A Girandole for Mr. Gass
Bradford Morrow
Read anything by William Gass and you bear witness to what great writing is about. Writing that will survive the infamous vicissitudes of time and taste. Incapable of fashioning a dull idea or courting a cliché, he matches the necessary, often unanticipated, image, the apt metaphor, with an equally necessary, equally apt language. And it moves like water. Form is content in a Gass sentence just as the contextual rhymes with its musical form. There's a bit of Bach here, a touch of Scarlatti, some Messiaen in The Tunnel, and also, on occasion, Charlie Parker. He is a medium with a message, just as his medium is a message. A literary magician without peer, Gass, unlike the recently outed Houdini, harbors no tricks up his sleeve, secrets no sneaky key in his cheek, nor does he offer up a single spurious sleight in anything he's put on paper. He pulls real rabbits from his word hat, and even the occasional ribbeting frog, pace Marianne Moore. There are a host of reasons he is the mentor to so many writers in my generation, as well as the generation of writers just now beginning to publish fiction, not to mention poetry and essays, as well as painters painting canvases in every shade of blue.
With mere words he anatomized melancholy, decoded the culture of a color, and laid out a way of thinking about our immediate and mostly mad universe, in one fell philosophical swoop. This would be On Being Blue, of course, with one of my dozens, no, hundredsof favorite Gassisms: "There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren't nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they're not at all sexy; and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough." Here is another, from Fiction and the Figures of Life: “A word is a concept made flesh, if you like-the eternal presented as noise." How's this for an opening line of a story by a fellow from Fargo, North Dakota:
So I have sailed the seas and come . . .
to B . . .
a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.
Read, savor, the dark beauty ofthis: "He had fathered every folly, every sin. No goat knew gluttony like his, no cat had felt his pride, no crow his avarice. He had said the psalm against envy, the psalm against anger, the psalm against sloth and the loss of hope, but they were no defense. He had wanted women. He had imagined them in every posture. He had wanted men. There was no perversity he had not thought to practice with them." The inevitability of these blasphemous deeds and thoughts are all wrought in a rhythm, made of simple, straightforward words. Like forging diamonds from toothpicks and chewing gum, not easily accomplished. "Further, he had wanted little girls. He had wanted boys. He had wanted most of all himself.” As this paragraph from Omensetter's Luck unfolds, the portrait doesn't get any prettier. Read it, if you haven't read it; check it out again, if you have (page 262). It is diabolically good. I remember first reading a short fugue that Bill had the generosity of sending along to a little-known literary journal that I had started at the front-end of the eighties, Conjunctions, and had the honor of publishing. "My dad wouldn't let me have a dog, it went. "A dog? A dog we don't need. My mom made the neighbor's spitz her pal by poisoning it with the gin she sprinkled on the table scraps. Feed it somewhere else, my dad said. A dog we don't need." I cracked up, holding the typescript of this brutal, brilliant exegesis of adolescence versus parenthood in my hands. "No. Chewed shoes, fleas, muddy paws and yappy daddle, bowser odor: a dog we don't need." Even Stephen King, much to Bill's astonishment when I told him about it in Paris, many years later, loved The Tunnel and prefaced his own reading at Princeton, where I was guest-teaching at the time, with an opening remark to the crowded audience of academ- ics, students, and leather-clad bikers, “Have you heard of this guy, William H. Gass? He's unbelievable. Let me read you from his new book," and so he did. Remember this, from Willie Masters' Lonesomе Wife...?
Actually,
it doesn't
matter how t
his scene is pla
yed, for this is wh
at they call a natura
lly humorous situatio
n. It's what you want to
try for: a naturally humor
ous situation. Now a fellow
finding his penis baked in his
breakfast roll like a toad in a bis
cuit-that's a naturally humorous . . .
And who ever brought more meaning to bear on the word "and"? Mr. Gass goes on, and on, and and. He is simply the Shakespeare of our day, a bawdy comic, a brilliant tragedian, a historian who would seem to know the full measure of human folly and dignity. In my copy of Habitations of the Word,Bill has written an inscription, "This stuff ought to be called The Rabbitation of the Word-but I won't stop copulating." Don't, old friend. We are all too eager to have more magic from your fruitful mind and fertile heart.
