A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  That was my guess: that one sense keyed up all the others; if he were looking, his ears would wiggle; if listening, his mouth would water; if in a tub of mud, who knew what else would demand an oiling?

  My wife, Mary, had her heart set on seeing the Church of St. George, a ninth-century structure at Oberzell, on the island of Reichenau, so naturally I had mine set on seeing it, too. Shelly and Jack Barth were committed to sailing, so we persuaded Heide and the Hawkeses to come with us on a voyage to Reichenau Island. It turned out to be a frustrating, hot all-day tramp in full sun over flat, dull, unshaded terrain—an island as magical as monotony, with Jack frequently reminding us how the Barths must be feeling a blue breeze and beneath them lulling swells. In fact, we had scarcely started our walk when Jack thought it time to stop—for a beer. But true tourists do not stop. True tourists trudge. And we did, promising Jack, as often as the prophets promised the Israelites, the swift coming of his kingdom, a cool dark saloon. Of course the kingdom never came. They never do. Jack peeled and handed the peelings to Mary, who bore them before her. When we found the church, it was … well, okay, if you like ninth-century stuff. Jack still had most of his clothes.

  I suggested to Jack, who was now silent and stooped as a parched plant, that this island seemed the perfect exotic spot to write his next book, since his books and their spots seemed so attuned. “Like Lesbos,” he said. “I’ve been here already.”

  The heat was leaden, the sea flat and gray, at the end of a short quay made of cracked concrete were hung dead and drying infant octopi from a sort of clothes line. The Turkish coast was a flat and ominous smudge on the horizon; there was a ruined fortress atop a bleak hill, a few tortured olive trees, a beach of pebbles and shards of rusty iron.

  It didn’t do to disappoint Jack. You’d be led to hell behind a troop of surly adjectives. But Reichenau Island, I thought, was nicer than the inside of an army ambulance, or nicer than Fort Peck, Montana, where he and Sophie were married, and even though it could hardly compete with Grenada or Vence, it was at least as lovely as the blackfly-filled farmhouse in Brittany he chose for a while to write in. Later, there would be Venasque, of course, where Virginie was composed, a work I much later taught to a roomful of innocent college kids in an act of pure revenge. They were not innocent of sex, of course, but of sensuality. And got even with me by making me explain everything—twice.

  Jack tried hard to be an innocent. He marveled, when we reached Berlin, that there were Russians there. We marveled that he marveled. How could he be innocent, I thought—though he wrote of innocence—since his prose knew everything. Innocence ends early in life; it ends with the awakening of the senses. Jack wanted his always just about to be aroused: alert, hungry, filling, overflowing, yet somehow not yet full.

  I wrote about Jack’s work once, and concluded my remarks by summing up my own sense of it, as if putting words in his mouth.

  The world is not simply good and bad on different weekends like an inconsistent pitcher; we devour what we savor and what sustains us; out of ruins more ruins will later, in their polished towers, rise; lust is the muscle of love: its strength, its coarseness, its brutality; the heart beats and is beaten by its beating; not a shadow falls without the sun’s shine and the sun sears what it saves. These are not the simplicities my saying has suggested. In our civilization, the center has not held for a long time; neither the center nor the place where the center was can now be found. We are disordered, arthritic fingers without palms. Inside the silence of unmoving things, there are the sounds of repeated explosions. Perhaps it is catastrophe breathing. Who has rendered this condition more ruthlessly than Hawkes has, or furnished our barren countrysides with their hanging trees and human sluices more honestly, yet with wealth, with the attention one lover has for another? For his work has always refused ruin in the act that has depicted it, and his life’s labor was the joyful showing forth and celebration of such a healing art.

  THE PUBLIC BURNING

  You are about to read the one real book about Captain America. Written in the 1970s, published finally in 1977, about actual and imaginary events of June 1953, it could not be more current, more relevant, more right on than it is now (on whatever date the reader finds herself immured).

