A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  And many of these sentences the reader will wish to commit to memory in order to carry them about like a favorite tune, to hum and to encourage and guide them through bad moments, boring conversations, or bouts of insomnia. Let me cite an example from one book good as any, Frances Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, at the point where he tells us that “learning endueth mens mindes with a true sence of the frailtie of their persons, the casualtie of their fortunes, and the dignitie of their soule and vocation.” Thinking produces its own endorphins, and encountering a fine thought is as thrilling as the sight of the bluebird, partly because both have been threatened with extinction.

  It is not their nouns and verbs alone that make the good books good, then; it is their adjectives and adverbs, their prepositions—their qualities and their relations.

  Charles Sanders Peirce said, “My book is meant for people who want to find out; and people who want philosophy ladled out to them can go elsewhere. There are philosophical soup shops at every corner….”

  Respect for experience, rigor in reasoning, passion in the service of selfless ideals, every one of the human urges allowed to represent itself without apology or hypocritical disguise, the architectural impulse, too, constructing cathedrals, even countries, out of concepts, and making spaces for the imagination to soar through, high but hawk-eyed, hungry but discriminating: These qualities, rather than simply opinions and prejudices, fill the good books; but mixed with these perfections, not always easily identified, are all our failures, too, each weakness like a model on display, dressed in our most attractive, come-hither silks; here is the severe, the ugly, the sordid, the cruel, rendered by a Goya or a Grünewald, who bravely puts paint where no paint should go, who dares to depict the nightmares that shadow our sunlamp lives.

  They will not do us any good—the good books—no—if by good we mean good looks, good times, good shoes; yet they still offer us salvation, for salvation does not wait for the next life, which is anyhow a vain and incautious delusion, but is to be had, if at all, only here—in this one. It is we who must do them honor by searching for our truth there, by taking their heart as our heart, by refusing to let our mind flag so that we close their covers forever, and spend our future forgetting them, denying the mind’s best moments. They extend the hand; we must grip it. Spinach never made Popeye strong sitting in the can. And the finest cookbook ever compiled put not one pot upon the stove or dish upon the table. Here, in the library that has rendered you suspect, you have made their acquaintance—some of the good books. So now that you’ve been nabbed for it, you must become their lover, their friend, their loyal ally. But that is what the rest of your life is for. Go now, break jail, and get about it.

  INFLUENCE

  What does Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary say? That the stars are said to influence the order of nature and the affairs of men; that when God withdraws His attention, annihilation follows; yet his Dictionary also states that a wise man has a greater grip on his own well-being than the stars can claim direction; that the effect of religion is so benign, it ought to be supported (one good deed deserves another); that inconstancy in the pursuit of our goals has a bad influence on their realization; that some consequences stain but others are easily removed; and that the truth ought to have more clout than it has. The entry does not mention advertisers, PR flacks, product endorsers, spin doctors, ghostwriters, salespersons, or other professional manipulators of opinion. In cruder, blunter times like Dr. Johnson’s, public executions were designed to deter evildoers from further crime. Now, with our advanced media skills and gulling savvy, we perform these public tasks with more sophistication and similarly vagrant results.

  Of course, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary does not actually say these things; it gives us instances of the concept’s usage; it relies on quotes that stress the importance of various influences on behavior, but lessening, if I may say so, the influence of influence as it goes along, ending with a wish rather than, as with the constellations, a prognostication. Influence ends up weaker than a compulsion or an itch. It claims responsibility for some part of what has been effected, but only as a challenge and incentive to the will. If I push a paperhanger from a ladder, I do not influence his fall, but cause it; however, if I lodge in his psyche a prior fear of falling, for instance, I have possibly predisposed his limbs; or if I have encouraged him to climb with his pastes and papers while carrying an angry dog or a kitchen cabinet, I have had a hand.

  Does Dr. Johnson’s choice of authorities—Milton thrice, Rodgers twice, Prior, Sydney, Hooker, Tillotson, Addison, Atterbury also twice, Newton, each as eminent as a peak—make them influences concerning the proper use of influence or is it the doctor’s selection or Sam Johnson’s clout that does that?

  Dictionaries are supposed to influence usage. Usage is what dictionaries record. “This is what we have meant,” they say; “continue in the same vein so that communication will be accurate, reliable, and fluent.” Then the next dictionary will record that fidelity, and issue the same command, which will complete the cycle. Among users, however, there are many who are incompetent, inventive, or disobedient. The French Academy tries to drive strays back into the herd. English has no comparable guardian and its speakers lack every discipline. Soon meanings have multiplied or slid or mushed, and niceties—delicate distinctions—lost along the way. In this haphazard fashion, influence has come to mean a kind of causality that operates only through the agency of a consciousness. Where this puts the stars, I’m not sure. Because of smog or city glare, we often don’t even know the stars are there.

