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.
The Tunnel is the hole into which Gass’s fiction fell, for what might otherwise have been the most productive quarter century of his life, his late middle age. By the second half of the ’60s he’d made his name with one novel (1966’s Omensetter’s Luck), one novella that played with typography and images (1968’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife), and a handful of gemlike stories. Thematically, his fiction was just recognizable enough, a version of Midwestern Gothic, tales of shut-ins and monomaniacal preachers and murderous break-ins set anywhere from Ohio to the Dakotas, often and famously in Gass’s signature weather: deep snow, the kind in which you could dream a subterranean life, the density of which might incline you to dig, well, tunnels, as happens in his breakthrough story from 1961, “The Pedersen Kid.” The allure of the early work, however, was the way Gass improvised this dark Americana, half Jack London and half Sherwood Anderson, with a gorgeously jazzy, deeply lettered, wised-up style. When you can write sentences like these, the sentence becomes your subject:
I could toss a whole cluster into a basket from several feet . As the pear or apple lit, they would explosively rise, like monads for a moment, windowless, certainly, with respect to one another, sugar their harmony.
Or this, where the characteristic high-low mixture we call “postmodernist” just sings, melismatically:
Nevertheless, on the road along the Wabash in the morning, though the trees are sometimes obscured by fog, their reflection floats serenely on the river, reasoning the banks, the sycamores in French rows. Magically, the world tips. I’m led to think that only those who grow down live (which will scarcely win me twenty-five from Wisdom’s Monthly Digest), but I find I write that only those who live down grow; and what I write, I hold, whatever I really know. My every word’s inverted, or reversed — or I am.
Gass didn’t fall into any of the easy tricks of High PoMo Style, like the pop-canonical diction clash or the run-on showpiece sentence. His sentences keep the time, so to speak, while freeing themselves from it, finding some different rhythm within the beats of bent but more or less conventional syntax. Their dynamic range is wide without violent clashing. They hold on to some referentiality — they make you see something — but hold on loosely; lexical surprises (reasoning the banks) keep you giddily off-balance. They resist the sense-making function of prose almost successfully. In the balmy postwar summer of the American art sentence, before minimalism stripped the trees bare, Gass’s sentences were the least datable, are the least dated. They’re durably impressive: Post a Gass-passage screenshot and see.
As with others in the wartime generation, he arrived too late to be a prodigy and dealt with much early rejection, but he ended up with the prodigy’s dilemma nonetheless: Where do you go from brilliantly idiosyncratic early work like this? One path was theoretically surveying what you’ve been doing. And from the late ’60s on, Gass became a virtuoso of the generalist critical essay. He’d long been an academic philosopher, but early training in (and, briefly during his doctoral work at Cornell, by) Wittgenstein inoculated him against contributing to the so-called literature, and instead he became one of the major informants about and exponents of poststructuralist theory, modulated in his handling into a tough-minded common sense about literary form. You read Gass from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and you get something like Shklovsky or Barthes or Todorov, translated into a slightly more analytic idiom and with a disarming succinctness. From “The Concept of Character in Fiction” in 1969: “He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him.” On scene setting: “There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions, and the principles which govern these constructions are persistently philosophical.” In 1970, he coined the word metafiction. This is Gass as law-giving messenger and interpreter of foreign dictates to the wandering tribes, and these essays are all still so readable and elegant, so washed free of incidentals, as to seem outside of academic discipline or intellectual fashion, shards of eternal truth. Even when they have faddish titles like “Tropes of the Text,” from 1982, they have a style and procedure of almost Platonic transparency. Meanwhile he wrote criticism, too — a criticism almost entirely without grievance or score settling: appreciations mostly, usually of Gass’s own slightly idiosyncratic canon of the not too distantly dead, such as Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Lowry, Stein, Rilke, Colette — all, to varying degrees, inventors of kinds of sentences. In terms of ubiquity in the still varied, still remunerative arcade of American cultural-intellectual periodicals, before its end-of-century going-out-of-business clear-out, Gass’s nearest analogue might be Susan Sontag. But Sontag was registering every tremor of the culture, while Gass, hidden in his heart of the heart of the country — moving teaching positions from the College of Wooster to Purdue to Washington University in St. Louis — planted himself away from more active fault lines. You go to Sontag for history as a live wire; you go to Gass for precepts and clarifications.
