William H. Gass, The Tunnel, Dalkey Archive Press, 1999.www.readinggass.org/
If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return? — William H. Gass
"Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.
William Frederick Kohler, a distinguished professor of history at a midwestern university, has just completed his magnum opus, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany." All that remains to be done is an introduction, yet when Kohler sits down to write he begins instead to write an entirely other book, another history- that of the historian himself. What he writes is the complete opposite of his clearly argued causally determined history of the Third Reich. It is chaotic, obscure, full of lies and disguises, gaps and repetitions. Indeed, his introduction is so personal that he hides it from his wife, and then begins digging a tunnel out from the basement of his house. The tunnel mirrors Kohler's digging into his life—his feelings, his past, his loves and hatreds, as the writing, the digging, and the reader's reading blend into one profound meditation on history, on evil, on the living and the dead. The Tunnel is a monumental and monumentally original work of fiction."
"This horrible novel, which I read and re-read as part of a rather sporadic reading group, was wonderful. Tunelling with Gass was depressing work, but work that rang true at many levels. At a meta-level I found Gass’s text, and his authorial presence behind his protagonist, useful in the development of empathy and self-analysis – Gass excavates that William Kohler may tunnel, and it his excavation that redeems, however blackly, Kohler’s tunnelling." - Robert Minto
"A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 1/2 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition... The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime." - Michael Silverblatt
"There is no light at the end of this Tunnel, not even a whimper, merely a pun, like a shaggy God story, except that God is dead and so are Author Gods. As if he were Isaiah Berlin's evil twin, Gass kills off everybody who was anybody in the Western intellectual tradition (.....) (G)ravedigger Gass has composed a kind of anti-canticle, an aria of obloquy. Each paragraph, each sentence, every clause, every phrase, has been burnished breathless, willfully wrought, stippled stark, with an obsessiveness bordering on Brodkey baroque. Not a lyric, but it's laced with acid. Not a whale tooth, but it's scrimshawed." - John Leonard
"Surely at least once per page, I leaned back in my chair and felt that opiated dilation of the senses, that vicious surplus, that glowworm flash of being that I can get only from language affixed to the page, and then only when a master has affixed it there." - Sven Birkerts
"The Tunnel strikes me as an extraordinary achievement, a literary treat with more than a few shocking tricks inside of it. For 650 pages one of the consummate magicians of English prose pulls rabbits out of sentences and creates shimmering metaphors before your very eyes." - Michael Dirda
"This long-awaited magnum opus by the dean of American prose modernists, 30 years in the making, is a terrible disappointment. In this endless ramble of a novel, Gass (Omensetter's Luck; In the Heart of the Heart of the Country), though here, as always, possessed of a bewitching and spectacularly fluid and allusive style, fails to find a suitable home for his narrator's wickedly dyspeptic views of history, marriage and culture. William Kohler is a Midwestern academic historian working on an introduction to his life's work-a massive study of "guilt and innocence in Hitler's Germany.'' This, however, and the fact that Kohler begins to secretly dig a tunnel out of his basement, are the only shards of plot in this otherwise formless book. Gass, as readers of his fiction and gorgeous literary essays will know (On Being Blue), can turn a phrase and render lyrical descriptions that have not only music to them, but also shape and weight. But in portraying the failed career and life of Kohler, these gifts are brought to bear on such a litany of sour rant-about his aging body, his wife's widening girth, the fatuous enthusiasms of his colleagues and mentors-that the reader will beg for a way out of this dark and airless space. Unfortunately, there is no light at the end of The Tunnel, and the promise of a new perspective on our century's most heinous crime-the Holocaust-is very much a forgotten vow." - Publishers Weekly
"Here, Gass presents William Kohler, a professor of history who sits in his basement study trying to write a preface to his monumental work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, but instead finds himself writing his autobiography. Historical objectivity eludes him, as old wounds and resentments obscure the facts. He broods over an unhappy childhood and a loveless marriage and regrets "a life spent in a chair." The result is a sort of Mein Kampf from this self-described Fhrer of the Party of Disappointed People. Between chapters, Kohler pauses to dig an escape tunnel through the basement wall as his wife waits patiently upstairs. Like Gass's best-known metafictional work, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (LJ 12/1/71), this book is filled with puns, limericks, illustrations, and unusual typefaces. In marked contrast to the earlier work, this playful design seems completely at odds with the ponderous text. For larger fiction collections." - Edward B. St. John
"The publication of Gass' most ambitious work to date is without doubt a literary event, although one wonders how many readers will see this torrent of a text through to the end. Gass is known for his experimentation with the multiplicity of meanings and texture of words and syntax and has always been fascinated with creating a literary equivalent of the meanderings of the mind. Here he has rendered the dense flow of musings, memories, and fantasies contained within "fair and fat" William Frederick Kohler, a fiftysomething historian who is supposed to be putting the finishing touches on his magnum opus, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany". Instead, overwhelmed by his prolonged contemplation of the Holocaust and perverse defense of Hitler, Kohler is cracking up. He begins writing a secret and obsessively explicit journal about his wretched boyhood, shameful experiences in Germany during the 1930s, and sexual dalliances, concealing these confessional pages within his book's immense manuscript. Then, descending further into a spiritual crisis, he starts digging a tunnel to nowhere in the basement of his house. This exercise in futility, with its sexual undertones and clear reference to the grave, is a symbol of his desperation. Kohler's stream of consciousness carries both deep thoughts and sheer nonsense, and he is, by turns, funny, irritating, gross, poignant, and brilliant. Gass has his antihero ponder the significance of everything from his obesity and small penis to the poetry of Rilke, the subjectivity of history, and the nature of depravity in a narrative that is both virtuosic and indulgent." - BookList
"William Gass' magnum opus, thirty years in the making, is an unusual summing-up. This tome fits in the long (and fat) line of American novels that try to be comprehensive and larger than life, encompassing everything and more. In recent decades Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis, and others have had a go (or several), and here is Gass' contribution. The Tunnel stands out for a number of reasons, the two most obvious being that it is a nasty piece of work, and that it is incredibly carefully crafted. These, especially, are both the greatest weaknesses and greatest strengths of the work.
The language of The Tunnel is meticulous and inspired. Sentences, paragraphs, pages are perfectly cadenced, a sheer reading pleasure rarely found. Gass writes stunningly well, and many of the details and asides are more fully realized and better done than many an author manages anywhere in their texts. The danger, of course, is that Gass gets lost in the beauty of expression. Even this might be manageable, except that finally the novel does read like one that has been cobbled together over the decades. The short, strong sections that have appeared over the years in eighteen different literary publications (though often in quite different form) are not ideally tied together. It is not a fatal weakness, but a noticeable one.
More difficult to adjust to is the darkness of the novel. It is a bleak tunnel, with no exit, a somber ride, with Gass unrelentingly dragging his readers down deeper. Most such big books - certainly those by Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis - are marked by a sense of humour, often emphasizing the absurd. Gass offers little in the way of such amusement. There is no relief in what little humour is on offer, and even the absurdity hits too close to home. There is a lot of pain and disaffection in this book.
The framework of the novel is relatively simple: its narrator, William Frederick Kohler, is a professor at a Midwestern university. He has basically finished his magnum opus, analyzing Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, and sits in his cellar trying to write the introduction to the work. What he writes instead is this - an introduction and explication not only of the work but of his own life.
It is not a happy life. Kohler is unhappily married to Martha, father of two sons he can not relate to. He had an unhappy childhood, and he is dissatisfied with the world and himself. A recurring theme is his idea to found the Party of Disappointed People - the PdP. (He doodles designs for the PdP logo throughout the book, including proposed flags, insignias, banners, and a "Medal for ingratitude". The last page is a picture of the PdP logo.)
The Tunnel is a book about history, the German example used as a focus, but one whose lessons Kohler sees applicable in all the world, at any level. The most influential figure in Kohler's life is "Mad Meg", Magus Tabor, a German professor of history. This professor, "an aborigine on display," determined Kohler's view of history. Tabor has little respect for historical data and so-called hard facts: "data are dogs," he claims, "they merely need to be trained." His strong personality and unusual approach to the study of history greatly impress a susceptible Kohler.
Kohler readily identifies with the Nazis - not necessarily as a sympathizer, but understanding what they do. He is outraged by some of their actions, but he understands how it came to that - and sees himself acting similarly. Morality is not black and white in this book. Kohler revisits Kristallnacht and the events leading up to it in the book, his historical analysis pointing to the ambiguities and complexities of the event. The outcome was reprehensible, but Kohler paints a more complex picture of what led to it.
It is hard to sympathize with a character who can so easily identify with the Nazis, and Kohler has few redeeming qualities that might change one's opinion of him. However, he also makes few excuses. He is honest in presenting himself as thoroughly unlikable. His arguments, as to man's weakness and willingness to commit such heinous crimes, are his central issue. He shows little professorial respect for ideas, understanding the importance of life itself, focussing as much on sex as anything (and his own sad and sorry sex-life (and sexual organ)). He is, realistically, filled with contradictions - surprisingly, Rilke is his favourite poet (and a major influence on the book).
Kohler slowly reveals more about himself, telling of his unloving childhood and his parents, then of his marriage and his early, difficult years as a young, married academic. (Gass presents many of these descriptive scenes exceptionally well.) Later the focus is on colleagues. Kohler does not do well in his personal relationships, reviling everyone on these pages with his poison pen.
Language also plays a significant role for Kohler. From the many references to Rilke (art he can admire, though he questions the man) to his limerick-spouting colleague Culp, Kohler finds some release in poetry. (There are quite a number of limericks in the book, among the few genuinely funny parts of the novel - though most might be considered quite offensive.) But language pervades all, as Gass constantly reminds his reader. He has Magus Tabor state:
'The study of history is essentially the study of symbols and markers, of verbal remains - symbol middens, shall we say ? - and tombs. Our study, gentlemen, the study of history, is really a study of language. Only words speak past the present; only words have any kind of honest constant visual life.'
Kohler claims that "I had begun life with the poet's outlook, in the celebrational mode." Disillusionment, however, is not long in coming. The blame lies with his unloved parents, on whom he dwells more and more, as well as the world as Kohler finds it. Disappointment rears its head at every corner, and Kohler can identify with society's losers, bigots, and fellow-travellers - and their ultimate incarnation, the Nazis. Language and his love for it keeps him somewhat human and grounded, but it can also be brutal:
Language is always honest. Language doesn't lie, only its users. (...) Notice how 'lover' is mostly spelled by using 'over,' and 'sex' is two-thirds 'ex.'
Kohler is not German, as he often reminds the reader (or himself), but he is drawn to Germany. Professionally, the history Kohler focusses on is that of Nazi Germany. His first book, Nuremberg Notes, was "a collection of observations of the War Crimes Trials." Kohler's approach - wondering about "the real reasons for this legal charade" - won him no praise. Kohler continues to be uncompromising in his examination of the Nazi period, an attitude easily mistaken for that of the apologist.
Kohler seeks escape and refuge, in both the book which he can not complete and in his life. He secretly tunnels under his house, out from the cellar, and though he does not get very far it is an accomplishment he takes pride in. Instead of release, however, he finds himself in danger of being buried alive. Similarly, what was meant to be an introduction to his grand tome shifts more and more towards a memoir of his unhappy childhood and his unhappy life.
The Tunnel is a sweep of history, with the odd arc of Nazi Germany and the American Mid-West dominating it. There is hardly a word about modern Germany, nor much of the rest of the world (beyond the mention of some stray tyrants). It ultimately reads surprisingly like a work of regional (Mid-Western) literature.
The Tunnel is a dark, big book, without the passion of the European pessimists (Gass is no Strindberg, nor, for all the pseudo-sympathy for (or understanding of) the Nazis, is he a Céline). The moral questions posed loom large and Gass presents them well - but not everyone will want to hear them. Kohler admits to belonging to the huge disenfranchised group that would make up his imagined Party of Disappointed People, but few others are likely to admit to identifying with that group.
Gass writes exceptionally well, and in large part this book is, on a purely literal level, a great pleasure to read. The moral dilemmas might give pause and quite a few nasty things do happen (and Gass does the graphic as well as he does everything else), but this is a masterfully written book.
It is also a surprisingly domestic and rural book, for all its pan-historical ambitions. It considers the twentieth century, but ultimately shies away from it. The Nazis are examined in detail, but even America is otherwise examined in relatively cursory manner. Kohler is too self-obsessed and too filled with egomaniacal loathing to give much of a picture of his students and life in general. The book also reads as if written in the 1960s, stuck in the moment of its first conception.
It is, nevertheless, a significant achievement. There are aspects of the book that are off-putting, but it is exceptionally well done, raising important issues and framing them well (and in a manner one does not frequently encounter). And Gass is an exceptional stylist, with only a few sections that might be described as over-written (and simply none that might be called under-written).
Definitely not a book for everyone, but a must for anyone interested in serious literature. It is among the few American books written in the 1990s that will undoubtedly last, and it is arguably among the best (certainly better than, for example, Pynchon's and DeLillo's 1990s efforts)." - The Complete Review
"IF you want to go down into the self, you'd better go armed to the teeth. Paul Valery says that somewhere, and it was what came to mind as I began reading "The Tunnel," this huge and long-awaited novel by William H. Gass, the masterpiece, one must presume, of this 70-year-old American master.
A middle-aged professor of history at a Midwestern university takes to going down into the cellar of his big middle-class house, away from his unloved, undesired, unloving wife. He starts tunneling down through the floor and out beyond the foundations, lying on his fat belly and squirming past trowelfuls of clay and dirt and dust on his way out. He is escaping from his life.
That is the operative metaphor of this 652-page book, yet in only a few of its many chapters is the actual tunneling presented in ordinary narrative space as ordinary narrated event. Mostly the book is remembrance, invective and expostulation, along with lewd instances and merry excuses, and the tunnel remains just a motif, a poetic image occasionally stumbled into in the midst of other things. All the things, in fact, that Mr. Gass has provided his professor with in the way of the arms and weapons he will need to dig out of his life. As we know, and not just from Freud and other psychoenterologists, the only way to dig out of your life is to dig through it. So the professor talks from the middle of his life, backward, forward, remembering a furtive love life that is mostly skin and spurt, the nasty trivial obsessions of academic life, his horrible home.
"The Tunnel" is maddening, enthralling, appalling, coarse, romantic, sprawling, bawling. It is driven by language and all the gloriously phony precisions the dictionary makes available. It is not a nice book. It will have enemies, and I am not sure after one reading (forgive me, it's a big book) that I am not one of them. Let me tell you what I can.
There was a little boy, an only child, raised in a bleak Midwestern town by an alcoholic mother and a verbally brutal father. It would not take a Dickens to borrow the reader's sympathy and show us the little boy's suffering, his slow escape from that abusive milieu, and to delicately sketch the paths of liberty the boy might find, or the hopeless mire into which he might, reader sighing, fall back.
BUT that is not William Gass's way. Instead, he leaps ahead half a century and gives us the sex-besotted, verbally brutal professor the boy becomes, a gross character with fascist views and a taste for sly affairs with his students. He gives us the thick of the man, the dirt to tunnel through. To get, if we get, at last to the truth of him. In fact, it is not till more than 600 pages into the book that we learn anything like the full particulars of the boy's youth. And when we get there, it is only to doubt that history is any more meaningful when it reveals origins than when it displays the blood and ordure of results.
Our professor of history is William Kohler (the name reminds us of plumbing fixtures), who occupies a wooden chair once held by his teacher, a German scholar named Tabor, who introduced him to the dangerous paths of history-by-paradox, to the historian as the creator of history. A loud know-it-all, Kohler began his academic career with a treatise that seemed to deny the probity and necessity of the Nuremberg Trials. Kohler has now crowned his work with a massive study called "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany," among the typescript pages of which he interleaves the pages he is writing, the ones we seem to be reading. The novel is then to be understood as the hidden, personal expression of that mind that publicly announces itself in a strange study of the range of German innocence.
Once I tried to write a novel in the voice of someone I detested, while still engaging the reader's fellow feeling. Alas, it was all too easy. And the reader found it all too easy to accept my monster as a hero. There is a trahison des clercs not confined to historians and political analysts. Novelists and poets too can commit the treason of the intellectuals. Kohler's whole existence, his operatic self-pity, the very articulateness of his self-justifications, affront our sense of right and of intellectual responsibility. Yet this is where the satiric novelist works best, exploring this plausible monster, our shadow man.
