A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  It is, of course, an incredible courtship, carried on near the bedside of Melanctha’s dying mother, delayed by the illness and the malice of Jane Harden, entirely verbal in its approaches and in its retreats, with embraces that are all air, an intercourse of thought and feeling that allegorizes the characters. As Richard Bridgeman has observed, Jeff and Melanctha sing duets, and, in Stein, we are never far from the operatic. Jeff Campbell has Hamlet’s handicap. His habitual hesitations are the result of his slow thought, his constant pondering. Melanctha’s passion is impulsive and headstrong. She leans near hoping to be touched. Jeff Campbell talks until she straightens up and drifts away. Or trembles. Then he puts his arms around her like a brother. The sexes continue to make war by means of mutual misunderstanding. The love/death theme is sounded on the first page when the result of love, in the body of the baby, dies of indifference. Finally, after an act or two of mutual confusion and the machinations of Jane Harden, they are allowed to enjoy their idyll, singing love and death together through the summer.

  But does a dash of Liebestod do it? Does the psychological analysis (most of it left in the dark anyway) achieve it? Does the dance of phrases, clauses, compounds around a point establish the quality one feels here? Uniqueness may be a value, but it is not an aesthetic one. Certainly there is an amazing match in this prose between meaning and shifts of meaning, in addition to the movement, the singsong of the line; and when one hears it, maybe then that music does it: how it combines thought with flows of feeling, how it measures time, how inexorable its movement is in the direction of disaster. It is not the form, a bit of which I shall now describe, but the feeling of that form when articulated—when performed—that does it … whatever it exactly is. For instance, there are the uneasy iambs that precede the strong stresses of Jeff’s fair firm love, and the bumpy fall away into its futility in this sentence (shortly to be cited); there is the modulation of “with her,” “about her,” “for her,” and “with her” again, as we pass through this customary and customarily brilliant passage: “He was uneasy always, with her, he was uneasy when he thought about her, he knew now he had a good, straight, strong feeling of right loving for her, and yet now he never could use it to be good and honest with her.”

  It’s what kept me up and drove me out into the street. Stein had restored prose to its formerly powerful rhetorical place, the way Joyce, of course, had done; yet more simply, less like the Irish tenor being piteous in a bar, or arranging sensualities to resemble bottles posed before their drinker in a cautionary line like, as we used to say, dead soldiers; but more the way William Jennings Bryan might have ranted, or some tent preacher might have reiterated his belief in the latest or the oldest rigmarole of his religion. It was done with the simple abstract workaday words of “yet” and “now” and “never.” The most ordinary … the most ignored … “true,” the most frequently repeated … the most modest of materials made her palate—a word like “now” for instance, a word like “one,” a word like “like,” or the infinitive “to go.”

  What would happen to “now”—that simple sound, familiar notion? It would find itself cheek by jowl with “always.” Always—a stretch of great extension—always—suddenly cut short by being confined in a small tight space like an eagle in a cage—“always now.” Then the space between them—“always” and “now”—is artfully lengthened, shortened, lengthened again; and a few synonyms are allowed to serve, most momentarily, in their stead, diminishing “always” to “often” for instance:

  Always now Jeff had to go so much faster than was real with his feeling. Yet always Jeff knew now he had a right, strong feeling. Always now when Jeff was wondering, it was Melanctha he was doubting, in the loving. Now he would often ask her, was she real now to him, in her loving. He would ask her often, feeling something queer about it all inside him, though yet he was never really strong in his doubting, and always Melanctha would answer to him. “Yes Jeff, sure, you know it, always,” and always Jeff felt a doubt now, in her loving.

  I am an organization man, and this was prose organized to matter, not just because of the importance of its sense or sentiment but also because of its art. The pace, the pause, the repeats, the loops, the variations, the apparent monotones, the pronouns, the placeholders, suddenly rose, threw off their modest roles to become riots of color, to call for new orders, and at last to assume positions of authority, majesty even; and when there, when secure in the seats of power, to turn time like a top whose turning alone kept it atiptoe: “Always now every day he found it harder to make the time pass, with her, and not let his feeling come so that he would quarrel with her.”

