What a bad rap reading has these days. As a recent NEA study reminded us, the percentage of Americans who read just one novel a year is way down. Newspapers subscriptions are eroding. Even President Bush boasts about having made it through Yale without having finished a book.
In this environment, William H. Gass is more than a necessary angel. He is practically a public servant. No essayist alive makes one hungrier to read than Gass. Sitting down at the intellectual table of this St. Louis writer is like being invited over for dinner by a master chef. The smells wafting out of the kitchen are positively delicious, while the premeal commentary goes to the head faster than wine.
In his latest book of essays, “A Temple of Texts,” Gass cuts through all the latest bad news with a single aperitif. “I’m here to tell you – speaking through the glass, between the bars, by slow post, in the babelous halls of the Academy – what you would like to hear: why, in doing what you’ve done, you’ve done the right thing.”
One sentence is all it takes to persuade us to leave the strap-a-long world of computers and digital media behind. The most profound intellectual intimacy, Gass demonstrates, still only has just one medium: the printed word.
Gass proves this over and again throughout “A Temple of Texts,” which is his seventh work of nonfiction, three of which have won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
In other words, he’s well qualified to tell us why to read classics, set up a list of his 50 most treasured writers and then dig into their finest (or most misbegotten) work. Some pieces originally were published as introductions, yet none has that “reprinted” feel.
Readers familiar with Gass’ taste will recognize a few signature dishes, though. An unabashed Rilke junkie, Gass contributes two pieces on the German poet’s work. There are also essays on two of Gass’ contemporaries, novelists Robert Coover and John Hawkes, as well as a long meditation on the work of fellow St. Louis writer Stanley Elkin.
One thing that makes Gass such a disarming critic is that at work in a text he operates like a good starch, absorbing the ingredients around him and enriching their flavor. Thus, he explains that Robert “has been trying to come to grips with commercial deceit, political lies, and religious myths, the better to strangle them. He empties out fables and received beliefs like frequently used spittoons.”
Like Melville, Gass is mad for metaphors and similes. They tumble out of his sentences like trunks of gold casually tossed from a moving train.
“Misinformation alley is a more apt designation for the internet,” he notes in “In Defense of the Book,” “although it is lined with billboards called ‘Web sites,’ obscuring whatever might be seen from the road.”
There is a slight danger to this receptivity, for occasionally Gass takes on writers with bitter or unsavory taste. Thus, Gertrude Stein inspires in him heights of pretension and long-windedness that even Henry James would blush at. Erasmus draws out Gass’ prickly high-mindedness.
Yet for every eye-glazing bit of puffery in this book, there are many sentences potent enough to make you stop, walk across the room, take out a pencil and copy them down. One could fill an entire newspaper, let alone a single column, with such delights.
Here is one that seemed fitting to highlight since it describes exactly what Gass has accomplished again here, as it if it were easy.
“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; to provide suggestions of where best to start, what to expect, how to look or read or listen; and to give reasons why the work should be treated with seriousness and respect.”
In this fashion, Gass performs a clever act of seduction. So thoroughly does he entice us to read, that we almost forget we had to be called to the table in the first place.
John Freeman is writer in New York.
A Temple of Texts
By William H. Gass
Knopf, 418 pages, $26.95
