Second is Last
Richard Watson
Well known it is that George Lucas modeled Yoda on Bill Gass: the penetrating gaze, half-lowered lids over protruding eyes,expressive ears, pursed mouth, "umm umm" before oracular speech, predicate before subject, virtuosity with a light sword, masterful control of The Force. And patience enough to crack a tomb. After Bill had been working on The Tunnel for twenty-two years, I pointed out that publishing posthumously is not much fun. He hummed and continued to pile up and pore over manuscript. At the end, The Tunnel turned out to be a mountain range that forms a divide between reviewers. Down the slope toward oblivion rumble those obtuse literalists accuse Gass himself of who holding the opinions of the anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer who is the main character, one even to the extent of remarking (in the New York Review of Books) that like the novel's anti-hero Gass himself must have a small penis. This, you see, gives him an inferiority complex and leads him to abuse Jews.
The editor of the New York Review of Books is famous for picking reviewers who in turn pick the bones of the books and authors they review, but only a fool would enter into a pissing contest with Bill Gass. Maybe Robert Silvers published that personal attack simply because he was bemused to find such a fool. Right.
"Who is Bill Gass?" was the question at a meeting of the Washington University department of philosophy in 1968 when the chairman, Richard Rudner, announced that he had hired him. I blurted out that Gass was a wonderful writer, but few others had heard of him. It didn't matter. Those were the days when chairs were men and hired whomever they pleased with or without the concurrence of other members of the department. Rudner hired everyone that way, including me.
Rudner had been set up by Jarvis Thurston, chair of the English department, who wanted to hire Bill. But Bill had earned his Ph. D. in philosophy and didn't want to be an English professor. So Jarvis brought Bill in as a visitor for a few weeks, made sure Rudner met him over gimlets, and the rest is history.
Over the years, how have I felt, as a writer of novels and essays, to have as my colleague one of the finest writers of our time? Grateful. It is always good to know one's place. With Gass as a colleague, I have had the greatest advantage a writer can have: direct contact with a level of accomplishment always out of reach, like the lure greyhounds chase at dog races. They know they'll never catch it, but it draws them on madly anyway to greater performances than they could have achieved had they merely run around the track on their own.
Gass is known for his introductions of writers and often feared, for on occasion, Gass's introduction outshines the reading that follows. One might attribute this to meanness, but the cause has nothing to do with his attitude toward the writer he is introducing. The mere fact that Gass is giving the introduction means that he approves. His introductions are sometimes overshadowing because takes each one as a writing assignment, and, for him, all writing is serious.This is why you will find very few long letters in the Gas archives. They are, he told me once, too difficult to write. But introductions he writes, and rewrites, and gets right. Nothing personal i intended. Then after that introduction, the writer must read from his own work. At one of these affairs, a young writer who had been getting inflated reviews for his first novel was obviously terrified to be reading in front of Bill Gass. My admiration for the young man immediately increased.
Bill Gass's appointment as a full professor in the Washington University philosophy department did not proceed without opposition. The two most distinguished full professors in the department objected. Bill Levi resented the English department's role. Who was Jarvis Thurston (who beat Levi at golf) to decide who the philosophy department should hire? Herbert Spiegelberg was scandalized at Gass's announcement that he would write and publish no more philosophy. Rudner simply ignored Levi. I assured Spiegelberg that everything Gass writes is philosophy. Poor Levi. After he died, Gass was given the university professorship Levi had occupied. Spiegelberg decided that Gass was a phenomenologist, Spiegelberg's own field.
One might say that Gass learned that an art object—such as a poem—can and should be analyzed and appreciated solely in itself, without consideration of the biographical details about or the intentions of its author, and that form is independent of content during his undergraduate years at Kenyon College where John Crowe Ransom professed the New Criticism. Never mind that Gass majored in philosophy and never took a course from Ransom. And then one might say that Gass learned the analytic philosopher's mantra—that moral values are independent of and not derivable from facts—during his graduate school years at Cornell University where he did take courses from and write his Ph. D. dissertation for Max Black, one of the finest analytic philosophers of his day. But I don't believe Gass learned these things in those places. He merely gravitated where his predilections were reinforced.
I wonder if the story is true that Gass once assigned the project of designing an aesthetically excellent gas oven for the Third Reich? No matter whether or not the story is apocryphal. It makes the point. Of course it can be done. As for making high art on the Holocaust theme, Gass met the challenge with The Tunnel.
Now comes the knuckle rub. Critics sometimes go nyaa nyaa nyaa because, they say, Gass asserts the independence of the art object from its content, and then he tells stories! Why not? Gass has never claimed that just because form and content are logically independent, someone who writes to create an aesthetic object must not tell a story. And just because no moral conclusions can be derived from the fact or existence of a work of art, that does not mean that a work of art cannot have a profound moral content, as does Gass's novel The Tunnel. No artist lives in a vacuum of form without content, if only because it is impossible to do so even if one tries.
Enough nit-picking. Bill Gass's philosophy is expressed in one of his favorite sayings: Second is last. Doing the best you can is for suckers and wimps. It isn't that if you aren't the best, you might as well be last. It's that if you aren't first, you have failed.
Gass always manages to say in interviews that he is angry, and some people ask what on earth this man, who has done so exceedingly well, can have to be angry about. The stupidity of the human race is not adequate—that's commonplace. What grinds Gass's gut is this. In the game of high art, nobody is number one.
