On Writers & Writing

John Gardner, Stewart O'Nan

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781453203545
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

The classic work on the art of fiction by the "refreshingly unpredictable" novelist and literary critic ( Publishers Weekly )

In this posthumously published collection of his essays and reviews, acclaimed novelist John Gardner discusses the craft of fiction writing, taking to task some of his best-known contemporaries in the process. Gardner criticizes some for writing disingenuous fiction, and commends others who produce literature that acts as a life-affirming force. He offers insights into and exacting critiques on such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, while addressing his personal influences and delivering broad-ranging observations on literary culture.
Provocative and poignant, On Writers & Writing is a must-read for both aspiring writers and careful readers of American literature.
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.

General Plan
for The Sunlight
Dialogues

I DISCOVERED THE GENERAL PLAN FOR THE Sunlight Dialogues uncatalogued among the papers of the Gardner Collection at the University of Rochester. The document from which it is taken is a photocopy of a typescript with only a few minor spelling corrections in ink. This is the only copy of the Plan unearthed so far; the original, I presume, no longer exists. John Gardner apparently wrote it either for his editor at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, or his agent, Georges Borchardt. As a fan of the book and an aspiring novelist, I read his explication greedily. Possibly the last major unpublished Gardner document, the Plan is a map for the general reader and a treasure for scholars. Beginning writers who wished for more in-depth nuts-and-bolts examples in The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist will find answers here. On paper, Gardner makes sense of his huge, architectonic novel, explaining the intertwined mechanisms of character, action, and idea in specifics, bunting down connections, mapping out plots, and checking events against his timeline. Though be wrote the Plan for someone else, it’s hard not to see Gardner urging himself on, telling himself that this monstrous project will come together in the end. It did and it does— S.O.’N.

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A long, difficult metaphysical novel which explores the ideas of responsibility and freedom on many levels organized around two controlling metaphors, one a cops-and-robbers metaphor (developed in the main action), the other a philosophical contrast between the ancient Mesopotamian and Hebrew cultures (developed in the four dialogues themselves, sections VII, XI, XIV, and XIX). On a psychological level, responsibility means the struggle to resist withdrawal and alienation, on one hand, despotic self-assertion on the other; and freedom means either acceptance of suffering and limitation, and positive action despite one’s suffering or limitation, or else freedom—a bad kind of freedom—means psychotic flight from reality. (As in The Resurrection, the controlling psychological theory is that of R. G. Collingwood and those who directly or indirectly follow him.) On a familial level, the ideas of freedom and responsibility characterize successful and unsuccessful relationships within an archetypal family pattern—father, mother, son, daughter. On a social level, the same ideas characterize relationships of ethnic groups, generations, and so forth. Further levels explored are the political and metaphysical or, loosely, religious. All levels of experience are interpreted, as in any good philosophical system, as parallel expressions of a single abstract set of relationships—in effect, the complex relationships of the archetypal cop and robber.

