Disorder & Early Sorrow

When I was 14 or 15, our group of fledgling drug addicts and intellectuals – during that brief time when the two seemed complementary avocations – included a boy named Les Levy.While we all wrote the occasional vers libre, Les wrote novels – handwritten, wordy, leadenly comic, surreal adventures with an antic protagonist who faced adversaries ranging from dragons to social studies teachers. Smart alecks that we were, we nicknamed this voluble, over stimulated boy “Les is more,” or sometimes “Les is a lot more” or “Les is really much more.”Les overflowed. While one or two of us picked up the harmonica for a couple of weeks, Les played the guitar incessantly and improvisationally, an unwitting pioneer in atonality. He drew – badly and unendingly; he philosophized – he was a revolutionary then an “evolutionary,” a Marxist, Sartrean, Maoist, Buddhist, Deadhead, and macrobiotic.He was, in short, the John Gardner of our little crowd.Considering his fame only a few decades ago, it is surprising that the late novelist, critic, teacher, translator, librettist, and biographer Gardner is not much better known today than is Les Levy himself. It’s an unlikely fate for a man who published scores of books and was praised and vilified enthusiastically by a literary establishment he both embraced and derided, often simultaneously.Gardner contained more than Whitman’s famous multitudes; he was a teeming, ambitious, reckless, badly run republic with a heartbreaking founding myth. When he was a 12-year-old farm boy, he let his younger brother ride along with him on a tractor that was pulling a 2 ton cultipacker. The younger boy fell off and was killed.The boy who survived became a guilt-ridden man with a frenzied work ethic and an insatiable set of contrary appetites – for liquor and family, tradition and revolt, approbation and punishment. Gardner’s early sorrow, his gray Prince Valiant haircut and Harley-Davidson, combined with a polymath’s false authority and an enormously seductive manner, put this third-rate thinker and worse novelist briefly in the front tier of American writers.Gardner’s variousness makes him an impossible author to peg. He wrote constantly and voluminously, starting at age 8, in almost every imaginable genre, from children’s books to operas. William Kennedy called him the “Lon Chaney of contemporary fiction.” His novels and stories range from quiet realism to comic bombast to grotesque parody to complex metafiction. He also wrote a couple of Cliffs Notes that are still on the shelves, and some books on how to become a writer that continue to be read. The only thing these works have in common is their lack of literary distinction.Gardner’s prose is either too studied or too rushed, his humor puerile, his psychological insight truncated. The one or two moving short stories, the few vivid scenes in “Grendel,” the graceful phrase here and there – all these can be tentatively attributed to a kind of random felicity, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “the thousand monkeys effect.”It is something of a wonder, then, that New Directions has decided to republish Gardner’s “major” novels. This past fall it reprinted “October Light,” a philosophical rural burlesque originally published in 1976, when it received the sort of acclaim Gardner had been pursuing for years. Next fall, it intends to republish his 1973 novel, the ponderous “Nickel Mountain,” with another novel coming out in the fall of 2007.But it’s less of a wonder when we remember what John Gardner was good at. He was a brilliant networker, a sometime critic of writing workshops who workshopped his way to the top of the heap. An early student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he claimed later with characteristic anti-authoritarianism and implicit self-regard, “I didn’t learn anything from the faculty, but all the best young writers in the country were there and we taught each other.”On the side, this indefatigable learner studied ancient and modern philosophy, medieval literature and history; he had a particular enthusiasm for Chaucer. Gardner’s manic reading turned him into one of his many contradictions, a traditionally educated autodidact. After earning his master’s and then, at the age of 25, his Ph.D., Gardner went to Oberlin to teach.He was, by most accounts, a charmingly eccentric, inspiring, and immensely dedicated teacher of writing. His students included Raymond Carver and Charles Johnson, both of whom later wrote about him with gratitude and genuine affection. The profoundly gifted Carver (an over praised cult figure himself) describes Gardner’s pivotal role in his career. Gardner not only supplied Carver with minutely close line-by-line criticism, he also gave him the key to his own office so the beleaguered and broke young husband and father would have a place to work.Early in his career, in 1961, Gardner was also canny enough to found his own literary journal – MSS. With