(The following is used by permission of Liz Rosenberg, who retains the copyright. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the author)
I no longer remember the woman, or the place, but I do remember the question. John had just finished giving a reading, when a woman approached me out of the pressing crowd. "How does it feel to live with a genius?" she asked.
I was young, nervous and arrogant enough to snap at her, "I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?"
All these years later – more than twenty – I have grown into a little humility, so I thought I would address that question today; an interesting one, to be sure: what does it feel like to live with a genius? Or, to be more specific, How did it feel to live with the genius peculiar to John Gardner?
Because he was peculiar. Make no mistake about that. I went to sleep to the sound of John’s typing – like rain on a metal roof – and woke to the same sound, winter or summer, year in and year out for most of seven years. He wrote six, eight, sometimes fourteen hours a day. He was famous for his dedication. One summer at Breadloaf I was working, myself, on what I hoped would be a novel. (It wasn’t.) The novelist Stanley Elkin was staying downstairs in the echoing old faculty house called "Maple." I sensed him becoming more and more irate with John. Finally, at breakfast one morning, he burst out, "What the hell are you typing all the time?"
It’s not John, it’s me," I answered.
Elkin was visibly relieved. "Oh, that’s all right, then."
It was like that, living with a genius. It was like living in the shadow of a great mountain. On the one hand, you live with a perfect view of, say, Mt. Fuji. On the other hand, very little light actually falls in your own personal space. Geniuses like John are larger, realer, shinier than ordinary life. They take up more space, more air. It happens sometimes that geniuses are also saints, and this is really a terrible double-whammy for the wife, because if geniuses are hard to live with, saints are impossible. Tolstoy’s wife wrote about this quite touchingly in her diaries. Tolstoy would sit around the house being a saint, establishing schools, giving away money, while poor Sonia had to haggle with the merchants.
John would give away his last dollar. Often he gave away his first one, too. He said yes to every young writer who needed any favor. When he died, I looked at his desk, piled high with manuscripts, letters, requests, and thought, well at least he doesn’t have to deal with those. He lived in a higher realm, which did not include laundry or vacuuming, car repair, changing the lightbulb, restaurants or movies. He did not enjoy idle conversation, and any conversation not about literature or ideas – or preferably, both – was to him idle.
Yet I also remember him lying on his back next to me on the living room rug, while we did this strange Charlie Chaplin-esque side-by-side foot dancing in the air. He cried at Ivory Snow and AT&T commercials. He loved ice cream. When Peter Prescott--a vicious son of a bitch–called John to begin his inquisition for Newsweek into charges of plagiarism I heard John take the phone call, and I heard from his voice that he was afraid. John never plagiarized but he borrowed constantly–from books, articles, scraps of conversation and himself–he expected the world to be as generous as he was. He wasn’t afraid when he learned he had colon cancer, and he never complained against his fate, or indulged in self-pity. He told me, "I have to go before you, so you won’t be afraid." Once I saw him lose his temper at a toll collector. Once at a crooked auto repair place. That was about it. The late poet James Dickey’s wife Deborah once told me, "John is a perfect gentleman. He never hurts anyone’s feelings accidentally."
Well, I didn’t often see him hurt anyone’s feeling on purpose either. He was single-minded, focused, a bit of a bulldozer. In his arguments for On Moral Fiction, he was willing to take down every big tree in the forest–John Barth; Saul Bellow, John Updike; William Gaddis. I can swear to the fact that not one word of it was written out of pettiness or envy. He thought he saw his civilization going to hell in a handbasket, and believed that its artists had something to do with it.
I argued with him about his methods then, but the older I get, the more I believe he was right. He had to give details, name names, take a risk or no one would have listened at all. That’s what it’s like when you live with a genius. Sooner or later you discovered you were wrong most of the time, and most of the time they were right.
John seldom took the easy route to anything. This may have begun when at age 12 he took a straight path across his younger brother’s body on a piece of heavy farm machinery. The way he told it to me, Gilbert, age 7, was hanging off the back of the family cultipacker, watching the world go by, when suddenly he slipped off and fell under the heavy machine. By the time John saw what was happening, his brother was already more than half crushed; blood poured out of his mouth. John had a farm boy’s instinct to finish the job. He kept driving and his brother died instantly. For years he shouldered the blame for that accident. Every year, even the year he died, some thirty five years after the event, he went a little nuts in April. Somehow it did not occur to the Gardners to discuss why a twelve year old boy had been given the responsibility of driving home a heavy piece of machinery, while looking after his seven year old brother and three year old sister. That was–as Robert Bly likes to say about the alcoholics in the family–the elephant at the dinner table that no one discusses.
