A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Beckett’s How It Is and “Ping”

  His name is the same as a saint’s. He represents perfectly one supreme pole of the art of writing, along with Rilke, Valéry, and Flaubert. His dedication was so total, it regularly threatened his existence. Most of us compromise. That is how one gets on in life, avoids labor disputes, saves a marriage, ducks a war. Even principles get dirtied and we have to wash them periodically like clothes. Beckett is a minimalist because he is as devoted to his ideals as a Shaker and thinks most things frivolous, or decorative, or vain. And he is no doubt right. He writes equally well in two languages: Nitty and Gritty. He is a minimalist because he compresses, and puts everything in by leaving most of it out. Joyce wished to rescue the world by getting it into his book; Beckett wishes to save our souls by purging us—impossibly—of matter. Only Borges has had a comparable influence. I have only known one other man who bore the brunt and brilliance of his art in his person, who literally “stood for” what he stood for in the best sense, and that was Ludwig Wittgenstein, the only other saint in my modest religion.

  The library at Washington University has a wonderful Beckett collection. There you may actually observe (in a manuscript like “Ping” in English, “Bing” in French) the hand of the master at work—with a mind that’s mathematical, musical, always skeptical, Cartesian—crossing out, writing in, encircling, fretting in the margins. When I first held “Ping” in my hands, my hands shook, not because of a reverence for relics, but because the pages were pure epiphany.

  José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso

  The translation by Gregory Rabassa reads wonderfully, but we know that the jungle has been cleared, the nighttime lit, the tangles, at least some of them, straightened. If How It Is is one polar cap of my little literary world, Paradiso lies at the other: both forbidding, both formidable, both wholly formed, though so differently achieved. Beckett was as spare in person as his work. Lezama Lima was large, and wore (I believe) a wide white hat, and held forth in cafés, and put his loving fat hands on young men and blessed them with his attention. The Latin American literary boom has heard the firing of many cannons, but none sounds more loudly in my ears than Paradiso. Surely, with Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers, it forms a fresh Andes. I shall now make a bad joke: If Sir Style is the king of the Baroque, here is the queen. Long may they live and break wind, as Pantagruel would say.

  Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

  Of the astonishing Latin American writers, I am including only a few in my fifty, simply because only these few jarred as much my writing hand. But the work of Fuentes, Paz, Neruda, Carpentier, Vallejo, Rulfo, Puig, Donoso, Cabrera Infante, Sarduy, Sábato, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and so on, should not be in any sense skimped or neglected. These writers now own the novel. We others, who try our hand at it from time to time, we merely rent. And Hopscotch is one reason for the preeminence of the Spanish language in contemporary literature. Rich, inventive, sprawling, intelligent … I halt on this word, not one I should assign as a special quality to many writers. Joyce, for instance, picks up ideas the way a jackdaw steals buttons off of hanging wash—because they are bright—and he carries them back to his nest, another shiny trophy. But he does not know the inside of any of them. He knows the brutalities of theology, the beauty of its pageantry, the fearfulness of its fanaticism, but not its internal intellectual power. But so many of the great Latins do. They are smart. Many have been diplomats. They are smooth. They have seen their countries ravaged by carpetbaggers and impoverished by homegrown dictators. They are really pissed off.

  Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths

  Another amazing mind. Here is the consciousness of a devoted, playful, skeptical intelligence, a man made civilized by the library, as if to prove it can be done. At what a deliciously ironic remove does he observe (through words) the world. What this blind seer sees is just how little we see if fully sighted; how little there is to understand in all we think we know. But Borges is not a man for despair; that, too, is vanity. Nor is there anything new under the sun, not even a new view: that the sun is a hotheaded youth drag-racing the moon to his doom; that it is a hot rock; that it is an idea in God’s mind; that it is a bundle of burning perceptions; that it is; that it is not. Borges is a fine poet, too, but he revolutionized our conception of both the story and the essay by blending and bewildering them. He will not be forgiven or forgotten for that.

  Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain

  Lifetimes don’t last long enough for us to have more than two or three vocational revelations. Perhaps I was fifteen when I first read “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” but I still remember part of my emotion. I desperately wanted to be “like Mann.” It was not just that I wanted to write as powerfully or as profoundly, or even that I wanted to have his art or his mind. I remember trying to understand my desire for that likeness, and it was only later that I decided what my feeling really was: I wanted to be like that story—to have that measured depth, that subtlety, that sense—yes—of its own importance, and even to be its problems, endure its theme. And later I would devour everything he wrote, especially Death in Venice. Dr. Faustus is an equally admirable novel, I think; but The Magic Mountain is a work I have read more often than any other novel, and one I studied carefully when young, and began to see as a complex textual world. I loved the fact that I could read its brief passages of schoolboy French. At St. Louis’s yearly Book Fair (the region’s most important cultural event), I found a few years back a nice copy of Joseph in Egypt. On the flyleaf, in Mann’s hand, was a thank-you note to his St. Louis hostess. The book cost me a buck.

  Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor and Other Stories

  Kafka was for me a perfect example of “getting to the party late.” By the time I arrived, I had heard of Kafka for several decades; I had read his imitators, and his critics. I had played with his angst as if it were a football. I did not expect to be impressed (something had held me from him), though impressed I was—mightily. But he would not be “an influence.” Then, in the middle of Kafka—a Kafka I had begun to teach—I found A Country Doctor, a mysterious and extraordinary prose lyric, a Kafka in a Kafka. And suddenly, all of Kafka grew more luminous and impenetrable at the same time. Kafka is my next writing project. If I can get to him. [I never did.] I don’t play with his angst anymore—the game is no longer a game. He is a great letter writer, a great diarist, too.

  Herman Broch’s The Sleepwalkers

  Broch may be the most neglected writer on my list, next to Flann O’Brien (over whom he would tower). I think of Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, as well, or Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, but Canetti is a Nobel laureate now, and Musil is well known, though only from infrequent sightings, like a family ghost. An equally neglected work is Broch’s own Death of Virgil. Certainly, his books have been translated into many languages, and he has been given the flattery of polite applause. Exiled to the United States, he won awards and received grants. Yet he has been neglected by being insufficiently singled out, his excellence hidden in the hubbub ordinariness predictably receives. The Sleepwalkers begins as a psychological narrative, passes through a center made of the “real” world’s descriptive surface, and ends as a philosophical lyric. Each phase is masterfully done, but it is the direction of the change that is most significant. If we were to think of the traditional novel as a pane of glass, then The Sleepwalkers is a thrown stone, and The Death of Virgil its shattered window. We can no longer see out because there is nothing to see through. Like Mann, he is a “philosophical novelist.” Unlike Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or Anatole France, he is not a novelist of ideas.

  Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno (or Zeno’s Conscience in

  William Weaver’s marvelous recent translation)

  How different German and Italian ironies are. Svevo takes the world seriously by refusing to do so; his touch with everything
is light. Mann takes the world seriously in order to make something serious out of what, after all, is rather an absurd affair. His lightest touch leaves a bruise, but not one a bully’s blow leaves, one the doctor’s inoculation causes. My colleague Naomi Lebowitz has written wonderfully of Svevo, who called himself, on the late occasion of his fame, as she reports, a “bambino di 64 anni.” But when he met Joyce, he was a businessman named Ettore Schmitz, and as Ettore Schmitz he lent the impoverished Irishman money. However, when Joyce recommended Zeno to Ford Madox Ford and T. S. Eliot (among others of influence), he was the Svevo we know and the author also of an earlier work we didn’t know, called Senilità—itself quite beautiful. Svevo did not take himself seriously as a literary personage, or romanticize about himself as a pursuer of the great arts. He was in the glassware business. He wrote, sufficiently, not solely, for himself. Svevo is on this list, however, because he opened up Italian literature for me. It was a world to which I had been almost totally oblivious. Dante had been my final stop. And once I had entered the country through Trieste, where one day D’Annunzio would hang his banner, I would make my way slowly and stay in many regions: in Pavese, for example, in Montale, Pratolini, Vittorini, and later in Emilio Gadda’s Rome, in the Turin of Primo Levi, in the dreamlands of Italo Calvino.

