Sentences Seeking, and Finding, Forms: On Some Passages in Barnaby Rudge
William Gass died a few days ago, and, as I do when a writer I value dies, I returned to his work. I read around in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country , and then A Temple of Texts , where, in the essay "The Sentence Seeks Its Form", I read: Between Shakespeare and Joyce, there is no one but Dickens who has an equal command of the English language. This struck me because I hadn't ever particularly thought of Gass as a Dickens man. You won't find, for instance, a Dickens novel listed in the book's earlier essay on "Fifty Literary Pillars" , nor has Gass written at length about Dickens in the way he has so many other writers. (But still, many of us have writers we cherish, or at least admire, about whom we've written little or nothing.) I found, going back through his essays, that Gass has scattered brief insights about Dickens throughout; not only is there the wonderful discussion of David Copperfield , Mr. Micawber, and details in ...