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"
 Books by William H. Gass

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE

IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

omensetter’s LUCK
FICTION AND THE
FIGURES OF LIFE
 FICTION
AND THE
FIGURES OF LIFE

WILLIAM H.
GASS

ALFRED A. KNOPF

NEW YORK
 M3 M \U

Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the following publications which first printed

these essays, some in slightly different form:
New American Review, #7—-"The Concept of Character in Fiction"
New American Review, #ro-—"In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of
Life"
The New York Review of Books—"The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon" ;
"Mirror, Mirror"; "Imaginary Borges"; "In the Cage"; "Cock-a-doodle-doo”;
"From Some Ashes No Bird Rises”; "The Evil Demiurge”; "The Stylization of
Desire”
The New York Times■—Vol. 129, No. 40811 "Pricksongs and Descants"
The Philosophical Review—"The Case of the Obliging Stranger"
Book Week Magazine, The Chicago Sun-Times—"Russell's Memoirs”; "A Spirit in
Search of Itself”
The New Republic—"A Memory of a Master”; "The Artist and Society"
The Nation—"The Medium of Fiction” ; "The Bingo Game at the Foot of the Cross”
The Philosopher-Critic—"Philosophy and the Forms of Fiction"
South Atlantic Quarterly—"The Imagination of an Insurrection"
Reprinted by permission of The Duke University Press.
Accent—"Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language" ; and "The High
Brutality of Good Intentions”
Reprinted by permission of The University of Illinois Foundation.
Frontiers of American Culture—© 1968, Purdue Research Foundation "Even If, By All
the Oxen in the World"
Reprinted by permission of the Purdue Research Foundations.
-—"The Shut-In”

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright © 1958, 1962, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 by William H.
Gass. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy¬
right Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New
York.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-123929

Standard Book Number: 00-000-00
Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition
 to
Lynn Nesbit
and
David Segal
for believing

4 PQ
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

Part One

Philosophy and the Form of Fiction 3

The Medium of Fiction 27
The Concept of Character in Fiction 34
In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures
of Life 55

Part Two

Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective

Language 79
The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon 97
Pricksongs & Descants 104

Mirror, Mirror 110

Imaginary Borges and His Books 120

The Bingo Game at the Foot of the Cross 134

The Shut-In 140

vii
 Part Three

A Spirit in Search of Itself 157

In the Cage 164
The High Brutality of Good Intentions 177
The Stylization of Desire 191
Cock-a-doodle-doo 206
From Some Ashes No Bird Rises 2 12

Part Four

The Case of the Obliging Stranger 225

Russell’s Memoirs 242
A Memory of a Master 247
The Evil Demiurge 253
The Imagination of an Insurrection 263
Even if,7 by
J
All the Oxen in the World 268
The Artist and Society 276

viii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WANT TO THANK THE EDITORS OF THE FOLLOWING PUBLICA-

tions for permission to reprint the pieces collected in this

book, although a number appear here in a somewhat dif¬
ferent form: The New York Review of Books for “Cock-
a-doodle-doo,” “The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenome¬
non,” “Mirror, Mirror,” “From Some Ashes No Bird Rises,”
“The Evil Demiurge,” “In the Cage,” “The Stylization of
Desire,” and “Imaginary Borges and His Books”; Accent
for “The High Brutality of Good Intentions,” and
“Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language”;
The New American Review for “The Concept of Char¬
acter in Fiction,” and “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction
and the Figures of Life”; Book Week for “A Spirit in
Search of Itself,” and “Russell’s Memoirs”; The Nation for
“The Medium of Fiction,” and “The Bingo Game at the Foot
of the Cross”; The New Republic for “A Memory of a
Master,” and “The Artist and Society”; The South Atlantic
Quarterly for “The Imagination of an Insurrection”; The
New York Times Book Review for “Pricksongs & Descants”;
the Southern Illinois University Press for “The Shut-In”;
The Purdue University Press for “Even if, by All the Oxen

ix
 Acknowledgments

in the World”; The Philosophical Review for “The Case of

the Obliging Stranger”; and Robert Scholes for “Philosophy
and the Form of Fiction.”

x
 PREFACE

IT IS EMBARRASSING TO RECALL THAT MOST OF PAUL VALERY’S

prose pieces were replies to requests and invitations, just as

attendance at a wedding is. The card is from a couple you
scarcely know perhaps, yet you dress and go, a decision
which seldom springs from the deepest sources. Whether
his were prefaces, lectures, addresses, or reviews, whether
they appeared in journals or gazettes, in periodicals as differ¬
ent as Art et medecine and La Nouvelle Revue frangaise, he
enjoyed the challenge of his limitations; length, topic, audi¬
ence, appropriate tone: he allowed each a seat at the center
of his method and his method’s meditations, and brought his
clear and graceful mind to every occasion. He created, in
himself, opinions—often fragile, momentary blooms, often
ones as tough and as continuous as ivy. He dared to write
on his subjects as if the world had been silent; and because
he was so widely reflective, because he looked upon the
arbitrary as a gift to form, he turned the occasions com¬
pletely to his account, and made from them some of his pro-
foundest and most beautiful performances—the Eitpalinos,
for which no praise will suffice, “Poetry and Abstract
Thought,” or “Man and the Seashell”—shaping subtle, elu¬
sive lines of thought like the silvered paths of fish, and with

xi
 Preface

his calm, poetic style, robbing the reader of his breath.

The recollection is embarrassing because the reviews and
essays gathered here are responses too—ideas ordered up as,
in emergency, militia are. Though ill-equipt and ragged, the
call comes, and they are sent out willy-nilly. Valery’s hands
were so strong, he could hold his views lightly, offering his
thought as he might offer feeling. Rarely was he cruel, defen¬
sive, or angry—never smart aleck. He spoke easily to widely
separated minds—painters, dancers, doctors, poets, politicians,
humanists, men of science—because he had their interests too,
but none of their disunity. One of the more obvious char¬
acteristics of my essays, however, is the evidence of a
struggle in them to find such a calm and confident single
voice. Instead—strange spectacle—we observe an author try¬
ing to be both philosopher and critic by striving to be neither.
Here is one who puts out his principles like flags, and then
lowers the flags to half-mast; one whose views seem stretched
like wet string between passion and detachment, refusal and
commitment, tradition and departure. In another sense I see
them as the work of a novelist insufficiently off duty.
If there is not, among these pieces, the promised com¬
munity of the completed jigsaw, I have tried, with revisions
and arrangements, to make it seem so. I don’t believe I go
back on my words very often, and I would suggest to any
reader with the idleness and inclination to pursue it, that
he will find shifts of emphasis, mainly, not basic alterations in
ideas.
Ideas or themes? motifs? metaphors? I see that I circle
around a good many without ever quite coming to grips, as
though they all had cold hands. I notice, too, that some are
regularly accompanied by a surge of feeling, while near
others I find myself calm. Perhaps I am too suspicious of
public speech, of the manufacture of opinions, the filling of

xii
 Preface

orders for views. I ought to doubt my own reasons for ac¬

cepting these invitations to lecture or review, then. It may be
that one’s thought should be carried out in the same privacy
as good poetry and fiction is, in full indifference to daily
hoopla, at a distance from every audience, and apart from
any causing occasion, for its own sake only, just as the purest
philosophy; but possibly Valery himself, recognizing as he
did that poetry was composition, refinement, silence, that
it was not outcry, not communication, felt the nag of that
lack as a man of words might, felt the need to write about
his trade the way Flaubert wrote of his; and that stirred by
this—perhaps no nobler itch than any—said in reply to yet
one more request: Dear sir, I shall be happy to lecture to
your group on the day you suggest; I shall speak on the sub¬
ject . . . well, I shall speak on any subject that you like.

xiii
PART ONE
 PHILOSOPHY AND THE
FORM OF FICTION

S A) much of philosophy is
fiction. Dreams, doubts, fears, ambitions, ecstasies ... if
philosophy were a stream, they would stock it like fishes.
Although fiction, in the manner of its making, is pure phi¬
losophy, no novelist has created a more dashing hero than
the handsome Absolute, or conceived more dramatic ex¬
trications—the soul’s escape from the body, for instance, or
the will’s from cause. And how thin and unlaced the forms
of Finnegans Wake are beside any of the Critiques; how sun¬
lit Joyce’s darkness, how few his parallels, how loose his
correspondences. With what emotion do we watch the flight
of the Alone to the Alone, or discover that “der Welt ist
alles, was der Fall ist,'” or read that in a state of nature the
life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Which has written the greater Of Hitman Bondage, or
brooded more musically upon life’s miseries, or dwelled
more lovingly upon the outlines of its own reflection? Is it
not exhilarating to be told that the “desire and pursuit of

3
 William H. Gass

the whole is called love”? And if we wish to become critical

we can observe that Descartes’ recourse to a gland in the
skull to account for our intercourse with ourselves is a simple
failure of the imagination, and that for the philosophers, God
is always in His machine, flying about on wires like Peter
Pan.
Novelist and philosopher are both obsessed with language,
and make themselves up out of concepts. Both, in a way,
create worlds. Worlds? But the worlds of the novelist, I
hear you say, do not exist. Indeed. As for that—they exist
more often than the philosophers’. Then, too—how seldom
does it seem to matter. Who honestly cares? They are divine
games. Both play at gods as others play at bowls; for there
is frequently more reality in fairy tales than in these magical
constructions of the mind, works equally of thought and
energy and will, which raise up into sense and feeling, as to
life, acts of pure abstraction, passes logical, and intuitions
both securely empty and as fitted for passage as time.
Games—yet different games. Fiction and philosophy often
make most acrimonious companions. To be so close in blood,
so brotherly and like in body, can inspire a subtle hate; for
their rivalry is sometimes less than open in its damage. They
wound with advice. They smother with love. And they im¬
personate one another. Then, while in the other’s guise and
gait and oratory, while their brother’s smiling ape and
double, they do his suicide. Each expires in a welter of its
own surprise.
Philosophers multiply our general nouns and verbs; they
give fresh sense to stale terms; “man” and “nature” are their
characters; while novelists toil at filling in the blanks in proper
names and at creating other singular affairs. A novelist may
pin a rose to its stem as you might paper a tail to its donkey,
the rose may blush at his command, but the philosopher can

4
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

elevate that reddening from an act of simple verbal predica¬

tion to an angel-like ingression, ennobling it among Beings,
The soul, we must remember, is the philosopher’s invention,
as thrilling a creation as, for instance, Madame Bovary. So I
really should point out, though I shall say little more about
it, that fiction is far more important to philosophy than the
other way round. However, the novelist can learn more
from the philosopher, who has been lying longer; for
novelizing is a comparatively new, unpolished thing. Though
philosophers have written the deeper poetry, traditionally
philosophy has drawn to it the inartistic and the inarticulate,
those of too mechanical a mind to move theirs smoothly,
those too serious to see, and too fanatical to feel. All about
us, now, the dull and dunce-eyed stool themselves to study
corners.
Souls, essences, the bickering legions of immortals, the
countless points of view which religion and philosophy have
shaped, are seldom understood as metaphorical, as expressions
of our wishes and our fears, as desperate political maneuvers,
strategies of love or greed, as myths which make a sense
which some men may, at moments, need; for the celebrated
facts of life, whatever they are, are not very forceful, and
even the most stubborn and most brutish ones (that man
must eat to live, for instance) allow an indefinite number of
attitudes and interpretations, including vegetarianism or
solemn pronouncements in favor of fish or stern edicts
against pork and beans.
If games, then sometimes dangerous ones. Let us suppose
for a moment that both our Russells and our Becketts are
engaged in telling us hoiv it is, that the novelist and the
philosopher are companions in a common enterprise, though
they go about it in different ways. The objects I see and
sometimes label—pencil, paper, table, penny, chair each

5
 William H. Gass

seems solid yet is pocked with spaces, each seems steady yet
is made of moving pieces: shape, steadiness, solidity, and
color . . . are these illusions? I call the penny round, but I’m
reminded I see an ellipse. I say the pencil’s yellow, yet per¬
haps the yellow’s painted in by eye, the yellow is the reading
of a signal maybe, although the reading does not reside within
the receiver, and possibly its actual home is in the mind. The
what? The mind. Who, or what, is that? A character. Like
Micawber. Going on in the firm belief that something will
turn up. Hasn’t he made my world strange, this philosopher?
I find I have a body, then a mind. I find that the world I
live in, the objects I manipulate, are in great part my con¬
structions. I shortly come to believe in many invisible beings,
gods and angels, wills and powers, atoms, voids. Once where
I thought an anger “out there” like a demon, a color “out
there” in an object, connections “out there” holding hands
with things, I now think otherwise. Loose bundles of af¬
fections and sensations pass me like so many clouds of dust
in space (and, dear heaven, who am I?).
Beckett tells us that we live in garbage cans; sit at the
side of empty roads, in emptiness awaiting emptiness; crawl
blindly through mud. My skin is the tattered dirty clothing
of a tramp, my body a broken bicycle, my living space is
earth to just beneath my shoulders, my speech the twittering
of an unoiled pump. Hasn’t he made my world strange, this
novelist? No, of course our lives are not a muddy crawl—
apparently. But that is mere appearance. We’re fooled con¬
stantly. We think our emotions fine when they are coarse;
we think our ideas profound when they are empty, original
when commonplace; we think at first we are living richly,
deeply, when all we possess is a burlap bag, unopened tins,
dirty thoughts, and webby privates.
I cannot help my home still looks well furnished, or my

6
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

body trim; I cannot help the colors which I seem to come

upon, or the unflinching firmness of my chair; I cannot help
I glory in my sex or feel and think and act as one and not as
a divided community; for I’m incurably naive, incurably in
love with deception; still, I can be taught, I can learn
suspicion, learn that things aren’t really what they seem;
I can learn to hate my pleasures, condemn my desires, doubt
my motives, deny my eyes, put unseen creatures in the world
and then treat them with greater reverence, give them
greater powers than those I innocently know—to bow and
bow and bow in their direction; I can replace my love for
people with a love for principle,1 and even pursue a life
beyond the grave as a program for the proper pursuit of this
one. Bravo, novelists and philosophers; good show.
Save the appearances, Plato said. Then make them all re¬
alities. No better way. Yet without that splendid distinction,
the novelist as philosopher and the philosopher as novelist
would both be out of business.

The esthetic aim of any fiction is the creation of a verbal

world, or a significant part of such a world, alive through
every order of its Being. Its author may not purpose this—
authors purpose many things—but the construction of some
sort of object, whether too disorderly to be a world or too
mechanical to be alive, cannot be avoided. The story must
be told and its telling is a record of the choices, inadvertent
or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of
language. Whether or not it was correct of Aristotle to rea-

1 This point is developed at length in “The Case of the Obliging

Stranger.”

7
 William H. G ass

son, as he apparently sometimes did, from the syntax of the

Greek language to the syntax of reality, the art of fiction
consists of such reasoning, since its people and their destinies,
the things they prize, the way they feel, the landscapes they
inhabit, are indistinct from words and all their orderings.
The artist’s task is therefore twofold. He must show or
exhibit his world, and to do this he must actually make some¬
thing, not merely describe something that might be made.
This takes tremendous technical skill, and except in rare and
highly favored persons, great labor.2 Furthermore, he must
present us with a world that is philosophically adequate, and
this requires of him the utmost exercise of thought and
sensibility. No one should mistake the demand. It is not for a
comprehensive and correct philosophy. Truth, I am con¬
vinced, has antipathy for art. It is best when a writer has
a deep and abiding indifference to it, although as a private
person it may be vital to him. If the idea of truth is firmly
defined and firmly held in line; if it is not, like Proteus, per¬
mitted to change its shape at every questioning, the very
great difference between the theoretical formulations of the
philosopher and the concrete creations of the novelist must
make itself felt. The concepts of the philosopher speak, the
words of the novelist are mute; the philosopher invites us to
pass through his words to his subject: man, God, nature,
moral law; while the novelist, if he is any good, will keep us
kindly imprisoned in his language—there is literally nothing
beyond.3 Of course, if the philosopher has made up his sub¬
ject, as I suspect he has made up God, sin, and sense data,
then he is performing for us, at least in part, as the novelist

2 For more on this, see “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and
the Figures of Life.”
3 This is a recurrent theme—see especially, “The Concept of Char¬
acter in Fiction”—though I qualify it in “In Terms of the Toenail:
Fiction and the Figures of Life.”

8
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

performs. Theology, it appears, is one-half fiction, one-half

literary criticism.
A philosophy may be “adequate” without being true. If
it answers, or shows how to answer, the questions its as¬
sumptions and its inferential laws allow, it is complete; if its
conclusions follow from these assumptions as its rules dictate,
it is consistent; and if the questions it permits are, in any de¬
gree, the same that everyday life puts to the ordinary man,
it and its answers are to that degree significant; for the
everyday questions of ordinary life are always addressed to
those ultimate appearances which we remember must be
saved. Any philosophy complete, consistent, and significant
is, in the sense here used, adequate. It is adequate within its
range, although its range may not be vast. A long and com¬
plex novel, or series of novels, however, may present us with
a world complete through every principle and consequence,
rivaling in its comprehensiveness the most grandiose philo¬
sophical systems; while a brief story may exhibit only an
essential part from which we may infer, at our desire and
leisure, much of the remainder. Finally, the artist is not asked
to construct an adequate philosophy, but a philosophically
adequate world, a different matter altogether. He creates an
object, often as intricate and rigorous as any mathematic,
often as simple and undemanding as a baby’s toy, from whose
nature, as from our own world, a philosophical system may
be inferred; but he does not, except by inadvertence or mis¬
taken esthetic principle, deem it his task to philosophize. A
man who makes a thing that moves utilizes the laws of
motion, although he may be unaware of their existence. All
he cares about is the accomplishment of his particular design.
The worlds which, in like manner, the writer creates, are
only imaginatively possible ones; they need not be at all like
any real one, and the metaphysics which any fiction implies

/
 William H. Gass

is likely to be meaningless or false if taken as nature’s own.

The man who makes machines intuitively, the laws of heat
and light and motion in his fingers, is inventive. Indeed, he
may invent, in the principles of its running, what science
knows nothing of. The writer, similarly, thinks through the
medium of which he is the master, and when his world
arises, novel and complete—sometimes as arbitrary and re¬
mote from real things as the best formal game, sometimes as
searchingly advanced and sharp to the fact as the gadget of
the most inspired tinker—his world displays that form of
embodied thought which is imagination.
Nature is more than its regulations. Galileo follows the
swinging Pisa Cathedral lamps with his dreadful eyes, but it
is not the spill of light and shadow, the halo or the burning,
that attracts him. It is the quantity in the action, the principle
in the thing. So any maker, bent on rendering concrete the
dominion of number, must find the qualities of sensation
which will embody them.4 Nor can he merely name the
qualities over, for what he makes is a world, not a diagram,
and what he makes must live. Swinging has a law, but before
the law of swinging come the swings.
Writers whose grasp of esthetic principles is feeble, or
whose technique is poor and unpracticed, or whose minds are
shallow and perceptions dim, give us stories which are never
objects for contemplation, but arguments; they give us, at
best, dramatized philosophy, not philosophically significant
drama; or, if they know they must exhibit or present, show
us Bradleyan selves in Berkeleyan suits sitting down to
Boolean tea.
The philosophy that most writers embody in their work,
with those amendments and additions which any strong

4 More on embodiment in “The Concept of Character in Fiction.”

10
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

personality will invariably insist upon, since it can only

identify itself with what it calls its own begetting, is usually
taken unconsciously from the tradition with which the writer
is allied. As a result, a writer whose work has little esthetic
merit may retain an historical or a philosophical interest. He
may have represented, in just the confused way it existed,
the world his generation saw and believed they lived in; or
he may have produced a model of some philosopher’s
theoretical vision; and since the philosopher’s vision is as
often as not blind at the last to the signals of reality, it may
be as near to the sight of fact his theory will ever come. On
such occasions the work is commentary. Some novels are of
very great philosophical importance, as it is doubtless one
test of a philosophy to imagine, more simply than the cosmos
itself does, what it would be like to live under its laws—
whether, in other words, with its principles it is possible to
build something that will run. Such imaginative construction
is particularly useful for the evaluation of moral and political
systems. One wants to know what people, good according to
Kant or Nietzsche or William James, are like, and how it feels
to house the conscience of Saint Paul or guard with the eyes
of Augustine the affairs of the city of God. An artist may
precede the sciences in discovery, just as the inventor may,
by incorporating in his work ideas which turn out true,
but his success in this is not esthetic, and depends entirely on
what science decides.
An idea must first be thought before it can be tested, but
a principle encased in fiction has, most likely, not been
thought of at all. It has been used, d his may have been what
Plato had in mind when he classified his citizens according
to their nearness to the Forms. Certainly it is one thing to
employ an idea, another to state it in a manner suitable to
thought, while yet another to carry out the tests which make

li
 William H. Gass

it true or false. It is a sadly limited view of the power of

mind in man to suppose that only truth employs or pleasures
it. It appears that any expression suitable to science must
be quantitatively abstract, and that thought itself proceeds
by quantities and extensions, yet one may contemplate the
most purely abstract and most purely quantitative system for
the values of the system’s sake, and so far as this is done,
and is the end of such pure systems, they, and the opposite
pole of art, have the same appreciative aim, and are in value
much akin; for creative thought and creative imagination are
not so much stirred on by truth in any synthetic sense as by
sublimity—a vision of absolute organization. It is really a
moral insistence, this insistence that truth be first, whether
it is the Platonist, who requires that Ideas do the work of
things, or the Pragmatist, who demands that things perform
the functions of ideas.

For the purposes of analysis we can regard the sentences

of fiction as separate acts of creation. They are the most
elementary instances of what the author has constructed.
Wittgenstein believed for a time that a proposition, in the
disposition of its names, pictured a possibly equivalent ar¬
rangement of objects. This is a pleasant fancy, and plainly
must be true ... of fictions; though sentences in stories
should do more than simply configure things. Each should
contrive (through order, meaning, sound, and rhythm) a
moving unity of fact and feeling.
Before us is the empty page, the deep o’er which, like
God, though modestly, we brood. But that white page, what
is it? Perhaps it is the ideally empty consciousness of the

12
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

reader a dry wineskin or a tabula rasa. And if, as authors,

we think this way, then what we want is a passive mind and,
as in love, an utterly receptive woman. Thus our attitudes,
before the first act of creation, make a philosophical dif¬
ference. What shall we sail upon it first?

All known all white bare white body fixed one

yard legs joined like sewn,

Beckett’s “Ping” begins. An audacious first term: all. The

sentence isolates its words; they slowly fall, slowly revolve,
slowly begin to group themselves. We are in the hands of an
ancient atomist.

All known all white bare white body fixed one

yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat white floor
one square yard never seen. White walls one yard
by two white ceiling one square yard never seen.

Stately monotonous strokes, like measured beats of a gong,

occur within, but do not fill, this void. Though here the gong
sometimes emits a ping. Truly, nothing is previous. Groups
first formed form the first connections, and are repeated.

Bare white body fixed only the eyes only just.

Traces blurs light grey almost white on white.
Hands hanging palms front white feet heels to¬
gether right angle. Light heat white planes shining
white bare white body fixed ping fixed elsewhere.

With what remarkable confidence, on the other hand, does

Jane Austen reach for our responses. She does not form a
chaos or create from nothing. Her pen moves through us; we
part a bit and yield the paths of her design. How much we
are expected to know already: manners, values, social struc¬
ture. She thinks in far, far longer lengths; her silences are like
the silences which occur in happy conversations; her spaces
 William H. Gass

are interiors, tamed and quiet; she does not begin, she ends, in
terror, and the metaphysical.
Let’s descend into the sentence briefly, on a rope for our
return. How amazing they can be, how strange. The shortest
one can spell us back to infancy. (“A cow broke in tomorrow
morning to my Uncle Toby’s fortifications,” for instance.)
The meaning of a sentence may make a unity, comprise some
whole, but inevitably its concepts are loosed one by one like
the release of pigeons. We must apprehend them, then, like
backward readers: here’s a this, now a that, now a this. The
sentence must be sounded, too; it has a rhythm, speed, a
tone, a flow, a pattern, shape, length, pitch, conceptual direc¬
tion. The sentence confers reality upon certain relations, but
it also controls our estimation, apprehension, and response
to them. Every sentence, in short, takes metaphysical dicta¬
tion, and it is the sum of these dictations, involving the
whole range of the work in which the sentences appear,
which accounts for its philosophical quality, and the form of
life in the thing that has been made.
In Beckett’s sentences, quoted above, there is no subordina¬
tion, but a community of equals—well, hardly a community
either, though the primordial relationship of adjective to
noun is not entirely suppressed. This is not the place to get
lost in details, but we are all aware of the kind of influence
Aristotle’s subject-predicate logic had on his philosophy, and
on all those which followed for quite a long time. The
novelist’s characteristic grammatical forms affect the build¬
ing of his book at least as much, though we must be careful
to notice not only his words’ syntactical pasts, but their
present syntactical functions. So some sentences are crowded
with nouns; some contain largely connectives. Some sentences
are long and tightly wound; others are as hard and blunt as
a hammer. Some combine events of contrasting sizes, like a
sneeze and the fall of Rome; others set dogs at bears, link the

H
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

abstract and the concrete, quality and number, relation and

property, act and thing. In some worlds the banjo and its
music are two banjos, in others all the instruments dissolve
into their music, that into a landscape or a climate, thus
finally, through the weather, to an ear.
The Humean sentence will reduce objects to their qualities,
maintain an equality between them by using nonsubordinat¬
ing conjunctions, be careful not to confuse emotion and re¬
flection with perception, but at the same time will allow their
presence in the same onward flow. Everywhere, Hume makes
his world out of lists and collections. Some novelists, like I. B.
Singer, for example, drain the mental from their books as
if it were pus in a wound. Thoughts are rendered as public
speech; there is recourse to journals; incidents and objects are
presented always as the public might see them; and even inner
temptations—lusts, hates, fears—receive embodiment as
visibly material demons.5 6 Henry James’s sentences are con¬
tinuous qualifications, nuance is the core and not the skin;0
and the average idealist, proceeding with a similar scrupu¬
losity, treats his entire work as the progressive exploration
and exposure of a single subject. It would suit him if there
were no ordinary periods, no real beginning or real end,
if every word were an analytic predicate of one ultimate
Idea.
Imagine for a moment we are making up a man, breathing
life into a clay lung.

He stood in the mud: long, thin, brown in his

doctor’s gown of fur, with his black flapped cap
that buttoned well under his chin and let out his
brown, lean, shaven and humorous face like a
woodpecker’s peering out of a hole in a tree.

5 This is a central concern of my essay on Singer, “The Shut-In.”

6 See “The High Brutality of Good Intentions” and “In the Cage.”
 William H. Gass

What is the shape of Achilles’ nose? what color were his

eyes? Achilles is what Achilles does; he has no secret wishes,
secret dreams; he has no cautiously hidden insides. Shall we
make our man on that model, out of deeds? or shall we see
him through his station: prince or clown, clerk or plumber,
servant or secretary, general or priest? Shall we dress him
in his features as Ford here puts Magister Nicholas Udal in
his clothes? Whether a man has thick lips or thin, crafty ones
or cruel, we can always count on Ford to tell us, though in
other men’s fictions many are lipless. The colon contrives to
give the qualities which follow it to Udal’s whole muddy
standing, not to Udal and his form alone. Observe what hap¬
pens if we remove it, and at the same time alter the order of
our apprehension of these details:

He was long, thin, and brown in his doctor's gown

of fur, with his black flapped cap that buttoned well
under his chin and let out his brown, lean, shaven
and humorous face like a woodpecker's peering out
of a hole in a tree. He stood in the mud.

The original passage is packed with possessives, the dominant

relation is that of ownership, but the Magister need not own
everything. Can we feel the effect of progressively loosening
these ties, the clothing first, and then the features?

He stood in the mud: lo?ig, thin, brown in a doctor's

gow?i of fur, with a black flapped cap that buttoned
well wider his chin and let out his brown, lean,
shaven and humorous face like a woodpecker's
peering out of a hole in a tree.

He stood in the mud: long, thin, brown in a doctor's

gown of fur, with a black flapped cap that buttoned
well under a chin and let out a brown, lean, shaven

16
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

and humorous face like a woodpecker1s peering out

of a hole in a tree.

Perversely, let us let him own his clothes but not his face.

He stood in the mud: long, thin, brown in his

doctor's gown of fur, with his black flapped cap
that buttoned well under a chin and let out a brown,
lean, shaven and humorous face like a woodpecker's
peering out of a hole in a tree.

It is not simply that our understanding of Udal changes; our

understanding changes because Udal has become a figure in
a changed world.
We might at first be inclined to think that style is a form
of perception; that each sentence reveals the way the writer
looks at the world—

for example, observe the differences between (i) We

walked through the woods. The trees had leaves. The
leaves were newly green. (2) We walked through the
woods. New leaves greened the trees. (3) We walked
the greening woods. (4) It seemed the greening woods
walked while we stood.

—but strictly speaking style cannot be, itself, a kind of

vision, the notion is very misleading, for we do not have
before us some real forest which we might feel ourselves free
to render in any number of different ways; we have only the
words which make up this one. There are no descriptions in
fiction, there are only constructions,7 and the principles
which govern these constructions are persistently philosophi¬
cal. The same, for that matter, is true of narration, dialogue,
character, and the rest. Just as the painter’s designs help make

7 See “The Concept of Character in Fiction.”

n
 William H. Gass

his object, the lines of the novelist offer no alternatives, they

are not likely interpretations of anything, but are the thing
itself.

Thus so many of the things which are false or foolish when

taken to the world—in religion or philosophy—become the
plainest statements of what’s true when taken to fiction, for
in its beginning is the word, and if the esthetic aim of any
fiction is the creation of a world, then the writer is creator—
he is god—and the relation of the writer to his work repre¬
sents in ideal form the relation of the fabled Creator to His
creation.
Once God was regarded as the cause of all, as the Great
Historian with a plan for His people, the Architect, the Law¬
giver, the principle of Good; so that if Mary sickened, the
cause was God, and if Mary died, it was God who called her
Home, and if anything happened whatever, it was ordained
by Him, indeed it was counted on, by Him, from the begin¬
ning. He saw things, all things, plain—plainer surely than
any novelist ever saw his story before a word of it went
down. So that really, in this created world, there are no
necessary beings, there are no categorical creatures, and
events do not follow one another out of the past, because
of the past, but everlastingly out of God, because of God.
In a movie, too, where everything is predestined, the illusion
of internal structure is maintained, as though one part of the
film explained the occurrence of another. However, the di¬
rector had the scenes shot; had them spliced as he desired; and
the sensation that the villain’s insult has provoked the hero’s
glove is an appearance often not even carefully contrived. In

18
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

the story of Mary, if Mary dies, the novelist killed her, her
broken heart did not. The author of any popular serial
knows, as Dickens did, that to the degree he makes his world
real to his readers, to that degree they will acknowledge his
authorship; hold him responsible; and beg him to make the
world good, although evil seems present in it; beg him to
bring all to a moral and materially glorious close, in clouds
and hallelujahs. Though such appeals may cause smiles in the
sophisticated, they are appeals more rationally directed to
the actual power than those, exactly parallel, delivered by
the faithful in their prayers to God. The novelist is un¬
comfortable. He may enjoy his alleged omnipotence, his
omniscience and omnipresence, but with it, spoiling it, is re¬
sponsibility. What about all that perfection? Can he take
upon himself this burden? Can he assure his readers that his
world is good, whatever happens? He can explain evil no
better than the theologian; therefore shortly the novelist who
assumes the point of view of the omnipotent, omniscient, and
omnipresent narrator begins to insist upon his imperfection;
apologize, in a gentle way perhaps, for his cutpurses, whores,
his murderers, and in general surrender his position. “I’m
sorry Becky doesn’t seem as sweet as she should, but what
can I do about it? That’s just how she is.” “Well, I’m ter¬
ribly sorry about all this sordidness, as sorry as you are,” he
may say, “but that’s how the world is, and what am I, poor
fellow, but a dime-store mirror held to it?” This is a sly de¬
vice. And the worlds which the novelist creates are shortly
deprived of their deities. At last the convention seems ac¬
ceptable only if it’s all in fun. God snickers and pushes
parsons into ditches. And when the novelist begins to
explain that, of course, omnipotence is artistically vulgar;
that one must limit oneself to a point of view, he is insisting,
for his world, upon the restriction of knowledge to the
 William H. Gass

human, and often only to a few of these, and finally only

to rare moments occurring in the best minds. He gives up
his powers to a set of principles. He allows himself to be
governed by them, not to govern, as if God stepped down
in favor of moving mass and efficient causes, so to say: “This
is not mine; I do not this; I am not here.” Novels in which
the novelist has effaced himself create worlds without gods.
Even outside books time passes. These days, often, the
novelist resumes the guise of God; but he is merely one of us
now, full of confusion and error, sin and cleverness. He
creates as he is able; insists upon his presence and upon his
wickedness and fallibility too. He is not sure about what he
knows; his powers have no great extension; he’s more imper¬
fect than otherwise; he will appeal to us, even, for sympathy.
Why not? He’s of his time. Are there any deities who still
have size?
An author may make up his own rules, like the god of the
Deists, or take them from experience where he thinks he
finds them ready-made; but the control which these rules
exercise is little like that exercised by the laws of nature,
whatever they are. The star-crossed lovers in books and plays
are doomed, not because in the real world they would be,
but because, far more simply, they are star-crossed. Simple
slum conditions, as we know, do not so surely produce a
certain sort as in novels they are bound to, and no amassing
of detail is sufficient to ensure a perfectly determinate New¬
tonian conclusion. Authors who believe they must, to move
their fictions, hunt endlessly through circumstances for
plausible causes as they might hunt for them in life, have
badly misunderstood the nature of their art—an enterprise
where one word and one inferring principle may be enough.
As in a dice race, when we move over the squares with our
colored disks, the dice impel us and the ruled lines guide.

20
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

There are no choices. 1 he position of each disk is strictly

determined. W e see the track, we know the throw, we can
predict the new arrangement. Such a game is the simplest
kind, and forms the simplest system. There is one rule of
inference. Any principle that permits the rational expectation
of some situation upon the occurrence of another is a prin¬
ciple of inference, and such a principle is called a rule when
the conclusion to be inferred awaits an inferring power—-a
power that must be, therefore, ordered to its task—and is
called a law when the inferring power acts, as it were, from
within its premises. The form of the game, however, lies in
number, the winner he who rolls the highest score; but this
form is imaged out upon a table; disks describe the level of
addition; and these are transmogrified by fancy into
thoroughbreds, while the player, through this really peculiar
evidence of the superiority of man, becomes the owner of a
stable. The adding of the dice can be expressed in many ways.
This simple system is the foundation of many more com¬
plicated ones. There are principles, one might call them, of
embodiment, wherein the players are enjoined to treat the
disks and the squared path as representing the units and the
total of addition. There are yet other principles, here as¬
sumed, that call the squared-up path a track, the flat disks
horses. The game may make these assumptions explicit, but
if it does not, the player may imagine for himself any other
suitable kind of linear contest.
When God abdicates, or at least sanctions a belief in the
end of miracle, he gives over his rule to inference. For fiction,
the rules can be as many as the writer wishes, and they can
be of any kind he wishes. They establish the logic, the order,
of his world. They permit us to expect one event will follow
another, or one sentence another, or one word another. To
the degree words, sentences, and, materially, things and

21
 William H. Gass

happenings follow without rule, the world is a world of

chance. Since no work can exhibit a conformity to principle
so complete each word is, in its place and time, inevitable
and predictable, all fictional worlds contain at least an ele¬
ment of chance, and some, of course, a very high degree of it.
It is merely a critical prejudice that requires from fiction a
rigidly determined order. Chance, too, is a kind of principle,
and can be brought to the understanding of reason. In the
natural realm, the principle of causality is often regarded as
the inferring instrument. Causality, in general, makes out the
possibility of predicting events from the evidence of others.
Since the inferring power is thought to reside otherwise than
in the observer, any particular expression of it is a law. When,
as in the game above, it is impossible to predict the future
organization of a system on the basis simply of its present
state and its governing rules or laws, and when the prediction
must await the unpredictable disclosure of further facts, for
instance what the dice will read, then the svstem is a system
based on chance. It must be borne in mind that the results of
the game proceed inevitably from its nature, and that a
system based on chance remains as beautifully systematic
as any other. If what the fates decree must come to pass,
chance can lie only in the way to it. Or each affair may be
seen necessarily to unfold out of its past without anyone’s
being able to guess the ultimate consequences. Again, cer¬
tainty and doubt about both end and means may be so
shrewdly mixed, the reader is delightfully tossed between
cruel suspense and calm inevitability. In the dice game, the
players finger disks, but if the game, by its conventions,
calls them horses, they are horses. However, to a fellow who,
his disk dead even with the others, resolutely calls all disks,
and only waits the adding up of his account, art must ever

22
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

be a failure; for it can succeed only through the cooperating

imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out,
for themselves, the artist’s world and make it round, and
whose own special genius partly determines the ultimate
glory of it.
The causal relation itself may be logically necessary or
psychologically customary, formal or final, mechanical or
purposive. It may be divinely empowered or materially
blind. Causality in fiction is usually restricted to the principle
that controls the order of constructed events, considered
separately from whatever rule may govern the placement of
symbols, the dress of the heroine, the names of the characters,
and so on, if any rule does govern them. An event, however,
may be anything from the twitch of an eyebrow to the
commission of adultery, and a cause, any event which leads
beyond itself to another. The plot (to risk that rightly abused
word) is composed of those events the novelist has troubled
to freshly arrange as causes, as opposed to those he has
thrown in for vividness, but which cause nothing, or those
concerning which he has let nonfictitious nature have its
way. Nonfictitious nature has its way about a good deal. If
in a story it rains, the streets usually get wet; if a man is
stabbed, he bleeds; smoke can still be a sign of fire, and
screams can be sounds of damsels in distress. No novel is
without its assumptions. It is important to find them out, for
they are not always the same assumptions the reader is ready,
unconsciously, to make. Hawthorne could count on more
than Henry James, as James complained. Do we any longer
dare to infer goodness from piety, for example, evil from
promiscuity, culture from rank?
And has not the world become, for many novelists, a place
not only vacant of gods, but also empty of a generously

23
 William H. Gass

regular and peacefully abiding nature on which the novelist

might, in large, rely, so to concentrate on cutting a fine and
sculptured line through a large mass taken for granted, and
has it now also seemed to him absent of that perceptive and
sympathetic reader who had his own genius and would
undertake the labor, rather easy, of following the gracious
turns that line might take; so that, with all these forms of
vacantness about him, he has felt the need to reconstitute,
entire, his world; to take nothing, if he felt the spur of that
conceit, for granted, and make all new, distinct, apart, and
finally, even, to provide, within the framework of his vision,
the ideal reader, the writer’s words his mind and eyes?

The use of philosophical ideas in the construction of fic¬

tional works—in a very self-conscious and critical way, I
mean—has been hastened by the growing conviction that not
only do these ideas often represent conceptual systems of
considerable complexity, they have the further advantage of
being almost wholly irrelevant as accounts of the real world.
They are, that is, to a great degree fictional already, and ripe
for fun and games. Then, too, the novelist now better
understands his medium; he is ceasing to pretend that his
business is to render the world; he knows, more often now,
that his business is to make one, and to make one from the
only medium of which he is a master—language. And there
are even more radical developments.
There are metatheorems in mathematics and logic, ethics
has its linguistic oversoul, everywhere lingos to converse
about lingos are being contrived, and the case is no different
in the novel. I don’t mean merely those drearily predictable
 Philosophy and the Form of Fiction

pieces about writers who are writing about what they are
writing, but those, like some of the work of Borges, Barth,
and Flann O Brien, for example, in which the forms of fiction
serve as the material upon which further forms can be im¬
posed. Indeed, many of the so-called antinovels are really
metafictions.8
Still, the philosophical analysis of fiction has scarcely
taken its first steps. Philosophers continue to interpret novels
as if they were philosophies themselves, platforms to speak
from, middens from which may be scratched important
messages for mankind; they have predictably looked for con¬
tent, not form; they have regarded fictions as ways of view¬
ing reality and not as additions to it. There are many ways
of refusing experience. This is one of them.9
So little is known of the power of the gods in the worlds
of fiction, or of the form of cause, or of the nature of soul,
or of the influence of evil, or of the essence of good. No
distinction is presently made between laws and rules of
inference and conventions of embodiment, or their kinds.
The role of chance or of assumption, the recreative power
of the skillful reader, the mastery of the sense of internal life,
the forms of space and time: how much is known of these?
The ontological significance of the subordinate clause, or the
short stiff sentence regularly conjoined to more, or new
words, or inversion—all passed over. Writers are seldom
recognized as empiricists, idealists, skeptics, or stoics, though
they ought—I mean, now, in terms of the principles of their
constructions, for Sartre is everywhere recognized as an

8 A number of the preceding points are developed in “Mirror,

Mirror,” concerning Nabokov, in “Pricksongs & Descants, concern¬
ing Coover, in “The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon, con¬
cerning Barthelme, and in “Imaginary Borges and His Books.”
9 Others are discussed in “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World”
and “The Artist and Society.”

25
 William H. Gass

existentialist leaning left, but few have noticed that the

construction of his novels is utterly bourgeois. No search
is made for first principles, none for rules, and in fact all
capacity for thought in the face of fiction is so regularly
abandoned as to reduce it to another form of passive and
mechanical amusement. The novelist has, by this ineptitude,
been driven out of healthy contact with his audience, and
the supreme values of fiction sentimentalized. The art of the
novel is now a mature art, as constantly the source of that
gratification found in the purest and profoundest contempla¬
tion as any art has ever been, and the prospect of a com¬
prehensive esthetic that will provide for its understanding
and its judgment is promising and grand. The novel is owed
this. It has come, in darkness, far. But it will not stir farther
until the appreciation of it has become properly philosophi¬
cal.

26
 THE MEDIUM OF FICTION

I
JL t seems a country-headed
thing to say: that literature is language, that stories and the
places and the people in them1 are merely made of words as
chairs are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth or
metal tubes. Still, we cannot be too simple at the start, since
the obvious is often the unobserved. Occasionally we should
allow the trite to tease us into thought, for such old friends,
the cliches in our life, are the only strangers we can know.
It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through
books quite out of sight,2 pass clamorous pages into sound¬
less dreams. That novels should be made of words, and
merely words, is shocking, really. It’s as though you had dis¬
covered that your wife were made of rubber: the bliss of all
those years, the fears . . . from sponge.
Like the mathematician, like the philosopher, the novelist

1 For the people, see “The Concept of Character in Fiction.”

2 This, as well as the comparison with mathematics, is returned to
in “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life.”

-27
 William H. Gass

makes things out of concepts. Concepts, consequently, must

be his critical concern: not the defects of his person, the
crimes on his conscience, other men’s morals, or their kind¬
ness or cruelty. The painter squeezes space through his
pigments. Paint stains his fingers. How can he forget the
color he has loaded on his brush or that blank canvas audience
before him? Yet the novelist frequently behaves as if his
work were all heart, character, and story; he professes to
hate abstraction, mathematics, and the pure works of mind.
Of course, unlike poetry, and despite its distinguished
figures, for a long time now the novel has been an amateur’s
affair, an open field for anybody’s running, and it has
drawn the idle, sick, and gossipaceous, the vaguely artistic—
prophets, teachers, muckrakers—all the fanatical explainers,
those dreamily scientific, and those anally pedantic.
Paint stains the fingers; the sculptor’s hair is white with
dust; but concepts have no physical properties; they do not
permit smell or reflect light; they do not fill space or contain
it; they do not age. “Five” is no wider, older, or fatter than
“four”; “apple” isn’t sweeter than “quince,” rounder than
“pear,” smoother than “peach.” To say, then, that literature
is language is to say that literature is made of meanings, con¬
cepts, ideas, forms (please yourself with the term), and that
these are so static and eternal as to shame the stars.
Like the mathematician. For the novelist to be at all, in any
way, like a mathematician is shocking. It’s worse than dis¬
covering your privates are plastic. Because there’s no
narration among numbers. It is logically impossible. Time’s

When David Hilbert, the great logician, heard that a

student had given up mathematics to write novels, he is sup¬
posed to have said: “It was just as well; he did not have
enough imagination to become a first-rate mathematician.”

28
 The Medium of Fiction

The yammer of thought, the constant one-after-another

of sounds, the shapes of words, the terrible specter of spell¬
ing, are each due to this fact that meanings are heavenly
bodies which, to our senses, must somehow announce them¬
selves. A word is a concept made flesh, if you like—the
eternal presented as noise. When I spell, then, let’s say,
avoirdupois,’ I am forming our name for that meaning, but
it might, just as well, be written down “dozzo,” or still more
at length, with the same lack of logic, “typary,” “snoddle,”
or “willmullynull.” “Avoirdupois.” An unreasonable body.
Nonetheless lovely. “Avoirdupois.”
There is a fundamental contradiction in our medium.3
We work with a marble of flaws. My mind is utterly unlike
my body,4 and unless you’re an angel, so, I am certain, is
yours. Poor Descartes really wrote on the problems of poets:
word sense and word sound, math and mechanics, the mind
and its body, can they touch? And how, pray God, can they
resemble? In the act of love, as in all the arts, the soul should
be felt by the tongue and the fingers, felt in the skin. So
should our sounds come to color up the surface of our stories
like a blush. This adventitious music is the only sensory
quality our books can have. As Frost observed, even the
empty sentence has a sound, or rather—I should say—is a
series of nervous tensions and resolves. No artist dares neglect
his own world’s body, for nothing else, nothing else about
his book is physical.
In the hollow of a jaw, the ear, upon the page, concepts
now begin to move: they appear, accelerate, they race, they
hesitate a moment, slow, turn, break, join, modify, and it be-

3 See “Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language.”

4 The contrast which is meant here is not that often alleged to
exist between thought and feeling, but that between consciousness
and things.

29
 William H. Gass

comes reasonable to speak of the problems of narration for

the first time. Truly (that is to say, technically), narration is
that part of the art of fiction concerned with the coming on
and passing off of words—not the familiar arrangement of
words in dry strings like so many shriveled worms, but their
formal direction and rapidity. But this is not what’s usually
meant.
For most people, fiction is history; fiction is history with¬
out tables, graphs, dates, imports, edicts, evidence, laws; his¬
tory without hiatus—intelligible, simple, smooth. Fiction
is sociology freed of statistics, politics with no real party
in the opposition; it’s a world where play money buys you
cardboard squares of colored country; a world where every¬
one is obediently psychological, economic, ethnic, geographi¬
cal—framed in a keyhole and always nude, each figure
fashioned from the latest thing in cello-see-through, so we
may observe our hero’s guts, too, if we choose: ah, they’re
blue, and squirming like a tickled river. For truth without
effort, thought without rigor, feeling without form, existence
without commitment: what will you give? for a wind-up
world, a toy life? ... six bits? for a book with a thicker
skin? ... six bucks? I am a man, myself, intemperately mild,
and though it seems to me as much deserved as it’s desired,
I have no wish to steeple quires of paper passion up so many
sad unelevating rears.
Nay, not seems, it is a stubborn, country-headed thing to
say: that there are no events but words in fiction. Words
mean things. Thus we use them every day: make love, buy
bread, and blow up bridges. But the use of language in
fiction only mimics its use in life. A sign like gents, for in¬
stance, tells me where to pee. It conveys information; it pro¬
duces feelings of glad relief. I use the sign, but I dare not
dawdle under it. It might have read men or borne a

30
 The Medium of Fiction

moustache. This kind of sign passes out of consciousness, is

extinguished by its use. In literature, however, the sign re¬
mains; it sings; and we return to it again and again.
In contrast, the composer’s medium is pure; that is, the
tones he uses exist for music, and are made by instruments
especially designed. Imagine his feelings, then, if he were
forced to employ the meaningful noises of every day: bird
calls, sirens, screams, alarm bells, whistles, ticks, and human
chatter. He could plead all he liked that his music was
pure, but we would know that he’d written down sounds
from a play unseen, and we would insist that it told a story.
Critics would describe the characters (one wears a goatee)
and quarrel over their motives, marriages, or mothers, all
their dark genes. Although no one wonders, of a painted
peach, whether the tree it grew on was watered properly,
we are happily witness, week after week, to further exam¬
ination of Hamlet or Madame Bovary, quite as if they were
real. And they are so serious, so learned, so certain—so
laughable—these ladies and gentlemen. Ah well, it’s merely
energy which might otherwise elucidate the Trinity.
So the novelist makes his book from boards which say
ladies and gents. Every scrap has been worn, every item
handled; most of the pieces are dented or split. The writer
may choose to be heroic—poets often are—he may strive
to purify his diction and achieve an exclusively literary
language. He may pretend that every syllable he speaks
hasn’t been spit, sometimes, in someone else’s mouth. Such
poets scrub, they clean, they smooth, they polish, until we
can scarcely recognize their words on the page. “A star
glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass
greediness,” wrote Gertrude Stein. “Toute Pensee emet im
Coup de Deswrote Mallarme. Most novelists, however (it
is one of the things that make them one), try to turn the

3i
 William H. Gass

tattering to account—incorporate it cleverly—as the painter

does when he pastes up a collage of newspaper, tin foil, and
postage stamps. He will recognize, for example, that stories
are wonderful devices for controlling the speed of the mind,
for resting it after hard climbs; they give a reassuring light
to a dark place, and help the reader hold, like handsome
handles, heavy luggage on long trips.
A dedicated storyteller, though—a true lie-minded man
—will serve his history best, and guarantee its popularity, not
by imitating nature, since nature’s no source of verisimili¬
tude, but by following as closely as he can our simplest,
most direct and unaffected forms of daily talk, for we report
real things, things which intrigue and worry us, and such
resembling gossip in a book allows us to believe in figures
and events we cannot see, shall never touch, with an assur¬
ance of safety which sets our passions fre'e. He will avoid
recording consciousness since consciousness is private—we
do not normally “take it down”—and because no one really
believes in any other feelings than his own. However, the
moment our writer concentrates on sound, the moment he
formalizes his sentences, the moment he puts in a figure of
speech or turns a phrase, shifts a tense or alters tone, the
moment he carries description, or any account, beyond
need, he begins to turn his reader’s interest away from the
world which lies among his words like a beautiful woman
among her slaves, and directs him toward the slaves them¬
selves. This illustrates a basic principle: if I describe my
peach too perfectly, it’s the poem which will make my
mouth water . . . while the real peach spoils.
Sculptures take up space and gather dust. Concepts do
not. They take up us. They invade us as we read, and they
achieve, as our resistance and their forces vary, every con¬
ceivable degree of occupation. Imagine a worry or a pain.

32
 The Medium of Fiction

an obsessive thought, a jealousy or hate so strong it renders

you insensible to all else. Then while it lasts, you are that
fear, that ache, for consciousness is always smaller than its
opportunities, and can contract around a kernel like a
shell. A piece of music can drive you out and take your
place. The purpose of a literary work is the capture of con¬
sciousness, and the consequent creation, in you, of an
imagined sensibility, so that while you read you are that pa¬
tient pool or cataract of concepts which the author has con¬
structed; and though at first it might seem as if the richness
of life had been replaced by something less so—senseless
noises, abstract meanings, mere shadows of worldly employ¬
ment—yet the new self with which fine fiction and good
poetry should provide you is as wide as the mind is, and
musicked deep with feeling. While listening to such symbols
sounding, the blind perceive; thought seems to grow a body;
and the will is at rest amid that moving like a gull asleep on the
sea. Perhaps we’ll be forgiven, then, if we fret about our words
and continue country-headed. It is not a refusal to please.
There’s no willfulness, disdain, exile ... no anger. Because
a consciousness electrified by beauty—is that not the aim and
emblem and the ending of all finely made love?
Are you afraid?

