Light at the End of the Tunnel : After 25 Years, Cult Figure William Gass Finally Finishes That Monumental Novel

IF THERE IS A SECRET KING OF AMERICAN LETTERS, IT IS WILLIAM GASS. HIS VARIED AND FAR-FLUNG interests have kept him out of the limelight as a novelist for some time. And Gass readers are starved for his new work. But they can start preparing for a feast. After more than a quarter-century of toil, Gass has finally finished what will more than likely be his last novel, “The Tunnel.”

* His writings, though widely honored, are still more familiar to the literati than to the general reading public. Gass, 68, has published a few short pieces of fiction since he began “The Tunnel,” but much of his time has been devoted to writing three books of literary essays: “Fiction and the Figures of Life” (1971), “The World Within The Word” (1978) and “Habitations of the Word” (1985). His 1976 essay, “On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry,” a jazzy, ribald 90-page treatise on just about every shade and metaphorical meaning of blue , became a cult item.

* In his critically acclaimed first novel, “Omensetter’s Luck,” and his book of stories, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” both of which came out in the mid-’60s, the measured music of his prose has raised the often mute ordinariness of life to a high linguistic pitch. Banality is replaced by a blunt mythic poetry, and we see that what we term banality might simply be lack of attention. Gass’ unmistakable voice, in his fiction and his essays, proclaims the cornucopia of delights and profundities, the dulcet shimmers and the crude blats of the English language, the shocks of recognition when words grab hold of something live and dangle it before us.

* “We’re always out of luck here,” Gass writes in a passage from an extended meditation on small-town, Midwest life that forms the title piece of his story collection. “That’s just how it is--for instance in the winter. The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings--they are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank and front, each top is gray. Everything is gray: hair, eyes, window glass, the hawkers’ bills and touters’ posters, lips, teeth, poles and metal signs--they’re gray, quite gray. Cars are gray. Boots, shoes, suits, hats, gloves are gray. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons, all are gray, everything is gray, and everyone is out of luck who lives here.”

GASS’ FIRST TWO BOOKS OF FICTION BURST ONTO THE LITERARY SCENE IN THE mid-’60s and immediately placed him among the modern masters of American literature. His work has inspired an entire generation of writers as divergent as Susan Sontag and John Hawkes. Sontag called his work “extraordinary” and “stunning” when it first appeared. Poet and critic David Lehman says: “Gass writes with extraordinary panache about everything--and nothing. Nobody but Gass would . . . devote an entire essay--and that a panegyric--to the diverse functions of the word and ,” referring to “Habitations of the Word.” But Gass has confounded others with the obscurities of his work. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times wrote of the same book: “More often, alas, the prose is numbing. I’m not sure what the problem is. Professor Gass may be in over my head.” But he concedes that Gass may be “training us still to be better readers. But at this he’s reached the point of diminishing returns.”

In many of his essays, Gass celebrates the achievements of writers such as Gertrude Stein, Colette, Malcolm Lowry, William Faulkner, Henry James, Paul Valery and Ford Madox Ford. Gass taps into the sounds of their innermost thoughts, which often are lurking behind the words on the page. He immerses himself in others’ works, reading them with a verve and passion few do. “I’m interested in how the mind works,” Gass has said, “sliding off into sneakily connected pathways, parking the car at another level of discourse, arriving by parachute.”

Gass arrived in Santa Monica last fall from St. Louis via a fellowship at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. In his modest Santa Monica office, as his fellowship came to an end, the final pages of his 1,200-page novel took shape.

Minus the final formatting, “The Tunnel,” the secret memoir of a historian sympathetic to the Nazi regime, is complete. At first, Gass is a bit wary of discussing, in simple terms, such an immense, unpublished work. “Well, people ask what it’s about , you know,” he says with a sigh and a small, weary laugh, looking up at the ceiling. “And so I have a little formula. I try to explain that it uses the Holocaust and the Nazi period as a backdrop for the similar problems set in an American domestic situation. And the phrase I use to describe it is: It’s about the fascism of the heart.” Although he’s had to accommodate himself to such rubrics during the book’s lengthy gestation, he clearly doesn’t like doing so. “There’s so much more going on--and I’m not an ‘about’ writer.”

