Synthesising the published record, Ted Morrissey chronicles and analyzes the relationship between literary Williams Gaddis and Gass, which began in 1976 after Gass had helped secure the National Book Award for Gaddis's J R. Morrissey examines not only the pair's shared social history of meetings, conferences, and letters, but also examines the commonalities in their approaches to literature, and their affinities of taste, habit, and vision.
Anyone more than a little familiar with William Gaddis or William Gass likely knows of their long friendship. They first met at the National Book Award ceremony on April 21, 1976—Gass being one of the judges that gave the prize to J R—and when Gaddis was near death in 1998 Bill Gass was one of the last people he wanted to speak to. Unfortunately Gass received the message too garbled and too late, and that final telephone conversation never took place. Throughout their more than twenty-year friendship, they supported each other’s work in myriad ways, both publicly and privately, and they shared in the amusement of people confusing them due to their sound-alike names and similar ambitions when it came to the written word.
I’m ashamed to admit that I was nearly 40 when I learned of both writers practically simultaneously, which I hope indicts the shortcomings of the U.S.’s literary culture more severely than it does my own. What I mean is, I read Gass’s brilliant introduction to The Recognitions before embarking on my maiden voyage into Gaddis’s now-mythical inaugural novel. Indeed, Gass’s introduction is probably almost as well known as the novel itself, and quite possibly more frequently read than the masterpiece it precedes in the Penguin Classics edition. The intro took on a life of its own, being reprinted in various iterations and quoted countless times. Unlike the book it introduces, the piece’s brilliance was recognized (sorry) from the start. Michael Millman, senior editor at Viking Penguin, wrote to Gass on January 21, 1993: “Would you have any objections to our approaching The New York Times Book Review [sic] about running your introduction? In my experience . . . I can’t remember another time when we had an essay of this caliber as an introduction to one of our volumes. . . .”
Gass begins the piece by talking about the enigmas and confusions surrounding William Gaddis, not least about which literary William G he was. Writes Gass, “Even The New York Times, at one low point, attributed his third novel, Carpenter’s Gothic, to that self-same and similarly sounding person. Yes, perhaps William Gaddis is not B. Traven after all, or J.D. Salinger, Ambrose Bierce, or Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps he is me” (Temple 179). What follows is where I borrowed for this paper’s title: “When I was congratulated,” continues Gass, “I was always gracious. When I was falsely credited, I was honored by the error.” In his tribute to Gaddis, in 1999, Gass said that he “could enjoy these mistakes, since Gaddis seemed equally amused” (204).
It’s difficult to say when the two writers became aware of each other’s work. They were close contemporaries. Gaddis was born in 1922, Gass in ’24. The Recognitions came out in 1955, the same decade that Gass’s earliest fiction began to appear (the literary journal Accent, published by University of Illinois English Department, included three pieces by Gass in its Winter 1958 number).1The issue of Accent was co-edited by Stanley Elkin, who eventually became Gass’s close friend and colleague at Washington University in St. Louis. Elkin joined the faculty there in 1960; Gass in 1969. Gass’s writing began to appear here and there in this journal or that (unlikely to be on Gaddis’s radar), but his first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, came out in 1966, quickly followed by In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (a collection of novellas and stories) and Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (a wildly experimental novella), both in 1968, and Fiction and the Figures of Life (a collection of essays, including essays on the writer’s craft), in 1970. The essays were well regarded by Gass’s peers. We know, for example, that Cormac McCarthy acquired a copy of the collection while he was writing Child of God, published in ’73 (King 31).
It seems fair to assert, then, that by the mid-’70s both Gaddis and Gass had read one another, and apparently approvingly. In a Gaddis letter to his second wife Judith, dated March 17, 1976, about J R's National Book Award Nomination, he references Gass: “But if the book selections are odd, the judges are even odder; a writer, a critic, and a complete idiot: Wm Gass, Mary McCarthy, and Maurice Dolbier” (377). Compared to the epithet he uses for Dolbier, a novelist among other things, too, the neutrality of “a writer” almost sounds like praise. (For that matter, McCarthy, though a “critic” beside Gass, was another writer, publishing her first novel more than a decade before Gaddis’s debut, and achieving long-running bestseller status in the 1960s). That same year, 1976, Gass talks about Gaddis in his “Art of Fiction” interview in The Paris Review, specifically in response to Thomas LeClair’s question “Who are some living novelists you respect?” Gaddis makes the list. Gass says he admires Gaddis for the same reasons he admires John Barth: “What I like . . . is the unifying squeeze which that great intellectual grasp of his gives to his work, and the combination of enormous knowledge with fine feeling and artistic pride and total control. I really admire a master” (37). Gass underscores Gaddis’s masterful control of the narrative apparatuses in his books.
