A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  … everything has a perfectly reasonable explanation. Everything. Wars, earthquakes, and the self-contained individual disasters of men. Courage as well as cowardice. Generous acts out of left field and the conviction that one is put upon. Everything. Man’s fallen condition and birth defect too, those San Andreas and Anatolian, Altyn Tagh, and Great Glen faults of the heart, of the ova and genes. They’re working on it, working on all of it: theologians in their gloomy studies where the muted light falls distantly on their antique, closely printed texts, as distant as God (which, God’s exorbitant aphelion, outpost, and mileage—the boondocks of God—also has a perfectly reasonable explanation); scientists in their bright laboratories where the light seems a kind of white and stunning grease.

  Everything has a reasonable explanation.

  3

  After Everything Was Over

  When Stanley Elkin’s heart finally failed, it killed his MS. Multiple sclerosis is a pitiless disease. It deserved to die. Gone, too, were what I imagine were his daily humiliations: trying to get out of bed, trying to shave, to dress, to face another day of pain and physical incompetence. The smooth board which, like a spatula, helped slide him from wheelchair to sofa or car seat could now suffer some idleness, as did the tram which hauled him up and down the stairs. The wheelchair itself can remain folded in a closet out of sight. MS is cowardly. It weakens you, and encourages other organs to fail, but like the parasite which destroys itself when it destroys its host, is itself done in by its own nefarious doings. Stanley’s lungs would occasionally collapse. He would fall ill of pneumonia. His heart had been repaired more than once. Stanley wrote about all this—wrote wonderfully about it; that is the irony. Illness, his own, others’, had come to occupy a central place in his work. MS sneaks up on you. It leaves you for a while, only to return like an unwelcome relative. It goes about its business more slowly than a postal clerk. There is no present cure, and hopelessness must invade its victims, dull every activity like a storm of dust. Another irony (not lost on Stanley—ironies never were): Its initials form the singular for manuscript.

  However he dealt with it in private, I never heard a single note of self-pity from Stanley Elkin. He got about, as hard as movement had become, with a resolve I could admire but never really comprehend. Such adversity would destroy me in minutes.

  For years, we treated his increasing infirmities as a joke. When I returned from a journey, I would take him yet another cane. I’d complain at having to snail along at his pace. In Europe, when we occasionally attended a conference together, he frequently could not get his chair into the narrow elevators, and would have to be left behind while the group visited a library or museum. From a balcony, I would sometimes describe our good times in jovial shouts. These exchanges were childish, clumsy, but a comfort. Stanley made it easier for his friends to endure his illness, the sight of his hardships. I call that courage of a very special kind.

  He held his classes at his home, and I had participated in several oral exams. When he sat, his breath would be forced from his lungs like a bellows. There was no way to make light of that. And his body had begun to bend, as if it were thinking of bowing. But Elkin’s spirit was not bowing down; it was working, though he complained that his new book was proceeding slowly. I expressed surprise that he was embarked on another project so immediately after sending a new novel to his publisher, but his firm, direct look told me what I should have known. Writing was literally life.

  Writers in romantic moments like to talk that way. If only, they say, if only writing were the one thing in their life, how much they would accomplish! Stanley did not make such a wish, but it was granted him anyway. How awesome the burden, how awful the boon! Clichés, I guess, can no longer comfort, and the sense of accomplishment does not accompany you to the grave, but it is nevertheless true that Stanley’s pages will remain alive as long as literature is allowed to; that in the midst of the most disagreeable of destinies, in pain, and personal decay, Stanley Elkin created a language that rises from the page to celebrate life in a way no one of us who are scribbling now can rival.

  Stanley was an intimate of undeserved misfortune. It made a theologian of him. He even wrote about a rabbi—The Rabbi of Lud—a rabbi whose incompetence is so finely honed, he only serves families he does not know in a town whose chief industry is cemetery plots. It is a city—rather, a town—of the dead, but the whole earth is a grave, and in The Living End we shall hear from one who is buried beneath a high school athletic field. What about that final book that he told me he was pushing out? It was to be called … Mrs. Ted Bliss. Of course. How ironic, even in its music: missus Bliss. Yet how wholly meant in all the ways it went.

  Stanley Elkin loved excess. More is more, he quite correctly said. Sometimes he sounded like a sideshow barker. His was the Greatest Show on Earth. Here, inside the covers of his books, would mysteries be revealed: Behind this jacket flap, ladies and gentlemen, you will see wonders—the hairless bearded lady, the anorexic fat man, the sword swallower who is made, himself, of shiny metal—and why shouldn’t he be, with that steady diet of steel?

  For him, it was the nomenclature of the world which was its wonder. From drugstore, dance studio, cosmetics counter, dry cleaner, hospital, motel, jailhouse, Hell—he gathered his words. And released them at the right time, the way the magician does his birds. Illness—his, kids’, country’s—he visited like a doctor, a consoling friend, a doubting Thomas. When Stanley did illness, he did the illness in. The illness was a curse, of course, but a curse like that uttered by one of Mark Twain’s river pilots, a curse so elaborate, it had, by its end, forgotten the pain that had provoked it.