Gass’ appearance is both earthy and elfin. From the gentle oval of his head to the spherical belly, he is constructed of various sorts of comforting roundness. Even sitting in a chair, he’s always in motion, rocking, turning, gesturing, shifting about. A mild huffing and puffing surrounds his sentences as if, in the rush of connecting his thoughts, he must remind himself to breathe. His rich and reedy voice is somewhat high-pitched, but it often drops in a flash to a hearty chuckle, usually at his own expense.

Gass, director of the International Writers Center at Washington University in St. Louis, teaches philosophy at “Wash U” (as he fondly calls it), so it’s not surprising that his conversation repeatedly comes back to themes that occupy him daily: human perception and the paradox of language. Again and again, Gass plays with the ineffable distance between words and things. In his essay “In Terms of the Toenail,” Gass explains: “You can read about frogs or you can raise frogs and watch them. The count can be described to you or introduced. Annie can say she is weary or fall all of a heap.” The gap between the word tree on the tip of one’s tongue and the thing through the window shading one’s desk means that language both refers us to the world, yet keeps us from it as well. For Gass, a sentence is a palpable thing, like a vase or a waterfall, and the worlds we make of words needn’t teach us anything or be good for something.

As he wrote in “Habitations of the Word”: “A sign like ‘Gents’ tells me where to pee. It conveys information; it produces feelings of glad relief. The sign could have said ‘Men.’ It could have been replaced by a mustache. The sign passes out of consciousness, is extinguished, by its use. To the degree a sign grows literary, it does not have a ‘use.’ The meaning is not extinguished. I return to it again and again. The secrets of literature lie in that magnetism.”

IN AN ERA INCREASINGLY DEVOTED TO THE FACTUAL, GASS’ INSISTENCE ONwriting fiction and essays that defeat the question “What is it about?” can come as a shock.

“People get puzzled ! I can understand that,” he chuckles. His approach to writing is simply what “feels right at the time. I don’t have an ideology. Don’t want one. Don’t believe in them. For me, there’s no system which gives you an advance answer to something or which dictates the way in which you will write or the way you will judge a book. I have a critical stance, but part of that stance is an intense skepticism about positions. I don’t believe in systems. Rules are fun to have around so you can not obey them.” He laughs with the private pleasure of one who has gotten great enjoyment out of breaking the rules.

When “Omensetter’s Luck,” a haunting novel in which a laborer finds himself accused of murder by a demonic preacher, was finally accepted, Gass wrote a letter to his editor, a letter that he admits could only have been written by “one who was half unhinged.” In it, however, he says something that still rings true today: “Unfortunately, this book was not written to have readers. It was written to not have readers, while still deserving them. This is the position I prefer, and I suspect encourages me to my best work.”

Gass has been criticized by some, and especially by critic Robert Alter in the New Republic, for letting his obsessions with the structure of his prose and the sound of his words override the specific content or argument of his work, but he dismisses such objections. “All these issues are so old! They come up in the Greek tragic writers all the time. As you went from Aeschylus to Euripedes, say, you had an increasing vulgarity of expression. Earlier writers were going to have strong subjects, sure, but nobody was going to put his eyes out onstage. Instead, you were going to have a great speech. That’s how you do it. The attraction of a subject with tremendous resonance and power is to disarm it and get it into your world. That’s what I’m interested in.

“What I’m trying to do . . . is (to write) a work that is intensely referential, but whose quality does not depend on that reference. And therefore setting up a tremendous tension between the two. It’s a tension I have taken on full tilt with ‘The Tunnel,’ ” he asserts, alluding to its difficult material that deals with both familial and political madness. “My view,” he sums up, “is that the quality of a novel does not depend on its subject. My fundamental belief has always been the same, and has to do with the division of morality, truth value and artistic value. Which for me are separate and equal, independent, bound together all the time, but quite different, and to be judged in different terms. To decide of something that if it tells the truth, then it’s got to be good--I think that’s so vulgar.”

But after this statement of abstract principles, Gass relents regarding “The Tunnel.” “In a way, you know, it does have a subject. Or subjects,” he admits. “And one of the subjects is my concern about the sort of ‘fascist unconscious’ that we see so much of in a lot of American life. The politics of the breakfast table. The family. I write about domestic things all the time, that’s my subject.”