The Tunnel doesn’t narrate; it wallows. Kohler digs but gets nowhere. It’s shit all the way down.
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His fiction, though, went underground. Other names, bigger and more coastal ones, became the totems of high postmodernism; some of them, like Gaddis, were even Gass’s friends. Tied to his professorial-philosophical dock, with whatever relief or misgiving, Gass stuck it out — and throughout all these years, as Vietnam yielded to stagflation and then to the neoliberal march through the institutions, Gass chipped slowly away at The Tunnel, publishing bits of it here and there, from TriQuarterly to Esquire, like a postwar “Work in Progress.” Here was a different voice to that of the master essayist. His career had developed a Dorian Gray doubleness; the equanimity of the essays, so magisterial and unstrained, has almost no place in his fiction after the ’60s, which becomes a repository for all the ill will, grudge keeping, and unmanageable fear that the essays, like the elegant pleasure grounds they are, have kept outside the fences. As he famously insisted in a 1977 Paris Review interview: “I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.” Not that there weren’t signs, even early on. The primary one is the usual narrating voice of the early stories: the Man Alone in a House. “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” his early masterpiece, already offers some signals. Why is this man alone in a house? “I am in retirement from love,” he tells us. To be alone means to have done with longing attachment, to be free to become the narrating eye/I, but not to be entirely free of negative cathexis. That eye wants to see things because it wants to find reasons to be done with them. So his narrator watches out windows, catalogs things, and however lyrically expansive he might be, he is also the dyspeptic and self-pitying and rather creepy omniscience of his small Indiana town: “I want to rise so high, I said, that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.”
Bad feeling, lots of it. The first-person voice Gass developed here experiences personhood as mostly bad feeling, and Gass catches this voice in the act of trying to divest itself from all that — trying to become not the figure at the window but the window itself, somewhere between the first and third persons, and it’s to that middle space of potential transcendence that his early work pointed. (In the mid-’90s he taught a seminar on the philosophy of windows.) Gass knew this was Henry James’s famous “house of fiction” theory of narratorial perspectivism, but now the house isn’t an English country estate but a drafty small-town Victorian, marooned in the middle of the continent and the middle of the century, nowheresville in a snowstorm or locust-ridden heat wave, and the watcher posted at the window is brimming with envy, dislike, and — the word that would later become Gass’s theoretical object — disappointment. If Gass doesn’t get enough credit for being a great, possibly the great, Midwestern writer, it’s because of how astringent his vision of the region is. He gives us variously maimed nuclear families; sexual longings curdled into bitterness; and all that flatness and wind scrubbing life into hard, precise, eventless reality, the acidic clarity of life in minor places — not even the Mississippi in Gass, but the Wabash or the Mahoning; not even Chicago, but Hammond, Indiana, or Warren, Ohio. (Did Gass also coin mid? In The Tunnel: “My tastes were small town too, timid, and Mid: pie and potatoes, meat and gravy.”) Not that he would have had it any other way. You get the sense that staying Midwestern was for Gass a way of staying modern: the self-containment and solidity and disdain for its surroundings of a Mies skyscraper, there in his stories of trapped solitaries in the quietest, shabbiest towns, who are not what modernity left behind so much as what modernity really is, its unpretendingly dark heart.
Ensconced in the nation’s broad middle and in the routines of the university, Gass might have had reason to wonder what those shelters did, if not to his reputation, with which he seemed always to be playing the long game, then to the work itself. You could catch something just short of regret — an honest cost assessment — when he occasionally compared himself with his contemporaries and colleagues who were either selling better or jumping to the front of the Great Postmodernist relay race. On John Gardner, dead at 49 from a motorcycle accident: “He was reckless with everything. . . . I was the careful one. You are like a lady who has seen a mouse, he would tell me; you climb no more than a chair.” (Chairs again.) Gass traveled, and brought the world’s writers to St. Louis, but, like his early narrators, his imagination remained in the Bed and Breakfast Abyss, stayed put, stayed inside the house — the Midwest; the university; his method; “life in a chair.” Again from “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”: “Here a stair unfolds toward the street — dark, rickety, and treacherous — and I always feel, as I pass it, that if I just went carefully up and turned the corner at the landing, I would find myself out of the world. But I’ve never had the courage.” Was there something out there, some wilder greatness to be seized, some new collectivity or newer modernity to be discovered when or if you got outside?
