechanism, like Eliot’s “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” That is, how are we to deal with the pain and suffering in the world but through our art? When trying to understand and contend with something like mental illness, some of us turn to art, to poetry, for answers.
Many of the poems seem to be highly personal in their subject matter. Can you discuss the process of tapping into those emotions via the creative process?
As I said, I see the collection as something of a coping mechanism — but then in some ways, all art functions as a mechanism of this kind, even if you’re not dealing with emotionally fraught subjects. What do we make of this world around us and all of the various experiences we have? How do we give our lives any kind of meaning but by forming it, shaping it? Even the most experimental, appropriative forms of conceptualism in which all subjectivity has been evacuated are ways to cope.
That said, there are some poems in The Waxen Poor I can’t read in public anymore because they’re too emotionally difficult for me to get through, but I think that probably means something important is happening. I try to tell this to my creative writing students, that if something is too painful to write, you should write it, not for the sake of therapy — though that might end up being part of it — but because when a poem is difficult in this way, you’re getting near something that you care deeply about, even if it’s in ways that you can’t quite articulate yet. When we find a form for our pain or confusions, we’re allowing others to identify with it, with us. We’re letting our readers in.
The form of these poems varies considerably, and there are even some prose poems included in the collection. Can you discuss the interplay between subject and form for you as a poet? For example, how much one influences the other?
I’m a formalist insofar as I believe that form is meaning. To sever the two is to do a deep violence to the poem — and to misread it entirely. I think it takes a long time before this insight, which is easy enough to say and understand intellectually, sinks in deeply enough for it to be true as a writer. Or at least this has been the case for me. The prose poem is a perfect example of this fusion between form and meaning. I never set out to write the prose poem sequences you find in this collection. Rather, I discovered that this was the form the poem had to take — especially the somewhat surreal ones in which the thoughts and images and phenomena all seem to tumble forth, like consciousness itself. Likewise, some of the unrhymed sonnets in the collection were discovered. That is, as I began writing, I felt the rhetorical movement of the sonnet happening, the turn, and so I began shaping it accordingly. This means paying attention to more than just the “subject,” more than what the poem is supposedly “about,” and opening yourself up to different ways of knowing.
But there are a handful of exceptions. The poem “Abecedarian Advice” is a received form that I didn’t “discover” but rather imposed on myself as a challenge. And the four “Meds” poems are acrostics that spell out the names of the antipsychotic drugs “Haldol,” “Thorazine,” “Zyprexa,” and “Lithium” down the left margins of the poems. I like the way these formal experiments turned out because I found that I ended up thinking about things I never would have thought about before. The somewhat arbitrary restraint can ironically be very liberating. In fact, I think the acrostic is the most underrated form. With other forms, like the sonnet, for example, you’re dealing not only with external characteristics like rhyme and meter but also an internal rhetorical shape that isn’t always the right fit for the poem. The acrostic, though, can accommodate absolutely anything. It gets a bad rap and seems unsophisticated because we’ve all written them in elementary school. But I think there’s something refreshing about the form’s simplicity.
Several of the poems in the collection had been published individually, but it seemed that you hadn’t been circulating the collection for a while. Can you discuss the history of the collection in terms of your thoughts on its publication as a whole?
Well, I did send this manuscript out into the world for a while, entering it into contests and open reading periods at a handful of presses that I like. But I’m a constant and somewhat obsessive reviser, so I pulled it back and have been working on it periodically for a few years. I’d add a poem, remove a poem, tinker with the chronology, worry over line breaks. Was it Valéry who said that a poem is never finished, it’s only abandoned? I guess that feeling had something to do with it — a desire not to abandon the poems. And because it’s a collection that I care deeply about and is in some ways very personal, I felt it had to be just right — and it had to find the right place, too, that would present it in the way I think it needs to be presented. I’d say it’s finally ready for the world, and so I’m excited now that it’s found a great home with Twelve Winters.
You play with both Christian and Classical allusions (and bring these together in the title and cover illustration, which you found). Why overtly connect these two traditions? What do you think is the effect of their interplay in the collection?
First, I’d say that even though I am not a Christian, Christian symbols and metaphors are culturally inescapable. And so these stories and images live with us and inform our very identities quite deeply. To deny them is to deny a rich vein of cultural and personal meaning. So, too, with the Greeks. As much as the Christian bible, the Iliad is a foundational text that we should allow to enter and affect our work, even today. In this way, I’d call myself a traditional poet — though that word “tradition” rings vaguely conservative, doesn’t it? What I mean to suggest is that I’m traditional in that I attend to the past — this great gift of literature that has been left to us — and try to make meaning of and from it. I’m reminded of something Barry Lopez wrote: “If art is merely decorative or entertaining, or even just aesthetically brilliant, if it does not elicit hope or a sense of the sacred, if it does not speak to our fear and confusion, or to the capacities for memory and passion that imbue us with our humanity, then the artist has only sent us a letter that requires no answer.” I suppose I’d say that what I’m trying to do is in this collection — and in all of my work, really — is to respond to the letter that’s been sent to us from the past, while writing a letter of my own in the present. Not to mix my metaphors, but I believe artists are not so much influenced by tradition as they exist at a confluence, where the past meets the present, like two rivers meeting.
With your wife Adrianne Finlay being a novelist, you’re a two-writer household. I suspect that creates an interesting dynamic. Can you discuss what that is like, and how it may affect your own creativity?
My wife is always my first reader — and my best. Having another writer in the house is always beneficial for when you want to know if something makes sense or sounds right. But also because there’s a mutual understanding that we each need time to do our work, and so we make time for each other in that way. Of course, a big difference is that she deals with long narratives while I deal with shorter lyrical pieces, and so we’re often trying to accomplish much different things. For Adrianne, I think, clarity is very important — as is plot — whereas I might value strangeness or obscurity in a poem. As a poet, I also think the form is just as important as the meaning — as I said before, it is the meaning — but writers of novels I think tend to be less interested — not uninterested, just less interested — in the overt music of language. Or they want to foreground something else. To dwell too decidedly on sound and language might interfere with the story. That said, we both teach fiction and poetry, and so we’re each well enough acquainted with the other’s genre to be good readers. And so, while The Waxen Poor is, indeed, a collection of lyrical poems, I do think that my work slips in and out of narrative and dramatic modes, too. That’s something I think I pay more attention to because of Adrianne.
What projects are you working on now?
What’s been occupying a lot of my creative energies lately is my work as associate editor of the North American Review. The magazine was founded in 1815, so we’re about to celebrate our bicentennial, which is really quite remarkable. I mean, how many things in the United States get to celebrate a bicentennial? It’s exciting but humbling. At any rate, I’m directing a conference to mark the occasion. We have so many great events planned, including keynote readings by Martín Espada, Patricia Hampl, and Steven Schwartz. People can find the call for papers here.
I’m also editing a book called Walt Whitman and the North American Review, which collects the seven essays Whitman published in the NAR in the last decade of his life, along with the many reviews, essays, and articles on him and his work that appeared in the magazine’s pages. Editorial work is challenging but also deeply gratifying.
J.D. Schraffenberger is the associate editor of the North American Review and an associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He’s the author of the collection of poems Saint Joe’s Passion (Etruscan), and his other work has appeared in Best Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his two daughters and his wife, the novelist Adrianne Finlay.
(Author Photo by Adrianne Finlay)
Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C
My paper, “Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C,” was presented Feb. 20, 2014, at the Louisville Conference on Literature Culture Since 1900 as part of the panel “The New Adventures of Old Debates: Postmodernism and the New Sincerity,” chaired by Nick Curry, University of Louisville. Other papers presented were “‘Everything is ending but not yet’: Post-Modern Irony and the New Sincerity in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Katherine Leake Weese, Hampden-Sydney College; and “Liminality and Dialogism: Dreamscape Narratives in Donald Barthelme’s Postmodern Paradise” by Nicholas Sloboda, University of Wisconsin-Superior. (A much abridged version of this paper appeared as a review in North American Review, 298.4. Search this blog for other Gass papers.)
Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C
by Ted Morrissey, University of Illinois Springfield
A long and complex novel, or series of novels . . . may present us with a world complete through every principle and consequence, rivaling in its comprehensiveness the most grandiose philosophical systems. (Gass, “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” 9)
With the release of Middle C in 2013, William H. Gass’s third novel, one imagines that Gass has attempted to do just that: present us with a world complete. For the past half century, William Gass has been one of America’s most prolific essayists and literary critics, as well as one of its most receptive interviewees. Consequently, his ideas about writing, especially about writing the novel and what makes a great one, are well documented, and they’ve remained amazingly consistent decade after decade. Middle C, even more so than his previous two novels, is a praxis of his most heartfelt theories—which makes it a deliberately challenging read, deliberately aimed at a rapidly disappearing readership. What is more, given Gass’s age, Middle C may prove to be the final argument in his legendary debate with John Gardner in which aesthetics was pitted against morality as the rubric for assessing great literature.
