A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies

  I became a Rilke junkie. I cannot let many days pass without having a fix. The relationship cannot be rationally explained, and I no longer feel the need to. I am not a reader who reads to learn about an author, and I rarely pursue the writer into his or her privacy on account of that person’s public utterance; but in Rilke’s case, I did: I collected and read every word I could find, whether on or by him, and that is a whole lot of lard. He is the only writer I ever tried seriously to translate, despite his difficulty, and my foreign-language handicaps, for the truth is, I am really a monoglot. Well, I would buy Rilke’s kiddie car at auction if it ever came to the block. Who, if I cried, the Elegies shout, would hear me among the orders of angels? But I felt I had cried long ago and often, only to be heard now by these poems. They gave me my innermost thoughts, and then they gave those thoughts an expression I could never have imagined possible for them. Furthermore, the poet who thought and wrote these things, for all his shortcomings, actually endeavored to be worthy of his work—and that effort made him, in my eyes, the most romantic of romantics. My passion for this poet was, I thought, a private one, yet I taught his work for thirty years, and even wrote a book, all the while treating his presence in my life as something I kept in a drawer. Strange. These poems also have a remarkable compositional history, and many are the result of the most exemplary inspirational storm our weather-keeping records record.

  Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus

  Written in an unheralded and unparalleled burst at the same time that he was furnished the conclusion of the Elegies, these poems are also truly awesome, as my daughters, I’m afraid, would say. It is probably embarrassingly clear by now that works of art are my objects of worship, and that some of these objects are idols at best—rich, wondrous, and made of gold—yet only idols; while others are secondary saints and demons, whose malicious intent is largely playful; while still others are rather sacred, like hunks of the true cross or biblical texts, and a few are dizzying revelations. Orpheus is the singing god, whose severed head continued its tune as, in addition to its other modes of dying, it drowned.

  And even if one of them suddenly held me against his heart (doesn’t the “First Elegy” say?), I would fade in the grip of their completer existence. It is one of Rilke’s doctrines, expressed most directly in his poem “The Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” that works of art are often more real than we are because they embody human consciousness completely fulfilled, and at a higher pitch of excellence than we, in our skinny, overweight, immature, burned-out souls and bodies, do. Rilke’s poems very often seem to me to have been written by someone superhuman.*

  I.I

  There rose a tree. O pure uprising!

  O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear!

  And hushed all things. Yet even in the silence

  a new beginning, beckoning, new bent appeared.

  Creatures of silence thronged from the clear

  released trees, out of their lairs and nests,

  and their quiet was not the consequence

  of any cunning, any fear,

  but was because of listening. Growl, shriek, roar,

  shrank to the size of their hearts. And where there’d been

  ramshackles to shelter such sounds before—

  just dens designed from their darkest desires,

  with doorways whose doorposts trembled—

  you built a temple in the precincts of their hearing.

  Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters

  We say that in some letters we see their authors come forth and reveal themselves, often quite plainly and directly, as D. H. Lawrence and Lord Byron do in their delicious correspondence; sometimes inadvertently, as Proust does, with his toadying and his flattery, which is as insincere as Pascal’s wager; or deviously, on tiptoe, as Henry James often does. I think in Rilke’s letters we see someone creating a persona, not hiding or revealing one. He (the person) wishes he had the sentiments, the style, the skills, the virtues, which he (the poet) exemplifies and champions in his work. Eventually, we can see what began as pretense becomes truth; the person and the poet coalesce. We tend to think of Rilke as a poet who also wrote an odd, experimental novel; but Rilke’s prose is not confined to one or a few public prose pieces. He wrote thousands of letters. In these letters, he made his best friends, had his best thoughts, made his best love. He is present in his letters, when in his person he is often waving farewell as he says hello. And his letters, like his poems, were sent to their recipients in his own calligraphically ornate and careful hand. One has the sense, reading Rilke, that he is making even the ink.

  Postscript

  I originally compiled a much longer list, and pared it for the exhibition, mentioned earlier. After I had made my choices and pell-melled my notes about them, I realized that one book was missing which ought—absolutely—to have been present: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, a work, among all of his others, that made a convert of me for more than twenty years. This masterpiece I just—well, I just forgot. Let it stand for the Nothing that is not here, and the Nothing that is.

  *All quotations from Rilke’s poetry are from William H. Gass. Reading Rilke. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

  THE BOOK OF PREFACES

  The editor of this Book of Prefaces, Alasdair Gray, has opened it with what he calls an “Advertisement” and followed that with an essay entitled “On What Led to English Literature.” Since he deliberately does not distinguish between the various sorts of front matter a volume may contain, they both might be characterized as prefaces. I encountered this laxity with some dismay, although I understand it. The editor did not wish to inhibit his choice of materials by drawing lines none of his examples would obey anyway, or slow his process of selection with quibbles. Nevertheless, to protest sloppy common usage, as well as some traditional waywardness, I think the necessary distinctions should be made.

