Life Sentences Read online

  Also by William H. Gass

  FICTION

  Cartesian Sonata

  The Tunnel

  Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife

  In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

  Omensetter’s Luck

  NONFICTION

  A Temple of Texts

  Tests of Time

  Reading Rilke

  Finding a Form

  Habitations of the Word

  The World Within the Word

  On Being Blue

  Fiction and the Figures of Life

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by William H. Gass

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpt from The Tunnel by William H. Gass, copyright © 1995 by William H. Gass. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  University of Chicago Press: Excerpt from Gnomes and Occasions by Howard Nemerov, copyright © 1973 by Howard Nemerov. Used by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gass, William H., [date]

  Life sentences : literary judgments and accounts / William H. Gass

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95744-3

  I. Title.

  PS3557.A845L54 2012

  814’.54—dc23 2011033577

  Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde

  v3.1

  For Mary, Catherine, and Elizabeth

  The women in my life

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  THE PERSONALS COLUMN

  The Literary Miracle

  Slices of Life in a Library

  Spit in the Mitt

  The First Fourth Following 9/11

  What Freedom of Expression Means, Especially in Times Like These

  Retrospection

  OLD FAVORITES AND FRESH ENEMIES

  A Wreath for the Grave of Gertrude Stein

  Reading Proust

  Nietzsche: In Illness and in Health

  Kafka: Half a Man, Half a Metaphor

  Unsteady as She Goes: Malcolm Lowry’s Cinema Inferno

  The Bush of Belief

  Henry James’s Curriculum Vitae

  An Introduction to John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain

  Katherine Anne Porter’s Fictional Self

  Knut Hamsun

  Kinds of Killing

  THE BIGGS LECTURES IN THE CLASSICS

  Form: Eidos

  Mimesis

  Metaphor

  THEORETICS

  Lust

  Narrative Sentences

  The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence

  Acknowledgments

  The Personals Column

  THE LITERARY MIRACLE

  An acceptance speech for the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

  I have already participated in the Truman Capote Prize for Criticism, first as a nominator, then as an evaluator, so I am familiar with many of the texts which have been considered for it in the past. They comprise a company I should be proud to say I keep, and I am grateful that you have now encouraged me to that immodesty.

  I have always been interested in miracles—not just in the one we are presently celebrating, but especially in the secular kinds. A miracle is something that cannot happen, and shouldn’t, and won’t again, but has occurred all the same, despite laws, odds, expectations. A miracle is also something fortunate for somebody, and suggests the influence of a higher power—doubtless a holdover from its sacred use. We don’t say, “Wow, five hundred people died from eating the same ice-cream cone. It’s a miracle!” though it is remarkable, even deplorable, depending upon the flavor.

  There is another sort of miracle, though, equally unlikely, equally difficult to explain, but one that occurs with satisfactory frequency despite enemies almost as persistent as mortality itself, and that is a phenomenon called consciousness and its tendency toward individuation.

  Hume, I think, was right in insisting that any event that deserved to be classified as a miracle should be examined by a host of competent observers who had nothing to gain if Lazarus, to take a famous example, were to wake from his death to boast that now only his belly ached. Suppose dispassionate and qualified observers could be found in Beijing, Berlin, and Boston. Then Lazarus would have to oblige by dying (when he wasn’t booked elsewhere) in front of gathered specialists in these varied cities, who might attest then to his pre- and postmortem condition. Of course, if his revival was used to support the claims of any religion, political party, or upcoming movie, it would be immediately disqualified for violating the impartiality rule, and if it passed all tests it would simply become another exceptional break in an otherwise impeccable regularity, like black swans or albino squirrels, and no longer a miracle at all. Footnotes would merely mention that a few folk, each one named Lazarus and owning a mole on his left cheek, occasionally returned to life after their deaths, if their deaths occurred on the second of February, and they performed their demises in public before qualified officials for the edification and amusement of many. This kind of circular begging of the question is okay if Hume does it.

  Not content, we would explain the anomaly by showing that—whatever the exemplary occurrence was—some subatomic particle, not the butler, had done it, and further that this surprising breach of the laws of nature formed a pattern with others of a similar sort (like albinism), and was, in fact, establishing a February second, mole-cheeked regularity of its own. If black swans can do it, why can’t the Lazarites?

