Words are names we attach to things to create definition. In Gass’s hands, the outline of meaning is filled in and expanded with comparisons, contrasts, implications, confessions, rebuttals, questions, arguments, derision, and repetition. Words to watch for in these stories include snow (it’s beautiful, deadly, boring, and defiant), inside (where characters go for shelter from the cold, where they hide, and where they can’t escape themselves), imagination (we learn from the housewife in “Order of Insects” how easy it is to lose control of it), world (jostle it a little, and the l comes out: “The world — how grand, how monumental, grave and deadly, that word is”), and, of course, heart.
Added together into sentences and paragraphs, words are the signs that provide a route toward truth. We tunnel through snowdrifts and head inside, seeking to discover what lies in the hearts of these characters. It’s not, as the salesman Pearson pretends, clear, easy, or clean. Nor should it be, not with so much at stake. Gass gives us the opportunity to learn more than we thought it possible to know about his subjects, and to enjoy the pleasure that comes from a deepening of understanding. We imagine what it’s like to inhabit other selves. Through them, we may begin to grasp the beauty and enormity of the world this writer has created.
— JOANNA SCOTT
PREFACE
Few of the stories one has it in one’s self to speak get spoken, because the heart rarely confesses to intelligence its deeper needs; and few of the stories one has at the top of one’s head to tell get told, because the mind does not always possess the voice for them. Even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor or with love, where is that sensitive, admiring, other pair of ears?
No court commands our entertainments, requires our flattery, needs our loyal enlargements or memorializing lies. Fame is not a whore we can ring up. The public spends its money at the movies. It fills stadia with cheers; dances to organized noise; while books die quietly, and more rapidly than their authors. Mammon has no interest in our service.
Literature once held families together better than quarreling. It carved a common ancestry simply from vibrating air, peopling an often empty and forgotten past with gods, demons, worthy enemies and proper heroes, until it became largely responsible for that pride we sometimes still take in being Athenian or Basque, a follower or fan. Think of the myths we’ve wrapped around Lincoln, that figure we have made a fiction in order to make him immortal. Think of the satisfaction there is in supporting a winning team of any kind. It’s no small gift, this sense of worth which reaches us ahead of any action of our own, like hair at birth, and makes brilliant enterprises possible.
Some of the stories in this book have been alive (such is the brevity of story-life these days — like the photographer’s flash) a long time (no time at all, of course, for Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple is now one hundred years old); no, not long by immortal measure, yet a surprising while, nevertheless, like the landed fish who startles us with a late flop. Now I’m to place a few words in front of them — these tales without plot or people, I’ve been told — and I wonder whether they should serve as muffled drums or slowed steps do: to ready respect before the coming of the hearse.
Perhaps it is the case with many fabrications, but I am struck by how easily they might not have been at all; how really unreasonably provisional their entire existence is. The same for us all, you say? aren’t we accidents of genes and conditions of acidity ourselves, of elemental woove and wovvle? the product of opportunity and inclination, simple negligence and malice? Yes. O. Yes. Of course. But we burgeon as easily as water falls. We grow meanly like a cancer. Wasted acres testify to the undiminished requirements of our needs. Suppose it were otherwise, and a mother had to make her child’s every cell. How many of us, in that case, would reach complete existence?
What of these excruciating passivities of print, then? If I break a dish, physics takes charge of my freedom like a warden, and there’s no finger-smear of mine in the scatter of its bits. My cat’s grassy urps, alas, show more of me than the shavings in my sharpener. However, these — these litters of language — they could not exist without the stubborn sustainment of my will… amazing to contemplate… a commonplace to encounter. So consciously composed, these stories are naturally laden with indebtedness, as though they had been to Hawaii, and encircled by exotic blooms. If my hero’s hair is red as rust, to whom goes the credit — a recessive gene in my grandmother’s unmentionable make-up? And all those authors I have lain with — loved — left — which ones are to blame for my page-long shopping lists, my vulgarized lingo, my tin pan prose? whose blood beats in the baby when none will claim paternity and the mother is unknown?
To be born unencumbered is not the complete advantage one might immediately imagine. Although the struggle to free one’s youthful self of religion, relatives, and region is thereby greatly simplified, since there are no complicated cuffs to be unclasped, no subtle knots to be untied, the self in question is as vague and vaguely messy as a smudged line. I was born in a place as empty of distinction as my writing desk. When I wrote most of these stories, it was a dining table, featureless as Fargo. And I was born through a time so unnoteworthy in the locality that public memory starved, though I was scarcely six weeks old when I was floated out of North Dakota like Moses in a wicker basket. Alas… the resemblance was a brief and shallow one, because my basket was placed on the back seat of an old Dodge which tunnelled through twelve hundred miles of gravel dust to surface at the sooty industrial city in Ohio where my father was to teach and eventually to clench his bones together in a painful, accusatory claw.
Obscurely born (rumors circulated secretly like poorly printed money: was I caesarian? a breech? were those forceps marks on the back of my little red neck? was my papa playing baseball when my mother pushed me screaming into being? was I supposed to care that I was born obscurely?) of parents who hardly honored their heritage even by the bother of forcibly forgetting it; and who had many prejudices but few beliefs (the town I grew quickly older in appeared to be full of nigs, micks, wops, spicks, bohunks, polacks, kikes; on the public walks, in the halls of the high school, one could not be too careful of the profaned lips of water fountains); thus while there was much to complain of, just as there is in any family — much to resist — it was all quite particular, palpable, concrete. Good little clerk, my father hated workers, blacks, and Jews, the way he expected women to hate worms. There wasn’t a faith to embrace or an ideology to spurn, unless perhaps it was the general suggestion of something poisonously Republican, or a periodical’s respect for certain Trade Marks. And I remember resolving, while on long walks or during summer reveries or while deep in the night’s bed, not to be like that, when that was whatever was around me: Warren, Ohio — factory smoke, depression, household gloom, resentments, illness, ugliness, despair, etcetera, and littleness, above all, smallness, the encroachment of the lean and meager. I won’t be like that, I said, and naturally I grew in special hidden ways to be more like that than anyone could possibly imagine, or myself admit. Even as a grown man I was still desperately boasting that I’d choose another cunt to come from. Well, Balzac wanted his de, and I wanted my anonymity.