High-Octane Gass

BOOKS

James Wolcott

"Buzz, buzz!" said Hamlet. And asked by Polonius what he was reading, he replied, "Words, words, words." William H. Gass's third collection of essays, Habitations of the Word (Simon and Schuster), is a series of brainy, intense meditations on words, words, words, with Gass acting as both hive keeper and king bee. "To be—don't we know by now?—is to burst with energy and enterprise like a hive of bees," he writes in one essay, only to tell us later that life demands more of us than this clustered hum. "It is simply not enough to live and to be honey-happy, to hump and holler, to reproduce. Bees achieve it, and they still sting, still buzz." That's what Habitations of the Word is like—humpy and industrious, yet equipped with a wicked stinger. It's really the damnedest book, packed with both brilliance and slough, fine expressions and rude belches, dead-on insights and dawdling asides. It's as if Gass is so proud of his rapacious mind that he can't be bothered with neat presentation. He serves up his rubies on greasy brown paper.

But there's also a rough excitement in watching Gass untether his mind from all the niceties. If there's room in criticism for V. S. Pritchett's calm, astute courtesies, there's more than enough left over for Gass's distinctive brand of bad manners. Where I part company with him is when he exalts his critical acumen into a worldview, and curses the rest of mankind for being an illiterate bog, a sedentary herd. D. H. Lawrence, who railed similarly, at least earned his stripes in the real world. Gass, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is a misanthrope with tenure.

Snaking through the thickets of Gass's prose in Habitations is a simple, noble hope: that language will survive the clutter and blare of pop culture and regain its sovereign place in the theater of the imagination. Words, he argues, have been transformed by advertising into a chaotic roar of message units. "Words are stuck on bumpers, stenciled across chests so they can bounce with the breasts." And in our personal dealings, words are often a transmission of static. "Talk, of course, is not always communication. It is often just a buzz, the hum the husband makes when he's still lit, but the station's gone off." No, words need once again to be savored as pebbles, shined and weighed and artfully arranged; to make on the ear their own intimate splash and echo. Reading, Gass says with great feeling, is not a pastime for passive lumps: "It is like cycling, reading is." Like cycling, reading requires a little push and exertion. "A book of poems has no electric eye which will open its covers automatically when a literate reader passes by. It is not a flytrap." Habitations is not a flytrap, either, though it does try to digest us. Investigating tropes, the soul of the sentence, the liquid deceits of metaphor, and the word and (a dot of a word with a galaxy of uses), Gass draws us in so deeply— gulp—that he coats us with his gastric juices. A lot of how one reacts to Habitations depends upon how much one is willing to put up with Gass's gut rumbles. He's aware of those rumbles—he even refers to himself as "the Gassy who demonstrates the accuracy of his name on occasion after occasion"—but he's complacent about them, too. He rather enjoys petting his gassy turn.

In earlier collections, even Gass's irascible essays had a shapely ease. Not here. The violent yanks of tone in this book could cause whiplash. Gass writes with crusading appreciation about Ford Madox Ford's Fifth Queen and handsomely memorializes Emerson ("Our emblem and our entertainer, Emerson wished to see through common things to their uncommon core; to be all pith, yet not lack a shaping rind"), but then allows himself to skid into something like this:

1 have a dream. I dream that a carefully selected section of an appropriate city—a particularly foul and eloquent ghetto—is suddenly sprayed with polyurethane to the clear depth of several inches, so that the exact character of the pesthole is retained: the bugs in the bed, the people in their tatters, the turds overflowing the toilets—only black folks after all, fixed forever.. .as if they had been Pompeii'd—and the world could parade by our National Ghetto Museum, where only whites may apply as guides.

Even granting that Gass is assuming a voice for the occasion (this brain wave was delivered at an academic colloquium), it's still ugly stuff, down to the mocking echo of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream." (Indeed, the entire essay, entitled "The Origin of Extermination in the Imagination," ought to be stricken from the record.) Gass once told the Paris Review that his motto, taken from one of his own characters, was "I want to rise so high that when I shit I won't miss anybody." To be a defecating angel—it's a pretty sordid calling.

Like Norman Mailer, who once boasted on The Dick Cavett Show that at Lally Weymouth's parties only real glasses were used, William H. Gass depicts the plastic cup as the symbol of our counterfeit, disposable culture. "It is not worth a re wash. It is not worth another look, a feel, a heft. It has been desexed." From such cups comes the kitsch that "Cokes the stomach, and affrights the mind." And it's clear Gass considers people who drink from plastic cups to be themselves plastic—smooth, uniform, second-rate. Though this nosecrinkling elitism isn't new to Gass's writing—"The average man does not want to know how he looks when he eats; he defecates in darkness, reading the Reader's Digest," he wrote in an earlier collection—it's more hoity-toitily expressed in Habitations of the Word. But is defecating in the dark with the Reader's Digest any worse than reading Dante and defecating from on high? Plastic cups and the Reader's Digest are just coded ways of sneering at those off-campus.

Oh, I do not like thee, Dr. Gass. But for thy bristling intelligence I do respect thee, truly. And raise a plastic cup of diet soda in salute.