Storybites Blog

Readers familiar with John Gardner’s biography cannot help but be struck by the similarity between the story line of “Redemption” and the facts of the author’s own life. When Gardner was eleven, he was towing a cultipacker (a farm vehicle used for compressing soil prior to seeding), holding his little sister on his lap as his younger brother, Gilbert, hung onto the back of the tractor. Gilbert fell off and was crushed beneath the cultipacker’s ridged roller. Gardner was never able to forgive himself for an accident that was almost certainly unavoidable, and he sought a sense of redemption in vain. It is little surprise that he would seek to express his anguish through art. In the end, Gardner tells us in his short story collection The Art of Living, art may be all the redemption we have — if we have any at all.
 

In “Redemption,” the main character is twelve-year-old Jack Hawthorne, and the facts of the story are very similar to the real events – with one very significant difference. In Gardner’s story, there is an awful moment when Jack could have stopped the machine before it crushed little David’s skull, and he doesn’t stop; he keeps right on going, pushing David’s body into the earth. Gardner infers that Jack knows that David is already as good as dead, and finishing the job is actually merciful, like shooting a wounded deer. But this does not in any way assuage Jack’s intense feelings of guilt over his brother’s death.

Jack’s family is devastated, as any family would be. His father wears his anguish on the outside; he engages in meaningless affairs and storms across the countryside on his motorcycle, not returning for extended periods of time. Jack’s mother internalizes her grief, covering for her husband’s erratic behavior and pretending to the children that nothing is wrong. She signs Jack’s little sister up for piano and Jack for French horn lessons, as if behaving normally makes things normal. When Jack’s father finally buries his ghosts and returns to the family for good, she tells Jack, “It’s all over. Your dad’s come home.” But of course it’s not over, because David is still dead and Jack has not found his own way back from hell.

As Jack develops a passion for the French horn and the music it produces, we are clearly intended to see his artistic life as the “other half” of the story: if the accident is Jack’s fall, then music is his redemption. Yet the solution is unconvincing. Is Gardner arguing that art overcomes death because art is itself deathless? Or is he arguing that if David had to die, then Jack has to become better than either of them would have been had the accident never occurred?  If so, Jack’s got a long way to go; when he asks his music teacher, the Russian virtuoso Yegudkin, whether he will ever play as well as his mentor, Yegudkin essentially laughs in his face. Where, exactly, is Jack’s redemption?

One of the most eerie things about “Redemption” – the second story in Gardner’s collection The Art of Living – is the woodcut on the cover of the book. It is reminiscent of Jack Hawthorne’s father Dale barreling blindly into the night on his motorcycle; but it bears a disturbing resemblance to the author himself, who the following year would meet death on a motorcycle, barreling into a night of his own.

On my Storybites site, I very often place short bios of authors I’m reviewing — generally I write the review before the bio, but since the two are tied together in this case, I’ll give you the bio first.

John Champlin Gardner was born in Batavia, New York in 1933; his father was a dairy farmer and lay Presbyterian minister, and his mother was an English teacher. Both parents instilled in him a love of classic literature. He also developed passions for cartooning and music, which his parents encouraged. His idyllic childhood was shattered, however, by the freak death of his younger brother Gilbert in a farming accident. This incident is reflected in Gardner’s story “Redemption.”

  After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Iowa, Gardner embarked on a lifelong teaching and writing career. He not only taught at a variety of colleges (including Oberlin, Chico State, San Francisco State, Southern Illinois University, Bennington, and the State University of New York at Binghamton), but spearheaded writer’s workshops such as the annual Bread Loaf Conference at Middlebury College, Vermont. Big-hearted, hard-living and larger than life, John Gardner was married twice, first to Joan Louise Patterson and second to poet and fellow teacher Liz Rosenberg. He was preparing to make Susan Thornton his third wife in 1982 when he died as the result of a motorcycle accident in Susquehanna, PA.

