In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

by William H. Gass

  School was a dull time in the beginning; I was a slow student, my achievement intermittent and unpredictable as a loose wire. I decorated my days with extravagant, outrageous lies. Yet I was reading Malory, too, and listening to Guinevere bid Launcelot adieu:

  For as well as I have loved thee, mine heart will not serve me to see thee; for through thee and me is the flower of kings and knights destroyed. Therefore, Sir Launcelot, go to thy realm, and there take thee a wife, and live with her with joy and bliss, and I pray thee heartily pray for me to our Lord, that I may amend my misliving.

  Amend my misliving. And everything in me then said: I want to be like that—like that aching phrase. So oddly, at a time when no one any longer allowed reading or writing to give them face, place, or history, I was forced to form myself from sounds and syllables: not merely my soul, as we used to say, but guts too, a body I knew was mine because, in response to the work which became whatever of me there was, it angrily ulcerated.

  I read with the hungry rage of a forest blaze.

  I wanted to be a fireman, I recall, but by eight I’d given up that very real cliché for an equally unreal one: I wanted to become a writer.

  . . . a what? Well, a writer wasn’t whatever Warren was. A writer was whatever Malory was when he wrote down his ee’s: mine heart will not serve me to see thee. And that’s what I wanted to be—a string of stresses.

  . . . a what?

  The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward. This is not a boast or a complaint. It is a fact. Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. The condition I describe is not extraordinary. Certain scientists, philosophers, historians, and many mathematicians do the same, advancing their causes as they can. One must be satisfied with that.

  Unlike this preface, then, which pretends to the presence of your eye, these stories emerged from my blank insides to die in another darkness. I willed their existence, but I don’t know why. Except that in some dim way I wanted, myself, to have a soul, a special speech, a style. I wanted to feel responsible where I could bear to be responsible, and to make a sheet of steel from a flimsy page—something that would not soon weary itself out of shape as everything else I had known (I thought) always had. They appeared in the world obscurely, too—slow brief bit by bit, through gritted teeth and much despairing; and if any person were to suffer such a birth, we’d see the skull come out on Thursday, skin appear by week’s end, liver later, jaws arrive just after eating. And no one of us, least of all the owner of the opening it inched from, would know what species the creature would eventually contrive to copy and to claim. Because I wrote these stories without imagining there would be readers to sustain them, they exist now as if readerless (strange species indeed, like the flat, pigmentless fish of deep seas, or the blind, transparent shrimp of coastal caves), although a reader now and then lets light fall on them from that other, less real world of common life and pleasant ordinary things.

  Occasionally one’s companion, in a rare mood of love, will say: ‘Bill, tell about the time you told off that trucker at the truck stop’; but Bill’s audience knows he’s no emperor of anecdote, like Stanley Elkin, and they will expect at best not to be bored, pallidly amused, not edified or elevated, not cemented or composed; and occasionally one’s children will still want a story told them, improvised on the spot, not merely read or from a flabby memory recited. Then they will beg far better than a dog.

  Tell us a story, fawfaw. Tell us a lonely story. Tell us a long and lonely story about the sticky-handed giants who had no homes, because we want to cry. Tell us the story of the overfriendly lions. Tell us the story of the sad and barkless dog. Tell us, fawfaw, tell us, because we want to cry. Tell us of the long bridge and the short wagon and the tall tollkeeper and the tall tollkeeper’s high horse and the tiny brown tail of the tall tollkeeper’s high horse that couldn’t swish away blue flies . . . because we want to cry. We want to cry.

  Well which? . . . which shall I tell you the story of to make you sad so you will cry?

  Oh don’t do that, fawfaw. We want to cry. Don’t make us sad. We merely want to cry. Tell us a lonely story. Tell us about the giants. Tell us about the lions. Tell us about the dog. But do not make us sad, fawfaw, just make us cry.

  Well which? . . . which then shall I tell you if you want to cry? . . . which, the story of?

