A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  FIFTY LITERARY PILLARS

  Plato’s Timaeus

  I have been teaching Plato for fifty years. I know I have sometimes bored my students, but Plato has never bored me. His dialogues are among the world’s most magical texts. I remember how the Republic set fire to my head, and among the other dialogues it is difficult to choose a favorite, but I should say, now, that the Timaeus strikes me as his strangest, and perhaps his most profound—at once most mystical and mysterious, hardheaded and mathematical. Beneath the surface of this “likely story” of how the universe was formed, Plato’s conception of our world, as the qualitative expression of quantitative law, runs like a river.

  Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics

  Following my first encounter with Plato, it was hard for me to imagine an equal mind, yet Aristotle showed up shortly after to astonish me. He is, in so many ways, his teacher’s opposite: secular and scientific—not soaring—as ripe with common sense as an orchard, and an unrivaled intellectual inventor. Edison’s bulbs burn out, but Aristotle’s creation of the treatise form, his discovery of the syllogism, his establishment of scientific method remain incandescent. Aristotle’s occasional path to a false conclusion is more scenic and exhilarating than a hike in the mountains. Finally, though, it is the commonplace nobility of the Ethics that wins me. There is scarcely a badly reasoned or backward line in this book. Plato can sometimes be sourly scary, but Aristotle is solid, forthright, sunny. He may even be right.

  Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War

  Here is history seen, endured, and created at the same time. He made many a Greek great by giving them his own thoughts, his own words, by lending them the extraordinary sheen of his mind; and it is there they are reflected like shadows cast by the ghosts of their real selves, for the war need never have taken place. It takes place now, and repeatedly, in this great cool prose, in these half-fictive events passing through an ideal disillusionary mind. Hobbes’s mind, Machiavelli’s mind, Thucydides’ mind, are minds that allow little room for romance, and they became the romantic, unrealized, model for mine. If you will believe only that which you know to be true, you will trouble yourself very little with belief.

  Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter,

  Form, and Power of a Commonwealth

  Hobbes translated—magnificently—Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Moreover, he learned from that work how to look at the world. The first two books of the Leviathan are usually the only ones read, but I was equally impressed with the latter half. The book sets the biggest and best intellectual trap I know. In the first part, Hobbes argues that if you are a materialist, and do not believe in any life but this one, you must embrace an absolute sovereignty in order to establish and preserve peace. In the second half, he argues that if you are a Christian, and believe in a life everlasting, then a proper reading of Scripture will convince you to embrace an absolute sovereignty in order to achieve peace and properly obey God. The prose is unequaled in English philosophy.

  Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

  It is, of course, a commonplace to admire this book, although it is one panel of a mighty triptych. The Critique’s thorny style, its difficult terminology, its original and complex thought drove me crazy when I first tried to cope with it. I wanted to blame Kant for my weakness of intellect, my inadequate background, my flabby character, my toddler’s mind-set, and at college I actually threw my copy through a closed schoolroom window. (I attended school at a time when you could commit such childish things if you paid promptly for the labor and the glass. Beer bottles were often pitched out dorm windows. My breakage had to be a cut above.) The three Critiques, among many large things, do an important small one: they render the difference between the sort of thought and writing which is inherently and necessarily hard and the kind, like Heidegger’s, which forms a soft metaphysical fog around even the easiest and most evident idea.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

  A lightning bolt. Philosophy was not dead after all. Philosophical ambitions were not extinguished. Philosophical beauty had not fled prose. I remember that we approached this text (as we did Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica) with all the reverence due a sacred, arcane work. From the resonant and dark opening lines, “Die Welt ist Alles, was der Fall ist,” to its stunning conclusion, we are in the presence of logic delivered as music. How flat the translations are: How unmelodious, unmystical, unmysterious is “The world is everything that is the case.” Who would want to consider seriously such a flat-earth remark? Well, a great many, apparently. Wittgenstein’s project was akin to Spinoza’s (who wrote his own Tractatus), and, as Spinoza’s does, it puts us in the presence of the philosophical sublime. The fact that the Tractatus’s fundamental assumptions may be quite wrong seems almost beside the point.

  Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space

  La favorita. This is writing which gives me a warm feeling, like sunny sand between the toes, or like one of Bachelard’s own hearth fires. Bachelard was trained as a positivist; and as an historian of science, he specialized in the alchemists. He wrote an interesting book on relativity, and in The Philosophy of No, he laid down a speculative history of the development of intellectual thought which is certainly in the spirit (even if it wildly surpasses it) of Auguste Comte. His interest in the persistent errors which scientists make (alchemists in particular) led him to write, in a psychoanalytic mood, his wonderful books on the four elements. The Poetics of Space is his first venture into phenomenology, and what an adventure it is. A famous lecturer, Bachelard was also a very gifted reader, and by “gifted,” I mean he knew what a gift a great book is, and responded to each present with witty and intelligent passion. The Poetics of Space has the ability to reorganize one’s attitude toward reality in an enormously enhancing way.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria

  I am not the only reader who considers the Biographia the greatest work of literary criticism ever—even if Coleridge plagiarizes from the German idealists. I was lucky enough to study it under the gentle and wise guidance of Professor M. H. Abrams. The seminar was built on one directive: We would not only read the Biographia but would (by sharing and parceling out the labor) read every book it quotes from, mentions, or alludes to. The result was, in miniature, a university education. In researching my papers for the course, I also learned never to rely on secondary sources, but to trust only primary ones—a teaching that leads directly to this ideal: Write so as to become primary.

  Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, ou l’architecte

  The Eupalinos is a dialogue, but it is my favorite essay, and, in the William McCausland Stewart translation, it seems to me to be one of the supreme works of English prose. Valéry had a breathtaking mind, and the quality of his thought was like the quality of his poetry, where nuance was a thing in itself. Culture is a matter of considered and consistent choice, and high culture is concerned with estimations of quality. No writer I know, writing on any subject, demonstrates such a perfect power of discrimination. Here, writing on architecture, Valéry imitates a Platonic dialogue, and without in any way aping the master, he certainly rivals him. Thucydides, writing about the plague in Athens and the revolution in Corcyra, can make your hair stand on end. Valéry, writing about the mysteries of making anything, can cause you to lose your breath, or your hair, too, if it has already risen.

  Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur

  What a debt I think I owe this transcendental fable! Although I had passed out of third grade, I was still a lazy, bored, slow, and inaccurate reader. I disliked school, did sums with all the enthusiasm I would later summon up to clean latrines, and lied a lot to entertain myself. Then at some point in fourth grade, while still floundering in school, I found myself inside some doubtless cleaned-up and dumbed-down version of Malory. Even youthanized, it was faithful enough. And I was lost. The ordinary world was ordinary in a way it ha
d never been before—ordinary to the googolplex power. I knew now what was real, and I would never forget it. I began to eat books like a alien worm. From three a week, I rose to one a day. The page was peace. The page was purity. And, as I would begin to realize, some pages were perfection.

  Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia: Urne Buriall,

  or a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes

  lately found in Norfolk

  The full list, the final role of honor, would include all the great Elizabethan and Jacobean prose writers: Traherne, Milton, Donne, Hobbes, Taylor, Burton, the translators of the King James Bible, and, of course, Browne, or “Sir Style,” as I call him. I would later find them all splendidly discussed in a single chapter of George Saintsbury’s A History of English Prose Rhythm, the chapter he called “The Triumph of the Ornate Style.” Of course, there are great plain styles. Of course, positivists, puritans, democrats, levelers, Luddites, utilitarians, pragmatists, and pushy progressives have something to say for themselves. There are indeed several musicians after Handel and Bach. And there are other mountains beyond Nanga Parbat. But. But the great outburst of English poetry in Shakespeare, in Jonson, in Marlowe, and so on, was paralleled by an equally great outburst of prose, a prose, moreover, not yet astoop to fictional entertainments, but interested, as Montaigne was, in the drama and the dance of ideas. And they had one great obsession: death, for death came early in those days. First light was so often final glimmer. Sir Style is a skeptic; Sir Style is a stroller; Sir Style takes his time; Sir Style broods, no hen more overworked than he; Sir Style makes literary periods as normal folk make water; Sir Style ascends the language as if it were a staircase of nouns; Sir Style would do a whole lot better than this.

  Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

  I think all my choices are obvious. Only what is left out of the temple is not justifiable. (Why weren’t you influenced by Proust? Well, that was probably a good thing.) We always speak of Sterne as ahead of his time, but what was it about Sterne that made him permanently avant-garde? His honesty about artifice? “Leave we then the breeches in the taylor’s hands …” Henry James once said, in his snobbiest manner, “I see all round Flaubert.” That’s what Sterne did. Fiction had scarcely gotten started, and, already, Sterne saw all round it—as well as through. For example, this: “A cow broke in (tomorrow morning) to my Uncle Toby’s fortifications….”

  Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

  Pepys, everybody knows about. The lover of diaries, however, is familiar with them all, from André Gide’s famous work to Emanuel Carnevali’s more obscure entries. Actually, Gide kept a journal, while Cesare Pavese kept a diary, and the difference between a notebook of the sort Henry James tended, which was his workshop, the record of activities that makes up the diary, and the kind of “thought-clock” the journal resembles is an interesting one. Loneliness is the diary keeper’s lover. It is not narcissism that takes them to their desk every day. And who “keeps” whom, after all? The diary is demanding; it imposes its routine; it must be “chored” the way one must milk a cow; and it alters your attitude toward life, which is lived, finally, only in order that it may make its way to the private page. It is a pity Virginia’s could not have held her head above water a while longer.

  Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (the Tietjens tetralogy)

  Ford is, for me, a much-maligned, misunderstood, and heroic figure, the author of at least three great works, the Fifth Queen trilogy, the masterful epistemological novel The Good Soldier, and his Tietjens books. He was a wonderful memoirist, too, a great editor, and a true friend of literature, “a man mad,” as he said, “about writing.” About fifteen years ago [now nearer thirty], talking to a group of literature students at the University of Leeds, I asked them their opinion of Ford, and fewer than a handful had ever heard of him. No wonder the empire fell into decay. Largely through the efforts of Sondra Stang, Ford’s reputation has grown since then, but he is still not accorded the position he deserves. Some Do Not, the first volume of the four, was written in 1924, the year of my birth. I still think it is the most beautiful love story in our language. It is a modern love story, with this astonishing difference: Everything is treated with profound irony except the love itself.

  William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

  There are many famous works, and a few famous writers, who are not among my fifty. It is not just some reasonable limit that has kept them off. My list is supposed to represent works which, I feel, have changed me as a writer in some important way, and while making such a list may be an act of egotism, it does not possess the arrogance of a roll call of Great Books. That is not to suggest that I do not believe in great books, for I believe in very little else—some music, some paintings, a few buildings, perhaps. Great books are great for innumerable reasons, but one of them surely is that they will remain faithful to the values they are made of. And it happens that if an author is too obviously great, the reader can never have the delirious excitement of discovering him or hearing his special note strike, because it has been broadcast in bits and pieces over a whole life. This is so often true concerning Shakespeare. Our society disarms genius. Beethoven is played to death, van Gogh tacked to closet doors, Burns’s songs sung by drunks, sublime lines mouthed by movie stars. This play by the Bard, whom immortality has murdered, his texts chewed by actors dressed in business suits, his corpse cut to pieces by directors and the remains dragged by popularity through the street, rose for me in a manner more vibrant than life. The language is yet a cut above the most high, the imagery so flamboyant sometimes as to establish a new style. I became properly fatuous in his presence. I said: “Boy, you sure can write.”

  Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist

  A man after my own heart. He is capable of the simplest lyrical stroke, as bold and direct as a line by Matisse, but he can be complex in a manner that could cast Nabokov in the shade. Like Rabelais and Joyce, he is a master excrementalist. The Alchemist (and the belly is the best one) is no stroll through the park. It is an arduous, even odious, climb. Shakespeare may have been smarter, but he did not know as much. Nowadays, knowing a lot is often thought to be a part of the equipment of a bore, a handicap to the personality, an office impediment. Jonson also makes marvelous lists, and I love lists. His are not as supreme, perhaps, as Rabelais’s, but they are quite calorific. The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

  James Joyce’s Ulysses

  When I was in high school, I tried to smuggle a copy of this once-banned and still “dirty” book past the resolutely puritanical eyes of my hometown librarian. No luck. I’d have placed a curse upon her ovaries had I known where ovaries were. But everything works out for the best, as Dr. Pangloss says. I was then too young for Ulysses. When I did read it, I was not struck dumb, as I should have been. Rather, I was flung into a fit of imitation. Like Dante, like Milton, like Proust, like Faulkner, like García Márquez, Joyce is too towering to imitate. It would be years before I could escape his grasp, and I still avoid Ulysses when I am working. The only words that dare follow “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan …” are Joyce’s.

  James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

  … Yet no song the sirens sang is as beguiling as the song Anna Livia Plurabelle sings while she rubs her wash clean on a rock by the Liffey. We literary snobs once dressed in FW as if it were the latest and most expensive and most extreme of fashion. Like Tristram Shandy, it is permanent member of the avant-garde, and immune to popularization. Graduate students will be forced to corrupt it, of course, and its music will fall into footnotes.

  Joyce was recorded reading portions of this work, and his performance is unforgettable and wholly convincing. Passages linger in the memory. The conclusion of the Wake is among the most poignant I know, and the idea that it is a cold labor of anal obsessiveness is all-the-way-round wrong. FW is the high-water mark of Modernism, and not to have been fundamentally influenced by it as a writer is not to have lived in your time.
Not to live in your time is a serious moral flaw. Although not to object to our time is an equal lapse in values and perception.

  Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds

  My only problem with Brian O’Nolan (two of whose pseudonyms are Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen) is that he seemed too satisfied to be Irish to be sane. You ought to live in your time, I thought, but try never to be what you have been. Like Joyce and Beckett, O’Brien was an accomplished linguist; like them, too, a darkly comic writer, and a master of pastiche. A cult is all, so far, that he has been able to gather to him, which is too bad, for O’Brien is also an innovator in language. At Swim-Two-Birds (the name of an inn, a pub, a puddle of texts) was published in 1939, the year FW appeared, and World War II broke out, which makes that date ideal as Modernism’s triumph and its knell. If you are caught in O’Brien’s web of words, you will not be sucked dry and left a hull, but incredibly enriched, filled to the bloat point, ready to pop. There aren’t many funnier books. He was also a fine journalist and not a total drunk. He read contemporary literature in five languages, wrote regularly in two, and if he is uneven, he is uneven as a roller coaster is, and not rough as a rough road.