{"id":115497,"date":"2017-09-14T14:00:30","date_gmt":"2017-09-14T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=115497"},"modified":"2017-09-14T17:22:41","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T21:22:41","slug":"john-gardners-tangled-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/14\/john-gardners-tangled-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"John Gardner\u2019s Tricksy Death and Tangled Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

From the cover of John Gardner\u2019s Grendel<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I think it has given a few readers pleasure. And I suppose it may have depressed a few. I hope it does more good than harm.<\/p>\n

\u2014John Gardner, when asked what effect he thinks his writing has had on people, in conversation in The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>, issue no. 75<\/a>\u00a0(Spring 1979).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two weeks before his third wedding, John Gardner, novelist and writing teacher, was drifting in a small boat on a lake in the middle of the night, despairing. He\u2019d lost control of his personal life, his health, and his finances. Once made rich by his best sellers, he now owed five hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. Once a literary darling, he\u2019d made himself an\u00a0outcast. That night on the lake, he told his friend he was afraid he was going to die. And days later\u2014thirty-five years ago to the day\u2014he did. John Gardner was only forty-nine when his motorcycle crashed along the Susquehanna River in New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, we\u2019ve mostly forgotten about Gardner. But in the sixties and seventies, he was a star: a regular at Bread Loaf, and an advocate for a kind of mimesis he called \u201cthe vivid and continuous dream.\u201d He taught writers such as Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Tim O\u2019Brien, Raymond Carver, and many others, many of whom went on to great success. He made himself into an icon of the postwar realist-fiction boom and of the nascent creative-writing industrial complex. And then, just as his career was reaching top speed, it tipped over. The wreckage, you can imagine, was fiery.<\/p>\n

As a boy, John Gardner Jr., who everyone then called \u201cBud,\u201d learned about the realities of death on his family farm: he ran over his six-year-old brother with a cultipacker and killed him. That accident shaped his life for decades to come. Viewed in this context, his middle-age preoccupation with death seems less prescient. It was a part of who he was and of who he became; today, it\u2019s a part of how we remember him, along with our idea of him as a fierce protector of young writers, the mentor of up-and-coming talents, and the author of books like On Becoming a Novelist<\/em> (still a standard textbook for many introductory creative-writing courses). Although it\u2019s unclear whether he was diagnosed as such, he certainly seems to have suffered from some kind of depression, and, like many people who do, especially those who hide their suffering behind jam-packed schedules and professional accomplishments, or who paper over the pain they feel with jokes, drinks, and affairs, Gardner was a complex man.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

John Gardner in 1979<\/p><\/div>\n

Here is another reason we remember Gardner: for his bitter, public fights with other writers. Gardner locked horns with his contemporaries in a way that few writers ever dare. He called the fiction of Saul Bellow and Donald Barthelme \u201csecond rate.\u201d He once humiliated John Barth by giving a negative interview about Barth\u2019s writing in the\u00a0Baltimore Sun<\/em>. Barth, a diplomatic man, was so enraged by these incidents that he punched a vending machine. Gardner also feuded with John Updike, Norman Mailer, William Gass, and Joseph Heller, among others. Although many remember him as a thoughtful writer and friend, many also remember him as arrogant. If Gardner thought your writing was trash, he was going to say so to your face, and perhaps to other people\u2019s faces.<\/p>\n

Four years before his death, John Gardner committed his negative opinions of his contemporaries to print. Gardner\u2019s On Moral Fiction<\/em> argues for a moral, life-affirming view of fiction and aims to continue the conversation left off at the end of Leo Tolstoy\u2019s late-in-life screed What is Art? <\/em>(in which the Russian master denounces everything he\u2019s written as not <\/em>being true art). Gardner railed against his contemporaries, such as Updike and Thomas Pynchon, accusing them of a tricksiness that elided fiction\u2019s eternal verities. Most contemporary literature, he claimed, was \u201ceither trivial or false.\u201d On Moral Fiction<\/em>\u2019s tone was perceived as deeply conservative\u2014so much so that the American Nazi Party sent Gardner an invitation for membership (he sent back an expletive-filled reply saying, in effect, fuck off). Gardner\u2019s publisher, Knopf, refused to print the manuscript, but\u00a0Basic Books eventually did. In an essay published fifteen years after his death, Gardner\u2019s second wife, Liz Rosenberg wrote, \u201cNearly overnight, he turned from darling of the literary establishment to its pariah.\u201d She says she thinks Gardner named names in On Moral Fiction<\/em> to prove to himself he wasn\u2019t afraid. \u201cPerhaps,\u201d she wrote, \u201che should have been.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Moral Fiction<\/em> cemented Gardner\u2019s celebrity, which had grown throughout the seventies, but it also made him enemies. His subsequent novels were treated to lukewarm reviews.\u00a0\u201cNever do anything cheap with the reader,\u201d Gardner told his students. \u201cDon\u2019t kill a kid.\u201d But his own death came in the midst of his life\u2019s most crucial moments\u2014days before his wedding, with the IRS at his door\u00a0and his career under attack. Its neatness violated his own rules of fiction, and it left his legacy in limbo, unresolved. Today, Gardner no longer occupies the central space he once did.\u00a0But his work still appears on the syllabus. Grendel<\/em>, a retelling of Beowulf<\/em>, remains in print, as do Mickelsson\u2019s Ghosts<\/em> and October Light<\/em>. One may hope that he has found a better resting place in American literature\u2014remembered as a hardworking teacher, a combative novelist, and a dedicated friend\u2014than he had feared that night on the lake.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ben Pfeiffer<\/a>\u00a0has written for\u00a0<\/em>Electric Literature, the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books,\u00a0and the\u00a0<\/em>Kansas City Star, among others. He\u2019s also an editor-at-large and a contributor at\u00a0<\/em>The Rumpus. He lives in Kansas City, where he\u2019s writing his first book.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I think it has given a few readers pleasure. And I suppose it may have depressed a few. I hope it does more good than harm. \u2014John Gardner, when asked what effect he thinks his writing has had on people, in conversation in The Paris Review, issue no. 75\u00a0(Spring 1979). Two weeks before his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[11877,30554,1427,19506,8996,14681,615,3080,4861,30555,30556,1437,30557,30558,14682,263,1194,22596,3829,16024],"class_list":["post-115497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-beowulf","tag-charles-johnson","tag-donald-barthelme","tag-grendel","tag-john-barth","tag-john-gardner","tag-john-updike","tag-joseph-heller","tag-leo-tolstoy","tag-liz-rosenberg","tag-mickelsons-ghosts","tag-norman-mailer","tag-october-light","tag-on-becoming-a-novelist","tag-on-moral-fiction","tag-raymond-carver","tag-saul-bellow","tag-tim-obrien","tag-toni-morrison","tag-william-gass"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJohn Gardner\u2019s Tangled Legacy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The talented teacher and combative critic John Gardner died in the midst of a crucial crisis, leaving his legacy in limbo.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/14\/john-gardners-tangled-legacy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"John Gardner\u2019s Tricksy Death and Tangled Legacy by Ben Pfeiffer\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 14, 2017 \u2013   I think it has given a few readers pleasure. 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