In the Heart of the Heart of the Country Read online

  WILLIAM H. GASS (b. 1924) is an essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He grew up in Ohio and is a former professor of philosophy at Washington University. Among his books are six works of fiction and nine books of nonfiction, including On Being Blue (1976; published as an NYRB Classic), Tests of Time (2002), A Temple of Texts (2006), and Life Sentences (2012). Gass lives with his wife, the architect Mary Gass, in St. Louis.

  JOANNA SCOTT’s most recent novel is De Potter’s Grand Tour. Her other books include the novels Arrogance, The Manikin, and Follow Me and the story collections Various Antidotes and Everybody Loves Somebody.

  IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

  And Other Stories

  WILLIAM H. GASS

  Introduction by

  JOANNA SCOTT

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1958, 1961, 1962, 1967, 1968 by William Gass

  Foreword copyright © 1981 by William H. Gass

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Joanna Scott

  All rights reserved.

  These stories originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following magazines: “The Pedersen Kid” in MSS, “Mrs. Mean” in Accent, “Icicles” in Perspective, “Order of Insects” in The Minnesota Review, and “In the Heart of the Heart of the County” in New American Review.

  Cover image: T. W. Smillie, Photograph Painting of Creek and Small Waterfall, by E. L. Rogers?, c. 1890; Smithsonian Institution

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gass, William H., 1924–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  In the heart of the heart of the country / by William H. Gass; introduction by Joanna Scott.

  1 online resource. — (NYRB classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-791-4 — ISBN 978-1-59017-764-8 (paperback)

  I. Title.

  PS3557.A845

  813'.54—dc23

  2014022180

  ISBN 978-1-59017-791-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction by Joanna Scott

  Preface by William H. Gass

  THE PEDERSEN KID

  MRS. MEAN

  ICICLES

  ORDER OF INSECTS

  IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

  INTRODUCTION

  In the heart of the heart of this collection, deep inside the title story, the narrator contemplates his cat, Mr. Tick: “You are a cat—you cannot understand—you are a cat so easily.” The confident Mr. Tick, unlike the narrator, does not worry over his mortality or think about the burden of self-consciousness. He does not care that the past is past. He does not fear possibility or imagine himself as anything other than the cat he is. Mr. Tick spends his time murdering birds and walking across rooftops. Content just to be alive, he moves elegantly, “his long tail rhyming with his paws,” leaving our forlorn narrator to fend off loneliness on his own, with the only weapon he has at his disposal: words.

  Words are free, there for the taking, and William Gass makes sure we are aware of their infinite potential. Words can be used to command, to describe, to denigrate. They can be strung into sentences and bellowed in a song “in such a way that from a distance it will seem a harmony, a Strindberg play, a friendship ring.” We understand nuance and learn how to prepare for consequence with the help of words. We can make beautiful things with words. Those inclined can dare to treat the medium of language as an inexhaustible source of art.

  Art is the business of serious writers, Gass insists. A brilliant essayist as well as one of this nation’s most important novelists, Gass argues in his essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” that the task for a serious writer is twofold: “He must show or exhibit his world, and to do this he must actually make something, not merely describe something that might be made.” In his emphasis on making, Gass is proposing that the meaning generated by a work of fiction goes beyond its mimetic familiarity. The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn’t to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers “a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language.” A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author’s agile mind.

  The stories that comprise In the Heart of the Heart of the Country first began to appear in periodicals in the late 1950s. For Gass and his generation at that moment, modernism was such a gargantuan precursor that it threatened to obscure the work that followed. Whether they considered literary modernism a failed experiment, characterized by H.G. Wells as a “monstrous egotism of artistry,” or a grand success that expresses, in Virginia Woolf’s estimate, “the quick of the mind,” novelists beginning their careers in the 1950s and ’60s necessarily had to position themselves in response to the dramatic shape-shifting that had just occurred in their genre. Joyce’s Ulysses, arguably the most influential book of the twentieth century, stood as a particularly powerful model of formal innovation. For those who chose to build off modernism, fiction became a field for radical explorations in narrative form and voice. Writers set out in search of new techniques that could serve as sources of discovery and offer unique opportunities for amplifying the potential meaning of their subject matter.

  Looking back over this heady period in American literary culture, John Gardner would claim that no one writing at that moment “was willing to live by the old, righteous rules.” Fiction, like all art, was supposed to be free from the shackles of rules. Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” (a slogan that Pound tellingly recycled from Chinese historical sources) continued to reverberate as the defining challenge.

  Gardner recognized the need to give these adventurous new writers a venue and in 1960 co-founded the literary journal MSS, based in California. While he was collecting material to publish in the first volume, a story called “The Pedersen Kid,” by a young writer named William Gass, came to his attention. A fellow editor told Gardner that the story had been rejected at another journal because it had “questionable language; doubts had been expressed about meaning and point of view.” We know from Gass that he had been sending out the story for seven or eight years before it landed on Gardner’s desk. Gardner jumped at the opportunity to publish it.

