The following paper by John Mulryan is fully copyrighted and may not be reproduced in full or part without the express written permission of the author:

John Mulryan, English Department

St. Bonaventure University

St. Bonaventure, New York 14778

When I first began teaching creative writing in 1982, ironically, the very year that John Gardner met his fiery end on the roads in Southwestern Pennsylvania, a friend who had been a student in John Gardner’s course in creative writing was kind enough to give me a copy of the novelist’s creative writing exercises (at this time, they were unpublished). Using these exercises as a base, I developed a syllabus that integrated the exercises with analyses of short stories and novels (both Gardner’s and those of other writers), as well as private conferences to monitor the students’ personal progress in creative writing. I envisioned Gardner as both a role model for my students, and as a practicing writer who could shift the focus of creative writing from high-flown theories of fiction to the nuts and bolts of writing. As a beginning "Gardinian," I was incurably optimistic about the ways in which these exercises might transform my students’ writing. But when the students set sail on the uncharted seas of actual short story and novel writing, it was another matter. My students have always enjoyed doing these exercises, but they have not always been successful in transferring their writing from the experimental phase to the practical phase.

Since I have already published a brief essay describing my Gardner-inspired course in creative writing, I thought I would begin today’s presentation with a discussion of selected exercises and some actual examples of student (and faculty) writing. At all times. I shall try to keep the focus on Gardner’s pedagogy rather than my own. I shall conclude with a few remarks about how the novel chosen for discussion can be brought to bear on Gardner’s values and ideas about writing.

I

Several strategies remain unchanged. I still require that selected exercises be prepared and read aloud in class, that each student redo at least one exercise in class, and read that aloud as well, and, finally, prepare an exercise of the student’s own choice, and, once again, read it aloud to the class . This is meant to promote the communal aspect of writing; I also require the students to read some of these exercises aloud to me in private conferences. No credit is given for any of these efforts, but the completion of all exercises is a requirement of the course. Thus students benefit both from private analyses of their efforts, and the collective criticism of other students in the class. I also continue to do versions of the exercises myself and read those aloud to the class, or photocopy them so that the students can consult them. Since I don’t grade their efforts, they can’t grade mine either!

I usually start the students off with exercise two: "Take a simple event: man gets off bus, trips, looks around in embarrassment, sees woman smiling." Here is my version, from the bus driver’s point of view:

Thirty years working for the bus company Sid, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Here comes this dude dressed to the nines, gets on the bus, hands me a twenty-dollar bill like I was a turd or something. Then he sets his hind end right down on the rear seat reserved for the old people. Man I was burnin’ up. But the good part comes next. Off the bus he goes, right down on his ass. I was laughin’ so hard I almost shit myself, and when ol’lady Jenkins burst into a smile my day was complete!

One student reshaped the assignment and made the pavement, which is always flat on its back, the prostrate witness of the tripping and smiling described above:

Yay, bus time, come one come all, step on my face, see if I care! Uh, it’s way too hot, I feel like I’m a hundred and fifty freakin degreees. It pisses me off to no…. whoy, hey, nice move big guy, way to impress the ladies. Oh, ya’ like that, do ya darlin’? Uh hu, smile it up, ain’t he cute! Smile it up, cause I may be concrete, but I’m lookin’ right up your skirt, and lovin’ bein’ me!

Here’s one of the student’s favorites: exercise 24. "Without an instant’s lapse of taste, describe a person vomiting." I won’t play games, so I’ll identify the first response as mine and the second as a student’s. Actually, I think hers is better than mine, although you need not feel yourselves under any obligation to agree with me:

It wasn’t the beer. No, it wasn’t the martinis either. Could it have been the bourbon or the black russians? No, it was the damn port wine! No, maybe it was the peanut butter sandwiches with marshmallow topping that I had afterwards. Anyway, I don’t really feel too good. I guess the Romans would have just stuck a feather down their gullets and let nature take its course. God—I feel like someone is taking a hammer to my stomach! Everything inside me is coming right up into my throat! I have this awful retching feeling—got to get to the bathroom. Too late—look at all the pretty colors! If it only smelled as good at it looked! God, I feel like one of those bowery bums; I’ve never felt so disgusted with myself. Next time, I’ll cut out some of those peanut butter sandwiches.

