A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk add a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned stick figure out what the hell he wants, plump the God damned pillow bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how he’s coming along all expect him out any day don’t want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you’ll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him … (JR.)

  We made our way down the stairs. They wouldn’t pass the fire code, these worn wooden sticks. I put my hand on Gaddis’s shoulder, not to steady either of us, but to soothe what I felt was a shared exasperation. Though muffled by his muffler, Willy snorted on my behalf. He wore the wrong kind of cap for this cold. His ears glowed like Fyodor’s cigarette box would when we got there. “Sentimentality should be one of the deadly sins,” I said to no one in particular, still stuck in my fatuous phase. It was especially mortifying when one’s tears ran from the contemplation of a pregnant Bette Davis. “Faith is bad; bad faith is deadly,” Gaddis answered to no one’s question. For folks our age, Sartre was unavoidable. And during our brief span of effort and exclusion, excellence as an ideal became romantic.

  Well, excellence is inconveniently difficult. Moreover, as Aristotle argued concerning virtue, it is neither guaranteed nor rewarded by any external sign. We shall all go to our graves in ignorance of our work’s worth. Our aims may be as perverse as our group’s search for Raskolnikov’s room was that dark afternoon, and our comfort as cold as a Leningrad winter, but perhaps we can say with some honestly earned pride that during our most minor and marginal lives we did not dishonor our gods.

  3

  When It Was Over

  In 1955, a writer with no record, no resources, and few connections published a novel called The Recognitions. Great novels are never merely “about” something, but certainly one theme of this unexpected beast of a book was counterfeiting—forging, faking, aping, impersonating, conning, duping, misleading, pretending, lying, misrepresenting, spinning, dreaming—a continuum that travels almost perversely from the cheap knockoff to the creation, by the imagination, of the ineffably real. Its reviewers didn’t read The Recognitions, but they hated it anyway, verifying, by means of their own vilification, the novel’s vision of America as a land where the flimflam flag waves … from “me” to shining “me.”

  While its author, who had scarcely surfaced, sank out of sight once more, the few who loved the book circled protectively about it. Critics said we were a cult, as if, at midnight, we gathered in abandoned barns to tear out pages of Herman Wouk while chanting from The Recognitions especially loved lines like “Merry Christmas! the man threatened,” a sentiment that belongs alongside Ring Lardner’s treasured “Shut up! he explained.” There were bits of poetry also worth memorizing, but it was not true that we recited them in dark stalls. I remember, particularly, sweet Norah Winebiscuit:

  Pride drew her garments up, and swathed her face

  In lineaments incapable of disgrace.

  Slipped then away, her face bedewed with do,

  Beyond the glass, and knowing all, she knew

  That the immortals have their ashcans too.

  So in the absence of the author, in the absence of the audience, we, the faithful, did create an icon, and make the sudden appearance of this skull-busting, heartbreaking book—its sordid reception, the ensuing silence—into an emblematic cause célèbre; because what The Recognitions proved was that great ambitions were still possible, were not just instances of romantic futility; that the real, the original, the genuine work of art could be accomplished; that the novel was not dead, as many liked to think, but had only taken a brief nap, a short snooze; that the book’s bleak outlook could be shared with something like a wry smile rather than the suicidal funk the sad seaminess of its worldview suggested.

  The novel’s motto became our motto: No Counterfeits, No Fakes, No Imitations, No Compromise.

  And twenty years appeared to pass. We began to fear that solicitude was scarcely enough to sustain such a work forever. Then, quite coincidentally (for coincidence is the real ruler of all things), I was asked to be a judge for the National Book Award during the very year in which JR, William Gaddis’s second novel, would appear. Mary McCarthy, also on the jury, simply shoved the third judge (a worn-out hack reviewer) into the corner as you would an unnecessary chair, and the award went to “Junior,” as she liked to call it. This did not mean the war was won. The war against mediocrity is never ending. Mediocrity is like the salt mill of fable: It keeps on turning, and a sea of brains goes brackish. For decades, Gaddis had endured our culture’s obdurate resistance to excellence, but now he would have to endure more. George Steiner pronounced JR “unreadable,” and Alfred Kazin, bless his bourgeois heart, wrote that it was “like nothing else around, and is not a masterpiece.” Well, he was half right. It was like nothing else around.

