Authors: William H Gass
Life Sentences (5 page)
There are so many types of tyranny. There is the tyranny of your own routines—your own habits—that rise around you like the sides of your grave. There is the castle where we keep the girl with the golden hair. Beauty set in stone becomes only a diamond. There are the cries of the crows and other customs of society. There are the demands of decorum. There is ideology lying over us like a smog that stings any eye that dares to stay open.
Swaddle the woman like a baby then; squeeze her feet; bury her in confining conventions like Winnie is buried whenever she takes the stage. Pound her into her housewife life like a post into the ground.
The tyrant ties tongues in knots. Speech is so easy it takes more than snow to slow its course. The tyrant must frighten people from their freedom; beat the soles of their feet till they mince their step in time to his goose-wide stride. Stagger after me; the best is yet to be. The tyrant can make men line up as though they were made of tin or lead to tip over for this week’s war, because pain is a great big persuader, and their lead-headed patriotism is petty and made of hatred; because, after all, though a war may topple their obedient rows, the tyrant can, in any case, melt them down, these tin-lead men, mold them anew, and paint their britches pretty. He can encourage kids to tattle on their folks; he can set friend against friend, family against family; for the fear of punishment and the promise of reward do for men what they do for the donkey. Be fruitful, multiply, the tyrant says benignly. I must have a larger army.
What is always offered us? The truth like a stuffed bird. But even
if the real word were given, given in all honesty, given with good intention, given as tradition claims it gives everything, with absolute accuracy and serene assurance, it will not be our word until it is allowed freely to live in us and freely to issue from our mouths, even poorly pronounced, inadequately stated, open to the risk … the terrible risk … of misstep, misstatement, of error … or … horror! … change of mind. Because we have the right to be wrong. We have the right to be mistaken. We have the right to travel the long low potholed road instead of the high. We have the right to dawdle when called, to dance instead of march, to make vulgar sounds and embarrass society, embarrass ourselves.
Our tyrants always feel in need of excuses. Our enemies are always spying, undermining, arming, plotting, seizing the high ground, inventing new horrors, inventing flashier weapons. This mole, or that rat, is smarter than we ever imagined, and it is working day and night against us—cunning and conniving—out of sight, in secret—because beneath deep undergarments it holds a gun, a knife, a bomb, or a book full of dreadful ideas.
We must monitor our phones, watch our neighbors—note, film, record, trace, follow, measure every movement, scrutinize every public meeting, overhear every private one, rifle records, ponder every purchase, search through garbage, twist dumb tongues till they scream with the pain of prying pliers.
Tyrannies do not come in ones or twos; tyrannies come in battalions: there is Mother’s heart you mustn’t break or Father’s hopes you dare not dash; there are the reprisals taken by society because you sniffed when you should have sneezed; there are all those looks delivered like blows from someone sitting on his high horse and wielding his scorn like a whip. It does not matter what the party motto is, what flag flies, what history pretends to teach, what rewards will be yours, what hurt feelings will follow; we need to be free to choose our own errors, our own myths, to furnish our souls as we see fit.
Of course, what we believe is important, but that we believe it freely, that we can speak of it openly, that we fear neither disapproval
nor contradiction, is essential to the humanness of our being. This freedom—if it is to be freedom and not another fraud—comes at a cost. It is a cost that those who have rarely been free are often reluctant to pay, because they are as unused to the presence of liberty in others as they are of freedom when granted to themselves.
We can be real only when others are allowed to play their radios. It’s odd, but our liberty lies in the liberty of our neighbors. They will be rude; they will cross the street against the light; they will eat offal; they will entertain tyrants at tea; they will be tasteless; they will be other; they will be … That’s it … they will be. They will speak strangely, dress oddly, live quaintly, worship a deity they found in a dime store. Worse: they won’t like Bach or Henry James. Worse: they will live like gnats in annoying clouds. Worse: for us they will have no particular esteem. Worst: they will want us to be nice to them, share our rights, give them room. Worse than worst: they will deny us our desires if they can; they will blame us for their plights; they will give evidence, everywhere, of the same mean-spirited insecurities that have soiled our souls from our birth.
When we deny to others their interior life, we deny ourselves all knowledge of it. We are unaware of what, unhindered, they would choose to do, how they presently feel, the strength of their resolve, what may in consequence ensue. The naive, the innocent and open, may allow us to read their minds and hear their hearts as though they were television news, and this may merely amuse us for a moment or endanger them for life; but at least they turned the tube on, they chose their own exposure, they told us what sort they were.
Freedom of expression is, like that of speech, a freedom to conceal, to dupe, to put on an act; it is also the freedom to be a jerk; yet I should prefer that the bigots who now pretend to be my buddies, because they don’t want to lose their jobs or get sued, were rude to my face, and crude as a crowd, because then I should know who they really were, and what creeps were crawling up the columns of the courthouse to take from me my bill of rights.
It is a tough life, living free, but it is a life that lets life be. It is
choice and the cost of choosing: to live where I am able, to dress as I please, to pick my spouse and collect my own companions, to take pride and pleasure in my opinions and pursuits, to wear my rue with a difference, to enjoy my own bad taste and the smoke of my cooking fires, to tell you where to go while inspecting the ticket you have, in turn, sent me. I shall make my Hail Marys, my happy hallelujahs, my bows and scrapes, to whom I wish and when I want; I shall wear my cap and gown with an arrogant swagger or with deceptive modesty; I shall practice foolishness day and night until I get it right.
And if we are free to express ourselves, we are bound to give offense: a joke, a gesture, a point of view, a choice of words, a jeer. Some tyrannies are made of toes. And if you move you’ll step on twenty. Yet who is really hurt by boorish behavior but the boor? No, the tyranny of the one, the few, the many: each must be opposed, as must be resisted all brutal, all subtle, all soft, all comfortable, all easy and agreeable suppressions of the self. There are both murderers and mufflers among them.
Nothing is older than this issue. No one has spoken more vigorously in the defense of free expression than the nonconformist John Milton. “The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty,” he wrote. The free commonwealth should be most concerned to protect, above all things, our liberty of conscience, since, as a government, it ought to be the “most fearless, and confident of its own fair proceedings.”
It is not the strength of convictions that must worry us, but their weakness: the doubts, the fears, the insufficiencies inside them, that make us take up the sword on their sad behalf, to shut all mouths not shouting for our side, to try to cow the slightest opposition and send it quietly to pasture. When one is confident of the truth, slurs are simply shaken off, remonstrance is calmly observed and duly noted, while one awaits the counterargument that cannot come—because the truth, before the contest began, was already a winner.
I don’t have to like what you stand for, but I must stand for it all the same; and stand up for it, too, even if someone were to try to
take away what I can’t stand about you without your leave, since we both ought to be resolved not to stand for that. We should not permit any tyranny over consciousness; we should not allow any move to squelch the soul’s sense of itself. Such suppression is in no one’s interest, for if I silence the sound of your heart, I shall surely sour the sound of mine.
“Don’t look back,” Satchel Paige is supposed to have said; “someone may be gaining on you.” Don’t look back, Orpheus was advised; you may find your earlier poems better than the ones you will write tomorrow. Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom and was so shaken by the sight of the Red Sea swallowing the city she became salt. Look back only if the mess you have made of your life leaves you eager to reach a future that will offer a fairer prospect. Otherwise cover your eyes before blame blinds them the way Oedipus’s pin put out his. However, Paul Valéry warns us that no one “can deliberately walk away from any object without casting a backward glance to make sure he is walking away from it.”
For anyone who has reached eighty-seven years, as I have, only the past is likely to have much duration; greed and regret will have eaten the present, which is at best a sliver of cake too small for its plate, while the future fears it may cease before having been. I hear it running to get here, its labored breathing like an old man—eighty-seven—on the stairs. Lust and rage, Yeats rightly said, attend one’s old age.
