A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  In lovely blue the steeple blossoms

  With its metal roof. Around which

  Drift swallow cries, around which

  Lies most loving blue….

  And as I read on, I, who am not a believer, said, my single sincere time, with wonder and devotion, “My God …”

  Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés

  Hölderlin had tried to live through a revolution, and felt that in poetry, too, there should be a similar upheaval. Mallarmé made quietness cover his life like a cloth—teaching in a high school, inviting a few friends in of an evening, talking and talking, quietly, in a prose pointed at poetry. In that quiet, gray, low-key, laid-back, nothing life, except for the language devoted to his love of language, he hatched a revolution that has yet to come round to its beginning. A piece of paper, where it became a page, became pure space, a space over which a divinity brooded as though it were the primeval waste. And words were not to be words. When were words in poems ever words? And a book, a book was not to be a book. Open one. Perhaps that opening exposes a great snowfield where a word, now a single dead bird, lay in the snow and sang nothing … sang it. I always thought it very exciting to know that there were men who looked on language and its page like that, who lived in a withinness wider than any without, who quietly blew up the Customary (Nietzsche said his books were bombs), so quietly, customers purchased the ruins to furnish their flats. Of course, it is a corrective to remember who came to take tea on Tuesdays at the schoolmaster’s: nearly every important literary figure in Paris, or anyone significant who was passing through. Among the Mardistes, talk was animated and wide open. Manet watched from a wall. Space was made in the dining room for the crowd. The cat, Lilith, sat on the sideboard. Everyone rolled their own. Odilon Redon prepared himself to collaborate on Un Coup. Now and then, a flirt would call. Some evenings (at the godawful hour of 10:00 p.m.) the Pauls Verlaine and Valéry would seat themselves among young men thoroughly cowed and quieter than the furniture.

  Ezra Pound’s Personae

  The power of these poems has paled. Pound was the number-one teach in the old days, and T. S. Eliot was number two. Pound told us to “make it new.” He cajoled editors to print avant-garde work. He fought for the right and the good and the ideals of art. Maybe I wore Ez out. I certainly wore out Eliot. Some of one’s gods grow dim, and perhaps it’s because the eyes begin to weaken, or possibly it is because the idols themselves have wearied of their own tainted divinity. It is still beautiful stuff, but I am conscious now of how much pastiche is present, how deep the posturing goes. Perhaps the chaos of the Cantos, a work I would once have fought for like a hunting territory, cannot be saved by commentary. Anyway, when I met these poems, they were fresh, their author was brash, and I was young, and still unread.

  William Butler Yeats’s The Tower

  Wouldn’t we all like to grow old full of lust and rage as Yeats did? Wouldn’t we all like to have a late phase that would unlace the stays, and unwrap everything, and lay it bare for our wise, ripe, appreciative, and lascivious gaze? The Tower is not a volume of the late poems. Those I admire even more than the masterpieces here, but this is the book that did its worst and best with me. Poetry has been a beleaguered castle on a cliff for a long time, and my castle had four towers: Yeats, Valéry, Rilke, and Wallace Stevens. Their period produced some of the greatest lyric poetry our European culture has ever seen—perhaps its last gasp. These poets understood that poetry was a calling—and to consciousness a complete one. Yeats wanted to be a seer, and if, as it happened, there was nothing to see, he would invent it, not simply for himself but for everybody else, too. He sets Byzantium down in Sligo. Yeats invested his language with an original richness, as if every word were a suitcase he would open, rummage around in, and carefully repack, slipping a few extras in among the socks. I read him in one gulp—the Complete Poems—from end to end, and then in small bites, and finally in ruminative chews. The Tower became a tree, and rooted itself in me. Yeats grew old disgracefully. It is the only way to go.

  Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium

  I have always believed that genius and originality should be evident almost at once and delivered like a punch—in a paragraph, a stanza, even an image. One should not have to eat the whole roast to determine it once was a cow. That’s why I always liked Ford Madox Ford’s “page ninety-nine test.” (Wyndham Lewis also laid claim to this method.) Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you. (Of course, if you do that to Harmonium, you will read from “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks,” lines stamped with the poet’s individuality, but not, I think, genius. Nevertheless, overleaf, you will encounter a poem entitled “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” and all doubts will be dispelled. Although some individuality is lost, since it might—almost—have been written by Edith Sitwell—“Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk.”) With Stevens, you will not be kept long in suspense, if you’ve begun at, as one ought. Shortly you will sense that something extraordinary is happening to the language. By you are reading of “golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,” and by you come face-to-face with the first masterpiece, “The Snow Man,” which quietly begins “One must have a mind of winter,” a line that does true justice to m and n, and then concludes, so characteristically:

  For the listener, who listens in the snow,

  And, nothing himself, beholds

  Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

  Listening, our breath taken, we behold it. Later, in that same first work, we shall encounter “Sunday Morning,” perhaps the pinnacle of the metapoetical—do I dare to say?