  And when he did health, what happened? Health soon had the snivels and a rough cough. In this passage from The Franchiser, his paean to “convenience” comes down with a fever.

  Maybe all that distinguishes man from the beasts is that man had the consideration to invent garbage can liners. What a convenience! We die, yes, but are compensated by a million conveniences. Hefties are just the beginning. We perfect ourselves, we reach toward grace—I foresee a time when there will be flowered sheets and pillowcases in motel rooms. This is a deflection to convenience and the magnitude of the human spirit, the leap to comfort. The chemical creams … the chemical creams. You know, the little sacks of powder you put in your coffee. I foresee the day—someone may be working on this right now—when non-dairy creamers shall be mixed with saccharine in the same packet! There you go: convenience! And do you think for one minute that the man now waiting for this great idea’s time to come will have thought it up for mere money? No. Unthinkable. It will hit him on an airliner like an inspiration, for the grace of the thing, only that, for the convenience it would make, and if he profits by his idea, why the money will be only another convenience. Someday a visionary shall come among us. He will lobby Congress to legalize pot on the principle that it would be a terrific boon to the snack-food industry! Oh, friends, the quality of all our lives shall rise like yeast. I love this world, this comfortable, convenient world, its pillow condition.

  And Stanley did love this world, he loved it well, even when it did badly by him, even when he became bedded and pillowed in awkwardness and pain; and when we read him, our lives really do rise. He used to pretend—and he did a good job of it—that money was the only measure that mattered; but had he wanted money, he would have made it. He wrote—as Ben Flesh imagines his inventor of conveniences invents—he wrote for the grace of it, for he was an unmatched celebrator of the world, and most particularly of its unseemliness, its vulgarity, its aches and envies, its lowlifes, its absurd turns, its apparently ineradicable superstitions—still, for the grace of it … only that.

  THE SENTENCE SEEKS ITS FORM

  I have always thought more about writing than I have written about writing, and even when I was writing about things a world away from writing, I was thinking harder, longer, more eagerly about writing them than anything the writing aimed to address. Even putting down the
se first few words makes me aware of an emerging rhythm, a pattern of repetition, and consequently of an attention to what has been written that will tell me what to write, as if the first few words were seeds already intending the plant they would become, as if they were anticipating the earth they would occupy and own, if not adorn, the nettles they would form, the allergies they would eventually exacerbate. That is: the sentence seeks its fulfilling form.

  Naturally, since the form it seeks can be realized only through the agency of its author, the direction it seems to be taking must be agreeable to him, please him in a no doubt deeper way than chowder. See that? The word chowder, lowborn and jobless, has shouldered its way into the middle of this half-formed thought, unasked and unannounced, simultaneously to energize a handful of typing fingers—who knows why?—so many others could have done the trick—chocolate, say—however, chow was hiding there like an ingredient in the soup, even though chow signifies a class of which chowder can represent but a member—a situation that would not change even if it were the dog that was meant. (I cannot prevent my ego from admiring the way the phrase “even if it were a dog that was meant” passes smoothly from the subjunctive demanded by all contrary-to-fact conditionals into the passive past.) (Self-congratulation is the only sincere form of flattery though it has but a mayfly’s life.) In sum: The sentence, seeking its form, must pass through belly and bowel without irritation, as though it belonged in that dim hallway, as though it was—as though it were—on skis, on rails, on call, on a mission.

  Well, that was the wrong image, although characteristic of the low slope to this author’s mind which impelled the text to embrace such a misleading and evacuational metaphor. The nose will do us better service. When we breathe, we take in the oxygen we need to live, but we also acquire at the same time the air necessary to form words, and these are sent forth, when we exhale, in the same way that the lion growls or the hyena chortles. Breath (pneuma) has always been seen as a sign of life, and was once identified with the soul. Don’t fall for phrases like “gut feeling” or “coming from the heart.” Language is born in the lungs and is shaped by the lips, palate, teeth, and tongue out of spent breath—that is, from carbon dioxide. That is why plants like being spoken to. Language is speech before it is anything. It is born of babble and shaped by imitating other sounds. It therefore must be listened to while it is being written.

  So the next time someone asks you that stupid question, “Who is your audience?” or “Whom do you write for?” you can answer, “The ear.” I don’t just read Henry James; I hear him.

  Breath that has sustained a life has been shaped into words useful to communicate a life. This breath is otherwise waste, which may be another reason why the text wanted to intestinalize itself. These words hope to find companions called a sentence, and the sentence, too, is seeking a paragraph it may enhance. The writer must be a musician—accordingly. Look at what you’ve written, but later … at your leisure. First—listen. Listen to Joyce, to Woolf, to Faulkner, to Melville. And to the poets, above all.

  Ah, but I have a story to tell, characters to create, a plot to contrive, you may, with incautious confidence, insist. No. That’s what moviemakers do. They make hokum. You do not tell a story; your fiction will do that when your fiction is finished. What you make is music, and because your sounds are carriers of concepts, you make conceptual music, too.

