Wikipedia Deep Dive

William H. Gass

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The Worm Inside the Prose

William Gass spent twenty-six years writing a single novel. When asked about his glacial pace, he offered this explanation: "I write slowly because I write badly. I have to rewrite everything many, many times just to achieve mediocrity."

This was, of course, a magnificent lie.

Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post, called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Critics described his sentences as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. The novel that took him a quarter century to complete—The Tunnel—was hailed by Robert Kelly as "an infuriating and offensive masterpiece" and by Moore as "obviously one of the greatest novels of the century."

So why did Gass insist he wrote badly? Perhaps because he understood something fundamental about craft: the distance between first draft and finished work is not measured in hours but in ruthless honesty. Or perhaps because he'd learned early that creative ambition rarely survives parental approval, and self-deprecation became armor.

A Steel Town Education

William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota, but his family soon moved to Warren, Ohio—a steel town where literature was not exactly the local industry. There were no bookstores. His father, trained as an architect but injured in the First World War, worked as a high school drafting teacher. His mother was a housewife who drank.

Gass later described his childhood as profoundly unhappy. His father was abusive and racist. His mother was passive and alcoholic. Critics would eventually notice that these qualities appeared again and again in his fictional characters—the cruelty, the bitter drinking, the domestic prisons. Gass did not hide from this observation. He openly stated that anger from his childhood was a major influence on his work.

"I wrote to get even," he said.

Without bookstores, young Gass devoured whatever he could find—from pulp magazines like The Shadow to serious history like accounts of the French Revolution. Then came what he called his salvation: pocketbooks. These were the affordable paperback editions that began flooding the American market in the 1930s and 1940s, making literature portable and cheap. He saved every penny he earned or obtained, and every two weeks he'd buy as many as he could afford.

His father disapproved. The man who'd been forced to abandon architecture for teaching, who nursed a war-injured back and whatever resentments came with it, berated his son for reading. But the boy kept reading anyway.

Philosophy and the Making of Sentences

After graduating from Warren G. Harding High School, Gass enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he excelled in everything except mathematics. Then came the Navy.

He served as an ensign during World War II for three and a half years, a period he described as perhaps the worst of his life. Whatever he experienced—and he did not elaborate much publicly—it left a mark. When the war ended, he returned to school with intensity.

At Kenyon College, he earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy, graduating magna cum laude and winning election to Phi Beta Kappa, the prestigious academic honor society. From there, Cornell University, where he earned his doctorate in philosophy by 1954. His dissertation bore a title that would prove prophetic for his entire career: "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor."

At Cornell, he studied under Max Black, a renowned philosopher of language. He also studied briefly with Ludwig Wittgenstein himself—the Austrian philosopher whose investigations into language and meaning revolutionized twentieth-century thought. Wittgenstein believed that philosophical problems often arose from confusions in language, that meaning came from use, and that the boundaries of one's language marked the boundaries of one's world.

For a young man who would grow up to be called America's finest prose stylist, this was the right training ground.

It was also at Cornell that Gass discovered Gertrude Stein. Her experimental writing, with its repetitions and rhythms and attention to the texture of words themselves, would influence everything he wrote afterward.

The Twelve Books That Made Him

Gass once named the twelve books that most shaped him as a writer. The list reveals a mind drawn to linguistic adventurers and formal experimenters:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria—that strange hybrid of autobiography and literary criticism
Virginia Woolf's Diaries—the interior life of a prose stylist
Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End—a tetralogy about war and English society
James Joyce's Ulysses—the great novel that reinvented what novels could do
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain—ideas debated in a tuberculosis sanatorium
Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor and Other Stories—dreamlike fables of bureaucratic nightmare
Gustave Flaubert's Letters—the correspondence of an obsessive perfectionist
Colette's Break of Day—the French novelist's late-life meditation on love
W. B. Yeats's The Tower—the Irish poet's collection from 1928
William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury—the Southern Gothic masterpiece
Gertrude Stein's Three Lives—the experimental stories of three women
William Gaddis's The Recognitions—the sprawling novel about art forgery and authenticity

Notice what these books share: ambition, difficulty, a refusal to conform to conventional expectations of narrative. These were not books that went down easy. They demanded rereading. They rewarded attention to sentences.

Teaching and Writing

Gass spent his career teaching philosophy at universities—four years at the College of Wooster, sixteen at Purdue, and then Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained from 1969 until his retirement in 1999. At Washington University, his colleagues included the novelist Stanley Elkin and two poets who would each become Poet Laureate of the United States: Howard Nemerov in 1988 and Mona Van Duyn in 1992.

He earned a living as a professor. But he published stories steadily throughout—stories good enough to appear in the annual Best American Short Stories collections of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968, and 1980. His essays appeared in the Best American Essays of 1986, 1992, and 2000.

His debut novel, Omensetter's Luck, appeared in 1966. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it told of a newcomer named Brackett Omensetter and his confrontations with the Reverend Jethro Furber, whose sanity proves fragile. Critics immediately recognized something special in the language. Richard Gilman, writing in The New Republic, declared it "the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation."

Harper's called it "a rich fever, a parade of secrets, delirious, tormented, terrifying, comic."

Gass had arrived.

Experiments in Form

In 1968, Gass published two very different books. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country collected five stories about isolation and the difficulty of love. These were relatively conventional in form, if gorgeous in execution.

But Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife was something else entirely. This experimental novella included photographs and typographical tricks—different fonts, unusual page layouts, visual constructs meant to break readers free from what Gass saw as the prison of linear narrative. It was a book that drew attention to itself as a made thing, an artifact of ink and paper, not just a transparent window onto a fictional world.

This approach—fiction that knows it's fiction and makes that knowledge part of the experience—is called metafiction. Gass would become one of its major American practitioners, though he resisted labels. When interviewers called him "postmodern," he laughed and suggested "Late Modern" or perhaps "Decayed Modern."

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, he published collections of essays that won him as much acclaim as his fiction. Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970) explored how narrative creates meaning. On Being Blue (1975) was a philosophical inquiry into a single color—blue—and everything it might signify. Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), and Tests of Time (2002) each won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Three awards in the same category over seventeen years. That's a kind of mastery.

The Tunnel

Then there was the big one.

Gass began working on The Tunnel in 1969. He published it in 1995. Twenty-six years for a single book.

The novel tells the story of William Frederick Kohler, a history professor who has just completed his life's work, a scholarly study called "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany." Now he needs to write an introduction. What emerges instead is an entirely different book—a sprawling, confessional, disturbing exploration of his own life, his failing marriage, his resentful colleagues, his violent emotions, the cruelties and half-truths that constitute a human history.

As Kohler digs through his memories, he also begins literally digging a tunnel from his basement. The metaphor is not subtle, but it doesn't need to be. The book is seven hundred pages of burrowing through the dark matter of a single consciousness.

Michael Silverblatt of the Los Angeles Times wrote one of the more revealing reviews: "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."

Revived by the beauty. Devastated by the content. This tension runs through all of Gass's major work.

Gass himself understood how unsettling the book would be: "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."

The worm inside. It's a perfect description not just of his protagonist but of Gass's method—burrowing into comfortable assumptions, exposing what writhes beneath.

The Final Novel

In 2013, at age eighty-eight, Gass published Middle C. The novel tells the story of Joseph Skizzen, a mediocre professor living a mediocre life in the middle of Ohio. His father had gotten the family out of Austria before the war by pretending they were Jewish—an inversion of the more common survival stories. In London during the war, the father disappeared, presumed to have escaped to America or Canada. The rest of the family eventually reached Ohio, where young Joseph grows into an adult who still lives with his mother and maintains an elaborate fantasy life centered on something he calls his "Inhumanity Museum" and his obsession with the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Middle C won the William Dean Howells Medal in 2015, an award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters every five years for the most distinguished work of American fiction.

Gass was ninety when he received it.

Honors and Legacy

The awards accumulated over decades. Grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. Four Pushcart Prizes. The American Book Award for The Tunnel in 1996. The PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, which Gass called his "most prized prize." The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2007 for A Temple of Texts.

In 1990, he founded the International Writers Center at Washington University, intended to serve as a hub for writing excellence across disciplines and cultures. He has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. In Dan Simmons's science fiction novel Hyperion, set in the far future, Gass is referred to as "the twentieth century's most honored writer."

He died on December 6, 2017, at ninety-three.

The Sentence as Architecture

What made Gass matter? Why should anyone read a difficult novelist who spent twenty-six years on a seven-hundred-page book about a history professor digging a hole in his basement?

Because of the sentences.

Gass was the son of a failed architect who became a drafting teacher. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gass's second wife was also an architect. And there is something architectural in his approach to prose—the sense that sentences are constructed things, weight-bearing structures that must hold up under pressure.

Most fiction writers treat language as a delivery system for story. The words are the truck; the narrative is the cargo. Get the cargo from here to there as efficiently as possible. Gass reversed this priority. For him, the language was the point. The sentences were not vehicles for meaning but the meaning itself.

His view of metaphor—which he studied formally as a philosopher—expanded over his career. In his dissertation, he treated metaphor as a linguistic phenomenon, a relationship between subject and predicate. By his later interviews, he understood that metaphor could be made "by juxtaposing objects and in lots of other ways." You could create meaning not just with words but with structure, with typography, with the physical experience of the book as object.

This is why Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife includes photographs and experiments with font. This is why The Tunnel incorporates fake book reviews and typographical games. The book is not pointing at something beyond itself. The book is the experience.

The Anger Underneath

And yet Gass was not an aesthete floating above the world. That angry boy in Warren, Ohio—the one whose father berated him for reading, whose mother retreated into alcohol, who enlisted in a Navy he would remember as the worst years of his life—that boy never fully disappeared.

"I wrote to get even."

His characters are often cruel, or passive, or drunk, or trapped. His prose is beautiful, but it depicts ugliness without flinching. The Tunnel includes Holocaust material handled in ways designed to unsettle, not comfort. The protagonist is not a hero. He is, in Gass's formulation, a worm—something that crawls through the rot.

Some readers find this intolerable. Robert Kelly called The Tunnel "infuriating and offensive" even as he called it a masterpiece. Gass knew this would happen. He'd designed it that way.

Perhaps the most American thing about Gass is this: he took his damage and made it into art. The unhappy childhood, the brutal father, the alcoholic mother, the terrible war—all of it became fuel. Not for therapy, not for confession, but for sentences. Extraordinary, difficult, musical, annihilating sentences.

The worm inside, doing its work.