English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Celebrant of Texts

William Gass. A Temple of Texts. Knopf, 2006. 418 pp. $26.95.

By Jeff Westover, Howard University

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            “Every real book . . . is a mind, an imagination, a consciousness” (167).

In a book mostly about other books, William Gass grandly succeeds at creating an appetite for the work of the classic and contemporary writers he praises. His recurrent gastronomic metaphors attest to his epicurean love of words and their artful arrangement.  His enthusiastic tropes and vigorous, sprawling syntax often have the happy effect of enticing his readers to seek out the works he champions, in precisely the way he prescribes near the end of “The Melodies of Melanctha,” his lecture on Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. Acknowledging the limitations of critical discourse, Gass writes that “Accounts cannot intervene in aesthetic determinations; only the direct, informed, repeated experience of the work will serve, and therefore no one without that experience should be persuaded to admire a Mona Lisa or a pyramid, only to acknowledge its extensive and positive press” (139). But since his ultimate goal is to defend the primacy of personal experience, Gass goes on to plead for the edifying benefits of critical praise and pedagogy: “What one can do, with description and analysis and expressions of enthusiasm, is entice, lure others to peek between the covers; to remove possible prejudices or expectations that might interfere with the experience” (139).  While A Temple of Texts offers an extended record of Gass’s personal aesthetic delights, the words of this connoisseur reach out to readers to beget in them a hunger for the texts he celebrates. The priest of this temple knows how to preach, but he does so more in the manner of a devout gourmand than a severe divine.

There is a sideswiping, manic, and titanic quality to a lot of Gass’s writing. It is frequently appealing, sometimes alluring, but it is most often tidal in its powerful excesses.  Gass frequently speaks of sentences as his preferred unit of thought, but he should speak of wavelike pages and pages of restless words, a syntax in frenetic spate that is indifferent to the weariness if not the wariness of his readers. This baroque or cataclysmic style can tire and overwhelm readers as well as delight them. One feels that Gass doesn’t care; he only wants the die hard devotees of language among his faithful fellow worshippers in the temple of his texts.

Many of his sentences pulse with a songlike power, paying a tribute of passionate attention to the work of the writers he singles out for praise. (Perhaps the title of an essay near the end of the volume, “The Sentence Seeks Its Form,” sums this idea up in a more focused, gnomic way than my sentence.)  The essays in this volume honorably portray the avid mind of a well-read and cosmopolitan man.  Among the best essays in the collection are “A Defense of the Book” and the much more opaque essays on Rilke, all of which deserve more than a fleeting sentence about them, despite my space limitations.  “Sacred Texts” dazzles you with the professor’s polymathic references, but its humor makes the onslaught of texts and sects tolerable.  “Defense of the Book” offers a heartwarming account of the intensely personal interaction between avid readers and their books. It is a paean to the sensual appeal of their materiality and the role they play as memory banks. Wouldn’t I (wouldn’t you?) love to live in his “ideal logotopia” where “everyone would possess their own library, and add at least weekly, if not daily, to it. The walls of each home would seem made of books” (167)?

Gass’s writing often harshly reminds me of the deficiencies in the scope of my own reading, and perhaps in the range of values I bring to it.  On the one hand, I find this reminder a potentially bracing corrective not only to my own lack, but to my culture’s more wholesale lack of proportion and temperateness—what Gass calls “the sort of idiocracy that America has become” (25). (Similarly, in “A Defense of the Book,” he writes, “In this country, we are losing, if we have not lost, any appreciation for what we might call ‘an intellectual environment’” (167).) On the other hand, while Gass isn’t above making jokes at his own expense and acknowledging the potential excesses of his penchant for polemic and wordplay (he gives readers a wonderful send-up of himself in his homage to William Gaddis), a magisterial gravity often elbows out the other qualities of the ethos he creates in this book.  Gass’s lexicon of aesthetic pleasure, his Stevensian characterization of art as substitute religion, and his affinity for lists can, as I’ve said, wear one out as well as win one over.

 Although this book is clearly a miscellany, Gass’s temple-metaphor invites commentary on the “architecture” of the book.  In the doorway of this temple, for instance, an orator addresses himself “To A Young Friend Charged with Possession of the Classics.” While in this and other essays, Gass champions the value of established classics against the perennial soft-headedness that for him prevails in any culture and any time (excepting the Renaissance, perhaps), the title of this essay has a wonderfully subversive cast in the puritanical wake of the Clinton impeachment and the current climate of Big Brother wiretapping.  Gass’s “charged with” is equivocal: the young friend is both incriminated by what he possesses and entrusted with a gift or duty that possesses him. “To a Young Friend” was evidently composed just for this volume (it isn’t noted in the list of acknowledgements citing the initial publication information for the other pieces in the volume). While the apostrophic essay-title functions as an inviting foyer into the sacred precinct of Gass’s book, it also rings with echoes of the past.  When Gass translates a famous Greek proverb (“Nothing too much”) and marries it to a folksier colloquialism (“but everything a little bit”) to characterize (again in characteristically gastronomical terms) “the classic diet,” I am reminded of Richard Wright’s account in Black Boy of his efforts to avail himself of this intellectual smorgasbord by fooling the librarian into letting him check out books with his forged permission slip. The liberal hand and mind of Gass’s motto (“Nothing too much, but everything a little bit”) offsets, or complements, his demanding ideal: the high “bar of the classics.”

