Place of Death: Susquehanna, PA Genre(s): Novels; Children's fiction; Literary criticism and history; Autobiography/Memoir Table of Contents:
MEMBER:Modern Language Association of America, American
Association of University Professors.
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:NOVELS
JUVENILE
CRITICISM
OTHER
Also author of The Temptation Game (radio play), 1980.
Contributor of short stories to Southern Review, Quarterly
Review of Literature, and Perspective; of poetry to
Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, and other literary quarterlies;
and of articles to Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, and
other magazines. Founder and editor, MSS (a literary magazine). "Sidelights"John Champlin Gardner--not to be confused with the John Edmund Gardner who writes satiric mystery novels or John L. Gardner who was once the head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare--was a philosophical novelist, a medievalist well versed in the classics, an educator, and an opinionated critic. Described by Village Voice contributor Elizabeth Stone as "Evel Knievel at the typewriter," Gardner stood for conservation of values from the past yet maintained a lifelong love-hate relationship with "the rules." Though he championed the moral function of literature, his long hair, leather jacket, and motorcycle classed him with nonconformists. The typical conflict in his work pits individual freedom against institutions that dominate by means of cultural "myths." In Gardner's novels and stories, Paul Gray of Time summarizes, "Gardner sets conflicting metaphysics whirling, then records the patterns thrown out by their lines of force. One situation consistently recurs, . . . an inherited past must defend itself against a plotless future." Gardner's novels provoked a wide range of critical responses, and, unlike many academic fictions, were appreciated by a large audience. Three of his novels were bestsellers. "Very few writers, of any age, are alchemist enough to capture the respect of the intellectual community and the imagination of others who lately prefer [Jacqueline] Susann and [Judith] Krantz. Based on critical acclaim, and sales volume, it would seem that this man accomplished both," Craig Riley wrote in Best Sellers. Carol A. MacCurdy reported in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1982, "Many critics consider Grendel (1971) a modern classic, The Sunlight Dialogues an epic of the 1970s, and October Light [which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1976] a dazzling piece of Americana." Gardner's notes on Morte D`Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Gawain poet have helped younger readers to appreciate these classics. His books for children also draw from his knowledge of medieval literature. They are fairy tales retold with original twists, "hip" tales in which familiar characters speak in today's cliches, or where unlikely contemporary characters are revived by the magic of the past. For example, in Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales, losers win and heroes lose. "Kings prove powerless, young girls mighty. The miller wins the princess, but she proves to be a witch. Tables are turned this way and that, with consequences that are hilarious and wonderful," Jonathan Yardley related in the New York Times Book Review. Like most of Gardner's fairy tales, In the Suicide Mountains--the story of three outcasts who find happiness after hearing some old folktales--is for adults as well. Gardner always worked on several book projects at a time and did not publish his novels in the order that they were finished. Gardner's first published novel, The Resurrection, traces a philosophy professor's thoughts after he learns his life will be shortened by leukemia. David Cowart observed in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "The book asks the question Gardner would ask in every succeeding novel: how can existential man--under sentence of death--live in such a way as to foster life-affirming values, regardless of how ultimately provisional they may prove?" The Resurrection introduces features that recur in later books: an embedded second narrative, usually a "borrowed" text; a facility with fictional techniques; and an emotional impact Cowart describes as "harrowing." Gardner's second published novel, The Wreckage of Agathon, proved his skill as an antiquarian, as a writer who could bring forward materials from ancient history and weave them into "a novel transcending history and effectively embracing all of it, a philosophical drama that accurately describes the wreckage of the 20th century as well as of Agathon, and a highly original work of imagination," wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times. Built of mostly dialogue, it exposed Gardner's "manic glee in disputation," or "delight in forensic and rhetorical flashiness for its own sake," Cowart observed. Its themes include the relation between individuals and the social orders they encounter. The Wreckage of Agathon "delineates the mental motion of the individual as sacred, whether he's a seer or not. . . and it exuberantly calls into question society's categorical insistances--the things brought into being at our own expense to protect us against ourselves, other