The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2004

The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2004, Vol. XXIV, no. 3.

Even Stephen King, much to Bill’s astonishment when I told him about it in Paris, many years later, loved The Tunnel and prefaced his own reading at Princeton, where I was guest-teaching at the time, with an opening remark to the crowded audience of academics, students, and leather-clad bikers, “Have you heard of this guy, William H. Gass? He’s unbelievable. Let me read you from his new book,” and so he did. (A Girandole for Mr. Gass, Bradford Morrow, 25)

What’s he like? Often asked hungrily, but with a frown, with the expectation of bad news. … people seemed to think I was employed by someone a little scary, and they were uniformly surprised (and, my guess, often disappointed) when I replied: he is a sweetheart, an embodiment of generosity and even gentility, and he is wry and funny and he looks like a turtle and I love him; I loved him right away. (About Reading, Sally Ball, 40)

Some of Bill’s sentences have become aphorism in my creative life, which is a married one, full of children, full of poems: … Each child costs one book. Initially that seemed to describe a sacrifice, but it’s become a backhand source of comfort, for if there were no Ted, no Celia, no Oscar, wouldn’t there be three books, a little library? Which might still be made¬—that cost, that price we’ve paid, isn’t it negative proof of what I could have written? (40)

[I. Husband and Wife (Goethe)] But his mentorship is special: it is caring and easygoing, almost serving and yet demanding; in short, there is something decidedly feminine about it. (Three Encounters with Germany: Goethe, Holderlin, Rilke, Heide Ziegler, 46)

[II. Brothers and Friends (Holderlin)] In July 1979 the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Amerikastudien (German Association for American Studies) invited whom they considered to be three of the most important postmodernist American writers to their annual conference for readings and panel discussions. This conference was to take place at Bebenhausen, a former Cicstercian abbey close to Tubingen, in the southwest of Germany. I was to organize the whole trip. The three writers were John Barth, John Hawkes, and—William H. Gass. All the writers had some connection to Germany and were thus looking forward to the trip and to their and their wives being together. (49)

Goethe is an acknowledged master of the German tongue, and it was that classical master Gass attempted to deal with in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Friedrich Holderlin, however, Gass’s companion in Bebenhausen, is a romantic poet. He admired Goethe from afar and for some time considered himself a friend of Friedrich von Schiller, who had defined their own realm of influence in what is nowadays thought of as classical Weimar, were not fond of the Greeks like Empedokles or Hyperion, of his patriotic exuberance, his hymnic eloquence. It was all too much for them, too intense for their Weltlaufigkeit, their international well-connectedness, which Goethe had created for himself and which Schiller emulated. Thus Friedrich Holderlin’s genius had to fend alone, struggling hard for renown for many a year, but finally giving up and withdrawing into himself. For decades Holderlin lived a secluded life in Tubingen, tended to be living in the seventeenth, not in the nineteenth, century, that is, in preclassical times. By all contemporary standards, Holderlin had gone mad. /
But there is a deeper mystery to his life. The renowned French politician and scholar Pierre Bertaux who, together with his friends, avowedly lived his whole life in the name of Holderlin, i.N.H. (im Namen Holderlins) has written an intruiging study showing that Holderlin was not insane according to the common understanding of the word. And the true reason for his patient and intricate research about Holderlin’s forty-one years of withdrawal from his contemporary world (he lived to be seventy-three) is that Bertaux realized more and more how Holderlin’s work and his person cannot be separated, that a dark private undercurrent can be found wherever and whenever the sparkling stream of Holderlin’s poetry delights the eye, yet that the poet did not want the world to see his troubled heart, and that he thus eventually had to hide it. /
There is a poem that Holderlin addresses to the three Weird Sisters, who spin, measure, and cut off the life-thread of every human being. In his prayer to them, Holderlin expresses his deepest desire: … To the Weird Sisters/ Grant me One summer, All-Powerful Sisters! / And one Fall for a ripe song, / So that my heart, more willingly and saturated/ From playing sweetly, can die within me. /
And Holderlin’s wish was granted. He did write his divine poem. Several in fact. … But Holderlin himself had long since paid for aspiring to perfection through the asceticism and self-abnegation of the second half of his life. The sight of the tower on the shore of the river Neckbar in Tubingen, where Holderlin lived during that time, must have reminded William Gass, as he strolled along that river… (50-51)

That Gass understood Holderlin’s plight becomes apparent through the fact that he spent a large part of the second half of his life writing The Tunnel, which—in terms of the painful effort that must have been involved in surrendering to his antagonist William Kohler—might very well be compared to Holderlin’s withdrawal and posing as one Scardanelli from the past. In working on The Tunnel, Gass gradually began to release the dark undercurrent that, like the ancient river Alpheius, which in its upper part runs underground, had not been visible under the surface of his humane, regular, and peaceful life as a writer and a scholar and professor at an American university. (52)

