Biography

William Howard Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on July 30, 1924, the son of William and Claire (Sorensen) Gass. With two brief exceptions Gass has spent most of his life in the Midwest, the place most frequently evoked in his works of fiction.

From 1943 to 1946, he served in the U.S. Navy principally in China and Japan. He left the Navy in 1946 with the rank of ensign, and in 1947 he finished his undergraduate studies at Kenyon College in Ohio. He then enrolled in graduate studies in philosophy at Cornell University in New York, specializing in the philosophical analysis of language a preoccupation that would become the central focus in his works of fiction.

While working on his Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell, Gass supported himself by working as an instructor of philosophy at the College of Wooster (in Wooster, Ohio) from 1950 to 1954. On June 17 1952, he married Mary Patricia O’Kelly, withwhom he had two sons and one daughter. In 1954, he received the Ph.D. from Cornell and immediately took a new teaching position as a professor at Purdue University, where he taught until 1969. The period at Purdue was an especially productive one for Gass. During this time, he published his highly original first novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), and a critically acclaimed book of short stories, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Other Stories (1968). In 1968, Gass also published an important novella, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, which appeared in the pages of TriQuarterly magazine.

In 1969, he married again, to Mary Alice Henderson with whom he had two daughters. In 1969, Gass also began a long and fruitful association with Washington University in Saint Louis Missouri, a period marked by a flood of publications having to do with his philosophy of language and general theories of fiction. He also wrote a prodigious number of reviews and critical articles on contemporary and classic works of fiction. Gass was writing regularly for such influential publications as Tri Quarterly, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The New Republic.

These scholarly articles and reviews became the basis for his important works of nonfiction and often served as chapters in such books as Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970); On Being Blue (1975), his most famous and frequently quoted work of nonfiction The World Within the Word (1978); and The Habitations of the Word: Essays (1984).

The collective importance of these works of nonfiction for the student of Gass’s work cannot be overstated; in them, Gass created his own complex theory of fiction as an end in itself, thus establishing himself as one of the chief practitioners and theoreticians of the New Fiction, a style practiced by such writers as Donald Barthelme, Richard Coover, John Barth, and John Gardner, among others.

Gass’s work in all these arenas—teaching, literary creativity, and scholarly publication—began to attract more and more attention as well as many coveted awards, prizes, and honorary positions. In 1965, he won the Standard Oil Teaching Award at Purdue University, followed by Sigma Delta Chi Best Teacher Awards at Purdue in 1967 and 1968.

The Chicago Tribune also recognized Gass in 1967 giving him an award for being one of the best Big Ten university teachers. In 1969, he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1974 he received the Alumni Teaching Award from Washington University.

The awards were not limited merely to Gass’s teachings skills, outstanding though they were. His fiction and essays began to receive more and more national recognition, as suggested by the following honors: The National Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Literature (1975) and the National Medal of Merit for Fiction (1979). He won the National Book Critics Circle Award an unprecedented three times: in 1985 for Habitations of theWord; in 1996 for Finding Form; and in 2003 for Tests of Time. In 2000 Gass won the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award, which he called his “most prized prize.”

Gass was asked to serve as a member of the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities from1978 to 1980 and as a member of the literature panel of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1979 to 1982. Gass has also been awarded honorary degrees from Kenyon College (1974), George Washington University (1982), and Purdue University (1985).

Analysis

Anyone who has read the first page of Gass’s famous On Being Blue must recall the dazzling, virtuoso performance of the author, who manages, in the first few paragraphs, to evoke every possible connotation of the word “blue,” including the blues and such phrases as blue laws, blue stockings blue blazers, and blue pencils. This playfulness with language, this delight in turning words around and examining them as if they were resplendent prisms or baffling puzzle cubes, is characteristic of Gass’s fiction.

Again and again, one is struck by the fact that Gass’s short stories and novels, however enticing and entertaining they may be, somehow evade the standard storytelling function of most narratives. Gass’s stories are not so much about something as they are explorations of how to look at something how to discover the multiple possibilities inherent in the simplest moment or action. In a real sense Gass is a proponent of art for art’s sake.Heis not interested in delivering a familiar moral or preaching a popular message, and he is rarely interested in realism as such.

A typical Gass story makes relatively few historical or chronological references to the everyday world. His narrative plots tend to be spare and minimal even though a great deal seems to happen in each story. The reader thus may be hard put to summarize or encapsulate a Gass story, yet that story will leave its audience with an indelible sense of having experienced a richly imagined world—or a sense of having lived in the mind of an unforgettable character. Much of Gass’s fiction is focused on the choices and thought processes of such characters.

Gass often creates a kind of stream of consciousness in which every perception, doubt dream, fear, or memory of a character bursts upon the page in a rushing torrent of words. Once again it is the individual word, with all of its associations and musical reverberations, that becomes the principal unit of composition.

