“Models interfere with the imagination,” William Gass insists in response to a question about how or where he gets the material for his fiction.¹ In this same interview, however, Gass confesses: “The only time I ever used a ‘model’ in writing was when, as a formal device, and to amuse myself, I chose to get the facts about ‘B’ in ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ exactly right.”² An important connection exists, I believe, between Gass's theory about the stifling effect of models on the imagination and the fact that he uses a model to create “B” in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” The narrator in that story, a “teacher, poet, folded lover,” constantly seeks models for his work and his life, and these models certainly interfere with his imagination.³ He shuns human connections and seeks literary ones; he hides behind an image of himself that he has fabricated from literary models: he is W. B. Yeats's aging artist and the etherized patient from T. S. Eliot's “Prufrock”; at various times throughout the narrative, he is Whitman's oratorical singer or Rilke's “poet of the spiritual” (202). Yet this narrator/poet is miserable, lonely, and lost in a fragmented world, much like the world of Eliot's The Waste Land, because he fails to participate fully in either art or life.

The reference to Yeats's Byzantium in the opening lines of the story signals that the narrator has left one world and entered another—the world of his own imagination.⁴ This first segment of “In the Heart” is titled “A Place,” and it characterizes the world of the story, “B,” as a place that is stagnant and decaying behind a veneer of progress and pleasantness. “B” is “fastened to a field in Indiana,” and it “always puts its best side to the highway”; for instance, on one lawn stands a “wood or plastic iron deer,” a mock representative of the artifice of Yeats's Byzantium—a substitute for the natural, sensual world that is subject to decay (172). Also in “B”, according to the narrator, the lawns are green in spring; but a careful reader will realize that spring never arrives in the story. As Gass leads us into his story, we move away from the best side of town and into an unmistakable wasteland where “gravel dust rises like breath behind the wagons” (173). “A Place” concludes with the narrator's announcement that he is “in retirement from love,” an indication that we are, indeed, in an emotional wasteland “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” (173).

With the fragmented structure of his story, Gass conveys a subliminal message of the isolation, loneliness, and departmentalized perception of his narrator. The thirty-six segments offer descriptions of, and/or observations about such varied topics as weather, church, politics, education, business, people, and wires, indicating that the narrator is somehow trying to “measure the whole” in his book of critical essays, The World Within the Word. After defining words as “deposits of meaning made almost glacially over ages … names for thoughts and things acts and other energies which only passion has command of,” Gass refers to T. S. Eliot's coffee spoon metaphor in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to illustrate his definition:

Prufrock did not measure out his life One/Two, One/Two, but carefully, in coffee spoons, from which the sugar slid, no doubt, like snow, and the beverage circled to their stir as soundlessly as a rolled eye. Morning, noon, evenings, afternoons. There was the polite chink as they came to rest in the saucers—chink chink chink … a complete world unfolds from the phrase like an auto map reveals its roads. In metaphor, meanings model one another, wear their clothes. What the poet tries to measure is the whole.⁵

However, Gass's narrator, more like Prufrock the character than Eliot the poet, slips into pools of words that drown his “measurements” in solipsistic emotional paralysis. Because Gass's poet has retired from love, he lacks the passion to command language and his stifling self-consciousness renders him unable to maintain a metaphorical vision.

In the first “Weather” section, Gass introduces the information that the narrator is a writer and that he blames the weather for his mood. Thus, the narrator reports that “it is a rare day, a day to remark on, when the sky lifts and allows the heart up. I am keeping count, and as I write this page, it is eleven days since I have seen the sun” (173). Bruce Bassoff aptly observes in “The Sacrificial World of William Gass,” “that the climate of “In the Heart” is an objective correlative for the inner state of the narrator.”⁶ That this inner state is winter, the season of stasis, of withdrawal from life, is in keeping with the wasteland imagery that opens the story of a place whose inhabitants are “lonely and empty” and “barren and loveless” (180). The next “Weather” section (segment 15) emphasizes the ubiquitous grayness of winter—even “speech is gray” (180). This segment also includes a hellish description of summer:

The heat is pure distraction. Steeped in our fluids, miserable in the folds of our bodies, we can scarcely think of anything but our sticky parts. Hot cyclonic winds and storms of dust criscross the country. … (180-81)

Through the narrator's obsessive attention to weather, Gass emphasizes a controlling irony in the story: though the narrator complains about the weather, he is the one who is responsible for the world in which he lives. His complaints suggest that he does not accept this responsibility.