It’s no accident that Gass’ fiction is powerfully identified with the tough, bleak landscapes of the American Midwest and the chaos of a harsh family life. He was born in North Dakota and grew up in Warren, Ohio, a steel town not far from Pennsylvania. Later, he taught for 15 years at Purdue University, and he is quick to point out that Indiana, the spiritual center of his fiction, was the strongest northern outpost of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and other such groups. He knows the territory well, the “world of small-town values that this country is; it just can’t cope with urbanism yet.”

Gass’ father, William, a onetime minor-league baseball player, gave up an architectural career because of ill health. Through Gass’ childhood, during the Great Depression, he taught mechanical drawing and coached at the local high school. “Grim times. My father didn’t get paid much, but, at least, he had a job. There was lots of violence--strikers, scabs, stuff like that. My father had all kinds of kids who were discipline problems. He’d keep these people in line by knocking them down, if necessary, as I’ve seen him do. Those were days when you didn’t get sued if you knocked somebody down. He was a tough guy--small, short, but wiry. He was an ardent Republican of the sort that hated Roosevelt with a passion--called him Rosenfeld, that kind of thing. He was a bigot.

“I was a great disappointment,” he says with little regret. “I was totally unathletic. I have a very bad memory about my past, but according to my parents, I was 8 or 9 years old when I announced that I was going to be a writer. Probably just to annoy my father, I mean I did everything I could.”

By the time Gass was in high school, writing was a habit. “I had a column for the newspaper and knew I wanted to be a writer. Then I decided that with the kind of writing I wanted to do, I’d probably never have any economic success, so I decided I wanted to study philosophy.” Gass shows no trace of irony at this plan for a more “lucrative” career. “I was reading the people you read when you’re young--Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. I was reading a lot of Thomas Mann, and it was full of ‘ideas’ and I thought that was great. I wanted to go to school and study philosophy and write, not having any idea what that would require. In one sense, I’ve led a very organized program of directing my life, and in another sense it’s complete chaos.”

The Gass household had its special sort of unruliness. “My parents had a lot of parties. Bathtub gin during Prohibition and all that. My mother started to drink heartily over the years. I didn’t really notice it at first, but she was quite an alcoholic by the time I graduated from high school. My father was struck by arthritis and was fairly crippled by the time I graduated. Those were the two main ‘events,’ I think, growing up. Those two things I’m feeding on for the novel.”

Gass attended Ohio’s Kenyon College in 1942, attracted in part by the English department headed by legendary critic John Crowe Ransom. A year later, however, World War II interrupted his studies. He joined the Navy and spent the next 3 1/2 years in the Pacific.

“I hated the military,” he laughs wryly. “I have an authority problem. My father, I guess. But I loved being at sea. Our ship was in a lot of action, but we couldn’t hit anything, nobody could hit us. As a consequence, the war for me was largely newsreel. In the Navy, you didn’t sleep in a foxhole, the food wasn’t great, but it was there. When I went ashore a few times in Okinawa, it was surprising--war! They were having a war there!”

After the war, Gass, making up for lost time, crammed in enough philosophy and German to graduate, choosing an academic life over that of a starving writer. Then came graduate school, his first marriage, the beginnings of a teaching career, and the years and years of writing fiction and receiving rejections before his work began, little by little, to be published.

THOUGH HIS WRITINGS HAVE COMMANDED HONORS AND HIGH PRAISE IN LATER years, Gass has been painfully slow to produce them. Factors other than his busy academic schedule and family life have slowed his output.

For instance, there was the agonizing time when the manuscript of “Omensetter’s Luck” disappeared. “I was on the last chapter when it was stolen off my desk at school. I didn’t have another copy. I was in a funk, a kind of fugue state. I reconstructed the book by working almost nonstop for about six months. It wasn’t the same book,” he says, explaining that a minor character in his first version became a major character in the third and final version. The culprit, it turned out, was a fellow professor who had acquired a long and distinguished bibliography by soliciting contributions to anthologies he was supposedly editing and then publishing the works under his own name. By the time they came out, the professor would have moved on to another school. One of Gass’ earliest essays, on writer Katherine Anne Porter, was appropriated in this fashion and appeared under this professor’s name. Gass did not pursue the matter legally and is still reluctant to discuss the details of the theft.

