Gass - The world within the word: essays

The World Within the Word

On Being Blue

Willie Masters Lonesome Wife

Fiction and the Figures of Life

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Omensetters Luck

This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 by William H. Gass
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gass, William H. (Date) The world within the word.
1. Literature History and criticism Collected works. I. Title.
PN511.G34 809 77-90933
eISBN: 978-0-307-82429-5

v3.1

For

Robert Silvers

who made me write

most of these essays

and

to

Mary

who had to endure

their doing

Crane went sudden as a springboard. The Gulf gave nothing back. My mother, I remember, took her time. She held the house around her as she held her bathrobe, safely doorpinned down its floorlength, the metal threads glinting like those gay gold loops which close the coat of a grenadier, though there were gaps of course unseemly as sometimes a door is on a chain so that to urinate she had to hoist the whole thing like a skirt, collecting the cloth in fat pleats with her fingers, wads which soon out-oozed her fists and sprang slowly away one consequence so that she felt she had to hover above the hole, the seat (clouds dont care about their aim), unsteadily necessarily more and more so as the night-time days drew on, so that the robe grew damp the way the sweater on a long drink grows, soggy from edge to center, until I found I cared with what success she peed when what she swallowed was herself and what streamed out of her in consequence seemed me.

Though Hart shed his bathrobe frugally before he jumped, my mother, also saving, would have worn hers like the medal on a hussar straight through living room and loony bin, every nursing home and needle house we put her in, if those points hadnt had to come out (they confiscate your pins, belts, buckles, jewelry, teeth, and theyd take the air, too, if it had an edge, because the crazy can garrote themselves with a length of breath, their thoughts are open razors, their eyes go off like guns), though there was naturally no danger in these baubles to herself, for my mother was living the long death, her whole life passing before her as she went, the way those who drown themselves are said to have theirs pass a consequence, yes her own ocean like a message in a bottle, so that she sank slowly somewhere as a stone sill sinks beneath the shoes of pilgrims and tourists, not like Plath with pills, or Crane or Woolf with water, Plath again by gas, or Berry man from a bridge, but, I now believe, in the best way possible, because the long death is much more painful and punishing than even disembowelment or bleach, and it inflicts your dying on those you are blaming for it better than burning or blowing upduring an exquisitely extended stretchsince the same substance which both poisons you, preserves, you both have and eat, enjoy and suffer your revenges together, as well as the illusion that you can always change your mind.

Yet my mother wasnt what we call a suicide, even though she died as though shed cut her throat when the vessels burst there finally, and my father, who clenched his teeth till neither knees nor elbows would unfist, dying of his own murderous wishes like the scorpion whos supposed to sting itself to deathnohe wasnt one either: both had a terribly tenacious grip on life so that some suicides will survive anything, and many who court death have no desire to wed her it mixes us up

Should a suicide be regarded as the last stage of a series of small acts against the self, since the murderer who arsenics his wife little by little is still a murderer though she takes a decade dying; or does this confuse kinds of hostility in a serious way, because harsh words arent the same as blows or their bruises, desire isnt adultery whatever Jesus preached, not even a degree of it? Cigarettes shorten our life, but the alcoholics fuddle mimics death (the loss of control, the departure of the soul) in a way the smokers never does. What can we make of that? We shall manage something.

My mother managed. She was what we call a dedicated passive liquidly acquiescent supinely on the go. Still, she went in her own waythe way, for instance, her robe was fastened.

Socrates acquiesced in his own execution, others demand theirs. The Kamikaze pilot intends his death, but does not desire it. Malcolm Lowry, who choked on his vomit, evidently desired his, but did not intend it. Soldiers charging the guns at Verdun neither wished for death nor were bent on it, though death was what they expected. My mother accepted.

I used to think my father was the actively aggressive one because while he sat, temporized, bided and brooded and considered and consolidated, he growled, swore, and made horrible faces.

During the decline of Christian morals, few groups have risen so rapidly in the overall estimation of society. It was dangerous for Donne to suggest that suicide was sometimes not a sin. It was still daring for Hume to reason that it was sometimes not a crime. Later one had to point out that it was sometimes not simply a sickness of the soul. Now it seems necessary to argue that it is sometimes not a virtue.

To paraphrase Freud, what does a suicide want? Not what he gets, surely.

Some simply think of death as the absence of their present state, a state which pursues them like a malignant disease and which cannot be otherwise escaped. Others consider it quite positively, as though to die were to get on in the world. Seventh Heaven, after all, is a most desirable address. Still others spend their life like money, purchasing this or that, but their aim is to buy, not to go broke. Are we to say to them (all and every kind) what we often say to children? no, Freddie, you dont want a pet boa, you wouldnt like the way it swallows mice.

It doesnt follow at all that because it is easy enough to kill yourself, it is easy enough to get, in that case, what you want. Can you really be said to want what you cannot possibly understand? or what you are in abysmal confusion about? or what is provenly contrary to your interests? or is plainly impossible? Is Id rather be dead anything like: I want to be a chewed-up marshmallow; or: I want 6 and 3 to make 10; or: I want to be a Fiji princess; or: I want a foot-long dong; or: I want that seventh scotch-on-the-rocks; or I would love to make it with Lena Home?