12/01/1989: abolish the damned thing

"Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, along with [Elizabeth] Hardwick, [William] Gaddis, [James] Merrill, [Helen] Frankenthaler. The solemnity of it all in that vast, empty assembly room, especially laughable when the big discussion came up whether or not to abolish the damned thing. [Ralph] Ellison piped up, no, he believed in hierarchy."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

On Ellison and Houellebecq

Commentary Magazine recently included Christopher Caldwell on Michel Houellebecq in "A Bellow from France" and Joseph Epstein's "Ralph Ellison in Opposition."

May 29, 1964

"[Ralph] Ellison came down for lunch, the Department-about-to-hire-you lunch, and talked very soundly and very impressively about the translation of American experience into authentic works of the imagination. . .

"Ralph is terribly impressive. With his beautiful light-Indian-Negro color, the Oklahoma accent, the scar just alongside of the right eye, and above all his sense of American experiences as something naturally flowing into and boiling up creatively in a literary mind of his kind of sensitivity, I find that I learn from him more of what I owe myself than I do from many writer-friends. This same evening, the Hoftstadters just back from Europe were over for dinner, full of self-satisfaction and purring with tales of the Mercedes and the grand tour. Whenever I am with the Hoftstadters, I feel in the air this self-consciously competitive ticking off of everything--academic accomplishment, literary accomplishment, motor-car acquisition."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, entry from May 29, 1964

Not Only On Moral Fiction

As has been reported here, reading John Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts led to my return to writing novels and from there, through effort and luck I was able to publish one, and then two, but Gardner was never my favorite writer. Based upon my reading of that one long acclaimed novel, he was fundamentally sound and usually interesting, but the book was not on the same level as Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, or John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. I once read an interview where Gardner placed himself in a big three, which possibly included Pynchon and Norman Mailer, I can't remember exactly, but this wasn't evident to me from reading Mickelsson's Ghosts. The novel trended toward realism, but for American realism, I prefer Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, John Updike's Rabbit is Rich, Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes (I think of it as such), and several others. Gardner did have wider range than all of these writers though, working as a scholar and teacher even as he produced in many different genres although to the best of my knowledge none were what we would call "genre fiction."

Everyone knows that Gardner was the first to mentor Raymond Carver, but before reading this new piece in The Paris Review, I was unaware that he also taught greats like Charles Johnson and Toni Morrison. And the final motorcycle ride off the road makes it seem as if he was a far badder dude than writers like Bellow and Morrison who aged gracefully in the comfort and security that we imagine prestigious tenure lines ensure. I suppose that would have been Gardner's destiny too if he had lived. But he died at 49, only a year older than I am now. The Paris Review article mentions that he has remained "on the syllabus," although I've only read On Moral Fiction for a class. In twenty years of teaching literature classes, the majority of which were for Gardner's period (American, after 1945), I've never assigned any of his fiction, and I think I've only seen Grendel and On Moral Fiction assigned by others. (It's possible that Bellow, Barth, John Updike, and a few others have done even more of a disappearing act. I'm not sure.) The only time I've ever discussed Gardner, I'm almost certain, was in the context of his lending a hand to a young Raymond Carver, janitor, who needed quiet office space. Gardner was there for many other writers.