  It is customary to point out that Melanctha represents impulse and instinct; that she is reckless in her openness; and that Jeff is practical, a man of science and healing, of reason and moderation. Yet Jeff does not think a lot, if by that one means hunting for premises and driving them to their conclusion. Jeff does not investigate, if one means he collects data and forms hypotheses. No. Jeff mulls. Over and over. He hesitates; he vacillates; he suddenly, inexplicably, has a change of mind (or perhaps a change of heart has preceded and hastened it). He wonders why his attitudes have altered, and he wonders why he is wondering. Because Jeff Campbell is above all cautious. He understands the black man’s world, the black man’s position. He knows how easily things go wrong in it. He is in the grip of conventionality—he seeks the safe life, which is a life defined for him by the white world, its white God, its white leaders, its white laws. And every time his feelings seem to venture forth or his mind leaps like a fish to snap at a new notion, he is frightened and worried by his fear. He can look in the white man’s mirror and see shiftlessness, carelessness, irresponsibility—qualities his features must not match.

  Melanctha’s knowledge is carnal, and she obtains it willy-nilly—through her wandering. Jeff’s knowledge includes the carnal, too, for he is a doctor, after all, but it is principally knowledge of pain, not pleasure, of breakdowns in the body, not in its happy, healthy, or exuberant use. Jeff’s knowledge is licensed, Melanctha’s is forbidden. So Jeff Campbell stews, drawn by desire, repelled through prudence. In the wide room in his head set aside for worry, he paces, and the style Stein has given him paces with him, step for step.

  The satisfaction of such sentences has stayed with me for fifty years, setting a standard that would last, for me, my lifetime; but persuading others that such sentences are as new in English as miracles, and as miraculous in themselves as miracles, too, as curative as the king’s touch, their loops as thrilling as a coaster, is not easy, because quality cannot be contained in a report.

  The Bridgeport Bureau of Health and its coroner can report that baby Johnson died of malnutrition on such and such a date; and the data contained in that report, said to be facts that establish the document as a true one, are open to the inspection of anyone’s eye and the judgment of anyone’s mind. Fresh information can always turn up, and could possibly cause us to regard the report as less than truthful. In other words, descriptions are capable of being true and false, of being added to or subtracted from; and it is to the account (and not the death of infant Johnson by itself) that we properly assign the value true or false.

  Moreover, that description, if taken as true so far as it seems inclined to go, will normally give rise to feelings of moral dismay or repugnance; and even if the text is indifferent and passes over the infant’s death as simply incidental, we know that Rose Johnson’s callous negligence was wrong, that any social situation that requires such indifference is evil, and the author’s observation that infant deaths were common in the community will not alleviate or palliate our concern. That is, moral judgments are based upon, and should attach themselves to, accurate descriptions. In this way, customarily, the law proceeds. A true account is the platform on which moral judgment stands when it proposes to speak.

  But when we think of the lines that comprise the description instead of the situation they render, and call these sentences fine or exc
ellent, or forceful or moving, or eloquent or lovely, there is no item referred to by the wording, no bit of data, no stubborn or redoubtable fact, that will help us support our judgment, nor will any analysis of the description do the trick; for, although it may be true to say a certain sentence shifts halfway in its course from iambs to dactyls, that its phrases repeat like the bells of Rachmaninoff, that there is a pun in the third clause and a curse in the last, that mouthing its open vowels makes the mouther nervously yawn and swallow hard, that it mimics, perfectly, the slow repetitious turns of interior life, none of these characteristics will give any third party a clue as to quality the way we know that a sentence that says someone saw steam turn to snow must be untrue or that a case of such neglect as was Rose’s, if the account is correct, should be morally condemned.