people, and, putatively, other societies," Paul West wrote in the New York Times Book Review. The Sunlight Dialogues also grapples with this theme. In a Washington Post Book World review, Geoffrey Wolff called The Sunlight Dialogues "an extended meditation on the trench warfare between freedom and order." The Sunlight Man--a policeman-turned-outlaw embittered by the loss of his family--and Police Chief Fred Clumly, obsessed with law and order, duel to the death in this novel. Emerging in the conflict between them is Gardner's examination of how these two forces impinge on art. Wolff commented, "While all men wish for both--freedom and order--the conflict between them is dramatized by every decision that an artist makes. The artist will do what he will. . . . No: the artist does what he must, recognizes the limits, agrees to our rules so that we can play too. No; . . . it's his cosmos. And so it goes." Grendel retells the Beowulf tale from the monster's point of view. This new take on the sea of the familiar hero myth allowed Gardner to fathom new insights into the conflict between order and chaos. In the New York Times, Richard Locke explained how the uncivil behavior of "civilized" man contributed to Grendel's murderous career: "Though twice he attempts to shed his monsterhood, become human, join these other verbal creatures, . . . he's misunderstood on both occasions, and the rat-like humans attack him in fear. So, racked with resentment, pride and vengeful nihilism, outraged by mankind's perversity (for the noble values of the poet's songs are betrayed in a trice by the beery warlords), Grendel commences his cynical war." Though confirmed in cynicism, the monster remains haunted by the words of The Shaper, the poet who revives inspiration and hope in the hearts of his listeners. In this way, Gardner demonstrated the power of art and its role in Western culture. Nickel Mountain: A Pastoral Novel explored again the complex relationship between order and chaos, particularly as they relate to human responsibility for events in a world that seems to give random accident free play. Narrator Henry Soames, proprietor of an all-night diner, has a ringside seat to the "horror of the random," to cite Cowart, in the lives of his patrons. Slow-moving and dominated by routine, the pastoral life around the diner is interrupted by a series of fatal accidents, including auto wrecks and house fires. Touching Henry more closely is the man who fell to his death on the stairs while recoiling from Henry's shout. Debates ensue about limits to the assignment of blame. Some of Gardner's characters feel that the assignment of guilt, though painful, is preferable to seeing themselves as victims of mere chance. As London Magazine contributor Herbert Lomas put it, recognitions of personal failure or weakness are "what lead you to love, brotherhood and God. It's through weakness and failure that you find warmth, . . . see your need for mercy and forgiveness, and thus everyone's, and feel the beginnings of sacramental consciousness." "Here, as in his other fiction," wrote Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books, "Gardner shows a marvelous gift for making stories ask balanced, intricate questions, for getting his complex questions into tight stories." Henry's bout with guilt in Nickel Mountain stemmed from a personal tragedy Gardner suffered early in his life. The eleven-year-old Gardner was at the wheel of a tractor that ran over and killed his seven-year-old brother David. Though it was an accident, he believed he could have prevented it. Daily flashbacks to the accident troubled him until he had written the story "Redemption" in 1979, a story based on his memory of the accident. Because writing the story demanded concentration on the scene in order to take narrative control of it, his terror was diffused. But the question of human responsibility versus chance continued to surface in many of Gardner's novels and stories, suggesting that this question had become, for him, a habit of mind. What was an internal conflict in Nickel Mountain became open debate in Gardner's next bestseller. October Light pits American conservativism against liberalism embodied in a seventy-year-old Vermont farmer and his eighty-year-old feminist sister. In a characteristic rage about declining morals, James shoots Sally's television set and locks her into an upstairs room. They shout their arguments through the closed door. Sally finds a store of apples in the attic and parts of a trashy book about marijuana smugglers, The Smugglers of Lost Soul's Rock, and refuses to come out, even after her niece unlocks the door. She sees correspondences between the book's plot and her conflict with James. More vulnerable to his intimidating anger is James's son Richard, who commits suicide. Gardner exposed the regrettable stubbornness of both sides of their conflict and at the same time implied the paucity of absurdist literature in the "trashy" parody of postmodern literature Sally reads. By the novel's end, James revises his opinions to accommodate a wider range of sensibility. "In October Light, then," reasoned Cowart, "we have a rustic world where the same horrors obtain as in the black-comic, nihilistic, `smart-mouth satirical' novels typified by Smugglers, but