  The finer works of art are miracles in the sense that they are so unlikely to have emerged from the ignoble and bloody hands of man that we stand in awe of them, and that they have been written or built or composed at the behest of superstitions so blatantly foolish as to embarrass reason, and cause common sense to snicker, is itself wondrous and beyond ordinary comprehension. However, the fact that a gay guy painted the Sistine ceiling is not nearly as dumbfounding as the papacy’s protection of pederasts in spite of their official attitude toward such “objectionable” practices—one of which ought to be the ceiling itself, for if anything is unnatural, for them, genius is.

  The secular miracle is an incomprehensible juxtaposition of events, not a rare or occasional break in the order of things, but a paired regularity that persists in making no sense: the first being the creation of inspired art, and the second requiring a wonder equal to it, namely, that such astonishments are accomplished, often, by quite ordinary or even subpar human beings. For a long time I have been trying to understand these two things—the miracle of their appearance and the unlikely nature of their cause. Moreover, some of these artists are required to perform their miracles many times, for patrons and audiences everywhere, something we know Lazarus could not manage.

  No wonder the Muses worked overtime, and inspiration, itself inexplicable, was often offered as an explanation. As cognitively empty as the concept has always been, there was this much to it: when inspiration struck, the vain slow-witted poet of commonplaces left his body like someone removing a soiled shirt, and the spirit of a higher power took his place. Pete the poet didn’t do it, any more than Paul t he prophet had the vocal cords to speak for God, but simply lip-synched the deity’s messages, which had been conveniently prerecorded for this purpose.

  Yeats writes amazing poems on behalf of a personal mythology; Blake also roars at the wind like a hound at the moon; dozens and dozens of other poets, ditto; Wagner rises to unheard-of—or rather heard—heights despite a character that would not be chosen by a jackal; Mozart often played the fool; Marlowe was a murderer; some artists are bigots, some are thieves, far too many were Tories. Out of the mouths of sewers fine wine flows; out of bitter British laureates, truths sneak like thieves. What is to be made of all this? What are the contents of these revelations?

  Are we really to suppose that Dante was right about the afterworld? Is that why his Comedy is so compelling? Or that he was just such a fine chap he should have been canonized by the Church as well as the academy? And his genius pours out of him like wine from a bottle he couldn’t stopper? Ah … it’s because it is a handsome tale of revenge and redemption. Well, an act of revenge it surely is. No one ever got even as unfairly or as often as Dante.

  Gertrude Stein (not one of the slow wits) said: “Let me recite you what history teaches. History teaches.” And painters paint, musicians compose, and writers put one word next to another, as we all do when we write, so what is the difference? But Shakespeare had profound thoughts, deep feelings, a proud incorruptible pen … didn’t he? We wish we knew. What we do know is that his words, led by their music, rich in range and reference, a remarkable image in every line, expressed ideas with the force of a fist, evoked passions more profound than the abyss (not the pits which are easily provoked but as shallow as a saucer), and, to consider that proud pen’s problems … well, it probably made humiliating accommodations to stagecraft, actors, donors, and the political weather.

  What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds. Not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s. They are merely partaking of the evolutionary miracle found most obviously in man, but not necessarily any more useful to his survival than a raven’s, or a cat’s, or a chimp’s is to its. It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness. And how it happens, and what value it has, has been a persistent question in my little essayistic exercises.

  Emerson’s essays build the mind that thinks them. It is that mind that is the miracle that interests me. Did he think the thinker who then thinks his thoughts? “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” I don’t believe he began by having “the eye is the first circle” arrive in his own inward office like a parishioner with a problem, and that, subsequently, he copied this thought down exactly the way it appeared when it knocked, and as he would have been required to had the words come from Allah or from God. He wrote them down so he could think their thought. And when he thought, “the eye is the first circle,” I’ll bet he didn’t know what the second circle was. But writing notions down means building them up; it means to set forth on a word, only to turn back, erasing and replacing, choosing and refusing alternatives, listening to the language, and watching the idea take shape like solidifying fog.

  “Dream,” he writes … “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.” Apparently life is a train made of metaphors: life is just a bowl of cherries, life is rosy as a cheek, life is alum, stinging nettles, a bog, a lawn, a log on which we may sit in good company while we converse beneath another, not yet fallen, tree. I feel fulfilled and ripe today, rich with juice, but yesterday I was as sour as a grape. In essays like “Circles” and “Experience,” Emerson takes the measure of our moodiness, our vagaries, in different sentences, other images, changing speeds. It is not the idea, but an awareness of it that he catches. “What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”

  Thoughts are assembled, worried like a cat with its mouse, armed against enemies, refined and refashioned, slid forth into the world like a christened ship. Perceptions, feelings, energies, and images are parts of the same verbal enterprise that creates, for instance, a poem. “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”

  To adorn nature with a new thing: that is the miracle that matters. Most prose flows into an ocean of undifferentiated words. To objectify through language a created consciousness, provide it with the treasured particularity we hope for for each human being—that is the cherished aim of the art.

