The Fascism of the Heart

WILLIAM H. GASS, the portly pontiff of English prose, felt for literature an intense ardor that imbues his audacious fiction and his studious, poetic criticism with almost frightening virtuosity—labyrinthine syntax, a vast vocabulary comprising many arcane words, brilliance achieved through obsessive revisions, every sentence worked and reworked over and over. And yet, as obvious as his love for the written word was, he famously said, in a 1977 interview, “I write because I hate.” How does someone who writes out of hate write so beautifully? He makes you wonder what hate really means and begin to appreciate the profound creative power, and beauty, of that emotion we consider so ugly.