On Becoming a Novelist (21 page)
It depresses me to think how many versions I wrote of this first chapter and the two that followed it—working on these three in a block because they laid out all the main themes and background events to be developed, as well as, of course, advancing the present action. (By the end of the third chapter Mickelsson knows that, according to his mountain neighbors, his house is haunted.) Getting the hundred-page, three-chapter block finally right took more than a year of steady writing and revising and saw one dramatic scene after another invented, frantically polished, then discarded. In the end I settled for: (1) A large scene in which Mickelsson fumes and sweats in his overheated third-floor apartment, then walks the night streets, looking enviously at other people’s large houses and imagining the lives inside, comparing them with his own lost life, hating these mediocre professors (as he thinks them) whose luck has turned out to be so much better than his own—a scene that ends with Mickelsson’s killing a large black dog that threatens him on the sidewalk. (2) A scene at the university, where Mickelsson’s department chairman, whom he hates, wangles out of him an undergraduate advising job (not one of Mickelsson’s responsibilities) for an unpleasant young man who wants to transfer to philosophy from engineering. (3) A scene presenting Mickelsson’s angry decision to look for a house in the country, then his search, concluding with his finding the ancient and eerie house in the mountains. Developed in detail, allowing space for Mickelsson’s memories and ironic internal observations, this arrangement of scenes finally satisfied me, insofar as one can ever be satisfied in these matters. Together they move the story forward by a direct chain of cause and effect. The climax of the first scene, Mickelsson’s killing of the dog, frightens him and gives focus to his paranoia (specifically his fear that people like his chairman are watching and judging him, suspecting the failure of which he accuses himself). The climax of the second scene, in which the unpleasant engineering student insists on enrolling in Mickelsson’s own course, tips the scales of Mickelsson’s increasing inclination to move as far as he can from the university without giving up his job completely. And within these sprawling scenes it is possible to place directly before the reader, in dialogue and action (sometimes in momentary flashback), the main forces that have brought Mickelsson to this moment.
As I’ve said, I didn’t work all this out intellectually. I worked out
a
plan, did my best with it, revised it, and finally discarded it. I worked out another, and then others after that, and by muddling along, sometimes reclaiming an element or two from a scrapped approach, I finally came up with something that would do, at least for me. Except in extremely simple novels—novels almost not worth writing, in my opinion—the most careful plan in the world won’t actually work. Things intended for one chapter turn out to take two, and since the overall rhythm of the novel will not allow the division, one has to overhaul the whole scheme. But an inadequate plan is better than none. Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. If you have a plan and a course laid out, that’s helpful. If you drift off course, checking the stars can help you find a new course. If you have no map, no course laid out, sooner or later confusion will make you check the stars.
When the tentative plan is done, maybe scrawled almost illegibly in a fat, shedding notebook, maybe tacked up neatly around the walls of your room, on butcher paper, you’re ready to start the writing—if you haven’t started already, turning back to the planning stage only when driven by desperation. If you have prepared yourself well, there is nothing more anyone need tell you. If you have taken the time to learn to write beautiful, rock-firm sentences, if you have mastered evocation of the vivid and continuous dream, if you are generous enough in your personal character to treat imaginary characters and readers fairly, if you have held on to your childhood virtues and have not settled for literary standards much lower than those of the fiction you admire, then the novel you write will eventually be, after the necessary labor of repeated revision, a novel to be proud of, one that almost certainly someone, sooner or later, will be glad to publish. (It may be that you can only get it published after other, later novels have proved successful.) If you do none of the things I advise in this book, then you may nevertheless, by some freak of fortune or grace, write a novel to be proud of. (The god of novelists will not be tyrannized by rules.) If, on the other hand, you miserably fail, you have only three choices: start over, or start something else, or quit.
Finally, the true novelist is the one who doesn’t quit. Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a
yoga,
or “way,” an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious—a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand—and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.
John Gardner (1933–1982) was a bestselling and award-winning novelist and essayist, and one of the twentieth century’s most controversial literary authors. Gardner produced more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, consisting of novels, children’s stories, literary criticism, and a book of poetry. His books, which include the celebrated novels
Grendel
,
The Sunlight Dialogues
, and
October Light
, are noted for their intellectual depth and penetrating insight into human nature.
Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father, a preacher and dairy farmer, and mother, an English teacher, both possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. When he was eleven years old, Gardner was involved in a tractor accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, Gilbert. He carried the guilt from this accident with him for the rest of his life, and would incorporate this theme into a number of his works, among them the short story “Redemption” (1977). After graduating from high school, Gardner earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and he married his first wife, Joan Louise Patterson, in 1953. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1958, after which he entered into a career in academia that would last for the remainder of his life, including a period at Chico State College, where he taught writing to a young Raymond Carver.
Following the births of his son, Joel, in 1959 and daughter, Lucy, in 1962, Gardner published his first novel,
The Resurrection
(1966), followed by
The Wreckage of Agathon
(1970). It wasn’t until the release of
Grendel
(1971), however, that Gardner’s work began attracting significant attention. Critical praise for
Grendel
was universal and the book won Gardner a devoted following. His reputation as a preeminent figure in modern American literature was cemented upon the release of his
New York Times
bestselling novel
The Sunlight Dialogues
(1972). Throughout the 1970s, Gardner completed about two books per year, including
October Light
(1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the controversial
On Moral Fiction
(1978), in which he argued that “true art is by its nature moral” and criticized such contemporaries as John Updike and John Barth. Backlash over
On Moral Fiction
continued for years after the book’s publication, though his subsequent books, including
Freddy’s Book
(1980) and
Mickelsson’s Ghosts
(1982), were largely praised by critics. He also wrote four successful children’s books, among them
Dragon
,
Dragon and Other Tales
(1975), which was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the
New York Times
.
In 1980, Gardner married his second wife, a former student of his named Liz Rosenberg. The couple divorced in 1982, and that same year he became engaged to Susan Thornton, another former student. One week before they were to be married, Gardner died in a motorcycle crash in Pennsylvania. He was forty-nine years old.
A two-year-old Gardner, shown here, in 1935. He went by the nickname “Buddy” throughout his childhood.
Gardner on a motorcycle in 1948, when he was about fifteen years old. He was a lifelong enthusiast of motorcycle and horseback riding, hobbies that resulted in multiple broken bones and other injuries throughout his life.
Gardner’s senior photo from Batavia High School, taken in 1950. Though he found most of his classes boring, he particularly enjoyed chemistry. One day in class, Gardner and some friends disbursed a malodorous concoction through the school’s ventilation system, causing the whole building to reek and classes to be dismissed early.
Gardner and Joan Patterson, his first wife, in the early 1950s. The couple were high school sweethearts and attended senior prom together in 1951.
John and Joan’s wedding photograph, taken on June 6, 1953.
