314- ] English Literature - John Gardner

314- ] English Literature

John Gardner 

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction No. 73

The following interview incorporates three done with John Gardner over the last decade of his life. After interviewing him in 1971, Frank McConnell wrote of the thirty-nine-year-old author as one of the most original and promising younger American novelists. His first four novels—The Resurrection (1966), The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), Grendel (1971), and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972)—represented, in the eyes of many critics and reviewers, a new and exhilarating phase in the enterprise of modern writing, a consolidation of the resources of the contemporary novel and a leap forward—or backward—into a reestablished humanism. One finds in his books elements of the three major strains of current fiction: the elegant narrative gamesmanship of Barth or Pynchon, the hyperrealistic gothicism of Joyce Carol Oates and Stanley Elkin, and the cultural, intellectual history of Saul Bellow. Like so many characters in current fiction, Gardner's are men on the fringe, men shocked into the consciousness that they are living lives that seem to be determined, not by their own will, but by massive myths, cosmic fictions over which they have no control (e.g., Ebeneezer Cooke in Barth's Sot-Weed Factor, Tyrone Slothrop in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow); but Gardner's characters are philosophers on the fringe, heirs, all of them, to the great debates over authenticity and bad faith that characterize our era. In Grendel, for example, the hero-monster is initiated into the Sartrean vision of Nothingness by an ancient, obviously well-read dragon: a myth speaking of the emptiness of all myths—“Theory-makers . . . They'd map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories, their here-to-the-moon-and-back lists of paltry facts. Insanity—the simplest insanity ever devised!” His heroes—like all men—are philosophers who are going to die; and their characteristic discovery—the central creative energy of Gardner's fiction—is that the death of consciousness finally justifies consciousness itself. The myths, whose artificiality contemporary writers have been at such pains to point out, become in Gardner's work real and life giving once again, without ever losing their modern character of fictiveness.

Gardner's work may well represent, then, the new “conservatism,” which some observers have noted in the current scene. But it is a conservatism of high originality, and, at least in Gardner's case, of deep authority in his life. When he guest-taught a course in “Narrative Forms” at Northwestern University, a number of his students were surprised to find a modern writer—and a hot property—enthusiastic, not only about Homer, Virgil, Apollonius Rhodius, and Dante, but deeply concerned with the critical controversies surrounding those writers, and with mistakes in their English translations. As the interview following makes clear, Gardner's job in and affection for ancient writing and the tradition of metaphysics is, if anything, greater than for the explosions and involutions of modern fiction. He is, in the full sense of the word, a literary man.

“It's as if God put me on earth to write,” Gardner observed once. And writing, or thinking about writing, takes up much of his day. He works, he says, usually on three or four books at the same time, allowing the plots to cross-pollinate, shape and qualify each other.

Sara Matthiessen describes Gardner in the spring of 1978 (additional works published by then included October Light; On Moral Fiction was about to be published). Matthiessen arrived with a friend to interview him at the Breadloaf Writer's Colony in Vermont: “After we'd knocked a couple of times, he opened the door looking haggard and just wakened. Dressed in a purple sateen, bell-sleeved, turtleneck shirt and jeans, he was an exotic figure: unnaturally white hair to below his shoulders, of medium height, he seemed an incarnation from the medieval era central to his study. 'Come in!' he said, as though there were no two people he'd rather have seen than Sally and me, and he led us into a cold, bright room sparsely equipped with wooden furniture. We were offered extra socks against the chill. John lit his pipe, and we sat down to talk.”

 

 

 

INTERVIEWER

You've worked in several different areas: prose, fiction, verse, criticism, book reviews, scholarly books, children's books, radio plays; you wrote the libretto for a recently produced opera. Could you discuss the different genres? Which one have you most enjoyed doing?

JOHN GARDNER

The one that feels the most important is the novel. You create a whole world in a novel and you deal with values in a way that you can't possibly in a short story. The trouble is that since novels represent a whole world, you can't write them all the time. After you finish a novel, it takes a couple of years to get in enough life and enough thinking about things to have anything to say, any clear questions to work through. You have to keep busy, so it's fun to do the other things. I do book reviews when I'm hard up for money, which I am all the time. They don't pay much, but they keep you going. Book reviews are interesting because it's necessary to keep an eye on what's good and what's bad in the books of a society worked so heavily by advertising, public relations, and so on. Writing reviews isn't really analytical, it's for the most part quick reactions—joys and rages. I certainly never write a review about a book I don't think worth reviewing, a flat-out bad book, unless it's an enormously fashionable bad book. As for writing children's books, I've done them because when my kids were growing up I would now and then write them a story as a Christmas present, and then after I became sort of successful, people saw the stories and said they should be published. I like them, of course. I wouldn't give junk to my kids. I've also done scholarly books and articles. The reason I've done those is that I've been teaching things like Beowulf and Chaucer for a long time. As you teach a poem year after year, you realize, or anyway convince yourself, that you understand the poem and that most people have got it slightly wrong. That's natural with any poem, but during the years I taught lit courses, it was especially true of medieval and classical poetry. When the general critical view has a major poem or poet badly wrong, you feel like you ought to straighten it out. The studies of Chaucer since the fifties are very strange stuff: like the theory that Chaucer is a frosty Oxford-donnish guy shunning carnality and cupidity. Not true. So close analysis is useful. But writing novels—and maybe opera libretti—is the kind of writing that gives me greatest satisfaction; the rest is more like entertainment.

INTERVIEWER

You have been called a “philosophical novelist.” What do you think of the label?

