The novelist, critic and philosopher is a difficult read – but even at 91 he is able to create novellas of startling beauty, as in his latest work Eyes: Novellas and Stories
Recently, the novelist, critic and one-time philosophy professor William H Gass was asked by Publishers Weekly for five writing tips. His advice contained the following sentence: “Be happy because no one is seeing what you do, no one is listening to you, no one really cares what may be achieved, but sometimes accidents happen and beauty is born.”
I like to imagine the Knopf publicist who negotiated this assignment for Gass banging a head against a solid surface, in reply to such a despairing marketplace self-assessment. And yet anyone who publishes Gass probably already knows his thinking about mass taste. In his 1983 essay Tropes of the Text, Gass wrote that “only the common run of novels expects the one-night stand”. Gass himself belongs to the class of writers – in that essay he cites Gertrude Stein, Thomas Bernhard and Mario Vargas Llosa as fellow travellers – whose less-common fictions demand more of their audiences (and justify longer, more committed relationships).
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