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The post-obit interview incorporates three done with John Gardner over the final decade of his life. Afterward interviewing him in 1971, Frank McConnell wrote of the thirty-nine-twelvemonth-old author as one of the nearly original and promising younger American novelists. His start four novels—The Resurrection (1966),The Wreckage of Agathon (1970),Grendel (1971), andTheSunlight Dialogues (1972)—represented, in the optics of many critics and reviewers, a new and exhilarating phase in the enterprise of modern writing, a consolidation of the resources of the contemporary novel and a leap frontwards—or astern—into a reestablished humanism. One finds in his books elements of the iii major strains of current fiction: the elegant narrative gamesmanship of Barth or Pynchon, the hyperrealistic gothicism of Joyce Ballad Oates and Stanley Elkin, and the cultural, intellectual history of Saul Bellow. Like and then many characters in current fiction, Gardner's are men on the fringe, men shocked into the consciousness that they are living lives that seem to be adamant, not by their ain will, just past massive myths, catholic fictions over which they have no control (e.g., Ebeneezer Cooke in Barth'sSot-Weed Factor, Tyrone Slothrop in Pynchon'sGravity'due south Rainbow); but Gardner's characters are philosophers on the fringe, heirs, all of them, to the great debates over authenticity and bad faith that narrate our era. InGrendel, for example, the hero-monster is initiated into the Sartrean vision of Pettiness by an ancient, obviously well-read dragon: a myth speaking of the emptiness of all myths—"Theory-makers . . . They'd map out roads through Hell with their beatnik theories, their here-to-the-moon-and-back lists of paltry facts. Insanity—the simplest insanity always devised!" His heroes—similar all men—are philosophers who are going to dice; and their characteristic discovery—the fundamental artistic energy of Gardner'southward fiction—is that the decease of consciousness finally justifies consciousness itself. The myths, whose artificiality contemporary writers have been at such pains to point out, become in Gardner's piece of work existent and life giving once again, without always losing their modern character of fictiveness.

Gardner's piece of work may well represent, then, the new "conservatism," which some observers take noted in the electric current scene. But it is a conservatism of high originality, and, at least in Gardner'southward case, of deep authorisation in his life. When he guest-taught a course in "Narrative Forms" at Northwestern Academy, a number of his students were surprised to find a modern writer—and a hot property—enthusiastic, not only well-nigh Homer, Virgil, Apollonius Rhodius, and Dante, but deeply concerned with the disquisitional controversies surrounding those writers, and with mistakes in their English translations. Equally the interview following makes clear, Gardner's task in and affection for aboriginal writing and the tradition of metaphysics is, if annihilation, greater than for the explosions and involutions of mod fiction. He is, in the full sense of the give-and-take, a literary man.

"It's as if God put me on earth to write," Gardner observed once. And writing, or thinking about writing, takes up much of his day. He works, he says, usually on iii or four books at the aforementioned time, allowing the plots to cross-pollinate, shape and qualify each other.

Sara Matthiessen describes Gardner in the spring of 1978 (additional works published by then includedOct Light; On Moral Fiction was almost to be published). Matthiessen arrived with a friend to interview him at the Breadloaf Writer's Colony in Vermont: "After nosotros'd knocked a couple of times, he opened the door looking haggard and only wakened. Dressed in a majestic sateen, bell-sleeved, turtleneck shirt and jeans, he was an exotic effigy: unnaturally white pilus to beneath his shoulders, of medium height, he seemed an incarnation from the medieval era central to his study. 'Come up in!' he said, as though in that location were no two people he'd rather take seen than Sally and me, and he led us into a cold, bright room sparsely equipped with wooden piece of furniture. We were offered extra socks against the chill. John lit his piping, and we sat down to talk."

INTERVIEWER

You lot've worked in several unlike areas: prose, fiction, verse, criticism, book reviews, scholarly books, children's books, radio plays; y'all wrote the libretto for a recently produced opera. Could you discuss the different genres? Which 1 have yous most enjoyed doing?

JOHN GARDNER

The i that feels the most important is the novel. You create a whole world in a novel and you bargain with values in a mode that y'all can't possibly in a short story. The trouble is that since novels represent a whole globe, you can't write them all the time. Afterwards you lot cease a novel, it takes a couple of years to get in enough life and enough thinking about things to have annihilation to say, whatsoever clear questions to piece of work through. You have to proceed decorated, so it's fun to do the other things. I do book reviews when I'thou difficult up for money, which I am all the time. They don't pay much, but they go on you lot going. Book reviews are interesting because it's necessary to proceed an centre on what'due south good and what's bad in the books of a society worked and so heavily by advertising, public relations, and so on. Writing reviews isn't really belittling, it's for the most part quick reactions—joys and rages. I certainly never write a review about a volume I don't think worth reviewing, a apartment-out bad book, unless it'south an enormously fashionable bad volume. As for writing children's books, I've done them because when my kids were growing up I would now and and then write them a story as a Christmas present, and then after I became sort of successful, people saw the stories and said they should be published. I like them, of course. I wouldn't give junk to my kids. I've likewise done scholarly books and articles. The reason I've done those is that I've been instruction things likeBeowulf and Chaucer for a long time. As you teach a poem twelvemonth after twelvemonth, yous realize, or anyway convince yourself, that you understand the poem and that virtually people accept got it slightly wrong. That'southward natural with any poem, but during the years I taught lit courses, it was especially true of medieval and classical poetry. When the general critical view has a major poem or poetbadly wrong, you experience similar you ought to straighten it out. The studies of Chaucer since the fifties are very strange stuff: like the theory that Chaucer is a frosty Oxford-donnish guy shunning carnality and cupidity. Not true. So shut analysis is useful. But writing novels—and maybe opera libretti—is the kind of writing that gives me greatest satisfaction; the rest is more like amusement.