 

GARDNER

I'm not sure that being a philosophical novelist is better than being some other kind, but I guess that there's not much doubt that, in a way at least, that's what I am. A writer's material is what he cares about, and I like philosophy the way some people like politics, or football games, or unidentified flying objects. I read a man like Collingwood, or even Brand Blanchard or C. D. Broad, and I get excited—even anxious—filled with suspense. I read a man like Swinburn on time and space and it becomes a matter of deep concern to me whether the structure of space changes near large masses. It's as if I actually think philosophy will solve life's great questions—which sometimes, come to think of it, it does, at least for me. Probably not often, but I like the illusion. Blanchard's attempt at a logical demonstration that there really is a universal human morality, or the recent flurry of theories by various majestical cranks that the universe is stabilizing itself instead of flying apart—those are lovely things to run into. Interesting and arresting, I mean, like talking frogs. I get a good deal more out of the philosophy section of a college bookstore than out of the fiction section, and I more often read philosophical books than I read novels. So sure, I'm “philosophical,” though what I write is by no means straight philosophy. I make up stories. Meaning creeps in of necessity, to keep things clear, like paragraph breaks and punctuation. And, I might add, my friends are all artists and critics, not philosophers. Philosophers—except for the few who are my friends—drink beer and watch football games and defeat their wives and children by the fraudulent tyranny of logic.

INTERVIEWER

But insofar as you are a “philosophical novelist,” what is it that you do?

GARDNER

I write novels, books about people, and what I write is philosophical only in a limited way. The human dramas that interest me—stir me to excitement and, loosely, vision—are always rooted in serious philosophical questions. That is, I'm bored by plots that depend on the psychological or sociological quirks of the main characters—mere melodramas of healthy against sick—stories that, subtly or otherwise, merely preach. Art as the wisdom of Marcus Welby, M.D. Granted, most of fiction's great heroes are at least slightly crazy, from Achilles to Captain Ahab, but the problems that make great heroes act are the problems no sane man could have gotten around either. Achilles, in his nobler, saner moments, lays down the whole moral code of The Iliad. But the violence and anger triggered by war, the human passions that overwhelm Achilles's reason and make him the greatest criminal in all fiction—they're just as much a problem for lesser, more ordinary people. The same with Ahab's desire to pierce the Mask, smash through to absolute knowledge. Ahab's crazy, so he actually tries it; but the same Mask leers at all of us. So, when I write a piece of fiction I select my characters and settings and so on because they have a bearing, at least to me, on the old unanswerable philosophical questions. And as I spin out the action, I'm always very concerned with springing discoveries—actual philosophical discoveries. But at the same time I'm concerned—and finally more concerned—with what the discoveries do to the character who makes them, and to the people around him. It's that that makes me not really a philosopher, but a novelist.

INTERVIEWER

The novel Grendel is a retelling of the Beowulf story from the monster's point of view. Why does an American writer living in the twentieth century abandon the realistic approach and borrow such legendary material as the basis for a novel?

GARDNER

I've never been terribly fond of realism because of certain things that realism seems to commit me to. With realism you have to spend two hundred pages proving that somebody lives in Detroit so that something can happen and be absolutely convincing. But the value systems of the people involved is the important thing, not the fact that they live on Nine Mile Road. In my earlier fiction I went as far as I could from realism because the easy way to get to the heart of what you want to say is to take somebody else's story, particularly a nonrealistic story. When you tell the story of Grendel, or Jason and Medeia, you've got to end it the way the story ends— traditionally, but you can get to do it in your own way. The result is that the writer comes to understand things about the modern world in light of the history of human consciousness; he understands it a little more deeply, and has a lot more fun writing it.

INTERVIEWER

But why specifically Beowulf?

GARDNER

Some stories are more interesting than others. Beowulf is a terribly interesting story. It gives you some really wonderful visual images, such as the dragon. It's got Swedes looking over the hills and scaring everybody. It's got mead halls. It's got Grendel, and Grendel's mother. I really do believe that a novel has to be a feast of the senses, a delightful thing. One of the better things that has happened to the novel in recent years is that it has become rich. Think of a book like Chimera or The Sot-Weed Factor—they may not be very good books, but they are at least rich experiences. For me, writers like John O'Hara are interesting only in the way that movies and tv plays are interesting; there is almost nothing in a John O'Hara novel that couldn't be in the movies just as easily. On the other hand, there is no way an animator, or anyone else, can create an image from Grendel as exciting as the image in the reader's mind: Grendel is a monster, and living in the first person, because we're all in some sense monsters, trapped in our own language and habits of emotion. Grendel expresses feelings we all feel—enormous hostility, frustration, disbelief, and so on, so that the reader, projecting his own monster, projects a monster that is, for him, the perfect horror show. There is no way you can do that in television or the movies, where you are always seeing the kind of realistic novel O'Hara wrote . . . Gregory Peck walking down the street. It's just the same old thing to me. There are other things that are interesting in O'Hara, and I don't mean to put him down excessively, but I go for another kind of fiction: I want the effect that a radio play gives you or that novels are always giving you at their best.

 John Gardner

John Gardner was a British author, born on November 20, 1926, in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, known for his contributions to the mystery and espionage genres, particularly through his work extending the legacy of iconic characters like James Bond and Dr. Moriarty. He began his writing career after leaving the Anglican priesthood and gained early recognition with his Boysie Oakes series, which blended humor with crime narratives. Gardner's notable achievement was his selection in 1981 to continue Ian Fleming's James Bond series, resulting in a total of sixteen novels that adapted the character to contemporary themes while maintaining some of the original's essence.

