Three weeks after that dinner, John was still trying to bolster me up—this time after my novel was rejected on its first trip out and another long piece of fiction still wasn’t coming right after two years of work. “I know,” he said, “how hard it is being a writer. I never liked to tell people, when I was starting out, that I was a writer. I’d tell them anything in the world but that I was a writer.”
I wanted to know what kinds of things he’d say.
“Oh…I’d tell them I probated animal wills.” He paused. “But this was in California.”
I laughed then. “And what would they say?”
“They were really interested. I could have made some money on that.” Then he went back into the house to find the reviews of his new novel, Michelsson’s Ghosts. “Four, maybe, out of a hundred good.” He came out empty-handed. He didn’t know where they were. Burnt, maybe, in the woodstove. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
Two years earlier, on the day Ronald Reagan was elected president, I’d driven John to the airport from the university, and he talked excitedly about this new novel he was working on. “Wittgenstein, Nietzsche …everything…it’s really crazy….” Now he threw his broken sunglasses―somehow pinned together―onto the roof of his Honda Civic. One stem fell off. “This is what it means,” he said, “to be a writer.” Inside the car, a chaotic swirl of clothes, books, manuscripts, cans of oil, tins of pipe tobacco, packs of matches, books, manuscripts― Slanted atop the pile in the backseat, a red IBM typewriter. John was about to leave for Vermont and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he was on the faculty. A silver dog leash had been looped around the tailpipe to hold it on.
As others often see it, artistic ambition is not only pretentious but also foolish, particularly when “success” doesn’t come readily. There were times when I could almost read the little thought bubble above a person’s head whenever I was asked what I was doing these days, and I’d respond with something like Oh, writing fiction. Oh man, the thought bubble would say, are you ever deluded, while the actual words usually were “So have you published anything?” That might have been an innocent question driven by simple curiosity. Writers publish, no? But I came to think, finally, that there’s something sad―and fishy―about academics who make their living on the works of dead writers or established living ones but treat aspiring writers with judgmental coolness if not disdain. John’s classrooms, his office redolent of Dunhill pipe tobacco, became “safe” zones where it was perfectly fine―and immensely important―to want to be a writer. And not just any writer, but a really good one. “You don’t have a job?” he said to me once in the early days of my study with him. “Your husband, though, is working? Wonderful! Tremendous! Write!” Thus slaying, for the moment, the dragon Guilt. I couldn’t know then just how many times in three years I’d call upon him to slay those dragons of mine: doubt, anxiety, guilt―all rising up again and again from their slain segments. Here’s a little scene that might illustrate the kind of situation I’d run into that would feed these dragons. One day, soon after I began John’s class, an employment tax assessor came to our farmhouse―an older neighbor on our dirt road. He wanted to know what my husband “did” and what I “did.” I said I was unemployed. No courage, yet, to say the word writer; besides, had I earned any money at it? No. “Unemployed,” he said, looking down his list and not finding it. “Well, I guess that’s about the same as housewife, ain’t it?” That earned, I think, one point. I should have said student—or that I probated animal wills.
But back to beginnings― On the first day of classes at the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University), seats in the large room assigned to John Gardner’s creative writing class were fast becoming scarce. There were kids in trendy clothes, preppy clothes, scruffy clothes, a few “older people” like myself―I was thirty-four then. That September afternoon was summer-hot, and John entered in paint-spattered Levi’s, denim shirt, and black leather motorcycle jacket. The air in the classroom went still. I had taught his novels in a contemporary lit. course, had read a number of interviews he’d given, had seen him on TV, and of course had seen photographs on book jackets, yet the reality of it―this is man who wrote all those amazing words―was hard to take in. Along with everyone else, I sat there and discretely gawked.
John sat on the edge of the desk and looked at us a moment, then took out his pipe and loaded it up. We looked at him. I could hear his jacket creaking. I wondered why he kept it on. But it wasn’t the black jacket against the long silver hair that held one, finally. Nor the spattered jeans or graceful hands, an index finger blackened with tobacco ash. It was his eyes. Blue. Holding light. And resigned, it seemed, to facing whatever was Out There. I got the feeling that once those eyes focused on a person or a thing, there’d be no end to the seeing. But for the moment they were a little dreamy—a luminous sort of detachment, as if he were seeing something other than a roomful of new students. I chickened out and looked down at my blank notebook.
In a soft, hurried, non-too-clear voice John began by speaking of a Day of Confusion, of the undergraduate and grad students somehow placed in the same class. While the grad students wrote their names and telephone numbers on a sheet of paper, he talked about how “this” writing differs from analytical English-major writing, and how we can read only so much Bellow and Salinger and Joyce but finally must make our own decisions; how developing this way― constantly making choices and writing down words―was like developing muscle. Poets, he said, often develop faster than prose writers because they get a feeling for what’s good, for what works in short poems, then send them out and get a number of wins. Getting those in a row helps develop confidence, and then one takes risks, which further enhances development. A prose writer working on a novel might work five years or so and get a “lose.” Five years. The eyes held steady while we took this in. He went on to talk about writing as a dreamy, subconscious thing. One shouldn’t plot out symbols in the beginning, for instance, but rather allow them to emerge on their own. In that way, Chaucer is better than Edmund Spenser, who had things all figured out from the start. Finally, he promised to do most of the work during the class sessions until we began discussing our own fiction. That was it. He left, and the air seemed to settle.
I was late for the first graduate seminar―still fired up from the first session, I’d lost track of time while writing. Also, I was driving a 1950 Ford pick-up, and its top speed was forty-five miles an hour, which was pushing it. Our class met in a seminar room this time, and John, wearing his black leather jacket, sat at the head of a conference table. Students jammed the room, crowding the table, layered in tiers around the table, tucked into corners, sitting, even, on the floor. I found a chair against the wall directly behind him. Then I spent two hours watching his hands move through the air as he talked. Fiction is an act of love, he told us, and character is central to the work. All else supports the characterization―or should―even philosophy, which the work must have. Revision, to a great extent, is the art of fiction writing. That’s where the subconscious materials can be refined, placed in balance. When you write a novel, he said, it will be loaded with all kinds of stuff, all your nightmares, and that’s why doing an English-major style analysis after you have a good working draft is important. (Some months later I’d ask how he kept everything in his head while he worked on a massive novel like The Sunlight Dialogues. He said he took endless notes as he reworked the material.) We should, he told us during that first seminar, read the black notebook he’d placed on reserve―The Art of Fiction in manuscript form. We should also check out W. W. Watt’s An American Rhetoric. He talked non-stop―digressive, skittering talk, breaking the solemnity now and then with something funny: the Marquis de Sade―“A head full of hot sawdust.” Or how beginning writers often have a penchant for setting up artificial difficulties, wanting to write about, say, not just a psychopath, but a psychopathic cow. He introduced us to what he called “deep errors” and “sins.” In his novel October Light, for example, whenever the reader is forced to leave the interesting for the trivial, he, the author, committed the sin of frigidity. But sometimes, if it’s important that you do commit that sin, you “pay back” in other ways. At first I wasn’t clear on this. Frigidity? But the word does imply a withholding, a lack. Judging by the narrative structure of October Light, its interwoven story lines, I finally understood that it has to do with leaving the authentic for the superficial and stereotypical. (For example, writing in a totally superficial vein, you might “characterize” a group of businessmen as “the Suits.”) In October Light, authentic writing forms the outer novel; trashy, pop culture writing, the inner one. Authentic writing gets at reality as far as possible; the superficial, well, skims surfaces and relies on cleverness and tricks. In October Light John juxtaposed the two in order to dramatize contrasts.
Again and again during that first seminar, John stressed the importance of characterization. All description should be emotionally charged and serve to illuminate character. So should dialogue, yet at the same time to get at reality is to get it right, be absolutely truthful. He gave us an assignment, a longish piece of 5-10 pages in which everything is to be characterization: setting, gesture and gait, dialogue, the reactions of others to the main character, at least one action, and finally even the writing style. We shouldn’t do anything in an exercise that we wouldn’t do in a real story. Someone asked how a story differs from a sketch. In a story, John explained, you’re fascinated by what a character does or is going to do. Also, we should know how to plot an energeic action. I later found the word in the black notebook and saw that it’s from Aristotle’s word energeia, which means bringing potency (in character, in situation) into actualization. It was beginning to sound like a course in metaphysics.
I drove back into Pennsylvania that afternoon excited but also shaken and scared. Fields and woods went by without my noticing them. So this is it, I thought. Writing. Who would’ve figured it was so complicated? At home I took out the I Ching I’d found in a used bookstore in Hawaii and threw three Chinese coins over my work table. My hexagram turned out to be Sui, “Following”; Tui the joyous, lake above; Chen the arousing, thunder below. Following has supreme success, read the Judgment. Perseverance furthers.
I began working on the assignment.
(To be continued.)
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.
