To Read: John Gardner
John Gardner was one of our most unusual writers. He was distinctly American, yet had far-flung interests involving Medieval lore and fairy tales. He was a writing teacher, staunchly preferring the traditional standards of direct language, character-driven plots and deploring everything post-modern and cynical. Yet he wrote some wildly experimental fiction himself, which could nearly be self-consciously stylized.
He also did translations, biographies, books for children, books of poetry, treatises on the craft of writing and short stories in addition to his handful of novels. He died at only forty-nine years old in a motorcycle accident, in 1982. Considering that he did not get any books published until his 30’s, that gives a good idea of just how prolific he was, and everything else we may have missed.
John Gardner first came to my attention with his book On Becoming a Novelist, which I read in my senior year of high school. I was required to read it for my creative writing class. I initially hated him. I thought he was a pompus academic of the most despicable kind and let the teachers know this. To the lay person, who is first confronted with his opinions, especially in his book On Moral Fiction, this reaction is not uncommon. Gardner had a conservative curmudgeonliness about him, and tended towards making outrageous denunciations of writers who were accepted as fairly great: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike, for example.
However, my own reticence was accompanied by a curiosity. Soon I found myself seeking out other books he had written, or at least browsing them. One thing that additionally attracted me was how hard they were to find, how ancient and cast-aside they seemed. It was impossible to find any of his books aside from Grendel and On Becoming a Novelist in a regular bookstore. Many of his novels are accompanied by illustrations, giving them the impression of a folktale.
My first introduction to Gardner’s actual fiction was Grendel; this is a book written from the point of view of the monster in Beowulf, who meets his astonishing fate at the hands of the warrior in the title. That it is told from the point of view of a creature rather than a person and is written in a semi-colloquial, semi-philosophical rambling style is what I mean when I say Gardner himself was an experimental writer.
Following Grendel, I read Nickel Mountain, a beautiful book set in the Catskills; although it contains elements of magic realism, it is a generally straighforward story set in contemporary times, and is probably my favorite of his works that I’ve read. I read some of his short stories and eventually his final novel, a long, exasperating book called Mickelsson’s Ghosts.
What was equally interesting, to me, were the various stories I sometimes heard about him, from people who had either seen him lecture or met him in person. My father said he visited his college to read from his most recent novel in the 70’s. Another person I know as an acquaintance said he worked as a bartender at a writer’s retreat in upstate New York where Gardner occasionally went; he simply remarked that Gardner was a “strange person.” In most pictures you can find of him, he has long, white hair and is smoking a pipe. It seems he was something of an alcoholic, which likely contributed to his motorcycle accident.
The saddest fact I would come to realize about Gardner was that the literary world had the same reaction to him that I initially had. His criticisms of contemporary writers were seen as mean-spirited and his own novels were criticized as being long-winded and self-indulgent. Once a literary star, he was banished from the literary world and is now almost unread. New Directions Paperbacks, however, has recently republished a select few of his novels, one of which– The Sunlight Dialogues— we have here in Snell. Go and check out this great unknown’s books while you can; we have a handful on the shelves.