  JR is about that great depersonalizer, money, and is written in speech scraps, confetti-like wiggles of brightly colored cliché. As a medium, it would appear to be as unpromising as might be imagined. And the reader has to ride in the parade and organize all that fluttering that’s come down from on high. JR takes time. JR takes patience. JR takes faith. But unlike other faiths, it does not put off salvation until some weekend after all who have lived are dead and only their bones dance; it is immediately and continuously redeeming.

  Reading it, I could see Gaddis with his scissors, slicing another instance of inanity and foolishness from the news, lining up this imbecility above that one, or should this jackass sit over here, nearby still another numbskull. The world convicted itself of lunacy almost daily, and Gaddis had his chuckle and his scissors ready for it.

  As time goes by, the mysterious Mr. Gaddis is actually seen in public, is elected to the Academy, earns a MacArthur, writes a book in less than twenty years. He must be slipping. Carpenter’s Gothic, the briefer, more accessible novel, breaks the cult’s hold on his appreciation and gives him a larger audience. This is certainly true in Europe, especially in Germany, where Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own have been acclaimed. Reviewers read no better than they ever did, but they are respectful now. Damn, did we, the faithful, want him to have this kind of approval?

  When A Frolic of His Own appeared, and after the Lannan Foundation awarded William Gaddis their Lifetime Achievement Award, those earlier works quietly became classics, as if they had never been thunderclaps, as if they had always been applauded, as if his artistry, his stature, had never been in doubt, as if he had never exposed America as the land of the fraudulently free, as he was doing once again—this land of the litigious, of the suer and the suee—in a depiction so farcically funny, so absurdly interconnected, so bottomlessly baroque, it reads not like something scissored from the New York Times but bits rescued from a National Enquirer that’s come apart in the rain.

  Given their material, and each book’s point, these novels ought to be gloomy and sour, but they manage to achieve quite the opposite effect. I have found myself momentarily happy that man has been such a mean and selfish small-time huckster, because he has thereby furnished William Gaddis such a satisfying target.

  His death did not catch me altogether by surprise. Sarah Gaddis had reached my answering machine with the message that Gaddis was in the hospital, that he was being brought home soon (a disheartening phrase), that he wanted to talk to me. She gave me two numbers: the hospital, where he would be no longer by the time I rang; and another, presumably “home,” where he wou
ldn’t be, either. That second number was a wildly wrong one. A voice had been misheard or misconstrued. Perfect. If Gaddis could still chuckle the chuckle he had perfected, he’d chuckle—this artist of missed, of broken, of imperfectly made connections.

  Number was one of Gaddis’s tic words, too. He would say he had someone’s number, or that so-and-so had done a number on him, or that another’s number had come up, or that a lovely young woman, just observed, was quite a number. He allowed these mostly faded uses to place him, to tell us when he had been young and with the crowd, and to say he wasn’t ashamed that a part of him was still of that time and that place.

  Chuckle he surely would, too, if he were able to see that on the back of his New York Times obituary there was a list of mutual funds and their performance. Remember how JR opens: “—Money …? in a voice that rustled.” And the response: “—Paper, yes.”

  Opening the Times, I half-expected to read of my own demise. Our names—Gaddis and Gass—were so frequently confused. The first time was during the babble of voices that make up cocktail parties, and provide for the participants decent cover. At the awards ceremony for JR, I at last met Gaddis. In the din of artificial levity and the crush of mostly insincere congratulations, I was mistaken for him so many times that evening, I finally began to accept sweet nothings on his behalf with a benign smile and a modest nod.

  This confusion could not always be put down to static and a bad connection, because, later, the New York Times credited me with the authorship of Carpenter’s Gothic, and Books in Print, confusing my introduction with the text, listed me as the author of The Recognitions. I could enjoy these mistakes, since Gaddis seemed equally amused, but I couldn’t help notice that no one mistook Gaddis for Gass, only Gass for Gaddis.

