In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass

For we're always out of luck here. That's just how it is--for instance in the winter. The sides of buildings, the roof, the limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings--they are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank and front, each top is gay. Everything is gray: hair, eyes, window glass, the hawkers' bills and touters' posters, lips, teeth, poles and metal signs--they're gray, quite gray. Cars are gray. Boots, shoes, suits, hats, gloves are gray. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons, are all gray, everything is gray, and everyone is out of lock who lives here.

William Gass' novella "The Pedersen Kid" is one of those stories--or, I guess, novellas--that stick with you a long time; it chills the blood beyond the effective description of the Midwestern winter, chills it like the kid of the title, found outside the narrator's house in a snowbank nearly dead. The narrator, too, is a child or a teenager, and the sight of the frozen "Pedersen Kid" stripped naked, dead-looking, being rubbed by the family's workman Big Hans, unsettles him. In a brief moment of wakefulness, the Pedersen Kid tells an ambiguous story of a gunman who's trapped his family in their root cellar, where they will surely freeze if they haven't been shot. Together, the narrator, his alcoholic father, and Big Hans go to investigate, and the brutal winter may be as dangerous to them as the gunman.

(OK, a spoiler alert from here on.) Although the gunman is never seen, he does seem to be real: the narrator hears the shooting death of both his father and Big Hans as they crouch outside the Pedersen house in the snowbank. The gunman leaves, but comes back after the narrator slips into the house, and much of the drama of the novella's final third is purely psychological: the narrator never goes into the root cellar to see if the Pedersen family is really there, though his imagination provides what appears to be an essentially impeachable truth. He senses that he and the "Pedersen Kid," recuperating in his own house, have been swapped or traded for one another. Because he and the Pedersen Kid are equivalent, the death of the Pedersen Kid's family precedes and has ensured his own. What the narrator experiences in the house as he waits for the gunman is not, in the end, fear, but joy--he's been freed from the cruelties of his father and the predations of Big Hans, who is subtly suggested to have been sexually abusing the narrator.

It's an astonishing, frightening story. It's united with the other pieces in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by the motif of the intense Midwestern winter. It's there in "Icicles," a novella about a real estate agent who becomes obsessed with the row of perfect icicles that have formed along his porch. He, Fender, has a boss named Pearson whose maxim is Everything is Property, and whose totalizing aggression reminded me of Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts. Fender takes Pearson's maxim to heart, which is both affirmed by icicles on his porch--beautiful things which belong to his "property" and thus to him--and threatened by it--because the icicles are fundamentally fragile and liable to be snapped off by warming weather or mischievous children. Like "The Pedersen Kid," "Icicles" is primarily psychological; what "happens" is mostly contained within Fender's mind as he grapples with the possibility that he, too, is property, and yet the evanescent nature of the icicles suggests that might not as assuring or permanent a belief as one might expect.

But I think my favorite is the title piece, an extended description of Gass' hometown of "B," Indiana. Gass describes B and the larger Midwest as a gray and dreary place--you get the sense that it never experiences a season that isn't winter--and yet, in that grayness and dreariness there is much to capture the attention. Gass leaves no room for any cant about rural living--he calls the idea of farmers living close to the land "a lie of old poetry"--but also describes as being far superior to the hot and crowded life of cities, "swollen and poisonous with people." Though the piece--story? novella? essay?--is largely descriptive, it's addressed to a lover whose unexplained absence touches every scene and experience. To me, it's his kind of piece that allows Gass' tremendous verbal capacity to breathe, without getting caught up in the necessities of event and plot. It allows the reader to luxuriate in descriptions of "snow without any laughter in it, a pale gray pudding thinly spread on stiff toast"; and of the slinking cat, "is long tail rhyming with his paws."

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William Gass

The privacy which a book makes public is nevertheless made public very privately--not like the billboard which shouts at the street, or the movie whose image is so open we need darkness to cover the clad-ass and naked face that's settled in our seat.  A fictional text enters consciousness so discreetly it is never seen outdoors... from house to house it travels like a whore... so even on a common carrier I can quite safely fill my thoughts with obscene adjectives and dirty verbs although the place I occupy is thigh-sided by a parson.

William Gass' single-essay book, On Being Blue, isn't quite about the color blue.  Well, it is, I guess, but not quite in the way I expected when I got it as a Christmas present.  (From my mother no less-sorry, Mom; I'm not sure either of us knew what was really in here.)  In fact, On Being Blue vacillates between two poles: one, a meditation on the proliferation of the color blue in all its forms and habitations, and the other an investigation into one particular shade of the word "blue"--that is, the blue of blue films and working blue.  That is, obscenity and sex.

Gass' essay is diffident, without a clear purpose or center.  But his style, fluid and exuberant, is worth the price of admission in and of itself, as illustrated by his facility with repetition that ought to make the book's opening a dull sentence indeed:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep hole in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit--dumps, mopes, Mondays--all that's dismal--low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter,which is our signal for getting underway; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasingly absentness of heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for insurance, or, when the sky's turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese... the pedantic, indecent and censorious... watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it's stood for fidelity.

Whew!  That was a beast to type.  But it's an incredible thing to see--Gass clearly takes his cues on how to deal with the repeated word from D. H. Lawrence, who gets special recognition in the essay for his failure to write about sex convincingly.

It's not just Lawrence, though his case is the most tragic--Gass thinks that no one can really write about sex sufficiently.  It's one of the few cogent points that emerge now and then from the essay.  We retreat from sex, literarily speaking, because our efforts to treat it directly are doomed to failure.  So we embrace terms that are emptied of signification because they are the best we can do.  ("When, with an expression so ill-bred as to be fatherless," Gass writes, "I enjoin a small offensive fellow to 'fuck a duck,' I don't mean he should.")  Blue, a color Gass conceives of as taking an especially wide range of meanings and connotations, easily takes on the ineffable connotation of the sexual act.  That's what links the two poles together.

Around this idea, the essay meanders with only a modicum of purpose or organization.  Were Gass' prose itself not so captivating, it would hardly be tolerable.  In contrast, read Michael Gorra's laudatory introduction, which apes, or falls despite itself into an imitation of, Gass' style, but far less effectively.  And the central connection of the book suffers today because, forty years after the essay's writing, we don't really use the word in the same way.  Who calls porn "blue movies" now anyway?  I didn't close On Being Blue feeling especially enlightened, either on sex or the color wheel, but I enjoyed reading it anyhow.