A Writer’s Life

Gardner is too good to be forgotten without a fight. Born in Batavia, New York, in 1933, he was a farm boy who went away to college. Although he wrote furiously through his twenties, his first novel, “The Resurrection,” didn’t appear until 1966, and then to little notice. His second novel, “The Wreckage of Agathon,” received some fine reviews but nothing more when it was published in 1970. Only in 1971 with “Grendel”–an inspired retelling of “Beowulf” from the point of view of the monster–was he finally established, at close to forty, as a writer to reckon with.

The voice of Grendel, telling his own story, is a narrative invention as distinctive as Melville’s Ishmael, Bellow’s Augie March, or Ellison’s Invisible Man. Now crude, now tender, ridiculous and poignant, the voice of the monster is the human writ large, caricatured with witty incongruity: this selfish bag of bones with a soul and an insatiable yearning for the true, the beautiful, the divine. Parodying the conventions of the Old English poetry he loved (his Grendel is mad for alliteration), shifting registers effortlessly from high archaic to anachronistic modern vernacular, Gardner works the antinomies that define humanity even into the texture of his sentences. And if the reader notices that the dragon which Grendel visits sounds suspiciously like Jean-Paul Sartre, so much the better.

For the next decade, until his death in 1982, Gardner was ubiquitous. He followed the critical success of “Grendel” with three widely praised and bestselling novels: “The Sunlight Dialogues” in 1972, “Nickel Mountain” in 1973, and “October Light” in 1976. A dazzling collection of short fiction, The King’s Indian, had appeared in 1974, not to mention the book-length poem “Jason and Medeia,” several children’s books, libretti for operas, and a shelf of translations and literary criticism of works in Old and Middle English.

While enjoying a triumphant run such as few writers ever achieve, Gardner was hardly solitary and inaccessible. His long, prematurely white hair and always-present pipe made him immediately recognizable. A new interview with him seemed to appear every week: rapid-fire literary talk, by turns passionate and sly, often outrageous, not infrequently contradicting in some particulars the interview he had given the week before. It was clear at a glance why students flocked to his classes.

Yet having reached this summit of literary celebrity, Gardner took a mighty fall. In April 1978, not long after he underwent surgery for colon cancer, he published “On Moral Fiction,” an important but deeply flawed book in which he took self-serving swipes at many of his contemporaries and generally muddied the waters even as he rightly decried the fashionably glib nihilism of so much contemporary fiction. That same month, Peter Prescott in Newsweek accused Gardner of excessive and unacknowledged borrowing from other scholars in his biography of Chaucer, published the year before. A year or so earlier, Gardner had left his first wife, Joan, after years of bitter wrangling, and was living intermittently with one of his students, Liz Rosenberg (whom he married in 1980 when his divorce became final). As he learned early in 1979, he owed the IRS several hundred thousand dollars in unpaid taxes. This was the author of “On Moral Fiction”–a jeremiad which, to top it off, laid down aesthetic laws that his own fiction flagrantly violated.

The resulting controversy dominated the response to Gardner’s remaining fiction, and to some extent has continued to shape perceptions of his work. A cluster of critical studies, including a couple that are quite good, appeared in the decade after his death, but since then there has been very little.

The time is right for Barry Silesky’s new biography, which should draw attention back to Gardner’s own fiction. Silesky’s book was preceded several years ago by “On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner,” a valuable memoir by Susan Thornton, the woman Gardner was about to marry when he lost control of his motorcycle on a gentle curve near his home in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. Taken together, they give a much fuller picture of Gardner than has previously been available.

Silesky is an honorable biographer–and if that seems like damning with faint praise, you haven’t read many biographies lately. He is humane, honest but never prurient, candid about Gardner’s flaws yet not assuming superiority to his subject. As a writer, alas, Silesky is mediocre, and he hasn’t been helped by his editors. It has been a while since I encountered a book so carelessly edited, full of howlers, solecisms, clumsy repetition, and other signs of negligence.

Silesky frames his account of Gardner’s life with two accidents. The first took place in April 1945 on the family farm in western New York, when eleven-year-old Gardner ran over his six-year-old brother, Gilbert, who had been riding on the bar between the tractor Gardner was driving and the cultipacker he was pulling, a 1,500-pound double roller that crushed the younger boy. (A lightly fictionalized account of the event appears in the story “Redemption,” from the 1981 collection, “The Art of Living.”) The September 1982 motorcycle accident that concludes Silesky’s narrative ended Gardner’s life.

HOW MUCH the life Gardner lived between those accidents was shaped by that April day will remain a matter of speculation. What’s beyond debate is the character of that life. Gardner was driven and ferociously ambitious, but his ambitions were for his art as much as for himself. He was often close to intolerable, with his infidelities, his drunkenness, his arrogance–and yet he was an exhilarating talker, an inspiring and generous teacher, and an inexhaustible impresario. He had a gift for encouraging talent, becoming one of the first editors to publish Joyce Carol Oates, and he was Raymond Carver’s most influential teacher.

He was also, as his friend the poet Dave Smith recalled, a compulsive liar and a world-class put-on artist–yet with a sweetness, too, that is caught in some photos of the early 1970s, before he put on the mask of the clown. Beneath all his acts was a purity of intention that doesn’t excuse his self-indulgence but that justifies Silesky’s labor and makes Gardner’s books worth seeking out: not only those the critics loved when he was riding high (“October Light,” in fact, hasn’t aged well) but also those that were savaged when he became public enemy number one on literary hit lists. “Freddy’s Book” is greatly undervalued, and “Mickelsson’s Ghosts,” published the year he died, is a fitting capstone to his lifework.

GARDNER’S OVERRIDING THEME was Milton’s–to justify the ways of God to man. “I think he never got over being a Christian,” Dave Smith said, “though he once told me when I asked him about this that he was the last worshipper of Zeus.” “Blessed are the meek,” proclaims the Dickensian hero of “The Sunlight Dialogues,” Fred Clumly, police chief of Batavia, after he has lost his job, “by which I mean all of us. . . . God be kind to all Good Samaritans and also bad ones. For such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

It’s fashionable to bemoan the current divisiveness that rends the nation as “unprecedented,” but I suspect Gardner would be amused by such hand-wringing. America in 1966, as depicted in “The Sunlight Dialogues”–when a long-haired, terribly scarred anarchist who calls himself the Sunlight Man writes the word “love” across two lanes of Oak Street and is thrown in jail–is no less divided than the country today. No less divided than Grendel’s heart, for that matter. You want to take the pulse of America? Read John Gardner.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.