[It’s strange to think, now,
that I felt back in the winter that this series could be produced pretty
quickly. But it took much longer than I expected. And the overall “argument”
may seem flabby and cursory at times—but it all may be more helpfully
“expository” for taking so long to do. This
entry may seem pretty long for Internet reading on crazy-hot late-June days,
but take your time, return to it when you’re ready. There’re a lot of nifty
things tucked in here, I think. Edits 6/26/13.]
Here are the earlier installments,
some on my other blog:
Longer Part 1, with additional
end notes (on other blog, April 8)
Part 3, subpart A (on other
blog, June 10)
Part 3 footnote, on
Schwarzschild (on other blog, June 24)
The Schwarzschild story is like
a true war story—forged in a cauldron of an “old fight,” and about meaningful
matters (Kant, how to pursue a philosophy career). My story about Gass is more
whimsical, and more casually gathered. I dealt with him less than I did
Schwarzschild, and Gass was obviously less noxious (that is, not at all). I
spoke with Gass along the lines of wanting to be a published novelist, which
was more an “ideal career” thing for me, not the more “realistically pursued”
philosophy thing. And my conclusions on Gass derive from years of scraps of
info, broader consideration, his essays, and so on. My conclusions on Schw. are,
contrarily, based on a very brief, very pungent, and fairly cheating
experience.
Subsections below:
Getting together with Gass: preliminaries, including a weird
administering of my foreign-language exam
After McClennan’s several hints, the get-together happens
The account in my 1987 journal, originally written on separate dates on
one meeting on September 28
My visit to Professor Gass’s house
Gass’s advice on
literary agents—not timed right for me; and an anecdote from my experience on
an erratic agent in 1986-87
Gass as a Plotinus among Joycean writers, and his value to a beginning
writer
It ain’t over till the Big Bear sings: Mr. Kodiak Grizzly makes a
speech
Getting together with Gass: preliminaries, including a weird
administering of my foreign-language exam
I and all the other new students
to the program had Professor McClennan for a course that—it was rather stupid,
but forthcomingly enough helmed by McClennan—was about learning to write a
paper in philosophy. It was a sort of English course, except there was an area
of philosophy McClennan started having us look at, some books of Plato (which I
think were largely centered on ethics); so we were writing papers that
initially touched on classical philosophy. But eventually our work was to
center on a major paper most of our grade was based on, and this wouldn’t
necessarily or strictly be on a classical philosophy subject. (Mine was
actually on Aristotle’s concept of akrasia,
and how it was handled by later philosophers starting with Thomas Hobbes.)
And we had this “how to write a
paper” course, which was required for all of us new students, even while we had
other philosophy courses at the same time where we had to write a competent,
standard major paper, willy nilly. (Not only was the general premise of this
“how to write” class seemingly frivolous, but McClennan’s pointedly casual way
with it left some students cold; the class was seemingly on how to write a
paper, but he left us starkly hanging in
what to do even more than the likes of the forbidding Schw. with his own
way of assigning work. I rather liked McClennan, but not for this class. One
way the class was frivolous was not just that all of us new students had
clearly done work, including papers, in philosophy already as undergraduates,
but one incoming student, Jose ___, an enthusiastic sort from Brazil, already
had a master’s degree: he had gone to university in his home country, where such
schooling was free, and he was proud to have a large master’s thesis that must
have been at least 100 pages long, on the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and his relation to the philosophical disposition of skepticism.
Jose was a nice guy, eager to get me to try a liquor called gashasso [sp?], or
such. But I rather envied his having been able to do a large master’s thesis on
a topic he loved, without all the rather “requisite” bullshit I began to
encounter, fast and thick, at the hand of several of WU’s philosophy
professors.)
Anyway, McClennan was our sort
of “casually-teaching professor” who in tone, and maybe in some particular
heuristic ways, was also a sort of advisor, or avuncular buddy of sorts, to us
newbies. (As well, he had just been on sabbatical, I think, and he made clear
he was getting back into the swing of teaching classes.) If some students
didn’t like how offhand he did this class, I think they might have appreciated
that he meant well as a sort of friendly “booster.” Anyway, it was generally from
the perspective of his wanting to clue us students in on the “ropes” of the WU
philosophy environment that he became my main ally—not that he skimped (as far
as I know) on being a sort of support to other new students—when my
relationship with Schw. started to come undone, which started as early as
September 14, after I was there about two or three weeks.