If Gass entertained any escape fantasies, however, The Tunnel does not indulge them. It’s the big, the biggest, Man Alone in a House story. It’s an anti–systems novel, uninterested in conspiracist linkages, fantasias of historical causality, politics, even money; it’s got no reportage, no news. It’s a novel of minor academic failure but invites no pity or nostalgia — it’s the anti-Stoner, that’s for sure. (Just try to feel bad for its protagonist, I dare you.) A product of the university, it’s unteachable within it; it’s the Midwestern Mort à crédit, the story of an American Underground Man, the surprising doubling down on a lifetime’s artistic wager. No, Gass won’t leave the house here; he won’t even stay at the window; he’ll burrow deeper inside, literally and otherwise, because now the subject isn’t the ambient alienation of the early stories, the is-this-all-there-is blankness of small-town modernity, but fascism itself.
The tunnel in The Tunnel is dug in the basement of an overlarge, drafty Indiana house — that very Gassian milieu — by its almost shut-in resident, William Frederick Kohler, professor of German history at the local college. Kohler is in his fifties, on sabbatical, and about to submit the manuscript of his own massive opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, which has already gathered some advance notoriety based on the not wholly unfounded suspicion that it is a work of revisionist mitigation, the product of a “Nazi-nuzzler.” All that’s needed is an introduction. Which is The Tunnel itself, Kohler’s logorrheic apologia/rant, a scattershot recapitulation of a lifetime’s stored-up bile, a defense of the indefensible. He’s held it in — all those years spent sitting have produced psychic constipation — and now this academic nobody, leader of “a small, square, solid, six-buck, clothbound, print and paper-jacket life,” a mid-century mid-career mediocrity, will finally let it all out onto the manuscript we read, the pages of which he carefully hides from his wife by interleaving them with those of his monograph. What they tell is nonsequential, sometimes repetitive, often internally inconsistent, and temporally implausible: Kohler is at once a child of the Depression (in small-town Ohio, born to an abusive father and alcoholic mother); a doctoral student in mid-1930s Germany, mentee to Magus Tabor, a figure of sub-Nietzschean speculations about the fictionality of history, during which time he participates in Kristallnacht out of something like fascination; a soldier in the US First Army, liberating France while ducking the Krauts’ cannon fire; and then, in the 1960s of student protest, a stalled-out tenured professor with loathed colleagues and a record, more or less known to them, of sleeping with his students; husband to an estranged wife, and a father of two disliked children, one of whom his wife named, out of spite and rage at her husband, Adolf.
During his sabbatical daytimes, with wife and children absent, Kohler writes and digs. Each activity is an analogue of the other. Both look like ways of escaping the intolerable — the indignities of a stuck life, the guilt of having lived the wrong life — but are in fact modes of going ever deeper into the mire that he can’t imagine cleaning off. The tunnel itself is not a plot mechanism, despite a bit of late Great Escape–style business around how Kohler hides the displaced dirt (there is some dark comedy about his killing the family’s cat, who had become too curious about the basement hole), and its digging is merely the backdrop to Kohler’s rants; it is instead a master trope subtending the novel’s collection of recollections, fantasias, lectures, speculations. Nor is it particularly subtle. Kohler — the name, of course, of the Midwest’s great toilet manufacturer — is building his own intestine, a GI tract for the former GI, carving out the tube by which he’ll let loose the shit of the 20th century, bury the reader’s nose in it. He spends his time, whether in his basement or on the page, crawling up his own ass. (Robert Alter, in a 1995 anti-Tunnel screed, called it “bloated.”) And when he dreams up a new, more all-encompassing fascist party — the Party of Disappointed People, he calls it, or PdP — its emblem, depicted within the novel in several places, and originally figured on the red armband of the novel’s cover, is the Gassian (or Gassy) reimagining of the swastika: the cross section of a rectum.