Gardner’s most impressive work of fiction is probably Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf story from the viewpoint of the monster. The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and October Light met with the most popular acclaim (although he was definitely a literary writer rather than a “popular” one).

John Gardner’s fictional works are often difficult and confound literary classification. Although he is frequently considered a postmodernist, he sharply criticized postmodernists such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme. He expounded on his philosophy of writing in his most provocative book On Moral Fiction (1978). In this work, he argues that literature that has no moral center has no reason to exist. The true purpose of art, he maintains, is to express eternal truth, that which uplifts without sentimentality and redeems without pity. His scathing criticism of contemporary writers did not win Gardner many popularity contests among his fellow writers at the time, but today he is remembered as much for his analysis and philosophy of literature as he is for his fiction.

In my next post, I’ll talk about “Redemption” and its relationship to John Gardner’s life.

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You’ll probably notice that I haven’t written anything in the blog for (gulp!) more than six months. It’s been quite an overwhelming six months in our family, but suffice it to say that I’ve returned to the blog and will be updating it more regularly now. More to the point, I’m going to start posting my Storybites short story commentaries here so that I can actually get them written and uploaded easily — posting to a blog is a LOT easier than revamping a website. So look for some new commentaries on short stories soon. I’ve got a list of about a hundred I hope to do. That’s probably excessively ambitious, but we’ll see!

I would love to know how many of my readers write literary fiction (we’ll use Wikipedia’s definition of literary fiction as “[focusing] more on style, psychological depth, and  character, [versus] mainstream commercial fiction … [which] focuses more on narrative and plot.” If you do write literary fiction, do you have a terminal degree in literature, and do you teach in a university? And if you don’t have a degree — or your degree is in the wrong area altogether, like nursing or engineering — do you feel you’ve had difficulty getting publishers to take your literary creations seriously?

This may seem like an odd rant, but a new literary magazine started up in our community, and when I read the bios of the authors, they all seemed to be college professors. I think that’s odd. No, I really do; I suspect there are many, many closet literati out there who just aren’t getting published.

If you love to read and write literary fiction but feel the publishers of that kind of work have shut you out, I’d love to hear from you.

Every so often I take a creative writing class. (A good thing to do, I should note.) I take away some new insight from each one, but in the last few workshops I’ve attended, I’ve picked up some strange hints or tips that just don’t fit the way I write. I don’t know this at first, of course, so I gleefully input these new ideas into whatever story I’m working on. Then I happily prance off to my writer’s group, manuscript in hand, ready to share what I’ve written and learned.

 My first clue that the story’s gone south is the looks on my friends’ faces. After I finish reading the story, they tend to look at me as if I’d just extolled the virtues of chocolate-covered squid. Sometimes they exchange uneasy glances; there is often pen-tapping and clearing of throats; a few timid souls venture to tell me they like the description of the urn, or the way I introduced the motif of the barking dog. Eventually, because they’re my friends, they give it to me straight. I’ve done it again; I’ve written a story in a style that is so completely foreign to the way I normally write that it’s not only at odds with my ordinary writing voice, it’s at odds with who I am as a person. I’ve written what would have been a perfectly serviceable story if it were written by somebody else.

Should this matter? I mean, if it’s a perfectly serviceable story… But yes, it does matter. I have a set of definite beliefs and attitudes that underlie not only what I write about, but the very way I write. For example, I don’t believe that the protagonist should ever get exactly what he thought he wanted when the story began. This directly flies in the face of the writing advice I give small children — “Think of a character, give him a problem, and have him solve it.” That advice gets the person going, gives the story a definite beginning, middle, and end, and ensures a unified whole. And it produces a good story most of the time. But that certainly is not the way I write, and it’s not the way many other famous writers write either.  

How so? Well, I love creating characters who don’t believe they have any problems at all (although we, the reader, can clearly see they are deeply flawed). Through a series of successively bad choices, the character gets into worse and worse straits, until the climax he has created forces him to stop and reassess his life situation. The end of the story isn’t “happily ever after” — the end of the story is the realization that he’s gone off track. Not so much resolution as epiphany.