His writing often integrated elements of comedy and historical detail, showcasing his ability to imitate various styles while also developing his unique voice. Gardner's attention to historical accuracy and his interest in the occult were evident in works like the Kruger trilogy and the Moriarty series. Despite facing criticism for his Bond novels, which some felt strayed too far from Fleming's spirit, Gardner's storytelling captured a wide audience, with his books translated into over fourteen languages. He continued to write until health challenges slowed him down, ultimately passing away on August 3, 2007.

Published in: 2023

By: Delaney, Bill<br />Barratt, David

Go to EBSCOhost and sign in to access more content about this topic.

John Gardner (1933-1982) was a popular and controversial author. He wrote several best-selling novels, including Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and October Light (which won the National Critics Circle Award in 1976), and The Art of Fiction, an essay text now standard in university writing classes, and On Moral Fiction, a book so scandalous it almost destroyed his career.

Mickelsson’s Ghosts

Fiction by John Gardner

The final novel by John Gardner, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, originally published in 1982 just months before his untimely death in a motorcycle accident, is a tour de force. The protagonist Peter Mickelsson, a former star philosophy professor at Brown, relocates to Binghamton University. On the verge of bankruptcy, separated from his wife, in questionable mental health, and drinking heavily, Mickelsson decides to buy a country house in northeastern Pennsylvania. What he encounters there are impassioned and shameless love affairs (one of which results in a regrettable pregnancy), a Mormon extremist cult, small town mythologies, the robbery of a robber, multiple murders, the ghosts of an incestuous family, Plato, and our hero’s own possible insanity.

The Sunlight Dialogues

Fiction by John Gardner

In The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner’s vision of America in the turbulent 1960s embraces an unconventional cast of conventional citizens in the small rural town of Batavia, New York. Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called “The Sunlight Man,” who has been jailed for painting the word “LOVE” across two lanes of traffic, and who is later suspected of murder. The men battle over morality, freedom and their opposing notions of justice, leading each to find his own state of grace. Their conflict is mirrored in the community of middlebrow politicians and their church-going wives, Native Americans, working-class immigrants, farmers, soldiers, petty thieves, and even centenarian sisters too stubborn to die. Gardner’s alchemy is existential: from the most raw, vulnerable, and conflicting characters in the American melting pot, he transmutes common denominators of human isolation and longing. With unnerving suspense, his acute ear for American speech, and permeated by his deep-rooted belief in morality, this expansive, sprawling, and ambitious novel is John Gardner’s masterpiece: “A superb literary achievement,” noted

Nickel Mountain

Fiction by John Gardner

At the heart of John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story: when at 42, the obese, anxious and gentle Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells–who is pregnant with the child of a local boy–it is much more than years which define the gulf between them. But the beauty of this novel is the gradual revelation of the bond that develops as this unlikely couple experiences courtship and marriage, the birth of a son, isolation, forgiveness, work, and death in a small Catskill community in the 1950s. The plot turns on tragic events–they might be accidents or they might be acts of will–involving a cast of rural eccentrics that includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself) and an itinerant “Goat Lady.” Questions of guilt, innocence, and even murder are eclipsed by deeds of compassion, humility, and redemption, and ultimately by Henry Soames’ quiet discovery of grace. Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague of the author, has written an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised but often misunderstood John Gardner.

October Light

Fiction by John Gardner

October Light is one of John Gardner’s masterworks. The penniless widow of a once-wealthy dentist, Sally Abbot now lives in the Vermont farmhouse of her older brother, 72-year-old James Page. Polar opposites in nearly every way, their clash of values turns a bitter corner when the exacting and resolute James takes a shotgun to his sister’s color television set. After he locks Sally up in her room with the trashy “blockbuster” novel that has consumed her (and only apples to eat), the novel-within-the-novel becomes an echo chamber providing glimpses into the history of the family that spawned these bizarre, sad, and stubborn people. Gardner uses the turbulent siblings as a stepping-off point from which he expands upon the lives of their extended families, and the rural community that surrounds them. He also engages larger issues of how liberals and conservatives define themselves, and considers those moments when life transcends all their arguments.

Nickel Mountain is shapely and moving enough to make you believe, while you are reading it, in ancient forms and permanent truths.

— New York Times Book Review

  

313- ] English Literature - John Gardner

313- ] English Literature

John Gardner

John Gardner (British writer)

John Edmund Gardner (20 November 1926 – 3 August 2007) was an English writer of spy and thriller novels. He is best known for his James Bond continuation novels, but also wrote a series of Boysie Oakes books and three novels containing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional villain, Professor Moriarty.

During the Second World War, Gardner joined the Home Guard at the age of 13, served in the Fleet Air Arm and subsequently joined the Royal Marines: he later described himself as "the worst commando in the world". After demobilisation, he followed his father into the Church of England, studying theology at St John's College, Cambridge, and being ordained as a priest in 1953. After losing his faith, he left the church in 1958 and took a job as a drama critic at the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald.

Gardner's literary career began in 1964 with the autobiographical Spin the Bottle, which detailed his experience of alcoholism. In the same year, he published The Liquidator, a parody of James Bond in which the cowardly Boysie Oakes is mistakenly recruited as a British spy. The book was made into a film, and followed by seven further Oakes novels and four short stories over the next eleven years. He subsequently wrote further novels centred on the characters of Derek Torry and Herbie Kruger, a Scotland Yard inspector and an intelligence agent respectively. From the mid 1970s onwards, he published three novels using the character of Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes series.

