A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Patience Worth was invented on July 8, 1913, when she appeared as a spirit who directed the planchette on Pearl Curran’s Ouija board to spell out the four million words that were reverently copied down and subsequently gathered into seven substantial books, along with thousands of poems, numerous short stories, aphorisms and epigrams, and sheaves of conversations Patience enjoyed with guests who came by the hundreds to call on her at Pearl’s residence, ironically located on the same long street in St. Louis where the T.S. Eliot family lived and where Tennessee Williams would later stay like a restless captive for a while until his family moved their unhappiness into another neighborhood.

  Yet for all her popularity—despite the Ouija board sales she stimulated, or the copycats who claimed Mark Twain was gracing their board with a new novel, even the affinity of the spirit world for soggy souls and weak minds—neither Patience Worth nor her amanuensis, Pearl Curran, are remembered in St. Louis today, let alone within the wider audience she once reached, now that the generations who read her have passed into their own mythology.

  Counting copies is not a reliable method, then. Merit, as we may imagine it, will not succeed, for we would not want to include Mein Kampf among the sacred books, though its influence resembles theirs, while Gone With the Wind, a mediocrity, has not only sold as widely as Winston Churchill did but has hung on, thanks to the cinema and Southern chauvinism, with more determination than most. Many movies that have circled the globe like some satellite have nevertheless left nothing more substantial than a vapor trail behind them. However, Latin American writers have testified to the impact thirties and forties films in particular had on them—we must specify—when they were young.

  It is easy to hear Rudyard Kipling in Robert Service, although both were balladeers who liked to frequent severe frontiers, or a cinch to catch Faulkner’s cadences in early Styron. We can feel the Salinger effect in the increased production of books with similar adolescent attractions, as is common in such cases.

  Salinger has become such a notable literary figure that he actually appears as a character in W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, the novel on which the picture Field of Dreams was based, but his importance can best be measured in the way Catcher has influenced books that have been written after it. Last Summer by Evan Hunter, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry, The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Birdy by William Wharton, Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerny, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen—these are just a few books written in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye. (Paul Alexander. Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999.)

  Those literary scholars who are economists at heart like to count citations in order to lay claim to a readership for the books listed on their CVs. To live on as a footnote is to achieve important academic authority, for many a journal article walks on ibid. and op. cit. feet. Instead of this decorous tiptoe, a book may strike a single blow and disappear like a mysterious assailant, leaving injury and altered lives behind it.

  Critics lamenting that poetry no longer makes a difference do not have in mind the difference made by Wilkes’s obscene parodies of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. Arguably, however, these are the most influential poems in English or American literature. They made more happen. (Regina Janes. “The Salacious Sorrows of Scholarship,” in Salmagundi, no. 143, Summer 2004.)

  “They made more happen.” Pope himself could carve a couplet on the brow of some unfortunate opponent that no cosmetic might hide, an A for ass or D for dolt, in lines that licked their lips before they pursed them. Of course, Pope meant to requite his enemies, but he also intended to cleanse the literary scene of the Welsteds, Curlls, Lintots, Ducketts, Herveys who are always with us, though they die before the day is done, because another batch swarms out to pester the next sun.

  Pope makes known what spurs him into song by mentioning his servant (John), his wife, or friends and enemies, local contretemps, in his verse—“Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu’d I said, / Tye up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead”—or by simply announcing that a poem is an imitation of Rochester, Waller, or Cowley, or by telling us, with the sweet smile of a child, that he is imitating Spenser when he writes about an alley, stinking with stinky things, more in the manner of Hogarth than his alleged high-minded model: “How can ye, mothers, vex your children so? / Some play, some eat, some cack against the wall, / And as they crouchen low, for bread and butter call.” But we always have to bear in mind that these excuses for compliment or complaint are of Pope’s choosing, not his pals’ or opponents’, so that calling them “influences” might be a stretch.

