In his office at the university John sat hunched over my manuscript, breathing clouds of tobacco smoke over the words. In one hand his pipe, in the other a pencil. Every so often he jotted something in the margin. It was like sitting in a dentist’s chair and being aware of the dentist silently marking things down on a chart showing teeth. I looked, instead, at a small oil painting on the wall to the right of the desk. Woodcutters. Winter. I looked more closely. No, those were hunters seated on the snowy ground, hunters leaning against trees and dozing. Snow falling straight down. Small animals peering out at these snoozing hunters. Rabbits. Deer. Birds. John had painted this picture. A non-sequitur zoomed through my head, a thought I’d woken up with that morning—how we walk through life leading memory, a hobbled horse. I wrote it down to distract myself from the image of John Gardner poised hawk-like over “The Season of the Spirit.” My hands were blue with cold and nerves, the handwriting, jerky. Students came to the open door, glanced in, then signed their names on a sheet listing sessions for the next few days.
“Incredible,” John murmured, not looking up. “This is incredible.” He kept on reading. Incredible good? I wondered, or bad. The pencil lay forgotten on the desk as John read. Good, I decided. I wanted to run out into the hall and shout, pull my hair, make faces, but I sat there like a bump, the stereotypical student needing to project an image of thoughtful calm. He looked up finally. “Where did you― When did you start writing?” Words to that effect.
I mumbled something about always wanting to write but finally concentrating on teaching until just recently. This story, I told him, I’d started a few months ago. It was his first class that somehow made everything come together. To this day I’m grateful to my husband for not telling me just how awful those early drafts were—the English major knowing a whole lot but the writer in some state of flailing-about infancy. The thought hit me that John Gardner might have said “incredible” simply to encourage. I looked at him. Those eyes. Lines, shadows, some puffiness. The Icelandic sweater resembling a medieval tunic. No. The stakes, I sensed, were too high. This man played for keeps where writing was concerned.
Quickly, incisively, he went over his penciled comments. This section too choppy. That one not developed enough. I should integrate the past and present more smoothly somehow. Find a way. You can do it. All at once I knew that I could. He said he was glad I was in his class. He was glad. Good Lord. I could have run the fifteen miles home that day on the leftover adrenaline from that half-hour session.
“Do plots,” he told us during the next class. Plots. We looked at him. He told us he usually works out a dozen or so—more—all kinds of crazy things, then picks the one that strikes him the most. We should be able to think up plots just like that—he snapped his fingers. Our assignment was to write down three or four plots. The results were dismal. Disappointed, he heard us out one by one. Little action, mainly passive reactions. And instead of three or four apiece, we’d only managed one or so—and that one not so hot. Try it again, he told us. It should be easy. It should be fun. He wanted to hear our plots before we began writing our next piece.
I looked deep into my past and came up with a memory of an old man I’d loved, my grandfather. “There’s this old man,” I said in John’s office, “a proud man. He works all the time, around his big house. Work is his life. Before Easter one year, he removes the dusty lace curtains on his living room windows and takes them to a poor widow who washes people’s curtains.” I went on, outlining what happens next. The old man starts taking curtains over there all the time. He likes her little house, the steamy air, the homemade soup and bread. His grown daughter is suspicious, mad actually. She doesn’t want him doing anything so foolish as marrying again, especially since that might threaten her inheritance. One winter day, while chopping ice off his steps, he falls and winds up in the hospital. On her bad legs, the widow walks to the hospital to bring him homemade soup. This goes on for a few days. One day, when she doesn’t arrive, the old man sneaks out of the hospital and takes a taxi to her house. He finds her laid up and unable to work. It’s just before Easter again, and everyone wants clean curtains, even a woman he’s judgmental about, but the widow is unable to wash them. So, he kneels at the old-fashioned wash tub and washes them himself. To my ear, this all sounded horribly simplistic. Bare bones and awful. “The title,” I finished, “will be ‘The Courtship of Widow Sobcek’.” Then I slipped in some fancy English major talk. She, the old woman, is in fact the one who―” After concluding my little analysis, I sat there, aware of the quiet and of pipe tobacco smoke.
“That’s wonderful,” John said after a moment, as always stressing the first syllable of wonderful. “It’ll be a tremendous story.”
There it was. The green light. The energy. I drove home in my old pickup and wrote like a crazed person. The only problem was, I’d been reading Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and my sentences poured forth in something of that cool, objective, 19th century mode. I thought it was great. High on the previous victories, I signed up on the sheet and awaited new praise, still more approval. (I’m afraid that young writers, and even older ones, often do become addicted, unfortunately.) I felt a little edgy about the story, true, but thought that was just my old lack-of-confidence-edginess a few words from John might vaporize in a moment. If he loved “The Season of the Spirit,” he’d be amazed by this one.
Pencil in hand, he began reading and making marginal comments. No good, I thought. After a while he put the pencil down and kept reading. Good, I thought. Better. He said nothing, though, and the silence became ominous. He’d given me something to read, his “Songs for the End of the World.” I held the typed poems gingerly. What was this? John Gardner giving me things of his own—to read? To comment on, maybe? Now that was incredible. I lingered over the line, “I took sides with the earth.”
John leaned back. He seemed very tired. “This isn’t working.”
I placed “Songs for the End of the World” on a pile of story manuscripts. At that moment a photographer barged in and asked if he could take some photos, and while he snapped away, John explained at length why he didn’t like the story—the 19th century tone, particularly, bothered him. That distancing. “Too great a psychic distance.” I imagined the back of my head appearing in those photos, imagined the photographer taking all this in, and felt great shame. I’d blown it, all right, but how could I have blown it so badly? I hadn’t gotten one thing right.
I began reworking “The Courtship” and gradually the pain of that session abated. A fire burned in the wood stove. Canada geese flew south day and night. Working on the story paragraph by paragraph brought quiet joy. In my notebook were two maxims gleaned from the class—Never hurry a story. Polish each paragraph until it sings. I was beginning to hear the singing. But when I finally read the story to the graduate seminar, John said little. I figured I’d blown it again. After class, though, he told me to send it to the Atlantic. And if they didn’t take it, he wanted it for MSS, the literary magazine he’d soon be publishing again.
The Atlantic.
When the Atlantic declined, kindly adding that they were sure they’d like to see more work, John did take the story. After that triumph, I wrote continuously but couldn’t seem to strike gold again—make, out of mere words, a beautiful construction that was true and honest and emotionally evocative. So many botched stories! So many revisions! So many half-hour sessions during which John would pencil in comments, and finally say, “Not there yet. Mine deeper.” Several stories finally got there; many didn’t. A play did. A first novel, a historical, was only so-so. If I’d had been a potter, I would have broken a lot of flawed pots. And yet, the work of writing was getting done, the trial and error and endless revising, the re-visioning. The faithful return to the desk day after day after day. Just as, each fall and spring, the geese flying in formation over our old farmhouse were doing their faithful ancient thing. Now, thinking back on that time, I recall John’s words, “This is what it means to be a writer.”
A year and a half after the inaugural issue of MSS, John died in a motorcycle accident on a country road, the saddlebags of his motorcycle filled with student work. He’d been on his way to teach that morning. At the university’s memorial service—a time when words, all words, seemed impoverished beyond measure, I offered a few of my own. “Because he had faith in us, we are learning to have faith in ourselves.” Faith. Belief in what the eye cannot yet see. And connected to it, all the old courtly virtues of courage, hope, purity of heart, steadfastness of intention, and caritas, love for one’s characters, for the process, the journey. The way of the writer.
John believed that life is buzzing confusion and horror upon horror, but we can, after all, make the choice to go on with it. For his family, his many students, his friends, colleagues, and the wider literary community, John’s death, at 49, was just that—a horror, stupidly senseless. The only things we could do were to dredge up some words from the well of grief, that sudden awful vacancy, say them to one another, and make the choice to go on. Live. Write.
(Conclusion.)
Material excerpted from an essay titled “John,” in MSS Vol. IV, No. 1,2 ©1984 MSS State University of New York at Binghamton. Used with permission.