Between 1981 and 1996, Gardner wrote fourteen James Bond novels and the novelisations of two Bond films, at the invitation of Ian Fleming's former production company, Glidrose Publications. Although commercially popular, his Bond novels were not a critical success: The Guardian considered them "dogged by silliness". He ended his work on Bond following a diagnosis of oesophageal cancer in the 1990s, and took a break from writing altogether in 1997, following the unexpected death of his wife, Margaret Mercer. In 2000, he resumed his literary work, publishing Day of Absolution in 2001 and Bottled Spider in 2002. The latter work introduced Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford, named after Gardner's ex-fiancée, Patricia Mountford, who resumed her engagement with him after reading the book. He published a further four Suzie Mountford novels before his death in 2007, from suspected heart failure.

Early life

John Edmund Gardner was born on 20 November 1926 in Seaton Delaval, a village in Northumberland. His parents were Cyril Gardner, a London-born Anglican priest who had been ordained in Wallsend in 1921, and Lena Henderson, a local girl; the couple were married in 1925. In 1933 the family moved to the market town of Wantage in what was then Berkshire, where Cyril took up the position of Chaplain at St Mary's, Wantage, and Gardner was educated at the local King Alfred's School.

During the Second World War he joined the Home Guard, despite being only 13 at the time. Gardner subsequently served in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, before transferring to 42 Commando, Royal Marines, for service in the Middle and Far East. Gardner considered himself "the worst commando in the world" and, despite being "a small-arms expert ... [who] also knew a lot about explosives", he admitted that "I bent an aeroplane I was learning to fly".

After the war he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, to study theology and was subsequently ordained as an Anglican priest in 1953. He realised that he had lost his faith and made an error in his career; he later admitted that during one sermon, "I didn't believe a word I was saying". He was released from the church in 1958 and took up a position as a drama critic with the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald. It was whilst at the Herald—aged 33—that Gardner realised he was an alcoholic, drinking two bottles of gin a day. He overcame his addiction and produced his first book as part of his therapy: the autobiographical Spin the Bottle, published in 1964. Critic and scholar John Sutherland says that of all the books Gardner published, it is "the one that most deserves to survive."

Writing career

In 1964 Gardner began his novelist career with The Liquidator, in which he created the character Boysie Oakes who inadvertently is mistaken to be a tough, pitiless man of action and is thereupon recruited into a British spy agency. In fact, Oakes was a devout coward who was terrified of violence, suffered from airsickness and was afraid of heights and Gardner admitted of him that, "though I have denied it many times—he was of course a complete piss-take of J. Bond". The book appeared at the height of the fictional spy mania and, as a send-up of the whole business, was an immediate success. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, Anthony Boucher wrote, "Mr. Gardner succeeds in having it both ways: He has written a clever parody which is also a genuinely satisfactory thriller." The book was made into a film of the same name by MGM and another seven light-hearted novels and four short stories about the cowardly Oakes appeared over the next eleven years.

Following the success of his Oakes books, Gardner created new characters: Derek Torry—a Scotland Yard inspector of Italian descent—and Herbie Kruger, the latter of which appeared in a series of novels published simultaneously with his Bond works. In the mid-1970s Gardner also wrote the first of three novels using the character of Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes series, the last of which was published posthumously. The third of this series, titled simply Moriarty, was delayed due to a dispute with the publisher, but was finally released shortly after his death. Erik Lee Preminger bought the film rights to the first of the trilogy—The Return of Moriarty—and wrote a script. Edgar Bronfman Jr., for Sagittarius Entertainment and Nat Cohen, for EMI Productions were to produce. Donald Sutherland was to portray Moriarty. Funding however fell through shortly before filming was to begin.

In 1979 Glidrose Publications (now Ian Fleming Publications) approached Gardner and asked him to revive Ian Fleming's James Bond series of novels. Between 1981 and 1996, Gardner wrote fourteen James Bond novels, and the novelizations of two Bond films. Gardner stated that he wanted "to bring Mr Bond into the 1980s", although he retained the ages of the characters as they were when Fleming had left them. Even though Gardner kept the ages the same, he made Bond grey at the temples as a nod to the passing of the years. With the influence of the American publishers, Putnam's, the Gardner novels showed an increase in the number of Americanisms used in the book, such as a waiter wearing "pants", rather than trousers, in The Man from Barbarossa. James Harker, writing in The Guardian, considered that the Gardner books were "dogged by silliness", giving examples of Scorpius, where much of the action is set in Chippenham, and Win, Lose or Die, where "Bond gets chummy with an unconvincing Maggie Thatcher". Whilst Gardner's Bond novels received a mixed reaction from the critics, they were popular and a number appeared in The New York Times Best Seller list, bringing the author commercial success.

Gardner had an ambivalent view on being the Bond author, once saying "I'm very grateful to have been selected to keep Bond alive. But I'd much rather be remembered for my own work than I would for Bond", while saying on another occasion that "I remain proud that my contribution to the Bond saga played a great part in its development". In the mid-1990s, after discovering he had oesophageal cancer, Gardner officially retired from writing Bond novels and Glidrose Publications quickly chose Raymond Benson to continue the literary stories of James Bond.

His break from writing lasted for five years, following the death of his wife, but after battling his illness he returned to print in 2000 with a new novel, Day of Absolution. Gardner also began a series of books with a new character, Suzie Mountford, a 1930s police detective.

The Globe and Mail crime critic Derrick Murdoch said, "John Gardner is technically a highly competent thriller novelist who never seems to be quite at ease unless he is writing in the same vein as another writer. (He has worked John le Carré and Graham Greene this way, and it's what makes him so well qualified to continue the James Bond saga.)"