When Schw. and I had a little
episode of conferring on September 14 about my foreign-language test, which
also touched on my first term paper proposal, there was a blowup that led me to
start my journal entry on this situation with “Fight with Schwarzschild.” I was
probably quite shaken as I wrote this shortly after it happened. McClennan got
wind of the situation before too long, and he and I talked, probably within the
two weeks after this, and it must have come out that I had been writing novels
and tried to get one or two of them published, etc.
The foreign-language tests.
This account may seem tedious, but what it leads to explains why I present
this. It’s actually amazing to see what a “grand specimen of graduate-school
candidate” I was then (the scare quotes are appropriate), even while, today, I
seem like a hapless shuttlecock in the smoky mosh-pit of the New Jersey publishing world. The
foreign-language requirement, which is typical of graduate programs in the
humanities, was rather stiff at WU, but nowhere near what it was regarding
symbolic logic. In fact, I had taken three foreign languages in high school and
afterward: I had taken four years of Spanish in high school, and two years of
French in high school. I had one semester of Spanish in my first year of
college. After graduation from college, in 1985 I took a course at GWU—actually,
only audited it (took it not for a grade)—in “German for reading
comprehension,” a weak way to learn some German. By 1987, for obvious reasons, I
was strongest in Spanish, because I’d taken so many years of it. I was weak in
French; and German I had only a small grasp of, and what little strength I had
was partly because I had studied aspects of it with homemade flashcards the
summer of 1987, from material I got from the textbook I used in 1985 for the
reading comprehension course. (Today, I am strongest in Spanish, but that still
isn’t too good—I’m pretty rusty. I sometimes test myself by trying to overhear
conversations in Spanish among workers at Burger Kings and McDonald’s where
Mexican and other Latin American workers are common, and I still don’t pick up
much of what I hear—which I figure means I’m not really invading their privacy.
Anyway, I’ve always been better in written Spanish—reading and writing it—than
in spoken Spanish, where I’m maybe only slightly better in speaking it than hearing
it.)
Despite the range of languages I
took some courses in, even while my competence in them has degraded over the 26
years since 1987, I still feel like I learned something from them in that, with
my editorial work over the past 20+ years, my acquaintance with those other
languages still comes in handy. (Actually, not only do you need to know tiny
bits of foreign languages, even Greek or Latin, in your working as an editor in
the U.S., but I strongly feel that learning what foreign languages I did in
school helped me with English: for instance, I learned about the subjunctive
mood mainly from Spanish, and I appreciated something about cases from German;
both were not taught well about in English classes I had in school. Further, I
think you learn better to have certain proficiencies in languages by the actual
practical hurly-burly of being an editor, than in the more static-presentation
way you learn languages in school.)
Even with German, I know enough
bits that I feel I can be helped by them a bit when I deal with German this or
that on rare occasions in my current type of work, but I would never say I
really know German (and, for those who think I’m “German,” I never had a desire to learn the language
well). But in 1987, I was certainly weak in French and German for grad-school
purposes. (Again, the tragedy of being tested in languages at this point was
that it relied on your learning them in a static-academic way, not in the more
piecemeal, hearty practical way you do in paid editorial work.)
So when I took the
foreign-language test—which, wouldn’t you know?, Schw. was in charge of
assessing—I first suggested to him I could test in Spanish (which I knew I
could do well in). Characteristically, he dismissed this language as of any use
in graduate philosophy studies (when I mentioned to him the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset [Schw. neatly corrected me when I mispronounced his last
name “Gasset,” my own fault, though I knew in more fortunate circumstances how
it should be pronounced], Schw. dismissed him out of hand as second-rate, as if
that very “fact” was reason not to test for my Spanish proficiency at all).
So, the next language I offered
to test in was French. The test involved a passage of at least 100 (or 200) words,
which you had to translate. (From here on, I’ll assume it was 200, which seems
more likely.) There might have been a time limit (10 or 15 minutes). I didn’t
do well on the French test; that Schw. and I were pretty much in agreement on.
So then I would test in German.
