A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Lest these remarks lead my readers to suppose I decry technological advance like some old codger whose energies are conserved for rocking, I would somewhat proudly remind them that the leaders of the literary avant-garde in this country are all over sixty, and almost alone advancing the art; that if you are eager to embrace the new cybergible boy on the block, please practice safe sex, for the children of such unions are not always the sweet apples of someone’s eye. Anyhow, next to the computer, the printer sits, and spits out sheets of paper like indigestible seeds: bushels of seeds, reams of sheets, from zillions of personal computers, from millions of office copiers in hundreds of peaceful or war-torn countries, night and day.

  The elevator, at first, seemed merely helpful, and the high rise splendid against the night sky—what you could see of it. Recordings allow us to hear a few elevating strains from “The Ode to Joy” several times a day, the genius long ago beaten out of it. And those miracles of modern electronics that have allowed us to communicate quickly, easily, cheaply, gracelessly with every part of the world permit us to do so in private, and in every remove from face-to-face. Air travel is comfortable, affordable, and swift (right?), and enables us to ignore geography, just as we ignore climate, because we have HVAC, and, in addition, can purchase terrible tomatoes any season of the year from stores that are open all nite.

  The aim of the library is a simple one: to unite writing with its reading … yes, a simple stream, but a wide one when trying to cross. The library must satisfy the curiosity of the curious, offer to stuff students with facts, provide a place for the lonely, where they may enjoy the companionship and warmth of the word. It is supposed to supply handbooks for the handy, novels for insomniacs, scholarship for the scholarly, and make available works of literature, written for no one in particular, to those individuals they will eventually haunt so successfully, these readers, in self-defense, will bring them finally to life.

  More important than any of these traditional things, I think, is the environment of books the library puts its visitors in, and the opportunity for discovery that open stacks make possible.

  When I wish to look up a word—golliwogg, which I’ve encountered spelled with two g’s—or when I wish to plenish my mind with some information, say, about the ill-fated Library of Alexandria, why don’t I simply hit the right keys on my machine, where both a dictionary and encyclopedia are imprisoned? Well, I might, if the spelling of golliwog were all I wished to know; if researches, however large or small, were not great pleasures in themselves, full of serendipity; for I have rarely paged through one of my dictionaries (a decent household will have a dozen) without my eye lighting, along the way, on words more beautiful than a found fall leaf, on definitions odder than any uncle, on grotesques like gonadotropin-releasing hormone or, barely above it—what?—gombeen—which turns out to be Irish for usury. I wonder if Ezra Pound knew that.

  Similarly, when I walk through the library stacks in search of a number I have copied from the card catalog (where I can find all the information I need about my book in a single glance), my eyes are not watching my feet, or aimlessly airing themselves; they are intently shelf-shopping, running along all those intriguing spines, all those lovely shapes and colors and sizes. That is how, one day, I stopped before a thick yellow-backed book which said its name in pale blue letters, The Sot-Weed Factor. Though it was published by Doubleday, so there was probably nothing of value in it, I still pulled the book from its place. What did the title mean? I read the first page, as is my habit. Page one and page ninety-nine are my test spots. Then I bore it home, neglecting to retrieve the book for which I had begun my search. Instead, for two days, in a trance of delight and admiration, I read Barth’s novel. Later, I repeated my initial search—for a book that turned out to have no immediate interest. But right beside it, as well as two shelves down and five volumes to the right … well, I discovered another gold mine. That is why I stroll through the encyclopedia, why I browse the shelves. In a library, we are in a mind made of minds—imagine—all man has managed to think, to contrive, to suppose, to scheme, to insinuate, to lie about, to dream … here … within reach of our hand.

  Moreover, when I get my “information” from a book, rather than a compendium, I get it in the context of an author’s thought. Which would you prefer—an olive wiped dry and placed in the hollow of a relish tray along with anonymous others, or one toothpicked from its happy haunt in a perfect martini? Location … location … location … haven’t we heard? The dictionary itself is evidence that every word is made of the meanings it has accumulated, like delta mud, from its flow between the boards of books.