The Crime Writers' Association short-listed The Liquidator, The Dancing Dodo, The Nostradamus Traitor, and The Garden of Weapons for their annual Gold Dagger award.

Personal life

In 1952 Gardner married Margaret Mercer and the couple had two children. Gardner also had another daughter, the result of a long affair with Susan Wright, a former personal assistant to Peter Sellers. In 1989, Gardner and his family moved to the US and it was in America that he was diagnosed with cancer; firstly of the prostate and then, six years later, of the oesophagus. The subsequent medical treatment in the US left him near bankrupt and he returned to the UK in November 1996. Shortly after his return, in February 1997, Margaret died unexpectedly.

When Gardner returned to writing, his second book, Bottled Spider, introduced a new character, Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford. Gardner took the surname from Patricia Mountford, an ex-girlfriend to whom he had been engaged in 1949. When she read the book Mountford contacted Gardner through his publishers, and the two were subsequently engaged.

Gardner died on Friday 3 August 2007 from suspected heart failure.

Works

Autobiography

Spin the Bottle (1964)

Boysie Oakes novels

The Liquidator (1964)

Understrike (1965)

Amber Nine (1966)

Madrigal (1967)

Founder Member (1969)

Traitor's Exit (1970)

The Airline Pirates (1970)

A Killer for a Song (1975)

Derek Torry novels

A Complete State of Death (1969)

The Corner Men (1974)

Professor Moriarty novels

The Return of Moriarty (1974)

The Revenge of Moriarty (1975)

Moriarty (1976)

Herbie Kruger novels

The Nostradamus Traitor (1979)

The Garden of Weapons (1980)

The Quiet Dogs (1982)

Maestro (1993)

Confessor (1995)

The Railton family novels

The Secret Generations (1985)

The Secret Houses (1988)

The Secret Families (1989)

James Bond novels

Licence Renewed (1981)

For Special Services (1982)

Icebreaker (1983)

Role of Honour (1984)

Nobody Lives for Ever (1986)

No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)

Scorpius (1988)

Win, Lose or Die (1989)

Licence to Kill (1989) – novelization of a film script

Brokenclaw (1990)

The Man from Barbarossa (1991)

Death is Forever (1992)

Never Send Flowers (1993)

SeaFire (1994)

GoldenEye (1995) – novelization of a film script

Cold (1996)

Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford novels

Bottled Spider (2002)

The Streets of Town (2003)

Angels Dining at the Ritz (2004)

Troubled Midnight (2005)

No Human Enemy (2007)

Other novels

The Censor (1970)

Every Night's a Bullfight (1971)

To Run a Little Faster (1976)

The Werewolf Trace (1977)

The Dancing Dodo (1978)

Golgotha (1980)

The Director (1982) (A re-working of his 1971 novel Every Night's a Bullfight.)

Flamingo (1983)

Blood of the Fathers (1992) (as by "Edmund McCoy". Later published under his own name in 2004.)

Day of Absolution (2001)

Short story collections

Hideaway (1968)

The Assassination File (1974)

  

312- ] English Literature - John Gardner

312- English Literature 

 John Gardner

 John Gardner

John Gardner was a British author, born on November 20, 1926, in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, known for his contributions to the mystery and espionage genres, particularly through his work extending the legacy of iconic characters like James Bond and Dr. Moriarty. He began his writing career after leaving the Anglican priesthood and gained early recognition with his Boysie Oakes series, which blended humor with crime narratives. Gardner's notable achievement was his selection in 1981 to continue Ian Fleming's James Bond series, resulting in a total of sixteen novels that adapted the character to contemporary themes while maintaining some of the original's essence.

His writing often integrated elements of comedy and historical detail, showcasing his ability to imitate various styles while also developing his unique voice. Gardner's attention to historical accuracy and his interest in the occult were evident in works like the Kruger trilogy and the Moriarty series. Despite facing criticism for his Bond novels, which some felt strayed too far from Fleming's spirit, Gardner's storytelling captured a wide audience, with his books translated into over fourteen languages. He continued to write until health challenges slowed him down, ultimately passing away on August 3, 2007.

Published in: 2023

By: Delaney, Bill<br />Barratt, David

Go to EBSCOhost and sign in to access more content about this topic.

John Gardner (1933-1982) was a popular and controversial author. He wrote several best-selling novels, including Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and October Light (which won the National Critics Circle Award in 1976), and The Art of Fiction, an essay text now standard in university writing classes, and On Moral Fiction, a book so scandalous it almost destroyed his career.

Mickelsson’s Ghosts

Fiction by John Gardner

The final novel by John Gardner, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, originally published in 1982 just months before his untimely death in a motorcycle accident, is a tour de force. The protagonist Peter Mickelsson, a former star philosophy professor at Brown, relocates to Binghamton University. On the verge of bankruptcy, separated from his wife, in questionable mental health, and drinking heavily, Mickelsson decides to buy a country house in northeastern Pennsylvania. What he encounters there are impassioned and shameless love affairs (one of which results in a regrettable pregnancy), a Mormon extremist cult, small town mythologies, the robbery of a robber, multiple murders, the ghosts of an incestuous family, Plato, and our hero’s own possible insanity.