You would think this was a
mistake—it was my weakest area of foreign language competence. And yet I passed
the test. But get a load of how I passed it (and I hope to relate this without
getting my hackles up over the “Schw. twist” that occurred). I translated about
200 words, the minimal requirement. I did it within the time limit, I think.
There were fewer errors than in my French test (and I think perhaps I’d done
better on this than on French because of my small-scale studying the summer
before). But Schw. still didn’t think I’d done well (and note that German was
Schw.’s strongest foreign language). He even snootily made some criticism about
how I’d only translated two
sentences—yet I met the 200-word criterion, and maybe, if you know about
German, you know that German can easily have two sentences add up to 200 words.
So he was hesitant to say I’d passed.
(As I am careful to recount all
this, I am struck, after my 20+ years of working as an editor, where being
detail-oriented on the fly is so important, by what a pompous stickler for petty details, as an academic, Schw. could
be.)
Schw. asked, semi-rhetorically,
did I think I had enough German proficiency? I said yes, I thought I did (and
part of my own reasoning, though I didn’t say this to him, was that my doctoral
dissertation, which is where I think the foreign-language proficiency really
mattered, might well be in William James anyway, and James wrote in English).
He differed with me on this; there might have been another go-around along
these lines, where it weirdly seemed as if he was partly leaving it up to me to say I’d passed the test; I
remained steadfast in saying that I felt I’d shown I knew enough, or that I
knew enough (for my purposes). But I also, equally pointedly, said that if he thought I didn’t pass, then I didn’t
pass. Finally he admitted (or claimed) that I passed, but then he opined, “I
think you’re making a mistake.”
This cleans up the exchange a
bit—I have it detailed elsewhere—but you can see the almost Kafkaesque way it could
be in dealing with him. He was like the cliché of the Native American chief who
is testing the young up-and-comer by holding out the feather to be snatched,
and always whisking it away just as the young-un is reaching for the feather.
Sidebar:
Professors who feared the return of
hippies, which themselves had reminded them the first time around as the return
of Nazis. Also, as I recount what this specimen of an old-time professor
was like, and I compare him to other professional men at the time (who died in
the late 1980s), and when I think about Lillian Hellman as germane to my review
of Rosemary Mahoney’s A Likely Story,
I would say that these people represented a mentality that seems to have been
very much shaped by World War II, all scalded (understandably enough) by the
breakdown of civilization at the time, and their subsequent professional work
seeming as doctrinaire and self-important—and increasingly anachronistic—as
some 1960-era policy of mutually-assured destruction. For those who were ideologically
inclined, especially the Marxists (of which Schw. was arguably one), it seemed they felt that their student-inculcating
product was all about instilling orthodox ways of Whatever, to guard against
another invasion by the Unspeakable Hun. One telling thing about them—and
this includes such people as Edward J. Bloustein, a
former president of Rutgers
University (and coincidentally
a friend of writer Joseph Heller, I believe; see this old New York Times piece for some suggestion, about midway through the piece)—is that they were solidly built
professors who were working during the 1960s when college students started to
get more rebellious and hippie-ish. Some of these professors pronounced the
hippie phenomenon as a resurgence of Nazi mentality. [See End note.] And some professors never
got over this, and seemed to be on the “watch the skies!” lookout for it all
the way into the 1980s. Schw., for one, could make “doctrinaire-scornful”
remarks about “Let it all hang out” types, as if he could never get over them.
(Professor Richard Schlagel at GWU was somewhat this way, not as fevered about it.)
That hippie mentality was never mine; I very much rejected the druggie
licentiousness of the late 1970s. So for a professor to think I was a recurring
nightmare of a latter-day hippie, which itself was regarded as warmed-over
Nazism, this did me a big disservice.
I think some of Schw.’s reacting to me was as if I was this way. And this to me
was his prejudice, with little to do with who I best was or wanted to be, even
if I was suffering from unusual career-related stress in 1987.
Anyway, that was how I squared
with the foreign-language issue. Now today, it might seem to many editorial
peers of mine that I was Mr. Polyglot (which I wasn’t really).
My James paper. Another
way I impressed some professors there was with my paper on Henry and William James,
which had been done for a postgraduate course at GWU (see the June 24 footnote
to the Sons of Joyce Part 3 set of entries), and which came out as well as it
did partly because I was well-versed in, and enthusiastic about, both Jameses,
and had read a lot of their works by that point, both in college and shortly
afterward. This paper apparently made me look like a supernova of a philosophy student
to the WU professors, but then when I arrived and started fumbling, as with the
foreign-language test and later with Schw.’s paper requirement, I might have
looked like a paper tiger of sorts.