In creating such a character, Mr. Gass avails himself of classic arms of modernism: allusion, puzzle, style as flesh, language as fable. In those particulars he will not at all disappoint the readers who were so excited by his stories ("In the Heart of the Heart of the Country") a quarter-century ago, his novel "Omensetter's Luck," the enthralling essays of "On Being Blue," and, closest in many ways to the book at hand, that nonpareil shimmer of text and image in the novella "Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife," a foretaste of what we find in "The Tunnel."
But here the typographical games seem (unlike those in the novella) playful rather than evocative. And while Mr. Gass uses some devices Georges Perec or Harry Mathews might wield as strategies of composition, or grids of meaning, here the devices seem decorative, not so much claims on the reader's puzzle-solving faculties as rewards to the writer for going on, allowing himself some smutty doggerel after a night's hard noveling.
The real structure of the novel seems episodic, spasmodic, and thus apt enough for tunneling and boweling along. The first 50 pages or so are hard going, a Wagnerian wash of false starts, motifs, recollections, anticipations. Music helps; the rhythmic pressure of his language is seductive and bears along ever-interesting images and ideas. So much stuff in this novel! Old High Overdo is spoken here, burgessing and rabelaising; a favorite trick for a Gassian paragraph is to be a list of items rhythmically, sometimes even rhymingly, thrown together.
We first strike steady narrative with a splendid bravura chapter on the childhood town. We follow page after page of nostalgic detail through beautifully circumstanced streets, until slowly we realize that in all this Joycean summoning there is no one present except a plump little lonely boy, all alone in an unpeopled town. And that sets the measure of the book. This is a book about a monstrously lonely man, and how he makes himself so.
FOR the first few hundred pages not one of the few characters says anything at all except about the narrator. They have no selves except what they say about Willie young or old. The narrator has engulfed their reality, made their words his own.
Martha, his wife; Tabor, his teacher; his oddly-named colleagues in the Nabokovian history department; the imaginal (and maybe imaginary) Susu, with whom he has erotic escapades; lost Lou; fresh little Ru - all the u-girls of his life. We learn about these people, but few of them ever take on any kind of dimensionality; they are voices prodding, blaming, pleasing, leaving Willie.
All except Tabor. He's real enough. (He's usually called Mad Meg, after Bruegel's painting of the madwoman.) Kohler's mother is Margaret too, also a Meg, so the novel has two Mad Megs. Kohler winds up his youth by putting her into a madhouse. It's Tabor who sets Kohler off on his path of study - the darkest business of this novel - Hitler and the Holocaust.
In one of the strongest chapters in the book, Kohler goes through his own memories of researching Kristallnacht, the terrible first act in the war against the Jews, purportedly unleashed in response to the assassination in Paris of a German diplomat by an enraged Jew. Mr. Gass interweaves Kohler's studies of himself and his own reactions (of course) and his debunking guesses about the unethical motives of the assassin, with paragraphs ostensibly recording the memories of someone who actually took part in attacking the Jews.
The horror here and throughout "The Tunnel" is the way history is personalized, the plight of any individual equated with the plight of nations. The theory of Kohler's treatise seems to be something like this: Hitler was a wimp and couldn't have done a thing by himself; it was the massive resentment of the German people that did his work. So the German people are guilty, and the Nazis curiously innocent - dreamers who chanced to dream out loud and cause a 12-year riot of destruction.
What Kohler makes of this is a Party of Disappointed People, a PdP to match Hitler's NSDAP (the Nazi Party). All through "The Tunnel" we find cartoons, jokes, party platform planks, regalia, for this party of the resentful, the envious, the spiteful, the bigoted. (There is even a long chapter in defense of bigotry.) But like the central metaphor of the tunnel itself, the PdP never gets anywhere. It is never narrated, just thought about, played with. Its flags are funny, its party fez is a treat. But its implications are horrendous. Hitler was just a joke; it's the people who did it.
I can't imagine William Gass believing this, any more than I can believe that the Vorticist novelist and painter Wyndham Lewis (whom Mr. Gass often interestingly resembles in daring and despondency) really doubted that the Jews were human. The risk is the representation. One offers a character, and the character is taken as a man, then as a hero. When Kohler, speaking of his own resentment, remarks about Hitler, "I would have followed him just to get even," one senses maybe a comic exaggeration and tries to keep going. But when in the course of his endless bitter reflections on his failed marriage, Kohler exclaims "I've been in bedrooms as bad as Belsen," we recognize only iniquitous nonsense. There is no bedroom as bad as Belsen, and to say so is to signal that you do not know what Belsen is.
In whose hands are we as we read? Much of the time, we revel in the sheer glory of Mr. Gass's phenomenal prose style, his unflagging energy, in a prose that seems to embrace and swallow everything and make all things alive with interest. He can touch the secret waters of childhood, and spell out (in a beautiful chapter called "Do Rivers") the delicate silence of the body after love. But in the same invented character we keep coming up against raw bitterness, bigotries no fresher than Archie Bunker, intolerably lighthearted deployment of Nazi vileness.
While it is impressive that a novelist can pull off the tricks of creating such a sexist, bigoted, hate-filled character and of making the reader accept his vision of the real, there is a risk, one that every satirist takes. The risk is being believed, taken literally. To this day, we tend to think Jonathan Swift loathed humankind on the strength of Gulliver's aversion. William Gass takes the risk, and it is no small achievement to make us take our bearings from Swift and Wyndham Lewis and those magniloquent sourpusses Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Samuel Beckett, ghosts who seem to hover, as James Joyce does too, over this novel. But it is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds it so delights to display. It will be years before we know what to make of it. Darkness Is Deliberate
Spending 26 years writing any novel would be trying, but imagine living with William Kohler of "The Tunnel" for that long. "Better to have him on the page than inside of you," said a relieved William Gass during a recent telephone interview from his home in St. Louis.
He quickly dispelled any worries over how deeply he identified with his protagonist: "To write of such a man, you have to know loneliness, of course, but only of the kind that everyone has experienced at one time or another. It's like the terrible blizzards I once put in a short story. I had never experienced blizzards like that, but I had experienced snow. You just turn up the volume."
Mr. Gass, who teaches writing and directs the International Writers Center at Washington University, described "The Tunnel" as an exploration of "the inside of history" - the ambiguity and confusion hidden beneath any intellectual attempt at understanding the past.
"Historians tend to want to create a narrative, to make the world along the lines of the so-called realistic novels of the 19th century that pretended the world has meaning, that there are heroes and heroines and climaxes and real denouements and turning points," he explained. "I happen to believe in none of that, so I feel my book is real realism: there's contradiction and confusion and deliberate darkness."
"History is not simply the geology of human beings, it's about values," Mr. Gass said. "Historians have to constantly be weighing values of one sort or another. But it's not possible to come up with some neat picture, which is very unsatisfactory to many minds."
That, he explained, is why historians are particularly prone to simplification and vulnerable to moral lapses. "Kohler is a master of sophist reasoning," Mr. Gass said. "He certainly knows right from wrong, but that does not guarantee that one will make the right choices. Plato said that no one would knowingly do evil. I think people knowingly do evil all the time - for selfishness or revenge or all sorts of reasons. Evil has always given more pleasure than virtue, and we don't really like virtuous people."
Mr. Gass said the Holocaust was an inevitable subject for a novel about historical truth because of society's trouble consigning the Nazi horrors to the past. "A lot of Holocaust theorists worry about submerging it in history," he explained. "If it becomes a part of history, then it's no longer that special. It becomes like an unusual tornado or an extraordinary hurricane, when we've had a lot of tornadoes and hurricanes in history, and the Greeks persecuted this person and the Turks persecuted these people, and so on." TOBIN HARSHAW Neighbors and Strangers
They'd designed our building like a pair of paper mittens, but the left mitten had been limp when we moved in... and when its new tenants arrived, we found nothing amiss in the movers' tread... We simply had new neighbors. There was a hand now stuffed in the other glove. The noise was natural. Things would settle down. We hoped they would prove to be sympathetic types, maybe even friends. Then a headboard bumped rhythmically against what we'd thought was our most private wall. Their vacuum cleaner approached and receded like a train... After that we tiptoed, grew footpads, became stealthy. When we heard their closet hangers jangle like cattle on a hill far away, we shut our doors so silently the latches snicked like a rifle…. Our ears were soon as sensitive as a skinless arm, and we spoke in whispers, registered the furtive drip of remote taps. It was like living in front of a mike as you might pose and smirk in front of a mirror… In the flush of our shame, we wanted no one to know us, so we held hats in front of our voices, coats over our sinks and drains… I ceased singing in the shower. We kissed only in distant corners, and as quietly as fish… I exaggerate now, but it's true that as our neighbors sensed our presence the way we had theirs, they sent their sounds to Coventry too, and the house was shortly filled - palpably stuffed - with silence like a stomach's ache. From "The Tunnel." - Robert Kelly
"`The Tunnel'' is a book that's easier to marvel at than enjoy.
After two novels ("Omensetter's Luck'' and "Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife'') and an extraordinary story collection ("In the Heart of the Heart of the Country'') that came out between 1966 and 1971, William Gass has been electrifying his admirers for the past 20 years with literary and philosophic commentary rather than fiction.
His has always been the rarest kind of speculative writing, from ''On Being Blue'' to the more recent ``Habitations of the Word'' - argumentative, idiosyncratic, wise, the ideas twisting out in masterful sentences, turns of language and swings of mind.
In some ways, ``The Tunnel'' is a kind of continuation of Gass' recent publications, the meditative musings of the critic now delivered in the flimsy artificial semblance of imaginative tale-telling.
Never much on plot, Gass has reduced action to almost 700 pages of first- person commentary. The main - really only - character is William Frederick Kohler, a historian who has just completed a grand study of Nazi Germany. But when he tries to compose the introduction to his masterwork, he finds he cannot: ``Endings, instead, possess me... all ways out.''
So instead of an academic introduction, we are treated to several ``ways out,'' of himself and of his life, that Kohler attempts. The result is an overwhelming rant: rages and ruminations of a disgruntled man who has dwelled too long in his study, sat too long on his duff, ruminated too long on the follies of others, sequestered himself too long from his wife.
Kohler mingles comments on literature and Hitler with invective at his colleagues and rage at a lover's betrayal, supplying obsessive descriptions of her sexual parts. Sardonic and melancholic reminiscence of his mother's erratic behavior mixes with mournful annoyance at his father's negligence and desertion.
All this is delivered in long passages as full of puns and wordplay as events. Poems and limericks in boldface type, on everything from carnal nuns to history, pop up at odd moments to keep us in a mental dance, reeling between plot and parody. There are flags and pendants, crossword puzzles and illustrations, calling cards and typographical jokes - all reproduced on the page, all more a confirmation of Gass' ingenuity than Kohler's.
In short, "The Tunnel'' is a kind of symbolist's sandbox full of outcroppings and hills indicating ideas hidden just below the surface. It's hard not to find something on almost every page that surprises, asks a question in a new way, turns the story in an unfamiliar direction.
And there are some wonderful fictional motifs, particularly the image of Kohler digging a tunnel out from his entrapment in his study and hiding the dirt in the drawers of the massive Victorian furniture that his wife has bought and that occupies every square inch of their home.
All praise given, however, "The Tunnel'' seems a kind of masterwork of trash. Taken separately, sections are often compelling: a series of meditations on a photo album, for example, or a paragraph where Kohler argues that we forget the so-called great events of history and remember instead the "things that recollect us'': "laminated four-leaf clovers and cellophane sacks whose interiors marshmallows have powdered, jars containing jellybeans, balsa planes with their wings chipped where they'd struck trees, or rolls of bright red yarn, ripe as fruit, a darning egg, cricket clicker, or knitting needles with long amber handles.'' Sentences linger in the mind, ideas startle and brush across one's confirmed opinions like fresh paint.
But this is a claustrophobic exercise in tedium as well, page following page with what sometimes seems like random disregard for connections, incident heaped on incident with a merciless loathing for everyone, including himself.
Kohler has squandered his isolation on an invective-filled walk down a mud-spattered memory lane bordered by manure rather than roses. The person who receives most of his venom, along with all that dirt from the tunnel, is his obese wife, whose size is thickened with each phlegm-filled phrase, until the weight of Kohler's hatred crushes our sympathy for him.
Part of Gass' challenge seems to be to maintain our curious if not kindhearted relationship to Kohler, a misanthropic man given to self-flagellation and verbal masturbation. But Kohler is an invention that would test a saint's compassion. His arguments range from comments soft-soaping Hitler's reprehensibility to others where the historian seems to link himself with all of Germany in a Party of the Disappointed People (PdP), with the implication that such disappointment makes one prey to a man of Hitler's talents.
Too fascinating in its separate parts to dismiss, too meanspirited to be read without feeling soiled, eventually ``The Tunnel'' is just too much of a good, and bad, thing: too rich to absorb, too intemperate to endure." - Paul Skenazy
"At the opening of "The Tunnel" - William H. Gass's first novel since his much-praised "Omensetter's Luck" was published nearly 30 years ago - William Frederick Kohler, a distinguished historian at a Midwestern university, sits at a desk in the cellar of his house and contemplates the manuscript of his all-but-completed masterwork, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany."
All he has to do is write the book's introduction. But as he begins - "This is to introduce a work on death by one who's spent his life in a chair" - he finds that he cannot proceed. Instead he starts writing an anti-introduction, a rambling, inexhaustible monologue that mixes memoir, confession, philosophical speculation, lectures on the meaning of history, philological rumination, pornographic verse, song lyrics, typographical tricks, puns, diagrams and comic drawings. In the midst of this literary self-excavation, Kohler describes how he has begun to dig an actual tunnel out from the cellar of his house. The resulting text, while by no means as difficult to decipher, sounds many of the overtones of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake."
Much in "The Tunnel" is depressing. As the fragments of Kohler's autobiography begin to cohere, we realize he has a loveless marriage that has produced two hateful male children, the name of the younger one of which he cannot even bring himself to utter, apparently because his wife has mockingly called the child Adolf. His mistress has dismissed him: "My throat was suddenly full of puns, bad jokes, and all sorts of snappy retorts like risen bile. It was awful. It was awful. She was giving me the sack. And I realized, as I formed the words, how she was also kicking me out of hers."
His poisonous academic colleagues are by turns waspish and viperish as they quarrel among themselves and level charges against Kohler of seeking sexual favors from his students, a transgression he alternately lies about and confesses. Deeper into Kohler's background, we learn that he was a friendless, brilliantly precocious child, with an alcoholic mother and a father who ridiculed him for not being manly.
Summing up his life, he reflects: "Once in a while, I'd bring myself to wonder whether my mother wasn't simply suffering from a serious loss of love. Perhaps she'd been passionate and needful and now was, in effect, in mourning for deeds of darkness which were no longer ever done; but that was before I found myself in the same situation. Now I do what I always did: eat and grow angry at the least thing, call down curses on this or that head, devour a lot of soft cheese, retire to my study, dig into other people's pasts, write scurrilous verse, conceive worse."
So why, given the considerable grimness of "The Tunnel," does the reader still track its endless coils of prose? For the lyrical set pieces, for one thing; the haunting evocations of a small-town childhood so sensually rich in detail that the prose is sometimes hypnotic.
But more compelling still is the tension Mr. Gass has created between literary art for its own sake and transcendent psychological truth. On the one hand, he employs here many of the techniques he introduced in an earlier work, "Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife" (1971). This was an essay-novella, as he called it, intended to break apart conventional narrative and plunge the reader into a new experience of art, which Mr. Gass has always believed to be separate from life and autonomous.
On the other hand, the reader remains curious why Kohler is subverting his history of Nazi Germany, and why he feels the need to tunnel out of his present life, both metaphorically and literally. The problem, to put it more bluntly than the novel ever does, seems to be that Kohler identifies with the Nazis in too many ways to publish a book passing judgment on them. As he picks away at the scabs of his own hatred and bigotry, he concludes that whatever attracted people to Hitler was in no way unique to Germany. Almost as if to prove the point to himself, he invents his own political organization, the Party of Disappointed People, or PdP. He even designs emblems for it, including "The Pennants of Passive Attitudes and Emotions," among them bigotry, spite, niggardliness, procrastination, sloth and jealousy.
Yet the shock of this message concerning what Kohler calls "the fascism of the heart" does not mean that psychology overwhelms art in "The Tunnel." Instead the message challenges Mr. Gass to deepen his conception of art so as to contain such destructive emotions. This is where Kohler's excavation comes in. At first he seems merely to be identifying with the Holocaust victims he has written about in his history, and learning whether he himself could have escaped from a death camp.