Frederick Busch argues that in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” the narrator's world is “the refuge or prison he creates for himself. So we have a man who has fled the world of nature, who has somehow fallen, and who is now trapped (or hiding, or both) in his imagination. This little story is a saga of the mind.”⁷ Therefore, the present-tense season for “B” is always winter because the narrator's mood is a perpetual winter. The poet/narrator avoids thinking of spring as the season of rebirth and renewal. Thus, even when he does mention spring rain, the rain mentioned is only a memory, and it is not associated with desire or awakening to life; instead, he insists that “in the spring it rains as well, and trees fill with ice” (181).

By the time he narrates the final “Weather” section of the story, Gass's poet has begun to realize the fallacy of blaming the weather for his barren, loveless predicament. He claims: “I would rather it were the weather that was to blame for what I am and what my friends and neighbors are—we who live here in the heart of the country”; but he equivocates in the next sentence with “better the weather, the wind, the pale dying snow … the snow—why not the snow?” (191). In the following paragraph, however, the poet again attempts to accept responsibility for his world by stating, “a cold fall rain is blackening the trees or the air is like lilac and full of parachuting seeds. Who cares to live in any season but his own?” (192). But he backs away immediately from the frightful prospect that he has created his own sickness and answers himself; “Still I suspect the secret's in this snow, the secret of our sickness, if we could only diagnose it, for we are all dying like the elms in Urbana” (192). Thus, we are back to winter again in the heart of the country of this story.

Gass's poet, finding himself in a dormant winter state, attempts to gain a new perspective in the section titled “My House” (segment 3) by climbing the high stumps of the headless maple trees behind his house “like a boy to watch the country sail away …” (173). Here he has the revelation that “I think then I know why I've come here: to see, and so to go out against new things” (173). But his resolution lasts only as long as he is perched upon his tree stump. By the next “house” section (segment 7), the poet has retreated from his perch; he has moved inside where he faces his inability to create; he seems to have abandoned his resolution to “go out against new things.” Here we find that “leaves move in the windows,” and the narrator cannot tell us “how beautiful it is, what it means” (175). The next “house” section, “My House, This Place and Body” (segment 13), illustrates the narrator's final retreat from his previous resolution. Here, he explains: “I've fallen as fast as the poet, to the sixth sort of body, this house in B, in Indiana, with its blue gray bewitching windows, holy magical insides. Great thick evergreens protect its entry. And I live in” (179). Following this announcement of total withdrawal, Gass reasserts his narrator's connection to the land with “this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well” (179). But the poet is not well; he has not been able to re-create the “ecstasy on a tree stump,” which originally inspired him to “go out against new things” (173).

In fact, he has achieved the reverse of meaningful interaction with humanity or movement toward new knowledge: he now “lives in” and his thoughts are dominated by his past, and particularly his failed love affair. But in spite of his self pity and narrow perception, the poet continues to make metaphors. He calls his love a fiction, “a figure out of Twain” (179); and later, as Busch notes, “the beloved is on a raft with the poet and is simultaneously the river on which they drift. She becomes a metaphor for the Finn-like journey from the real and noxious world.”⁸ Gass's achievement in this metaphor is twofold: he demonstrates that his narrator still has creative powers, the recuperative powers necessary to deliver himself from his living hell; however, the narrator's creative production is clearly limited by his solipsism, and thus incapable of becoming something new, something separate from its maker: a work of art.⁹

The section that follows “My House, This Place and Body” consists of one paragraph titled “The Same Person” (segment 14) that intensifies the theme that the narrator's ability to make metaphors cannot save him as long as he lacks love and flees from commitment to his community. In this passage, the narrator encounters Billy Holsclaw at the post office. The details of the segment contribute to Gass's portrait of his narrator as a person who deliberately cuts himself off from humanity. The setting is ironic since the post office itself represents connections with the world outside of the character's immediate sphere—communications, messages sent forth, messages received. And here Billy Holsclaw talks “greedily” to his neighbor “about the weather” (179). The narrator observes: “His [Billy's] head bobs on a wild flood of words, and I take the violence to be a measure of his eagerness for speech” (179-80). But instead of responding to Billy's need for fellowship, the narrator retreats: “I leave him … and our encounter drives me sadly home to poetry—where there's no answer” (180).