Gardner convinces us that James Page can, at the age of seventy-two, come to self-knowledge--and that the thawing of this man's frozen heart holds much promise for all people who, bound in spiritual winter, have ever despaired of the spring." While writing Mickelsson's Ghosts, Gardner deliberately tried to make the novel radically different from his prior works. The result, by comparison, said Curt Suplee of the Washington Post, "is a highbrow potboiler. . . . And it takes a wide-bodied and fast-moving narrative to carry all Gardner's themes, aiming them at the totalitarian threats in modern culture (metaphorically embedded in the Mormons and tax men) and a grand theological synthesis." Gardner explained to Suplee, "The two sort of big ghosts in the thing are Nietzsche and Luther: Luther's saying none of your works mean anything; and Nietzsche's saying works are everything. And if you get those two things together, you have courtly love. The lover does the most that he can possibly do, and then the grace of the lady saves him." The title character, a philosophy professor, is troubled with a proliferation of "ghosts." The farm on which he has taken refuge from the world is haunted by apparitions of its previous owners, including the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, and the still-living Hell's Angel who sold him the farm. Harassed by the Internal Revenue Service and the Sons of Dan (a fictional group of fanatic assassins), Mickelsson is haunted by his own crimes. After a teen he sleeps with gets pregnant, he robs an elderly man, hoping to pay the girl not to have an abortion. During the robbery, the man dies of a heart attack. Should Mickelsson, or should he not, think of himself as the murderer of the elderly miser? This and other questions of ethics--including how to assess the worth of individual human lives, Jack Miles noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review--are the center of "this huge and ambitious book." Woiwode suggests that "its grappling hook at your heart . . . is its questioning of our premises of what is real, or what `reality' is; and in its brave examination of this, and of borderline states of supposed health, it becomes the kind of book that can alter one's way of looking at life." In addition to these novels, Gardner wrote a number of thought-provoking works on the purpose and craft of fiction. His criticism was hailed, as were his novels, as "disturbing." On Moral Fiction, written in part before his novels were published, contained many blunt statements that negatively assessed the works of other major novelists. Some of his statements contradicted others, such that his position was at times overstated, understated, or unclear. Some took these judgments as insults; and some critics, picking up the gauntlet, evaluated Gardner's subsequent works from a fighting stance. Yet others forgave the book's faults because they agreed with Gardner about the essentially humane quality of great literature. On Becoming a Novelist expressed Gardner's many thoughts about his vocation and outlined what it takes to be a professional novelist. Most important, he claimed, are "drive"--an unyielding persistence to write and publish; and faith--confidence in one's own abilities, belief in one's eventual success. The book restated his moral aesthetic. Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Richard Rodriguez was struck by Gardner's passionate rejection of fictions that substitute "inconclusiveness," "pointlessly subtle games," or obsessive "puzzle-making" for essential storytelling. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers "originated as the so-called `Black Book,' an underground text passed from hand to hand in university creative-writing departments," Stuart Schoffman noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, citing Gardner's comment from its preface that "it is the most helpful book of its kind." John L'Heureux remarked in the New York Times Book Review that "Gardner was famous for his generosity to young writers, and The Art of Fiction is his posthumous gift to them." Twelve years after his tragic death in a motorcycle accident,
a volume of Gardner's literary reviews and essays appeared as
On Writers and Writing. The collection includes Gardner's
critical response to the fiction of John Steinbeck, William Styron,
John Cheever, Walker Percy, and Bernard Malamud, among others,
as well as an autobiographical essay and a posthumously discovered
plan for The Sunlight Dialogues. According to William
Hutchings in World Literature Today, "Gardner's essays
are remarkable for his astringent intelligence, his pugnaciousness,
his lucid style, and his relentless pontifications about The
True Nature of Art and the `great persons' who create it."
Commenting on Gardner's extreme "seriousness" and daunting
standards, New York Times Book Review contributor Brooke
Allen wrote, "what Gardner always sought was great art,
something to place alongside Melville and Tolstoy, the literary
yardsticks against which he continually measured lesser writers.
Needless to say, he was usually disappointed, therefore unnecessarily
harsh in his judgements." FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:BOOKS
PERIODICALS
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