In the balmy postwar summer of the American art sentence, before minimalism stripped the trees bare, Gass’s sentences were the least datable, are the least dated.
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So, The Tunnel’s tunnel gives the book its eidos, its idea of form: It is the thing that gives notional shape to the mass of ingested detail that moves peristaltically through it. But the matter, the shit-substance of the novel, consists of Kohler’s meditations on what he repeatedly calls “the fascism of the heart.” The impossible-to-specify sense that somewhere, at some point, we were traduced, denied, let down, not given what we’d earned, or been promised, or was ours by right — this is what Kohler calls “disappointment,” and each lecture he has to give is on this theme in some way, whether the psychic tearing experienced in the moment of such loss, or, more darkly, what it later gives rise to:
were fortune’s crooked wheel to luck us the opportunity; if even a little power should come our way like a windfall from a distant relative’s will; if we had in the bank just enough authority saved up to keep open an account; then what damage would we do, what revenge we would take; just like that bleeding balcony, there, you’re looking at . Must be in Vilnius. In what is left of Jew town. Good bet . That’s how my smile would be, see the rotten spindles? if for the briefest bit of blessed time, I — my habitually helpless hand — once — once — just once — held the whip .
Much of the texture of the novel is Kohler whipping himself, as here, into a mode of ominous lyricism about the pain we would all like to inflict. At times he shifts into a more bitterly comic mode, as this, which became one of the novel’s most-quoted bits:
But if you want to think about something really funny, consider how the titles of tyrants change. We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs, or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger our boys; the masses make such appointments now; the masses love tyranny; they demand it; they dance to it; they feel that their hand is forming the First Citizen’s Fist; so we shall murder more modestly in future: beneath the banners of Il Duce, Der Führer, the General Secretary or the Party Chairman, the CEO of something. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called Coach.
A good line, that last one — you can pick at it and say, well, events have belied it a bit, but it’s prescient enough; it catches the pep-rally quality of American fascist aesthetics, locker-room hazing its luridly desired primal scene. The Tunnel’s illustrations of the PdP’s regalia — its medals, banners, pennants — have a team-merch quality to them. (Gass once suggested to his Knopf editor, Victoria Wilson, that they sell PdP T-shirts instead of the book.) But it won’t do to press too hard on the novel’s foresight, because it isn’t really aimed at the future as a distinct moment. The Tunnel is not a warning or a call to arms, not tied to historical time in that way. Decades pass in it, and nothing much changes. Both in its nonteleological timeline and the bizarre history of its writing, through each of those thirty-year back-and-forth leaps that treat cataclysmic events or mass countercultural shifts like little speed bumps, it says instead that disappointment, as an engine of mass (and intimate) cruelty, has no history, or has instead the timelessness of psychic myth. The death pit was, is, already present in what Kohler calls “that scuffy struggle to find foot-and-feeling room in father-filled houses” — the houses not just in Lübeck but Logansport or Lansing. Might as well buy a PdP T-shirt, because look what they took from you: You were promised jet packs, or functional social services, or gainful employment, or a livable planet. (You may be entitled to compensation.) To tell that myth, you have to dolly back really very far. You have to (try to) write a classic.
You certainly can’t tell anything like a story. The Tunnel doesn’t narrate; it wallows. Kohler digs but gets nowhere. It’s shit all the way down. This relentlessness has a distending pull on Gass’s own prose — never less than hypnotically inventive, it nonetheless here increasingly abandons syntactic constraint. The angular, rhythmic displacements of his earlier style shift to the rolling freedom of the pure list, and in the process a key tension — what his earlier style was tightly holding together — goes just a bit slack. His early Men Inside a House, at their windows, caught between hate and curiosity, loathing and wonder, give each of their contending impulses the bite or lift of the opposite; there’s always a negotiation underway, and the result is a peculiarly luminous kind of abstraction made up of different kinds of tactilities: You can never really say what an early Gass story is “about.” (It’s pretty much Platonic, I’m tempted to say.) The Tunnel, on the other hand, having withdrawn from the window into a world of shit and from transcendence into the abjection of personhood, is full of a diffuse, encyclopedic aboutness. Kohler has topics on his mind: misogyny, bigotry, abuse, intellectual fraudulence, genocide — a postwar inferno, down the steps we go. And so the charged tension between identifying with Kohler (we are all Disappointed People, Gass always reminds us), and hating him, sometimes goes soft. It’s in the novel’s list-syntax above all that the dilemma arises and a persistent moral-gastrointestinal queasiness develops.