the help of his Iowa friends, his new colleagues, and his considerable charm, Gardner rounded up for its few but important issues W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, John Hawkes, William Gass, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others. That same year, he published his first short story, in the Northwest Review.Unlike most working writers, whose professed aim is solitude, Gardner often emphasizes a writer’s need for community. He championed even “bad workshop” classes because they expose one to the scrutiny of peers. In his avuncular, meandering instructional book “On Becoming a Novelist” (1983), he talks often about the importance of “the steady encouragement of friends.”Gardner had not only friends and colleagues but also his wife and young children read and amend his works in progress. His friends and wives changed over the years. But he always made himself the social center of his environment: From Oberlin to Chico State to Bread Loaf, Bennington and Binghamton, Gardner threw legendary bashes, through which he would drink as intemperately as he wrote, making friends and enemies – early on, more friends than enemies.Gardner once wrote that the greatest danger for a writer was to “slip into alcoholism.” He dove into it. One friend recalls, “He was an Olympic gin drinker. I’ve seen him drink fifths, martinis all the time … He was always backed up against the sink, and there was always a crowd around him. I asked him once why he was always in the kitchen, and he said, ‘That’s where the ice is.'”Gardner’s fierce, didactic, often muddled criticism won him fewer friends than his socializing. In 1978, at the height of his career, the author kick-started a heated national discussion with the publication of his confused yet deeply felt book “On Moral Fiction.” Here, Gardner argues against the prevailing literary styles of the day, primarily the “subversive” postmodern, narrative-bending, tradition tweaking fiction of Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, John Barth, and Stanley Elkin.These were writers, Gardner said, “short on significant belief” who “disparage the pursuit of truth” and pursue instead “texture for its own sake.” This lugubriously playful group was ripe for a trip to the woodshed, but Gardner didn’t have the consistency or fortitude to do the job properly. He accuses them of a fatal lack of seriousness: “That art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all. Art is essentially serious and beneficial.”His charges would have much more power, as Gardner’s targets promptly pointed out, if he did not belong to the fabulist, metafictional, naturalist snubbing school himself. To confuse matters further, Gardner accuses these amoral nihilists of moral didacticism, “Elkin … is bullying us and his characters … toward what seems to Stanley Elkin the right way to live. The same bullying is patent in the work of … John Barth.”In both “On Moral Fiction” and his posthumously published book of collected criticism, “On Writers and Writing” – in which he ricochets between apologizing for earlier attacks and launching new ones on the same targets – Gardner also goes after more traditional novelists. In these assessments he contradicts himself on nearly every other page yet manages to remain unerringly wrong.Gardner dismisses Saul Bellow as trivial while touting John Fowles as “the only novelist now writing in English whose works are likely to stand as literary classics.” Joyce Carol Oates is “one of the great writers of our time,” and her gothic doorstop “Bellefleur,” a “brilliant” book. John Updike, on the other hand, is a “hypersensitive whiner” whose humor is “not funny” (while “merry old Chaucer” remains a hoot). Mssrs. Pynchon and Updike won’t be “read into the next century.” Philip Roth’s “The Breast” is far superior to “Portnoy’s Complaint.”Gardner’s personal and critical idiosyncrasies were highlighted in numerous articles and interviews, notably in a 1979 New York Times Magazine story that described the longhaired motorcycling author as “a pregnant woman trying to look like a Hell’s Angel.” The article also gave some of the writers he’d savaged a chance to respond. Some were reticent and somewhat cryptic, showing a certain sympathy for Gardner and all his excesses. Said Bellow: “If I’m not Gardner’s ideal novelist, I’m full of regret.” “No comment,” Norman Mailer said, smiling. “We’ll meet in heaven.”If genius, as Edison is tiresomely quoted as saying, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, the frighteningly industrious Gardner has shown us just how far 100% perspiration can go. He was a force, a phenomenon, a foundry of a man, and it was sad and shocking when he died in a motorcycle accident in 1982 at the age of 49. He should be remembered fondly and wonderingly, but not republished.Mr. Solomita last wrote for these pages on William Maxwell.

Disorder & Early Sorrow

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