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The following interview incorporates three done with John Gardner over the concluding decade of his life. After interviewing him in 1971, Frank McConnell wrote of the xxx-nine-twelvemonth-old writer as i of the nigh original and promising younger American novelists. His first four novels—The Resurrection (1966),The Wreckage of Agathon (1970),Grendel (1971), andTheSunlight Dialogues (1972)—represented, in the eyes of many critics and reviewers, a new and exhilarating phase in the enterprise of modern writing, a consolidation of the resource of the contemporary novel and a leap forward—or backward—into a reestablished humanism. 1 finds in his books elements of the iii major strains of current fiction: the elegant narrative gamesmanship of Barth or Pynchon, the hyperrealistic gothicism of Joyce Carol Oates and Stanley Elkin, and the cultural, intellectual history of Saul Bellow. Like so many characters in current fiction, Gardner's are men on the fringe, men shocked into the consciousness that they are living lives that seem to be determined, not past their ain volition, only by massive myths, cosmic fictions over which they accept no control (e.k., Ebeneezer Cooke in Barth'sSot-Weed Factor, Tyrone Slothrop in Pynchon'due southGravity's Rainbow); only Gardner's characters are philosophers on the fringe, heirs, all of them, to the great debates over actuality and bad faith that narrate our era. InGrendel, for example, the hero-monster is initiated into the Sartrean vision of Nothingness by an aboriginal, apparently well-read dragon: a myth speaking of the emptiness of all myths—"Theory-makers . . . They'd map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories, their hither-to-the-moon-and-back lists of paltry facts. Insanity—the simplest insanity ever devised!" His heroes—like all men—are philosophers who are going to die; and their feature discovery—the primal artistic energy of Gardner's fiction—is that the death of consciousness finally justifies consciousness itself. The myths, whose artificiality contemporary writers take been at such pains to point out, become in Gardner's piece of work existent and life giving one time again, without e'er losing their modern graphic symbol of fictiveness.

Gardner's work may well represent, and so, the new "conservatism," which some observers have noted in the current scene. But it is a conservatism of high originality, and, at least in Gardner'southward case, of deep authority in his life. When he invitee-taught a class in "Narrative Forms" at Northwestern University, a number of his students were surprised to find a mod writer—and a hot property—enthusiastic, not simply about Homer, Virgil, Apollonius Rhodius, and Dante, but deeply concerned with the disquisitional controversies surrounding those writers, and with mistakes in their English translations. As the interview following makes clear, Gardner's task in and affection for aboriginal writing and the tradition of metaphysics is, if annihilation, greater than for the explosions and involutions of modern fiction. He is, in the total sense of the word, a literary man.

"Information technology's as if God put me on world to write," Gardner observed once. And writing, or thinking virtually writing, takes up much of his mean solar day. He works, he says, commonly on 3 or four books at the same time, allowing the plots to cross-pollinate, shape and authorize each other.

Sara Matthiessen describes Gardner in the leap of 1978 (boosted works published by and then includedOctober Low-cal; On Moral Fiction was virtually to be published). Matthiessen arrived with a friend to interview him at the Breadloaf Writer'south Colony in Vermont: "After nosotros'd knocked a couple of times, he opened the door looking haggard and just wakened. Dressed in a imperial sateen, bell-sleeved, turtleneck shirt and jeans, he was an exotic effigy: unnaturally white hair to below his shoulders, of medium elevation, he seemed an incarnation from the medieval era cardinal to his study. 'Come in!' he said, equally though there were no two people he'd rather take seen than Sally and me, and he led u.s.a. into a common cold, bright room sparsely equipped with wooden article of furniture. We were offered extra socks against the chill. John lit his pipage, and we sat down to talk."

INTERVIEWER

You've worked in several different areas: prose, fiction, verse, criticism, book reviews, scholarly books, children'south books, radio plays; you wrote the libretto for a recently produced opera. Could you hash out the different genres? Which one take y'all near enjoyed doing?

JOHN GARDNER

The one that feels the most of import is the novel. You create a whole world in a novel and you bargain with values in a way that you can't perhaps in a brusk story. The trouble is that since novels represent a whole earth, you tin can't write them all the time. After you finish a novel, information technology takes a couple of years to get in enough life and enough thinking about things to have anything to say, whatsoever clear questions to work through. You have to continue busy, and so it's fun to do the other things. I practise volume reviews when I'yard hard up for money, which I am all the time. They don't pay much, merely they keep you going. Book reviews are interesting because it'south necessary to proceed an eye on what's expert and what's bad in the books of a society worked and then heavily by advertising, public relations, and so on. Writing reviews isn't actually analytical, it's for the most part quick reactions—joys and rages. I certainly never write a review about a book I don't think worth reviewing, a flat-out bad book, unless it'southward an enormously fashionable bad volume. Every bit for writing children'due south books, I've done them because when my kids were growing up I would at present and then write them a story as a Christmas present, and then later on I became sort of successful, people saw the stories and said they should be published. I like them, of form. I wouldn't give junk to my kids. I've also done scholarly books and manufactures. The reason I've washed those is that I've been teaching things similarBeowulf and Chaucer for a long time. Equally you lot teach a poem year after year, you realize, or anyway convince yourself, that you understand the poem and that near people take got information technology slightly wrong. That's natural with any poem, but during the years I taught lit courses, it was especially true of medieval and classical poetry. When the general critical view has a major poem or poetbadly wrong, you feel like you lot ought to straighten it out. The studies of Chaucer since the fifties are very strange stuff: similar the theory that Chaucer is a frosty Oxford-donnish guy shunning carnality and cupidity. Non true. And so shut analysis is useful. But writing novels—and maybe opera libretti—is the kind of writing that gives me greatest satisfaction; the rest is more than like entertainment.

