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John Gardner: Literary Outlaw

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I have read almost everything Gardner wrote, and if you're at all like me then you've probably already read this book, JG's first major biography. You probably even enjoyed it, because you love Gardner so much, and because he's so interesting. Which makes Barry Silesky's monumental failure here so upsetting and disappointing. It is so sad that he is writing about a writer who cared massively about art's deeper thematic questions and meanings, yet Silesky himself cannot manage a single intelligent reading of one of Gardner's books. It's all none-too-bright paraphrase; when he writes about their critical reception, he quotes (I'm not exaggerating) from their paperback blurb copy. It is also sad that he is writing about a writer who loved beautiful, dense prose, yet Silesky himself writes so drably, and boringly, and unenlighteningly, that you want to spike the book. Other things: Gardner was accused of plagiarism several times (not just once, as Silesky has it), and apparently "borrowing" was central to his creative process. Fascinating notion, no? Number of pages Silesky devotes to this: 0. It is spelled Finnegans Wake, not (Jesus!) Finnegan's Wake. Fellows are not the lowest rung in the Bread Loaf hierachy, they're the second-highest. Alison Lurie and not Allison Lurie. And so on. But God love Barry Silesky: he published the thing, he talked to a lot of Gardner's friends and rivals, and people might be talking about Gardner again. But man: what a blown opportunity this book is. Someday a real artist will write about Gardner, and a great book will result. It hurt to write this; it really did. I wanted to like it so much. Respect, pity, and anger to Barry Silesky, then. May God keep him.

Many years have passed since Silesky's scattered account of John Gardner's life & work was published. Alas, the confusion, garbage,& errors haven't settled into a form of truth. When Silesky wanted a writer to profile, he admitted to the 2 Gardner friends who recommended John that he had read almost nothing of Gardner's work. Now there was a red light already!
(NOTE: John & I were 1st cousins, had been married for more than 23 years--between the ages of 19 $ 43; I was the mother of his 2 children; I didn't want to contribute, partly because I was writing my own memoir for our own family; I was extricated from the marriage & was more than ready for a sane, calm life.)
Having read some of Silesky's other writings, it's clear that he was not the one for the job; his own writing & critical education were less than moderate, to be blunt. During the course of his project, he wanted me to answer questions and give him more information, which I did not want to do since it was his job to do the research & write the book. I did agree to vet some of his findings & verify/modify some of the more outrageous claims.)
He set forth on a trek to visit many of the places where we'd lived, where he interviewed people from the past who had their own axes & violins to grind. People who hadn't even known John or me personally had plenty to say; we're talking tabloid quality here. Many of the people who really knew us had either passed on or had gone on to higher ivory towers. Others wouldn't talk to him. Somehow in the gossip pit he neglected the good times and the actual writing--John's important work.
So this is not a complete picture, by any means. Most people agree that John was a wonderful, dedicated teacher, generous with his time. They also agree that he was a fine, prolific writer of all kinds of books. They know that he was a personal mess, & he could make your own life one. But John, once an innocent, loving farmboy, developed into a bi-polar nutbag who lost his sense and his life in ignominious fashion. Striving to be the Ren Man was taxing, & he paid the ultimate price.
Yes, it was more than sad that John Gardner became Grendel, but he deserved a better biographer.

John Champlin Gardner grew up near Batavia, a rural community located nearly halfway between Buffalo and Rochester, New York. The tragic loss of his fearless brother Gilbert in a farming accident shaped his outlook on life and death, figured thematically in several of his life's works, and may have contributed to his own accident-prone and reckless nature. Inside and outside the classroom, shaggy and unconventional Gardner inspired legions of fledgling writers. Some of his more notable students included Raymond Carver, Charles Richard Johnson, and Richard Russo. Gardner was associated with a number of teaching institutions (Oberlin, Chico State, San Francisco State, Southern Illinois at Carbondale, Bennington, SUNY Binghamton) in his prolific but beleaguered career as a medievalist, fabulist, poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, literary critic, creative writing teacher, and translator. Grendel, his retelling of the Beowulf epic through the eyes of the monster, is considered one of his greatest works. October Light won the National Book Critic's Circle Award in 1976. Several books have analyzed Gardner's oeuvre and described aspects of his outrageous life but this folksy but gripping book is the first full-length biography. In 2000, Gardner's fiancée and former writing student Susan Thornton published On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner, a memoir of their brief time together. To quote Gardner, "Spending a lifetime writing novels is hard enough to justify in any case, but spending a lifetime writing novels nobody wants is much harder." In 1982, the world of little literary magazines and writing workshops lost a giant as great as Grendel when Gardner died at age 49 in a motorcycle accident.

