Victor Lindsey
Department of English and Languages
East Central University
Ada, Oklahoma 74820-6899
DR. JOHNSON AND DR. GARDNER ON NICKEL MOUNTAIN
Let's be honest about the anachronism to come: Samuel Johnson died on December 13, 1784. Though not attuned to spiritual presences, I don't think he is with us today, squinting at suspect Americans from beneath his ill-fitting wig and imperiously scaring us even if he does no more than clear his throat. But brazen anachronism is no literary crime, and since John Gardner himself takes a twentieth-century American writer back to Bronze Age Corinth in Jason and Medeia, I think it fitting for this occasion to conjure a real-looking image of Johnson across the Atlantic to say something about Gardner's Nickel Mountain.
In this exercise, we are being, if not multicultural, then bicultural, recognizing that culture changes with time, as well as from place to place; and we have the possibility of cultural discord. We may also have the possibility of cultural harmony, if we agree with what Gardner says in On Moral Fiction: that, while ordinary persons in one culture generally do not appreciate great art from another culture, artists are an exception, for "in culture after culture artists have proclaimed repeatedly that art in some sense 'tells the truth' " (172). Yet there arises a question someone asked one spring morning a long time ago and a long way off: "What is truth?" (John 18.38). In considering Johnson and Gardner, these two artists and critics, we will see different answers to that enduring question--answers that distinguish between a Christian, late neoclassical moralist writing as the English-language novel was rising and a seemingly ex-Christian moralist influenced by romanticism and writing in an era when he feared the novel was declining.
Johnson, I believe, is important enough as a critic to belong at any literary conference, even one devoted to an author who affords him only a fleeting reference in his most famous critical book (On Moral Fiction 184). In a chapter devoted to Johnson in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom has written that Johnson stands "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him" (183). Succeeding James Boswell as an authoritative biographer, Walter Jackson Bate has described Johnson as wide-ranging, practical, morally sincere, truthful, and brave (4). More recently, Richard B. Schwartz has noted how Johnson embodies roles and talents seldom found together today in one person, with our academic specialization (23)--though, I would point out, Gardner's career, in the academy and beyond, proves Gardner an exception to Schwartz's rule.
Furthermore, Johnson is sufficiently consistent in his critical opinions for us safely to mix comments he made at long- separated times. While Boswell acknowledges that his eminent friend, like anyone else, sometimes contradicted himself, Boswell contends that Johnson remained of one opinion "in any great or essential article, upon which he had fully employed his mind" (1399); and, writing two centuries after Boswell, James Woodruff generally confirms that idea, noting what we should also note if we tend to form a simple idea of Johnson based on twentieth-century editors' selections from Boswell's hundreds of pages: Johnson, Woodruff remarks, was a man of his era but not a caricature.
Therefore, conceding always that I am speculating, I will try to avoid caricature in
what I think Johnson would say about Nickel Mountain, were his anti-Americanism put
in abeyance, perhaps by his learning of the abolition of slavery and the United States'
defense of Britain in two world wars.
Let's begin by considering what Johnson might like about this fiction subtitled A Pastoral Novel. If we let dairy cattle substitute for sheep, then Nickel Mountain presents the genuinely pastoral. Johnson's opinion of what he knew as pastoral literature appears in his famous censure of Lycidas:
In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting: whatever images it can supply, are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. (335)
But Johnson died sixteen years too soon to know "Michael," which William Wordsworth defiantly subtitled "A Pastoral Poem," and it is Wordsworth's pastoral tradition, not John Milton's, that Gardner follows. This later pastoral smells of the pasture, not the library, and whatever romantic light Wordsworth and Gardner shine onto their stories falls on real grass and real livestock and more realistic characters than Milton's.
Johnson might find much truth in Gardner's picture of the Catskills, with its manure and dead cow (247), maybe more truth than in Wordsworth's picture of the English Lake Country. Luke, Michael's son, follows "evil courses" only in "the dissolute city" (lines 444-45), but in the fields and diner near Nickel Mountain in New York State no one is completely innocent, except Jimmy Soames as a baby. For all his insistence that an author of fiction create a morally admirable character for readers to imitate, in the fourth number of The Rambler Johnson also acknowledges that a character's virtue should not be "above probability" (71). Then too, Johnson, the lover of London life, would note that Gardner creates no sentimental picture of the woods near the Stop-Off; they are not an elegantly lit place for a romantic refreshing of the soul but a dark place, the habitat in winter of "the low-moving shadows of dogs gone wild and birds" and even bobcats (123). Civilized, though not citified, Henry Soames lives just at "The Edge of the Woods," not in them.