  There was no other place from which a mix-up might emerge, because if I was shabby, shaggy, and paunchy, Gaddis was dapper and thin, even a bit gaunt in his gray days, a face from which good looks had gone, but only after a long stay. He was quiet, and, though opinionated, did not feel the need to advertise or argue or orate, whereas I (at the same age Hercules had throttled a serpent in his crib) was lecturing my parents on the art of bringing up baby.

  We saw one another on the rare and brief visits I made to New York, at this or that occasion of award, sharing an L.A. earthquake once; or, by odd chance, on trips we took abroad together: to the Soviet Union, in Cologne. Offered a second vodka, Gaddis would give me a gleeful roguish look: We’re on a junk-ket … a junk-ket … a term reserved for pointless trips by politicians on padded expense accounts. In Leningrad, forced by our hosts to follow Raskolnikov’s footsteps up and down a dark and bitterly cold stairwell while being read to from Crime and Punishment, Gaddis and Gass heard themselves muttering in concert, “But it’s fiction; it’s fiction.” Then walking by a bookstore window in Germany and seeing there, as large as life, Gaddis pictured on a Key West porch, accompanied by the announcement, formerly appropriate only for God, “Gaddis kommt.” Best of all, though, was the moment, with Matthew, in Cologne, after riding through the dark in a limolike car to Gaddis’s great German celebration, when Gaddis slowly emerged into a starfall of flashbulbs worthy of the Academy Awards, the popping of a hundred corks. It was so impressive that I said, to cover my glee, “I must be riding with Jimmy Stewart,” and Gaddis replied, to cover his, “William Holden, I think.” It was a wonderful evening, fully worthy of him, which he nevertheless had to go to Germany to enjoy.

  When the bad news came, that his number was up, I was able to take it. I had seen him sitting in a window a world away, so I knew: Gaddis didn’t went. He kommt.

  THE ROAD TO THE TRUE BOOK

  Elias Canetti was a short, slight, then pale-gray-mustached man I met in Berlin years ago at a festive German writers’ party. From three insufficiently separated places in a large ballroom, three bands were playing colliding tunes. Umpahpah rammed jazz, roll hit rock, and watermelons spilled their seeded juice and soft red pulp all over the road. In the wreck, some broken loaves of Wonder Bread Blues lay soaking. I tried to tell Canetti how much I admired his novel Auto-da-Fé. Jack Barth was executing a storklike dance step. I was fascinated. Canetti could not hear me, of course. A person between us (it was Christopher Middleton, the poet and translator, I believe) passed our words back and forth like notes in bellowed code. “He wants to know where you’re from,” Middleton yelled. “The USA.” “What?” “Eh?” “The USA.” Shout it forward. Pretend it is the flag. Do not drop the flag. A tuba ran into the grand piano with a crash. Spoons of soup spilled. I think Canetti said he didn’t much care for the USA, but I can’t be certain. He refused to raise his voice, and my intermediary was reluctant to continue in such a futile role. I was irritated by the braying of instruments about me—the deplorable saxophone, the hateful amplified guitar—annoyed both by the need I felt to say something significant to this remarkable man, and by the impossibility of saying anything. An accordion, for Christ’s sake, began breathing heavily, its costume predictably Bavarian. Canetti seemed bemused, reduced even further by the din, as if his vest gave us the glimpse of another shrunken suit beneath the one he wore. Jack Barth was concluding some complicated flourishes of foot. I was fascinated. The bands brayed on. They bombinated. They blared. They baaed. I moved. That caused one kind of noise to rise. Was that preferable?

