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Tests of Time: Essays. By William H. Gass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Pp. 336. $25.

Once upon a time, William H. Gass—now near 80, his arms heavy with literary awards—had a sort of genius. He was a poet who wrote prose: first fiction, and then, increasingly, essays. To be sure, his plots and thoughts weren't always of the most urgent extraction—in fact, he seemed his best when writing description, when painting character (biography and poetry, unsurprisingly, are his favorite genres)—but his images were astonishing, his juxtapositions thoroughly original, his rhythms tumbling and incantatory. He wrote on Proust and Faulkner and Crane and Stein and Sartre and Rilke—and even when he wrote about the "little" people in the lives of these "big" people, his eye for detail and metaphorical prowess were extraordinary. Witness this picture of a drunk who happens to haunt the favorite bar of Malcolm Lowry:

. . . the Consul sits there like a bum on a bench, the beautiful ruin of a man, now as splendidly incompetent and out of place as a john in a junkyard. He shakes too badly to shave or to sign his name. He misplaces his Plymouth. . . . His penis cannot stand, and he likewise falls down in the street.

Or of the author's own mother:

She held her house around her as she held her bathrobe, safely doorpinned down its floorlength, the metal threads glinting like those gay gold loops which close the coat of a grenadier. . . .

Both these passages hail from articles that initially appeared in the New York Review of Books and were republished in The World Within the Word in 1971. This is Gass at his strongest; this is the man who the Washington Post could, with some credibility, nominate as "the finest prose stylist in America." Since then he has succumbed, alas, to a slow process of self-infatuation and self-caricature: he has turned what were once attractive stylistic proclivities into indigestible fetishes and gimmicks. He has changed his winning knack for associative thought, for example, into an exasperating idolatry of digression, his gift for descriptions into a rejection of ideas, his dexterity with surfaces into a hatred of "profundities," the spontaneity of his written voice into a misplaced belief in the sanctity and interest of his brain's every blind alley.

It is in "Emerson and the Essay" (first published in 1982 and republished in 1985 in Habitations of the Word) that Gass first formulates his new literary creed: "Have we digressed . . . ?" he asks. "I hope so. For we must. What is a stroll without a stop, a calculated dawdle . . . the indulgence of several small delays?" Indeed, he says, the essay is by nature "unhurried"; it "browses," and "thumbs through things."

It turns round and round . . . disposing of prejudices and even of the simple truth itself—as too undeveloped, not yet of an interesting age.

This all sounds very civilized, except that it's hard to think that the essay is not being unnecessarily limited. It is hard to think it is not being excessively domesticated—even trivialized. This fiery form—the form in which George Orwell delivered his impassioned cries for social justice, Virginia Woolf pleaded for the rights of her sex, Montaigne shocked his contemporaries, and Emerson sought to bare the Oversoul—need we turn it into a sort of wine-tasting session, a leisurely gentleman's afternoon ramble? To be sure, that's one thing it can be—but is it all? What if one has a mission, an injustice, an insight one feels strongly about; does that disqualify one from the writing of essays? Does that make one too heated for a form so cool? Is the genre reserved for the wearers of sunglasses—for the ironic, the aimless, the jaded?

Gass seems to think so; thus his visceral distaste for Emerson. What disdain he heaps on him in this piece for thinking his essays or lectures might potentially matter! "The full ear," he mocks, "the full heart and hall, are fast empty; the tireless are now weary; what we thought was profundity is made of smeary surfaces like a stack of dirty plates." Nice phrase—but whence the fury? Because Emerson is weary after a lecture? Or Gass imagines that he is? "Life," he tells us officiously, "is not all eloquence and adulation: life is wiping the baby's bum; it is a bad case of croup. . . ." Would Emerson have denied it? More often than not, he championed the quotidian, the active life: "I do not know how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake," he declared in "The American Scholar." "It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Calamity, exasperation, want are instructors. . . ."

No, it is not because Emerson evades the quotidian that Gass dislikes him, it is because Gass refuses the conceptual—as though they were somehow mutually exclusive, rather than mutually illuminating and, indeed, dependent. It is not Emerson's "smeary" profundities that make Gass's skin crawl; it is the very notion of "profundities." It is not that Emerson is stupid or false or wrong that bothers him; it is that he is arrogant for thinking that he might—that literature, that the essay might—help teach anybody anything worth knowing. "Are we better now that Calvino has written? that Rilke has rhymed?" Gass asks in Tests of Time. No. Ergo, literature "does nothing, says nothing, is nothing, harms no one, opens not a single eye." "Speak solidities," Emerson prompted himself before facing his audience. "To whom?" Gass sneers. "With what right?"

With no right, perhaps—but with considerable interest to his readers. What, by contrast, is the interest of assuming, as Gass does in his new set of socio-literary essays, that no meanings exist—or that we lack authority to formulate them? Precisely in the seizure of such authority lies the historical boldness of the essay—its "aggressive" edge, as Elizabeth Hardwick has called it. Montaigne, the father of the form, was all authority: "Where I know least, I use my judgment most freely," he notoriously announced. And with that he proffered his hypotheses about human nature. But is this, in fact, any more arrogant than what Gass does in his new essays—namely, meander about inconclusively, interminably, verbosely, often peevishly—and expect us to follow along for pure awe of his formidable mind? He'll idle up an alley, strike a pose, advance a woolly impression, wrap us into his yarn, and then proclaim: "To speak bluntly, this is garbage. God is garbage. National honor is garbage. So are peculiar histories, goals, destinies—garbage. Most of the ideas which motivate the actions of people and nations are false. More than that: stupid, so incomprehensibly silly, so severely baseless as to humiliate the human mind." Fine. But frankly, we don't need Gass to tell us this; we don't need him to take us on his winding walking tours of the garbage dump. We can find such throwaway sententiae ourselves—and at less expense to our time and patience.

The thing about avoiding meanings is that, ultimately, you can't. All you can do is avoid deliberate and well-crafted meanings. For all his contempt for Emerson's "messages," Gass sends a number of his own in this book—the difference is that Emerson's are often provocative and regularly demanding; Gass's—once one has disentangled them from the knot that is his prose—are almost relentlessly trite. "The Tests of Time" asserts that literature is outside time. "The Shears of the Censor" bravely proposes that censorship is bad. "The Writer and Politics" suggests that writing and politics are, well, different. Perhaps the most baroque essay ever written, "There Was An Old Woman," begins by elaborating an invented "news" story of a Los Angeles mother who eats her children, proceeds to describe how "it is human consciousness that counts" in history, and ends, triumphantly, on the declaration that the one thing worth striving for in life is (surprise!) "excellence." After all, "What else that's positive have we contributed to this world?"

Gass's essay collection represents the total and tragic triumph of form over content—the metastasis of style at the expense of substance. It is for this reason (I'm willing to gamble) that it will not survive the "Tests of Time" after which it is titled. Indeed, it will repel any reader here and now who attempts to flog through its unweeded entirety.

"It is much easier to write," someone once observed, "when you have something to say." Beware the essayist who would survive on style alone, who won't hazard a hypothesis, who distrusts "solidities." Chances are, you will simply get gaseousness in their place. Beware those, too, who would make the boldest of literary genres a leisurely pastime for epicureans to compose over their aging cheese. The essay has bloodier origins than that. It is a dangerous form, and those who handle it can't afford to be modest. In any case, the modesty of the world's Gasses is only a different kind of arrogance—a less fruitful kind than we saw in Montaigne and Emerson: it presumes on our attention without grappling with our intelligence.