Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  When a government bans nonobjective art, it is because its very look is threatening; it is its departure from the upright, its deviationism, that is feared—a daub is a dangerous breach of decorum. Finally, when the Soviet authorities decided to loosen their restrictions on the publication of books and the holding of performances, this was not suddenly a choice of art over politics on their part; it was politics, and had to do with such issues as the freedom of information, the quashing of the Stalin cults, the placation of certain opponents, and so on, not with art. They knew what the novels in the drawers were about.

  I do happen to feel, with Theodor Adorno, that writing a book is a very important ethical act, consuming so much of one’s life; and that, in these disgusting times, a writer who does not pursue an alienating formalism (but rather tries to buck us up and tell us not to spit in the face of the present, instead of continuing to serve this corrupt and debauched society although it shits on every walk and befouls every free breath), is, if not a pawn of the system (a lackey, we used to say), then probably a liar and a hypocrite. (Shit cannot sing, you say? perhaps; but by the bowels, shit sells.) It is a general moral obligation to live in one’s time, and to have a just and appropriate attitude toward it (to spit upon it if need be), not to live in the nineteenth century or to be heartless toward the less fortunate or to deny liberty and opportunity to others, to hold on to stupid superstitions, or fall victim to nostalgia.

  But good books have been written by bad people, by people who served immoral systems, who went to bed with snakes, by people who were frauds in various ways, by schemers and panderers. And beautiful books have been written by the fat and old and ugly, the lonely, the misbegotten (it is the same in all the arts), and some of these beautiful books are, like Juan Goytisolo’s, ferociously angry, and some of them are even somewhat sinister like Baudelaire’s, and some are shakingly sensuous like those of Colette, and still others are dismayingly wise, or deal with terror tenderly, or are full of lamentable poppycock. (I am thinking most immediately of Pope’s Essay on Man.)

  I think it is one of the artist’s obligations to create as perfectly as he or she can, not regardless of all other consequences, but in full awareness, nevertheless, that in pursuing other values—in championing Israel or fighting for the rights of women, or defending the faith, or exposing capitalism, supporting your sexual preferences or speaking for your race—you may simply be putting on a saving scientific, religious, political mask to disguise your failure as an artist. Neither the world’s truth nor a god’s goodness will win you beauty’s prize.

  Finally, in a world which does not provide beauty for its own sake, but where the loveliness of flowers, landscapes, faces, trees, and sky are adventitious and accidental, it is the artist’s task to add to the world’s objects and ideas those delineations, carvings, tales, fables, and symphonic spells which ought to be there; to make things whose end is contemplation and appreciation; to give birth to beings whose qualities harm no one, yet reward even the most casual notice, and which therefore deserve to become the focus of a truly disinterested affection.

  There is perhaps a moral in that.

  SIMPLICITIES

  1

  Junichiro Tanizaki wrote that we “Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament.” What he wrote is certainly true about Americans. We are amazed. Often, furthermore, we deeply approve; for simplicity—severity even—plainness—are pioneer virtues still held in high esteem by us, if rarely practiced now. Indeed, the simple, in our covered-wagon days, was directly connected, as a tool might be, to the hand and what the hand made. This simplicity implied less skill than it demanded determination, and it emerged from coarse necessity the way the vegetables we grew in the dirt near our farmhouse kitchen did: products equally of effort and rough chance, as crude as our first fence, and cultivated no farther than you would dig a well—not an inch beyond the reach of water.

  The shelters we built were like the ground we broke and the implements we made—plain as their names: house, field, food, cloth, plough—simple as the simple liberties we enjoyed, though these were not freedoms from Nature, certainly, since Nature hemmed us in and made life hard; nor from thieves or Indians or illness, dangers common and recurrent as nighttime; but from society, from other people’s profiteering regulations, from laws we didn’t like, servitude, and our own past failures, from the exasperating complications of a civilization caught in the toils of Time, tied down by custom and privilege.

