Life Sentences (21 page)

In another way, it was impossible to imagine John other than alive. Everyone who knew him was astonished and confounded by his energy, his enthusiasm, his rapid grasp of circumstances, his generosity and good nature. He would teach all day, party much of the evening, write all night, and was readier to meet the world when it rose than I was after a proper rest. He could work in silence; he could work in hurly-burly. His typewriter clattered to catch up with his mind. He had Falstaff’s capacity for drink, for talk, for revelry. He was a drop-in guy who loved drop-in people, yet he longed for quiet and preferred living in the country. Once back on the farm, where wheat and grain said not a word, he would lodge a rock band in his barn. He was so often onstage, playing a part in an opera that had two sunny acts and a dark one, that I guessed his energies were theatrical too—not less real, but somehow untouched and thus not worn down by the rough rub of ordinary things.

Before
Nickel Mountain
was a mountain it was a series of hills.
Lots of early novels start this way, especially if you enroll in a writing class. Its first assignment will ask for a short story, because a short story is more quickly written and more easily discussed. John’s was set in real time—winter 1954. Which meant its author was twenty-one. The story survived the corrections of the class to find publication in the student literary magazine. John was then an undergraduate. Several stories also set near Batavia, New York, followed, mostly written at Iowa, whose famous workshop he attended as a graduate student, though he was to obtain a degree in medieval studies. Bit by bit a volume of linked pieces that could be sent off to his agent was amassed. The agent predictably responded that collections of stories are difficult to market. So the manuscript was parked like a second car while new models were made to run past it. The old jalopy soon had fewer miles on it than the spiffy current model.

Not a good situation. John had begun writing in what is called “the realist tradition,” a manner naturally appealing to his rural upbringing and its evangelical flavor, but as he encountered the temper of the times he found it advantageous to put his academic interests to use, and adopt the trendier tendency called, as if it were a new perfume, “fabulism.” These folks were said to treat literature as a game, to display their style as if it were the latest fashion, and to be so disenchanted they were impervious to spells, and could not be morphed into croaking frogs or—bewitched—become snarly hairy beasts or put with a charm into beauty sleep. If a fairy tale were to be approached by any such, it would be, like Coover or Nabokov, with a killing jar and a net. In an interview at the time, John unwisely said:

Playing the devil to our own Faust, we often persuade ourselves to be true, things we feel clear to our feet are false. Still, at least partly under the banner of the enemy, John published
Grendel
, which was a big hit, and
Jason and Medeia
, which wasn’t. Fables, parodies followed, texts that swallowed texts, texts that played the very games his postmod opponents were accused of. Meanwhile,
Nickel Mountain
was sitting quietly back at the ranch, no longer written in the style his public expected to see. Or so it seemed to John at the time. He had tinkered with the text now for more than fifteen years, knitting the sections together, connecting the dots. But was the book still his? He suggested to his agent that he publish it under another name. However, he still valued the novel and did not wish to cast it from him like a disgraced daughter. So, while it might seem a troubled relation, he would acknowledge it and take it in. When he published the manuscript at last in 1973 it became his third bestseller. In our world, irony is inescapable.

Now it wore a subtitle: a pastoral novel.
Pastoral
is the label for a popular genre, that of an archaic reflective poem that initially pretended to provide bored shepherds with lyrics for the tunes they piped, the songs they improvised. These songs generally celebrated the herdsman’s simple life (sans wolves and rustlers), and depicted nature in a peaceful and cooperative mood. Classical forms merged with Christian easily enough because Jesus, at least metaphorically, was said to be our shepherd and we his docile flock. At first the pastoral was a purely poetic form, but soon novelized versions, still in verse, appeared, one by Boccaccio, for instance, another by Edmund Spenser, as well as
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
of Sir Philip Sidney, who made his of prose and let it darken in the direction of elegy. Soon there were as many pastorals posted over Europe as sheep. Its voyage to America was inevitable, since America was the New World, where those who fled Europe would enjoy rebirth—become free, pure, and self-reliant. Emerson was not the first to say so.

There is more evidence for the existence of dragons than for the
noble savage or the simple plowman who lives in innocent and happy harmony with the earth; but the New England farmer did satisfy his needs by snaring rabbits, shooting squirrels, picking berries, milking cows, and tilling the soil. He did clear his land of rocks and trees, build his house, cut his firewood, feed his stock, weave his own cloth, and churn his cheese. He did enjoy the unmediated relation of his work to its products and, in turn, their treasured satisfaction of his necessities. Moreover, the pioneer (for that is where we are now in the story) could not hope to survive without the assistance of the community which assembled to help him raise his barn, harvest the crops, repel Indians, teach his kids, fiddle up a dance, worship God. Trade was mainly barter; your word was your bond; your property became yours by the sweat of your brow. Such a life had values that should be very reluctantly lost.

You had much to fear, most of it inexplicable: fire could consume the forests, drought turn topsoil to dust, hail beat wheat to the ground; winds too, might blow away your buildings or lightning strike them, rain that overran streams and flooded rivers could also drown the crops. Moreover, given time, peaceful villages grew to the size of more stressful towns. It was true that cities were still far off, but even their distance was a lure. They were all Sodoms, and would be as bad as Gomorrah tomorrow.

