Review of Contemporary Fiction
Fall 1991
EDITOR'S NOTE: Dates in parentheses refer to letters contained in the Twentieth-Century Literary Manuscripts Collection of the Washington University Olin Library System in St. Louis. I am grateful to William Gass and Stanley Elkin, as well as to Kevin Ray, Curator of Manuscripts, for permission to reprint these documents.
Gass first came to prominence in the pages of Accent, thanks in large measure to the advocacy of Charles Shattuck, coeditor of that journal, which was published at the University of Illinois. The Winter 1958 issue featured "Mrs. Mean" and "The Triumph of Israbestis Tott" (the latter from the novel-in-progress Omensetter's Luck), as well as an essay on Henry James, "The High Brutality of Good Intentions," which would eventually be collected in The World within the Word. The Spring 1960 issue was also highlighted by a long section from Omensetter's Luck, "The Love and Sorrow of Henry Pimber."
Gass confessed ambivalence about the prospect of publication making him "a public object," concluding in a letter to Shattuck (23 February 1958) that "success is merely failure at another level": "People who've read you, like you or not, look at you with knowing eyes as if they'd read the secret history of your life and seen you in bed with your wife. Fools, most positively garbed with opinion, tell you what is best, where you've failed, and go on to ask if you've read By Love Possessed." The letter below (16 November 1958), in which the fledgling author sternly justifies his demanding prose style to Shattuck, establishes critical touchstones that would become familiar to readers of Gass's essays (especially in Fiction and the Figures of Life) and his memorable "debates" with John Gardner.
Dear Chuck,
It was good of you to write so soon. It has saved me a month's fruitless work.
You are probably quite correct. You have had more experience in these matters than I have. You have thought about them longer and harder.
You have a wider range of acquaintance with literature. So it has been unfortunate for our understanding of one another's points of view that our judgments seemed sometimes to harmonize-about Tott and Mean, then about this one. We dislike the story, however, for fundamentally different reasons. This difference has been clear to me for some time and I suspected it from the moment Accent accepted my stories. Perhaps other editors disliked them for what they really were.
On my view there aren't any good subjects. Or any bad ones. Technique (though I view it broadly) is not confining, but enlarging, and your remarks about technique I have heard made about all those works of literature 1 value most. You love people and the wide world. I love words and arrange-ments. I want the reader stopped short at the language. You want the reader, I take it, to see through that language and to consider what that language is about in a world of things—to envision through the artist's power, if I have to say it-life! To you, I should suppose, character, incident, anecdote, physical tics that suggest psychic ones, the rich qualities of existence, narrative line, etc.— in short most of those notions about stories which I ascribed to Tott—are important. To me the beauty of a story lies in its treat-ment, and this treatment should cut if off from its subject as painting, music, and poetry are cut off. One does not possess a story until the end, for the end modifies and enriches the beginning, and fiction may run backward as well as forward, so it is not only natural but inevitable that one not know any until he knows all.
Even so, from my point of view, your suggestion that the story unroll chronologically (a technique) by means of progression of effect (another technique) might be correct, for certainly the story as it stands does not succeed. But I consider that this technique (as I persist in calling it) is wholly artificial as far as significance and esthetic effect are concerned, since it merely imitates life (a sloppy affair at best) and not even life as experienced but as historically described. It is a difficult technique to use because chronology does not normally accommodate itself to an esthetic movement. It is not even realistic. In Pimber's life the connections are made by means of their emotional significance, as I take it they are generally, and he experiences the past at the same time he experiences the present and the force of it in the fiction comes through the fact they are joined without a seam.
Our misunderstanding has extended to our standards of judgment, and the control these standards have over the way we talk about things. When speaking of my own work I always judge it in terms of what I consider esthetically its proper aim. and I rate its success against the very highest possible mark. Of course I shall always fail and hate everything. This is presumptuous, but putting words together at all is already the greatest presumption. A second rate writer has no reason to exist unless he is on his way to being a first rate writer, and there is no point at all in doing pleasant easy things, or altering one's conception of how a story ought to be to get it into print. Nor has the writer any responsibility to the reader. If the reader is artist he may want to make his own object. Others will wish to sink the story to the level of their own sensibilities. He has a responsibility to the thing he is making.