  Woods.

  Woods. I knew it would be woods. I knew it would be woods when you said tell of the giants and the lions and the dog. I knew it would be woods when you said tell me of the long bridge and the short wagon and the thin road running to the bridge which the wagon rode over.

  There’s no thin road in the story, fawfaw. No. There’s no thin road.

  Oh. Well. Maybe there’s a fat hog? a fat hog squatting on a large log? a large log lying in the thin road running to the bridge which the wagon rolls over.

  No, fawfaw, of course not. You know there’s no thin road, and therefore there can scarcely be any large log lying in any thin road, and therefore there can hardly be any fat hog squatting on any large log lying in any thin road. No. There can’t be because there isn’t. And because hogs don’t squat, ever. And on logs, no, never. So.

  Oh. Well. Perhaps there’s a thin snake? Perhaps he sunning himself on a wide rock resting by the side of the road that runs to the brook the bridge goes over?

  No. You’re hateful and you’re horrid. You know there is no road like that. There never never was. There was always only the long bridge and the short wagon and the tall tollkeeper and the tall toll-keeper’s high horse that couldn’t swish away blue flies. We remember. We remember about that. We want to hear about woods.

  Woods. I knew it would be woods. You want to cry.

  No. We no longer want to cry. We did but now we don’t, but we still want to hear about woods, so say about the woods now, say about them.

  Oh. Well. Woods. Anyway, I knew it would be woods.

  Well then tell about them. Tell about woods.

  You remember about the woods as well as I. I know about you. You remember about the woods.

  Yes. Certainly. We remember about woods. We remember everything about them. We remember them entirely and wholly, absolutely and altogether. Because we do, because of that, we want to hear everything again. We want to hear it through from end to end, fawfaw. Mind. You’re not to leave out. You’re not to put in. We remember wholly about woods, and that is why we want to hear about them right now, and so say about it, and say how it was, and why it was, and all about it.

  Woods. Well then. Well then woods. Well . . .

  Rhythmic, repetitious, patterned, built of simple phrases like small square blocks (draw me a clown, build me a castle, fold me a hat, sail my paper plane), with magical and imaginary logic, their facts nailed carefully to clouds, often teasing, these stories were fond possessions which fondly possessed their possessor like our dolls . . . remember? And the best ones were those which sounded, when you heard them for the first time, as if you had heard them many times before. Of course, the paragraphs I just placed on the page are not the beginning of any such story; they are about the character and quality and construction of such stories, and therefore do not resemble the child’s mind or mortality at all.

  After those stories which we once employed to hold the ears of children came those calculated to suspend—not just you or me, but everyone—our souls like white rags in a line of wash; and these were written to manipulate a kind of universal mechanism in our psyches: the Gothic romance played upon passivity, just as nursie stories put girls in their place, while the hard-eyed private eye became a hard and fancy phallus. In my adolescence I forsook Malory to pursue simpleminded empathies. I read of G—8 and his Battle Aces, about Doc Savage and the Shadow. Threats, entanglements, and bloody
extrications followed one another with increasing amplitude and gratifying rapidity. Plots lay over my life like a treasure hunter’s map. The solace they contained was as immense as it was deceitful, since there was always a way out. I now wonder whether this glut of blood and mindless action didn’t stamp all story for me as trivial, childish, and cheap. Later I painfully advanced on Thomas Wolfe and like him made the world a Whitman Sampler and a list of sweets. I also ranted against that mysterious enemy, the other sex, because I wasn’t whatever I thought women wanted my own sexuality to be.

  If Gertrude Stein understood first principles, and borrowed much of her magical hypnotic beat from children’s tales (everything but woods and witches), Kafka grasped the second ones with an unholy hand. He simply did not specialize in extrications.