Is the first half of life comparable to summer then, the second half to winter? The first half happy and holy, the second half frozen and of the netherworld? Not quite. The second half may be more or less “cold,” like the second half of Holderlin’s life, when the love of his life, Susette Gontard, had died; and William Kohler may substitute his tunnel, the “shadows of earth” for the former drunken kisses of his mistress Lou; yet winter is also the time when remembrance and images reign. And the reason why they can take over is thing else but remembrance foretold, reality mirrored. “What a beautiful idea: earth, solid and settled, flesh rosy and trim, life full and accomplished, altering into water, into remembrance, into image”(Gass, on “Falfte des Lebens” in Reading Rilke). (53)

And that’s what The Tunnel is really about. … it is mainly a novel about the second half of one’s life, a novel of remembrance of things past and Plato’s world of ideas that come to (after)life in language once they have been mirrored in the pools of reality. Mad Meg, the Faustian German philosopher who tempts the young Kohler, is a thwarted Socrates, and William F. Kohler becomes his inadequate American Alcibiades, unable to bristle with the essence of life Mad Meg seeks, unable to act, unable to incorporate self-sufficient beauty, able only to recall and describe. (53)

For Gass is not only both his own unyouthful American Alcibiadesas well as Mad Meg… but at the same time he also remains his sane alter ego at Washington University… (53-54)

And while Kohler has given up poetry for history, Holderlin and Rilke for Mad Meg, Gass has not. “Halfte des Lebens,” half of life—for Gass this title relates not just to chronology, but also marks a victory, exorcism accomplished, the river returning to the surface. (54)

Like Holderlin, Gass cherishe friends, and many friends have colleagues, students, editors, men and women of letters. For Holderlin, friendship was the happiest gift of the gods. (54)

[III. Father and Son (Rilke)] William H. Gass is Rainer Maria Rilke’s alter ego, deeply tied to him through like sensitivity, insight, giftedness. Deeply tied to him most of all, however, through their shared concept of space, Rilke’s Raum, Weltraum, the realm of all things, which denies any chronological sequence. (55)

Gass is not a poet. … He leaves that title and the nearly unparalleled mastery of the German language (plus some translations from the French) to Rilke. (56)

Gass the son attempts to provide that space for Rilke the father. That is the meaning of the “temple” metaphor. In space, not in time Gass diminishes the distance between Rilke and himself as much as he dares, by creating that space in the first place. (56)

What does that secret father-son relationshipprove? It proves three things: / First and foremost it goes to show that, as Gass articulates it, real art exists and that “it can matter to a life through its lifetime” (Reading Rilke) . (56)

Second: Gass’s daring closeness to the poet of his heart proves that Rilke’s Angels are true shapes: … An Angel is that beauty that strikes terror into the heart, because we die to be close to it, yet cannot cope with it. An Angel represents what poets in former centuries—for want of a better word—would have called the sublime. They would have searched for the sublime in Nature. For Rilke and Gass, however, the Angel is the sublime in “innerworldspace”, not in Nature. It is the outcry of things to let us know they are there, dying to become a quality of consciousness, dying to become—language. The sublime is translation, Transfiguration. Gass’s language may be less precious, dazzling, or elitist than Rilke’s, more sardonic and witty, copiously democratic, borrowing his images from all tiers of life, but ultimately it is just as exact, just as demanding as Rilke’s. (57)

Finally, the father-son relationship between Rilke and Gass proves that all great writing is autobiographical, in the sense that it is written with our heart’s blood. … For the true artist, life gradually needs to become art. (58)

And when we linger on the pages in between, we find that this mighty novel offers with its original example tribute to such precedents as the puzzles of Borges, the music of Joyce and Stein, the flamboyance of Shakespeare, the impressions of Woolf, (Homage to Bill Gass, Joanna Scott, 69)

Nearly forty years ago, in 1966, his then publisher sent me bound galleys of his first novel, as publishers will, in hopes of testimonial: Omensetter’s Luck, by one William H. Gass. Never heard of the chap, although I should have: His fiction had already been included in The Best American Short Stories in 1959, 1961, and 1962. Anyhow, my vows to the muse prohibit, among other things, the blurbing of blurbs except for first books by my former students. All the same, I opened the thing. (70)

As Omensetter was followed by the story-collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (which I liked even more than its so-impressive predecessor) and that by Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (which if possible I enjoyed more yet: the most formally sportive item in Gass’s oeuvre) and the several splendid essay-collections, I came to know their author not a bit: in Buffalo, St. Louis, and Baltimore, in New York, and North Dakota, in Germany and in Spain. Admired his presence onstage and off. Admired his formidable intelligence and learning, his commitment to teaching (“I’ll probably keep at it till I drop,” he remarked to me upon my own academic retirement, “and then I’ll have myself stuffed and go on teaching”), his obiter dicta (“I’ll never do a fiction-writing workshop,” he once vowed to me: “When I’m reading a bad student paper on Plato, at least I’m thinking about Plato; but when I’m reading a bad student short story about trout fishing, I’m not thinking about anything”). … if I were obliged to single out one element or aspect for special commendation, which I am not but nevertheless will) the similes: those homely yet show-stopping similes, still the Gass trademark for this admiring reader, which stick in my memory long after I’ve forgotten which work they’re from and what subtle additional relevances they no doubt have to their context. A character’s hands “quick as cats,” drafts of air that “cruise like fish through the hollow rooms,” a feeling “like the loneliness of overshoes or someone else’s cough,” a face “life a mail-order ax,” “wires where sparrows sit like fists,” an argument “as sinuous and tough as ivy”… (72)

His introductions are sometimes overshadowing because he takes each one as a writing assignment, and, for him, all writing is serious. This is why you will find very few long letters in the Gass archives. They are, he told me once, too difficult to write. (Richard Watson, Second Is Last, 82)

Bill Gass’s appointment as a full professor in the Washington University philosophy department did not proceed without opposition. The two most distinguished full professors in the department objected. Bill Levi resented the English department’s role. Who was Jarvis Thurston (who beat Levi at golf) to decide who the philosophy department should hire? Herbert Spiegelberg was scandalized at Gass’s announcement that he would write and publish no more philosophy. Rudner simply ignored Levi. I assured Spiegelberg that everything Gass writes is philosophy. Poor Levi. After he died, Gass was given the university professorship Levi had occupied. Spieelberg decided that Gass was a phenomenologist, Spiegelberg’s own field. (82)

Now comes the knuckle rub. Critics sometimes go nyaa nyaa nyaa because, they say, Gass asserts the independence of the art object from its content, and then he tells stories! Why not? Gass has never claimed that just because form and content are logically independent, someone who writes to create an aesthetic object must not tell a story. And just because no moral conclusions can be derived from the fact or existence of a work of art, that does not mean that a work of art cannot have a profound moral content, as does Gass’s novel The Tunnel. No artist lives in a vacuum of form without content, if only because it is impossible to do so even if one tries. (83)

At nineteen, when I slouched around the streets of Boston with a copy of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems in one pocket and Dylan Thomas’s in the other, I feasted on Thomas’s frisky, hypnotic language and sensuous rigor. But I dined equally on the voluptuous mind I found in Stevens. What I really wanted was to fuse them into one plumage: the sensuality of thought. / Years later, I devoured William Gass’s On Being Blue, followed by every other Gass-eous book I could get my mitts on. I had found a rare bird of just that hybrid sort: a philosophy-voluptuary, someone who thinks marbly thoughts full of words like good and moral, as philosophers are wont to. But, at the same time, someone who romances language… (Diane Ackerman, One Beautiful Mind) (84)

“You have no unusual works habits?” I asked, in as level a tone as I could muster.
“No, sorry to be so boring,” he sighed. I could hear him settling comfortably on the steps in the pantry, and, as his mind is like an overflowing pantry, that seemed only right.
“How does your day begin?”
“Oh, I go out and photograph for a couple of hours,” he said.
“What do you photograph?”
“The rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city. Filth and decay mainly,” he said in a nothing-much-to-it tone of voice, as casually dismissive as the wave of a hand.
“You do this every day, photograph filth and decay?”
“Most days.”
“And then you write?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t think this is unusual?”
“Not for me.”
After all, it wasn’t as far out as Edith Sitwell’s lying in an open coffin for a while before she began her day’s writing; or Schiller’s keeping rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhaling their pungent boquet when he needed to find the right word; or D.H. Lawrence’s climbing naked up mulberry trees in a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his muse; or Colette’s beginning her day’s writing by first picking fleas from her cat. No, in the grand scheme of writerly eccentricities, it was remarkably well-behaved to go out armed only with his camera to shoot deep-texture photographs of the defiantly beautiful and weird face of civilization disappearing in plain sight. I sometimes wonder how he sees himself among the ruined, derelict, downtrodden, decayed surface of cities. But I’ve yet to ask him. (84-85)