But gradually he comes to see his tunnel as a way of getting past his bitter state of mind. In a typically compacted paragraph, Kohler reflects:
"We sail the seas and fly the skies and drive up and down all the roads, but the deepest caves, the cleverest caverns, cannot take us to the underground, tell us what goes on in that inner realm, however it happens . . . or whether, at the genetic center of the self, in pure birth earth, there is no need for action and all is over and nothing's begun: because we're in that fabled place where compacts of conclusion coalesce like veins of coal, compressed past the thought of further futures and consequently beyond each form of the past . . . - that's what we really don't know and maybe motivates my burrowing - if there's a bottom nature, and just what's what where the well ends, when we pass beneath its water, when we actually enter 'in' and find ourselves in front of n and on the other side of i."
So in one of its many senses, "The Tunnel" confronts the question whether the savagery of the 20th century can still be encompassed by an art that is willing to dig deep enough." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
"The Tunnel is a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century, a novel to set beside the masterpieces of Proust, Joyce, and Musil as well as those of Gass's illustrious contemporaries." - Steven Moore
"Reading Gass is like reading Thomas Mann: The Tunnel's moral seriousness matches The Magic Mountain's and Doctor Faustus's, but I find Gass the better writer." - James McCourt
"William Gass's The Tunnel: The Work in Progress as Post-Modern Genre" by John Unsworth
William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck, Penguin Classics, 1997. (1966)"Brackett Omensetter arrives, with his wife, family and belongings in the rural American town of Gilean. It swiftly becomes apparent that he is someone out of the ordinary, as he sets off a ground swell of violent emotions in the once tranquil commmunity. Who is he? What does he represent?"
"Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil."
"This Sound and Fury-esque novel relates the action from several characters' points of view as it follows the ramblings of the title character and his family through Ohio." - Library Journal
"William H. Gass. For me his story, ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,’ demonstrated several things. First, that prose could be sustained without narrative. Second, that character need not be beholding to psychological ‘depth.’ Third, that juxtaposition is all and that, yes, there is a world within a word. And fourth, that ‘Indiana’ could be a subject. Published in the late fifties, this fiction, I think, was eclipsed for decades by the hegemony of narrative realistic neo-Chekhovian stories, so I am unsure how influential it was for other writers writing in the last half century. For me, I held it silently in my heart: a story that is not a story, prose that is poetry, action that is static, character that is fields of language, flat fields of Indiana that are depthless. Mr. Gass did not so much write a story as create a complex space, an interesting environment and invited me, the reader, into it to collaborate and contribute to its meaning. It is a frenetic performance where nothing happens. And that nothing was the everything I needed." - Michael Martone
"It’s weird, wonderful, Faulknerish in its loose (but somehow layered and constructed) stream of consciousness. Omensetter’s Luck comprises three sections, each progressively longer; I finished the second one today, and so far the novel seems to dance around a description or accounting of its namesake, Brackett Omensetter who carts his family into the small sleepy town of Gilean, Ohio, and immediately perplexes the townsfolk with his amazing luck. As Frederic Morton put it in his contemporary 1966 New York Times review, “It quickly becomes apparent that as other people have green thumbs, [Omensetter] has a green soul. The cosmos and he live in mysterious congruity.” There’s much to commend and unpack in Gass’s writing here, but the pleasure of his musical rhythm are enough for me now (in my writer’s block, I retreat to aesthetic criticism [shudders]). Besides, do I really have to recommend this novel when David Foster Wallace already did so in his semi-famous list “Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels > 1960″? No, I don’t, that’s right. Here’s Wallace on Omensetter’s Luck: “Gass’ first novel, and his least avant-gardeish, and his best. Basically a religious book. Very sad. Contains the immortal line ‘The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.’ Bleak but gorgeous, like light through ice.” - Bibliopklept
"Omensetter's Luck. Oh-Men-Set-Ter's Luck. I had wanted to read this novel for a long time without really knowing anything about it. It seemed to be a well-regarded book that was still somehow obscure. It had about it-or seemed to have, to my limited perception-a kind of sexy, postmodern aura. And that title, man-that evocative, mysterious title. Omen-a mystical, occult kind of word. Setter-a more practical, craftsmanlike word. Juxtaposing these two to create this totally unique name-it floored me. What kind of 'luck' would such an individual have?
Somewhat surprisingly, these vague, inchoate notions of mine are actually relevant to the book-Brackett Omensetter isn't actually the main character, but he is a leatherworker, and there is something putatively mystical about him. I win!
Is the novel 'postmodern?' Well, sure; you could make the case-certainly, the brief first section, "The Triumph of Israbestis Tott," makes it clear that there is at least a good case to be made for seeing the history presented therein as stories the accuracy of which it is impossible to judge. However, this isn't exactly all-pervasive, and in terms of history-making, it seems more like a somewhat less extreme Absalom, Absalom! than anything else. Indeed, Faulkner and Joyce seem to be the novel's key reference points. It's a fairly difficult novel, and there are times when one is strongly reminded of parts of Ulysses.
The real main character is Jethro Furber, the town's new preacher, a man torn apart by cynicism, unbelief, thwarted lust, and feelings of inferiority. Gosh, when I put it like that, I make him sound like every stereotypical fallen man of the cloth ever, but he is redeemed from banality (I think) by the writing itself-his narrative often lapses into ferocious streams-of-consciousness, punctuated with occasional dirty (or just plain bizarre) doggerel, and while the effect can be trying at times, I find it mostly mesmerizing.
It would be very, very tempting to compare Furber to The Tunnel's Kohler (their names even sound the same, sort of!), but while the resemblances are pretty obvious, dwelling on them would very likely cause one to short-change the differences, which to my mind are more important: the thing about The Tunnel is that, to employ a really obvious turn of phrase that I have no doubt a whole bunch of people have already used in relation to the novel, there is no light at the end of it. It's more of a mausoleum, really. An architectural marvel, sure, but still-Kohler is essentially a corpse. No meaningful relationship with the outside world is desired or possible. Furber is not at all like that-he may be a cynic, he may spend a disproportionate amount of time ranting at the ghost of his predecessor, but there's still life in him-he isn't dead inside; he still aspires, on some level, to be more than he is.
This is illustrated in his relationship, such as it is, with Omensetter. The back cover describes it as a "confrontation between…a man of preternatural goodness and…a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts." This creates the impression that we're going to be witnessing some sort of allegorical battle between Good and Evil, which isn't really the case. Describing Omensetter as "preternaturally good" seems like a stretch; it would be more accurate, I think, to say that he represents-to Furber, certainly-a kind of natural, prelapsarian simplicity. Furber tries to imagine Omensetter experiencing sexual desire and fails, because he can only picture his nemesis as an Adam, having sex if at all in a purely animal way devoid of all the cultural entanglements that make up sexuality for the rest of us (paging Judith Butler).
But does this make Omensetter "good?" As I hinted at earlier, we don't actually see all that much of the character, and I'm tempted to just call this a failing of the novel. I'm not convinced that we really have all the information we would need to get a clear bead on him. However, is it "good" that he's perfectly content to let a fox who's fallen down his well die of starvation/thirst if the fates don't somehow see fit to rescue it? Is it "good" for him to refuse to get the doctor for his infant son who is evidently dying of diphtheria? You could argue that I'm getting caught up in irrelevancies here-the point being more Furber's perception than Omensetter himself in any objective way-but the fact remains, he is shown doing these things and you want them to mean something.
At any rate, this is Furber's problem with Omensetter-as someone hopelessly ensnared in his own fears, neuroses, and doubts, he is desperately jealous of someone who appears to have no such problems, and this jealousy manifests itself as anger. But! He isn't turning his back on the world. When Omensetter is accused of murder, Furber finds himself defending the man (and having a nervous breakdown of some sort, but what can you do?). His section, which makes up the great bulk of the novel, is entitled "The Reverend Jethro Furber's Change of Heart," and this is what that title seems to be referring to. On balance, he reveals himself to be a sympathetic character, which is more than you can ever say for Kohler, and that's why the novel works for me in a way that The Tunnel didn't.
At any rate, these are just my scattered thoughts. Don't try to crib them for your book report, kids. I've completely elided any mention of one important character, for instance, and your teacher might wonder about that. Also, at the lack of any mention of the "luck" in question. Just read the damn book like you're supposed to-you probably won't regret it." - inchoatia.blogspot.com
"My original plan was finally to read Mason & Dixon. It was all prepared. I had some twenty hours on a plane over the course of three weeks; long afternoons in Belgian cafes, those littering the sides of countryside canals mostly, but a few in small Limburg towns. A perfect time for Pynchon, I told myself. When time came to pack, however, I discovered that my copy of the massive novel simply did not fit comfortably into my lone carry-on bag. Thus it came to pass that I instead brought along William Gass’ difficult (but, I was soon to discover, not too difficult) first novel, Omensetter’s Luck.
The relationship started off a little rocky. I struggled with and against it so badly on the plane that I gave up, opting for something more immediately palatable on the in-flight entertainment screen in front of me. I will never get back those hours watching Date Night, Sherlock Holmes, 500 Greatest Goals, and a special about the football rivalry between Argentina & Brazil. Even upon settling into the pace of life in Belgium I found the damn thing, except for the end of section two,* sluggish. But then it happened. And by “it,” I mean page 125. it was here that one of the novel’s main characters, the Reverend Jethro Furber, described his parishioners thusly:
'Wit and pedantry were out of place among these dreary villagers. Trees, hills, river... yet life was monotonously flat, straight... plankish... with a dreadful sameness everywhere like dust… a climate without any real extremes, deprived of virtue even in its mean... though there were trees, the sloping fields, the river, still life was hard, level… wooden… inevitable... and moments ran on mindlessly like driven cattle, and young men struggled in the nets of their friends, relatives, and other connections for a while like dripping fish before wearing out their wills and settling down to live with the rest of the gently poor, their pets, and their obsequious diseases… where bitterness grew up on everything like ivy. Yet the fact was he wanted their good opinion. Lord, lord, he was a dreadful creature.'
Oh, did I love those lines. So much so that I raced upstairs and IM’d them to a half-dozen people who happened to be online at the time. They effectively sealed the deal, as it were. So much so, in fact, that I’m now convinced Omensetter’s Luck is a criminally neglected American masterpiece, and believe it to be on par with some of the best contemporary works of fiction I’ve ever read.
Students of religion & literature, of whom I am one, will be especially interested. Here we have a newly minted telling of the Fall; the bleak reality that knowledge, of what lies behind and beyond good and evil, isn’t really all that it’s cracked up to be; and a delightfully vulgar, satanic preacher of the Lord. Yes, much of the story is delivered in fragments that must be retrieved from and pieced together amidst the unfortunate torrent of words and and thought that distinguish stream-of-conscious prose. And, as such, it will not be for everyone or for every occasion. But, if you are patient, if you give yourself over to the language, you will, like Rev. Furber, find yourself rewarded, if that is the right word for gorgeous melancholy: “Why have You [God] made us the saddest animal? He pushed himself off and felt the jar in his bones. He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can’t continue us. All he can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He’s a pretty good fellow”." - Brad Johnson
William H. Gass, Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, Dalkey Archive Press, 1989. (1968)"In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic.
Like Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll before him, Gass uses a variety of visual devices: photographs, comic-strip balloons, different typefaces, parallel story lines (sometimes three or four to the page), even coffee stains. As Larry McCaffery has pointed out, "the lonesome lady of the book's title, who is gradually revealed to be lady language herself, creates an elaborate series of devices which she hopes will draw attention to her slighted charms [and] force the reader to confront what she literally is: a physically exciting literary text."
"That Gass often writes beautifully to match, with a strange lyricism of the inner body, its organs and fluids, and certain lovely, half-fashioned windows onto blind landscapes outside the room, does not serve to conjure away all doubts as to the genre intended. (...) And the author at times tries to parry in advance the charge of gratuitousness with unpersuasiveness claims on the clown's comic genius and the poet's liberty. However this may be, the amount of arbitrary cogitation going through the woman's mind seems heavy for such a short work." - Nathaniel Tarn
„What we have, after finishing the book, is a retrospective sense of having witnessed—assisted at—a ventriloquial showpiece of literary style in which Gass, by juxtaposing the humdrum with the histrionic, has worked compassion into a just rhetoric that runs the gamut of human commotion from spit to spirit . . . To my mind, Gass here proves that straight, rectilinear prose is no longer sufficient for the writer who wants to discuss the spirit of the age with the people most aware of it. How right and fitting it is that one of the evoked ghosts in Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is "Sam" (not Johnson or Beckett, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge, high priest of imagination, the 'esemplastic' or unifying power). For Gass here raises that power to its highest and, in so doing sets an alternative standard for American narrative prose.“ - Washington Post Book World
„Gass's text takes us into the heart of the heart of the desolations of our corporeal existence, but it also takes us into 'the sweet country of the word'—writer and reader talking and dying alike, the lonesome self losing and recreating itself in language, the prison house turning itself into the playhouse before our very eyes.“ - Salmagundi
„Mr. Gass's experiment in prose fiction offers innovations in form, imagination in concept, and complete originality in execution… Plain fun aside, the book is lyrical and above all poignant, ending in impeccable symbolic fashion with the picture of an umbilicus stained by the ring of a coffee cup.“ - Virginia Quarterly Review
"Carry this book with you, and you'll get some curious looks. Perhaps it's the naked female on the cover and the subsequent, unavoidable implication about the text within. Disregard your instincts, though, which might tell you to be embarrassed, and just read the book. It's not what you think.
William Gass speaks from a perspective so universal it might make you nervous. In a roundabout way, he conquers the lonely maze of the mind, wowing readers with his beautiful, complex stream-of-consciousness technique. Despite its classification as a novel, the plot and purpose are difficult to derive. We can surmise very little except that the protagonist has a fantastic imagination and employs it to describe the observations and emotions of everyday life. Gass implements several twists to keep his readers at full attention: screenplay-like dialogues, clever font tricks and some physical poetry snippets reminiscent of e.e. cummings.
Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is comparable to a calm pond. At first glance, it's just water. But look again; there's the reflection of the clouds, and if you blur your vision a little, there's your own reflection. This book contains such magic, in its own way." - www.weeklywire.com
"Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is a thin book, though one of considerable ambition. The dissatisfied Babs Masters (the lonesome wife) challenges the reader, enticing him or her with a text of literary variations.
The text is written in a number of typefaces and sizes, the text shaped and sub-divided as Gass sees fit, at points even falling off the page. There are coffee mug stains and photographs, a page mirrored in another, and a page taken from Passions of a Stableboy
Gass tries to bring alive his text, and the reader is drawn in: directly addressed by the text, questioned and challenged. Reader and writer mirror the male-female relationships in the book, but the author also fades, leaving a text with a life of its own and a reader facing it. Ultimately Gass tries to create a disembodied text, with neither Gass nor Babs Masters present, only the words, the words.
It is a well done exercise displaying the power and potential of the word and text, of literature standing alone. It is a call to arms, while gently reminding the reader that it is only words and that life itself is elsewhere.
Gass writes well, handling the different styles he employs convincingly. It is a clever book, and short enough that it does not wear thin. The experimental look and feel may not be to everyone's liking, but it is a worthy volume. Recommended.
Note that the photographs (by Burton L. Rudman) are, like the text, revealing. Breasts and buttocks are exposed, for those who worry about such matters (or for whom that is an inducement to purchase the book)." - The Complete Review
"If the name William H. Gass doesn’t cause anyone’s ears to perk up it is no surprise, he is one of the best-kept secrets of modern literature. He is the winner of three National Critics Circle Book Awards, one American book award, and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism among others. He has been publishing regularly since 1966 with the debut of his highly regarded Omensetter’s Luck. His non-fiction works most often focuses on the practice, discipline, and evolution of our greatest writers and their creations.
Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife is the title of William Gass’ 1968 novella. It was—it is—a literature defining masterpiece of experimental, metafictional fiction. There are rings of coffee spilled over coffee mug rims across the pages; photographs of Willie Masters’ (Babs) Wife, naked, wallowing across the pages; four voices voicing their foments of mind on a paltry page at one time; “cantilever”ed lines crawling out until they crack, somewhere in the middle of a sentence—collapse forward and bend beneath their own gravity. And there is much more to mesmerize your eyes, illuminate your thoughts throughout these sixty-four strange sheets of paper, than I have mentioned.
Plot? Point of View? Character? Climax? Setting? Rising Action? Gass dispenses with these thoroughly tested time honored testaments to text, and though you could claim that there is some of these elements in his endeavor, I would argue that they are merely the Shakespeare derived from a myriad of monkeys randomly driving down the shiny buttons of typewriters in a Harvard lab. What matters to Gass in his literature is meaning, metaphor, and sound (and evolution), not deftly dealt mysteries with unforeseen antagonists, not horrifying endings, masterful explosions of suspense and climactic conclusion, he cares for didactic descriptions and rhymes within the lines of prose, not weak limbed paraplegic nouns attached to solitary adjectives.
