World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Books by William H. Gass

  The World Within the Word

  On Being Blue

  Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife

  Fiction and the Figures of Life

  In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

  Omensetter’s Luck

  This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright © 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 by William H. Gass

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gass, William H. (Date) The world within the word.

  1. Literature — History and criticism — Collected works. I. Title.

  PN511.G34 809 77-90933

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82429-5

  v3.1

  For

  Robert Silvers

  who made me write

  most of these essays

  and

  to

  Mary

  who had to endure

  their doing

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Doomed

  in Their Sinking

  Malcolm Lowry

  Wisconsin Death Trip

  Mr. Blotner,

  Mr. Feaster,

  and Mr. Faulkner

  Gertrude Stein

  and the Geography

  of the Sentence

  Three Photos

  of Colette

  Proust at 100

  Paul Valéry

  Sartre on Theater

  Upright

  Among Staring Fish

  The Anatomy

  of Mind

  Food and Beast

  Language

  Groping for Trouts

  Carrots, Noses,

  Snow, Rose, Roses

  The Ontology

  of the Sentence,

  or How to Make

  a World of Words

  Notes

  and

  Acknowledgments

  The Doomed in Their Sinking

  Crane went sudden as a springboard. The Gulf gave nothing back. My mother, I remember, took her time. She held the house around her as she held her bathrobe, safely doorpinned down its floorlength, the metal threads glinting like those gay gold loops which close the coat of a grenadier, though there were gaps of course … unseemly as sometimes a door is on a chain … so that to urinate she had to hoist the whole thing like a skirt, collecting the cloth in fat pleats with her fingers, wads which soon out-oozed her fists and sprang slowly away … one consequence … so that she felt she had to hover above the hole, the seat (clouds don’t care about their aim), unsteadily … necessarily … more and more so as the night-time days drew on, so that the robe grew damp the way the sweater on a long drink grows, soggy from edge to center, until I found I cared with what success she peed when what she swallowed was herself and what streamed out of her in consequence seemed me.

  Though Hart shed his bathrobe frugally before he jumped, my mother, also saving, would have worn hers like the medal on a hussar straight through living room and loony bin, every nursing home and needle house we put her in, if those points hadn’t had to come out (they confiscate your pins, belts, buckles, jewelry, teeth, and they’d take the air, too, if it had an edge, because the crazy can garrote themselves with a length of breath, their thoughts are open razors, their eyes go off like guns), though there was naturally no danger in these baubles to herself, for my mother was living the long death, her whole life passing before her as she went, the way those who drown themselves are said to have theirs pass … a consequence, yes … her own ocean like a message in a bottle, so that she sank slowly somewhere as a stone sill sinks beneath the shoes of pilgrims and tourists, not like Plath with pills, or Crane or Woolf with water, Plath again by gas, or Berry man from a bridge, but, I now believe, in the best way possible, because the long death is much more painful and punishing than even disembowelment or bleach, and it inflicts your dying on those you are blaming for it better than burning or blowing up—during an exquisitely extended stretch—since the same substance which both poisons you, preserves, you both have and eat, enjoy and suffer your revenges together, as well as the illusion that you can always change your mind.

  Yet my mother wasn’t what we call a suicide, even though she died as though she’d cut her throat when the vessels burst there finally, and my father, who clenched his teeth till neither knees nor elbows would unfist, dying of his own murderous wishes like the scorpion who’s supposed to sting itself to death—no—he wasn’t one either: both had a terribly tenacious grip on life … so that some suicides will survive anything, and many who court death have no desire to wed her … it mixes us up …

  Should a suicide be regarded as the last stage of a series of small acts against the self, since the murderer who arsenics his wife little by little is still a murderer though she takes a decade dying; or does this confuse kinds of hostility in a serious way, because harsh words aren’t the same as blows or their bruises, desire isn’t adultery whatever Jesus preached, not even a degree of it? Cigarettes shorten our life, but the alcoholic’s fuddle mimics death (the loss of control, the departure of the soul) in a way the smoker’s never does. What can we make of that? We shall manage something.

  My mother managed. She was what we call a dedicated passive … liquidly acquiescent … supinely on the go. Still, she went in her own way—the way, for instance, her robe was fastened.

  Socrates acquiesced in his own execution, others demand theirs. The Kamikaze pilot intends his death, but does not desire it. Malcolm Lowry, who choked on his vomit, evidently desired his, but did not intend it. Soldiers charging the guns at Verdun neither wished for death nor were bent on it, though death was what they expected. My mother accepted.

  I used to think my father was the actively aggressive one because while he sat, temporized, bided and brooded and considered and consolidated, he growled, swore, and made horrible faces.

  During the decline of Christian morals, few groups have risen so rapidly in the overall estimation of society. It was dangerous for Donne to suggest that suicide was sometimes not a sin. It was still daring for Hume to reason that it was sometimes not a crime. Later one had to point out that it was sometimes not simply a sickness of the soul. Now it seems necessary to argue that it is sometimes not a virtue.