  Gustave Flaubert’s Letters

  Here I learned—and learned—and learned. My letters. I did not learn how to write. You learn that by writing. After you have read much. I learned what and how to think about writing. I learned what literary ideals were and why they were important. I became only a third-grade fanatic, but every advancement helped. I also got to understand something of my own anger by studying Flaubert’s rage. I must say I trust hatred more than love. It is frequently constructive, despite the propaganda to the contrary; it is less frequently practiced by hypocrites; it is more clearly understood; it is painfully purchased and therefore often earned; and its objects sometimes even deserve their hoped-for fate. If you love the good, you have to hate evil. I cannot imagine a love so puerile and thin and weak-kneed it cannot rage. But hate killed Flaubert, I think, and it didn’t do Céline many favors. If I had any advice to give a young writer (and I haven’t), I would suggest an enraptured reading of these letters. One ought not to feel about women as Flaubert did—he could be coarse and brutal—but he will teach you how to treat a page. Maybe I go too far if I say that every mot is juste, but certainly every other one is.

  Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet

  I had read and admired everything else by the master but this late text. I had swallowed the stories, been overwhelmed by Bovary and Education, admired even Flaubert’s oriental excesses. But I had not gotten to the great “put-down.” This book is not for the faintly minded. It is a devastation, a blowup as total as the bomb, of our European pretensions to knowledge. B and P are silent film comics, almost. They Laurel and Hardy their way through wisdom, and leave it a wreck. Their sincere admiration for any subject is equivalent to the announcement of its disgrace. I had thought these things already, thought them all, but I had never found them quite so well expressed. So this work changed me through its confirmation of my prejudices. It made certain that to this set of attitudes, I should remain not only wed but faithful.

  Stendhal’s The Red and the Black

  Boston, 1943. I am about to go down to the submarine base to test out for the school there. I have come into possession of the Liveright Black and Gold edition. (What a wonderful series. I loved them all. There was Jules Romain’s The Body’s Rapture, a kooky, overwrought book, I know now, but it was sex, and it was French. There was Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love, more sex, more French. There was Balzac’s The Physiology of Marriage, more sex, more French. There was Stendhal’s own On Love, ditto. There was The Collected Works of Pierre Loüys, double dots, double ditto. There was Alexandre Dumas’s The Journal of Madame Giovanni, which was simply French, a disappointment. And The Red and the Black, like checker squares.) Anyway, I am lining up New London in my train table’s sights, and scanning the novel I have bought because of the series it is in, thinking that I’m not going to like climbing a rope through all that water, and thinking that the first chapter, a description of a small town, is commonplace, ho-hum, and will I be put in a pressure chamber at sub school like a canned tomato? When suddenly, I am suckered into Stendhal, and no longer read words (against all the rules of right reading I will later give myself), but barrel along like my own train, a runaway, holding my breath oftener and oftener, aware only of a insistently increasing tension, and it is not because I am underwater; it is because I am inside the magic of this narrative master. The Charterhouse of Parma would do exactly the same thing to me, except that I didn’t let a sub school come between us, but covered its lengthy length as nearly in one sitting as might be managed, snacking at the edge of it as though it were on a TV tray. That sort of gluttonous read is rare, and never happens to me now, when I read, because I read to write or teach or otherwise to talk, and not because I am a reading madman about to lose his soul to the seductions of a sentence.