  What does make a sentence or a line of verse rise from the dead and walk again, run for a record, and even dance as dancers do when blessed? It is important for the reader to respond to these miracles with belief when they occur, because two or three inspired lines can turn a sonnet into a masterpiece, or make what might have been a rather slight little song into an arresting aria. It is equally crucial for the critic to be aware of those who merely mimic greatness through grandeur’s empty gestures, and not be taken in by inarticulate simplicity’s pretense to profundity, or answer to the trumpets that announce the coming of deep feeling as they might the queen. In addition, the critic should remain suspicious of imaginative sweeps more suitable to a broom, or a rhetoric that’s about to ride longhaired but bareback through the streets.

  Matthew Arnold called genuine poetic moments “touchstones,” since it seemed to him they were exemplary instances of inspiration, and Paul Valéry, who liked to think artistry was an arm of intellect, confessed that some lines, images, or phrases appeared suddenly, inexplicably, from who knew what embarrassingly irrational depths, and between these glistening peaks were the dull unambitious gullies that the skills of the poet had to fill with intelligence and technique, as you might try to level a road. In short, between these rare and wonderful gifts from the gods, a chain gang’s labor.

  Though the three greatest masters of English prose—Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne—came to their loose syntax and noble music by way of Latin, they were capable of some resounding Anglo-Saxon when those notes were needed, and it is among their sentences that the miracles I have been speaking of can be most frequently found. Emerson may have had passages from Browne’s Urn Burial in mind when he wrote “Circles”—especially the one by Sir Thomas that begins:

  Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks.

  I can repeat these clauses with the same appreciation I have for the greatest poetry: “our fathers find their graves in our short memories”; “grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years”; “old families last not three oaks.”

  But the sons and daughters of such sentences—Virginia Woolf, for instance, Henry James—aspire always to, and often realize, such heights. From their eminence they urge even us, with our lesser talents, to make the climb, because, though we must halt at a ledge halfway, the view of the valley below is still sublime.

  SLICES OF LIFE IN A LIBRARY

  I live in a library.

  When I was a youngster, eager to leave the nest although flightless as a dodo, I would imagine a magical new life for myself in New Zealand. Since I knew nothing about New Zealand except that it was at both ends of the earth and had rules against bringing bad habits into the country, my Zealand could be dreamed as I chose, made safe from all family connections and therefore without resident illness or anger, its days sweet, its nights serene. There, trees bore books instead of fruit, and one drank sodas tapped from gourds whose juices had been blessed by the native gods. I would sail there as a deckhand on a ship whose description came from Joseph Conrad and whose course was plotted by Robert Louis Stevenson. Getting away was cheaper by the book than by the ticket, and when you went by book you were always home in time for dinner.

  Then, during the Second World War, I actually sailed the ocean blue. The sea was all that had been written of it. It was never blue; it was moody; there was a lot of it; and it was, every ship’s bell, more beautiful than the bells before. On calm days its surface was the skin of a sleeping creature. I would wash my skivvies by tying them to the end of a rope and letting the ship pull them through the water as though I was fishing for a bigger catch, perhaps a dress suit. There they gathered salt while being thoroughly scoured, so that wearing them was no longer advisable. I decided to go without underwear, something I managed for a brief time, till a tell-all told all to my superiors, of whom there were many. Several years later, packed away in drawers at home, my skivvies still smelled of salt.

  I was a passively disobedient officer, often confined to my quarters, where I read whatever readable books were aboard. This lot consisted of a handful of Hemingway and a pinch of Faulkner. Otherwise I played chess with another miscreant, who was never confined to quarters but was always there anyhow. Because of my exemplary incompetence I was promoted (such is the navy way) to top-secret officer. I was therefore entrusted with the combination to the ship’s walk-in safe, where books of codes and ciphers, printed on dissolvable paper and weighted with lead, dwelt in silent isolation except for the company they kept with the ship’s medicinal booze. To this secure space, the size of a bedroom at the Red Roof Inn, I regularly repaired, closed its heavy armored door, nipped a bit of brandy, and read the same Hemingway and Faulkner I had already repeatedly enjoyed, but with my ease uninterrupted and my attention undistracted—a lot like my dreamy New Zealand—until some tell-all told all to my superiors, of whom there were many. They immediately removed the brandy. I could still lock myself in and read or snooze. My superiors seemed content to miss me.