  No description of either subject matter or treatment will provide the least real clue to the actual artistic quality of the object, even if we are inclined to be suspicious of paintings of covered bridges in moonlight or of sci-fi stories or music made of metal (probabilities created by the repeated experience of so-called similar things), since lovely pictures of covered bridges are certainly possible (after all, the Madonna, among the more sentimental of subjects, has been painted magnificently untold times), while from any popular loudmouthed medium, and possibly to great surprise, excellence might show itself like Venus riding shoreward on a dollar bill.

  Accounts cannot intervene in aesthetic determinations; only the direct, informed, repeated experience of the work will serve, and therefore no one without that experience should be persuaded to admire a Mona Lisa or a pyramid, only to acknowledge its extensive and positive press.

  What one can do, with description and analysis and expressions of enthusiasm, is entice, lure others to peek between the covers; to remove possible prejudices or expectations that might interfere with the experience; to provide suggestions of where best to start, what to expect, how to look or read or listen; and to give reasons why the work should be treated with seriousness and respect.

  Once the quality of “Melanctha” is fully granted, and the excellence of those other two lives (Anna and Lena, neither negligible) is also admitted, then we can push our suspicious critic toward other surprises, other savors, equally ineffable, but equally there.

  If Stein herself, in those earlier years, was a model for the cautious, ruminating Dr. Campbell, she learned, at least with language, to Melancthalate it, to wander with a whirling skirt among words, to play with them, to seek excitement, to risk chance encounters, to dance and sing, sing from inside, because whatever is sung from inside is yours. Readers of Stein should learn to ease up and rollick a little, to expect a good time. Here is an amusing modulation from a book called Useful Knowledge: “When they are sung and sung and sung and little have to have a hand and hand and two and two hands too, and too and two and handled too to them, handed to them, hand and hands. Hands high.”

  Then I think we know the reason Stein is Stein—we’ve felt the reason, heard the reason, sung the reason why.

  AN INTRODUCTION TO

  AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS

  The book you are about to read—if for the first time, with delight and amazement, and if for the fourth, with delight and fond remembrance—appeared in the same year (1939) as Finnegans Wake, another very Irish contrivance. But the beginning of the text (there are several openings) is pure Samuel Beckett, which, for such a book as this is, seems wholly appropriate, since Murphy had already arrived the year before. “Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing …” Brian O’Nolan, who assumed pseudonymity as eagerly as Kierkegaard, had perfect pitch and could capture and copy any tone—even before he’d heard it. Still, I shall not speak more of James Joyce, whose love of At Swim was well known to O’Nolan because a Joyce blurb was used to puff more than one edition, though without any apparent success. In the United States, it unanimously failed to find more than a few readers. To this day. When all shall change.

  The comparison with Joyce was, I suppose, inevitable, if misleading, inasmuch as the resemblances are accidental—that is to say, Irish. “If I hear that word ‘Joyce’ again, I will surely froth at the gob!” O’Nolan wrote in a letter to a friend. So the publisher will perhaps paste an errata slip over this part of my remarks.

  According to its author, Adolf Hitler hated At Swim-Two-Birds so vehemently, he started World War II in order to interfere with its sales. “In a grim irony that is not without charm,” O’Nolan wrote, “the book survived the war while Hitler did not.”

  O’Nolan did not begin life as O’Nolan. He was born a Brian ó Nualláin, sometimes spelled Brian Ua Nualláin when apostrophed O’s ran out, but he grew tired of seeing his name misspelled, especially during the public controversies in which he was so frequently but happily embroiled. He had discovered his debating skills at Dublin’s University College, practiced them in the “Letters” page of the Irish Times, where he had begun by attacking Seán ó Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, whom he accused of pretending to “high art” (though an attack carried out under an assumed name cannot be accounted brave), and then—finding it all so much fun—polished his scorn to a high shine while contributing to other controversies, some of which his own letters had created (in company with a pal of equal waggishness, Niall Sheridan)—a sport that required the invention of many more noms de plume, including naïvely local identifications for the missive makers, such as “An Irishman from Aberdeen” or “A Glaswegian from London.” It was especially delightful when honest and sincere folk were gulled into entering the fray, only to be verbally tarred and feathered by folk who did not exist.