Gass read his peers’ work and commented on it regularly, in interviews, guest lectures, critical articles, and book reviews. Gaddis, on the other hand, was not inclined to read his contemporaries. Steven Moore writes that “[h]e seemed to have little interest in the novels of those contemporaries with whom he is most often associated,” including Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, John Hawkes, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon. “William H. Gass was an exception,” says Moore, “whom he admired both personally and professionally” (William Gaddis 13). At the tribute to her father in 1999, Sarah Gaddis said, “William Gass was important to Gaddis. . . . He held Gass in the highest esteem for his work, and no other writer made him feel so understood” (150-151). This respect for Gass and his opinions, literary and otherwise, is made clear by Gaddis’s frequently quoting or paraphrasing his friend in letters to others over the years;2In The Letters of William Gaddis, 2nd ed. (which is only a selection and so doesn’t exhaust Gaddis’s references to Gass), see pp. 523, 567, 572, 590 and 594. and his admiration for Gass’s abilities as a writer is put plainly in an April 13, 1994, letter to Michael Silverblatt, host of the literary radio program Bookworm: “Gass is for me our foremost writer, a magician with the language” (629).
Similarly, Gass’s admiration of Gaddis had a great deal to do with his “poetic” use of language. In a 1984 interview with Arthur M. Saltzman, Gass said that “all the really fine poets now are writing fiction. I would stack up paragraphs of Hawkes, Coover, Elkin, or Gaddis against the better poets writing now. Just from the power of the poetic impulse itself, the ‘poets’ wouldn’t have a chance” (91). In Gass’s introduction to The Recognitions he writes about the poetry of both that book and J R, saying: “. . . J R was as different from the earlier novel as Joyce from James. But do not put down what you have to go to J R yet, even if it is almost as musical as Finnegans Wake. . . . [W]e must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master’s hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen, we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying . . .” (184).
After their meeting at the National Book Award ceremony, the two writers became fast friends. The following year they were slated to be at a writers’ conference in Sarasota, Florida, and Gaddis’s participation was somewhat contingent on Gass’s being there, also. In a March 18 letter to Judith, Gaddis laments that other writers had canceled or declined—namely Barth, Susan Sontag, and Barthelme—and says that “if Gass abruptly disappears I may be tempted to do the same.” Gaddis explains that he was looking forward to “hav[ing] a good & encouraging talk with William Gass [who is] coming with his wife [Mary].” Otherwise Gaddis had been “shying from readings and panels” because they interfered with his writing process. He notes that “Gass admires me because I’ve been able to stay out (till now), I admire him because he separates it all clearly & relaxedly in his head” (389). Later that year, Gaddis was scheduled to appear at an event closer to home, in Stonington, New York, for which—he says in a July 7, 1977, letter to Joy Williams and Rust Hills—he was “girding his loins.” Part of his trepidation was that “it won’t have Gass” (391).