  Were I to write my autobiography (were I to find myself handsome, rich, young, famous, dancing on the moon), should I include this trivial little incident? After all, it is stuffed like a pillow with important names. And I have managed, with the customary arrogance of the autobiographer, to attach this deeply thoughtful and dedicated writer to me, quite offhandedly, as if he were a mitten I’ve removed. He is—if you want him identified—short, slight, pale, glassed-over, gray, and simply a man I met one noisy evening in Berlin. No more considerable importance can be conferred upon him. And, in addition, now you know I knew of his work and its importance well before Canetti received his Nobel Prize and passed from one obscurity to another like a low moon among clouds. Besides, my admiration is as interesting to me as his novel—anyone can see that. My admiration is my precious gift. Fortunately, Canetti will not have to walk it home, shelve it somewhere out of sight, leave it with the Samaritans to be shoveled on the poor. Yet my account shows me to be modest enough. We met, I merely say. We shouted (I shouted), but we didn’t speak. I am not puffing myself, making much of it. The incident is all nicely underdone, like a properly roasted leg of lamb. I am, however, dropping names like melons on the road, even nicks: Jack this, Jack that. Is no one who happens along to have any protection from me and the private diaries I am eager to hurry into print; the journals, like johns before whose mirrors I parade my pride, bowls in which I relieve my spite? And the impatient, hence incautious, reader (so slyly sounded are my description’s undertones) may believe that Saul Bellow has also been mentioned.

  Then the word I—that moist reedlike letter that makes the winds sing, that wonderful word for me—takes ten typical bows in our specimen paragraph, while my and me get one each (it could easily have been oftener for all); although, at the party, I was less than one really, a quarter of one perhaps, when I left, and I remained unknown in the noise the entire time—my name blown away from Canetti’s ear—alas!—as overlooked as the rug upon which nothing more was spilled than a little ash, wine, wads of napkin, foams from German beer.

  I think back, but thinking back is a bad business, because doubts immediately begin to nibble on the edges of my images, and I cannot allow these doubts to dim the clarity of my account. My text must smell of certainty, if not with success. Yet was it a vest, or a sweater, Canetti was wearing? And isn’t that my present self—the self that since has seen Canetti photographed in a cardigan—standing there is the midst of the din I’m repossessing? His pictures suggest a man more birdlike than he was. Then were there really three bands playing simultaneously, or did it simply seem (and sound) so? I may have told the story several times to friends, adding orchestra
to band as I played for the attention of the dining table. No, I stood in front of each of them in order to hear what they were individually playing. But does that prove there were three? Well … to remember is to give limbs to a new lie.

  As the autobiographer in this experiment, I must balance the self I am with the several selves I was, nor dare I scant the selves I shall become as the writing of my life goes on and alters me; I must furthermore not conceal the disparities there are between the “I” I look through and the “me” you see, even while I seek an essential harmony; therefore, I must never omit myself, my things, the things of others, or the others who own them, and I must carefully place my lonely consciousness down between the blaring of the bands and the many figures who stand stiffly about like bearers of cups; because I had come to this party hoping to meet Günter Grass (why—to make him a present of my admiration?); consequently, as I searched for him among these strangers whom I assumed were located somewhere in German writing like oil in an engine, I looked about for a fiercer face, another kind of mustache; hence my encounter with Canetti was wholly unexpected: I hadn’t thought to think he was alive. And did these feelings of mine—my prickles of irritation, my brief whiff of surprise—did they dance a bit of a jog like Jack’s while I stood to one side and watched with fascination? Already our incident has become uncontrollably complex. I must know more than I know in order to render my insecurity, fix floating images, outline my ignorance. Where am I to put my smothered startle when Canetti’s name was said, a hand from somewhere shaken?

  Many writers, novelists especially, use up their pasts until there is no more paint in the can when they come to cover their lives, only in the rim of the lid, and Canetti is quite aware of this. Many of the experiences that went into the writing of Auto-da-Fé are missing from his autobiography. But once you have falsified fact and made it fiction, it is impossible to go back and re-cover the case, as it was, intact and untouched—to reverse the metamorphosis—and that is because you have meddled with your memory, and to meddle with memory, either in the service of art or from a fear of the unexamined, alters it; it is no longer “your” memory; it has been reconstructed, just as you were being rebuilt when you cleared away the obscurities of the past, overcame its biases, filled everything evenly in; for “your” memory was dirty and broken and incomplete from the beginning. Now that you understand it, it is no longer yours; it belongs to your analysis. Your dreams have become oedipal, like everyone else’s.