William Gass on 12 of the Most Important Books in His Life

Here I learned—and learned—and learned. My letters. I did not learn how to write. You learn that by writing. After you have read much. I learned what and how to think about writing. I learned what literary ideals were and why they were important. I became only a third-grade fanatic, but every advancement helped. I also got to understand something of my own anger by studying Flaubert’s rage. I must say I trust hatred more than love. It is frequently constructive, despite the propaganda to the contrary; it is less frequently practiced by hypocrites; it is more clearly understood; it is painfully purchased and therefore often earned; and its objects sometimes even deserve their hoped-for fate. If you love the good, you have to hate evil. I cannot imagine a love so puerile and thin and weak-kneed it cannot rage. But hate killed Flaubert, I think, and it didn’t do Céline many favors. If I had any advice to give a young writer (and I haven’t), I would suggest an enraptured reading of these letters. One ought not to feel about women as Flaubert did—he could be coarse and brutal—but he will teach you how to treat a page. Maybe I go too far if I say that every mot is juste, but certainly every other one is.

Colette’s Break of Day

Wouldn’t we all like to grow old full of lust and rage, as Yeats did? Wouldn’t we all like to have a late phase that would unlace the stays, and unwrap everything, and lay it bare for our wise, ripe, appreciative, and lascivious gaze? The Tower is not a volume of the late poems. Those I admire even more than the masterpieces here, but this is the book that did its worst and best with me. Poetry has been a beleaguered castle on a cliff for a long time, and my castle had four towers: Yeats, Valéry, Rilke, and Wallace Stevens. Their period produced some of the greatest lyric poetry our European culture has ever seen—perhaps its last gasp. These poets understood that poetry was a calling—and to consciousness a complete one. Yeats wanted to be a seer, and if, as it happened, there was nothing to see, he would invent it, not simply for himself but for everybody else, too. He sets Byzantium down in Sligo. Yeats invested his language with an original richness, as if every word were a suitcase he would open, rummage around in, and carefully repack, slipping a few extras in among the socks. I read him in one gulp—The Poems of W. B. Yeats—from end to end, and then in small bites, and finally in ruminative chews. The Tower became a tree, and rooted itself in me. Yeats grew old disgracefully. It is the only way to go.

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

American literature, it is often said, has two poles: the conscience-haunted and puritanically repressed novel of “bad” manners, represented by Nathaniel Hawthorne and culminating in James, and the wild and woolly frontier baroque, pioneered by Herman Melville (whose whale ought also to be here), that triumphed in the historical hungers and, far from manifest, destinies we find in Faulkner. His name ought properly to stand here in front of a fistful of titles: Light in August, As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, and so on. The Sound and the Fury is a little too Europeanly experimental to be ideal Faulkner. Still, it was just this bridgelike quality to which I initially responded. If he wrote in the world of Joyce, he had to be all right. However, Faulkner wrote in another world as well, in the world of the old-fashioned (as well as the newfangled) epic, and his work has that sort of sweep: it is multitudinously peopled, as foreordained as film, as rhetorical as the circuit rider or the tent-pole reformer. Faulkner’s career illustrates another thought for the dark: you can take yourself seriously about only one thing at a time. When Faulkner began to take himself seriously as a thinker, his work as an artist precipitously declined.

Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives

The circumstances of the blow are so often fortuitous. I read Tolstoy or Proust and say, “Of course.” Greatness as advertised, like the beauty of the Alhambra or the Amalfi coast. Cervantes, certainly, no surprise. And have a helping of Dante or Boccaccio. (I tried to seduce a young lady once through the present of the Decameron, but that doesn’t come under the principle of this collection.) There are texts, and there are times, and sometimes both are right and ring together like Easter changes. (I remember, at Wells Cathedral, the shock of such bells, whose vibrations made me sound.) I didn’t read Stein until my first year in graduate school, and I was ready. No prose ever hit me harder. This was the work of the woman they called “the Mother Goose of Montparnasse”? How could you read the central story, “Melanctha,” and not take everything she did seriously? I read with an excitement that made me nearly ill, and having finished the book at 1:00 a.m. (having never contemplated reading it in the first place, having been lured, suckered, seduced), I immediately began reading it again from the beginning, singing to myself, and moaning, too, because this tension had caused my stomach to hurt quite fiercely. My head also ached. I was sort of sore-eyed. Was this how it felt to have a revelation? Her prose did produce in me some of the same exhilaration that, say, the description of the Great Frost does in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and some of the terrible tension I have when, in John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, Margaret is beaten with the wet rolled-up newspaper; but in addition it produced discovery, amazement, anger (at having been told yet more lies about values by critics and colleagues and teachers). And so, at the end, I was sick, and though hanging over the mouth of the john (where my fears were not confirmed), I knew I had found the woman my work would marry. And I would, in effect, always carry three great faces in my wallet: Virginia Woolf’s, Colette’s, and Gertrude Stein’s. If you ask, like a cinema soldier in a movie foxhole, I will take them out and show them to you.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions