Free Finding a Form by William H. Gass Page A

sentences where they hide; since, oddly enough, while you can confront and denouncea colleague or a spouse, run from an angry dog, or jump bail and flee your country, you can’t argue with an image; in as much as a badly made sentence is a judgment pronounced upon its perpetrator, and even one poor paragraph indelibly stains the soul. The unpleasant consequence of every such botch is that your life, as you register your writing, looks back at you as from a dirty mirror, and there you perceive a record of ineptitude, compromise, and failure.

II

A FIESTA FOR THE FORM
    W hen I was a child I was frequently forced to entertain a malicious little boy two years beneath my notice. He was loud, rude, undisciplined, and entirely too intelligent for his parents, whom he ruled with incontinence and screaming. I remember the time when, at dinner, he spat in the mashed potatoes, and how my father sat in silent smiling fury through the whole affair, since it was the little snot’s house we were visiting, and it was the little snot’s mum who had mashed the spuds he’d spat in, and it was their gold-rimmed dish that continued, untaken, around the table, so that a proper punishment was far outside his jurisdiction. One afternoon, both his parents having to sing in the matinee of something by Gilbert and Sullivan, the Kaiserling (as my father called him) was fobbed off on me. We were playing with trucks and trains in the living room, just at the feet of my father, who was trying to read and at the same time obliterate our presence by opening the evening paper widely across his face, thus disappearing behind its sheets. Suddenly (on what provocation I cannot recall, if there was one) the Kaiserling hurled a cast-iron dump truck through the headlines, piercing them the way a trained tiger leaps through a circle of paper flames, and raising a red welt the precise size of the barrow on my father’s brow, before the entire toy fell against the base of a floor lamp with what seemed to me a terrible crash.
    My father rose groggily with the Kaiserling’s collar in his fist, forhe knew without need of knowing who had so directly expressed himself, and his reflexes in those days were still those of the athlete he had been. He swung the brat back and forth by his shirt until, alas, the shirt tore—creating, of course,
evidence
. It was one of those eminently satisfactory incidents that now and then, and always without warning, grace one’s life; for I should have dearly loved to have thrown the truck myself; and the breaching of that wall of indifferent dislike was more than appropriate, as was the thwack of the truck on my father’s forehead, a thump so long deserved, I thought … by fate so long postponed. The comeuppance of the kid, who was no longer sure, as he dangled, of his immunity; the frustration of my father, who could not commit the crime the occasion called for; the quarreling among mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and friends that was soon to come: all were causes of the deepest pleasure for me like a fizz of fine grape soda through the upper nose.
    And I’m reminded now, perhaps in a manner not unlike the elaborate, large, and densely populated metaphors of our latest Spanish-speaking novelists, of the appearance in our provincial northern world of other singular movers of earth, of tough heavy untykelike toys, missiles hurled at the brow of a petty almighty. When I consider the image, rather as if Father Freud had designed it, I see how my own point of view shifts, and how I am in all roles like a raisin; for I have scarcely fed a fresh sheet of paper into my IBM and begun some decorous composition when
The Autumn of the Patriarch
bursts through the page, shattering a delicate tea-fumed sentence like a china cup. This is another kind of news, and I am dazed. Or I am sitting quietly in my study, perhaps, considering a bit of brittle characterization (a photographer’s assistant, I think, with hair like the camera’s