Gass, who was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924, is a self-acknowledged slow writer of his own fiction. Therefore, his novels have appeared with great gaps of time in between: Omensetter’s Luck (1966), The Tunnel (1995), and now Middle C—with an iconic collection of stories, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), a highly experimental novella (?), Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), and a collection of novellas, Cartesian Sonata (1998), rounding out his books of fiction. Meanwhile, the professor of philosophy, retired from Washington University in St. Louis, has published ten collections of essays and criticism between 1970 and 2012. Conversations with William H. Gass, a compendium of just some of his copious interviews, was released by University Press of Mississippi in 2003.
This paper will deal with Gass’s concept of narrative structure that he refers to as layering, his views on characterization, and his sense of morality’s proper place in fiction.
In Middle C, via the novel’s singular focus, music professor Joseph Skizzen, Gass demonstrates the narrative elements he believes to be essential to great fiction, but also the ones that have prevented him from being a best-selling author—though they have garnered him numerous honors and accolades, including the American Book Award for The Tunnel, a ponderous novel twenty-six years in the writing, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Though not a musician himself, Gass has long been fascinated with musical composition and has tried to structure his novels as if they were orchestral arrangements. More important, Gass’s nonlinear structural technique that he refers to as layering mimics musical composition, he believes, because the goal of a great novel is to affect the reader as a whole creation: “[T]he linear element in fiction is inescapable and must be dealt with, used just as it is in music, but there are other elements too, equally important. So I have a kind of view of a work as being layered: certain layers, or certain aspects of it, are nonlinear and certain aspects are linear. Then what becomes interesting is the tension, the contrasts, contradictions between the layers” (Janssens 60-61).
The result of layering is a narrative that shifts relentlessly between Skizzen’s childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and beyond to nearing retirement age, forcing readers to acquire their temporal bearings with each new section. It is useful that each phase of Skizzen’s life tends to take place in a distinct setting with different casts of characters (except for the professor’s mother, Miriam, as she is a constant throughout). Gass also provides some assistance in how he references Skizzen as either Joey or Joseph, but ultimately the two names appear side by side in the novel as if the young and old versions of his character become conjoined twins and experience the world through dual perceptions.
The merciless shifting in time is due to the thematic elements in the book. Gass writes in “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” “But there are some points in a narrative which remain relatively fixed; we may depart from them, but soon we return, as music returns to its theme” (49). In The Tunnel, Gass employed a twelve-part structure suggestive of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone pattern. “That is how I began working out the way for the various themes to come in and out,” said Gass. “It’s layered that way too” (Kaposi 135). In Middle C, Gass has returned to the concept of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system but even more overtly. For one thing, Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, like Alan Berg and Anton Webern, are discussed at various points in the novel via Professor Skizzen’s lectures; and Skizzen himself effects the aura of a Viennese intellectual, reflective of Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School of musical composers. Also, throughout the novel Skizzen wrestles with a sentence, or series of sentences, having to do with the destructive nature of the human race, as he continually composes the thought, critiques it, and revises it. Skizzen believes he is on the right track when he writes the sentence in twelve beats, and near the end of the novel he feels he has the sentence perfect:
First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive
The Professor sums up his perfect creation: “Twelve tones, twelve words, twelve hours from twilight to dawn” (352). Gass, through his narrator, does not discuss the sentence’s direct correlation to the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone system, but it does match it exactly. The twelve-tone system has four parts, described as Prime—Retrograde—Inverse—Retrograde Inverse. As such, the primacy of “First Skizzen felt” is represented literally with the word First, while “mankind must perish” suggests the retrograde movement of the species from existence to extinction. “Then he feared” marks the inverse of Skizzen’s initial impression, and “it might survive” is the retrograde inverse because it reverses his belief that mankind will become extinct and concludes that it will actually persist.