  Before Watergate and Whitewater and all the other gates that have opened and shut in recent decades, the United States had many a witch-hunt, political trial, congressional investigation, retaliatory leakage of private papers, as well as periodic waves of general harassment, with their associated villains and victims: the Sacco-Vanzetti case, for instance, that of Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs and Harry Gold, the McCarthy hearings, the ordeal by committee of the Hollywood screenwriters, the confinements of suspicious persons after December 7, and, among the more notorious, the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  Our country is as rich in scares as Halloween. They have come in almost every color, and conspiracy theories have not been confined to rural right-wing gun toters. Nor have our politicians been above the use of fright and intimidation to gain votes and influence policy. Assassinations occur with the frequency of business cycles and provide the paranoid with many hours of happy conjecturing. Although we still dig up traitorous moles from the grounds of the CIA, the Red Menace has largely gone back to the comics, from whence it came. We cling to the Yellow Peril, though, and fear various cults of the ungodly, such as Castro’s Cubans, plague-bearing gays, ghetto gangs, drug lords, and immigrants in general. Then there are the terrorists to trouble our sleep, and all those rogue nations manufacturing chemical weapons and planning to build the bomb, which, now that it’s no longer scary, has become hairy scary indeed.

  In The Public Burning, the fright wig is worn by the Phantom, who is naturally invisible and everywhere—all ears. Huge hunks of the book are narrated by Dick Nixon, Eisenhower’s VP at the time, though thinking and conversing with more pith and eloquence than the real one managed, since we have now read the tapes and are acquainted with his style. The book’s Tricky Dick is nevertheless blessed with sufficient hypocrisy, self-delusion, and opportunism to suggest his connection to the historical vice president. But not to cement it. Coover’s Richard Nixon is a rich and beautifully rendered fictional character. The real Richard Nixon is a caricature. That is one of the profound ironies of Coover’s achievement. In evidence thereof, here is a passage in which Nixon is describing his peacemaker’s role as Eisenhower’s second in command:

  I was Eisenhower’s salesman in the Cloakrooms, that was my job, I was the political broker between the patsies and the neanderthals, I had to cool the barnburners, soften up the hardshells, keep the hunkers and cowboys in line, mollify the soreheads and baby tinhorn egos, I was the flak runner, the wheelhorse, I had to mend the fences and bind up the wounds. I’m a lot like Lincoln, I guess, who was kind and compassionate on the one hand, and strong and competitive on the other.

  The allegedly real Nixon does not speak in sentences, but in sputters and jabs. His clichés are mostly scatological. He talks like a mob boss. Concerning Ted Kennedy, Nixon orders his henchmen: “Plant one. Plant two guys on him. This will be very useful. Just might get lucky and catch that son-of-a-bitch and grill him for ′76.”

  As the novel proceeds, the text will furnish us with ample evidence of Nixon’s treacherous, self-serving, delusional character, and would do so even if Nixon’s name were changed to Fred Smith. The reader does not need to know Nixon’s history of paranoia to understand the Nixon of The Public Burning. This Nixon, like the historical Nixon, like politicians generally, speaks in pat phrases, employing epithets, if not of Homeric quality, at least of Homeric frequency. He needs to fool himself (“I’m a lot like Lincoln”) before he can fool others. But the rhetorical range and energy of the fictional figure, the psychological complexity of his personality as pictured, reach a level far surpassing the historical Nixon’s pandering curse-laced drivel and Lionel-sized two-track mind.

  The same can be said of Uncle Sam, the slick salesman of snake oil. As
an American symbol, he has almost outlived his usefulness, a weak finger-pointing rube on enlistment posters; but here he is America’s cutout boy, described in a dozen resplendent but tacky, hence circuslike, lingoes, everywhere larger than anyone’s life, a liar but a go-getter, proud as spiked punch: The tall-tale teller and backwoods braggart, the glib salesman, the sideshow barker, the Fourth of July politician, the ringmaster, the circuit rider and tub-thumper, the inspiring coach, the corn-fed orator, the bullyboy roughrider, the shoot-’em-dead cowboy, the patronizing educator and preacher, the soldier of your fortune, the mealymouthed savior of souls and robber of the poor box … they are all here in their linguistic glory; and you will meet Sam—created, top hat to coat tales, by all of these cartoon creatures in a newsreel-rolling prologue whose satiric energy and savage musicality are simply unequaled in our literature except by some other passages, constructed on similar principles, in The Public Burning.

  This novel—the interior history of a history—is consequently dense in detail, fragments drawn together like a crowd to an accident (or a mob to an execution); disparate pieces suddenly become one and massive and in motion, which is just as it should be for a fiction that intends to alarm history and ourselves by demonstrating how the Unreal rules, that must immerse us in many facts and figures—data dancing to a clown’s song in Kay Kaiser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge—because around any one character whirls another dozen and all their doings, each a Jack Benny, a Rochester, a Charlie McCarthy.

