In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

by William H. Gass

  The material that makes up a story must be placed under terrible compression, but it cannot simply release its meaning like a joke does. It must be epiphanous, yet remain an enigma. Its shortness must have a formal function: the deepening of the understanding, the darkening of the design.

  In a sense, ‘Mrs. Mean’ is a story of sexual curiosity translated, again, into the epistemological, although it had its beginning in an observation I never used.

  3 August ’54. The following tableau at the House of Many Children: father is going to work and is standing by the car talking with his wife. He is tall, thin, dark, heavily bearded so that, though he shaves, he always has a heavy shadow, almost blue, across the sides of his face and chin. She is large, great breasted, fat, pig-eyed, fair. The children annoy father who yells at them in a deep carrying voice, cuffs one hard and shoos the rest away with a vigorous outward motion of his arms (like chickens). The children flee, crying and screaming and carrying on. Then father departs. Mama waves and when he’s gunned the car furiously away (it stalls twice), she turns to the house; the children’s heads pop into place. She makes her voice deep and gruff like his and shouts at them. She swings at one or two (missing widely), and makes his shooing motion with her arms. The children roar delightedly. She goes in and they all troupe gaily behind her.

  I was to observe this scene, played with only slight variations, many times, and what interested me about it, finally, was the triangle formed by mother, children, and private-public me; but I didn’t begin to invent a narrative Eye, my journal tells me, until July 12, 1955, when the first words of the story appear in an unwhelped form. Empty of any persuasive detail, the focus wrong, order inept, rhythms lame, these initial early sentences are aimless, toneless, figureless, thin.

  We call her Mrs. Mean, my wife and I. Our view of her, as our view of her husband and each of all her children, is a porch view. We can only surmise what her life is like inside her little house, but on warm, close Sunday afternoons, while we try the porch to stay cool and watch her hobbling in the hot sun, stick in hand to beat her children, we think a lot about it.

  I notice that by November I have begun writing little encouraging notes to myself: buck up, old boy, and so on. It has become a drab affair, like the writing of all my fictions. Imagine an adultery as full of false starts, procrastination, indecision, poor excuses, impotence, and, above all, plans.

  The idea I must keep in mind is how I can (a) tell the story of the public Mr. & Mrs. Mean, as seen by the ‘I’ of the story, (b) make ‘I’ more than a pronoun—rather a pronounced personality, (c) slowly, imperceptibly shift from the factual reporting of it to the imaginative projections of ‘I.’ The problem is as knotty as PK, and as nice. The ending will be, of course, unsatisfactory, as it will end in the imagination, not in the fact, as if the imagination had filled in the gaps between facts with more facts, whereas only fancies are there. All stories ought to end unsatisfactorily.

  A month later I had a page, and I completed the piece at some unspecified time in 1957.

  I write down these dates, now, and gaze across these temporal gaps with a kind of dumb wonder, because I am compelled to acknowledge again the absurd manner in which my stories have been shovelled together: hodge against podge, like those cathedrals which have Baroque porches, Gothic naves, and Romanesque crypts; since the work on them always went slowly; time passed, then passed again, bishops and princes lost interest; funds ran out; men died; shells shattered their radiant windows; they became victims of theft, fire, priests, architects, wind; and because they were put in service while they were still being built, the pavement was gone, the pillars in a state of lurch, by the time the dome was ready for its gilt or the tower for its tolling bell; so the difficulty for me was plain enough: as an author I naturally desired to change, develop, grow, while each story in its turn wanted the writer who’d begun it to stick around like a faithful father to the end. This dilemma, like drink, nearly destroyed the work of Malcolm Lowry. The absurdity enlarges like the nose of a clown, too, when one realizes that the structure which eventually gets mortared and plastered and hammered together more nearly resembles some maison de convenence than even the most modest church. Still, needs are served as much by the humble and ridiculous as by the lordly and sublime.

  In any event, it became necessary (it is always necessary) to rewrite earlier sections of whatever I found myself finally trapped in, according to the standards and style of the part presently underway; because, though time may appear to pass within a story, the story itself must seem to have leaked like a blot from a single shake of the pen.

  And when you retrace your steps, even if it’s your intention to change them, the path you’ve already worn down deepens; it is increasingly difficult to escape your first mistakes, really to see a fresh new way of solving some repeating problem; while certain points along the route, like places where you’ve fallen often, threaten your nerve, so that you are inclined to seek trails around the mountain which won’t require you to climb in the cold and cross it.

