It might have been raining a little that night when I rode my bike down through Crown Heights to Eastern Parkway and followed the tree-lined mall past the dark, iron-wrought Botanical Gardens and the green-blue-lit fortress of the Brooklyn Museum to Grand Army Plaza and the newly renovated library. It's always raining when I come to events down here, and the trip takes longer than imagined, but it's worth it--these are Brooklyn's crown jewels, from a time when we were our own city and Walt Whitman was on the museum board.
William Gass had been wined and dined by the Rail 's fiction editor, and now he's here to read for us, either from the new edition of his classic experimental novel Willie Masters' Lonely Wife , or something new. It turns out to be a new work, a story called "The Man who Spoke with his Hands," from a novel-in-progress. "I hate reading from published work," he would say to the audience later. "Once I publish something, it's dead. But it's good to read stuff I'm working on because I can see what works and what flops."
Gass is soft and shortish, with gray hair and glasses, and takes the podium withcausal grace. He speaks in 20th-Century literary terms, introducing his reading selection with the hope that it will have "enough round to read as a complete story." His dry jokes and carefully exaggerated details draw steady chuckles from listeners, such as "His hands were composed almost entirely of fingers," or, "Her breasts were like the crossing of tennis balls, or like small animals bundled behind the cloth." The wryness melds nicely with deeper moments as well: "Professor Devise's features seemed to be dissolving in a solution of sorrow."
The novel, to be called Middle Sea, is about a pretender, who lies in order to protect himself from evil. The concept, according to Gass, is inspired by Thomas Hobbes, who wrote that deception is the only path to protect one's self from, and to infiltrate, the evils of the world. In order to find safe passage from Germany to the United States in the early '40s, for example, the character impersonates a Jew. The protagonist, Joseph Schisen, has a talent for sensing evil, and prepares a museum in his midwestern attic with relics of destruction called the Inhumanity Museum.
The novel is epic in scale compared to earlier experimental works, and when asked about Willie Masters' and its impact on the form, as well as his departure from it, his response is that he realized that an idea is only an idea, and that if this is so with a book, in which the reader gets it , rather than grasps the meaning behind the idea, the author has failed.
Coming to the topic of engagement in causes beyond the realm of aesthetics, Gass says that he'll read the newspaper and be moved to outrage, but he won't be one of the brickthrowers. Instead, he'll head for the desk. Reminds me of the way high school shot me into action, causing me to produce my own work (zines, music, etc.) amidst opposition to free thinking, whereas my college years were fraught with procrastination.
"Use the energy from what you hate," he says, "toward the things you love."