INTERVIEWER

Y'all have been called a "philosophical novelist." What do you think of the label?

GARDNER

I'yard not certain that being a philosophical novelist is better than being some other kind, merely I approximate that there's not much doubt that, in a mode at least, that's what I am. A writer's cloth is what he cares about, and I like philosophy the way some people like politics, or football game games, or unidentified flight objects. I read a man like Collingwood, or fifty-fifty Make Blanchard or C. D. Wide, and I get excited—even anxious—filled with suspense. I read a man similar Swinburn on time and infinite and it becomes a matter of deep business concern to me whether the construction of space changes near big masses. It'southward as if I actually call back philosophy volition solve life's great questions—which sometimes, come up to think of it, it does, at to the lowest degree for me. Probably not often, simply I similar the illusion. Blanchard's attempt at a logical demonstration that there reallyis a universal human morality, or the recent flurry of theories by diverse majestical cranks that the universe is stabilizing itself instead of flight autonomously—those are lovely things to run into. Interesting and arresting, I mean, similar talking frogs. I go a skillful deal more out of the philosophy department of a college bookstore than out of the fiction section, and I more than oftentimes read philosophical books than I read novels. So sure, I'm "philosophical," though what I write is by no means straight philosophy. I brand upwards stories. Meaning creeps in of necessity, to keep things clear, like paragraph breaks and punctuation. And, I might add, my friends are all artists and critics, not philosophers. Philosophers—except for the few who are my friends—potable beer and lookout football games and defeat their wives and children by the fraudulent tyranny of logic.

INTERVIEWER

But insofar as youare a "philosophical novelist," what is it that you do?

GARDNER

I write novels, books well-nigh people, and what I write is philosophical only in a limited way. The human being dramas that interest me—stir me to excitement and, loosely, vision—are e'er rooted in serious philosophical questions. That is, I'one thousand bored by plots that depend on the psychological or sociological quirks of the principal characters—mere melodramas of healthy against sick—stories that, subtly or otherwise, simply preach. Fine art equally the wisdom of Marcus Welby, One thousand.D. Granted, most of fiction's great heroes are at least slightly crazy, from Achilles to Captain Ahab, just the problems that make great heroes act are the problems no sane man could have gotten effectually either. Achilles, in his nobler, saner moments, lays down the whole moral code ofThe Iliad. But the violence and acrimony triggered by state of war, the human being passions that overwhelm Achilles's reason and make him the greatest criminal in all fiction—they're just as much a problem for lesser, more ordinary people. The same with Ahab's want to pierce the Mask, nail through to absolute knowledge. Ahab's crazy, so he actually tries it; but the same Mask leers at all of usa. So, when I write a piece of fiction I select my characters and settings and so on because they have a bearing, at least to me, on the former unanswerable philosophical questions. And as I spin out the action, I'1000 e'er very concerned with springing discoveries—bodily philosophical discoveries. But at the same time I'm concerned—and finallymore concerned—with what the discoveries do to the character who makes them, and to the people around him. It's that that makes me not really a philosopher, simply a novelist.

INTERVIEWER

The novelGrendel is a retelling of the Beowulf story from the monster's point of view. Why does an American writer living in the twentieth century carelessness the realistic approach and infringe such legendary material equally the basis for a novel?

GARDNER

I've never been terribly fond of realism considering of sure things that realism seems to commit me to. With realism you have to spend two hundred pages proving that somebody lives in Detroit so that something can happen and be absolutely convincing. Just the value systems of the people involved is the important thing, non the fact that they alive on Nine Mile Road. In my earlier fiction I went every bit far as I could from realism because the like shooting fish in a barrel way to get to the heart of what you desire to say is to take somebody else'due south story, particularly a nonrealistic story. When you tell the story of Grendel, or Jason and Medeia, you've got to end information technology the way the story ends— traditionally, but you can become to do information technology in your own way. The result is that the writer comes to sympathise things nearly the modern world in light of the history of homo consciousness; he understands it a picayune more than securely, and has a lot more than fun writing information technology.

INTERVIEWER

Merely why specificallyBeowulf?

GARDNER

Some stories are more interesting than others.Beowulf is a terribly interesting story. It gives you some really wonderful visual images, such as the dragon. It's got Swedes looking over the hills and scaring everybody. It'southward got mead halls. Information technology'due south got Grendel, and Grendel's mother. I really do believe that a novel has to be a banquet of the senses, a delightful thing. One of the better things that has happened to the novel in contempo years is that it has become rich. Think of a book likeChimera orThe Sot-Weed Factor—they may not be very adept books, but they are at to the lowest degree rich experiences. For me, writers similar John O'Hara are interesting only in the manner that movies and tv plays are interesting; there is almost cypher in a John O'Hara novel that couldn't be in the movies just every bit easily. On the other hand, there is no way an animator, or anyone else, tin create an image fromGrendel as exciting as the image in the reader's mind: Grendel is a monster, and living in the first person, because we're all in some sense monsters, trapped in our own language and habits of emotion. Grendel expresses feelings we all feel—enormous hostility, frustration, disbelief, and so on, so that the reader, projecting his own monster, projects a monster that is, for him, the perfect horror prove. There is no fashion yous can practice that in boob tube or the movies, where you are e'er seeing the kind of realistic novel O'Hara wrote . . . Gregory Peck walking downwardly the street. It's just the same former thing to me. At that place are other things that are interesting in O'Hara, and I don't mean to put him downwards excessively, just I go for another kind of fiction: I desire the consequence that a radio play gives y'all or that novels are always giving you at their all-time.