In a real sense, then, Gass’s language-oriented technique is his basic theme. Everything he writes in some way reflects on his fundamental notion that words do not merely create reality; they are, finally the only reality. This technique does not however, absolutely exclude other interpretations or thematic possibilities. Words fail the narrator in Gass’s novel The Tunnel. Although Professor Kohler has written an entire book seeking to discover the truth of Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany he is no closer to it at the end than he was at the beginning. In fact, he finds it necessary to add even more misinformation to justify his viewpoint.

He is equally unable to discover the truth of his own life through words. Gass is certainly moved by the theme of human loneliness and alienation; he is fascinated by the spectacle of individuals cut off psychologically or socially from the rest of society.

He is equally fascinated by the impossibility (or near impossibility) of arriving at any fundamental truth in human life. His works often suggest that ambiguity, misunderstanding, and confusion tend to be the norm. This skepticism on Gass’s part may well result from his professional training as a philosopher in general, or fromhis specific attention to the philosophy of language. After all, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, theorized that language is a game that people learn to play by virtue of their humanity.

The rules of the language game are arbitrary for words can mean anything the speaker wants them to mean, as Lewis Carroll’s Alice, for example discovers on her confusing journey through Wonderland. Despite his spare plots, general themes of uncertainty and misunderstanding, and love of individual words (a kind of poet’s attention to craftsmanship) Gass does not leave the reader in a sort of literary vacuum, a minimalist universe with only bare outlines and skeletons. In fact, he provides one of the richest textures of detail in contemporary American fiction. His fictions positively bristle with details about weather, facial appearances, architectural details, slang terms, odd names, nicknames bits of song and poetry, and passages from the Bible. In The Tunnel, he also uses different font styles, drawings, and cartoons. Perhaps the secret of Gass’s success is that he invites the reader to make a fresh interpretation or reordering of the wealth of details always present in his narratives.

Therefore, what Gass provides most consistently is an overwhelming sense of the richness and complexity of day-to-day life. The subject most frequently evoked by that rich detailing is Gass’s native Midwest, the region where he has spent most of his life. Midwestern weather, snowstorms, sunsets fields, flowers, trees, farm buildings, and turreted Gothic mansions abound in his fiction. For all his avant-garde experimentation, Gass always keeps his attention on what he calls the “heart of the heart of the country.”

Gass has always maintained a kind of love-hate relationship with the Midwest. On one hand, its pastoral beauties and traditional patterns of social life have fascinated him and provided him with the raw material for his experimental storytelling. On the other hand, however, he has utterly rejected the small-mindedness, bigotry, and cultural conservatism that often characterize small-town life in the heartland. One might observe that Gass’s literary experimentation and philosophical independence might not have occurred in the first place if he had not experienced a kind of artistic claustrophobia in his youth.

In “A Revised and Expanded Preface,” written in 1981 for the second edition of his classic work In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Other Stories (originally published in 1968), Gass speaks passionately and sometimes bitterly about his origins.

Racial slurs (“nigs, micks, wops, spicks, bohunks polacks, kikes”) were spoken abundantly in his hometown. Gass’s response to this poisonous atmosphere (which he described in many of his later works) was to seek refuge in art. Heread widely and deeply, developing a taste for the works of modern writers such as Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and William Faulkner—in short, all the masters of twentieth century literary experimentation. In the process, Gass determined to become a writer himself and to define himself as an artist with “a soul, a special speech, a style.” For Gass, there is no discontinuity between his life as an artist and the rest of his existence; the two are inseparably intertwined. “I was born somewhere in the middle of my first book,” he explains. The rest of his life can be seen as a brilliantly successful process of self-discovery through one artistic creation after another.

On the surface, at least, “The Pedersen Kid” is a relatively simple tale. A Scandinavian family, the Jorgensens, are trying to keep warmduring a howling blizzard that has virtually rendered them snowbound. The family consists of Ma (Hed), a kindly self-effacing woman, and Pa, a boorish, drunken lout who hides his whiskey bottles all over the house and expresses his displeasure by dumping the contents of his chamber pot on the heads of his victims. Jorge, their son and the narrator of the tale, fears and despises him, as does Big Hans, the hired hand who works for the family and lives in the house with them. It is Big Hans who finds the Pedersen kid, half-buried in a snowdrift in front of the Jorgensen farmhouse.

Although he first seems to be dead (the first of many ambiguities in the story), Ma revives the young child (his exact age is another ambiguity—he could be two or even four years old) with the help of Big Hans and Jorge. Pa awakens, fuming as always, but eventually he, Big Hans, and Jorge determine to visit the Pedersen family to notify them of the child’s rescue—and to verify if they have been killed or put in the cellar by a mysterious character called “yellow gloves” by the Pedersen kid.