The two remaining sections that deal specifically with Billy, “That Same Person” (segment 23) and “The First Person” (segment 33) support the interpretation that Gass employs “fluid identifications” for his narrator, and that Billy is one of these identifications.¹⁰ The narrator, therefore, expresses his own desire for stasis when he says about Billy, “Quite selfishly I want him to remain the way he is—counting his sticks and logs, sitting on his sill in the soft early sun—though I'm not sure what his presence means to me … or to anyone” (190). Immediately following this passage, the poet reasserts that “Byzantium” desire to become a work of art and thus remove himself from the world of senses and decay. He speculates, “whether, given time, I might someday find a figure in our language which would serve him [Billy] faithfully, and furnish his poverty and loneliness richly out” (190). Here he projects onto Billy that which he desires for himself—immortality through art.

That Gass's narrator shuns Billy because he shuns the natural forces of life is expressed most clearly in “The First Person.” The poet confesses that by severing himself from humanity, “I did not restore my house to its youth, but to its age” (202). Though Billy is old, tattered, and almost blind, the narrator says, “I'm inclined to say you [Billy] aren't half the cripple I am, for there is nothing left of me but mouth” (202). But he retracts this metaphor as just “another lie of poetry” before finally declaring: “My organs are all there, though it's there where I fail—at the roots of my experience” (202). Here the poet recognizes that he has the equipment to be human (bodily organs), but that he has cut himself off from the community of human experience, the roots of humanity. Thus Gass articulates in “In the Heart” perhaps the most important theme from Eliot, the central question in The Waste Land: “What are the roots that clutch?”¹¹ Eliot suggests that the roots, which keep modern man alive, are the roots of myth, of death, and of rebirth. Christ's sacrifice is part of this continuum, and Christ's message merges in The Waste Land with the Vedic order: “Give. Sympathize. Control.” When Gass's narrator says that he has failed at the roots of his experience, he is recognizing that his experience has not been human: his love has been a fiction (179), his childhood a lie of poetry (205), and his present existence is a retirement from love (173).

Admittedly unsuccessful at both art and life, the poet/narrator of “In the Heart” cannot see that his failure results from his unwillingness to give to either of these processes the central ingredient of both—love. He tries, instead, to substitute order. Beginning the first of three “Politics” sections (segment 8) with the half sentence “for all those not in love,” the poet signals that he is actually addressing himself. He proceeds, then, with a brief paragraph about two political figures, Batista and Castro, who have been engaged in a power struggle for control of Cuba. Perhaps because he identifies with Batista, a man who has lost his power, the poet's commentary in “Politics” degenerates into egocentric metaphor with “A squad of Pershing Rifles at the moment, I make myself Right Face: Legislation packs the screw of my intestines. Well, king of the classroom's king of the hill. You used to waddle when you walked because my sperm between your legs was draining to a towel” (175).

Finally, this section turns into a Whitman parody with “I chant, I beg, I command, I sing—” (175). Alluding to the conclusions of the first and second sections of The Waste Land, Gass's poet sings:

Good-bye … Good-bye … Oh, I shall always wait
                                        You, Larry, traveler—
                                                            stranger,
                                                                      son,
                                                                                —my friend—
my little girl, my poem, my heart, my self, my childhood. (175-76)

This conflation of the conclusions to “The Burial of the Dead” and “A Game of Chess” suggests that the poet of “In the Heart” is trying desperately to unify his own experiences through another writer's consciousness.

But none of his literary models can contain the material that Gass's narrator would like to pour into them, and the attempt at narrative control in “Politics” fails by breaking into a lamentation of personal bewilderment and ineffectiveness. Interrupting the political discussion, and introducing the Whitman parody and the Eliot allusion, the poet whimpers: “I cannot write the poetry of such proposals, the poetry of politics, though sometimes—often—always now—I am in an uneasy place of equal powers which makes a state” (175). The “uneasy place” for the narrator is a zone of his own invention. Caught between the equal powers of life and death, he finds himself in a state of living death. Escape requires change, and change is what this character fears the most. Therefore, instead of venturing forth into the unknown, making new relationships, Gass's narrator tries to enter the world of literature and thus escapes death.

