A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  There are suppressions and recognitions, then, that are inherent in the traditional myths and tales anthropologists turn up, and that constantly occur as a part of the mechanism of their unfolding (among the suitors surrounding Penelope, it is only Ulysses’ dog who recognizes him in his beggar’s rags); and there are recognitions that the characters in this novel experience, too; as well as those we readers will have as we pursue its complicated course, a course whose origins it constantly alludes to in the manner of The Wasteland—references which make for much of its richness. Among these “epiphanies” is that special one of which I have already spoken—namely, of what it is to be a genuine work of art, and what, being genuine, “touches the origins of design with recognition.”

  We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. For the temple of our pretenses shall come down at the end in a murderous fall of its stones (just as it does at the conclusion of this novel), not from the brute blind strength of a Samson shoving great pillars out of plumb, but from an art, a music, realized in the determined performance of an organ whose stops have been pulled out to play, at last, with a reckless disregard for the risks its reverberations run it, till every stone in the vicinity trembles.

  The reviews that struck William Gaddis and his book were indeed stones from an old order, but, as The Recognitions concludes, such genuine work “is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.”

  So turn the page … and change that unfortunate frequency.

  2

  Gaddis Gets Read To

  “Our immortality is made of memories and lies,” Gaddis whispered to me as our group struggled up tenement stairs toward the door to Raskolnikov’s room. The air was cold, the stairs were old, and Willi had the collar of his camel-hair coat up around the muffler he also wore. I knew how to say Willy but not how to spell it—certainly not Willie, for nothing about ie seemed right. Wasn’t it Willy Brandt? Yes, Willy was more appropriately European, and where else were we? Leningrad in winter, at the frozen edge of Asia. Consequently, I said, “Willy, do you remember what Rilke wrote to open his piece on Rodin?” We could step up two abreast, but only if we sidled, so we were facing each other. Gaddis’s silence told me that he never indulged in smart-ass references and didn’t take tests. Which wasn’t fair, because his books, his carpers said, were full of arcanity and longer than the bar exams. “Fame is but the sum of the many misunderstandings that have gathered about a new name.” I recited my reconstituted quote through a cloud of aspiration. He put the red tip of his nose between the soft paws of his mittens and groaned. He put his nose between his mittens. “Pity poor Dostoyevsky,” I said sotto voce. Now of course cured, I could be fatuous in my middle age. “These guys can’t even leave the man’s characters alone,” he said upon removing his nose from his mittens. The draft, basement-born, wasn’t warmth rising, but it was nevertheless filling me like an arm through a sleeve. At yet another landing, in front of a boarded door, stood a sickly green bucket, its lid thrust out like a lower lip, its wire handle flipped up the other way, as if soliciting a lift. Mary’s red scarf was much admired, but, during the darkness of the afternoon, admiration for everything had died away. Except for Bakhtin, of course, who was now more important than Dostoyevsky. Ginsberg wore a flapped hat, Gaddis an inadequate gray cap, and Auchincloss was in a dark stocking. “This is it,” the professor who was serving as our guide announced, allowing his arms to leave the chest they had been hugging. “The murderer’s apartment.” Comrade Granin had become reverence itself, like a bust on a pedestal, and now he waited for us to take it all in. “From here it is exactly mumbled steps to the spot of the crime.” I was bareheaded because I am hardy and brave, eschewing stock, cap, and hat. I scorned cover because nothing could ever replace the aviator headgear I was given when ten. I was so proud of. After a time, the flaps no longer fastened under my chin. But I sported. I was Raoul Lufbery, French air ace. In snapshots, I grinned. “Is the bucket an historical marker?” Gaddis asked our guide, who gave no answer. He was, I suspect, furious with both of us. We had been disrespectful for three-quarters of an hour.

