ABlog

William Gass came to read at my workplace the other day. I’d read next to nothing of his work before the pending event sent me running to the library for In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, so I wouldn’t seem too out of it. I’m absolutely in love with “The Pedersen Kid”—a great, wrenching, bleakly hilarious tour de force about American values, Kafka and Beckett meet Faulkner on the High Plains. I’m less taken with the coruscating stylings of the rest of the collection, though its redolence of the world of my childhood, its attempt to do something with the peculiar cultural barrenness of the Fifties mainstream, is of considerable interest.

The reading itself had a bit the feel of mandatory chapel attendance at some old-fashioned boarding school. Here were all the members of the writing faculty, showing the flag, asking their smart questions: female voices focused on theme and ethical implications quickly giving way to the male questioners’ implicitly rebuking attention to style.

Gass read from a work in progress, a novel about a man whose non-Jewish father fled Austria ahead of the Anschluss by posing as a Jew, as a result of which the protagonist grows up completely inauthentic on all counts, becoming a phony professor of music based on fake credentials. He amuses himself by constructing in his home an obsessive monument to the advance of human folly (“stupidness,” as West Indians say, writ large); he keeps newspaper clippings about contemporary atrocities alongside artistic depictions of lynchings and medieval tortures. He is galvanized by the suspicion, supplanting his initial conviction that homo sapiens will not be long for this world, that the race may survive after all; he’s unsure which outcome seems the more unsettling.

You’ve got to hand it to Gass; he puts the question to us, however much one may bristle at his boastful misanthropy (“I write to indict Mankind,” he grandly quoted himself) or dispute specifics of his implied analysis (his foregrounding of the Holocaust set against his broad-stroke rendering of atrocities in other parts of the world; the word “nigger” snarling out from his elegantly phrased catalogue of horrors with a relish none too readily explained—a friend pointed out—by calling it mere characterization of the speaker). Skipping headlong over any and all problems, I felt an impulsive kinship; a sense of recognition; the opening up of a space of possibility, as happens when someone recognizes her seemingly private, isolated preoccupations powerfully reflected in the work of another, proving that what has been deemed unspeakable can and must be spoken. We are working the same vein is what I felt, with a rush of gratitude.

Hearing Gass read went at least some little way towards explaining to me the satisfaction I take in the more gruesome (though, I flatter myself, aesthetically shaped and ethically justified) iconography of my Cannibal novel. There’s a pleasure in breaking taboo that has to do with anger—never mind whether it’s justified or not—at humanity’s inattention, and above all anger at the sentimental conventions that support that inattention. Think! Think! Wake up! Feel! Feel uncomfortable! Hold still a minute while I take my trusty ax to that frozen sea within! Probably it is impossible to avoid some self-righteousness, but the initiating impulse is to replicate, in a formally controlled setting, a very painful movement of consciousness that one has already undergone and continues helplessly to undergo by virtue of being a semi-informed person living on this planet.

The cheapest thrill of the evening came when Gass, in response to a question about the morally and politically immunizing properties of reading (“Would you agree that it would be impossible for someone who had thoroughly read The Diary of Anne Frank to become a Nazi?”) responded that (a), no, he would not agree: one can, like Heidegger, be a great thinker as well as a great reader, and still be a fascist; (b) the Diary is, in his opinion, sentimental rubbish. I interpret the latter response as having more to do with the book’s reception than its actual content, as I hardly imagine that the eminent novelist and critic has recently done a close reading of it. Probably he has been swayed by the oft-quoted passage in which Anne expresses her lasting belief in people’s basic goodness (indict Mankind, indeed!). Evidently he didn’t think it important to mention the evidence that the manuscript was emotionally sanitized through extensive bowdlerization before publication. On one level, the comment certainly reminded me of every critical dismissal of “confessional” writing, “memoir” and “damn scribbling women” at least since Anne Sexton (but one could dip far back into the 19th or earlier centuries); on another, I suspect a hidden affinity with the functioning of the racial epithet mentioned above; how is it that the purportedly all-purpose, equal opportunity application of withering scorn to fallen humanity ends up landing with more severity—an intensified “denigration” (a word whose root means “to blacken”)--upon the already marginalized and disadvantaged?

Cheap thrill, I say, because I relished this riposte—its puncturing of the questioner’s easy assumptions about linear connections between content and reception, the academic’s self-congratulation about the “liberal arts” mission.

So much for any notion that the Provost’s well-advertised mandate (scholarly rigor, Teaching Excellence—and, ironically, an end to the supposed ascendancy of touchy-feely “self-expression” embodied in “feminine” literary forms like the memoir, not to mention the diary) has anything to do with saving civilization.

I was amused and irritated to hear that a colleague’s students had voiced in class the next day their disgust that the visiting Great Man didn’t sound a more hopeful note. The desperate young, when not busy slicing themselves with razors or having risky sex or nursing a drug problem, require from their elders…user-friendly reassurance. Certainly not the tough-hope answer received by one young man who lobbed a question that amounted to a plaintive demand for a more encouraging message: recognizing that one has a disease, said William Gass, could be the beginning of a cure.

What does it mean that nobody, neither the author nor audience members, referred directly to the current political situation, even though Gass stated that he wrote his 1995 novel The Tunnel out of a preoccupation with the possibility of fascism in America? My friend who noted the racial undertones of Gass’s character’s atrocity catalogue said she was afraid that Gass’s comments stressing a separation of form and content, aesthetic and ethical values, might have come off sounding like a dismissal of the latter, against both his intentions and his actual involvements. I marveled at the almost medieval resonance of Gass's clear-cut distinction, which struck me as impeccably synchronized with the mentality that can un-ironically repeat the word “Mankind” as a term for the human collective. I felt, simultaneously, the usefulness of having that dichotomy so starkly posed, given its deep reverberations with all the other dualisms upon which our so-called civilization is so famously founded: mind and body, white and black (or “colored”), culture and nature; contemplation and action. I realized then that an outlook which sometimes finds the call to action in tension with the pull of the aesthetic yet never could imagine them going their separate ways might be part of what marks most of the writers I value as merely bastard offspring of the great tradition invoked as much, perhaps, by Gass’s persona of Master Author as by his actual writing.

“He seemed to know so much!” a student of mine said helplessly.

I wonder what William Gass would have to say about poor Emily’s treatment of a related topic? Would the beautiful ambiguity of her poem’s plot (oblivion, not identity, having the last word) rescue her from the short shrift accorded hapless Anne?

I died for Beauty – but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room –

He questioned softly “Why I failed?”
“For Beauty”, I replied –
“And I – for Truth –Themselves are One –
We Brethren are”, He said –

And so, as Kinsmen, Met a Night –
We talked between the Rooms –
Until the Moss had reached our lips –
And covered up – our names --