  In “The Pedersen Kid”—the lead story of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country—Gass has created a narrative that with its disruptions and immersions is reminiscent of Quentin’s chapter in The Sound and the Fury. Like Faulkner, Gass does more than depict a boy’s experiences; he offers a full enactment of a boy’s confusion. As Jorge struggles to assess the danger of his predicament near the end of the story, even the print takes on dramatic shape in an expression of fear: “He’s even come round maybe. Oh no jesus please. Round.” At the same time, Gass conveys the physical impact of the setting with unrivaled intensity, offering, through Jorge’s perception, a Midwestern landscape where snow is “as blue as the sky,” stars are “flakes being born that will not fall,” and larks in summer “winked with their tails taking off.”

  Devoted as he is to artistic excellence, Gass has never been cowed by the bold ambitions of the modernists. Just the opposite. In h
is essays, he pays tribute to writers he associates with what he calls “a permanent avant-garde”—Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce. Gass’s own essential fiction, written over the past half century, offers us a strikingly varied array of forms, all enriched with wit, intense emotion, and provocation, all full of the promise of discovery. He doesn’t mind when a writer’s intelligence is on display, especially since he values the intelligence of a perceptive reader. He reminds us that art is a proven human glory, and that literature shares with all great art the potential to expand our awareness.

  In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, first published in 1968, reaches across two great expanses: the harsh, flat exterior landscape of the Midwest, and the mysterious interior landscape of human consciousness. Both landscapes hide secrets. Beware the salesman Pearson, in Gass’s story “Icicles,” who twists his magazine into a roll and with a whack asserts his certainty: “It’s so clear. It’s so easy. It’s so clean.” In these fictions, Gass shows us that certainty is an elusive prey. Snowdrifts cover evidence of a terrible crime. Typewriter-ribbon tins hide a housewife’s obsession. A man goes into his house, closes his door, and closes his eyes—“there’s simply no way of knowing how lonely and empty he is . . . here in the heart of the country.”

  We travel with Gass through this collection toward a center that beckons, the heart within the heartland. “This Midwest,” says the narrator of the title story, “a dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; our outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time, as Alice both changed and remained in her story.” For Gass—born in North Dakota, raised in Ohio, and rooted for the past several decades in St. Louis—the American Midwest is home. The region, with all its consonance and dissonance, enriches his literary explorations. The scenery and weather, the noises of its farms and neighborhoods, the conflicts and longings of its people are vividly rendered. But Gass’s fictional Midwest is also infused with mystery—“epiphanous,” he asserts, yet still “an enigma.”

  The stories invite us to follow the author’s map and focus our attention. “So I have sailed the sea and come . . . / to B . . . / a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.” It may seem a barren land from afar, yet up close we see it is teeming with singular characters. Meet the formidable Aunt Pet, who will raise the knob of her walking stick to the level of your eyes. There’s Big Hans, who drops the frozen Pedersen kid on the table, on top of biscuit dough. Rolling and raking, spinning and clipping, waging war against the weeds is Mrs. Mean—that’s not her real name, but it serves her fine. A gaggle of children run through this book: the boy known only as the Pedersen kid, Jorge, Ames, Nancy, Toll, Tim, Cheryl Pipes, Paula Frosty. And sauntering through the neighborhood goes that dignified cat with his perfect name, Mr. Tick.

  Words are names we attach to things to create definition. In Gass’s hands, the outline of meaning is filled in and expanded with comparisons, contrasts, implications, confessions, rebuttals, questions, arguments, derision, and repetition. Words to watch for in these stories include snow (it’s beautiful, deadly, boring, and defiant), inside (where characters go for shelter from the cold, where they hide, and where they can’t escape themselves), imagination (we learn from the housewife in “Order of Insects” how easy it is to lose control of it), world (jostle it a little, and the l comes out: “The world—how grand, how monumental, grave and deadly, that word is”), and, of course, heart.

  Added together into sentences and paragraphs, words are the signs that provide a route toward truth. We tunnel through snowdrifts and head inside, seeking to discover what lies in the hearts of these characters. It’s not, as the salesman Pearson pretends, clear, easy, or clean. Nor should it be, not with so much at stake. Gass gives us the opportunity to learn more than we thought it possible to know about his subjects, and to enjoy the pleasure that comes from a deepening of understanding. We imagine what it’s like to inhabit other selves. Through them, we may begin to grasp the beauty and enormity of the world this writer has created.

  —JOANNA SCOTT

  PREFACE

  Few of the stories one has it in one’s self to speak get spoken, because the heart rarely confesses to intelligence its deeper needs; and few of the stories one has at the top of one’s head to tell get told, because the mind does not always possess the voice for them. Even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor or with love, where is that sensitive, admiring, other pair of ears?