  A prologue imparts information that is necessary for the reader to have before beginning a book or watching a performance. The narrative aria that opens Tristan und Isolde tells us the story up to the point of the curtain’s going up. The prologue to the Canterbury Tales describes the occasion for the tale it will frame and introduces the pilgrimage’s cast of characters. Prologues are true openings and therefore more essential to the main text than other bits like those souvenir shops on the walk to Saint Michel that may entice readers to dally on their way. For instance, if the main text is in verse, the prologue will feel obliged to follow suit. The prologue should never be by anyone other than the author, though the prologue may be delivered by a prologuer as in Henry V, or by a character in the book, play, or opera, as in Pagliacci, or by the author under another name.

  Carried away by prologomania, Chaucer writes one for his knight, the knight’s squire, his prioress, his friar, his monk, his lawyer, his clerk, his merchant, his carpenter, his cook, and so on, including, thank heaven, his good wife from Bath, whose virtue most immediately is that she enables the poet to rhyme “deef” and “Ypres” within the first four lines—and internally to boot. Happily, all of them are included in The Book of Prefaces—as well as the stirring prologue to Piers Plowman. This is poetry that proves powerful verse needn’t be politically puny and pusillanimous just because it alliterates, meanwhile also demonstrating how the deserved vilification of a politician in one period will fit others in other times equally well, corrupt and incompetent governance being drearily the same for every age. Enjoy the lines in which rats consider belling the cat, for instance. An updated English accompanies the original text to facilitate the pleasure.

  A prolegomenon is a simplified version of a more complicated text or theory; it is therefore something like an introductory course. It covers the main points, leaving out only subtleties and details. The prolegomenon can therefore substitute for the text if you are in a hurry, or can, in some cases, serve as the only text, because, for a prolegomenon, it is the ideas that count. A prolegomenon
suggests an intimacy with the thoughts which concern it that only their author might be expected to possess. Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomenon to Any Future Metaphysics is an example—maybe the only one.

  A preface explains the meaning, nature, history, or importance of the text, preparing the reader to engage it in a resourceful rather than a dilatory manner, as Granville Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare do. A preface should mean business, but it is not a reduction of its text to bite size. Usually, the works of dead authors get prefaces written by scholars. Imagine the hyena explaining to the jackal the finer qualities of what it is about to eat.

  Each of the addenda that concern us here could conceivably be published independently of its home text. This happens, particularly, to prolegomena. They are then said (by me) to be untethered. That is why some of the selections in The Book of Prefaces seem sufficient and complete in themselves and others feel fragmentary and rather lost. The selections are frequently abridged, sometimes leaving out both banks.

  Occasionally, the forematter is so forceful, so trenchant, so outrageous that it outcrescendos the piece to follow, and subsequently only the overture is played, say it’s by von Suppé or Rossini, leaving the opera that occasioned it in wholesome oblivion. A literary example is Theophile Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, though it ignores all my splendid distinctions twixt foreword, intro, and preface, as if I hadn’t made them yet. This extended polemic has very little to do with the novel itself. It was, in fact, written to lengthen the total text so that it might be issued in two volumes, and would have been better called a fusillade. His attack on the utilitarian character of the bourgeoisie came to be regarded, after May 1834, as Modernism’s opening—well, fusillade. Synge’s preface to The Playboy of the Western World has known a fame equal to the play. Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads approaches it.

  Although every one of these pieces of prior matter is made of language, only prefaces and forewords must announce an oncoming text. Persons can be introduced, prologues can precede plays, prolegomena run in front of theories. However, a foreword requires a written or printed work it can be the “fore” of. I can say, “Let me preface my remarks …” but I cannot permit myself to foreword them. It has been said that the golfer’s cry of “Fore!” heralds the ball the way the “Fore!” of a text warns of the word.

  An introduction should get the reader interested in the subject of the book by briefly describing it, praising its author, and providing a fascinating curriculum vitae without necessarily explaining or parsing the work. The introduction is an extended blurb, a barker’s spiel, and hence it is like an old-fashioned advertisement, and may concern itself primarily with the personal history of the author. It permits reminiscence and gossip. Both preface and introduction can apologize for the public’s past neglect of the work. The author may write his own blurb, but this is definitely bad form. He will pretend to be introducing his book to the reader, which is a little like introducing his dog. Ideally, it should be by another writer of fame, if not distinction, because an introduction is an endorsement. Introductions are usually a lot of baloney. And there are far too many of them.

  If some mushhead were still of the opinion that these aforementioned terms were interchangeable, especially in the mushhead’s world, consider this: I may introduce a speaker to an audience, or two people to each other, but I cannot prolegomenon or preface them. I can introduce you to roast quail or to miniature golf, to the prime minister or the Rotary Club, but I cannot even foreword mail.