I knew he’d had a pet monarch butterfly that supped on sugar water and tip-toed across a floral arrangement in his living room, and a pet spider which lived in the glove compartment of his car. (86)

Once at a Mark Twain celebration, where Bill was on a panel, someone in the audience stood up and asked him: “Why do you think Mark Twain wore white suits?” As I recall, Bill paused a scant moment over the word “Well…” then began free-associating brilliantly about American Puritanism. (86)

After some time I wormed my way onto the literary committee with the meetings over lunch at Bill’s house. Thus began the first time Bill and I dreamed out loud about the writers we would like to bring to St. Louis. He’d serve Amighetti sandwiches; there was always plenty of wine. (Lorin Cuoco, Page 399)

Shortly after I left the radio station in 1989, I organized a Halloween benefits at Duff’s where the readers were to dress up in the character of the writer being read or as some other literary figure. Bill wore his Mao jacket and hat (Mao counts) and read the beating scene from The Lime Twig by John Hawkes, offending nearly everyone there. (It was supposed to be scary.) (89)

(His car is gray and he is round, I would say to visiting writers who had not yet met him.) On this occasion the waiter, upon receiving Bill’s credit card, said, “You are one of my favorite writers.” “Only one?” Bill mused as the young man walked away. (89)

In the spring of 1991 the exemplary Holly Hall, the head of the library, asked if there might be something that Bill would like to curate for an inaugural exhibit in Special Collections. Days later, Bill handed me the text of A Temple of Texts and a photocopy of the Parthenon. It read like the reading list of my alma mater qua alma mater, St. John’s College, the great books school, but with a twist. The Parthenon, I learned then, has eighty-seven pillars. He chose a text for each one, with the final four books, all by Rilke, placed in the sanctuary. (91)

You may want to know what happened to pillars fifty-one through eighty-seven. Cutting room floor, I’m afraid, too many books for the library’s available display cases. (92)

…he received an invitation to be a Getty Scholar in California, which would take him away for a year starting the summer of 1991, less than a year after we started and in the throes of planning our first conference. The dean didn’t like an interim director in Bill’s place. In August 1991 Bill and his wife Mary and their cat Nicholas, who is immortalized in paint in the portrait of Bill that hangs in Olin Library, drove to Los Angeles. … The Getty gave Bill an office, a computer and someone to teach him how to use it. He finished The Tunnel in his year in Santa Monica… (95)

Allow me to uncorrugate. There was the secret meeting with Salman Rushdie in Colorado in 1992 after we joined the Rushdie Denfense Committee. The drinks, the dialogue, the dinners, the lunches. One writer, over lunch, always paid for by Bill despite my protestations, usually at the Ritz, across the street from our office, said she had been to one of these whither-the-novel symposia. “Ere, it is there on the morning dew,” says Bill. (97)

When it is cold in Saint Louis, and it gets very cold in Saint Louis, William Gass drives everywhere, even a couple blocks away, because he doesn’t like to wear a coat. (Ethan Shaskan Bumas, William H. Gass Meets the –ba particle, 100)

We had graduate seminars in his and Mary Gass’s living room, and when everyone wanted to come, Professor Gass did not say no, and we had very crowded seminars in his living room. We sat still and drank little, trying to get our head around these new ways to apply philosophy to linguistics, and Nicholas the cat walked between us, making sure we didn’t break anything, and if he felt like it, nestling against our legs. (101)

At an International Writers Center conference, Eavan Boland gave a lecture on the miracle of an Irish statue of the Virgin that cried and moved like one of those robot dogs which all children absolutely needed a few Christmases ago. She said she couldn’t say for srue if it had moved. Of course it didn’t move, said Professor Gass. Of course it moved, said Amitav Ghosh, imported from another panel. Afterward the three went out to dinner and reportedly had a lovely time. (101)

There was also Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife—an ambitious book of a hundred fonts over a dozen nude photos. Professor Gass, though he was tenured, was encouraged to leave Indiana, and he moved to Missouri (102)

A hundred visiting lectures we sat through because we had come for the introduction and it would be impolite to leave afterward. (103)

He was disapproved of in the English department, especially by those who had an unpublished novel waiting to be discovered like America in a desk drawer. They made the mistake that had also brought me into the field, that English was a synonym for literature, but then they were forced into keyholes of time-country discourse. (103)

Well, I asked. What was it like having twin babies?
You put the babies down on the floor, and each one immediately crawls toward the electric socket at opposite ends of the room. (104)

William H. Gass, Director of the International Writers Center, put a blurb on the dust jacket of my undeserving book. The blurb was not only flattering but also in itself beautiful. Imagine how happy that made me, to have the approval of such a preeminent literary mind and such a gorgeous blurb. Only later did I understand the thrust of his implied message, its injunction and reproach. The blurb was better written than anything inside the book. (106)

