How to Read Like William Gass
50 literary recommendations from a master wordsmith
William Gass — novelist, critic, philosophy professor — was a magnificent writer. As is the case with any giant of letters, he was also an insatiable word worm. As Gass wrote in St. Louis Magazine:
Now in my own home I am surrounded by nearly 20,000 books, few of them rare, many unread, none of them neglected. They are there, as libraries always are, to help when needed, and who knows what writer I shall have to write on next, what subject will become suddenly essential, or what request will arrive that requires the immediate assistance of books on — well — libraries, or the language of animals or the pronunciation of Melanesian pidgin, since my essays tend to be assigned, not simply solicited, and because I am easily seduced by new themes. I can actually say a few things in Melanesian pidgin, none of them polite.
Gass calls the 50 writers and books below “literary pillars.” He cautions that the works of art influenced his education, reading, thinking, and writing. He had no sympathy for creating a list of “best books,” a descriptor that doesn’t apply to the list that follows because
not all great achievements are influential, or at least not on everybody. So Proust was not there, or Dante or Goethe or Sophocles, either. Awe often effaces every other effect.
What’s on Gass’s list? A heavy dose of Philosophy. Mounds of classic and postmodern literature. And Rilke. Lots of Rilke.
If you were to stock a library based on Gass’s influences, here’s what it’d look like. I’ve taken the liberty to share some of his comments on several of the references. His full account of why these books were influential can be found in A Temple of Texts (Knopf, 2006).
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Plato’s Timaeus
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth
Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’
The three Critiques…render the difference between the sort of thought and writing which is inherently and necessarily hard and the kind, like Heidegger’s, which forms a soft metaphysical fog around even the easiest and most evident idea.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space
But book dipping is great fun, and not a day passes that I don’t blindly pick a prize and then read a page of it to be mystified, informed, surprised, delighted and affronted.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria
Paul Valéry’s Eupalino, ou L’Architecte
Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’
…at some point in fourth grade, while still floundering in school, I found myself inside some doubtless cleaned-up and dumbed-down version of Malory. Even youthanized, it was faithful enough. And I was lost. The ordinary world was ordinary in a way it had never been before — ordinary to the googolplex power.
Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia: Urne Buriall, or a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
Virginia Woolf’s Diaries
Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (the Tiethens tetralogy)
William Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’
The language is yet a cut above the most high, the imagery so flamboyant sometimes as to establish a new style. I became properly fatuous in his presence. I said: “Boy, you sure can write.”
James Joyce’s Ulysses
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
Beckett’s How It Is and “Ping”
José Lezama Lima’s ‘Paradiso’
The Latin American literary boom has heard the firing of many cannons, but no sounds more loudly in my ears than Paradiso.
Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch
Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” and Other Stories
Herman Broch’s ‘The Sleepwalkers’
The Sleepwalkers begins as a psychological narrative, passes through a center made of the “real” world’s descriptive surface, and ends as a philosophical lyric. Each phase is masterfully done, but it is the direction of the change that is most significant.
Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno (or Zeno’s Conscience in William Weaver’s translation)
Gustave Flaubert’s Letters
Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet
Stendhal’s The Red and the Black
My books are there to comfort me about the world, for only the wicked can be pleased by our present state of things, while the virtuous disagree about the reasons for our plight and threaten to fall to fighting over which of us is responsible for the misery of so many millions and in that way steadily increasing the number of hypocrites, jackals and rogues.
Colette’s ‘Break of Day’
Break of Day is the classic menopause book. Resilient and resigned, yet rich in resolution, Break of Day does not translate La Naissance du Jour very well, when what is meant is something like the dawning of the end.
John Donne’s Poems and Sermons
Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns
Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés
Ezra Pound’s Personae
William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Tower’
The Tower…is the book that did its worst and best with me…[the book] became a tree, and rooted itself in me. Yeats grew old disgracefully. It is the only way to go.
Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium
Henry James’s The Golden Bowl
Henry James’s Notebooks
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’
From her first tale to her last, she was in complete command of her manner — a prose straightforward and shining as a prairie road, yet gently undulating, too. But above all, for me, it was the sharpness of her eye that caught mine, and the quiet reach of her feeling.
Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives
William Gaddis’s The Recognitions
John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig
Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’
It is one of Rilke’s doctrines, expressed most directly in his poem “The Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” that works of art are often more real than we are because they embody human consciousness completely fulfilled, and at a higher pitch of excellence than we, in our skinny, overweight, immature, burned-out souls and bodies, do. Rilke’s poems very often seem to me to have been written by someone superhuman.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters
Nota bene: Gass created the above list for an event that celebrated the International Writers Center. It was first published in his collection of essays A Temple of Texts (Knopf, 2006). The two pulled quotes are from “Shelf Life,” St. Louis Magazine (2007).
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