Word Lover

On a single page of On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William H. Gass celebrates (and echoes) the prose of two of my (and his) favorite fiction writers. Referring to the stone-sucking episode in Molloy, Gass writes, “Stones will never nourish us however patiently or hard we suck them. What fills us then, in such a passage?” He answers:

“It is Beckett’s wonderful rhythms, the way he weighs his words, the authority he gives to each, their measured pace, the silences he puts between them, as loving looks extend their objects into the surrounding space; it is the contrapuntal form, the reduced means, the simple clear directness of his obscurities, and the depth inside of every sentence, the graceful hurdle of every chosen obstacle, everywhere the lack of waste.”

Two paragraphs later, he writes:

“If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we’d never long for another, never wander away; where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood? Who else would robe us so richly, take us to the best places, or guard our virtue as his own and defend our character in every situation? If we were his sentences, we’d sing ourselves though we were dying and about to be extinguished, since the silence which would follow our passing would not be like the pause left behind by a noisy train. It would be a memorial, well-remarked, grave, just as the Master has assured us death itself is: the distinguished thing.”

The entire postmodern project leaves me cold, but I love Gass’s work as I have for more than 35 years. I met him once, at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the fall of 1994, when he read from his long and long-deferred novel The Tunnel, which was published the following year. After the reading, I shook his hand and thanked him for all the pleasure he had given me, and on the title pages of my first edition of Omensetter’s Luck (a library discard!) and the Nonpareil paperback of The World Within the Word, he wrote “For Patrick Kurp, William H. Gass,” almost as though he were giving the books to me a second time.

Go here for a useful interview with Gass published last year in The Believer.