We enter this book on Willie Masters’ wife just finishing with a man named Phil. She is a whore, as she herself proclaims with purpose and acceptance. This man’s name is not really Phil, it might be Bill, or Will, or Gill, but it is not Phil, Phil is just a pseudonym. And from that point onward names become important, you must notice them, as John Wooden said “It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” John, Nikolai, Charles, Christopher, Sam, Albert are other men she lays down with.
Bungling our way into the midst of this book the sense of a message begins to smart, like a ruler across fiddling Catholic school hands, in our minds. Could this be another Feminine Mystique? The time is right, 1968, and O’ so lonesome Willie Masters’ wife is not even called by her own name in that title, forced to borrow from her husband, and we find that her back smarts like the hands in our mind smarted from their smarting because old Willy has got a heart that’s chilly cold and he takes his cane and smacks her back, yes, he beats her. This poor woman has got her head twisted, suffering from a false belief system that’s got her harping on the honor of being a poker table, how she wants chips to rest on her hips, and cards to lay out on her chest, with a baize dress, A BAIZE DRESS!! A feminist novel from a male perspective, interesting...
Though alliteration is something we would ponder in poetry (Paw—Poh) and even praise (Pray!) in poetry, William Gass challenges the reader to applaud his alliteration in the midst—in the minefield—of prose. With lines like, “All she was was string and tassels, tossing string and tassels, a storm so strange you would have thought the snow drove the wind . . . ” a casual reader becomes engrossed, enchanted, swept up by swinging words, swiveling poetic strings and tassels, so that he’d think he was reading a poem. Let’s break it up and see:
“All she was was string and tassels,
tossing string and tassels,
a storm so strange
you would have thought the snow drove the wind”
Doesn’t that look like a poem? but more importantly, doesn’t that sound like a poem? To Gass there is an architecture in language, there is a construction of concepts, but not only of concepts, it is also a formation from similarities and rhymes, prepositions and melodies, nouns and verbs with firm foundations. (Gass in one essay restructures the text of a passage in Italian Hours by Henry James so that it looks like a building, with rafters and beams and buttresses and floor plans.) He cares that writing should, when spoken, be as pleasant to the ear (and tongue, don’t forget the speaker) as the theories and meanings are to the mind. “Die Welt ist Alles, was der Fall ist.” “The world is everything, that is the case” as Gass loves to quote from Wittgenstein, that master of the masters of language, as the exemplification of his belief.
The story progresses and we see none of the “elements” of fiction which have for so long be lauded as the scars that riddle masterpieces and proclaim their place in the Pantheon of Literature. Not since Sterne have we seen such legitimate disregard for convention paired with the honor and esteem of all the intelligent in the writing world. Yes, [insert politely unnamed author], flip your pages upside down, put them in funny font that grows smaller as you reach the bottom of the page until you cannot read it, but what does it mean? Is all the playfulness of those pages just for revolution and not evolution, to force a “stylistic” wall between [insert politely unnamed author] and all the other writers? For Gass there is a thought in every picture, an idea (though Gertrude Stein said “Ideas aren’t Literature”) in every foreign font, a reason (that is the fundamental constant) in every aberration of normalcy from the tradition of prose.
So now, since we have established that for Gass rhythm and rhyme is more than an author’s message typed subliminally beneath the page (not that writing shouldn’t have meaning, rather they shouldn’t moralize and preach to their already untrusting participants) what do we make of Lonely Babs and her cry for more; for more than an unfulfilled life with numerous unfulfilling lays with men who care to mask themselves in names not theirs?
Gass sets his coffee mug down upon the sheet he has been writing on, a Florida wave of creamy brown liquid rushes the porcelain embankment, surges over, descends the steep side, forms a ring around the base. He chose, he explains, to place within his novella that ring of coffee so as to, maybe, touch the reader in a physical way. There is more to this though, it is the key to an understanding of the text. On the final page Gass places his last ring of coffee, (he has placed several more in the course of the work) this stain of coffee is visually different however. Unlike the other rings—each inked over a paragraph of the writing—this one encircles Babs’ navel in a photograph of her stomach, the “climactic” image we are, at this startling novella’s conclusion, left to ponder.
In a rush of recollection and connection the oftentimes obscured (though widely hinted at) truth of the book’s meaning is revealed. Fowles, Gogol, Lamb, Marlowe, Coleridge, Camus! (Look above). These are names of those men she laid down with, respectively. That ring on her belly was a ring on paper. Those beatings she received were the beatings of Willie (William H. Gass?) forcing words to make sentences to make paragraphs to make beautiful prose. Her desire is the desire for great writers, writers who will know her body (language) with their uncompromising minds. Babs Masters is Lady Language.
This is a piece of fiction which does not deal in the same currency of literature as others do. There are no elements of fiction in use here, no plot, no story really, just a shotgun blast of ideas, thoughts, and teaching to the face. In spite of this we are astounded, knocked back into our seats with the force of Gass’ words, shocked to realizations we should have come to before, instilled with new appreciation for the written word, stunned as masterpieces stun us. This is among the literary heirs to Ezra Pound’s Cantos and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. As those works before, so does this one care passionately for the sound of words, ushering its meaning to a secondary position. This is the progeny of a master, not of fiction or literature, but of the English Language, and it is, in its own right, a “classic.” - J Tolle
William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country: And Other Stories, HarperCollins, 1968.„Gass is his own best commentator, and no reader compelled by his work should miss the preface revised and expanded to account for "these litters of language." The five tales include the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," as well as "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story."
"Sentences sweet as Godiva Chocolate, turns of phrase so luscious they verge on the lubricious, paragraphs one could live on — anyone who savored the prose of William Gass will remember it with pleasure or heartburn." — Washington Post Book World
"These stories scrape nerve and pierce the heart. They also replenish the language. They are told sparely, hauntingly, with compassion and a remarkable exploratory courage." — The New York Times
"Of all his fiction, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" may well be Gass's most accessible and easily digestible offering. Still, this collection of stories challenges and it exhibits all of the dense, elliptical, poetic, and philosophical prose styling of which Gass is so justifiably praised-and so understandably under-read.
-Though all distinctively Gass, each story in this collection finds a distinctive voice all its own, as if Gass were playing medium to a seamless utterance of organic wholeness perfectly appropriate to its narrator-young farm boy, housewife, middle-aged real estate agent, etc.
-From "The Pedersen Kid,* a Faulkneresque shocker set during a deadly Midwestern blizzard to the elegiac title story whose bookish narrator has "retired from love" (and life) to a small Indiana town that is eternally dying, these tidy stories, each in their own way, find the seams in ordinary life where one little tug unravels the entire tapestry to reveal the violence, alienation, and despair-the void hidden underneath it all.
-Gass's prose is like nothing so much as an incantation, conjuring these all-too-human nightmares in a language so powerful and beautiful it can hardly fail to seduce those at all susceptible to the spell of language to charm and bewitch. Not so much a stream-of-consciousness but the non-local, non-logical leaps of poetry, prayer, and lament hold these tales together where strict logical progression fails to go-and hold the mesmerized reader's attention-even when one cannot say exactly what is transpiring.
-For Gass, the music inherent in language unleashed can carry a symphony of meaning beyond the meaning we can't express using words as words in their prosaic capacity alone. The sonorous, tumbling, torrent of eloquence that Gass undams joins conscious and unconscious currents in order to sweep everything before it, to speak the unspeakable, and express the pain and passion too big for hearts to bear...or share.
-But I myself here wax verbose. Quite simply this is a wonderful collection of short fiction by one of the most intelligent American writers of our-or any-time. This is fiction stretched to the very limits of its power to move us, to make us see, to change our life." - Mark Nadja
Read it at Google Books
William H. Gass, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.„In the words of the late Walker Percy, William Gass is a "totally committed, totally uncompromising, and extraordinarily gifted writer." His latest work is a suite of four novellas that explore Mind, Matter, and God.
In the title story, God is a writer in a constant state of fumble, Mind is a housewife cum modern-day Cassandra, and Matter is-who else? - the helpless and confused husband of Mind. In "Bed and Breakfast," the concept of salvation is explored through material possessions-a collection of kitsch -as a traveling businessman is slowly swamped by the sheer surfeit of matter in a small Illinois town. In "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's," a young woman growing up in rural Iowa finds herself losing touch with the physical world as she loses herself in the work of her favorite poet. And in "The Master of Secret Revenges," God appears in the form of a demon to a young man named Luther, whose progress from devilish youth to satanic manhood is recounted with relish and horror.
A profound exploration of good and evil, philosophy and action, marked by the wit and style that has always defined the work of William Gass.“
"Revered two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle award, Gass serves up an enticing mix of high-flown lyricism, sketchy narrative and momentary brilliance in his playful latest fiction (after the celebrated The Tunnel). The title novella is really an amalgamation of three short stories written during the 1960s and '70s, before and after the great stories included in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. Ostensibly the story of a clairvoyant named Ella Bend, her Cassandra-like curse of psychic vision and her brutal husband, this bleak interior monologue charts the narrator's descent into near madness as she escapes into an imaginary intrigue between Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Here, as in the other novellas, Gass's love of verbal wordplay almost eliminates narrative coherency. "Bed and Breakfast" is a variation on a Rod Serling plot: a traveling accountant takes a room at a rather sinister old-fashioned bed and breakfast and feels compelled to settle down there. You'd think Walter Riffaterre, the accountant, would look for a Howard Johnson's or even a Motel 6 when the landlady starts conversing in Emily Dickinson outtakes ("what would we do if we had no burden, no weight upon our chests, we'd fly, wouldn't we? Fly like fluff, up and away to nowhere, for we're nothing but our burdens..."). While this work may puzzle or even bore some readers, Gass is an engrossing character-portraitist, whose plots depend on psychic and spiritual motions rather than linked events and whose humor, inventiveness and erudition keep the ride inviting, wherever it goes. Agent, Janklow and Nesbit. - Publishers Weekly
"Reading William H. Gass's fiction is a little like looking at oneself in a fractured mirror: the usual components are all there, but not necessarily in the right places. Take, for example, the title novella of Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas: here Gass introduces us to Ella Bend, a sensitive clairvoyant married to a rather burdensome husband. But no sooner does Gass get us started with a very conventional opening, ("This is the story of Ella Bend Hess, of how she became clairvoyant and what she was able to see") than he injects himself into it ("Her gift was the gift of the gods … inexplicable and merciless. Marvelous is what I mean. Miraculous. Mysterious? Surely not a word so weak. Yet it has to begin with an m"). It isn't long before Ella becomes a bit player in her own story, the starring role having been appropriated by artful digressions, dizzying streams of consciousness, and Gass's own formidable wordsmithing talents.
The other three novellas in this collection are equally high-concept: a traveling salesman falls in love with his hotel room and refuses to leave; an aging spinster literally loses herself in a line from an Elizabeth Bishop poem; a young boy inexplicably decides to live for revenge. The plots, such as they are, are offbeat enough to catch the interest-what holds it, however, is Gass at play in the fields of the word. Cartesian Sonata will not be to every reader's taste-those who are impatient with absurdity, non sequiturs, and pages and pages of verbal pyrotechnics may want to steer toward more conventional literature. Those who like their fiction liberally laced with equal measures of philosophy and anarchy, however, should give William H. Gass a try. -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.“ - Amazon.com Review
William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, David R Godine, 1978."Twenty-four essays by the modern master of literary criticism, ranging from discussion of Gertrude Stein and Jorge Luis Borges to Henry James and "The Evil Demiurge."
"Gass's criticism, in the best tradition of eloquence, wit, and passion, is a defense of 'poesy' in a time of need... Nearly all the essays are a pleasure to read and some it almost seems shocking to say it are works of beauty. It has happened before one thinks of Keat's letters and some fragments of Lawrence that the unlikely combination of criticism, philosophy and metaphorical inventiveness has resulted in a kind of poetry." - New York Times Book Review
"For anyone who writes fiction or writes about it, or reads fiction for the solacing sense of potential reality it can provided, Gass's book is the most important and bracing theoretical study I know of. Beside being a miraculous gifted writer he is that rare thing among creators, a trained philosopher. No one I can name has his persuasive power." - Geoffrey Wolff
William H. Gass, The World Within The Word: Essays, Basic Books, 2000. (1978.)"In this sequel to Fiction & the Figures of Life, one of America's most brilliant and eclectic minds examines literature, culture, writers (their lives and works), and the nature and uses of language and the written word. Included are discussions of Valry, Henry Miller, Sartre, Freud, Faulkner, suicide, "art and order," and the transformation of language into poetry and fiction. The vividness and clarity of Gass's writing, the unabashed love and inimitable use of language-his startling metaphors, the sinuousness of his philosophy, the originality of his vision-make each essay a searching revelation of its subject, as well as an example of Gass's own singular artistry."
William H. Gass, Finding a Form, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009."Scathing, lyrical, and hilarious by turns, this collection of essays by William H. Gass—perhaps our greatest critic and author—sounds a rallying cry against the steady encroachment of the banal ("the Pulitzer Prize in fiction," he claims, "takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses") and the lazy (on minimalist realism: "The advantage to writing this slack is that the writer can't hang himself with any length of it") into the fields of fiction. It also provides two of the most dazzling statements of purpose a writer has ever set down about his own art ("Finding a Form," and "The Book as a Container of Consciousness"); makes a thorough and entertaining examination of what, exactly, ought to be called "avant-garde"; examines the work of a number of other great thinker-stylists (Ford Madox Ford, Robert Walser, Wittgenstein); and provides a concise, playful history of the art of narrative as a whole. An indispensable roadmap to the language that shapes our books and our lives, Finding a Form is a milestone in American letters."
"In his first gathering of essays in several years, novelist and critic Gass's commitment to ideas, concentrated energy and originality shine through on every page. The title essay, an exploration of how writers navigate complex, refractory reality, discloses how his childhood with an abusive father and alcoholic mother influenced his escape into writing and shaped his fictional characters, symbols and preoccupations. "Nature, Culture, and Cosmos" pessimistically gauges the "immense indifference" of the universe to our moral values and our deaths. Other pieces deal with Ezra Pound as a failed modernist; the lives of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in relation to their thought; various species of the avant-garde from Pierre de Ronsard to Degas, Beckett and the Bauhaus; the exacting demands of autobiography; the Pulitzer Prize Committee's "banal and hokey" choices in fiction; and the abyss between the moral viewpoints expressed in works of art and the lives of their creators. Gass's deeply felt essays, reprinted from the New York Times Book Review, Antaeus, etc., are quotable, flecked with fertile insights and a pleasure to read. On stoicism: "If we have to accept what we get, why not imagine that it's just what we want?" On Impressionism: "It allows subversion to go on with the approval of the subverted." - Publishers Weekly
"William H. Gass is embattled... and in Finding a Form he confronts the conundrum of the writer that he has faced in previous essays: the word is sacred. Though there are no longer sacred texts, 'writing puts the writer in illusory command of the world, empowers someone otherwise powerless, but with a power no more pointed than a pencil'... Against the odds, William Gass, a tortured man in the attic, has empowered himself to write scripture in an unredemptive time.“ - Maureen Howard
"Gass is "as obdurate as nails" when it comes to the best possible use of the written word. Each essay in this wide-ranging book (be it titled "Ezra Pound," "Nietzche: The Polemical Philosopher," "Robert Walser," "Nature, Culture, and Cosmos," "Pulitzer, The People Prize," or "The Music of Prose") offers evidence for such a conclusion. Gass is concerned with how best to use a phrase or word and believes we should be tough-minded when it comes to reading. He reveals a sardonic sense of humor as well, for example, in discussing the winners of the Pulitzer prize, and he dislikes the fact that anyone would enjoy his/her own writing. His compound sentences"little shimmied stretches of human awareness"are utterly unique and perfectly difficult. This collection succeeds in his aim to arrest and inform persuasively. For literature collections." - Robert Kelly
"Gass won the 1985 National Book Award for a previous essay collection, Habitations of the Word; most recently he authored an ingenious, gigantic novel, The Tunnel. The essays reprinted here belong to a variety of genres, but all centrally consider how writing enters into the world—how writers find forms adequate for their thoughts. In an opening section Gass takes on several institutions that in his opinion mark today's writing with mediocrity; he dissects the disgraceful track record of the Pulitzer Prize for literature and the inadequacies of the minimalist prose style that emenates from academic fiction-writing programs. His main focus, however, is on conjunctions of writing with philosophy and experience. Gass offers appreciations of favorite modern authors whose works and lives are rich in philosophical meditiation, such as Robert Walser and Danilo Kis; biographical review essays treating the relationship of life to work for Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Ezra Pound; and digests of intellectual history burdened with such portentous titles as "Nature, Culture, and Cosmos." These latter can suffer from showboating and cutefying. Such faults crop up occasionally even in the best essays here. Gass's postmodern idiom at times leads him to facile would-be cleverness—informing us with regard to Nietzsche, for instance, that "of course, the superman doesn't sport blue underwear." At his best, however, when Gass puts his philosophical bent at the service of his literary gifts, singular insights emerge. This volume's finest essays shed new light on the workings of prose style—on "the music of prose"—in cases ranging from a lively piece of Middle English sermonizing to the impressionism of Ford Madox Ford.