  To paraphrase Freud, what does a suicide want? Not what he gets, surely.

  Some simply think of death as the absence of their present state, a state which pursues them like a malignant disease and which cannot be otherwise escaped. Others consider it quite positively, as though to die were to get on in the world. Seventh Heaven, after all, is a most desirable address. Still others spend their life like money, purchasing this or that, but their aim is to buy, not to go broke. Are we to say to them (all and every kind) what we often say to children? no, Freddie, you don’t want a pet boa, you wouldn’t like the way it swallows mice.

  It doesn’t follow at all that because it is easy enough to kill yourself, it is easy enough to get, in that case, what you want. Can you really be said to want what you cannot possibly understand? or what you are in abysmal confusion about? or what is provenly contrary to your interests? or is plainly impossible? Is “I’d rather be dead” anything like: “I want to be a chewed-up marshmallow”; or: “I want 6 and 3 to make 10”; or: “I want to be a Fiji princess”; or: “I want a foot-long dong”; or: “I want th
at seventh scotch-on-the-rocks”; or “I would love to make it with Lena Home”?

  It’s been said that suicide is a crime of status. Poverty limits it, as it virtuously inhibits so many other vices. It occurs, we are also told, when its victim is not properly folded into the general batter of society, and when external constraints upon one’s behavior are weak. (The superego, however, can come down on conscience like a hammer.) So suicide is a disease of singularity and selfhood, because as we are elevated in the social system, and authorities “over” us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether it is better to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self.

  In a sense, society has already rejected the prospective suicide, hurled him overboard as Jonah was. His beliefs, all that was beloved, have forsaken him. He is a jinx. Once in the water, is it his fault he drowns? Hamlet, of course, has too many motives. Death and adultery have parted him from his family—murder and adultery from his king—imbecility from his love. He’s in the firmly impalpable grip of guilt. Above all, he is too fine a spirit for this wormy world. Don’t we often think so?

  The logic of misery hides its premises to forget its fallacies: Hamlet’s a prison; Hamlet’s a Dane; Denmark’s a prison; then is the world one.

  On the other hand, if I were to commit suicide, I am sure it would be from a surfeit of family and society, in a desperate effort to escape its selfish swallowing hug; yet to feel that way may already signify the absence of the necessary melodic relation. To be ruled by Reason, rather than by Father, Nature, King, or God, is an antisocial resolve. The autonomous self listens only to its own voice, unaffected by the grate of force, the lure of bribes, or the temptations of love.

  Anyway, men have been killing themselves, we may suppose, as long as life has afforded them the opportunity, but to be sick of life is not the same as having a painful illness or suffering a shame so denobling life is no longer endurable. The presence everywhere of decay, disease, coarseness, brutality, and death—the flow of value into a blank abyss—this death-in-life that made living like the aftertaste of drunken vomit—was the black center of the plague of melancholy which afflicted the Elizabethans.

  Hamlet’s question, indeed, throws everything in doubt. The doubt becomes a commonplace, and a century later Pope defends the self-slaughter of an unfortunate lady in an elegant poem which takes for granted what continually shocked the Elizabethans—the democracy of death.

  Poets themselves must fall, like those they sung;

  Deaf the prais’d ear, and mute the tuneful tongue.

  Ev’n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays,

  Shall shortly want the gen’rous tear he pays;

  Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part,

  And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart,

  Life’s idle business at one gasp be o’er,

  The Muse forgot, and thou belov’d no more!

  Definitions of suicide, like definitions of adultery, are invariably normative, and frequently do little more than reflect the shallowest social attitudes, embody the most parochial perspectives. Above all, these attitudes are for the most part deeply irrational. Failures may be executed, for example, while the corpses of successes are assaulted. Studies of suicide, including those of Alvarez and Choron,1 are soon elaborately confused about desire, intention, deed, and consequence, ownership and responsibility (whether we belong to ourselves, society, or God); neglect the difference between act and action, refuse to decide whether to include deaths of soul (Rimbaud?) as well as deaths of body, since holy living may indeed be holy dying, so that physical and metaphysical murders become hopelessly intertwined; and they are content to record, with a tourist’s widened eyes, the sweet, sour, wise, or benighted opinions of nearly everyone.

  If we are to call suicide every self-taken way out of the world, then even the Platonic pursuit of knowledge, involving as it does the separation of reason from passion and appetite, is suicidal … as are, of course, the search for ecstatic states, and longings for mystical union. It is the habit of such examinations to mess up these matters as if they were so many paints whose purpose was purely to give pleasure to the fingers.