But the James paper still
impressed some there, including McClennan, who thought he spied in it some
interesting take on a classical ethical question he also was dealing with in
his own work at the time (a book he was working on, I believe). (The ethical
question had to do with the relation between ethical choice and knowledge,
which McClennan posed in talk with me as if it was central to Plato, and which
related rather tangentially to the paper I would end up doing on akrasia, weakness of will, in
Aristotle’s philosophy for McClennan. I think McClennan was under a bit of an
illusion about how much my James paper dealt with this particular question,
which wasn’t by my intention.)
Also, this paper certainly made
me seem like a literary type, which is apparently part of the reason why he
thought I could really use a meeting with William H. Gass, especially as my
dealings with Schw. started to get really sour.
“You ought to see Gass,”
McClennan would intone more than once. And the implication seemed to be that
maybe Professor Gass could give me pointers on what I could do with my career,
or maybe he also meant that, if I stayed at the WU philosophy department, I
could do things in classes with Gass, and that would make best use of my
strongest areas of competence. Or something like that. (Of course, this notion
would become moot when Schw. effectively started to torpedo my prospects for
staying in the program at all.)
If you feel it is amazing how
much in this situation seemed like people having illusions about each other,
and how much flashing visions of particular ideas seemed to define what promise
professors saw in students, which could vanish pretty quickly. But this wasn’t
all fleeting illusions, like vapid ideas at a party. It really was a place to
make connections and get started on a grand career, if you met the requirements
imposed by the department. But it was also a department that fully intended to
weed newcomers out. And though it may seem surprising I remember so much from a
four-month period, when—as it happened—I was in some ways exhausted, depressed,
and alone, this shouldn’t be surprising: the views you got of prestigious
academia, coinciding with your own passage as a recently successful academic
striver, were such that you never forgot what so much of it was about, even if
you were kicked in the ass there and certain of your dreams died there.
After McClennan’s several hints, the get-together happens
I had taken the dreaded symbolic
logic test around maybe September 21, and I got the grade a week or so later.
It was September 28 when Professor Barrett revealed to me my score on the
test…and the same day I would be meeting with Professor Gass.
I seem to recall that McClennan
had provided some initial essential impetus for this meeting; he might have
tipped off Gass that he ought to meet me. In the wake of this, after maybe some
inciting by McClennan, I might have made an appointment through a departmental secretary
for a specific time to see Gass. I know I never encountered him before the day
I spoke with him at length.
Anyway, there was a set time to
see him, and I went to stand outside his office door, which was (as I recall)
on a lower level of an arm of the building in which the philosophy-department
offices were housed. I waited for what seemed a while. Then a man showed up,
not quite what I expected. He looked somewhat elderly, with grey hair, but he
had a bouncy sort of carriage of himself, a little like a young person. He also
gave an air of seeming like an old woman in a way, and on the other hand like
an elf. He unlocked his door and went in, I believe not seeing me waiting in
the hall. Then I went in to see him.
If you have ever met any
esteemed writers, you find that, first, they are unusual people by the
standards of many, maybe not neurotic in manner, maybe not striking some
onlooker as an “obvious genius,” whatever that is, but they do seem unusual as
people, intelligent but also on a different track of a kind. I’ve also heard
the comment—I wish I remember who said it (I think it was a journalist)—that
(major) writers seem as if they “live in their eyes.” Gass, while friendly
enough, seemed this way. His big blue eyes had a sort of hungering, severe-ish
look—and seemed as if he was looking quite fully at his thoughts before him as
he was speaking.
If you see pictures of him
today, especially in his very old age, his eyes may make him look forbidding,
or as if he is a kind of humorless bullfrog, with his round head (yes, his head,
more exactly his face, looked rather round, in an unlikely way, even in 1987).
Maybe age makes him look more forbidding than he used to look, but with his
eyes, he still was amenable to talking in 1987, and he even led the conversation
to a good extent—he was apt to be a bit chatty. He didn’t know me from Adam,
and I probably struck him as yet another frumpy philosophy student who had come
coursing through their department, but he had seen my James paper—he commented
a bit on it at one point—and a good deal of our conversation surrounded the
issue of what it took to become an author of published trade books.