Gass shines when he addresses the subject most befitting a self-described "Methodologist," one "for whom the medium is the muse"—his own prose medium itself."
William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, David R. Godine Publisher, 1991."BLUE PENCILS, blue noses, blue movies, laws, and stockings. The dumps, mopes, Mondays; the ocean, the sky, and the deep, deep ice. The Whale. Jay. Ribbon. Fin. The grass in Kentucky. The china in Grandmother’s pantry. Of all the colors, blue has the widest range of associations, and the widest bandwidth of emotional tints and shades. It is therefore the most suitable color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright and thin or low deep sweet thick dark and soft, blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling. This eccentric essay into the "world of blue" is the heart of the heart of Gass’s oeuvre."
"In this, one of the strangest books about writing and language you're likely ever to read, fiction writer and philosophy professor Gass spins off into an improvisational inquiry into the nature of words and consciousness, using as his departure point the concept of the color blue-the idea of blue, the state of blue, the uses of blue...the bluenesses of blue. It's kind of hard to sum up, and if it sounds weird, it is-but it's also wonderful." - Amazon.com Review
Look up at the sky, or down into the ocean, and what color do you see? We see blue, but not Homer—he never once employs the term throughout The Iliad and The Odyssey, famously calling the sea “wine-dark” and the heavens “bronze.” Neither did the Greek philosopher Xenophanes say blue—he described the rainbow as having only three colors. Though few would claim that the Ancient Greeks could not see blue, it has been argued that they had no word for it. This would accord with Guy Deutscher, who says in his 2010 book Through the Looking Glass that there is something strange about blue that generally makes it the last primary color a language names.
Perhaps this helps explain the fixation that this color has exerted on English-speakers, a thing the novelist and critic William H. Gass makes extraordinarily clear in his beautiful book-length essay On Being Blue. He begins with a page-long list of “blue” things, ranging from blue noses and blue laws to the blue dahlia, blue moons, blue bottles, and, most paradoxically, blue blood. This remarkable list grows and grows throughout these pages until we cannot help but join Gass in pondering the question that animates this self-described “philosophical inquiry”: just what is this thing we call “blue”?
As a literary critic, Gass is known for taking a microscope to the devilish details most readers would find too commonplace to linger over, and so it is here. In a sense, the meaning of blue is perfectly obvious—it’s that color we see whenever we at the ocean—but just think about that for a second and you realize it actually tells us nothing. For why do we see the sea as blue whereas the Greeks saw it the color of wine, and why can blue at once be a part of so many metaphors, many of them contradictory? And just what is the color blue? Scientists will talk of wavelengths and the cones in our eyes, Goethe will say,
This colour has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful—but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
As one might imagine, Gass comes closer to Goethe than the scientists, devoting a significant amount of attention to simply finding the right way to ask the question, What is blue?; his other major concern is this question’s answer. These are matters that deal with how language works and what exactly we mean when we say things, and they’re ideal questions for a man like Gass, because few writers of his generation have treated language so painstakingly, nor gone as far in fathoming its secrets. Reading this spectacular example of the creative essay, one soon realizes that though it stops at just under 100 pages, its subject would not be exhausted with 1,000.
So what exactly goes on in this strange little book? After a bravura opening that tours us through all things blue, Gass wastes no time in broadening his inquiry: not content to simply ask what this color is, he now wants to understand language’s strange relationship to reality. What exactly is the relationship of the word blue to the world we inahbit? Sex, it soon becomes clear, is the example par excellence of this separation between words and acts—how does one write skillfully about the sexual act, and why do so many otherwise good authors fail? Gass deliberately and mischievously confuses matters until it is unclear whether he is talking about blue or some other four-letter words, but this is all to his point—language should be like love, and it’s just as messy as a trip to bed. Ultimately, blue really does have more in common with those other words than you would think.
One might argue that On Being Blue is actually just an excuse for Gass to ponder the language of intercourse, and in a sense it is. A true sensualist, he wouldn’t dream of penning a sterile sentence, and this book is, among other things, a way of explaining why he finds “the use of language like a lover” essential to great literature. He very solemnly warns us that “it is not simple, not a matter for amateurs, making sentences sexual,” and it’s clear that this is exactly what he thinks writers must do. Somewhere in those amorous sentences one finds the language of blue, whatever exactly that word means.
On Being Blue came at an interesting point in Gass’s career: it was published in 1976 after he had released what many still consider his best fiction, namely the ’60s trio Omensetter’s Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. He has reached mastery of the literary essay, as evidenced by 1970′s Fiction and the Figures of Life, which collected work he scattered in the leading publications of the day. he would continue to regularly produce volumes of essays, but he would not publish another novel until 1995′s immense The Tunnel. It was here, in 1976, that he released this strange, slender volume, unlike anything else he would ever write—as an essay, it is much longer than virtually any other he would write, but compared to the immense novels he was working toward, it was but a shard.
It comes across as an exceptionally personal book—Gass is known for weighing each word like gold, and the sentences here are lovingly cared for and rapturously manufactured. Absent is the brusqueness that characterizes much of his nonfiction. Although I’m far from unambiguous about Gass, finding him alternatively tedious and magnificent, I can say with no reservations that On Being Blue is one of the best in his bizarre oeuvre. Originally published in 1976 in three luxurious editions by the boutique publisher Godine, it subsequently went out of print and became a lusted over (sorry) commodity. It has now found a second life as a NYRB Classic, with the added bonus of a perceptive introduction by the Pulitzer-finalist Michael Gorra. A true classic indeed, this is a book that feels like it hasn’t aged a day in its four decades, eminently relevant, endlessly fascinating, and a pure pleasure.- Scott Esposito
William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts, Dalkey Archive Press, 2007."Gass loves words. His prose is extravagant, lush, sometimes overly florid (as when he talks of Flann O'Brien's death on "the first Fools' Day of April, 1966"), and in this new collection, his words have a tendency to get in the way of his subject matter. Which is a shame, because Gass, a novelist and award-winning critic, writes about books and authors often ignored by mainstream readers: Rabelais, Robert Burton, Elias Canetti. Then again, Gass doesn't write for the mainstream. He is the strangest of academic amalgams: a self-professed lover of the avant-garde as represented by Gertrude Stein, Flann O'Brien and Robert Coover, while at the same time he extols the virtues of what he calls "the classics." His definition of classic is, to be sure, expansive, but he applies an old-fashioned standard to all literature, declaring the need for those classics as the basis for a varied literary diet. Despite the occasional gem, such as a touching, if rambling, tribute to William Gaddis, the essays often devolve into little more than a brief synopsis of plot. This volume is appropriately titled, because Gass approaches his subjects reverently, but as in a temple, the service depends as much on the ritual of devotion as on innovation in thought." - Publishers Weekly
"It's unfortunate that the term critic often connotes negativity and sniping. What novelist and professor of philosophy William Gass practices in his critical essays is more in the line of learned appreciation or ecstatic advocacy. Though many of these pieces first appeared in other books as forwards, afterwards, and introductions, reviewers feel that A Temple of Texts may be his most cohesive collection yet. Gass's allusions and elaborate metaphors don't make for skimming. But for these willing to dig in, the author fulfills his mission "to provide suggestions of where best to start, what to expect, how to look or read or listen; and to give reasons why the work should be treated with seriousness and respect." - Bookmarks Magazine
"A Temple of Texts collects a variety of William Gass' writings on literature from the past quarter of a century (though most of the pieces are relatively recent). There are numerous book-introductions and forewords, and several reviews - all generally quite in-depth -, as well as a variety of other pieces with a literary focus. What marks them all is an incredible enthusiasm for the literary, and a fascination (and deep knowledge) of both the traditional and the experimental. Gass proves himself again very much the bookish writer, and a reading writer, repeatedly emphasising the necessity of familiarity with the old to create the new.
The first three pieces specifically address - as the title of one of them has it -: "Influence". The title-piece is a compendium of "fifty literary pillars", previously published as a pamphlet of "fifty works that I was prepared to say had influenced my work." Naturally - and to his dismay -:
'this list was immediately taken to be a roll call of "best books," an activity I have no sympathy for, and certainly did not apply in this case, because not all great achievements are influential.'
Indeed, Gass' approach is clearly the more interesting and revealing one - at least as it applies to him and his work (but then again, how many people are familiar with his work ?). In taking reading as the personal experience it mainly is, the idea of influence pervades much of this book: even where Gass is introducing a text to an audience, in a foreword or review, he often sees it as part of a lineage of texts. Of course, several of these titles - most notably Alasdair Gray's The Book of Prefaces and Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy - specifically lend themselves to this approach, but even elsewhere it is noticeable.
Because of the breadth and depth of his reading, many of Gass' pieces are a roller-coaster ride of reference and allusion, generally to good and informative (if also slightly overwhelming) effect. His review of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel begins with Socrates' nose, Gass catching the newest translator (Andrew Brown) 'correcting' Rabelais' version (making a nez pointu into a "snub nose") and ingeniously then combining a comparison of translations and approaches with a reading of the book itself.
The mix of pieces on grand classics and some smaller, more recent work (Ernesto Sábato's On Heroes and Tombs, John Hawkes' Humors of Blood & Skin, Robert Coover's The Public Burning) makes for a slightly skewed collection, but Gass has something of interest to say about them all. Often there's a personal touch - an encounter with Canetti, in a review of The Tongue Set Free, or his experience of being mistaken for William Gaddis (in 'William Gaddis and his Goddamn Books') - which he handles quite well (though the references to 'Jack' Barth and 'Jack' Hawkes prove mildly irritating).
Rainer Maria Rilke is one of Gass' major influences ("I became a Rilke junkie. I cannot let many days pass without having a fix", he admits), and he crops up repeatedly. Among the more ambitious pieces is 'Rilke and the Requiem', a creative introduction/appreciation/survey.
Several of the pieces are general defenses of the literary, most notably 'A Defense of the Book', in which he makes his heartfelt case for the library and the book. He offers a variety of explanations and reasons for being a book-fan, including:
'Because books are like bicycles: You travel under your own power and proceed at your own pace., your riding is silent and will not pollute, no one is endangered by your journey - not frightened, maimed, or killed - and the exercise is good for you.'
A Temple of Texts is written by one who both venerates and appreciates texts (and also has the critical faculties not to be entirely blind to their defects), and it makes for a spirited defense of literary tradition - whereby Gass sees that tradition very much also in the modern, with literature still very much a field that is alive and in which much good and interesting work is (or can be) done. It's a marvelous collection of often very creative pieces on important (and a few lesser) works, as well as more general essays, and though much might be familiar from when it was first published (in magazines, or as book introductions), - and though it is a bit of a hodgepodge - it's nice to have it all collected, and it makes for a very worthwhile collection." - The Complete Review
William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, Basic Books, 2000."In 1922, four years before he died of leukemia at age 51, Rilke finally completed the Duino Elegies, named for the castle where they poured out over an intensive four day (and night) period; within days of their completion, the Sonnets to Orpheus emerged as a reality-affirming coda. Rilke's dense and intricate verbal texture has made translation all the more irresistible over the years, and Gass, an intellectual eminence (Cartesian Sonata; Finding a Form; The Tunnel; etc.) is the first to meet the challenge discursively: this genre-bending book is a series of personal essaysAat times veering between melodramatic and ellipticalAthat explore Rilke's biography as much as they address Gass's own difficult choices in the translations scattered throughout. Gass vividly evokes a poet "getting used to strange dark halls, guest beds, always cadging and scrounging, eating poorly," finding Rilke's lyrics "obdurate, complex, and compacted... displaying an orator's theatrical power, while remaining as suited to a chamber and its music as a harpsichord." In the translations themselves, however, Gass tends to replace complexity with unwarranted truism, as in the Fourth elegyA"but the contours of our feelings stay unknown/ when public pressure shapes the face we know"Aas if to shield readers from the difficult and the strange. (Translations of all 10 elegies appear in an appendix at the book's end.) That said, Gass has an impressive ear for dramatic prosody, and a sensitivity to Rilke's playfulness and formal elegance (especially in the Tenth Elegy). Its willingness to be bold in a climate of scholarly restraint makes this translation one of the best availableAsuperior, in particular, to the once-standard versions by Leishman and Spender, and to the recent versions of Stephen Mitchell." - Publishers Weekly
"Gass offers so much more than the subtitle to this gem might imply. The pages are filled with seamlessly intertwined biographical insights, textual analysis, commentary on the elusive art of translation, and fresh and vibrant new renderings of many of Rainer Maria Rilke's key works. A fitting tribute to one of the 20th century's greatest poets and everything literary criticism should be." - Library Journal
William H. Gass, Tests of Time: Essays, University Of Chicago Press, 2003."For those willing to overlook the author's wandering style and bursts of elitism, William H. Gass's latest series of essays, Tests of Time, yields many rewards. Gass unifies this ambitious work with a focus on the ethics of writing, and, on a more general level, morality. The first of three sections, Literary Matters, includes essays investigating the nature of narrative, experimental fiction, writing's effect on memory and experience, and culture and canonization. The second section, Social and Political Contretemps, explores the influence of politics, religion, censorship, and nationalism on writers, as well as the similarities between American and German culture. Finally, the Stuttgart Seminar Lectures section concerns the value of well-documented history and artistic writing. Gass insists throughout that only through creative, brave, and responsible writing can humanity avert moral degeneration-and he often succeeds in powerfully conveying and inspiring this point. His thorough reading of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities beautifully emphasizes the role of poetry in our connection with the past and present. "There Was an Old Woman Who" entertains and informs with its use of a largely forgotten case of urban cannibalism as an example of the need for accurate documentation and a moral view of history. Unfortunately Gass often muddles his valuable ideas with overlong ranting, inflammatory rhetoric, and out-of-touch popular-culture criticisms. The author is easily at his best when he remains succinct and organized yet impassioned, as he does in the collection's excellent final essay, "Transformations." Here and elsewhere, Gass delivers a modernist critique in every way exemplifying the courage, skill, and consciousness in writing that he so values." - Ross Doll
"These 14 essays from essayist, novelist and philosopher Gass (Finding a Form, etc.), which first appeared in a variety of other venues, are neatly divided into three sections, "Literary Matters," "Social and Political Contretemps" and "The Stuttgart Seminar Lectures," delivered to a cultural studies seminar. Ardent in his admirations, Gass, an emeritus professor in the humanities at Washington University in St. Louis who is nearing 80, produces remarkably succinct and well-thought-out criticism in a passionate and precise yet easy and vernacular-based language. Some essays start with deceptive lightness, like "I've Got a Little List," beginning with takeoffs on a famous Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, then developing into revealing literary observations: "The list is the fundamental rhetorical form for creating a sense of abundance, overflow, excess. We find it so used in writers with an appetite for life from Rabelais and Cervantes, or from Burton to Browne, to Barth and Elkin." On social and political matters, Gass employs a similarly tuned instrument, as he examines Algerian literary politics, and 1930s American fascism from the moment "I first heard my father refer to his president as `that rich Jew Rosenfeld'" to Father Coughlin and beyond. All the essays retain care and gusto; even a meditation on history and lies based around the O.J. Simpson trial feels fresh. If Gass finds the prose of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities "elevated to poetry without the least sign of strain," the same might be said for much of this collection. (Mar.) Forecast: Gass has won a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and many other honors. This book is not going to set any records at the register, but it will be well reviewed, particularly in terms of the newly invigorated search for a workable modern ethics… a la Richard Rorty." - Publishers Weekly
"Tests of Time collects fourteen pieces. Though mainly focussed on literary matters, Gass' scope extends far beyond. Literature is the center of Gass' world - and for him it also extends everywhere. It is the obvious point of reference.
Gass is a spirited writer, and he lets loose nicely on these pages. Three of the pieces are "Stuttgart Seminar Lectures" - lectures that even Gass acknowledges "fly a few feet from convention". The rest are more straightforward essays - though still with an energy and dazzle that can easily overwhelm.
