William H, Gass, Bill Gass

William H. Gass, Bill Gass, in a Revised & Expanded Preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & other stories, is looking for a reader.

Even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor or with love, where is that sensitive, admiring, other pair of ears?  . . .  I am fashioning a reader for these fictions . . . of what kind, you ask? well, skilled and generous with attention, for one thing, patient with longueurs, forgiving of every error and the author's self-indulgence, avid for details . . . ah, and a lover of lists, a twiddler of lines.

I circle around his pages, pleased to be there, as you could circle a copse of trees and go home, go to sleep, all in a day's work. The calque or layer upon layer of reading every so many years, the re-forming of an image you will forget, amalgamates into a reading yet to come.

The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need.

William H., or Bill, is clear about the difficult and the free, subtle about the obvious.

... though time may appear to pass within a story, the story itself must seem to have leaked like a blot from a single shake of the pen.

Reading the stories In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is one thing. Reading the preface is suddenly closer to the source and instead of being teased and pleased, you're moved.

Unlike this preface, then, which pretends to the presence of your eye, these stories emerged from my blank insides to die in another darkness. I willed their existence , but I don't know why. Except that in some dim way I wanted, myself, to have a soul, a special speech, a style. I wanted to feel responsible where I could bear to be responsible, and to make a sheet of steel from a flimsy page—