[Knopf; 2013]
As a young man, William Gass made, what he called, a rather “odd decision.” One day while in college, he sat at his desk and forced himself “with the greatest deliberation” to write in a different script. He told an interviewer in 1976 (when he was 52) that he had wanted to change the physical nature of the words, “which even then were all of [him he] cared to have admired.” He went on for years after, writing everything, “marginal notes, reminders, messages — in a hand that was very Germanic and stiff.” If he were to “eventually write anything which has any enduring merit,” he claims it will be because of this change, because, as he has it, “I stuffed another tongue in my mouth.”
This short episode from William Gass’s life illustrates, better than any other, the type of writer he is. He believes wholeheartedly in the somatic experience of writing words to create sounds in an effort to form thought-based effects that give his readers an internal-auditory experience. Gass doesn’t give a “shit for ideas.” “By the mouth for the ear,” is how he says he does it. The Tunnel, his longest work of fiction, is a veritable sea of liquid sentences that crash into the eardrum even in the quiet rooms where they are silently read. Some of these sentence-waves, as readers of The Tunnel are aware, can reach tsunami proportions.
How does an author achieve such a feat of creating sounds a reader can hear clearly while reading in silence? Gass’s answer seems to come to one end: shitting.
“Writing by hand, mouthing by mouth: in each case you get a very strong physical sense of the emergence of language — squeezed out like a well-formed stool — what satisfaction! what bliss!”
Much like the forced change of handwriting explains the kind of writer he is, shitting may be the best way to describe how he writes. He does it alone, he does it for himself, and after much effort and straining, it seems to bring him great satisfaction. Once the novel or story is finished, like a turd in the bowl, he flushes it, and moves on.
Gass is an author, it can be said, who spends a lot of time on the pot. In that 1976 interview he speaks about working on The Tunnel, a novel that won’t see the light of publication until 1995. He worked on his first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, for many years before he felt it was finished, then in an almost unbelievable turn of events, the completed manuscript was stolen off his desk at the college where he was teaching at the time. He rewrote the book by piecing together pages from various drafts he had lying around. He completed a new draft, but has said in that draft the Jethro Furber section of the book, The Reverend Jethro Furber’s Change of Heart, did not exist. The Furber section of Omensetter’s Luck is 230 pages. Omensetter’s Luck is only 304 pages, which means he must have worked for years after finishing the new draft of the stolen novel before completing it. Middle C, his third novel, appears now, almost twenty years after The Tunnel.
In the time it took him to write his three novels, he wrote nine works of non-fiction (majority of those being collected essays), one collection of short-stories, one collection of novellas, and one rather unclassifiable work of fiction. A large part of Gass’s novel-writing technique involves putting away the most recent draft he has completed and waiting until the text has grows strange to him. He spends this time working on other things, hence his output thus far. So Gass will continue to write. He’ll publish critical essays. Maybe he’ll even put out a collection of short fiction. (He released Cartesian Sonata, a collection of novellas, three years after The Tunnel.) But more than likely, Middle C will be his final novel. (Unless, that is, the publishing world gathers together whatever it finds after his death, throws it between two covers, and stamps it with the words a novel, as it has done most recently with David Foster Wallace and Vladimir Nabokov).
How fitting then that Middle C would be the book that it is.
With the addition of Middle C, Gass’s three novels now form a trinity of the misanthropic man, all expressing a hatred for humankind in a unique way: In Omensetter’s Luck we meet Jethro Furber, a preacher of ill-repute who was fired from his congregation in a large Ohio city and forced to take a position as reverend in a small town’s quaint church; in The Tunnel we meet William Kohler, a cantankerous history professor who has recently finished writing a book titled Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany; and in Middle C we meet Joseph Skizzen, an autodidact who fakes his way into everything, including a professorship in the music department at a small university.
Middle C is, in many ways, The Tunnel inverted.