  Or had I misunderstood the nature of our journey? Was this the old woman’s room and had we been retracing the murderer’s skittish course across the courtyard below and up these windy stairs? Had we managed to pick up an ax from beneath some handy porter’s bench on the way? “And here was the fourth storey, here was the door, here was the flat opposite, the empty one.” (I have just now looked up the passage.) I was certain that Gaddis understood our situation, because, for him, Dostoyevsky was as near to God as nature got. He would have been as disdainful of our guide’s confusion of fiction with reality as I was, but he would have listened to every unclear word like a mole for a footstep. Then it was that our proctor, according to his guidelines, began to read the appropriate passage out of some authorized Soviet translation. My wife, Mary, standing with Adele Auchincloss a step above me, reached back a restraining hand and took my arm. Shut up, it said, with a squeeze for please. Gaddis had disappeared into a roll of wool. These Russians were not my idols. Well, perhaps André Bely was a bit golden-toed and his pseudonym properly accented; otherwise, my daily devotions were in Flaubert’s French and Rilke’s German. But the Russians spelled his first name Andrei, I remembered in the nick of time. On account of his accent, Professor Granin had turned the reading over to Mischa, one of our young translators. “Don’t you think,” I said to Gaddis, “that when a new character is introduced, the reader should be given more information than a long unpronounceable name?” “Just say he comes from the provinces.” We stood, our feet as fixed as our expressions, in a faint urine yellow light. It was going to be a long read. Mischa held the book close to his face. His accent was excellent.

  I had teased Willy a bit about his English-aping bourgeois enthusiasms early in our journey and before I realized how serious and full his appreciation was. So now he might not relish my popping off, even though his gorge was also rising through this well of iced air. The muffler concealed his chin but not his opinions. Which I wanted to be the same as mine despite indelible differences. Though I had lost sight of the set of his jaw. How much of his youth was he carrying around now under his camel-hair coat? Remembering, as he was supposed to, while Mischa recited, his own youthful reading. The tensions of the first time. Wasn’t Muriel, his beautiful companion, Russian, as well? Which accounted for just what, exactly?

  Gaddis’s love for the Russian novel—and for the predictable Russians at that—had surprised me, though in hindsight it shouldn’t have, if I’d kept The Recognitions fully in front of me, because these works were nothing if not epic, with a reach as extended as their own steppes, with borders as far off as their frozen mountains. “Loose and baggy monsters,” my treasured cher maître had said of them, a description too enviously mean-spirited to be forgotten, yet memorably on the mark. In sum, they wore plus fours, though not for golf. But if loose and baggy, The Recognitions was nevertheless knit. These Russian tomes were broody books, too, fundamentally melancholy, especially when, as Gogol was, they were funny. Above all, as Bakhtin had finally made us aware (bless his sainted name), Dostoyevsky at least was demonically polyvocal. He had been infernalized at an early age. Novels jam-packed with passionate ideas half-understood but as motivational as money. Every one evincing major moral concerns. Moreover, their authors were majestically indifferent to their mistakes, confident that any error would be but a beauty mark on a work of genius. Novels made of issues as well as innumerable details, richly peopled, penned in brash and innocent confidence, and written from outrage as much as ego. Worse yet, bedbugged and fleabagged by proper names. “Just say he wore a dusty overcoat and checked trousers, and came out hatless onto the low porch of the posting station at X,” Gaddis said. “There is a bucket marking the spot where Mr. Hatless stood.�
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  It was kind of Gaddis to give me my Turgenev at this juncture. “Bely was a bloody mystic,” he said, withdrawing his offer of Fathers and Children. “Which one of them wasn’t cuckoo?” I was standing on a creaky tread. “Doc. Chekhov.”

  Though he had crossed oceans in his youth, and run around nations in pursuit of girls, I felt Gaddis would have turned down a similar invitation to visit almost any other country now. However, the Russians would be an irresistible draw. I did remember how Raskolnikov had hung the ax head from a noose concealed beneath his coat. Present custom would advise a sawed-off shotgun. Or a malicious self-serving review. Neath his fulsome robe Phaedrus concealed someone else’s speech, which he planned to deliver as his own. And I’ve noted since how cleverly Dostoyevsky lets the ax hang, as if swung by Damocles, over the old woman’s figure while he describes her “thin, light hair, streaked with grey and thickly smeared with grease,” before its blunt end arrives to bloody her head just a bit above that broken comb the author has deftly put there, as well as the rat’s tail in which the wretched woman’s hair was plaited. Beautifully done, no doubt about it. An ax murder by a master.

