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Between an invitation and a dare: John Gardner’s last lecture at Bread Loaf

by Susan Thornton

For eight summers beginning in 1974 and ending in 1982, John Gardner was on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This conference is held annually on the Bread Loaf Mountain Campus of Middlebury College in Vermont.

The 1982 brochure, containing photos and brief biographies of that year’s faculty included a photo of John with his pipe and a Prince Valiant haircut, looking out at the viewer with a look Norton Girault has described as "something between an invitation and a dare."

Writers attending the conference in 1982 got exactly that: an invitation and a dare. It wasn’t what they expected.

To understand Bread Loaf in those years, imagine an isolated summer camp of keyed-up adults with adolescent wants and add a patina of liquor. Breathe over it the aphrodisiac of fame, include a desire for success so strong that it closes the throat, all but cutting off the breath, add a dash or two of bitchy competitiveness--the sense that "this is the chance of a lifetime"--and you won't be far wrong.

Writers come to writers’ conferences to get published. Literary anecdotes abound. The young poet Langston Hughes, working as a waiter, slipped his poems under the plate of Richard Wright, the honored guest at the banquet. Wright stormed the kitchen, clutching the poems, and Hughes’ literary career was born.

The novice writer hopes, dreams, imagines that he will show his pile of dog-eared, coffee-stained manuscript pages to the star of a conference, for example, John Irving, John Gardner, Erica Jong, and the star will say, "This is fabulous! Do you have a quarter? Let’s go call my agent."

John was a teacher who was more than happy to contribute to students’ hopes of publications. He read any manuscript any student was brave enough to press into his hands, and his lectures on writing technique seemed to promise that if you sat still, listened hard, took good notes, and did everything he said, you’d break into print. With writers who were further along the path, his encouragement and generosity was unstinting. Betsy Sachs has written that when she reported to John that her manuscript was still under consideration at a publishing house after more than a year of negotiations and revisions, "he became incensed. ‘You call them. Now,’ he roared. ‘And tell them I said you want it back. They have no right to treat you like this. Just because you’re a new writer. I’ll write a letter to the Saturday Review about this. They can’t do this to young writers!’"

John had clout, and he used it.

His help and encouragement had made the difference between a successful career and no career for many of his students. "A writer should be a center of energy for other people," he once remarked, and at Bread Loaf, students flocked around him, some of them attending the conference year after year just for his lecture on fiction technique alone.

In 1982 the mood at the conference was different from previous years when the conference resembled nothing so much as a two week long cocktail party. Every meal began with the litany: "Are you a poet or a fiction writer?" If one gave the wrong answer, said, "I’m a poet" to a short story writer, the result was usually a tight, polite smile, and a turned shoulder. Small talk stayed determinedly small. Guests gathered, men in light jackets, women in casual summer frocks, and if you strolled through the west lawn on a perfect summer evening, plastic wine glass in hand, eavesdropping, you might hear any of the following remarks: "Who’s your agent? You don’t have one? Neither do I. Oh? You subscribe to Publisher’s Weekly too? I do find it so worthwhile. Did you get an MFA? And how is their MFA program? Now, how do I get an agent? Are agents coming here?"

In 1982, this hot house atmosphere was shattered by two hand grenades: the writers Carolyn Forche and Terrence Des Pres. Each had been at the conference before, but this summer each brought a new seriousness of purpose. Carolyn had only recently returned from El Salvador, where she had been a human rights observer for Amnesty International. She was closely associated with Archbishop Romero. He personally had urged her to flee the country. "What about you?" she had asked. "You, me, we are all dead men," he had told her, spreading his hands. She took him seriously and left the country. Two weeks later he was shot dead while celebrating Mass in the central square of the capital city.

Her book of poems, The Country Between, eloquently spoke to the conditions she saw in El Salvador and to her own experience.

Terrence Des Pres was the author of a book on the Holocaust, The Survivor.

Both were passionate advocates, who made many conference goers uncomfortable. Carolyn was young and beautiful; she looked quite fragile. Her subject matter ranged from her Slovak heritage to meditations on political prisoners to descriptions of war atrocities. To those conference goers who had never left the United States, whose subject matter never went beyond their suburban experience, Carolyn was, probably, a frightening, puzzling figure. Likewise Terrence, at that time on the faculty of Colgate University, but not a typical academic: he wore a long leather coat, rode a motorcycle, and had written a terrifying book detailing memories of survivors of the death camps of the Second World War. Were these people writers to be emulated? This question made many conference goers uncomfy.