The bulk of the narrative is taken up by their visit to the Pedersen farmin the midst of the blinding blizzard, itself a kind of symbol for the confusion and ambiguity of the entire situation. Pa drops his whiskey bottle in the snow, and Jorge finds a dead horse, which they realize does not belong to Pedersen. They all conclude, without any real evidence that the dead horse must have been ridden by the murderer of the Pedersens, although even the fact that the family has been murdered has not been established. The entire meaning of the story is revealed at that juncture, because Jorge (on whose point of view the reader is forced to rely) speculates that the horse may be the murderer’s, or it may belong to Carlson or Schmidt—nothing is clear.

Pa and Big Hans dig a tunnel to the barn, and finally all three of them stumble toward the house but Jorge thinks that rifle shots have been fired killing Big Hans and Pa. In any event, they fall behind in the snow, and Jorge makes no attempt to rescue them or to check on their condition, preferring the relative warmth of the Pedersen cellar (which contains no corpses) and the empty house.

The story ends there, with Jorge riding out the storm, uncertain of his fate or that of his companions because at any moment he could be eliminated by “that fellow.”

Like other precocious and highly imaginative narrators—Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield readily come to mind—Jorge invents a complex and often contradictory universe. Yet that world is always thrilling and vivid precisely because of its uncertainty.

Like Jorge, the reader will want to thank the mysterious “yellow gloves” for the “glorious turn” he has given to what would have been a hopelessly ordinary little world.

Omensetter’s Luck is a highly complex and original novel which enchants and mystifies the reader on nearly every page. The novel actually takes the form of three closely related tales, the last two progressively longer than their predecessors, all somehow dealing with the mysterious central figure of the book. The three tales (subdivided into chapters) include “The Triumph of Israbestis Tott,” “The Love and Sorrow of Henry Pimber,” and “The Reverend Jethro Furber’s Change of Heart.” Just as in “The Pedersen Kid,” Gass places his story in the familiar terrain of the Midwest, in Gilean, a small, imaginary community on the Ohio River at the turn of the twentieth century.

The broad details of the story are simple enough: Brackett Omensetter, a dark, burly harness maker arrives in Gilean during a season of drought, rents a home from Henry Pimber, and takes a job with Mat Watson, the blacksmith. A flood arrives, and the Omensetter house survives in spite of its perilous location near the river. The myth of Omensetter’s luck begins. Omensetter’s reputation as a kind of magician or possessed man (a fiction created by the half-demented and jealous Reverend Furber) is enhanced when he cures Henry Pimber of lockjaw by using a poultice made from ordinary beets. Henry Pimber later hangs himself in a tall oak tree, Omensetter’s recently born son contracts diphtheria, and Omensetter finds Henry’s body at the same time that he refuses to seek a doctor’s help for his son. The novel concludes with the departure of both the Reverend Furber and the Omensetter family. Amos, the Omensetter infant miraculously survives his diphtheria, and “Omensetter’s luck” is forever established as a kind of catchphrase in the inbred community of Gilean.

Gass employs a number of literary techniques in this novel, another story of ambiguity and misunderstanding. Omensetter’s luck is merely a projection of the town’s superstitions and insecurities. The literary technique that Gass uses most frequently to bring this town and its unique residents to life is the device of the catalog or list of items, a technique used as far back as the ancient poetry of Homer. In Gass’s novel, the catalog is used to show how people literally create reality by piling one piece of data atop another. In Gilean, the world is made up of lists.

Israbestis (“Bessie”) Tott, the ancient postmaster of Gilean, is a kind of living historian, carrying lists of people’s possessions (the opening scene of Omensetter’s Luck is an auction). Henry Pimber will make a detailed list of Omensetter’s possessions on the day of his arrival in town. The Reverend Furber makes lists of flowers, mourners at a funeral, and jars of preserves on a shelf. Names, though, constitute the primary data in this list-making process.

In his famous preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Gass admits that he collected names as the germs or catalysts for stories, including names such as Jethro Furber, Pelatiah Hall, George Hatsat and Quartus Graves. It is not surprising, then to see some of those names (such as Jethro Furber) figure prominently in his later work, nor is it strange to read the catalog of names supplied by the oddly named Israbestis Tott at the beginning of the novel including May Cobb, Kick Skelton, Hog Bellman and Madame DuPont Neff. For Gass, the world is made up of words, as suggested by the title of his book of essays, The World Within the Word (1978).

Words possess the magical power of invocation: They can call things into being. Names are the most powerful of all words, able to call forth the whole town of Gilean, Ohio.