A compassionate man himself, as his kindness to such poor, long-term house guests as Robert Levet and Anna Williams indicates, Johnson would also admire, I believe, the compassion so important in Henry's character in Nickel Mountain and would agree with David Cowart that Henry serves as a kind of pastor of the flock of persons around him (10-11). When S. J. Kuzitski, a lonely old junk man, drives his truck drunkenly through a guard rail and burns to death at the bottom of an embankment, George Loomis may care, but he hides his feelings behind flippancy. Trying to hide his own grief and control his anger, Henry says to Callie Wells, his new helper at the Stop-Off: "He lived alone. Why should anybody pretend to be sorry he's dead?" (25). But suddenly Henry weeps. Some weeks later, with Callie pregnant and the baby's father, Willard Freund, having deserted her, Henry drives at night to George's huge old house on Crow Mountain to try to persuade or bribe George into marrying Callie, for in July 1955 only the worst of girls bear children out of wedlock and Callie, as Henry tells his friend, is "a fine girl" (53).
Much later, after Henry has married Callie and when Jimmy has grown into a toddler, Henry takes into his own home Simon Bale, the friendless, poor Jehovah's Witness whose wife has died from the burns she suffered when someone set fire to their "black-shingle house just beyond the city limits" (148). For weeks Henry lets Simon stay with him, despite his personal filthiness and the missionary compulsion that makes him a nuisance at the Stop-Off. With Simon unable to pay for even the simplest burial for his wife and unconcerned about the matter, Henry visits the morgue, smells the formaldehyde and the charred tissue, sees the corpse, and arranges with Wiegerts' Funeral Home a six hundred dollar burial at his own expense, thus risking Callie's anger.
In my opinion, Johnson would also appreciate Henry's forgiveness of Willard. In the issue of The Rambler dated December 24, 1751, Johnson writes that "[o]f him that hopes to be forgiven it is indispensably required, that he forgive," for, as Johnson adds, to those who refuse to forgive others, "the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the SAVIOUR of the world has been born in vain" (147-48). Johnson truly believed in the Christian importance of forgiveness, however angry he might have been for a time at what he considered an offense inflicted upon himself. Yet to forgive is to acknowledge sin, which Johnson certainly did. With regard to Willard's initial sin with Callie, it is important to note that, in Boswell's words, Johnson "would allow of no irregular intercourse whatever between the sexes" (729). Johnson, however, distinguished in seriousness among sins and, as Boswell reports, said that fornication was no "heinous sin" and that "you don't call a man a whoremonger for getting one wench with child" (479).
Nevertheless, for a time it would have been hard for Henry to continue to call Willard a friend, despite Willard's last name. Having betrayed Callie and Henry, Willard becomes someone whose return Henry fears; and, by late December 1955, when Callie is suffering through a long labor, Willard has become someone whom Henry vows to kill. At home, though, with Callie and her newborn son still in the hospital, Henry realizes that, by being gone, Willard has relinquished his right to Henry's wife and child, and Henry thinks that Willard, were he to come back, would have "[n]o place but the woods" (123). Then four years pass. At the end of a remarkable scene that begins at Llewellyn's store, Willard realizes that Henry has forgiven him, as has Callie. Relieved from guilt and "full of crazy joy," Willard at first runs away; but, knowing he is now welcomed back by those he sinned against, he surrenders to acceptance as Henry's old Ford approaches "growling like the hound of heaven." Henry's words of welcome back into the community sound as sincere as they are plain: "Willard, you old son-of-a-gun" (289-90).
Oddly, Henry wants to feel guilty about Simon Bale's falling to his death down a flight of stairs at Henry's home, because, as George remarks to Callie, Henry claims "he made a choice, the choice to go on yelling"; and thereby, Henry wants to believe, in his rage he caused Simon to die and deserves the blame. He does not want to accept George's claim that what happened was freakish: "It was an accident, Henry was the accidental instrument, a pawn, a robot labeled Property of Chance" (239). Johnson would sympathize with Henry's need to feel the dignity of free will and would emotionally reject George's idea, for, according to Boswell, Johnson once asserted: "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it" (947).
As for Simon Bale as a character, I think Johnson would generally approve of Gardner's presentation, although Johnson's theology differs vastly from Gardner's. Hester Thrale Piozzi describes her friend as "[l]owly towards God, and docile towards the church; implicit in his belief of the gospel" (qtd. in Hill 297). For all his antipathy toward Mrs. Piozzi, Boswell agrees with her in this instance, calling Johnson "a sincere and zealous Christian, of high Church-of-England and monarchical principles," but adds that early in his life Johnson might have "narrowed his mind somewhat too much, both as to religion and politicks" (1399). While Johnson would have distinguished between being merely narrow and being exactly right, as he knew he was, his numerous prayers and meditations do show the intensity of his religion, a religion which may have arisen from deep anxiety about life, as Charles E. Pierce Jr. claims (10-11), but which was nonetheless genuine.