33
 THE CONCEPT OF CHARACTER
IN FICTION

l have never found a hand-

book on the art of fiction or the stage, nor can I imagine
finding one, that did not contain a chapter on the creation
of character, a skill whose mastery, the author of each man¬
ual insists, secures for one the inner secrets of these arts:
not, mind you, an easy thing: rather as difficult as the whole
art itself, since, in a way, it is the whole art: to fasten in the
memory of the reader, like a living presence, some bright
human image. All well and good to paint a landscape, evoke
a feeling, set a tempest loose, but not quite good enough to
nail an author to his immortality if scheming Clarence, fat,
foul-trousered Harry, or sweetly terraced Priss do not
emerge from the land they huff and rage and eat in fully
furnished out by Being; enough alive, indeed, to eat and huff
in ours—dear God, more alive than that!—sufficiently en¬
larged by genius that they threaten to eat up and huff down
everything in sight.
Talk about literature, when it is truly talk about some¬
thing going on in the pages, if it is not about ideas, is gen-

54
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

erally about the people in it, and ranges from those cries of
wonder, horror, pleasure, or surprise, so readily drawn from
the innocently minded, to the annotated stammers of the
most erudite and nervous critics. But it is all the same. Great
character is the most obvious single mark of great literature.
The rude, the vulgar, may see in Alyosha nothing more than
the image of a modest, God-loving youth; the scholar may
perceive through this demeanor a symbolic form; but the
Alyosha of the untutored is somehow more real and present
to him than the youth on his street whom he’s known since
childhood, loving of his God and modest too, equally tried,
fully as patient; for in some way Alyosha’s visionary figure
will take lodging in him, make a model for him, so to reach,
without the scholar’s inflationary gifts, general form and uni¬
versal height; whereas the neighbor may merely move away,
take cold, and forget to write. Even the most careful stu¬
dent will admit that fiction’s fruit survives its handling and
continues growing off the tree. A great character has an
endless interest; its fascination never wanes. Indeed it is a
commonplace to say so. Hamlet. Ahab. Julien Sorel. Madame
Bovary. There is no end to their tragedy. Great literature
is great because its characters are great, and characters are
great when they are memorable. A simple formula. The
Danish ghost cries to remember him, and obediently—for
we are gullible and superstitious clots—we do.
It hasn’t always been a commonplace. Aristotle regarded
character as a servant of dramatic action, and there have
been an endless succession of opinions about the value and
function of characters since—all dreary—but the important
thing to be noted about nearly every one of them is that
whatever else profound and wonderful these theories have
to say about the world and its personalities, characters are
clearly conceived as living outside language. Just as the
movie star deserts herself to put on some press agent s more

35
 William H. Gass

alluring fictional persona, the hero of a story sets out from

his own landscape for the same land of romance the star
reached by stepping there from life. These people—Huckle¬
berry Finn, the Snopeses, Prince Myshkin, Pickwick, Molly
Bloom—seem to have come to the words of their novels like
a visitor to town . . . and later they leave on the arm of the
reader, bound, I suspect, for a shabbier hotel, and dubious
entertainments.
However, Aristotle’s remark was a recommendation.
Characters ought to exist for the sake of the action, he
thought, though he knew they often did not, and those who
nowadays say that given a sufficiently powerful and signifi¬
cant plot the characters will be dominated by it are simply
answered by asking them to imagine the plot of Moby Dick
in the hands of Henry James, or that of Sanctuary done
into Austen. And if you can persuade them to try (you will
have no success), you may then ask how the heroes and the
heroines come out. The same disastrous exercise can be given
those who believe that traits make character like definitions
do a dictionary. Take any set of traits you like and let
Balzac or Joyce, Stendhal or Beckett, loose in a single para¬
graph to use them. Give your fictional creatures qualities,
psychologies, actions, manners, moods; present them from
without or from within; let economics matter, breeding, cus¬
tom, history; let spirit wet them like a hose: all methods
work, and none do. The nature of the novel will not be
understood at all until this is: from any given body of fic¬
tional text, nothing necessarily follows, and anything plaus¬
ibly may. Authors are gods—a little tinny sometimes but
omnipotent no matter what, and plausible on top of that, if
they can manage it.1

1 This has already been discussed in “Philosophy and the Form of

Fiction.” In “Mirror, Mirror,” I complain that Nabokov’s omnipotence
is too intrusive.

36
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

Though the handbooks try to tell us how to create char¬

acters, they carefully never tell us we are making images,
illusions, imitations. Gatsby is not an imitation, for there is
nothing he imitates. Actually, if he were a copy, an illusion,
sort of shade or shadow, he would not be called a character
at all. He must be unique, entirely himself, as if he had a
self to be. He is required, in fact, to act in character, like a
cat in a sack. No, theories of character are not absurd in the
way representational theories are; they are absurd in a
grander way, for the belief in Hamlet (which audiences
often seem to have) is like the belief in God—incompre¬
hensible to reason—and one is inclined to seek a motive: some
deep fear or emotional need.
There art too many motives. We pay heed so easily. We
are so pathetically eager for this other life, for the sounds
of distant cities and the sea; we long, apparently, to pit our¬
selves against some trying wind, to follow the fortunes of a
ship hard beset, to face up to murder and fornication, and
the somber results of anger and love; oh, yes, to face up—
in books—when on our own we scarcely breathe. The
tragic view of life, for instance, in Shakespeare or in Schop¬
enhauer, Unamuno, Sartre, or Sophocles, is not one jot as
pure and penetratingly tragic as a pillow stuffed with
Jewish hair, and if we want to touch life where it burns,
though life is what we are even now awash with—futilely,
stupidly drawing in—we ought not to back off from these
other artifacts (wars, pogroms, poverty: men make them,
too). But of course we do, and queue up patiently instead
to see Prince Hamlet moon, watch him thrust his sword
through a curtain, fold it once again into Polonius, that fool¬
ish old garrulous proper noun. The so-called life one finds
in novels, the worst and best of them, is nothing like actual
life at all, and cannot be; it is not more real, or thrilling, or
authentic; it is not truer, more complex, or pure, and its

31
 William H. Gass

people have less spontaneity, are less intricate, less free, less
full.2
It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction’s
fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can’t
afford to play—the product of idleness and immoral ease.
In the grip of that feeling it isn’t life we pursue, but the
point and purpose of life—its facility, its use. So Sorel is
either a man it is amusing to gossip about, to see in our
friends, to puppet around in our dreams, to serve as our more
able and more interesting surrogate in further fanciful ad¬
ventures; or Sorel is a theoretical type, scientifically pro¬
found, representing a deep human strain, and the writing of
The Red and the Black constitutes an advance in the science
of—what would you like? sociology?
Before reciting a few helpless arguments, let me suggest,
in concluding this polemical section, just how absurd these
views are which think of fiction as a mirror or a window
onto life—as actually creative of living creatures—for really
one’s only weapon against Tertullians is ridicule.
There is a painting by Picasso which depicts a pitcher,
candle, blue enamel pot. They are sitting, unadorned, upon
the barest table. Would we wonder what was cooking in
that pot? Is it beans, perhaps, or carrots, a marmite? The
orange of the carrot is a perfect complement to the blue of
the pot, and the genius of Picasso, neglecting nothing, has
surely placed, behind that blue, invisible disks of dusky
orange, which, in addition, subtly enrich the table’s velvet
brown. Doesn’t that seem reasonable? Now I see that it must
be beans, for above the pot—you can barely see them—are

2 I treat the relation of fiction to life in more detail in “In Terms

of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life.” The problem is
handled in other ways in “The Artist and Society,” “Even if, by All
the Oxen in the World,” and “The Imagination of an Insurrection.”
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

quaking lines of steam, just the lines we associate with

boiling beans ... or is it blanching pods? Scholarly re¬
search, supported by a great foundation, will discover that
exactly such a pot was used to cook cassoulet in the kitchens
of Charles the Fat ... or was it Charles the Bald? There’s a
dissertation in that. And this explains the dripping candle
standing by the pot. (Is it dripping? no? a pity. Let’s go
on.) For isn’t Charles the Fat himself that candle? Oh no,
some say, he’s not! Blows are struck. Reputations made and
ruined. Someone will see eventually that the pot is standing
on a table, not a stove. But the pot has just come from the
stove, it will be pointed out. Has not Picasso caught that
vital moment of transition? The pot is too hot. The brown is
burning. Oh, not this table, which has been coated with re¬
sistant plastic. Singular genius—blessed man—he thinks of
everything.
Here you have half the history of our criticism in the
novel. Entire books have been written about the characters
in Dickens, Trollope, Tolstoi, Faulkner. But why not? En¬
tire books have been written about God, his cohorts, and
the fallen angels.

Descartes, examining a piece of beeswax fresh from the

hive, brought it near a flame and observed all of its sensible
qualities change. He wondered why he should believe that
wax remained. His sensations lent him nothing he could
fasten his judgment firmly to. Couldn’t he give that puddle
in his hand another name? He might have added that the
sleights of the mountebanks did not bewilder him. Somehow
he knew milady’s hanky didn’t disappear in a fist to emerge

39
 William H. Gass

as a rose. It occurred to Descartes then that perhaps his

imagination was the unifying faculty. But the wax was
capable of an infinite number of spills, reaching every stage
of relaxation, and he was unable, he writes in what is now
a brilliant phrase, “to compass this infinity by imagination.’’
How then? Some higher, finer capacity was required. His
knowledge of the wax, soft or hard, sweet or flat, became
an intuition of the mind.
Like so many philosophical arguments, this one was
erected upside down, and consequently is a bit unsteady on
its head. How, I’d rather ask, from the idea of wax, can we
predict and picture just this sticky mess? What do we see
when we peer through a glass of words?
If we ask this question of Hume, he will give us, as usual,
a brilliantly reasonable, and entirely wrong answer—out of
the habit empiricists have, I suppose, of never inspecting
their experience. Nothing is more free than the imagination
of man, he says; “it can feign a train of events with all the
appearance of reality . . .” With all the appearance of
reality . . . Then we might suppose that it’s my imagination
which allows me to descend from a writer’s words, like a
god through the clouds, and basket down on sweet Belinda’s
belly at the moment of her maximum response (or less ex¬
citingly, to picture upon the palm in my mind a slowly
sprawling blob of molten wax).
To imagine so vividly is either to be drunk, asleep, or mad.
Such images are out of our control and often terrifying. If
we could feign with every appearance of reality, we would
not wish to feign Nostromo, or even Pride and Prejudice.
Of course, the imagination cannot give us every appearance
of reality, and just as well, but perhaps it can give us every
appearance of a faded reality: the shadow of Belinda’s body
on the bed (so far has this theory fallen through the space

40
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

of a sentence!), an image seen the way I see this print and

paper now, though with the mind’s disocular eye. Or, as
Gilbert Ryle writes:

Sometimes, when someone mentions a blacksmith’s

forge, I find myself instantaneously back in my
childhood, visiting a local smithy. I can vividly
“see” the glowing red horseshoe on the anvil, fairly
vividly “hear” the hammer ringing on the shoe and
less vividly “smell” the singed hoof. How should
we describe this “smelling in the mind’s nose”?3

Certainly not by explaining that there is a smell in me, a

shadow of a smell, a picture of a smell, an image, and putting
to my noseless spirit the task of smelling it. Not as a bruise
to its blow, as Ryle says, are our imaginings related to our
experience. Yet Hume sometimes supposes that imagination
works like madness. If it can give to fiction all the appear¬
ance of reality, how is one to know what to believe when
an author’s words, stirring in us like life, managing our
minds with the efficiency of reality, throw Anna Karenina
under the train’s wheels before our eyes?
Here is the whole thing in a single passage:

The imagination has the command over all its ideas

and can join and mix and vary them in all the ways
possible. It may conceive fictitious objects with all
the circumstances of place and time. It may set them
in a manner before our eyes, in their true colors,
just as they might have existed. But as it is impos¬
sible that this faculty of imagination can ever, of
itself, reach belief, it is evident that belief consists
not in the peculiar nature or order of ideas, but

3 In The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1950).

 William H. Gass

in the manner of their conception and in their feel¬

ing to the mind.4
The name of this feeling is belief, and I am given it by the
greater intensity and steadiness with which actual impres¬
sions occupy me—a narrow difference, one only of degree.
Don’t mystery stories make us lock our doors?
But I should suppose that “seeing things” through novels
did not involve succumbing to a drunken frenzy, finding
animals in walls or naked ladies draped on desert rocks like
some long celibate Saint Anthony.
We do visualize, I suppose. Where did I leave my gloves?
And then I ransack a room in my mind until I find them.
But the room I ransack is abstract—a simple schema. I leave
out the drapes and the carpet, and I think of the room as a
set of likely glove locations. The proportion of words which
we can visualize is small, but quite apart from that, another
barrier to the belief that vivid imagining is the secret of a
character’s power is the fact that when we watch the pic¬
tures which a writer’s words have directed us to make, we
miss their meaning, for the point is never the picture. It also
takes concentration, visualization does—takes slowing down;
and this alone is enough to rule it out of novels, which are
never waiting, always flowing on.

Instantly Hugh’s shack began to take form in her

mind. But it was not a shack—it was a home! It
stood, on wide-girthed strong legs of pine, between
the forest of pine and high, high waving alders and
tall slim birches, and the sea. There was the narrow
path that wound down through the forest from the

4 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New

York: Oxford University Press). There is reason to suppose that
Hume thinks the imagination plays with ideas only after they have
lost all vivifying power. Then, however, their arrangement could
satisfy only our conceptions of things, not our perceptions of them.
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

shore, with salmonberries and thimbleberries and

wild blackberry bushes that on bright winter nights
of frost reflected a million moons; behind the house
was a dogwood tree that bloomed twice in the year
with white stars. Daffodils and snowdrops grew in
the little garden.5

And so forth. Do you have all that? the salmonberries and

the thimbleberries? I’m afraid you’ll be all day about it. One
reason is that our imaginings are mostly imprecise. They are
vague and general. Even when colored, they’re gray.

A hare vaguely perceived is nevertheless a specific

hare. But a hare which is the object of a vague image
is a vague hare.6
Consequently, writing which carefully defines its object,
however visual its terms, sets the visual successfully aside.
It does, that is, if what we see inside us are misty visual
schema. But

Suppose that I have an image of a head that is non¬

specific about baldness, is this not rather queer? For
presumably this head must be neither bald nor not
bald nor even a half-way house with just a few
hairs.7
Enter Mr. Cashmore, who is a character in The Aiukward
Age.
Air. Cashmore, who would have been very red¬
headed if he had not been very bald, showed a single
eyeglass and a long upper lip; he was large and
jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense
ejaculations that were not in the line of his type.

5 Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: Reynal and

Hitchcock, 1947).
6 Sartre, Psychology of Imagination (New York: Citadel, 1961).
7 J. M. Shorter, “Imagination,” in Mind, LXI.

43
 William H. Gass

We can imagine any number of other sentences about Mr.

Cashmore added to this one. Now the question is: what is
Mr. Cashmore? Here is the answer I shall give: Mr. Cash-
more is (i) a noise, (2) a proper name, (3) a complex
system of ideas, (4) a controlling conception, (5) an instru¬
ment of verbal organization, (6) a pretended mode of re¬
ferring, and (7) a source of verbal energy.8 But Mr.
Cashmore is not a person. He is not an object of perception,
and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be
correctly said of him. There is no path from idea to sense
(this is Descartes’ argument in reverse), and no amount of
careful elaboration of Mr. Cashmore’s single eyeglass, his
upper lip or jauntiness is going to enable us to see him.
How many little petulant movements are there? Certainly
as many as the shapes which may be taken by soft wax. If
we follow Hume, we think we picture things through lan¬
guage because we substitute, on cue, particular visual mem¬
ories of our own, and the more precisely language defines
its object, the less likely we are to find a snapshot in our
book to fit it. Our visualizations interfere with Mr. Cash-
more’s development, for if we think of him as someone we
have met, we must give him qualities his author hasn’t yet,
and we may stubbornly, or through simple lack of atten¬
tion, retain these later, though they’ve been explicitly de¬
barred. “On your imaginary forces work,” Henry F’s

8 (1) He is always a “mister,” and his name functions musically

much of the time. “He was an odd compound, Mr. Cashmore, and
the air of personal good health, the untarnished bloom which some¬
times lent a monstrous serenity to his mention of the barely men-
tionable, was on occasion balanced or matched by his playful
application of extravagant terms to matters of much less moment.”
What a large mouthful, that sentence. His name (2) locates him, but
since he exists nowhere but on the page (6), it simply serves to draw
other words toward him (3), or actualize others, as in conversation
(7), when they seem to proceed from him, or remind us of all that
he is an emblem of (4), and richly interact with other, similarly
formed and similarly functioning verbal centers (5).

44
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

Prologuer begs. “Piece out our imperfections with your

thoughts . . . Think, when we talk of horses, that you see
them / Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth,”
and then the audience (and the similarly situated novel
reader) is praised for having done so; but this is worse than
the self-congratulating pap which periodically flows from
the bosom of the “creative” critic, because these generous
additions destroy the work as certainly as “touching up” and
“painting over.” The unspoken word is often eloquent.

Well, l finally met Mr. Mulholland.

Oh, what’s he like?
He has large thumbs.

Characters in fiction are mostly empty canvas. I have

known many who have passed through their stories without
noses, or heads to hold them; others have lacked bodies alto¬
gether, exercised no natural functions, possessed some
thoughts, a few emotions, but no psychologies, and appar¬
ently made love without the necessary organs. The true
principle is direct enough: Mr. Cashmore has what he’s
been given; he also has what he hasn't, just as strongly. Mr.
Cashmore, in fact, has been cruelly scalped.
Now, is there a nose to this Mr. Cashmore? Let’s suppose
it—but then, of what sort? We’re not told. He is an eye¬
glass without eyes, he has no neck or chin, his ears are un¬
explored. “Large”—how indefinite a word. But would it
have been better to have written “sixteen stone”? Not at
all, nor do we know how this weight is disposed. If it is
impossible to picture Mr. Cashmore, however carefully we
draw him, will it be easier to limn his soul? Or perhaps we
may imagine that this sentence describes not Mr. Cashmore,
out or in, but his impression—what sort of dent he makes in
his surroundings. He gives the impression of a man who
would have been redheaded if he hadn’t been bald. Very

45
 William H. Gass

well. What impression, exactly, is that? Will it do to think

of Mr. Cashmore as a man with red eyebrows and a red
fringe above his ears, but otherwise without hair? That
would rephrase Mr. Cashmore, and rephrase him badly. The
description of Mr. Cashmore stands as James wrote it, even
if Mr. Cashmore hasn’t a hair on his body. As a set of sensa¬
tions Mr. Cashmore is simply impossible; as an idea he is
admirably pungent and precise.
Similarly, it is not at all correct to infer that because Mr.
Mulholland has thumbs, he has hands, arms, torso, self. That
inference destroys the metaphor (a pure synecdoche), since
his thumbs are all he seems to be. Mr. Mulholland is monu¬
mentally clumsy, but if you fill him in behind his thumbs,
clumsiness will not ensue.
So sometimes, then, we are required to take away what
we’ve been given, as in the case of Mr. Cashmore’s red hair;
sometimes it’s important to hold fast to what we’ve got and
resist any inclination we may have to elaborate, as in the
case of Mr. Mulholland, who 1 said had thumbs; and some¬
times we must put our minds to the stretch, bridging the
distances between concepts with other concepts, as in the
two examples which follow; or we may be called upon to do
all these things at once, as in what I promise will be my
final misuse of poor Mulholland.9

Well, / finally met Mr. Mulholland.

Oh, what’s he like?
A silver thimble.

9 The entire matter is far more complicated than I have indicated.

Not only is there a linear order of apprehension (the reader is first
told Mr. Mulholland has been seen, then that he was walking his
thumbs), but also an order, in depth, of implications. Analysis, in
searching out these implications, frequently upsets this order, bringing
the bottom to the top. Meanings, uncovered, must be put back as
they were found. It is a delicate operation.

46
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

l saw Mr. Mulholland today.

Oh, what was he doing?
Walking his thumbs.

Mr. Mulholland's face had

a watchful look. Although
its features had not yet arrived,
they were momentarily expected.

To summarize, so far:
1. Only a few of the words which a writer normally uses
to create a character can be “imaged” in any sense.
2. To the extent these images are faded sensations which
we’ve once had, they fill in, particularize, and falsify the
author’s account.
3. To the degree these images are as vivid and lively as
reality is, they will very often be unpleasant, and certainly
can’t be “feigned.” Then words would act like a mind¬
expanding drug.
4. To the degree these images are general schema, indis¬
tinct and vague, the great reality characters are supposed to
have becomes less plausible, and precise writing (so often
admired) will interfere with their formation.
5. Constructing images of any kind takes time, slows the
flow of the work; nor can imagining keep up, in complexity,
with the incredibly intricate conceptual systems which may
be spun like a spiderweb in a single sentence.
6. We tend to pay attention to our pictures, and lose sight
of the meaning. The novelist’s words are not notes which
he is begging the reader to play, as if his novel needed some¬
thing more done to it in order to leap into existence.
Words in daily life are signposts, handles, keys. They ex¬
press, instruct, command, inform, exhort—in short, they

47
 William H. Gass

serve; and it is difficult to think of our servants as kings.10

But among real things words win the gold medals for Being.
Ortega y Gasset asks us to imagine we are looking through
a window at a garden.

The clearer the glass is, the less (of the glass) we
will see. But then making an effort we may with¬
draw attention from the garden; and by retracting
the ocular ray, we may fixate it upon the glass.
Then the garden will disappear in our eyes and we
will see instead only some confused masses of color
which seem to stick to the glass. Consequently to
see the garden and to see the glass in the window-
pane are two incompatible operations. . . . Likewise
he who in the work of art aims to be moved bv the
fate of John and Mary, or of Tristan and Iseult, and
readjusts to them his spiritual perception will not
be able to see the work of art. . . . Now the ma¬
jority of people are unable to adjust their attention
to the glass and the transparency which is the work
of art; instead they penetrate through it to pas¬
sionately wallow in the human reality which the
work of art refers to. If they are invited to let loose
their prey and fix their attention upon the work of
art itself, they will say they see nothing in it, be¬
cause, indeed, they see no human realities there, but
only artistic transparencies, pure essences.11

Ortega seems to believe, however, that words are windows

through which something can be seen, and I have argued
that words are opaque, as opaque as my garden gloves and
trowel, objects which, nevertheless, may vividly remind me

10 See “Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language,”

and “The Medium of Fiction.”
11 Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (New York:
Anchor Books, 1956).

48
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

of spring, earth, and roses. Or Uncle Harry, Africa, the

tsetse fly, and lovesick elephants.
On the other side of a novel lies the void. Think, for in¬
stance, of a striding statue; imagine the purposeful inclina¬
tion of the torso, the alert and penetrating gaze of the head
and its eyes, the outstretched arm and pointing finger;
everything would appear to direct us toward some goal in
front of it. Yet our eye travels only to the finger’s end, and
not beyond. Though pointing, the finger bids us stay instead,
and we journey slowly back along the tension of the arm.
In our hearts we know what actually surrounds the statue.
The same surrounds every other work of art: empty space
and silence.12

A character, first of all, is the noise of his name, and all

the sounds and rhythms that proceed from him. We pass
most things in novels as we pass things on a train. The words
flow by like the scenery. All is change.13 But there are some
points in a narrative which remain relatively fixed; we may
depart from them, but soon we return, as music returns to
its theme. Characters are those primary substances to which
everything else is attached. Hotels, dresses, conversations,
sausage, feelings, gestures, snowy evenings, faces—each may
fade as fast as we read of them. Yet the language of the
novel will eddy about a certain incident or name, as Mel¬
ville’s always circles back to Ahab and his wedding with

12 The way in which both the reader and the world are drawn
into the novel is discussed in “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and
the Figures of Life.” .
13 Of course nothing prevents a person from feeling that life is like

this. See “A Spirit in Search of Itself.”

49
 William H. Gass

the white whale. Mountains are characters in Malcolm

Lowry’s Under the Volcano, so is a ravine, a movie, mescal,
or a boxing poster. A symbol like the cross can be a char¬
acter. An idea or a situation (the anarchist in The Secret
Agent, bomb ready in his pocket), or a particular event,
an obsessive thought, a decision (Zeno’s, for instance, to quit
smoking), a passion, a memory, the weather, Gogol’s over¬
coat—anything, indeed, which serves as a fixed point, like a
stone in a stream or that soap in Bloom’s pocket, functions
as a character. Character, in this sense, is a matter of degree,
for the language of the novel may loop back seldom, often,
or incessantly. But the idea that characters are like primary
substances has to be taken in a double way, because if any
thing becomes a character simply to the degree the words
of the novel qualify it, it also loses some of its substance,
some of its primacy, to the extent that it, in turn, qualifies
something else. In a perfectly organized novel, every word
would ultimately qualify one thing, like the God of the
metaphysician, at once the subject and the body of the
whole.14 Normally, characters are fictional human beings,
and thus are given proper names. In such cases, to create a
character is to give meaning to an unknown X; it is abso¬
lutely to define; and since nothing in life corresponds to
these Xs, their reality is borne by their name. They are,
where it is.
Most of the words the novelist uses have their meanings
already formed. Proper names do not, except in a tangential
way. It’s true that Mr. Mulholland could not be Mr. Mull,
and Mr. Cashmore must bear, as best he can, the curse of his
wealth forever, along with his desire for gain. Character has

14 1 here is no reason why every novel should be organized in this

way. This method constructs a world according to the principles
of Absolute Idealism. See “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.”

5°
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

a special excitement for a writer (apart from its organizing

value) because it offers him a chance to give fresh meaning
to new words. A proper name begins as a blank, like a wall
or a canvas, upon which one might paint a meaning, perhaps
as turbulent and mysterious, as treacherous and vast, as Moby
Dick’s, perhaps as delicate, scrupulous, and sensitive as that
of Fleda Vetch.
I cannot pause here over the subject of rhythm and sound,
though they are the heartbeat of writing, of prose no less
than poetry.
Their friend, Mr. Grant-Jackson, a highly pre¬
ponderant pushing person, great in discussion and
arrangement, abrupt in overture, unexpected, if
not perverse, in attitude, and almost equally ac¬
claimed and objected to in the wide midland region
to which he had taught, as the phrase was, the size
of his foot—their friend had launched his bolt
quite out of the blue and had thereby so shaken
them as to make them fear almost more than hope.15
Air. Grant-Jackson is a preponderant pushing person be¬
cause he’s been made by p’s, and the rhythm and phrasing
of James’s writing here prepares and perfectly presents him
to us. Certainly we cannot think of Molly Bloom apart from
her music, or the gay and rapid Anna Livia apart from hers.
If one examines the texture of a fiction carefully, one will
soon see that some words appear to gravitate toward their
subject like flies settle on sugar, while others seem to emerge
from it. In many works this logical movement is easily dis¬
cernible and very strong. When a character speaks, the words
seem to issue from him and to be acts of his. Description first
forms a tiatvre, then allows that nature to perform. We must
be careful, however, not to judge by externals. Barkis says

15 Henry James, “The Birthplace.”

51
 William H. Gass

that Barkis is willing, but the expression functions descrip¬

tively to qualify Barkis, and it is Dickens’ habit to treat
speech as if it were an attribute of character, like tallness or
honesty, and not an act. On the other hand, qualities, in the
right context, can be transformed into verbs. Later in the
book don’t we perceive the whiteness of the whale as a de¬
sign, an intention of Moby Dick’s, like a twist of his flukes
or the smashing of a small boat?
Whether Mr. Cashmore was once real and sat by James
at someone’s dinner table, or was instead the fabrication of
James’s imagination,16 as long as he came into being from the
world’s direction he once existed outside language. The task
of getting him in I shall call the problem of rendering. But
it must be stressed (it cannot be stressed too severely) that
Mr. Cashmore may never have had a model, and may never
have been imagined either, but may have come to be in
order to serve some high conception (a Mr. Moneybags)
and represent a type, not just himself, in which case he is
not a reality rendered, but a universal embodied.11 Again,
Mr. Cashmore might have had still other parents. Meanings
in the stream of words before his appearance might have
suggested him, dramatic requirements may have called him
forth, or he may have been the spawn of music, taking his
substance from rhythm and alliteration. Perhaps it was all
of these. In well-regulated fictions, most things are over¬
determined.
So far 1 have been talking about the function of a char¬
acter in the direct stream of language, but there are these
two other dimensions, the rendered and the embodied, and I
should like to discuss each briefly.

16 Some aspects of this imagination are dealt with in “The High

Brutality of Good Intentions,” and “In the Cage.”
17 See “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.”

52
 The Concept of Character in Fiction

If we observe one of J. F. Powers’ worldly priests sharp¬

ening his eye for the pin by putting through his clerical
collar, the humor, with all its sharpness, lives in the situation,
and quite incidentally in the words.18 One can indeed imag¬
ine Powers thinking it up independently of any verbal for¬
mula. Once Powers had decided that it would be funny to
show a priest playing honeymoon bridge with his house¬
keeper, then his problem becomes the technical one of how
best to accomplish it. What the writer must do, of course, is
not only render the scene, but render the scene inseparable
from its language, so that if the idea (the chaste priest
caught in the cliches of marriage) is taken from the situation,
like a heart from its body, both die. Far easier to render a
real cornfield in front of you, because once that rendering
has reached its page, the cornfield will no longer exist for
literary purposes, no one will be able to see it by peering
through your language, and consequently there will be
nothing to abstract from your description. But with a
“thought up” scene or situation, this is not the case. It
comes under the curse of story. The notion, however amus¬
ing, is not literary, for it might be painted, filmed, or played.
If we inquire further and ask why Powers wanted such a
scene in the first place, we should find, I think, that he
wanted it in order to embody a controlling “idea”—at one
level of abstraction, the worldliness of the church, for in¬
stance. If he had nuns around a kitchen table counting the
Sunday take and listening to the Cubs, that would do it.
Father Burner beautifully embodies just such a controlling
idea in Powers’ celebrated story “The Prince of Darkness.”
Both rendering and embodying involve great risks because
they require working into a scientific order of words what

18 I enlarge on this aspect of Powers’ work in “The Bingo Game

at the Foot of the Cross.”

53
 William H. Gass

was not originally there. Any painter knows that a contour

may only more or less enclose his model, while a free line
simply and completely is. Many of the model’s contours
may be esthetically irrelevant, so it would be unwise to
follow them. The free line is subject to no such temptations.
Its relevance can be total. As Valery wrote: There are no
details in execution.
Often novelists mimic our ordinary use of language. We
report upon ourselves; we gossip. Normally we are not
lying; and our language, built to refer, actually does. When
these selfsame words appear in fiction, and when they follow
the forms of daily use, they create, quite readily, that dan¬
gerous feeling that a real Tietjens, a real Nickleby, lives just
beyond the page; that through that thin partition we can
hear a world at love.19 But the writer must not let the
reader out; the sculptor must not let the eye fall from the
end of his statue’s finger; the musician must not let the lis¬
tener dream. Of course, he will; but let the blame be on
himself. High tricks are possible: to run the eye rapidly
along that outstretched arm to the fingertip, only to draw
it up before it falls away in space; to carry the reader to the
very edge of every word so that it seems he must be com¬
pelled to react as though to truth as told in life, and then
to return him, like a philosopher liberated from the cave,
to the clear and brilliant world of concept, to the realm of
order, proportion, and dazzling construction ... to fiction,
where characters, unlike ourselves, freed from existence,
can shine like essence, and purely Be.

19 See “The Medium of Fiction.”

54
 IN TERMS OF THE TOENAIL:
FICTION AND THE FIGURES
OF LIFE

open book, an open eye, and the first page lifts like fragrance
toward us so we read, “Two mountain chains traverse the
republic. . . Later we say to a friend, “I have begun Mal¬
colm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano.'’ A sentence read,
a sentence spoken, both imparting information, one accurate
as to Mexico, the other to our actions. The town is well
south of the Tropic of Cancer, but we are buying groceries
in Bayonne or teaching at Vassar. Our eye blinks, our mind
wanders, the doorbell buzzes, and time between the two
ranges ceases, or rather it waits, hushed, held like a lungful
of air; for our hero, the Consul, will always be there, sitting
in some bar or other, perfectamente borracho, drunk on
guilt, and drinking mescal. How easy to enter. How difficult
to remain. It reads like a guide, the beginning of this book.
The walls of the town are high, the streets and lanes twist,
the roads wind. There are four hundred swimming pools—
four hundred—and many fine hotels. It’s a resort city with

55
 William H. Gass

the unpronounceable Indian name—Quauhnauhuac—like the

groan of a duck. The day is the Day of the Dead, the first
of November, 1939. But we are in ’50 or ’85, and our
eyes ache. Still it’s like a report on ourselves, despite the
differences, an account of Oil City, Pa.: dates, places, per¬
sons, conversations, parties, politicking, lies. Or it is history
which hasn’t happened yet but may begin to any day; and
as we read we find ourselves companions to a landscape or a
dog, a shattered marriage, broken street, a doctor, brother,
drunkard, deep ravine—each familiar (Oil City has its own
steep slopes)—and in that sense our meeting with the text
can seem quite seamless, the book and cigarette we hold no
different fundamentally from the glass which imprisons
Geoffrey Firmin. Life here, life there—then much the same.
Words here, words there—then similar as well; the sentences
hauling their communications from station to station like
heavily freighted trains. The Consul has a beard, fair hair,
few friends . . . and two mountain chains traverse the re-

But is Under the Volcano really a biography, a one-day

history of a man, and is its advantage in being imaginary
that it can with confidence report details biographers can
rarely have? Novels are made of such details, no doubt of
that. But what biographer would want them?—the Consul
observing that it is only eight-thirty and taking off his
glasses; the Consul tracing with the toe of one dress shoe a
pattern in the porch tiles; the Consul hanging up the tele¬
phone receiver the wrong way; the Consul sweating pro¬
fusely and hunting a cantina, or thinking suddenly of Don
Quixote, or sucking a lemon, reading a menu, being shaved.
Facts by the thousands here, in Henry James, throughout
the pages of War and Peace or Ulysses—all trivialities, items
which could never find their way into any serious history.

5<>
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

And Geoffrey Firmin is no George Washington or General

Lee, even by allegation; he shapes nothing, affects few; and
his body slides down a ravine. This novelist, indeed, has a
passion for the unimportant: bus and railroad schedules, for
example, theater marquees, boxing posters, an old volume of
Elizabethan plays; but this passion is in no way extraordinary
—Jane Austen liked hats and hair ribbons. What, too, of our
own feelings for these obscure, superfluous, nonexistent
people, and their queer creators, obscure, superfluous, and
nearly nonexistent themselves, who, throughout their lives,
do nothing—the man Malcolm Lowry, a drunkard too, who
rounded the world as a sailor, wrote a few strange stories,
was twice married, and, perfectamente borracho, choked to
death on his own vomit?
We shall never verify this history. It rests nowhere in
our world. Our world, in the first place, lacks significance;
it lacks connection. If I swallow now—what of it? if I pass
a cola sign—no matter; if I pet a striped cat, or tell a tiny
lie, put down the tenth page of the Times to train my puppy
—nothing’s changed. And the real mountains of Mexico,
those two chains which traverse the republic, exist despite
us and all our feelings. But the Popocatepetl of the novel is
yet another mountain, and when, in the first chapter, we
are taken on a tour of the town, the facts we are given have
quite a different function. Lowry is constructing a place,
not describing one; he is making a Mexico for the mind
where, strictly speaking, there are no menacing volcanoes,
only menacing phrases, where complex chains of concepts
traverse our consciousness, and where, unlike history, events
take place in the moment that we read them—over and over
as it may be, irregularly even, at widely separated times—
whenever we restore these notes to music. Each of us, too,
must encounter and enter the book alone, bring our lifetime

57
 William H. Gass

to it, since truly it is a dark wood, this Mexico, a southern

hell we’re being guided through, and although simply begun,
it is difficult to remain, to continue so terrible a journey. In
this conceptual country there are no mere details, nothing
is a simple happenstance, everything has meaning, is part of
a net of essential relations. Sheer coincidence is impossible,
and those critics who have complained of this quality in
Lowry1 have misunderstood the nature of the novel. They
would not complain of the refrain of a song that its constant
reappearance was coincidence. So the Ferris wheel of the
festival—for this is the Day of the Dead, after all—will turn
in our eyes as it turns in the Consul’s, the burning wheel of
Buddhist law, “its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos
of the trees,” appearing just as often as design demands.
Nothing like history, then, the Volcano ties time in knots,
is utterly subjective, completely contrived, as planned and
patterned as a magical rug where the figure becomes the
carpet. Nothing like a country or a town—no Oil City—
the Volcano is made of a series of names which immediately
become symbolic, and reverberate when struck like a hun¬
dred gongs. Even drunkenness has a different function, for
the Consul does not drink so we may better understand
drunkenness, and though he is ridden with guilt, his guilt is
as fictional as he is. The Consul’s drinking frees the language
of the book, allows it to stagger and leap like verse, gives
Lowry the freedom to construct freely. The Consul’s stupors
are the stupors of poetry, as madness was for Lear and his
fool, and chivalry for Cervantes.
The Volcano is a mountain. We must climb. And it is
difficult to maintain a foothold at first. Yet soon we begin

1 Ford is frequently accused of it, so is Nabokov. I make this com¬

plaint about Nabokov myself, though for different reasons, in “Mirror,
Mirror.”

5*
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

to feel the warmth at its core, and few books will finally flow
over us so fully, embed us in them as the citizens of Pompeii
were bedded by their mountain, the postures of their ordi¬
nary days at once their monuments, their coffins, and their
graves. Of novels, few are so little like life, few are so
formal and arranged; there are few whose significance is so
total and internal. Nonetheless, there are scarcely any which
reflect the personal concerns of their author more clearly, or
incline us as steeply to a wonder and a terror of the world
until we fear for our own life as the Consul feared for his,
and under such pressures yield to the temptation to say what
seems false and pedestrian: that this book is about each of
us—in Saint Cloud, Oil City, or Bayonne, N.J.—that it is
about drunkenness and Mexico, or even that it is about
that poor wretch Malcolm Lowry.
A scene: the Consul and his friend, M. Laruelle, in con¬
versation. Ad. Laruelle is advising the Consul to go home to
bed, for God’s sake. His wife has returned to him, and hasn’t
he been howling for just that? yet here he is drinking, carry¬
ing on in the same disagreeable manner which drove her
away in the first place. But tequila, the Consul claims, is
healthful—not like mescal—and clarifies, marvelously, one’s
thoughts and perceptions. Perhaps, sometimes, when you
have calculated the amount exactly, M. Laruelle admits, you
do see more clearly:

But certainly not the things so important to us

despised sober people, on which the balance of any
human situation depends. It’s precisely your inabil¬
ity to see them, Geoffrey, that turns them into the
instruments of the disaster you have created your¬
self. Your Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it
was Christopher Marlowe, your Faust man, saw the
Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That’s like

59
 William H. Gass

the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything

seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly
clear, in terms of the toe-nail.

Fiction is life in terms of the toenail, or in terms of the

Ferris wheel, in terms of tequila; it is incurably figurative,
and the world the novelist makes is always a metaphorical
model of our own. It will be my concern, in what follows,
to suggest something of the way in which metaphors func¬
tion, and how such fictional models are made. But let’s begin
with something simpler—small enough to close our mouths
and minds on, something from one of those nail-gazing
Elizabethans.

Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus walk upon the castle

platform awaiting midnight and Hamlet’s father’s ghost.
Hamlet says, “The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,” and
Horatio answers, “It is a nipping and an eager air.” Hamlet
and Horatio do not think of it as cold, simply. The dog of
air’s around them, shrewd and eager, running at heels. The
behavior of this dog is wittily precise in their minds. It
nags—shrewishly, wifelike. The air is acidulous, too, like
sour wine.2 Hamlet and Horatio, furthermore, are aware
of the physical quality of their words. Horatio not only
develops Hamlet’s implicit figure, he concludes the exchange
with the word that began it, and with sonorous sounds. The
nature of the weather is conveyed to us with marvelous
exactitude and ease, in remarks made by the way, far from
the center of action; so that we find ourselves with knowl-

2 This is very likely the primary meaning of “eager.”

6o
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

edge of it in just the offhand way we would if, bent on

meeting a king’s ghost, we too went through the sharp
wind. Yet Hamlet’s second clause is useless. “The air bites
shrewdly” is the clause that tells us everything. It is cold.
The wind is out. The wind is alive, malevolent with wise
jaws. The two clauses have a very clear relation. The first
is metaphorical, the second literal. Both are about the
weather, but one is art, the other not.
If we knew the temperature was ten degrees and the wind
force five, we might imagine rather well how cold the wind
would feel on the cheek, how persistently it might lift the
flaps of jackets and enter sleeves, and we might give expres¬
sion straight away to the fact of our feeling: the wind is
cold. The inference we should draw, as familiar as it is, lies
dark in its own empowering, for the relation of the pure and
empty structure that is mathematics to the scientifically ex¬
pressed observation, and both of these again to the cold
wind of experience, are not yet understood relations. Per¬
haps one can say that the scientist works always through a
quantitatively abstract system, and that his purpose seems to
be to find ways to represent the vague and informal quali¬
tative content of experience within a rationally well-ordered
formal scheme. But Hamlet’s and Horatio’s words rely in
no obvious way upon the mathematical or scientific, and we
are forced, in what is really a very complicated and very
peculiar manner, to infer the same phenomenon we reached
from ten degrees and force five from logical absurdities,
strange comparisons, and silly riddles. The speed with which
we make our inferences should not deceive us of the fact
we make them. The air bites, therefore the air is alive. The
air bites shrewdly, therefore the air is wise. It is eager, so it
feels. These deductions, upon the information that it nips,
and the immediate conclusion that it nips as dogs nip, give
 William H. Gass

us the dog of the air itself. To communicate the nature of

the weather, Shakespeare has introduced an altogether novel
set of concepts; novel, that is, with respect to the idea of
weather as such; and it is through these concepts that we
understand the kind of wind and cold we’re in, just as,
through the mathematical, the scientist tries to understand
the experienced weather too. And I think it will be obvious
to anyone who fairly examines the meaning of Shakespeare’s
language that it renders the weather with a precision quite
equal to the precision of the scientific, although the scientific
precision is of a different kind.
To resort to a commonplace example: if we represent the
strength and direction of any force by the length and posi¬
tion of an arrowed straight line, we can readily examine
and resolve, by the construction of parallelograms, any
forces collected about a point and expressing themselves
from there. Our inferences in these cases are made possible
only by the rules of representation we have permitted our¬
selves to make, for it is these rules which place the physical
forces in the maw of Euclid’s reasoning machine.3 In a sense
yet to be fully discovered, the technique of the artist is like
that of the scientist. He invariably views the transactions of
life through a lens of concept: through the shrew, the wife;
through the wife, the dog; and through the dog, the cold
and persistent wind.
From “the day is without warmth,” from “the water is
frozen in the well,” from “it is ten below,” from “it is a
nipping and an eager air”—from each of these we can infer
the cold; first analytically, from the definition of the state;
second, from the effect, reasoning to the cause; third, by
construction, from the manner of our representing tempera-

3 See “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.”

62
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

ture within a formal system; and fourth, from the charac¬

teristic maneuvers of art and metaphor. Metaphor is a
manner of inferring; a manner of setting down as directly
and briefly and simply as possible whatever is necessary for
the inference desired, although the conclusion may require
premises that are neither brief nor plain and do not seem
direct, since direction, in both art and metaphor, is often
indirection elsewhere; for it is as much a matter of concern
there to seek the severe straight way as it is in science and
mathematics to seek the same. But metaphor is more than a
process of inference; it is also a form of presentation or

The distinction involved is familiar enough. There are at

least two ways of finding out about frogs. You can read
about frogs or you can raise frogs and watch them. The
Count can be described to you or introduced. Annie can
say she is weary or fall all of a heap. A description can
serve as a premise from which certain conclusions can be
reached and this is the way ordinary argument proceeds.
The connective tissues of such an argument, moreover, are
linguistic. They fasten words, they do not stretch between
things; and the rules that permit the movement that is the
essence of every inference are rules about the uses of our
language or the uses of some language; they are not laws of
nature that experiment discovers. Insofar as metaphor is
argumentative and inferential it can be made out to be sys¬
tematic and formal—bound purely in every part by its own
rules, just as art as a whole is, and concerned only with its
faithfulness to them. When I say that the Count is fair and
tall and frogs are jumpy and green I name their habits and
their properties, but when Annie sinks wordlessly to the
carpet, nothing is actively inferred; the act does not auto¬
matically fall into an abstract system.

63
 William H. Gass

Yet Annie has argued her weakness. She has done so di¬
rectly, her material a rich and inexhaustible context that
language can only peevishly pick over. The roll of her
eyes, the pallor in her face, the sag of her flesh, the shadow
of her bones: they testify together and by no means alone
to the correctness of our conclusion. This conclusion is
neither described by the event nor reached by logically
ordered propositions, although logically ordered proposi¬
tions could be imagined that would imitate it. It is not dis¬
played as the sag and the pallor of the faint are, nor is it
symbolically present. We are not compelled to see in her
swoon a moral fall and evidence of a moral frailty, though
when the Consul collapses in a steep street while guiltily
hunting a cantina, we must. Still, quite apart from these
things, Annie’s weakness has been shown.
The word “show” is equivocal in a useful way, for it
means both display and demonstration. Showing argues and
showing produces acquaintance. It presents to the mind one
thing in order that the mind may seem to have possession
of another. The length of the Count’s trousers shows his
height to his tailor. The most interminable stream of words
can never equal, in its production of detail, the incredible
number in Annie’s proof, or, in its unity, the complete sim¬
plicity of her faint. No curve comes easily of straight lines.
Yet metaphor must somehow create the illusion of that
context, make with its abstractions some display if it is
going to possess the qualities we know it has. Metaphors
argue. They endeavor also to produce acquaintance: the
frog who jumps, the Count who is tall. “It is a nipping and
an eager air” has qualities of both proof and meeting. It
describes one very strange thing in order that we may infer
and in some equally strange way feel another. It seems to

64
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

present us with the cold rather than name it, and it seems
to argue the cold rather than be it.
It is far from customary to think of metaphor as a kind of
model making—in terms of system, presentation, and infer¬
ence—or of fiction as life in terms of the toenail (more
metaphors—curse their constant intrusion); it is, in fact,
tactless to suggest any similarities with science, for isn’t it
the cold destroyer of the qualitative world, an enemy of
feeling, concubine to the computer? More metaphors—and
surely false ones. The scientist, after a time, finds himself
with a store of observations of the natural world on the one
hand, and a system of pure mathematical connections on
the other. Within the mathematical system he can make in¬
ferences with great speed and accuracy. Unfortunately the
system is empty; it has no content; it tells him nothing about
the world. His observations tell him nothing either, for log¬
ical connections cannot be perceived; his data remain dis¬
organized; there are no paths through it for the mind. But
if he decides to represent a body by a point and motion by a
line, then the system becomes concrete, at once trapping a
vast number of physical things in a web of logical relations.
In this way the scientist makes his model. The model is not
to be confused with the world of ordinary experience, and
the connections it establishes, made possible entirely by the
rules of representation the scientist adopts, are not connec¬
tions in any sense inherent in things. The model can be used
to make predictions which mere observation is helpless to
do, and in that manner its utility can be estimated. Thus the
shadow made by a tree can be carried past the rather quali¬
tative understanding of the eye into the dominion of number
by representing the passage of light as a straight line. The
light, the shadow, and the tree now form the sides of an
 William H. Gass

Euclidean triangle, and upon that triangle all kinds of useful

operations can be performed. The system is a lens through
which the world is seen ... or rather, it furnishes a scheme
through which the world is thought.
Metaphors rarely have a thoroughly formal and abstract
lens, but when they do the resemblance to the scientific case
is striking. If one lover says sadly to the other: “We shall
always be as far apart as we are now; we meet only in illu¬
sion,” the figure is drawn from geometry and the rule is:
let lives travel in straight lines; while the conclusion is:
since our lives are parallel, we shall never meet. And it is a
commonplace that such lines seem to converge at the hori¬
zon. Donne’s famous compass comparison is of the same sort.
Metaphors are used with varying degrees of figurative
commitment. If Clifford is truly and completely seen as a
mouse, then the character of his skin, the size and color of
his eyes, the quality of his movements, the strength of his
moral fiber, as well as countless other things, are known at
once, and the whole system of meanings gathered under
“mouse” is brought to bear upon poor Clifford—not serially,
a step at a time, as in a proof, but wholly, totally, and at
once. We need to know, too, how long we are to retain this
commitment. Is Clifford a mouse just for the moment, in
this line or paragraph, or are we to carry the mouse in our
pocket through the entire book? The Consul, momentarily
overcome by something more than mescal, has begun to
make love to his wife, yet he is certain of failure already,
he thinks of the bar he will flee to. Then:

This image faded also: he was where he was,

sweating now, glancing once—but never ceasing to
play the prelude, the little one-fingered introduc¬
tion to the unclassifiable composition that might
still just follow. . . .

66
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

The commitment of this image is complete; these, indeed,

are opening bars, and as it is morning, soon in peace and
silence, the cantinas themselves will open, the Consul will
enter one—they are named for their music as much as their
mescal—to fashion a song from the rhythms of alcohol.
Metaphors which are deeply committed, which really
mean what they say, are systematic—the whole net of rela¬
tionships matters. But the moment the mind moves through
the system establishing certain points of comparison and
denying others, then the system is replaced by its interpreta¬
tion. Each time we refer to someone as a mouse we beat the
same path through the concept until at last this path is
broad and movement is easy and immediate. The sense of
traveling through strange lands is lost, and when we no
longer have to hunt for the point of the comparison, we
begin, quite justly, to wonder why Clifford wasn’t called
shy and frightened in the first place; for, of course, Clifford
could have been a mouse for every reason, his whole life
seen through that system; but this particular metaphor has
slid even beyond proportion to comparison—where the
metaphor says, in effect, Clifford is like a mouse because
both are afraid—until it is nearly a case of catachresis, which
has little or no figurative commitment, the word “mouse”
being wrongly used to mean someone shy and easily fright¬
ened.
We are inclined to think that in metaphors only one term
is figurative—“mouse,” not “Clifford”—but this inclination
should be resisted; it is frequently mistaken. When the
Consul plays upon the body of his wife, it’s not merely
love that’s seen as music making (he the performer, his wife
the instrument); our understanding of music is also altered,
conceived through love (in this case of an inadequate kind).
The terms are inspecting one another—they interact—the

6j
 William H. Gass

figure is drawn both ways. Sometimes the metaphor’s stress

is heavier on one side than another (as I think it is here), but
often the emphasis is nearly equal, as if we were seeing mice
through Clifford. This can be determined only in context,
and of course it would take quite a context to Clifford a
mouse.
I should now like to suggest that the form and method of
metaphor are very much like the form and method of the
novel. If metaphor is a sign of genius, as Aristotle argued,
it is because, by means of metaphor, the artist is able to
organize whole areas of human thought and feeling, and to
organize them concretely, giving to his model the quality of
sensuous display. But I do not wish to suggest, by the com¬
parisons with science that I have made, that the value of
metaphor lies in its truth, or in its power to produce those
brilliant flashes of dogmatic light which I believe are called
“insights” among the critics who pursue literature because
they prefer philosophy but will not submit to the rigorous
discipline of systematic thought.
If the metaphors in a few lines of poetry can be complex
—and they can intoxicate us as easily as mescal can—con¬
sider, for instance, the rather difficult question Lady Mac¬
beth puts to her husband: “Was the hope drunk wherein
you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since? And wakes it now,
to look so green and pale at what it did so freely?” (try
dressing yourself in drunken clothing—it isn’t easy), or the
great cry of Antony: “The hearts that spanieled me at heels,
to whom I gave their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
on blossoming Caesar; and this pine is barked that over¬
topped them all” (where he seems to envy Caesar’s being
presently pissed on because pissed on so sweetly)—then
imagine the Oriental deviousness, the rich rearrangements,
the endless complications of the novel conceived as I sug¬
gest it should be, as a monumental metaphor, a metaphor

68
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

we move at length through, the construction of a mountain

with its view, a different, figured history to stretch beside
our own, a brand-new ordering both of the world and our
understanding; for most of us do live under our lives like
creatures covered by a sea or shadowed by a mountain, a
volcano, its edges deepened further by ravines.