As the story of a now unjustly neglected American author of great scholarly and artistic importance, this biography begins with an inspirational tone that, all too soon, turns heartbreaking and as affecting as anything in Gardner's own fiction. In many ways the life of John Gardner mirrors a struggle in the heart of modern America--there is something especially tragic about great idealism and intellectual conviction that fails to manifest fully in one's personal life.

Silesky's book has a few failings, but the greatest of these is something that, most likely, could not be avoided with the present effort--and that is the book's length. For the most part, it seems that when he came to tough choices on what to include, Silesky stuck with his expressed theme, that of Gardner as "literary outlaw," a conflicted author who struggled against authority while also championing the ideas of "law and order." It cannot have been an easy thing to get the go-ahead for publishing even a book of moderate length about an author of whose novels all but one have dropped out of print in the 20 years since his death. However, squeezing the experiences of Gardner's 49 years into just over 300 pages makes for a very tight fit, especially when it comes to the details of certain relationships. For instance, we get a few references to the "several miscarriages" Joan, his first wife, had. But, with the exception of the final miscarriage, we do not get a real sense of the impact this had on the relationship. We also must wonder about Gardner's relationship with his two children when the family split, since we never learn if he had much contact with Lucy and Joel in the last years of his life. One especially craves more details of his association with other writers--his now-famous students, such as Charles Johnson and Raymond Carver, and the peers he knew socially, such Joyce Carol Oates and William Gass. Such details might have been elaborated if Silesky had curbed the attention paid, at key points in the biography, to Gardner's books and their critical reception, yet the context of these passages is important as well. Silesky has walked a difficult line structuring this book, and we can be grateful for his effort while also hoping that the book helps to fuel further Gardner scholarship and, perhaps, another biography or two sometime down the line. For the present, this book satisfies a long-felt void in the realm of Gardner scholarship.

I know that all of Gardner's family is not happy with this book, but Gardner enthusiasts will find it irresistible. A word of warning, however. In the modern world we have perhaps an unprecedented number of opportunities to develop admiration for people we have never met, and Gardner has earned his fair share of devotees--in no small part due to that invaluable instruction book for writers, "The Art of Fiction." So, be warned that learning the details of Gardner's personal life may not be an entirely pleasant business. However illuminating this book is about the human condition, the life it chronicles also has a side to it that is terribly devastating.

Odd as it is to think, considering how important and envied he was in his prime, today John Gardner is nearly forgotten. Apart from a pair of writing manuals we now learn he wrote to make money when the IRS descended on him to pay over $400,000 in back taxes, are any of his books in print? Silesky ends his story at the moment of Gardner's death, so we don't hear any of the innumerable reasons for the critical decline in Gardner's reputation, and he doesn't do him any favors by printing that photo on the cover with the big white mullet caught poetically in mid flight. It is a further shame that Silesky is so badly served by his proofreaders. As another reviewer has pointed out, who doesn't know the first name of the US novelist Alison Lurie? And on page 231, the eniment translator of Lorca, Ben Belitt, gets turned into "Bellit" -- why? I guess because nobody bothered to check. My favorite misspelling is Silesky's rendering of the classic opera "AHMAL and the NIGHT VISITORS" (pg 283).

It doesn't seem to me that enough really happened to Gardner to justify such a long book. The tragic death of his brother apart, Gardner led a typical MFA type of life. He catapulted himself into one writing job after another, replete with lots of booze, lots of admiring colleagues, lots of students all too willing to part him from whatever wife he was on at the time. Silesky's story turns tragic only when Gardner reaches fame with the publication of "The Sunlight Dialogues," and suddenly his character changes, and the friends who once called him "sweet" now realize he's a pompous windbag, a Father Mapple of the faculty lounge. It's all very sad, but fails to convince you that a Gardner revival is in order, "moral fiction" or no. When Charles Johnson uses the word "legend" to describe his late friend, he's being loyal, but it's a terrible debasement of the word "legend."