In “Politics” and similar sections containing spliced allusions and frustrated rantings, Gass demonstrates the futility of his character's attempt to find a formula for his feelings or a system of values through literature. As Charles Newman explains Gass's theory of fiction, “it [fiction] is a process of signification which does not unify experiences but is its own experience.”¹² According to Gass, truths exist within the world of a piece of fiction that apply to that fiction. When we sever these truths from their fictional universe, we inevitably distort what we have extracted by trying to fit that fragment of fiction into our lives in any meaningful way. The work itself is truth, complete and whole, and the process of reading it is the process of discovering the world of truths within the words. Gass will allow that good works of literature deal with ambiguities that “can be made into an orderly revelation of meaning”; but readers are to measure their lives against that meaning, not extract that meaning to live by.¹³ Thus, the poet/narrator of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” fails to find meaning in his life because he refuses to participate in the process of living.

At times, however, the poet of this story appears to be committed to his quest for physical, spiritual, and emotional restoration. In the fourth “house” section, “My House, My Cat, My Company” (segment 18), he declares resolutely, “I must organize myself,” (182) which reveals that he is attempting to exert some kind of control over his life. This control is manifest through language as the poet divides his existence into titled sections that vary in content, structure, and point of view. But his search is characterized generally by directionless commentary that invariably slips away from objective observations or rational discourse into narcissistic whining. As he casts about for topics of discussion, the “folded lover” admits his lack of control:

My will is like the rosy dustlike light in this room: soft, diffuse, and generally comforting. It lets me do … anything … nothing. My ears hear what they happen to; I eat what's put before me, my eyes see what blunders into them; my thoughts are not thoughts, they are dreams. I'm empty or I'm full … depending; and I cannot choose. (182)

Here, the narrative voice of control discloses itself as a mere pose, the echo of modern consciousness.¹⁴

When Gass's narrator announces in “My House, My Cat, My Company” (segment 18) that “I am learning to restore myself, my house, my body, by paying court to gardens, cats and running water, and with neighbors keeping company,” he seems to have reached beyond himself to make a meaningful human connection (183). He refers to his eighty-five year old neighbor, Mrs. Desmond, as his “right-hand friend” and describes her obsession with loss and death (183). In the next paragraph of this segment, however, the poet reveals that he and Mrs. Desmond do not really communicate, that there is no real relationship between them: “We do not converse. She visits me to talk. My task to murmur. … Her talk's a fence—a shade drawn, window fastened, door that's locked. …” (184). Thus, in his “listening posture,” the narrator retreats to his past, remembers listening to his grandfather talk, compares himself to “badly stacked cards,” and recalls his lost love affair in terms of a card game (184). This scene underscores the fact that the only character with whom the narrator even pretends to keep company is a character who, like himself, uses language as a protective fence to bar any real contact with others.¹⁵

Gass describes his poet as “one person who's having a lot of problems looking at certain things in the town in a certain way”; he adds that his poet, in fact, “is suffering from a lack of perception of the world.”¹⁶ Everywhere the narrator looks in “B,” he sees himself, his own inadequacies, metaphors for blindness and failure. One of three “Business” sections (segment 22), for instance, focuses on failed enterprises. A particularly vivid image in the section is a torn campaign poster that blocks the windows of a watch repair shop and urges viewers “to vote for half an orange beblazoned man who as a whole one failed two years ago to win at his election” (189). Significantly, this poster blocks the narrator's view of a watch repair shop, a place where broken timing mechanisms can be restored. This image draws attention to the fact that the poet is stuck in time, suffering from a perpetual winter, fearing both life and death.¹⁷

The very next passage articulates explicitly the narrator's fear of the unknown:

What do the sightless windows see, I wonder, when the sun throws a passerby against them? Here a stair unfolds toward the street—dark, rickety, and treacherous—and I always feel, as I pass it, that if I just went carefully up and turned the corner at the landing, I would find myself out of the world. But I've never had the courage. (189-90),

The poet himself is the half man on the poster who “failed two years ago to win at his election” (189). Instead of going on with his life, “going out against new things,” he clings to his past failures and shuns pathways that lead to unknown experience. In this passage, Gass's poet echoes Prufrock's question: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”

