The Pedersen Kid –
Alcoholism. Hatred. Self-hatred and transferred anger and hatred.
It reads like a Faulkner. Specifically, for this reader, his 1930 published As I lay Dying. One summarises young Gass looked upon this prior work as inspiration for his own, later story. One needs inspiration where they can find it – or the Latinised trope Creatio Ex Nihlo abounds. Intertextuality, they call it, on creative writing courses at colleges across the land. Influence, my dear, influence. (There may be other Faulkner novels which are alluded to but I have, as of the time of writing, have only read two Faulkner’s, the aforementioned and Absalom, Absalom.)
Jorge’s great confusion. Big Hans – a man of action.
The chilled Pedersen kid and his flabby behind on the doughy table. And a return to this image as if to fix the imagery down, a tent peg in the forest floor of the text – an exercise of a literary omphalos, a weighted centre. The naval gazing of man on boy or childhood. A move away from vulnerability to individuality but not full maturation. Far from it. Like a snowball thrown at a passing bus for larks and idleness.
His father’s rage. It reads almost auto-biographical with William Faulkner as a brace. And that’s fine.
A frozen tunnel of snow and ice.
‘Pa started back with the shovel. What are you doing to do with that? I said. Dig a tunnel, he said. and he went around a drift out of sight, the sun flashing from the blade.’
One wonders if it was this the scene that led to Gass’s novel The Tunnel?
We cannot forget the frozen horse.
The whiskey-soaked snow soon evaporates. The fumes snap in the glacial blue air. Sub-aquatic vowels uttered by the father on seeing this. But then he is resigned to the situation. Reality harkens.
There is a flatulence-led simile to this story – it is a ripened tale of masculinity at war with each other. With neighbours. With their family. With themselves. The father’s machinations and his paranoid rants. It brings up the need for counselling and a healthy relationship with reason in your brain.
I will have to read it again. You see, the story judders, jolts and trundles slowly like the creak of a 19th-century wagon but builds like a tunnel. You look back and you see Jorge and the Pedersen kid, the horse, Hans and Jorge’s father’s barking rage.
(Gass had related that his father was a bigot and a racist. Who would berate William, his son, for spending his money, as a boy, on pocketbooks and round on the boy’s aspirations. Turning his wife towards alcoholism.
Terrible.)
It is why some write.
Mrs Mean –
The hardness of raising children if you yourself are hardened and have been hardened. By harshness and childhood abuses by parents or guardians, one supposes coming at it from a Freudian perspective. That side. Abuse. Mrs Mean keeps her brood in the confines of what she deems just. There is a reeling auteurship at play here. It is as if Mrs Mean is a projected matriarch from the Gass household and Gass is playing it out on the page.
There are no homely tropes of muffin-making and licking the spoon. No parlour games and sing-song Happy Birthdays. This is a story about Gass’s lost childhood. I realise it now. The one he yearned for and many do. Have.
Icicles –
At the start of the collection, we began with poverty. Now we find ourselves secluded in suburbia. On the couch. Counting the gradient of ingredients in the evening meal. Counting the peas.
A solemn real estate agent’s monotony is broken by his fixation on winter icicles which dangle off the homes in his neighbourhood. One which he is trying to sell. There are office-based power struggles. All beating away, insipidly, behind the forehead.
Then there’s the quantifying of that chicken pot pie.
The Order of Insects –
upturned shells of dead beetles. The cat paws and bats at them from a place of unreason. Dead things. In the home. Domesticity. Mop bucket. Flypaper. Tread of footfall on a wooden parquet floor. Bluebottle droning relentlessly against a closed window. Silence in the mid-morning hallway. Then an almost violent interlude, a noisy flap of the letter box. Postie. A scatter of white envelopes hit the mat. This story reminded me of a short by Will Self – silverfish in the hall. Moths signalling in mid-air. Insects come to the fore. To dine….
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country –
Fragments –
we see the writer morphing into his butterfly self. Under the kaleidoscopic experience of reading texts, consuming, and digesting texts, then writing and going in opposite, at times, angles, and hues. Fits of despair. Madness. And then tempered – the maturer, the former pupa, once cocooned in his winter coat, free to flutter and fly his wings, a writer in summer glory, has a bastion of letters and sentences at his command. He has grown. A titan. I see it in these later sentences Gass has laboured over; and which come to him now, less raw. Less slowed by the molasses of youth and inexperience. Those clawed frustrations that a writer, no doubt, has to contend with and outgrow. ‘Where sparrows sit like fists.’ On a wire? On a steeple? On the page? He writes. Definite?
Mr Tick – ‘his long tail rhyming with his paws.’ Fragments. Nice. Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, I love you… yes, I dooooo.
‘The church has a steeple like the hat of a witch, and five birds, all doves, perch in its gutters.’
Very nice.
I hope to read later-Gass. Soon.
N
mindmuesli 