Free Finding a Form by William H. Gass Page B

hood), when I see
The Obscene Bird of Night
perched above my chamber door, or when—
caramba
, as we used to exclaim as kids (
Donnerwetter
and
caramba
, we cried before we learned to roll our
r
’s and growl,
merrrrrde
)—so,
caramba
, then, and
Conversation in the Cathedral
crashes through the pane of my plans like a rioter’s brick. They come from everywhere,these massive, burning books; new masterpieces hatch like chicks and reach maturity in a matter of weeks. No use to shake the terrible volume till the jacket tears (whichever one it is), not a word will fall out (and I have given
Three Trapped Tigers
a good shaking, I can tell you), although almost daily I receive the galleys of my compatriots from which words, presugared and sufficient for every minimal daily requirement, spill like Cheerios from their cereal box. Perhaps when the books are bound and cleverly promo’d, with testimonials from
The New York Times
on their flaps and backs, the words stay put. I haven’t looked.
    It wasn’t long ago that literature, at least the novel, seemed safely in gringo hands; we could look down along the slope of the world with the arrogance of the higher climber at the silly specks below: those clumsy countries not even the Balkans would have borrowed for their operettas. Let them have their Hemingway as he had their bulls; let them follow Faulkner if they liked. The wiser among us would do neither. Besides, Spanish was the language of etiquette and euphemism, and to follow Faulkner through his narrative loops and ellipses merely by inverting his question marks; to sing the heart dark, as he had, in a sweetly melodious and lisping Latin, was to leave the soft nest of your lady’s lap to yap after the hounds … misguided, hopeless, absurd.
    All the same, prose went secretly south. Prose, the cold northern art, began to journey like the Germans to Venice, or wash up, like blond Scandinavian girls are supposed to, on the shores of the Aegean; even Spain had its Mexico just across the straits, as France its several Egypts. It proved always possible to go south, to Tangier, into some interior, up a Conradian river as we once went west; but how different those old expeditions were, because our wagons, our wants, our humble household wealth, our hardy women, always went
out
in that west they went to; it was seen as a place to replace life, to alter both circumstance and nature, to begin anew; whereas to go south was to go dangerously downhill, as Malcolm Lowry’s metaphors persistently suggest. We went there only for a visit, for we knew that if we ventured far enough, down south became deep.
    With the way west blocked by the Pacific, it was still possible for us (it proved necessary for us) (it was our fate) to turn left and make the descent. If Africa went endlessly
in
, Central America went endlessly
down
like some twisted pipe driven angrily into the continent below, or conversely like some whirlwind rising from a lower land to suck the heavens in. First there were the deserts, and then the jungles began: the heat, the snakes, the carnivorous fish, the orchids, the butterflies, the blowgun’s bite. There was fecundity, and the fear of what that implied; there was raw life like a split-open fruit, the sweet taste of death in a soft chocolate skull. Space slowly became time, and around that different clock customs collided like car and cycle in a traffic circle. As though they were Semites, each tick fought its following tock.
    One found oneself in noisy fumeous bazaars, beggar-crowded, dream-strewn streets, such as those we’ve been transported through in Juan Goytisolo’s unequaled imagery; or, going south, where cultures, like transvestites, swap one another’s clothes and clichés, we might stroll in ancient worlds one hour and hurtle down new-laid highways the next, through cities that are like a great stage, everything not alive the same pale age; or yet encounter pagan Christs and Negroid Marys; hobnob with savage