The Sunlight Dialogues

Fiction by John Gardner

In The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner’s vision of America in the turbulent 1960s embraces an unconventional cast of conventional citizens in the small rural town of Batavia, New York. Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called “The Sunlight Man,” who has been jailed for painting the word “LOVE” across two lanes of traffic, and who is later suspected of murder. The men battle over morality, freedom and their opposing notions of justice, leading each to find his own state of grace. Their conflict is mirrored in the community of middlebrow politicians and their church-going wives, Native Americans, working-class immigrants, farmers, soldiers, petty thieves, and even centenarian sisters too stubborn to die. Gardner’s alchemy is existential: from the most raw, vulnerable, and conflicting characters in the American melting pot, he transmutes common denominators of human isolation and longing. With unnerving suspense, his acute ear for American speech, and permeated by his deep-rooted belief in morality, this expansive, sprawling, and ambitious novel is John Gardner’s masterpiece: “A superb literary achievement,” noted

Nickel Mountain

Fiction by John Gardner

At the heart of John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story: when at 42, the obese, anxious and gentle Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells–who is pregnant with the child of a local boy–it is much more than years which define the gulf between them. But the beauty of this novel is the gradual revelation of the bond that develops as this unlikely couple experiences courtship and marriage, the birth of a son, isolation, forgiveness, work, and death in a small Catskill community in the 1950s. The plot turns on tragic events–they might be accidents or they might be acts of will–involving a cast of rural eccentrics that includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself) and an itinerant “Goat Lady.” Questions of guilt, innocence, and even murder are eclipsed by deeds of compassion, humility, and redemption, and ultimately by Henry Soames’ quiet discovery of grace. Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague of the author, has written an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised but often misunderstood John Gardner.

October Light

Fiction by John Gardner

October Light is one of John Gardner’s masterworks. The penniless widow of a once-wealthy dentist, Sally Abbot now lives in the Vermont farmhouse of her older brother, 72-year-old James Page. Polar opposites in nearly every way, their clash of values turns a bitter corner when the exacting and resolute James takes a shotgun to his sister’s color television set. After he locks Sally up in her room with the trashy “blockbuster” novel that has consumed her (and only apples to eat), the novel-within-the-novel becomes an echo chamber providing glimpses into the history of the family that spawned these bizarre, sad, and stubborn people. Gardner uses the turbulent siblings as a stepping-off point from which he expands upon the lives of their extended families, and the rural community that surrounds them. He also engages larger issues of how liberals and conservatives define themselves, and considers those moments when life transcends all their arguments.

Nickel Mountain is shapely and moving enough to make you believe, while you are reading it, in ancient forms and permanent truths.

— New York Times Book Review

311-] English Literature - John Gardner

311-] English Literature 

 John Gardner

John Gardner

Born: November 20, 1926

Birthplace: Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, England

Died: August 3, 2007

Place of death: Basingstoke, England

Types of Plot: Comedy caper; espionage; master sleuth; police procedural

Principal Series: Boysie Oakes, 1964-1975; Derek Torry, 1969-1974; Professor Moriarty, 1974-1975; Herbie Kruger, 1979-1995; James Bond, 1981-1996; Sergeant Suzie Mountford, 2002-2005

Contribution

John Gardner specialized in taking over characters created by other writers. By presenting characters such as James Bond and Dr. Moriarty in his own way, Gardner added an extra dimension to his novels: The original characters remain in the reader’s mind, available for comparison with Gardner’s versions. Gardner also pioneered the practice of including comic elements in the standard mystery, effectively creating a new genre. His work shows great attention to historical detail and more than a touch of the occult. Gardner’s professionalism and ability to imitate other writers’ styles helped him, particularly in his James Bond novels. However, his own stylistic sense was better than that of Ian Fleming , so his stories read somewhat differently. Nevertheless, he retained Fleming’s readers and handed the series over to other writers after illness forced him to abandon it. His books have been translated into more than fourteen languages.

Biography

John Edmund Gardner (not to be confused with literary scholar John Champlin Gardner, Jr., 1933-1982) was born on November 20, 1926, in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, England. He developed an interest in writing very early and at the age of nine told his father he wanted to be a writer. His progress toward that goal, however, was hardly direct. After wartime service in Britain’s Royal Navy in the latter part of World War II and as a commando with the marines in 1946, he graduated from St. John’s College, Cambridge University, in 1950. He decided to follow his father into the Anglican priesthood and was ordained in 1953. Meanwhile, in 1952, he married Margaret Mercer, with whom he had two children. Gardner developed doubts about whether he had followed the right calling and eventually left the priesthood in 1958. He then worked as a theater critic and art editor for a Stratford-on-Avon newspaper for six years.

Gardner came to realize that he wanted to write books of his own rather than to remain a critic. After writing a nonfictional work discussing his alcoholism, he became a mystery novelist. He won popularity immediately with his Boysie Oakes series, but his career did not really blossom until 1981, when he was selected to continue the James Bond series, more than fourteen years after Ian Fleming died. At first, he contracted to write three books to bring Bond into the late twentieth century. However, his contract was repeatedly renewed because of the success of his books. He himself said that Bond was too much of a fantasy character for his liking, but his professionalism carried him through sixteen Bond novels, some of which were novelizations of screenplays.

While writing the Bond novels, Gardner moved to the United States and then to Ireland. However, the onset of cancer in 1995 and the death of his wife in 1997 brought him back to Great Britain. After major surgery, he survived the cancer, and after a gap of some five years, resumed writing. He began a completely new series, set during World War II, with Suzie Mountford, a female police sergeant, as the series lead. He imagined her as a middle-class woman thrown into a world of crime and men by the demands of the war. The first novel of the series, Bottled Spider, was published in 2002. He continued to work hard until 2006, when a serious stroke stopped him from writing once again. He died on August 3, 2007, in Basingstoke, England.