  If Dickens improved conditions in orphanages and workhouses, or Steinbeck the lives of migrant workers … well, these are results to be admired and celebrated; and if Mein Kampf or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion did the dirty work often attributed to them … well, these are influences worse than influenza and their quirky spread can be followed through the writings and speeches that have welcomed them and gloried in the symptoms.

  The Tweedledumbing that goes on about the effects of porn on lonely people or of snuff films on murder rates and flog flicks on leather futures; or rape and rob movies that do or do not encourage rob and rape; cigarette and liquor ads and their appeal to parched throats and teens yearning for sophistication: This pitiless bickering does not encourage confidence, especially when the inability of the truth to penetrate the convictions of voters or other fans of fidelity to party, God, and country is a given.

  Comparative studies also can be promising, provided points of comparison are made specific enough. There is always the possibility (to which in gloomy moods I cling) that Dickens’s orphanages were about to be improved anyway, or that the similarities of style between types like Kipling and Service have often been due to common natures and shared circumstances rather than to any literary contagion. According to Regina Weinreich, five kinds of correspondence between Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac can be discerned: their common love for sensory catalogs and Whitman-like emotional overloads; their love of the land and the townscape; their nostalgic tone; their pell-mell method of composition; and their narcissistic subject matter—mememoreme. (Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001.) It is significant, however, that these characteristics are all external and exhibit preferences for subject matter or cite similar working habits.

  There are influences as huge as oceans—that of the Italian Renaissance on nineteenth-century England or that of ancient Greece on Germany—so that one hardly knows where to begin, or if it would be wise to begin at all. And then there are those that interest me—so minor in their manifestations, so quiet, so internal to the self, they hardly seem blips on any screen. Yet I remember actually sucking in my breath upon reading the opening line of Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte,” “Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace,” or, in another time, with similar astonishment, Hardy’s “If it’s ever spring again, / Spring again, / I shall go where went I when / Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen …” while recognizing, despite the distance between the two occasions, in the bump in Hardy’s syntax, a relation to the strangeness of Pound’s bump that was of fundamental importance. The match, I think, was this: The sum of my reading experience had deposited in me a number of convictions that I could not up to then express, and these lines exemplified one of them. I might still find it difficult to state what that certainty was, but whatever it was, “I shall go where went I when / Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen” had it. The line stumbled to a stop at “when,” looked over its cliff, and watched the next line begin “Down.” Hardy’s “where went I when” was the finest assemblage of four words I could then imagine, and I repeated them, I’d be later told, like a mantra. An old poeticism had been rejuvenated, leading to a law confirmed, if not a lesson learned. And how had Hardy gotten away with rhyming “again,” “when,” “hen,” and “the
n,” or with dangling “hen” from its line like something plucked? Afterward, I ran to Gerard Manley Hopkins like a lover.

  But what is a gasp? An ooph of surprise? A moment of wonder? A reaction so strong that its source should be a real influence? That is, alter in some important way one’s inherent nature, one’s determined outlook, or a style that’s been raised from a child?

  The moments most marked as influential by their owners are often epiphanies that were waiting to happen. Elias Canetti gives us a splendid account of one such, and with his help we can identify the preparatory stages. In Vienna, when Canetti was twenty-two, he witnessed the burning of the Palace of Justice by a crowd protesting a verdict of not guilty that had just been given two alleged murderers. When those fighting the flames were prevented from reaching the site by the mob, the police opened their own fire, and in the shooting and its subsequent panic, ninety people were killed and many more injured. This event so marked Canetti that he spent much of his adult life trying to understand it. His initial attempt resulted in the novel Die Blendung (literally, “The Blinding,” but translated into English as either Auto-da-Fé or The Tower of Babel); and his final effort in the study Crowds and Power. The second precondition was the completion of Die Blendung at the age of twenty-six, which left Canetti empty, exhausted, and remorseful. He felt almost morally responsible for the burning of books that comprises the climax of the work. The torching of the library by the novel’s protagonist the sinologist, Peter Kien, was, after all, composed by Canetti, and in that odd way, the author was responsible for a truly dastardly deed. Moreover, after at first naming the character Kant, he called him Kien, meaning “kindling,” so what was possible for that person but ignition? The burden Canetti felt was also the consequence of his complete immersion in the work, his subsequent exhaustion, and postpartum gloom, which made him feel useless and empty. Even reading, the customary way writers rescue themselves from disagreeable states of soul, was denied him. “I had lost my right to books,” he says in the final volume of his autobiography, The Play of the Eyes, “because I had sacrificed them for the sake of my novel.” His favorite books repel him. He lets fall Stendhal, Gogol strikes him as silly, and finally he leaves his shelves untouched. The emptiness that had filled him now poured out in every direction, as if he were leaking sterility, since he had burned the contents of these books when he had burned their fictional exemplars in Auto-da-Fé.