The Tunnel is written in rambling first-person prose, where the narrator, William Kohler, blends his own personal history with the history of World War II and tunnels into the earth hoping to escape both, whereas Middle C is written in rather tightly-controlled third-person prose, where the main character, Joseph Skizzen, doing everything he can not to create a personal history, to remain his namesake (in German skizzen means a sketch or outline, though, of course, Joseph doesn’t seem to know this) and instead of tunneling into the earth to escape from all humanity’s wrong-doings, he goes up to the attic where he clips articles of humanity’s crimes against itself (leaving crimes against nature out because there are far too many of them) in order to face what we have done to one another over the years. Skizzen refers to this space in the attic as The Inhumanity Museum.
In the opening chapter of Middle C, Joseph Skizzen’s mother tells him the story of how, during World War II, their lives led them from Vienna all the way to a small town in Ohio. His father, Rudi Skizzen, dreamed of a life across the Atlantic where he could raise his children in peace. The problem: They were broke. The proposed solution: Pretend to be Jews and hope that by taking on the identity of the persecuted they could hitch a ride with other Jews the Catholics were helping to escape to England. A preposterous strategy, and a sin of the father that Joseph will spend the rest of his life paying for. The Skizzens become the Fixels. They escape to Great Britain. Rudi Skizzen, denounced as Yankel Fixel by the Jews upon discovering his fake identity, becomes Englishman Raymond Scofield, wins a large amount of cash betting on horses, and disappears, never to be heard from again. Nita Skizzen, Joseph’s mother, who at the time of Rudi/Yankel/Raymond’s disappearance is having difficulty keeping track of her own identities and may, at this time, be Miriam Fixel, pleads with England to allow her and her two children to travel to Canada. England permits, and, from Canada, the Skizzens (sans father) make their way to Ohio. This story, which very easily could be its own novel, takes place in the first two chapters of Middle C. The remainder of Middle C concerns the life and times of Joseph Skizzen. But the changing of identity, found here at the start, carries through the rest of the text.
Viewed from afar, Joseph Skizzen lives out a rather conventional life. He discovers the piano at a young age, goes to school, takes a job at a local record store, eventually goes to college, drops out and finds a better job at a small library in a town not far from where he was raised, and, in the end, takes a position as professor of music at Whittlebauer College. Quite obviously, Middle C, like most of Gass’s fictional works, is not read for its plot. This begs the question, why are his fictional works read at all? Other than the way he wields metaphor, of which he is by far one of the greatest wielders alive, we read him for his mind. We read him because it’s Gass that gives us something to read. His novels, and Middle C is no exception, are not for the passive reader, a category that seems to grow larger each year. No, his novels are meant for those who would like to engage with the text. To do battle, in much the same way his main characters do. To fight with ideas. To disagree. To hate. To love. To think.
Middle C is more than a character-driven novel, another classification that ought be destroyed. More often than not “character-driven” is a nice way of saying “nothing happens”. But Gass has proven that even a life lived in a chair is full of happenings.
In Middle C we are given a character who is three men. When he’s young or with his mother, he is known as Joey. When he gets a little older, he is known as Joseph. In the chapters where he is presumably in middle-age, he is called Professor Skizzen. At first the changing of names seems unimportant. The reader might think he is being called Joey when he is younger and Joseph when he is older for the same reason name changes like this occur in real life. Bobbys become Bobs, Johnnys become Johns, and Dannys become Dans after a person leaves childhood and wants to be taken more seriously. But as the novel moves forward (though time-wise, the novel jumps around quite a bit between chapters) the reader encounters both Joey and Joseph in the same chapter. At about two-thirds of the way into the book, the reader encounters all three in the same chapter. Professor Skizzen sits in his attic surrounded by the newspaper clippings of his Inhumanity Museum and ponders its creation. Gass writes that the museum “was an advancement that came through accumulation not selection, repetition not interconnection or — he feared — any deeper understanding.
