A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  “I had no advice, no counsel …” is a move Micawber might have made. Mark the noes—to the sixth power: They measure the rhetoric’s pace, teaching us what energy is—vehemence—and Dickens is masterfully energetic; his prose has more muscles than Mr. Universe. The sentence is composed of short bursts—“of any kind, from any one”—and is a bit of a whine. But we should also watch the way the noes are re-formed, turned inside out, in the o n of “Monday,” the o r n of “morning,” the o u n of “counsel,” the o n’s of “one” and of “consolation.” No consolation for us either when on reverses no (after all, it is a yea-sayer, consolation is), lets so rhyme with that same no, and finishes with another on. “Con so lat ion” offers to us little of its nature, since it is sister to “iso” as well as “deso.” A “console” is likely to hold a radio. “Consolation.” The word brings none of any kind I can call to mind, not for a person wishing desperately to be a writer—yet another lesson for the learner.

  We can gather nearly everything from Mr. Dickens, but here is just one more passage to ponder, containing a device that, in the hands of Henry James, becomes transcendent. The sentence sometimes moves as its meaning moves; in this case, like a camera in terms of what it perceives. This camera is able to say what it is doing: I am now backing, tracking, zooming, closing in. A younger, smaller Copperfield is looking down the hall from Peggotty’s kitchen into a churchyard, although the eye’s move (following a blatant pun on “passage”) is an imaginative one:

  Here is a long passage—what an enormous perspective I make of it!—leading from Peggotty’s kitchen to the front-door. A dark store-room opens out of it, and that is a place to be run past at night; for I don’t know what may be among those tubs and jars and old tea-chests, when there is nobody in there with a dimly-burning light, letting a mouldy air come out at the door, in which there is the smell of soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee, all at one whiff. Then there are the two parlours; the parlour in which we sit of an evening, my mother and I and Peggotty—for Peggotty is quite our companion, when her work is done and we are alone—and the best parlour where we sit on a Sunday; grandly, but not so comfortably. There is something of a doleful air about that room to me, for Peggotty has told me—I don’t know when, but apparently ages ago—about my father’s funeral, and the company having their black cloaks put on. One Sunday night my mother reads to Peggotty and me in there, how Lazarus was raised up from the dead. And I am so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.

  I shall rest my case with “soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee.” If you switch “pepper” with “pickles,” retaining both meter and the pattern of alliteration, you will immediately hear why Dickens had it right: “soap, pepper, pickles, candles, and coffee” is hard to say because the two l e’s aren’t as easily articulated when placed that close together, yet their closeness pulls “pickles” into orbit with “candles and coffee” rather than leaving it with the “soap,” where it belongs.

  Just a detail, don’t I hear a critic complain? There are no details in execution, Paul Valéry wisely said. He said everything wisely. Even when what he said wasn’t wise, it was wisely said.

  So smell the moldy air of the storeroom and then the doleful air of the Sunday parlor, and let those memories dance a Proust for you. The dead are no comfort unless doornailed. The paragraph (written in the key of p and rich in Peggotty’s doubled letters) occupies precisely the spaces it makes. And suggests the reason why we compose and perform requiems. And fasten down coffins with lids, and weigh down graves with earth and with heavy headstones. And keep storeroom doors closed. Our instructor’s paragraph has its own stone, exquisitely fashioned from mn’s and o’s: “below the solemn moon.” One can browse this paragraph like a meadow, there is so much that is tender to be chewed. Would poetry were so regularly on its way to milk.

  So the sentence, in search of its birth, is passing through the company of writers the writer has stored like so many bars of soap, barrels of pickles, sacks of coffee, candles connected by uncut wicks. It wants a rhythm the way infants need feet; it hopes for a satisfactory rhetorical shape; it curses its bad luck and low-class diction; it likes to hum a tune as it rolls along.

  I know that you expect decadent authors like myself to cite Nightwood, so I shall, in this instance in order to demonstrate what a bit of delicious diction can do. This is Felix’s father, from the first page, dead already:

  Guido Volkbein, a Jew of Italian descent, had been both a gourmet and a dandy, never appearing in public without the ribbon of some quite unknown distinction tinging his buttonhole with a faint thread. He had been small, round, and haughtily timid, his stomach protruding slightly in an upward jutting slope that brought into prominence the buttons of his waistcoat and trousers, marking the exact centre of his body with the obstetric line seen on fruits—the inevitable arc produced by heavy rounds of burgundy, schlagsahne, and beer.

  The word belly will not appear here, stomach is the preferred term, as is trousers over pants, but there are plenty of “buttons” discreetly placed to remind us of its self-satisfied shape. Djuna Barnes’s observation of the “obstetric line” is worthy of Marianne Moore, and her Germanized whipped cream is a masterstroke. Mister Micawber would have liked to use such language about himself. In any mouth, it will say “fraud.”