Analysis

Although adept at creating original characters, John Gardner devoted much of his career to mysteries that developed the characters of other detective writers. Ian Fleming’s James Bond ranks foremost among those that Gardner used for his own purposes. Bond plays the principal role in two of Gardner’s series, the first using the name Boysie Oakes and the second explicitly continuing the original Bond novels. Another character Gardner adopted is Dr. Moriarty, the greatest antagonist of Sherlock Holmes. Not all Gardner’s work, however, was variations on themes by other writers. He also wrote a number of espionage novels—one trilogy in particular earned wide recognition because of its detailed picture of life in England during World War II.

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels appealed to audiences in the 1950’s in part because of their ruthless but suave and sophisticated hero. Although Fleming took Bond very seriously, certain elements of his stories readily lent themselves to parody. Gardner made apt use of these elements in his Boysie Oakes series, beginning with The Liquidator (1964).

The Boysie Oakes Series

In his first Boysie Oakes novel, Gardner paints an easily recognizable character. Oakes, also known as “L,” works as a professional killer for the Department of Special Security. Unlike most members of his profession, he fears violence and hires others to do his killing for him. As if this were not enough, Oakes also cannot stand flying. In the Oakes series, which eventually numbered eight novels, the plot usually matches the principal character in absurdity. In Understrike (1965), Oakes—nervous, inept, and forgetful as always—goes on a mission to observe the test of a Russian submarine. The Russians quickly catch on and send a duplicate of Oakes, an agent of their own, to substitute for the real Oakes. As usual, Gardner’s hero somehow muddles through.

Many of the Oakes novels illustrate a feature that appears often in Gardner’s work. He depicts sexual scenes very graphically. In the Oakes novels, this subject becomes an occasion for humor: Oakes overcomes his habitual indolence for extended exercises in lechery, often with Miss Chicory Triplethrust.

A Complete State of Death

Readers who viewed Gardner as a skilled parodist and comic mystery writer soon learned that his talents extended far beyond this rather minor genre. In A Complete State of Death (1969), he introduced Inspector Derek Torry of Scotland Yard. Unlike Oakes, Torry is a very serious character. To him, crime stands as a personal enemy, and he is consumed by his hatred of it. Interrogations often end with Torry losing his temper and slugging his suspects. He does this not because he is cruel but because he becomes too involved. Torry, a conservative Roman Catholic, also finds himself troubled by religious doubts. Some people see in Torry a reflection of Gardner himself. Gardner, however, denied that Torry mirrored his own problems and viewed with hostility attempts to read his novels as autobiography.

Although Gardner intended A Complete State of Death and his other Torry novel, The Corner Men (1974), as comments on criminal violence and its malevolent effects, the author found his taste for the bizarrely humorous difficult to abandon. In the former novel, for example, the plot centers on a school for aspiring criminals run by a character whose manner resembles that of an English university teacher. The aristocratic head of the school is, for all of his apparent good breeding, an agent of the Crime Syndicate who operates with ruthless efficiency.

The Return of Moriarty

Gardner soon returned to novels featuring another writer’s character. In The Return of Moriarty (1974), Gardner began a popular series that features the main antagonist of Sherlock Holmes. According to Gardner’s series, Moriarty, like Holmes, survived their famous showdown at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Moriarty, portrayed as a professor, has returned to London in an effort to control all crime in Europe.

Although the Moriarty novels do not boast the fine character portrayal of the Torry stories, they make evident another key feature of Gardner’s work: Gardner took great pains to depict accurately the background for his stories. He showed in his Moriarty series an impressive knowledge of Victorian England. He neglected almost nothing in his efforts toward realism: He knew Victorian criminal slang, for example, and informed the reader what diners in restaurants of the time were likely to order for dinner.

The Werewolf Trace

With The Werewolf Trace (1977), yet another one of Gardner’s interests came into full view. He had a detailed knowledge of World War II, dating back to his own service in the Royal Navy. The horrors of Nazism and the fears that Adolf Hitler aroused among the British people form the backdrop to this novel.

Its characteristically unusual plot concerns a nine-year-old boy who may be a survivor of the last hours of the Third Reich. If so, it is likely that the boy is being groomed for the role of Werewolf, the British code name for the future leader of any attempt to revive the Nazi empire. Although from this description one might suspect that a farce is in the offing, Gardner in fact intended his novel to make serious points. These concern the bad effects of technology, the evils that result from unmanageable obsessions, and the need for privacy. The Werewolf Trace also illustrates Gardner’s interest in the occult. The house in which the alleged future Führer lives has been visited by ghosts that have arisen from a mysterious killing of another little boy.

The Kruger Trilogy

Gardner’s occultism was not something that he placed in his stories to satisfy a whim. On the contrary, he artfully blended elements of the occult into his works to add to the feeling of mysterious terror. This use of the occult is a principal feature of The Nostradamus Traitor (1979) , the first volume of a trilogy whose main character is a German-born British intelligence officer named Herbie Kruger.

Here the occult lies at the center of the novel. As the title suggests, the prophecies of Nostradamus, a sixteenth century French astrologer, serve as the book’s leitmotif. They enabled Gardner to tie together events in Great Britain and France in 1940/1941 with later developments in London in the 1970’s. Although the connection between Nostradamus and the first Allied agent to penetrate German-occupied France might seem tenuous, in Gardner’s skilled hands astrology evoked the eerieness of the Third Reich, through the interest of Hitler and Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in that subject.