By beginning the story with words lifted from Yeats, then relying upon images, patterns, and themes from Eliot, Rilke, Whitman, and others, Gass underlines an important impulse of his narrator's character: he approaches art, as well as life, selfishly, with a limited consciousness that attempts to appropriate words, experiences, and emotions from other sources because his own creative and procreative faculties are paralyzed. In The World Within the Word, Gass exhorts readers to “watch out for images which are merely telephonic sums, for explanations which aren't really meant but are, like plastic bosoms and paste gems, only designed to dazzle. We confine ourselves to too few models, and sometimes live in them as if they were, themselves, the world.”¹⁸ In the narrator of “In the Heart,” Gass creates a character who dramatically cripples himself with explanations only designed to dazzle, a character who confines himself to too few models and lives in those models as if they were the world. His attempt to find his own poetic voice is obstructed by the clutter of poetic images, phrases, and postures that he borrows from the world of literature and tries to piece together to make his own statement.

That the narrator's own words out of which he models his wasteland world are barriers to his renewal is most evident in the final “house” section, “House, My Breath and Window” (segment 28). In this segment, consisting of one long single paragraph, the narrator explains that his window “is a grave, and all that lies within it's dead” (195). What lies within this death frame is not only the view of the world outside, but also the narrator's reflection that merges with the outside setting by the end of the paragraph. The poet's breath becomes visible on the glass, he says, to “befog its country and bespill myself” (195). In this scene, Gass dramatizes how his narrator's words blur the outside world and drive him in upon himself. The poet speaks to his own reflection here; he becomes his own audience: “Ah, my friend, your face is pale, the weather cloudy: a street has been felled through your chin, bare trees do nothing, houses take root in their rectangles, a steeple stands up in your head. You speak of loving; then give me a kiss. The pane is cold” (196).

The narrator's narcissistic gesture epitomizes the personal limitations that trap him in his cold, static world. The poet cannot find his way out of this wasteland because his vision encompasses only himself. He grasps only a fragment of Eliot's climactic message at the end of The Waste Land. He gives to no one; he sympathizes only with himself; and his attempt to control his world through language fails because he lacks love, the vital ingredient needed to transform language into art. At the end of the story, Gass's poet/narrator remains, still, in the wasteland winter of his own imagination.

Notes

1. Joe David Bellamy, The New Fiction: Interviews With Innovative American Writers (Chicago: U of P, 1974) 36.

2. Bellamy 36. Surprisingly few critics have tried to explicate the story or to come to a satisfactory understanding of the narrator's character. The most comprehensive study of “In the Heart” is Frederick Busch's article, “But This Is What It Is Like To Live in Hell: William H. Gass's ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,’” Modern Fiction Studies, 19.1 (Spring 1973) 97-108. Also, Bruce Bassoff includes a brief discussion of the story as part of his article, “The Sacrificial World of William Gass: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 18.1 (Fall 1976) 36-58.

3. William H. Gass, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1968) 175. Subsequent references to the story are cited from this edition and noted by page number in the text of the essay. To distinguish between sections of the story that have identical titles, and to assist the reader in making sequential connections between story segments, I have numbered the segments of the story and make a note of the number whenever I refer to a section not previously mentioned.

4. Both Busch and Bassoff discuss the implications of Gass's allusions to Yeats's poem.

5. William H. Gass, The World Within the Word (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978) 275.

6. Bassoff 47.

7. Busch 100.

8. Busch 102.

9. William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) 284-85.

10. Bassoff 38.

11. All references to T. S Eliot's poem, The Waste Land, are cited from The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, ed. Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1973) 459-71.

12. Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985) 63-64.

13. “A Colloquy with William H. Gass,” Modern Fiction Studies, 29.4 (Winter 1983) 608. See also Ned French, “Against the Grain: Theory and Practice in the Work of William H. Gass,” Iowa Review, 7.1 (Spring 1976) 102.

14. Bassoff introduces his discussion of “In the Heart” by calling the story “a fiction about the relation between poetry and false consciousness.”

15. Bassoff 49.

16. “A Colloquy With William H. Gass,” 607.

17. Busch 106.

18. The World Within the Word, 274.