  An introduction presupposes ignorance. When Albert J. Guerard introduced John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal, in 1948, he could properly feel both Hawkes and his novel were unknown to most readers. But this is what Guerard begins by saying: “Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the classic text under consideration is deservedly a classic, with hidden meanings and beauties.” Guerard had been teaching too long and assumed rows of ignorant students were sitting in front of him. You can’t call a new novel a classic, however fine you think it is, without puffing a sail loose. An introduction is an introduction, not a nomination. “This is Helen Hoho; she teaches at Heehaw” is quite enough. Not: “This is Helen Hoho, and despite what you have heard, she isn’t bad in bed, is rather good with pilaf, and can darn cotton socks like crazy.” Indiscreet praise is still slander.

  Martin Samson says, endeavoring to “introduce” The Ambassadors, “The main purpose of an introduction, as usually written, seems to be the statement of a critical opinion of the literary work concerned. Possibly the best place for such an opinion would be not as prologue but as epilogue, to be read when the book was finished and when one’s own tentative judgment had been formed.” His loose use of “prologue” should leap out at us by now. In an introduction, some innocuous praise is permitted: “This is Helen Hoho; she is a wonderful teacher, too bad she’s been stuck at Heehaw for thirty years.”

  An epilogue, now that it’s come up, like its older brother, is a part of the text. It may satisfy the reader’s curiosity about the fate of the characters, or contain some acid account of the likely course of its tale, but remarks about the resistance of publishers to genius or the blindness of reviewers to subtlety and wit, as well as pleas for pity on the part of the author for his undeserved plight, should be reserved for an afterword.

  A foreword should be written by the author, at the time of publication, explaining perhaps why the piece was written, anticipating difficulties, alerting the reader to its special qualities, removing current misconceptions, apologizing in advance for defects it may be perceived—vengefully—to possess.

  Sometimes a foreword is added to later editions in order to attack previous reviewers, and defend the text from their criticisms (which the author, if shrewd, will never spell out), or to brag in a modest manner about why a new edition seemed necessary, and point to corrections and additions whose prior absence, as useful or required as they may seem now, did not prevent the book from being a big hit.

  Perhaps this is the place to warn the reader that the tome he might be holding, titled Oceans of the World, also includes seas because the difference between oceans and seas, let alone bays and gulfs, was to the author of Oceans never clear or never considered.

  Forewords are so often self-serving that I tend to skip them, hoping to hold on to some regard for the writer at least until after the first pallid pages of his book have slipped away into the “nevermore to be remembered.” Their premature celebrations of genius are usually a proclivity of men, but a few are so wise and so just their recommendations should be piously followed. Such is the case with King Alfred’s greeting to his bishops on the occasion of sending them his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care. “Think how we would be punished in this world, if we neither loved learning ourselves or let other men love it: that we had the name of Christian only, and few of the virtues.” He remembers how the Greeks translated every text into their own language, and he encourages this practice in his bishops, so that what is locked in Latin, and so kept from the people, will be set free in their understanding. A great good king indeed.

  Early on, information we would now think properly put on the acknowledgments page was consigned to a foreword, as is the case here with the Venerable Bede, who is careful to inform his patron, King Ceolwulf, concerning the sources of the stories he is about to relate, so he may have the comfort of saying, Don’t blame me; it’s what I’ve been told: “Of things known about the faith of Christ in Northumbria up to the present day, I do not use the authority of one person, but the words of many truthful witnesses, who knew and remembered the events….”

  Addresses are of three kinds. The first (often a poem) is by the author to his or her issue: “Go dumb born book …” et cetera, and explores the conceit, frequently invoked, that the book has been whelped the way mammals are, and is sent forth, now, like an orphan, to make its way. The second (often a poem) is directed to the author’s patron (or hoped-for patron) (some highborn lowbro
w nobleman normally), as Robert Herrick’s is posted to the Prince of Wales, and packed with obsequious lies: “Well may my Book come forth like Publique Day, When such a Light as You are leads the way”; the third (often a poem) is from the author to the reader, pretending to be a personal letter from one to the other, and often slyly performing some of a foreword’s business.

  Caedmon considers his patron to be God. Naturally, he addresses Him, but he does so publicly, letting the rest of us overhear. The regularity in which this is done (in addresses to the Deity) suggests that there is a real concern God may be turning a deaf ear, if He has any ear at all, so someone else had better be listening, if only for the record.

  An author’s note or just a note usually serves as a foreshortened preface, though sometimes it combines that with the task of an acknowledgments page. A note had better be a note—that is, a paragraph or two, max—and contain information—several facts per sentence—that may be “tucked away.”

  Any one of these otherwise-innocent textual members may be misused, for instance, when E. E. Cummings bestows a dedication upon all the publishers who have rejected his work.

  The above-listed elements may not be explicitly named “Preface” or “Foreword.” You have published, in the sixties, a book for which you supplied a preface; now you are reissuing it with additional material called, perhaps, “A View from the Seventies.” Whatever it is labeled, if it takes account of the preface to the first edition (as it should), then it is a metapreface. With “metas,” all bets are off.