The two central characters in the novel establish the polar opposition: Chief of Police Fred Clumly, a just, moral, and responsible man who struggles to defend and support “law and order,” and whose difficulty is that the ideal he seeks is an impossible one, finally—and the archetypal robber, known as “The Sunlight Man,” who, confronted by the complexity of the modern world, has abnegated responsibility, social commitment, even sanity, and who has the experience and intelligence to make a convincing case for his position. The driving dramatic concern of the whole thick novel, and the central focus of its suspense, is the rising chaos which threatens both men. As head of a police force which is—as most small-town police forces now are—transitional, shifting from the once standard methods to the methods of modern technology, including the so-called “averaging strategy,” whereby one calculates the relative importance of a given crime and fights crime with one eye on the time-product-factor—that is, the extent to which a given investigation pays off in terms of tax dollars (a nine-dollar theft is worth one policeman’s effort for one hour, if the breakdown of police force time shows the operational cost per man to be nine dollars an hour)—as head of such a police force, Clumly endures pressures from the Mayor, the public, and the press which push him in divergent directions. The Mayor wants efficiency at low cost, in other words, a record of apparent success; the public wants both this and police success of the old-fashioned kind; the press wants yet another kind of success-interesting cases solved. And there are other difficulties as well: our laws, which Clumly would agree are just, are in fact outmoded. Present day criminal systems—the modus operandi of the new professionals—make detection under the present laws nearly impossible. And the courts, traditionally calculated to protect the innocent, increase the difficulty by adding to the odds for the criminal. Because Clumly is concerned with the old values of the cop—preventing or checking crime—he works as he sees fit, procrastinates with the Mayor, evades responsibilities he does not approve of (public talks, discussions of the civic parking problem, etc.) and hopes to save himself by a dramatic capture of the Sunlight Man before the police department roof falls in. Clumly is right that the capture of the Sunlight Man is important; and one approves of his defiance of the system being imposed on him, which limits his efficiency though it also has strong justifications. But as the novel progresses one fears that his chance of success according to his own individualistic and privately responsible code is very small. To make matters worse, Clumly is old (sixty-four), occasionally troubled by mental lapses, anility, and plagued by partly irrational fears. In short, Chief Clumly is a fictional embodiment of the problems facing the responsible man—personal, familial (his wife is unwell), social, political, and ultimately metaphysical as well. If we affirm him and all he represents, we cannot do so with any firm expectation that he will prevail. But time is running out for the Sunlight Man, too. He knows this, and he is resigned to his doom. His question, and the reason he persists in eluding capture, is that it is for him a psychological imperative that he know for certain whether or not he is right. He respects Clumly but sees clearly the impossibility of Clumly’s ideal. As a result, the Sunlight Man holds a tentative position as a nihilist and anarchist, and to some extent as maniac, though he is not quite crazy in the usual sense. The necessity of remaining “free,” eluding capture, forces him to repeated social contacts, repeated crimes, and increasingly desperate flight to unreality. Philosophically, he is as right about the world as Clumly—perhaps righter—and because he is, like Clumly, an absolutist, he stubbornly refuses to resolve his dilemma in merely pragmatic terms. True, his course must inevitably lead to his death, but he would rather die than submit to illusion or to what he thinks of as victimization by a confused and sick society. Insofar as the Sunlight Man is a character who wins the reader’s sympathy—and for any thinking reader he must surely be worth respect—his queer race against time must be as suspenseful as Clumly’s.

The ideas implicit in the relationship of these two characters are further explored in the lives of a broad cast of minor characters: an old country lawyer who for complicated reasons pursues Clumly just as Clumly pursues the Sunlight Man (that is, hunts down the areas of Clumly’s neglected responsibility, searches out the evidence of Clumly’s incompetence, and so forth); a younger lawyer, the older lawyer’s son, who is a hunter of professional skips—people who set up paper businesses, milk a town, then vanish; a thief who has two identities, one as thief (Walter Boyle), the other as respectable suburbanite (Walter Benson), and who cannot resolve the conflict of the two; an Indian boy; a woman hell-bent on destroying the son she loves; and others. In every case, specific parallels of action and imagery subtly suggest the parallels between these people and the archetypes, cop and robber. The most explicitly philosophical analysis of the central conflict comes in the four dialogues of Clumly and the Sunlight Man—conversations which come at intervals in the novel, in which Clumly is forced to debate the Sunlight Man’s position: an extremely one-sided debate, since Clumly is no logician and the Sunlight Man is. (He is also, and more important for the drama of the novel, an expert amateur magician.)

One of the central questions in the novel is the identity of the Sunlight Man. (See “The Identity of the Sunlight Man,” below.) On the level of drama, the question is part of the controlling cops-and-robbers vehicle of ideas. But the question also involves the larger question of human identity itself. Because one’s identity is, finally, a matter of one’s choice between lawless freedom and responsibility. Ironically—and symbolically—at the very moment the Sunlight Man learns what his real identity is, that is, what his final values are, he is robbed of his identity: he is shot.

PLOTS

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The main plot is that which concerns Clumly and the Sunlight Man, but threaded through this plot are a number of subplots, each developing, as I have said, implicit ideas in the main plot.