In Mexico, Malcolm Lowry was drunk more than once.

Perhaps he tipped himself over in the air as the Consul does
at the dying edges of the fair when, pursued by begging
children who recognize his condition, he cages himself in
the loop-o-plane and turns his dizziness topsy-turvy. The
Consul has wobbled away from his conversation with M.
Laruelle—a conversation, we learn, which was very likely
imaginary—to confront menacing images at every step; and
let us pretend that Lowry did so too, that at some festival on
the Day of the Dead in Mexico he had himself held upside
down, pipe, pennies, passport falling from his pockets;
still, however he might have felt about it, it was not him¬
self, not his soul’s debris which now showered from him
like a cloud, the cage that contained him was not a confes¬
sional, and pipe, pennies, passport were all that fell; he was
not, even momentarily, absolved; yet the Consul, so sus¬
pended, has this experience, rains more than coins upon
the kids below, and his overturning moment, composed
with extraordinary vividness and power, takes on a brilliant
glo\\r, for by putting a piece of possibly personal experience
in such language, Lowry has made a marvelous model for
us, concrete in its depiction, abstract in its use, and univer¬
sal in its significance.
In short, even the apparently literal language of the novel

69
 William H. Gass

has a figurative function, but in saying so I don’t mean to

suggest that the riderless horses, the mountains, garden,
clouds, and cantinas of Under the Volcano are metaphors
for mountains, horses, gardens, barrancas, or cantinas in
our world, in our Oil Cities or Saint Clouds; for, although
details are used, they are escaped—pierced through—and
when the Consul falls over in the road, the concreteness of
the scene presented should keep us to the concreteness of
our own, each immediate and personal yet as shared as
breathing, so we don’t dare make a mean abstraction of it,
crying out as though we were critics: ah, look, the fall of
man! oh, feel again the foolish frailties of flesh! or, dear
me, how hard life is to mount, how slow to summit! (all
such shouts are vulgar and may rouse the Consul from his
swoon before the proper words do); rather we see our
own life in the same fashion Lowry has envisioned Firmin’s;
what we take away and keep is the novel’s figurative form;
we reconceive our own acts in his manner; hear, in our
own ears, similar symbolic tones; and finally everything
becomes clear—clear, that is, in terms of one quite bent and
dirty toenail, since on another toe there might not be
Carthaginians in combat, but Buicks broken down, or dis¬
graced angels falling into Indiana. The object of that mousy
metaphor was Clifford; the object of every novel is its
reader. And when the metaphor is meant, we look for
Clifford’s tail; and when the metaphor is apt, we find it.
The novel does the same thing to us; there is no point it does
not touch. Certainly details are different. Clifford hasn’t a
real tail either. Nor does Hamlet’s wind bark. What would
make the metaphor if they were just the same?
Yes, our lives are safely different. Why is it then that a
novel like the Volcano is so easy to enter yet so difficult
to endure? No, it is not an image of the human condition.

70
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

That s far too easy. It does not first address, then mail it¬
self to some abstraction. It does not say the wind is cold,
that life is hard, that Clifford is timorous and beastie. Beck¬
ett s books do not assert that life’s absurd. Does that news
pain me.- I m sick already if it does. The novel does not
say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels
me to stare at my toes. I live in a suburb of Cincinnati, yet
the Consul’s bottled Mexican journey is so skillfully con¬
structed that its image fits me—not just a piece of it with
which I may identify, such sympathies rend the fabric,
but the whole fantastic dangerous country, the tale in its
totality.
How does it feel to be the fore end of a metaphor,
especially one so fierce and unrelenting? And how does it
work, exactly—this book which takes us into hell? The
philosophical explanation is complex. Here I can only sug¬
gest it. But you remember how Kant ingeniously solved
his problem. Our own minds and our sensory equipment
organize our world; it is we who establish these a priori
connections which we later discover and sometimes describe,
mistakenly, as natural laws. We are inveterate model
makers, imposing on the pure data of sense a rigorously
abstract system. The novelist makes a system for us too,
although his is composed of a host of particulars, arranged
to comply with esthetic conditions, and it both flatters and
dismays us when we look at our own life through it be¬
cause our life appears holy and beautiful always, even when
tragic and ruthlessly fated. Still for us it is only “as if.”
Small comfort for Clifford, the metaphorical mouse.
I mentioned earlier that the terms of some metaphors in¬
teract. If a rose bleeds its petals, as much strange is happen¬
ing to blood as to rose, and if the weight of Lowry’s novel
at one end of the seesaw lifts me, I, with my weight at

7'
 William H. Gass

the other, will in a moment lift it. Thus when Geoffrey

Firmin, who lives upside down—standing in Mexico as
though it were China—is swung right side up by the loop-
o-plane; when his possessions spill from him, cleansing his
pockets; when he thinks with fierce delight: let it go! let
everything go!—as all these details, these whirling meanings
interpret us, put into our world unique new relations (a
hunchbacked Chinese sold the Consul his ticket), our right
side upness is seen suddenly as drunken and wrong; as we
are tipped like him and our cars fall from us, our house in
the suburbs, our plastic wives or the hubbies whom we are
indentured to; as we are put by Lowry’s art beneath the
volcano, in the cage of the spin plane, in a dangerous can¬
tina; we, from our side, from our point of view, fulfill
Geoffrey Firmin, round him in a way no novel by itself
could ever do, and there is a perfect metaphorical inter¬
action between us—just as blood becomes petal-like in my
little example;4 indeed, a triple transformation has oc¬
curred, for Malcolm Lowry, desperately drunk once and
trapped in Cuernavaca (renamed in the novel for that
duck’s loud groan), more than once threatened with death
by tequila, by mescal many times in a soft dark bar, has
created an image for his life too, and conceived it as shaded
by a shining volcano.
The novelist may fling his language from him as that
First Bang blew the stars, pretend to a distance and blacken
each relation; he may claim no acquaintance with garbage
cans, say he has never ridden a bicycle, assert he’s not
once crawled through mud, companion to a gunnysack,
and not once waited with a cardboard tree and empty road

4 I conceive the reader’s participation in the novel in this way

rather than in the role of “helpful coauthor.” See “The Concept of
Character in Fiction.”

7-2
 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

for anyone, let alone Godot (we should accede to this; he

may be honest); yet we can be confident that sometime it
has been “as if”; that he has placed himself only at a meta¬
phorical distance from his creation, has hidden his face
while exposing his privates. On the other hand a novelist
like Malcolm Lowry may wear his words next to his skin,
keep them as close as underclothing, cry out loudly: this is
real, true, honest—this happened to me; yet it will no longer
matter, his words will never directly describe him, neither
terrors nor torso, love affairs or other follies; for they shall
have run away to poetry, free of their father and certain to
sin. Only a figurative resemblance can be painted on a
toenail.
Although Under the Volcano has many flaws, it is strong
where most recent novels are weak: it has no fear of feeling.
Even our finest contemporary work—that of Beckett and
Borges and Barth, for instance—as conscious of metaphoric
form as it is, with every part internally and wonderfully re¬
lated; subtle sometimes as Lowry seldom is; scrupulous to
maintain a figurative distance between author, work, and
reader, and resisting every effort at literal interpretation; in¬
sisting, indeed, upon the artifices of the author; has achieved
many morose, acid, and comic effects. Certainly the work of
these writers is as challenging as any which fiction affords (I
don’t mean merely puzzling, but profound); yet they’ve
been led too far toward fancy, as Coleridge called it, neg¬
lecting, somewhat, in the forming of their figures, the full
responsive reach of their readers, that object (as I take it)
of their labors.5 Their books act on us. We are Clifford,

5 It seems to me that this is also true, in the same relative and vari¬
able way, of the work of John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme (“ The
Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon”), Robert Coover (“Prick-
songs & Descants”), and, of course, Vladimir Nabokov (“Mirror,
Mirror”).

13
 William H. Gass

and Clifford is a mouse. Unhappy man. But we are too

much a passive term in this relation. Listening to the voice
that makes up Beckett’s How It Is saying,

take the cord from the sack there’s another object

tie the neck of the sack hang it from my neck
knowing I’ll need both hands or else instinct it’s
one or the other and aw^ay right leg right arm push
pull ten yards fifteen yards halt

or reading the list of Pierre Menard’s visible works with

which Borges intends to delight us,

a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice

(with variants) in the review La conque (issues of
March and October 1899).
b) A monograph on the possibility of constructing
a poetic vocabulary of concepts which would not
be synonyms or periphrases of those which make
up our everyday language, “but rather ideal ob¬
jects created according to convention and essen¬
tially designed to satisfy poetic needs” (Nimes,
1901).
c) A monograph on “certain connections or affini¬
ties” between the thought of Descartes, Leibniz and
John Wilkins (Nimes, 1903),

and so on through

s) A manuscript list of verses which owe their effi¬

cacy to their punctuation,

we find first our physical condition, and then our mental

and creative life (have we missed those heavy allusions to
Paul Valery? not we!) rendered in a figure; yet how diffi¬
cult it is for us to return that favor, to use our lives, as
various as they may appear to be, to enfigure them. We
stay those whiskered Cliffords mice have seen. Still, per-

14
 hi Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life

haps not entirely. Often these things are matters of a little

more or a little less. We may be writers or academics with
bibliographies of our own; we are certainly acquainted with
lists, both shopping and laundry, lists of things to do
crossed out as they are done, and it is possible to look at
the works of Pierre Menard in the light of our own, reverse
our positions. Still, not easy. We’ve been sent no invitation.
In Faulkner, Lowry, and Lawrence, however, or in Bellow
and Elkin, this reversal is commanded, and carefully
controlled.6
When I peer at the web of a spider, I can choose to see
there geometry; I can discover sine curves on shells or in
love affairs angles of ninety degrees. On the other hand, I
can also find shell shapes in my sine curves, sexual sinuos¬
ities, my geometry can seem haunted and covered with
webbery. Similarly, then, do we intermeet Geoffrey Firmin;
not merely on our toenail do we perceive Carthaginians
fighting; among the tangles of their arms we notice the toes,
feet, limbs, and eyeshines which both watch and reflect
them; by means of this metaphorical mutuality, our moun¬
tains cross Mexico, our addictions become the former
British Consul’s.
Models, however, aren’t real. And metaphorical models
are even less so. Light does not travel in straight lines, we
only represent it that way. Nor are all the features of our
mathematics features of our data. Twice 25 is 50, but 50
Fahrenheit is not twice warmer than its half. With meta¬
phorical models the discrepancies are even greater. Al¬
though the scientific model yields testable results (triangu¬
lation does give us the height of the steeple), our fictional
conclusions, the inferences we draw there, remain for¬
ever in the expanding spaces of the novel. Clifford’s eyes

6 See “From Some Ashes No Bird Rises.’’

75
 William H. Gass

are bloodshot and tiny, his face pointed, he has a nose

twitch, he continually scurries, then attentively stops. We
know what his house looks like; we know how he eats,
works, and worries; our attitudes are precisely defined.
Have we reduced the image? Is he now a list of such
facts? Not at all, for Clifford does not scurry like a man,
he scurries like a mouse. And if one says, examining Clifford,
you see, he hasn’t a nose twitch, your figure is false, the
proper reply should be: whoever claimed he had? he
simply behaves as if he had one. In a metaphor that’s meant,
the descent to the literal can never be made. And as I’ve
pointed out, when the terms interact, we should begin to
see Clifford-like qualities among our friends who are mice.
How comparatively easy it is to capture Clifford, whis¬
tle up a sour wind, intoxicate the hopes of the Thane of
Cawdor—after all, they’re only imaginary, these winds.
Thanes, and Cliffords; another matter if we must, with the
same metaphor, render Chuck, Frank and Harry, Martha
and Lou; fashion a lens to look at these lifetimes, both as
lived now and as they may be lived later, in Saint Cloud,
Sioux City, or Cincinnati; and achieve, when we can, the
reader’s ardent whole participation in what has to be a
purely conceptual relation, a poetic involvement with
language. No wonder the novel is long. No wonder, either,
that at the edge of the Volcano, the danger is real though
its source is a fiction, an image perceived on a drunkard’s
toenail, for such a book says to each of its readers more than
that two mountain chains traverse the republic; it says what
Rilke wrote of another work of art, the torso of an archaic
Apollo:

There is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
PART TWO
 GERTRUDE STEIN:
HER ESCAPE FROM
PROTECTIVE LANGUAGE

JL_ t has not proved helpful to

the understanding of Gertrude Stein’s creative works that
she wrote so much herself to justify and explain them. It
has not been helpful either that her autobiographies are
rich and charming or that she took such care with the rituals
of genius, finally fashioning for herself a personality as elo¬
quent and commanding as her Roman face. Of this she
never tired, and she began again and again. But in her life
she knew too many foolish men and women, became too
willingly a legend among them, something to be seen in
Paris like the Eiffel Tower. They attacked her with their
admiration and she encouraged it. She gave them manu¬
scripts to market and they handed them around as signs of
their complete release from common sense. She composed
their portraits and they read these aloud and had them
printed on expensive paper and dropped about like cards
of visitation. Her art must have seemed an ideal medium for
making known their own confusions, and I imagine it was

79
 William H. Gass

comforting to see how all of it proceeded from one so sure,

oracular, and solid. All in all she was a gesture more decisive
and more meaningful than they could ever make themselves,
and when they left her it was often to wobble about the
world like Mabel Dodge, enshrining foolishness. They
would receive their portraits and they would write to say
how pleased their friends were, how delighted. “Am I
really like that, Gertrude? how very wonderful to be!”
Her stories, poems, and plays lie beside the mass of mod¬
ern literature like a straight line by a maze and give no
hold to the critic bent on explication. Art to be successful
at nearly any time dare not be pure. It must be able to invite
the dogs. It must furnish bones for the understanding. In¬
terest then has sought the substitutes that she provided for
it. There has been prolonged and largely malicious gossip
about her and her circle and those famous friendships that
finally faded. And there have been all those horrid little
essays whose titles she might have enjoyed arranging into
piles: The Notion of Time in Gertrude Stein, repeated
again and again. Only a few people, and nearly all of them
are writers, have done as Donald Sutherland advises in his
book about her (the advice comes too late for Mr. Suther¬
land to have taken it):

Forget all this talk about her work and do not pre¬
pare to have an opinion of your own to tell. Simply
read her work as if that were to be all.1
Gertrude Stein has mostly been, therefore, an anecdote and
a theory and a bundle of quotations. The advice of Mr.
Sutherland is certainly simple but it seems too hard. Once
admired by a few without judgment, she is now censured
by many without reason, and that perplexity her work and
1 Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1951), p. 200.

80
 Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language

person have created, as Coleridge noted the connection,

has contained sufficient fear to predispose some minds to
anger.
B. L. Reid, whose book is the most recent attack,2 makes
all the customary substitutions. He describes it, with an easy
presumption of its power, as “an essay in decapitation” and
he genuinely believes that it destroys her reputation. On
the other hand, Mr. Reid insists, Gertrude Stein has no
literary reputation. She is “effectively dead as a writer”
and “nobody really reads her.” The critics have ignored
her and all the important essays about her can be lightly
ticked across the fingers of a single hand. As a result she
occupies her present literary position by default. It is Mr.
Reid’s intention, apparently, to drag Miss Stein from the
dizzy height to which ignorance, calumny, and neglect
have raised her. But there has been a “sizable flurry” of
books about her; Yale is unaccountably printing her pre¬
viously unpublished work;3 and while no one reads her,
“everybody continues to talk knowingly and concernedly
about her.” Mr. Reid must have been standing on this
shore of his confusion when he subtitled his book, “A
Dissenting Opinion,” for these words imply the presence
in it of a carefully composed and calmly judicial argument,
fashioned to overcome an opposition equally deliberate
and well-defined, while his book is, in fact, a muddled and
angry piece of journalese whose only value lies in how
well it expresses the normal academic reaction and how
superbly it contains and how characteristically it uses those
malicious inferences fear lends so readily to anger.

2 Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958). It was the most re¬
cent when, in 1958, I wrote this. Hemingway s nastiness, in A Move-
able Feast, is mostly personal.
2 I understand that her will left some funds for this purpose.

8l
 William H. Gass

The first of these inferences is double-jointed. It permits

Mr. Reid to malign Miss Stein’s work by maligning Miss
Stein, and her work, of course, is the major source of
evidence against her.
He begins his book with an anthology of critical excla¬
mations, nearly all violent, amid which he tries to find his
place as an impartial judge, one who will refrain from the
mindless flattery or the vulgar abuse Miss Stein customarily
receives. Too many critics, he complains, disturbed by
the degree of their feelings, fail to bed their conclusions
safely on a text and try to make their points by shouting.
But Mr. Reid’s claim to objectivity and scholarship is
sheer pretense, a rhetorical stance that he assumes to aim
his blows, most of which follow a feint toward generositv.

There is no point in vilifying Gertrude Stein. She

is the victim of her pathology rather than her vil¬
lainy. (205)

. . . one cannot, of course, impugn her sexuality.

Dark suspicions are certainly possible, but I am
more inclined to attribute her literary attitude
toward sex to that pathological ability to compart¬
mentalize her mind that I have called near schizo¬
phrenic. (74)

If Gertrude Stein is a genius, she is one in the vul¬

gar sense of the term: perversely elevated, isolated,
inhuman. (170)

As Mr. Reid proceeds, like a warrior given courage by

his own noise, he enlarges his anger, showing he can make
his points as loudly as anybody.

It is finally just to say that Gertrude Stein’s true

position is anti-literary, anti-intellectual, and often

82
 Gertrude Stein: Her Escape front Protective Language

antihumane and antimoral. Her whole orientation

is ruthlessly egocentric. (191)

Not satisfied with this list of crimes, Mr. Reid goes on to

“document” what he repeatedly calls Miss Stein’s schizo¬
phrenic pathology by complaining that she once confessed
that anything in oil on a flat surface could hold her attention
(“indiscriminate ingestiveness”), that she described a fire
once as “one of those nice American fires that have so
many horses and firemen to attend them” (“antihumane
and egocentric”), that she referred to war as a form of
dancing (“monumental detachment”), that she liked to
arrange buttons and hunt hazel nuts (“enormous patience
with triviality”), enjoyed Burma Shave rhymes (“unproduc¬
tive catholicity”), and never learned to speak French
perfectly (“ivory tower”).4
If in the first instance Mr. Reid replaces Miss Stein’s
work with Miss Stein, in the second he substitutes her
critical writings for her creative ones. And these he system¬
atically misreads. In a book that is heavily marbled with
quotation, there are only a few examples from her creative
work and even these are used for autobiographical purposes.
There is not a single analysis of any of her stories, poems,
and plays. Mr. Reid gives no concrete evidence of having
read them, and surely this is the critic’s first responsibility.5
The critical essays show Miss Stein at her best, Mr. Reid
says, but he brings to their explication the willful literal-

4 Strangely, Mr. Reid makes little use of Wyndham Lewis, who

attacked Miss Stein in Time and Western Man (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1957), and he does not seem to know Katherine Anne Porter’s
essay “The Wooden Umbrella,” which is one of the most rhetorically
effective personal attacks in modern literature.
5 What should we think of someone who undertook to estimate the
achievement of Henry James by reading the prefaces and The Middle
Years, examining some of the letters, and studying Percy Lubbock?

S3
 William H. Gass

mindedness of an investigating congressman. He is so intent

upon conviction that he often misses the tone of her lan¬
guage,6 fails to follow the directions in the context,7 supplies
no historical background for her remarks,8 blurs essential
distinctions,9 and is prevented from dealing justly with
some of the ideas he does understand because he regards
them, having come from Miss Stein, as peculiar and mad,
even though they may be (and are) characteristic of an
entire movement in modern literature that begins at least
as far back as Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin
and contains many of the most important literary figures
of our time. One example of his way of reading should be
enough.
In The Geographical History of America Miss Stein
writes:

It is only in history government, propaganda that

it is of any importance if anybody is right about
anything. Science well they never are right about
anything not right enough so that science cannot
go on enjoying itself as if it is interesting, which
it is. . . . Master-pieces have always known that
being right would not be anything because if they
were right then it would not be as they wrote but
as they thought and in a real master-piece there is
no thought, if there were thought then there would
be that they are right and in a master-piece you
cannot be right, if you could it would be what you
thought not what you do write.
Write and right.

6 Her remark about the nice American fires, for instance. Reid,
p. 193.
7 Ibid. War is dancing.
8 As, for example, her allusions to Shelley in the discussion of God
and Mammon: Reid, ch. 3.
9 Between the artist as artist and the artist as citizen, soldier, friend,
etc. See below.
 Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language

Of course they have nothing to do with one an¬

other.10

And Mr. Reid declares that this passage makes the “full
antimorality and anti-intellectualism of her position abun¬
dantly clear.”11 On a page following, Mr. Reid quotes Miss
Stein again:

. . . master-pieces exist because they came to be as

something that is an end in itself and in that re¬
spect it is opposed to the business of living which
is relation and necessity.12

This displays “the full preciosity, the distasteful hermetic

quality” of her anti-intellectualism.13 I cannot understand
what is precious, distastefully hermetic, or anti-intellectual
about thinking that the values of masterpieces are intrinsic,
or that they constitute a system in themselves or that they
are composed for their own sakes, nor is there anything
about the Kantian language Miss Stein uses that gives any
strength to that impression.

10 Geographical History, pp. 198-99. Reid, p. 76. In other words:

It is fortunate for science that its methods give only probable and
fallible results, for absolutes halt inquiry. Only politicians and propa¬
gandists need absolutes. The purpose of art is not the enunciation of
such Truths or their discovery, but rather that of presentation and
rendering. Masterpieces do not depend upon being True but upon
being faithful and exact, for if they depended upon being True, how
many of them would there be?
11 Reid, ibid. What is evident in this passage is the stumbling in the
style, but Mr. Reid never complains about bad writing in this sense.
12 What Are Masterpieces, p. 90. Reid, p. 78.
13 Reid, ibid. Compare F. M. Ford: “The one thing you can not
do is to propagandise, as author, for any cause. You must not, as
author, utter any views: above all you must not fake any events. . . .
It is obviously best if you can contrive to be without views at all: your
business with the world is rendering, not alteration. Joseph Conrad
(1924), p. 208. Ford does not mean that an author, as a private person,
ought to have no opinions. He means what Stein means, that write
and right have nothing to do with one another. This may be a mistake
but it can scarcely be evidence of pathology.
 William H. Gass

It is clear from the opinions Mr. Reid expresses here and

there that Miss Stein’s work embodies principles that upset
his whole notion of art, but he is so far from grasping
what these principles are that he prefers to linger without,
talking about her talk about it, where there is safety. And he
is naturally upset that anyone should admire these mad
babblings or their complacent author or that the English
language should absorb any of the qualities of her absurd
style. If only she hadn’t written Three Lives; if only she
hadn’t insisted on the Picassos when she and Leo split the
spoils;14 if only she hadn’t written all those compelling
aphorisms or hadn’t put together phrases that fasten them¬
selves in the memory like great lines of verse (one wants
to laugh at the pigeons on the grass, and does, but the
pigeons aren’t disturbed and fail to fly); if only William
James had thought less highly of her or if Hugo Munster-
berg hadn’t called her “an ideal student”;15 if she had lost
her wit and magnetism and gone strange as her writing
did, and if her lectures had failed and the soldiers had
been bored and if her writing had continued in its obscurity
and hadn’t, at the close of her life, clarified again and be¬
come strong at the end; if she hadn’t been so sure of her¬
self, so tough and so consistent; if, really, she hadn’t written
Yes Is for a Very Young Alan or “The Coming of the
Americans”; then it might be easier to dismiss her as a fraud
or a neurotic lady with too much leisure, as a lesbian or
a Jew or just another of the wild ones, or as genius, even,
destroyed by ego; Mr. Reid wouldn’t have felt any need
to write his book. Certainly he would not have felt,

14 Leo didn’t want them. He wanted the Renoirs, as he didn’t care

much for Picasso. He always said that Gertrude knew nothing about
painting. The Flowers of Friendship, ed. Donald Gallup (New York:
Knopf, 1953), pp. 86, 91.
15 Ibid., p. 4.

86
 Gertrude Stem: Her Escape from Protective Language

against all the facts, so alone with his anger, in the camp of
“dissent”—with most of the world on his side.
T he writings of Gertrude Stein became a challenge to
criticism the moment they were composed and they have
remained a challenge. This challenge is of the purest and
most direct kind. It is wholehearted and complete. It asks
for nothing less than a study of the entire basis of our
criticism, and it will not be put off. It requires us to consider
again the esthetic significance of style; to examine again
the ontological status of the artist’s vision, his medium, and
his effect.16 None of the literary innovators who were her
contemporaries attempted anything like the revolution
she proposed, and because her methods were so uncompro¬
mising, her work cannot really be met except on the finest
and most fundamental grounds. Finnegans Wake, for in¬
stance, is a work of learning. It can be penetrated by stages.
It can be elucidated by degrees. It is a complex, but familiar,
compound. One can hear at any distance the teeth of the
dogs as they feed on its limbs. With Miss Stein, however,
one is never able to wet one’s wrists before cautiously
trusting to the water, nor can one wade slowly in. There
the deep clear bottom is at once.
In Things As They Are,11 Gertrude Stein’s first story,
the pressures that shaped her style show plainly. The novel
is a psychological analysis of the relationship among three

16 I am always calling for such a program (see, for example, “Phi¬

losophy and the Form of Fiction”), but I never do much more than
cry out.
17 Written in 1903 and called, significantly, Quod Erat Demon¬
strandum; no effort was made to publish it until it was discovered
among her things and sent to Louis Bromfield for his opinion in 1931.
Ffe found it “vastly interesting” but thought publication would be
difficult. (The Flowers of Friendship, pp. 249-50.) It was retitled and
published by the Banyan Press, Pawlet, Vermont, in 1951. The quota¬
tions that follow were taken purposely from the same scene.

8l
 William H. Gass

women, one of whom, Adele, is clearly the author, and

it is equally transparent that the fiction is a stratagem
against the self to take its secrets, for the novel has no other
subject than the strength and character of its author’s
sexuality and the moral price she must pay if she wishes to
indulge it. Such an intimate inquiry might have been lurid,
should at least have been interesting, but is remarkably
dull instead. The self is revenged and keeps its secrets.
The language of Things As They Are is not very prom¬
ising. It is abstract, monotonous, pompous, vague. Circum¬
locution, euphemism, pedantry bring the story to its knees.
Its rhythms are held back; they go with stilted care. Even
those passages in which Miss Stein permits herself to touch
the air are afraid, and the mark of the graduate essay is
everywhere.

One usually knows very definitely when there is no

chance of an acquaintance becoming a friendship
[sic] but on the other hand it is impossible to tell
in a given case whether there is. (15)
The characters cannot pay one another compliments with¬
out getting them up like letters of recommendation.

Adele you seem to me capable of very genuine

friendship. You are at once dispassionate in vour
judgments and loyal in your feelings; tell me will
we be friends. (15)
The wit is weary and rhetorical.

“You were very generous,” she said “tell me how

much you do care for me.” “Care for you my dear”
Helen answered “more than you know and less
than you think.” (15)
Thought is not permitted any real precision but, held off by
the shame and intimacy of the subject, merely apes it. The

88
 Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language

result is protective speech. One way in writing of not com¬

ing near an object is to interpose a kind of neutralizing
middle tongue, one that is neither abstractly and impersonally
scientific nor directly confronting and dramatic, but one
that lies in that gray limbo in between, composed of the
commonest words because its objects are the objects of
every day, and therefore a language that is simple and un¬
specialized, yet one whose effect is flat and sterilizing because
its words are held to the simplest naming nouns and verbs,
connectives, prepositions, articles, and pronouns, the tritest
adjectives of value, a few adverbs of quantity and degree,
and the automatic flourishes of social speech—good day,
how do you do, so pleased.18 This desire to gain by artifice
a safety from the world—to find a way of thinking without
the risks of feeling—is the source of the impulse to abstract¬
ness and simplicity in Gertrude Stein as it is in much of
modern painting, where she felt immediately the similarity
of aim.19
Protective language names, it never renders.20 It replaces
events with speech. It says two people are in love, it does
not show them loving. Jeff and Melanctha talk their passion.
Protective language, then, must be precise, for in a world of
dangerous objects which by craft of language have been
circumvented, there remains a quantity of unfastened feeling
that, in lighting elsewhere, will turn a harmless trifle into
symbol. Name a rose and you suggest romance, love, civil
war, the maidenhead. The English language is so rich in its
associations that its literature tends to be complex and carrv
its meanings on at many levels. Conrad, who, as Ford re-

18 Another way of not coming near a sexual subject is discussed in

“From Such Ashes No Bird Rises.”
19 Mr. Reid very frequently complains of the flat effect of this lan¬
guage and comments on its evasiveness.
20 See “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life.”

*9
 William H. Gass

marks, wanted to write “a prose of extreme limpidity,”

often bitterly complained that English words were never
words; they were rather instruments for causing blurred
emotions.21 Protective speech must cut off meanings, not
take them on. It must find contexts that will limit the func¬
tions of its words to that of naming. Gertrude Stein set about
discovering such contexts.
Dull, flat, repetitious, thin, and cowardly—these are the
more obvious qualities of this euphemistic language. To
these are added, in the experimental stage where disassocia-
tion is also sought, the qualities of confusion and tedious sur¬
prise. Things As They Are, largely written in the simpler
style, gets at nothing as it is. Many later works (large por¬
tions of Lucy Church Amiably, for instance), experimenting
bravely, choke in the coils of their own locutions. I cannot
imagine a language more thoroughly and obstinately in¬
artistic, and Mr. Reid’s objections would be fair and mild
enough if her course had ended here; but she was often able
to take another step, the last available to protective speech:
that of giving to her words the feelings that arise from
things; that of creating from her words real objects, valuable
for themselves, capable of an independent existence, as
physical as statuary. In Things As They Are one can mark
the isolated moments when she struck her special note, but in
Three Lives she plays a constant music all her own.22
The transfer of emotion must be made by means of every
physical resource (rhythm, pattern, shape, and sound). How
interminably her lovers talk, and how abstractly, yet her
rhythms and repeating patterns make an auditory image of
her lovers’ passion.

21 Ford, op. cit., p. 214. In Reid see ch. 7.

22 I try to say something about the whole problem in “The Styliza¬
tion of Desire.”

90
 Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language

“Well you trust me then Melanctha, and I cer¬

tainly love you Melanctha, and seems like to me
Melanctha, you and me had ought to be a little
better than we certainly ever are doing now to be
together. You certainly do think that way, too,
Melanctha to me. But may be you do really love
me. Tell me, please, real honest now Melanctha
darling, tell me so I really always know it in me,
do you really love me?” (198)23

The rise and fall of the name Melanctha, its marvelous

quality as a sensuous pause and organizing sound, are used
again and again, as here:

“I don’t see Melanctha why you should talk like

you would kill yourself just because you’re blue.
I’d never kill myself Melanctha just ’cause I was
blue. I’d maybe kill somebody else Melanctha ’cause
I was blue, but I’d never kill myself. If I ever killed
myself Melanctha it’d be by accident, and if I ever
killed myself by accident Melanctha, I’d be awful
sorry.” "(87)

Nor is Three Lives an isolated success.

Old ones come to be dead. Any one coming to be

an old enough one comes to be a dead one. Old
ones come to be dead ones. Any one not coming
to be a dead one before coming to be an old one
comes to be an old one and comes then to be a
dead one as any old one comes to be a dead one.24

Like most dirges, all this says is that people die. In doinq
so it sticks closely to its point, more scrupulous in this than

23Three Lives (1909). Quotations are from the New Directions

edition.
2iThe Making of Americans (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934),
p. 419.

9>
 William H. Gass

most. But it is not death that has the power; it has been
deprived. The power is in the word.

They stayed there and were gay there, not very gay
there, just gay there. They were both gay there,
they were regularly working there both of them
cultivating their voices there, they were both gay
there.25

Modern criticism has lived like a shrew upon paraphrase

and explanation. Literature, it holds, is made of signs and
the significance of literature, especially prose, lies in the
meaning of these signs. The whole tendency of Gertrude
Stein’s work is to deny this. She was right to do so. Art is
not a form of simple communication. It is this principle,
explicit in her work, that, because he has failed to clearly
grasp and understand it, has perplexed Mr. Reid.26
Words have sound and shape. Even the written word
wears a halo of unvoiced sound while the spoken word bears
the image of its written shape. But sound and shape are ac¬
cidental properties of words and make up what Aristotle
might have called their material cause, for signs are perfectly
transparent. They possess only spirit. The logician commonly
distinguishes between the physical token, which is any actual
instance of a word, and the conceptual type, which is the
idea of the word apart from any particular specimen of it.27
The distinction removes the temptation to suppose that some

25 “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” Geography and Plays (Boston: Four
Seas, 1922), p. 17.
26 Sutherland discusses this problem with what seems to me a good
deal of intelligence, op. cit., pp. 83 ff. Although I restate this position
many times (see “The Medium of Fiction,” for example), Paul Valery
says it better than I ever could. See his essay “Poetry and Abstract
Thought,” to mention one (The Art of Poetry [New York: Vin¬
tage]).
27 This is inexact, for the distinction involves many subtleties, but
I think it is exact enough here for my purposes.

92
 Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language

one written word, for instance, is that word entirely, so that

if the word is erased it ceases to exist in the language. Ob¬
viously all that ceases to exist are the marks that make that
instance of the word (the token), and not the word itself
(the type). Every effort of language to call attention to its
indispensable though semantically irrelevant body is treason¬
ous to its function, for the function of the physical is to bear
the meaning, not to be the meaning; it is to point beyond it¬
self to the notion it represents, not to grimace and grand¬
stand and walk fearsomely on wire.
So ordinarily language ought to be like the gray inaudible
wife who services the great man: an ideal engine, utterly
self-effacing, devoted without remainder to its task; but
when language is used as an art it is no longer used merely
to communicate. It demands to be treated as a thing, inert
and voiceless. Properties that it possesses accidentally as a
sign it suddenly possesses essentially. Why should it matter
that “bush” begins with a b} That any word has the sound
or shape it has: that it is long or short, formed with the
tongue or lips or teeth, uttered from the throat or through
the mouth or nose, pronounced with a rising or a falling
note, clipped or slurred, spoken slowly, fast; that it is stressed
in one way or another, habitually whispered or mumbled or
roared, surrounded by questionable gestures or impeccable
clothes; that it is associated with other shapes and sounds
because it happens to resemble them, or for reasons even
more fortuitous; that it was Latin once or came from Greek
or is used only by people who stammer at ladies as an ex¬
ercise in discretion; that any word has or is any of these
things, although they may explain the origin of its meaning
or the limits of its social use or simply the way, in the
language, it is produced, is a fact about the word as funda¬
mentally irrelevant to its purely communicative function as

93
 William H. Gass

the flavor of food to its nutritional value or the color of a

locomotive to its force.
In every art two contradictory impulses are in a state of
Manichean war: the impulse to communicate and so to treat
the medium of communication as a means, and the impulse to
make an artifact out of the materials of the medium and so to
treat the medium as an end. Calligraphy is an obvious in¬
stance. The elaboration that can be accorded the letter r,
for example, far outruns its meaning, yet it would receive no
elaboration at all if it were not a letter. One is tempted,
therefore, to see in the elaboration some explication of the
meaning of the letter, some search for mystic essence even,
while at the same time the elaborations reduce it to a pure
design whose interest lies wholly in the movement and
harmony of lines in space. A sign will tend to make more
and more of its physical nature intrinsic to its function by
placing more and more meaning on more and more parts of
itself. In this way it becomes iconic and the distinction be¬
tween the sign and its object is progressively broken down.
Instead of reducing the strength of the token as one might
expect, this attempt to increase the generality of the sign by
scooping its material into its type increases immeasurably
the uniqueness of the token until it is a token of nothing but
itself, for continuously one is invited to wonder if there are
not more properties of the sign that can be given significance,
and the sign is searched with the thoroughness of a treasure
island. So words become the objects they mean while objects
are given qualities proper to their names. This is, of course,
the action of magic. Levels of language are destroyed. Logi¬
cal types are deliberately confused. Ends are telescoped into
means. Types are merged with tokens. Signs are identified
with things. In a sense, the serious aim of language is ignored
and even made fun of. And insofar as the literary arts use

94
 Gertrude Stem: Her Escape from Protective Language

signs in this way, it is wholly misleading to describe them as

forms of communication. They are devoted, quite as much,
to the manufacture of intentionally useless objects. The
attraction to the artist of the word made flesh, the love of
the word as a resonance or a shape in space, is the least
understood of all esthetic phenomena, being perhaps so
purely a property of the creative consciousness and the first
quality of which the insensitive are usually deprived.

Trembling was all living, living was all loving,

some one was then the other one. Certainly this one
was loving this Ada then. And certainly Ada all
her living then was happier in living than any one
else who ever could, who was, who is, who ever
will be living.28

In her effort to escape a purely protective language and

make a vital thing of words, Gertrude Stein unsettled the
whole of prose. Her abstractness enlarged the vocabulary of
exciting words and made for some of the dullest, flattest, and
longest literature perhaps in history. Her experiments in dis-
association enlivened many dead terms and made her a master
of juxtaposition.29 They also created bewildering and un¬
pleasant scatterings of sound. Her success in uniting thought
and feeling in the meaning and movement of speech showed
that rhythm is half of prose, and gave it the power of poetry
without the indecency of imitation. It also nearly made her a
mystic and sent her wildly after essences and types. She
studied grammar creatively, as few writers have, though
little concrete seemed to come of it, and she was sometimes
made to sound an utter idiot by present tense and Time.

28 “Ada,” Geography and Plays, p. 16.

29 This can be examined best in the latter half of A Long Gay Book,
in Tender Buttons, and on a larger scale in Ida, a late surrealistic novel
rich in symbolism, a rare thing for Gertrude Stein.

95
 William H. Gass

She rid her works of anecdote and scene and character and
drama and description and narration one by one and in both
a theoretical and applied way raised the serious question of
their need and function.30 None of her contemporaries had
her intellectual reach, few her persistence and devotion,
though many had more industry and insistence on perfection.
In some such way, it seems to me, rather than in the way
of Mr. Reid, her measure should be made. But calmly, above
all, and slowly. She reads easily when an impatient mind
does not hasten the eye. We habitually seek some meaning
and we hurry. But each word is an object to Gertrude Stein,
something in a list, like the roll call of the ships, and lists are
delightful simply for the words that are on them.

Winter and wet is on the apple, that means more

handkerchief of any color, the size is the same when
the pillow is little. That is the way to be conscious.
A perfume is not neater.31

I think that sometimes she brings prose by its own good

methods to the condition of the lyric. And everyone knows
some perfectly beautiful lyrics that mean hardly anything.

Please the spoons, the ones that are silver and have
sugar and do not make mischief later, do not ever
say more than listening can explain.

30 Although her influence continues (it seems evident to me in the

work of Barthelme and Beckett), many contemporary experimenters
are merely, in ignorance, repeating her work, and often repeating it
badly.
31 This and the following quotation are from A Long Gay Book in
G.M.P. and Two Shorter Stories (Paris: Plain Edition, 1932), p. 102.

96
 THE LEADING EDGE OF THE
TRASH PHENOMENON

C —-^omanches are invading

the city. The hedges along the Boulevard Mark Clark have
been barbed with wire. “People are trying to understand.”
This is “The Indian Uprising,” the finest story in Donald
Barthelme’s new collection. There’s fruit on the table, books,
and long-playing records. Sylvia, do you think this is a good
life? Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts is the third and
best of Barthelme’s books, and each of them has seemed un¬
natural; certainly none speaks. A captured Comanche is
tortured. The work of Gabriel Faure is discussed. The
nameless narrator sands a hollow-core door he intends as a
table. He has made such a table for each of the women he’s
lived with. There’ve been five. So far. Barricades are made
of window dummies, job descriptions, wine in demijohns.
They are also made of blankets, pillows, cups, plates, ash¬
trays, flutes. The hospitals have run out of wound dusting
powder. Zouaves and cabdrivers are rushed to the river.

91
 William H. Gass

This unit was crushed in the afternoon of a day that

began with spoons and letters in hallways and under
windows where men tasted the history of the heart,
cone-shaped muscular organ that maintains circula¬
tion of the blood.

It is impossible to overpraise such a sentence, and it is

characteristic: a dizzying series of swift, smooth modula¬
tions, a harmony of discords. “With luck you will survive
until matins,” Sylvia says, and then she runs down the Rue
Chester Nimitz, uttering shrill cries. Or she runs down
George C. Marshall Allee. Or ... Miss R. is a schoolteacherish
type. She naturally appears for no reason. The only form of
discourse she likes is the litany. Accordingly, the 7th Cavalry
band plays Gabrieli, Boccherini. And . . .
In addition to the way he tells his stories, Barthelme
habitually deals with unnatural apathy and violence—un¬
natural indeed, but not abnormal; so ordinary, in fact, that
although we speak of killing by the countless, of lives in¬
different, closed, and empty of any emotion, of cliche and
stereospeech, of trademarks and hypocrisy, we speak so
repetitiously, so often, so monotonously, that our discourse
is purely formal (a litany). The words we hear are travel¬
ogues of gossip; they are slogans, social come-ons, ads, and
local world announcements; phatic, filling our inner silence,
they produce an appearance of communion, the illusion of
knowledge. Counterfeit, they purchase jail.1
The war is not going well. We’ve used love, wine, cigar¬
ettes, and hobbies, in our barricades, to shore against our
ruin. Useless. The ghetto’s been infiltered. There’s a squabble
in Skinny Wainwright Square. The narrator drinks deeply,
and deeply feels the more-so of love. Sometimes the narrator

1 See “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World,” and “The Artist and
Society.”
 The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon

is examining maps; sometimes he’s in bed, tracing scars on

the back of his beloved; sometimes he’s pointing proudly to
his table; sometimes he is garroting the testicles of an Indian.
Sometimes . . .
There are other names in this story: Jane, Block, Kenneth,
and Miss R. Miss R., one feels, is not to be trusted. She
recommends metal blinds for the windows; she arranges
words in lines, in stacks. Perhaps she’s in the pay of the
enemy. She also speaks for the author. That’s the trouble:
everyone speaks for the author. “Strings of language extend
in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald
whole.” We try to keep informed, but in the end we know
nothing. “You feel nothing,” hectoring Miss R. says.

You are locked in a most savage and terrible ignor¬

ance. ... You may attend but you must not attend
now, you must attend later, a day or a week or an
hour, you are making me ill.

But where are the Indians by this time? “Dusky warriors

padded with their forest tread into the mouth of the mayor.”
With helicopters, a great many are killed in the south, but
they are mostly children from the north, the east. Like the
narrator, we are captured by these Comanches; taken to a
white and yellow room. “This is the Clemency Committee,’
Miss R. says, for it is she. “Would you remove your belt
and shoelaces.” Now, as ordered, we’ve removed our belts
and shoelaces, and we’ve looked
(rain shattering from a great height the prospects of
silence and clear, neat rows of houses in the sub¬
divisions) into their savage black eyes, paint,
feathers, beads.

The Indians with their forest tread, through one aperture or

another, have padded into all of us.

99
 William H. Gass

Barthelme has managed to place himself in the center of

modern consciousness. Nothing surrealist about him, his dis¬
locations are real, his material quite actual. Radio, television,
movies, newspapers, books, magazines, social talk: these
supply us with our experience. Rarely do we see trees, go
meadowing, or capture crickets in a box. The aim of every
media, we are nothing but the little darkening hatch they
trace when, narrowly, they cross. Computers begin by dis¬
criminating only when they’re told to. Are they ahead that
much? since that’s the way we end. At home I rest from
throwing pots according to instructions by dipping in some
history of the Trojan war; the fete of Vietnam is celebrated
on the telly; my daughter’s radio is playing rock—perhaps
it’s used cars or Stravinsky; my wife is telling me she loves
me, is performing sexercises with a yogi Monday, has ac¬
cepted a proposal to be photoed without clothing, and now
wonders if the draft will affect the teaching of freshman
chemistry. Put end to end like words, my consciousness is a
shitty run of category errors and non sequiturs.2 Putting end
to end and next to next is Barthelme’s method, and in
Barthelme, blessed method is everything.
In his novel, Snow White, he tells us about the manufacture
of buffalo humps.

They are “trash,” and what in fact could be more

useless or trashlike? It’s that we want to be on the
leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted
sphere of the future, and that’s why we pay partic¬
ular attention, too, to those aspects of language
that may seem as a model of the trash phenomenon.
Much interest is also shown in “stuffing,” the words which
fill the spaces between other words, and have the quality
at once of being heavy or sludgy, and of seeming infinite or

2 Our heterogeneous experience of language is basic to Borges, too.

See “Imaginary Borges and His Books.”

ZOO
 The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon

endless. Later we are told (Barthelme is always instructing

the reader) that the seven dwarfs (for the novel is a retelling
of the fairy story)

. . . like books that have a lot of dreck in them,

matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant
(or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully
attended to, can supply a kind of “sense” of what is
going on. This “sense” is not to be obtained by read¬
ing between the lines (for there is nothing there,
in those white spaces) but by reading the lines them¬
selves. . . .

Dreck, trash, and stuffing: these are his principal materials.

But not altogether. There is war and suffering, love and hope
and cruelty. He hopes, he says in the new volume, “these
souvenirs will merge into something meaningful.” But first he
renders everything as meaningless as it appears to be in
ordinary modern life by abolishing distinctions and putting
everything in the present. He constructs a single plane of
truth, of relevance, of style, of value—a flatland junkyard—
since anything dropped in the dreck is dreck, at once, as an
uneaten porkchop mislaid in the garbage.
In the second story of this volume, Barthelme imagines
that a balloon has been inflated at some point along Four¬
teenth Street and allowed to expand northward to the Park.
Just as, in the novel, there are pages of dim-witted reaction
to Snow White’s long black hair, so also in this case:

There was a certain amount of initial argumenta¬

tion about the “meaning” of the balloon; this sub¬
sided because we have learned not to insist on
meanings. . . .

Eventually people take parklike walks on it, and children

jump from nearby buildings onto it, or climb its sides. The

101
 William H. Gass

story is full of spurious facts and faked considerations typical

of science fiction. When the narrator’s girl returns from
Bergen, the balloon is deflated and packed off to be stored
in West Virginia, its inventor no longer a victim of sexual
deprivation, the balloon’s suggested cause.
If “The Indian Uprising” is a triumph of style, achieving
with the most unlikely materials an almost lyrical grace and
beauty, “The Balloon” is only charming; and a commercial
bit like “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” (a spoof
of the English Lord and Elizabeth Taylor lady-magazine
interview, and stuffed with syrupy cliche and honeyed con¬
tradiction) is simply cheap. Here Barthelme’s method fails,
for the idea is to use dreck, not write about it. Another short,
properly savage piece, written in bureaucratic engineerese,
is a “Report” on a recently developed secret word which,
when “pronounced, produces multiple fractures in all living
things in an area the size of four football fields.” Another tells
of the Police Band, which is designed to curb disturbances in
the streets with its happy, loud arrival. The band is formed.
It’s readied; but of course it never musicks. Still another
concerns two mysteriously military men who are buried in a
bunker. They watch a console and each other; they watch
for breakdown, something strange. They do not know for
which city their bird is targeted. They watch, and they
wait for relief. While we are reading, none comes. Barthelme
is often guilty of opportunism of subject (the war, street
riots, launching pads, etc.), and to be opportune is to suc¬
cumb to dreck. Two stories, written in a flat, affected style
resembling a nervous tic that’s nonsignificant of nerves, both
about cutouts named Edward and Pia, permit the reader to
race to the finish ahead of the words, to anticipate effects, and
consequently to appreciate a cleverness in the author almost
equal to his own.

102
 The Leading Edge of the Trash Yhenornenon

It was Sunday. Edward went to the bakery and

bought bread. Then he bought milk. Then he
bought cheese and the Sunday newspapers, which
he couldn’t read. (It’s a Swedish newspaper.)
But cleverness is also dreck. The cheap joke is dreck. The
topical, too, is dreck. Who knows this better than Barthelme,
who has the art to make a treasure out of trash, to see out
from inside it, the world as it’s faceted by colored jewelglass?
A seriousness about his subject is sometimes wanting. When
this obtains, the result is grim, and grimly overwhelming.

People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia.

“Do you think this is a good life?” The table held
apples books, long-playing records. She looked up.
“No.”

103
 PRICKSONGS & DESCANTS

B
-1—^ efore us we have several
stacks of unread cards, maybe as many as a week’s worth,
and when in the course of the game we discover them, turn¬
ing their faces toward us, they are placed in overlapping
layers on the table. There these thin and definite narrative
slices play us, though of course we say that we are playing
them. Most of the fictions in Robert Coover’s remarkable
new volume are solitaires—sparkling, many-faceted. Sharply
drawn and brightly painted paragraphs are arranged like
pasteboards in ascending or descending scales of alternating
colors to compose the story, and the impression that we
might scoop them all up and reshuffle, altering not the ele¬
ments but the order or the rules of play, is deliberate. We are
led to feel that a single fable may have various versions:
narrative time may be disrupted (the ten played before the
nine), or the same space occupied by different eyes (jack of
hearts or jack of diamonds), fantasy may fall on fact, lust
overnumber love, cliche cover consternation. The characters
 Pricksongs & Descants

are highly stylized like the face cards. We’ve had them in
our hands before: Swede, the taciturn guide; Quenby, his
island-lonely wife; Ola, their nubile daughter; Carl, the
fisherman out from the city . . . and in other stories there are
others equally standardized, equally traditional.
Just like the figures in old fairy tales and fables, we are
constantly coming to forks in the road (always fateful),
except here we take all of them, and our simultaneous
journeys are simultaneous stories, yet in different genres,
sometimes different styles, as if fantasy, romance and reality,
nightmare and daydream, were fingers on the same hand. In
“The Elevator,” several types of self-serviced trips are
imagined for its fourteen floors plus B, and the fact that the
story is in fifteen numbered paragraphs seems as inevitable
as the fourteen lines of the sonnet.
One of the most impressive pieces in the book in this regard
is called “The Babysitter.” She arrives at seven-forty, but
how will her evening be? ordinary? the Tucker children
bathed and put away like dishes, a bit of TV, then a snooze?
Or will she take a tub herself, as she seems to have done the
last time? Will she, rattled, throttle the baby to silence its
screaming, allow it to smother in sudsy water? Perhaps her
boyfriend will drop over for a spot of love? and bring a
sadistic friend? Or maybe a mysterious stranger will forcibly
enter and enter her? No—she will seduce the children; no—
they will seduce her; no—Mr. Tucker, with the ease and sud¬
denness of daydream, will return from the party and (a)
surprise her in carnal conjunction with her boyfriend, (b)
embrace her slippery body in the bath, (c) be discovered
himself by (i) his wife, (ii) his friends, (iii) the police . . .
or . . . All the while the TV has its own tale to tell, and
eventually, perhaps, on the news, an account will be given
of . . . While the baby chokes on its diaper pin? While the
 William H. Gass

sitter, still warm out of water, is taken by Mr. Tucker?

