undefinedWilliam Gass teaching at Washington University, 1974. Photo: Washington University Magazine

 

In the book-bound alcove off the bare room where he writes when at home, William Gass gave this interview in July of 1976. Sitting in cutoffs and T-shirt, sipping on a bottle of Ballantine ale, Gass, at age fifty-three, resembles a boyish headmaster at his Sunday ease. When he talks, the small shifts of his compact body, the voice’s inflections, and the mind’s dartings reveal a writer harsh on himself and his work, though generous in his responses.

Now 53, Gass is professor of philosophy Washington University in S. Louis. His books are Omensetter's Luck, a novel (1966); In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, stories (1968); Fiction and the Figures of Life, essays (1970); Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, a fictional essay (1971); and On Being Blue, criticism (1976). Parts of The Tunnel his novel in progress have been appearing since 1969.

 

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel you are writing full throat now?

WILLIAM GASS

I hope so, but if I am a hound, at what am I baying? I am basically a closet romantic, a tame wild man. When I was in college, I closed the closet door behind me. Then, for all sorts of reasons, some artistic if you like, but at bottom personal as bottoms are, I became a formalist: I became detached; I emphasized technique; I practiced removal. I was a van. I took away things. And I became a toughie, a hard-liner. When I was in high school, I chanted Thomas Wolfe and burned as I thought Pater demanded and threatened the world as a good Nietzschean should. Then, at college, in a single day I decided to change my handwriting . . . which meant, I realized later, a change in the making of the words which even then were all of me I cared to have admired. It was a really odd decision. Funny. Strange. I sat down with the greatest deliberation and thought how I would make each letter of the alphabet from that moment on. A strange thing to do. Really strange. And for years I carefully wrote in this new hand; I wrote everything—marginal notes, reminders, messages—in a hand that was very Germanic and stiff. It had a certain artificial elegance, and from time to time I was asked to address wedding invitations, but when I look at that hand now I am dismayed, if not a little frightened, it is so much like strands of barbed wire. Well, that change of script was a response to my family situation and in particular to my parents. I fled an emotional problem and hid myself behind a wall of arbitrary formality. Nevertheless, I think that if I eventually write anything which has any enduring merit, it will be in part because of that odd alteration. I submitted myself to a comparatively formal, rather rigorous, kind of philosophical training. I stuffed another tongue in my mouth. It changed my tastes. It wasn’t Shelley any longer, it was Pope. It wasn’t even Melville, it was James. Most of these changes were for the better because, being a little older, I saw more in my new choices than I had in my old ones. But now, after maybe twenty years of not going near Nietzsche—of even being embarrassed by my youthful enthusiasms—I find him exciting again. My handwriting has slowly relaxed and is now the sloppy kindergarten scrawl I had as a child. I suspect the same kind of thing is happening in my work. I am ready to go in any direction. But I hope I’ve learned that the forms are inherent, that the formal discipline is inherent, so that when I want to start improvising I won’t have forgotten how to dance. It wasn’t until I was ready to come out of my formal phase that I began to read Rilke. Once I took my thumb out of my mouth—well—soon there was no dike. So now I try to manage two horses: there is one called Valéry and another called Rilke. I remember I once compared writing to the image of the charioteer in the Phaedrus. Intellectually, Valéry is still the person I admire most among artists I admire most; but when it comes to the fashioning of my own work now, I am aiming at a Rilkean kind of celebrational object, thing, Ding.

INTERVIEWER

How much did this change have to do with your family?