I will recount some of what we
talked about—I made a detailed journal entry on this in 1987—and then I will
relate an episode that still surprises me a bit, that I was actually in his
house one day sometime after this, when one of the department’s graduate
students was house-sitting, or such, for him, and invited a few of us over,
which apparently was assumed to be OK by Professor Gass. I won’t reveal
anything about his house that will constitute invasion of privacy; I will keep
the description generic, but one distinguishing feature shouldn’t surprise
anyone—he had a ton of books in there, lining the walls of one room almost like
endless, library-looking wallpaper.
The account in my 1987 journal, originally written on separate dates on
one meeting on September 28
[The following
subsection comprises a few journal entries. A few technical editorial notes: Without noting this with brackets
or such, ampersands are changed to “and”; punctuation is changed in places for
clarity; certain words that are abbreviated in the original are spelled out; a
paragraph break is done for readability; and elisions of words in original are
filled out for clarity. The entries below may read more fluently than they seem
in the original. Also, sometimes where changes are needed for further clarity
that indicate an innocuous omission or a curious lapse in 1987, these are done
with brackets. And sometimes I used brackets in the original that I changed to
parentheses here, because the brackets shouldn’t be taken to mean an editorial
insertion.]
[following two sets of entries
from September 28]
Gass—elfin sort, grey-haired,
reminded me of an old woman at a couple of points, sensitive, intellectual
(“looks to thoughts before his eyes” a lot), chatty. He stressed getting an
agent for a [trade-book-]writing career; he’d been done well by his own. Get a young agent[, he said]. He’d gotten a
“lucky break” starting his [teaching?] philosophy career at Purdue in an
“incipient program” (my words) where he needn’t publish very professional works
at first. He’d always wanted to teach philosophy—also prefers to stay in the
academic world for a job, hasn’t gone outside. He says there are more jobs in
the [teaching-of-writing] field [than when he started out, I assume he meant]
but no content is taught [in these classes]—only writing skills are developed,
which is why he doesn’t like [the field]. [You’ll recall I said, in subpart A
of Part 3, that philosophy helps you become a good syntax-related writer, but I
do remember the content of philosophy I learned, not least Kant (despite
Schw.’s unhelpfulness to me, because I learned so much about Kant before I even
got to deal with Schw.).]
He’s enthusiastic about starting
a “value-theoretic” [philosophy sub-]program with Lucian Krukowski and “Red” [I
wondered if this was McClennan, and am still not sure] and a writer at the
school—Charles Newman. He says commitment to [trade-book-]writing and putting
up with “junk” in a second career are necessary (if [one] take[s] a second
career), and when you’re delayed being published (he was [delayed] 10 years), [you
must understand] that it’s just as well—you must tell yourself this [that it’s
OK to be delayed], even if you don’t feel it. (And though you may feel badly
about earlier writing being done while not being published as you work on
[further pieces], you may also feel glad an earlier mess wasn’t published.)
He was very forthcoming about
these sorts of views. He says everyone in the writing business “has stories to
tell” about the vagaries of [first?] getting published. (I had thought before
meeting him, noting I didn’t seem to have much to say, that part of the problem
with meeting with [Mary Robison in 1986] had lain in waiting on her for help
[with my career]—that sort of thing. [This was a matter of] “[b]eing without
consensus” [with such a writer,] though that’s anything but to the point for
your interests and “inner interest,” so to speak [i.e., regarding your anguish].
[irrelevant sentences redacted] [Noted in pencil in original—Lynn Nesbit was Gass’s
agent]
Gass said he found it annoying
to receive full manuscripts in the mail preceded by a note “I like your
work”—he gets one manuscript per week now. [This a]lthough he did get something from a writer (a
forward[-mannered] homosexual) which caught his eye/interest—and so the writer
is published [with his help; interestingly, the way he put this, he stated the
writer was published, baldly, not
directly saying he had a role, though that was pretty clearly what he meant].