  The niceties must be observed. That means distinctions are required when considering influence as much as we might employ for any other word. Suppose my father is an angry, disappointed man. Suppose I dislike him and vow not to imitate him in anything. Yet I find that I, too, am an angry, disappointed man. His influence has been counterproductive because the opposite of my father’s behavior was aimed at, although the target was poorly struck. However, it is inadvertent, since he certainly did not intend to pass on his resentments, and they express no intention of mine, either. But he was also an accomplished public speaker—banquets and such—and I did hope to follow his lead in that regard. He ruled his classroom with an iron hand, and conveyed his scrupulosity of design to his students, some of whom showed similar qualities in their work, while others bore no evidence of it. In short, influences are positive or negative, advertent or accidental, direct or devious, general or targeted, unidirectional or reciprocal, effective or futile, actual or merely believed.

  Influences are also due or appropriate and undue or improper. As the president’s adviser, if I speak the truth and report the facts, then those facts—the truth—may influence his subsequent decision, not I; but if I rhetorize and wrangle, insinuate and connive, intimidate or flatter, no matter the soundness of my suggestions otherwise, I shall have led my leader by the nose, though I was not elected to that office; and I remain responsible if I have allowed him to choose among alternatives already carefully narrowed to my purpose. All such influence is undue. If the president knows that his old crony is a truthful man—moreover, that he usually has a good command of the facts—and so follows his lead instead of the direction the data have indicated, he has made his pal’s influence inappropriate, and himself a stooge. Though if heeding another’s advice leads to success, being your own man and following your own nose is usually deemed an unaffordable luxury.

  Most influence is whispered in an ear, not delivered like a push, though we do admit that liquor puts drivers under its spell, and that we’ve had to widen the crime of DWD to DUI in order to include drugs of other kinds. Driving under the influence of hubris is not yet a yellow-sheet offense.

  No evil can befall a good man, Socrates said, because evil efforts achieve evil effects only when they leave their victims morally worse than they were, and for evil to do that to a good man would mean he had frailties so far unrecognized, and his character was not as stout as had been rumored. Iago plays upo
n Othello in a similar fashion: Once the weak key is found and repeatedly struck, the murderous chord finally sounds. Neither Plato nor Aristotle was likely to applaud those whose virtue was chiefly measured by the extent of their triumph over temptation; they thought it safer if your cashier, accountant, business manager were oblivious to beguilements.

  An intelligence without integrity (a condition so often found in people of public life) is likely to succumb to the blandishments of ideology; otherwise, the mind’s inherent skepticism will guarantee its safety from superstition and other forms of sugary conjecture. Socrates knew nothing really awful could happen to him if he kept his mind free of unwarranted opinions. True strength, throughout its spectrum, shows itself through unflustered gentleness and forbearance, since only such strength has nothing to fear. The con man succeeds by exploiting the greed of his marks and is often reluctantly admired because wit is on his side, as well as discipline. His cynicism is just good sense and his nose for moral weakness is like the dowser’s wand for water. Similarly, when ill-formed or palpably false ideas make their way through the multitude, it is because the comforts they bring are so ardently desired.

  If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey.

  Plato treated poetic inspiration as a case of such irrational infection: The gods bypass sober skill to make the pen prophetic so that the resulting poem, recited by a rhapsode similarly tranced, becomes an incitement to the mob. Or an unconscious wish, sneaky as an odor, enters the author’s awareness disguised as its opposite, and arranges the stage for a coup d’éclat. Thus the magnetic coil is closed: muse to poet, poet to page, page to performer, and performer to audience, whose applause pleases the muse, encourages the poet, and grants his forbidden desire: to rule.

  This pattern repeats itself precisely with religious texts: God to prophet, prophet to his books of revelation, those to the mullahs, pastors, and the priests, priests and pastors to their congregations.

  Indeed, the spread of illness was influence’s ancient occupation: It was either the source of a seizure induced by a divinity or a sickness of the system later called influenza, and because of its mysterious onset, a malady consigned to alignments of the heavenly bodies, an origin suggested by one of Dr. Johnson’s definitions. I have long suspected certain concepts of causing mental aberrations in those who entertained them (“substance,” “essence,” “soul,” or “angel,” “salvation,” “spirit,” “sin,” “transmigration,” “grace,” “phlogiston,” “zeitgeist,” and “wavicle” come to mind), and it seems to me superstitions operate on the sly, like poets and musicians, placing in our innocent ears a poisonous distillment, so that we wake to find ourselves a ghost in armor on a battlement—perhaps on an ill-fated crusade—or a victim of the stars and a casualty of the flow of macro-cosmic fluid into sublunary things in somewhat the same way Greek and Latin are presently seeping into my Anglo-Saxon. I am informed that nowadays astrologers are no longer so naïve and simpleminded as to credit the constellations with all these abilities by themselves, when influences also stream from the zodiac, from planets and their angular relationships, from nodes, as well as from countless other cosmic phenomena. It’s a big world. There are sun flares. There are comets. Quarks. Strings. Holes. And viruses unidentified. Growing immune. Gathering strength.