  One does not go to a library once, look around, and leave as if having seen it. Libraries are not monuments or sights or notable piles: churches by Wren, villas by Palladio. Libraries, which acquire the books we cannot afford, retain the many of which we are ignorant, the spate of the new and the detritus of ancient life; libraries, which preserve what we prize and would adore; which harbor the neglected until their time to set forth again is marked, restoring the worn and ignoring fashion and repulsing prejudice: Libraries are for life, centers to which we are recycled, as recursive as reading itself.

  If I am speaking to you on the phone, watching your tinted shadows cross the screen, downloading your message from my machine, I am in indirect inspection, in converse, with you; but when I read the book you’ve written, you are as absent as last year, distant as Caesar’s reign. Before my eyes, asking for my comprehension, where I stand in the stacks or sit in the reading room, are your thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, set down in sentences and paragraphs and pages … but in words not yours, meanings not mine, rather, words and meanings that are the world’s.

  Yes, we call it recursive, the act of reading, of looping the loop, of continually returning to an earlier group of words, behaving like Penelope by moving our mind back and forth, forth and back, reweaving what’s unwoven, undoing what’s been done; and language, which regularly returns us to its origin, which starts us off again on the same journey, older, altered, Columbus one more time, but better prepared each later voyage, knowing a bit more, ready for more, equal to a greater range of tasks, calmer, confident—after all, we’ve come this way before, have habits that help, and a favoring wind—language like that is the language which takes us inside, inside the sentence—inside—inside the mind—inside—inside, where meanings meet and are modified, reviewed and revised, where no perception, no need, no feeling or thought need be scanted or shunted aside.

  I read around in this reprinted book I’ve rescued until I stumble on—I discover—my sentence, my marvel, my newfound land. “What a deale of cold busines doth a man mis-spend the better part of life in! in scattering complements, tendring visits, gathering and venting newes, following Feasts and Playes, making a little winter-love in a darke corner.” What a bad business deal indeed … to spend a life without an honest bit of purchase.

  This sentence is a unit of human consciousness. It disposes its elements like the bits and pieces of a collage, and even if a number of artists were given the same materials—say a length of ribbon, empty manila folder, cellophane wrapping, sheet of blue paper, postage stamp, shocking pink crayon—or a number of writers were allowed a few identical words and asked to form a phrase—with was, for instance, out of that, or fair, or when, and all—they’d not arrange them in the same way, make the same object, or invariably ask, in some wonder, “When was all that fair?” as if a point were being made in a debate. Among them, only James Joyce would write of paradise, in Finnegans Wake, as a time “when all that was, was fair.”

  In this process of constituting a unit of human perception, thought, and feeling, which will pass like every other phase of consciousness into others, one hopes, still more integrated and interesting, nothing is more frequently overlooked or more vital to language than its pace and phrasing: factors, if this were ballet, we would never neglect, because we are well aware how the body of the dancer comes to a per
iodic point of poise before beginning another figure, and how the central movement of the torso is graced and amplified by the comportment of the arms, the tilt of the head and smile of the eyes, and how the diagram of one gesture is made to flow into another; how the dancer must land from a leap, however wide or high, as if a winged seed; and how the energy of movement is controlled by the ease of its execution within the beat and mood and color of the music until we see one unified flow of expression; so, too, must the language keep its feet, and move with grace, disclosing one face first before allowing another, reserving certain signals until the end, when they will reverberate through the sentence like a shout down a street, and the vowels will open and close like held hands, and the consonants moan like maybe someone experiencing pleasure, and the reader will speed along a climbing clause, or sigh into a periodic stop, full of satisfaction at this ultimate release of meaning: a little winter love in a dark corner.