Maybe John would have taken a hard way no matter what. His mother used to tell me that when John–Bud they called him–was a little boy, he memorized a poem about a little goldfish swimming around in his bowl. The way he’d recite it, it was a tragedy, grand opera. Later on, his little brother Gilbert recited it, giggling, and it became a comedy. Character is fate, says George Eliot. John had a great character and an enormous fate. Watching him was like watching great fiction—or as John used to say, quoting Aristotle, it was watching his energia—the potential which exists in character and situation.
John was driven like no one I have ever known. For him, ordinary daily life was a painfully slow affair. I believe the reason he so often got drunk at places like Breadloaf or after-readings was because otherwise he’d have died of boredom. Drunk, everything became more interesting, electric, alive. He’d wax eloquent, standing in the kitchen, holding forth, a drink in his hand, his back against the kitchen sink. The hangers-on liked to get him drunk, and watch the show. I always resented that, because of course it made him sick and sorry the next day. But it was quite a show. Whatever he believed at any given instant, he believed absolutely. He could describe John Cheever as an absolute idiot, without talent, then turn around and introduce him at a reading as the world’s greatest writer. And he wasn’t lying, because he never lied. Or rather, he always lied. But he believed his lies—he believed his fictions.
He talked about teaching as "stewardship," and he had a keen, unflagging sense of responsibility toward others. He would hold office hours late into the night, on weekends, in snowstorms—for the really serious students. To the unserious ones he’d say things like, "You’re going to end up selling shoes like your father," or "You could read from the telephone book and make it sound good." He could, then, be ruthless, but I never saw him attack a student who was weak or who lacked confidence. It was the arrogant blow-hards he went after—usually because they were going after someone else smaller and weaker. His parents said that John would only fight to protect another kid. He was a very gentle, very tender child. I once spoke with a schoolmate of his from Alexander School, a shy boy, part American Indian who was terrified his first day of school. He told me John came right over and put his arms around him. He was that kind of kid, and that kind of adult. He’d give you one of those big bear hugs and you felt absolutely safe. At least I did.
He was driven to write, to lecture, to "mine deeper, that’s the ticket!"—something he quoted from Melville. Perhaps he was also driven to succeed, though if so he hid that drive from me, even from himself. He had little or no ambition for himself, and less vanity. Every time he finished a novel he’d swear he was never going to write again. One year he was going to become a painter. Next, a toy-maker. Next, a goat farmer—I understand that he and Susan Thornton actually went so far as to purchase two goats and keep them in the old barn behind what had been our farmhouse. Alas, they turned out to be mountain goats and busted loose after two days. I still have some of his paintings, and consider them very beautiful, eerie and direct, like Grandma Moses gripped in a visionary dream—and my husband still carries in the back of his car a wooden toy pig that John carved. Maybe John needed to believe that he didn’t have to be a writer, if the muse abandoned him he could still survive. I thought this a very healthy way to survive in the unhealthy, hyped-up atmosphere of publishing.
John made enemies, lots of enemies, just by speaking his mind. He made hundreds over On Moral Fiction. The literary "establishment" was out to get him from the moment of that book’s publication, and I don’t really expect his reputation to fully reassert itself till all of the people who felt themselves injured are long gone. The New York Times sent a hit man named Stephen Singular out after him for a front-page article in the Times Magazine. Even after his death, they assigned his unfinished novel to a critic who had openly declared that he despised John’s writing. One of the horrors of On Moral Fiction, for him, was now nearly completely it was misunderstood. If his friends hated him for it, his enemies loved him. He received telegrams inviting him to join the American Nazi Party, the Christian Right Wing. The only time I ever saw him write an obscenity was in response to those invitations.
But he was always very gentle with those people who were wrathful at him. His gift and his curse was that he could always see the other person’s point of view—that’s what made him a great novelist. It didn’t hurt that he had an eagle-eye global kind of brain. Twenty minutes in a strange town and he’d know just where the river was, the main highways, the four directions, the airport, the dump. After a day he could imitate the local dialect exactly, and he’d know its history. Countless times I watched him wander off the subject during a lecture, or a question-and-answer period—he’d looparound for ten or fifteen minutes and just when you yourself had completely forgotten where he’d begun—wham! he’d hit home again. His brain was like Theseus’s thread leading through the maze of the minotaur. He always found his way back home. He knew a little something about everything, and almost everything about a few things.
