‘In The Heart of The Heart of the Country’ by William H. Gass

This is what got me into Gass. Pure love of writing—even though in some interview he said he wrote from hate. I mentioned a few Lish people in this list. Love of language, even if it’s silly sometimes. I always sought out a Lish/Gass essay. Never found one to my satisfaction. If someone wants to pay me I’ll try. There’s a clear love of language in both of them—Gass’s writing and in the writing of the writer’s edited by Lish. I don’t love much of Lish’s writing. But I’ll stop and get back to Gass: ‘In The Heart of the Heart of the Country’. It’s a story about place. A short story in chapters/sections. Section titles include: A Place, Weather, My House, A Person, Politics, The Church. And there are others. Many repeated. List heavy—see sections having to do with Vital Data. I like this guy Billy who shows up in the story. He stomps around the high grass and weeds around his house. His head bobs, he counts sticks and logs, collects coal, he bends down to pick up something shiny.

First published in New American Review, 1967, and collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Harper & Row, 1968, which was republished by NYRB, 2014. Also in The William H. Gass Reader, Knopf, 2018

‘The Pedersen Kid’ by William H. Gass

Chosen by Daniel Davis Wood

William H. Gass once said he wrote ‘The Pedersen Kid’ “to entertain a toothache”. But his casual levity is a sleight-of-hand, a chicanery that betrays none of the sinister things at the heart of the story. Set in the American Midwest in deepest winter, in a rural clearing distinguished only by a pair of farmhouses, what makes ‘The Pedersen Kid’ so sinister is its smothering snow. The snow abducts and oppresses. It doesn’t just drift or fall; it “curl[s] around” and “crawl[s] over” bodies, and it obliterates all features of the terrain until “[t]here wasn’t anything around. There wasn’t anything: a tree or a stick or a rock whipped bare”. The snow, here, is an impersonal force of nature whose power is subtraction, the erasure of the world, and it becomes all the more sinister when the few inhabitants of this wasteland abuse it for personal ends—to conceal their secrets, their ill intentions, and their whereabouts.

Usually with Gass, the artistry lies in the exuberance of the language. In ‘The Pedersen Kid’, though, it’s more to be found in the quite atypical tone: muted, indeed anodyne, in a way that suggests cold calculations behind each and every line. There’s a good deal of action, appropriately seasonal—a child returns from the dead (maybe) to offer a sort of salvation—but what abides, finally, is the chilling composure of the sentences with which Gass takes the measure of human souls as denuded as the snowscape around them.

First published in MSS, 1961. Collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, HarperCollins, 1968, and The William H Gass Reader, Penguin Random House, 2018. * Daniel Davis Wood is a writer based in Scotland. His début novel, Blood and Bone, won the Viva La Novella Prize in his native Australia, and his follow-up, At the Edge of the Solid World, was published to acclaim in 2020. He also runs Splice (www.ThisIsSplice.co.uk), a small press focusing on adventurous, unconventional literature. You can read his other contributions to A Personal Anthology here.

‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ by William H. Gass

This story was assigned by Sigrid Nunez in a class on autobiographical fiction that I took in my very first semester at Columbia. The ‘Heart’ of which Gass writes is at once the vast breadth of the American Midwest, and the soft, vulnerable centres of the human heart. The story, as I understood it from Nunez’s class, came out of a travel article Gass had been asked to write about his hometown in Indiana. But he was heartbroken, and so the story is a piece of formal strangeness, assembled from the detritus of the article, a collection thirty-six discrete vignettes addressed to a ‘you’ who has broken our writer’s heart, a portrait of his town and a portrait of his heartbreak. It is, in short, a kind of essay-story, and to that end it made me hugely excited about the possibility that one could combine the two. I also highly recommend Etel Adnan’s 2004 response to Gass, In The Heart of the Heart of Another Country, published by City Lights.

First published in New American Review, 1967. Collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, 1968, available in the NYRB Classics edition, 2015. Available to read here