Simon's last name suggests not only evil and suffering but also the Canaanite storm god and hence, from an Israelite viewpoint, a false god, though the Nickel Mountain region does suffer from a drought after Simon's death. As a Jehovah's Witness and thus not even a Trinitarian, Simon would have been religiously obnoxious to Johnson, and as a man of slovenly personal hygiene, meager literacy, and an uncongenial personality, he would have been far from clubable. Yet Johnson could appreciate the limited sympathy with which Gardner depicts Simon, who, while he appears in a section of the novel titled "The Devil," is really just a financially and spiritually impoverished man in his fifties who has been overcome by his grief and the proselytizing demands of his sect. A religious fanatic in his own right, Johnson sympathized with his insane friend, the poet Christopher Smart, who would kneel in the London streets to pray and would press his companions to pray with him. "Now although, rationally speaking," said Johnson, "it is greater madness not to pray at all, than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question." Continuing to refer to Kit Smart in words that might apply to Simon Bale, Johnson added: "Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it" (qtd. in Boswell 281).
Furthermore, Johnson, who had known as an Oxford student the feeling of not having the money that most of his classmates had, could sympathize, as Gardner does, with Simon's poverty. Reviewing Soame Jenyns' Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, Johnson comments on Jenyns' statement that the poor often receive compensations which make poverty easy to bear:
The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes imbitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyment, of the rich. They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of a malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh. (222)
If my guess is educated enough, then for the reasons I have given, and maybe for others too, Johnson would like several features of Nickel Mountain, but at least two other features might be, as we in education like to say, problematic, starting with the complexity of Gardner's protagonist.
For us to understand the reaction I speculate that Johnson would have, it would help to consider the critical position he tried to take between what, in the twentieth century, M. H. Abrams has called the mimetic and the pragmatic theories of criticism. As Abrams says, a mimetic theory explains "art as essentially an imitation of aspects of the universe" (8), while a pragmatic theory is audience-oriented, seeing the artistic work as "an instrument for getting something done," for creating certain effects in the audience (15). One of the two effects that a literary work needs to achieve in its readers, according to Johnson, is pleasure; the other is profit, by which Johnson means, above all else, moral profit.
Quite notably, Johnson begins the fourth number of The Ramblerby quoting line 334 of Horace's Ars Poetica and appending a translation: "And join both profit and delight in one" (67). For Johnson one of the delights in a great work comes from discovering how well its author imitates human life, as Johnson indicates when, in the "Preface to Shakespeare," he praises Shakespeare's plays as "the mirrour of life" (266). Yet he later points out that the "first defect" of Shakespeare is that he "sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose" (271). As I have said, Johnson claims in Rambler 4 that no character's virtue should strain the reader's belief, but he imposes that limitation for a pragmatic purpose, because, as he says, "what we cannot credit we shall never imitate" (71) and he warns that a novelist should not "promiscuously" depict life, since it is "so often discoloured by passion, or deformed by wickedness" (70).
In writing that crucial Rambler essay, Johnson had the recently published Tom
Jones on his mind. Although there is no character in Nickel Mountain like Henry
Fielding's hero, not even Willard, we might question whether Henry Soames, the
protagonist, would seem to Johnson to have virtue "the highest and purest that
humanity can reach" (71-72). Henry holds inside himself a resentment of his mother
for her outspoken resentment of Henry's father, whom she considered a ne'er-do-well, and
this resentment leads Henry not to use the money his mother has left him, vowing to
himself not to "pick it up with a gutter fork" (15). In a related but more
important matter for the plot, Henry lives not only with a huge love but also with a huge
rage inside his huge body. Although normally he keeps the rage deeply suppressed beneath
his consciousness, at times it bursts through his internal restraints. For instance, when
Callie pats his arm and tries to console him after they have learned of Kuzitski's death,
he yells an obscenity, slams his hand violently onto the counter, and charges to his car,
presumably for a furious ride up Nickel Mountain. Not long afterward, ranting to Willard
and Callie in an overflow of love, Henry clumsily tells of his sexual encounter with an
apparently drunken woman in a cheap hotel in Utica, where he had gone to attend a
trucker's funeral. That night, in the woman's room, where "they had talked about
loneliness and devotion and God knew what, and he had held her in his fat arms trying to
tell her of the bursting piece of sentimental stupidity inside him that had longed for
something or other all his life" and he had even said he intended to marry her, he
had instead struck her face (43-44). The anger bursts forth again in the scene in which
Jimmy dreams frightfully and wakes up screaming that he sees the devil in the shadows in
his room. When Simon arrives seconds after Henry, rage hits Henry "like a mountain
falling" and, "howling in his fury," he strides toward the man he thinks
has put the fear of Satan in the child's soul--the man repeatedly whispering
"Forgive," before he falls down the stairs to lie dead, in his final ambiguity,
with "the light from the kitchen door like a halo on his murderous face"
(207-08).
