William H Gass
American master of metafiction
William H Gass, a proudly postmodern author who valued form and language more than literary conventions like plot and character and who had a broad influence on other experimental writers of the 1960s, ‘70s and beyond, died on Wednesday in St Louis. He was 93.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Mary Henderson Gass, said. He lived in St Louis, where he taught at Washington University for 30 years. Gass was widely credited with coining the term “metafiction” to describe writing in which the author is part of the story. He himself was one of the form’s foremost practitioners.
His writing reflected his knowledge of philosophy and his academic background, but it also included irreverent and often bawdy limericks. He used ordinary words to great effect, as when he described a character as having “a dab of the dizzies,” but it was his metaphors, his rhythms and the effort he put into each sentence that made him the object of other writers’ admiration.
Sentences have souls, he explained in an essay, and if they were good enough, “it would be a crime on the world’s part to let them die”. In an ideal sentence, he said, the words choose to be there. Sometimes more than 300 words chose to be in a Gass sentence, in which clauses, connected by semi-colons, were strung out like rail cars.
Plot, he argued, was of secondary importance, though not absent from his stories. His plots just didn’t come in standard linear form.
Though he never wrote a chase scene or a courtroom scene, laws were broken in his stories, and there was plenty of terror and brutality. Since his first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, was published in 1966, Gass was one of the most respected authors never to write a bestseller. (He wrote only two other novels but many novellas, short stories and essays.)
“Oddly enough I think of myself as more of a realist than most of the realists,” he told the New York Times in 1999. “In my books, there’s darkness. You don’t know everything. In the Victorian novel, everything is clear; in the real world, motives are mixed. People are unreliable. There are contradictions. People forget. There are omissions. You certainly don’t know everything. There aren’t good people and bad people. There are shades of this and that.”
His masterwork was The Tunnel (1995), a 652-page novel in which the main character, the lonely, miserable and unlikable William Frederick Kohler, a middle-aged history professor, retreats to his basement, where he begins, little by little, to tunnel his way out – metaphorically trying to escape from a loveless marriage and a painfully unhappy life. The Tunnel took Gass almost 30 years to finish but did not find much of an audience. And while many critics praised it effusively, others, had trouble with it. “It will be years before we know what to make of it,” the poet Robert Kelly wrote in the New York Times Book Review, calling the book an “infuriating and offensive masterpiece.”
William Howard Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on 30 July 30 1924, the son of William Gass and the former Claire Sorenson. Gass grew up during the Depression. His education was interrupted by wartime service in the Navy. After the war he received a doctorate in philosophy at Cornell and taught at Purdue. He came to Washington University in 1969.
Gass gained literary prominence in 1958 when Accent, the literary magazine of the University of Illinois, devoted an entire issue to his short stories.eight years later Omensetter’s Luck, a historical novel about the conflict between a man of inexplicable good fortune and a fire-andbrimstone preacher, was published to great acclaim.
Critic Richard Gilman called it “the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation” and praised its “replenishment of language”. In 1999, the novelist David Foster Wallace included it on a list of five “direly underappreciated” US novels written since 1960. It was translated into seven languages. Gass’s other works of fiction were In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, a collection of two novellas and three stories (1968); Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife (1971), an “essay novella” that is essentially a woman’s interior monologue while she is engaged in sex; Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998); and his third and last novel, Middle C (2013), the story of an Austrian immigrant who teaches music at a college in Ohio and whose life, like his father’s before him, is built on lies.
Gass’s first marriage, in 1952, to Mary Pat O’kelly, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Richard and Robert, and a daughter, Susan Gass, all from his first marriage, as well as five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
For decades, Gass led a spirited attack on the traditional US novel. “It is an ideological war that has been going on since the beginning of literature,” he said in 1999.
“The whole problem of what the novel is supposed to be doing and what literature’s value is, whether it is truth or morality or what my friends accuse me of – aesthetic bliss – this will continue to go on.”
He said the Pulitzer Prize for fiction “takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses”.
He blamed university programmes for creating writers whose stories treated ideas like “a cockroach in a picnic basket”. It wasn’t that these authors had been brainwashed by their teachers, he added; it was that they had “no brain to wash”.
At the height of the literary furor over postmodernism, Gass debated with novelist and critic John Gardner at the University of Cincinnati in 1978 about the role of the novel. Gardner argued that a novel had to be morally uplifting.
Gass maintained that art and morality do not necessarily mix. Gardner used aviation imagery to describe their different approaches: “What I think is beautiful, he would think is not yet sufficiently ornate. The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.”
“In my books, there’s darkness. You don’t know everything. In the Victorian novel, everything is clear; in the real world, motives are mixed. People are unreliable”