Reading their personal correspondence, filled with warm regards and jokes that each man knows will land because of their kindred kinds of humor, it is obvious how much they genuinely liked each other. An excellent example of this tone appears in a letter to Gass dated August 25, 1980, in which Gaddis alludes to a previous trip to Washington University in St. Louis. Gaddis begins, “Dear Bill. Attending a stylish Hamptons opening of a very good painter [Polly Kraft] out here.” He believes that Gass will appreciate her art and has enclosed some slides of her paintings. He says, “I inveigled them from her on grounds of your sterling generous & rowdy character & Mary’s good looks.” Then, “I write this on the assumption that you are still alive, after day after day reports of 114° in St. Louis (my recollection being -10°)” (436). Gaddis had been in St. Louis in February 1979 for a three-week teaching session at Washington University. A few months beforehand (October 14, 1978) he wrote to his daughter Sarah about receiving “a letter from Washington Univ in St. Louis (where Bill Gass is)” with the teaching proposal. The letter was from Stanley Elkin, a writer who is “marvelous.” Gaddis says that he “accepted immediately . . . mostly for the prospect of rowdy time with Elkin & Gass & I’m really looking forward to it. I think we’ve all 3 got similar views on what good writing’s about plus highly compatible senses of humor” (414-15). Gaddis seems to be referring to the three writers’ similar emphasis on the sound of their prose, citing, for example, Elkin’s “excellent ear” in a May 1, 1980, letter to British movie producer Jack Gold (432-33). Gass, meanwhile, considered both Gaddis and Elkin among those “prose writers [who] are much in advance of the poets” (LeClair 37). Gaddis concludes the August 25, 1980, letter by encouraging Gass and his wife to visit him on Long Island when they can. It is an open invitation that Gaddis expresses in several letters.
Their relationship was not just about mutual admiration and sharing “rowdy” times. They also did what they could to advance each other’s careers and reputations. Gass’s efforts on Gaddis’s behalf began with his judgment of J R for the National Book Award and continued for the next two decades. It included his writing the introduction for the Penguin edition of The Recognitions, and his being instrumental in bringing Gaddis to St. Louis to teach, and then again, in 1994, to contribute to a symposium on “The Writer and Religion.” What is more, Gass wrote a recommendation that contributed to Gaddis’s being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. Gaddis wrote to him (April 12), “Do you KNOW what joy (read money, prestige, vainglory) your kind effort has contributed to this modest household?” (439). Gaddis, for his part, appeared to always have Gass’s best interests at heart. In the 1980 letter in which he references St. Louis’s harsh weather, he also writes that he “escaped Knopf for Viking (a move I’d encourage you … enthusiastic leaves-you-alone . . .)”; and he recommends a specific editor at Viking he thinks Gass would like (436). In 1991 and ’92 Gass more or less sequestered himself at the Getty Center (at the time located in Santa Monica)3The Getty Center opened its current location, in Los Angeles, in 1997. to complete, at long last, his novel The Tunnel, which he’d been writing since 1966. Gaddis wrote to him at his Santa Monica address (dated January 9) to offer some comic relief (composing much of the letter in rustic dialect), as well as encouragement and support. He says, “[I]t would be something if we both finished these god dam [sic] books this same year 1992 . . .” (587). Gaddis is referring to A Frolic of His Own, published in 1994. Gaddis informs Gass that his daughter Sarah is soon to arrive in California also and closes by saying “let me know if theres [sic] anything I can do for you here.”
If one were to do a Venn diagram (so popular these days) of the two writers’ influences, there would of course be considerable common ground. Both had a taste for some Medieval authors as well as Elizabethans, especially Donne and Shakespeare (Gaddis’s favorite play was As You Like It, while Gass counted Antony and Cleopatra as one of his “Fifty Literary Pillars” [Moore 11; Gass, Temple 36]). European authors were among each man’s favorites, perhaps most notably Rilke, who was Gass’s literary lodestar. They had their differences too, however. Gaddis claimed to have read little of James Joyce, in spite of the critics who were convinced of the Irish writer’s influence; whereas Gass counted Ulysses and Finnegans Wake among his “pillars” and alluded to Joyce frequently in his nonfiction. Perhaps the most significant disagreement centered around Russian novelists, particularly Dostoevsky, whose place for Gaddis, says Steven Moore, was “paramount” (10). In 1995, Gaddis told an interviewer for a German magazine, “That man [Dostoevsky] could do everything. Complicated characters, madness. . . .” (Ingendaay).4The interview by Paul Ingendaay was originally published as “Agent der Veränderung. Ein Gespräch mit William Gaddis” in Rowohlt Literatur Magazin 39 (1997), pp. 64-92.
This difference of opinion was comically and touchingly captured by Gass in his piece about the two writers’ participation in a trip to Soviet Russia in 1985, which included frigid visits to landmarks associated with Dostoevsky and especially his writing of Crime and Punishment. Gass was in the mood to be flippant and wanted Gaddis to be too. Writes Gass, “Gaddis’s love for the Russian novel—and for the predictable Russians at that—had surprised me, though in hindsight it shouldn’t have, if I’d kept The Recognitions fully in front of me . . .” (Temple 194). As such, Gaddis didn’t “relish [Gass’s] popping off” during the tour, and Gass’s wife Mary worked to keep his tongue in check by squeezing his arm when she knew he was about to say something that could prove regrettable. Gass continues, “I could see [Gaddis’s] youthful love glowing plainly when our group visited Dostoyevsky’s apartment. The sight of the master’s desk actually wet Willy’s eyes. I envied him. When my eyes moistened, it was only for Bette Davis, and such a shallow show of weakness made me angry with my soul” (196-97).
Their opposing opinions on Russian authors stand out because in practically every other way Gaddis and Gass were likeminded literary souls, and perhaps this kindredness is most plainly seen from a distance; that is, by looking at the arc of each man’s entire career. Both writers began their pursuit of the writing life with optimism in the potential for literature to improve American society. In fact, Steven Moore says of Gaddis’s first two novels that they “can be read, in one sense at least, as crusades: in The Recognitions, against fraudulence and fakery at all levels . . . ; in J R, against the abuses of capitalism, newfangled pedagogy, mechanization, and the farcical notion of corporate ‘democracy’” (15). Moore asserts that in both works Gaddis employs satire, which “is primarily a constructive . . . artistic approach . . . that has as its quixotic goal the rejuvenation of society, not its ruin” (14). However, by the early 1980s, when Gaddis was beginning work on his third novel, he seems to have given up on art’s potential to cure any of the United States’ ills. “A positive message is conspicuously absent in his final three novels [Carpenter’s Gothic, A Frolic of His Own, and Agapē Agape],” writes Moore (16). Instead, “his pessimism deepened” over the years (17). Moore marks Carpenter’s Gothic as a turning point in that it “suggests that it is too late to reverse the tide, to restore the promise of the American Dream” (207).
Similarly, Gass’s hopes for art and literature as instruments of redemption, as agents of change, also began positively but turned sour over time. His optimism is on full display in the essay “The Artist and Society,” originally published in The New Republic (1968) and collected in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970). “Works of art,” writes Gass, “confront us the way few people dare to: completely, openly, at once. They construct, they comprise, our experience” (Fiction 283). He claims that the artist (including the literary artist) is a revolutionary because “[h]e is concerned with consciousness, and he makes his changes there.” Gass continues, “His inaction is only a blind, for his books and buildings go off under everything—not once but a thousand times. How often has Homer remade men’s minds?” (288). Gass probably continued to believe in the potential for literature to reshape human consciousness, but it soon became clear that such potential was being squandered because fewer and fewer people were reading literature (or, eventually, much of anything), and as a consequence fewer and fewer publishers were interested in publishing the kinds of books that Gass had in mind in the Sixties. We can witness Gass’s crumbling optimism in numerous essays and interviews. In 1971, for example, Gass quipped that the novel he had been writing since 1966, The Tunnel, may have trouble finding a publisher because of its ambitious aspirations: “Who knows, perhaps it will be such a good book no one will want to publish it” (McCauley 12). He saw that the publishing industry was increasingly churning out books that did not require much thought. He said in his “Art of Fiction” interview (1976) that “[a] lot of modern writers . . . are writing for the fast mind that speeds over the text like those noisy bastards in motor boats. . . . They stand to literature as fast food to food” (LeClair 25). Gass expanded on this idea in a commencement address to graduates of Washington University in 1979, later collected as “On Reading to Oneself” in Habitations of the Word (1985): “When you read for speed you do not read recursively, looping along the line like a sewing machine, stitching something together. . . . The speeding reader is after the kernel, the heart, the gist. . . . The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish” (219-20). In sum, Gass told the grads, “We are expected to get on with our life, to pass over it so swiftly we needn’t notice its lack of quality. . . . We’ve grown accustomed to the slum our consciousness has become” (222).
Moreover, Gaddis and Gass both possessed the sort of artistic temperament that allowed them (required them) to spend years working on a project. Gaddis worked on his debut, The Recognitions (1955), for seven years, and around a decade on A Frolic of His Own (1994), while J R (1975) was an undertaking of some twenty years.5 Carpenter’s Gothic (1984) appears to be an exception to this pattern. Based on his work in the Gaddis archive at Washington University in St. Louis, Ali Chetwynd (in a personal email) concludes that Carpenter’s Gothic was Gaddis’s focus “only really from 1981 onward. . . . The late 70s is actually the interesting rare period where he didn’t have a definite project on the go . . .”Regarding why he’d only produced four novels in forty years and not a lot of other material, Gaddis said, “[B]ecause that’s my job. . . . Novels are my craft, my calling, if you like. That’s why I’m not at all interested in anything else like stories and essays” (Ingendaay). Gass didn’t forswear essays or stories, meanwhile, but toiled away on The Tunnel (1995) from 1966 to 1992, with excerpts of it appearing regularly over the years, especially in the journal Conjunctions. Another example is the narrative of Ella Bend Hess, to whom we are introduced in Gass’s short story “The Clairvoyant,” published in Location in 1964 (she also makes an appearance in the novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife [1968] among other places); yet Ella only becomes fully fleshed out in the novella Cartesian Sonata, published as one of four collected novellas in 1998. Gass always characterized himself as a “slow” writer, describing his plodding process by saying,
I always have to try to and figure out from what I’ve done what should come next, and then I find out from looking at this lump that I can’t see anything that comes next. . . . So, I rewrite that, and when I rewrite that it becomes a bigger lump, and that’s what comes next. I do that for ten years, and then maybe I’ve got a book done. It’s a dumb way to write. (White 43)
This doggedness when it comes to a project may best be illustrated in their final works—in each case completed only weeks before their deaths: for Gaddis the posthumously published Agapē Agape, and for Gass the as yet unpublished “Baroque Prose” (a significant excerpt appeared in the journal Socrates on the Beach in 2022—which is a fuller version of the excerpt published in the inaugural issue of LitMag just months before Gass’s death). Agapē Agape, of course, is a short novel that distills Gaddis’s thoughts on the history of the player piano and more broadly on the mechanization of the arts. Throughout his adult life, Gaddis was interested in publishing a nonfiction account of the player piano and how it reflected the demise of the arts as a uniquely human undertaking. He conceived of the idea as a young man and worked at it, off and on, throughout the decades, doing research and taking stabs at writing it. Joseph Tabbi writes, “[T]he accumulated research of half a century weighed on him during these final years, demanding an outlet. He worked hard on the history through 1996 and early 1997, when he discovered that he would not have long to live” (102). Instead of the ponderous work of nonfiction he’d initially envisioned, Gaddis became resigned to a brief work of fiction instead, “one gemlike meditation without false illusions or consolations” (101). Gass, meanwhile, had a lifelong devotion to baroque prose, that is, a style of writing characterized by its rhetorical complexity and flourishes of poetic ornamentation. The final (last) draft of “Baroque Prose” is 149 manuscript pages (or about 35,500 words, according to my calculations), and it chiefly discusses and dissects the work of two seventeenth-century practitioners of the baroque: clergymen John Donne and Jeremy Taylor.6See my paper “Bridging Donne with the Digital Age: William H. Gass’s Devotion to Baroque Prose” for a more detailed description Gass’s final work, available at https://tedmorrissey.blog/2023/02/24/bridging-donne-with-the-digital-age-william-h-gasss-devotion-to-baroque-prose. Had he the time, Gass tells us, he would say more about John Milton’s baroque style, especially his masterful use of adverbs; he also identifies a paragraph that is not up to his usual standards, but he no longer has the wherewithal to rework it properly, joking in brackets, “I have decided to leave the foregoing paragraph as it first fell upon the page, as a warning to those who compose.” Like his friend who died nearly twenty years before, Gass, at age 93, was trying to express ideas that he’d been contemplating since his youth. In Gass’s unpublished dissertation, “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor” (Cornell, Ph.D. in Philosophy, 1954), he examines many of the same rhetorical strategies he returns to in “Baroque Prose” as well as the same writers, like Donne, Taylor and Milton, and even many of the same passages. Mary Henderson Gass, Gass’s widow, said (in a personal email), “Bill worked on this piece off and on for the last years of his life. . . . These were the authors he was reading, re-reading and enjoying as he researched the period, its politics, art, architecture, theater and music. . . . Perhaps he had a longer work in mind, but as his energy failed he was determined to complete this. As is. Final project.”
In William Gaddis, in the section titled “A Writer’s Writer,” Steven Moore offers a thorough accounting of the writers and works directly influenced by Gaddis. Gass isn’t counted among them, but he is on a short list of novelists of whom “it would be safer to say . . . share affinities with Gaddis rather than show his influence” (213). I delayed sending off this article for some time as I attempted to build a case that, in fact, there had been direct mutual influences. But after fumbling around and raking together a spate of rickety paragraphs, I reached the conclusion that Moore is right (as he tends to be in all things Gaddis-related). Looking back over the landscape of their lives and affinities we see that Gaddis and Gass shared a reverence for all the arts, not just literature. We see their bruising critiques of human nature, often delivered via laugh-out-loud plot developments and dialogue. Yet we also see their enduring ability to find redeeming qualities in their fellow human beings, in individuals, at least, if not in humanity as a whole. Gaddis poignantly expressed this sentiment near the end of his life:
[O]bviously a lot of people need this idea that they do exist for a reason. God has put me here so that I can do some good. I mean . . . there are nuns, as an example, who do many good things, good deeds that give them the feeling that they are serving the Lord if they bother to put themselves out to help the poor who are bedridden or if they need their bodies washed. You know, it’s astonishing, it’s all good and beautiful as well. . . . (Ingendaay)
In 1999, Gass concluded his tribute to his departed friend by recounting Gaddis’s arrival at a celebration in his honor in Cologne, Germany: “Gaddis slowly emerged into a starfall of flashbulbs worthy of the Academy Awards, the popping of a hundred corks” (Life Sentences 205). I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I think it’s a swell idea. In fact, I like to imagine a Literary Great Beyond, a kind of Valhalla for writers instead of warriors. And if such a place did exist, I would hope that the great friends, Gaddis and Gass, were both greeted as novelist titans just as Gaddis was on that glorious Teutonic night.
Works Cited
Ammon, Theodore G., editor. Conversations with William H. Gass. UP of Mississippi, 2003.
Gaddis, Sarah. “A Note of Gratitude.” Conjunctions 33, 1999, pp. 149-51.
Gaddis, William. The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore, 2nd ed., New York Review Books, 2023.
Gass, Mary Henderson. “Re: Bill’s Baroque Prose project.” E-mail received by Ted Morrissey, 20 Jan. 2023.
Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 1970.
—. Habitations of the Word. Simon and Schuster, 1985
—. Life Sentences. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
—. A Temple of Texts. Dalkey Archive Press, 2007.
Ingendaay, Paul. “Agent of Change: A Conversation with William Gaddis [1995].” Translated by John Soutter, edited by Steven Moore. WilliamGaddis.org. Accessed via https://williamgaddis.org/nonfiction 21 April 2023.
King, Daniel Robert. Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author, The U of Tennessee P, 2016.
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass: The Art of Fiction LXV.” Conversations with William H. Gass, ed. Theodore Ammon. UP of Mississippi, 2003: 17-38.
McCauley, Carole Spearin. “William H. Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, ed. Theodore Ammon. UP of Mississippi, 2003: 3-12
Millman, Michael. Letter to William H. Gass. 21 Jan. 1993. William Gass Papers, Box 29, Folder 36. Washington University in St. Louis.
Moore, Steven. William Gaddis: Expanded Edition, Bloomsbury, 2015.
Saltzman, Arthur M. “An Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, ed. Theodore Ammon. UP of Mississippi, 2003: 81-95.
Tabbi, Joseph. Afterword. Agapē Agape, by William Gaddis, Penguin, 2003, pp. 99-112.
White, Jay. “An Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, ed. Theodore Ammon. UP of Mississippi, 2003: 39-45.