  He had come from the ship at dawn, eager to see the sights of the city—he had heard there were so many—and perhaps, one never knew, to turn a penny of the honest kind through wine and conversation. Hardly had he crossed the docks and entered one of the narrow streets that lead from the waterfront when nine sergeants of police, running out of doorways, caught him in a plastic net, bobbing their silver epaulets and swaying their silver cords across their chests with the exertion; and he was carried head down over the right shoulder of the largest, a man terribly strong, so that all he saw around him as he bounced against the fellow’s buttocks were nine pairs of superb trousers and the eighteen shining shoes that darted out of them, their silver laces shaking, while on the road he saw patches of brilliantly iridescent oil. He was slung so steeply that his head several times struck the pavement until he cruelly bent his neck. Once he remembered to cry out but a jounce made him bite his tongue and he choked upon saliva. Blood collected above his eyes, making him sick and afraid to speak. In this condition he was brought before a magistrate who questioned him at once.

  He tried to answer but the magistrate only stared, his head wagging constantly so that powder drifted from his wig. The questions continued, receiving the same answers as before. But the blood in your cheeks, cried the magistrate, bring me a basin! All he could do was plead. The magistrate rose angrily and hurled his wig at him, clouds of powder rising, forcing him to sneeze. The magistrate produced a portfolio of photographs which he shook one after the other so the images seemed to blur. There! What do you say to that, sir? what do you say to these? At last in terrible vexation he shouted back: you are crazy, crazy, a creature in my nightmare; and one of the sergeants thereupon entered to strike him on the hands and about the face with a watch strap while the magistrate repeated peevishly: he has no dignity, this one, look at his nose.

  Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, Lawrence Sterne and Tobias Smollett, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and William Faulkner, André Gide and Joseph Conrad: what could a poor beginner do? And from whose grip was it easier to escape—the graceless hack’s or the artful great’s?

  In any case, break loose. Begin. And I began by telling a story to entertain a toothache. To entertain a toothache there has to be lots of incident, some excitement, much menace. When I decided to write the story down, I called it ‘And Slowly Comes the Spring,’ because that fragmentary phrase seemed somehow appropriate and poetic (it wasn’t); but it was some weeks before I began to erase the plot to make a fiction of it, since one can’t count on the ear of an everlasting toothache. I titled it, then, ‘The Pedersen Kid,’ and because I believed it was good for me (it turned out, it was), I tried to formulate a set of requirements for the story as clear and rigorous as those of the sonnet. From the outset, however, I was far too concerned with theme. I hadn’t discovered yet what I would later find was an iron law of composition for me: the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come, and the necessity for continuous revision, so that each work would seem simply the first paragraph rewritten, swollen with sometimes years of scrutiny around that initial verbal wound, one of the sort you hope, as François Mauriac has so beautifully written, ‘the members of a particular race of mortals can never cease to bleed.’

  But what do beginners know? too much. It is what they think they know that makes them beginners. Anyway, here are some of the instructions I drew up (or laid down) for myself during that January of its commencement nearly twenty-five—no—nearly thirty years ago.

  The problem is to present evil as a visitation—sudden, mysterious, violent, inexplicable. All should be subordinated to that end. The physical representation must be spare and staccato; the mental representation must be flowing and a bit repetitious; the dialogue realistic but musical. A ritual effect is needed. It falls, I think, into three parts, each part dividing itself into three. The first part is composed of the discovery of the boy, the discovery of what the boy has seen, the discovery (worst of all) that they will have to do something. The second part is composed of efforts—the effort made to reach the farm; the effort needed to build a tunnel; the effort made to gain the house from the barn. The point here is that the trio, who have come this far only through the social pressure of each other, and in shaky bravado, must go on, knowing that they are ignorant of causes—of the force itself—(‘He ain’t there’). But the shooting leaves Jorge alone in the house. The pressure which had moved him this far is removed, and the pressure of fear—the threat of death—substituted. The third part contains Jorge’s attempt to escape and his unwilling stalk through the house, his wait through the blizzard and the night, and his rescue in the morning. The force has gone as it came. The Pedersens are missing and the great moral effort of the Jorgensens, compelled at every step as it was, is wasted and for nothing.