Now the difficulties the readers found with the story (putting it together I mean). as I gather from the marginal notations and your own remarks, are difficulties of the most elementary sort. (If it were poetry more effort would be expended as a matter of course, but then poetry is an art and fiction an entertainment). It would appear that, in complete violation of the point of view, I am to give a kind of dossier on every one whose name is mentioned, to mention those names in a way they could not possibly occur in any consciousness, so as to ease the reader's way through something which, to be fair, he should be discouraged from getting into as quickly as possible. In one case the reader couldn't wait one line to find out who was speaking. In another case it was too much to remember that Doctor Orcutt was a doctor for half-a-dozen sentences. To specify who Watson is the first time he appears is destructive to the point of view, for this is the way his name would enter Pimber's mind. Pimber knows a great deal more than the reader. The reader must infer (if the writer has made this possible) the carpet from the string. Such a complaint does amount (as you indicate) to writing the story omnipotently or in another way. From this, and another's notes, I can conclude only that the reader is not prepared to give me a fraction of that absolute and exacting attention that is to be given to any serious work. A primitive notion of narrative clarity has been insisted upon at every turn, as if it was important to the story that every corner of Pimber's mind be lighted with the same bulb that lights the telephone directory. Surely, I have to ask myself, they would be more humble in front of a writer they took seriously.
The point is this, and I believe it is one you made over here— the difficulties aren't worth it. This would bother me considerably if it were true. The question then is—to get what? To get the story. But there is no story. There remain but words— the continuous exploration of concepts. I hate to seem to be defending a story I believe to have faults. I do not intend to. I feel I am defending the profession.
I should like to point out that you would not ordinarily have had to trouble yourself with it, and that I would not have sent it out (my letter was designed to emphasize this), for when it was asked for it wasn't ready and I released it as a favor (oh irony) because I felt indebted.
What you are asking me to do is not just to change a work of fiction. You are asking me to make it over from a work of art into a story. My work may be ugly but it's not cheap. I take it hard and I'm damned if I'll do it.
—Bill
The longstanding friendship of William Gass and Stanley Elkin, as chronicled, for example, in the appreciations exchanged in the Spring 1984 Washington University Magazine, has its complement in their mutual professional admiration (see Gass's laudatory foreword to the Godine reprint of Elkin's novel The Franchiser). The many letters they have exchanged display a consistent mixture of wit and reverence that fortifies the enticing image of the two notable stylists refining and exchanging sentences when Gass was a visiting lecturer and Elkin a graduate student at the University of Illinois.
For Elkin, Omensetter's Luck was "the greatest novel since Moby-Dick. Also before Moby-Dick.... Compared to Bill Gass, everyone else writes a sort of broken English'" (6 April 1966). Meanwhile, earning Gass’s praise is "like having the tests come back negative (the highest satisfaction I can register—beyond that I tilt)" (20 October 1970).
For his part, Gass proclaims, "Well I hope you grow huge Stan. I hope you swallow the world. You can even swallow me, if you don't mind. I imagine it would be pleasant inside. Warm"' (21 January 1963). The appearance of Elkin's first novel confirms Gass's high opinion. In a letter tracking his progress through the newly published Boswell (24-26 June 1964), Gass calls himself "utterly glazed and ghasted." "Stanley— you are a cinch," he announces. "What a rollicking whee and a wonder!" And summarizing his delighted review: "There are a number of reasons: the book is so good, you are a friend (though sportive), and one always enjoys the vindication of one's judgment; but whatever they are, they mightily combine, and I cannot recall when a book has given me a greater or a purer pleasure.
The following letter from Elkin (12 October 1960) further exhibits his conviction about Gass's writing and, not incidentally, Elkin's own celebrated style.
Dear Bill,
I was just speaking to Jarvis Thurston, the editor of Perspective, which, as you may know is published here at Washington U. He is a Gass fan, come by his interest in you legitimately; i.e., by reading your stories in Accent.
When I told him of "The Pedersen Kid," a work that will live in my memory long after I have forgotten my mother's name, he urged me to do what I had wanted him to urge me to do in the first place; i.e., get you to submit it to Perspective. He will print it by itself. (My assumption is that he will print it. He told me that even without reading it he is convinced he will like it. A great inductive leap. Glory by association.)
Fate is most strange. If Sophocles came back he would put me in a Dionysian festival, and people would ask what is Stanley Elkin's tragic flaw. It is precipitousness. Don Finkle just walked into the office. I had mentioned "The Pedersen Kid" to him a few weeks ago. I am a literary tout.I hang on to respectability by swinging from aesthetic grapevines. Finkle, It comes out (so tightly is this plotted), wrote his California buddy, the editor of Shasta Review (?) telling him of your story. Finkle saw me typing a letter to you and told me that he had touted "Pedersen" secondhand, and that you have already promised to send the story to California after you revise it. Is this so? Are Finkle and I barking up the same kid? Of course, you must dispose of this as you see fit, but I feel like a damned fool now. I promised Jarvis I would write to you. If you have committed "The Kid" elsewhere, please send us a different story. Would you?