  Gaddis had bade the Quad a pissy good-bye during the sad senior year of his Harvard career, so he was largely self-taught and would not be disabused of his youthful enthusiasms as I suspected most of us were who went on through the levels of snobbery one’s momentary peers deemed necessary to an education. I remember having to leave Spengler and Tchaikovsky, Emerson and Nietzsche, E. E. Cummings and Thomas Wolfe behind on my journey to more elevated realms—as much as I had loved them once. And the higher one rose in the ranks of the system, the greater the sacrifice the system asked for: eventually, Verdi was dumped for Monteverdi, Tolstoy for Flaubert, and everybody for Cézanne. It took twenty years for me to return to Nietzsche, Emerson required even more self-discipline, while Dickens was recovered the day I believed I had at last learned to read.

  Yet even when I was aware I had shaken off my bad ideological habits, and was actually paying attention to the words as they miraculously ran from cap to period, I never felt so special that I could call myself a Dickens reader or want to hold him to account for faults I may have feared I had. I could have complained: “Hey, don’t get so soggy, and leave melodrama for the movies,” but aren’t we always grateful for the sins of others? His readers loved him for his weaknesses because they shared them. Gaddis’s critics hated him for the strengths they didn’t have.

  Stendhal wrote, he said, for the happy few a hundred years ahead. It’s true that the happy are always in the minority. But if you wrote for the happy few a hundred years ahead, you would certainly be scorned by the miserable many presently in dire need of fun and an absorbing story. It was pitch-dark at three in the afternoon and there was snow everywhere in the city that lay always under an alias. It was a habit of postrevolutionary countries to buy new street signs for every regime change—so the Esplanade of Friday the Thirteenth could become the Plaza of Fallen Heroes. In a wink, the Highway of High Hopes got renamed Sellout Strasse. Regally titled Königsberg was now a plebian Kaliningrad. Kant, the city’s most distinguished citizen, remained der Allzermahler, even if there was no moral law within to build without the universal kingdom of ends.

  Starless, moonless as it was on Neva’s banks, you could still see by the snow’s sheen where to go in search of Raskolnikov’s lodgings. No. I was out of step again. Now we were hunting for Dostoyevsky’s digs. His furniture would be at home even if he wasn’t. I prefer movies in which people, cars, planes, and buildings are blown up and gasoline abused, because I don’t have to think, then, about people, cars, planes, and buildings blowing up and dreams being misused. Could I count myself one of Andrei Bely’s happy few in that case? ’Fraid not. Merciless man. Bely called his novels “cerebral play.” No one reaches visceral velocity. Early in our visit, one of the bullies who called himself a host asked me whom I took to be Russian literature’s most important character. Mr. Shishnarfne, I said, who enters St. Petersburg as an hallucination and dwindles to a dot.

  Gaddis’s god had never risen from the dead as so many of mine had, and I could see his youthful love glowing plainly when our group visited Dostoyevsky’s apartment. The sight of the master’s desk actually wet Willy’s eyes. I envied him. When my eyes moistened, it was only for Bette Davis, and such a shallow show of weakness made me angry with my soul. I fancied that he was feeling the same sort of exalted state of nostalgia for an imaginary past that I had felt a few days before when our party had left Moscow in a midnight snowfall for Leningrad on the legendary Red Arrow Express. The train moved slowly from the station through a whitened landscape more literary and historical than railed, while I cooled my glass of weedy tea against the compartment window and wondered if it could really be little ole me at midnight on this train tracking a perfect Russian snow, leaving my beloved Anna, Katya, or Marfa Petrovna behind, on my way to relieve Leningrad from its one-hundred-day siege by the Huns. Dostoyevsky’s room contained a table whose cloth covered all but its corners with red leaves cut into velvet. A lamp that bore a shade resembling a beaded glass crown shone on a casually opened cigarette box so directly, the case’s golden bottom glowed. Gaddis allowed a forefinger to rest upon the corner of a desk where the most ordinary of objects lay—letter opener, penholder, inkwell. This—this—is Dostoyevsky’s desk, his finger said. Or more likely: This is where those remarkable pages were made. Willy had taken his cap off as he entered, said nothing, but looked at everything as one looks at a lover at long last unclad.