…we both have swimming pools, which give us distraction and delight in about equal measure. I recall seeing Bill’s pool empty, for the painters, and marveling at his apparent equanimity; down into that bare white dental cavity we looked, and I felt the space there oppressive whereas it seemed to free him and gave him a new view of the bathing hole. (Paul West, At-Swim among the Noble Gasses, 108)

Thus too we get Bill Gass, passionate photographer, going out to snap the ugliest sights he can find in St. Louis, firm in his conviction that the act somehow provides a supplementary hidden tune, making the hideous or the barren more interesting , exciting, than we would ever have believed. /
So, in this sense, he is a serendipitous beautifier, in his prose as in his photographs, the point being that the right kind of attention can convert a sow’s ear into a silk purse, or, failing that, into something implying porcelain. (109)

Bill have never, so far as I remember, been in our somewhat run-down pool, it never having been the right season, thought he has slept in our caboose, selecting for his midnight reading Last Tango in Paris, in whose buttery longueurs he perhaps takes more pleasure than I do, exercising devout phenomenology on every word. (109)

Another day during my visit, we two free-wheeled in front of a philosophy seminar, and that same day I sat for hours in a high bedroom in his house writing prose, undisturbed and at peace, as it were among his or his children’s toys. (110)

Earlier, before we hat met, we both journeyed to a conference held Indiana University, where we read papers. … “Well,” Bill said, “I really came to meet you.” “Well,” I said, “it’s the same with me.” We had some rare and rather polished exchanges after that, and began a desultory correspondence. I say desultory, but I mean something worse: Bill has an appalling aversion to answering letters, to which you become accustomed, so much so that, when a letter arrives from him out of the blue, you exclaim in delight, seeing he has caught up. (110)

This was the same man who, out wheeling one of his twin daughters in a baby carriage, swathed in a turban and voluminous coats against the cold, heard someone telling his daughters how nice it was to have grandmother out wheeling them about in the fresh air. He took the tribute in his stride and rolled on. (111)

…we got to talk with Bill and sometimes Mary, architect and gourmet cook. (112)

Considering Bill’s age, and his less than normal dependence on Pollock, tuna, anchovies, halibut, clams, cod, crab, herring, salmon, scallops, striped bass, trout, bluefish, and most of all fresh albacore tuna, he remains rather healthy, even allowed to drink hard liquor. (113)

I differ from Bill (and Mary) in that style and phrasemaking occupy me much more than does literary architecture, by which Bill means diagramming sentences. “Aesthetically,” he tells Saltzman, “That means doing floor plans, facades. My wife—she’s an architect—is doing the drawings for me.” (114)

The Tunnel is the most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime. It took nearly thirty years to write, including long periods of silence and the author’s repeated decisions to abandon the work; (Michael Silverblatt, Review Essay The Tunnel: A Small Apartment in Hell, 122)

…beginning in 1969 when a chapter called “We Have Not Lived the Right Life” appeared in the New American Review. (123) … I read it aloud to friends, to teachers, to whoever would listen. Its rhythms entered my conversational speech. As the years passed The Tunnel continued to appear in the literary magazines, I came to recognized that the material was dark and difficult … Now at least we have The Tunnel. For months I have been digging through it. A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety four and a half times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. (123)

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. (123)

The ancestor authors for this book are Flaubert, Rilke, and Joyce. Flaubert because he describes with loving, careful relish the bourgeois life which, as we know from his letters, he ardently deplored. Rilke because of the ambience of pure loss in his poetry and prose and because of his decision to find a way to praise poverty and desolation, a level of praise that turns his writing into spiritual project. Joyce because of his systems and his archeology of minutiae—newspapers and garbage floating in the Liffey, making complete itineraries that Joyce chooses to keep track of—and most crucially, his aesthetic decision to leave the author out of the novel, lounging indifferently above, pairing his fingernails. (125)

If you sit down to read The Tunnel, really read it, you cannot help but come away altered. Not because the world it describes is imaginary, but rather because in The Tunnel states of reality are multiple and simultaneous. How literature does this is a question of style. Imagine meeting yourself as a fatso in a Dickens novel, now you are abject in a Raymond Carver story, now obsessed and lurid in a case study by Freud, and now, barely there, you’re abstracted by Plato. Do you still know who you are? William Gass can give us a Raymond Carver character as analyzed by Freud blown up into a balloon by Dickens’s caricaturing style—and give us a Platonic theory of identity as an encore. Can Gass still be himself? I would recognize a page of William Gass anywhere. (127)