I also love writing stories in which people get exactly what they wanted — only to discover they’re worse off than before. This sounds laughable and it often is, but nothing that has ever happened in my life has convinced me that the “plan ahead, work hard, and all your dreams will come true” philosophy has any credence whatsoever. If I don’t believe it, why should my readers?

I started off by mentioning that I’d taken a few creative writing classes that didn’t work. I should note that most of the classes I’ve taken have been wonderful, and I highly recommend taking creative writing classes, just as I highly recommend joining writer’s groups. But for me (and again, this may not be true for you) the classes that don’t work are the ones that seductively try to reduce my writing to a formula. ”In step one, your protagonist needs to recognize he has a problem….” No, no, no. Step one is whatever draws the reader in, engages his interest, quickens his blood… It’s whatever you want it to be. Your story is your story. 

 There are a few rules to writing, and as you continue to write (and read authors you admire), you’ll get a better idea of what those rules are and how they apply to you. But make sure that the story, as it unfolds inside your heart, makes sense to you. You’ll know. The pieces will start fitting like a jigsaw puzzle, and your heart will sing when the last one pops into place.

So far I haven’t done any fiction reviews, and I can’t think of a better way to begin than with Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. It’s told from the point of view of three characters – something I normally dislike, since I think that makes it harder to really get into the heart of any of them – but O’Farrell does it incredibly well. First we have Iris Lockhart, a young single woman who owns a shop in Edinburgh, Scotland. Iris receives a phone call that astounds her; it turns out that her grandmother, Kitty, whom Iris always believed to be an only child, has a sister. The sister has spent her entire adult life in an institution. But the institution is closing, and since Iris’ grandmother Kitty has Alzheimer’s and couldn’t be responsible for anyone, Iris is now responsible for a great-aunt, Esme, that Iris never knew existed.

Of course, everyone gives her the obvious advice. Esme has been in an institution since she was a teenager. Teenagers aren’t institutionalized for no reason, so obviously there’s something tremendously wrong with Esme. Just arrange for an alternative placement – no need to even go visit her – and forget all about it. But of course Iris can’t do that. She has to go see Esme. And the Esme she meets seems to be a surprisingly composed, lucid, intelligent woman who has simply had a very restricted life. Sort of cloistered, like a nun. And Esme desperately wants Iris to take her home.

A second voice emerges – that of Esme herself. She paints a picture of her childhood as a Scottish child in India in the early years of the twentieth century. Esme, from day one, has been willful, odd, her own person. In contrast, her older sister Kitty is graceful, poised, anxious to please. There is a little brother, too – Hugo – whom Esme loves dearly. Nonetheless, she’s put out when her parents, angry over her unpredictable behavior, leave her home with Hugo and the nanny when they take Kitty on vacation. She knows she’s being punished for something she can’t help – for just being the person she is. She takes a nap in the heat of the day – remember, this is India – and when she wakes up, she finds both Hugo and the nanny dead. Typhoid, she tells someone later on, and the person she’s speaking to replies soberly that she must have been saved for a purpose.

And suddenly a third voice emerges, and it took me a long time to realize who this third voice is. This voice is chaotic and disjointed, swinging wildly from past to present with only the most fragile grasp of time and place — more emotion than narrative.  It’s Kitty, Esme’s sister and Iris’ grandmother, rambling through her Alzheimer’s. Because her thought processes are not linear, it takes us a long time to orient ourselves to who she’s talking about, when the events she describes are taking place, and where. But her fragmented, splintered recollections are so sharp, so spot-on, that once we put them together with Esme’s more orderly recollections, we’re able to get a whole other view of the events that led Esme – not Kitty – to a lifetime of confinement.