  Nowadays, instead of the stars, in place of the Fates, in lieu of the family curse, or the theory of the humors, we can cite genetic dispositions, and blame our irascibility on grandpa as automatically as we see in him our unruly red hair.

  Wills (probably another unnecessary concept) … wills aren’t really strong or weak; it is the characters that they express and serve that are. Consequently, young people, who are often thought willful but whose natures are not yet fully formed, are most easily driven from fad to fad like sheep by dogs; or it is old people, whose minds move as unsteadily as their bodies do, who are likely to suffer the theft of their nest eggs by cuckoos, cowbirds, and other con artists. The flimflam man finds allies in the willies, the fuddles, the general neediness of his marks, and he speaks to them like a friend about their present illness, their meager widows’ portions, their imminent demise, or to youths of their acned chins, tepid dates, and dwindling desirability, to each and everyone of loneliness and laggardly self-esteem. Meanwhile, the socially defined good people—parents, an older brother, the parish priest, a teacher, the coach (we assume)—are working the right side of the street, leading by precept and example, threat and plea, toward success, licensed fornication, and financial security. We might expect, then, that literary influences, when they occur, would follow a similarly forking path of edification, seduction, and disillusionment.

  Sometimes great books have deleterious consequences for other writers, creating footsteps that can’t be walked in, shade the sun can’t penetrate, expectations that have no grounds. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude crushed the hopes of scores of young Colombian writers, and the spread of magic realism was not exactly beneficent, since it takes a magician to work magic and because rabbits don’t hide in just anybody’s hat. Movements of most kinds flow downhill.

  Bad companions, a rum crowd, pinko friends are thought to have a great deal of influence, but there is no group or figure to match, for “all aboard” magnetism, the “role model”—that “Do as I do, be as I be” advertisement for the good life. Pied Pipers are an admitted draw, but they play a different tune. Role models are to be imitated—their lifestyle aped from cereal to shoe. Pied Pipers are only to be followed. Out of town. Toward the front. And everyone’s disaster. No one asks the rats to huff a fife, just to stay in line, keep up, and step smartly.

  Writers and scholars do not have role models, nor do they heed pipers; they have mentors. A mentor is a teacher who becomes a mentor by exceeding his authority and meddling with the student’s life. Writing students want mentors because their instructors are believed to have friends (that is to say, influence) in important publishing firms or are intimate with editors of important magazines. So they do their best to write as will please these persons; to flatter them by appearing to be under their wide benevolent wing (such students are said to be “teachable”); moreover, they seek out counsel from their wiser, more accomplished elders, not only on the course of careers but also on matters of the heart and the problems of life, payment for which sometimes includes the offer of sexual favors. Among the things that swell in such circumstances is the mentor’s pride at his apprentices’ achievements. Reflected glows are as good as sunlamps. To be attractive, especially if a girl or a gay person, often outstrips the need for talent, and frequently makes it unnecessary. Good looks, a little talent, and a slavish wish to please make an irresistible combination.

  European students are particularly eager to capture a powerful sponsor. The hierarchical system from which they have come is feudal still, even if not quite so tyrannical as in Hegel’s day, when Hegel was Germany’s philosopher in chief. One needs a protector, as Rabelais and Erasmus did, someone with influence at the Vatican or at court. One needs an agent’s eye, an editor’s ear—an “in.” Why? The answer comes ready-made: because every editorial office is a speakeasy, a restaurant overbooked before it was built, a disco that admits only celebrities. Myth or truth, the belief of beginners is that it’s whom you know, while those who already have powerful patrons are convinced that their skill got them into the loop and their charm passed them round like snacks at a party.

  Influence is one thing when it has a definable goal, a definite result—to sign the poultry-protection bill, to build the new bridge, to vote for Bob the Blackmailer, to care for the city’s bank deposits, to blurb a book—and another when it wants to alter a state of mind, a way of life, a manner of writing. And taking the latter’s measure is more difficult than obtaining the inseams of an octopus. Both might be easier to understand if
looked at from the place where influence has come to rest—with the banker, the bidder, the buyer, the bribed—in the student, the reader, the well beloved—at the turn of the last page, a week after exposure or the first interest payment or a month in jail, upon returning to the text, leaving the book on the plane.

  For instance, St. Louis’s two best-selling novelists have been Winston Churchill and Patience Worth, one an actual author with the same name as the British prime minister, himself a composer of thundering prose, the other the Ouija board alter ego of someone we might call a “neighbor lady.” Both had print runs longer than the Olympic torch’s and enjoyed more luminous results. Our Churchill ruled the American literary scene during the early years of the twentieth century. He published seventeen books of drama, fiction, and poetry during the twenty years of his reign, his ten novels each enjoying worldwide sales of half a million in fifty-four editions. Surely that should amount to influence in boxed lots. There was, however, no effect that history noticed, except the other Winston’s annoyance at the occasional confusion of their persons.