I felt it all rising up; all those noxious fluids that once were foods: potato chips, Pistachio ice cream, pickles, Redi-Whip. I felt a huge slushy ball splattering the walls of my stomach, creeping up my slippery esophagus, lingering near my tonsils in a slimy melee of once-chewed food. I cringed, doubled over, as the familiar acidic taste filled my mouth, and I lunged for my wastebasket. It swung like a pendulum as I retched up the semi-solid, startingly orange-red filth. It stung my mouth and assaulted my nostrils. It dripped over used Kleenex and old post-it-notes, dirtying the sides of my wastebasket. The stench was horrible. There were pieces of chewed hamburger in the mess, along with half-decomposed Lays and pickle bits. My mouth was coated in vomit, tongue heavy with it. There was some trapped behind my left molar. Suddenly, it happened again, and I clutched the edge of the wastebasket, feeling lightheaded. There wasn’t nearly as much, and it was greenish and clear, but the gross taste was in my mouth and nose. I coughed and strands of vomit dribbled from my lips like orange iciciles.

The exercise students keep coming back to to edit, rewrite, and rework into their short stories and novelettes is 5b: Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just commited murder. Do not mention the murder." One student came up with this response:

The calm, blue mirror stretched out before him. In it he could see the burning autumn leaves of the emcompassing trees staring back at him, taunting him with their beauty. The power, the simplicity, the energy, the comfort they offered filtered through his eyes and warmly ebbed to his heart, filling it, engorging it, until it became heavy with the burden.

He wanted to stay forever, unmoving, unblinking, simply in love with the world before him. He would become a lifeless, guiltless statue, a monument to the beauty in the world. No, he would abandon himself here, to be found a sinful, hideous scab reflected in the flawless face of the lake, marred by his presence there. But fortunately, they would come and find him, and remove the blemish upon nature. They would take him away, and lock him up somewhere that was dark, cold, and artificial. Away from the calm blue lakes that mirror the burning autumn leaves.

But he wasn’t ready yet. So he stood, motionless, nearly thoughtless, enchanted by the spell cast upon his eyes. And he stared, out over the lake, the calm blue lake, filled with the reflections of Autumn’s blood red leaves.

One that the students find particularly difficult is exercise 16: "write an honest and sensitive description of one of your parents." This student mixed humor and malice to produce a parodic sketch of a successful failure:

One of my parents is my father. This fact seems obvious. Should you meet the man on the street, you’d see before you a heavy-set, bearded man with a sensible haircut and a pair of glasses to match. If he didn’t know you, odds are you’d have to greet him first if you wanted him to notice your existence.

My father’s current state is in many ways a product of misfortune. Born crosseyed, a correctional operation damaged his right eye; hence the glasses. An underactive thyroid, disturbed when he was having his tonsils removed, resulted in his curent girth. Not academically adept, failure at barber school forced him to settle for a career as a doctor of chiropractic. However, he turned his life around by marrying his secretary, ten years younger than he. Then came the kids, succeeded by the gray hairs.

My father is far too logical, so much so that he is often excluded from most petty family bickerings. This logic often translates into indifference, felt most when advice is most earnestly sought. My father leads the least stressful life any husband and father could achieve. A self-employed doctor, he schedules his hours around Jeopardy, with Alex Trabek. Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, he has been retired for three years now, merely practicing chiropractic as a hobby, which I’m sure reduces much stress when it comes time to pay taxes.

My father bets on pro football, basketball, and baseball. He doesn’t drink or smoke. He doesn’t trust medical doctors. He’s forgotten his French. He let my sister get a puppy. He doesn’t know I take this class.

My favorite is 23b, write the first three pages of the novel described in exercise 23a, which reads: "In high parodic form plot a gothic novel." Unfortunately, I only have an example of my own exercise, but fortunately, it is less than three pages:

The wind blew coldly and bitterly as Majorie Happenstance approached the manor with no lack of trepidation. She was dressed conservatively in her nanny suit, and carried the worn carpet bag containing her few belongings and a well-used umbrella to guard against the elements. She was beginning to wonder if she really should have taken the position of governess for Lord Lovelust’s two children, Sapphire and Broadbolt. There was some mystery about Lovelust—after all, his first thirteen wives had died under mysterious circumstances, and the present lady of Lovelust Manor spent most of her time in the carriage house greasing the wheels of the milk wagon. Some say she was a mite ‘tetched; others that it was the only way her husband could be convince to give her any food—idle hands are the devil’s workship, he used to say, and it was true that the Ladies of Lovelust were known more for their callouses than their physical charms. Marjorie shivered a little as she heard the screaming shutters of Lovelust Manor and the repeated slamming of the rusty gate opening on to the unkempt lawn. She rang the bell timidly, only to be greeted by the snarl of a Doberman Pincher, who bounded at her with hungry zeal. She tried to fend him off with the worn umbrella, but his teeth had already begun to dig into her nanny collar and to pierce the silken skin of her throat. Suddenly, a deep and throaty voice commanded, "Off, Rage!" and the dog’s attack ended as suddenly as it had begun. Lord Lovelust himself, tall and strong, with a brisk, red, swarthy mustache and riverboat gambler sideburns, helped her up with the steel claw he used for a right hand. Jokingly he said, "that’s just Rage’s way of being friendly—just don’t try to shake hands with him—I made that mistake once!" As Marjorie Happenstance looked up at the full seven feet of Lord Lovelust, taking in the figure entirely clothed in black sealskin, and noting the eight-inch scar on his leoline face (a love tap, he termed it later), feeling the filthy spittle of Rage dripping down her face, a face that was already stained with tears, she realized that life would be far from dull at Lovelust Manor. Perhaps it was here that she would learn to forget her own thirteen late husbands and how they too had let their idle hands become the devil’s tools.