  Though I dropped the rescue, I did not so much depart from this conception as complicate it, covering the moral layer with a frost of epistemological doubt. In any case, during the actual writing, the management of monosyllables, the alternation of short and long sentences, the emotional integrity of the paragraph, the elevation of the most ordinary diction into some semblance of poetry, became my fanatical concern.

  Working through the summer, I finished the story in September, and it was seven or eight years after that—and you can imagine how many editorial rejections (it seemed like hundreds; I can still hear the flat slap of the ms. on the front step, the sting of shame in my cheeks, my humiliation, doubts, confusion; I heard the laughter of thousands); and you can imagine how many well-meant sympathies, mailed like cards at Christmas, how many broken chairs and bitter bottles and household quarrels, black thoughts and stubborn resolutions, intervened—before John Gardner generously published it in his magazine, MSS.

  One must begin, but one must know how to end. It is a knowledge I have altogether lost. ‘The Pedersen Kid’ had an end I could aim at. Like death, I knew it would come. Like death, I did not know how I would face it. That the rest of these stories are short; that Omensetter’s Luck is long and The Tunnel, as it is turning out, under endless excavation: these are things I had no inkling of when I began. I realize, too, that each one was written with full knowledge of the public failure of the others; hence written with worsening nerves. I explored this, tried that, but like an ignorant and careless gardener, I never knew what sort of seed I had sown, so I was surprised by the height of its growth, the character of its bloom.

  Writing and reading, like male and female, pain and pleasure, are close but divergent. Although writing itself may be a partial substitute for sexual expression (during adolescence, at any rate), sexual curiosity propelled my reading like a rocket. Over how many dry pages did I pass in search of water? Beyond the next paragraph, around the turn of the page, an oasis of sensuality would materialize, fuzzy in the desert light at first, but then clear, precise, and detailed as a dirty drawing. My sexual puzzles would undo like bras, mysteries would fall away like underpants passing the knees. Alas! such a hot breath blew upon the page that every oasis withered. What did I learn from Pierre Louÿs? Balzac? Jules Romain? . . . their puzzles and their mysteries, their confusions and their lies. I didn’t understa
nd. I didn’t realize. I wanted dirt or purity, innocence or cynicism, never the muddy mix, the flat balance, the even tones of truth. I carried a critic with me everywhere who rose to applaud the passionate passages with a shameless lack of discrimination, and during the throbbing din it made I couldn’t honestly feel or sharply sense or clearly think. Of course, sexual curiosity remains the third lure of reading, yet what an enormous amount of the body’s beautiful blushing is wasted on the silliest puerilities when writers write for the reasons readers read.

  He wondered how her breasts were really formed. Guess, she said. Did the nipple rise like a rainspot on a pond, and were the hollows of her thighs like cups which would contain his kisses? Imagine what will pleasure you, she said. Her clothing always fought him off. His fingers could not construct the rest of what they touched, even when one, slipping beneath the boundary of her underwear, traversed a sacred edge. She would permit him every liberty so long as cloth was wrapped like a bandage between them, but his hands or his lips or his eyes on anything but customary flesh caused her to stiffen, sucking at her breath until it drew like a bubbly straw. He realized he was as much ice water as a wound. One day, indeed, she had taken all her upper garments off but a soft thin blouse of greenish Celanese, and through its yielding threads he had compressed her. His protests were useless. Guess, she always said. And finally when he had with sufficient and extraordinary bitterness complained how hard her teasing was on him, she’d firmly ordered his phallus from its trousers as you might order a dog from a tree. Dear thing, she said; I’ll free you of me. Ultimately, this became their love, like shaking hands, and he had eventually accepted the procedure because, as he explained, it was so like the world. She smiled at this and slowly shook her head: you still have your dream, she said, and I have my surprise.