Category: Books

Every time I think John Gardner has passed from our cultural memory, I get a reminder of the impact he had.

I read obsessively. When I discover something new, I dive in head first, as was the case this summer when a long-time obsession branched in a new direction. As a card-carrying Yinzer, I’ve loved August Wilson’s work from the first time I saw one of his plays produced. After seeing “Fences” in the back yard of his childhood home in the Hill District last summer, I picked up a biography of Wilson, where I learned about Charles Johnson, a new-to-me writer who Wilson confided in and conspired with while living in Seattle.

I picked up a copy of Johnson’s Night Hawks, which includes a story about his friendship with Wilson, and was blown away by his work.

And a new obsession was born. After Night Hawks, I read Middle Passage, then picked up an edition of Oxherding Tale that includes an introduction from Johnson where he talks about the impact Gardner had on him:

“As a former student of John Gardner, I had to take teaching writing seriously. — indeed, as a moral work — and I did,” he writes, going on to discuss Gardner’s reaction to a rewritten draft of Oxherding Tale. (Johnson also wrote the introduction to Gardner’s “On Writers & Writing.”)

In many ways, they’re very different: Johnson, the African-American Buddhist and Gardner, the Yankee Christian. But they (and August Wilson, I would argue) believed that fiction can have a moral purpose, an instructive role. These ideas got Gardner run out of the academy, more or less, and he often expressed them in doctrinaire terms and insults to his peers that made it easy to brush him off. But I still believe he had a point. Wilson and Johnson also were grappling with the edifying role art can have and how to get there.

Each October, I’ve been attending a tribute to Gardner in his hometown of Batavia, NY, where Gardner fans gather to remember him by reading from his work. During the past few readings, I’ve been tinkering with an idea I call Gardner’s Yankee Grotesque, a variation on Flannery O’Conner’s grotesque, perhaps best personified in O’Conner’s Misfit and Gardner’s Goat Lady.

I can’t make it to the reading this year, but I’ll be there in spirit, perhaps as one of Michelsson’s Ghosts. Gardner’s influence has waned immensely. But the network effect of his life and writing lives on in writers like Charles Johnson.