Art of Redemption

John Gardner

John Gardner's Art of Fiction was required reading when I came through the university writing system.  I also read his marvelous novel, Grendel as an undergraduate and as a graduate student.  I rank Grendel as one of my all-time favorite novels.  It is the story of Beowulf from the monster's point of view. 

In another book called On Moral Fiction, Gardner asserted that all artists work from a psychic "wound."  I mention this now because several people have stated recently that they find writing to be theraputic.  (And indeed, all the arts are theraputic.) 

I know that every poem or story I have written has alleviated some kind of burden, helped me to endure various dilemmas.  For some reason, though, this fact has been somewhat embarrassing for me to admit.  Not to my writer-friends, certainly.  But within the academic world, something seems unseemly, downright weak, about writing to heal.  Reading in an article recently that Gardner, a magnificent novelist and scholar, equated writing and healing, has made me feel bolder.

The article reveals that Gardner's deep personal wound was probably the death of his younger brother in a childhood accident.  Gardner blamed himself for the brother's death (the brother fell from a tractor that 11 year old Gardner was driving).

Just after I read the article about Gardner, I was flipping though a book of poetry recently sent to me by a former student, and one of the poems is "Hoeing," by John Updike.  The poem can have many interpretations, of course, but as I was reading it, I was struck by how similar the act of hoeing in the poem seems to the act of writing:

I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived

     of the pleasures of hoeing;

     there is no knowing

how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.

 

The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing

     moist-dark loam--

     the pea-root's home,

a fertile wound perpetually healing.

 

How neatly the green weeds go under!

     The blade chops the earth new.

     Ignorant the wise boy who

has never performed this simple, stupid, and useful wonder.

 

I like to think of the human mind as earth, a place of fertility, creativity.  The hoeing in Updike's poem is the mental task of breaking through the crust of our numbed existence.  It is also the process of making choices in our writing about what stays and what goes.  What we "discard" is not destroyed but simply turned under.  The ideas we don't "use," continue to fertilize our thoughts.

When Updike says "stupid," I believe he is not being derogatory.  Rather I think he is being modest.  Certainly, neither gardeners nor writers can afford to let their heads swell too much.  For neither gardening nor writing can be fully controlled. 

The article about John Gardner suggested that through his prolific writing, he was somehow trying to atone for his brother's death.  No one can be sure if Gardner himself understood this.  We can't be sure, either, why we are driven to write.  But through our writing, we may find ourselves ever closer to the truth.