  A description is an arrangement of properties, qualities, and features that the author must pick (choose, select), but the art lies in the order of their release—visually, audibly, conceptually—and consequently in the order of their interaction, including the social standing of every word. To accompany Djuna Barnes, here is Flem Snopes in The Hamlet in his bow tie:

  In addition to the gray cloth cap and gray trousers, he wore not only a clean white shirt but a necktie—a tiny machine-made black bow … a tiny viciously depthless cryptically balanced splash like an enigmatic punctuation symbol against the expanse of white shirt which gave him Jody Varner’s look of ceremonial heterodoxy raised to its tenth power and which postulated to those who had been present on that day that quality of outrageous overstatement of physical displacement which the sound of his father’s stiff foot made on the gallery.

  The gray cloth cap, the clean white shirt, the machine-made black bow—ordinary nouns and their simple modifiers that live almost out of sight in the crowd—are succeeded by another triad, this time of abstract, subjective, and judgmental adverbs—“viciously, depthless, cryptically”—capped by “enigmatic punctuation,” “postulated,” and “ceremonial heterodoxy,” before the sentence falls back at the sound of the father’s stiff foot. We recognize this rise and fall in diction to be as typical of Faulkner as is the heteronymous collection of terms for the tie: a viciously depthless splash (the latter a measure that suits most splashes) and a cryptically balanced one, like a punctuation mark on the white shirt.

  As for punctuation, Faulkner very carefully doesn’t give us enough. The words that make up the description of the bow tie come at us without pause, like thrown stones. We are bound to be bumped about on our first try, but then we pick ourselves up and insert the pauses where they belong: “a tiny [pause] viciously depthless [pause] cryptically balanced [pause] splash.” Then we sail along smoothly enough until we hit more rough swells: “ceremonial heterodoxy”—one word like a waltz step, one like the bunny hop.

  Lest we imagine such fancy writing is an accomplishment of the dead alone, here is a final example of language’s social structure, taken from Alexander Theroux’s satirical masterpiece, Three Wogs.

  Touching a finger to her chin, Mrs. Cullinane pondered the frightening aspects of seeing a bread line five miles long filled with beggars, schinocephalic pygmies, gypsies, old men in tatters, imported grobians teetering on the edge of some evolutionary mishap, and Negroes with eyepatches and their bronze-age cutlery, stropped, blood red and as long as broom h
andles, all marching with their ferocious wives and poly-dactylic offspring into Buckingham Palace where, in a stroke, they would chew past the carpets, do the buttery, weasel into the state bins and wardrobe, and devour everything in sight, up to and including the Queen’s Candles.

  This is a style, snobbish to the nose, directed against social prejudice. It describes what it is feared the great unwashed will do if given a chance to use a lavatory, and does so in a highbrow style full of scorn for those who fancy themselves superior while wearing attitudes that bring them below rags. The acerbic Theroux (not to be confused with his glib and unenviable brother) once replied to a reviewer who had dared to demonstrate against one of his sermonious sentences by reminding the author that “less is more,” a lie no more countenanced on the page than in the countinghouse. “More is more,” Stanley Elkin once replied to such a squit. Theroux’s rejoinder in Metaphrastes, because he is an Alexander, was more elaborate:

  To the wood-hewing Gibeonite, the mis-educated snool in factory shoes, it’s [my style is] irksome and my less than homeric reviewer visibly had no patience for it, she, poor thing, with small Latin, less Greek, and an utter void apparently when it comes to knowledge of what we today have inherited from the beautiful Franco-Latin-English trilingualism of the Norman Period.

  As if Pinocchio had lengthened his nose only to look longer down it at earthworms, Theroux’s lines are triumphs of tone, a topic we now wearily arrive at after a long walk through diction, rhythm, rhyme, and even some reason. Theroux, quite put out, goes on to get even angrier at Samuel Clemens, who hasn’t any longer the energy required to resurrect and read Three Wogs, let alone Darconville’s Cat:

  “Eschew surplusage,” snapped Twain, that anti-European, anti-Catholic pinchfist from the American midwest, with his unlovely spray of scentless botanicals. Blink the incidentals! Fract that chicken! Scumble that depth-of-field! Rip off that wainscotting! Slubber that gloss! Steam down those frills! (Metaphrastes.)

  Alexander Theroux does not find the periphrastic Mr. Micawber funny, possibly because both are shopping for the same bargain: a stool to stand on, a place where one may feel superior even to the lake of the same name.

  The tone of most writing is that of neglect born of indifference, with the consequent loss of much possible effect, but tone need not be an absent feature of a style that is plain, direct, and Anglo-Saxon. Twain would have repealed the Norman Conquest if he’d had a genie to grant his wish; otherwise, he can tub-thump with the best of them, and against every kind of cleric. He is Amurrican, all right, sage of the whittle stick, a teller of tall tales and a lay-about liar, otherwise a skeptical son of the King James Version, with enough tone, enough attitude, to hay a horse.