  In a land whose very features were unfamiliar, where even the rules of life were strangers, where the past had been abolished so that everyone could feel they were starting life as equals from a line of opportunity which was the same for all; in such a land, with such a task, you had to learn to depend on yourself, to make a religion, as Emerson did, out of “self-reliance” and become a handyman, a “jack-of-all-trades,” as it was put. But it was also true that when you did need others, you desperately needed them—to form a posse, raise a roof, to bridge a stream—nor did you have the time or training to divine obscure intentions or engage in elaborate ritual games in order to discover whether another person was a friend or an enemy, a worker or a wastrel, dependable or weak, an honest man or a rustler; so you wanted to know immediately “how the land lay,” and the frank and open countenance was consequently prized, as were the looks of a man who had worked long and hard in the wind and sun, who appeared to fear God (for you were often beyond the reach of any other law), who had the confidence that came from overcoming many obstacles, who “put on no airs,” “wore his heart on his sleeve,” was entirely “up front,” and, as the salacious saying is now, “let it all hang out”—presumably his (his wife’s) wash. Nowadays, even a candid, blunt, abrasive boss can be admired because he has been “straight” with you, letting you know “where you stood.”

  The simple, like the straight and the plain, is relatively featureless. It reduces the number of things with which you have to cope. After all, when crossing the country by covered wagon, you took winding trails only when rivers and mountains made the circuitous the shortest way. And in the Bible, didn’t God promise to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain? We liked the land we settled to be level, well-drained, free of rock. We often preferred the companionship of animals because they couldn’t talk at all and could be expected to act within their species as if in a cage. It was the body which dealt with the day’s difficulties. It was the body which built, which ploughed, which planted, and which, on occasion, danced and sang and played. The body baked. The body begot. It was not the brain.

  So our breath was supposed to be too short for long sentences. Democracy didn’t encourage subordination, not in people or in any part of their speech, whether it was to fancy words or flattering phrases or complicated clauses. Honesty was suspicious of endless ramifications. Adverbs that didn’t contribute to their action were needless frills. If it didn’t matter to the bite of the blade what the color of the ax’s handle was, you didn’t write it down or say its name. Events were the chief ingredient in stories, and the main thing was not to dawdle but to offer up the verb and then get on with it. Ideas fuddled you far worse than alcohol. Theories couldn’t thread a needle. You read a bit from the Good Book of an evening because, otherwise, God might blight your wheat. And you went to the Sunday Meeting for the society of it, and for the same wary reason you read. What’s more, there was always another row to hoe.

  How different this simplicity was from the sort praised by the subtle Tanizaki, and how misled we Westerners were when we admired an innocence we thought was our own. Those ashen walls, with their unadorned surfaces, the candles that lit them, the unpretentious wood that framed the windows, the plain mats that softened and warmed the floor, were there to receive the indefinite wavers of the flame, to grow uneven with revelation and concealment, to move, as if alive, inside their planes and provoke the profoundest contemplation.

  While th
e walls of the American settlers existed to keep out the cold and be forgotten … existed to keep out the vast space of the prairie, which lay around every cabin like an endless sea … existed to keep out the high sky you could fall into like a pit.

  The traditional Japanese room might give out onto a garden of gravel, a small raked space with one or two stones, which stood for a world or any mountain, each tame as a household bird. What of the planks whose grain will emerge only after years of timidity and suspicion, the mats that greet each footstep with a whisper which they pass among their fibers? and what of the corners in such a room, carved from darkness, where perhaps a thread of gold gleams from the flank of an otherwise invisible lacquer chest, where the dimmest hint of an ardent desire may lie wrapped in alternating layers of shadow and silk so that an additional breath bends the candle flame? These conditions, these qualities, speak to us not of simplicity, not in our sense, but of the indirect and devious, and suggest—there is the word!—they suggest that these plain surfaces and impassive features are screens on which one reality plays while another lurks behind them, and may move, when it moves, in metaphysical earnest.

  One kind of simplicity is reached, then (we cannot say “achieved”), when skills and means and time and energy are minimal. It is the sort of simplicity which looks not at the causes of things but only at their effects. Who cares, it says … who cares what drove the nail if now its head rests in the right place? When the larder holds only a bit of ground corn, a corn cake is what we shall have. Two “I do”s shall marry a couple as well as any cathedral ceremony.