INTERVIEWER

You take been called a "philosophical novelist." What do you recollect of the label?

GARDNER

I'm not certain that beingness a philosophical novelist is meliorate than being another kind, but I guess that there'southward non much doubt that, in a way at least, that's what I am. A writer's fabric is what he cares well-nigh, and I like philosophy the way some people like politics, or football games, or unidentified flight objects. I read a man like Collingwood, or fifty-fifty Brand Blanchard or C. D. Broad, and I get excited—even anxious—filled with suspense. I read a man like Swinburn on time and infinite and it becomes a thing of deep business to me whether the structure of space changes near large masses. It's as if I really retrieve philosophy volition solve life'south slap-up questions—which sometimes, come to think of it, it does, at least for me. Probably not ofttimes, merely I like the illusion. Blanchard's attempt at a logical demonstration that there reallyis a universal man morality, or the recent flurry of theories past various majestical cranks that the universe is stabilizing itself instead of flying apart—those are lovely things to run into. Interesting and arresting, I mean, similar talking frogs. I get a good deal more than out of the philosophy section of a college bookstore than out of the fiction section, and I more than often read philosophical books than I read novels. And so sure, I'm "philosophical," though what I write is by no means straight philosophy. I make up stories. Meaning creeps in of necessity, to keep things clear, similar paragraph breaks and punctuation. And, I might add, my friends are all artists and critics, non philosophers. Philosophers—except for the few who are my friends—potable beer and watch football game games and defeat their wives and children past the fraudulent tyranny of logic.

INTERVIEWER

But insofar as youare a "philosophical novelist," what is it that you do?

GARDNER

I write novels, books about people, and what I write is philosophical only in a express fashion. The human dramas that involvement me—stir me to excitement and, loosely, vision—are always rooted in serious philosophical questions. That is, I'm bored by plots that depend on the psychological or sociological quirks of the main characters—mere melodramas of healthy against ill—stories that, subtly or otherwise, merely preach. Fine art as the wisdom of Marcus Welby, K.D. Granted, near of fiction'due south great heroes are at to the lowest degree slightly crazy, from Achilles to Captain Ahab, only the bug that make great heroes human activity are the problems no sane man could have gotten around either. Achilles, in his nobler, saner moments, lays downwards the whole moral code ofThe Iliad. But the violence and anger triggered by war, the human passions that overwhelm Achilles's reason and make him the greatest criminal in all fiction—they're just as much a trouble for lesser, more ordinary people. The same with Ahab'southward desire to pierce the Mask, smash through to absolute noesis. Ahab'south crazy, then he actually tries it; just the same Mask leers at all of u.s.a.. So, when I write a piece of fiction I select my characters and settings and so on because they have a begetting, at to the lowest degree to me, on the old unanswerable philosophical questions. And equally I spin out the action, I'chiliad ever very concerned with springing discoveries—bodily philosophical discoveries. But at the aforementioned time I'chiliad concerned—and finallymore concerned—with what the discoveries practise to the character who makes them, and to the people around him. Information technology'south that that makes me not actually a philosopher, only a novelist.

INTERVIEWER

The novelGrendel is a retelling of the Beowulf story from the monster'south point of view. Why does an American writer living in the twentieth century abandon the realistic arroyo and borrow such legendary material as the ground for a novel?

GARDNER

I've never been terribly fond of realism because of certain things that realism seems to commit me to. With realism you lot have to spend two hundred pages proving that somebody lives in Detroit so that something can happen and exist absolutely convincing. But the value systems of the people involved is the of import thing, non the fact that they live on Nine Mile Route. In my earlier fiction I went equally far equally I could from realism because the easy way to go to the heart of what you want to say is to take somebody else'southward story, particularly a nonrealistic story. When you lot tell the story of Grendel, or Jason and Medeia, you lot've got to end information technology the manner the story ends— traditionally, but you lot can become to practise it in your ain way. The result is that the author comes to understand things near the modern globe in light of the history of human consciousness; he understands it a footling more deeply, and has a lot more fun writing it.

INTERVIEWER

But why specificallyBeowulf?

GARDNER

Some stories are more interesting than others.Beowulf is a terribly interesting story. Information technology gives you some really wonderful visual images, such equally the dragon. It's got Swedes looking over the hills and scaring everybody. It's got mead halls. It'southward got Grendel, and Grendel'due south mother. I really do believe that a novel has to be a banquet of the senses, a delightful thing. One of the improve things that has happened to the novel in recent years is that it has become rich. Think of a book similarChimera orThe Sot-Weed Cistron—they may not be very good books, just they are at least rich experiences. For me, writers like John O'Hara are interesting just in the manner that movies and television receiver plays are interesting; in that location is nearly nothing in a John O'Hara novel that couldn't be in the movies just as easily. On the other mitt, there is no way an animator, or anyone else, tin create an image fromGrendel as exciting as the image in the reader'southward listen: Grendel is a monster, and living in the commencement person, considering we're all in some sense monsters, trapped in our ain language and habits of emotion. Grendel expresses feelings nosotros all experience—enormous hostility, frustration, atheism, and then on, then that the reader, projecting his ain monster, projects a monster that is, for him, the perfect horror prove. There is no way yous can do that in tv or the movies, where you are always seeing the kind of realistic novel O'Hara wrote . . . Gregory Peck walking down the street. It'southward just the same old thing to me. There are other things that are interesting in O'Hara, and I don't mean to put him downward excessively, but I go for some other kind of fiction: I want the effect that a radio play gives you lot or that novels are always giving you at their best.