On the other hand: He boasted that he spoke something like twenty different languages, ancient and modern, but I watched him be utterly lost in French, German, and Scandinavian. Maybe he had once spoken all those languages. "I could get it back if I had a week," he’d tell me. "My lip is out, " he’d say, explaining why he kept hitting clinkers on the French Horn. And indeed, he’d attended Eastman School of Music, he’d been something of a prodigy on the french horn—at cartooning—the first thing he ever sold was a cartoon to seventeen Magazine—at the high vault, at motorcycle racing. He was a brave, tough, small man with great strength in his shoulders and arms, great endurance. I saw this first hand as he lay—as we all thought—dying of colon cancer in Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was not afraid of death, though he was given to grisly nightmares during that time. He was only afraid of deserting the people who depended upon him. He volunteered for every experimental protocol the hospital had, and was the seventh person ever to undergo an experimental procedure to rejoin his colon—and only the second to survive. The doctors and nurses loved him. He was brave, uncomplaining, stoic, matter of fact, and he kept busy.
It is true that he was still typing on The Art of Fiction while he sat hooked up to an IV machine minutes before he underwent colon surgery. He took up painting while still in the hospital. He watched documentaries on the TV screen pointed at his head like a gun, and took notes toward a novel about Rasputin. He ate the hospital food and thought it tasted fine.
This is what it was like to live with that genius. It was exhilarating and exasperating. Sometimes I’d bring his dinner to his study and he’d eat it in his room while he wrote. He wished I would sew my own clothes, cook some real food, raise a family. I was stubborn and did none of it. I’d eat alone, in the lonely little farmhouse where the nearest neighbor was too far to see. I went to movies alone, went for walks alone, often went to bed alone—though not always—there were a few things John would interrupt his writing for. Not much, though. One time, at a restaurant, he put his head down on the table and fell asleep while we were waiting for our food. I tried not to take it personally. He hated smorgasbords and fancy hotels because he hated waste—waste of food, money, most of all, wasting time.
We fought, John and I, not the knock-down drag-out fights he’d have with his first wife, whom he’d known and loved since childhood, but snappish arguments. He’d give me his work to edit and then when I actually criticized something he’d stomp around the house like Rumplestiltskin, and after an hour or so come back and say, OK, you were right. Here’s the next chapter.
The worst fight we ever had was over the great American novelist. Of course John said Melville, I said Hawthorne. It sounds funny now but at the time it was terrible. We ranted and raged. One of the other of us got out of the car in the middle of a country road and stalked off. We were on our way to the Fourth of July Fair in the nearby Village of Montrose. One or the other of us—I think now it was John—wrote a note and left it on the car saying, it doesn’t matter. I love you. Meet me back here at five.
That’s what it was like, living with a genius. Or rather, that’s some of what it was like. I could go on and on because John is one of my favorite topics. We lived together for only seven years, and out of those seven were married only for two. I used to kid him and say I got the seven years of famine—and it’s true, he was very poor in those days. The IRS had come after him and Joan, and he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. When we were first together, I bought him his car, for $900, and gave him one of my old sweaters to wear. When he showed up to get the car—a junker—a college kid was working the lot and asked, "Mr. Gardner, what is a man of your stature doing in a place like this?"
That became a standing joke with us. "What is a man of your stature doing…" I don’t know what a man of his stature is doing out of print, some of his best books, indispensable things like Nickel Mountain and October Light and all the wonderful children’s books. I don’t know what a man of his stature was doing dead at 49—he may have been tired, or drunk, he may have skidded on gravel or been pushed off the road by a passing truck some neighbor claimed went by blowing its horn. How frightening that he once was twenty two years older than I, and I am rapidly, inexorably catching up. I can’t imagine being older than John.
I have lived with several geniuses—I live with two of them now, and in my experience, it’s pretty much as Henry James said in Portrait of a Lady. Marry an interesting person, and your life will become interesting. It is not always easy, living with a genius, but it is hardly ever dull, either.
updated on 5 August 1998