  Then one night, in a state of mind that could not have been more desolate, I found salvation in something unknown, which had long been on my shelf but which I have never touched. It was a tall volume of Büchner bound in yellow linen and printed in large letters, placed in such a way that it could not be overlooked, beside four volumes of Kleist in the same edition, every letter of which was familiar to me. It will sound incredible when I say that I had never read Büchner, yet that is the truth. Of course, I knew of his importance, and I believe I also knew that he would someday mean a great deal to me. Two years may have gone by since I had caught sight of the Büchner volume at the Vienna bookshop in Bognergasse, taken it home and placed it next to Kleist. (The Play of the Eyes, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.)

  Accidentally, but who knows by what unconscious prompting, with a memory for the body of the book as well as its mind, the twenty-six-year-old Canetti chooses the linen-covered volume of a writer who died of typhus at twenty-three, and allows his fingers to open it to a section from Woyzeck (Wozzeck). “It was as if I had been struck by lightning.” He reads the scene, soon the entire play, again and again. Then, still in a most agitated state, he takes the early-morning train to see his girlfriend, in a sense to blame her for not recommending Büchner to him before this. To make it up to Canetti, she suggests he read a tale about a madman called Lenz—in actual fact, a poet friend of Goethe. “My novel that I’d been so proud of crumbled into dust and ashes.”

  Into dust and ashes. As dusty books burn down to bookish ashes. A parliament building on fire, a library consumed: They have occurred more than once in the world; but Canetti’s own conflagration has an internal reality that exceeds them. Canetti’s sinologist also burns on the pyre of his books, but his author has put him there and lit the match. Mind broken, Kien travels from the dust he was made of to the ashes he ends in, from first words to their erasure. Büchner is alleged to have said, on his deathbed (for the speaking of last words, beds are inevitable): “We are death, dust, ashes, how should we complain.”

  Kien’s crumbling mind precedes his devastation. Canetti is fascinated by states of consciousness, especially ones that range far beyond the boundaries of the normal: the peculiar character of the crowd, which always seems to have a will of its own; the agonies and insights of schizophrenia; the derangements of society that so riled Büchner. Although he could not have foreseen the sort of idiocracy that America has become, aristocracies everywhere were giving way and the masses were on the move. Canetti admires in Woyzeck the way its characters condemn themselves—thoughts attacked by their own actions, actions at odds with their intentions—and contrasts this with the denunciations Karl Kraus (perhaps Canetti’s first hero) regularly administered to Viennese society—complaints that came not from the miscreants themselves, who stood at the edge of disaster, banal as babies, as unaware as rocks, until Kraus drove them before him with the lash of his language and hurled them into the abyss. Büchner’s people always offer evidence of their tortured interiors by their own painful behavior. These observations are important, but they do not, I think, entirely account for Canetti’s sudden recovery of spirit. Büchner’s scenes were cinematic and flowed in and out of one another, yet it was impossible to be certain what their correct order was, or even if there was one, and the play feels unfinished yet somehow all there, like so many of our human relations. It was how Büchner did it that transfixed Canetti—in dramas that did not narrate in the customary way, in a novella that refused to render madness as a mere aberration—and he almost immediately turned to the theater to write his play The Wedding, then read it to Hermann Broch, while Broch, utterly silent, appeared to be holding his breath.