In a microcosmic sense, Skizzen’s capturing of the perfect expression of his fears about the human race reflect Gass’s overarching strategy of novel composition, which he expressed in a 2012 Tin House interview: “You want to organize and make sense out of it on a conceptual level as well as a physical, or musical, level. And indeed, a spatial level. Like a parking garage, there are a bunch of levels” (Gerke 41). On the page, Gass, as he often has, uses typographical features to suggest the multilayered nature of Skizzen’s expression, by indenting, tabbing and boldfacing the words, so that visually they draw attention to their deeper meanings and associations. This evolving thought about humanity is associated with another reoccurring element in the novel, Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum, which is a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings, and handwritten notecards that detail horrific human actions:
The gothic house he and his mother shared had several attic rooms, and Joseph Skizzen had decided to devote one of them to the books and clippings that composed his other hobby: the Inhumanity Museum. . . . Sometimes he changed the [name] placard to an announcement that called it the Apocalypse Museum. . . . Daily, he would escape his sentence to enter yesterday’s clippings into the scrapbooks that constituted the continuing record. (55)
And just as Gass returns to the evolving sentence throughout the novel, he also references the Inhumanity Museum and its growing record of atrocities. Hence, the motif of humans’ inhumanity to other humans demonstrates one of Gass’s other important theories about fictional narrative: that anything can be a character and people don’t make for the most interesting ones. He writes, “Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached. [. . . A]nything, indeed, which serves as a fixed point like a stone in a stream or that soap in Bloom’s pocket, functions as a character” (“The Concept of Character” 49, 50). Perhaps Gass’s interest in developing ideas as characters and not people stems from his most fundamental affections. In the Tin House interview, he acknowledged that he “hate[s] the species” and aligns himself with Spinoza’s advocacy of “lov[ing] ideas” (Gerke 33, 36). People, he says, are less trustworthy than objects, and the singular focus of Middle C, Joseph Skizzen, reflects that lack of trustworthiness in that the music professor is a complete fraud who constructs his career, and his very life, from forged documents and fabricated CVs.
Gass said that Skizzen was based on a real history professor at Wooster College in Ohio who was living under a false identity and on the run from both the English and Canadian authorities. Gass remarked, “I want to talk about—or deal with—somebody who’s a counterfeit of that sort. Professor Skizzen obtains his position with false CVs [. . .] but he gradually expands his dreamland to include the classes he starts to teach” (Gerke 37-8). Skizzen’s falseness even extends to his supposed admiration of Schoenberg, whom he chose as a pet topic because no one knew much about him. Perhaps Skizzen’s irreverent strategy reflects to some degree Gass’s own choice of Schoenberg’s twelve-part system to use as a controlling structure for his fiction. In writing criticism, Gass had to stay within the boundaries of expectation, he said, but for his fiction, which has been more important to him, “there are no expectations, there is no job to fulfill,” allowing him “to be more outrageous, or daring” (32).
Gass’s emphases in Middle C on inhumane behavior and on Skizzen’s profound falseness represent another of his theories about artistic, versus popular, writing. On the one hand, Gass has said that significant novels need to be about significant themes. In the essay “Fiction and the Figures of Life,” Gass writes, “[T]he form and method of metaphor are very much like the form and method of the novel. . . . [T]he artist is able to organize whole areas of human thought and feeling, and to organize them concretely, giving to his model the quality of sensuous display.” He goes on,
[T]hen imagine the Oriental deviousness, the rich rearrangement, the endless complications of the novel conceived as I suggest it should be, as a monumental metaphor, a metaphor we move at length through, the construction of a mountain with its views, a different, figured history to stretch beside our own, a brand-new ordering both of the world and our understanding. (68-9)
Yet this world-altering effect must be executed via mundane plot details. Gass said, “. . . I want to avoid as much as possible situations, extreme situations whose reality is strong because then the reader is reading it like a newspaper or something. If you’re going to write aesthetically about it, you have to defuse its power in order to get anybody to pay any attention to the nature of the prose” (Gerke 42-3). He said that “ninety percent of bad literature” was due to writers focusing on the sensational act itself, the part of real life that is “quite shattering, or pornographic, or whatever. And it isn’t art” (43). As such, Professor Skizzen’s achievement of the perfect twelve-part sentence about humans’ inhumanity acts as a kind of climax for Middle C, and Skizzen’s feared defrocking, which occupies the final pages of the novel, is a sort of anticlimax juxtaposed against the truly climactic narrative event.
This avoidance of the extreme situation has been practiced by Gass ever since his very first written narrative, from about 1951, the novella “The Pedersen Kid,” which carefully sidesteps descriptions of child abuse, molestation, kidnapping, rape and murder, leaving them merely implied on the fringes of the plot. And in The Tunnel, Gass’s most ambitious work, the Holocaust remains in the background while the novel’s protagonist secretly digs a hole to nowhere in his basement.