  Drenched in data, fantasy becomes reality. Because at one level, it is real. If Nixon is going to become president of his country, then he will have to be united with Uncle Sam the way a state is admitted to the union—joined by being buggered. The logic of this is impeccable. The voice of the chronicler, in a device that reminds me of John Dos Passos’s Newsreels in USA, sums up the state of the nation and the world, describing situations that are inherently hard to believe, if inspected thoroughly. Eisenhower and Nixon play golf at Burning Tree. Burning Tree? Nixon is the consummate duffer. Baseball may be the sport of America’s ordinary guy, but golf, and golf alone, is the game of the successful man: presidents, actors, bankers, heroes of other sports. They tee off…. They pitch; they drive…. They hole out…. They toss them down—their scotches and waters—at the nineteenth green … still wearing their nail-soled shoes. Facts, which are dumb, resonate when they enter fiction, and fantasies, when acted on, become factified. When she was a girl, Ethel Green-glass starred in a prison melodrama. A prison play? She is starring still—but only while we read, since in stir she scarcely stirs. And Richard Nixon gradually becomes enamored of the woman he wants to electrocute in the square of burning signs called Times. Then she—this duchess of darkness, she—(he comes to feel)—she wants—(as he does)—someone to love. Before the final hour, he will go to her in her cell in Sing Sing. Sing Sing? The book begins with a quote from Mrs. Nixon about how much fun they used to have at parties, sometimes reenacting “Beauty and the Beast.” Guess who the beast is; think whom a transposed Ethel plays.

  At one point, as Nixon works amid a scatter of papers on the celebrated case, he finds himself thinking about the names of its principals.

  … all the colors. Strange. Green, gold, rose … which nation’s flag was that? I played with the street names, codenames, names of the lawyers, people at the edge of the drama—Perl, Sidorovich, Glassman, Urey, Condon, Slack, Golos, Bentley. I realized that the initial letters of the names of the four accused—Sobell, Rosenberg, Rosenberg, and Yakovlev—would spell SORRY were it not for the missing O. Was there some other secret agent of the Phantom, as yet unapprehended, with this initial? Oppenheimer? Oatis? This kind of thinking may be crazy, but it is common; it is customary, everyday; its catastrophic consequences are quite ordinary and certainly to be expected.

  Throughout Robert Coover’s career, he has been trying to come to grips with commercial deceit, political lies, and religious myths, the better to strangle them. He empties out fables and received beliefs like frequently used spittoons. His fine first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, concerns the creation of a millennial cult awaiting the end of the world (as here it is an execution). In The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., a sport sets sail for the sacred. His book of stories, Pricksongs & Descants, pops many a cultural cliché, reducing them to raddles of split rubber. Then there is his short play, A Theological Position, (playlets crawl out of cracks in The Public Burning), and several political send-ups like A Political Fable (or, as I prefer, The Cat in the Hat for President) follow it, as well as Coover’s manipulation of the stereotypes featured in Hollywood’s films (A Night at the Movies).

  Coover’s prose is occasionally leisurely, like a sailing ship, bobbing along on the waters of history, but then it will shift suddenly into high gear, zip away, and rocket off. Diction rises and falls like an elevator. There are floors for High Art, Religiosity, Bamboozle, and Scatology, as well as Porn. Good guys—villains to the villains—for instance, Justice William O. Douglas, who, with an opinion, saves, at least momentarily, the Rosenbergs from burning—are nevertheless greatly outnumbered. Lawyers run loose like packs of wild dogs. Orators are apuff with pomposity and deliver themselves of their opinions in slow and heavy southern drawls. “Ah see no pahticulah point in sendin’ mey-un to Ko-REE-ya to dai, Mistagh Cheymun, whahl aytomic spies are allowed to liy-uv heah at HOME!” Above all, there is Uncle Sam, constantly trying to come to terms with constraint, calumny, and disappointment. Hearing his voice, I know that I love Uncle Sam—this Uncle Sam, that is—a creature of unending criminentlies (expressions of surprise).