Like Johnson, Gardner as a critic stands close to pragmatism, as his book On Moral Fiction indicates. Early in that work, Gardner remarks tellingly: "Nothing could be more obvious, it seems to me, than that art should be moral and that the first business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature . . . on grounds of the production's moral worth" (18). Yet Johnson might disagree with Gardner's distinction between, on the one hand, skillfully written propaganda in the form of fiction, "moralistic" literature through which the author has simply put forth ideas he or she had in mind before beginning to write, and, on the other hand, authentically moral fiction, which "communicates meanings discovered by the process of the fiction's creation" (107-08). Gardner contends that "[d]idacticism and true art are immiscible" and that true art "explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach" (19). With such ideas, Gardner parallels Samuel Taylor Coleridge's idea of "organic form," which "shapes, as it developes, itself from within" (46).
To avoid distorting Johnson as a critic, we must acknowledge that he remarked to Boswell that "[t]he value of every story depends on its being true" (685) and that the characters of Samuel Richardson are superior to those of Fielding because Richardson's are "characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart," while Fielding's are merely entertaining "characters of manners" (389). Nonetheless, Johnson would not object, as Gardner does in On Moral Fiction, to an author's externally imposing "some fierce ethic" as a substitute for "true morality" (74)--that is, Johnson would approve if the ethic were what he considered the true Christian ethic and therefore the true pattern of morality. Moreover, he would recoil from the supposed truth a writer might reach through the untrammeled exploration Gardner advocates, for truth comes from God, he would say, not from a mortal novelist; and the lesson that a religiously liberated novelist might imply through his or her fiction would depend perilously on the novelist's character. "[T]he human heart is naturally malevolent," Johnson once told Mrs. Chapone, "and all the benevolence we see in the few who are good, is acquired by reason and religion" (qtd. in Quinlan 106).
Henry reasons, and Henry has a religion. His religion, though, owes much, however indirectly, to the romanticism that came in full force to English poetry half a generation after Johnson's death. "The Grave," the last section of Nickel Mountain, presents Henry approaching death from heart disease and reminiscing to himself as he and Jimmy, out hunting rabbits, come upon the little graveyard on the mountain, where two hired men are exhuming the body of a fourteen-year-old killed by lightning fifty years before, while the aged parents wait and talk. This scene, similar in a few ways to the main one in Katherine Anne Porter's short story "The Grave," shows Henry at peace, having discovered "the holiness of things (his father's phrase), the idea of magical change," including that of death (302). Although he has "felt unworthy" to worship with the Presbyterians at their local church, where, as he suspects, few of them really accept the predestination so prominent in their official theology (304-05), he has come to sympathize with his mother-in-law, his girlfriend years ago, who, for all her seeming ignorance and her unpleasant Baptist hymn-singing voice, nevertheless somehow believes, as he does, in "a vision of dust succinct with spirit, God inside wasps, oak trees, people, chickens walking in the yard," and in his reverie he describes religion as "a kind of formal acting-out of what every human being felt, vague fears over things he could do nothing about, vague joys over things only partly his doing--the idea of holiness" (303).
To all that, Johnson might reply in the words Boswell reports his friend used when a
prostitute solicited their business on the Strand one summer night in 1763: "No, no .
. . it won't do" (323). And to point out the likeness between this novel and
Ecclesiastes, as Richard C. Harris does, would not change Johnson's mind. As two moralists
influenced by Protestant Christianity but differing ultimately about truth, Johnson and
Gardner stand on opposite sides of the Great Romantic Divide. While resistant to neat
literary classification and hardly identifiable with Henry, Gardner shows through Henry's
thoughts the influence Wordsworth and Coleridge have exerted on later writers in English.
An externally imposed "fierce ethic" that Gardner warns about may lead, as we
know, to the shrillest of propaganda for the best or worst of causes, or it may lead to
Dante's Comedy. The ethic the author creates through the work of art may lead, with
a warped creating mind, to a perverse moral anarchy in fiction; or it may lead to a fine
novel like Nickel Mountain.
Works Cited
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the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1953.
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updated on July 24, 1998