Herbie Kruger, the agent featured in The Nostradamus Traitor, was one of Gardner’s favorite characters. Gardner carefully depicted his personality in The Garden of Weapons (1980), the second volume of the Kruger trilogy. Kruger is highly nervous, sexually impotent, and in his own eyes a failure. He comes out of his gloom only when listening to the music of his favorite composer, Gustav Mahler. In this novel, the plot, while skillfully woven, takes second billing to the depiction of Kruger. The story is about an espionage network set up in East Berlin that may have been infiltrated by a double agent. In the novel, Kruger recalls his troubled past as a child living in wartime Berlin.

The first two volumes of the trilogy, along with the final volume, The Quiet Dogs (1982), illustrate an aspect of Gardner’s work that became increasingly prominent. He offered a detailed picture of the way an espionage agency works. The interplay between the “masters,” the leaders of the intelligence agencies who manipulate men like chess pieces, and the agents, who carry out orders without knowing their real purposes, fascinated Gardner. One of his later novels, The Secret Generations (1985), made the mechanics of espionage its chief theme. This work traces a British and an American family, both of which have long-standing connections with the intelligence services of their country, through three generations of involvement in spying.

License Renewed

Gardner did not become a real star among mystery writers until License Renewed (1981). He had been selected by Gildrose Publications, which held the copyright to the James Bond novels, to continue Ian Fleming’s immensely popular series, and this was his first Bond novel. Gardner’s novels in the Bond series won for him a wide audience and celebrity status. His James Bond differs from Fleming’s: Even though he was hired to continue the series, he produced no slavish imitation of the original 007. The new Bond is conscious of Earth’s limited resources and carefully avoids using too much gasoline. Also, although Gardner was not writing a parody of Bond, a few Boysie Oakes details appear from time to time. In License Renewed, a thirty-foot-long python removes the shoes of its victims before eating them, and the story’s villains plan to seize an American defense command station by using ice cream to flood the soldiers guarding it.

Many critics did not like the new Bond; although Gardner had generally received good reviews from critics during his career, the Bond novels were an exception. Most of Gardner’s critics contended that he had failed to capture the spirit of the true Bond. They found his style too arch and sophisticated, unsuited to the simplicity of Ian Fleming’s original. When Gardner attempted to imitate Fleming’s style, to some reviewers the result was awkward prose.

This criticism is somewhat surprising. Although Gardner had not concentrated on his style before the Bond series, it had almost always been considered accomplished and engaging. He had shown remarkable skill in the evocation of historical events, and his plotting was highly intricate. If, in the light of his previous success, the criticism of the Bond series surprised Gardner, it is unlikely that it disturbed him very much. Some critics did like the Bond books, and numerous readers did also. Without a doubt, the Bond series brought Gardner much commercial success.

Troubled Midnight

Troubled Midnight (2005), the fourth novel of the Suzie Mountford series, is set, as are all the books in the series, in wartime Great Britain. Shortly before Christmas, 1943, two badly battered bodies are found in a quiet town in southern England. Suzie is assigned the case under Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Livermore, who is her secret lover. They are joined by an operative from Intelligence, because one of the victims has details of the forthcoming Normandy landings. Gardner thus combines police work with the kind of undercover plot with which he is most at home.

Principal Series Characters:

Boysie Oakes , a parody of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, is a lazy and lecherous espionage agent who hires others to do his killing for him. He is inept, forgetful, and afraid of airplanes.

Derek Torry , a Scotland Yard inspector of Italian descent, takes crime personally and reacts angrily to criminals. He suffers from religious crises of conscience. His conservative Roman Catholic beliefs often inhibit his efforts at romance and make him self-doubtful.

Professor Moriarty , created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is a leading antagonist of Sherlock Holmes who has the personality of an English university teacher. His efforts to bring all major European crime under control rarely result in confrontation with Holmes.

Herbie Kruger , a German-born British intelligence agent, considers himself a failure. He is devoted to Gustav Mahler’s music and, like many Gardner characters, is thoroughly neurotic.

James Bond , the famous Agent 007 created by Ian Fleming, has been revived by Gardner. The new Bond differs from the original in being interested in conservation. He is also more sophisticated and faces villains who are often not mere stock figures of evil.

Suzie Mountford is a female detective who operates during World War II and has to fight her way through male chauvinism in the police force as well as to sort out the mysteries of the working class.

Bibliography

Broyard, Anatole. “James Bond Revised.” Review of Icebreaker, by John Gardner. New York Times, April 9, 1983, p. 1.17. Negative review of Gardner’s continuation of the Bond series. Finds Gardner’s prose awkward when compared with Fleming’s smooth style.

Bryant, Bobby. “James Bond 00-50: After Half a Century, Novels Are at a Crossroads.” Times Union, September 14, 2003, p. J4. This discussion of the James Bond novels after Ian Fleming’s death notes that the series was continued first by Kingsley Amis, then Gardner, and finally Raymond Benson (1997-2002). Gardner states that he feels the series should no longer be continued.

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. This work contrasts fictional espionage with that in the real world. Although it does not discuss Gardner’s work, it does discuss some of Fleming’s and sheds light on Gardner’s Bond novels.

Melton, Emily. Review of Bottled Spider, by John Gardner. Booklist 99, no. 2 (September 15, 2002): 209. Reviewer finds the first book in the Suzie Mountford series, which is about a serial killer, to be suspenseful and well paced and to provide a good sense of London in World War II.

Wright, David. Review of Troubled Midnight, by John Gardner. Booklist 102, no. 12 (February 15, 2006): 50. Review of the fourth entry in the Suzie Mountford series about the murders of an air-force colonel and his lover finds the work filled with period details. Compares the work to that of Helen MacInnes.