John Gardner

[Cal McInvale]

On Thu, 5 Jun 1997, RICHARD ROMEO wrote:

> Was JG on the "GR obscene, unreadable" committee? Plowing thru _Sunlight 
> Dialogues_ at the moment...just curious

I'll trace the evolution of JG's opinions of Pynchon for you:

c.1977: "The generous critic might hold up numerous other writers as
important artists -- John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, James
Purdy, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Katherine Anne Porter, Guy Davenport,
John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, and John
Updike, the name a few. [A few?!? - ed.] How many of them will outlast the
century? . . . . some will die of intellectual blight, academic
narrowness, or fakery -- Pynchon, Updike (or most of his work), and
Barth." [On Moral Fiction, p. 93-94]

. . . Pynchon's symbols are Platonic inexpressables (for instance, the SS
of Gravity's Rainbow), mythic and mystical summaries of everything, not
pegs on which to hang argument but, instead, the innumerable disguises
which mask what can only be described as the central mystery. [On Moral
Fiction, p. 130]

. . . Thomas Pynchon, who, in Gravity's Rainbow, carelessly praises the
shlock of the past (King Kong, etc.) and howls against the shlock of the
present which, he thinks, is numbing and eventually will kill us. We may
defend Gravity's Rainbow as a satire, but whether it is meant to be satire
or sober analysis is not clear. It is a fact that, even to the rainbow of
bombs said to be circling us, the world is not as Pynchon says it is. That
may not matter in this book -- the reader must judge -- but it would be
disastrous in a book impossible to read as satire. [On Moral Fiction, pp.
195-96]

c.1980: In his two longer novels, Pynchon works like laughing gas -- a
little fascinating weirdness, a few guffaws, then Morpheus. ["A Writer's
View of Contemporary American Literature," from Dismisura, in On Writers
and Writing, p. 189]

c.1982: Though it is true that most science fiction is junk, some of it is
excellent. Certain books spring immediately to mind -- some of Ray
Bradbury's work or Kurt Vonnegut's, certain modern classics like Brave New
World and 1984, not to mention works of obvious high-class intent, such as
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. . . [On Becoming a Novelist, p. 94]

This last comment of John's shows how generous he could be, when so moved. 
To be fair, he often felt apologetic about ON MORAL FICTION; most of it
was too off-the-hip and belligerent, he came to feel before he died, and
he regretted a few of his ill-formed and harsher opinions, esp. of his
contemporaries. Nonetheless, he did have some mighty strong opinions about
good writing. I rate him as the best writing teacher I ever had, and the
second best all-around teacher. Ray Carver's descriptions of what we often
referred to as "Gardner's Way" (in the intro of On Becoming a Novelist,
the damn finest book about wiritng hands down) is very accurate -- every
Gardner student I know has some damn strong opinions about literature.


yr pal cal              |   The only reason for time is so that
cal at tpdinc.com          |   everything doesn't happen all at
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