  Politicians talk. They talk to their colleagues, endeavoring to strong-arm them with verbs and frighten them with nouns. They speechify, I suspect, within their own heads, and hear themselves in sleep squarely praise and roundly denounce the talk of other talkers. Though their words reach newsprint, and memos always have to be circulated, it is still the press conference, the convention floor, the smoky cloakroom, and the halls of Congress where the politicos live and lie and babble. Appropriate to its theme, then, is the insistent and successful orality of Coover’s prose. The reader cannot hurry and still hear; because an entire nation’s mendacity is given rhythm by its political marches, by the brasses of its big bands, through its swoony hymn singing; and Coover’s sentences sing similarly, becoming another sort of sentence, another kind of verdict.

  Whatever the justness of its final judgment, the Rosenberg trial was a show trial. Coover’s Times Square setting for their execution is scarcely an exaggeration. The nation’s taste has eagerly lowered itself in the direction of public executions—at least ones that the vengefully aggrieved may observe and enjoy—so that the idea of achieving death through electrical illumination in the fashion of a flashing sign is not so wildly satirical as it once might have been. The description of the Rosenbergs’ ordeal is full of deft and devastating touches. “Julie had to have two teeth pulled out (Warden Denno in his economy-minded way making sure he got temporary plates only) …” This garish and vulgar “chair in Times Square” is meant to remind us of the behavior of the Inquisition, which held public burnings on a regular basis—not for punishment but for edifying educational purposes. In their yellow robes and conical hats, they could have been clowns. The Public Burning envisions a Roman carnival, a Roman circus, as well as a witch-hunt. But the ceremony is mostly one appropriate to the pagan pomp of some secular religion. Gertrude Stein once declared, when she decided that General Grant was a leader of the American Church, that “there is no up in American religion.”

  Power, when it has to rest on public opinion instead of relying on policemen and armies, is compelled to express itself differently from the way it does when secrecy and silence are its henchmen. Early in their steps to power, both the fascists and the Communists opened their courtrooms to public gaze and edification; however, later, their positions secure, they tended simply to have their enemies quietly disappear.

  In the United States, th
e court of public opinion has always been a busy one. Now, with TV technicians focusing on the court’s proceedings, judges preen, juries dress up, while lawyers listen to the roar of the crowd and try their cases on, instead of in, camera. Vanzetti’s noble last words to the court concerning his friend Sacco, which the local press probably carried, cannot be imagined for this case, because the Rosenberg trial was bourgeois from top to bottom. It was, in a way, a family affair. We have, no longer, even ears for such words as Vanzetti uttered. “Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man, lover of nature, and mankind; a man who gave all, who sacrificed all to the cause of liberty and to his love for mankind: money, rest, mundane ambition, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life.”

  It has become customary for journalists to jive up the lives, the crimes, the conditions they write about with fictional flourishes, but, until recently, it was not acceptable for novelists to deal with the present in a similar way, allowing living figures to walk their fictional streets, figures modified from their real-life roles so that their actual natures could be better recognized. The Public Burning does more. It puts Very Important People in the center ring of a circus, in the highlighted square of the editorial cartoon, and I am reminded of the fierce satirical images of Félician Rops, George Grosz, of Hogarth and Daumier, as well as the unintentional parodies of Horatio Alger. The lawyers of allegedly real life worry about the cut and fit of impending suits of libel.

  Nor does our history speak well of our moral improvement, now that we enjoy a president who daily issues new smeary blue lies like an old-fashioned mimeo machine.

  Coover’s manuscript has suffered as many ups and downs as some of the novel’s characters. Prudently, he shows a swatch of it to his editor, who is alarmed but valiant. So Coover continues working on the book, although with less confidence now about its eventual reception than could be considered helpful. Suddenly, tragically, the editor, young and at least morally strong, dies during a tennis match. The Public Burning is without a champion. But shortly another publisher appears, full of confidence and good cheer. The editing of the manuscript proceeds without incident. The book seems ready for publication in 1976, appropriately during the nation’s bicentennial year. Copyediting is completed and the manuscript returned to the publisher, where it falls into a well of silence. Finally, the truth is wrung from the wet suit of reluctance. The company’s legal team is scared, and has Nixoned the novel’s publication. He, the Most Feared Tricky Dicky, is most feared because he is a lawyer with a skin thinner than a condom, and is believed to possess a vindictive streak so wide, it would turn a skunk white. After difficult negotiations, it is agreed to submit the manuscript to an impartial jury for judgment. This group, headed by the dean of the Columbia Law School, sees some potential problems but decides that they are not serious enough to prevent the book’s publication. Virtue appears to have triumphed.