The book is divided into three sections. The first is titled "Literary Matters" and deals with these most directly. Two essays deal with specific books: "Sidelonging" is a book review of Peter Handke's My Year in the No-Man's-Bay, and "Invisible Cities" is a longer consideration of Italo Calvino's book of that name. These show Gass' literary interests nicely, and are good introductions to the books.
Other pieces in the first section look at broader literary subjects. "The Nature of Narrative and Its Philosophical Implications" differentiates stories and fiction. A clever survey of what stories and story-telling mean, it is an excellent introduction to Gass' own literary approaches. Many examples and quick summaries are effectively used to make his points. And there are many of these - for example: "Story is eager to reach its climax; fiction is all foreplay."
"Anywhere but Kansas" is a more conventional piece, looking at the the idea of experimental fiction (and using childhood chemistry experiments as an example). "Many fictions which appear to be 'experimental' are actually demonstrations", he notes.
"I've Got a List" exhaustively considers list-making over the ages, an encyclopaedic whirlwind tour. "Tests of Time" considers what the tests of time (for art, specifically) are, and what the consequences of them are - a single failure on the constantly repeated test, after all, likely destining a work to eternal oblivion.
Gass heaps examples and arguments on the reader - or rather: he throws them and shoots them, a barrage that can easily overwhelm. There is so much here - so much everywhere, on each of the pages - that it can literally leave a reader speechless (and certainly breathless). Gass is unrelenting - though admittedly that is much of the fun. His style is an odd mix of the erudite and the... unusual. Describing the failure of art to civilise mankind, for example, he writes:
'A derisive noise is appropriate here. As the moral educators of mankind, masterpieces have been one big floppola.'
The second section of the book, on "Social and Political Contretemps" then begins with a piece on "The Writer and Politics". He calls it "a litany" - as if much of what came before wasn't. But this truly is a litany, a literary romp of brief mentions of authors who have had their troubles with the law and politics. Some stories get a few sentences or two, some sentences are little more than lists. Still, it is compelling: a demonstration of the myriad troubles the writer can (and too often: has) had. Though Gass, tongue half in cheek, can note:
Prison is an excellent place to put authors. It gives them a sense of grievance, and we know that grievances are among a writer's more powerful motives; it removes them from temptation, and we know how easily writers are tempted by bosom or bottle to imbibe; it eliminates distractions (.....)
Certainly his cries should be heeded:
What is unthinkable ? Think it. What is unutterable ? Utter it. What cannot be spelled without a dash ? Fill in the dashes with doubts. What is obscene ? Dream it. In all its tones, in seamy detail, at indelicate length. What is too horrible to contemplate ? Describe it.
"Tribalism, Identity, and Ideology" looks at the oppression of writers again: the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the assassination of Tahar Djaout. "The Shears of the Censor" looks at another form of repression, in a broader survey of different forms of censorship (and the consequences).
"Were There Anything in the World Worth Worship" is a distinctly Gassian take on the the question of worship and religion. "How German Are We ?" is, in large part, an explanation of Gass' novel, The Tunnel (see our review), mixing biographical detail and a warning that it can, indeed, happen here:
How German are we ? my novel asks. Its answer has pleased few. Its answer is - very.
The final section of the book collects the three "Stuttgart Seminar Lectures" - creative, ambitious attempts at presenting his material, weaving fiction into a discussion of fact, offering a take on Flaubert, moving neatly from nursery rhymes to ugly reality in another lecture, closing finally with a piece on (and, again, of) "Transformations".
Literature is everywhere. Gass sees and explains almost all in relation to literature - and he does it well. He has a great deal to say, and he expresses it well - and firmly and in a way guaranteed to make an impression. It can be a bit much. Or far too much. But it is generally worth the effort.
Tests of Time is an exciting collection. Gass is passionate, and passion carries many of his pieces. He has seen (and read and written) a great deal. He is always looking to examine matters anew, to shed different light on them. And he still believes - strongly, convincingly - that literature matters." - The Complete Review
"If readers fail to apppreciate the range and subtlety of William Gass's essays in his latest collection, Tests of Time, he'll partly have himself to blame. Gass's prose is the very model of mixed-diction modernism, but one voice threatens to outshout the rest: a Lear-like old cuss, out of temper with the times. (Oh, the usual gripes: pop culture, political correctness, irrationality, and the failure of others to see what he was up to in his widely unread 1995 novel,The Tunnel.) Quantitatively, however, rant takes up relatively little space compared with literary wonder-working. "The Nature of Narrative and Its Philosophical Implications" - not a snore, despite the title - usefully argues that story and fiction are not synonyms but antonyms. "There Was an Old Woman Who" corrals the nursery rhyme, the Holocaust, and the O. J. case into a ringmasterly demonstration that true history is the history of human consciousness. Still, you keep bracing yourself for Gramp's next outburst.
"For twenty-five years," Gass claims, "I have been writing about resentment, and maybe I am now ill of my occupation." This preemptive half-admission doesn't make him any more attractive when he gets onto "shrill and posturing" minorities and "the typical liberal strategy of whining about environment, upbringing, background, and forces of society and nature." But when Gass flips into p.c. mode himself, oh-so-casually referring to the writer-in-general as "she," or noting that "the story of Adam and Eve has been used for centuries to denigrate women" - denigrate, yet! - you begin to see that his is a radically divided sensibility. You could waste hours figuring out whether you agree or disagree with this or that "position" Gass "takes"; ultimately the play of his sensibility trumps whatever he's playing with.
When considering literature - always his happiest choice of topic - Gass himself makes a similar argument against the centrality of content. The writer, he says, writes "not by running with the bulls in Pamplona... not by enjoying an unfortunate marriage... not by holding the thinning fingers of your aids-eaten friend, alas, though it feels sad enough to be inspiring, for that kind of thematic content counts for nothing." He quotes Flaubert's idea that "there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects; from the standpoint of pure Art one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject." And Gass concludes that "right reading... must be for relations, continuities, balances, breaks, disembowelments of design, surprising restitutions of order."
Aha: Then Gass is a formalist? Sure, except that he has (like Flaubert) a passionate attachment to the concrete, the fleshly, the particular: "If one is to see the world in a grain of sand, one must first see the sand." He hangs his concluding essay, "Transformations," on the image of dewdrops on the leaves of a whitebud tree in morning sunlight; in the title essay, he quotes an exquisitely visualized passage of Walden in which Thoreau recalls fishing at night, and comments that "there's no moment too trivial, too sad, too vulgar, too rinky-dink to be unworthy of such recollection, for even a wasted bit of life is priceless when composed properly or hymned aright, even that poor plate of peaches slowly spoiling while its portrait is being painted."
IYet Gass (who teaches philosophy, not literature) doesn't mistake the particular for the real: A description of a dewdrop exists at several removes from the dewdrop. "When I replace the fact (which I can never see, which is a construction) with my perception, and my perception with a series of words... two series of transformations will have intersected: that of Nature becoming Experience, and that of the thought-sounded sentence sliding down an arm into its written form." Aha: Then Gass is a neoromantic, taking Coleridge's proposition that "in our life alone does Nature live" one more step: In art alone does experience survive? Sure, except when you remember his antiromantic disdain for the ostentatiously primal. "Let them take pride in being Scots, or Samoans," he writes, "and memorize epics in meters beaten by oars upon ocean waters. Let them grow up stupid, Fred thought; it cuts the competition."
Of course this is a persona talking to itself, but Gass talks just the same way in his own voice: "Dope and dumbness keep the competition down. Let them love Elvis." He argues that we shouldn't confuse "an egalitarianism which is politically desirable with a cultural equality which is cowardly, damaging, and reprehensible." And he takes dead aim at types like you (presumably) and me (most definitely) who pride themselves on their connoisseurship of, you know, like, whatever. "Although there may be a few persons capable of enjoying honky-tonk and high mass, pork rinds and puff pastry, celli concerti and retch rock, and therefore be in a position to pronounce upon the quality of each of these endeavors... it should be clear that a life of idiocy and a life of civility are rarely joined, and that we have probably stretched our standard beyond its useful limit." Except for the iffy syntax (there may be persons capable of... and therefore be), this is the channeled voice of Nabokov.
Ah. So then Gass belongs to the fussy old high-culture mandarinate? Well, in that case he should try, as he puts it, "not to swear so fucking much"; he must be the most potty-mouthed elitist since Ezra Pound. Much of Gass's studied impropriety, like Pound's, runs to the excremental ("The ideal cultural product... contains no substance of any substantial kind - so that after you have eaten it, for days you will shit only air"), though once in a while he'll throw a dutiful fuck into his prose. Doesn't he see that his own diction is the stylistic equivalent of pork rinds and puff pastry? Doesn't he see that such juxtapositions were what old-school modernism - the only rubric that really comes close to fitting him - was all about? Well, of course he sees. Language, Gass writes, "can absorb every stink-footed invader and turn them, in time, into model citizens." He hardly needs to add that if this were to happen to his language, he'd invent new obscenities. Gass's omnidirectional provocations finally, fortunately, read more like performance than polemic: This is a mind too capacious, too complicated, too mercurial�too modern�to enlist for long in any cause but self-celebration and self-contradiction. "If you want to be made a fool of," he writes, "take sides, and then let the side take you... Coins and paper have sides but value and language haven't; there are no sides to a stew, either, only surfaces, ingredients, and flavors." - David Gates
Read it at Google Books
William H. Gass, Habitations of the Word: Essays, Cornell UP, 1997. (1985)"Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, 1985 Now a Cornell Paperback-
"These twelve essays take risks, make connections, give off sparks and illustrate Gass's love of language. Using Freudian concepts, he compares the art of writing to the art of becoming civilized: writing parallels the transformation of raw instinct into shared expression. . . . Gass writes with impassioned concern." - Publishers Weekly
"[These] essays [are] meant to enliven the form as Montaigne, Emerson, and Woolf enlivened it. This is an ambitious task, but no contemporary American has better credentials than Gass. . . . He announces a topic, then descants with impressive erudition and unbuttoned ardor for the surprising phrase. The results often dazzle, and they're unfailingly original, in the root sense of the word-they work back toward some point of origin, generally a point where literature departs from the external world to invent a world of its own." - Sam Tanenhaus
"William H. Gass is not alone among... American fiction writers in giving some of his time and talent to nonfiction, but nobody does it more energetically." - Frank Kermode
"Borges observed that young writers tend to bury their ideas under baroque ornament, but as they get older they seek a plainer, more open expression. Is this true of you?
- No, it has been a double thing for me. For a long time I abandoned an elaborate style because it simply wasn’t working—I wasn’t able to manage it at all. I went into a phase in philosophy and writing in general that was extremely disciplined and formal. I have a hunch that I am moving now from a baroque stage into a more clear, lyrical stage. That was always there, though. It just depends what kind of story I’m working on, I guess. I feel that I’m more likely to move in the direction of Henry James and get more mannered. I don’t mind that at all. I like late James better than anything. I like late things: Finnegans Wake, late quartets by Beethoven, late Bartok, late Verdi, late Yeats. They’re breaking through their manner to something absolutely different. And if you’re very, very lucky, that’s what happens. What Borges has decided to do is to simply be Borges, which I would be happy to be, of course. But to do something like Fuentes is doing is to constantly push, to try new things. That is more exciting to me, that breaking through. Late Beethoven breaks through and finds for himself a new scheme. Of course, that’s just a dream. He had to be a great artist to do that." - From an interview between Lorna H. Domke and WIlliam H. Gass, published in The Missouri Review in 1987.
Willam H. Gass, Eyes, Penguin Random House, 2015.
A dazzling new collection—two novellas and four short stories from one of the most revered writers of our time.
It begins with “In Camera,” the first of the two novellas, and tells the story, which grows darker and dustier by the speck, of a Mr. Gab (who doesn’t have the gift) and his photography shop (in a part of town so drab even robbers wouldn’t visit), a shop stuffed with gray-white, gray-bleach photographs, each in its own cellophane sheet, loosely side-filed in cardboard boxes, tag attached . . . an inner sanctum where little happens beyond the fulsome, deep reverence for Mr. Gab’s images and vast collection, a homemade museum in the midst of the outer maelstrom . . . until a Mr. Stu (as in u-stew-pid) enters the shop, inspecting the extraordinary collection, and Mr. Gab’s treasure-filled, dust-laden, meticulously contained universe begins to implode . . .
In the story “Don’t Even Try, Sam,” the upright piano from the 1942 Warner Bros. classic Casablanca is interviewed (“I know why you want to talk to me,” the piano says. “It’s because everybody else is dead. Stars go out. Directors die. Companies fold. But some of the props get preserved. I’ve seen my friend the Vichy water bottle in the storeroom as wrapped up as the Maltese Falcon. We’d fetch a price now”) . . .
In another story, “Charity,” a young lawyer, whose business it is to keep hospital equipment honestly produced, offers a simple gift and is brought to the ambiguous heart of charity itself. In “Soliloquy for a Chair,” a folding chair does just that—talks in a barbershop that is ultimately bombed . . . and in “The Toy Chest,” Disneylike creatures take on human roles and concerns and live in an atmosphere of a child’s imagination.
“Language of balletic precision . . . Readers already familiar with William H. Gass’ oeuvre will find all six tales in this volume sending them back to his earlier fiction, while newcomers to the work of this American master will hasten to discover more.” – Claire Hopley, Washington Times Book Review
“Enough formal inventiveness and lyrical sleights-of-hand to keep even the most seasoned Gass acolyte pleasantly off-balance . . . a wonderful entry point into the Gassian literary cosmos. In these strange, piercing stories we read of ourselves hungrily and with a growing awareness. We read for the inimitable prose style, and the brilliant narrative gambits—but we also read to see what he sees . . . Life and literature shimmer and intensify. May we all learn to see with such eyes.” – Dustin Illingwirth, Electric Lit
“Powerful, passionate . . . Gass at his best and most mysterious . . . impressive . . . All of [the stories] are distinguished by Gass’ dry wit, verbal facility and rich prose style.” – Harper Barnes, St Louis Post-Dispatch
“Quietly suspenseful, emotionally lustrous . . . The literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, seething, trenchant, hilarious . . . imaginative and incisive . . . Gass is a mind-bending original of phenomenal brilliance, artistry, wit, and insight.” – Donna Seaman, Booklist
“[Gass is] an exquisite maker of sentences, weighing his prose like a poet for rhythm, consonance, and intellectual heft . . . excellent . . . dry but artful . . . It says something about Gass’ talent and flexibility that he can write an effective story that’s narrated by a barber-shop folding chair. But this is Gass’ universe, and here, even folding chairs don’t get off easy. Glum fun.” – Kirkus
An “eye,” the epigraph to Gass’s (Middle C) new story collection informs us, is “the point where an underground spring suddenly bursts to the surface.” It is evident from these tales that the 90-year-old’s creative fount is far from dry. The book opens with two novellas, each of which coaxes sublimity out of wry, misanthropic portraits. In the first, “In Camera,” a gruff art dealer zealously guards his invaluable photography collection from prying eyes. He is less interested in profits, or people, than luxuriating in the infinite grays of his black-and-white prints and their representation of the “world as it is rescued by the camera and redeemed.” Like his On Being Blue, the second novella, “Charity,” demonstrates Gass’s extraordinary ability to riff on the philosophical, spiritual, and earthly materializations of an idea. Here a young lawyer besieged by panhandlers, fund-raising groups, and scam artists all seeking contributions ruminates on “creation’s constant need for charity.” In a free-flowing, associative, and often ribald narrative, Gass anatomizes a cultural phenomenon that only vaguely resembles the charity St. Paul lauded in his famous epistle. The stories that follow don’t reach the same heights. Particularly belabored are two comic exercises, “Don’t Even Try, Sam,” in which a prop piano narrates its experience on the set of Casablanca, and “Soliloquy for an Empty Chair,” in which a barber shop’s folding chair divulges the secrets of its sedentary life. Much better are the previously unpublished “The Toy Chest,” alternately acerbic and nostalgic, and “The Man Who Spoke with His Hands,” which balances its whimsy with a vague sense of menace in an account of a music professor whose expressive hands have a life of their own. For most of this collection, Gass proves himself a master diviner, able to tap into the deepest and most mysterious reservoirs.