  Meanwhile the mind whispers reasons to the soul which explain why a bad line is a lovely one; how all your strategies have superbly succeeded; why you may march confidently on in cardboard shoes, for no one will notice. My training had stocked me with rationalizations like a pond. I had merely to throw a line in to catch one. The poor phrase, the campy connection, the cheap joke, the trite observation, the cute twist you’ve contrived, the smart aleck attitude, the infantile ideas and innumerable alliterations, the glib topping you’ve just poured on a paragraph: these and other ‘awfuls’ are a part of you; they come from the deepest cave; and they must be sent back like a bad bottle no matter what the label says, or the degree of your humiliation.

  There is much fright. It settles like a cloud of acid in the stomach. Doctors prescribe milk. They know there is no calcium in kindness. Although unwell, one tries to stick one’s words together well; but perhaps, as I write this, the sentences these sentences are supposed to front are melting like icicles, and pointedly passing away; so that, reader, when you turn the final pages of this preface, you will be confronted with a pale, pretentious blank; and if that happens, I know which of us will be the greater fool, for your few cents spent on this book are a little loss from a small mistake; think of me and smile: I misspent a life.

  My journal begins to sputter—gutters out. No more little plans, no more recorded glooms or glorious exhortations, and no more practice paragraphs either, like scales run over in the street. For several years before I began ‘The Pedersen Kid,’ I had practiced them (and single sentences, too, and imaginary words, and sounds I hoped had fallen out of Alice); three of which I have put in this preface like odd bits of fruit in a pudding—just a change of texture and a little action for the teeth—and these exercises were another idiocy, because I knew that words were communities made by the repeated crossing of contexts the way tracks formed towns, and that sentences did not swim indifferently through others like schools of fish of another species, but were like lengths of web within a web, despite one’s sense of the stitch and knot of design inside them.

  Once more right about art and wrong about the world, the Idealist philosophers had argued the same way, Leibniz suggesting that every truth was an analytic one, and that all legitimate predicates would eventually be found (by God) embedded like so many weevils in a single subject there wouldn’t be any biscuit; but, then, conversely, was a sentence like that flower in its crannied wall, that speck of sand we might see a world in, and could one observe inside its syntactically small self the shape of a busy populace? would the unity of a well-formed sentence serve as a model for the unity of All or Any? I guess I hoped so.

  Hours of insanity and escape . . . hours inventing expressions like ‘kiss my teeth,’ and then wondering what they meant . . . hours of insanity and escape . . . hours spent looking at objects as if they were women, sketching ashtrays, for instance, and noting of a crystal one

  . . . the eyes, the lines
of light, the living luster of the glass—the patterns, the ebb and flow—shadows, streaks—the flowing like water in the quiet streams with the sun on it—the foam and bubble of the glass . . .

  and concluding the study grandly (who was I pretending to be? Maupassant tutored by Flaubert? with this command:

  Never mention an ashtray unless you can swiftly make it the only one of its kind in the world.

  A rule I obeyed by never mentioning an ashtray.

  As should be obvious from my collection of words about the ashtray, I could not teach myself to see without, at the same time, teaching myself how to write, for the words, and the observation they comprise, coalesce. If one is not alive and lustrous, neither is the other. Here I had made nothing to snuff a smoking end in—a gathering as burnt out and gray as ash.

  Thus, obscurely and fortuitously, chance brought these stories forth from nowhere. Icicles once dripped solidly from my eaves, for instance. I thought them remarkable because they seemed to grow as a consequence of their own grief, and I wondered whether my feelings would freeze to me by the time they had traveled my length, and whether each of us wasn’t just the size of our consciousness solidified; but these fancies scarcely crept into the story which, like ‘Order of Insects,’ and everything I’ve written since, is an exploration of an image. I was impressed not only by their cold, perishable beauty, but by the feeling I had that they were mine, and that, though accident had fixed them to my gutters the way it had hung them everywhere, no one had a right to cause their premature destruction. Yet where may the eye fall now its sight is not bruised by vandals and their victims? No matter. The story merely began from this thought, it did not create itself entirely as an icicle should, so that passions warmed elsewhere would cool as they passed along the text until, at the sharp tip, they became themselves text. That would have been ideal. That would have been something!

  Hours of insanity and escape . . . collecting names in the hope they’d prove jackpotty, and stories would suddenly shower out like dimes . . .

