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2.2 The writer's main themes and plot, his genre style
October Light
Gardner has called Nickel Mountain his “simplest” novel; October Light, also a pastoral of sorts, is a much more complex work—more varied in style and characters, at once funnier and yet more serious than Nickel Mountain. Most of October Light takes place on Prospect Mountain in Vermont, where seventy-two-year old James L. Page and his eighty-year-old sister, Sally Abbott, are locked in “a battle of the bowels.” James, the taciturn New England farmer, suffers from constipation as a result of having to eat his own cooking. A bigot, he simplifies right and wrong and rages against the valuelessness of modern life to the point of shotgunning Sally’s television and locking her in her bedroom. James, however, is more than merely a comic buffoon; he is also a man burdened with guilt and oppressed by mortality—not only his own approaching end but also the accidental death of a young son, the suicides of his son Richard and his uncle Ira, and the passing away of his wife Ariah in bitter silence. Self-reliant in the worst sense, James is outwardly unemotional (except for his anger), distant from those around him and from his innermost feelings. Only when he realizes the degree to which he is responsible for Richard’s death and the part Richard played in accidentally frightening his Uncle Horace (Sally’s husband) to death, does James once again take his place in the natural world and the human community.Sally, meanwhile, a self-appointed spokeswoman for all oppressed minorities, remains locked in her room where, having nothing to eat but apples, she suffers from loose bowels. A liberal in name if not in fact, she thinks of her stubborn refusal to leave her room as a protest against her tyrannical brother. She is encouraged in her “strike” by the paperback book she reads, The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock. Constituting nearly 40 percent of the text of October Light, this novel-within-a-novel parodies the two kinds of fashionable literature assailed by Gardner in On Moral Fiction: the reflexive and the cynically didactic. Although Sally is not an especially discriminating reader, she does understand that The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock is trash— entertaining perhaps, but certainly not true. As she continues to read, however, the book, which she begins to see as a reflection of her situation, starts to exert its pernicious influence. Slowly Sally adopts its values and point of view as her own: its moral relativism, nihilistic violence, the acceptance of an accidental and therefore purposeless universe, and a casually superficial and irresponsible attitude toward human relationships. The subjects that are so weightlessly and artlessly handled in her paperback novel (suicide, for one) are substantive matters of concern in the “real” lives of James and Sally; but this is a point that Sally, caring less for the Pages to whom she is related than for the pages of her novel, does not understand.In effect, October Light successfully dramatizes the argument of On Moral Fiction, that art provides its audience with models and therefore affects human behavior. Reading The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock leads Sally to devise and implement a plan to kill James; when the plan misfires and nearly results in the death of her niece, Sally, like the characters in her book, feels neither responsibility nor remorse.⁸ James is similarly affected by the violence he sees on television and, more particularly, by his Uncle Ira, who appears to have been more a monster than a man and certainly a poor model for James to pattern his own life after. The more James and Sally become like characters in what Gardner calls trivial or immoral fiction, playing out their inflexible parts as victimized woman locked in a tower or rugged New England farmer, the greater the danger that they will lose their humanity and become either caricatures or monsters. One such caricature in The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock dismisses all fiction, claiming that the trashiest “is all true” and “the noblest is all illusion.” In their wiser moments, Sally and James know better; they understand that art is humanity’s chief weapon in the battle against chaos and death (what James calls “gravity”) and that the true artist is the one who paints “as if his pictures might check the decay— decay that . . . people hadn’t yet glimpsed.”As in Nickel Mountain, Gardner’s affirmation avoids sentimentality. Acknowledging the fact of death, acknowledging how easily the agreements that bind people together can be broken, he exposes the fragility of human existence. What makes his characters’ lives even more difficult is the way in which their knowledge is, except for brief flashes of understanding, severely limited. Instead of the easy generalizations of trivial fiction, Gardner offers the complex and interrelated mysteries of Horace’s death and Richard’s suicide. Memory plays an especially important part in the novel; implying wordless connections between people and times, it is one effective antidote to Sally’s “reasonable anger” and James’s having stubbornly locked his heart against those he once loved. Another binding force is forgiveness—the willingness to forgive and to be forgiven—which absolves the individual of the intolerable burden of guilt without freeing him or her of all responsibility. James’s son-in-law, Lewis Hicks, for example, can see all sides of an issue and so takes the one course open to humankind (as opposed to monsters): forgiving everyone. Lewis is the dutiful, ever-present handyman who stands ready to shore up everyone else’s ruins, understanding them to be his own as well. Significantly, it is Lewis who first sees the October light that, while a sign of winter and therefore a reminder of death, has the power to transform the everyday world into a vision of radiant, magical beauty, a reminder of that life that is yet to be lived.Freddy’s Book:Many reviewers regarded Freddy’s Book as one of the least satisfying of Gardner’s novels; certainly it is the most perplexing. Like October Light, it comprises two distinct stories, but in Freddy’s Book the two are not interwoven (Gardner thought October Light was flawed for just that reason). The first part of Freddy’s Book is sixty-four pages long and concerns Professor Jack Winesap’s visit to Madison,Wisconsin, where he delivers a lecture on “The Psycho-Politics of the Late Welsh Fairy Tale: Fee, Fie, Foe—Revolution.” Winesap, a psychohistorian, is a gregarious and sympathetic fellow who appears to accept the relativism and triviality of his age until his meeting with the Agaards makes plain to him the limitations of his easygoing rationalism.Professor Sven Agaard is a self-righteous dogmatist; his son Freddy, the victim of a genetic disorder, is another in Gardner’s long line of misfits: a sickly looking eightfoot monster dripping baby fat. The manuscript Freddy delivers to Winesap at midnight (Freddy’s Book) constitutes the 180-page second part of Gardner’s novel. Freddy’s tale of sixteenth century Sweden, titled “King Gustav and the Devil,” is a dreadful bore—at least at first. Then the story begins to improve; the style becomes more controlled, the plot more compelling and more complex as Freddy begins to use his fiction writing to explore the possibilities inherent in his story and, analogously, to explore alternatives to his own various confinements.Many reviewers were puzzled by Gardner’s decision to use the ending of Freddy’s tale to conclude the larger novel, which, they felt, seemed broken in two. This narrative strategy is both understandable and effective once it is considered in the context of Gardner’s “debate on fiction” with his friend, the novelist and critic William Gass. Gass contends that fiction is a self-enclosed and self-referential art object that does not point outside itself toward the world of men but back into “the world within the word.” Gardner, on the other hand, maintains that fiction does extend beyond the page into the reader’s real world, affecting the reader in various and usually indirect ways. In Freddy’s Book, Gardner makes the reader think about what effect Freddy’s manuscript has had on its midnight reader, Winesap.Freddy’s Book Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and October Light the qualities that have made Gardner a significant as well as a popular modern American novelist: the blend of realism and fantasy, narrative game-playing and serious purpose, and the interest in character that implies Gardner’s interest in humankind. ⁹The reader finds characters such as Winesap and Freddy compelling because Gardner draws them honestly, and he draws them honestly because, in part, each represents a side of his own personality. He is as much Grendel as he is the Shaper, as much the anarchic Sunlight Man as the law-and-order police chief Clumly. Gardner sympathizes with those who show the world as it is, but ultimately he rejects their realism in favor of those heroes—poets, farmers, and others—who choose to do what they can to transformthe world into their vision of what it should be, those who, like Gardner, affirm the Shaper’s “as if.”Mickelsson’s Ghosts:In the case of Peter J. Mickelsson, protagonist of Gardner’s ninth and last novel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, the similarity between author and character is especially close: Both are middle-aged, teach at the State University of New York at Binghamton, own farmhouses in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, have two college-age children, marriages that end badly, difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service, and both find that their careers, like the rest of their lives, are in a state of decline. The very texture of the novel’s 103-word opening sentence makes clear that “something, somewhere had gone wrong with (Mickelsson’s) fix on reality.” According to several influential reviewers, it was not only Mickelsson who had lost his fix; in the pages of Esquire and Saturday Review, for example, Gardner was venomously attacked for his carelessness, boring and pretentious pedantry, implausible language, and failure to resolve or even make sense of his numerous plots: love, ghost, murder, academic life, philosophy, marital stress, sex, environmental issues, and Mormonism. Whether these attacks were directed more against the author of On Moral Fiction than the author of Mickelsson’s Ghosts, as Gardner believed, can only be conjectured. What is certain is that these reviews disturbed Gardner so deeply that for a time he considered giving up novel-writing altogether. Moreover, the hostility shown by reviewers James Wolcott, Robert K. Harris, and others is out of proportion to the novel’s actual defects (in particular, the unconvincing last scene and Gardner’s ill-advised attempts to deal openly with sex). Rather than being a “whopping piece of academic bull slinging” (Wolcott), Mickelsson’s Ghosts is clearly Gardner’s most ambitious work since TheSunlight Dialogues, the novel it most resembles both in scope and narrative power.Mickelsson (who Gardner says is based on his friend, the poet James Dickey) is in most respects a familiar Gardner protagonist. Just as the novel follows no single course but instead branches out in many seemingly unrelated directions, so too is Mickelsson a man torn apart by his own inner conflicts. He fondly recalls the certainties and ideals of his past, yet at the same time he finds it easier to live in the present by adopting the cynical, existentially free position he abhors. Finding himself in a world that is at best trivial and at worst self-destructive, Mickelsson recoils from all sense of responsibility and from all human relationships (except the most sordid with a teenage prostitute). Having been betrayed by his wife, he himself becomes a betrayer. Mickelsson is, however, too much the good man, the man desirous of goodness and truth, unwilling to accept any rift between mind and body, thought and deed, to rest easy in his fallen state. Thus Mickelsson’s many ghosts: those of the former owners of his farmhouse, the murderous Spragues; those from his past (wife, children, psychiatrist); the philosophical ghosts of Martin Luther, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and others; and most important, the ghost of his better self.¹⁰
By restoring his farmhouse, Mickelsson is in effect attempting his own moral restoration project. Before he can be freed of his ghosts, however, Mickelsson must first feel the need to confess his guilt (he is, among other things, responsible for a man’s death)—to confess his guilt rather than to internalize it out of shame (as George Loomis does in Nickel Mountain) or to wallow in it as if values did not exist. Only then, through forgiveness, can he enjoy the saving grace of human community.Within the novel’s murder-mystery plot, Mickelsson escapes from the murderous design of a fanatical colleague, Professor Lawler, a self-appointed avenging angel, only after making his act of faith in the form of a wholly irrational “psychic cry for help.” Acknowledging his dependency on others and, later, accepting his place within the human community, Mickelsson becomes whole again. More than a novel about one man’s redemption, Mickelsson’s Ghosts is an exploration of the way in which the modern-world individual can truly find himself—the self that he longs to be—and that discovery can only occur, Gardner believes, in the context of the individual’s commitment to others and of their commitment to him.
Stillness” and “Shadows”
The posthumously published book “Stillness” and “Shadows” was drawn from the University of Rochester’s extensive collection of the author’s papers. Stillness appears as Gardner wrote it in the mid-1970’s, in the form of a complete but unrevised draft that Gardner apparently never intended for publication, though he did mine it for two of his finest short stories, “Stillness” and “Redemption.” Written as psychotherapy in an effort to save his failing first marriage, it is Gardner’s most intimate and autobiographically revealing work. The main characters appear as thinly disguised versions of John and Joan Gardner. Martin Orrick, who Gardner nicknamed Buddy, is a professor and novelist; he is stubborn, opinionated, unfaithful, and often drunk. Joan, his wife and cousin, is a musician who has given up her career in order to allow her husband to pursue his. Although she has reason to complain, she, too, has faults and must share responsibility for their marital difficulties. Both are, however, redeemed, in a sense, in that, as critical as they may be of each other outwardly, each is inwardly critical of himself or herself. The breakup of their marriage is handled with an intensity and sensitivity unusual in Gardner’s fiction but not without the typically Gardnerian concern for seeing an isolated fact of domestic life as a sign of the universal decay that the novel’s improbable happy ending serves only, ironically, to underscore.
Stillness evidences considerable promise; Shadows, on the other hand, suggests a certain pretentiousness on Gardner’s part, given his remarks to interviewers on this work in progress. The published novel is nothing more than a patchwork toggled together by fellow novelist Nicholas Delbanco from the author’s voluminous notes and drafts. Set in Carbondale, Illinois, the novel concerns Gardner’s seriocomic, hardboiled detective Gerald Craine, as he tries to find a murderer and protect a young Jewish student, Ellen Glass, who has come to him for help. Craine’s search for the murderer becomes a search for truth. Delbanco’s text makes clear what was to have been the novel’s thematic center, Craine’s discovery that he cannot protect Ellen, whom he has come to love. The published work, however, does not support Gardner’s claim that Shadows would be his most experimental work in terms of technique as well as his most conservative in terms of values. That claim is nevertheless important, for much of Gardner’s greatness as a novelist derives from the unresolved dialogue between the values he sought to affirm and the often postmodern ways he employed to test and often undermine those values.