  What can we do to find out how writing is written? Why, we listen to writers who have written well—wondrously well—because that self through which the sentence passes—those eyes, those ears, that nose—is made not of flesh and bone and their dinky experiences, but of pages absorbed from the masters, because that is what writing comes from: It comes from reading. It is not acquired by taking the lift to a slippery peak, by breaking up with yet another boyfriend, by being miserable from thirteen until now. Nor would you have been miserable from thirteen until now if you had sheltered yourself with books.

  You must pay attention; but you can pay attention to anything. Experience is constantly being egged on to surpass itself by descriptions that lie on its behalf, achieving an accuracy of perception rarely reached, a complexity and depth of feeling normally unavailable, and a thoughtfulness too considerate of its object to be common or comfortable in the self-absorbed consciousness that writers tend to possess—or rather, be possessed by.

  “My Lord,” Jeremy Taylor writes to his patron, the earl of Carbery, by way of introduction to his new book, “I am treating your Lordship as a Roman Gentleman did Saint Augustine and his mother; I shall entertain you in a charnel-house, and carry your Meditations awhile into the chambers of Death, where you shall find the rooms dressed up with melancholy arts, and fit to converse with your most retired thoughts, which begin with a sigh, and proceed in deep consideration, and end in holy resolution.”

  Taylor wrote what some believe to be the most enduring monuments of sacred eloquence in English, and this passage only gets better as it goes along; but did Taylor ever entertain such a conceit as this is? Was it a thought he had while also wondering how to impress the man whose chaplain he presently was? In this charnel house, they (you, I, Lord Carbery, Saint Augustine, and Jeremy Taylor) will find the body of Caesar “clothed with all the dishonours of corruption that you can suppose in a six month burial.” Not: There we shall find Caesar’s badly decomposed (that is, rotting) corpse. No, not in a room dressed up with melancholy arts. Not where we might speak with our most retired thoughts, a sigh preceding our considerations, and in such meditations as will reach an edifying and holy conclusion. No, these were never the musing of any man; they were constructed; they were built and rebuilt; they were sought before they were seen, and seen only after their period had been put down, and the mind had gathered up its words and brought them like raiment’s to the noun that ruled them, and laid them gently down there.

  The sentence, through you, seeks its form, and its form is the endeavoring of a desire, the outline of a feeling, the description of a perception, the construction of a concept, the dreaming of an image.

  Between Shakespeare and Joyce, there is no one but Dickens who has an equal command of the English language. He can be a misleading guide, because if you pay attention to what is usually said about Dickens, you will miss his gifts altogether. David Copperfield has just met his new landlord, Mr. Micawber, who offers to show the young man the way he must take through the city to reach his new lodgings. Mr. Micawber always endeavors to condescend, but he must do so from such a helpless height, he is always looking for a stool on which to stand himself; consequently, he puts on airs—verbal flourishes—and adopts, like a dog not his own, a highborn tone. This tone is particularly necessary when something embarrassing must be admitted; in this case, that the Micawbers are so strenuously up against it they must rent out a room they can scarcely spare.

  Like many of Dickens’s delinquent creatures, Mr. Micawber is made of Mr. Micawber’s speech, which customarily characterizes him, rather than some subject or sentiment that may be on his mind. Here he has designed his speech to do (to accomplish) just the opposite—to hide his status, conceal his plight—but it regularly fails of its purpose. “‘I have received a letter from Mr. Murdstone, in which he mentions that he would desire me to receive into an apartment in the rear of my house, which is at present unoccupied—and is, in short, to be let as a—in short—… as a bedroom …’”

  Mr. James has the very highborn tone that Mr. Micawber strives for, and if he were to read Mr. James (which, as fellows common to the Universal Library, he might), the right airs could be donned and doffed as circumstances required. The right airs include a measured gravity, a mouthfilling motion and stately rhythm that suggests that every word is formed out of the politest consideration for every other, and that a Latinated diction has been chosen, which is so full of itself, so free of the contaminations of commonness, it can hardly bear to touch any subject whatever, and lights upon one, only to leave immediately for another, which it approaches with the same tr
epidation.

  In scarcely less than a moment after he appears upon the page, Mr. Micawber becomes the famous W. C. Fields figure we all pity, sunshine our smile upon, and sentimentally love.

  “Under the impression,” said Mr. Micawber, “that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon in the direction of City Road—in short,” said Mr. Micawber, in another burst of confidence, “that you might lose yourself—I shall be happy to call this evening, and instal you in the knowledge of the nearest way.”

  There are words so workaday they have no class, no special niche or station, and the phrase “that you might have some difficulty” is made of them, at least up to “difficulty,” which is firmly middle-class; “trouble” would be a mite lower, while “that you might have a hard time” is lower still. Words have their class and their occasions: “Hey, Davie boy, since you don’t know the town, I’d better show you around or you’ll get as lost as Shirley’s sheep.”

  A little later, Davie boy is bemoaning his impecunious circumstances; his lot in life has made him hungry as a hound, so he thinks often of food and how little money he has to buy any. He makes (earns, receives) seven shillings a week for his work (labor, efforts, contributions) at the warehouse, and this sum he must stretch like a thin length of rubber till it snaps (breaks, stings, deelasticizes, rebukes him). “From Monday morning until Saturday night, I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from any one, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!”