  Horace Bardwell, Ada Hunt Chase, Mary Persis Crofts, Kelsey Flowers, Annie Stilphen, Edna Hoxie, Asher Applegate, Amos Bodge, Enoch Boyce, Jeremiah Bresnan, James G. Burpee, Curtis Chamlet, Decius W. Clark, Revellard Dutcher, Jedediah Felton, Jethro Furber, Pelatiah Hall, George Hatstat, Quartus Graves, Leoammi Kendall, Truxton Orcutt, Plaisted Williams, Francis Plympton, Azariah Shove, Peter Twiss; and in addition the members of the cooking club of Mt. Gilead, Ohio, 1899: Dean Booher, Floy Buxton, Nellie Goorley, Ira Irwin, Bessie Johnson, Clara Kelly, Sadie McCracken, Clara Mozier, Josie Plumb, Sarah Swingle, Maude Smith, Anna, Belle, Deane, and Ivan Talmadge, Roberta Wheeler.

  Round, ripe, seedful names like these are seldom found and cannot be invented, though they might be more sweetly arranged. I could not have shaken them from any local tree because I have no locality. I am not a man from Warren. What is it to be from Warren? or weakly half-Protestant, half-Catholic? nondescript in half-wasp white? of German and Scandinavian blood so pale even pure Aryans are disgusted? and with a name made for amusement, and one which, even in German, means ‘alley.’ Though I am, Gassy was not the worst I was called. I am no one’s son, or father, it appears. Not Northern, not American, not a theosophist, not a scholar, not Prufrock, not the Dane. Yet I gathered these names all the same. From a book . . . books . . . from the pages that are my streets.

  Nature rarely loops. Nature repeats. This spring is not a former spring rethought, but merely another one, somewhat the same, somewhat not. However, in a fiction, ideas, perceptions, feelings, return like reconsiderations, and the more one sees a piece of imaginative prose as an adventure of the mind, the more the linearities of life will be bent and interrupted. Just as revision itself is made of meditative returns, so the reappearance of any theme constitutes the reseeing of that theme by itself. Otherwise there is no advance. There is stagnation. The quiet spiral of the shell, a gyre, even a whirlwind, a tunnel towering in the air: these are the appropriate forms, the rightful shapes; yet the reader must not succumb to the temptations of simple location, but experience in the rising, turning line the wider view, like a sailplane circling through a thermal, and sense at the same time a corkscrewing descent into the subject, a progressive deepening around the reading eye, a penetration of the particular which is the partial theme of ‘Mrs. Mean’—at once escape and entry, an inside pulled out and an outside pressed in, as also is the case with my single short story, ‘Order of Insects.’

  Hours of insanity and escape . . . in which I write inadequate verse, read, rage . . . record anecdotes which fade into the page like stains . . . beat time with my pencil’s business end . . . nip at the loose skin on the side of my hand with my teeth . . . cast schemes and tropes like horoscopes . . . practice catachresis as though it were croquet . . . grrrowl . . . kick wastebaskets into corners . . . realize that when I picture my methods of construction all the images are architectural, but when I dream of the ultimate fiction—that animal entity, the made-up syllabic self—I am trying to energize old, used-up, stolen organs like Dr. Frankenstein . . . grrrind . . . throw wet wads of Kleenex from a spring or winter cold into the corner where they mainly miss the basket . . . O . . . Ohio: I hear howling from both Os . . . play ring agroan the rosie . . . pace . . . put an angry erection back in my pants . . . rhyme . . .

  Then occasionally perceive beneath me on the page a few lines which . . . while I was elsewhere must have . . . yes, a few lines which have . . . which have the sound . . . the true whistle of the spirit. Wait’ll they read that, I say, perhaps even aloud, over the water running in the kitchen sink, over the noise of my writing lamp, coffee growing cold in the cup, the grrowl of my belly. Yet when I raise my right palm from the paper where, in oath, I’ve put it, the whistle in those words is gone, and only the lamp sings. Till I pull its chain like a john.

  Thus the idea of an audience returns like an itch between the toes, because now we have words watching words—not surprising: what should Berkeley’s trees do, hidden in their forest, if they learned, if they believed, if they knew that unnoticed they were likely to be nothing? encourage birds? grow eyes and ears and rub remaining leaves like foreign money?

  When Henry James, bruised by his failure in the theater, returned to the novel with The Awkward Age, he wrote in the scenery himself; he created his actors and gave them their speeches and gestures. More than that, he filled the spaces around them with sensibility—other observations—the perfect vessel of appreciation—himself, or rather, his roundabout writing. His method has become a model. Now, on the page, though the stage is full, the theater is dark and empty. Red bulbs burn above the exits. And when the theater is empty, and the actors continue to speak into the wings and walk from cupboard to sofa as if in the midst of emotion, to whom are they speaking but to themselves? Suddenly the action is all there is; the made-up words are real; the actors are the parts they play; questions are no longer cues; replies are real replies; there’s no more drama; the conditions of rehearsal have become the conditions of reality, and the light which streams like colored paper from the spots is all there’ll ever be of day.