While both she and the children are murdered by Boyfriend
& Friend? No . . . But our author says yes to everything;
we’ve been reading a remarkable fugue—the stock fears
and wishes, desires and dangers of our time done into Bach.
Within the paragraphs, the language, which is artfully
arranged and colored for both eye and ear, reads often like a
scene set for the stage:

Night on the lake. A low cloud cover. The boat

bobs silently, its motor for some reason dead.

Or it has the quality of an image on the oblong screen which

is being described for us because we’ve been carried away
into the kitchen and yet wish to miss nothing: what’s hap¬
pening now, dear?

Mark is kissing her. Jack is under the blanket,

easing her panties down over her squirming hips.

The present tense is often salted with a sense of something

altogether over.

I wander the island, inventing it. I make a sun for

it, and trees—pines and birch and dogwood and
firs—and cause the water to lap the pebbles of its
abandoned shores.

While the collection is dominated by the paragraph as

playing card, there are short pseudo dramas and sections of
monologue, too, as well as patches of more traditional nar¬
rative, for this is a book of virtuoso exercises: alert, self-
conscious, instructional, and show-off. Look at me, look at
me, look at me now, says the Cat in the Hat. Indeed, Coover
is the one to watch—a marvelous magician—as the last piece,
“The Hat Act,” suggests; a maker of miracles, a comic, a
sexual tease, befooler of the hicks and ultimately a vain re-

106
 Vricksongs ek Descants

builder of Humpty Dunipty, murderer of his own muse, a

victim of his own art . . . mastered by it, diddled, tricked,
rendered powerless by the very power he possesses as an
artist:

At times, I forget that this arrangement is my own

invention. I begin to think of the island as some¬
how real, its objects solid and intractable, its con¬
dition of ruin not so much an aesthetic design as an
historical denouement. I find myself peering into
blue teakettles, batting at spider-webs, and contem¬
plating a greenish-gray growth on the side of a
stone parapet. I wonder if others might wander here
without my knowing it; I wonder if I might die and
the teakettle remain. . . . Where does this illusion
come from, this sensation of “hardness” in a blue
teakettle . . . ?

A number of our finest writers—Barth, Coover, and

Barthelme, for example—have begun to experiment with
shorter forms, as Beckett and Borges before them,1 and in
many ways each wishes to instruct us in the art of narration,
the myth-making imagination. The regions they have begun
to develop are emphatically not like the decaying South, the
Great Plains, or the Lower East Side; they are rather regions
of the mind, aspects of a more or less mass college culture;
and therefore the traditions—the experience—they expect to
share with their readers is already largely “literary”: Greek,
often, with Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, though a broader
spectrum of language received via TV, magazine, movie, and
newspaper occupies Barthelme in Unspeakable Practices,
Unnatural Acts, while biblical stories, fairy tales, and the

1 See “The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon,” and “Imagi¬

nary Borges and His Books.” Nabokov’s example is also important.
See “Mirror, Mirror.”
 William H. Gass

myths and fables of popular culture most concern Coover

in the short pieces he’s collected here, as well as in some
others which he has yet to reprint.2
Barthelme rewrote Snow White. Coover rewrites Little
Red Riding Hood (and who is the woodman but Beanstalk
Jack?); gives us a beautiful new Hansel and Gretel; adds to
our knowledge of Joseph and Mary (how did he take it?);
injects as much bitterness as flood into the story of Noah;
leans toward goatboy allegory in a tale titled “Morris in
Chains,” etc., and at all times contrives to counter, even to
destroy, the meaning and power of the original.
Coover himself remarks, in a dedicatory preface addressed
to Cervantes and placed with predictable perverseness well
within the body of the book, that

The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms

to combat the content of those forms and to con¬
duct the reader ... to the real, away from mystifica¬
tion to clarification, away from magic to maturity,
away from mystery to revelation.

No wonder, then, that in the tale about the Ark, it’s not the
high and dry Coover writes about, but the abandoned, the
drowned.
It is finally significant, I think, that the experimental
methods which interest Coover, and which he chooses to
exploit so skillfully, are those which have to do with the
orderly, objective depiction of scenes and events, those
which imply a world with a single public point of view, solid
and enduring things, long strings of unambiguous action

2 Many of these qualities can be found in the superb work of John

Hawkes, too; and the fact that most of these writers teach writing is
scarcely surprising. That they are often on the circuit, vocalizing them,
counting sometimes on their personal presence for its effect, is in no
way surprising either.

108
 Pricksongs & Descants

joined by tight causal knots, even when the material itself

is improbable and fantastic; and the consequence of his play
with these techniques is the scrambling of everything, the
dissolution of that simple legendary world we’d like to live
in, in order that new values may be voiced; and, as Coover
intends them, these stories become “exemplary adventures
of the Poetic Imagination.”
It is also characteristic of this kind of writing to give
covert expression to its nature, provide its own evaluation;
so that the imagined reader, dressed in red riding, bringing
a basket to her wolf-enclosed granny and hesitating mo¬
mentarily before the cover of the cottage, finally opens the
door with the thought

that though this was a comedy from which, once

entered, you never returned, it nevertheless pos¬
sessed its own astonishments and conjurings, its
tower and closets, and even more pathways, more
gardens, and more doors.

This reader, too, will subscribe to that.

 MIRROR, MIRROR

T —he train stands still. The

world is moving. Objects shatter into points of light, reflec¬
tions are observant, shadows follow us like menacing dogs.
All the visual qualities of things, and these predominate, are
hard and impersonal. Everything’s a mirror or an image in a
mirror; depth is space upon a surface where every visual
relationship is retained, though subtly inverted. A Nabokov
novel is sliding by us, through our still attention, and the
objects which it holds up to us are flat and disconnected:
cathedral, shop sign, top hat, fish, a barber’s copper basin.
The people, head to foot, are faces (knees, toes, elbows:
these are also faces); faces done in glossy printers’ colors and
stamped out on the covers of a million magazines, the copies
of each kind the same, yet when found in different combina¬
tions, they are strangely altered (if left in the seat of a train
or taken to a room, scissored up for scrapbooks, read in bed,
or stacked in dusty attics to be saved), and they possess, in
every place they occupy, an additional significance, as cards
are changed in fresh hands, so that the two of spades on one
occasion fills a flush, while on another proves to be super-

110
 Mirror, Mirror

fluous, or as the white queen’s puissant knave is rendered

impotent, slid to a new square. Cards and chessmen, char¬
acters and words: all are hollow powers. Ruled by rules
which confine their moves, they form a world of crisp, com¬
plex, abstract, and often elegant, though finally trivial, rela¬
tions.
King, Queen, Knave is Nabokov’s second Russian novel,
but it’s his twelfth in English, and if Gleb Struve’s transla¬
tion1 of a passage from the Russian edition is accurate, and a
standard sample, then the text has been revised, and im¬
proved, line by line. The work seems early only in the clarity
of its intentions. Nabokov’s esthetic was already formed, and
this book’s written to its program. The author’s manipula¬
tions are quite obvious, even blatant, for we’re supposed to
see his clever hands holding the crossed sticks, managing the
strings. Smoothed (one can’t be sure how much), youthful
gaucheries perhaps removed, mistakes erased: its date is now
much later than it was. Each verb and noun, as though in
search of something sweet, fly to their modifications, and
this is because the modifications manifest the master: reveal
him, praise him—glorify. The result is sometimes fussily
decorative, like insistent blossoms on a swatch of chintz.

The man was leafing through the magazine, and the

combination of his face with its enticing cover was
intolerably grotesque. The ruddy egg woman sat
next to the monster, her sleepy shoulder touching
him. The youth’s rucksack rubbed against his slick
sticker-mottled black valise. And worst of all, the
old ladies ignoring their foul neighbor munched
their sandwiches and sucked on fuzzy sections of
orange, wrapping the peels in scraps of paper and

1 In his essay on Nabokov as a Russian writer in Nabokov: The

Man and His Work, edited by L. S. Dembo (Madison, Wise.: Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1968).

Ill
 William H. Gass

popping them daintily under the seat. But when the

man put down his magazine and, without taking
off his gloves, himself began eating a bun with
cheese, glancing around provokingly, Franz could
stand it no longer. He rose quickly, he lifted like a
martyr his pale face, shook loose and pulled down
his humble suitcase, collected his raincoat and hat
and, banging his suitcase awkwardly against the
doorjamb, fled into the corridor.

It’s Franz (our poltroon, knave, the dull point of our

triangle) whom the images are passing. He’s riding third
class, as befits his station; but how ugly everyone around
him is (that bun-eating man has no nose), and so Franz
stumbles with his bag to second class and selects a com¬
partment occupied by our story’s King and Queen. Socially,
they are traveling beneath them because the Queen is stingy.
Thus upper and lower meet, like teeth, in the mouth’s moist
middle. Pnin begins, too, on a train. Pnin, too, worries that
he’s lost his wallet. Pnin, too, like Grandmaster Luzhin, like
so many others, lives in a muddle. Pnin’s train is taking him
the wrong way, and he has no little man to help him like
Sebastian Knight does. Here it’s Franz, the climber, who is
going wrong. King, Queen, Knave: each stares out the
window, waiting—as we’re waiting—to be played. Deep
in the game they stand in their squares until their master
moves them. The world surrounding strangely shifts. It has
inexplicable ways. What can the players be up to?2

2 Answers to these and other intriguing questions of the same kind

concerning most of the master’s major games can be found in Andrew
Field’s Nabokov: His Life and Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), in
Page Stegner’s Escape into Esthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov
(New York: Dial Press, 1966), in Carl R. Proffer’s study, Keys to
Lolita (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1968), and in the
anthology edited by Dembo (the latter provides a critical checklist
whereby even fainter footprints can be followed and identified).

I 12
 Mirror, Mirror

Nabokov has taken his title, we’re told,3 from a tale bv

Andersen, but it is also Madame Bovary, slightly rearranged;
it is the story of the shepherd, Gyges, whose Aladdin-like
ring renders him, at will, invisible, enabling him to seduce
a queen and contrive her husband’s death to seize the crown.
Franz does not know this middle-aged and tawny moustached
man’s his uncle who, obscurely petitioned by the youth’s own
worried mother, has promised Franz a job in town. Uncle?
Would this weak Franz, within a web of high connections
such a low relation, play so poor a prank upon Freud’s
Hamlet as to wish his uncle dead and he, himself, instead, the
kingly penis in the queen’s bed? Think not on’t.
In Nabokov’s sardonic version, the traditional romance is
burlesqued. Franz sleeps with his lady, all right, though he’s
a booby in the boudoir to begin with, that is, until she
seizes his initiative; and the pair plot the death of their king,
too, quite according to custom (shall it be by shooting,
strangling, stabbing? no? by means of a subtle poison? no—
and they research the matter thoroughly, consulting en¬
cyclopedias and other catalogues of magic; but the cards
say death by water finally, although events play in, not from,
their hands). At the seaside, on vacation, rowing on the
ocean, the lovers plan to empty husband from the boat, and
because he cannot swim, Nature, it’s presumed, will hold him
under. Husband, however, rowing manfully, reveals a busi¬
ness deal he’s to close in the city that’s likely to net him a
tidy. Why murder a man at a moment so financially in¬
opportune? Postponement proves comically fatal. T he
Queen, never sturdy (and anyway a value lower than the
King), overwetted by the outing, is finessed by pneumonia
from the game. The Knave (still another count inferior) is

3 By Field.

ll3
 William H. Gass

released from a slavery that’s been sweet but also terrifying

to him (the worm in the apple’s no innocent either), and as
the cover closes, we hear him laughing a little too merrily.
Back aboard the train, Uncle Dreyer hasn’t bought Martha
any strawberries (there is a reason, but never mind it), and
his wife is annoyed with him. He also insists on reading
poetry, and this annoys her too, because only a magazine is
appropriate for journeying. (Dreyer is really reading these
poems now because reference will be made to them later,
though not by me.) Martha yawns, and Franz

glimpsed the smell of her tense tongue in the red

penumbra of her mouth and the flash of her teeth
before her hand shot up to her mouth to stop her
soul from escaping.

Yes. You’re right. To Franz this yawn resembles “somehow

those luscious lascivious autumn strawberries for which his
hometown was famous.” But you’re wrong if you think
that Martha fears her soul is trying to escape, or that Franz
is of that opinion. She has no soul, though, if she had, a yawn
is what it would flee through. This carriage has another
passenger. Franz shall eat of these strawberries, taste this
mouth often, the deity shall see to that, for all these details
trolley through the book as this train does, making countless
local stops:

Presently the bed stirred into motion. It glided off

on its journey creaking discreetly as does a sleeping
car when the express pulls out of a dreamy station.

All the characters are invisible to one another. The world

for Dreyer is a dog he plays with: here, Franz, fetch the ball.
It never occurs to him that doggie’s sleeping with his wife.
And when he gives the young man a job in his store, he puts
 Mirror, Mirror

him in sporting goods, where chewy balls for dogs are sold,
and other rubber implements. Only occasionally does Franz
see how much mistress Martha resembles a toad; and Franz
means nothing to her, certainly; he’s just a symbol of those
dissatisfactions which she’s decided suit her situation: in her
life adultery is overdue.
We must remember that mirrors reflect us quite indif¬
ferently: they accept anything, and if these characters are
followed by puddles, polished steel, and shadowing walls, the
characters themselves are mirrors. They contain images, they
do not see. Two pure mirrors, facing one another, draw a
blank. Furthermore, the mirror someone sees his shape in,
which doubles him for observation, performs a task no dif¬
ferent than the mind does in reflection, since in Nabokov
reflection is a metaphor for thought—his own. These figures
wait like mirrors, too; their movement is illusory; they blur if
they’re flawed or cracked or improperly silvered. Franz
smashes his glasses and the world becomes a painting by
Monet. (How many of Nabokov’s kings, queens, or knaves
have broken or mislaid their glasses; how many are myopic,
or are led by madness, strokes, or fevers into a world of
dreams?4 Freed of natural color and the world’s unshapely
forms and corners, the language rises; within the stream of
the eye, Nabokov is always lyrical and moving.2)

4 Answers to these and other intriguing questions of the same kind

can be found . . . etc. For more on mirrors see Imaginary Borges and
His Books,” and “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World.”
5 Novelists, today, employ all sorts of similar strategies to justify the
release of language. They return to myth or fable as Coover does
(“Pricksongs & Descants”); they resort to a mock epic style (Barth’s
“Menelaiad” for example); they make drunk or mad the consciousness
they are concerned with (“In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the
Figures of Life”); they indulge in fantasy, create grotesques, play at
dreaming and propose conundrums (like Pale Fire; see also Imaginary
Borges and His Books”), seek some freedom in parody and pastiche
or in other, otherwise imprisoning historical forms such as the pica-
 William H. Gass

His characters are his clowns. They blunder comically

about. Clubbed by coincidence, they trip when most passion¬
ate. With rouge on their pates and wigs on their features,
their fundaments honk and trousers tear. Brought eagerly,
naively near, beauty in a boutonniere pees on their faces.
Like the other clowns, how we laugh at that. Pieces in the
play, they live, unaware, in the world of Descartes’ evil
demon,6 that relentless deceiver whose deceptions do not
qualify, but constitute, his nature. For Descartes, perhaps,
the demon was merely a philosophical fear, an academic
danger and a happy thought, but not for Nabokov’s crea¬
tures or his readers; for if it’s not we who remain in our
squares to be moved, it’s ourselves the moves are made
against: we are the other player. Most of Nabokov’s novels
(King, Queen, Knave is no exception) are attacks upon
their readers, though not like Genet’s and much modern
theater; not like Baudelaire’s, who called his lecteur a
hypocrite, because he also called him his double, his frere.
Yet what can this mighty magician do, this godlike con¬
triver, when forced to perform for his life like a servant, but
pick the pockets of the yokels whom he entertains? No
brother, then. Opponent to be beaten.
Carl Proffer’s Keys to Lolita is an explanation, move by

resque or allegorical tale, and only after establishing hyperbolic con¬

ditions allow a rhetorical rise, as Elkin does with such conspicuous
success in A Bad Man; they often find themselves experimenting with¬
out knowing quite why, lecturing the reader on the nature of tech¬
nique—the an of fiction—and insisting on their almost magical skills
while bamboozling their audience and defeating its every expectation.
Comedy is the customary consequence—a comedy frequently filled
with hostility. In every case, realism with respect to dialogue is the
last to go. Even Faulkner’s rhetoric does not normally reach as far
as the speech of his characters. The writer’s consciousness of what is
possible is, at this point, severely and seriously limited.
6 See “The Evil Demiurge.”

116
 Mirror, Mirror

move, of one of the great man’s greater games. Here he’s

discussing the use of poor Annabel Lee (for only too obvious
reasons):

If Lolita-Annabel is Humbert’s girl “as Vee was

Poe’s,” it seems reasonable for the reader to expect
Lolita s death. . . . The trail of deception goes
something like this: At first we are led, by allusion,
to suspect Lolita will be his victim. . . . Then when
Charlotte Haze enters the picture ... it seems cer¬
tain Humbert will murder her. . . . Then Humbert
smilingly dismisses the possibility. ... In spite of
this slap in the face, the reader still has to keep
Charlotte in mind as a . . .

I wouldn’t want to spoil for you the sequence of the other

ploys, though reading this book and Dembo’s collection is a
little like cheating at crosswords. Certainly these essays
wear airs of solution, as spies do suspicion. Readers of KQKn
won’t be entirely fooled. They know all threats of death by
drowning are a joke. While unwrapping the Poe allusions,
Proffer wonders: “Is this just another cryptrogrammatic
paper chase . . . ?” He decides not, because of the deceptions
they practice on us. That is, they function. Yet might not
the clues in a paper chase do the same? In any case, “ ‘An¬
nabel Lee’ is a very serious and beautiful poem. So,” he adds,
“is Lolita."
The funny, the comical, side-splitting Nabokovian thing
is that Nabokov’s novels are frequently formless, or when
form presides it’s mechanical, lacking instinct, desire, feel¬
ing, life (nostalgia is the honest bloodstream of his books,
their skin his witty and wonderful eye); and when the form
is so ruthlessly imposed from the outside, seldom allowed to
grow from within, rather bearing its bones on its hide as
some insects do, then not only the end, but beginning and
 William H. Gass

middle as well, are directed deus ex machina. We perceive this

at once when the critics, clothed in butcher’s aprons, carving
come, for they clearly regard their discussions of construc¬
tion as interpretations, and as they go about their operations,
we hear not a squeak from the beast. What our author pos¬
sesses in plenty is technique. Yale Fire, Lolita, and Sebastian
Knight are built of devices: these bones make the meat.
(That deal of Dreyer’s which saves him from a final tipping-
out concerns the sale, for display windows, of moving mani¬
kins he’s had made. It figures, but it doesn’t add.)
Even the characters on occasion, as if they’d begun to
doubt like Descartes, employ—to manage their world and to
murder like Hermann does in Despair—precisely the demon’s
deceptive wiles and much of his disdain and malice ... in
self-defense. These elaborate shapes fail to function as form,
as a mollusk might cleverly exude a shell in Gothic style
it didn’t use but sold, instead, in shops. Not only do the
novels seem cold (though Pnin is not, and The Defense is a
loving exception to everything; every move is emotional,
even the last one, when Luzhin flies like a Pegasus from life
to death and board to board), there is a striking contrast
between their rich contrivance and the thin interest they
have for the entirely engaged mind. Even a sentence which
fails the demands of the body, which calls upon only the
deductive faculty, which does not fuse the total self in a
single act of sense and thought and feeling, is artistically
incomplete, for when the great dancer leaps, he leaves noth¬
ing of himself behind, he leaps with, and into, all he is, and
never merely climbs the air with his feet. Nabokov’s novels
often, especially as described by Proffer and by Dembo’s
dozen, seem like those Renaissance designs of flying machines
—dreams enclosed in finely drawn lines—which are intended
to intrigue, to dazzle, but not to fly.

118
 Mirror, Mirror

Form makes a body of a book, puts all its parts in a system

of internal relations so severe, uncompromising, and com¬
plete that changes in them anywhere alter everything; it
also unties the work from its author and the world, establish¬
ing, with them, only external relations, and never borrowing
its being from things outside itself. A still umbilicaled book
is no more formed than a fetus.
Close to conclusion, at that resort by the sea where the
drowning’s planned, Nabokov puts his name to KQKn:

The foreign girl in the blue dress danced with a re¬

markably handsome man in an old-fashioned dinner
jacket. Franz had long since noticed this couple;
they had appeared to him in fleeting glimpses, like
a recurrent dream image or a subtle leitmotiv—
now at the beach, now in a cafe, now on the prome¬
nade. Some times the man carried a butterfly net.
The girl had a delicately painted mouth and tender
gray-blue eyes, and her fiance or husband, slender,
elegantly balding, contemptuous of everything on
earth but her, was looking at her with pride. . . .

King, Queen, Knave is supposed to be a game of cards, but

the purpose of the playing was and is, both at the first and
now, to hold the mirror up to Nabokov. One puzzle of
Nabokov’s long imperial career is why he’s never signed his
books with a large and simple N. It was good enough for
Napoleon; and after all, Nabokov’s novels are empires, and
more than that, they’re his.

119
 IMAGINARY BORGES
AND HIS BOOKS

JL
A m mnng Paul Valery’s jot¬
tings, Andre Maurois observes the following: “Idea for a
frightening story: it is discovered that the only remedy for
cancer is living human flesh. Consequences.”
One humid Sunday afternoon during the summer of 1969,
in a slither of magazines on a library table, I light like a
weary fly upon this, reported by Pierre Schneider: “One of
Jean-Paul Riopelle’s stories is about a village librarian who
was too poor to buy new books; to complete his library he
would, whenever he came across a favorable review in a
learned journal, write the book himself, on the basis of its
title.”
Both of these stories are by Borges; we recognize the
author at once; and their conjunction here is by Borges, too:
a diverse collection of names and sources, crossing like
ignorant roads: Valery, Maurois, Riopelle, Schneider—who
could have foreseen this meeting of names in The New York
Review?

120
 Imaginary Borges and His Books

Shaken out of sleep on a swift train at night we may un¬

blind our compartment window to discover a dim sign
making some strange allegation; and you, reader, may unfist
this paper any moment and pick up a book on raising herbs
instead, a travel folder, letter from a lover, novel by Colette;
the eye, mind, memory which encounters them as vague
about the distance traversed as any passenger, and hardly
startled anymore by the abrupt change in climate or terrain
you’ve undergone.1 How calm we are about it; we pass from
a kiss to a verb and never tremble; and having performed that
bound, we frolic or we moon among our symbols, those
we ve assigned to Henry Adams or those we say are by
Heraclitus, as if there were nothing to it. Like the hours we
spent mastering speech, we forget everything; nor do our
logicians, our philosophers of language, though they may
coax us like cats do their fish, very often restore what we
once might have had—-a sense of wonder at the mental coun¬
try we inhabit, lost till we wander lost into Borges, a man
born as if between syllables in Argentina where even he for
many years believed he had been raised in a suburb of Buenos
Aires, a suburb of adventurous streets and visible sunsets,
when what was certain was that he was raised in a garden,
behind a wrought-iron gate, and in a limitless library of
English books.2

1 Unless the changes are forcibly called to our attention. See “The
Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon.”
2 Or so he asserts in the prologue to Evaristo Carriego, according to
Ronald J. Christ (The Narrow Act: Borges’ Art of Allusion [New
York: New York University Press, 1969]), although errors are con¬
stantly creeping in—his, Christ’s, mine—errors, modifications, corrup¬
tions, which, nevertheless, may take us nearer the truth. In his little
note on Carriego, does he not warn us that Carriego is a creation of
Carriego? and in the parable “Borges and I” does he not say, “I am
quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying
things”? does he not award all the mischievous translations of A
Thousand and One Nights higher marks than the pure and exact one

121
 William H. Gass

Just as Carriego, from the moment he recognized himself

as a poet, became the author of verses which only later he
was permitted to invent, Borges thought of himself as a
writer before he ever composed a volume. A nearsighted
child, he lived where he could see—in books and illustrations
(Borges says “shortsighted,” which will not do); he read
English authors, read and read; in clumsy English wrote
about the Golden Fleece and Hercules (and inevitably, the
Labyrinth), publishing, by nine, a translation of The Happy
Prince which a local teacher adopted as a text under the
impression it was the father’s doing, not the son’s. In
Switzerland, where his family settled for a time, he com¬
pleted his secondary education, becoming more and more
multitongued (acquiring German), yet seeing no better,
reading on. He then traveled extensively in Spain, as if to
meet other authors, further books, to enlarge the literary
landscape he was already living in—deepening, one imagines
daily, his acquaintance with the conceptual country he would
eventually devote his life to. Back in Argentina, he issued
his first book of poems. He was twenty- They sang of Buenos
Aires and its streets, but the few lines Christ quotes give the
future away:

Perhaps that unique hour

increased the prestige of the street,
giving it privileges of tenderness,
making it as real as legend or verse.

of Enna Littmann? and in his conversations with Richard Burgin

(Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges [New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1969]) does he not represent memory as a stack of coins,
each coin a recollection of the one below it, and in each repetition a
tiny distortion? Still we can imagine, over time, the distortions cor¬
recting themselves, and returning to the truth through a circle like a
stroller and his dog.

122
 Imaginary Borges and His Books

Thus he was very soon to pass, as he says himself, from “the

mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and in¬
finity” which finally made him famous—made him that
imaginary being, the Borges of his books.
Becoming Borges, Borges becomes a librarian, first a minor
municipal one like our poor French village author, and then
later, with the fall of Peron, after having been removed for
political reasons from that lesser post, the director of the
National Library itself.
Idea for a frightening story: the books written by the
unknown provincial librarian ultimately replace their origi¬
nals, which are declared to be frauds. Consequences.
Inside the library, inside the books, within their words: the
world. Even if we feel it no longer, we can remember from
our childhood the intenser reality which opened toward us
when like a casket lid a cover rose and we were kings on
clipper ships, cabin boys on camel back, Columbuses cross¬
ing swimming holes to sack the Alps and set free Lilliput, her
golden hair climbing like a knight up the wall of some
crimson battle tent . . . things, men, and moments more
than merely lived but added to ourselves like the flesh of a
fruit. In Borges’ case, for instance, these included the lamp
of Aladdin, the traitor invented by H. G. Wells who
abandoned his friend to the moonmen, and a scene which I
shall never forget either, Blind Pew tapping toward the
horses which will run him down. Senor Borges confides to
Burgin’s tape that

I think of reading a book as no less an experience

than traveling or falling in love. I think that read¬
ing Berkeley or Shaw or Emerson, those are quite
as real experiences to me as seeing London. . . .
Many people are apt to think of real life on the one
side, that means toothache, headache, traveling and

123
 William H. Gass

so on, and then on the other side, you have imag¬

inary life and fancy and that means the arts. But I
don’t think that distinction holds water. I think
that everything is a part of life.

Emerson? Many of Borges’ other enthusiasms are equally

dismaying, like the Russians’ for Jack London, or the
symbolist poets’ for Poe; on the whole they tend to be
directed toward obscure or marginal figures, to stand for
somewhat cranky, wayward, even decadent choices: works
at once immature or exotic, thin though mannered, clever
rather than profound, neat instead of daring, too often the
products of learning, fancy, and contrivance to make us
comfortable; they exhibit a taste that is still in its teens, one
becalmed in backwater, and a mind that is seriously intrigued
by certain dubious or jejune forms, forms which have to be
overcome, not simply exploited: fantastic tales and wild
romances, science fiction, detective stories, and other similar
modes which, with a terrible theological energy and zeal,
impose upon implausible premises a rigorous gamelike rea¬
soning; thus for this minutely careful essayist and poet it’s
not Aristotle, but Zeno, it’s not Kant, but Schopenhauer;
it’s not even Hobbes, but Berkeley, not Mill or Bradley, but
—may philosophy forgive him—Spencer; it’s Dunne, Beck-
ford, Bloy, the Cabbalists; it’s Stevenson, Chesterton,
Kipling, Wells and William Morris, Browne and De Quincey
Borges turns and returns to, while admitting no such similar
debt to James, Melville, Joyce, and so on, about whom, in¬
deed, in these Conversations, he passes a few mildly un¬
flattering remarks.3
Yet in the country of the word, Borges is well traveled,

3 I am of course not suggesting that Borges regards Wells, say, as a

better writer than Joyce, or that he pays no heed or tribute to major
figures. Christ’s treatment of this problem is fair and thorough. He
tells us, incidentally, that in an introductory course on English litera¬
ture, Borges’ own interests led him to stress the importance of William

12+
 Imaginary Borges and His Books

and has some of the habits of a seasoned, if not jaded,

journeyer. Whatr see Mont Saint Michel again? that tourist
trapr far better to sip a local wine in a small cafe, watch a
vineyard comb its hillside. There are a thousand overlooked
delights in every language, similarities and parallels to be
remarked, and even the mightiest monuments have their
neglected beauties, their unexplored crannies; then, too, it has
been frequently observed that our childhood haunts, though
possibly less spectacular, less perfect, than other, better
advertised, places, can be the source of a fuller pleasure for
us because our familiarity with them is deep and early and
complete, because the place is ours; while for other regions
we simply have a strange affinity—they do not threaten, like
Dante or the Alps, to overwhelm us—and we somehow find
our interests, our designs, reflected in them. Or is it we who
function as the silvered glass? Idea for a frightening story.
Thus, reading Borges, we must think of literature as a
landscape, present all at once like space, and we must re¬
member that literary events, unlike ordinary ones—drinking
our coffee or shooting our chancellor—repeat themselves,
although with variations, in every mind the text fills. Books
don’t plop into time like stones in a pond, rippling the surface
for a while with steadily diminishing waves. There is only
one Paris, we suppose, and one Flaubert, one Madame
Bovary, but the novel has more than a million occurrences,
often in different languages, too. Flaubert may have ridden
a whore with his hat on, as has been reported, but such

Morris. Though Borges himself appears in most ways a modest man,

such preferences are nevertheless personal and somewhat vain. Just as
Borges becomes important by becoming Borges, Morris becomes im¬
portant by becoming Borges, too. “An author may suffer from absurd
prejudices,” he tells us in his fine and suggestive lecture on Haw¬
thorne, “but it will be impossible for his work to be absurd if it is
genuine, if it responds to a genuine vision.” As for Spencer, it might
be worth noting that this philosopher tended to think of art as a
form of play.
 William H. Gass

high jinks soon spend their effects (so, comparatively, does

the murder of any Caesar, although its initial capital is
greater), whereas one sentence, divinely composed, goes on
and on like the biblical proverbs, the couplets of Pope, or
the witticisms of Wilde.
We may indeed suspect that the real power of historical
events lies in their descriptions; only by virtue of their
passage into language can they continue to occur, and once
recorded (even if no more than as gossip), they become
peculiarly atemporal, residing in that shelved-up present
which passes for time in a library, and subject to a special
kind of choice, since I can choose now to read about the war
on the Peloponnesus or the invasion of Normandy; change
my climate more easily than my clothes; rearrange the map;
while on one day I may have traveled through Jonson to
reach Goldsmith, they are not villages, and can be easily
switched, so that on the next I may arrive directly from
De Quincey, Goethe, or Thomas Aquinas. New locations are
constantly being created, like new islands rising from the sea,
yet when I land, I find them never so new as all that, and
having appeared, it is as if they had always been.4
It is a suggestion, I think, of Schopenhauer5 (to whom
Borges turns as often as he does to Berkeley), that what we
remember of our own past depends very largely on what of
it we’ve put our tongue to telling and retelling. It’s our

4 That all our messages are in the present tense, as I have tried to
suggest, is fundamental to Barthelme’s method of composition. See
“The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon.”
5 Borges’ good friend and collaborator, Bioy Casares, once attributed
to a heresiarch of Uqbar the remark that both mirrors and copulation
were abominable because they increased the number of men. Borges
momentarily wondered, then, whether this undocumented country
and its anonymous heresiarch weren’t a fiction devised by Bioy’s mod¬
esty to justify a statement, and perhaps it’s the same here. It should be
perfectly clear, in any case, that Schopenhauer has read Borges and
reflects him, just as Borges reflects both Bioy and Borges, since the
remark about mirrors and copulation appears more than once.

126
 Imaginary Borges and His Books

words, roughly, we remember; oblivion claims the rest—-

forgetfulness. Historians make more history than the men
they write about, and because we render our experience in
universals, experience becomes repetitious (for if events do
not repeat, accounts do), and time doubles back in confusion
like a hound which has lost the scent.
Troy, many times, was buried in its own body, one city
standing on the shoulders of another, and students of
linguistic geography have observed a similar phenomenon.
Not only are there many accounts, both factual and fictional,
of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (so that the event becomes
multiplied in the libraries), there are, of course, com¬
mentaries and critiques of these, and then again examinations
of those, which lead, in turn, to reflections upon them, and
so on, until it sometimes happens that the originals are quite
buried, overcome (idea for a frightening story), and though
there may be a definite logical distance between each level,
there is no other; they sit side by side on our shelves. We
may read the critics first, or exclusively; and is it not, in fact,
true that our knowledge of most books is at least second
hand, as our knowledge of nearly everything else is?
Borges knows of the treacheries of our histories (treach¬
ery is one of his principal subjects)0—they are filled with
toothache—and in his little essay called “The Modesty of
History” suggests that most of its really vital dates are secret
—for instance, the introduction, by Aeschylus, of the second
actor.6 7 Still, this is but one more example of how, by prac-

6 He published his Universal History of Infamy in 1935, a work

which is very carefully not a universal history of infamy. See Paul de
Man, “A Modern Master,” New York Review, Nov. 19, 1964.
7 Professor Celerent has complained bitterly that there is scarcely
a history of Western Europe which troubles itself to mention Aris¬
totle’s invention of the syllogism—one of that continent s most forma¬
tive events. “Suppose,” he says, “that small matter had been put off,
as it was in India, to the 16th century?

12 7
 William H. Gass

ticing a resolute forgetfulness, we select, we construct, we

compose our pasts, and hence make fictional characters of
ourselves, as it seems we must to remain sane (Funes the
Memorious remembers everything, while the Borges who
receives a zahir in his drink change following a funeral one
day finds the scarred coin literally unforgettable; both
suffer).
It isn’t always easy to distinguish ficciones from inquisi-
ciones, even for Borges (of the famous Pierre Menard, he
says: .. it’s not wholly a story . . . it’s a kind of essay . . .”),
though the latter are perhaps more unfeignedly interroga¬
tions. It is his habit to infect these brief, playful, devious,
solemn, outre notes, which, like his fictions, are often ac¬
counts of treacheries of one sort or other, with small treach¬
eries of his own, treasons against language and its logic,
betrayals of all those distinctions between fact and fancy,
real life and dreaming, memory and imagination, myth and
history, word and thing, fiction and essay, which we’re so
fond of, and find so necessary, even though keeping them
straight is a perpetual difficulty.
If, as Wittgenstein thought, “philosophy is a battle against
the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,”
then Borges’ prose, at least, performs a precisely similar
function, for there is scarcely a story which is not built upon
a sophistry, a sophistry so fanatically embraced, so pedan¬
tically developed, so soberly defended, it becomes the prin¬
cipal truth in the world his parables create (puzzles,
paradoxes, equivocations, and obscure and idle symmetries
which appear as menacing laws); and we are compelled to
wonder again whether we are awake or asleep, whether we
are a dreamer or ourselves a dream, whether art imitates
nature or nature mirrors art instead; once more we are
required to consider whether things exist only while they

128
 Imaginary Borges and His Books

are being perceived, whether change can occur, whether

time is linear and straight or manifold and curved, whether
history repeats, whether space is a place of simple locations,
whether words aren’t more real than their referents—
whether letters and syllables aren’t magical and full of
cabbalistic contents—whether it is universals or particulars
which fundamentally exist, whether destiny isn’t in the
driver’s seat, what the determinate, orderly consequences
of pure chance come to, whether we are the serious play¬
things of the gods or the amusing commercial enterprises
of the devil.
It is not the subject of these compulsions, however, but the
manner in which they are produced that matters, and makes
Borges an ally of Wittgenstein. It is not hard to feel that
Borges’ creatures are mostly mad. This is, in many ways, a
comforting conclusion. The causes, on the other hand, re¬
main disturbing; they resemble far too literally those worlds
theologians and metaphysicians have already made for us
and in which we have so often found ourselves netted and
wriggling. When Schopenhauer argues that the body in all
its aspects is a manifestation of the will, he is composing
poetry; he is giving us an idea for a frightening story, one
which derives its plausibility from facts we are quite un-
poetically aware of (teeth are for biting), but the suggestion
that the will grew its body as a man might make some tool
to do his bidding is a fiction which, if we responded to the
cry for consequences implicit in it, would advertise its ab¬
surdity with the mad metaphysical fantasy which would
grow from its trunk like a second head.
Thus the effect of Borges’ work is suspicion and skepticism.
Clarity, scholarship, and reason: they are all here, yet each is
employed to enlarge upon a muddle without disturbing it,
to canonize a confusion. Ideas become plots (how beauti-

129
 William H. Gass

fully ambiguous, for Borges, that word is), whereupon those

knotty tangles the philosopher has been so patiently picking
at can be happily reseen as triumphs of esthetic design.8 In
the right sun suspicion can fall far enough to shadow every
ideology; the political schemes of men can seem no more
than myths through which they move like imaginary crea¬
tures, like fabulous animals in landscapes of pure wish; the
metaphors upon which they ride toward utopia now are
seldom seen (such is the price one pays for an ignorance of
history) to be the same overfat or scrawny nags the old
political romancers, puffing, rode at windmills in their time,
and always futilely. “The illusions of patriotism are limit¬
less.” Hitler tries to turn the world into a book; he suffered
from unreality, Borges claims, and collaborated in his own
destruction. Under the right sun one may observe little that
is novel. The world of words spins merrily around, the same
painted horses rising and falling to the same tunes, and our
guide delights in pointing out each reappearance. We have
seen this before: in Persepolis, and also in Peking ... in
Pascal, in Plato, in Parmenides. The tone, throughout, is that
of a skeptical conservative (this shows up very clearly, too,
in his conversations with Burgin). Least government is best,
and all are bad. They rest on myth. “Perhaps universal his-

8 Borges has made this point repeatedly himself (in the Epilogue to
Other Inquisitions, for example); yet his commentators persist in try¬
ing to pin on him beliefs which, for Borges, are merely materials.
They want him more imaginary than he already is. Perhaps this ac¬
counts for the statement, written we can imagine with a smile, which
Borges includes in each of the little prefaces he has written to im¬
primatur the books about him: in Barrenechea, in Burgin (he “has
helped me to know myself”), in Christ (“Some unsuspected things,
many secret links and affinities, have been revealed to me by this
book”), though he does not refrain, in the latter instance, from adding:
“. . . I have no message. I am neither a thinker nor a moralist, but
simply a man of letters who turns his own perplexities and that re¬
spected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the forms of
literature.”
 Imaginary Borges and His Books

tory is the history of a few metaphors.” And we have had

them all already, had them all.
As a young poet Borges pledged himself to Ultraism, a
Spanish literary movement resembling Imagism in many
ways, whose principles he carried back to Argentina in his
luggage. It demanded condensation, the suppression of orna¬
ment, modifiers, all terms of transition; it opposed exhortation
and vagueness—flourish; it praised impersonality, and re¬
garded poetry as made of metaphors in close, suggestive
combinations. It was primarily a poetry of mention, as
Borges prose is now, and Christ has no difficulty in showing
how these early slogans, like the literary enthusiasms of his
childhood, continue to affect the later work. Any metaphor
which is taken with literal seriousness requires us to imagine
a world in which it can be true; it contains or suggests a
metaphorical principle that in turn gives form to a fable.
And when the avhole is an image, local images can be re¬
moved.
Borges makes much of the independence of the new
worlds implied by his fiction; they are “contiguous realities”;
the poet annexes new provinces to Being; but they remain
mirror worlds for all that; it is our own world, misthought,
reflected there. And soon we find in Wittgenstein, himself,
this ancient idea for a frightening story: “Logic is not a
body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world.”
Mirrors are abominable. A photographer points her cam¬
era at Borges like a revolver. In his childhood he feared
mirrors—mahogany—being repeated . . . and thus becoming
increasingly imaginary? In the beautiful bestiary (The Book
of Imaginary Beings) which has just been translated for us,9

9 The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita

Guerrero, trans. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration
with the author (New York: Dutton, 1969).
 William H. Gass

it is suggested that one day the imprisoned creatures in our

looking glasses will cease to imitate us; fish will stir in the
panes as though in clear water; and “we will hear from the
depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.” How many times,
already, have we been overcome by imaginary beings?
This bouquet which Borges has gathered in his travels for
us consists largely of rather harmless animals from stories,
myths, and legends, alphabetically arranged here in the texts
which first reported them or in descriptions charmingly re¬
built by Borges. Most of these beasts are mechanically made
—insufficiently imaginary to be real, insufficiently original to
be wonderful or menacing. There are the jumbles, created by
collage: centaurs, griffins, hydras, and so on; the mathemat-
icals, fashioned by multiplication or division: one-eyed, half¬
mouthed monsters or those who are many-headed,
sixteen-toed, and triple-tongued; there are those of inflated
or deflated size: elves, dwarfs, brownies, leviathans, and
fastitocalon; and finally those who have no special shape of
their own—the proteans—and who counterfeit the forms of
others. A few, more interesting, are made of metal, and one,
my favorite, the A Bao A Qu, is almost wholly metaphysical,
and very Borges.
There’s no longer a world left for these creatures to in¬
habit—even our own world has expelled them—so that they
seem like pieces from a game we’ve forgotten how to play.
They are objects now of curiosity or amusement, and even
the prospect of one’s being alive and abroad, like the Loch
Ness serpent or abominable snowman (neither of whom is
registered here), does not deeply stir us. Borges’ invented
library of Babel is a far more compelling monster, with its
mirrored hallways and hexagonal galleries, its closets where
one may sleep standing up, its soaring and spiral stairways.
Even those lady-faced vultures the harpies cannot frighten

132
 Imaginary Borges and His Books

us, and hippogriffs are tame. It is that library we live in; it

is that library we dream; our confusions alter not the parts
of animals anymore, they lead on our understanding toward
a culmination in illusion like a slut.
And which is Borges, which his double? which is the
photograph? the face perverted by a mirror? image in the
polish of a writing table? There is the Borges who compiles
A Personal Anthology,10 and says he wishes to be remem¬
bered by it, and there is the Borges who admits to Burgin
that he did not put all of his best things in it; there is the
Borges who plays with the notion that all our works are
products of the same universal Will so that one author im¬
personally authors everything (thus the labors of that pro¬
vincial librarian are not vain), and the Borges whose
particular mark is both idiosyncratic and indelible. The
political skeptic and the fierce opponent of Peron: are they
one man? Can the author of The Aleph admire Chesterton?
Wells? Croce? Kipling? And what about those stories
which snap together at the end like a cheap lock? with a
gun shot? Is this impish dilettante the same man who leaves
us so often uneasily amazed? Perhaps he is, as Borges wrote
so wonderfully of Valery,

A man whose admirable texts do not exhaust, or

even define, his all-embracing possibilities. A man
who, in a century that adores the chaotic idols of
blood, earth, and passion, always preferred the lucid
pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of
order.

Yet can this be a figure that same age salutes? Consequences.

10 A Personal Anthology, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York:

Grove, 1967).

133
 THE BINGO GAME AT THE
FOOT OF THE CROSS

JL rom the start, nearly twenty

years ago now, when his writing began to excite the admira¬
tion of the readers of Accent, it was evident that the stories
of J. F. Powers had a very special quality, a rare richness
of theme and perception; and, for all their liberal zeal and
satirical intent, often an even rarer gentleness of tone. His
style seemed equal to all its occasions. Direct and colloquial
without being finicky, it was tilted pleasantly toward the
conversational, and made its effect with undemonstrative
simplicity and ease. By the time his first collection, The
Prince of Darkness, had appeared, it was evident, too, that
he was a master of the short story in at least one of its forms.
Moreover, Powers seemed almost immediately to have
found, in the vocation of the priest, the subject which was
eventually to possess him and draw forth his best; just as
he was, with equal readiness, to discover the ideal line to
take with it, one that gave him his characteristic fictional
“situation.”

'34
 The Bingo Game at the Foot of the Cross

The trouble with Powers’ second volume, for which he

kept us waiting nine years, was that his best stories were still
in the first one; but this was a petty complaint then, since the
collection was very fine, and the title story, “The Presence
of Grace, superb. Now, six years later, we have Morte
D'Urban, Powers’ third book, first novel. All told, they’ve
been years of care, of conscious artistry—the repeated exer¬
cise of correct choice, harsh scrutiny, and continuous re¬
vision. Thus I imagine it, for nothing else can account for
Morte D'Urban's special excellence. The time must have
been spent gathering, with a delight comparable to that
which Flaubert derived from the gaffs of the bourgeois,
those manifestations of our spiritual corruption from which
his stories and this novel are principally composed.
Theme, subject, situation, tone—for Powers, they have
not changed much as he moves from short fiction to the
novel. As he himself described the new book in a recent
interview in The Critic:

[It] is about Father Urban being sent to this foun¬

dation of the Order in Minnesota. He had been
a big-time speaker, a poor man’s Fulton Sheen.
He was suddenly sent up here to this white elephant,
not as the rector, but as one of the boys, one of the
three priests. That’s my story, what he did there,
how he tried to put the place on its feet, how he
worked as a common workman—because that was
the rector’s idea about everything, saving string;
the pound-foolish, penny-wise kind of man. He’s
what used to be called the Pullman type, now the
type with the attache case, doing lots of good and
instilling a feeling in the young men in the novitiate.
Father Urban was trying to develop something
special for the Clementines. What it was, he was not
sure—a kind of opportunism, I would say.

'35
 William H. Gass

Powers’ theme remains truly haunting; it is one that might

be framed as a question: how can the spirit express itself
in nature without compromise, without debasement, since
one is so distant from the other, and each is obedient to dif¬
ferent laws? Again: can a mind manipulate its body without
becoming its body first? Or: is it possible for the church to
do its work in the world without becoming worldly itself?
And there are a hundred other ways to put it. In “Lions,
Harts, Leaping Does,” Powers’ most beautiful story, the
Franciscan priest, Didymus, is finally able to feel the truth
he has so long bowed his head to, that “in trivial attach¬
ments, in love of things, was death, no matter the appearance
of life. In the highest attachment only, no matter the ap¬
pearance of death, was life.” But as Didymus approaches
the condition of the saint, wanting “nothing in the world for
himself at last,” he finds he is still “beset by the grossest dis¬
tractions. They were to be expected, he knew, as indelible
in the order of things: the bingo game going on under the
Cross for the seamless garment of the Son of Man: every¬
where the sign of the contradiction, and always. When
would he cease to be surprised by it?” The mystic, for
example, forgets his fellows in his flight toward the divine.
There seems to be an obligation laid upon those who follow
the Ideal to yield themselves to practice.
Thus the dilemma. There is a perfectly reasonable solution
to this paradox in Aristotle, but Catholic writers are seldom
long on doctrine, and the most arresting thing about Powers’
priests is that they never talk theological shop. A layman
will occasionally raise a question; it is always embarrassing.
But whatever the doctrine—the appearance remains. The
ladies leave their lipstick on the crucifix they kiss. One could
regard these smears as testimony of continuing love, but

136
 The Bingo Game at the Foot of the Cross

Powers does not choose to and, of course, the evidence is

mostly on his side.
^ et if Powers' fundamental theme escapes the parochial
residence he has given to it, his “situation” is, by contrast,
quite definitely fixed and narrowly predictable: we shall see
the priest, easy emblem of the fairway, hook heavily into
the rough and nearly lose his ball—a new Angelflite, one of
a dozen like the original disciples, given anonymously at
Christmas in a box of paper grass, balls he’s had to fly
south, in the anonymous donor’s private plane, to strike.
Well? What harm? Can’t priests, like presidents, play golf?
The position of the priest has always struck many people
(mostly Protestants, I suppose) as curious, and Powers men¬
tions this fact in the novel. The priest wears a uniform of
spiritual dedication and physical denial, is celibate as though
to celebrate it, moves through the mysteries of ritual as if
he knew his way there, incanting an ancient tongue—a
figure altogether strange to this world. Yet he is permitted
to smoke cigars, prefer martinis, improve his game, accept
personal gifts, and drive about in large cars. If the Catholic
Church is to survive and grow and do its work, it must at¬
tract wealth, acquire political power, advertise itself, build,
train bright ambitious men for the priesthood and put them
in effective places; it must, in our competitive world, ener¬
getically compete, and to compete it must be heard, it must
be chic, it must seem glamorous to the crowd, right up to
date. Surely Father Urban would agree, for that is the
meaning of his name. Only reasonable. The Protestants are
building bowling alleys.
Powers has found the formula for his fiction in all this.
He regularly sees the priest in a worldly role. I he necessity
of this role makes Powers’ satire kind. The contradiction

131
 William H. Gass

implied makes his irony deep. Nevertheless, it is a formula,

for we can feel the force of it before we read, and in great
part predict its course before that course has well begun.1
A few examples. In one story the relation between curate
and pastor is likened to that between landlord and tenant,
the particular problem being how the tenant can wrangle a
writing table for his furnished room from the store gather¬
ing dust in his landlord’s basement. In another, Father holds
patriarchal sway over a household of women. We are treated
to the irony of nuns counting collection money, while
Mother nerves herself to ask Father to buy a new stove.
(“The stove’s all right, Sister. It won’t draw properly, is
all.”) In perhaps the best-known of these pieces, “The
Valiant Woman,” what would otherwise be a dreary cliche
of married life becomes deliciously comic when the partici¬
pants are housekeeper and priest. They even play honey¬
moon bridge.
Not only does the formula, the particular “situation,”
give these stories their form, it supplies the details, too, and
Powers is immensely gifted at filling every corner of his
picture with ironies. Father Ernest Burner, the fat prince of
“The Prince of Darkness,” to my mind the finest of the
stories of this kind, is cast as a time server in a large corpora¬
tion hoping for a transfer that will mean a promotion. A vic¬
tim, principally, of sloth (though all the notable sins are his
in one small way or another), he receives a demotion instead.
Burner golfs, of course, and in his room he practices putting
through his clerical collar. (Father Urban is constantly
mislaying his.) As he drives to his flying lessons (he is, we
must remember, the fallen angel), Father Burner’s trousers

1 The problem of the “linguistically detachable formula” and its em¬

bodiment in language is discussed briefly, with reference to Powers,
in “The Concept of Character in Fiction.”