  Henry James’s The Golden Bowl

  Here is the late phase, and what the late phase can do. James was born in a late phase and grew phasier all his life, like a jungle vine. By the time he was truly old, he was beyond time, and need not have marked his birthdays. The Golden Bowl, the critics said, was James indulging himself, James parodying James. Critics are a dim lot. It was James being James right enough. I could have listed half a dozen of his novels (from The Portrait of a Lady through The Spoils of Poynton to The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors) or half a dozen of his tales, and called upon his travel work as well, so that to place only the great Bowl here is a bit perverse. I do so because what affected me most about Henry James lay not in some single work itself, but in his style—that wondrously supple, witty, sensuous, sensitive, circumloquatious style—and the Bowl is that style brought to its final and most refulgent state. Like Valéry in the realm of the mind, James was a nuancer, and believed in the art of qualification, the art of making finer and finer distinctions (an art that some have said is the special province of philosophy). And Henry James formed the phrase—the slogan—the motto—which I would carve on my coat of arms if I had one: “Try to be someone,” he said, “on whom nothing is lost.”

  He is also supposed to have said, at the moment of his death, “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.” What he actually said, of course, was, “So here it is at last, the extinguishing thing.” People will embroider.

  Henry James’s Notebooks

  The workshop of Henry James was the third major classroom of my writer’s education. Flaubert’s letters were the first course, Gertrude Stein’s lectures and stories made up the curriculum of the second, and James’s notebooks would constitute the third. What a workshop it was. Transmutations were made there an alchemist might envy. I could see how James’s fascination with gossip and social trivia was transformed into his burning moral concerns, and how these, in their turn, were refined in a manner of writing so scrupulous, so delicate, so reflective it became an indictment of the very material it had risen from, as if the odor of the roast were to blame the pig for being pork. Like Proust, James knew how to read and how to write the language of society. Like Proust, too, what he wrote was devastating. To look in this book is like looking into the master’s head, into that majestic dome, in order to watch the cogs. Only the
se cogs don’t simply go click.

  William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

  American literature, it is often said, has two poles: the conscience-haunted and puritanically repressed novel of “bad” manners, represented by Nathaniel Hawthorne and culminating in James, and the wild and woolly frontier baroque, pioneered by Herman Melville (whose whale ought also to be here), that triumphed in the historical hungers and, far from manifest, destinies we find in Faulkner. His name ought properly to stand here in front of a fistful of titles: Light in August, As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, and so on. The Sound and the Fury is a little too Europeanly experimental to be ideal Faulkner. Still, it was just this bridgelike quality to which I initially responded. If he wrote in the world of Joyce, he had to be all right. However, Faulkner wrote in another world as well, in the world of the old-fashioned (as well as the newfangled) epic, and his work has that sort of sweep: It is multitudinously peopled, as foreordained as film, as rhetorical as the circuit rider or the tent-pole reformer. Faulkner’s career illustrates another thought for the dark: You can take yourself seriously about only one thing at a time. When Faulkner began to take himself seriously as a thinker, his work as an artist precipitously declined.

  Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider

  What James called “the beautiful and blessed novella” often comes in triads, possibly because a novella is roughly a third of a novel in length, so that it takes three to make a book. There is Flaubert’s Three Tales, for instance, Stein’s Three Lives, and Porter’s Pale Horse. We could compose our own such trios for Chekhov, James, Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, Colette, too, as well as a number of others. And we would hear no finer music made than here. From her first tale to her last, she was in complete command of her manner—a prose straightforward and shining as a prairie road, yet gently undulating, too. But above all, for me, it was the sharpness of her eye that caught mine, and the quiet reach of her feeling. If Noon Wine shook you, Pale Horse swooped you, and its lyricism put me to bed with a fever. Its song is matched in our fiction by what? Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” perhaps? Or J. F. Powers’s “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does”? A tough lady. She did me the honor of liking my early work. I had the manuscript of my first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, stolen from me, and the same thief purloined an essay of mine on Katherine Anne, which he changed scarcely at all, and published under his name (Edward Greenfield Schwartz) in the Southwest Quarterly Review. He also swiped someone else’s essay on Nathanael West. Alas, with her name, I still associate this professional plagiarizer.

  Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives

  The circumstances of the blow are so often fortuitous. I read Tolstoy or Proust and say, “Of course.” Greatness as advertised, like the beauty of the Alhambra or the Amalfi coast. Cervantes, certainly, no surprise. And have a helping of Dante or Boccaccio. (I tried to seduce a young lady once through the present of the Decameron, but that doesn’t come under the principle of this collection.) There are texts, and there are times, and sometimes both are right and ring together like Easter changes. (I remember, at Wells Cathedral, the shock of such bells, whose vibrations made me sound.) I didn’t read Stein until my first year in graduate school, and I was ready. No prose ever hit me harder. This was the work of the woman they called “the Mother Goose of Montparnasse”? How could you read the central story, “Melanctha,” and not take everything she did seriously? I read with an excitement that made me nearly ill, and having finished the book at 1:00 a.m. (having never contemplated reading it in the first place, having been lured, suckered, seduced), I immediately began reading it again from the beginning, singing to myself, and moaning, too, because this tension had caused my stomach to hurt quite fiercely. My head also ached. I was sort of sore-eyed. Was this how it felt to have a revelation? Her prose did produce in me some of the same exhilaration that, say, the description of the Great Frost does, in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and some of the terrible tension I have when, in John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, Margaret is beaten with the wet rolled-up newspaper; but in addition it produced discovery, amazement, anger (at having been told yet more lies about values by critics and colleagues and teachers). And so at the end, I was sick, and though hanging over the mouth of the john (where my fears were not confirmed), I knew I had found the woman my work would marry. And I would, in effect, always carry three great faces in my wallet: Virginia Woolf’s, Colette’s, and Gertrude Stein’s. If you ask, like a cinema soldier in a movie foxhole, I will take them out and show them to you.

  William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

  It sometimes happens in a writing life that you get lucky, and I have been lucky often. I think that perhaps JR is the greater book, but it hardly matters. The Recognitions was a thunderclap. It was a dull decade, the fifties, but here was a real sound. [I must have been thinking of American literature too exclusively when I wrote this, because no decade could be dull that saw both William Gaddis and Malcolm Lowry appear with major works. Under the Volcano should have been an entry among this fifty. Imagine it as the roof. It took me three starts to get into it; my resistance to it is now inexplicable, though I suspect I knew what I was in for. I have never read a book more personally harrowing. It is also a rare thing in modern literature: a real tragedy, with a no-account protagonist to boot. The Consul is one of the most completely realized characters in all of fiction. However, enough of this effort to make up for a shocking omission.] Okay, it was a dull decade. The Recognitions made a real sound. And the sixties would be the novel’s best ten years. But here was Mr. Cranky to accompany Sir Style. Here was a man even madder about the general state of things than I was. Here was a man whose business was seeing through—seeing through bodies, minds, dreams, ideals—Superman was Mr. Magoo by comparison. And here was a man who immediately reminded me of another hero (they can’t all be present), the Viennese culture critic, Karl Kraus, because this man collected mankind’s shit, too, and knew where to throw it, and knew where to aim the fan. Then, as affairs would fall out, I had the good fortune to be on the jury that awarded JR the National Book Award, and got a little recognition for an author who, till then, had been the idol of a clique. In time, as it also turned out, I met William Gaddis and became his friend. Thus my third rule was realized: In this business, to have the respect of those whom you respect is the only genuine reward. And that reward is quite enough.

  John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig

  This novel humbled me in a number of ways. I was reading manuscripts for a magazine called Accent, and had in front of my prose-bleary eyes a piece called “A Horse in a London Flat.” And I was in a doze. More dreariness. More pretension. When will it all end? How shall I phrase my polite rejection? Something, I don’t remember what it was now, but something ten pages along woke me up, as if I had nearly fallen asleep and toppled from my chair. Perhaps it was the startle of an image or the rasp of a line. I went back to the beginning, and soon realized that I had let my eyes slide over paragraphs of astonishing prose without responding to them or recognizing their quality. That was my first humiliation. I then carried the manuscript to my fellow editors, as if I were bringing the original “good news,” only to learn that they were perfectly familiar with the work of John Hawkes and admired it extravagantly. Hadn’t I read The Cannibal, or The Goose on the Grave? Where had I been! What a dummy! (Though my humiliation would have been worse if I had written that rejection.)

  A number of years had to erode my embarrassment before I could confess that I had not spotted him at once (as I initially pretended). What a dummy indeed. The Lime Twig is a beautiful and brutal book, and when it comes to the engravement of the sentence, no one now writing can match him.

  Rainer Maria Rilke’s

  The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  There have been books that have struck me like lightning and left me riven, permanently scarred, perhaps burned-out but picturesque; and there have been those that created complete countries with their citizens, their cows, their climat
e, where I could choose to live for long periods while enduring, defying, enjoying their scenery and seasons; but there have been one or two I came to love with a profounder and more enduring passion, not just because, somehow, they seemed to speak to the most intimate “me” I knew but also because they embodied what I held to be humanly highest, and were therefore made of words which revealed a powerful desire moving with the rhythmic grace of Blake’s Tyger; an awareness that was pitilessly unsentimental, yet receptive as sponge; feelings that were free and undeformed and unashamed; thought that looked at all its conclusions and didn’t blink; as well as an imagination that could dance on the heads of all those angels dancing on that pin. I thought that the Notebooks were full of writing that met that tall order. Of the books I have loved (and there are so many, many more than I could have collected here), from the electrifying alliterations of Piers Plowman (“Cold care and cumbrance has come to us all”) to the sea-girt singing of Derek Walcott’s Omeros, there has been none that I would have wished more fervently to have written than this intensely personal poem in prose, this profound meditation on seeing and reading—on reading what one has seen, on seeing what one has read.