  I am an irreverent person because I believe reverence is usually misplaced when it isn’t faked, but I felt reverence for his reverence then.

  Mischa asked of some small box, “What’s that?” Mary was shaking her hair out of her hat and had no hand to restrain me. “A bomb in a sardine tin,” I said. Mischa was a nice young man. He laughed. Such a show-off, I said of myself to myself, but was it showing off when no one but a nice young man was shone? Maybe it was art.

  Another of Willy’s admirations was Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, a work Theodore Dreiser also prized, perhaps because it gave parents a bad time, dissed marriage, was scornful of religion, and exposed Victorian institutions as guardians of privilege and power. Or because it was as pointlessly plotless as our hunt for a fictional murderer’s bedroom. Or because it was fundamentally philosophical, as Dostoyevsky always tried to be. And dealt with money and property as though they were cards. Well, a book in which the Bible gets kicked across a room into a forlorn corner certainly has merit, I thought, but these reasons did not account for the supremely high regard in which Gaddis held it. I felt happier in my conclusion that Butler himself was part owner of Willy’s praise, since he had kept the manuscript locked up till his death, and even if he were protecting the relatives it savages by waiting for their deaths, he could never be accused of writing this book for money, fame, or sex with a faithful reader.

  For Willy, writing was a serious matter. How serious? Beckett serious. It was serious in the sense that any aim disgraced it that wasn’t utmost. He never toured, read in circles, rode the circuit. He rarely gave interviews or published opinions. He didn’t cultivate the cultivated, nose around the newsworthy, network or glad-hand, sign books or blurb. He didn’t teach, prognosticate, distribute awards. He was suspicious of wannabes, wary of flatterers; he guarded his gates. He didn’t write the way he did to prove how smart he was, to create a clique that would clack at his every move. Or to get reviewed. Or to receive the plaudits of some crowd. Or to be well paid and bathe in a tub of butter. Or to be feared or sneered at or put down by pipsqueaks. He wrote as well as he could and as he felt the art required, and he knew he would not be thanked for it. Nor would he have an ass available for posterity to kiss.

  Willy followed no false gods, for he believed in none. Mankind’s most universal habit was hypocrisy; its true and enduring love was money, its favorite avocation litigation, its drug of choice amusement, and the ful
lest expression of its fears to be found in the dogmas, trappings, and hierarchies of organized religion. He would have liked to have been an Allzermahler.

  Gaddis knew the realities so worshiped by readers were fakes. Instead, he created realities fashioned from their lies, their superstitions, their fatuous remarks, their pretensions, their envy, their guilty excuses and habitual bad faith. His chuckle was the chuckle of someone whose business was “seeing through.” He knew that entertainers ate the survivors of their shows. He knew what it was like to be distasteful to tastemakers. He knew when and for whom he should doff his cap.

  How Russian was he? Had Viktor Shklovsky read him, he’d have said that Gaddis’s novels practiced ostranenie in its purest form—that is, defamiliarization, placing inanities, like urinals, in hallowed places, grocery lists in museum cases; consequently, zatrudnyonnaya forma, or defacilitation, as well, by forcing the reader to pay attention and puzzle over meanings; then zamedlenie, or retardation, too, sacrificing easy enjoyments to demanding strategies.

  JR did for money what Butler did, but JR was also a music box, a Bely-organized symphonia. You only had to open it. Then it would start its tunes—tunes that ranged from hymns to hurdy-gurdy. How could you not hear? It’s what the Englished Dostoyevsky doesn’t have. Listen to the guy I call “the God damn man”: