The Tunnel

ALSO BY WILLIAM H. GASS

FICTION

Omensetter’s Luck

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife

NONFICTION

Fiction and the Figures of Life

On Being Blue

The World Within the Word

Habituations of the Word

THE TUNNEL

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED IT ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright @ 1995 by William H. Gass

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gass, William H.

The tunnel / William H. Gass.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-679-43767-3 I. College teachers—Middle West—Fiction. 2. Historians Middle West—-Fiction, I. Title.

PS3557.A84.57T86 1995

813’.54—dc20 94-12089

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published February 28, 1995

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Purdue Research Foundation, and Washington University for their generous assistance during the years it took to write this book In addition, the author is most particularly indebted to the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities for providing the time and facilities for completing it, and to Gretchen Trevisan, Daisy Diehl, and Kimberly Santini of the Getty Center staff for their careful and kind assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication.

Portions of this text, in often quite different form, have previously appeared in Conjunctions, Delta, Esquire, Fiction, Grand Street, Granta, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The New American Review, New Letters, The Paris Review, Perspective, The Review of Contemporary Fiction., River Styx, Salmagundi, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review.

This book and my love are for Mary

THE TUNNEL

Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he lay dying

in a foreign land, “The descent to hell is the same from every place.”

THE

TUNNEL

What I have to tell you is as long as life,

but I shall run as swiftly, so before you know it,

we shall both be over.

It was my intention, when I began, to write an introduction to my work on the Germans. Though its thick folders lie beside me now, I know I cannot. Endings, instead, possess me . . . all ways out.

Embarrassed, I’m compelled to smile. I was going to extend my sympathy to my opponents. Here, in my introduction, raised above me like an arch of triumph, I meant to place a wreath upon myself. But each time I turned my pen to the task, it turned aside to strike me. As I look at the pages of my manuscript, or stare at the hooks which wall my study, I realize I must again attempt to put this prison of my life in language. It should have been a simple ceremony: a wreath to honor death and my success— the defense of my hypothesis concerning Germany. And when I wrote my book, to whom was I writing if not the world? . . . the world! . . . the world . . . the world is William welshing on a bet; it is Olive sewing up the gut of a goose; it is Reynolds raping Rosie on the frat-house stair; it is a low blow, a dreary afternoon, an exclamation of disgust. And when I wrote was I writing to win renown, as it’s customarily claimed? or to gain revenge after a long bide of time and tight rein of temper? to earn promotion, to rise above the rest like a loosed balloon? or was it from weak self-esteem? from pure funk, out of a distant childhood fear or recent shame? . . the world . . . the world, alas. It is Alice committing her Tampax to the trash.