  The books in the library regularly leave it, leave it for fresh human attentions, and the work of the institution will often take place far from its doors: at a kitchen table maybe, in someone’s suddenly populated bed, amid the rattle of a commuter train, even in a sophomore’s distracted head. Every day, from the library, books are borrowed and taken away like tubs of chicken to be consumed, though many are also devoured on the premises, in the reading room, where traditionally the librarian, wearing her clichés, sushes an already-silent multitude and glares at the offending air. Yet there, or in someone’s rented room, or even by a sunny pool—who can predict the places where the encounter will occur?—the discovery will be made. And a finger will find the place and mark it before the book’s covers come closed; or its reader will rise and bear her prize out of the library into the kitchen, back to her dorm room, or, along with flowers and candy, to a bedside, in a tote bag onto the beach; or perhaps a homeless scruffy, who has been huddling near a radiator, will leave the volume behind him when he finally goes, as if what his book said had no hold on his heart, because he cannot afford a card; yet, like Columbus first espying land, each will have discovered what he cares about, will know at last what it is to love—a commonplace occurrence—for, in the library, such epiphanies, such enrichments of mind and changes of heart, are the stuff of everyday.

  MR. GADDIS

  AND HIS

  GODDAMN BOOKS

  1

  Introduction to The Recognitions

  He had been a floorwalker at Bloomingdale’s. That was one rumor. He was presently writing under the nom de plume of Thomas Pynchon. That was another. He had had to pay Harcourt Brace to publish The Recognitions, and then, disappointed and peeved by its reception, he had the unsold stock destroyed. He died of dysentery or some similarly humiliating and touristy disease at forty-three and had been buried, stoneless, in Spain under a gnarled tree. Among the more absurd was the allegation that he had worked as a machinist’s assistant on the Panama Canal and served as a soldier of fortune for a small war in Costa Rica. He had no visible means. What he did do was traipse. He became a character in books that bore a vagrant’s name. No. He worked for the army and wrote the texts of field manuals. No. He scripted films. They told you/showed you how to take apart and clean your rifle. A rather unkind few suggested he had been a fact checker at The New Yorker. Not at all, argued others, he was born a freelance. And became a ghost who moved corporate mouths while gathering material for a novel he would write one day about America and money. When John Kuehl and Steven Moore edited a collection of essays about him, the honored author turned artist and, for the title page, drew himself suitably suited and bearing a highball glass. The figure has no head.

  In 1975, when his second novel, JR, won the National Book Award, his admirers, confused by William Gaddis’s previous anonymity (very like the chary pronouns above), by the too sensibly priced fumé blanc, and by the customary babble at celebrational parties, frequently misheard his name, often congratulating a fatter man. Even the New York Times, at one low point, attributed his third novel, Carpenter’s Gothic, to that selfsame and similarly sounding person. Yes. Perhaps William Gaddis is not B. Traven after all, or J. D. Salinger, Ambrose Bierce, or Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps he is me.

  When I was congratulated, I was always gracious. When I was falsely credited, I was honored by the error.

  These mistaken identifications turned out to belong in William Gaddis’s book, where reality already had been arrested; for what can be true in a world made of fakes, misappropriations, fraud, and flummery? Only this: that, if we had two doorsteps, on one would stand a hypocritical holy man, on another a charlatan dressed as a statesman; that among our most revered relics, if we had some, we’d find out our local saint’s pickled thumb belonged originally to a penniless neighborhood drunk, that our museum’s most esteemed painting was a forgery, that the old coins we’d collected were inept counterfeits, and the fine car we’d just bought a real steal. What Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of Auguste Rodin is certainly true of the man in that headless sketch: “Rodin was a solitary before fame found him, and afterward perhaps he became still more solitary. For fame is finally only the sum of all those misunderstandings which gather round a new name.” In our oddly clamorous yet silent times, to be a famous author is to be ignored not here, not there but everywhere. Similarly, The Recognitions, the work which wrapped William Gaddis in the cloud of its carefully adumbrated confusions, remains widely heard about, reverently spoken of, yet rarely read. It seems to lead, like a entombed pharaoh, an underground life, presumably surrounded by other precious things and protected by a curse.