The point is that the exercises are only as good as the responses they elicit, and they get the students writing, not to mention the professor! I would never have had the delight of composing such a shameless piece of writing as the Gothic parody if Gardner didn’t make me do it! Thus the exercises force the student to enlarge his technical ability by writing about unpalatable topics (gong to the bathroom, murdering a child), taking unorthodox points of view (a landscape as seen by a bird, a lake as seen by a man who has just drowned his girlfriend in it), and doing the same simple thing many different ways (describing a simple incident, like a bus accident, five different ways).

II

In more ambitious days, I decided to pit Gardner against his arch-enemy, John Barth. Taking Gardner at his word in On Moral Fiction, I focused on his own novel of values, Mikellson’s Ghosts and the nihilistic Barth novel, End of the Road. You may recall Gardner’s published opinion of John Barth: "Whenever I read John Barth, I’m Disgusted." I also wanted to test Gardner’s principles in the exercises against a hefty hunk of his own writing. This system has become too cumbersome in practice, so I now do just one novel, Don De Lillo’s White Noise. De Lillo wasn’t famous enough in 1982 to incur Gardner’s wrath, but his remarks about metafiction, black comedy, and parody can easily be applied to De Lillo: "Innovative Fictions are literary stunts." "The writer who denies that human beings have free will . . . is one who can write nothing of interest." White Noise is surrealistic, parodic, and, like both End of the Road and Mikelson’s Ghosts, it deals with the irrelevance of the ivory tower to society’s real problems—in this case a cloud of toxic waste that envelops the community of Blacksmith while the non-German speaking protagonist, David Gladney shores up his Hitler studies program against the threat of the competing Elvis Studies program and the pop-culture seminars in car crashes. But unreality rules both inside and outside of academe: the German nuns who don’t believe in God, even though somebody has to,;the people who die after becoming lost, not in the woods, but in the mall; the senior citizen courses in correct posture; the medical experts who dispense arcane but meaningless information,;the total lack of a moral sense or a moral center; the triumph of consumerism; the universally held assumption that appearance is reality. On the one hand, DeLillo is a poor choice from Gardner’s point of view, since Gardner warns us eloquently to avoid driving our readers to despair: ". . . every writer, every minute, every sentence, should be aware that he might be read by the desperate, by people who might by a single sentence be persuaded to choose to jump off the bridge." On the other hand, DeLillo is a master of dialogue, sentence structure, imagery, setting, and plot, all elements of writing that are covered in the exercises. While I revere Gardner’s fiction and respect his pedagogical instincts, I simply do not agree that "if the novelist himself is a cynic, it goes beyond character flaw to flawed novel," or that satire is nothing "there’s no place in great literature for satire," which is a "sideshow," "a secondary mode." Gardner promotes one type of fiction over all others, but his methodology is greater than his theory: all novelists, great and small, can learn from the exercises, be they cynics or idealists. Gardner also seems to have a prejudice against the novel of ideas, claiming that "the primary subject of fiction is and always has been human emotion, values, and beliefs." But DeLillo creates a world where emotions seem almost inappropriate, and dialogue, in the Bakhtinian sense, has been utterly divorced from both feeling and imagination. But that is his vision and his techniques reflect the techniques Gardner espouses in these exercises, For example, one could find, in White Noise, examples of exercises 6, 8 (Gladney and his wife’s secrets about who will die first), 21, and 23a (the novel opens with a parody of the western roundup—the "wagons" of the parents returning their children to school). In sum, great writing is great writing, and great writing about great writing, which is how I would characterize these exercises, can be applied to the idiom of any age, of any culture. The spirit of John Gardner lives on in his ephebes and his published works, but as far as his exercises in creative writing are concerned, the "word" is just getting out now.