138
 The Bingo Game at the Foot of the Cross

feel uncomfortably tight. He tugs “viciously at both knees,

loosening the seat.” So in every line: the apt symbolism, the
rich irony, the identical implications. Each time, too, the
shock of the contradiction is freshly felt, for instance in the
easy vulgarity of the priests’ thought and speech, a frequent
device of the novel. “Your ass is out, Father,” Monsignor
Renton says.
But the formula which has served Powers’ shorter fiction
so well does not lend itself as readily to the longer form.
His situations tend to close upon themselves, making the
novel a trifle episodic. The writing is astonishingly deft,
continuously comic, but Powers is too afraid of being a bore.
His formula permits him repeated illustrations of the same
theme, yet obstructs any deeper exploration. There’s no
more here than in “Lions, Harts . . .” or “The Prince of
Darkness,” where the material is held under greater pressure.
It is perhaps the final irony, but I cannot imagine a book in
which religious feeling would be more conspicuously ab¬
sent, or even out of place (though I may mistake the emo¬
tion), or one whose artistry would make its compromises
with the world with better grace.

*39
 THE SHUT-IN

I .
JL. B. Singer’s work is re¬
markable for a number of reasons. Critics have called it
“modern.” It is not. Most of his stories take place in the
past, certainly; but Gide composing Le Roi Candaule, or
Camus his Caligula, writes in an unmistakably modern way.
Singer’s stories turn so remote a corner in the history of
human consciousness, they may give the impression of com¬
ing from the future when they are really returning from
a circumnavigation of infinity . . . and by the back way.
He writes in Yiddish, but he thinks in Hebrew; or if you
like, in awfully early Greek. The characters Singer creates
(like the world he makes), whether he puts them down in
Poland or New York, whether they live in the sixteenth
century or presently, are as distant from us as the aborigines.
It isn’t their funny beards or costumes; it isn’t because they
live by law in a book that’s dead as dumbbells, or engage
in quaint inter-Jewish squabbles; it isn’t because their lives
are so compressed by custom, so driven on by superstition,

140
 The Shut-In

that we simply feel our age superior in light and air at

least, it isn t even because goose-footed devils are as real as
geese there, or that from time to time evil steals from one
or other body-pox its part as plague-in-chief. I have already
called Singer a shut-in: this, again, not because he writes in
a fossil language, risking, yet escaping, the fate of Eugene
Marais; or because the world is as much a magical volume
of words for him as it is for any glossing cabbalist (since he
is clearly a scholar, studies up, arranges, and collects); but
only because of the primitive materiality of his approach;
thus what Singer’s shut inside of is a metaphysics—honored,
ancient—a metaphysics of that Word which once worked
itself up into World, a philosophy of acts and not inten¬
tions, of prayers and rites, not states of soul, a universe in
which nothing’s real but things. There’s no soul silliness in
the old Old Testament, and the pneumatic psyche of the
early Greek was blood, breath, shadow, water, fire, air . . .
each quite substantial. So was insanity substantial, uncom¬
mon lust or rage; even eloquence belonged to property and
might be stolen like one’s money or one’s wife. Dreams were
other countries, relations attributes, and numbers round,
triangular, oblong, or square. Sin was a contaminating
miasma. To level the waves the Greeks would have thrown
Jonah overboard too. Beliefs were commanded actions, and
one’s history was often just a thread between the shears.
Who knew what the gods might do?1
The name of Descartes, Leibniz, or Maimonides may be
mentioned, but it never functions structurally. (Dr. Fischel-
son studies Spinoza as though the Ethics were the Torah.)
Singer frequently chooses a subject which might be called

1 The theoretical basis for my interpretation of Singer here can be

found in “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” the opening essay of
this book.
I4l
 William H. Gass

“the coming of modern consciousness,” but the form of

his fiction denies it ever came. The most important fact about
a novelist is the kind of creation he commands, for he’s the
true god there—brooding, in the beginning, above a blank
and dismal page. His book’s in this sense sacred. He must
be taken at His Word. Construction counts. It forms the
world in the work we see. In the better novels, construc¬
tion counts for everything, since everything is construction,
and there are no “details.” It’s not merely the words the
author puts down, then, which matter, but their type or
kind, and the characteristic patterns they form, the facts
(in this way) they comprise, and the manner of knowing
that is therefore implied. Nor must we be bamboozled by
small mimes or minor traits or little tics into supposing that
our author’s “modern.” (There are few cozy asides to the
reader, for example, no loud labels of value, or manifestos
of artistic intention.) Robbe-Grillet’s pathetic “scientific”
recital of acts and objects reveals an almost total subjectivity.
It’s not the waves but the power which moves them we
must measure. It is, however, true that, like Flaubert, Singer
hides the arm which holds his hand. This is because, in this
writer’s world, everything is possible. It matters very little
what is true. If something’s not true now, it once was, or
it will be; if it didn’t happen here, it happened somewhere
else. Look about. What is important is not what we may
believe, but the way we choose to believe it—our fidelity,
our heat. Men are moved by falsehoods just as fiercely as
by truths. (This is the position, by the way, of Gimpel the
fool.) Then too, times change. Opinions change. One view
is nearly as bad as another ... or as good. Evaluation-
fevered praise or blame—how does it serve us? Our philoso¬
phies are partial, partisan; that is, they’re human, and they
will pass away. Only God, through every change, remains,

142
 The Shut-In

though he stays hidden from us, dwells beyond us (just as

Singer does), behind the blinding rays of heaven, out of
sight. A sobering thought for the critic, bending over one
of Singer s books, patiently construing.
The whole of Singer’s fiction possesses this magnificent
ontological equality (fables, fantasies, and fairy tales are
therefore never out of place); it has exactly the material
solidity it claims for everything, since everything is open,
and in space. 7 he sensational, the extreme and extraordinary,
the violent, saintly, severe and the cruel, the divine, the
human, the diabolical: all are mastered by his method, placed
in a line on the same plane; ritual acts and uncontrollable
savagery, marriage and murder, prayers and pogroms; for
they are all acts, acts like tangible objects resting in the
world. After all, the flower and the phallus both exist, so do
stones in a wall, or passions in a person. This gives Singer an
important freedom. If, on the one hand, facts are everything,
on the other, everything can be factual. No mind and body
problem here, no links to be forged between percept and
object, or bridges to be built between nature and the unnat¬
ural, thought, dream, and thing. Whatever is, is matter in
ritual motion. An intense sense of reality in the reader is the
initial advantage. No one quite believes in any inner spirit
but his own.
We have no acquaintance with another consciousness.
Shut in, all we can perceive is a world of objects; all we can
feel is ourselves. Pain in the person beside us is a cry and a
grimace, a message sent from the inside, or so we read it,
connecting our former hurts to this present crying, attribut¬
ing our subjectivity to the friend we have injured, or the
cat we’ve kicked. If we meet ourselves as strangers, “one
hand asks the other by the pulse,” as Donne avers, “and our
eye asks our urine, how we do.” But what of indemonstrable

>43
 William H. Gass

agonies, silent debates, terrors and dangers repressed for a

secret reason, at enormous spiritual expense: those internal
stresses hidden from the eye like weakening steel in faltering
bridges? Furthermore, one weeping can disguise a thousand
griefs, each different. The tears do not distinguish. They
rise in joy as well as sorrow. Emotion, by behavior, is only
indicated, never uniquely differentiated. Acts have particu¬
larity, too, but only part of their nature is internally deter¬
mined; the feelings exercise a limited control over their
manifestations, for the world makes its demands as well; it
imposes on the aims of actions all kinds of means and con¬
ditions; it requires material expression be given to the soul.
When there seems to be a match, when the inner state
receives complete expression, each pang in one represented
by an appropriate ping in the other, as with an oversubtle
actor, we find the gestures hard to read, the feeling difficult
to define, for it’s precisely not our own; from behavior so
subjectively determined there’s no path back unless we are
prepared to imitate it, and to imitate it in the same external
situation, in order to discover what it does to us. This world,
so full, is that way empty; we therefore fill it with our
feeling. However strange the acts, the age, the characters
have no other souls than those the readers give them. Iden¬
tification, on such grounds, is inevitable and easy.2
We accompany a character as he leaves his house to enter
a street. Hoofs ring on the cobbles, carts creak, vendors cry
their wares. In Singer these sounds are never sounds in any¬
one. They are objects which we come upon impersonally;
they are therefore as much ours as the character we are

2 Thus we infer feelings in characters as we infer them in our

friends, and the more we perceive them from the outside (like our
friends), the easier this is to do. The illusion of “life” produced is not
always desirable. See “The Concept of Character in Fiction.”
 The Shut-In

following. Water puddles, shadows gather, snow falls: these

details are not selected in deference to a consciousness.
Thoughts are given words, devils materialize psychology, or
we read journals, letters, and diaries which do. Decay within,
like the portrait of Dorian Gray, manifests itself conveniently
in drooping eyes and sallowness, wrinkles, weight, com¬
plexion, posture, loss of hair. The ritual bath is neglected;
a man fouls his mouth with less than purely kosher food,
or buys new shoes and shaves his beard. Singer empties out
the mind the way small boys turn out their pockets.
Here’s the Warden, undertaken by Trollope:

Mr. Harding is a small man, now verging on sixty

years, but bearing few of the signs of age; his hair
is rather grizzled, though not grey; his eye is very
mild, but clear and bright, though the double
glasses which are held swinging from his hand, un¬
less when fixed upon his nose, show that time has
told upon his sight; his hands are delicately white,
and both hands and feet are small; he always wears a
black frock coat, black knee-breeches, and black
gaiters, and somewhat scandalises some of his more
hyperclerical brethren by a black neck-handker¬
chief.

Notice how vague and diffident this description is. Mr.

Harding is verging on sixty years; his hair is rather grizzled;
he somevohat scandalizes some of his hyperclerical brethren.
Despite their purposiveness, “black” and “small” are repeated
wearily. Almost nothing gets said that isn’t nervously re¬
tracted: “though” and “but” are frequent. Trollope com¬
poses in precisely similar breaths; “and” (that empty
conjunction) often serves him; “is” and “are” (the simplest
and most passive of connectives) everywhere prevail; and
the whole paragraph, in consequence, is slow. Slack writing

l45
 William H. Gass

and amphibolous construction reinforce these impressions in

an undesirable way. Trollope characteristically works with
externals, yet we can ask why this passage lacks any vigorous
externality.
Normally we see things swiftly, in a single act of vision;
we see grizzled Mr. Harding, we don’t see Harding, then
his hair, and finally that same hair’s grizzled ratherness. Nor
do we see a somewhat, unless there’s fog. On camera, hands
aren’t delicately white, then small; they’re small, white,
delicate—at once. Noticing, however, is another matter. We
may notice, first, the whiteness of the hands, and then in a
moment also realize they’re small; but noticing is a subjec¬
tive act, and requires the selective operations of a mind. Mr.
Harding is given his properties very sedately indeed, as
though in thought, not observation. Really, the Warden isn’t
here, standing like a Christmas tree about to be hung with
baubles. He’s off in Barchester somewhere, doubtless, ful¬
filling his moral resolves. Presently, he is being remembered.
We are not permitted to infer, either, that age has affected
Mr. Harding’s sight; we are told. We’re also informed of
something we might not have inferred: that his black neck-
handkerchief has scandalized some of his brethren. This
fact carries, in addition, the implication that the scandalized
are hyperclerical. Obviously, the mind which Mr. Harding’s
dimly filtering through is Trollope’s.
Now let Singer introduce Rabbi Benish:

Rabbi Benish was in his sixties, but his skin was

still smooth, he had lost none of his white hair, and
his teeth had not fallen out. When he crossed the
threshold of the prayer house for the first time after
many years—tall, big-boned, with a full, round,
curly beard, his satin coat reaching to the ground,
the sable hat pulled down over his neck—all those

146
 The Shut-In

sitting there rose and pronounced the blessing in

thanks to Him who revives the dead. For there had
been reports that Rabbi Benish had perished in
Lublin during the massacres on the eve of the Fes¬
tival of Tabernacles in the year 1655. The fringes
of the vest that Rabbi Benish wore between his
shirt and coat tumbled around his ankles. He wore
short white trousers, white stockings, and half¬
shoes. Rabbi Benish grasped between his index
finger and thumb the thick eyebrow that hung over
his right eye, lifted it the better to see, cast a glance
at the darkened, peeling walls of the prayer house
and its empty book chests, and loudly declared:
“Enough! ... It is the will of our blessed God that
we begin anew.”3

The Rabbi is soon in motion, and the passive verbs of

linking are soon replaced with far more active ones, or
they’re eliminated in favor of direct qualification. The Rabbi
is busy: he crosses a threshold, he grasps, he lifts, he glances,
he declares. His qualities also behave; they act or suffer
action. His satin coat reaches, his hat’s pulled down, the
fringes of his vest tumble, even his eyebrows hang. His un¬
moving teeth and hair are said not to have fallen out. The
scene is clear, animated, and nowhere darkened by the
presence of mind.
Now for something else. Gradgrind has just informed us
that what he wants is facts.

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a

schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger
emphasized his observations by underscoring every
sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.
3 Of course my comments on this passage, as well as my remarks
about Singer throughout, are based upon the appearance of his books
in English. Of their nature in another language I have nothing to say.

147
 Willia?n H. Gass

The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square

wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its
base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in
two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The
emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which
was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was
helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible,
dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by
the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of
his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind
from its shining surface, all covered with knobs,
like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had
scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored
inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square
coat, square legs, square shoulders—nay, his very
neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with
an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact,
as it was—all helped the emphasis.

Trollope’s description has no shape; Singer’s hasn’t either.

On his Dickens has imposed a rhetorical scheme which, con¬
forming so perfectly to its content, has reshaped the “facts”
(so hard for Gradgrind, so soft for Dickens) to give them
feeling. Gradgrind takes his qualities from the air; sound
itself has greatly helped to create him, especially the hissing
s, and this has fastened him firmly in his medium—language
—where he belongs. Metaphors play over Gradgrind like
psychedelic lights. In short, where Singer has seen and
Trollope remembered, Dickens has imagined; for it is the
imagination which has made this masterful paragraph.
When Dickens’ creatures speak, subjectivity flows as from
a tap into the world: personal, poetic, unique; their talk is
testimony, and a pure quality of soul. For Singer, speech is
an act like tugging at one’s beard. Announcement, it’s some¬
thing solely to be heard. “Gold, gold, gold,” cries a seller

148
 The Shut-In

of oranges. “Brothers, we are lost. Let us blaspheme God,”

says a horse dealer. “What is there to forgive? You have
been a good and faithful wife,” declares Gimpel the fool.
The characters think, of course, but their thought is only
reported to us; we don’t see the process; we are handed
careful sums. They lust; they fear; they wonder: all of
which means that in very specified ways, they behave.
In a world where everything has a proper name and ad¬
dress in objective space, one might suppose a radical par¬
ticularity was possible—not only possible, but necessary.
Not quite. First of all, by simple mortals, such a world can¬
not be seen. We can only pretend it’s there. We can only
pretend to perceive like machines. Our observations do par¬
ticularize, but they do so because we bring to them ourselves,
our minds, our personal concerns. A God who has complete
detachment might be able to do it. Gods, then—or machines.
Yet language is a scarcely kettled stew of universal and
universal connectives. The unique is not very easily ren¬
dered in its terms. And faithful to his method, Singer does
not particularize, he names; the names form lists: lists of
properties, of acts and objects.

[An imp is hiding in a mirror] . . . my little

charmer suspected nothing. She stroked her left
breast, and then her right. She looked at her belly,
examined her thighs, scrutinized her toes. Would
she read her book? trim her nails? comb her hair?

It’s these collections which are unique, not the things in

them.

[The imp wonders.] Should 1 seduce a rabbi’s

daughter? deprive a bridegroom of his manhood?
plug up the synagogue chimney? turn the Sabbath
wine into vinegar? give an elflock to a virgin?

149
 William H. Gass

enter a ram’s horn on Rosh Hashana? make a cantor

hoarse?

Our sense of the uniqueness of any act or object described

depends entirely on our sense of the uniqueness of the
sentences comprising the description—i.e., their form. They
cannot be merely unique in the story, they must be unique
in the language. To say that someone—Ginger—went in
and out of her house as though in a dream does not particu¬
larize her action very much. To say that Ginger’s house
went in and out of her does, and not only because such
things don’t happen very often. Coats regularly reach, but
how often has a neckcloth been trained to take its wearer
by the throat? Dickens has made Gradgrind real, in this
sense, within a page. Another writer may need an outlined
life, a book. But we shall still feel strangely distant from him
in that case, because his distinct presence has never, at any
point, been felt. Singer’s fiction is weak in this respect, and
necessarily so, for his world does not permit the easy exercise
of the relevant techniques: he cannot interiorize, he dare not
distort or pattern too much (the public world remains
anonymous), he leans heavily on impersonal, though sig¬
nificant, rituals, on items equally objective for everyone, and
so he must use striking lists, rely on imps and devils of all
kinds. We’ve seen many beards, but not so many cloven
hoc* . Tndeed, the moment the minions of Satan stir, the style
rises with new heat to meet them.
You simply can’t have everything. One method may de¬
prive you of another. Joyce could never accomplish, though
he uses up a city of details, Singer’s fine solidity. James’s
characters are singularly vaporous, remarkable balloons
whose skins are weightless and invisible.
Many of Singer’s short stories are told in the first person.
 The Shut-In

We know that the speaker is Jewish, but the voice is cus¬

tomarily noncommittal, the voice of the chronicler, the voice
of tradition, a chorus for the community. It allows itself
from time to time a conventional sentiment, a little awe or
wonder, worried warding-off. (“God forbid it should
happen to any of us.”) Only the demons are permitted a
personality. They are always up to mischief, of course, and
consequently they never see with the machine’s divine neu¬
trality. They are selfish, partial, and they tell us more plainly
than anyone else how they feel. They are, in fact, entirely
human. Subjectivity, perhaps, is the devil’s true property.
The last demon, in the story of that name, has a character
distinctly his own, and Dickens might have made him. Al¬
most. An important exception is Gimpel, God’s fool. He
speaks with an imp’s cheery tone though he’s not as wise.
Always, imps know. He is devoted to his wife although
she’s whorish and cheats on him continually. For her he steals
“macaroons, raisins, almonds, cakes.” For us, he makes lists
to prove his feelings:

I loved the child madly, and he loved me too.

As soon as he saw me he’d wave his little hands
and want me to pick him up, and when he was
colicky I was the only one who could pacify him.
I bought him a little bone teething ring and a little
cap.

Gimpel does not differ a bit from the demon in this need to
establish behavioral proof: “I eat dust. I sleep on a feather
duster. I keep on reading gibberish.”
Gimpel is God’s fool because he still believes in devils,
dreams, and fairies. He can be tempted by one to put a stream
of his pee in the bread dough, but he can be persuaded by
another to bury what he’s baked. The rabbi whom the last

151
 William H. Gass

demon fails to lure toward sin does not wrestle with his
conscience and then win; he asks instead to see his tempter’s
feet. The coming world is one where demons will not ply
their trade because the people there, having taken evil in,
can sin very well without them. “Satan has cooked up a
new dish of kasha.” It’s called enlightenment:

The Jews have now developed writers. Yiddish

ones, Hebrew ones, and they have taken over our
trade. We grow hoarse talking to every adolescent,
but they print their kitsch by the thousands and
distribute it to Jews everywhere. They know all our
tricks—mockery, piety. They have a hundred
reasons why a rat must be kosher. All that they
want to do is redeem the world.

In the role of Messiah. In a world without God all is fallen;

there is no one—nothing—to seduce. No, subjectivity is not
the devil’s bailiwick, after all. And in a brilliant and bitter
passage, put in the mouth of the final demon, Singer tells us
why he prefers to remain shut in the old ways like leaves
closed between the covers of a holy book:

There are no more Jews, no more demons. The

women don’t pour out water any longer on the
night of the winter solstice. They don’t avoid
giving things in even numbers. They no longer
knock at dawn at the antechamber of the syna¬
gogue. They don’t warn us before emptying the
slops. . . . The Book of Creation has been returned
to the Creator. Gentiles wash themselves in the
ritual bath. . . . There is no longer an Angel of
Good nor an Angel of Evil. No more sins, no
more temptations! The generation is already guilty
seven times over, but Messiah does not come. To
whom should he come? Messiah did not come for
 The Shut-bi

the Jews, so the Jews went to Messiah. There is

no further need for demons. ... I am the last, a
refugee. I can go anywhere I please, but where
should a demon go? To the murderers?
This demon lives at last only on a Yiddish book. He swal¬
lows the letters. The book itself is written in the manner of
the moderns. “The moral of the book is: neither judge nor
judgment.” But the letters are still old-fashioned—some
nourishment in them. And when the demon has sucked the
substance from them, what then? will that be the end of
him? will he die of uselessness and hunger, driven from his
function the way the motored carriage drove the horse?
He seems to think so, but we who’ve read his author know
his outlook better. There’s a new life waiting for him in
these novels and these stories. However, he will have to
make some slight adjustments. He will have to consent to
live forever in a fiction. As for the rest of us, we readers,
fallen Jew or faithless gentile: well, Isaac Bashevis Singer
can be rabbi, if he wishes, for us all.

i S3
PART THREE
 A SPIRIT IN SEARCH OF ITSELF

carriages, buttoned into boats and trains. Days passed like

railway windows. “Every state of the soul was a landscape,”
his friend Flournoy said. Thus he changed—by drifting his
location. Awareness was a river. Ideas, feelings had no edges,
wore themselves away in one another, not unlike a married
couple. Indeed, reality might be a sea, and from time to time
a high wave lift a spirit like a nonplussed fish into the part
we were a simple cup of. Nonetheless, consciousness was
merely action on its way to action; an American traveler
on a purchased tour, moving to move, having been in order
—farther and farther—to be. But William James switched
his images as he switched his means of transportation. First
experiences blazed trails, he insisted. Trails were attractive
and tended to be trod. Habits were such neural paths, and
we should be especially mindful of our young, and carefully
choose their first impressions. One cannot say that William’s
first impressions were not chosen. His father was never “un-

*5 7
 William H. Gass

mindful,” never, alas, unconcerned. He was, instead, a soft

tyrannical improver, the sort who pats the pillow next to
him in the sun and firmly says: I think it would be better
for you over here. But thought was far too stimulating for
him, turned his head, and the family’s path, in those earlier
years, resembled a whimsical ricochet. Purposefully, Henry
senior shook the tree, and the fruit fell at random.
Do not allow your children to “be torn up by the roots
every little while as we were,” Alice wrote her brother later,
when he contemplated carting them abroad. “Of all things
don’t make the mistake which brought about our rootless
and accidental childhood.” She spoke with some feeling, for
their father had removed them from their home, school,
locality, and even country of residence as readily and as
often as he had replaced their nurse or governess or tutor
(until each child was only, as William said of Henry, a “na¬
tive of the James family”), and since William was right
about first impressions, at least as far as they concerned
himself, he could not follow his sister’s advice. What had
begun as a purely geographical zigzag had, by then, become
a troublesome vacillation of will and a powerful restlessness
of spirit.
All the Jameses bore the marks of movement, in some
ways William most. “Experience” was a holy verb, his books
its conjugation, and few men have been more willing than
he was to entertain the new, the fresh, outrageous—and
among ideas, the lonely. His “sensuous education,” as his
father put it, was remarkably complete at an early age. Ex¬
cept for the dark area of sexuality, he was overexposed. His
spirit complained by tormenting its body. He suffered from
backaches, eye trouble, stomach upsets, seasickness, fevers,
melancholia, neurotic indecisions and debilities, insomnia,
mania, and a sort of pacing, zooish irritability. For some of
these ills even advancing age, an enlarged liberty, successful
 A Spirit in Search of Itself

work and marriage, appreciation—fame—brought no re¬

mission. He was a James. His father had permitted every¬
thing but childhood. Though the boys argued brilliantly at
table and Father was charmingly, if destructively, eccentric,
an amateur at everything—spiritual, severe, and analytic—
his wife ruled a household described by a Cabot as stiff,
stupid, poky, and banal.
The older children’s backs ached because of the load they
bore. William knew his soul was sick. He wanted desperately
an ardent heart, a healthy mind. It would require an enor¬
mous effort, but an effort not impossible. “I may not study,
make, or enjoy—but I can will.” After all, Will was his
name. As a young man he began by expelling certain
thoughts he felt were poisoning him. He began at the same
time to believe in positive, useful, life-enhancing things . . .
in the freedom of that will, for instance, so necessary to the
whole performance. “My first act of free will shall be to
believe in free will.” “I will go a step further with my will,
not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my indi¬
vidual reality and creative power.” James was not, though
sometimes he seems, the sweaty director of a YMCA. It is
easy to trivialize him. He was, it must be said, despite his
scientific training, his respect for experience, his resolute
facing-up to life, wondrously innocent, enormously naive.
In a way he was a great man because of the innocence and
naivete he retained, since it enabled him to act, to be gen¬
erous and kind, to will and continue willing a better world
despite all the evidence of its unredeemable evil (which he
saw and to a degree understood and accepted). Just as he
had tried to fashion a finer climate for his soul from the very
winds and lightning of its storms. There is something foolish
in that, and something sublime . . . something miraculous,
too—for he succeeded.
Professor Gay Wilson Allen, whose biography of Walt

*59
 William H. Gass

Whitman, another democratic pluralist and professional naif,

was quite properly admired when it appeared about ten
years ago, has certainly done as well again with William
James. He does not so obviously dote upon his subject; he
does not struggle to convince; he does not heap his man
with praise. Nor does he endeavor to give extended accounts
of the philosopher’s ideas. These discretions, I believe, were
wise. Wisest of all, perhaps, was his decision (I think of it
as that) to write his history in the tongue of James. There is
no more sensitive, resonant, or lively language. Father, the
older boys, and Alice (then later William’s wife, an Alice,
too) wrote and spoke and spoke and wrote—spoke of their
writing and wrote of their speaking—with an energy which
would weary the rest of us merely to measure. Each voice
has its own sound, and each has an enviable range and hon¬
esty of feeling. Each hand is as equal to fact as to phrase,
and the family style raises over everything it touches that
whole heaven of wit and nearly palpable reflection which is
the plainest mark of the family’s genius.
Mr. Allen’s own conjectures are modest. He hides himself
in his arrangements. Thus this history of a James is not so
redolent with reference nor so warm with suggestion
(Henry might have said) as it might have been, but it is
more appropriate to its man for that restraint, and Mr.
Allen’s careful splicing of quotations into his own con¬
siderable account to form one rich and smoothly flowing
narrative must be admired by all who have ever attempted
the same. Especially, it seems to me, he succeeds in rendering
that particular American condition in his subject which
Henry called his brother’s “Williamacy of mind.”
William’s career is instructive. He begins as a student
of painting. However, apart from his mediocre talent, he
was psychologically unsuited to it. Paintings sit still in their

160
 A Spirit in Search of Itself

frames, colors persevere in their contours. He tries chemistry

but that is insufficiently human. Anatomy, physiology, and
medicine follow. At last he seems to settle in the country of
the mind . . . there to establish Williamacy. In his great work
on psychology, he turns out our heads as you’d turn out
your pockets—loose change, door keys, cigarettes, a torn-up
ticket, trouser lint—but if there’s a contraceptive down there
disguised as a coin, your fingers aren’t going to fish for it.
An unfair description. Still, in the two bulky volumes of
The Principles of Psychology there is one small portion
devoted to the sexual, and this is headed, demurely, love.
After a curious essay of a few pages on that instinct (we
shrink from sex as much as we pursue it), James confesses:
“These details are a little unpleasant to discuss.” His interest
in faith healers, mediums, and the spirit world later brought
him to the brink of Freud, but inwardness was illness, and
William, not about to peek over, backtracked quickly for a
brisk workout in the gym.
Williamacy suggests the sovereign and the social. His
brother’s mind was not the same. It was downward, curly,
Henryesque. “He and I are so utterly different in all our
observances and springs of action, that we can’t rightly judge
each other,” William said.1 Perhaps it was a case of Shem
the Penman, Shaun the Post. They did share an unremitting,
almost puritanical, moral concern; a profound distrust of
abstraction. Both placed an ultimate value on consciousness,
and in consciousness had a preference for feeling. So they
were blooms on the same plant, but otherwise their differ¬
ences were many, important, and emblematic. Like diverg¬
ing coordinates, they map our national space, and by finding
our qualities on them, we fix our place.

1 I discuss these differences again in “The High Brutality of Good

Intentions” and “In the Cage.”
 William H. Gass

William displays his inward life more readily than Henry,

who was secretive and stoical. William weighted will and
action, Henry sensibility and contemplation. William saw
small point in custom, ritual, and history; he was democratic
with people and opinions. Henry’s books and body became
the very books and body of tradition: stately, formal,
courtly, and aristocratic. William perceived the value of
quantity; he liked openness and health, Gemutlichkeit and
hiking; life on the stretch. Henry valued contraction and
focus; his tree grew its leaves on its roots. But William
reached his peak in the Psychology, and afterward he could
only broaden his experience, visit ideas, give expression to
his kindness, his tolerance, his human concerns; for the ill¬
ness which drew him to the medicine of the mind in the
first place, one suspects, would tolerate no underlooking;
the habits of his life permitted seeing far and wide, not
seeing deep.
After a life lived uneasily among his nerves, William
receives a real wound. He strains his heart. Mr. Allen’s story
of those final years, last days, is extremely moving. Wil¬
liam’s wife, Alice, is eloquent and brave. William remains
restless; is given to suicidal hiking in hills, physically hunting
an unphysical cure. A cure. In The Varieties of Religions
Experience he also sought a cure. And his description of
these spiritual conditions is no way short of beautiful. But
he never finds what he wants: a mental medicine for mental
discomfort, an idea which will work like a drug, beliefs you
can swallow with the will. He thought that spirits, if there
were any—those striking intruders—lived like the Lapps
in lands just beside us, so if we boarded a boat, or merely
rounded the right corner, we might bump into them. His
sister Alice growled to her diary: “I suppose the thing
‘medium’ has done more to degrade the spiritual conception

162
 A Spirit in Search of Itself

than the grossest forms of materialism or idolatry: was there

ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest
facts and details: anything rising above the squalid intestines
of human affairs?”
In Rye, Henry and William fall ill together, and William’s
wife mothers both selflessly. Nevertheless, everyone travels,
in transit to the end. The group returns to America, where
William dies. “No pain at the last and no consciousness,”
Alice writes. “Poor Henry, poor children.” No conscious¬
ness. No change. A cure at last.
 IN THE CAGE

JLrom Rye, where he has taken

up residence in Lamb House, Henry James wires to London:
“Are you utterly absent or can you dine with me Friday at
seven to go afterwards with three others to the theatre?”
James has passed his pale bescribbled paper across the
counter toward the visible half of the clerk; he has paid,
and paid by the word (a fact which could not fail to im¬
press an author, since it was so perfectly the reverse of his
own manner of making a living); he has pondered, as he
had more than once before, the exposure of his message to
a stranger, and wondered at the clerk’s opportunities to ob¬
serve and construe these brief pieces of privacy.
The clerks, it seemed to him, were quite closed in, en¬
meshed; they worked in every way in narrow quarters,
inconveniently cornered in some conveniently local groc¬
ery; their relation to the public was wholly disinterested
and practical; and yet they were in possession of so many
bits of the public’s personal property, bits usually of the
better off who lived in a wider, freer world, presumably,
 In the Cage

than these servants who handled their telegrams did, that

the novelist could not help but inquire of himself just what
they made of these messages; or rather, what, if the right
consciousness were caught in such a cage, it might compose
from the words slid over the counter, the sounds sent out on
the wire.
No doubt it is important to consider why Henry James
was so predisposed to see his small scene in this way rather
than in some other, but the reasons are not difficult to find.
The arts of conversation which his circle cultivated were, in
great part, the gossipaceous arts: that of making much out
of little, of displaying your wit and inventive facility, your
ability to amuse, without boring your listeners with too
many ideas, or unpleasantly stretching their minds on the
rack of an “issue.” It was a world which took an intense but
mainly anecdotal interest in people, and which was there¬
fore also on its guard against just the same exposure of itself
which it so assiduously sought to gain against others.
Telegrams often had that quality of being cryptic and
secret, and certainly, from the clerk’s station, had to seem
like the shards from vessels which in their wholeness could
never be observed. Henry James could not fail to see here
another instance of a parallel he had drawn several times
already, and was to draw again, to draw out even to infinity
in The Sacred Fount: the ultimate worthlessness of the
social exchanges he regularly participated in, the weak and
unreal interest of people in one another, the guarded, pro¬
tective nature of their social speech, and the greed of the
novelist for the same material—the need in that role to reach
through and beyond all tea talk to the selves it hid, to what¬
ever real life moved like the mole was believed to somewhere
beneath the softly raised and silently shoveled foothills of
its passage.
Almost the first thing that strikes us about this professional

*6S
 William H. Gass

London stroller, country-house visitor, and dinner guest, this

diligent cyclist, tourist, and correspondent, is his passion
for epistemology, his habitual self-conscious sense of stand¬
point: both his moral and esthetic sensibilities are dependent
on it, and his style, his rich metaphorical manner of seeing,
continually reflects it.1 Rootless from the beginning, in his
world but never of it (the whole James family suffered
from motion sickness),2 he lives in London as one lives on
a ledge . . . where it is always dangerous to be unaware. To
reach out, belong to, touch—how important this is to him;
but he must be satisfied to confer embraces on his friends
as though he were granting degrees, to buss both cheeks in
the continental manner, to command his friend Fullerton,
“Hold me then . . . with any squeeze; grip me with any
grip; press me with any pressure; trust me with any trust,”
to wire his friends to visit him at Lamb House, or to cry,
“lean on me as on a brother and a lover,” in his letters to
the young sculptor Andersen.

The port from which I set out was, I think, that

of the essential lonelmess of my life. . . . This
loneliness . . . what is it still but the deepest thing
about one? Deeper, about me, at any rate, than
anything else; deeper than my “genius,” deeper
than my “discipline,” deeper than my pride, deeper,
above all, than the deep counterminings of art.

So he interrogates sailors; he cycles, strolls, takes tea; he

moves his eyes in search of images, and what he must over¬
come, in his elaboration of them, is their own inherent as-
ifness, of which he is deeply suspicious. “You see too much,”
Mrs. Briss tells the narrator of The Sacred Fount. “You talk

1 This relationship and its expression in James’s style is the subject of

“The High Brutality of Good Intentions.”
2 See the piece on William: “A Spirit in Search of Itself.”
 In the Cage

too much-You’re abused by a fine fancy_You build

up houses of cards.” Any part of life which can’t be directly
rendered must be inferred, and when all that is seen are
mated pairs of boots and shoes in “promiscuous hotel door¬
ways” (as James remarked when writing of D’Annunzio),
one is very much tempted, defensively, to say:

Detached and unassociated these clusters of objects

present, however obtruded, no importance. What
the participants do with their agitation, in short,
or even what it does to them, that is the stuff of
poetry, and it is never really interesting save when
something finely contributive in themselves makes
it so.

Participants? agitations? Mr Edel thinks this statement very

wise, but I think it’s evasive bunk, and I think James, in the
depths of his loneliness, knew it. The exact sensuous feel
of things was something, on occasion, he expressed a clear
desire and even a preference for:

He wanted the hour of the day at which this and

that had happened, and the temperature and the
weather and the sound, and yet more the stillness,
from the street, and the exact look-out, with the
corresponding look-in, through the window and
the slant on the walls of the light of afternoons
that had been.

Participants? agitations? Clever, social, down-the-nose

words. These agitations frequently affect the spirit precisely
because they are so often so simple and complete in them¬
selves, because they possess so much intrinsic interest, so
much forgetfulness of self, because they are so remorselessly
physical. Spiritual signs are very fine but boots are better
evidence. Nor can we reason from effect to cause, as Hume

167
 William H. Gass

observed, except on the basis of constant conjunction. This

look-out, with its corresponding look-in, James seems never
to have sufficiently had, and there is more of mystery
and evil than eagerness and glee in the inferences he draws.
The shoes may be real but ghosts roll on the bed. The Awk¬
ward Age? What Maisie Knew? The Sacred Fount? The
Turn of the Screw? Throughout this volume, too,3 “The
grey years gather; the arid spaces lengthen, damn them!”
Art, pride, discipline, genius . . . In the Cage . . .
Where Mr. Edel is now, receiving the many messages of
Henry James. They are hardly telegrams; on the other hand,
they are hardly revelations either—cryptic in their very
completeness, deviously shaped. More than a million words
hem him in: novels, stories, notebooks, letters, plays, critical
essays and travelogues, reminiscences by both the subject and
his friends—countless testimonies of all kinds—the debris of
a wholly literary life; yet he must imagine more than he can
see, feel further than he has felt, deduce the kernel from
the shell: clarify, interpret, rearrange. Mr. Edel cannot close
his ears, as James did, when the anecdote becomes long; he
must employ “the common lens of history,” for his subject
is finally inert, famously dead, a choice piece of the past.
The novelist is henceforth (and how he would be horrified
to hear it) fair game; where once one might have thought
to “hunt him up” in London or at Rye, now he must, it
seems, be “hunted down” in five volumes of a life which
bears his name as a monument might ... as, for example.
Grant’s Tomb or the Lincoln Tunnel.
Mr. Edel tells us that In the Cage, which was the first
story Henry James wrote after he moved to Rye, was created
“out of immediate emotion.” Immediate emotion is a condi¬
tion Mr. Edel is all too eager to believe in, and it leads him

3 Henry James: The Treacherous Years 1895-1901, by Leon Edel

(New York: Lippincott, 1969).
 In the Cage

to suggest that the tale reflects its author’s sense of “isola¬

tion from his clubs and the murmurs of London society.”
1 he trouble is that it reflects the opposite if anything. The
distance in this story is an economic one. James, for a
change, is on the other side of the wire, handing messages
in, and although his heroine is customarily full of conjecture,
the weight of this small novel falls elsewhere.

W hat could still remain fresh in her daily grind

was the immense disparity, the difference and the
contrast, from class to class, of every instant and
every motion. . . . What twisted the knife in her
vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered
about them, in extravagant pleasures and sins, an
amount of money that would have held the stricken
household of her frightened childhood . . . together
for a lifetime.

James may be missing the pleasures of London—certainly

he is telegraphing, issuing invitations—but his sense of him¬
self and the price of his pleasures is far from comfortable. In
fact, one of the more important customers is called Lord
Rye.
Of course, Mr. Edel does not miss the economic motif,
but as a biographer he does not wag James’s tale this way;
his method is so narrowly “psychological” that the actual
psychology of his subject frequently escapes him, and he is
often so intent on fastening James’s feelings and behavior to
the distant past, interpreting any story to which his history
has risen in terms of ground floor and basement (as if the
clearest explanation of the French Revolution could be
found in the character of Charlemagne), that he skips even-
floor in between—an omission which seems all the stranger
when he has troubled, before, to give a lengthy description
of each of them.
But these numerous details of day to day seem for the

169
 William H. Gass

most part not to count; instead, to a frame formed in child¬

hood, life is seen to administer a few powerful and wrench¬
ing shocks: the Miss Woolson affair, for instance (described
in the preceding volume), or the disasters of Guy Domville,
the upsetting heartsickness of his brother, William, or an
uncommonly warm and physical feeling for a sculptor half
his age; and certainly it would be wrong not to measure
such shocks, to graph the depth and duration of their shake,
but what we tend to lose with such a stress on traumas is
any feel for the weight of the ordinary, any sense of the
accretions or the erosions of every day, the impact on the
camel of each added straw, or the strength of the back each
threatens to break. Sibling rivalries, castration complexes,
homosexual tendencies, oedipal longings: these are common,
we may suppose, to many men, none of whom possesses the
style and the mind of this master; they tell us too little, and
even in one life make our explanations increasingly monot¬
onous and empty; since what is any life, from this point of
view, but a repeating pattern of family relations, one where
every war is the first war refought? so that the answers to
our whys have a persistent dull sameness: basement, base¬
ment, basement.
Should James have had a biographer at all (especially one
so impressive as Mr. Edel, who must be measured against the
best) if he had not written novels? James captured no
castles, laid waste no countrysides (though in the next vol¬
ume he will motor through them—we must wait for that);
his audience was always modest, often bewildered, soft and
mannerly with its applause. Thus he made no fortune, sailed
no steam yacht a la Arnold Bennett, nor authored an im¬
portant column for the papers; he never fought with strenu¬
ous men, fish, or climates, nor escaped dramatically from
wrecked trains; he had no lurid love affairs which sent him
 In the Cage

with a quip to sickness, jail, and death like Oscar Wilde;

he altered public policies not a jot, had no famous enemies,
engaged in no vulgar quarrels, and avoided Shaw’s smart-
aleck image altogether; he invented no new gadgets, made
known no unknown territories, proposed no new philosophy,
uncovered no new truths nor spoke with shocking candor
about old ones, and could not bring himself to catch VD or
take up drugs or die with panache—suicidally. He merely
wrote his novels like the useless man he was, and what is
striking about these if not their quality, their extraordinary
refinement, their personality, their style? for they shimmer
and stink of idleness and isolation, detachment and removal.
In one sense he was simply a spy, his novels guessing games.
And when he thought to venture into life he threw his pen
at the stage. Periodically he would endeavor to be base, but
he could not hear American spoken without pain, and he
would persistently correct young ladies on their speech.
What did he do, one wonders, to punish his erections? And
he wrote, in effect, in his notebooks, that his study—not
his bedroom, parlor, or garden—was the proper enclosure
for his life. Here he prayed to his genius as one might to a
muse, and the lines he put upon paper were the lines he
chose for his face. The history of such a man must some¬
how contrive to be the history of his imagination—what
feeds it, what it does with what it gains, how it embodies
itself in its work—since his words were those servants who
did his living for him; and consequently every sign of sig¬
nificant change in the nature of that imagination will mark
an important moment in the life of its owner.
In the particular period covered by this volume (from the
collapse, amid catcalls, of his play Guy Domville to the
bodiless mysteries of The Sacred Fount, the leading edge of
his later phase) two such changes occur, and one of these

n1
 William H. Gass

Mr. Edel treats with wonderful understanding and com¬

pleteness. James responds to every rebuff by becoming more
artful and indirect, more difficult, circumspect, and delicate.
To challenge his “manner” was to force him to choose it—
to reaffirm all by redoubling everything; so that after his
failure to be cheap and theatrical (while Wilde—well, it
was hardly bearable—while Wilde and Pinero scored), he
returns to his fiction determined to demonstrate his abilities
as a dramatist in his own way.
Henceforth he will take charge of everything. Are direc¬
tors uninstructable, actors hammy, settings vulgar, critics
and audience dense? He replaces them all, including theater
and curtain, with his own words, and makes of The Awk¬
ward Age, for instance, a novelized play—one perfectly
performed and perfectly perceived . . . since performed and
perceived by him. Much in life defeated Henry James, but
because he was an artist of rare stubbornness and courage,
he would not allow himself a loss on his chosen field.
In the middle of Maisie, so it is claimed, James began
dictating to a typist, and the new method of materializing
his thought at once altered his style. The event, however, is
not of much importance to Mr. Edel, a page or rum will do
for it, and he is satisfied to repeat this customary glib ex¬
planation of James’s later manner, possibly because he simply
thinks it is correct, or because style (as a dominating feature
of Henry James) interests him rather little. Yet it is incon¬
ceivable that an artist so careful even his extravagances
were calculated could allow the machine he now dictated to
to dictate to him. Once his hand was free of the pen, his
mind simply flew in even more characteristic circles; his
imagination was able, more directly, to manifest itself, and
he began to brood upon his subjects as few writers have
brooded, before or since. “I can be trusted, artless youth,”
 In the Cage

James replied to Morton Fullerton, who had wondered

about the effect of the typewriter, “not to be simplified by
any shortcut or falsified by any facility.” The imagination
which now spoke out loud for itself was fully formed (it
would not have spoken this way twenty years before), and
could be relied on; the changes dictation might incline James
toward were already being 'willed.
Themes, plots, subjects, givens—those Mr. Edel treats at
length (indeed, he won’t let them alone) because he believes,
quite properly, I suppose, that they are significant psycho¬
logically; but they are also significant in other ways, and
these get scant weight. James is distressed by the Wilde case
for a number of reasons, as he is by the Dreyfus affair, but
Mr. Edel is preparing us for James’s strangely flavored
letters to Andersen (on the principle, perhaps, of at least
one “ah-ha!” per volume), so that we are never permitted
to infer much more than that on most public questions James
was admirably humane.
Although there is little religious feeling in him, there is
much moral passion, and if James is puritanical, he is puri¬
tanical in a typically Henryesque fashion (what shocks him
about Symonds is not the man’s homosexuality, but his pub¬
lic proclamation of it); if his language is consistently con¬
descending (Ford Madox Ford’s friends used to excuse
Ford by saying he would condescend to God if given the
opportunity); if it is often prissily fastidious and circumlo-
quacious, moving in a panic of discretion toward its subject
with cautious little rushes and retreats like a squirrel ap¬
proaching peanuts in an unfamiliarly scented hand; even if
it tends to make everything over, give to everything the
saving salt of Flenry James; nevertheless, however deeply
the outside is drawn in, the “great world” remains in essence
as it is. The very words w'hich often made his cage allowed

H3
 William H. Gass

him to escape from it, for his thoughts followed not their
own bent but the convolutions of their object; he overcame
his standpoint by recognizing so many of them, discovering
such a multitude of sides and shades and variations, seeing
(as he hoped and often bragged) “all round,” that we are
inclined to find him, in his faithfulness to people, situations,
and human arrangements—in his habit of putting everything
in an assayer’s balance—overly mental; we find him, in
short, as Mr. Edel frequently shows him to us: as driven by
demons, personal chagrins, as taking and rendering mainly
the landscape of his spirit, when in fact a good part of his
best self is simply composed of the outside, “the other,” the
precisely observed; and his moral anger is directed at all
those who infringe human freedom, who make pawns of
people, who feast on the poor, the naive, or the powerless,
who use love to use (though these ethical matters Mr. Edel
rarely mentions); and in those sentences which mark the
movement of his mind, his steady shift of position and deep¬
ening of view, we ourselves can complain of being caught—
caged—victimized. His sentences have such complex in¬
sides, they amaze, and we wonder if they have either end
or purpose; if we shall ever emerge. The object we sought to
have explained seems obscured by the explanation; it is no
longer a scene we see, it is a sentence we experience.
Still this, after all, is art, and in James the art is urged
upon us; it puts itself forward aggressively, as one nursing
merit who has been so far insufficiently recognized. How¬
ever, so is patience urged on us, and soundings—clear enun¬
ciation. Always vocal, a speaker’s art from the first (one
reason he may have been misled to the stage), his writing
became frankly music of a slow and resonant sort; not
merely baroquely decorated, but full of pauses—breaths—
pauses for savoring, silences for listening and learning in,
 In the Cage

not simply hastening duncedly on. In short, in fine, he would

say, before suspending himself like a spider from another
length. \ et these lines, so full of after- and before-thought
we wonder if the first thought’s there, are absolutely neces¬
sary, for the first thought is often sentimental, operatic, as
dreamy about life as the girl in the cage who cadged her
romances from yellow-frocked novels. Undress his plots
and what you’ll find is naked melodrama, the raw material
of a thousand “female” fictions, soft shapes for the lady
books.
It is all the more a triumph over self, then, that his
sentences should be, in the harshest contemporary sense,
subversive: they undermine our eyes, they speak of values
in the act of perishing; but, perhaps, since Mr. Edel’s por¬
trait on this point is faithful to the customary one, I am
wrong to think of James in any social sense as a revolution¬
ary. Perhaps he was simply gouty from rich foods and wine,
a leisured parasite whose pen defended his person, who
clicked his tongue at Symonds and the fate of poor Wilde,
groaned nicely about Dreyfus although suffering the anti-
Semitism of Bourget (in detesting anti-Semites, one should
never exceed the polite), toured Italy to revive old “im¬
pressions,” sold stories to pay for his house and servants, and
shaved his beard one gay spring day to reappear young.
Because James’s life had so little excitement, Mr. Edel ap¬
pears to feel he should add some, arranging his work in
short, easily swallowed chapters, beginning each dramatic¬
ally, and striking a portentous note at the end. The devices
are without exception cheap; they come straight from bad
novels; and they tell us more about Mr. Edel’s attitude
toward his subject than anything else, for they invariably
falsify for the sake of a small effect, a tiny frisson. There
are also innumerable variations on “little did he know then

ns
 William H. Gass

that...” or “having endured X, he was now ready to write

Y,” and so on.
The prefatory remarks Mr. Edel makes about his method
seem both inconsistent in themselves and inconsistently fol¬
lowed in practice. Stressing the importance of Freud, Mr.
Edel nevertheless says: “The physical habits of the creative
personality, his ‘sex life’ or his bowel movements, belong
to the ‘functioning’ being and do not reliably distinguish him
from his fellow-humans.” Why, if he wishes in any way to
follow Freud, does he want to slight these “agitations”;
why, if they are as slight as he claims, does he then drop
broad hints about some of them on every other page; and
why, if these things do not reliably distinguish James from
his fellow-humans, does he expect other general unconscious
patterns to do so? He complains that “Biography has for too
long occupied itself with the irrelevancies of daily life . . .”
yet his own account seems full of them. Mr. Edel wants to
explain James’s genius, to find the secret sources of his
imagination, and about James he certainly explains a good
deal; but the creature in Mr. Edel’s cage is not, it seems to
me, the golden singing bird. James says that the narrator
of The Sense of the Past

wanted the unimaginable accidents, the little notes

of truth for which the common lens of history,
however the scowling muse might bury her nose,
was not sufficiently fine. He wanted evidence of a
sort for which there had never been documents
enough, or for which documents mainly, however
multiplied, would never be enough.

Mr. Edel wants, that, too.

 THE HIGH BRUTALITY OF
GOOD INTENTIONS

The great question as to a poet or a novelist is, How does he feel

about life? what, in the last analysis, is his philosophy?
Henry James

-JL
A
A.rt, Yeats wrote in his
essay on “The Thinking of the Body,” “bids us touch
and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what
Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract thing,
from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a foun¬
tain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations
of the body.” Yet the world that we are permitted to touch
and taste and hear and see in art, in Yeats’s art as much as
in any other, is not a world of pure Becoming, with the
abstractions removed to a place safe only for philosophers;
it is a world invested out of the ordinary with formal
natures, with types and tvpicals, by abstractions and purest
principles; invested to a degree which, in comparison with
the real, renders it at times grotesque and always abnormal.
It is charged with Being. Touching it provides a shock.
The advantage the creator of fiction has over the moral
philosopher is that the writer is concerned with the exhibi¬
tion of objects, thoughts, feelings, and actions where they

7 77
 William H. Gass

are free from the puzzling disorders of the real and the need
to come to conclusions about them. He is subject only to
those calculated disorders which are the result of his refusal,
in the face of the actual complexities of any well-chosen
“case,” to take a stand. The moral philosopher is expected
to take a stand. He is expected to pronounce upon the prin¬
ciples of value.1 The writer of fiction, insofar as he is in¬
terested in morals, rather than, for instance, metaphysics, can
satisfy himself and the requirements of his art by the ex¬
posure of moral principle in the act, an exposure more telling
than life because it is, although concrete, concrete in no
real way—stripped of the irrelevant, the accidental, the
incomplete—every bit of paste and hair and string part of
the intrinsic nature of the article. However the moral
philosopher comes by his conclusions, he does not generally
suppose (unless he is also a theologian) that the w'orld is
ordered by them or that the coming together of feelings
and intents or the issuance of acts or the flow of conse¬
quences, which constitute the moral facts, wras designed
simply in order to display them.2
It is the particular achievement of Henry James that he
was able to transform the moral color of his personal vision
into the hues of his famous figure in the carpet; that he
found a form for his awareness of moral issues, an awareness
that was so pervasive it invaded furniture and walls and
ornamental gardens and perched upon the shoulders of his
people a dove for spirit, beating its wings with the violence
of all Protestant history; so that of this feeling, of the mov¬
ing wing itself, he could make a style. This endeavor was
both aided and hindered by the fact that, for James, art and

1 Many contemporary philosophers feel that his function is to analyze

meanings, not to discover or defend values. Some common defenses
are discussed in “The Case of the Obliging Stranger.”
2 See “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.”
 The High Brutality of Good Intentions

morality were so closely twined, and by the fact that no

theory of either art or morality has footing unless, previous
to it, the terrible difficulties of vision and knowledge, of
personal construction and actual fact, of, in short, the rela¬
tion of reality to appearance had been thoroughly over¬
come.3 James’s style is a result of his effort to master, at the
level of his craft, these difficulties, and his effort, quite apart
from any measure of its actual success with these things,
brought to the form of the novel in English an order of art
never even, before him, envisioned by it.
Both Henry James and his brother were consumed by a
form of The Moral Passion. Both struggled to find in the
plural world of practice a vantage for spirit. But William
was fatally enmeshed in the commercial. How well he
speaks for the best in his age. He pursues the saint; he
probes the spiritual disorders of the soul; he commiserates
with the world-weary and encourages the strong; he in¬
vestigates the nature of God, His relation to the world,
His code; he defends the possible immortality of the soul
and the right to believe: and does all so skillfully, with a
nature so sensitive, temperate and generous, that it is deeply
disappointing to discover, as one soon must, that the lenses
of his mind are monetary, his open hand is open for the coin,
and that the more he struggles to understand, appreciate,
and rise, the more instead he misses, debases, and destroys.4

In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort

of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose accounts
are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just
the values which naturally they appear to have,
and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and
minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and

3 See “In the Cage.”

4 See “A Spirit in Search of Itself” for more on William’s character
and his differences with Henry.
 William H. Gass

religious peace consist in living on the plus side of

the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on
the other hand, the world is a double-storied
mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple
addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from
life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in
amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very
being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier
enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be
the thing intended for our lasting worship.5

Even when William, in a passage not obviously composed

with the bookkeeper’s pen, makes a literary allusion, as here:

Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as

they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a
wave-crest or a flood, they show the way and are
forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so
they often seem in the midst of the world’s affairs
to be preposterous . . .6

it turns out to be a covert reference to “getting and spend¬

ing.”
Henry James was certainly aware that one is always on
the market, but as he grew as an artist he grew as a moralist
and his use of the commercial matrix of analogy7 became

5 The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern

Library), p. 163. God does a wholesale not a retail business, p. 484.
The world is a banking house, p. 120. Catholic confession is a method
of periodically auditing and squaring accounts, p. 126. Examples could
be multiplied endlessly, not only in The Varieties but in all his work.
In The Varieties alone consult pages: 28, 38, 39, 133, 134, 135, 138, 330,
33b 333, 340, 347, 429 n., 481, 482-
6 Ibid., p. 450.
7 Mark Schorer’s expression: “Fiction and the Matrix of Analogy,”
The Kenyon Review, XI, No. 4 (1949). The commercial metaphor
pervades James’s work and has been remarked so frequently that it
scarcely requires documentation.

180
 The High Brutality of Good Intentions

markedly satirical or ironic and his investigation of the

human trade more self-conscious and profound until in
nearly all the works of his maturity his theme is the evil of
human manipulation, a theme best summarized by the second
formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative:

So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own

person or in that of any other, in every case as an
end withal, never as a means only.

Nothing further from pragmatism can be imagined, and if

we first entertain the aphorism that though William was the
superior thinker, Henry had the superior thought, we may
be led to consider the final effect of their rivalry,8 for the
novels and stories of Henry James constitute the most
searching criticism available of the pragmatic ideal of the
proper treatment and ultimate worth of man. That this
criticism was embodied in Henry James’s style, William
James was one of the first to recognize. “Your methods and
my ideals seem the reverse, the one of the other,” he wrote
to Henry in a letter complaining about the “interminable
elaboration” of The Golden Bowl. Couldn’t we have, he
asks, a “book with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with
great vigour and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in
the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute
straightness in the style?”9 Henry would rather have gone,
he replies, to a dishonored grave.
The Portrait of a Lady is James’s first fully exposed case
of human manipulation; his first full-dress investigation, at
the level of what Plato called “right opinion,” of what it

8 Leon Edel develops this theme in the first volume of his biography:
Henry James: The Untried Years, iS^-iS-jo (Philadelphia: Lippin-
cott, 1953).
9 Quoted by R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William
James, 2 vols. (Boston, 1935), 1, 424.
 William H. Gass

means to be a consumer of persons, and of what it means to

be a person consumed. The population of James’s fictional
society is composed, as populations commonly are, of pur¬
chasers and their purchases, of the handlers and the handled,
of the users and the used. Sometimes actual objects, like
Mrs. Gareth’s spoils, are involved in the transaction, but
their involvement is symbolic of a buying and a being sold
which is on the level of human worth (where the quality of
the product is measured in terms of its responsiveness to the
purchaser’s “finest feelings,” and its ability to sound the
buyer’s taste discreetly aloud), and it is for this reason that
James never chooses to center his interest upon objects
which can, by use, be visibly consumed. In nearly all of the
later novels and stories, it is a human being, not an object—
it is first Isabel Archer, then Pansy—who is the spoil, and
it is by no means true that only the “villains” fall upon her
and try to carry her off; nor is it easy to discover just who
the villains really are.
Kant’s imperative governs by its absence—as the hollow
center. It is not that some characters, the “good” people,
are busy being the moral legislators of mankind and that the
others, the “bad” people, are committed to a crass and
shallow pragmatism or a trifling estheticism; for were that
the case, The Portrait would be just another skillful novel
of manners and James would be distinctly visible, outside
the work, nodding or shaking his head at the behavior of
the animals in his moral fable. He would have managed no
advance in the art of English fiction. James’s examination
of the methods of human consumption goes too deep. He is
concerned with all of the ways in which men may be reduced
to the status of objects, and because James pursues his sub¬
ject so diligently, satisfying himself only when he has un¬
raveled every thread, and because he is so intent on avoiding

182
 The High Brutality of Good Intentions

in himself what he has revealed as evil in his characters and

exemplifying rather what he praises in Hawthorne, who,
he says, “never intermeddled,”10 the moral problem of The
Portrait becomes an esthetic problem, a problem of form,
the scope and course of the action, the nature of the char¬
acters, the content of dialogue, the shape and dress of setting,
the points-of-view, the figures of speech, the very turn and
tumble of the sentences themselves directed by the prob¬
lem s looked-for solution, and there is consequently no
suggestion that one should choose up sides or take to heart
his criticism of a certain society nor any invitation to discuss
the moral motivations of his characters as if they were sur¬
rogates for the real.11
The moral problem, moreover, merges with the esthetic.
It is possible to be an artist, James sees, in more than paint
and language, and in The Portrait, as it is so often in his other
work, Isabel Archer becomes the unworked medium through
which, like benevolent Svengali, the shapers and admirers
of beautifully brought out persons express their artistry and
themselves. The result is very often lovely, but it is in¬
variably sad. James has the feeling, furthermore, and it is
a distinctly magical feeling, that the novelist takes possession
of his subject through his words; that the artist is a pup¬
peteer; his works are the works of a god. He constantly
endeavors to shift the obligation and the blame, if there be
any, to another: his reflector, his reverberator, his sensitive
gong. In The Portrait James begins his movement toward
the theory of the point-of-view. The phrase itself occurs
incessantly. Its acceptance as a canon of method means the
loss of a single, universally objective reality. He is com-

10 “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” The American Essays of Henry James,

ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage, 1956), p. 23.
11 See “The Concept of Character in Fiction.”
l83
 William H. Gass

mitted, henceforth, to a standpoint philosophy, and it would

seem, then, that the best world would be that observed from
the most sensitive, catholic, yet discriminating standpoint.
In this way, the esthetic problem reaches out to the meta¬
physical. This marvelous observer: what is it he observes?
Does he see the world as it really is, palpitating with delicious
signs of the internal, or does he merely fling out the self¬
capturing net? James struggles with this question most ob¬
viously in The Sacred Fount but it is always before him. So
many of his characters are “perceptive.” They understand
the value of the unmolded clay. They feel they know, as
artists, what will be best for their human medium. They will
take up the young lady (for so it usually is). They will bring
her out. They will do for her; make something of her. She
will be beautiful and fine, in short, she will inspire interest,
amusement, and wonder. And their pursuit of the ideally
refractive medium parallels perfectly Henry James’s own,
except he is aware that his selected lens dare not be perfect
else he will have embodied a god again, and far more
obnoxious must this god seem in the body of a character than
he did in the nib of the author’s pen; but more than this,
James knows, as his creations so often do not, that this manip¬
ulation is the essence, the ultimate germ, of the evil the
whole of his work condemns, and it is nowhere more brutal
than when fronted by the kindest regard and backed by a
benevolent will.
The Portrait of a Lady, for one who is familiar with James,
opens on rich sounds. None of his major motifs is missing.
The talk at tea provides us with five, the composition of the
company constitutes a sixth, and his treatment of the setting
satisfies the full and holy seven. The talk moves in a desultory
fashion (“desultory” is a repetitive word) and in joking
tones (“That’s a sort of joke” is the repetitive phrase) from
 The High Brutality of Good Intentions

health and illness, and the ambiguity of its value, to boredom,

considered as a kind of sickness, and the ambiguity of its
production.12 Wealth is suggested as a cause of boredom,
then marriage is proposed as a cure. The elder Touchett
warns Lord Warburton not to fall in love with his niece,
a young lady recently captured by his wife to be exhibited
abroad. The questions about her are: has she money? is she
interesting? The jokes are: is she marriageable? is she en¬
gaged? Isabel is the fifth thing, then—the young, spirited
material. Lord Warburton is English, of course, while the
Touchetts are Americans. Isabel’s coming will sharpen the
contrast, dramatize the confrontation. Lastly, James dwells
lovingly on the ancient red brick house, emphasizing its
esthetic appeal, its traditions, its status as a work of art. In
describing the grounds he indicates, too, what an American
man of money may do: fall in love with a history not his
own and allow it, slowly, to civilize him, draw him into
Europe. Lord Warburton is said to be bored. It is suggested
that he is trying to fall in love. Ralph is described as cynical,
without belief, a condition ascribed to his illness by his
father. “He seems to feel as if he had never had a chance.”
But the best of the ladies will save us, the elder Touchett
says, a remark made improbable by his own lack of suc¬
cess.
The structure of the talk of this astonishing first chapter
foreshadows everything. All jests turn earnest, and in them,
as in the aimless pattern of the jesters’ leisure, lies plain the
essential evil, for the evil cannot be blinked even though it
may not be so immediately irritating to the eye as the evil

12 Illness, in James’s novels, either signifies the beautiful thing (the

Minny Temple theme) or it provides the excuse for spectatorship and
withdrawal, the opportunity to develop the esthetic sense (the Henry
James theme).
 William H. Gass

of Madame Merle or Gilbert Osmond. There is in Isabel

herself a certain willingness to be employed, a desire to
be taken up and fancied, if only because that very enslave¬
ment, on other terms, makes her more free. She refuses
Warburton, not because he seeks his own salvation in her,
his cure by “interest,” but rather because marriage to him
would not satisfy her greed for experience, her freedom to
see and feel and do. Neither Warburton nor Goodwood ap¬
peals as a person to Isabel’s vanity. She is a great subject. She
will make a great portrait. She knows it. Nevertheless Isabel’s
ambitions are at first naive and inarticulate. It is Ralph who
sees the chance, in her, for the really fine thing; who sees
in her his own chance, too, the chance at life denied him. It
is Ralph, finally, who empowers her flight and in doing so
draws the attention of the hunters.
Ralph and Osmond represent two types of the artist.
Osmond regards Isabel as an opportunity to create a work
which will flatter himself and be the best testimony to his
taste. Her intelligence is a silver plate he will heap with
fruits to decorate his table. Her talk will be for him “a sort
of served dessert.” He will rap her with his knuckle. She
will ring. As Osmond’s wife, Isabel recognizes that she is a
piece of property; her mind is attached to his like a small
garden plot to a deer park. But Ralph obeys the strictures
The Art of Fiction was later to lay down. He works rather
with the medium itself and respects the given. His desire is
to exhibit it, make it whole, refulgent, round. He wants, in
short, to make an image or to see one made—a portrait. He
demands of the work only that it be “interesting.” He
effaces himself. The “case” is his concern. The Portrait's
crucial scene, in this regard, is that between Ralph and his
dying father. Ralph cannot love Isabel. His illness prevents
him. He feels it would be wrong. Nevertheless, he takes, he
 The High Brutality of Good Intentions

says, “a great interest” in his cousin although he has no real

influence over her.

But I should like to do something for her. ... I

should like to put a little wind in her sails. ... I
should like to put it into her power to do some of
the things she wants. She wants to see the world
for instance. I should like to put money in her
purse.”

The language is unmistakable. It is the language of Iago.

Ralph wants her rich.

“I call people rich when they’re able to meet the

requirements of their imagination. Isabel has a great
deal of imagination.”
With money she will not have to marry for it. Money will
make her free. It is a curious faith. Mr. Touchett says, “You
speak as if it were for your mere amusement,” and Ralph
replies, “So it is, a good deal.” Mr. Touchett’s objections
are serenely met. Isabel will be extravagant but she will come
to her senses in time. And Ralph says,

“. . . it would be very painful to me to think of her

coming to the consciousness of a lot of wants she
should be unable to satisfy. . . .”
“Well, I don’t know. ... I don’t think I enter
into your spirit. It seems to me immoral.”
“Immoral, dear daddy?”
“Well, I don’t know that it’s right to make
everything so easy for a person.”13
“It surely depends upon the person. When the

13 A remark characteristic of the self-made man. In the first chapter,

Mr. Touchett attributes Warburton’s “boredom” to idleness. “You
wouldn’t be bored if you had something to do; but all you young men
are too idle. You think too much of your pleasure. You’re too fastidi¬
ous, and too indolent, and too rich.” Caspar Goodwood is the indus¬
trious suitor.
 William H. Gass

person’s good, your making things easy is all to the

credit of virtue. To facilitate the execution of good
impulses, what can be a nobler act? . .
“Isabel’s a sweet young thing; but do you think
she’s so good as that?”
“She’s as good as her best opportunities. . .
“Doesn’t it occur to you that a young lady with
sixty thousand pounds may fall a victim to the
fortune-hunters? ”
“She’ll hardly fall victim to more than one.”
“Well, one’s too many.”
“Decidedly. That’s a risk, and it has entered
into my calculation. I think it’s appreciable, but
I think it’s small, and I’m prepared to take it. . .
“But I don’t see what good you’re to get of
it. ,.
“I shall get just the good I said a few moments
ago I wished to put into Isabel’s reach—that of hav¬
ing met the requirements of my imagination. . . .”

The differences between Gilbert Osmond and Ralph

Touchett are vast, but they are also thin.
Isabel Archer is thus free to try her wings. She is thrown
upon the world. She becomes the friend of Madame Merle,
“the great round world herself”: polished, perfect, beautiful
without a fault, mysterious, exciting, treacherous, repellent,
and at bottom, like Isabel, identically betrayed; like Isabel
again, seeking out of her own ruin to protect Pansy, the new
subject, “the blank page,” from that same round world that
is herself. It is irony of the profoundest sort that “good” and
“evil” in their paths should pass so closely. The dark ambi¬
tions of Serena Merle are lightened by a pathetic bulb, and
it is only those whose eyes are fascinated and convinced by
surface who can put their confident finger on the “really
good.” Ralph Touchett, and we are not meant to miss the
appropriateness of his name, has not only failed to respect
 The High Brutality of Good Intentions

Isabel Archer as an end, he has failed to calculate correctly

the qualities of his object. Isabel is a sweet, young thing.
She is not yet, at any rate, as good as her best opportunities.
The sensitive eye was at the acute point blind. Ralph has
unwittingly put his bird in a cage. In a later interview, Isabel
tells him she has given up all desire for a general view of life.
Now she prefers corners. It is a corner she’s been driven to.
Time after time the “better” people curse the future they
wish to save with their bequests. Longdon of The Awkward
Age and Milly Theale of The Wings of the Dove come im¬
mediately to mind. Time after time the better artists fail
because their point-of-view is ultimately only theirs, and be¬
cause they have brought the esthetic relation too grandly,
too completely into life.
In the portrait of Fleda Vetch of The Spoils of Boynton
James has rendered an ideally considerate soul. Fleda, a per¬
son of modest means and background, possesses nevertheless
the true sense of beauty. She is drawn by her friend Mrs.
Gareth into the full exercise of that sense and to an apprecia¬
tion of the ripe contemplative life which otherwise might
have been denied her. Yet Fleda so little awards the palm
to mere cleverness or sensibility that she falls in love with
the slow, confused, and indecisive Owen Gareth. Fleda
furthermore separates her moral and her esthetic ideals. Not
only does she refuse to manipulate others, she refuses, herself,
to be manipulated. The moral lines she feels are delicate. She
takes all into her hands. Everyone has absolute worth.
Scruples beset and surround her and not even Mrs. Gareth’s
righteousness, the warmth of her remembered wrongs, can
melt them through. The impatience which James generates in
the reader and expresses through Mrs. Gareth is the im¬
patience, precisely, of his brother: for Fleda to act, to break
from the net of scruple and seize the chance. It would be
for the good of the good. It would save the spoils, save

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 William H. Gass

Owen, save Mrs. Gareth, save love for herself; but Fleda
Vetch understands, as few people in Henry James ever do,
the high brutality of such good intentions. She cannot ac¬
cept happiness on the condition of moral compromise, for
that would be to betray the ground on which, ideally, hap¬
piness ought to rest. Indeed it would betray happiness itself,
and love, and the people and their possessions that have pre¬
cipitated the problem and suggested the attractive and fatal
price.
It is not simply in the organization of character, dialogue,
and action that Henry James reveals The Moral Passion,
nor is it reflected further only in his treatment of surround¬
ings14 but it represents itself and its ideal in the increasing
scrupulosity of the style: precision of definition, respect for
nuance, tone, the multiplying presence of enveloping meta¬
phors, the winding around the tender center of ritual lines,
like the approach of the devout and worshipful to the altar,
these circumlocutions at once protecting the subject and
slowing the advance so that the mere utility of the core is
despaired of and it is valued solely in the contemplative
sight.15 The value of life lies ultimately in the experienced
quality of it, in the integrity of the given not in the useful¬
ness of the taken. Henry James does not peer through experi¬
ence to the future, through his future to the future futures,
endlessly down the infinite tube. He does not find in today
only what is needful for tomorrow. His aim is rather to
appreciate and to respect the things of his experience and to
set them, finally, free.

14 When, for instance, in The Portrait Gilbert Osmond proposes to

Isabel, the furnishings of the room in which their talk takes place
seem to Osmond himself “ugly to distress” and “the false colours, the
sham splendour . . . like vulgar, bragging, lying talk”—an obvious
commentary by the setting on the action.
15 The ritual function of style is considered at length in “The Styli¬
zation of Desire.”
 THE STYLIZATION OF DESIRE

w ▼ ▼ hy is it that philosophers
have always felt obliged to think badly of the basic biologi¬
cal functions? They may believe in a life force; they may
even applaud its ferocity; but they do not inquire whether
it keeps its chin clean at table. It almost seems as if to come
near the breathing, sweating, farting body were an unphil-
osophical act; and it is certainly true that although the
philosopher frequently prefers to begin with some common¬
place fragment of experience, ready enough to ponder the
lessons of the spider or the problems of the sodden wax, as
though to say: “Look, you think I deal with empty abstrac¬
tions and make my thoughts fly off from daily life like a
startled sparrow, but how unjust that is, for as you see I
begin by considering the shape and color of this quite
ordinary penny, the snowed-on blankness of this simple sheet
of writing paper, the course these burning logs are taking, or
even the existence of my own well-manicured hand”—he
does not deceive us with these subterfuges, since we can also
see how carefully he ignores the secretion of saliva, the
 William H. Gass

shaping of dung in the lower intestine, the leap of sperm

(indeed the whole history of that brazen nozzle), all our
vague internal twinges, heart stops, and bellyaches, though
distantly these things are made the subject of denigrating
comparisons. Thus from Plato to Tolstoi philosophers have
felt that to liken something to the art of cookery was better
than an argument against it. Even when Epictetus advised us
to behave in life as at a banquet, he did not mean “eat
hearty”; he meant “be polite.” Elad they tongues of leather,
these gentlemen (and they were all, all gentlemen), or was
it rather that the needs we each share and must daily confess
to are uninteresting, unromantic, unsuited to the royal aspira¬
tions of so head-proud an animal?
In the West man’s sexuality was never the object of any
important or prolonged philosophical study before Freud
(in Plato, in Saint Augustine, and so on, there are brief
sallies), yet of our fundamental occupations only something
discreetly called “loving” has received much notice. The
reason, I suspect, is that of the lot it is the only one which
can be successfully prohibited, and the only one, therefore,
it makes sense to condemn. The eighteenth-century version
of human nature, for example, constructed with a Johnsonian
sense of the decorous, was triumphantly shallow, and it is
possibly for this reason that when Hume hunted through his
own experience for that constant impression which might be
identified as the source of the idea of the self, he never came
upon his own breathing, traditionally identified with the
soul, and whose regular, unobtrusive rhythms, like those of
the heartbeat, accompany all our acts and feelings, and order
and qualify them who knows how profoundly—just as pro¬
foundly, certainly, as the man whose experience of the world
is always accompanied by the grinding of his teeth is af¬
fected by that.

192
 The Stylization of Desire

We always ski on the higher slopes when we can. Count¬

less works of rich abstraction have been written about
perception. I know none on the subject of chewing.
Now all of us have read of men, and some of us have
even seen them—such are the chances for experience in our
time—who were by want and ill condition returned into the
animals they came from; who fought among themselves and
rushed upon their meat (though it were rank, spat on, and
cast before them in the dirt) with all the mindlessness of
dogs; and it is distressing but necessary to observe that man¬
ners serve one badly in such circumstances, that civilization
is an impediment to life—who holds to it will perish.
The happier case finds us at table. There is fresh water
and wine at the points of our silver, and our eye considers
whether the colors on the central platter are properly com¬
posed and if the sauces will be smooth and thoughtful. We
listen to a ribald anecdote about Petronius from a scholar
on our right, and wish the lady on our left had not employed
so vulgar and insistent a perfume, it is ruining the bouquet
of the food; and while we damn her in that moment as a
savage only lately from the forest, to remember, then, the
truly opposite condition I just mentioned is to realize that
she has not forgotten her manners altogether, but has merely
got her arts confused. Such are the vexations of a civilized
existence.
Between these two extremes, as I should like to study
them, lie all the stages that must be passed, all the conditions
that must be met, if one is to leave one’s place among the
beasts to someone else. It is fundamentally a process of
design, and the advantages of my central situation, as I
perceive them, are that its lines are simpler and show them¬
selves more plainly than the lines of others; that concentrat¬
ing on the human stomach effectively removes the problem

193
 William H. Gass

of style, which is my real subject, from the preconceptions

and confusions that so muddle most examinations of it in the
major arts.
Desires, alas, do not contain their own fulfillment. There
is a necessary incompleteness in them. They must figure to
themselves some end which, lying public, they can reach
for, and in that effort they express themselves. At one end
there is feeling and sensation, hunger’s pain and discontent
for instance, while at the other is the set of hunger’s objects,
seen one by one and each by each as food, for no desire will
be so foolish as to feed upon a class and miss the nourish¬
ment of members. Desire upon its natural base is always gen¬
eral and can be said to have a general aim; we are hardly
born with a passion for cream puffs. Each need has an eye—
a principle—a set of marks—whereby it recognizes some¬
thing as its own, and in this way desire defines its nature.
Simple hunger asks for any food and since the goal it posts is
broad, the means are many; but its pangs are pangs which
issue from the stomach and only through some great
maliciousness of nature can these signs be so confused that
hunger’s pain or hunger’s motions seem directed from the
throat or lungs or from the heart or bowels or from the
privy members, though such maliciousness is not unknown.
Suppose we ate through our anus and shat through our
mouth: how much of the world would be turned topsy¬
turvy besides ourselves?
Hunger’s purpose is to satisfy—that is, destroy—itself,
and it is a matter of the merest chance, to it, that sight and
smell are its most useful instruments, or that the stomach
must be filled through the mouth so that food finally hap¬
pens on the palate (we can feed through our veins); but
when the desire for food is stylized, it is not hunger which
receives the elaboration, but these instrumental senses, these
 The Stylization of Desire

accidental ones, and this is always true when a desire is

shifted from its natural base and satisfied by symbolic actions.
Thus there is a general movement toward sensation, con¬
centrating first of all around the products of the act of eating,
certain tastes and odors mainly, swallowing and chewing,
and second around the signs of wanted objects, special sounds
and colors. This movement, which I’ve chosen to call the dis¬
placement of desire from its natural base, and which is the
ground of all such stylization, begins with the association of
hunger with something formally higher, something otherwise
than blind and random in its effort, something intrinsically
aware. As the movement continues, this association becomes
so intimate and necessary that, at the end, the values of eat¬
ing are inverted, and one eats largely to produce a succession
of agreeable sensations, and only incidentally, and regret¬
fully, to fill the stomach.
The need for nourishment is very general, but it soon be¬
comes precise. Precision in desire, like the association with
it of sensations, defines a rarer, less attainable object, for
the gourmet’s hunger issues its commands no longer from
the stomach, whose chemicals are perfectly indifferent to
sauce mornay and truffled fowl, but from the tongue and lips
and from the eye and nose, and finally, from imagination.
The process whereby desire is made precise depends first
of all upon the lessening of its strength through success, and
second by the interruption of its haste by forcing choice
upon it. The desperately hungry man finds his whole soul
filled with pain and incompleteness, his body is aflail for
food, every sense and every thought is lost but to that aim,
and any object bearing the proper sign will be intently set
upon and instantly consumed.
All discrimination thus demands a ground of satisfaction,
a blunting of the edge of want which permits the exercise of

195
 William H. Gass

choice and provides for the leisure of body and calmness of

mind essential to contemplation. When rage retires, a man
may understand his hate. When emotion leaves the eye, a
man may see. So he may be able to express himself with
style when the need to express himself at all has passed its
adolescence. A man who must choose must reflect upon
the nature of his wants and the power objects have to satisfy
them. Finally some factor tips the scale, and that factor
acts as the principle of preference. The original class of
hunger’s objects divides. Desires multiply. Where one ob¬
ject was before, soon there are a dozen, then a hundred, then
a thousand, so that where the purely hungry man wished
food, the mildly hungry man with choice considers vegeta¬
bles and meats and fruits, considers soups and casseroles and
stews, and in the object of each new desire may arrange all
its probable representatives according to his preferences.
The entire process of precision may be repeated for each
fresh division and may continue until the object of each
desire is perfectly precise: one individual thing.
The poor man has no such problems. He works; he grows
hungry; he eats what he has. His interest in food is specific
because his circumstances limit his opportunities. An eco¬
nomy which is devoted to the satisfaction of many, widely
varied wants (and even to the manufacture of new ones)
can easily be thought to be corrupting, as Tolstoi believed:
the simple life of the peasant replaced by the temptations of
the supermarket. What happens to the composer of simple
tribal songs when set down in the middle of a modern music
market? what happens to the painter locked in Malraux’s
wall-less museum? or the poet caught between the covers of
some worldwide anthology? And will straightforward
screwing sustain a man in a country where kinds of copula¬
tion are canned and merchandised as variously as peas, beans,

196
 The Stylization of Desire

and carrots are? Soon he will wonder: which brand? Poverty

protects the simple man from sin—at least the sophisticated
and expensive ones. So it has been frequently argued.
We cannot will an end, Kant said, unless we are prepared
to will some way of achieving it, and he separated willing
from wishing for us on that basis; for when I merely wish
for something—as I might dream of owning a yacht one day
or of having peace or marrying a movie star—it can be ob¬
served that I never take any effective steps to obtain it.
Therefore when desire takes aim at its object, it takes aim
also at some means, and the force it has for its object it has
also for the means. If I want the bananas, which are yellow¬
ing on the tree, I want equally badly the stick which will
knock them down. This energy, however—the measure of
my need—since in its object it has a single end, and in the
means generally a choice of many, cannot stake itself entirely
upon one method and so preserve its purity and power, but
it must hover, avoiding ultimate commitment, prepared to
give way at one point to succeed at another. Stick or ladder,
each will serve. I shall not insist on the stick when it is
simply the bananas I want. The desire of the end is thus
obtained for the means, but ordinarily the desire is disloyal,
based upon pure utility.
The most important step in the stylization of desire, as in
the stylization of anything whatever, is the amalgamation of
a means with its end. This fastens the whole force of desire
as firmly on the method as a leech on a leg. Success hence¬
forth requires not only the enjoyment of the end but the
use of one path to it. When I want the bananas only if they
have been stick-struck; when I want money, power, and the
love of women only because I’m the heavyweight champ;
when I want my julep in a silver cup; it’s clear that I’ve
proposed a new goal for myself, a goal which possesses more

l97
 William H. Gass

than the character of an object of lust, pride, or hunger, but

an additional character, a ritual one. My desire has become
precise in its object and concrete in its method until the
method and the object have merged. And as soon as there is
a new object, there is, of course, a new desire. The process
of amalgamation, although I have treated it here as if it oc¬
curred after the process of precision, is contemporaneous
with it and begins, indeed, when desire begins, it is so nearly
automatic. A child often fails to distinguish means from ends
in any situation, so that Christmas, for example, isn’t Christ¬
mas without a tree or without a certain cake or a visit
to grandmother. The child, who is forever a stylist, iden¬
tifies the celebration with selected ways of celebrating,
and the child may feel, as the primitive man was sup¬
posed to, that any kind of success can be guaranteed
only by repeating, and by repeating exactly, everything that
was done the first time. The aim is good luck and the method
is magic, for the actual cause lies unknown in the welter of
surrounding conditions. The result is the security that pro¬
ceeds from repetition, so that if the feeling sought is lost or
if the prize is not forthcoming, something in the total order
of the acts was wrong—some gesture, some item of clothing,
some fragment of the sacred initial occasion left out.
This new end, while a unity, can be mapped. There is an
order to its realization. And as each new end, with its cor¬
responding desire, undergoes again the process of precision,
it devours further means and swells inside itself until it is
constituted by a series of ritual acts. The end is no longer
merely had, it is traversed. It is enacted. Each step displaces
further the new desire from its natural base. The gourmet’s
wants become not only precise as to food, but as to service.
He envisions glimmering crystal, snowy damask, brilliant
talk. Dividing these into ends and means, though it may serve

ip8
 The Stylization of Desire

an analytical purpose, is like approximating a curved line by

a series of straight ones. The force of the original desire,
flowing now through differently ordered channels, animates
the whole, and fixes itself successively to various means with
all the loyalty of the original desire for its original object.
We should realize that the initial means-ends relation has
now been entirely altered. Both have become parts of an
active whole in which the former end functions as the final
part, like dessert or the eighteenth hole, and the moment the
diner takes one bite simply so he may take another, the
original amalgamation has been shattered, and dining, as an
art, has ceased.
It is necessary to notice, also, that when difficult means
are deliberately chosen, and these means ritualized within the
end, the end is enriched. The distance at which the pursuer
is at first kept encourages contemplation. But all of this
supposes an initial ground of satisfaction so that the cat will
find it feasible, for example, to play with its food and not
swallow it all at once.
Everyone is familiar with the caveman of the popular
cartoon who, overcome by desire, goes straight to its object,
strikes her over the head with his club and drags her to his
cave by the hair. Imagine that we interpose, between the
caveman and the object of his lust, a series of formalities: a
visit to the father, certain gifts and payments, a gay parade
or a ceremonial chase. The object must be contemplated
through these difficulties. Admirable points have their chance
to be observed. Finally it is forbidden to gain one’s bride
in the earlier way, and the formalities become essential to
the end, an intrinsic part of it. Melodies are strummed under
windows, lust is fittingly arrayed, and the woman becomes
a lady; she is elevated to a new and more important place.
So courtship creates its object, becoming the art of pursuit

199
 William H. Gass

as running to hounds becomes that of hunting, and love the

stylization of carnal desire; while civilized dining, the whole
of high cuisine, becomes a transformation of one more
vulgar human need into an art.
The amalgamation of means and ends, because it makes for
a new aim, clearly shifts the original desire still further from
its natural base. The fact that the straight expression of de¬
sire is hindered, not by want of objects but by increasing
scrupulosity concerning means, makes contemplation pos¬
sible, and this contemplation discovers what the object is,
beyond its mere utility. There is an accompanying rise in
value as well as an altered attitude and a changed emotion.
Standards, at the same time, make their appearance, for
before the only measurements were speed, economy, and
success. Now, in addition, there are all those added forms
and ceremonies, and judgment frequently turns on them:
this gesture has not been made, that rite has been ignored;
this sauce employs poor brandy, that caress is crude.
Hunting, having tea, making love, arranging flowers, like
so many other minor arts, like gardening, bullfighting, and
keeping the sabbath holy, embody ends which might be
realized in countless ways. It is often thought, therefore, that
those means finally hit upon and combined with the end, so
as really to define its nature, have a special affinity the others
do not have, some suitability or fittingness, as though the
form of the sonnet were somehow metaphysically in har¬
mony with love; and sometimes this is true, and there are
what one would normally regard as “good” reasons for the
choice of one means rather than another: one is simpler,
easier, more economical, cooperates with other customs and
with other aims more than another, and so on; but I want to
insist that it does not matter. The choices may be whimsical,
arbitrary, neurotic, the result of sheerest chance, often like
the course a child pursues to school; yet these choices just as

200
 The Stylization of Desire

thoroughly inform their end with order as any others do.

Indeed you often find an artist placing obstacles in his own
path out of braggadocio, to show what he can do, or out of
self-mortification, because he feels that nothing in the world
ought to be easy for him, he is so unworthy. From such a
motive is born the penitential style, like the late style of
Joyce, and there are many other kinds.
I have been speaking, so far, as if stylization went on in a
vacuum, and of course it does not. The gourmet’s dinner
brings together and satisfies a number of ends in one series of
ritual acts, and each of these acts tends to take on a symbolic
significance as the art of dining develops. The final limit is
reached when the whole performance is so thoroughly con¬
ceptualized that the diner (or the hunter or the lover or
the keeper of the sabbath, each in his separate way) takes
his food not because he is hungry and requires it for life,
or because he wishes to indulge himself in certain flavors,
but because he wishes, by and through eating, to signify
something: safety or social position or breeding or love of
neighbor.
There is no lack of Don Juans, either, at the dinner table.
There are those, moreover, as we know, who substitute one
activity for another and court by cooking; their sensuality
sauces the fish; instead of bestowing kisses, they pass a plate
of cookies.
The gestures of the actors, the objects in the rite, con¬
stitute in this way a language, just as there is, for the com¬
poser of flowers, a language of them and their placement.
These formalities do not deny the artist any freedom, indeed
they make him eloquent, for they are no more confining
than any language, and there is always room for an individual
use of the given tongue. When such a highly formal language
is at large, it makes the most inarticulate and shallow mem¬
bers of society sensitive and expressive, much as the

201
 William H. Gass

ceremonial rending of clothes and scattering of ashes, for ex¬

ample, gives form and graciousness to what might otherwise
be an inelegant spray of feeling.
The final stage in the stylization of desire is reached when
the force of the original desire, snipped, as it were, from its
natural root, is made to serve another, more elaborate end, an
end which only barely contains the original as its final part.
The trick, and it is a trick, a process of covering up, of
masking and deception, is to retain the force of the original
desire without retaining its identity. The danger, and I speak
purely from the point of view of the process itself, is that the
original end, the culminating act of what has become a
rather lengthy activity, may be pushed out altogether, the
initial purpose forgotten entirely, and the whole form
emptied of significance.
Sterility and confusion of focus—these are the ills which
attack style from within, and they are encouraged by the
fact that one’s attention is naturally directed to the step just
ahead, not to the final one, and this becomes more and more
the case the further away, by heavy stylization, the end is
put. The wooer, delighted by the chase, can forget to pos¬
sess what at last he’s won, and the same mechanism of style
that can elevate “woman” from an object of priapic fury to a
companion and a wife can lift her also to a pre-Raphaelite
cloud, a woman to be pursued and worshiped, and in a sense
. desired, but never touched—a woman who is always depicted
with the reptilian neck of a swan.
Amos reports to us the attitude of God: I spit upon your
sacrifices. The Jews, the prophets complained, were merely
going through ritual motions; not only had they lost sight of
the original aims of these rites, they had made of them ends
in themselves.
It is the habit of stylistic formulas to proliferate, new

202
 The Stylization of Desire

ones appearing upon the backs of others like the famous fleas,
until the weight of the whole becomes intolerable. It is im¬
possible to speak, to eat, to love, or to worship under such
circumstances; there is too much to be gone through. Xhe
style cannot be called sterile in such a case. It is simply not
taken on. It may be abbreviated. Xhe wooer may become a
professional slayer of dragons, and it is very likely that hunt¬
ing, considered as an art, was once a fragment of a larger
action that had feasting as its end rather than death or capture
or photography. Generally, however, the style is abandoned,
and the old end is pursued again in cruder, more direct, more
successful ways. Xhen the process of stylization begins again.
Institutions stress correctness, proper etiquette, right¬
eousness by rule. Xhe revolutionaries are said not to know
how to draw, or it is claimed that what they have written
are not poems, or that they have made noise, not music; they
are ill-mannered boors; they have lost respect for the past,
for tradition, hallowed ways; they are, in fact, immoral-—
objects of scorn and derision, causes of anxiety and appre¬
hension.
While there have always been many individual artists who
have seen the danger in an overweight of preparation, cere¬
mony, and ordeal, and have themselves drawn back from it,
nevertheless, the form, as if it harbored deadly wishes against
itself, goes on to its demise. Artists, on the other hand, can
fail a style. Sometimes they lack the wit to grasp the form—
a frequent failing; sometimes they cannot keep their will to
its work, desire proves the stronger and takes an easier way;
sometimes they have too little energy and are discouraged
by any obstacle.
And the traditionalist is right: the rebel does flounder;
he is a fool; he does take pride in his ignorance, make a
virtue of chaos and disruption, and suppose that he is less a

203
 William H. Gass

hypocrite for being vulgar; he admires spontaneity and

despises effort, thinks sincerity will substitute for skill, al¬
lows heat to consume patience, and imagines that his simple
presence in the world is cause enough for rejoicing—he need
only be, and the world will be better. Yet the rebel is right,
too. A style can strangle.
We can make an art of anything, but this does not auto¬
matically mean it is worth doing. Some arts, like that of din¬
ing well, however much they may be a pleasant part of the
good life, must remain minor because they have too dif¬
ficult a struggle to gain the level of concept where really
subtle and complicated stylization is possible. A Balinese
dance, though it may seem exceptionally mannered to the
onlooker, has its every sign writ large, comparatively speak¬
ing, giving this impression, while its actual speech is thick,
impoverished, and short of breath.
Many of these minor arts have the advantage of a physical
concreteness that is close to the desire itself, love and danc¬
ing, for instance, eating and the continuance of life; but they
have the fatal disadvantage of conceptual inflexibility. The
bull is certainly an admirable physical token for a sign
of death and love—the noises men make when they make
words are not a twelfth as interesting, a lack that poetry al¬
ways so desperately, by every trick it knows, attempts to
overcome—but there is very little you can get a charging
bull to say. And this is a disadvantage, not because an art
somehow must become symbolic, but because becoming
symbolic helps it so much as an art, so immeasurably in¬
creases its expressive potentialities.
Finally, I should say that while every ethic involves and
specifies a style, stylization alone makes nothing moral.
Cruelty can be immensely refined. It can be, in this way,
removed from its natural base. It can be associated, as eating
 The Stylization of Desire

is, with accidental qualities, and its general object marvelously

split in pieces and precise. Torture can become a ceremony
of length and gravity, and of considerable significance for
its audience, but however set off from its foundation, how¬
ever stylized, it must have its victim at last, and for its victim,
pleasure in its pain. There is, perhaps, an indirect relation,
and it may be this: that such a process as I have here de¬
scribed does the best that can be done with the human
nature that it’s given, and in that sense, at least, may be, if
not the content, at any rate the shape of civilization.

205
 COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO

T ....
—1—he couples1 live in Tarbox.
Come. It is in places marshy. There are trees, lawns of
fine description, bodies, houses like them, banks of purply
flowered scenes, courts for games, arousing speeches, and the
groaning culminations of many amorous machines. That’s
because the principal industry in Tarbox is fucking. They
think of it, Elizabethanly, as dying, in Tarbox; descents to
hell are taken every day—through wood-dark poetries un¬
warily entered by the middle-aged. No one dies in Tarbox of
too little. Not only the place but the people bear distinguish¬
ing names. The heroine is called Foxy by her friends; a
dentist whose tongue is like a dental pick (the souls in Tar¬
box have teeth) is named Thorne, his wife, Georgene; the
heedless hero (always in dutch) is Piet Hanema; the pairs
most set on swapping are blended prettily together as the
Applesmiths. It is a fortunate thing that a family of sheep
didn’t stray into town; the combinations might have proved
1 Couples, by John Updike (New York: Knopf, 1968).
206
 Cock-a-doodle-doo

too distracting, especially since this novel is clearly the

suburbanite entry in the porno pageant, and I suspect such
soft-loaf sophisticates do not delight in the truly unusual:
mulogeny or grampalingus, for instance, meatusfoetus or
intermissolonghi. Conversant with the modern texts of sexual
hygiene, every reader can redream the acts he reads quite
guiltlessly. The obscene, sometimes, can even set a standard.
Tarbox sex is often oral, but that’s the way with writers; the
penis was never Nature’s purposed instrument of speech.

Mouths, Piet thought, are noble. They move in the

brain’s court. We set our genitals mating down
below like peasants, but when the mouth con¬
descends, mind and body marry. To eat another
is sacred. I love thee, Elizabeth, thy petaled rank¬
ness, thy priceless casket of nothing lined with
slippery buds.

A perfect wedding of style and subject, writing like this is

just the love it describes: you must sweep swiftly by in a
wash of passion, for if you stop to reflect you may retch
with laughter. In order to handle such scenes successfully,
the writer must be sure of his own sexuality; otherwise there
will be failures of observation and feeling, and he will render
them disgusting or ridiculous, attacking indirectly what he
thought he wished, so pointedly, to praise. In Of the Farm,
a far more tightly controlled though less ambitious book,
there is only one such passage.

. . . entered, she yields a variety of landscapes, seem¬

ing now a snowy rolling perspective of bursting
cotton bolls seen through the Negro arabesques of
a fancy-work wrought-iron balcony . . .

and so on. It was an unheeded warning.

The steeple of the Congregational Church in Tarbox is
 William H. Gass

tipped with a golden colonial rooster, an English copper

glinting in its eye. It has already survived several structures
which were destroyed or remodeled beneath it.

Children in the town grew up with the sense that

the bird was God. That is, if God were physically
present in Tarbox, it was in the form of this un¬
reachable weathercock visible from everywhere.
And if its penny could see, it saw everything,
spread below it like a living map.

Near the end of the book the church burns, but the weather
bird is saved to turn above another building.

. . . not a restoration but a modern edifice, a para¬

bolic poured-concrete tent-shape peaked like a
breaking wave.

The flames which attacked the church were really sexual.

The entire book has been that burning. Now book and
church and intercourse are charred, as all such customs and
competitors, burned out, must end in charring and in ashes.
Unaffected as the phoenix, the vane will point the wind
again. It is the same with Tarbox couples and their cult of
casual coupling, for in the end they give up screwing one
another as a principle and take up bridge instead. Communal
sex, they argue, will humanize them. Yet it’s only another
while-a-time game, another dogma (“To eat another is
sacred”), another freshly fashioned fad religion which will
exempt their lives from the laws of the living.
The novel takes its initial form from the computations of
pornography and the conversational bat and catch of Edward
Albee . . . much the same. The Appleby-Smiths go through
their drills like soldiers. Piet Hanema is carried from one
cunt to another like a sea log cresting helplessly. The ladies
are strangely worth bedding, and always a pleasure to lay.

208
 Cock-a-doodle-doo

The couples’ speech is strong, intentions deep, but feeling’s

weak and meaning shallow. Adultery has no interest as a
nervous habit. These people do terrible things to one another,
but although their conscience troubles them occasionally,
it’s only a prick. Everyone is very civilized about his
savagery; nobody hits anybody; no one screams convinc-
ingly, goes mad, or dies of this contraceptive cruelty. Tar-
box, the “post-pill paradise,” is a very tepid hell.
Otherwise the novel’s form is carelessly old-fashioned. A
character is introduced. We pause for his description. Gem¬
like renderings of nature seldom have a function, unless fill¬
ing the book is a function, and they shatter the text like a
window greeting common stones. The interior monologues
seem badly imitated Joyce, and many feats of wit and battle
come to nothing more than bluster, smirk, and revengeful
tattle. The symbolism is sometimes oppressive (“A condom
and candy wrapper lay paired in the exposed gutter”), and
the religious parallels aren’t convincingly drawn (Piet, the
jacket tells us, is a scapegoat, but he is more goat than scape).
Then there are those empty expansions of meaning (“Piet
felt the fireplace draft on his ankles and became sensitive
to the night beyond her hunched shoulders, an extensiveness
pressed tight against the bubbled old panes and the frail
mullions, a blackness charged with the ache of first growth
and the suspended skeletons of Virgo and Leo and Gemini”),
unfolding like collapsible tin cups. There’s the poetic epithet
(for a nipple: “an unexpected sad solidity”; the cat, heaven
help us, has a “throaty motor”); there’s the uselessly precise
fact (“He took his accustomed place in a left back pew”),
the fake dislocation of words from their normal positions
(“She was in only underwear”), the straining, unsoundable
line (“In the liquid a slice of lemon lay at fetal peace”), and
overexertions of every other kind (“Her receding hollowed

209
 William H. Gass

the dull noon. Tipped shoots searched for wider light

through entropic gray. The salami he made lunch from was
minced death”). In a novel like this there is no point in try¬
ing to make poetry out of everything.
In the midst of Tarbox sexual squalor there is a love story
lost like a child, and it seems for a time to be part of the
author’s plan to contrast Piet’s and Foxy’s adulterous affair,
which is beautiful and serious, though carelessly begun, with
the empty interlocking of the others. It might have been
moving, and the contrast instructive, for Updike can be
intense, perceptive, subtle. His prose is musical; his celebra¬
tion of the female body often glorious and cleansing; and
his treatment of the sexual is sometimes delicate and deeply
touching, male and female softly enclosed in a fine Japanese
line. Many passages, countless details, are nothing less than
acts of genius. He can form memorable phrases, and con¬
dense an image until it becomes a hard fist of meaning. (“He
lay on his back like a town suspended from a steeple.” The
steeple is Piet’s penis, and the whole novel is held in that
suspension.) But to turn sex into an ideology is to attack it;
to find it always casual in cause and consequence, to separate
it from sin and spirit at the same time, as if the spirit were
the price, is to attack it; to expose the symbolically sweetest
sides of sexual intimacy (as orality sometimes is) to the abuse
of words which praise it only out of pride, perversity, and
braggadocio, is to attack it centrally, in (as they are felt) the
instruments of love itself. Mind and body, value and act,
don't meet.
Thus despite the pills, coils, diaphragms, and hands and
mouths employed, cliche must still be served, and Foxy
(whom Piet made love to first when she was freshly pregnant
by her husband) later, after the birth of that baby, begins to
miss her periods because of Piet’s overeager sperm. Now the

210
 Cock-a-doodle-doo

dirty dentist knows another dentist who will abort our Foxy
for a fee, but the villain has his own price: a night with Piet’s
cold though shapely wife. Naturally Piet has been sleeping
with the dentist’s sweet frau, too—Georgene—so it’s sort of
snitch for snatch. All humane considerations gone, it is ar¬
ranged. Waiting in the living room below, while Dr. Thorne
is languid with his prize, Piet decides to give Georgene an¬
other whirl. All humane considerations gone, this also is
arranged. Besides, downstairs he found it chilly. It’s hard to
see how anyone could take this diagrammatic melodrama
seriously, least of all its author, even though he often seems
to. Anyway, it all works out. There are a pair of divorces,
and Piet and Foxy marry, move:

The Hantmas live in Lexington, where, gradually,

among people like themselves, they have been ac¬
cepted, as another couple.

Oh, look out. Another couple. People like themselves.

We are promised the weather vane will shine in the sun
again. Unreachable, perhaps the bird is God, but I am un¬
persuaded. It still looks like a cold colonial cock to me.

211
 FROM SOME ASHES
NO BIRD RISES

-JL t was a miserable war, a dirty

war, a war fought low in the loins, in his tubercular chest,
in the loving, bitter household of himself, the pits, in the
flame he liked to fancy was an image of all honest healthy
phallic life; his sharply burning beard and head circum¬
navigated in Brett’s paintings of him by a wake of holy light
or by the ship of death—it was hard, sometimes, to know
which. “Savage,” he said (he and Henry Savage were sitting
on the edge of a Kent cliff, and Lawrence was striking his
chest), “I’ve something here that is heavier than concrete.
If I don’t get it out it will kill me.” It was Lawrence, of
course, who was in there, glaring past the ribs like Rilke’s
panther past its bars, and there were always other bars be¬
fore him, colliery chimneys and mother’s arms, banning
judges, timid editors, teacup society, sycophants and sucking
friends, abundant Frieda . . . the menacing female monolith.
His hand was often used to stop his mouth. His cough
boiled by his fist. “. . . after our Crucifixion, and the dark¬
ness of the tomb, we shall rise again in the flesh, you, I, as we

212
 From Some Ashes No Bird Rises

are today, resurrected in the bodies. . . In the physical

sense, what this meant was very simple. The flesh should
rise; it should be swollen with the power of the blood; then,
at last, it should be feasible and safe to enter women. But
there was always that dangerous limpness after, that weak¬
ness, that depletion; there was always the fear, in the middle
of success, that this was the end, the sexual ash; there was al¬
ways in him this awareness, at the very moment of his
exultation, when he had in fact triumphantly come through
it (and a curse upon such consciousness), that the woman to
whom he’d given his seed and feeling had won somehow a
vital battle; that she had brought it off herself, committed
theft, ensnared his soul as she’d enclosed his penis. Pre¬
sumably, it was the great adventure, a fall into the future.