_________

One problem every writer faces when he puts together an architectonic novel of this sort—an old-fashioned Victorian novel, in a way—is that of probability. What leaves one restless about Dickens, say, is that sooner or later every character comes into contact with every other—a thing which strains the reader’s belief. In this novel the interwoven plots have moments of connection but no final connection. What must hold the book together is the thematic parallels, imagistic parallels, and similarities of action in the subplots. Further cohesive elements are the novel’s concentration on, mainly, one important family, the Hodges (the lawyer and his son, the lawyer’s ex-wife, the lawyer’s younger son, and the lawyer’s brother, and, finally—as one learns for certain only near the end—the Sunlight Man himself, a brother to the lawyer, who has been absent from the novel’s locale for sixteen years but has returned to it, incognito, in hopes of setting right an old mistake). Another cohesive element is the figure of the old lawyer’s father, a fine and brilliant man—once a Congressman—who established the ideal for his sons and grandsons, an ideal no longer meaningful because the world has changed, politics has changed, and family life has changed. The old ghost’s values are at the heart of the lawyer’s wife’s hostility, the Sunlight Man’s nihilism, and so on. Hopefully, the novel will also be held together by its use of a single, rich locale—western New York. And of course the novel’s primary emphasis on the Clumly-Sunlight Man story will help to keep the rest in proper perspective.

The plots are as follows.

THE IDENTITY OF THE SUNLIGHT MAN
(A MYSTERY UNTIL THE END)

---

Taggert Faeley Hodge, who would now be forty, left Batavia sixteen years ago, in 1950, having been disbarred as a result of his having defrauded clients and robbed the government. He was the youngest of the Congressman’s sons, the darling of his family, the most brilliant of the lot. In the army he was a minor hero. During his stint in the service he married Kathleen Paxton, daughter of one of Batavia’s relatively new rich. She was a little crazy, demanded more than Taggert could afford. In time, he began to rob clients to meet his bills. (He had expensive tastes of his own to support. Queer hobbies, gadgets, and, above all, books and relics from the Near East.) Abandoning his wife and two children, he fled New York State, Kept in touch with Will Hodge’s wife, his sole ally, and in six months returned for a secret visit to his children, at Hodge’s office. Betraying Hodge, he vanished with the children, taking his car, which he abandoned in Cleveland, mailing back the keys. Old Give Paxton hunted Taggert but never located him, remained a bitter man. Blamed Taggert Hodge for driving Kathleen Paxton mad. She now occupies a room in Clifton. After about five years, Taggert and the Hodges reestablish communication. All is more or less forgiven. Taggert works as a used car salesman, shoeclerk, custodian for the public school system of Phoenix. Marries, becomes an imitation of his father. Begins to write articles on Assyriology. Also begins to send Hodge feelers about a reconciliation with old Paxton. Along with one such feeler he sends a clipping of himself in a magician’s cape. A trifling detail, but one which recalls others, for Hodge. In college, in the service, and occasionally era before, Taggert used to do impersonations, card tricks, and so on, to entertain people. And he’s psychic.

On the night of August 22, Clive Paxton died in his study. His heart had been bad for a long time, and no one was surprised. The study window was opened, but no one noticed. His wife closed it almost without thinking—as Clumly makes her remember later. What happened, of course, is that Taggert Hodge paid him a visit, and the man died of either shock or rage.

At Luke Hodge’s house, where Millie and Luke are held prisoners, in effect, by the Sunlight Man, the Sunlight Man for some reason makes a point of never allowing anyone to see him. Millie would recognize him, though she cannot—quite—recognize his altered voice. Luke theoretically could not know him. Luke was six when Taggert left Batavia. And yet somehow—who knows how?—Luke does recognize him. “I know you,” he says just before the trip in which Luke dies.