So it is in a spirit of disobedience that I look back at what I may have done rather than toward all that remains to be encountered, coped with, perhaps yet accomplished. I say, “may have done”
because what one has really done is never clear and certainly never comforting. Rarely does one say, “I may have married her but only time will tell.”
Your station in the literary world, whatever that might be, does not matter much if you’ve spent your life chasing words with Nabokov’s net. That’s still where the results of your life went, into the killing jar, sentenced to a verbal smother, pinned in place, a display that’s initially a cause of mild indifference, and then evermore ignored.
Looking back I find it less painful to concentrate on the
kind
of thing that concerned me, rather than on the messes I made or on the few fragile triumphs I may have enjoyed. Looking back I find I fit the epitaph Howard Nemerov once wrote for himself in
Gnomes and Occasions
(1973).
Of the Great World he knew not much,
But his Muse let little in language escape her.
Friends sigh and say of him, poor wretch,
He was a good writer, on paper.
It turns out that these preoccupations, these bad habits, these quirks number at least seven, though I am sure I am ignoring the ones that really matter. They are: naming, metaphoring, jingling, preaching, theorizing, celebrating, translating.
First: naming.
Critics still write of me as if my interest in words was an aberration. Yet Adam’s task has always seemed to me to be, for a writer, the central one: to name, and in that way to know. It wasn’t true for Adam, for whom all names were fresher than the daisy, but it is true for us now: a name no longer merely points something out and distinguishes it in that manner from the rest of the world; every name stands for all that has been thought, felt, said, perceived, and imagined about its referent, and represents all that has been discovered during explorations of its indigenous concepts during two thousand years. And since we humans have the deplorable yet entrancing habit of naming things that do not exist, the realm of names is larger
than the realm of things as much as the population of China exceeds that of New York State. This passage about naming trees comes from my first novel,
Omensetter’s Luck
(New York: New American Library, 1966), and concerns my unfortunate character Henry Pimber, who will end up hanging himself from one of the branches of the trees he sings about.
The path took Henry Pimber past the slag across the meadow creek where his only hornbeam hardened slowly in the southern shadow of the ridge and the trees of the separating wood began in rows as the lean road in his dream began, narrowing to nothing in the blank horizon, for train rails narrow behind anybody’s journey; and he named them as he passed them: elm, oak, hazel, larch and chestnut tree, as though he might have been the fallen Adam passing them and calling out their soft familiar names, as though familiar names might make some friends for him by being spoken to the unfamiliar and unfriendly world which he was told had been his paradise. In God’s name, when was that? When had that been? For he had hated every day he’d lived. Ash, birch, maple. Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night clicked past as he walked by the creek by the hornbeam tree, the elders, sorrels, cedars and the fir; for as he named them, sounding their soft names in his lonely skull, the fire of fall was on them, and he named the days he’d lost. It was still sorrowful to die. Eternity, for them, had ended. And he would fall, when it came his time, like an unseen leaf, the bud that was the glory of his birth forgot before remembered. He named the aspen, beech, and willow, and he said aloud the locust when he saw it leafless like a battlefield. In God’s name, when was that? When had that been?
I have never been able to break the denominating habit. In a relatively recent piece, “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s,” I managed to cram the names of 110 weeds into one paragraph.
Writing has almost always been difficult for me, something I had to do to remain sane, yet never satisfying in any ordinary sense, certainly never exhilarating, and never an activity that might satisfy Socrates’ admonition to find a
Logos
for my life, as I felt it surely had for the authors I admired: even Malcolm Lowry’s dissolutely drunken sprees; even Hart Crane’s beatings at the hands of sailors, beatings he sought out as he ultimately sought the sea; even Céline’s meanness, a bitterness that ate through his heart before it got to his shoes and ate them too; even these malcontents, though nothing justified their wasted ways, their anger, their multiplication of pain, might be, by their works, somewhat saved, their sins hidden under sublime blots of printers’ ink.