It is so arranged that the very act which carries

us out into the unknown shall probably deposit seed
for security to be left behind. But the act, called
the sexual act, is not for the depositing of the seed.
It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a
cliff’s edge, like Sappho into the sea.

For Lawrence, the green fuse celebrant, sex was suicidal.

“It is so plain in my plant, the poppy,” he goes on to say in
his study of Thomas Hardy1 (which is not a study of Hardy,
but a study of Lawrence, for Lawrence wrote of no one,
ever, nothing, ever, in story, tract, or letter, ever, but him¬
self) how the life force flows through the stem to flower.

... a little hangs back, in reservoirs that shall

later seal themselves up as quick but silent sources.
But the whole, almost the whole, splashes splendidly
over, is seen in red just as it drips into darkness, and
disappears.

1 In Phoenix, Vol. I.

213
 William H. Gass

The famous doctrine is a futile deception, but the images

are honest, and they graphically describe the danger. The
poppy blooms, but it bleeds to do so. The snake of the well-
known poem, for instance, who comes to drink at the water
trough, too, honors the poet with his presence; he induces
reverence; and the poet overcomes the voice of an education
which tells him the gold snakes of Sicily are venomous and
must be killed—he’s even grateful to his guest—till the snake
puts his head back in that dreadful hole he came from, that
entrance to darkness, whereupon the poet throws a stick at
the trough and misses his chance, as he says, with one of the
lords of life. St. Mawr, the marigold stallion and color of
Lawrence, still “don’t seem to fancy the mares, for some
reason,” though he’s an animal enfleshment of potency.
There’s also a poem about the sex-scream of the tortoise
(“half music, half horror”), in which the poet wonders why
we were crucified into sex. This seed-fear often fruits in hate:
the phallic sacrifice, and the expressionless, hard-eyed Indian
who plunges a cold flint knife into a drowsy willing modern
woman. “The clutching throb of gratification as the knife
strikes in and the blood spurts out!” Sacrifice or crucifixion:
were these the sole alternatives to a hermit’s isolation and
lonely abstinence? Wrestling with his demons, Lawrence
wrote of “The Escaped Cock” (a perfect title for him), of
Quetzalcoatl, The Plumed Serpent, of The White Peacock,
“The Flying Fish,” “The Fox,” and also of the almond tree,
the gentian, wild animals, reptiles, bullfights, birds, neutering
women and neutered men, the red geranium and other
flowers, flowers which were, significantly, mostly male, ex¬
cept the snapdragon, which was not, and then of farms and
mining towns and seaports, peasants, mating elephants, game-
keepers, Indians, rectors, whales, of hillsides terraced with
flowers, of deserts redeemed by flowers (he wrote endlessly

214
 From Some Ashes No Bird Rises

of flowers, as, everywhere, the weather: sun, moon, stallions,

stars), and found his safest and most hopeful symbol finally
in the figure of the phoenix, bird of burning and rejuvena¬
tion.
The first volume of Lawrence’s posthumous papers was
published thirty-two years ago, and now, with yet another
volume to companion it, this important collection has been
handsomely reissued. There are no letters, poems, or plays,
but otherwise the total range of Lawrence’s writing is repre¬
sented: articles, reviews, translations, travel sketches, stories,
religious and philosophical effusions, prefaces to his own
poems, autobiographical snippets, forewords and fragments,
from every period and of every quality except flat. Lawrence
may weary his reader with his railing, but his work is never
lifeless; he is fully there in every line, for they are cries of
his, these lines, and they are as he is, and go as he goes,
whether well or ill, precisely. Nowhere in these pieces does
he touch bottom as he does in parts of Kangaroo or The
Plumed Serpent; nowhere is he as sick as he was when he
wrote “The Woman Who R.ode Away”; seldom is he as
silly as when he did parts of The Fantasia of the Uncon¬
scious., though portions of his book on Hardy are; rarely,
also, did he write with such luminous and original beauty as
he manages in “Flowery Tuscany,” or “The Flying Fish,”
or display his remarkable powers of characterization more
completely than in his Preface to Maurice Magnus’ Memoirs
of the Foreign Legion, and never, I think, is he as sane and
cogent in argument as in the essay “A Propos of Lady Chat-
terley's LoverT The set is certainly superbly titled, for
Lawrence lives, as the kids say: bright, burning, acrid, and
smoky.
Lawrence dreamed of black beetles. You must leave
these friends,” he commanded Garnett, “these beetles, Birrell

215
 William H. Gass

and Duncan Grant are done forever.” Bloomsbury gave him

nightmares. How the name would have chilled him, like a
piece of ice, had he bitten it in half! Beetles, he said, live and
feed in a world of corruption; their knowledge ends in the
senses, with decay. The force of his fears was so great that
the pages of his work, especially these in the volumes of
Phoenix, are like shouts he’s raised up in his sleep, and we
are bothered when such insistent realities seem to issue from
a distant, dreaming mouth. Cuddling was decay; doting,
cooing was decay; it was licking out the bowl before spoon¬
ing out the porridge. This seemed impossible and sickening
to Lawrence. The mind, he claimed, had become a servant
of abstraction, industry, and sensuality.
Thus there is less kissing in the later novels: neither
Mellors nor Cipriano is inclined to woo; and though the flint
knife phase finally passed (he even considered calling Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, in a woeful moment, Tenderness), he
never allowed love to become an individuating matter. “You
can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath,” he
writes in “. . . Love Was Once a Little Boy.” Petting is
personal; fucking is not. And he goes on in this essay to
admire the impassivity, the separateness, of Susan, his cow.
So what does tenderness turn out to be? “dirty” words
spoken softly? a gentle pat on the ass? a phallus girt with
flowers like a filling station ringed with flapping plastic
celebrational pennants? The lady’s satisfaction was to come
from the size of her master’s passion (spiritually speaking),
and the completeness of her submission to it: “Ah! and
what a mystery of prone submission, on her part, this huge
erection would imply!” It’s felt by Kate, by Alvina, by many
other heroines, to be a form of death. Well—better a she
than a he.
Such lovemaking is ultimately abstract: Man coming to

216
 From Some Ashes No Bird Rises

Woman. Me Tarzan. \ ou Jane, And part of its primitive

quality is due to its generality, the alleged universal sameness
of instinct. The id has no personality; it doesn’t take snuff or
wear spats; it entertains no opinions; it is utterly without
eyes; and every expression of it that isn’t straight is bent,
and bent perversely, mainly by the mind. It’s this lovemaking
mush that s sex in the head. So every act of intercourse in¬
volves a risk, a loss of individuality, of separateness. Yet the
dark gods of the mines provide the fuel for life, for the
vital burning of the bird; the descent must then be risked,
however dangerous or humiliating; even if Tarzan is tiny,
with a sunken chest; even if he’s the smaller of the two
tortoises in those revealing poems.
Much of Lawrence’s writing, it seems to me, is symptomatic
speech, controlled only by his inner reality, and measurable
by little else. His work cries out to the world: accept me!
and sotto voce: maybe then I can accept myself. And just as
Nietzsche, sick too, overwomaned, powerless to put into
the world the power he knew, within, he had, was driven to
work his will, instead, with words; so Lawrence wrote novels,
stories, essays of challenge and revenge, composed elaborate
and desperate daydreams, disposing of his problems and his
friends, recreating himself, rewriting his forlorn history.
Still, at night he had other dreams. “I hate your love,” he
once shouted at Murry, “I hate it. You’re an obscene bug,
sucking my life away.”
Life was daily to be started in a new spirit. Lawrence
would found a colony, Rananim. Bertrand Russell could be
president. In Florida. In, perhaps, New Mexico. On the
Marquesas. It would be a place “apart from civilization”
where he’d have a few other people by him “who are also
at peace and happy, and live, and understand,” and where
he’d “be free.” Free. With Mansfield, with Murry and

217
 William H. Gass

Frieda and Brett, with Campbell, the Cannans, Koteliansky,

and Gertler . . . peaceful, happy, kindred spirits all.
If he could only live in his dream. And it seemed so rea¬
sonable. He asked only to be free, free of himself, free and
proud, a man. Then, and only then, would his agony be
ended, Lawrence would enter his nature, enter into a nature
in a way no animal had to, for no animal was separate from
itself in this fashion, no animal had to knock on the door of
its being and ask for entrance, no animal had, malformed,
alone, to struggle toward itself. Even a rose, moving out
from its stem and flowering finally, did it all easily, thought¬
lessly, according to harmonious law. Oh, to be shed of this
Protestant skin, this shame, this hesitation, these many weak¬
nesses, these phallic inadequacies!
Lawrence among the flowers and the animals: how free
he felt, how accepted, how alive—until he returned to
Frieda, who stood in the doorway, absorbing the light. Be¬
hind her: publishers, reviewers, judges, critics, Bloomsbury.
When the rabbit wrinkled its nose it was wondrous; when
Lytton did it, it was not. This human world attacked him,
robbed him of his manhood, reminded him constantly of his
background, his social origins, his shortcomings, his inability
to reason off the cuff. Consumed with rage—impotent rage
—he felt himself superior yet cut down, a genius made a
fool of, a prophet mocked, while St. Mawr burned like a
jewel in his paddock, and the stars burned in the skies like
the eyes of wild animals. Meanwhile Lawrence burned with
fever, his soul consumed itself, his body wasted, and the only
place it was cool was in the sun, in the rarer airs, in the
burned dryness of the desert. Rejected by publishers and
the public, harried out of Cornwall like a spy, sick, he writes
an utterly hateful note to Katherine Mansfield: “I loathe
you. You revolt me stewing in your consumption. . . . The

218
 From Some Ashes No Bird Rises

Italians were quite right to have nothing to do with you.”

From some ashes no bird rises.
This restless, articulate, flashing, impassioned man mistook
taciturn, slow-spoken, stupid, selfish, stubbornly absorbed,
immovable types—tenders of horses, gamekeepers, Indians
(the one in “St. Mawr” is called Phoenix)—the touch-me-
nots, those who seldom “came to women,” who held them¬
selves aloof or lived alone like the wooden heroes of the
West, in whom there seemed to remain something wild and
untamed as their origins or surroundings were—he mistook
these for the true Males of Nature, representatives of (may
some god aid us!) the “twilit Pan.” Earlier, before he’d
begun to think of himself as the Nottingham Indian, he car¬
ried on, with the farmer, a similar romance. For example,
in The Rainbow. Incredibly (unless we understand the myth
he’d thrown up like a barricade), what he admired were
amputees; but Lawrence could not—he dared not—see the
missing member.
So while the public Lawrence cooked, and cleaned, and
kept house, and was sweet and gentle with the sick, and
leaned against women, and railed against them like a woman,
too, and fought with his tongue and threw crockery (and
was cracked in the head from behind once by Frieda—with
a plate), and was mean and cruel as a squaw in a home where
harpy often flew at harpy; the private Lawrence knew his
acts were passive, his love was passive, his rages, too, were
passive, and he hated his life, and regarded it as essentially
unmanly, a life lived at low wick.

“. . . there is no real truth in ecstasy,” he informed

Gordon Campbell. “Ecstasy achieves itself by virtue
of exclusion; and in making any passionate ex¬
clusion, one has already put one’s right hand in the
hand of the lie.”

219
 William H. Gass

But Lawrence’s life was built on passionate exclusion, and

every book was a battle, vast lines of good and evil rushing
pell-mell at one another . . . fanatics of the single sword.
And this is the Lawrence we are asked to admire, Lawrence
the warrior, the champion of sexual apartheid. Well, minds
with sore teeth prefer their foods soft boiled. Certainly, it
is no service to an author to admire him for his moments of
disaster. Driven by his demons to write about sex, he was
prevented by the animosity among them to write well about
it; for when Lawrence wishes to render these feelings, he
turns to an abstract, incantational shorthand, often full of
biblical overtones and antique simplicities, phrases which
are used like formulas, reiterated until they become meaning¬
less: hearts grow bitter and black and cold, souls melt or
swoon, bodies freeze or burn, people are rapt or blind, they
utter strange cries, their feelings ebb and flow (much, in¬
deed, is watery), they are rigid or languorous, they “go
mad with voluptuous delight,” they overmaster or submit,
bowels move poignantly (with sentiment enough to fertilize
the earth), and their eyes sing, laugh, dance, stab, harden,
burn, flash, seize, subside, cool, dim, and die. One lust could
do for another, angers are peas, nothing is clearly envisaged,
nothing is precise, and we pass through them soon in a daze.
Yet when Lawrence felt he could, go unprotected, when
he allowed things, landscapes, people, to enter him, when he
didn’t befog them first with his own dark dreams, but took
his feeling naked through his eyes, alert in all his senses as
an animal, then there was no greater sensualist, no more
vital, free, and complete a man, no more loyal and tender a
lover. How remarkably he renders the rabbit, “Adolf,” or
the dog, “Rex”; how perfectly, in a few pages, he puts “The
Miner at Home” before us; while books like Sea and Sar-

220
 From Some Ashes No Bird Rises

dinia are perfect miracles of living form and sensuous

language.
Even at his best, though, his mind is held back, for the
mind is memory and argument, the mind is self-awareness,
the mind is guilt, and the mind is that which looks down
when you are crossing a high place; it puts all in confusion,
doubt; and many of his essays reprinted in the Phoenix are
efforts made by his feelings to harness reason, to make it
serve him, and then he takes nothing in, sees nothing but
himself. There is no landscape, there are no hills, no stones;
there are only sermons, defenses, wailing, and gnashing of
teeth, only enemies, and agony of spirit, whittling him,
paring him, cutting him down. Lawrence was right, there
was a lover living in him, a great one, an ubermensch, a
celebrator of life, a healthy soul; but there was also Lawrence
the weasel, the little frightened mama boy, the death seeker,
the denier, the sick and terribly weak one, opening his coat
to flourish before us a phallus in the form of a flower.
Still, life was daily to be started in a new spirit. Letters,
essays, bubbled by his fist. Tolstoi has wet on the flame of
life! A new spirit ... a rabbit held trembling in the hand
of his father. Men must have the courage to draw near
women, expose themselves. Lawrence grew a beard: “behind
which I shall take as much cover henceforth as I can, like
a creature under a bush.” So to found Rananim. “I shall die
of a foul inward poison.” The rabbit’s white tail, as it flees,
is a flag of spiteful derision. Merde, it says: merde! merde!
merde! A new spirit ... “I curse England, I curse the Eng¬
lish, man, woman, and child, in their nationality let them
be accursed and hated and never forgiven.”

From such ashes no bird rises.

221
PART FOUR
 THE CASE OF THE
OBLIGING STRANGER

l magine I approach a stranger

on the street and say to him, “If you please, sir, I desire
to perform an experiment with your aid.” The stranger
is obliging, and I lead him away. In a dark place con¬
veniently by, I strike his head with the broad of an ax
and cart him home. I place him, buttered and trussed, in an
ample electric oven. The thermostat reads 450° F. There¬
upon I go off to play poker with friends and forget all
about the obliging stranger in the stove. When I return, I
realize I have overbaked my specimen, and the experiment,
alas, is ruined.
Something has been done wrong. Or something wrong
has been done.
Any ethic that does not roundly condemn my action is
vicious. It is interesting that none is vicious for this reason.
It is also interesting that no more convincing refutation of
any ethic could be given than by showing that it approved
of my baking the obliging stranger.

225
 William H. Gass

This is really all I have to say, but I shall not stop on

that account. Indeed, I shall begin again.

The geometer cannot demonstrate that a line is beautiful.

The beauty of lines is not his concern. We do not chide him
when he fails to observe uprightness in his verticals, when
he discovers no passions between sinuosities. We would not
judge it otherwise than foolish to berate him for neglecting
to employ the methods successful in biology or botany
merely because those methods dealt fairly with lichens and
fishes. Nor do we despair of him because he cannot give us
reasons for doing geometry which will equally well justify
our drilling holes in teeth. There is a limit, as Aristotle said,
to the questions which we may sensibly put to each man of
science; and however much we may desire to find unity in
the purposes, methods, and results of every fruitful sort of
inquiry, we must not allow that desire to make mush of their
necessary differences.
Historically, with respect to the fundamental problems of
ethics, this limit has not been observed. Moreover, the
analogy between mathematics and morals, or between the
methods of empirical science and the good life, has always
been unfairly one-sided. Geometers never counsel their lines
to be moral, but moralists advise men to be like lines and
go straight. There are triangles of lovers, but no triangles in
love. And who says the organism is a state?
For it is true that the customary methods for solving moral
problems are the methods which have won honors by leap¬
ing mathematical hurdles on the one hand or scientific and
physical ones on the other: the intuitive and deductive

226
 The Case of the Obliging Stranger

method and the empirical and inductive one. Nobody seems

to have minded very much that the moral hurdle has dunked
them both in the pool beyond the wall, for they can pri¬
vately laugh at each other for fools, and together they can
exclaim how frightfully hard is the course.
The difficulty for the mathematical method is the discov¬
ery of indubitable moral first premises which do not them¬
selves rest on any inductive foundation and which are still
applicable to the complicated tissue of factors that make up
moral behavior. The result is that the premises are usually
drawn from metaphysical speculations having no intimate
relation to moral issues or from rational or mystical revela¬
tions which only the intuiter and his followers are willing
to credit. For the purposes of deduction, the premises have
to be so broad and, to satisfy intuition, so categorically cer¬
tain that they become too thin for touch and too heavy for
bearing. All negative instances are pruned as unreal or para¬
sitic. Consequently, the truth of the ultimate premises is
constantly called into question by those who have intuited
differently or have men and actions in mind that they want
to call good and right but cannot.
Empirical solutions, so runs the common complaint, lop
off the normative branch altogether and make ethics a
matter of expediency, taste, or conformity to the moral
etiquette of the time. One is told what people do, not what
they ought to do; and those philosophers who still wish to
know what people ought to do are told, by some of the
more uncompromising, that they can have no help from
empiricism and are asking a silly question. Philosophers,
otherwise empiricists, who admit that moral ends lie beyond
the reach of factual debate turn to moral sentiment or some
other bonum ex machina, thus generously embracing the
perplexities of both methods.

22~J
 William H. Gass

Questions to which investigators return again and again

without success are very likely improperly framed. It is im¬
portant to observe that the ethical question put so directly
as “What is good?” or “What is right?”1 aims in its answer
not, as one might immediately suppose, at a catalog of the
world’s good, right things. The moralist is not asking for a
list of sheep and goats. The case of the obliging stranger is
a case of immoral action, but this admission is not an answer,
even partially, to the question “What is wrong?”
Furthermore, the ethical question is distressingly short.
“Big” questions, it would seem, ought to be themselves big,
but they almost never are; and they tend to grow big simply
by becoming short—too short, in fact, ever to receive an
answer. I might address, to any ear that should hear me, the
rather less profound-sounding, but nonetheless similar
question “Who won?” or perhaps the snappier “What’s a
winner?” I should have to ask this question often because,
if I were critical, I should never find an answer that would
suit me; while at the same time there would be a remarkable
lot of answers that suited a remarkable lot of people. The
more answers I had-—the more occasions on which I asked
the question—the more difficult, the more important, the
more “big” the question would become.
If the moralist does not want to hear such words as “Sam¬
son,” “money,” or “brains,” when he asks his question, “What
is good?” what does he want to hear? He wants to hear a
word like “power.” He wants to know what is good in the

1 The order in which these questions are asked depends on one’s

view of the logical priority of moral predicates. I shall not discriminate
among them since I intend my remarks to be indiscriminate.

228
 The Case of the Obliging Stranger

things that are good that makes them good. It should be

perfectly clear it is not the things themselves that he thinks
good or bad but the qualities they possess, the relations they
enter into, or the consequences they produce. Even an in-
tuitionist, who claims to perceive goodness directly, perceives
a property of things when he perceives goodness, and not
any thing, except incidentally. The wrong done the obliging
stranger was not the act of cooking him but was something
belonging to the act in some one of many possible ways. It
is not I who am evil (if I am not mad) but something which
I have that is; and while, of course, I may be adjudged
wicked for having whatever it is I have that’s bad, it is only
because I have it that I am wicked—as if I owned a vicious
and unruly dog.
I think that so long as I look on my act in this way, I
wrong the obliging stranger a second time.
The moralist, then, is looking for the ingredient that per¬
fects or spoils the stew. He wants to hear the word “power.”
He wants to know what is good in what is good that makes
it good; and the whole wretched difficulty is that one is
forced to reply either that what is good in what is good
makes the good in what is good good, or that it is, in fact,
made good by things which are not in the least good at all.
So the next question, which is always “And why is power
good?” is answered by saying that it is good because it is
power and power is good; or it is put off by the promise
that power leads to things worth much; or it is shrugged
aside with the exclamation, “Well, that’s life!” This last is
usually accompanied by an exhortation not to oppose the
inevitable course of nature.
You cannot ask questions forever. Sooner or later the
questioning process is brought up short by statements of an
apparently dogmatic sort. Pleasure is sought for pleasure’s

229
 William H. Gass

sake. The principle of utility is susceptible of no demonstra¬

tion. Every act and every inquiry aims at well-being. The
non-natural property of goodness fastens itself to its object
and will remain there whatever world the present world may
madly become. Frustrated desires give rise to problems, and
problems are bad. We confer the title of The Good upon
our natural necessities.
I fail to see why, if one is going to call a halt in this way,
the halt cannot be called early, and the evident, the obvious,
the axiomatic, the indemonstrable, the intrinsic, or whatever
one wants to name it, be deemed those clear cases of moral
goodness, badness, obligation, or wrong which no theory
can cloud, and for which men are prepared to fight to the
last ditch. For if someone asks me, now I am repentant,
why I regard my act of baking the obliging stranger as
wrong, what can I do but point again to the circumstances
comprising the act? “Well, I put this fellow in an oven, you
see. The oven was on, don’t you know.” And if my ques¬
tioner persists, saying, “Of course, I know all about that;
but what I want to know is, why is that wrong?” I should
recognize there is no use in replying that it is wrong because
of the kind of act it is, a wrong one, for my questioner is
clearly suffering from a sort of folie de doute morale which
forbids him to accept any final answer this early in the
game, although he will have to accept precisely the same
kind of answer at some time or other.
Presumably there is some advantage in postponing the
stop, and this advantage lies in the explanatory power of
the higher-level answer. It cannot be that my baking the
stranger is wrong for no reason at all. It would then be
inexplicable. I do not think this is so, however. It is not
inexplicable; it is transparent. Furthermore, the feelings of
elucidation, of greater insight or knowledge, is a feeling

230
 The Case of the Obliging Stranger

only. It results, I suspect, from the satisfaction one takes in

having an open mind. The explanatory factor is always more
inscrutable than the event it explains. The same questions
can be asked of it as were asked of the original occasion. It
is either found in the situation and brought forward to ac¬
count for all, as one might advance pain, in this case, out of
the roaster; or it resides there mysteriously, like an essence,
the witch in the oven; or it hovers, like a coil of smoke, as
hovers the greatest unhappiness of the greatest number.
But how ludicrous are the moralist’s “reasons” for con¬
demning my baking the obliging stranger. They sound
queerly unfamiliar and out of place. This is partly because
they intrude where one expects to find denunciation only
and because it is true they are seldom if ever used. But their
strangeness is largely due to the humor in them.
Consider:

My act produced more pain than pleasure.

Baking this fellow did not serve the greatest good to
the greatest number.
I acted wrongly because I could not consistently will
that the maxim of my action become a universal law.
God forbade me, but I paid no heed.
Anyone can apprehend the property of wrongness
sticking plainly to the whole affair.
Decent men remark it and are moved to tears.

But I should say that my act was wrong even if my

stranger were tickled into laughter while he cooked (though
the absence of pain would change the nature of the case);
or even if his baking did the utmost good it could; or if, in
spite of all, I could consistently will that whatever maxim
I might have had might become a universal law; or even if
God had spoken from a bush to me: “Thou shalt!” How

231
 William H. Gass

redundant the property of wrongness, as if one needed that,

in such a case! And would the act be right if the whole
world howled its glee? Moralists can say, with conviction,
that the act is wrong; but none can show it.
Such cases, like that of the obliging stranger, are cases
I call clear. They have the characteristic of moral trans¬
parency, and they comprise the core of our moral experi¬
ence. When we try to explain why they are instances of
good or bad, of right or wrong, we sound comic, as anyone
does who gives elaborate reasons for the obvious, especially
when these reasons are so shamefaced before reality, so mis¬
erably beside the point. What we must explain is not why
these cases have the moral nature they have, for that needs
no explaining, but why they are so clear. It is an interesting
situation: any moralist will throw over his theory if it re¬
verses the decision on cases like the obliging stranger’s. The
most persuasive criticism of any ethical system has always
been the demonstration, on the critic’s part, that the system
countenances moral absurdities, despite the fact that, in the
light of the whole theoretical enterprise, such criticisms beg
the question. Although the philosopher who is caught by a
criticism of this sort may protest its circularity or even
manfully swallow the dreadful conclusion, his system has
been scotched, if it has not been killed.
Not all cases are clear. But the moralist will furrow his
brow before even this one. He will pursue principles which
do not apply. He does not believe in clear cases. He refuses
to believe in clear cases. Why?

His disbelief is an absolute presupposition with him. It is

a part of his methodological commitments and a part of his
 The Case of the Obliging Stranger

notion of profundity and of the nature of philosophy. It is

a consequence of his fear of being arbitrary. So he will put
the question bravely to the clear cases, even though no state
of fact but only his state of mind brings the question up,
and even though putting the question, revealing the doubt,
destroys immediately the validity of any answer he has
posed the question to announce.
Three children are killed by a drunken driver. A family
perishes in a sudden fire. Crowded bleachers collapse. Who
is puzzled, asking why these things are terrible, why these
things are wrong? When is such a question asked? It is asked
when the case is not clear, when one is in doubt about it.
“Those impious creatures! ... At the movies . . . today,
. . . which is the Lord’s!” Is that so bad? Is being impious,
even, so bad? I do not know. It is unclear, so I ask why. Or
I disagree to pick a quarrel. Or I am a philosopher whose
business it is to be puzzled. But do I imagine there is nothing
the matter when three children are run over by drunken¬
ness, or when a family goes up in smoke, or when there is a
flattening of people under timbers under people? There is
no lack of clarity here, there is only the philosopher: patient,
persistent as the dung beetle, pushing his “whys” up his
hillocks with his nose. His doubts are never of the present
case. They are always general. They are doubts in legion,
regiment, and principle.
The obliging stranger is overbaked. I wonder whether this
is bad or not. I ask about it. Presumably there is a reason
for my wonderment. What is it? Well, of course there is not
any reason that is a reason about the obliging stranger.
There is only a reason because I am a fallibilist, or because
one must not be arbitrary, or because all certainties in par¬
ticular cases are certain only when deduced from greater,
grander certainties. The reason I advance may be advanced
upon itself. The entire moral structure tumbles at once. It
 William H. Gass

is a test of the clarity of cases that objections to them are

objections in principle; that the principle applies as well to
all cases as to any one; and that these reasons for doubt de¬
vour themselves with equal right and the same appetite.
That is why the moralist is really prepared to fight for the
clear cases to the last ditch; why, when he questions them,
he does so to display his philosophical breeding, because it
is good form: he knows that if these cases are not clear, none
are, and if none are, the game is up.
If there are clear cases, and if every moralist, at bottom,
behaves as if there were, why does he still, at the top, behave
as if there were none?

He may do so because he is an empiricist practicing induc¬

tion. He believes, with Peirce, that “the inductive method
springs directly out of dissatisfaction with existing knowl¬
edge.” To get more knowledge he must become dissatisfied
with what he has, all of it, by and large, often for no reason
whatever. Our knowledge is limited, and what we do know,
we know inexactly. In the sphere of morals the moralist has
discovered how difficult it is to proceed from facts to values,
and although he has not given up, his difficulties persuade
him not that no one knows but that no one can be sure.
Do we not frequently find him, even when he is swimming
in his own pool, doubting the wetness of the water, the buoy¬
ancy of his own body, the presence of his bathing suit? He
is not sure I am writing these words now, and believes I
should be equally skeptical. Perhaps I am dreaming? per¬
haps I am drunk? perhaps I am under hypnosis or suffering
from theology? And perhaps he is bathing in the belly of a
whale.

234
 The Case of the Obliging Stranger

Above all, the empiricist has a hatred of certainty. His

reasons are not entirely methodological. Most are political:
certainty is evil; it is dictatorial; it is undemocratic; all cases
should be scrutinized equally; there should be no favoritism;
the philosopher is fearless. “Thought looks into the pit of
hell and is not afraid.”
The moralist may behave as if there were no clear cases
because he is a rationalist practicing deduction. He knows
all about the infinite regress. He is familiar with the un¬
questioned status of first principles. He is beguiled by the
precision, rigor, and unarguable moves of logical demon¬
stration. Moreover, he is such an accomplished doubter of
the significance of sensation that he has persuaded the em¬
piricist also to doubt that significance. He regards the em¬
piricist as a crass, anti-intellectual booby, a smuggler where
he is not an honest skeptic, since no fact, or set of facts, will
account for the value we place on the obliging stranger un¬
less we are satisfied to recount again the precise nature of
the case.
The rationalist is a man in love, not with particular men
or women, not with things, but with principles, ideas, webs
of reasoning; and if he rushes to the aid of his neighbor, it is
not because he loves his neighbor, but because he loves
God’s law about it. He treats his children justly, as blind
to them as persons as the statue—even, but empty, handed.
He has a military mind, and he obeys.
Suppose our case concerned toads. And suppose we were
asking of the toads, “Why? Why are you toads?” They
would be unable to reply, being toads. How far should we
get in answering our own question if we were never sure
of any particular toad that he was one? How far should we
get with our deductions if we were going to deduce one
from self-evident toadyisms? What is self-evident about
toads except that some are toads? And if we had a toad be-

235
 William H. Gass

fore us, and we were about to investigate him, and someone

doubted that we had a toad before us, we could only say our
creature was tailless and clumsy and yellow-green and made
warts. So if someone still wanted to doubt our toad, he
would have to change the definition of “toad,” and someone
might want to do that; but who wants to change our under¬
standing of the word “immoral” so that the baking of the
obliging stranger is not to be called immoral?
The empiricist is right: the deductive ethic rests upon
arbitrary postulation. The rationalist is right: the inductive
ethic does not exist; or worse, it consists of arbitrary values
disguised as facts. Both are guilty of the most elaborate and
flagrant rationalizations. Both know precisely what it is they
wish to save. Neither is going to be surprised in the least
by what turns out to be good or bad. They are asking of
their methods answers that their methods cannot give.

It is confusion which gives rise to doubt. What about the

unclear cases? I shall be satisfied to show that there are clear
ones, but the unclear ones are more interesting, and there
are more of them. How do we decide about blue laws, sup¬
posing that there is nothing to decide about the obliging
stranger except how to prevent the occurrence from hap¬
pening again? How do we arbitrate conflicts of duty where
each duty, even, may be clear? What of principles, after all?
Are there none? Are they not used by people? Well, they
talk about them more than they use them, but they use them
a little—often to hide behind, like the bureaucrat does, or
that just father I mentioned.
I should like to try to answer these questions another

236
 The Case of the Obliging Stranger

time. I can only indicate, quite briefly, the form these an¬
swers will take.
I think we decide cases where there is some doubt by
stating what it is about them that puzzles us. We hunt for
more facts, hoping that the case will clear:
“She left her husband with a broken hand and took the
children.”
“She did! the ungrateful bitch!”
“He broke his hand hammering her head.”
“Dear me, how distressing, but after all what’s one time?”
“He beat her every Thursday after tea and she finally
couldn’t stand it any longer.”
“Ah, of course. But the poor children.”
“He beat them, too. On Fridays. And on Saturday he
beat the dog.”
“My, my—such a terrible man. And was there no other
way?”
“The court would grant her no injunction.”
“Why not?”
“Judge Bridlegoose is a fool.”
“Ah, of course, poor thing, she did right, no doubt about
it. Except—why didn’t she also take the dog?”
If more facts do not clear the case, we redescribe it, em¬
phasizing first this fact and then that until it is clear, or
until we have several clear versions of the original muddle.
Many ethical disputes are due to the possession, by the con¬
tending parties, of different accounts of the same occasion,
all satisfactorily clear, and this circumstance gives the dis¬
putants a deep feeling for the undoubted rightness of each
of their versions. Such disputes are particularly acrimonious,
and they cannot be settled until an agreement is reached
about the true description of the case.
And I don’t like descriptions which embarrass me morally.

231
 William H. Gass

Do you? So I’m inclined to resist them. Naturally I want

the facts to support me, my ego, and its interests.
There are, of course, conflicts of duty which are per¬
fectly clear. I have promised to meet you at four to bowl,
but when four arrives I am busy rescuing a baby from the
jaws of a Bengal tiger and cannot come. Unclear conflicts
we try to clarify. And it sometimes happens that the tug of
obligations is so equal as to provide no reasonable solution.
If some cases are clear, others are undecidable, and moral
tragedies can ensnare the most righteous.
It is perfectly true that principles are employed in moral
decisions—popular principles, I mean, like the golden rule
and the laws of God. Principles really obscure matters as
often as they clear them. They are generally flags and slo¬
gans to which the individual is greatly attached. Attack the
principle and you attack the owner: his good name, his repu¬
tation, his sense of righteousness. Love me, love my maxims.
People have been wrongly persuaded that principles decide
cases and that a principle which fails in one case fails in all.
So principles are usually vehicles for especially powerful
feelings and frequently get in the way of good sense. We
have all observed the angry arguer who grasps the nettle
of absurdity to justify his bragging about the toughness of
his skin.
Distances are great, human affairs can be complex, essen¬
tial data may be missing. We cannot argue every case on
its merits. Most of our lives we are morally in the dark, yet,
because we must move about, we like to act as if we had
invented light. Love, for instance, is meaningless apart from
those small communities which make a constant, close com¬
munication possible. Where we cannot offer love, we’ve at
least justice. So we resort to abstractions, to the rule of law,
to the ideal of equality, and notions of fair play and benevo-

238
 The Case of the Obliging Stranger

lence. Principles may be makeshifts; they may be, in the

facile, empty grandeur of their claims, even lies; but our
duty to those we do not know: how else can we conceive
it except through ardent generalities?
I should regard useful principles as summaries of what
may be present generally in clear cases, as for instance: cases
where pain is present are more often adjudged bad than not.
We might, if the reverse were true for pleasure, express our
principle briefly in hedonistic terms: pleasure is the good.
But there may be lots of principles of this sort, as there may
be lots of rather common factors in clear cases. Principles
state more or less prevalent identifying marks, as cardinals
usually nest in low trees, although there is nothing to pre¬
vent them from nesting elsewhere, and the location of the
nest is not the essence of the bird. When I appeal to a
principle, then, the meaning of my appeal consists of the
fact that before me is a case about which I can reach no
direct decision; of the fact that the principle I invoke is
relevant, since not every principle is (the laws of God do
not cover everything, for instance). In this way I affirm
my loyalty to those clear cases the principle so roughly
summarizes and express my desire to remain consistent with
them.

Insofar as present moral theories have any relevance to

our experience, they are elaborate systems designed to pro¬
tect the certainty of the moralist’s last-ditch data. Although
he may imagine he is gathering his principles from the pur¬
est vapors of the mind, the moralist will in fact be prepared
to announce as such serenities only those which support his
 William H. Gass

most cherished goods. And if he is not careful to do just

this, he will risk being charged with irrelevancy by those
who will employ the emptiness and generality of his prin¬
ciples to demonstrate the value of trivialities: as for example,
the criticism of the categorical imperative that claims one
can universally will all teeth be brushed with powder in
the morning, and so on in like manner.
Ethics, I wish to say, is about something, and in the rush
to establish principles, to elicit distinctions from a recalci¬
trant language, and to discover “laws,” those lovely things
and honored people, those vile seducers and ruddy villains
our principles and laws are supposed to be based upon and
our ethical theories to be about are overlooked and for¬
gotten.

Postscript

Esthetics is in an analogous fix. If anything, its fix is worse.

Philosophers distrust the subject. It has always been a
stepchild, a kind of after-error, offspring of the menopause.
Metaphysicians have swept it up with the rest of the dust,
and nowhere can you find better examples of ignorance and
arrogance cooperating against a subject than in many of
their writings about art. Landscape gardening is a higher
form of art than architecture, Schopenhauer says. Animal
training is even more expressive. There is no end.
They distrust the subject, not themselves. Everyone has
seen a painting. And no one imagines they lack the requisite
sensitivity, any more than they fancy themselves without a
sense of humor.
From an account of my baking the obliging stranger, any
reader can soon form an opinion of the ethical value of the

240
 The Case of the Obliging Stranger

act reported. From a comparable description of the David

or Desire Under the Elms, nothing about the artistic worth
of these works can rightfully be concluded. Our knowledge
of other things by the same artist, and our acquaintance
with present efforts of the same kind, often allows us to make
reasonable predictions, but such judgments rest on externals,
and are clearly not judgments of the work itself.
It is certainly not the function of esthetics, or even of
criticism, to inform us once again that King Lear is a great
play. King Lear's greatness is clear—clear as the case of the
obliging stranger. Nor can we get anywhere by deriving,
from Shakespeare’s practice, principles of judgment or
rules of composition. Neither keeping the unities nor dis¬
solving them is of any use, nor is loyalty to symmetry,
harmony, balance, or coherence. A consistent image can be
dull, and an inconsistent one both noble and exciting. You
have to taste to tell.
In the search for beauty-making properties, it is not sur¬
prising that the philosopher has most frequently found them
living elsewhere, at strange addresses, and under assumed
names—names like “knowledge” and “salvation.” It is not
merely that the esthetician doubts the existence of clear
cases; he doubts the existence of esthetics. The enjoyment
of beauty simply as beauty is an intolerable frivolity. And
in a world of function, purpose, and utility—this world of
the drone, the queen bee, and the hive—so it is. So it is.

241
 RUSSELL’S MEMOIRS

G -1 hostly, like a slow sea

fog, religious doubts and vague metaphysical disquiets began
to darken Bertrand Russell’s mind, and when, at eighteen, he
read a refutation of the First Cause Argument in Mill’s Auto¬
biography , he became an atheist. He was somewhat puritan¬
ical and priggish in his views, but a day of constant kissing
altered that. His first wife, Alys, intellectually freer about
sex than Russell was, emotionally had the same beastly Vic¬
torian attitudes. In their relationship, she’d decided intimacy
would, by preference, be rare. “I did not argue the matter,”
Russell says, adding smugly, “and I did not find it necessary
to do so.” Happy in his marriage, Russell had been leading a
calm and superficial life: an imperialist in politics, an empir¬
icist in philosophy, he had scrubbed his mind through mathe¬
matics until its surface shone with analytical clarity. One
day a witness to the agonies of an attack of angina in Mrs.
Whitehead, he changes again, this time going further, faster
(in five minutes), and concluding that “the loneliness of the

242
 RusseIPs Memoirs

human soul is unendurable,” that only intense love can “pene¬

trate it, that “whatever does not spring from this motive
is harmful,” that consequently “war is wrong,” public school
education “abominable,” the use of force as well, and “that
in human relations one should penetrate to the core of lone¬
liness in each person and speak to that.” Not commonplace
sentiments then, as inferences they were even more remark¬
able; but logic’s hold on Russell has always been precarious.
Happy and superficial: these are constantly conjoined in
Russell’s life; only pain and controversy give his mind its
weight; only then does it sink out of sight in the loneliness
he speaks of. Is it, for all of us, the same? Once, bestriding
his bike, he realized he no longer loved his wife. A grave,
tumultuous insight suddenly possesses the rider of the ma¬
chine. Of course he finds his reasons, but the page is plainer
than he is. Over the years he had floated to the surface of
Alys; he could no longer penetrate her; and no longer touch¬
ing bottom there, he could not confront more than the fore¬
head of himself either. For renewal, Russell needed another
love affair. The rider would like to be running, feeling his
own feet lifting him forward as he had, in the depths of his
love, once before.
The first volume of Russell’s Autobiography, from which
these incidents have been taken, shows him to be a man of
fairly shallow calculation, cold, and capable of the cruelty
of indifference, using his mind as a weapon and a cover; but
it shows him also periodically and quite irrationally shaken
by instinct and impulse, warm and generous sometimes,
noble and fine, or charmingly foolish. Gradually, through¬
out this brilliant second volume,1 we see these hidden forces,
appearing in his life in bursts, move his heart to the right

1 The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914-1944 (Boston: Atlan¬

tic/Little, Brown, 1968).
 William H. Gass

place, allowing him to speak for peace and gentleness and

love—often eloquently, with force, and at great personal
sacrifice; but we see, too, that he hasn’t yet ceased to simplify,
to reduce, as though the weight of experience were mostly
fatty excess to be sweated away by a series of vigorous men¬
tal exercises. His feelings may run deep, but his view of life
remains naive, and he is constantly surprised, sometimes des¬
perately disappointed, driven to the edge of suicide.
Whitehead once complained of some of Russell’s prelim¬
inary work for Principia Mathematica that “Everything . . .
has been sacrificed to making proofs both short and neat.”
In youth, for a period, a materialist, he nevertheless found
consciousness an irreducible datum; still, as this second vol¬
ume shows, he has continued to feel his self, his inward
person, to be like a ghost in some alien, indifferent, Cartesian
machine. To touch. To be touched! But you cannot touch
a ghost, nor can a ghost touch. Ghost. Over and over, un¬
consciously, he uses this word to describe himself, both in
his present account and in the letters he wrote at the time.
And the God he seeks vainly for is also a ghost, as is the
love he needs.
Russell is forty-two when this volume begins, and a well-
known philosopher, yet he is astonished to find that most
people are delighted at the prospect of war. He had, he says,
to revise his views on human nature; but he merely swings
from one facility to another, and blithely compares his sim¬
plistic views with Freud’s. He dreads failure, and has an
unwholesome tendency to recant. Even D. H. Lawrence’s
furious, sick, sadistic, Fascist rant derails him momentarily;
for passion appeals to him, as does Lawrence’s cult of the
deep core. Russell throws off this illness, although from it,
slowly, he learns a little more. He honestly wants to be an
impulsive man. We find him planning to be impulsive, and
 Russell's Memoirs

congratulating himself afterward for acting in the moment,

heedless of consequence, as he does so often in his love affairs.
This leads him to mistake the suddenness of his thoughts
sometimes for cachets of their truth, though his intellect in¬
sists upon a thorough investigation.
Still, he never is able to commit his mind to social issues
with the rigor and severity he allows it in logic and episte¬
mology. There is not a little, in Russell, of the scholar’s wist¬
ful love of power (“Power over people’s minds is the main
personal desire of my life . . .”), as if, through social action,
he could finally penetrate others, materialize his ghost.
Throughout the First World War he carries his pacifism
bravely, and there is a fine account of his imprisonment for
it. There are also excellent descriptions of his trips to Russia
(which he hated) and China (which he loved). With Dora
Black, his second wife, he founds an experimental school for
children. It swallows much of his money, while thought and
theory, like bubbles of air, carry him soon from its depths,
as he is carried gradually from Dora’s, too. The freedom he
wishes to give his pupils, as well as the freedom he wishes
to give his wife, both have to be modified, the one in the
practice, the other in the hope. “Anybody else could have
told me this in advance, but I was blinded by theory.” The
Nazis then give his pacifism too stiff a test. Nonviolent re¬
sistance, he decides, “depends upon the existence of certain
virtues in those against whom it is employed.” This volume
concludes with an account of his trip to the United States
with his third wife, Patricia Spence, his teaching and writing
here, and especially the (for us) shameful contretemps con¬
cerning his appointment at City College.
Clear, incisive, frequently witty, as honest as his inner
check and the law will allow, Russell has written the history
of an emblematic life: exemplary in its devotion to both

H5
 William H. Gass

emotion and truth, triumphant in its dedication to our free¬

dom to decently pursue them, and symptomatic of the con¬
sequences of their separation in its sometimes painful failures.

246
 A MEMORY OF A MASTER

1 rofessor Gregory Vlastos had

completed his paper on Reinhold Niebuhr. The paper was
excellent but the discussion had swallowed itself as such
things sometimes do (one was only inclined to cough), and
even the effort to be brilliant at someone’s expense seemed
no longer worth the trouble, when the funny, shabby man
began speaking. At least he seemed shabby, though I re¬
member giving him small notice at first. Old, unsteady,
queerly dressed, out of date, uncomfortable in space, he
struck me as some atheistical, vegetarian nut who’d some¬
how found his way to this meeting of the Cornell Philosophy
Club and would, at any moment, heatedly, endlessly, sup¬
port and denounce with wild irrelevance whatever simple,
single thought was burning him up. But he’d been silent
and I’d forgotten about him. Now he spoke, clearly yet
haltingly, with intolerable slowness, with a kind of deep
stammer involving not mere sounds or words but yards
of discourse, long swatches of inference; and since these
 William H. Gass

sentence lengths, though delivered forcefully, indeed with

an intensity which was as extraordinary as it was quiet,
were always cut short suddenly—in midphrase, madden¬
ingly incomplete—and then begun again, what you heard
was something like a great pianist at practice: not a piece of
music, but the very acts which went into making that per¬
formance.
Thus in this sudden, silly way began what was to be the
most important intellectual experience of my life, yet it was
an experience almost wholly without content, for it was
very plainly not just what the old man said that was so
moving, it was almost entirely the way in which he said it,
the total naked absorption of the mind in its problem, the
tried-out words suspended for inspection, the unceasingly
pitiless evaluation they were given, the temporarily tri¬
umphant going forward, the doubt, despair, the cruel recog¬
nition of failure, the glorious giving of solutions by
something from somewhere, the insistent rebeginning, as
though no one, not even the speaker, had ever been there.
Without cant, without jargon, and in terms of examples,
this abstract mind went concretely forward; and is it any
wonder that he felt impatient with twaddle and any em¬
phasis on showy finish, with glibness, with quickness, with
polish and shine, with all propositions whose hems were
carefully the right length, with all those philosophies which
lean on one another, like one in a stupor leans against a bar?
No wonder he was so jealous of his thoughts, no wonder
he so entirely hated those who seized on his results without
the necessary labors, as one might who’d sacrificed himself
for summits only to await there the handclasps of those who
had alighted from helicopters he’d designed; for he felt
philosophy to be an activity, this very activity he was enter¬
ing on before us, exactly as Valery had felt concerning the

248
 A Memory of a Master

creation of poetry, where every word allowed to remain

in a line represented a series of acts of the poet, of proposals
and withdrawals which, in agony, at last, issued in this one,
and how no one word was final, how the work was never
over, never done, but only, in grief, abandoned as it some¬
times had to be, and so, in the manner of the poet, each line
of thought was a fresh line, each old problem no older than
the sonnet, invented today, to be conquered again for the
first time, never mind if you’ve written a thousand; and a
murmur ran round the seminar table, heads turned toward
Malcolm, his student, who’d brought him, but I don’t know
for how many this movement was, as it was for me, a
murmur, a movement, of recognition.
I was also amused. Malcolm’s mannerisms were like his
master’s, and nearby sat Nelson, one of Malcolm’s students,
whose own mannerisms, in that moment, seemed to me but
one more remove from the Form. The three men had fash¬
ioned, whether through affinity or influence, a perfect
Platonic ladder.
Wittgenstein spoke very briefly, then. He produced an
example to untie the discussion. A few weeks later he met
with us, the graduate students there in philosophy, for two
two-hour sessions. Monologues they were really, on the
problems of knowledge and certainty, but since it was his
habit merely to appear—to appear and to await a question—
it was we who had to supply the topic, and for that delicate
mission one of us was carefully briefed. G. E. Moore had
once asked, staring, I suppose, at the end of his arm (and
with what emotion: anguish? anxiety? anger? despair?):
how do I know that this is a hand? and it was thought that
the opening question might properly, safely, touch on that.
Not all of us were primed, though, and before anyone real¬
ized what was happening a strange, unforeseen and un-

249
 William H. Gass

calculated question had rolled down the table toward the

master. Aristotle? Had it to do with Aristotle? And Witt¬
genstein’s face fell like a crumpled wad of paper into his
palms. Silence. Aristotle. We were lost. He would leave.
In a moment he would rise and shuffle out, pained and
affronted. Then Paul Ziff put his question—ours—for it
was he who had been the student appointed; and after a
terrible empty moment, Wittgenstein’s head came up, and
he began.
I thought, at the time, I’d undergone a conversion, but
what I’d received, I realize now, was a philosophy shown,
not a philosophy argued. Wittgenstein had uttered what
he felt could be uttered (and it was very important), but
what he had displayed could only be felt and seen—a
method, and the moral and esthetic passion of a mind in
love. How pale seems Sartre’s engagement against the deep
and fiery colors of that purely saintly involvement. It now
seems inevitable that the Tractatus should have stressed, so
much, the difference between what can be said (and any¬
thing that can be said can be said clearly), and what can
only be shown, and it is completely proper that Engelmann
should stress this himself in his memoir.1
However, the letters which comprise this volume, and the
recollections which follow them (by an architect and
friend during the time of the Tractatus), are almost en¬
tirely empty of interest. “I have received X, for which I
thank you; I wish you would send me Y at once; my train
will arrive in Z at T, and I feel ill and morally awful.” You
have now read the letters. Engelmann’s little history gives
us no more of the man than they do, and if we want to sense
this unusual philosophical presence, we must still go to
Malcolm’s lovely and delicate account. Engelmann’s pre-

1 Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a

Memoir, trans. L. Furtmuller (New York: 1968).
 A Memory of a Master

occupied with himself. He is full of wind-up, but has little

pitch, and his discussions of the Tractatus, though he men¬
tions some unarguably important things, are incomplete,
vague, and misleading. A statement like this: “. . . an under¬
standing of this philosopher will encourage the true believer
to be undismayed in the face of the advancement of en¬
lightenment and science, however successful they may be in
their proper field; because their range stops short where
that which alone matters to him begins . . .” will demon¬
strate, to anyone who knows Wittgenstein’s work at all,
how much Engelmann’s emotional inclinations have got the
better of him. His claim is that Wittgenstein’s work has
been generally misunderstood (which is easy enough to
understand by itself), and that, as in Kant, the emphasis
should fall upon the restrictions he places on reason, upon
what can be meaningfully said, and that this leaves meta¬
physics open to be enjoyed, provided it remains mute (in¬
deed the only way metaphysics can be enjoyed sometimes;
the silence is wonderful when it occurs). Yet even if we
make the distinction between saying and showing as simply
as Engelmann does, we are, it seems to me, constrained to
see that, in Wittgenstein, the world we cannot speak of
can be very precisely expressed. Whereof we cannot speak,
the philosopher has famously remarked, we must remain
silent; but does it follow from this that we must not show
what can only be shown by speech of Wittgenstein’s kind?
Or that showing is now something beyond the reach of
reason, as Engelmann seems to imply? As every poet knows,
the relation is rigorous. Nevertheless, Engelmann is right
to call attention to the moral and esthetic side of the
Tractatus, for these things have not received the attention
they deserve.2 The following strange line appears in this

2 Now, every day, this becomes less true.

 William H. Gass

beautiful poem: ethics and esthetics are one. I think Engel-

mann glosses it correctly, for I feel I saw it shown in those
three evenings with the genius, and he quotes Karl Kraus
appropriately:

I cannot get myself to accept that a whole sentence

can ever come from half a man.3

Both poet and logician have an equal interest here. Show¬

ing has several dimensions. Wittgenstein’s propositions are
complete, and therefore baffling to the wrong minds be¬
cause they record the struggles of one who as a day-to-day
human was only a half, no more, but who, as a philosopher,
was considerably greater—perhaps a man and a half.

