Life Sentences by William H. Gass Read Free Book Online Page A

up hanging himself from one of the branches of the trees he sings about.
    The path took Henry Pimber past the slag across the meadow creek where his only hornbeam hardened slowly in the southern shadow of the ridge and the trees of the separating wood began in rows as the lean road in his dream began, narrowing to nothing in the blank horizon, for train rails narrow behind anybody’s journey; and he named them as he passed them: elm, oak, hazel, larch and chestnut tree, as though he might have been the fallen Adam passing them and calling out their soft familiar names, as though familiar names might make some friends for him by being spoken to the unfamiliar and unfriendly world which he was told had been his paradise. In God’s name, when was that? When had that been? For he had hated every day he’d lived. Ash, birch, maple. Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night clicked past as he walked by the creek by the hornbeam tree, the elders, sorrels, cedars and the fir; for as he named them, sounding their soft names in his lonely skull, the fire of fall was on them, and he named the days he’d lost. It was still sorrowful to die. Eternity, for them, had ended. And he would fall, when it came his time, like an unseen leaf, the bud that was the glory of his birth forgot before remembered. He named the aspen, beech, and willow, and he said aloud the locust when he saw it leafless like a battlefield. In God’s name, when was that? When had that been?
    I have never been able to break the denominating habit. In a relatively recent piece, “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s,” I managed to cram the names of 110 weeds into one paragraph.
    Writing has almost always been difficult for me, something I had to do to remain sane, yet never satisfying in any ordinary sense, certainly never exhilarating, and never an activity that might satisfy Socrates’ admonition to find a
Logos
for my life, as I felt it surely had for the authors I admired: even Malcolm Lowry’s dissolutely drunken sprees; even Hart Crane’s beatings at the hands of sailors, beatings he sought out as he ultimately sought the sea; even Céline’s meanness, a bitterness that ate through his heart before it got to his shoes and ate them too; even these malcontents, though nothing justified their wasted ways, their anger, their multiplication of pain, might be, by their works, somewhat saved, their sins hidden under sublime blots of printers’ ink.
    Number two: whoring and metaphoring.
    One aspect of writing was easy, was unstoppable, and that was the flow of imagery that ran through my head like a creek in flood—no—like the babble of voices around a bar at happy hour—no—like a stream of ants toward a source of sugar—oh, no—like carp rise to a dimple of bread—oh, no—oh, no—a cloud of gnats—a giggle when tickled. An attack of bats. I could swat away six and still write eight. It was a curse disguised as a blessing. I was always looking at the world from another word. The wolf spider roams at night from field to field in search of prey, while the mantis sits still as a twig by a flower’s sweetened cup until some sucker comes to nose it, and then she, the madam mantis, sups. But these facts interested me mainly because I knew people like that. I was one—a waiter—the sort of waiter who is always looking the other way. So I wanted, when I named a tree, to invoke a plant equal to every phase the plant had seen. I didn’t simply want to make a tree with roots, bark, branches, trunk, twigs, nesting birds, needles, and leaves; I wanted to imagine ones that were telly poles too, bore lynch limbs, and had branches to which possums were driven by packs of unpleasant dogs; I wanted trees with doors in them, clothes trees where dress suits were hung; trees that had family histories dangling from their