Take another of its more famous passages, Kohler’s description of a mass execution — some Eastern European death pit, maybe Dubno, maybe Vinnytsia, maybe Katyn; at any rate the kind of event he studies. Kohler begins with a lyrical-humanist evocation of a father leading his son to the pit, of his unvoiceable regret at the last moment for “that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors — the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit,” and of his pride at their “quiet, dignified, brave” acquiescence to their murder. But Kohler has second thoughts: How many of those in the pit were worthless lives anyway? And the verbal propulsion of the list explodes:
Thousands of thieves, murderers, shylocks, con men, homos, hoboes, wastrels, peevish clerks, shysters, drunkards, hopheads, Don Juans, pipsqueaks, debtors, premature ejaculators, epileptics, fibbers, frigid females, faddists, nags, nail biters and bed wetters, frumps, fanatics, friggers, bullies, cripples, fancy ladies, got their just deserts . . . and we shall never know how many callow effusions we were spared by a cutthroat; how many slanderous tongues were severed; what sentimental love songs were choked off as though in mid-note by the rope; the number of the statues of Jesus, Mary, or the pope, whose making was prevented by an opportune blindness or the breaking of the right bones; what canvases depicting mill wheels in moonlight, cattle at dawn, children and dogs, lay unexecuted on their easels because of the gas, talent thrown out as if it were the random pissing of paint into a bedpan; so that, over all, and on sober balance, there could have been a decided gain . . .
Condemn it or praise it — as either a lapse in moral taste or the defiant freedom of the writer to plumb our very worst impulses — what doesn’t quite work about this moment is that it seems slightly too proud of its own outrageousness. It keeps pirouetting on its own axis of nominative energy, saying: Look how long I can keep this catalog going — I am going to make you laugh, make you recoil, make you retch; I have no reason to stop, because when it comes to the shit of human cruelty, there is always more to say, the abyss has no bottom. Here and elsewhere in the novel you can feel a dialectic spinning in place like a top: the novelist revealing that side of hate indistinguishable from curiosity, locked in an imitative struggle to the death with his protagonist, their energy fed by the power of the blasphemies they’ve mutually unleashed. When in his unfettered later interviews Gass called for the abolition of the family, or for Occupy protesters to rename Zuccotti “Fuck You Park” and take over the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, or recalled his activism as a younger faculty member, what shines through is his lifelong rejection of the obscene, outrageous Father. But in such a struggle, the writer might feel that figure’s libidinal allure, and a truly brilliant writer like Gass might even wind up reproducing it.
The Tunnel has moments of almost agonizing beauty — a hymn to the power of delicate touch in lovemaking, “as if one could most profoundly touch with what least did, thus did with utmost delicacy do it”; a bravura set piece in which Kohler discovers that his spinster aunt has spent a lifetime hoarding empty boxes, teaching him that “every space contains more space than the space it contains” — but also these other moments of repelled attraction in which you feel that Gass’s portrayal of Kohler’s hatreds, generating its own counter-hatred, mixes into a cocktail whose ingredients are no longer distinct. The Tunnel’s great achievement is its style, the High Style of the Hater. It’s a classicism of a sort, but an odd one that can at times, in its intoxicated rants and slurs, sound just like the hater’s lower styles. With so many styles of the hater around us that are lower still, these are the novel’s timeliest elements, and its least classic.
