Reviews

Nicholas Dames

On William Gass

He was, by that point, settled into his middle-aged frame: not so much stout as softly rounded off, a slow gravitational sag sloping all his angles into rondure. A kind of carriage — a word whose antique tang I imagine he’d have relished — that he would jokingly allude to in his fiction and with which he’d afflict his not dissimilar protagonists. (A fact-checker for the New York Review of Books once inquired of his university if he was, in fact, “fat.” Not when I started the book, he quipped.) A sedentary physique, let’s say instead. His biggest book begins with the words “Life in a chair,” and you could still see a chair’s shaping effect when he stood to lecture, which was, more or less, his paying job. A large round head with strikingly alert eyes, owlish when the glasses he wore around his neck were put on; he could pass, maybe, for an unbearded, still youngish Santa but for a colder glint to the eyes, something Calvinistically forbidding, not easily given to pity. His vowels puzzled me: Sometimes you heard a Midwestern nasal flatness, sometimes a fuller, oak-barreled drawl, almost the note of a traveling preacher. He bore all the elements of approachability, arranged instead to disconcert. His twice-weekly lectures had an impersonality to them, as if we were not exactly the intended audience for his talks. But maybe I was just intimidated. I was an undergrad in a classroom, and he was, so I’d been told, a Great American Writer.

It was the first months of 1990, in the usual bland St. Louis winter. The class was an entry-level philosophy course, Plato mostly, and the lecturer was William Gass, who was then more than twenty years into what would be the legendarily protracted composition of The Tunnel, his mega-opus, whose publication was still five years in the future. A tricksy, logomaniacal, six-hundred-page postmodernist first-male-person autobiographical narrative about the fascist within us, set in the late 1960s but mostly about the ’30s, dressed up in a black cover with a red band across it — a “Springtime for Hitler”–style visual jape not meant to make you laugh — it was a book so demanding and untimely that it disappeared into cultish fame even quicker than other Big Books of the ’90s. I doubt I knew what he was working on while he lectured us on Plato; it was no secret (bits of it had appeared in small magazines since the late ’60s), but certainly no sign of it intruded into the academic-philosophical proceedings that spring semester.

Gass’s lectures were direct, brisk, unornamented by topical references. I’ve saved my notebook — like most of Gass’s fictional characters I have hoarding tendencies — and on day one of the class I wrote down the only joke of the term: Plato, he said, means “broad” in Greek, but broad of what? Because he certainly wasn’t broad of mind. Cue a chortle. It’s the kind of one-liner that gets said once a year for an academic career, too baked to really ever go stale. The timelessness of the lecture hall: It wasn’t that history had ended, but it was and is always on pause there; that’s part of the lecture hall’s intent, and Gass was, in this way at least, observant of academic niceties. Like Plato, he kept history at a waving distance in the classroom. The wall had just fallen; the 20th century’s endgame rearrangement was well underway, but you wouldn’t have known it, nor would you have suspected that the lecturer was also deep into writing a fictional history of 20th-century hatred.

Gass remains bewildering: so unmarked by his time as to seem antique, so much more ahead of everything  as to make you despair that no one has really yet caught up.

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I’m telling you this, in part, because that book, The Tunnel, is a series of sprawling dissociative lecture-tirades, narrated by a historian at a Midwestern university of modest renown — one who denounces his students when he’s not assaulting them sexually; who addresses them as “you simple Illini, you down-home Hoosiers, you cornrow Hawkeyes” (here I, Chicago-born, feel retrospectively interpellated); whose language is the dark exuberance of loathing, very much including self-loathing — and because I imagine now, remembering Gass’s classroom demeanor, something like the dim possibility of that loathing disclosing itself, which means I remember a tacit honesty in him, no fake therapeutic-pedagogical solicitude. But also, and more importantly, I mention it because Gass’s anomalous status in postwar American letters is related to the timeless bubble of the lecture hall, that space in which so much of The Tunnel transpires, and toward which it seems aimed, as if it had been intended for immediate canonization. The Tunnel was written to be a classic. Gass was, strikingly and perversely, always a classic, just a little outside of time. And the waves of hyperarticulate hate in The Tunnel come out of a sense of the futility of historical knowledge in the face of the constant, enduring, undeniable human impulse to annihilating cruelty. If Dalkey’s 2026 reissue feels particularly timely, as if The Tunnel had been a bet now paying off, now that Gass’s ludic version of American fascism has real, if far less articulate, analogues, and now that the Big-Book-as-totem is again in vogue, that’s an irony Gass might not have entirely appreciated. Timeliness was not his game. What the book has to say about fascism is shot through with hesitation about historicity itself.