GASS

I think a lot of it was deeply personal. Every powerful reason is a cause, accounts for a condition. When you decide to change your handwriting, and when you sit down and spend a day or more making new characters, you’ve got to be in an outraged and outrageous state of mind. I simply rejected my background entirely. I decided, as one of my characters says, to pick another cunt to come from. Did I come out of that hole in the wallpaper? Rilke has his hero Malte wonder. I just had to make myself anew—or rather, seem to. So I simply started to do it. And I think it very obvious now, though it wasn’t obvious to me then, that I should pick the way I formed words to be the point where I should try to transform everything. The alphabet, for Christ’s sake—I would have changed that, if I’d been able. So all along one principal motivation behind my writing has been to be other than the person I am. To cancel the consequences of the past. I am not the person who grew up in some particular place, though people try to label me as a local Midwestern writer. But I never had roots: all my sources (as a writer) were chosen. I chose to be influenced by this or that book or chose to be defined as the author of this or that. I think that for a long time I was simply emotionally unable to handle my parents’ illnesses. My mother was an alcoholic and my father was crippled by arthritis and his own character. I just fled. It was a cowardly thing to do, but I simply would not have survived. I still hate scenes unless I make them. My situation certainly wasn’t more severe than most people endure at some time in their lives, but I was not equipped to handle it. What is perhaps psychologically hopeful is that in The Tunnel I am turning back to inspect directly that situation, and that means I haven’t entirely rejected it. On the other hand, I am taking a damn long time to write the book. But I don’t know. What is psychologically best for a writer is what produces his best work. I suspect that in order for me to produce my best work I have to be angry. At least I find that easy. I am angry all the time.

INTERVIEWER

Have you spent a good part of your writing life getting even?

GASS

Yes . . . yes. Getting even is one great reason for writing. The precise statement of the motive is tricky, but the clearest expression of my unwholesome nature and my mean motives (apart from trying to write well) appears in a line I like in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” The character says, “I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.” But maybe I say it’s a motive because I like the line. Anyway, my work proceeds almost always from a sense of aggression. And usually I am in my best working mood when I am, on the page, very combative, very hostile. That’s true even when I write to praise, as is often the case. If I write about Colette, as I am now, my appreciation will be shaped by the sap-tongued idiots who don’t perceive her excellence. I also take considerable pleasure in giving obnoxious ideas the best expression I can. But getting even isn’t necessarily vicious. There are two ways of getting even: one is destructive and the other is restorative. It depends on how the scales are weighted. Justice, I think, is the word I want.

INTERVIEWER

Isn’t there a line in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife about the pencil moving against the page with anger?

GASS

Something like that, sure. I am developing a theory about that in an essay I’m writing on creativity. One doesn’t want to generalize from what might be just a private psychology, but it seems to me the emotion is central. There is another sentence from Willie that should be mentioned here, though: “how close, in the end, is a cunt to a concept—we enter both with joy.” That’s the other line of mine I remember with pleasure. And both express something very close to me. If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste. There isn’t very much satisfaction in getting the world to accept and praise you for things that the world is prepared to praise. The world is prepared to praise only shit. One wants to make sure that the complete self, with all its qualities, is not just accepted but approved . . . not just approved—whoopeed.

INTERVIEWER

Did your years at Kenyon College have much influence on your later aesthetic positions?

GASS

Not directly. I was already very fascinated by Ransom’s stuff when I was in high school. I wrote an article on Ransom and sent it to him at the Kenyon Review. It was god-awful, but he was very sweet and returned it with a nice letter. I’d never met him, but I was so in love with the man’s “manner” I scrawled his initials in the books of his I owned and pretended to others that he’d signed them. When I got to Kenyon he did remember my essay, or was polite enough to pretend to. And that “manner” was real. When I was going to school there, the faculty were very much under the influence of Ransom and the New Criticism, but I think that influence was so widespread you’d have found it most places. I did audit a few courses that Ransom taught, but I didn’t take any courses in English while I was at Kenyon. I was busy taking philosophy and other things of that sort. And I found that I fought English classes. I was such a smart-ass I thought I knew much more than the instructor. No, my pretensions got ground beneath another heel. I couldn’t get published in the literary magazine—not a colorful fart, not a thumbprint. The students were very good writers; some of them were publishing in the Review already. And I held a small, limp pen; I was terrified and crushed; I couldn’t get anywhere; I was unbelievably bad; I was lousy. I knew the formalist ideas were in the air, of course, but I didn’t really come face-to-face with them in any extensive way until I went to grad school, so I think that the influence of Kenyon was predominantly philosophical.