Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  The Pulitzer has perceived an important truth about our complex culture: Serious literature is not important to it; however, the myth that it matters must be maintained. Ceremony is essential, although Mammon is the god that’s served. The PEN/Faulkner may toot, but few will hear. Its winners, until recently, could not be made into mass-market movies. Literature, which is written in isolation and read in silence, receives as its share less than 3 percent of the funds available to the National Endowment for the Arts. In my own state of Missouri, by no means the meanest, less than a penny a person is spent per year on arty words. And if you point to the discrepancy between the acknowledged importance of our literature to our culture and the pitiful public support it gets, and decry the injustice of it, you will receive the same response I always have: Those addressed, like a cat, will not follow the direction of your gesture, but will be just curious enough to sniff nervously for a moment the end of your admonitory finger.

  So it is silly to give a prize to Absalom, Absalom! when you can give it to Gone with the Wind, as happened in 1937. It is useless to single out unpleasant books that no one will read or enjoy, like The Day of the Locust or Miss Lonelyhearts, when so many will love the 1934 winner, Lamb in His Bosom, by Caroline Miller. The Pulitzer does not give glory to its choices; its choices give celebrity to it; and that is precisely why it is the best-known and, to the public, the most prestigious prize: It picks best-sellers, books already in the public eye, and if its judges insist on oddities like Gravity’s Rainbow, the Advisory Board will overrule them, as it did in 1974; and if the judges vote for some dim unknown like Norman Maclean, the board will simply leave the year blank again, as it did in 1977. It is difficult to see why anyone of distinction would want to be like an abused wife and serve on a Pulitzer jury.

  It’s been clear from the first year that it has never been the judges who needed their consciousness raised, or their moral point of view improved, or their allegiance to American values strengthened, but the Many “out there” who could use such elevation, so it was more than all right if an “all right” book was popular, it was positively a good thing. Indeed, a novel’s simplifications could be defended if its message was thereby better understood and more easily lodged in the reader’s mind. Hence an award-winning book did not necessarily have to represent the private tastes of the judges or the board; it represented, rather, their judgment that it would be edifying for those who read it. Strive and Succeed might have been the appropriate name for most of the winners, since that is what they preached.

  These winners have a fruit fly’s life span, and oblivion serves their names, but it is beside the point to protest them on this basis, as, indeed, critics have regularly done, sometimes quite scornfully, with no effect whatever. In the last decade the prize has continued its belated ways, finally getting around to John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Cheever. But the prize understands the public’s desires. The public longs to move on.

  Suppose the award had really been given to the best work of fiction published each year. Then Faulkner would have won it with The Sound and the Fury in 1930, beating out Hemingway and Wolfe (all of whom, in fact, lost to Laughing Boy, by Oliver La Farge); he would have won again in 1931 with As I Lay Dying, once more in 1933 with Light in August, certainly in 1937 with Absalom, Absalom!; and he’d have had a good shot at several others. Saul Bellow would have grabbed off at least two, perhaps more, and so on. Well, ho hum, what a bore. It is true that the best tennis players collect cup after cup and carry home baskets of money, but in their case the fix isn’t in. In the history of the Pulitzer Prize (leaving out Faulkner, who won twice, though for two less-than-worthy works, A Fable and The Reivers), Booth Tarkington has been the only double winner. Putting a ceiling on winning was wise, because the literary public will chew its fiction only while the immediate flavor lasts and, when that’s gone, spit the book back into its jacket.

  But if the award had really been given yearly to the best work, worse than repetition would have occurred. The Sot-Weed Factor would have acquired a crown in 1961, and JR would have won in ’76, and other horrors too dreadful to describe would have happened. The 1974 jury’s recommendation of Gravity’s Rainbow would not have been overruled, for one thing, and Thomas Pynchon would have had the opportunity to turn down a Pulitzer.

  While the Pulitzer Prize for poetry has none of the esteem that the Bollingen conveys, it has been spared fiction’s shame, partly, I think, because there is no appreciable audience at all for poetry, consequently no reader whose moral and mental welfare the judges must consider their prizewinning poems to improve.

  Nothing essential ever disappears. Schlock certainly seems essential. Hence the public and their fiction prize move on, but safely from same to same. For even if the titles change, or the subjects shift slightly as the fads run by, or the authors lean a little this way rather than that, the result is the fading sweet taste of an imagined past. What the public wants, as the Pulitzer sees it (and as Mr. Stuckey correctly concludes, I think), is an exciting story with a timely theme, although it may have a historical setting. The material should be handled simply and delivered in terms of sharp contrasts in order that the problems the novel raises can be decisively resolved. Ideally, it should be written in a style that is as invisible as Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, so that the reader can let go of the words and grasp the situation the way one might the wheel of the family car. And since most of the consumers of fiction are women (or they were until women went in for professions and other public works and now return home as tired and weary and in need of the screen’s passive amusement as men), it won’t hurt to fulfill a few of their longings, to grant, now and then, unconsciously an unconscious wish. Because we have a large, affluent, mildly educated middle class that has fundamentally the same tastes as the popular culture it grew up with, yet with pretensions to something more, something higher, something better suited to its half-opened eyes and spongy mind, there is a large industry of artists, academics, critics, and publicists eager to serve it—lean cuisine, if that’s the thing—and the Pulitzer is ready with its rewards.