Of course Esme does wind up going home with Iris, and it’s wonderful to watch their growing bond. It’s also wonderful to see how Maggie O’Farrell uses the two sisters’ voices – Esme who really doesn’t understand what happened to her, and Kitty who used to know, but no longer really remembers — to put together a story you’ll never forget.

Oh, by the way – I love unpredictable endings. And everything I’ve told you so far may have led you to think, “Oh, I know how this story is going to go.” Trust me – you don’t. If I say any more, I’ll ruin the surprise, so just read the book. It’s great.

I’m in the middle of reading the most amazing how-to book I’ve ever come across. Jon Franklin, winner of several Pulitzer Prizes, specializes in writing “creative nonfiction” – factual stories that read like fiction. But his advice applies to writers of pure fiction as well. In Writing for Story, he shows you how to structure the story before you write it to make sure you actually know where it’s going. He shows you how to flesh out your outline, how the pacing should work, how to modify the rhythm of your sentences based upon the degree of excitement you want to build into that part of the story — and he also shows you which parts of the narrative need to be exciting and which parts are more expository. The thing that sets this book apart from average “how-to” books is the degree of specifics. I’ve never read anything that told me exactly how to structure the book, exactly how to tell whether your structure is going to be satisfying or not (before you write a word, much less before you get to chapter thirteen!), and exactly where to put flashbacks, transitions, foreshadowing, etc. Franklin’s suggestions do not work on all kinds of stories, but they work often enough for this book to be a valuable addition to any writer’s bookshelf.

I knew it would only be a matter of time before I wrote something about politics or religion instead of just writing. Well, here goes. The U.S. claims to be fighting a war on terrorism. Well, when I was young, we were fighting a war on poverty. We didn’t go out and shoot poor people; we tried to help them. In the sixties and seventies, we also fought a war on bigotry. We didn’t go out and shoot bigots; we tried to be unlike them. Why, when we are confronted by terrorists who attack us with weapons, do we feel we must retaliate the same way? You can’t shoot an “-ism;” it can only be changed from the inside out.

Lately, there seems to be some kind of obsession with telling one’s life story. Perhaps as we age, we come to feel that civilization is losing the values with which we were raised, and we want to pass those values on to a younger generation before it’s too late. Or maybe we’re just self-indulgent, and we love to talk about ourselves. I really don’t know. But if the plethora of memoir-writing classes at our local community colleges and arts centers is any indication, talking about ourselves is a hot commodity.

Naturally, since I’m a freelance editor, many of these memoirs wind up in my lap. Some are deadly dull; most are at least interesting; many are really good. But just as novels have a point – a theme – the book of your life needs one too, and a lot of the memoirs I see seem to have missed that concept. Maybe your theme is “Even though I never graduated from eighth grade, I produced five college graduates – and here’s how.” If so, you don’t need to give me five pages about your Uncle Henry’s battle with gout. Maybe your theme is “Never say no to adventure.” That’s great – but then don’t spend half a chapter telling me about your grandmother’s home cooking.

It may be hard for you to pinpoint the theme of your own life. Sometimes your loved ones may have more insight into that than you do. More than once, I’ve been the one to tell my editing clients what the point of their life story seemed to be, because they honestly didn’t know. But once you figure out what it is, prune out the anecdotes that do not support that story at all. You don’t have to tell your readers every little memory you have. Carefully select the ones that most truly illustrate your theme, and let the rest go.

Comments? Questions? Feedback?

Lately several people have commented on the site, generally positively — nice site, good job, etc. — but I wasn’t able to post their comments because they included a) a link to something offensive, irrelevant, or nonexistent; or b) a string of random keywords that were clearly inserted in the post just to serve the business interests of the poster. Now, I don’t mind if, as part of your commentary on my post, you include a link that my readers might find useful as they become better writers, or even better human beings. But please don’t assume my readers share your more esoteric interests. And as you’ve probably noticed by now, I really do moderate each of my comments individually. (I greatly doubt that most of the people who actually read my blog are the offenders here — I know I’m preaching to the choir — but it merited saying, anyway.)