Please answer.
Foolishly,
—Stan Elkin
This is a true story. When I started the letter I didn't know about Shasta.
Gass's formal reaction to Washington University Library's request to house his papers has attained folkloric dimensions among those associated with the Twentieth-Century Literary Manuscripts Collection. The following letter to Mona Van Duyn (6 October 1964) evolved through numerous drafts, all of which have been dutifully docketed and retained in the collec-tion. Surely the final version, crafty and crafted, itself exemplifies why Gass received this early recognition.
Dear Miss Van Duyn,
The Lebowitz do sweet irrational things.
Certainly Stan did mention the matter of my mss to me, and your library's interest in collecting them. I remember some of the names that were on the list he gave me, and I was there all right, lying between Ralph Ellison and John Hawkes like a valley squeezed between two foresty knees. Barth and Powers squared the ends off, and Bellow and Nabokov had their thumbs up.Well naturally it was very funny and fitted Boswell's Elkin perfectly; for whom, in his own person, could Elkin solicit now but the uncelebrious, the drearily non-famous, and the sorrow middle-knowns? I could hear him slap his golden thigh with glee when his fellow conspirator at your library, to whom he told me to address myself, showed him how the hook had drawn my gizzard through my teeth. I wrote him as much.
But you seem to be in earnest. I can only conclude that you are all mad, for I could not bring myself to approach some Lolly Hankins and a simple such as I am, though he were the father of a hundred puddinpassled, barky pekineses, and deep plumdumplings, even in the high front line of duty, to make this kind of request, unless I had been seized with a Hettie Green-like bibliomania. As a futures list, too, Elkin's wore a certain antic look, warning me against swallowing. Ford's a lively dead old master. Beckett's no bet—he came home first, paid off handsomely, and is, I hope, stuffing himself in the stable.
It is certainly a splendid idea—put peaches in thy mouth, money in thy purse, peace in thy soul, honey in thy horn, and papers in thy vault-but its success depends on your guessing right at least some of the time. It will scarcely distinguish you to have the largest—and only —collection of Solly Wallow in the country. So I must tell you that there is at least one lame horse on your list. My agent, a determined and dedicated lady, has been trying to find a publisher for a number of mss of mine, both short and long without any success whatever. Indeed, I haven't had an acceptance in two years. My production, never voluminous, has meanwhile ceased. It will begin again when again my time yields some spaces, but circumstances have forced me to consider my writing the idlest of hobbies. You would no doubt find it embarrassing to withdraw your suggestion, so perhaps I should do your predicting for you and say no. I am pleased, naturally, that someone should make such a mistake in my favor, but consider — I have no proofs of books because I have no books; there are no translations for there are no translators; I have no letters from writers about my work because writers do not write me; I have no letters from editors, either, except those that say no; I have made no tapes, attended no workshops, conferences, or symposia, and I have made only one public appearance; all I possess are dull and repetitious sheaves of typed or pen and pencilled papers representing my staggery attempts to cross a paragraph-and then imagine how many "scholars" are going to nose the gates of your vaults throating for an eyeful of the building of my prose (the Pharaoh passes in the distance wearing a cardboard hat and carrying a stone, a shovel, and a hose); and won't it be confounding to us all when your appraiser values my wads at $5.67 or whatever they might bring per lb? I'd fire both Lebowitz–-charming but confused—and start over.
Of course you are welcome to the things I have, and to all of it if you want it. It would consist principally of worked over drafts, and there is probably quite a lot considering the slenderness of what's emerged. Measured absolutely, however.. I don't know. And would you want it decently arranged? Some sort of order can be given to it, but beyond a certain point. doubt that I can even imagine what version was the original and what came after that, and what after that, and so on.
I'll make a tape if you wish, though you've heard me read.
Putting restrictions on the use of such papers would be like dividing zero.
I am very interested, though, in the progress of your plan. Think of my scratches, filed alongside Ford's, receiving radiation. Ford's mss would be a great thing to have and I hope you get them, and since you seem to want them, I hope you get all the junk you're asking for.
Give my best to all of Washington's good people. I think I remember almost everybody.
Bill Gass