– Publishers Weekly
“In Camera”’s Mr. Gab, loves certain photographs and has a rare print shop where he moons over his valuables as Gass’s narrator describes an August Sander pic of a hotelkeeper and wife: “…the innkeeper’s arms clasped behind him so that the swell of his stomach would suggest to a hesitant guest hearty fare; well, they were both girthy and full-fleshed folk as far as that goes, her eyes in a bit of a squint, his like raisins drowning in the plump of his cheeks.” Such a metaphor does not grow a branch in the reader’s mind but inaugurates a sweet gooey sensation, so that this photograph is worth these fifty words transferring the Sander to the modern mind though the photo is unseen. And in “The Man Who Spoke with His Hands,” that man is described thus: “And despite all of this nearly continuous motion, the Professors hardly noticed them; took little heed of this habit; were not distracted as much by the fingers as by the light which rollicked from their owner’s bald head, pale as paper. He was a man, compact and even slight, whom one could nevertheless pick out of a crowd as one would the most attractive piece of fruit from a bin. His hair would have been brown had he had any.” Again metaphor and harmony — six out of ten words in the last sentence start with -h and four out of six begin -ha. Short sentences with a few clauses. Showing not telling, but really the story is being told — related might be a better word — so the reader knows who they are hearing about. The way Gass writes is a show, yet, supra-ironically, in the showiest time of human civilization, show-women and men are taken to task as showing off — Not being very Alice Munro-like, are they? the current gatekeepers wag their fingers.
A year ago, a youngish novelist published a diatribe in Dissent on many illustrious and/or popular writers of English prose — essentially a thumbs up/thumbs down appraisal, but all his thumbs, with caveats, pointed south and he seemed to ask for literature that is not too knowledgeable, not too in love with itself, but pleasurable for the reader. Gass (though called a genius) and his late friend, William Gaddis, were bandied about as both mean and snide, though only Gaddis is smug and classist. It was symptomatic of much paper-thin criticism, codifying people or art into one’s favorites list, like asking one’s internet date to fit all the nit-picky criteria before agreeing to meet. Gass’s interest in decrepit characters has often drawn rebuke, from the history professor William Fredrick Kohler’s nastiness in The Tunnel (A Professor! It’s just Gass, some critics cried, forgetting that there is the poet, the poem, and the speaker of the poem — even in fiction) to the phantom and phony Joseph Skizzen in Middle C, who poses as a music professor (Gass!). And don’t forget “Mrs. Mean,” the narrator of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” who “want[s] to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody” and the abusive families in “The Peterson Kid” and “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s.” In the two novellas, “In Camera,” and “Charity,” there are two more uncharming men to add to the heap, though the former’s Mr. Gab has u-Stu (short for “you stupid kid”), the deformed son of a former wife, but not Gab’s issue, as counterpoint. “Charity” only has Hugh Hamilton Hardy, a repugnant lawyer who is sick of strangers asking him for money in all the ways people do, though he eventually confronts his miserliness with help from the past in this kaleidoscopic seventy-page opera that often shifts space and time. There is little sympathy for this character, the modern yardstick for connecting to the reader, but as the words accrete, there is a unique sense of this cur, who sucks a woman’s toes and has her stand on him, the other admittedly no one aspires to be, but maybe at this hate-filled time more than any other, we need to put ourselves in the soul of the other to learn how to get along. No matter how much selective reading and viewing or surgical friendship (I only do this with him-I’ll never do that), we surely all inhabit the same planet. The book, as Gass has said, is a container of consciousness, and as Gass has also averred, “The world is not simply good and bad on different weekends like an inconsistent pitcher; we devour what we savor and what sustains us; out of ruins more ruins will later, in their polished towers, rise; lust is the muscle of love: its strength, its coarseness, its brutality; the heart beats and is beaten by its beating; not a shadow falls without the sun’s shine and the sun sears what it saves.” People have been uncomfortably identifying themselves and running scared from Richard III, Othello, MacBeth for four hundred years. What makes this time an exception? How does Gass come to describe such a sot? Here is one 115-word sentence:
Hardy’s passivity was perfect, he’d been told — although it hadn’t gotten him a raise in two years due to tough times, he’d been also told — because it was not subservient or cautious or lacking in oomph, but gave off an aura of calm confidence and certainty about the legal, if not the moral, superiority of his position, a nimbus which could have come from nothing but a clear and steady we’ll-wheel-you-into-suicide point of view, accompanied by a softly polished face, a cuff and color odor as seductively alluring as perfume from a scratch patch, yet a posture exhibited by the suit that resembled, in representing the claimant’s attitude, a volcanic cone only momentarily covered with cooling snow.
Hardy’s passivity was perfect, he’d been told — The subject of the sentence is Hardy’s passivity — the point of view of his attitude in life, a key ingredient of his shtick. He doesn’t judge it to be so — others do.
although it hadn’t gotten him a raise in two years due to tough times, he’d been also told—because it was not subservient or cautious or lacking in oomph, — But in this first clause there is comedy because his way of living doesn’t translate into more money. Still the passivity was perfect because it was ostentatious.
but gave off an aura of calm confidence and certainty about the legal, if not the moral, superiority of his position, — But because the passivity was levelheaded and reminding of his business, the legal, as “off an aura of,” becomes a saucy sauce of vowels with a diphthong pinned in the middle like a dab of butter.
a nimbus which could have come from nothing but a clear and steady we’ll-wheel-you-into-suicide point of view, — What is that aura? Now the narrator says it’s a “nimbus” and the metaphor grows with “could have come” being the sweet music that sends it on, and “clear” completing the trio of hard c sounds.
accompanied by a softly polished face, — But the nimbus is pulled inside out back to his physical being, his face, so sight unseen to seen and then smell — Hardy’s passivity is really being expressed, it’s not a small thing — qualities that make the character live in a reader’s mind.
a cuff and color odor as seductively alluring as perfume from a scratch patch, — And now his passivity is also accompanied by more hard c’s, “a cuff and color odor,” (odor slant rhymes with “aura” and “moral”) but the odor has its own double simile, “as seductively alluring as perfume from a scratch patch,” with double p’s.
yet a posture exhibited by the suit that resembled, in representing the claimant’s attitude, a volcanic cone only momentarily covered with cooling snow — But Hardy isn’t that easy because he also has a posture that goes along with his face and odor, a posture that takes the cake, because his haberdashery resembled, like his client’s force (he is a lawyer, but something of a hired gun), “a volcanic cone only momentarily covered with cooling snow.” Two more hard c’s, and one grand metaphor of his real power and success, his posture that threatens by sight with a little “They that have power to hurt but will do none” gloss proving that the man’s stance in life mirrors the anger in his mind.
Gass, like many before him, but few after, examines characters that are flops and successful hypocrites because flaws interest him more than luck, but also because his fictional universe is not that of making the right moral choices, those have already been made or not, but the result of civilization’s one step forward, three steps back build. He wears his rue with a difference. In “The Toy Chest,” the final piece and the last work composed, a man remembers his youth, his toys, and the toys that women would present, eventually taking over for the trains that couldn’t: “We were sitting right here alongside the toy chest. She said hers composed the toy chest now…I never again had a happiness so brief, so intense, so scared.”
Gass, a former philosophy professor, but more appropriately a philosopher of the word and sentence, has devoted his life to showing how the world is within the word and how a sentence has a soul and is its own story, developing spindle diagrams of sentences that he first debuted when speaking of the work of Gertrude Stein in the 1970s. In the last literary years there has been renewed interest in Gordon Lish and his theory of consecution, writing sentence upon sentence by means of repetition of what came before, be it word or sound, built from the work of Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue, and Julia Kristeva. Gass and Lish are squarely in the same tradition — if you don’t have music no one will listen or at least won’t listen very hard. It stretches back to Stein, Joyce, James, Melville, Dickinson, Emerson and over the ocean to the authors of Baroque prose, Shakespeare, and back to the nameless bards and authors of the Bible, and to Homer. This tradition has nothing to do with the moralizing realism that’s come to dominate US literary fiction or the epiphany moment whether in prose or verse. Some ask for fiction to show us how to live and some ask for entertainment. Absent religion, the pagan Pater says, “For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” Politicians pander, but parents, teachers, and friends, or some combination, are those consistent pitchers who help us learn how to live and what to do. Literary language communicates something ineffable, even parables work by metaphor. Rilke, Gass’s lodestar, had the gumption to end a poem, “You must change your life,” yet art is not usually as easy as self-help. It presents alternative realities that may be accepted, reviled, or ignored. So sentences come to us giving nothing but the beauty of their words — more than enough, or as Gass said, “Because a consciousness electrified by beauty — is that not the aim and emblem and the ending of all finely made love?” - Greg Gerke
ecently, the novelist, critic and one-time philosophy professor William H Gass was asked by Publishers Weekly for five writing tips. His advice contained the following sentence: “Be happy because no one is seeing what you do, no one is listening to you, no one really cares what may be achieved, but sometimes accidents happen and beauty is born.”
I like to imagine the Knopf publicist who negotiated this assignment for Gass banging a head against a solid surface, in reply to such a despairing marketplace self-assessment. And yet anyone who publishes Gass probably already knows his thinking about mass taste. In his 1983 essay Tropes of the Text, Gass wrote that “only the common run of novels expects the one-night stand”. Gass himself belongs to the class of writers – in that essay he cites Gertrude Stein, Thomas Bernhard and Mario Vargas Llosa as fellow travellers – whose less-common fictions demand more of their audiences (and justify longer, more committed relationships).
Whether you consider him the last modernist or one of the postmodernists, you can’t deny the fundamentally tricky nature of Gass’s fiction. Characters tend to develop strangely (or not at all); settings are sometimes created from a fusillade of petty-seeming details that can collectively avoid a straightforward accounting of the basic proscenium stage of action. Though what can pull you through – especially during a mystifying first reading – is the rhythmic verve of Gass’s sentences.
David Foster Wallace, citing Gass’s 1966 debut, Omensetter’s Luck, as one of the “direly underappreciated” American novels of the late 20th century, commended Gass’s prose for being “bleak but gorgeous, like light through ice”. But in that same brief entry, Wallace hit on another attribute of Gass’s, which is the author’s humor. Omensetter’s main character is a “cityish” priest; not long after being appointed to a post in a rural setting – and in the midst of a banquet held in the priest’s honor – Gass gives the character a multi-page internal monologue rife with details of the bash’s unappetizing menu and a hurried trip to a bathroom, which includes the line: “The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.”
Gass’s penchant for creating witty grouches and solipsists capable of charm can be seen, at the paragraph level, as a rebellion against the sentimentality of mainstream fiction. He has described the historical turn toward “realism” as the act of pulling “fiction up from its roots in Rabelais and Cervantes”, in order to spirit novels “away into the bourgeois world like so much else”. In an era during which most other storytelling mediums are working overtime to ingratiate via what the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead calls “the scourge of ‘relatability’”, Gass’s refusal to play on the sympathies we assume for ourselves can feel like a welcome change-up.
But Gass is not content merely to tweak the bourgeois modern reader. On a macro level, the author’s obsession with crimes against humanity has a starker (and more judgmental) political cast. The height of this form of protest was his long-in-process book The Tunnel – a 1996 novel about a historian of the Nazis who freely admits to an unseemly identification with the Third Reich. And even when one of Gass’s moral offenders gets what’s coming to him, as in the finale of the story “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” (which Gass says has “a feminist strain”), the vengeance doesn’t wholly vitiate the foregoing ugliness, either. “I’m resisting in the sense that I’m yelling about it,” Gass once said in an interview. “My anger comes from still thinking it might be … remedied, that it isn’t just: ‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ and sort of resigned to it.”
At 91 years of age, Gass remains anything but accepting of our world as it is. By being fleeter and more seductively plotted than The Tunnel, his 2013 novel Middle C managed to top it as a savage exploration of moral failure. And Gass’s new collection shows the author continuing his late-career roll. Except for its final, never-before-seen story, Eyes: Novellas and Stories scoops up the shorter fictions that Gass placed in literary journals during the same period he was composing Middle C. The first novella, titled “In Camera”, shares some similarities with that book – the most notable attribute being a viciously insular aesthete protagonist who articulates a critical distance from the rest of humanity through his studied curation of a private museum.
Early in the novella, we’re told that this proprietor of a photographic print shop accepts responsibility for a child beset by a host of physical challenges – and who was recently abandoned by his mother (the aesthete’s former wife). Was the aesthete the original father? (In classic Gass fashion, the welfare agency sounds oddly equivocal.) From there, the story is intent on shredding the ideal of familial affection entirely. Over the course of some years, the aesthete progresses from calling his charge “hey you, stupid” to, eventually, “Mr. Stu.” (So he’s not the traditional, nurturing father figure.)
And yet the aesthete manages to pass on what appears to be some family values. (Black and white prints are obviously truthful, while color prints are condemned as too eager to be loved.) Mr Stu gradually comes to understand that his surrogate father might not have come by all of his prized, rare black and white prints honestly. And though (spoiler alert) Mr Stu cannot keep the police from arriving and carting away his father’s stolen goods, the boy can create something of a miracle send-off, by massaging the light that the world casts into this dingy cavern devoted to photographic refinement. (Being dimly lit, the shop itself suggests the interior of a camera body – its rusty, exterior metal shutters an amateur’s aperture.)
While the remaining, shorter stories in Eyes are more akin to exercises, they generally have a playful air that mixes well with Gass’s customary grouchiness – as with “Don’t Even Try, Sam” (which is narrated by what turns out to be the casually racist prop piano used in the film Casablanca). Finally, though, the big draw in Eyes is the one-two punch of novellas that opens the collection – both of which linger in the mind with greater force than the works in his Tunnel-era collection, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas. Taken together with Middle C, the novellas in Eyes show that, for all of Gass’s expertise with the tropes of his favored texts, he’s still stumbling over some new accidents of beauty too. - Seth Colter Walls
William H. Gass is a trickster tour guide, and his many unreliable narrators demonstrate uniquely varied hues of his own proclivities towards wordplay. Actually, with Gass, let’s not call it mere wordplay: it’s something more like the meticulous scalpel used in reconstructive surgery, as if he’s using each onomatopoeic feature of each syllable as he slices it toward the page. Yet he also can bum-rush the reader with his words with the wilder whip of an abstractionist, a paint-happy surrealist. He wrings the words of their oozy essence and heaves them—like wriggling big-mouth bass in an open-air market—till they splash up against the canvas of his typed pages.
Between his essays, short stories and novels, Gass has been at this for decades. Should Eyes be your first encounter with Gass, keeping up might be like stepping aboard an already-revolving merry-go-round. One has to open the page to certain novellas contained here, like “In Camera,” not only with a tad more gumption then your typical short story surveyor, but with a readiness to grip and grip tightly. “In Camera” will sing a strange song to you about the hypnotic power of photographs, bewitching both the greedy salesman character at the center of the tale as well as you, reader, as though he’s pulling you straight into a pool of bright oranges and rich emeralds faded upon the exposed film.
“Grass cannot be captured in color. It becomes confused. Trees neither. Except for fall foliage seen from a plane. But in gray: the snowy rooftop, the winter tree, whole mountains of rock, the froth of a fast steam, can be caught, spew and striation, twig and stick, footprint on a snowy walk, the wander of a wrinkle across the face…oh…”
And on it goes. And, sure, Gass can describe a sumptuous scene, but he can also telegraph a character so completely that it’ll be as though they’re in the room with you as you read. He does this with the pensive lawyer of “Charity”—along with the man’s infantilizing manners, quietly smoldering anger and the rapturous experiences he encounters through the surreal suit-and-tie gauntlet of K Street.
Gass doesn’t slow down after the stimulation of our senses or the hip-checking of our empathy; he also casts his life-giving spells to inanimate artifacts. From a toy train to a cinematically famous piano, Gass also shoots a supernatural spirit into the things that occupy our time, as hollow as they may be. Yes, I’m referencing the piano in “Don’t Even Try, Sam,” a testimonial delivered straight from the mouth of the instrument inside Rick’s American Cafe in Casablanca. Can a piano make you blush? With Gass writing in its blunt, chiming voice, it can. It does.
Whereas his narrators’ voices may spontaneously sashay into a sing song-like flare or the structure and meter of a sentence may start to winnow down a swirly slide cadence, he’s also not going to write about the sweetest things. Gass’ work is scrubbed free of folky slices of life, and any profound moral truths are submerged far from the surface.
This article wouldn’t be the first time Gass’ name (and, particularly, with reference to his style and the specific cerebral/sense-stretching experience of reading his work) has been uttered in the same sentence of David Foster Wallace. We say this not as an intimidation, but as an enticement. With Gass, the allure is in the challenge of finding your footing. The feverous “Charity” lassos the reader for pages-long paragraphs that feel like montages. Consider it a ride, a dazzlingly literary lurch down loud city streets where words blur past like streetlamps as his narrators decide, capriciously, to swerve you down a narrow alley or precariously accelerate for some speed bumps.
