Saturday, December 9, 2017

THE TYPING DEAD (on William Gass)

      Some years ago in reviewing a book by J. P. Donleavy for the Chicago Tribune I remarked that while prolific he like Vladimir Nabokov, equally prolific, would be remembered for one book: The Ginger Man, Lolita. 
       That is why I reject the phrase: de mortuis nil nisi bonum

      Finally a death certificate and obituary have been issued for one of the typing dead: William Gass… of course in the near future it is likely we will be seeing such announcements for others of the typing dead: Don DeLillo, Joyce Oates and Robert Coover while some of the pre-maturely typing dead: Jonathan Franzen, Ali Smith, Jonathan Safron Foer—will serve as typical of the younger typing dead.
     Gass is part of a long tradition of the typing dead… at one time in second hard bookstores you could always find examples from previous times: John Sanford,  Waldo Frank, John Hawkes,  Philip Wylie are typical  examples--- the mystery of whatever did people find in these writers that is now no longer apparent…
        William Gass, if he had fallen silent after publishing the long story In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,  would have assured his writing of a real place in the literary world, much as Tillie Olson did with her very short collection of stories Tell Me a Riddle or Hannah Green did with her one short novel The Dead of the House… but in the case of Gass with each book of fiction or non-fiction  after In the Heart of the Heart of the Country the hole he dug for himself became bigger and  deeper… in particular the books of criticism which were finally exercises in style lacking any content thus leaving a reader hard-pressed to say what the essay had been about other than to murmur, it sounded pretty good but what was he trying to say ?...  while the blobs of “fiction” were just that and you can see for yourself by  using the method suggested by Ezra Pound: choose at random say page 51 in Gass’s Middle C or in The Tunnel and compare them to the same page in say Celine’s Rigadoon or in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction.  My case is thus rested and to think both the Celine and the Bernhard are translations…

        Altogether a sad fate for a one time professor of philosophy who was promoted or demoted into  a professor of humanities while being  proclaimed a genius by his current publisher upon his death…

                                         PS

     IN THE COMING WEEKS THERE WILL BE A BATHETIC CHORUS OF CELEBRATORY LAMENTS AT THE DEATH OF GASS AND THE LOSS TO LITERATURE... BUT THANKFULLY THE AMERICAN MEMORY IS ...  AND ON WE GO

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The death of a writer always brings comments about importance and an inflated reputation. Comments like your about Gass are part of that tradition. Reputations often decline in the immediate period after an author's death. Then things tend to balance out. I find your dismissal of "all" but one piece of Gass' work disturbing. Having followed your blog for some time, I know that you have a penchant for declaring that writers have one book or one essay in them and that is all that will remain (the point you make in this blog about Green and Nabokov). This reductionist attitude is hard to swallow. In the case of Gass, I am not a great fan of his fiction, but I think one of his qualities as an essayist was that he could put whole libraries between a few pages. He had a unique style, and he brought a particular voice to writers as diverse as Erasmus, Flann O'Brien, Canetti, Stein, and Rilke. Arguing about reputation, who decides whence reputation is established and whether a writer is to be put on the back burner, is a nowhere project. In the case of Gass I have been impressed with how deeply his intellect has affected younger writers.