House of Mirth

In a recent interview, William Gass made clear his distaste for scene-setting details--the state of the author's manicure, the color of his tie--so I won't dwell on the clothes he wore on Wednesday night at the Housing Works Café, where he was celebrating the new audio version of The Tunnel. I will say that Gass, white-haired and bespectacled, looked to be a plump but prosperous 81. He sat patiently onstage during the introduction by Lorin Cuoco, who helped him to found the International Writers Center in St. Louis. And then, before he could utter a word, we got a taste of the audio-verite Tunnel, recorded by the author himself in patient, Midwestern cadences. It begins: "What I have to tell you is as long as life…"

Give the nature of the book itself, you couldn't find a more appropriate opening salvo. Gass originally published The Tunnel in 1995, after decades of intense labor, and it was greeted with both high praise (Michael Silverblatt called it "the most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime") and hyperbolic disdain. Nobody was neutral. Either you adored the author's no-holds-barred approach to literary modernism or found it absolutely intolerable. There was, however, a single fact upon which all readers could agree: this was one long novel, nearly 700 pages of high-density prose. Contemplating an audio edition, a less courageous company might well suggest some judicious trimming. But the fine folks Dalkey Archive haven't abridged a single page. Gass recorded the entire novel in a St. Louis jingle studio last spring and summer. And thanks to the miracle of MP3 compression, Dalkey has squeezed this 45-hour marathon onto a mere three discs, neatly packaged with Gass's own artwork and his twelve Philippics (the closest he ever came to supplying Cliff's Notes for his daunting masterwork.)

While the sentences motored along, Gass sat motionlessly on the stage, blinking, staring into the middle distance. He seemed almost relieved when the live-action part of the show resumed. Cuoco began the interview proper with a discussion of the recording sessions. Gass had felt most comfortable with one-hour installments, which he then defined as his characteristic breath—let's say, his unit of composition: "I'm talking about how long a particular piece of prose would tend to go on before finding some emotional conclusion." For Gass this is no arbitrary measure. He really does peg it to the physical process of respiration. "Poetry, of course, is created out of our unused breath," he argues. "It rides, so to speak, on carbon dioxide. You're using up what you've taken in, or thought about, and then exhaling."

Was it difficult for Gass to read aloud certain sections of his novel? Again, his answer stressed the sheer physicality of composition, so at odds with its wispy and insubstantial outcome. "My writing is very chewy," he notes. "I had already mouthed the words on every page, many times. I mumbled the words as I did them. (The curses I usually left out.) Still, reading the book aloud did have a tiring effect on me. Valery said: 'Every bad sentence you write trails behind you like a monster.' That constant reminder made the recording a tough process. By now I'm thoroughly sick and tired of the novel!"

Now Cuoco turned to the original composition of The Tunnel. How did Gass know when he was actually done with his loose-and-baggy opus? He was finished, he explained, "when I reached the final sentence, which I had written 15 years before. During my final year of work on the book, I wrote an entire half of it, and I knew that sentence was waiting for me." Put that way, it all sounds easy: a cakewalk. But Gass spent decades on the novel--there are conflicting reports, but according to Dalkey he clocked a good thirty years--and his account of the structural complications made it clear that there were multiple migraines along the way. "Like slow-moving molasses," he recalled, "the book was always creeping away in all directions." To keep this chaotic seepage in check, he erected a number of formal structures, including some dodecaphonic lathe-and-plaster work: "The Tunnel was built on Schoenberg's 12-tone system--I divided it into 12 chapters, with 12 basic themes." (Like the Eroica-shaped structure of Anthony Burgess's Napoleon Symphony, this musical monkey business will probably be invisible--or inaudible--to most readers.)

Nor did Gass wrap the project up with a smile on his face. Did he feel, having finally tunneled his way through to that last sentence, that he "owned the language?" The very idea elicited a chuckle, and Gass cited Stanley Elkin's remark on the same theme: "I felt as though the language owned me. No, I felt very little as I finished the book, except--well, that’s over.” As was the conversation. But Cuoco and Gass had one more treat for the audience: a selection of outtakes from the recording sessions. We sat there in amusement while Gass stumbled in front of the microphone, most often when he hit a scatological pothole. After several attempts to render the celebrated "fuck-a-duck" passage, he was on the verge of giving up. "No, I don't want to do it again," he told the engineer. Luckily for his legion of fans--many whom had packed the reading, and stood patiently on the autograph line with the new Tunnel paperback or stacked, antediluvian editions of Omensetter's Luck or Fiction and the Figures of Life--the author gave it another shot. When it comes to perseverance, nobody does it better than William Gass.