If we said that Gass writes like a poet, we’d not only feel cliché, but as though we were being reductive. You can read some novels (or novellas) for escapism, but like the chilled autumn breezes that we’ll all be feeling each morning this month, this is the kind of bracing writing that you can really feel, and it makes you feel more alive, or at least it makes you conscious of what it feels like to be alive, even if you’re a piano. - Jeff Milo
William Gass is known and admired as a writer’s writer for his handsome, challenging, and experimental prose and as a misanthrope for his tendency to focus on his characters’ moral shortcomings. The two novellas and four short stories in Eyes show his prose virtuosity and his dim view of human nature undiminished at age 91.
At times Gass’ prose is stunning and throughout requires alert and focused reading. While emphasizing his characters’ personality flaws—most employ ugly racial epithets when referring to African Americans, including the antebellum “darkie,” perhaps as a device warning readers to keep an emotional distance from the characters—Gass also gives them qualities and enthusiasms that the author shares. The protagonists in both the novella “In Camera” and the short story “The Man Who Spoke with His Hands” discuss aesthetics, visual and musical respectively, at length and appear to share or reflect their author’s passions and taste.
The book opens with “In Camera,” which is set in a fine art photography gallery in a run down neighborhood of an unnamed middle American town or city. Much of the novella consists of philosophical dialogues in which the proprietor, Mr. Gab, and his physically deformed protege, employee, and informally adopted son referred to at first as “You stupid idiot,” then shortened to “U-Stu,” and later still “Mr. Stu,” discuss photographic aesthetics, including the superiority of photography to painting, and black and white photography to color.
Gass (himself an accomplished photographer) in the voice of Mr. Gab riffs on his favorite photographers and employs his verbal dexterity to develop pictures in prose. U-Stu's remark about how his physical appearance drives away other pedestrians calls to Mr. Gab’s mind Brazilian documentary photographer Sebastiao Salgado. Note how in this excerpt Gass repeats the word “picture” in lieu of commas to slow the reader and force her to read more attentively:
“Should Salgado—u Stu u—Mr. Gab rejoins, should he then forget his skills and just picture pain picture evil picture human greed picture desolation picture people other people have allowed to become battered trees made of nothing but barren twigs, picture many murdered, meadows murdered, hills heaved into the sea, sand on open eyes, the grim and grisly so that it approaches us the way you do on the street, so we will look away, even cross against traffic in order to avoid any encounter, . . .”
The novella’s dramatic tension resides in the knowledge that Mr. Gab’s prized photography collection includes stolen works he has fenced, that law enforcement may eventually catch up to him, and that Mr. Stu, who is wholly dependent on Mr. Gab, knows no other life and has no other source of livelihood.
The second novella “Charity” is a 70-page single paragraph stream of consciousness obsessive rant and the part of Eyes that demands the most focused and attentive reading. The protagonist Hugh Hamilton Hardy is a Washington, DC, health company’s receipts attorney whose job as an enforcer is to demand payment and accept no excuses, while in his private life he is beset and besieged by panhandlers and correspondence from people and organizations requesting charitable donations.
Most readers to a greater or lesser extent also find themselves discarding letters, deleting emails, and screening phone calls from charities without obsessing over it, but Hardy also receives letters from strangers asking for assistance, and compassion fatigue causes him to view trick or treating children as extortionists among whom he especially resents African American children:
“Darkies came in dreadful droves to mug the smug in their suburban enclaves. They didn’t even costume up or anything, just collected candy, keeping the economy healthy, their presence menace enough; what would we do without the poor to engage the gears? Yet what have we left them? Only a sweet tooth with which to bite down on their stale little pittance.”
The sheer volume of requests for assistance make Hardy wish for government intervention. “In Bologna, Hardy believed, charity was better managed because the Communists didn’t permit poverty. In a just society generosity would be unnecessary. But our society was just social.”
He also suspects that beneficence is counterproductive. “So giving charity or getting it: which did more harm? It certainly perpetuated problems, rewarded failure, indolence. How to keep the homeless homeless: feed them.”
Hardy is in a sexual relationship with a woman named Molly that he also sees as transactional except that he is the supplicant and she bestows favors. The two roles, receiver of sex and of requests for assistance, alternate in his cognitive riffs.
“Molly was not an appropriate name for the Cleopatra whose breasts she permitted him to heft. A holy office. Raising the fatty chalice to his lips. The Salzburg Seminar wanted him to support it, The Folger ditto. Anywhere you had ever been became an endangered place; everything you did incorporated itself as a not-for-profit foundation in need of funds; every Cause followed you with open envelope. Dear sir . . . sir. She offered herself—should he say?—fulsomely.”
Gass' dark yet playful levity continues in the short stories. The first two are in the voices of inanimate objects, the piano on the set of the movie Casablanca in “Don’t Even Try, Sam,” and a metal folding chair used by customers waiting their turn in a barbershop in “Soliloquy for a Chair.”
First among the overly literal racist piano’s complaints is that Dooley Wilson, the actor who played the pianist Sam, wasn’t a pianist, “the worst was when I realized this darkie couldn’t play me. . . . I heard he specialized in Irish songs sung in whiteface. . . . Jews were doing Nazis liked they wished they were. So why not a darkie who can’t dance.”
He parodies the film’s famous song: “Disremember this, a hit is like a miss, on squat you can rely . . . our fundaments get spry as time goes by.” Of the movie itself, “the production stumbled toward the truth of what they were trying to do—achieve a perfect mix of chauvinism and schmaltz.”
Unlike the piano, the folding chair doesn’t care about the race of the human sitting on him (the chair prefers the masculine pronoun), only the person’s size and weight. At night the chairs are moved to the back room for poker games during which the chair chats with the chips. “Boy, do they know a thing or two. As for me I keep my lid on.”
The chair compares the abuse chairs suffer at the hands of humans to that of the natural environment. “It is no matter with men what damage they do, . . . They murder the ground they walk on—it’s all right—so why should we chairs complain about a rusty pinion, a small tear, some slight impulsive knockabout?”
Like the protagonist of Gass’ 2013 novel Middle C (also reviewed in NYJB) the title character of the third story “The Man Who Spoke with His Hands,” Arthur Devise, is a music professor at a small college in Ohio. Like that novel and the novella “Eyes” the story is in part a vehicle for Gass’ discourses on aesthetics, petty academic rivalries and departmental politics. Like the novellas the narration is in the third person.
We return to first person narration in the final story, “The Toy Chest,” which at times is reminiscent of the childish voice in the opening pages of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and includes typographical errors and extra spaces between words, but with the jaded perspective of an adult. The male narrator’s reminiscences of childhood include his favorite toys such as the model train set he was only allowed to assemble and play with once a year during the winter holiday season.
He also played with other children, including a girl from Sunday school. “The problem was I wanted to play doctor; she wanted to play church, . . .” The boy’s view of religion is amusing:
“Easter was a funny day. You were given candy in a nest of shredded cellophane because God’s son, after he was murdered by a cloud of thrown stones, pushed away a few rocks from the cave where he was hiding and displayed his organ in an unfurling of raincoat.”
Short form suits Gass’ poetic prose, which concision intensifies, and “The Toy Chest” also includes lines of verse. Eyes is enthusiastically recommended to readers who enjoy dense prose and experimental fiction; the attentive reading it requires is amply rewarded. As a bonus the book includes reproductions of works of art by photographer Michael Eastman and painter Michael Hafftka. - David Cooper
William H. Gass often draws comparisons to literary polymath David Foster Wallace and to uncanny master George Saunders. In "Eyes," Gass has delivered a new work that is digestible and provocative, yet thoughtful and subtle. His latest offering (and nearly his 20th book) collects six novellas and stories of refreshing complexity and imaginative zeal.
For such a prolific composer of sentences, "Eyes" revels in wordless communication, emotional perception and artistic sensation.
"Music does not acknowledge the barriers of tongues," quoth the talking upright piano whose complaints Gass indulges in one story.
In another called "In Camera," two idiosyncratic art dealers debate the merits of photography when color enters the frame. ("Color is oratory in the service of the wrong religion," one of them exclaims.)
Like a genie from an unpolished lamp, "The Man Who Spoke With His Hands (An Exercise)" tickles out potent nuances of body language from the unremarkable personality of a professor.
Don't assume, however, that text has gone by the wayside. The book is loaded with enthralling and inventive language. Whether describing emotional states ("Gloom began descending like a jacket hood") or physical attributes ("He bobbed about as though fish were biting, nibbling at bait hung deeply beneath whatever he was walking on — a sidewalk, lawn, shop floor, cindered ground"), Gass delights with devious wordplay, rhetorical gymnastics and luscious description.
Clearly, "Eyes" doesn't shy from unconventional writing. One of the novellas is a 70-page-long paragraph, a darkly comic sketch of a man burdened by very particular shame. Another selection, "Soliloquy for an Empty Chair," is exactly what it sounds like: a monologue told by a chair in a barbershop.
Highlighting the seriousness hidden behind such gimmicky-sounding premises, Gass hints in one story that "at true play there are no consequences, although I hardly knew what the two words meant." His hijinks aren't "true play"; they're tools to tinker with life's thornier, more serious concerns.
Gass best displays his craftsmanship in the aforementioned "Soliloquy for an Empty Chair." What at first seems like the ramblings of a garrulous piece of furniture morphs into a Marx-lite treatise on how life is (or, often, is not) valued. "We die through use," laments the chair, like "buttons into buttonholes." After a bomb detonates in the barbershop, the chair explains how the tools in the shop, seeking justice, "were about to complain to an insurance company instead of the cops but found both were impossible because the complainers were just things."
In the voice of explosion-mangled objects, Gass teases out how legal mechanisms protect and institutionalize social violence. On a final, depressing note, the chair backpedals from its indignation: "The way we are misused is no worse than any other."
Again and again, by slipping the bounds of reality, Gass shows us many of life's Catch-22s.
- Will Wlizlo
William Gass was 44 years old in 1968, when Harper and Row published his first collection of short fiction. It was called “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” Its remarkable lead story, “The Pederson Kid,” a gripping tale of mysterious menace in the dead of a rural Midwestern winter, ranks with the best American short fiction of the 20th century. Writer Frederic Morton wrote in the New York Times that “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” heralded Gass as a “major voice” in American literature.
The following year, Gass joined the philosophy faculty of Washington University and now enjoys professor emeritus status at Washington U. This month, at the age of 91, he has released a new collection of short fiction. It is called “Eyes,” and while not a landmark like “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” it confirms that Gass remains one of the best and most important writers of fiction in the United States.The powerful, passionate lead story in the six-story collection is Gass at his best and most mysterious. It’s called “In Camera,” with the title reflecting the sort of double-meaning word play that Gass revels in.
The principal protagonist is Mr. Gab. Despite his name — names are also part of the very serious post-modern game Gass plays with his readers — Gab is generally close-mouthed. Gab runs a photography shop in a neighborhood so run down that, Gass writes, “robbers wouldn’t visit even to case its joints.” Gab has collected classic photographs by distinguished photographers — Eugene Atget, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Josef Sudek, scores of images, all of suspicious provenance.
All the photographs, which hang from the walls and are stored in boxes stacked around the tomb-like space of the shop, are black and white — color, Mr. Gab believes, is “Like an overpowering perfume,” dulling the senses. The photographs he prefers are straightforward and without gimmicks.
Gass is himself an avid photographer and student of photography — in part Mr. Gass is undoubtedly Mr. Gab. “Eyes” also serves as an explication of his aesthetics of photography. To Mr. Gab and presumably to Gass, “Realism — truth — was the exclusive property of the photograph.”
Unlike painting or literary fiction, no tricks are permitted in true photography, according to the tenets of Mr. Gab. In collecting unstaged photos, he is trying to preserve a world that is rapidly vanishing. He is not a businessman — he sells his treasures reluctantly, but there is no other way to get the money to buy more photographs. He is a collector as well as a dealer, not necessarily a good thing for a man who depends upon sales to pay the rent.
Gab does business strictly for cash, and it becomes clear that his suppliers are thieves who steal only the best. And his customers are, at best, shady. Threats both inside and outside the shop combine at the end to force Mr. Gab and his not-so-stupid assistant to reassess their lives and livelihood.
“In Camera” is the best story in the collection, but there are several other strong ones. Most impressive is “Charity,” the stream of consciousness brain-fever of a D.C. corporate lawyer who is apparently beset by panhandlers and letter-writers asking for money and wonders what is the charitable thing to do. Among the lawyer’s problems is one we’ve found in other stories by Gass — his mind keeps drifting to sex.
Three of the remaining stories involve supposedly inanimate objects coming to life — chairs in a barber shop, toys in a chest, and the piano that played “As Time Goes By” in the movie “Casablanca.” All of them are distinguished by Gass’ dry wit, verbal facility and rich prose style. The book is also distinguished by works of art from photographer Michael Eastman and painter Michael Hafftka. - Harper Barnes
Artists and writers sometimes grow conservative, creatively, as they age. The novelist and essayist William H. Gass hasn’t. Over the course of a career that stretches back to the 1950s, he has served as a standard-bearer for the sort of high-art, literary fiction that gives casual readers pause.
For Gass, the poetic qualities of fiction — its cadences and rhythms, its aural complexities — often trump more prosaic concerns for story and character. And he hasn’t shifted his aesthetic priorities in his latest book, “Eyes: Novellas and Storis." In fact, two of the collection’s stories dispense with human protagonists altogether, even if it doesn’t relieve them of enduring existential angst. In “Don’t Even Try, Sam,” the piano from “Casablanca” delivers a monologue about its experiences on-set with the actors it refers to as “Beauguy” and “Miss Visit Stockholm, the travel poster.” The piano is not, in general, awash in precious memories. (“Ever try Campari? It stains.”)
In “Soliloquy for a Chair,” a folding chair in a forgotten barbershop describes a life that is likewise disappointing and bereft of meaning and human companionship. “Of course the sleep of metal has its merits, but I find myself missing the company of our daily things, now that the passage of people has ceased,” it tells us.
Those stories’ sparse human populations are probably for the best. People crowd “Charity,” one of the book’s two novellas, but its protagonist would rather they didn’t. For him, a miserly lawyer named Hugh Hamilton Hardy, hell is facing a person with a charitable request, forever. (On the other hand, you might find yourself inclined to give generously after squirming inside his head for 70 pages.)
Gass explores the impulse to connect with greater complexity in the collection’s strongest piece, a novella called “In Camera.” In a shop hidden in a rundown neighborhood, a gruff art dealer named Mr. Gab takes in an orphan and guides him through an eccentric art education. It’s a troubled oasis for both men, and we shouldn’t expect it to end well. (This is a Gass story, after all.)
Readers are unlikely to set speed records with “Eyes.” Gass’ prose demands sustained, close reading. It’s worth the effort, though, especially with “In Camera.” In that story, Gass writes like a painter laboring over a canvas, adding a touch of brushwork and then reconsidering it before adding a few more.
Consider:
“The brown paper wall bore tears and peels and spots made by drops of who knew what — expectorations past. Yet in such stains lay lakes full of reeds and floating ducks and low loglike boats. Instead of the sort of wall which furnished a rich many-toned background for so many of Atget’s documents: instead of the cobbled courtyard that the remainder of the photo surrounded, shadowed, or stood on; instead of gleaming disks of stone with their dark encircling lines; instead of the leaves of trees in a flutter about a field of figures; there might be — instead — a single pock, the bottom of it whitish with plaster: that’s what he had to look at, descend into, dream about, not a rhyming slope of rock, its layers threaded and inked; not the veins of a single leaf like roads on a map, or a tear of paper resembling a tantrum — his rips didn’t even resemble rips — or faded petals that have fallen like a scatter of gravel at the foot of a vase; not an errant flash of light centered and set like a jewel: instead he had a crack, just a crack in a window, a cob’s web, or that of a spider, dewdrop clinging like an injured climber to its only rope of escape; not a clay flowerpot given the attention due to a landscape; not a scratch on the hood of some vehicle, not directional signs painted on the pavement, instructions worn by the wheels of countless cars; not a black eye enlarged to resemble the purple of a blown rose. These were the images in his borrowed books, the material of his mind’s eye, the Lilliputian world grown taller than that tattered Peruvian giant.”
The subtle, kaleidoscopic adjustments will captivate patient readers, even if Gass’ stories work tirelessly to undercut their faith in humanity.
Conversations with William H. GassInterview by Stephen Schenkenberg
Interviewed by Chris Orlet
INTERVIEW BY PAUL MALISZEWSKI
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