  No, this prize for fiction is not disgraced by its banal and hokey choices. It is the critics and customers who have chosen and acclaimed them, who have bought the books and thought about them and called them literature and tried to stick them like gum on the pillars of our culture. It is they who have earned the opprobrium of this honor.

  A FAILING GRADE FOR THE PRESENT TENSE

  Pauline experienced many perils, but none to compare with the perils of the present tense, She was tied to tracks, left to teeter on window ledges, allowed to hang from cliffs by the lace in her pantaloons. Yet in the week while we waited for her bloomers to rip or the train to come, time held its breath as we held ours—in serial suspension; that is, we calmly ignored the pause in her plight as we went about our business, placing our modest cares in a parenthetical phrase; because, when the lace on her undies relaxed at last, when the train’s hoot grew cruelly closer, or when Pauline’s delicate balance seemed to have slipped beyond refooting; then her peril continued as if there had never been an interruption, not a shiver was missing, or a screech from a scream, and, in order to reassure us of this, the second episode would reprise the conclusion of the first, and so on, right through fifteen plight-packed Saturday matinees.

  Later I would be taught to wonder—about the present but not about Pauline—whether anything of which we were normally unaware might have taken place between one tick and its following tock (molecular doings, quantum leaps), because if you ran past a picket fence at the right speed, you would seem to see the green field beyond, as if the fence weren’t there. Walk more slowly, and you might receive nothing but board. Going about at lifespeed, mankind might be missing … well, who knew what?

  Or maybe, relative to me, the world was moving as the frames of the movie moved, or the pages of those riffle books I fanned to animate Mutt and Jeff in unseemly ways, so that reality was a series of stills, like a so
lid row of alphabet blocks. There would have to be motion, of course, to produce the illusion, but we would be wrong about where the motion was. Or maybe the present was a continuous whoosh, or an uninterrupted whissh, and had no parts, so that all our divisions of time into eras, decades, milliseconds, advertising spots, falsified its flow.

  Suppose I were about to move my queen’s knight and, while my hand hovered above the head that, in this case, makes up the whole horse, the frame froze and, freed from that dramatic scene, my opponent and I rushed away during the intermission for a set of tennis played at fast-forward, only to return to the table in less time than it takes to tell: I to lift my knight from its square, my foe to wonder why and where—what then? Take this thought a little further. While one passage of time is dit-dotting along, perhaps others are passing at right angles between the dits like hair through a comb? How could one guess how huge the hiccup in Being was: perhaps, instead of a quick set of tennis, there was a long fall of empire, like that of Rome? In philosophy class, I was taught to ask such questions, and I was cautioned not to smile when I did so, but to appear genuinely concerned and intense. Now I put my VCR on pause and think no more about it. But what if God put me on pause while He spooned up a dish of Heavenly Hash? and slowly, over eons, slowly … slowly dribbled across it a sweet excess of chocolate sauce?

  When we put a dial on the sun and cut that dial like a pie, we created a mechanical time in which we decided to pass our days, believing in it more faithfully than in Santa Claus, because storetime came in a convenient package—it could be paused, shortened, backed, speeded up, or flopped, enriched, extended, ended—whereas real time simply went whoo-issh and wouldn’t alter its tune, accelerate, or stop.

  The present has many perils. The least of them are philosophical. The heart never stops yesterday, but this instant—on the steps to the bus. Your favorite glass is slipping from your soapy grasp. She says “not now” now.

  William James wondered how long the present lasted. It had to have a length, because if you cut every immediate moment into the part of it already over and the part of it yet to come—narrowing your slice from knife to thread—you’d have an edge so fine it had no size. The present would have no presence. Contrary to the clock’s analysis, our sensations sustain themselves. James called it “the specious present”—this period we do not appear to pass through but experience as a whole. To taste an entire swallow of wine, to possess all its qualities at once, does not require its characteristics to exist simultaneously. The before and after we perceive in the specious present nevertheless seem equally vivid and there for us, the nows form a row like bricks in a building. None of them are yet a then. In other words, for a brief and variable period, we experience time as we do space.

  The present has more lanes than an Olympic pool. My lane is not your lane. In mine, a shirt button is breaking from a weakened thread. In yours, perhaps a sense of wonder at the size of the solar system is enveloping your consciousness like a cloud of steam. The clock’s now, nevertheless, swims on evenly, counting and canceling the same number of laps from both our lives, or so we suppose—but are we right? I have sometimes felt that the minutes of others were longer than mine. I have had moments I felt would never end.

