By Chris Vaughan
When William H. Gass began The Tunnel, Nixon was president and America landed on the moon. A chapter called “We Have Not Lived the Right Life” first appeared almost intact in New American Review in 1969, but the world would have to wait another twenty-seven years to find out how that chapter connected to “Sweet Things” (Harpers, 1996), published when Bill Clinton held the reigns of a U. S. A. William Kohler, narrator of The Tunnel, would likely have given as little thought to as moon landings or Vietnam. The Tunnel is contemporary to every era of spleen because William Kohler reserves his hatred for no period or peoples in particular. His poetry of apoplexy is for all ages of anxiety.
For Kohler, Presidential inaugurations, earthquakes, murders, coups, scandals, revolutions are sewer water sluicing through the tunnels of history. Heraclitus and Hitler are closer to him than J. F. K. or the war in Vietnam. Not pinned down by modern sensibilities, swaddled in fashionable theories, or satisfied with a lukewarm marriage, Gass’s Kohler is the perfect beast of middling-late-twentieth century male anxiety, a beast that had yet to find itself pathetically and publicly outraged by its impotence. Eloquent and enraged, uneasy in his own era and baggy skin, Kohler brims with bile for almost everything: wife, sons, colleagues (Planmantee, Herschel, Governali, and, slightly less so, Culp the limerick-meister), students, parents, aunts and uncles, Grand, Ohio, his neighbours, his past, the future, though not to overlook the spleen he fires at himself, his habits, hangups, distractions, the way he can’t quite be done with his ego’s opus: Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany.
The Tunnel is a book that began as William Kohler’s introduction to Guilt and Innocence but became his confession, diary, manifesto for the Party of Disappointed People (Kohler goes as far as inventing the PDP’s logo, banners, badges, philippics), his memoir and testimony, repository for every gripe and grudge and complaint, full of limericks and doggerel, and a report on his latest project to dig a tunnel through the basement of his house undetected; the pages outgrow the academic introduction that’s never written and he hides them, his “container of consciousness,” within the manuscript of Guilt and Innocence, so that his wife Martha won’t discover his secret self.
It’s unlikely Martha would be too surprised though. Both Martha and Lou, his wife and once-lover, detest him. When Lou meets Bill in a café to call off their fling, he believes she chose a busy café to call it off in order to stop him making a scene. Knowing William Kohler over seven hundred pages, we can understand Lou’s fear of being alone with him, fearing he’d use language to seduce her again and prolong their love affair. Kohler’s seductions are a feast of language that leave no hors d’oeuvre unturned. After Lou has left him, and his wife has long resented him, he only has himself left to seduce, resulting in the long love letter to the “fascism of the heart”: The Tunnel.
Kohler is a compulsive voyeur, never quite comfortable in the open. In the chapter “Kristallnacht,” Kohler spies on a man across the street and invents his biography, taking pleasure in imagining what he can’t see when the curtains are drawn. Much later, in his office at an American university, Kohler finds maintenance passages behind a panel he unscrews, obsessing over his new hiding place, never content unless he’s in forbidden territory, deceiving, a secret, worming through his tunnel, climbing the pipes of his university passages, entombed in a trunk as a kid, where he seems to have first appreciated his love of becoming as close to nothing as possible. If not digging holes or escaping into maintenance tunnels, Kohler is busy building barricades to keep the world at bay, as here in one of Gass’s great word monuments:
“Boxes of sworn affidavits, cartons of cottage cheese, oysters hung from little wires. You wouldn’t believe the strength of it. I tell my students to do something with their lives. Build a barricade. They expect it to be built of twine and birdlime, sputum, the usual. Official optimism. Old affections. Soft cheese will withstand almost anything. They expect it to be surreal. Heartbeats without hearts. That sort of old-hat hat. The wheels will have come off all the old barricades. You’ve done enough, my son said. For one, you haven’t written poetry. Rest on that laurel. I answered gruffly: You can’t build a barricade with images, transparencies, figures of speech, madames reclining on divans and other deeds, gowns by David, picnics on the grass, and such like. They terrify the blind. My wife said, then my first son said, then my second son said: I don’t want to be in your barricade. I said: You’re in. Things are our only feelings, I said. Collect them. Use them. Treasure them. For instance: the vacuum cleaner, Uncle Balt’s hunting license, that congealed smear of jelly on the kitchen counter. I could have fooled everyone and built it of street stones and desktops and lawn chairs.”
The Tunnel is another such barricade built of words.
Kohler’s hatred finds some respite in his awe for Magus Tabor, and Mad Meg, his former professor while Kohler was studying history in Berlin during the late 30s, who cheers Hitler’s Third Reich as something like an inevitability. Kohler isn’t prone to hero worship, but writing about Tabor’s performances at the university, less lectures than rallies full of metaphysics and spite, is as close as Kohler comes to praise; even his love for Lou is one-sided, greedy, he’s no simple misogynist as he’ll claim his hate can’t be engendered, his hate, that famous “fascism of the heart,” won’t narrow its scope. Most cynically of all, to demonstrate that his hate bears no prejudice, he tells us that after joining the Kristallnacht mob in 1938, he threw a brick through a Jewish grocer’s window but balanced the act by smashing a goy window too. In this confession, we get the truest portrait of Kohler’s spleen, which takes up the largest part of him.
Kohler’s at his lyrical finest the further he goes back into his past, finding the young Kohler adrift in a world of friendless birthday parties crowned by puddled cake baked by his alcoholic mother, an aunt who hoards every scrap of her life in case it’ll come in useful, because her purpose is to impose her usefulness on the Kohler household, and the enlarged spleen he inherited from a father who’s bigoted, bitter, true heir and führer of the PDP (Party of the Disappointed People). Kohler is poet laureate of that party. History, his discipline, is a catalogue of unrealized events, his marriage a tit-for-tat of resentment, his children a reminder of failure, a constant aggravation; but Kohler’s language is his tunnel of love and one space in a world whacked out of shape.
In The Tunnel, we hear Kohler’s “mind munch” seeking lost time, though with less Proustian love to steer it. After his bark loses its bite and bile its acid, Kohler’s playfulness becomes less fun as he begins brooding further back in time. When Kohler’s not playing word games anymore or making doggerel of his life, what we’re left with are those pages where the accumulated effect is one of manic longing for his history to be more than it is, for his life that’s left such a bitter taste to amount to more than dirt dumped onto his great work. In one of the novel’s culminations, Martha discovers the soil he’s been smuggling in her antique furniture. And that’s how Kohler’s consciousness leaves off, ending in a bad pun: dirty drawers.
Gass began writing The Tunnel in 1969 and completed it twenty-seven years later in 1996; and now, twenty-eight years later, Dalkey Archive will publish the first e-book version of the tome. What keeps us coming back to The Tunnel? Why read a book packed with so much spleen, bile overflowing from the repugnant mind of a man like Kohler? Gass had one overriding goal: whether writing essays, short stories, or novels, he endeavored to make the page sing. In The Tunnel, Gass made a monster sing. Taking Kohler, a petty and justifiably unloved figure who’s failed at life, using that of all containers of consciousness to construct a work of such complexity and beauty, Gass produced a marvel. In The Tunnel, Gass transformed inchoate thoughts into art, constructed an intricate monument out of Kohler’s mess, and above all made music out of Kohler’s bark. Gass’s multi-tonal music in The Tunnel was “written by the mouth for the ear,” as he once claimed was “the way [he’d] like to write”; and it’s a profound pleasure to keep listening.