In “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” Gass not only makes short lists of names and objects, but he also creates the very structure of the tale from his ingrained habit of list-making. The story, in brief, becomes a list of lists. There is no regular story line or even normal paragraphing but rather a series of journal-like entries, each one with its appropriate subtitle such as “People,” “Weather,” or “Place.” There is only one voice, that of the unidentified poet-narrator, who is living in the dismally boring town of B. . . , Indiana (identified in the preface to the whole volume, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, as Brookston, Indiana).

As in Omensetter’s Luck, the texture of the world is composed of words and, particularly, of words turned into poem-like lists. There is again the preoccupation with names, including Mr. Tick, the narrator’s cat, and such hilarious names as “Gladiolus Callow Bladder, Prince and Princess Oleo Hieronymous, Cardinal Mummum, Mr. Fitchew Spot.” The narrator also lists all the possessions of an old man in Brookston, a kind of pack rat who has saved everything, even the steering tiller from the first, old-fashioned car he owned.

The narrator is a saver of things, too, a poet without a lover or a job who painfully plods through each day, examining the minutest details of his environment (clouds, trees, buildings) until they become a kind of poetry. This process of saving things through documentation is especially evident in the entries marked “Data,” which culminate with a magnificent list of all the social clubs and civic organizations in Brookston, fromthe ModernHomemakers to the Merry-go-round Club. One theme that emerges clearly in this story is the idea that something can be so boring that it actually becomes interesting—if one has the artist’s eye and the ability to have “intercourse by eye.” Another theme is the loneliness and isolation (often selfimposed) of the American artist. In the preface Gass observes, “The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene.”

Thus this famous story, for all of its well-articulated pain and loneliness, is ultimately a celebration of the power of art to elevate and transform even the plainest elements of a little Midwestern hamlet. “In the spring the lawns are green, the forsythia is singing, and even the railroad that guts the town has straight bright rails which hum when the train is coming,” the narrator says.

The Tunnel is told in the first person by Professor Kohler, who is seized by some strange paralysis of the soul when he tries to finish his book and instead writes the contorted story of his own embittered life. Kohler realizes that he is engulfed with rage, and he is determined to mine his past in an attempt to expiate it. He is the only child of a disappointed mother whose dreams center on her sulky obstinate son and an angry, bigoted father.

Time in the novel loops back and forth between personal history and world history as Professor Kohler (whose name means “miner” in German) becomes obsessed with his experiences in Germany in the 1930’s. Kohler finds his colleagues contemptible and taunts Herschel, a Jewish professor at the college, about Nazi motives. Because of a student’s harassment charges, his colleagues convene a faculty meeting to discuss Kohler’s lechery.

They bicker peevishly while he alternately lies and confesses. Kohler’s colleagues find him a problem not only because of his behavior but also because of his earlier book, Nuremberg Notes. As he tunnels deeper into himself in an attempt to come to terms with his relationship to history, he begins to dig an actual tunnel in the basement of the home that he shares with his wife, Martha. A long interior monologue detailing his failed relationship with Martha leads to a meditation on the quarrels that erupted into World War II and other international conflicts.

This sets the pattern for the novel: long sections of stream-of-consciousness narration interspersed with stories of the characters told with a more detached viewpoint by the narrator. The novel is not broken up into chapters, but the stories often have titles, such as “Learning to Drive,” “Aunts,” and “Do Mountains.” True to his midwestern background, Gass sets the novel in Indiana. A visit to an abandoned country farm with Martha and his two children segues into memories of the country drives of his childhood with his disapproving father. His thoughts drift to the failure of his marriage, his own young adult children who disappoint when they do not disgust him, and his father’s death. His father brings back thoughts of his student days in Germany and his relationship with Magus Tabor, the charismatic professor whom Kohler worshipped.

Tabor, who is entranced by the glorious sweep of history, is indifferent to individual death, falsifies historical facts, adores the German fatherland, despises truth and Jews, and loves conquest. Kohler recalls tossing bricks during the infamous Kristallnacht of November, 1938, and smashing the windows of Jewish shops. He adds a long defense of Adolf Hitler to his history of Germany and returns to excavating the tunnel, the debris of which he dumps into Martha’s collection of antique bureaus and sideboards. At the end of the novel, Martha discovers the debris and dumps a drawer full of it on the manuscript lying on Kohler’s desk. In some ways, The Tunnel is a long meditation on the difficulty of determining historical truth through language.

Summary

In a marvelous book called The Fabulators (1967) the distinguished critic Robert Scholes suggested that the best writers of the late twentieth century were not realistic storytellers so much as artists who were motivated by the embellishments and multiple possibilities in any story. He called this process “fabulation” and identified the work of Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth as prime examples. Like such fabulators, Gass has entertained and edified his readers by showing them the story behind the story—and the unending possibilities of meaning contained in even the simplest of words.

Like all true geniuses, he took an established form narration, and made something new and beautiful with it, something that no one had yet anticipated.

Bibliography

By the Author