  Colette’s Break of Day

  Books to go to bed with; books better than most breasts; books that feel like silk sheets someone has spilled crumbs on, for they are not so totally smooth as not to scratch. Adoration is the right word if spoken with the right accent. Colette was a heroine, too, who threw off the bribing bangles of her captors, dared to kiss other girls in public, or to appear nude (but so motionless, the tableau might not be living). Works in which the juice runs through your closing teeth. And wise, or, maybe, shrewd. Observant not as a god is, but as an adolescent looking on love, and later like a whore looking on lovelessness and age. Semiautobiographical the way one is semidressed. Never breathless as a schoolgirl, though, or like this prose, disjointed, but long and slow and generous and fine as the line of the leg. Regarde, she commanded. And in Chéri, she looked at age as it comes to those whose means of life depend on their physical attractions, or, at least, on the promises of the body. Break of Day is the classic menopause book. Resilient and resigned, yet rich in resolution, Break of Day does not translate La Naissance du Jour very well, when what is meant is something like the dawning of the end. American students, I have discovered to my sorrow, do not take kindly to Colette. Is it because, though they exercise their bodies, they never exercise their senses? Or because, though they know a bit about sex, they prefer not to know about sensuality?

  John Donne’s Poems and Sermons

  “Batter my heart,” he did. I grew up during the Age of Donne, the era of the New Criticism, when the metaphysical poets were brought, by T. S. Eliot and William Empson, to center stage, where they stood in front of Wordsworth and Shelley and wore outlandish conceits. It was Marvell and Donne, mainly, who set the standard. Crashaw had his thumb on the scale. I learned how admirable oxymorons were, and how to perform catachresis. We hunted ambiguities feverishly, as if they were bedbugs in the blankets. Gotcha. For all their excesses, the New Critics were generally sound about the reading of poetry, and their techniques are still standard. “The circle of bright hair about the bone,” we would whisper in one another’s ear while dancing, which was probably an improvement on humming along with the band, though no less absurd. Having drunk the poetry, I found the prose. And what prose! He raised rhetoric like a club of war. I must quote. How shall we be when we are angels? “The knowledge which I have by Nature, shall have no Clouds; here it hath: that which I have by Grace, shall have no reluctation, no resistance; here it hath: That which I have by Revelation, shall have no suspition, no jealousie; here it hath: sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a respiration from God, and a suggestion from the Devil. There our curiosity shall have this noble satisfaction, we shall know how the Angels know, by knowing as they know.” You have to admire the punctuation. He was another Sir Style, of course, and another deeply doubting believer. Or deeply believing doubter. It depended on the poetic subject. The poet’s real loyalty is t
o the rhyme and to the repetition of that “hath.”

  Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns

  I like Hölderlin best when his critics say he is mad. Whenever an artist bursts through the limits, he is said to be astigmatic, immoderate, deaf, arthritic, depressed, drunk, insane, syphilitic. Literature has many wonderful poets, each as mad as Blake. However, there are a few poets whose poetry outmodes poetry itself, the way very late Beethoven seems to transcend music and seek another realm. Mallarmé is a prime example. One might include Paul Celan. As if whatever had been done before was no longer enough, as if every old depth had dried up and shown itself shallow, as if every use of language had worn its edge round; the poet at first flutes on his instrument, until finally he finds a way to play backward through it, or upside down, or without using any breath, or simply by thinking through the tube, sounding the sense somewhere. The hymns and the late poems of Hölderlin, like the elegies of Rilke and the last lays of Yeats, are no longer poems. They have eluded her grasp and that of every category. Hölderlin once said this about the death of his wife: that she had borne his children, who were Popes and sultans, and that then “Närret isch se worde, närret, närret, närret!” (“She went mad, she did, mad, mad, mad!”) Near his own end, Hölderlin wrote the poem that passes poetry like an errant bus may run through all its stops. It is the one that begins, in Richard Sieburth’s English: