The Resurrection

John Gardner

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781453203828
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

A passionate portrait of a family's attempts to understand the meaning behind personal tragedy When Professor James Chandler learns he is dying from leukemia, he moves his family to his childhood home in Batavia, New York. There, surrounded by loved ones—both new and old—the immediacy of Chandler's illness strikes them with new force, and the limitations of his mortality become painfully clear.Rich and moving, and imbued with insight, The Resurrection is a poignant story of love in the face of the ultimate tragedy.This ebook features a new illustrated biography of John Gardner, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Gardner family and the University of Rochester Archives.

PART ONE

1

AT forty-one James Chandler felt secure, on top of things. He had reached the rank of Associate Professor; his articles and his book were beginning to be noticed; he was happily married and had three small daughters whom he loved very much, though he could not say he knew them. He had just finished a long monograph entitled “Am I Now Dreaming?”—perhaps his best work yet, at least in the sense that here, at last, he had achieved what seemed to him perfect control, a marriage of substance and form. He had undertaken it partly because the epistemological problem teased him, involved as it was with the old realist-idealist dilemma and threatened as it was at every turn by solipsism. But mainly he had chosen his subject because of the whimsicality of the thing. The monograph was an intellectual exercise, a tour de force which had taken him two full years to complete and which, he knew, was at bottom no more—or less—than an immensely elaborate joke on the idea of philosophy itself, a complement to his more serious Philosophy as Pure Technique.

There was of course not much question in Chandler’s mind about which of his thoughts and perceptions were real and which illusory dreamwork—for the most part, at least—but that was irrelevant; the problem was to find, if one could, satisfactory checks. It was R. G. Collingwood who had hit upon the secret, not only the general but also the specific approach: Who but the historian had developed techniques for dealing scientifically with that which was not only relative but also, in terms of present space-time, lost? But denying the ultimate value of logical abstraction and ignoring the element of abstract science in his own philosophy—the clue to das absolute Wissen itself in his Essay on Philosophical Method—Collingwood had conceived the analogy in terms too narrow, and in the end, though by no means lapsing into skepticism, he had lost the power of his initial vision and had fallen into self-contradiction. If Chandler’s terms were, in contrast, too broad, it was not from a failure of conception. His monograph was the warm-up for a more important book which he now believed himself fully prepared to write.

The prospect filled him with a serenity which must have been apparent at a glance even to strangers who saw him sitting, smiling, staring nearsightedly out the window of the bus he took Tuesday and Thursday afternoons (if he didn’t get his days mixed up) to the university. He had the look of a Dostoevskian priest, a look at once amusing and impressive on a pallid, owl-faced, professorial little man in thick glasses. It was as if he had discovered for a fact that, despite the opinion of the daily papers, Dame Juliana’s angel was right: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. His office-mate, Ken Roos, a friend from Chandler’s graduate-school days in Indiana, spoke of him as “childlike” and often, with an air half reverent, half bewildered, told anecdotes about him at the faculty lunchroom that made him seem some second Thales tranquilly tumbling down well after well. Chandler’s wife sometimes teased him too. “Excuse my husband,” she would say to friends when he’d lapsed into one of his silences, “he’s got it into his head that today’s Thanksgiving.” It was true. For Chandler every day was Thanksgiving. He loved his teaching: Every book he opened turned out to be closely related to his projected work, and every student turned out to have truly remarkable insights which the student himself, like poor Meno, did not understand. Watching Chandler in front of a class, or hurrying to his mailbox, or trying out a new piece on the piano (Chandler was an excellent musician), one could scarcely help thinking (if one’s thoughts were inclined to run in such channels) of Berkeley’s joy when he came to see the dreadful Lockean universe from a new angle which eliminated all skepticism, “corpuscular philosophy,” and the black pit of atheism. Chandler was infinitely pleased with his shabby little study off the children’s room—his Cave of Error, as his wife called it. He found great satisfaction in his sour old pipe, his new, somewhat mulish ball-point pen, his beautiful children, his piano (though the sounding-board was cracked), the remarkable speed and efficiency of the cleaning woman Marie had found. Above all Chandler was grateful for his wife. It was Marie—a pretty, soft-spoken, intelligent girl, once a student of his—who made possible all the rest. It was she who had decided on their coming to Stanford from Oberlin (he was, as she said, a stick-in-the-mud), she who sent out the checks each month, she who decided on buying the house in San Francisco, she who kept up their social calendar—a complicated business, since Chandler was a firm, unsentimental member of numerous organizations for social progress, including a combo which played, free of charge, for groups concerned with advancing civil rights. Without Marie he’d scarcely have known where to turn for pipe tobacco. And she managed it all quite effortlessly, or so it seemed. She even enjoyed it, although she admitted she’d liked teaching high-school English more, before she’d given it up to take care of the children.

And so there was nothing whatever to detract from Chandler’s joy or, to put it another way, to keep him from his book. And his joy was, moreover, pure: It was the work itself he looked forward to, not what it would win him in the way of money or prestige. One could scarcely imagine a project less likely to succeed in strictly practical terms: It was to be called The Uninhabited Castle: An Apology for Contemporary Metaphysics. He’d been gathering notes toward it for years. Certain sections, in fact, were already worked out in rough draft, for he’d taken the time to type up his lectures when they were relevant.

Unluckily, he found he couldn’t begin at once after finishing the monograph. The work on that had left him emotionally exhausted and, because of the hours he’d put in, apparently, had slightly damaged his health. His teaching seemed to take all his time and leave him spent, even shaky. But his serenity held. The necessarily lazy weekends gave him time to notice his family, count up his blessings, and daydream. From his chair in the garden, on the side of Twin Peaks, he could see all San Francisco Bay—the bridge, white sailboats, ocean liners moving in and out. Perhaps when the book was finished he’d visit Japan.

He would acknowledge at the outset the truth of Warnock’s observation that the metaphysical castles of the past have not fallen under siege, generally speaking, but have simply crumbled—citadels much shot at and never taken, merely discovered, one sunny afternoon, to be uninhabited. But he would go on to ask just how much that mattered. The question was not whether systems were expendable but whether they were useful at all and, beyond that, whether a well-thought-out metaphysical hypothesis was more useful than the more common sort of thing, “angles of vision” or, more ponderously, “alternative conceptual systems.”

However his book might at first be received, it would be recognized at last as important, at least as a minority report. Of this Chandler was confident. He had always been a man who knew his strong and weak points, and he had worked for years and with all his might at filling in the important gaps in his scientific and philosophical knowledge. Compared to the new book, the monograph he’d just completed would be juvenilia—or so he hoped. Happily, since such things can be destructive, he had no particular fears or overwhelming compulsions: If his Uninhibited Castle did not work out—if the obstructions that inevitably arose in one’s road, when one once got going, proved impassable—he would be sorry, but not crushed. He had labored before on projects which, despite the radiance of their promise, had failed to work out in the end.

But though he knew better than to lose himself in grandiose dreams, he was, for all that, calmly and more or less constantly awake to the possibility of splendid success, a triumph of the kind especially attractive to a man of his particular make-up: the triumph, in a way, of self. “Professor Quixote,” his wife sometimes called him, and she was not far wrong. His concern with metaphysics in the age of analysis made him a man born too late for his time, a harmless lunatic all of whose energy and skill went into a heroic battling, by the laws of an intricate and obsolete code, against whatever he could contrive in the way of dragons. His success, if he should prove successful, would not be success in some worthwhile endeavor but merely proof to himself and the esoteric world of his own quite superfluous discipline that he could manage a feat which, as everyone including James Chandler knew, was no longer worth attempting. He would prove, in a word, that an outmoded kind of philosophy was still of great value, in principle, with the result that—to take the most optimistic view—the usual disparagement of metaphysics would be dropped. The result would not be, probably, that philosophers would turn once more to metaphysics. Such work was very difficult, and the product—even if it could be shown to be preferable to the scatter-shot results of humbler labors—would not in the end seem worth the greater effort and, worse, the risk of total failure. Thus in plain truth James Chandler’s project was one from which any man of sense ought to shrink. Why did he pursue it then? No doubt he lacked the sense God normally proffered even to His philosophers. But perhaps—or so he at times suspected—he differed from most of his fellows in another way as well. He had once come across in a graduate paper, and had copied down in one of his notebooks, a statement which had for him peculiar interest: “The twentieth-century philosopher (if we discount self-pitying existentialists) does not suffer from any profound metaphysical anxieties. Philosophers who happen to believe in God and those who happen not to, do the same sort of work.” Chandler himself sometimes believed and sometimes did not, and his indecision troubled him as it had troubled Collingwood before him. Collingwood had written, “For the Christian, as never for any pagan, religion becomes an influence dominating the whole of life; and this unity once achieved can never be forfeited again.” Perhaps it was because of this very notion, pervasive in his work, that Collingwood went unnoticed. And perhaps it was this same old-fashioned uncertainty which, disguised by rationalizations, gave Chandler’s anomalous project its mysterious luster.

But there was another, more likely explanation. The pleasure in the projected achievement lay simply in the fact that—like the crest of Everest to a mountain-climber, or like a bank to a man inclined to steal—it was there; it might be managed. It was the glow of self in a new shape, in Sartre’s phrase, calling to itself from the ground of the future. That was, at times, precisely Chandler’s sense of it: a shadow that stood on a hill in the center of a labyrinth. He would reach it, as he had reached it already in uneasy dreams; and it was of no particular significance, as anyone could see, that when he reached the heart of the labyrinth the character of the place would be changed, the shadow gone to a farther hill, a new center, so that he would be forced to pursue again, pursue all the length of infinity, like Spengler’s Egyptians, joyful and without hope. For in this—the basis of all his muddle-headed nonsense (but that was perhaps overstating the thing; Collingwood too had made the mistake)—Sartre was wrong: It was not one’s past monstrosity that one fled in pursuit of one’s finer image, or that was at least not the necessary case. One negated a self one liked perfectly well for a self one liked better and another which one liked better yet in a game of infinite ascension. It was as if (as Chandler had put it to classes) Geoffrey Chaucer were to find himself in grim old Dante’s Purgatory. Each ledge would be a splendid triumph, a place too interesting to leave except that there stood, above, still finer ledges. And so if the project he now had in mind did not satisfy him when he finished it—no immediate problem, in any case—then so be it: One could always turn up new windmills to conquer. However man’s view of the universe had changed, the macrocosm-microcosm concept of those wise old Greeks still held: One was, oneself, with all one’s kind, the cosmic detonation. Or the cosmic rose, perhaps, as Collingwood had it—an idea as exciting (though admittedly false) as anything Chandler had ever come across. As Collingwood put it:

That history is a process in which tout casse, tout lasse, tout passe, is doubtless true; but it is also a process in which the things that are thus destroyed are brought into existence. Only it is easier to see their destruction than to see their construction, because it does not take so long. May it not be the same in the world of nature? May it not be the case that the modern picture of a running-down universe, in which energy is by degrees exchanging a non-uniform and arbitrary distribution (that is, a distribution not accounted for by any laws yet known to us, and therefore in effect a given, ready-made, miraculously established distribution, a physicist’s Golden Age), for a uniform distribution, according to the second law of thermodynamics, is a picture based on habitual observation of relatively short-phase processes, and one destined to be dismissed as illusory at some future date, when closer attention has been paid to processes whose time-phase is longer?

His monograph was just newly out (causing scarcely a ripple in the sea of philosophical thought) when Chandler learned he had possibly a month, or at most only two or three, to live. He had, according to his doctor, aleukemic leukemia, on the verge even now of the blast crisis, an increase in the lawless proliferation of lymphatic-type cells that would swiftly and suddenly shift the white count from its present six thousand to something astronomical, perhaps near 500,000; there was, in effect, nothing to be done.

And so it was settled. The limits of Chandler’s identity (It was thus that he put it to himself, fleeing into the comforting arms of pedantic abstraction) were set.

2

HE stood at the window in the doctor’s office, Marie in the chair in front of the desk behind him, the doctor in his own chair, carefully balanced, expressionless—all this from memory, for Chandler was not looking now at them but out at the wide street and, a block up the hill, the hospital, white in the sun, the sky very blue behind it. Cars in the hospital parking lot, looking down past the long white railing at the street, glittered sharply, and he had to look away. He glanced at the desk, a row of books along one side, a blotter, a pen set, white and yellow papers.

“About thirty percent of the time we achieve a remission,” the doctor said. He had a red face, curly silver hair, prominent teeth. His hands were fat. Marie sat perfectly still, pale, waiting. “After that,” the doctor said, “we keep the patient under close observation. You’ll need to be hospitalized, of course.”

“Why?” Chandler asked. The sound of his own voice startled him like a sharp intrusion from without. He had not realized he was going to speak.

The doctor glanced at him, then down at the blue-green blotter. After a moment he said quietly, as if evasively, “We need to keep close watch, in cases like this. For one thing, the drug we’ll use when we try for a remission will have a toxic reaction before long, and we’ll have to discontinue it.” He lifted the pen from the pen set and examined the bright gold point.

“But after the reaction I won’t need to be here,” Chandler said. He had an odd, completely irrational sense that winning this point, getting home again, was important. As if he were standing outside himself, watching it all disinterestedly, he saw himself speaking sharply, angrily, like Old Man Pursey at a faculty meeting, or like Chandler’s father long ago, arguing about levitation.

“You don’t need to be here,” the doctor said softly, as though he were angry himself.

Marie said, calm, “You said ’for one thing,’ Doctor. What are the other things?”

“In cases of this kind we can expect severe anemia, and you’ll need transfusions to keep you going. And then there may be other things too. The spleen may swell, pain may show up—”

“But why keep me going?” Chandler asked, startling himself again. And still he seemed outside himself, a bemused and dispassionate observer.

“For your family, perhaps,” the doctor suggested, speaking still more softly now, playing with the pen. It was painful for him, and in another mood Chandler might have sympathized with the man—if the unreasonable, petulant patient were somebody else.

“True,” Chandler said, pouncing on it, “but I’ll see less of my family in the hospital, even if you drag this business out, than I’d see of them at home.” He found all at once that he was frightened—not frightened by the thought of death; that had not yet taken hold: he had sealed his mind against it as tightly as Noah sealed his ark, or, according to the Schoolmen, the Second Noah sealed up the castle of the saved—but frightened by the godlike authority of the red-faced, healthy, bored-looking man who could listen to him or refuse him, just as he pleased.

But the doctor said, “Now listen, it’s a free country. I’ve given my advice, that’s all I can do. If you want to stay out, let Nature take its course—” He waved vaguely.

Marie said, holding her purse so tightly that her knuckles were white, “The doctor knows best, James.”

Chandler tried...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• A Biography of John Gardner
• Copyright Page