  1. Continue work . . .

  2. Study the masters . . .

  3. Do deliberate exercises . . .

  4. Regularly enter notes . . . sharpen that peculiar and forgetful eye . . .

  5. Take to sketching . . . details . . . exactitude . . .

  6. Become steeped in history . . .

  7. . . . the better word . . . the better word . . . the better word . . .

  8. Figure it will be five years before any . . .

  9. Wait . . .

  A former student, who had reached the lower slopes of a national magazine, charitably wrote to ask if I would do a piece on what it was like to live in the Midwest. Without quite knowing whether my answer would be yes or no, I nevertheless began to gather data on that subject, although it became plain soon enough that the magazine was not interested in the logarithmical disorders of my lyricisms. I had always a
voided the autobiographical in my work, reasoning that it was one beginner’s trap I’d not fall into (more witless wisdom), and by now I had become suspicious of my own detachment. Could I write close to myself, or would the letter B, which my narrator said he’d sailed to, stand for bathos?

  I was living in Brookston, Indiana, then, but I called it B because that’s how people and places were sometimes represented in the old days. Pamela is always pulling Mr. B’s paw out of her bosom. Turgenev’s characters occasionally wait on a low small porch which is fastened like a belt around an inn or posting station, rising like a fresh bump on the road—say—to S, though nothing is in sight yet when we encounter them. Like the reader, they are waiting for the book to begin. (On the other hand, Beckett’s roads are letterless, and his figures are waiting for the text to terminate.) Not only has the narrator come to B in a pun (a poor place), with the initial I also wanted to invoke the golden boughs and singing birds of Yeats’s Byzantium. Further more, I knew that when I’d finished, it wouldn’t be Brookston, Indiana, anymore, but a place as full of dream and fabrication as that fabled city itself. Inside my cautious sentences, as against Yeats’s monumental poetry, B would become an inverted emblem for man’s imagination.

  I certainly didn’t resort to the letter out of shyness or some belated sense of discretion; but as I got my ‘facts’ straight (clubs, crops, products, prospects, townshape, bar- and barn-size), I remembered how eagerly I’d come to the community, how much I’d needed to feel my mind—just once—run free and openly in peace, in wholesome and unworried amplitude, the way my legs before in Larimore, N.D., had carried me through streets scaled perfectly for childhood; and I slowly realized, while I drew up my lists (jobs, shops, climate), marking social strata like a kid counts layers in a cake, that I was taking down the town in notes so far from sounding anything significant that they would not even let me find a cow; yet I figured my estimates anyway (population changes, transportation, education, housing, love), and I took my polls (of churches and their clientele, of diets and diseases); I made my guesses about the townspeople’s privacy (fun, games, hankie-pankies, high or low finance: pitch or catch, cadge, swap or auction), just as any geographer would, impressed by the seriousness of habit, too, of simple talk or an idle spit or prolonged squat—a reflective shit in a distant field; and as I started to distribute my data gingerly across my manuscript, a steady dissolution of the real began; because the more precisely one walks down a verbal street; indeed, the more precisely trash heap and vagrant shadow, weed stand and wind-feel and walkcrack are rendered; when, in fact, all that can conceivably enter consciousness—like snowlight and horse harness, grain spill and oil odor, hedge and grass growth, the cool tin taste of well-water in a bent tin cup—enters like the member of an orchestra, armed with an instrument (the bee’s hum and the fly’s death, for instance); the more completely, in short, we observe rather than merely note, contemplate rather than perceive, imagine rather than simply ponder; then the more fully, too, must the reader and writer realize, as their sentences foot the page, that they are now in the graciously menacing presence of the Angel of Inwardness, that radiant guardian of Ideas of whom Plato and Rilke spoke so ardently, and Mallarmé and Valéry invoked; since a sense of resonant universality arises in literature whenever some mute and otherwise trivial, though unique, superfluity is experienced with an intensely passionate exactness: through a ring of likeness which defines for each object its land of unlikeness, too (though who says so aside from Schopenhauer, who was also wrong about the world?); and consequently the heart of the country became the heart of the heart with a suddenness which left me uncomforted, in B and not Byzantium, not Brookston, far from the self I thought I might expose, nowhere near a childhood, and with thoughts I kept in paragraphs like small animals caged.