Gass is in his ninetieth year, and it’s all but certain that he will not write any other novels. He’s said that more novellas, stories, essays and literary criticism could be forthcoming, so Middle C may well be his closing argument in his famous debate with John Gardner, who died in 1982. Gass and Gardner’s debate regarding the chief aim of fiction was often carried out in private, but it also became very public, being transcribed in various interviews and even fictionalized by Larry McCaffery in The Literary Review as a Point-Counterpoint-style “confrontation” (135). At the risk of oversimplifying their positions … Gardner believed that literature’s highest calling was to put forward a moral, life-affirming message, while Gass believed that literature’s highest calling was to be something beautiful, a work of linguistic art. Gass said in a 1978 interview, “There is a fundamental divergence about what literature is. I don’t want to subordinate beauty to truth and goodness. John and others have values which they think are important. Beauty, after all, is not very vital for people. I think it is very important . . .” (LeClair 55). Gardner’s view was that “you create in the reader’s mind a vivid and continuous dream . . . living a virtual life, making moral judgments in a virtual state” (49-50).
More than a decade after Gardner’s death, with the publication of The Tunnel, whose narrator, history professor Frederick Kohler, seems to sympathize with the Nazis, Gass was still clarifying his position on morality versus art in literature. He said that his “position [had] been frequently misunderstood, almost invariably” (Kaposi 122). He went on,
Ethical, political, and social concerns will be present in every writer’s work at every point. The question is not that; the question is how you write about them. . . . My view is that you don’t judge a work to be beautiful because it’s morally uplifting or tells the truth about things. And it’s perfectly possible for a work to be beautiful and not tell the truth, and in fact to be morally not a very nice thing. Ideally of course it would be all these things at once. (122)
Unlike Kohler, Joseph Skizzen is clearly appalled by human behavior, like the Holocaust. In his lectures on Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron, Skizzen contemplates how Jews were able to reconcile “the Almighty’s malevolence . . . a punishment long in coming and therefore most deserved” (209). Thus, in the context of a novel in which nothing much happens, certainly nothing earthshattering, Gass interjects significant moral issues, especially involving humakind’s inhumane treatment of itself. In The Tunnel, Gass created a character and a book who were “morally not a very nice thing,” and it seemed to distract many readers from its artfulness, its literary beauty. In a 1998 interview, Gass responded to critic Robert Atler’s assertion that The Tunnel was an immoral book because of the way it treated the Holocaust by saying that it must be “to some sorts of reader an immoral book. I want it to be for them. I want it misread in a certain way by certain people. It’s for me the proof in the pudding” (Abowitz 144). Gass said that he considers Middle C “a much lighter” book (Gerke 38), even though he deals with many of the same issues as in The Tunnel. What makes it seem lighter, perhaps, is the first-person narrator’s posture toward atrocities like the Holocaust.
In the end, then, Gass has found a way to create a work of literary art while also taking the higher moral ground that his friend John Gardner advocated. Gardner said in 1978 that his “ambition in life is to outlive Bill Gass and change all of his books” (LeClair 55)—maybe he managed to change Gass’s final novel from beyond the grave.
Gass is adamant that he’s written his last novel as a matter of practicality—after all, eighteen years elapsed between The Tunnel and Middle C (“I can’t live forever,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)—but he’s working on a collection of essays, a collection short stories (alluded to in the mid-1990s and still not complete apparently), and he’s planning another novella or two.
Let me end on a personal and professional note: I’m planning to edit a series of books on Gass’s work through Twelve Winters Press, and about a week ago I put out a call for submissions (of abstracts) for the first anthology, titled Critical Perspectives on William H. Gass: The Novellas. Please visit TwelveWinters.com/submissions for details and to access the submissions portal. You can also follow my 12 Winters Blog and ReadingGass.org for updates on the project.
Works Cited
Abowitz, Richard. “Still Digging: A William Gass Interview.” 1998. Ammon 142-48.
Ammon, Theodore G., ed. Conversations with William H. Gass. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.
Gass, William H. “The Concept of Character in Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 34-54. Print.
—. “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 55-76. Print.
—. Middle C. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.
—. “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 3-26. Print.
Gerke, Greg. “Many-Layered Anger: A Conversation with William Gass.” Tin House 14.2 (Dec. 2012): 30-45. Print.
Janssens, G. A. M. “An Interview with William Gass.” 1979. Ammon 56-70.
Kaposi, Idiko. “A Talk with William H. Gass.” 1995. Ammon 120-37.
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass and John Gardner: A Debate on Fiction.” 1978. Ammon 46-55.
McCaffery, Larry. “The Gass-Gardner Debate: Showdown on Main Street.” The Literary Review 23.1 (fall 1979): 134-144. Print.
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