However, where some saw discomfort, John saw an opportunity.

He was moved by Carolyn’s poetry, and her witness, and by Terrence’s quiet presence. The late night talks at Treman, the faculty lounge, took on a new seriousness as writers began to question what they were writing and why. Was it enough to write serious, poignant novels of divorce when poets were exiled from their home countries, when men and women suffered terrible tortures in prison, when children lacked medicine and doctors in badly supplied clinics in a tiny Central American nation? But what could writers in North America do? For many of us, life was comfortable. What did we know of being without clean water, without food, without a place to sleep? The night before his much anticipated lecture, John announced that he did not intend to give it. Instead he’d talk about politics.

"Don’t do it, John," Ron Hansen advised. "People come here to hear about writing. Don’t harangue them."

John didn’t reply; he pulled on his pipe and looked thoughtful.

But word got around—Gardner was up to something--and next day at ten AM, the scheduled time of the lecture, every seat was filled at the Little Theatre. Those who’d come too late stood outside peering in, leaning on the door jambs. Five minutes after ten, the crowd shifted in their chairs. Ten minutes after. A buzz began. Where was he? What was happening? Was this notorious bad boy of literature late again because he’d been up all night. . . drinking?

At last John trudged across the lawn, wearing the same black Harley-Davidson Tee shirt, torn fisherman knit sweater and blue slacks he’d worn for three days running. His face was swollen, his eyes puffy, and his hair wasn’t combed.

As soon as he stood by the podium the crowd stilled.

Other speakers had with them carefully prepared lectures, started on time, spoke with authority, were fortified by eight hours sleep and breakfast, or at least coffee. John had no written speech, looked like hell, and spoke spontaneously, stopping now and then as if to find the words. He began:

"I’m not going to do a lecture about literature, because I’m not that interested in literature any more. I’m not really interested in writing any more.
"I’m sort of interested in politics now. I think that’s what all of us writers should be interested in now."

I heard a shocked intake of breath. A woman in the front row turned to stare at her companion, then back to John. Whispers started in the last row.

John ignored these signs and continued. "I’ve lectured here about writing for eight summers. Two of my books on writing are going to be published this fall. Everything I know about writing is in those two books; The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist. So I don’t want to talk about writing, instead I want to talk about politics.

"For example, something I’ve been thinking about lately, there’s an equation between hunger and business. Do you know how many tons of lettuce American farmers dumped in the Pacific Ocean last summer? How many tons? Seventeen thousand tons. Because of a labor dispute. And people are starving all over the world. It’s a sin. We could save millions of lives if we irradiated food and shipped it to Third World countries. But we can’t, people are afraid of it for no good reason. And it would work!"

Now there was a louder, generalized hum of protest. "Irradiated food? Is he crazy?" "What does this have to do with writing?" Members of the audience craned their necks, put down their notebooks, stared at their neighbors and shook their heads. Chairs began to squeak.

John used up about fifteen minutes of his allotted hour and concluded his talk. "If you’re not writing politically, you’re not. . . writing." Then, head down, he left the podium and went out to stand on the lawn.

A stampede followed.

John stood by the door of the Little Theatre and people from the audience in the theatre lined up three and four deep to yell at him.

"I spent nine hundred dollars to attend this conference and lost two weeks of work and you want to talk about irradiated food?" A man shouted, separated from John by the crush of people.

"What do you mean, politics? Are we all supposed to write novels set in Washington?" A tall, thin woman frowned and bit on her pen.

"I don’t know anything about politics," came another voice. "Does this mean I’ll never publish?"

"Do Republicans count?"

"Does this mean we all have to be liberals?"

The questions went on and on. The angry man who’d spent his nine hundred dollars climbed onto a chair. "I came here to advance my career, and I’m not getting my money’s worth. And don’t try to fight me because I’m bigger than you are," he warned.

"No, you’re not," John observed. "You’re standing on a chair."

At the far edge of the crowd, I saw Georges and Anne Borchardt, keeping a safe distance from their famous and beleaguered client.

Discussion continued on this issue, and this outrageous performance, for some days. "Well, that does it, he’s lost it," remarked Bob Pack, the director of the conference. "I’m not inviting him back next year."

"But isn’t it a privilege just to hear what a great writer like that is thinking about?" asked one calmer, more philosophic soul. "I mean, it’s very important to know how someone like that thinks, and what motivates them. You don’t get that anywhere else."