  Nowadays the significance of a suicide for the suicide and the significance of that suicide for society are seldom the same. If, according to the social workers’ comforting cliché, they are often a cry for help, they’re just as frequently a solemn vow of silence. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine circumstances under which some of our conventional kinds of suicide would be impossible—impossible because we would simply refuse to recognize them. The liver fails. The veins collapse. Sleep seizes the wheel. No suicides there. Suppose that starving yourself were a “going-home-to-God” (no suicide there), while slashing your wrists were a “cowardly-copping-out.” In order to speak your piece properly you might have to shoot, hang, or poison yourself. Sprott records the case of “one that hang’d himself, upon his Knees, with a Bible on a Stool open before him, and a Paper to signifie that he had repented.”2 The liberated woman must do something manly, shotgun herself at the very least, avoid sleeping pills like the devil—that soothing syrup of the oppressed sex. If you don’t want the manner of your dying to be a message to mankind, if your aim is just to get the hell out, then you will have to be as clever at disarming symbols as Mallarmé. Alas, the way we think and write about suicides would provide many with still another motive, an additional despair, were they alive again and mercilessly aware.

  Breeding is not out of place even here. Petronius, the critics say, had class. Cato has consistently had a good press. And we write cheery loving thank-you notes; we put our affairs in order; we do not leap on top of people, run in front of cars owned by innocent strangers, bleed in public, allow the least hint of indecision, ambiguity, or failure to spoil our aim, and avoid every form of vulgar display. The ledge-huggers want to be coaxed, for instance. That’s a suicide for shopgirls. On the other hand, if you are, like Mishima, too stylish, your actions risk being thought incomprehensible. My favorites are rather theatrical, though. Choron tells us how Arria, the wife of a Roman senator who’d been caught plotting, in order to stimulate her husband to his duty, plunged a sword into her breast and then handed it to him with the words: Paete, non dolet (It does not hurt). Others seek the third rail and interrupt the service; swallow combs, crosses, safety pins, fountain pens, needles, nails; they blow up the planes they are riding in, smother themselves in plastic Baggies, or simply find a wall and dash out their brains. Sprott says that by 1600

  Suicidal types had become traditional: the epicure, the disappointed lover, the great spirit, the melancholiac, the jealous man, the frightened child, the debauched apprentice, the unfortunate merchant, the bloody murderer despairing of God’s pardon, the desperate zealot, the “tender Conscience’t Despairer” … (p. 36)

  Though methods, motives, meanings differ (“Whose head is hanging from the swollen strap?” asked Crane), most can be expected to mess up their deaths exactly as they’ve messed up their lives. Poor folks. Poor ways.

  Never mind. If you pay with your life you get a ticket to the tent: martyrs, daredevils, the accident-prone, those who cheat “justice” as Hannibal did, or are condemned by it as Seneca was; those who would die rather than surrender, even en masse, as the Jews died at Massada; those too poor, too rich, too proud, too ineffably wicked; all addicts, Cleopatras, all desolate Didos, mystics, faddists, young sorrowful Werthers; the fundamentally frigid, who cannot allow life to give them any pleasure; the incurably ill, the mad, the metaphysically gloomy; widows who go up with the rest of the property, and all those who from disgust or rage protest this life with emblematic ignitions and ritual sacrifice … it’s like cataloguing books according to the color of their covers … the mourners, the divided selves (not just Cartesians, severed into bum and bicycle as Beckett’s men are, but those who are cut up into competing personalities as viciou
s as sisters in some Cinderella); then the downright stupid, the inept and careless, the sublimely heroic, the totally disgraced … the color may be significant (the blue cover of Ulysses is), but it is scarcely a mode of classification which carves reality at the joints … those whom guilt feeds on as if they were already carrion; the Virginia Woolfs, too, who enter their own imagery, and the ones for whom death is a deer park, a convent, a place in outer space; also the impotent, ugly, acned, lonely; the inadvertently pregnant, and otherwise those who embrace their assassins, or who have felt only the hold of their own hand, thus to come and go finally in the same way … from little death to large … everyone’s welcome.

  Lost in lists, in the surveyor’s sweepings, borne along on conjecture like gutter water, the same act can signify anything you like, depending on the system—even the mood or the line of the eye—which gives it meaning: I cock my head one way and it appears to me that my mother was murdered; I cock it another and she seems a specially vindictive suicide; while if I face firmly forward as one in military ranks she seems to have been overcome by a rather complex illness, a chronic and progressively worsening disease. Simply examining “suicides” is like trying to establish a science of—let’s say—sallescape, which we can imagine contains the whys and wherefores of room-leaving. The word confers a fictitious unity upon a rabble of factors, and the ironic thing about suicide itself, intrinsically considered (and what my little litanies have been designed to demonstrate), is that it is a wholly empty act. It is—more than Rigaut, the Dada hero, was—an empty suitcase.

  And if the suicide believes his final gesture, like the last line of an obscure poem, will unite, clarify, and give meaning to all that has gone before; or if actual poems have held offhand hints—

  The news from Spain got worse. The President of my Form