But Gass blames his dilatoriness mainly on the fact that he is “far too interested in too many things.” He professes not to have any hobbies, but at least two different fields of endeavor have fed his work in important ways.

The first is architecture, which Gass once considered as a career. It’s a passion he shares with his wife, Mary, an architect. Gass now sees that a career in architecture “was real fantasy because, as I’ve seen more concretely when my wife was getting her degree, I couldn’t master the mathematics.”

But to Gass, prose is itself architectural. He enjoys talking about the physical structure of writing, once describing a particular sentence by Henry James as “a spiral staircase.” And he describes “The Tunnel,” divided into 12 exactly equal 100-page sections, in architectural terms. “The book has three fundamental elements. There’s the hole, or the nothing. There’s the dirt that’s taken out. And the supports, which have to be stolen from somewhere, and put in to hold the hole,” he explains, relishing implications that as yet only he can see. Gass sees his narrator as digging a tunnel, through the process of writing his memoir, which serves him both as a kind of escape, and, as with mining tunnels, as a path to hidden treasure.

The second passion that has enriched Gass’ writing is photography. “For years, I had no particular interest in photography. Didn’t look at it, paid no attention to it. Scorned it, actually. Then we got a trip to China, as part of a group of American writers invited over. We had a really interesting bunch of people--Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Gary Snyder and so on.” He began taking tourist snapshots. “All of a sudden, in Shanghai, I started to look at things in the street differently. Basically what I saw was collections of objects, arranged with a sense of community, things for sale, spread out on cloths or wooden boxes. Beans, rice drying, or things of that sort. There was something in the way in which these objects were put together which reflected the very relation of the people in this society. Suddenly, I started to see things quite differently. I got interested in photography as an art.”

As with most concerns in his life, this interest has led back to philosophy. His photographic vision has encouraged him to try and define why certain forms or arrangements are innately pleasing. “Most forms are coerced, somehow. Whether it’s logical or physical, there’s a force that’s holding things together. Ideal aesthetic form may be forms of free entities, entering a kind of community.”

Gass easily returns from such philosophical reaches to personal relationships. He points to an abstract photograph taken by one of his daughters, the sole decoration in his Santa Monica office, and says, with only a slight attempt at objectivity, “I think she has real talent.” Gass has three children from his first marriage, which ended in 1969, and twin daughters by his second--”sororal” twins, he calls them, “a word I guess I had to make up; ‘fraternal’ doesn’t seem to be appropriate these days; it’s not PC for girls.”

He settles back in his chair, fatherly for a moment. Asked what kind of parent he thinks he’s been, Gass admits to being “fair. Not horrible. Improved, as time went on. You learn that everything you do doesn’t mark the kid forever. In fact, marking the kid at all is going to be very difficult.” He laughs contentedly. “They’re not as breakable as you think. Because we had twins--Mary and I each had one--I got a chance to be the mother. I’m not a good father figure; I much more enjoy the mother side. Mary’s more the lawgiver. I’m more permissive: ‘Go forth and discover!’ The problem is that my belief in freedom is so strong that sometimes it’s taken for lack of concern.” He sighs. “You have to accept the fact that each child costs you at least one book.”

Even after close to 26 years of labor on “The Tunnel,” he’s in no immediate hurry to publish. With obvious pleasure, he describes the large Germanic typeface he requires to emphasize the novel’s setting. “It looks like a bunch of barbed wire,” Gass chuckles. He lists the illustrations of uniforms, flags and insignia that must be included, the sleeve that will go around the book “like an armband.” Some pages will have to look “like a grocery sack (written) with pencil. Who’s going to be interested in publishing this?” he asks doubtfully.

Indeed, even today he has trouble publishing his fiction; Harper’s magazine decided against printing a section from “The Tunnel.” He has a contract with Simon & Schuster for the book, signed many years ago. In spite of Gass’ seeming indifference to being published, his agent, Lynn Nesbit, says she is excited about receiving his manuscript in the next few weeks, although no publication date has been set.

But Gass is used to long labors and long waits. It’s been seven years since his last book of essays appeared. Nevertheless, he’s certain his readers will find him. Now he’s eager to move on to new projects. “I want to go back to writing short stories. That’s what I should be doing. Novels, forget it, it’s crazy!” he laughs. “I’ll never live forever. No, I’ll not write another novel.”