  Another sort of simplicity is reached by removal and erasure, by denial and refusal. It begins with features already played upon by the artist, with surfaces into which the candle’s flicker has been cut, and dark corners created with charcoal, so there need never be an actual niche or a real lantern, but only a steady, indifferent glare of light; for absences will have to be understood to be as solidly in place as any wooden headrest, waiting the head that will sleep. It begins by looking at decoration as if it were a disease, as a form of social mold, a sign of spiritual decay, another case of the showy bad taste of some nouveau riche, or the loud cosmetics of a whore. Beneath these excrescences, these layers of gilt, these scabs of fashion, is an honest beam, more richly grained and more interesting than all these distracting carvings; beneath this powder and this cream is a natural beauty who might again send the Achaeans against Troy; behind these nervous variations is a mighty theme; let us hear it. Just one time. So cleanly, so clearly, we cannot be confused, nor any flaw be disguised. We want to grasp the lines, follow the form, find the true source of our sensation. Then, when real simplicity has returned, when the essential has been restored to disclose its few rightful properties, we may let fall upon it the pale light of our mind; we may shadow it with the darkness that lives in a few of our own thoughts; we may allow to cross it the slow movements of our meditations.

  Let us reconsider, for a moment, the simple objects that our ancestors made: a plain wooden bowl, for example, hollowed from a sawed round of tree trunk. A chisel bites into the heart of that wood, eats into the center of its rings of yearly growth, so that shortly a spoonful of milk could be placed in it, and then a cup’s worth, although there will be bark remaining around the rim. The rind is peeled off, needless bulk is cut away, and by continued gnawing at the core, the tools of the carpenter create a basin we can begin to recognize as a bowl. Or perhaps hot coals burn the hollow in it. Its interior should be smooth enough to let liquids slosh, a spoon to scoop, a larger one to ladle, and it should rinse out easily. The wood must be hard and dense so that warm soup won’t penetrate its fibers. Beyond this, little needs to be done. For the utilitarian, the means cease the moment the end is reached. A little sand will scour the bowl; a little seasoning will secure the grain. If it were a size to conveniently stack—that would be a plus. Our sentences should similarly fly to the mark, deposit their message, and disappear, as if a pigeon were to become its poop, so when any one of us looked up to complain because our shoulder had been stained, there’d be no bird there.

  Then why did we ever worry about the exact slope of the hollow our tools had chipped, the precise sheen of the wood, the slim line and smooth run of the rim? We certainly should have cared about how sturdily the dish sat, and how its sides widened so the soup could cool; but why were we concerned about the match of its rings, the quality of the grain in the base and bowl, the shape of the shadows which crept from beneath its sides?

  This bowl is ceasing to be simple. Hardship forces the makeshift upon us; primitive conditions produce primitive results; urgent needs aren’t choosy; indeed, the sharp teeth of need close like a trap on any victim; but when circumstances are no longer as straitened as they once were and a bit of leisure, some small level of satisfaction, has been reached, the mind can let go of the plough’s handle, can turn aside from its single thought and transform its lust into a little love.

  The bowl has ceased to be simple. A word like “perfection” has us by the ear. Now we are seeking a smoothness, an evenness, an achievement in its completion that will take us days—months—beyond an efficient use of our time. We become obsessed (is it suddenly or slowly?) by geometry, by geometry’s deceptive simplicities, its lucent beauty, and we see how the bowl is but a nest of circles whose circumferences are steadily shrinking and whose diameters contract.

  The bowl is a celebration of complexity. We’ve had to set several versions aside in order to start over, trying to improve its proportions, passing before our mind’s demanding eye, as though they were bathing beauties, images of other utensils whose alluring features may help us with the one we’re composing. What is this resulting bowl, then, whose shaping requires the failure of so many others, which devours this base and that rim, accepts a surface, adapts a form, distorts a tendency—acquiring qualities the way an actor takes on personalities in order to realize a role? what is this object whose making is directed by memory as much as by the pots that are broken when they fail to satisfy, or the bowls that are burned as kindling when the wind turns cold, or the words that are sent away from the sentence they were to serve in, and linger near it like disconsolate shades? what is this thing built so solidly of ghosts?