I thought I might say to Gass
“although you’re [generally] annoyed by this [sort of thing], I wonder if you
would”—but I couldn’t see how I could do it. [Good choice to hold off.] He
didn’t know so much about me as to be interested; and I would be going against
his wishes. I “forebore” and don’t feel I’ve disappointed myself; I’ve [here] done
the opposite of acting rather immaturely—[i.e., I did not act with Gass] per
emotion [as if to say with muted anxiety, “Would you help me?”]. (It’s funny
how the adolescent tendency to seek an out for emotional strains, as it has
shown up in my [recent, 1986-87] writing, lingers on as to have at least had a chance to raise its head again [with
Gass?]; and in any case it raised its head to some degree, it looks like, with
[Mary Robison in 1986] […].) It’s “my own life” to have “forborn” as I just
said.
Another problem Gass mentioned,
an understandable one, is of being able to have time to write and devote oneself to a second
(supportive) career. [In later years I found this a bit of a problem, but not
as badly as this 1987 comment of Gass’s suggests.] Gass got himself into a
unique position that he’s in, as he’d admit. …Gass said “[T]he problems
change…” [a very quotable remark I’ve remembered ever since] but you always
have to live with problems, tell yourself “it’s OK the way it’s going,” or
such. He made some reference to there being something generally distressing
about the first year of graduate school…
More on Gass: he said there were
things in academia (now) that he didn’t like but he had to put up with them
(and [he still] would rather be in
academia than not). He said he’d gone through the rigamarole of getting a degree
“to do what [he] wanted.” He mentioned symbolic logic early on as a requirement
(maybe unpleasant) you had to meet. [In the June 20, 2013 New York Review of Books, in reviewing a book by M.H. Abrams, Gass
remarks very early on about his beginning graduate work at Cornell’s philosophy
department, “…[A]fter the first humbling year among the mathematically minded,
I needed some relief. My fellow students were firecrackers. Their bursts of
stardom lit the intellectual landscape. I was the damp fuse one lights and then
impatiently waits for” (p. 55)]
…He said my [Henry and William James]
paper was “interesting.” [Faint praise, you say? I thought this was encouraging
in the context.]
[following from September 30]
Gass said people go into MFA
writing programs with the “hope” of getting connected to a writer who’d help
them [get first] publish[ed]. (So I wasn’t too far off with naïve hopes re [the
JHU] writer’s conference.)
[from October 2]
Gass also characterized
psychology, in a tone slightly suggestive of distaste, or lack of enthusiasm,
as “scientific” when I’d said it was my other major and we were discussing
majors to follow in conjunction with a writing career. [Here we happily
diverged. I’ve never regretted my psychology studies, and I would say in 2013
that what makes me different from him now, with whatever I’ve done through age
51, while he was about 63 when I talked to him, is that my creative writing has
been “infected” by (or blended with) psychology as his has been by (or with)
philosophy and conceptual play.]
##
That’s the end of my account. He
spoke, as I noted, in a chatty way, and was casually forthcoming more than
Schw. or the qualified exception of McClennan was. (I.e., McClennan and I had
far more talk, and got to know about each other more; but Gass revealed a fair
amount given our small amount of time together, which may have been an hour.)
He spoke with his legs stretched out and tried to “be himself” around me, but
seemed to have a slightly hard time of it. I myself was awkward, for more
ingrained reasons—both as a student in the situation I was in and in terms of
my own personality. Even so, this conversation went better than I would have
expected. He did make an attempt to make me feel at home, such as it was not
very likely in the circumstances.
I’ve wondered if his reference
to a “forward homosexual” (not exactly his words) meant he wondered if this was
the case with me. Actually, he would have been wrong about me, but I get this
sort of reaction now and then, even today, when I am a timeworn old bear. And
certainly, a bit of paranoia that seemed among the professors there, not just
regarding me, was par for the course. (I think in some general sense the
professors, at large, knew as a fairly regular practice they had new variables
to deal with in all of us, and they had this not-officially-sanctioned but real
winnowing-out “function” to perform, hence in our first semester they did not,
by and large, welcome us all as permanent colleagues they could fully and
quickly identify with. Whether their lack of ease with us reflected a certain
defensive egotism [which certainly was true of Schw.] or, on the other hand,
some moral ambiguity they felt regarding the winnowing process but would not
fully have admitted to, is hard to say. This is an area that could use more
analysis, I think.)