  During this period of pan-enmity, At Swim-Two-Birds was written by Flann O’Brien, initially of that name to deflect from his novel the anger of those he had annoyed, but now itself a conspicuous target for more recent resentments (since Flann O’Brien had been signed to his scurrilities against ó Faoláin and O’Connor), that he offered his publisher another, suggesting the innocuous and unknown John Hackett in Flann’s stead. His editor, however, quite properly preferred the first choice as more grossly Irish.

  The correspondence column of the Irish Times became so popular that its editor sought out its pseudonymous instigator, and finally offered him a column of his—that is, Myles na Gopaleen’s—own. Flann O’Brien’s long career as a columnist had already begun in college, where he had regularly written for its magazine under the alias Brother Barnabas. In time, John James Doe and George Knowall would come into the world to write articles and stories for other papers. O’Nolan remained a moderate Catholic his entire life; O’Nolan toiled for eight years as a civil servant; so O’Nolan could not cast aspersions upon the character of government officials or castigate the policies of the Church or sneer at Irishness; but Brother Barnabas could, Flann O’Brien did, and, six times weekly, so did Myles.

  At Swim-Two-Birds embarrassed O’Nolan, who professed to detest its youthful excesses and pretended to loathe the merest mention of the book; however, it is hard to continue to admire your first work when it turns out to be your best one, and the one on which your reputation rests, fixing Flann O’Brien to your public presence as if it were the name of someone real. Although far from a one-book author—The Third Policeman and The Poor Mouth immediately come to mind—Flann O’Brien became a one-timer anyhow, and was thus kept imprisoned in his youthful pseudonym.

  Never very dutiful about the formal part of his education, O’Brien picked up ideas much as editors or journalists do—like persons met in a pub or embroilments encountered on the street. Instead of literature and grammar, he studied poker and billiards, drinking and purloining. A letter he liked, the manners of a friend, opinions overheard, a way a writer might have of putting things, places he habituated—all might find themselves hauled away to be housed in his book; and, in truth, his books were like food processors: Actual things were inserted into them and whirled about and chewed and chopped into the consistency of fiction, whereupon the mix wo
uld be poured into the world again, real once more but altered altogether.

  The metafictional form of At Swim-Two-Birds (and how O’Brien would have loathed the term) permits its author, and the narrator he invents, and all the other writers created by the book’s neophyte novelist, to be born again, to enjoy another life, to cross logical boundaries as if carried by a breeze. Here’s how it goes. Brian O’Nolan begets Flann O’Brien, who begets the novel’s unnamed narrator N and then places him in the real world of University College, Dublin, where he is (as his author once was) a far from diligent student. N creates, for his book, a pub owner named Trellis, who has two principal activities, writing and sleeping. Next, with the help of a cowboy romance writer, William Tracy, Trellis manages to have his archvillain appear, fully fledged, as if he had sprung, at age twenty-five, from the brow of the page. Through this strategy, Flann O’Brien makes the habit authors have of introducing characters at the one point in their life that will prove useful to the story seem strangely arbitrary, not to say weird. In the same way, he contrives his fiend’s moral opposite, Sheila Lamont, who must be invented to make an edifying contrast. However, most of Trellis’s characters are lured from other books, instructed as to their roles, and sent about their business.

  While Trellis sleeps, his characters, both created and borrowed, like toys beneath the Christmas tree, go their own ways, eventually drugging him in order to prolong their freedom. Trellis himself cannot resist the charms of his own fair Sheila, and having brought her into being in his bedroom, he forces his attentions on her there, with the result, prescribed by tradition, that a son, Orlick Trellis, is born, and born, eventually, to write a punishing book about his father.