Middle C
It's the place on the piano where you're first taught to rest your hands preparatory to playing. As a grade, C is what you get for being average, neither a success nor a failure, a middling personage, unworthy of especial notice, either good or bad. On the book cover, the depiction of a single piano key is reminiscent of a middle finger raised to the world.
If Bartleby the Scrivener were to answer Hamlet
Hamlet: To be or not to be.
Bartleby: Umm. I would prefer not to.
Joseph Skizzen
is the protagonist of Middle C. He's a fraudulent music professor at a middle-brow midwest university. He's middle-aged. He still lives with his mother. His father abandoned the family when Joseph was a child. It is from his father that Joseph has inherited his penchant for escape, for living behind a mask.
"My father fled the Nazis before they were the Nazis, because he knew our nature. He tried to remove himself from blame, from complicity. Had he not done so, would he not have been, in some small way, responsible for the Austrian state, greeting their cheapjack little Fuhrer as if he arrived with lunch?"
Likewise "Professor" Skizzen seeks to pass through life reasonably clean of hand, a conscientious objector to human affairs, free of complicity in human evil; for history, if not everyday life, proves that human beings and their conduct as individuals and more obviously in aggregate are everywhere and inevitably "envious, mean, murderous, jealous, greedy, treacherous, miserly, self-serving, vengeful, pitiless, stupid, and otherwise pointless."
Skizzen, as might be guessed from the above, has little use for the human race. In fact, he believes the earth will be immeasurably improved when it is finally scrubbed clean of the plague of humankind once and for all. He has devoted his "real" life to the perfecting of a single sentence that serves as personal mantra, credo, and keynote of his philosophy: "First Skizzen felt mankind must perish, then he feared it might survive." He has worked at this single sentence for years, writing and rewriting it until it reaches at last it's essential crystallized form, hard and shining and irrefutable as a musical equation. At the same time, he obsessively collects the documentation of atrocities from history books and daily newspapers that comprises the Inhumanity Museum which he maintains in his cluttered attic.
Skizzen is like a modern-day gnostic. He believes the purpose of life is to transcend life, its miserable terms, its base instincts. Unmarried, childless, chaste, he would agree with Sophocles, Schopenhauer, Cioran, and the Solomon of Ecclesiastes, among numerous others, that the very best thing would not to have been born at all. Failing that, the next best thing is not to participate in the folly of the human race.
And it's all folly.
Life, as it manifests itself in human nature, is so inextricably bound with evil that on balance it would have been far better not just for the individual but for the entire human species never to have existed. Evil is as endemic to our condition as the systole and diastole of our heartbeat. Children aren't the hope of the world, they are a continuation of it's stupidity. I believe it was Schopenhauer who suggested that we've got it all backwards. We should mourn in the delivery room because it signals the beginning of a man's suffering and celebrate at a funeral because it means that the deceased is at last finally free. Skizzen would agree.
So it is that Skizzen lives as a kind of shadow at the periphery of life, tries to live what might best be described as an un-life. But Skizzen, being unavoidably human, finds that in spite of his best efforts to efface himself, he can't make himself entirely invisible. He's seen by others and therefore can't help blundering, albeit unintentionally, into blameworthy behavior—occasionally his own, but more often than not, finding himself the more-or-less innocent target and victim of the everyday malevolence of others.
How, short of suicide, can one escape the dilemma? His father, adopting the identity of a Jew, consciously identifying himself with the persecuted rather than passively sinning with the persecutor, became a perpetual refugee. Skizzen, with his faked credentials, takes a similar if less radical path, settling into his bogus role of a quirky but respected music professor and hiding in plain sight.
(William Gass. He seems like such nice, friendly old guy. Does he really hate humanity so much?)
At an age (88) when its common to applaud a person if they can still dress and feed themselves and, in really exceptional cases, even do their own laundry ("God bless him!"), Williams Gass wrote Middle C, solidifying his position as America's finest living novelist. And when he's no longer living (he's now 90), he'll pass immediately onto the list of the greatest writers America ever produced, alive or dead.
One of the few great things about being 88 is that, so long as you don't have to beg a caregiver for painkillers or to have your diaper changed, you don't have to kiss anyone's ass anymore. You can drop the mask, the politesse, the beating around the bush. You can say what you mean. Middle C is a great big literary middle finger to the human race penned by an old man who isn't going gentle into that good night. Middle C is Gass's Book of Revelation, a blistering condemnation of the human race, a verbal apocalypse that weighs man in the balance and finds him not just wanting, but worthy of total extermination. The only thing Gass's Skizzen fears is that anyone at all should survive his imagined Armageddon, a second Adam and Eve, because, unfortunately, it only takes two to start the whole disaster rolling again.
You wouldn't guess it from the above description, but Middle C is also a very very funny book.
What has gone unsaid, or at least without sufficient emphasis up to now, is that Gass is a true wizard of words. His style is Shakespearean in its flexibility and felicity, Biblical in its authority. He is, as the overused phrase has it, a master of his medium, that is, the English language. What do I mean by a master? I mean that if he tells a sentence to bend over backwards, grab its two own ankles and lift its feet off the floor, twist its torso round, disengage its spine and perform obscenities upon itself for our amusement, the sentence does it, impossible as all that might seem to be. As a reader, you sit there agog, jaw unhinged, collecting spittle. You forget to swallow; you forget to blink. Never have you seen such wonders, heard such music.
Because in Middle C, it's Gass that is the virtuoso composer of a prose whose sum consistently transcends the sum of its parts. A Beethoven symphony is not just a collection of notes; a William Gass novel is not just a compilation of words This is one of those very rare books—Samuel Beckett's novels come to mind—that you might want to read aloud. The sentences and paragraphs have the sensual mobile muscularity of music.
July 30th
For the last three or four years, when this day rolls around I mark it with a tongue-in-cheek tribute to William Gass, it being the day he was born in 1924. Every day, when I check Wikideaths, I flinch for fear that I will find his name among those departed. I began noting his birthday as a kind of cynical statement on "American culture" (an oxymoron so perfect it could—and should—serve as the example given the word's definition in any dictionary)which hasn't the wit, forget the wisdom—that abandoned this land like its ass was on fire long ago—to appreciate even the few geniuses it has managed, against all odds and obstacles it has erected to prevent them, to produce.
Gass, if not so much in his fiction, then in his essays (i.e. A Temple of Texts, Fiction and the Figures of Life, The World Within the Word), has always been an unapologetic elitist. Art, literature, music, culture, they mean something. They are to be protected, pursued, cultivated, taken seriously, even in, especially in, a land of unthinking, unreflecting, unappreciative yahoos.
If there is anything that saves humanity from the atrocities described in Middle C, it is the dedicated cultivation of these higher aspirations. But here I am offering Gass the conventional "out" all pessimistic artists and philosophers who still have their crust of bread to gain from the world's approval take in the end. In Middle C, Gass himself asks no such quarter. He's done with crusts. He is as fierce and uncompromising as any of the most fiery Old Testament prophets. This damned world is rotten up and down, right and left, and straight to the core. Let it burn. The best one can do in the meantime is avoid it as much as humanly possible. Cultivate, as Voltaire suggested, one's own garden. And hope, when the time comes, to get out of here with as much speed, as little responsibility for the damage, and as little pain as you can.
Some day, unfortunately all too soon,
we'll no longer have William Gass to reflect back to us an image of human nature warts and all, to celebrate language and its comforts, to make of despair an absurd comedy and, more than likely, only one person in ten thousand will even be aware of what we lost. Skizzen was right to feel that mankind must perish, and right to fear that it just might survive.
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