He had once thought that the many terrible deeds of men might be understood by positing some underlying evil working away in the dirt of each life like the sod web worm. Perhaps there was an unrequited urge at the center of the species, a seed or genetic quirk, an impulse, bent on destruction, a type of trichinosis or a malignant imbecility that was forever ravenous.
These topics for thought gave him “no pleasure at all to pursue . . . in fact they made him queasy, but he felt it a duty to his dream.” He turns away from the clippings and looks out the attic window. He finds his mother working in her garden, a garden that echoes the one Voltaire’s Candide spoke of at the end of his short novel, the one that “we must cultivate” as a way of escaping the worlds tragedies, where we might possibly restore some innocence our surroundings. After watching her work for a few moments,
A stinging wind brought tears to Joey’s eyes when Joseph looked down on Miriam’s garden filled with captured leaves . . . Angered by the blurred vision in his watery eyes, Skizzen brought his fist down on his right thigh. The blow couldn’t reach through the cloth to cause a bruise.
All three men, in this one character, lose the fight against creating a life. Much like the argument Gass makes in The Tunnel — if you were alive when all this terrible occurred then you are partly responsible — Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen’s attempt at escaping the responsibility takes the form of doing everything he can to not make a life. Gass writes, “But he, Joey the Joseph, will have no actual past; he will be safely out of the stream of consequences: I was not here, I was not there, I was not noticed anywhere.” Gass uses this shift of person to remind us that we do this, we create lives at every stage. The goal of being human and yet remaining blameless for what humanity has done, as if somehow we were not a part of it, is impossible.
Aside from identity, the novel explores form, and in a way identity again. Throughout the novel Professor Skizzen works on a sentence that troubles him. The reader encounters it in bold and watches as it is edited. At first it reads: The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure. As the sentence undergoes its many changes (a little over thirty), the reader gets a chance to watch Gass, the devout sentence maker, work through his character Skizzen. We see why this sentence making is important: Skizzen changes a phrase here, a phrase there, the perspective from which the sentence is written, the subject and the predicate, the ordering of the clauses, the expansion, the compression, the words. All of these changes remind the reader of what language is, what the writer is doing. “As an artist you are dealing with a very abstract thing when you are dealing with language (and if you don’t realize that, you miss everything) . . . ” Gass could easily have replaced the word “artist” with “reader” and the statement would hold true. What is meaning? How do we make it? How do we even begin if we can’t work out what it is we are saying? But Skizzen reaches a point where he feels he has found the perfect way to communicate this problem. And there also the reader will find the importance of form.
All that said, the novel does have its problems. Throughout the text, Gass writes about Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. The text is practically saturated with talk of it, to the point that it makes one wonder if Gass is using it somehow in the structure of the novel. For example, and this is only one of many: Six women play important roles in Skizzen’s development as a person. Each woman starts out one type of person only later to be discovered to be a different type of person. Do these six represent a hexachord? Does their changing represent some type of hexachordal combinatoriality? Does this all lead back to the twelve-tone technique? Maybe. But it doesn’t seem to really matter. The novel would be no weaker if it didn’t.
Another problem is one Gass has been dealing with for quite some time. Gore Vidal wrote wrongly about many of the writers he took on in his well known essay American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction published in The New York Review of Books in ’76, but he said something about Gass that still holds true today:
“Gass’s problem as an artist is not so much his inability to come up with some brand new Henry Ford-type invention that will prove to be a breakthrough in world fiction (this is never going to happen) as what he calls his weak point — a lack of dramatic gift — which is nothing more than low or rather intermittent energy. He can write a dozen passages in which the words pile up without effect. Then, suddenly, the current, as it were, turns on again and the text comes to beautiful life (in a manner of speaking of course . . . who does not like a living novel? particularly one that is literate).”
There are points in Middle C where the words “pile up without effect,” but when the text comes to life, it truly is beautiful, despite, at times, the ugliness of its subject. But for those not actively engaged with the text, this book will never come to life. And yes, “who does not like a living novel?” Whoever those poor souls may be, Middle C is not the book for them. And sadly, it is not the book for everyone.
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