If you wonder if, seeing this
exchange from your own longer view, Gass had not done as much with me as he
might, I’ve never thought so. I’ve treasured my memory of dealing with him, but
from my own longer view, I also never
felt he did much for my career, not that I was actually offended by this, other
than the words of advice he gave that have long lingered with me. I think this
is because such writers tend to be remote from each other anyway. You treasure
their few words that you can really use, but you’re usually not going to be
long-term friends.
Today one could say, fairly
confidently, that Gass was never in the front ranks of “Sons of Joyce” writers,
not that he wasn’t capable of it, because he produced so little (in terms of
number of books, though what he did was substantial enough). He was primarily a
professor of philosophy and related literature; he may be considered to have
more stature as an essayist and curator of other writers’ work than a novelist
in his own right. If you consider his three novels of note to be Omensetter’s Luck, The Tunnel, and Middle C, this is not a terribly big
fictional oeuvre. No way does it rank him with Philip Roth, John Updike, or
even Joseph Heller in terms of number of novels written. (I leave out “Willie Masters’
Lonely Wife” [1968] because it was initially published as a supplement, or
such, to a literary [or similar] magazine, and it is, from what I know, more of
a metafictional experiment than a novel of the likes of his three I mentioned.)
Interestingly, with all the
advice he could give me on September 28, 1987, his The Tunnel, which could be perhaps called his most substantial, or
at least his longest and most darkly serious novel, was still eight years in
the future. And when he spoke with me, he was about 63, and The Tunnel would be published when he
was about 71. In no way was he a writer who had sweated bullets to live mainly
on his publishing of books, as had (to a definitely greater extent) John
Updike. He did not rise to be esteemed as a novelist based on doing mainly this
kind of work as a youth. (How Omensetter’s
Luck—which I think I will put on my “bucket reading list”—figured for him
as a consolation/rallying point while he was a young professor, I don’t know.)
With all due respect, and I give
him much, William H. Gass was a professor whose professor’s life had allowed
him the support, time, exposure to others’ works, and exposure to a wealth of intriguing
people to publish the later novels he did. This would hardly be a life I could
pursue. But did he still have no lessons for me, in my own humble route of
becoming a writer? Were we not similar in some way, the many big differences
aside?
Before I answer that, let’s turn
to a quaint experience I had—being inside his house one evening, with fellow
students.
The second half of this story is in the next entry.
End note.
To be fair: I know I saw some published item on this hippies-compared-with-Nazis view as having come from Bloustein, but I can't remember where, nor can I find the source in my files; I believe it was a New York Times Book Review item or something else, dealing with a number of people as sharing such a view. In absence of the backup, I think this sort of view wasn't entirely unreasonable on its face, and it is consistent with Bloustein's career according to his Wikipedia bio, but by no means it is proved therein. Nor do I mean to imply there was something politically retrograde or reactionary among professionals in the Rutgers culture, in the 1960s or later; e.g., a 1992 Star-Ledger article (April 10, 1992, pp. 1, 2) covered a special one-time conference held at the university, addressing the end of the Cold War, with a panel of noted writers, including Joseph Brodsky, Saul Bellow, and Czeslaw Milosz. At this conference, among numerous other things, Bellow is quoted as saying, "This Marxist populism has really taken hold of universities in some quarters and [in] the media..."--by which it doesn't seem he clearly meant Rutgers as an example.
End note.
To be fair: I know I saw some published item on this hippies-compared-with-Nazis view as having come from Bloustein, but I can't remember where, nor can I find the source in my files; I believe it was a New York Times Book Review item or something else, dealing with a number of people as sharing such a view. In absence of the backup, I think this sort of view wasn't entirely unreasonable on its face, and it is consistent with Bloustein's career according to his Wikipedia bio, but by no means it is proved therein. Nor do I mean to imply there was something politically retrograde or reactionary among professionals in the Rutgers culture, in the 1960s or later; e.g., a 1992 Star-Ledger article (April 10, 1992, pp. 1, 2) covered a special one-time conference held at the university, addressing the end of the Cold War, with a panel of noted writers, including Joseph Brodsky, Saul Bellow, and Czeslaw Milosz. At this conference, among numerous other things, Bellow is quoted as saying, "This Marxist populism has really taken hold of universities in some quarters and [in] the media..."--by which it doesn't seem he clearly meant Rutgers as an example.