While the essay “Influence” helps unify the volume by preparing readers for later essays by referring to Rabelais and Erasmus, the subjects of two of those essays, the miscellaneous character of the collection comes to the fore somewhat unpleasantly, and even a bit tediously in “A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars” and “The Blessed Company,” Gass’s preface to The Book of Prefaces. The first was a commissioned piece for an exhibit at St. Louis University celebrating Gass’s career. “Pillars” answers an unfulfilled undergraduate request I made long ago for a list of classic texts (although of course it’s not exhaustive), but it gets pretty thin pretty fast. A kinder editor might have elided it.  The second piece, which isn’t as aglow and uplifting as the first, plays a strategic role in the book, given that it is largely a collection of essays that began life as prefaces to other people’s books. (Perhaps the most rapturous of these is the preface to a collection by John Hawkes. Along with mouthwatering quotations, Gass’s wonderful sentences and astonishing figures make you ache to read Hawkes. But that doesn’t make up for the fact that most people probably won’t want to read a collection composed mostly of prefaces from cover to cover, especially if they haven’t read the texts that Gass prefaces.)

I find the distinctions in “The Blessed Country” between prologues, prefaces, forewords, and introductions interesting but also browbeating and pedantic. When reading this piece, I sometimes felt I was being driven to accept the Professor’s classy, learned, and niggling but indubitably superior definitions. I wanted the end of this essay to arrive sooner than it did. While this proves the exception in Gass’s book (there is no lack of quality in his ocean of words), it is also true that Gass or his editors might have done a better job of obeying the “nothing too much” rule.  That objection aside, Gass’s flair with language is supremely winning. Take his figures of speech for instance: one can find example after example of surprising and genuinely illuminating similes throughout these essays. In one of many favorites, for example, Gass points out that judging a piece of writing “is more difficult than obtaining the inseams of an octopus” (18).

In addition to some of the objections I’ve stated, some readers may carp that Gass’s taste runs a bit too much to the arcane. (In a recent review of Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story on the radio program Fresh Air, for instance, Maureen Corrigan singled out two figures Gass unabashedly champions, Flann O’Brian and Gertrude Stein, as examples of writers whose work is innovative and critically praised but not necessarily pleasing to read. Corrigan’s candid remark sharply contrasts with Gass’s outlook throughout A Temple.) Others may not like the fact that, his classicism notwithstanding, Gass’s sensibility is apparently polarized by a devotion to the Renaissance (there are essays on Rabelais, Erasmus, and Robert Burton, and references to Ben Jonson and Thomas Browne) and the contemporary (other essays address Gaddis, Hawkes, Coover, Sábato, and Stein). There are modern exceptions (in glowing references to Flaubert and essays on Rilke), but they tend to shape the “classic bar” by which contemporary tastes are to be informed in Gass’s classic pantheon. (Though unnamed, Matthew Arnold seems to be a literary patron saint, too. His definition of culture as the “best that has been thought and known” is a leading idea in the essays, and Gass frequently refers to the benighted as Philistines).

To turn once more to one of the overarching, most compelling features of A Temple: the essays in this book bring home to me my youthful yearning for the kinds of learning and stylistic finesse they exemplify.  Perhaps they will perform a similar service for you. In that regard, they may be judged to succeed, for they make you want to read or reread the books he devoutly praises and to improve your writing.  That’s the inspiring side of reading him. The downside, though, is a bitter, bilious aftertaste I get, that sense of guilt and failure (and vague uncertain anger) I feel in the face of his accomplishment, confidence, and cosmopolitanism.  I can console myself with the thought that, after all, I’m only a middle-aged man of middling ability, whereas Gass, an octogenarian (on p. 35 he reveals that the year of his birth is 1924), has had more time than I to prove himself. What I find more soothing than this threadbare thought, however, is the real enthusiasm his wonderful sentences awaken. For Gass, “books are like bicycles” because “you travel under your own power and proceed at your own pace, your riding is silent . . . and the exercise is good for you” (172). I may well never write as well (or as much) as Gass, but at least I can savor the smooth and soothing wine of his words. Happily, you can too.