Into this fragile Eden the devil sent the tractor to replace the horse, the ox, the plow. It made unnatural noise, spewed smelly smoke, ran on fuels found and refined in faraway reaches of the planet, required trained mechanics to repair, was a trouble to house, lured little boys by its growling song to desire a place on the driver’s seat, and mangled John Gardner’s brother one day when John was at its helm, leaving him with an unrepayable debt of guilt. The powerful nostalgia that determined a good deal of John’s preferred way of life held out the promise of a farm without farming, a garden without the machine, a cloister of retreat and contemplation, where the writer, like craftsmen of old, worked his words till they bore their fruit.

It also inclined John to imitate, in mostly unfortunate ways, his father’s defining habits: these included riding a Harley, a contraption which appears to have become a kind of motorized pen and penis for the both of them—the devil in another one of his disguises. His father worked late into the night and so would John. His father was a womanizer. John would womanize too. His father preached to his neighbors, ditto John, who would advise, hector, extol. After that it was easy to be just as earnest with his students, and then with the wide world. A direct causal connection between parent and child, as these parallels suggest, should not be drawn, but the set of such an example helped make certain convictions and courses of conduct comfortable. The traditional Protestant values of ambition, hard work, and the need for self-improvement, when allowed to prosper in a very bright multigifted person (in music and drawing, for instance) paradoxically propelled John into the academy, another Arcadia, but one of sophistication, complexity, and competition, of indirection and distance, of irreverence, license, and worldliness. Although writing classes are the least scholarly of institutions, the ivory tower could not be mistaken for a barn, and the two worlds these structures represent never found a comfortable fit.

During the great age of the novel—that of Dickens and Thackeray, of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky—the relation of the writer to his readers was widespread, intense, and warm. Authors were intellectual and moral leaders; they were honored and attended to, often persecuted in consequence, but always significant. Their novels reached out to their audience the way many movies do now, and regulated the beat of their hearts. Fiction’s imaginary characters seemed more real to its readers than the grocer down the block; their human sympathies were wrung by the plight of poor Copperfield; they laughed when Trollope skewered hypocrites like Mr. Slope; and they nodded with understanding at George Eliot’s revelations. I think John Gardner wanted this relation to remain, or to be restored if it had really disappeared. A great novel could actually create a community among its readers, a place where their spirits if not their bodies might live,
laugh, and love with some sort of security. Balzac and Dickens did it as no others could, and as the great epics of the past had. When, with great excitement, John showed me the drawings that were to illustrate
Nickel Mountain
, or spoke of the design for
October Light;
when he affixed to his books wonderfully chosen epigraphs or gave his chapters fulsome titles, as the old style had been, what he revealed he wanted, it seemed to me, was not parody, as some critics said, but parity.

And sometimes John did what he dreamed to do. He caused to rise up like an enveloping vision a fictional world that would help us live better in the real one. Not such a bad ambition. The reader will feel some of that absorption here. But the time was not in tune with such conservative ambitions. It was all right for I. B. Singer to write nineteenth-century novels in the twentieth, but even Singer’s Yiddish was as old as the past it represented. Gardner was Now and he should be depicting Nowness. But Now was a dismal, complicated, mean, deceptive, derivative mess. While in his academy mode, he could escape into the medieval by translating Anglo-Saxon (brilliantly, by the way) or writing
Grendel
(quite as dazzling) and by finding allegorical relevance in his tale, if he wished, to our contemporary plight like that plum once plucked from a pudding; however, an Eden of everyday decency was not very readily available, though, like D. H. Lawrence he did bear, as protectively as a newborn, utopian hopes even through the center of Sodom—a city that offered a lecture circuit that could be completed on a motorcycle, consequently giving him the opportunity to make converts, to spread his inspired word; but it also granted him an income, adulation, women, and whiskey. John was torn by ambitious ideals and indulgent temptations like a losing ticket at the track.

In this book, the conflict, as American as any Indian, is like that between bow and bowstring—its result is full of aim and energy. Characters rise from the page as John wished them to, and stride into their story. Consider the paragraph that opens the section called “The Devil,” and introduces Simon Bale, who “was a Jehovah’s Witness.”
A long deliciously rich sentence follows, with Gardner as good as Faulkner:

You can’t win an argument with writing like this. Nor are you likely to close the door, especially now that you have two copies of this piece of prose, like father and son, friendly suppliants in search of your soul. It is an honor to hold the cover open for you … and for them.

Katherine Anne Porter’s reported life was made of myths, most of them planted there by Porter herself, and many meant to improve her humble beginnings, refigure the course of her early years, and conceal the existence of her numerous marriages or frequent affairs. Of people fleeing their origins, some are inclined to brag about them afterward, proud of the distance they’ve come, while a few are so indifferent to the past that they manage to recall only whatever is routinely demanded by official documents. That leaves those who are still ashamed or hateful about their history, desperate to deny it, and prepared to rub it out if they can. There is something feudal about this embarrassment, because it gives credence to the claim blue bloods make for their superiority. The “nobility” can not only strut and preen, they can command, since others seem driven to grovel before those of elevated status, and appear to envy any member of the upper crust who got there, whether through birth, inheritance, marriage, or by old-fashioned hook or crook.

You have to remember the past rather clearly if you are going to lie your way out of its existence, but you also have to be able to enter your new history so completely that it replaces the truth even in your own mind. Katherine Anne Porter had no actual memories of her mother or of life in tiny Indian Creek, Texas, where she had been
born, so she imagined some, and then discovered them again when she searched her past, like finding gold ore shining in the water of the stream where it’s been planted.