  No court commands our entertainments, requires our flattery, needs our loyal enlargements or memorializing lies. Fame is not a whore we can ring up. The public spends its money at the movies. It fills stadia with cheers; dances to organized noise; while books die quietly, and more rapidly than their authors. Mammon has no interest in our service.

  Literature once held families together better than quarreling. It carved a common ancestry simply from vibrating air, peopling an often empty and forgotten past with gods, demons, worthy enemies and proper heroes, until it became largely responsible for that pride we sometimes still take in being Athenian or Basque, a follower or fan. Think of the myths we’ve wrapped around Lincoln, that figure we have made a fiction in order to make him immortal. Think of the satisfaction there is in supporting a winning team of any kind. It’s no small gift, this sense of worth which reaches us ahead of any action of our own, like hair at birth, and makes brilliant enterprises possible.

  Some of the stories in this book have been alive (such is the brevity of story-life these days—like the photographer’s flash) a long time (no time at all, of course, for Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple is now one hundred years old); no, not long by immortal measure, yet a surprising while, nevertheless, like the landed fish who startles us with a late flop. Now I’m to place a few words in front of them—these tales without plot or people, I’ve been told—and I wonder whether they should serve as muffled drums or slowed steps do: to ready respect before the coming of the hearse.

  Perhaps it is the case with many fabrications, but I am struck by how easily they might not have been at all; how really unreasonably provisional their entire existence is. The same for us all, you say? aren’t we accidents of genes and conditions of acidity ourselves, of elemental woove and wovvle? the product of opportunity and inclination, simple negligence and malice? Yes. O. Yes. Of course. But we burgeon as easily as water falls. We grow meanly like a cancer. Wasted acres testify to the undiminished requirements of our needs. Suppose it were otherwise, and a mother had to make her child’s every cell. How many of us, in that case, would reach complete existence?

  What of these excruciating passivities of print, then? If I break a dish, physics takes charge of my freedom like a warden, and there’s no finger-smear of mine in the scatter of its bits. My cat’s grassy urps, alas, show more of me than the shavings in my sharpener. However, these—these litters of language—they could not exist without the stubborn sustainment of my will . . . amazing to contemplate . . . a commonplace to encounter. So consciously composed, these stories are naturally laden with indebtedness, as though they had been to Hawaii, and encircled by exotic blooms. If my hero’s hair is red as rust, to whom goes the credit—a recessive gene in my grandmother’s unmentionable make-up? And all those authors I have lain with—loved—left—which ones are to blame for my page-long shopping lists, my vulgarized lingo, my tin pan prose? whose blood beats in the baby when none will claim paternity and the mother is unknown?

  To be born unencumbered is not the complete advantage one might immediately imagine. Although the struggle to free one’s youthful self of religion, relatives, and region is thereby greatly simplified, since there are no complicated cuffs to be unclasped, no subtle knots to be untied, the self in question is as vague and vaguely messy as a smudged line. I was born in a place as empty of distinction as my writing desk. When I wrote most of these stories, it was a dining table, featureless as Fargo. And
I was born through a time so unnoteworthy in the locality that public memory starved, though I was scarcely six weeks old when I was floated out of North Dakota like Moses in a wicker basket. Alas . . . the resemblance was a brief and shallow one, because my basket was placed on the back seat of an old Dodge which tunnelled through twelve hundred miles of gravel dust to surface at the sooty industrial city in Ohio where my father was to teach and eventually to clench his bones together in a painful, accusatory claw.

  Obscurely born (rumors circulated secretly like poorly printed money: was I caesarian? a breech? were those forceps marks on the back of my little red neck? was my papa playing baseball when my mother pushed me screaming into being? was I supposed to care that I was born obscurely?) of parents who hardly honored their heritage even by the bother of forcibly forgetting it; and who had many prejudices but few beliefs (the town I grew quickly older in appeared to be full of nigs, micks, wops, spicks, bohunks, polacks, kikes; on the public walks, in the halls of the high school, one could not be too careful of the profaned lips of water fountains); thus while there was much to complain of, just as there is in any family—much to resist—it was all quite particular, palpable, concrete. Good little clerk, my father hated workers, blacks, and Jews, the way he expected women to hate worms. There wasn’t a faith to embrace or an ideology to spurn, unless perhaps it was the general suggestion of something poisonously Republican, or a periodical’s respect for certain Trade Marks. And I remember resolving, while on long walks or during summer reveries or while deep in the night’s bed, not to be like that, when that was whatever was around me: Warren, Ohio—factory smoke, depression, household gloom, resentments, illness, ugliness, despair, etcetera, and littleness, above all, smallness, the encroachment of the lean and meager. I won’t be like that, I said, and naturally I grew in special hidden ways to be more like that than anyone could possibly imagine, or myself admit. Even as a grown man I was still desperately boasting that I’d choose another cunt to come from. Well, Balzac wanted his de, and I wanted my anonymity.