  The example to which I now turn—the example of examples—is printed on the obverse page, where a sentence from Henry James’s Italian Hours is reproduced as a spindle diagram. One is to imagine a stake driven through the sentence at its core in order to show the spine upon which the sentence hangs—namely, the infinitive and its repetitions: “to dwell,” “to have,” “to be able,” “to gallop,” “to look,” “to come back,” “to lead,” and “to gather,” along with the ghost “to dispose.” The second spindle skewers fifteen “and”s and the one “with” that joins them, to disclose a vertically organizing hinge. Two opening and closing latches can be found at “it” and at “of,” the preposition with which the sentence and its trip daringly concludes.

  The sentence and its subject leave the bustle of Rome for the quiet countryside. Three clauses open the city section, which is populated by eight descriptive phrases and ends with a one-line summary—the good and evil of it all. A couple of clauses front the escape into the countryside, which is made of four poetical descriptions, packed like a picnic with assonance, alliteration, consonance, and metaphor until, having eaten all its images, the prose returns through some gates to a six-propertied, less public, Rome again, before making its final falsely modest summation.

  To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and threatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinner parties and all the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look at the tufted broom blowing on a lonely tower top in the still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the “world,” dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about “Middlemarch” to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut shirt—all this is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of.

  A mind of slender capacities like his own, James suggests, may be bewildered by this double life. In which case, what will ours hold? We may have a brain the proverbial size of a pea, but perhaps our brain can manage to be the sort of pea that makes a princess uncomfortable.

  Of course most sentences need not, nor should, be built like a museum or a palace, but built they will be, well or ill or so-so, and their paragraphs, like towns they partially comprise, will also be commodious or cramped—a Paris Texas or a Paris France.

  Henry James always repays study, not simply because he knows what his vowels are about (“hollow sounding mounds”), but because he pays the best attention to everything, including the paragraphs that follow, for which this sentence is a preparation. An extended anecdote, like the country ramble, leaves the main road of the text and takes us to a farm where horses may be had for an exhilarating gallop. Why are we here? To illustrate the “double life” and confirm the presence of so many impressions, of which one bundle makes up the owner of the stables: “We talked with the farmer, a handsome, pale, fever-tainted fellow with a well-to-do air that didn’t in the least deter his affability from a turn compatible with the acceptance of small coin …”

  We must notice, with an admiration we should have used up by this time, what James does not write: He does not write “with the acceptance of a few small coins,” and he does not write “with the acceptance of some small coins,” or, even more unlikely, he does not write “with the acceptance of a tip”; rather, he elevates what might have been a by-the-way occurrence into a prescribed part of the farmer’s profession: “the acceptance of small coin.” The farmer must remain a farmer, not a servant, in his own freeholding mind, while his grand air, his affability, compatibility, and acceptance all hover, like tethered balloons, at the same altitude (I almost wrote “height”) of genial abstraction.

  The discreet tug of James’s f’s and the competition between the fellow’s fever and his well-to-do-ness help keep the farmer at a distance the writer will measure only with his walking stick.

  What are all these bucolic pages up to, after all? This is travel prose; we are seeing things, hearing things; our life is full of both nature and—rather high—society. My specimen sentence maps its represented journey, and disposes of the impressions it has gathered—despite modest protestations to the contrary—with a skill so practiced and secure, a form so perfectly adapted to its aims, that the reader forgets for a moment where she is: in a bit of prose written for the magazines in order to redeem the luxury of travel and the pleasures of high society from accusations of pure indulgence, and, by the by, to make a little money.

  To worship now, another god. How often, from a high window, did some unacknowledged widow watch for the return of her husband’s ship? Melville knows, and Melville will furnish me, in the eighth sketch of The Encantadas, with my final example of some of those aspects of writin
g whose neglect, in favor of the famous “plot” and “character” and “moral aim,” has so often fatally damaged just those prized factors. The “image” is the element I mean: the sudden transformative lens through which a commonplace can become as mesmerizing as a religious mystery. Here is a widow similarly preoccupied both with a window and one of its trappings, a venetian shade (I avoid the customary word here because Melville will pun upon it), waiting for a seaman who has not returned, as if “not returning” were a sail itself on an empty horizon. Properties of the shade are selected. The rhythm is recalcitrant.

  The panel of the days was deeply worn, the long tenth notches half effaced, as alphabets of the blind. Ten thousand times the longing widow had traced her finger over the bamboo—dull flute, which played on, gave no sound—as if counting birds flown by in air, would hasten tortoises creeping through the woods.

  The bamboo blind is fingered as though it were Braille worn down by a learner, or as if the tracing finger were lingering on, and moving off, the double o and ou stops of a flute, and this futile enterprise, longing’s Sargasso Sea, is compared to counting birds, as if their numbers and the frequency of their passage would hasten the tortoise—perhaps in its futile pursuit of the hare.

  The panel of the days turned into an alphabet—good—the alphabet, when fingered, became a flute—grand—the whole repetitive procedure by a leap refigured: as if counting hours were like counting passing birds, as if fingering the slats of a venetian blind spelled something, played something, a tune to urge turtles, symbols of longevity, on their laggardly way—a desperate non sequitur, but one of genius.