  How reluctantly, in the United States, have we come to recognize that civilization is refinement; that it requires leisure, judgment, taste, skill, and the patient work of a solitary mind passing itself, as though it were both a cleaner and a cleansing cloth, back and forth across an idea, back and forth until the substance of it—wood or marble or music, in syllables seeking their place in some song—back and forth until the matter of it begins to gleam deeply from its buried center, deeply where thought and thing are one, and therefore not solely from its surface, where a glitter may sometimes be glibly emitted, a glitter that comes just after a bit of light has struck, a glitter, a glit, before the beam has bounded off—a glitter, a glit—a spark, after which there will be only the light that has gone.

  Apart from the simplicity associated with the pioneer spirit of America, we developed, also very early, a simplicity of a second sort, though certainly in some sympathy with the first: this was exemplified by the distilled designs, the purified life and even purer dreams, of a sect called Shakers (so named because of their custom of dancing during their religious services, and of being frequently and literally moved by their love of God). They were separatists, forming withdrawn and self-sustaining communities. They were pacifists like the Quakers (another name signifying uncontrolled movement), and believed in equality and in the actual, rather than the rhetorical, Brotherhood of Man. They were celibate and endeavored to live a life free of sexual tension and gender competition. They were undogmatic, preferring to follow their faith rather than preach it, drawing communicants not by argument and propaganda but by shining example. Since Shakers did not breed, they were never guilty of corrupting their children with their principles, and converts came to them entirely out of free choice and when in p
ossession of a presumably mature mind.

  “When a World’s Fair was held several years ago in Japan,” June Sprigg, a student of the Shakers, writes, “one of the most popular features was an exhibit of Shaker furniture. Chairs without carving, tables without knickknacks, the simplicity of Shaker stoves and baskets, even the white walls and bare wood floors—all these made sense to the Japanese, who recognized and appreciated the same simplicity based on spiritual principles that characterize traditional Japanese culture.”

  I wonder if the visitors to the fair saw how directly the Shakers translated moral qualities into principles of craftsmanship: spare, straight, upright, plain, simple, direct, pure, square, tight, useful, orderly, unaffected, neat, clean, careful, correct. For every chair there was a peg on the wall from which it would hang while the floor was thereby more swiftly swept, and every peg was perfect. Since the chair was hung by its heels, as it were, what dust there was would settle on the bottom of the seat and not on the side where one sat. Beds folded up into the wall, and drawers drew out of anywhere. A sewing box might be fitted into a rocker, shutters slid up and down instead of swinging out into the room, and boxes were invariably nested. Every space was made of appointed places, and the tools that cleaned those hard-to-reach corners were hooked alongside a horsehair sieve sometimes, or a fluted tin mold for maple sugar.

  Yet the Shakers used only the finest maple, the truest oak and clearest pine, the best slate. Grooves and pegs which were internal to a piece, and therefore never seen, were finished as finely as if they would live their whole lives out-of-doors. Drawers not only slid out smoothly; they said they slid, in the look of them, in the shush of their sliding; and the ingenious nesting of things, the creation of objects which did double duty, the ubiquitous ledges and holders and racks and pegs, spoke of order, and neatness, and fit—the Godliness of Utility; for though their chairs were stiff and forthright, their tables were wide and unencumbered, and their solutions to problems quite evidently inspired by necessity; there was nothing humble about their materials, pure and as prized as silver and gold. There was nothing humble about the days of careful labor that obviously went into them. There was nothing humble and spare about houses with double doors and double stairs—one for each sex. Nor is there anything humble about a building built to stand a thousand years, or in some handmade things so supremely finished they provoke us to exclaim: “Handmade, maybe, but what careful fingers, what holy hands!” There is nothing humble about perfection.