What makes Clumly seek the identity of the Sunlight Man is Clumly’s sense of order. Why should a man from California (Clumly’s guess) appear precisely here in Batavia? Why should he release Nick Slater? Clumly isn’t after a neat mystery-plot connection but something much grander—connections in the very substance of reality. Running out of time himself—Mayor Mullen breathing down his neck—and having no rational idea of where to turn, he begins, simply, to fumble, that is, follow his hunches. He questions everybody. People off the street. Fellow policemen. He hits a queer kind of paydirt when he visits the Woodworth sisters. He shows them a picture, and they say they recognize it. It’s Taggert Villiers Hodge, father of the Congressman. T. V. Hodge died in 1908. Clumly sends a wire to Phoenix, Arizona. And visits Kathleen Paxton. Shown the picture, Kathleen screams—a high, mechanical, repetitive screech—then goes catatonic. (Kozlowski is with Clumly for this. He says, “It looks like you’ve got it, Chief.” Clumly looks disgusted, bored. “You think he’s dangerous?” Kozlowski asks. Clumly looks out the car window. “The world is dangerous, Kozlowski.”)

A further identity complication: Walter Benson, shadowing his boarder at a revolutionary meeting, sees Will Hodge Jr and believes him to be the Sunlight Man. Same voice, same eyes. Will is fatter, appears younger, but even so the impression is so powerful that Benson is convinced. This too he must decide whether or not to tell the police. When Will Jr greets Benson, casually, Benson is terrified, feels the Sunlight Man knows all about him, has gotten inside his skin, so to speak. On an impulse, Benson shadows Will Jr that night, instead of shadowing his boarder. Sees Will Jr go home, greet his nice family. Outside Will Jr’s house a car is parked. He’s being watched. By whom? The next night Benson finds he himself is being shadowed.

CLUMLY’S STORY

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Chief of Police Fred Clumly, a man who seeks honestly to control the area of his proper authority, be fully responsible. He recognizes the measure of waste of himself—the kinds of experience closed to him by virtue of his private and public commitments—and recognizes, though dimly, his human urge for fuller self-discovery, freedom from all social restrictions, even for evil, but suppresses the urge. Finds his responsible puritanism increasingly pointless in the populous and mechanized modern world. Sees on every side dehumanization and the decline toward bestiality. Strives to overcome both through personal force, assertion, but, like any man, lacks the power. Suffers paranoid delusions which increase as the novel progresses—the delusions of a bitter old man who has outlived his time. At the same time that he acts for justice in the old sense, he begins to spy nervously on his men, on the Mayor, and, confusedly, on himself, his own motivation, his capabilities.

His blind wife Esther, slightly self-pitying, thinks herself worthless, a burden on the world; plans to kill herself if she can ever “balance the score” with Clumly, who has sacrificed much for her, she rightly perceives. Thinks he has another woman, perhaps several (but only half thinks this)—he’s been apparently impotent for years—and she has a habit of studying her face and the faces of all younger women she can get to with her fingers. When Clumly begins to stay out late (in connection with the Sunlight case, mainly), she begins to follow him. Learns he spies outside the Mayor’s house (part of Clumly’s paranoia).

Meanwhile Clumly has...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• “Bartleby”: Art and Social Commitment
• An Invective Against Mere Fiction
• More Smog from the Dark Satanic Mills
• Witchcraft in Bullet Park, by John Cheever
• Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
• The Breast, by Philip Roth
• The Way We Write Now
• Saint Walt
• The Adventurer, by Paul Zweig
• Beyond the Bedroom Wall, by Larry Woiwode
• Amber (Get) Waves (Your) of (Plastic) Grain (Uncle Sam)
• JR, by William Gaddis
• The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, by John Steinbeck
• Lancelot, by Walker Percy
• Falconer, by John Cheever
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies, by Italo Calvino
• Daniel Martin, by John Fowles
• The Silmarillion, by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Stories of John Cheever
• Dubin's Lives, by Bernard Malamud
• Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
• A Writer's View of Contemporary American Fiction
• Bellefleur, by Joyce Carol Oates
• Italian Folktales, edited by Italo Calvino
• Fiction in MSS
• What Writers Do
• Cartoons
• Julius Caesar and the Werewolf
• General Plan for The Sunlight Dialogues
• A Biography of John Gardner
• Copyright Page