3 The last essay in this book, “The Artist and Society,” might be
considered to be a gloss upon these words.

252
 THE EVIL DEMIURGE

T I he neck, Plato tells us in the

Timaeus, was fashioned by the Demiurge as a kind of
isthmus between the head, which houses the higher soul,
and the damper, softer regions given to the appetites and
passions. This was done in order to protect the mind from
their pollutions. Since then we have had nothing but com¬
plaints about the arrangement. That sovereign light, we hear,
is a sly beguiler, a false leader, creator of gods and myths,
an envious organ of denial, and a professional instrument of
deceit. Long have the liver and the lungs, the bowels, heart,
and privy members, languished out of sight in the ghettos
of the body—becoming more resentful, more impoverished,
more maligned, and more embittered every age.
A revolution is finally under way: not one merely which
will deliver single bodies to them, some minuscule psycholo¬
gies (that’s happened often enough), or even one which will
turn over to these vital but barbaric powers an entire state
(that’s also occurred occasionally), but one which will catch
 William H. Gass

the whole declining West in its paws, and incidentally

demonstrate the parallel which Plato drew between the con¬
dition of the soul and the corresponding health of society.
Now, everywhere, in the name of Priapic Power, there is a
rising against that absent landlord, Monsieur Teste, and his
chief work, our civilization. “Whenever I pronounce the
word ‘civilization,’ ” Gauguin cried, “I spit.” And M. Cioran
writes: “. . . everything is virtue that leads us to live against
the stream of our civilization, that invites us to compromise
and sabotage its progress . . .”x
Yet cliche—and Cioran is, like Pope, a polisher of com¬
monplaces, a recutter of old stones, though he would dis¬
approve of any comparison with so classical a poet—cliche
informs us (doesn’t cliche tell us everything we know?)
that every revolution is betrayed from the beginning—the
ground of its spring is always spongy—and we have good
reason to be sorry for this one, good reason. For what ruler
has pleaded for his overthrow with greater eloquence and
poetry, provided better demonstrations of his own unfitness,
or supplied deadlier weapons to his enemies; who has spoken
with more bitter poignancy of the ruler’s isolation, the
burdens of such office and the emptiness of its outward show,
protesting “what have kings, that privates have not too,
save ceremony,” and exclaiming against all deeper differ¬
ences, “if pricked, do I not bleed?”; who has represented
more honestly the claims of the viscera to rule, then, than
the mind-weary philosopher and king of the necktie tower,

Although The Temptation to Exist is the first of E. M. Cioran’s

books to be translated into English (and beautifully, by Richard How¬
ard [Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968]), six of his essays have been pub¬
lished by the Hudson Review since 1962: “A Bouquet of Heads,”
several snippets from this Temptation; “A Portrait of Civilized Man,”
from which this quotation is taken; “The Ambiguities of Fame,” “The
Snares of Wisdom,” “The Evil Demiurge,” and, most recently, “The
New Gods.”

254
 The Evil Demiurge

who now divides his realm to rally opposition and lead it,
howling, against the head? But why? why, except to restore
the intellect to greater health, serener power?
The guts give the mind its strength; certainly the isthmus
must be crossed, and ditched up after; but we should not,
out of bad conscience, as Nietzsche warns us, Oedipus our
eyes out, trade scepter for staff, or kingship for a beggar’s
tatters. The mind is the only claw a man has. Cioran, least
of all, wants men harmless; he admires them when they’re
most wild . . . barbaric . . . mad. “Reason: the rust of our
vitality,” he writes, using a plumber’s phrase. And were the
Vandals thoughtless? were the Medici? Or was their rea¬
soning new and fresh instead, unweary, full of force and
optimism; weren’t they led on by what they thought they
could become, so that they drove themselves like warriors
into change?
Change, however, is a curse. Concentrating on it deprives
us of the present; we become a slave of time. “Doing is
tainted with an original sin from which Being seems
exempt.”2 The beggar, on the other hand, by cultivating
his impoverishment, gains his freedom. “He has nothing, he
is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity
is to live from day to day. . . .” Like Yeats’s old men and
his mendicants, like Shakespeare’s fools, and Beckett’s often
crippled outcasts, these beggars are purely imaginary. The
mystic, too, seeks Being, but through ecstasy, “the wreck
of consciousness.” With the magisterial myth of final
nothingness, they lift themselves out of ordinary fictions.
Fiction for fictions? Knowing this, we cannot follow them.
Mystic, beggar, and barbarian: all tempt him, but only
temporarily. Like a ball which can’t escape its court, Cioran

2 “The Ambiguities of Fame.”

 William H. Gass

is volleyed from one racket onto the unyielding strings of

another, his thought continuously describing the hopeless
parabolas of paradox. Zeno’s arrow, we all remember, either
occupies successively each place in its path, thus is stationary
there, and its movement, made of an infinity of stills, is mere
illusion; or else it does not pass the points at all, is never
anywhere, and its movement, as it’s fallen altogether out
of space, is, once again, a mere illusion.
Each of Cioran’s essays adopts the tone of the dilemma,
even if none has Zeno’s unflinching elegance of form, for
Zeno was rapacious, the Attila of logic, and wished to win;
he strove always for conclusions. Conclusions? Cioran seems
to say, they are only vanities, and he repudiates them all . . .
but again, not absolutely. Although he seems to have taken
his aphoristic style from Nietzsche, as well as many of his
ideas, he is never as wild or bold or positive as Nietzsche
was. His work drones with disillusion. His complaints about
the intellect, his stress on instinct, his references to time, re¬
mind one of similar attitudes in Schopenhauer and Bergson,
as well as some of the moods of the existentialists; nor can
one escape the feeling that he’s been kissed, immoderately,
by Spengler. However, principally he is a Platonist unsure
of which horse he should allow to lead, and regrets some¬
times that the dark horse of desire has been tamed. Being,
Non-Being, and Becoming: these ghosts haunt him, as do
those ancient Greek divisions of the soul. His essays are
exemplifications of the disease he says we suffer from: su¬
perbly written, economical, concerned with the very foun¬
dations of thought and being, they are nevertheless
extraordinarily careless pieces of reasoning, travel from fal¬
lacy to fallacy with sovereign unconcern, deal almost wholly
with borrowings, and spider down from dubious premises
thick threads of purely historical associations. So evenly is

256
 The Evil Demiurge

Cioran divided against himself, on irony’s behalf, that there is

scarcely a line which does not contain truth by precisely a
half. Yet it is the conditions these pieces reveal which justi¬
fies their claim (strong, though implicit) to picture our
contemporary mind. What one essay says of Meister Eck-
hart perfectly applies to Cioran himself:

Even in the Middle Ages, certain minds, tired of

sifting the same themes, the same expressions,
were obliged, in order to renew their piety and to
emancipate it from the official terminology, to fall
back on paradox, on the alluring, sometimes brutal,
sometimes subtle formula ... his style, rather than
his ideas, gained him the honor of being convicted
of heresy. . . . Like every heretic, he sinned on the
side of form. An enemy of language, all orthodoxy,
whether religious or political, postulates the usual
expression.

Thus, as Susan Sontag points out in her exemplary Intro¬

duction, there is nothing fresh about Cioran’s thought . . .
except its formal jury. His book has all the beauty of pressed
leaves, petals shut from their odors; yet what is retained has
its own emotion, and here it is powerful and sustained. The
Temptation to Exist is a philosophical romance on modern
themes: alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the
tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as
agony, reason as disease.
E. M. Cioran is, in every way, an alien; he has no home,
even in his own heart. Born in Roumania, that nebbish among
nations, he was exiled from it before he left, though now he
bitterly pretends to have come to terms with its history of
failure and its Balkan sense of fatality: . . would I have
been able, without my country, to waste my days in so
exemplary a manner?” Living in Paris since 1937, he has

2 51
 William H. Gass

abandoned his native language (alien, now, to that, too), and

composes his tight little essays in French; essays which he
has no home in either, for he distrusts even his occupation
(“To write books is to have a certain relation with original
sin”3), since a concern with the Word withdraws us from
the World—we vanish inside our syllables. “At least,” he
addresses a prospective author, “I have the excuse of hating
my actions, of performing them without believing in them,”
and although he loathes his own self-loathing, he often re¬
gards this emotion as the only way to redemption. Are we
to take all these repudiations seriously? Not a bit. Just a
little. Yes and no. Truths he utters ironically to expose the
falsehood in them, while falsehoods receive the same treat¬
ment, so what soundness they have will shine through. He
seems really to think that if he writes his lies like lies, that
will excuse them, but what he risks by this tactic is revealing
an essentially frivolous mind. At his worst he appears a
world-weary wit out of Oscar Wilde, no more: “Self-doubt
worked on human beings to such a point that they invented
love as a remedy, a tacit pact between two unfortunates to
overestimate and praise each other shamelessly.”4 Conscious¬
ness, itself, he’s quite alone in. Thought, as well—his sole
addiction—takes him even further from the sources of vital¬
ity, and ruthlessly discloses its own futility—so much so
that he says, “our strength can be measured by the sum of
beliefs we abjure,” and “each of us should wind up his
career a deserter of all possible causes.”5
What Cioran would do without his belief in alienation,
disease, and decline is not clear; yet surely these ideas should

3 Cioran has sinned, so far, six times.

4 “The Ambiguities of Fame.”
5 “The Snares of Wisdom.”
 The Evil Demiurge

be abandoned, unless he is willing to qualify them until they

lose their usefulness to poetry. Indeed, all his causes are in
the same sinking boat. He tells us that the only minds which
intrigue us “defend indefensible positions,” and that “the
only minds which seduce us are the minds which have de¬
stroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning”
(note how we are dragged by the us out to these extremi¬
ties); yet there are other minds, other styles, which risk
more (one essay is titled “Style as Risk”), those which dare
to replace flamboyance with responsibility. If we ask our¬
selves soberly what such remarks mean, or what amount of
truth they contain, mustn’t our answer honestly be: very
little, and not much?
Although his treatment of the doctrine of Destiny is acid,
and his feelings about determinism in general more than
skeptical, the opposition between reason and instinct, be¬
tween civilization and vitality, between time and freedom
—the whole lot—is presented as inescapable; and he reg¬
ularly throws his thought, which he properly describes as
autobiographical (and which has only a subjective, a psy¬
chological validity), into the first person plural, where it
obtains the abstractness and rigidity of a mathematical model.
Theories of decline and decay require a belief in Necessity
as much as those which naively predict Progress; they both
lean on history (which Cioran sourly regards as “man’s
aggression against himself”), and both depend heavily upon
the use of terms (like “instinct,” “intellect,” “civilization”)
which facilitate equivocation, and produce in the reader that
effortless sense of depth and subtlety which is so rewarding
and so inexpensive. Finally, both need eyes which blaze at
the oncoming of contrary facts, and dazzle them into the
ditch.
 William H. Gass

Nietzsche, who made so many of the same observations

Cioran does, was altogether wiser: the Apollonian and
Dionysian principles are only possible enemies; the health
he was after required their unity, not their opposition. Cioran
suffers from what Nietzsche called

the greatest and most disastrous of maladies, of

which humanity has not to this day been cured: his
sickness of himself, brought on by the violent sever¬
ance from his animal past, by his sudden leap and
fail into new layers and conditions of existence, by
his declaration of war against the old instincts that
had hitherto been the foundation of his power, his
joy, and his awesomeness.

Cioran’s diagnosis is the same, but he regards, even a little

smugly (a condition, of course, he also recognizes), this
disease as incurable; and therefore—some think bravely—
perseveres in it, aggravates it, champions it.
We no longer remember the trouble we took to walk. It
did not come so easily as sprouting for a seed. Now, when
we learn to drive a golf ball or a car, some notion of the
effort we took returns to us. Our body was our enemy at
first, a foreign thing, an uncustomary country. We were
forced to tackle the problem in a series of steps, mechanically;
commands were issued from the head to the head, to the
torso, to the legs, the arms, but they did not immediately
obey us, nor were our orders clear. Like a cage of big cats,
we frightened our limbs into obedience, into a semblance
of order. How arbitrary, too, the aims of the vaulter, how
artificial his grip, how unnaturally he must move to scramble
up the sky, how out of reach his achievement is for most
of us, how against Nature; yet how easily, how thought¬
lessly, how beautifully he finally does it. For at the moment
of his mastery, the vaulter and his pole, the bar he is overing,

260
 The Evil Demiurge

the pit below, the medium he moves through: all of these

are extensions of his will. We ought to understand these
powers, this expanded condition, for we did learn walking
once, and overcame similar handicaps, and now we stroll,
or run, or dance, or speak as simply as we see when we
open an eye. The world is there; we need not issue com¬
mands to it: let there be horns, hills, houses, intransitive
verbs; let there be strolling: left, right, left, right; let there
be rhymes. Yet these trained athletes are animals. Where is
the severance in them? They are well with regard to their
activities. Should thoughtfulness, the moves of the mind,
and its relation to its objects, be any different?
To feel at home in our body, to sense the true nostos of
it, is to have it move to our will so smoothly we seem will¬
less altogether. The will of God, Kant thought, might be
that holy with respect to the Good. We take walking for
granted, elementary seeing for granted, yet we find we
cannot feel. Thought seems to remove us; we cannot enjoy
life; the mechanics of the car are so demanding, we cannot
have the pleasure of the ride. Beckett’s men on their bicycles,
or with their cripples’ sticks, point the analogy in the other
direction. We have fallen out of our bodies like a child from
a tree; bruised, forlorn, we bellow at the foot of it and
wish we were back there among the leaves, and wish at the
same time never to suffer such risks again.
Love is an achievement like the achievement of the
vaulter; it’s to rise as expertly and naturally as he does. One
fundamental remedy for alienation is mastery—the incor¬
poration of skill. Rightly chosen, such skills liberate desire,
empower it; only when, for whatever reason, we no longer
bring into our bodies the forms of civilization are these felt
as frustrating obstacles and enemies of want. Civilized din¬
ing, to name a lowly instance: in what ways do its rites
demean us, and leave our stomachs empty, our natures un-
 Wtlliam H. Gass

fulfilled?6 As Marcuse writes: “The power to restrain and

guide instinctual drives, to make biological necessities into
individual needs and desires, increases rather than reduces
gratification. . . But such considerations have no place in
the myth of alienation.
Our minds can grow their own bodies, become body,
play a different Demiurge. We can swell with the world
we take in. Otherwise we shrink and wrinkle like a prune.
In the prune, contracting on its core, I sense small tempta¬
tion, little reason to exist.

6 The previous points are developed in “The Stylization of Desire.”

262
 THE IMAGINATION OF
AN INSURRECTION

O
JL JL istory may not be, as
Stephen Dedalus thought, a nightmare, since we are mur¬
dered in our beds of sleep quite bloodlessly; but dreams are
part of history, although all images, apparitions, fits, illu¬
sions, myths, the mind’s confusions, trances, dreams, even
history books themselves, and poetry, are frequently ignored
because they seem unlike most facts: so many shot on this
date, so many starved on that, so many neighbored by the
graves and cried a lot. Indeed, the failure of history seen as
a kind of science is its stubborn externality; it follows the
course of human behavior as the eye might follow sliding
rocks, and never feels the avalanche, never gains admission
to events, in the belief (an important myth itself) that they
have no historically significant inner life. We comprehend
insanity still less, standing, as we like to think, safely high on
shore. The river is simply discarding its banks (also a sea¬
sonal thing with snakes). We label it a flood and warn the
town: what more? Causes we examine, yes, but seldom the

263
 William H. Gass

quality of the experience. There is a silly grin upon the

madman’s face. Is there another silly grin inside? If not,
what? It’s possibly all that matters to the madman, and it’s
he who may decide on doing divination with your bowels.
If behavior alters consciousness, as it surely does, con¬
sciousness alters behavior; and no one supposes, now, that
consciousness is just a simpleminded mirror of the world.
These facts, indeed, these hard realities, often find no re¬
flection there. Yet history may be a nightmare (appear, that
is, fundamentally incomprehensible like the actions of the
mad when merely observed) if we do not understand men
more completely than hitherto we have. We must try to
understand, for instance, how a man’s own image of himself
can take hold of him as powerfully as a spinning wind, and
whirl him off to a land like Oz, which might be Berlin on
the Night of the Crystal, or Dublin entering the Troubles.
Mr. Thompson’s imaginatively conceived, carefully re¬
searched, and beautifully written book1 concerns the impact
of imagination on events, and although the moment he has
chosen (the Easter Rebellion) is perfect for him, allowing
him to match two important literary and political movements,
he is at all times aware of parallels among the acts of the
French in 1789, the Germans in 1844 (and again, alas, later),
the Irish in 1916, and the American Negro now. These com¬
parisons are tactfully made, nowhere insisted on, and Mr.
Thompson’s argument does not require them; yet despite
the great interest which his development of the Irish case
has, it is the theoretical pattern which emerges that is most
exciting; though it is curious, in this connection, that Mr.
Thompson overlooks such a book as Tolstoi’s What Is Art?
since it expresses so perfectly the same attitudes and dreams
as the Irish rebel poets.

1 The Imagination of an Insurrection (New York: Oxford Univer¬

sity Press, 1967).

264.
 The Imagination of an Insurrection

For a long time Irish society dawdled through the stages

of decay as though it suffered from a drawn-out illness. The
well-intentioned and well-educated were quite guiltily aware
of their advantages!/The sensitive deplored the conditions of
the peasants, but they also lived in fear of urbanization and
the machine. It is easy to sympathize, hard to give up privi¬
lege; thus the nicer members of the aristocracy dreamed that
like a loving father they would move from hut to manor,
elevating, educating, bettering lots, as though the evils every¬
one endured could be picked out like weevils in a biscuit,
leaving the remainder palatable, fresh, and even sweet.
Shame and contradiction were the basis of these liberal be¬
liefs, because if you are going to give your poor niggers a
hand up, you must always stand higher than they. Desiring^"
the impossible, both to retain and to change, and unable to
achieve either for themselves as long as Ireland stayed an
English fief, they began to express their national aspirations
by cultural rather than political means. They liked to feel
it wasn’t they who’d rendered Ireland impotent or enslaved
its peasantry, and when they cast out evil from themselves,
they extended this purification to the whole people. Scholars
slowly discovered, as Mr. Thompson relates so brilliantly,
a national past—the heroes, the glory, of an ancient age. But
if the Irish soul is basically pure, why hasn’t it triumphed?
Where is the source of this corruption? Clearly it was con¬
tained in that imported English culture which had created
the Irish scholars and artists themselves, the very men who
came forward finally to condemn it.
Thus imagination enters Irish history; henceforth every¬
thing’s reseen. Since the accepted religion is “foreign,” the
new one will be different, incorporating superstition in the
guise of mysticism. Business should be honest barter based
on agriculture. And a real morality is needed, one to accom¬
pany innocence like mint jelly and its lamb. Literary styles

26s
 William H. Gass

and canons, subject matters, themes, are made over to the

ancients. Myths and fairy tales jet from the Folk like a
fountain. But no tale the poets are able to take away from
time is more remarkable than the two they make up them¬
selves: that of Ireland’s glorious heroic age, and the goodness
and beauty of the common way. They found that the
peasant (Irish peasants, German peasants, Russian peasants,
Negroes) sang; led simple lives; spoke poetry; were near the
elemental things; had deeper personal ties than they had;
loved, slept, worked, and died in the rhythms of the seasons;
possessed natural piety, sexual potency, and a unity of in¬
stincts which could only have been a gift flown straight
from the gods. Their art was simple, crude—yes; but it
was sincere, fundamental, moving; and it promoted that
collective unity which present poets ought to strive for
themselves. The past, in short, was good- the present, awful.
Of course what Yeats (and Tolstoi) wanted was to keep
the huts and manor: they would move among their peasants
like the liberal moves among his Negroes, patting them on
the head, giving them instruction, and admiring, in turn,
the beautiful life, the rich culture, they had built out of ig¬
norance, poverty, and servitude. In the face of such accomp¬
lishments, one no longer needs to feel guilty; one can even
feel proud. The effect of these delusions on consciousness is
catastrophic, and the effect on poetry equally ruinous
(Yeats is driven away), for they oversimplify experience
dangerously, and finally deny that very poverty, ignorance,
and general suffering which they were intended to alleviate
in the first place.
Nevertheless, so great is the need to believe these confu¬
sions, so flattering, at first, do they seem, that the people
seize on them greedily; ideas have their edges rounded, be¬
come slogans with wheels, ready to roll into action. Yet the

266
 The Imagination of an Insurrection

myth is incomplete without martyrs, and the martyrs must

be real. Plunkett. Pearse. MacDonagh. The world which
they imagine weighs upon the world they act in as sub¬
stantially as shadows on a street. The poet is a dreamer in
this dream, and drawn to politics, remaking the nature and
identity of the nation, he steps inside his own mythology;
not to disappear as the legendary painter disappears in his
painting, but, a saint of the ridiculous, to die of Easter in
an Irish place.2
Mr. Thompson not only examines the images which helped
shape the Rising, he investigates with equal skill the way in
which the rebellion was retained and construed by Yeats,
A.E., and O’Casey. This is history, too. “The consequences
of an event take place in the mind, and the mind holds on
best to images.” His book is a fine example of imagination
working on imagination: instance and theory, scholarship
and history, criticism and poetry are woven in a single spell.
Mr. Thompson spells quite beautifully. I hope everyone will
read him.

2 See “The Artist and Society.”

 EVEN IF, BY ALL THE OXEN
IN THE WORLD

C _Consciousness comes too

easily. We did not learn it like a language. It leaps to its
work like a mirror. Yet consciousness can close and open
like an eye; its depths are not illusory, and its reflection on
itself is not mechanical. It’s something won, retrieved, con¬
served, as love is, and as love should be. It is with regard to
consciousness, and the consciousness of consciousness, that
I wish to examine popular culture in this country; and I
shall simply suppose that cultural objects are created so we
can become aware of them, and that those which are popular
are so in a double sense: because they are widely approved
and widely employed.
Imagine that a mirror, nothing falling into it, began re¬
flecting itself: what a terrifying endlessness and mockery of
light—merely to illuminate its own beams. You might think
that an empty consciousness, like a vacuum, would im¬
mediately fill; that the nerves would pour in their messages
like so many spouts from the roof of the skin, but sensing

268
 Even if, by All the Oxen in the World

is not so simple as we sometimes suppose. Like falling,

descent is easy only once we’ve jumped. Every conscious¬
ness has its rainless lands and polar wastes, its undiscovered
and unventured countries. And there are simply boring
stretches, like the Western Plains or the dry mouth’s taste.
Certainly consciousness is capable of subtle, wonderful, and
terrifying transformations. After all, it is the dream we
live in, and like the dream, can harbor anything. Although
we are alert to changes in our physical and mental health,
and have catalogued their causes and conditions, little has
been done to describe adequately states of consciousness
themselves or evaluate their qualities. Nonetheless, it is the
whole of all we are at any time. At any time, if it is
thrilling, we are thrilled; if it is filled with beauty, we are
beautiful. It is our only evidence we live. Yet nothing seems
more obvious to me than the fear, hatred, and contempt men
have for it. They find it useful (an electric map of tracks
and trains); otherwise it is embarrassing at best, or boring;
at worst, it’s threatening and horrible. Indeed, it’s so much
worse than simple black oblivion that only an obstinate,
foolish will to live, the simple insistence of the veins which
leaves have, cowslips, oxen, ants have just as well, can ac¬
count for most men’s going on, since such a will moves
blindly, in roots beneath the ground, in bottle flies and fish,
and our feelings are the price we pay for being brained in¬
stead of finned. Perception, Plato said, is a form of pain.
The working consciousness, for instance, is narrow, shut¬
tered by utility, its transitions eased by habit past reflection
like a thief. Impulses from without or from within must use
some strength to reach us, we do not go out to them.
Machines are made this way. Alert as lights and aimed like
guns, they only see the circle of their barrels. How round
the world is; how like a well arranged. Thus when desire is

269
 William H. Gass

at an ebb and will is weak, we trail the entertainer like a

child his mother, restless, bored, and whining: what can I
do? what will amuse me? how shall I live? Then

L’ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosite,

Prend les proportions de l’immortalite.

The enjoyment of sensation as sensation, a fully free aware¬

ness, is very rare. We keep our noses down like dogs to sniff
our signs. Experience must mean. The content of an aimless
consciousness is weak and colorless; we may be filled up by
ourselves instead—even flooded basements, some days, leak
the other way—and then it’s dread we feel, anxiety.
To tie experience to a task, to seek significance in every¬
thing, to take and never to receive, to keep, like the lighter
boxer, moving, bob and weave, to fear the appearance of the
self and every inwardness: these are such universal char¬
acteristics of the average consciousness that I think we can
assume that popular culture functions fundamentally with
regard to them.
But “before Plato told the great lie of ideals,” Lawrence
wrote, “men slimly went like fishes, and didn’t care. . . .
They knew it was no use knowing their own nothing¬
ness. . . .” Nothing keeps us back from nothingness but
knowing; knowing, now, not necessarily in the sense of
squeezing what we know into a set of symbols and under¬
standing those; but knowing in the sense of seeing—seeing
clearly, deeply, fully—of being completely aware, and
consequently of being perfectly ourselves; for Lawrence lets
his pagans speed to their mark as thoughtlessly as arrows.
Must we be drunk or doped or mad, must we be dunced
and numb to feed our animal halves? So it appears. The
average man does not want to know how he looks when he
eats; he defecates in darkness, reading the Reader's Digest;
 Even if, by All the Oxen in the World

his love has an awkward automatic metal brevity, like some¬

thing sprayed from a can, and any day his present sex may
be replaced with plastic; his work is futile, his thought is
shallow, his joys ephemeral, his howls helpless and agony
incompetent; his hopes are purchased, his voice prerecorded,
his play is mechanical, the roles typed, their lines trite, all
strengths are sapped, exertion anyhow is useless, to vote or
not is futile, futile ... so in almost every way he is separated
from the centers of all power and feeling: futilely he feeds,
he voids, he screws, he smokes, he motorboats, he squats
before the tube, he spends at least a week each year in tour¬
ing and a month in memorizing lies—lies moral, religious,
and political—he beats the drum or shouts hurray on cue,
he wears a neon nightie, swallows pills, and chews his
woman’s nipples now because a book he’s read has told him
that he ought to; my god, he jigs, he swigs, he sings the
very latest tra-la-las and sends his kids to scouts and all-white
schools, he rounds his bottom to a pew, loves pulpitry, and
contributes yearly to a cause; with splendid sexlessness he
breeds—boards receive their nails with greater sensitivity—
he kites the lies he’s learned as high as heaven where they
sing like toads in trees, yet he sickens just the same, and
without reason, for he’s been to bridge and bingo, said his
rahs as well as anyone, never borrowed on his insurance, kept
his car clean, and put his three sons twice through Yale;
but age, which is not real, hangs like a dirty suit inside his
freshly pressed tuxedo; thus he fails, assumes another
slumber, and dies like merchandise gone out of season.
Imagine for a moment what would happen if the television
paled, the radio fell silent, the press did not release. Imagine
all the clubs and courses closed, magazines unmailed, guitars
unplugged, pools, rinks, gyms, courts, stadia shut up. Sup¬
pose that publishers were to issue no more dick, prick, and
 William H. Gass

booby books; movies were banned along with gambling,

liquor, and narcotics; and men were suddenly and irrevocably
alone with themselves . . . alone only with love to be made,
thought, sense, and dreadful life. What would be the state
of our nature, then, Mr. Hobbes?
It is the principal function of popular culture—though
hardly its avowed purpose—to keep men from understand¬
ing what is happening to them, for social unrest would
surely follow, and who knows what outbursts of revenge
and rage. War, work, poverty, disease, religion: these, in the
past, have kept men’s minds full, small, and careful. Religion
gave men hope who otherwise could have none. Even a
mechanical rabbit can make the greyhounds run.
People who have seen the same game, heard the same
comedians, danced to the same din, read the same detectives,
can form a community of enthusiasts whose exchange of
feelings not only produces the most important secondary
effect of popular culture (the culture hero and his worship
services), but also helps persuade people that their experi¬
ences were real, reinforces judgments of their values, and
confirms their addiction. Popular culture occurs in public; it
is as much an event as an experience; and it is reported on
in the same spirit. There are therefore both participants and
spectators, and in much of popular culture a steady drift
toward voyeurism and passivity. As culture rises, it shatters;
nothing remains in what were formerly the highest cultural
realms but isolated works; isolated now by their character,
which repels all but the most devoted and cultivated love,
and by the divisive nature of society which sets them apart
in order to destroy them if possible. The objects of popular
culture are competitive. They are expected to yield a re¬
turn. Their effect must be swift and pronounced, therefore
they are strident, ballyhooed, and baited with sex; they
 Even if, by All the Oxen in the World

must be able to create or take part in a fad; and they must

die without fuss and leave no corpse. In short, the products
of popular culture, by and large, have no more esthetic
quality than a brick in the street. Their authors are anony¬
mous, and tend to dwell in groups and create in com¬
mittees; they are greatly dependent upon performers and
performance; any esthetic intention is entirely absent, and
because it is desired to manipulate consciousness directly,
achieve one’s effect there, no mind is paid to the intrinsic
nature of its objects; they lack finish, complexity, stasis, in¬
dividuality, coherence, depth, and endurance. But they do
possess splash.
It’s in a way unfair to popular culture to compare it with
the workmanships of artists since they do perform such
different functions; nevertheless, this kind of comparison is
not entirely unjust. Both shape a consciousness, but art en¬
larges consciousness like space in a cathedral, ribboned with
light, and though a new work of art may consume our souls
completely for a while, almost as a jingle might, if consump¬
tion were all that mattered, we are never, afterward, the
same; we cannot unconsciously go on in the old way; there
is, as in Rilke’s poem “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” no place
that does not see us, and we must change our life. Even
Arnold Bennett noticed that we do not measure classics;
they, rather, measure us. For most people it is precisely this
that’s painful; they do not wish to know their own nothing¬
ness—or their own potentialities either, and the pleasures of
popular culture are like the pleasures of disease, work,
poverty, and religion: they give us something to do, some¬
thing to suffer, an excuse for failure, and a justification of
everything.
If sixty percent of the people of a country are addicts of
opium, then we are not rash in inferring there a general
 William H. Gass

sickness of spirit; if alcoholism is epidemic, or suicide, or

gambling, still another spiritual malaise can be confirmed;
and if a great portion of any population is spending many
hours every day driving all life from the mind, in worship
of low-cost divinities like the goddess of the golden udder,
there’s been another plague in spirit, and there are deaths to
show for it, and endless deformities. Art does not, I hasten
to say, have a hortatory influence; it’s not a medicine, and it
teaches nothing. It simply shows us what beauty, perfection,
sensuality, and meaning are; and we feel as we should feel if
we’d compared physiques with Hercules.
None of these complaints is new, and there would be little
point in repeating them except that from time to time one
senses an effort to Hitlerize the culture of the Folk; make it
somehow spring from some deep well of human feeling, as if
art were ever the triumph of sincerity over ineptitude, as if
passion were a substitute for skill, as if, indeed, its gaucheries
were not only charming, but esthetically so . . . this, in
order to put out those high and isolated fires, those lonely
works of genius which still manage, somehow, amazingly,
now and then, to appear. There is no Folk, of course; there
are no traditions; fine moral sentiments improve no lyrics,
nor beautify their song; the occasional appearance of
splendid exceptions does not soften, excuse, or justify any¬
thing; popular culture is the product of an industrial machine
which makes baubles to amuse the savages while missionaries
steal their souls and merchants steal their money.
How romantically he talks about it, you may say; what
wretched little dramas he’s made up—these wee morality
plays from wild exaggerations. “High and isolated fires”
indeed. Anything which surrounds us like the air we breathe,
with which like wives and husbands we’re easy and familiar,
can’t be so poisonous; we are alive, aren’t we? Well no, if

214
 Even if, by All the Oxen in the World

you ask me, we aren’t, or only partially. This muck cripples

consciousness. Therefore no concessions should be made to
it; and those who take their pleasure there should not be
permitted to appear to lift those tastes to something higher
with scholarly hypocrisy and philosophical pretense. The
objects of popular culture are not art; their success or failure
should not be judged as art’s is; and the pleasures they
provide, among goods, come last, even if, as Plato says, they
are asserted to be first by all the oxen in the world.

215
 THE ARTIST AND SOCIETY

T _I_he tame bear’s no better off

than we are. You’ve seen how he sways in his cage. At
first you might think him musical, but the staves are metal,
and his movements are regular and even like the pulses of a
pump. It’s his nerves. Even when he claps his paws, rises like
a man to his hind feet and full height, he looks awkward,
feels strange, unsure (his private parts and underbelly are
exposed); he trembles. Smiling (you remember the fawning
eyeshine of the bear), he focuses his nose and waits for the
marshmallow we’re about to toss, alert to snap up the sweet
cotton in his jaws. There’s something terrible about the tame
caged bear ... all that wildness become marshmallow, ter¬
rible for his heart, his liver, his teeth (a diet so sugary and
soft and unsubstantial, the bowels seek some new employ¬
ment), and terrible for us—for what we’ve lost. His eyes,
too, are filled with a movement that’s not in the things he
sees, but in himself. It is the movement of his own despair,
his ineffectual rage.
 The Artist and Society

My subject is the artist and society, not the tamed, trained

bear, but in many ways the subjects are the same. Artists
are as different as men are. It would be wrong to romanticize
about them. In our society, indeed, they may live in nar¬
rower and more frightened corners than most of us do. We
should not imitate their ways; they’re not exemplary, and
set no worthy fashions. Nor does the artist bear truth dead
and drooping in his arms like a lovelorn maiden or a plump
goose. His mouth hasn’t the proper shape for prophecies. Pot
or bottle ends or words or other mouths—whole catalogs
of kissing—noisy singing, the folds of funny faces he’s
created and erased, an excess of bugling have spoiled it for
philosophy. In the ancient quarrel between the poets and
philosophers, Plato was surely right to think the poets liars.
They lie quite roundly, unashamedly, with glee and gusto,
since lies and fancies, figments and inventions, outrageous
falsehoods are frequently more real, more emotionally pure,
more continuously satisfying to them than the truth, which
is likely to wear a vest, fancy bucket pudding, technicolor
movies, and long snoozes through Sunday.
W. H. Auden remarked quite recently, when pestered, I
think it was, about Vietnam:

Why writers should be canvassed for their opinion

on controversial political issues I cannot imagine.
Their views have no more authority than those of
any reasonably well-educated citizen. Indeed, when
read in bulk, the statements made by writers, in¬
cluding the greatest, would seem to indicate that
literary talent and political common sense are rarely
found together. . . .

Israel makes war, and there are no symposia published by

prizefighters, no pronouncements from hairdressers, not a

277
 William H. Gass

ding from the bellhops, from the dentists not even a drill’s
buzz, from the cabbies nary a horn beep, and from the
bankers only the muffled chink of money. Composers,
sculptors, painters, architects: they have no rolled-up maga¬
zine to megaphone themselves, and are, in consequence,
ignored. But critics, poets, novelists, professors, journalists—
those used to shooting off their mouths—they shoot (no
danger, it’s only their own mouth’s wash they’ve wallowed
their words in); and those used to print, they print; but
neither wisdom nor goodwill nor magnanimity are the
qualities which will win you your way to the rostrum . . .
just plentiful friends in pushy places and a little verbal
skill.
If it is pleasant to be thought an expert on croquet, imagine
what bliss it is to be thought an authority on crime, on the
clockwork of the human heart, the life of the city, peace and
war. How hard to relinquish the certainty, which most of
us have anyway, of knowing. How sweet it is always to be
asked one’s opinion. What a shame it is, when asked, not to
have one.
Actually Auden’s observation can be spread two ways: to
include all artists, not writers merely, and to cover every
topic not immediately related to their specialized and some¬
times arcane talents. It’s only the failed artist and his foolish
public who would like to believe otherwise, for if they can
honestly imagine that the purpose of art is to teach and to
delight, to double the face of the world as though with a
mirror, to penetrate those truths which nature is said to
hold folded beneath her skirts and keeps modestly hidden
from the eyes and paws of science, then they will be able to
avoid art’s actual impact altogether, and the artist’s way of
life can continue to seem outrageous, bohemian, quaint, a
little sinful, irresponsible, hip, and charming, something
 The Artist and Society

to visit like the Breton peasants on a holiday, and not a

challenge to and denial of their own manner of existence, an
accusation concerning their own lack of reality.
\ et the social claims for art, and the interest normal people
take in the lives of their artists, the examinations of the
psychologists, the endless studies by endlessly energetic stu¬
dents of nearly everything, the theories of the philosophers,
the deadly moral danger in which art is periodically pre¬
sumed to place the young, unhappily married women, sacred
institutions, tipsy souls, and unsteady parliaments, and all
those nice persons in positions of power: these claims and
interests are so regularly, so inevitably, so perfectly and
purely irrelevant that one must begin to suspect that the
tight-eyed, squeeze-eared, loin-lacking enemies of art are
right; that in spite of everything that’s reasonable, in spite
of all the evidence, for example, that connoisseurs of yellow¬
ing marble statuary and greenish Roman coins are no more
moral than the rest of us; that artists are a murky-headed,
scurvy-living lot; that if art told the truth, truth must be
polkadot; in spite, in short, of insuperable philosophical
obstacles (and what obstacles, I ask you, could be more
insuperable than those), art does tell us, in its manner, how
to live, and artists are quite remarkable, even exemplary,
men. We are right to keep them caged.
Thus I begin again, but this time on the other side.
Ronald Laing begins his extraordinary little book The
Politics of Experience1 by saying:

Few books today are forgivable. Black on the

canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet
of paper, are perhaps feasible. There is little con¬
junction of truth and social “reality.” Around us are

1 (New York: Pantheon, 1967).

 William H. Gass

pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false con¬

sciousness adapted to see these events as true and
real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the
truth resides now less in what things are than in what
they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in
the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no
longer possible if it is not a lie.

You can measure the reality of an act, a man, an institution,

custom, work of art in many ways: by the constancy and
quality of its effects, the depth of the response which it de¬
mands, the kinds and range of values it possesses, the actuality
of its presence in space and time, the multiplicity and
reliability of the sensations it provides, its particularity and
uniqueness on the one hand, its abstract generality on the
other—I have no desire to legislate concerning these con¬
ditions, insist on them all.
We can rob these men, these acts and objects, of their
reality by refusing to acknowledge them. We pass them on
the street but do not see or speak. We have no Negro prob¬
lem in our small Midwestern towns. If someone has the ex¬
perience of such a problem, he is mistaken. What happened
to him did not happen; what he felt he did not feel; the
urges he has are not the urges he has; what he wants he does
not want. Automatically I reply to my son, who has ex¬
pressed his desire for bubble gum: Oh, Peppy, you don’t
want that. Number one, then: we deny. We nullify the
consciousness of others. We make their experiences unreal.
Put yourself in a public place, at a banquet—one perhaps
at which awards are made. Your fork is pushing crumbs
about upon your plate while someone is receiving silver in
a bowler’s shape amid the social warmth of clapping hands.
How would you feel if at this moment a beautiful lady in a
soft pink nightie should lead among the tables a handsome

280
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poodle who puddled under them, and there was a con¬

spiracy among the rest of us not to notice? Suppose we sat
quietly; our expressions did not change; we looked straight
through her, herself as well as nightie, toward the fascinating
figure of the speaker; suppose, leaving, we stepped heedlessly
in the pools, and afterward we did not even shake our shoes.
And if you gave a cry, if you warned, explained, cajoled,
implored; and we regarded you then with amazement, re¬
jected with amusement, contempt, or scorn every one of
your efforts, I think you would begin to doubt your senses
and your very sanity. Well, that’s the idea: with the weight
of our numbers, our percentile normality, we create in¬
sanities: yours, as you progressively doubt more and more
of your experience, hide it from others to avoid the shame,
saying “There’s that woman and her damn dog again,” but
now saying it silently, for your experience, you think, is
private; and ours, as we begin to believe our own lies, and
the lady and her nightie, the lady and her poodle, the lady
and the poodle’s puddles, all do disappear, expunged from
consciousness like a stenographer’s mistake.
If we don’t deny, we mutilate, taking a part for the whole;
or we rearrange things, exaggerating some, minimizing
others. There was a lady, yes, but she was wearing a cocktail
dress, and there was a dog, too, very small, and very quiet,
who sat primly in her lap and made no awkward demonstra¬
tions. Or we invert values, and assume strange obligations,
altogether neglecting the ones which are obvious and de¬
manding: we rob the poor to give to the rich rich gifts, to
kings their kingdoms, to congressmen bribes, to com¬
panies the inexpensive purchase of our lives. We rush to buy
poodles with liquid nerves—it has become, like so much else,
the rage. Teas are fun, we say, but necking’s not nice.
Imagine. We still do say that. Or we permit events to occur

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 William H. Gass

for some people but not for others. Women and children
have no sexual drives; men don’t either, thank god, after
fifty—sixty? seventy-five? We discredit events by inserting
in otherwise accurate accounts outrageous lies. It was the
lady who made the mess, not the poodle. In short, we do
what we can to destroy experience—our own and others’.
But since we can only act according to the way we see
things, “if our experience is destroyed, oar behavior avill be
destructive.''' We live in ruins, in bombed-out shells, in the
basements of our buildings. In important ways, we are all
mad. You don’t believe it? This company, community, this
state, our land, is normal? Healthy, is it? Laing has observed
that normal healthy men have killed perhaps one hundred
million of their fellow normal healthy men in the last fifty
years.
Nudists get used to nakedness. We get used to murder.
Why are works of art so socially important? Not for the
messages they may contain, not because they expose slavery
or cry hurrah for the worker, although such messages in their
place and time might be important, but because they insist
more than most on their own reality; because of the absolute
way in which they exist. Certainly, images exist, shadows
and reflections, fakes exist and hypocrites, there are counter¬
feits (quite real) and grand illusions—but it is simply not
true that the copies are as real as their originals, that they
meet all of the tests which I suggested earlier. Soybean steak,
by god, is soybean steak, and a pious fraud is a fraud.
Reality is not a matter of fact, it is an achievement; and it is
rare—rarer, let me say—than an undefeated football season.
We live, most of us, amidst lies, deceits, and confusions. A
work of art may not utter the truth, but it must be honest.
It may champion a cause we deplore, but like Milton’s
Satan, it must in itself be noble; it must be all there. Works

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 The Artist and Society

of art confront us the way few people dare to: completely,

openly, at once. They construct, they comprise, our experi¬
ence; they do not deny or destroy it; and they shame us, we
fall so short of the a±uality of their Being. We live in
Lafayette or Rutland—true. We take our breaths. We
fornicate and feed. But Hamlet has his history in the heart,
and none of us will ever be as real, as vital, as complex and
living as he is—a total creature of the stage.
This is a difficult point to make if the reality or unreality
of things has not been felt. Have you met a typical non¬
person lately? Then say hello, now, to your neighbor. He
may be male, but his facial expressions have been put on
like lipstick and eyelashes. His greeting is inevitable; so is his
interest in the weather. He always smiles; he speaks only in
cliches; and his opinions (as bland as Cream of Wheat, as
undefined, and—when sugared—just as sweet) are drearily
predictable. He has nothing but good to say of people; he
collects his wisdom like dung from a Digest; he likes to share
his experiences with “folks,” and recite the plots of movies.
He is working up this saccharine soulside manner as part of
his preparation for the ministry.
These are the “good” people. “Bad” people are unreal in
the same way.
Nonpersons unperson persons. They kill. For them no one
is human. Like cash registers, everyone’s the same, should be
addressed, approached, the same: all will go ding and their
cash drawers slide out when you strike the right key.
So I don’t think that it’s the message of a work of art
that gives it any lasting social value. On the contrary, insist¬
ing on this replaces the work with its interpretation, an¬
other way of robbing it of its reality. How would you like
to be replaced by your medical dossier, your analyst’s notes?
They take much less space in the file. The analogy, I think,

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 William H. Gass

is precise. The aim of the artist ought to be to bring into the

world objects which do not already exist there, and objects
which are especially worthy of love. We meet people, grow
to know them s'owly, settle on some to companion our life.
Do we value our friends for their social status, because they
are burning in the public blaze? do we ask of our mistress
her meaning? calculate the usefulness of our husband or
wife? Only too often. Works of art are meant to be lived
with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we
should try to understand them as we try to understand any¬
one—in order to know them better, not in order to know
something else.
Why do public officials, like those in the Soviet Union,
object so strenuously to an art which has no images in it—
which is wholly abstract, and says nothing? Because originals
are dangerous to reproductions. For the same reason that a
group of cosmetically constructed, teetotal lady-maidens is
made uneasy by the addition of a boozy uncorseted madam.
Because it is humiliating to be less interesting, less present,
less moving, than an arrangement of enameled bedpans. Be¬
cause, in a system of social relations based primarily on
humbug, no real roaches must be permitted to wander. Be¬
cause, though this may be simply my helpless optimism, your
honest whore will outdraw, in the end, any sheaf you choose
of dirty pictures.
Pornography is poor stuff, not because it promotes
lascivious feelings, but because these feelings are released by
and directed toward unreal things. The artist, in this sense,
does not deal in dreams.
Of course there are many objects labeled works of art, I
know, which are fakes—the paint, for instance, toupeed to
the canvas—but 1 am thinking of the artist, now, as one who
produces the honest article, and obviously, he is valuable to

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 The Artist and Society

society if what he produces is valuable to it. He is presently

valuable because in his shop or study he concocts amusements
for our minds, foods for our souls—foods so purely spiritual
and momentary they leave scarcely any stools. However, I
wanted to say that despite the good reasons for wondering
otherwise, the artist could be regarded an exemplary man—
one whose ways are worthy of imitation. How can this be?
The fellow sleeps with his models and paint jams the zipper
on his trousers.
I think we can regard him as exemplary in this way: we
judge it likely that a man’s character will show up some¬
where in his work; that if he is hot-tempered and impetuous,
or reckless and gay . . . well, find somebody else to be your
surgeon. And we regularly expect to see the imprint of the
person in the deed, the body in the bedclothes. I think it is
not unreasonable to suppose, too, that the work a man does
works on him, that the brush he holds has his hand for its
canvas, that the movements a man makes move the man who
makes them just as much, and that the kind of ideals, dreams,
perceptions, wishes his labor loves must, in him, love at least
that labor.
Often enough we lead split lives, the artist as often as
anybody; yet it isn’t Dylan Thomas or D. H. Lawrence, the
drunkard or sadist, I’m suggesting we admire, but the poets
they were, and the men they had to be to be such poets. It
would have been better if they had been able to assume in the
world the virtues they possessed when they faced the page.
They were unable. It’s hard. And for that the world is partly
to blame. It does not want its artists, after all. It especially
does not want the virtues which artists must employ in the
act of their work lifted out of prose and paint and plaster
into life.
What are some of these virtues?
 William H. Gass

Honesty is one . . . the ability to see precisely what’s been

done . . . the ability to face up . . . because the artist wants
his every line to be lovely—that’s quite natural—he wants to
think well of himself, and cover himself with his own praise
like the sundae with its syrup. We all know that artists are
vain. But they’re not vain while working. We know, too,
that they’re defensive, insecure. But they dare not be defen¬
sive about a bad job, explain their mistakes away, substitute
shouting for skill. If a runty tailor dresses himself in his
dreams, he may measure for himself the suit of a wrestler.
You can fill yourself with air, but will your skin hold it?
They don’t make balloons with the toughness and resiliency
of genius.
Presence is one. The artist cannot create when out of
focus. His is not another theatrical performance. There’s
no one to impress, no audience. He’s lived with his work,
doubtless, longer than he’s had a wife, and it knows all about
him in the thorough, hard-boiled way a wife knows. No
poseur wrote “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Presence is a
state of concentration on another so complete it leaves you
quite without defenses, altogether open; for walls face both
ways, as do the bars of a cage. Inquire of the bears how it is.
To erect bars is to be behind them. Withholding is not a
requirement of poetry.
Unity is another. The artist does not create with something
special called imagination which he has and you haven’t.
He can create with his body because that body has become
a mind; he can create with his feelings because they’ve turned
into sensations. He thinks in roughness, loudness, and in
color. A painter’s hands are magnified eyes. He is those
fingers—he becomes his medium—and as many fingers close
simply in a single fist, so all our faculties can close, and hold
everything in one clasp as the petals close in a rose or metal
edges crimp.

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 The Artist and Society

Awareness is another. Honesty, concentration, unity of

being: these allow, in the artist, the world to be seen—an
unimaginable thing to most of us—to fully take in a tree,
a tower, a hill, a graceful arm. If you’ve ever had an artist’s
eyes fall on you, you’ll know what I mean. Only through
such openings may the world pass to existence.
Sensuality is another. Painting and poetry (to name just
two) are sexual acts. The artist is a lover, and he must woo
his medium till she opens to him; until the richness in her
rises to the surface like a blush. Could we adore one another
the way the poet adores his words or the painter his colors—-
what would be the astonishing result?
Totality is still another. I mean that the artist dare not fail
to see the whole when he sees with the whole of him. He
sees the ant in the jam, yet the jam remains sweet. He must
fall evenly on all sides, like a cloak. If he stops to sing a
single feeling, he can do so well because he knows how feel¬
ings move; he knows the fish is offset from its shadow; knows
the peck of the crow does not disturb the beauty of its
beak or the dent it makes in the carrion. There is, it seems
to me, in the works of the great, an inner measure, wound to
beat, a balance which extends through the limbs like bones,
an accurate and profound assessment of the proportion and
value of things.
Naturally the artist is an enemy of the state. He cannot
play politics, succumb to slogans and other simplifications,
worship heroes, ally himself with any party, suck on some
politician’s program like a sweet. He is also an enemy of
every ordinary revolution. As a man he may long for action;
he may feel injustice like a burn; and certainly he may
speak out. But the torn-up street is too simple for him when
he sculpts or paints. He undermines everything. Even when,
convinced of the rightness of a cause, he dedicates his skills
to a movement, he cannot simplify, he cannot overlook, he
 William H. Gass

cannot forget, omit, or falsify. In the end the movement

must reject or even destroy him. The evidence of history is
nearly unanimous on this point.
The artist’s revolutionary activity is of a different kind.
He is concerned with consciousness, and he makes his
changes there. His inaction is only a blind, for his books
and buildings go off under everything—not once but a
thousand times. How often has Homer remade men’s minds?
An uncorrupted consciousness . . . what a dangerous thing
it is.
One could compile, I do not doubt, another list. These
are examples, although central ones. I could so easily be
wrong that no one’s going to pay me any mind, and so I
shall suggest most irresponsibly that we and our world might
use more virtues of this kind—the artist’s kind—for they are
bound to the possibility of Being itself; and occasionally it
strikes me as even almost tragic that there should be artists
who were able, from concrete, speech, or metal, to release a
brilliant life, who nevertheless could not release themselves,
either from their own cage, or from ours . . . there is no
difference. After all, we are—artists and society—both sway¬
ing bears and rigid bars. Again, it may be that the bars are
moving, and the bears, in terror—stricken—are standing be¬
hind them . . . no, in front of them—among them—quite,
quite still.

288
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