The Tunnel, to its credit, knows that its will-to-classic status is stuck in a struggle with the historical conditions that make the attempt possible, which for Kohler and Gass both was the postwar academy’s cloistered refuge. Inside it, as in Kohler’s house, what happens outside gets muffled, and everything is hard to rearrange, and showing its age, but also, maybe, down deep in its cellar, you could stay in touch with chthonic forces. So many male professors in postwar American fiction! McCarthy’s Henry Mulcahy, Nabokov’s Timofey Pnin, Bellow’s Moses Herzog, DeLillo’s Jack Gladney, Roth’s Coleman Silk; professors in Jarrell, Cheever, Brodkey, Chabon, Everett. Kohler is of their vintage, but even more culturally isolated, trying harder to abstract himself into permanence. Writing, he says, “is hiding from history, refusing to do any dying . . . writing is lying . . . in wait . . .” Well, it might work. Wait thirty years or so and you’ll find yourself, maybe, in a moment you understand even better than the one you lived in; maybe, by burrowing away, you can wait history out until it repeats itself. That may be a species of luck. Gass acknowledged as much about his career’s material comforts: “I’ve been fortunate,” he told one interviewer; “I lived well,” he told another. But what he also knew is, there’s really no right life in the chair.
It’s not all diminishing returns after The Tunnel. While Gass reworked its premise — in 2013’s Middle C there is another shut-in professor with scandalous Mitteleuropean wartime roots, who hides in his attic assembling an Inhumanity Museum, hoarding and digging being mirror images of each other — he also produced, in 1998’s Cartesian Sonata, a brilliant late-style return to the abstraction of his early stories, more wonderfully out of step with his moment than his Man Alone in a House novels. Gass remains bewildering: so unmarked by his time as to seem antique, so much more ahead of everything — particularly in the music of his style — as to make you despair that no one has really yet caught up. Which also means, strangely, there’s a hole where his present might’ve been.
Another lecture scene, this one lightly fictionalized. In a passage published in 1973 as “Writing a Novel,” originally intended for Sleepless Nights but later cut, Elizabeth Hardwick recalls attending a novelist-critic’s public lecture. “A short pear-shaped man” takes the stage, she writes, “rumpled, lumpy,” prematurely aged, appallingly dressed. Not a fraud, Hardwick cautions, but “a genius, a rare creature out of nowhere” — the nowhere here (a Manhattanite’s half-joking, self-conscious prejudice) specifically being Ohio. He is not widely known but is fiercely admired by those who do; “enormously ambitious, resolute, assured,” forbiddingly learned. It is all very puzzling; he is sternly avant-gardist, insisting on the necessity for fiction now to embrace the fragmented, the nonlinear, the metafictional, the chaotic flux of life; and yet, unlike his contemporaries, justifying it through a philosopher’s Reason. Something of the timeless intrudes into the ultramodern. He is so American, and yet so strangely placeless, universal. It is hard to keep him in focus. Hardwick tries to imagine the speaker’s wife, her quiet misgiving, her awareness of the genius’s daily failings that vitiate his work’s brilliance. It is a way to bring him down to earth, but ultimately, Hardwick thinks, a false way. How do you make this man seem real? How do you root him in his time, our time?
It is Gass, of course, that she’s describing: his way of striking everyone as one of the greats, whoever else might be in that pantheon; his not quite fitting in his moment, which means his resistance to novelization. Hardwick was an expert in ambivalence, and here her awe and her skepticism arrive at a stalemate. She is too immersed in the current of history to feel uncomplicatedly about the presence of a man who, out of stubbornness and creative independence and various kinds of privilege, has willed himself out of it. Remembering my own time in a Gass lecture, though, and with The Tunnel having made its all too prophetic return, I can imagine the coolly even way he might have replied to her: I live in history the only honest way one can, with unremitting, luxuriant rejection; I owe it no affirmation. Like many of The Tunnel’s readers, however, I wonder. I want to raise my hand and ask: Isn’t the will to write a classic an affirmation of its own? Did even you, Professor Gass, have a limit to your rejection, think of your sentences as a kind of redemption? Doesn’t even your famously stern negativity bend back around to aesthetic pleasure and its justifications? But the lecture hall is empty now. Only his black-covered prose monument is left, forbidding and puzzlingly sibylline and, at least from where we now sit in history, offering us only the answer of our own reflected image, haters all.