  Like Malcolm Lowry’s great dark work, Under the Volcano, The Recognitions needed devotees who would keep its existence known until such time as it could be accepted as a classic; but a cult following is not the finest one to have, suggesting something, at best, beloved only by special tastes—in this case, the worry was, a wacko book with wacko fans. In fact, a cult did form, a cult in the best old sense, for it was made of readers whose consciousness had been altered by their encounter with this book; who had experienced more than its obvious artistic excellence, and responded to its neglect not merely with the resigned outrage customarily felt by those who read well and widely and wish that justice be accorded good books; it was composed of those who had felt to the centers of themselves how much this novel was indeed a recognition and could produce that famous shock: how it revealed the inner workings of the social world as though that world were a nickel watch; how it combined the pessimisms of its perceptions with the affirmations of the art it, at the same time, altered and advanced; more, how its author, though new to the game, had cared enough about himself, his aims, his skill, to create greatness against the grain, and, of course, against the odds.

  Begun in 1945 without really knowing what or why, and continued in bursts from 1947, The Recognitions was published in the middle of the fifties, a decade so flushed with success, it could not feel the lines of morbidity which were its bones. A typesetter, it’s said, refused to continue work on the text, and sought advice from his priest, who told him he was right to desist. Naturally, the novel, when it appeared, won an award for its design.

  Its arrival was duly newsed in fifty-five papers and periodicals. Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid. But the reviewers’ responses to the book confirmed its character and quality, for they not only declared it unreadable and wandering and tiresome and confused; they participated in the very chicaneries the text documented and dramatized. It was too much to expect: that they should read and understand and praise a fiction they were fictions in. You, too, can let your present copy rest unread on some prominent table. A few critics confessed they could not reach the novel’s conclusion except by skipping. Well, how many have actually arrived at the last page of Proust or completed Finnegans Wake? What does it mean to finish Moby-Dick, anyway? Do not begin either The Recognitions or JR with any hope of that. These are books you are meant to befriend. They will be your lifelong companions. You will end, only to begin again.

/>   It was wrong in someone young to be so ambitious, the reviewers thought; the result was certain to be pretentious, full of the strain of standing on tiptoe. If the author works at his work, the reader may also have to, whereas when a writer whiles away both time and words, the reader may relax and gently peruse. Well, The Recognitions will lie heavily in any snoozer’s lap. (What is the weight of the one you are holding? You can compare it to the 956 pages of the first edition, which comes into the ring at two pounds, seven ounces, in order to discover how much of its substance has been leached out.)

  Well, it was ambitious certainly, dense, lengthy, complex. Its author is a romantic in that regard, clearly concerned to create a masterpiece; for how else, but by aiming, is excellence to be attained? It’s not often one begins a sand castle on a lazy summer morning—patty baking by the blue lagoon—only to—by gosh!—achieve, thanks to a series of sandy serendipities, an Alhambra with all its pools by afternoon. The book was about bamboozlers; the slowest wits could see that, and therein saw themselves, and therewith withdrew. This was not to be a slow evening’s soporific entertainment; it was to be their indecent exposure.

  They cribbed from the dust jacket. They stole from any review appearing earlier. They got things (by the thousands!) wrong. They condemned the subject, although they didn’t know what it was; they loathed its learning, which they said was show-offy; they objected to its tone, though they failed to catch it; they rejected with fury its point of view, whose criminal intent they somehow suspected. They fell all over one another praising Joyce, a writer, who, they said, was the real McCoy, whereas … yet had they been transported to that earlier time, they would have been first in line to shower Ireland’s author with deaf Dublin’s stones.