William H. Gass
William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts, won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.
Early life and education
William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, a steel town, where he attended local schools. He described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities. His father had been trained as an architect but, while serving during the First World War, had sustained back injuries that forced him to take a job as a high school drafting and architectural drawing teacher. His mother was a housewife.As a boy, Gass read anything he could get his hands on. From The Shadow to The History of the French Revolution, Gass read constantly, although there were no bookstores in the town of Warren. Later he would claim that the advent of "pocketbooks" saved his literary life. He'd save up all the money he earned or obtained and, every two weeks, head down and buy as many pocketbooks as he could afford. Even though Gass was always a reader, his father disapproved of his aspirations and often berated him for it.
He attended Ohio Wesleyan University after graduating from Warren G. Harding High School, where he did very well, except for some difficulties in mathematics, then served as an ensign in the Navy during World War II for three and a half years, a period he described as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. magna cum laude in philosophy from Kenyon College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From there he entered Cornell University as a Susan Linn Fellow in Philosophy and, by 1954, had earned his PhD in that subject. While at Cornell, he studied under Max Black and, briefly, Ludwig Wittgenstein. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school, Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing. He named the twelve most influential books of his life: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Virginia Woolf's Diaries, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor and Other Stories, Gustave Flaubert's Letters, Colette's Break of Day, W. B. Yeats's The Tower, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Stein's Three Lives and William Gaddis's The Recognitions.
Teaching
Gass taught at The College of Wooster for four years, Purdue University for sixteen years, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities. His colleagues there included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov, and Mona Van Duyn. After 2000, Gass was the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.Personal life
In 1952, before graduating from Cornell, he married Mary Pat O'Kelly. The marriage ended in divorce. He had two sons and a daughter with his first wife: Richard, Robert and Susan.Gass later married architect Mary Henderson Gass, author of Parkview: A St. Louis Urban Oasis. They had twin daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth Gass-Boshoven. Catherine is an artist teaching at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a photographer for the Newberry Library.
Writing and publications
Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His debut novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. Richard Gilman in The New Republic called it "the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. That same year Gass published Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He also published several collections of essays, including Fiction and the Figures of Life and Finding a Form. Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas was published in 1998, and his novel Middle C was published in 2013. His work also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.Gass cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he wrote "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he said that writing was difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to write. On the subject of his slow and methodic pace he said, "I write slowly because I write badly. I have to rewrite everything many, many times just to achieve mediocrity." Critical responses to The Tunnel upon its release included Robert Kelly's declaration that it was an "infuriating and offensive masterpiece," and Steven Moore's claim that it was ”a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century.” Michael Silverblatt of the Los Angeles Times wrote in his review of the novel: "A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4½ times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition." Gass, in reference to the harsh and disquieting nature of The Tunnel said "I don't think anything is sacred and therefore I am prepared to extol or make fun of anything. People who have very settled opinions are going to dislike this book because Kohler is the worm inside all that stuff." An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.
Gass typically devoted enormous attention to sentence construction. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post, called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass's work is metafictional. In an interview with Anglistik Gass commented on the subject of his genre and form defying works, laughing off the title "Postmodern," and coining himself "Late" or "Decayed Modern"
Gass's opinion of metaphor
Though much of Gass's central aesthetic has remained constant, there have been gradual shifts in his views of metaphor and ontology of the text. His view of metaphor is far more expansive than that proposed in his dissertation . Gass tells LeClair that "etaphor has been thought to be a pet of language, a peculiar relation between subject and predicate... ut you can make metaphors by juxtaposing objects and in lots of other ways". In other words, metaphor need not be a purely linguistic matter, and perhaps not surprisingly Gass's change in his explanation of metaphor from graduate school to now signals a change in the focus of his fiction. As noted earlier Gass claims to construct self-contained systems of ideas, but in these interviews, one can trace a growing concern with the relationship of his fiction to the world, as he makes clear to LeClair: "I've been principally interested in establishing the relationship between fiction and the world. If we can see that relationship as a metaphorical one, then we are already several steps in the direction of our models."