  I’ve had my own brief “Wow!” in Büchner’s youthful pages. Büchner begins his first work, a pamphlet made of polemic rather than paper, with this sentence—which persuaded me of everything: “The life of the rich is one long Sunday.” After which, he writes more, but unnecessarily. Canetti, too, liked sentences that had the hardness of stones, particularly those that shamed their creator by revealing a weakness in the writer otherwise invisible to him, such as, I suspect, one true of many: “Er hat sich an den Einteilunger seines Lieblingsphilosophen erhängt,” which Broch de Rothermann translates thus: “He has hanged himself from the categories of his favorite philosopher.” (The Agony of Flies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.)

  Büchner, Kraus, Broch, Musil, Mann, Canetti: what a line of march! After reading the manuscript of Die Blendung, Broch says, “You’re terrifying. Do you want to terrify people?” “Yes,” Canetti answers. “Everything around us is terrifying. There is no longer a common language. No one understands anyone else. I believe no one wants to understand.” (The Agony of Flies.) The substance of this remark will remain with him like a scar. In the notebook published in 1994, his last year of life, Canetti quotes Goethe: “The human race uses thought only as an evasive tactic.” (Notes from Hampstead. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998.)

  Die Blendung—“The Blinding”—appeared to appreciation and praise in 1935. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. The Austrians applauded the Nazis’ military parades. In November of that year, Canetti and his new wife fled Vienna for Paris.

  These remarks about Canetti were not a digression. Literary influence of more than momentary significance is the result of a context of conditions that permit one author to be particularly sensitive to another; in Canetti’s case, some of these were previous events, like the burning of the Vienna Palace of Justice, the psychological tensions in his own history and the
consequential dislike of Freud, the literary climate that featured Karl Kraus’s attacks on the Austrian monarchy and its bourgeois toadies, as well as the reinforcing example of writers like Broch, Mann, and Musil, who combined novelistic skill with intellectual reach, erudition, and demanding ethical ideals. Works like Woyzek could then set going the dynamics of his mind, and rally his own strengths, set a salutary example that was at once a technique and an ideal.

  I began to mull over the nature of literary influence (mull is not a word indicating any kind of progress) when I was considering opening this book with a pamphlet that the International Writers’ Center and the Washington University Library published to celebrate the center’s birth in 1990. We arranged an exhibit of books and manuscript materials to accompany a list of fifty works that I was prepared to say had influenced my own work. Our aim was modest: merely to get our endeavor noticed on a busy campus. I dashed my mini-catalog off in a few days as books called out their authors’ names to me, and I could have gone on I don’t know how much further. To my dismay, this list was immediately taken to be a roll call of “best books,” an activity I have no sympathy for, and certainly did not apply in this case, because not all great achievements are influential, or at least not on everybody. So Proust was not there, or Dante or Goethe or Sophocles, either. Awe often effaces every other effect.

  Reading over this catalog, I realized that some of my responses had been immediate, some delayed, while most had depended upon an array of circumstances: a few literary, others personal or bused in from other arts; moreover, many had been the consequence of dislike and opposition, instead of admiration and emulation. Developing his own views about “power” and government, Canetti was forced to fight his way by Hobbes and Nietzsche, for instance, and his own wildly oedipal relationship with his mother forced him to resist Freud. Nor would he have allowed the least suggestion of naïveté to yield a simple “Gee gosh” before Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, or Büchner’s Lenz, whereas I’d had many such dumbfoundings, which just left me dazed for days, as thoughtless as a spinning top until, tired and turvied, I came to rest. And I certainly found myself far more open to certain texts during times that were politically particularly onerous, such as were McCarthy’s filthy fifties, the vicious years of Vietnam, or our present time, when so many of our good citizens go to church in the comfort of their arrogance, their ignorant antique orthodoxies, and with smug fanaticism push the nation and the world toward catastrophe. Everything around us is terrifying, as Canetti wrote. Andan influence.