As a young man, William Gass made, what he called, a rather “odd decision.” One day while in college, he sat at his desk and forced himself “with the greatest deliberation” to write in a different script. He told an interviewer in 1976 (when he was 52) that he had wanted to change the physical nature of the words, “which even then were all of [him he] cared to have admired.” He went on for years after, writing everything, “marginal notes, reminders, messages — in a hand that was very Germanic and stiff.” If he were to “eventually write anything which has any enduring merit,” he claims it will be because of this change, because, as he has it, “I stuffed another tongue in my mouth.”
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