John meanwhile puffed his pipe and kept his own counsel. He’d succeeded in his objective, which was to shake people up and get them to talk about something more than how to get an agent or the necessity to subscribe to Publisher’s Weekly.

And, as Betsy Sachs remarked: "He was so right, there was nothing else to say."

In an interview with David Stanton, a conference contributor, John elaborated on some of his views. What follows are John’s words, taken from a typescript of that interview, published in the Croton Review in 1983. "I really do mean political writing. I know there are going to be a lot of people who can’t or don’t want to write real political things, and who would want to expand the definition to say, ‘well, anything about a husband and wife is political,’ and that’s OK.

"The truth is that we need all kinds of writing, of which political is only one; but it’s also true that this is a very important moment in history. There’s been so much mere propaganda that we have this feeling, especially in universities, that we really shouldn’t be talking about the bomb or the ERA.

"I certainly don’t mean propagandistic writing—that’s of course, the risk—and I don’t mean writing which has no technique; writing that cares so much about the world that it really doesn’t hold up aesthetically. If you write a strong political book, one that’s strongly felt, but your technique is lousy, you’ll influence no one; you won’t change the world a bit. It’ll just be more trash to throw out.

"I really mean The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow. I mean Mickelsson’s Ghosts.

"I think the United States has the capacity, and is sometimes working up the will, to destroy the world; and I think we, writers, are Americans too, and we can tell a different story.

"We think it’s easy for the South Americans to write political fiction because the terrible evils are all around them; they can see what the fruit companies are doing, what fascist states are doing, and what well-paid terrorists on the other side are doing but even though that’s more dramatic—people cutting people’s ears off—I think nothing that’s happening right now is more important to the ultimate welfare of the world than what’s happening in the United States. The really big troubles start here; the big companies, the use of hunger as big business.

"I think in On Moral Fiction I was asking for concerned writing, and for affirmative writing; and now I’m asking that that concern be directed at what we, the United States, are doing.

"What I’m saying is that, here at Bread Loaf, where technique has reached such a high level, I see story after story of publishable quality, but very few stories that seem to me really important to the world right now.

"The thing that Carolyn Forche does is show that the evil’s on every side. We liberals like to think that the fascists are the bad guys, and some, who are more conservative, might like to think that the terrorists are the bad guys, or the other side; and it’s much more complicated than that.

"I don’t think the evils in America are either Liberal or Conservative. I don’t think that people who want to build up our military budget at the cost of economic stability are either Conservative or Liberal. They’re outside all that; they’re money people.

"If no small business in America--you know all this, but anyway--if no small business can borrow money because the government has already borrowed it all, and borrowed it all to make more and better bombs and germs, what’s going to happen is economic disaster. No matter how big our army is, if we’re insolvent and bankrupt, we’re going to get beaten.

"We’re on a hell course: it seems to me that our situation is hopeless, and everything we fear is being brought upon us by ourselves.

"On the other hand, if we figure out what are our strengths, like a football team figures out, ‘who are our fastest runners and who are our slowest runners?’ we’re going to have to think, number one, that we are the food basket.

"We can make more food than anybody. We dump it in the oceans now, and we should be selling it. If it costs too much to ship it, then the money that is going to all those bombs should be taken away from the bombs and be spent to ship food.

"I think we should make our present Third World enemies into allies by selling or giving them the goods needed to stabilize their governments.

"I know that sounds politically naïve, but I think if we really used the massive powers we have to present the world with the goods it needs, we’d have a chance."

This interview was conducted on August 27, 1982 between 12:30 and 1:15 AM and continued the following afternoon. The intervening years have seen many startling incidents, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of flashy discotheques and organized crime in Moscow. They have seen corporate downsizing that left many middle managers out of work while CEOs took home record bonuses. They have seen war in Europe, and genocide in Africa. They’ve seen massive starvation in North Korea and an embargo against Iraq that has meant malnutrition for infants and young children. And they’ve seen the introduction of irradiated foods into my local supermarket.

Whether American fiction has produced political fiction up to John’s standard I will leave to my audience to mull over and determine.

But when I remember that restive audience in the Little Theatre at the Bread Loaf Writer’s conference on that bright day in August sixteen years ago, I remember that they got more than they bargained for when they mailed in their tuition check: they got a cross between an invitation and a dare.

this page updated on 27 May 1998