  Unlike the present, the present tense is the condition of a verb. “Is” will remain in the present tense through all eternity, while a day is warm no longer than that day. So the perils of the present tense (and there are plenty) are neither an orchestrated series of difficult movie moments, like those that beset Pauline in film time, nor the normal passage of experience from oops to ouch that often constitutes life time if we’re unlucky. Writing of any kind involves the creation on the page of connections in language that denote, describe, and relate events (verbal occurrences that we can call “word time”) and within which the only lapse that can count as a crime is a lapse of grammar. Yet the perils of the present tense are real; rescues are infrequent (unlike the case of plucky Pauline, who is always saved from the saw just ahead of its nick); and those efforts to assist that are reluctantly attempted are generally botched. The present tense is a parched and barren country. In the past, writers rarely went there.

  The perils of the present tense are pronounced, but as speakers we might now and then avoid them. “What are you doing in there, Helen?” is a question natural enough. “I am mopping the floor around the fridge.” (She mops.) “What is Lady Jane saying to Jack Strongthong now?” Helen asks in a moment, carrying on her progressive present. “Come and see the TV for yourself.” “I can’t stop mopping. This leak is enormous … as if the whole fridge were weeping,” she says, putting on the subjunctive with the ease of robe and slippers. (She mops.) (Her husband wonders whether his wife actually said what she said, slipping so sexily into the subjunctive, since what she said seems as strange to him as the thought that his thought alliterates.) (The present tense frequently adorns margins in the form of stage directions: She mops.) “Well, hon, Baby Janey ain’t sayin’ nuthin’,” husband answers, shifting into yokelese. “She is slappin’ Cousin Jack’s slap-scarred face.”

  Occasionally, without mortal risk, we use the speaking present to sharpen the sense of immediacy in some story we are telling—a story we think is full of giggles, one of them being the tense it’s told in. “Let me tell you what happened to me in Altoona last month. I’m standing in front of the local five-and-dime, see, sharpening my musical saw, when this guy comes up to me and says, ‘How would you like to make a sawbuck?’ ‘My name’s not Buck, stranger,’ I say with a toothless grin, ‘but I can try to make one—how’s this? You can lead a mind to matter, but you cant make it think.’ ” The present tense is terrific for vaudeville and other turns of phrase. It also lends itself to satirical intentions, usually without much interest.

  Why do I warn you, stranger, of the perils of the present tense? Because there is a lot of it going around. What was once a rather rare disease has become an epidemic. In conjunction with the first person, in collusion with the declarative mode, in company with stammery elisions and verbal reticence—each often illnesses in their own right—it has become that major social and artistic malaise called minimalism, itself a misnomer. This is not the minimalism of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, or of Anton Webern and Kazimir Malevich, in which a few obsessively selected means are squeezed into a mighty More—that more, as Mies van der Rohe said, which is the large result of less. This is rather the less that less yields. This is modesty taken down a peg. Here we have the simple without the pretensions of simplicity, plainness without the pressures of an Amish or a Shaker ethic.

  Minimalism does not really represent an -ism, but a sizable number of -ists. If there is an urban prose, this prose is suburban. If there is an academic prose, this prose is collegiate. If there is a yuppie prose, this would be it, except that it says “nope” more often than it says “yup” Out of Hemingway, out of O’Hara, out of detective fiction and brand-name realism, it is as terse as a telegram. It is as hard-boiled, but not an egg.

  One of the virtues of the present is that the present passes. (I should correct myself: the present is the only thing that is always around; what is present in the present passes.) One of the perils of the present tense is exactly the evanescence of its referent. (To be precise: this is true only if the referent is a particular thing or action in the world; if the referent is “mopping,” “leaking,” “sweating,” these Ideas of Action may be as eternal as the Eternal Itself.) One of the perils of writing about any event is, of course, that it will be gone before its verb is well in place and its nouns have had a chance to settle down around it. So if I say: “There is an outbreak of measles at Slimbo’s Summer Camp,” you, the reader, will smile at this old news, having brought your kid home to get well and rest up several epidemics ago—that would be before chicken pox, before mumps.

  How does it happen that I have been alerted to this outbreak of the present tense when, perhaps, you haven’t? Not long ago I was asked to select some stories by n
ew writers for an anthology, and my initial survey of the field, taking me geologically about fifteen years deep, uncovered the condition. Further researches at writing schools, the principal source of the contamination, underlined the seriousness of the situation and the extent of its ramifications. (I wrote “underlined” just now—quite wrong; it dates me. “Highlighted” is the right term. A bilious yellow marking pen is run over words as if to cancel them. The face of the text can still be made out, like the figure of someone drowned beneath the phlegm. But for you who are reading this, the practice may have passed beyond your ken—a happy thought.)

  There were writing programs in a few universities before World War II, but it was only after that conflict that they began to multiply and flourish. So they’ve been with us, roughly, a bit beyond a generation, as it is often measured. We are now experiencing the cumulative effects of their operations. You may have noticed the plague of school-styled poets with which our pages have been afflicted, and taken some account of the no-account magazines that exist in order to publish them. In addition, thousands of short-story readers and writers have been released like fingerlings into the thin mainstream of serious prose.

  The most distant layer of my excavations turned up pretty much what one might expect: a scattering of subjects, persons, tenses, places. I ran into more males than females, and there were the usual number of initiation stories, family muddles, bittersweet affairs. As I advanced toward the present, however, the number of women writers increased, as did the number of fictions in the first person, and tales in the present tense.