Twenty years ago John Champlin Gardner published a poem about a middle-aged husband and wife aboard a motorcycle“fat goblins” racing “down the slopes of roaring night.” The ride is a metaphor for life and lovebrief, furious, and doomedand the poem was prophetic: four years later Gardner died in a motorcycle crashat night.

“Like boulders rumbling by they roar,” the poet tells us, and Gardner’s own life and career had a roaring and rumbling quality. Though almost nothing he wrote saw print during his years at Chico State (1959-1962), he went on to publish over one hundred stories, poems, articles, essays, and reviews and more than thirty books, including Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, On Moral Fiction, and October Light (the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1976), and to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And all the while he seems to have been shooting “down the roaring slopes of night.”

With Gardner, Lennis C. Dunlap, Jr., CSU, Chico professor emeritus of English (fondly remembered in Statements, spring 1997), wrote The Forms of Fiction, Gardner’s first published book (1962). Asked what it was like collaborating with the man, Dunlap replies:

John liked to work all night. He would buy a loaf of some pullman bread and fan the slices out like a deck of cards. Then he’d coat each slice with peanut butter and stack them--no waxed paper or anything. Then he would produce a box of Baby Ruth or Snicker Color s bars and put on a thirty-cup pot of coffee. He could go for three days, but around dawn I’d be exhausted. I’d get cold and start to shiver. Twelve hours was my limit.

Composing his epic poem Jason and Medeia, Gardner couldn’t stop. “He’d write on toilet paper,” Dunlap recalls. “He’d go to sleep and his teeth would grind, and he’d recite the lines out loud.” Calling on Gardner after a sequence of freakish accidents left the prolific author with two broken arms in slings and casts, Dunlap discovered his friend hunched over a table typing. The engine never ceased running.

The results are impressive. In addition to The Forms of Fiction, Gardner and Dunlap produced three issues of MSS., a literary journal that printed future Pulitzer Prize winners Howard Nemerov and W.S. Merwin, as well as the avant-garde writer William Gass, and William Stafford, whose poetry won a National Book Award. The journal looks good too. Janet Turner, from the Art Department, was art editor; Ken Morrow, also from the Art Department, contributed illustrations; and Gardner designed a cover. (The first two issues can be found in the Meriam Library’s Special Collections.)

Gardner the writer, editor, and graphic artist was also Gardner the French horn player and Gardner the Anglo-Saxon literature expert, Gardner the banjo plunker, Gardner the lyricist whose opera Frankenstein was featured at CSU, Chico’s first Fine Arts Festival in 1975, and Gardner the historian whose unflattering account of Chico State the administration suppressedaccording to legend. “John would put on any hat,” says Dunlap, “and once he’d put on a given hat, he delivered. He always became what he said he was. He had the talent and the drive to master anything that caught his fancy.”

The clenched-teeth determination shouldn’t obscure the playfulness and offbeat humor. This, after all, is the man who retold the Beowulf story from the monster’s point of view, investing the creature with his own irreverent and reflective take on life. (“Reality, alas,” says Grendel, “is essentially shoddy.”) And Gardner is also the man who teased his Chico State English Department colleagues in the novel Resurrection, listing as “books” Diseases of the Dog and How to Feed by Prof. E. M. Glenn, V.S.; Diseases of the Horse and Their Cure by Harold Armstrong, M.D.; Capturing and Training the Elephant by Prof. P. Nordhus; and Mesmerism and the Salesman by Lennis C. Dunlap. All four “authors” (emeriti professors today) taught with Gardner, who elsewhere in the book parodies one of Dunlap’s lectures. “John’s work is full of inside jokes,” the doubly honored Dunlap observes.

John Gardner, then, was many peopleboth simultaneously and over timeand anyone who saw him at the 1975 Frankenstein performanceshiny blond hair flowing over the paisley smoking jacketwill be amused by Ray Carver’s portrait of Gardner the Chico State creative writing teacher in 1959:

He didn’t look anywhere near what I imagined a writer should look like. The truth is, in those days he looked and dressed like a Presbyterian minister, or an FBI man. He always wore a black suit, a white shirt and a tie. And he had a crewcut… I’m saying that Gardner looked very square. And to complete the picture he drove a black four-door Chevrolet with black-wall tires, a car so lacking in any of the amenities it didn’t even have a car radio. (from “John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher”)

If that isn’t enough, Gardner went to church on Sundays, but, as Carver points out, the instructor could be unconventional too, chain smoking in class, speaking of James Joyce and Flaubert, “as if they lived just down the road in Yuba City,” and driving his charges as he drove himself. Carver wrote:

…he would have marked up my story, crossing out unacceptable sentences, phrases, individual words, even some of the punctuation; and he gave me to understand that these deletions were not negotiable. In other cases, he would bracket sentences, phrases, or individual words, and these were items we’d talk about… And he wouldn’t hesitate to add something to what I’d written… We’d discuss commas in my story as if nothing else in the world mattered more at that moment—and, indeed, it did not.

Above all, Gardner inveighed against phoniness in fiction, insisting that, “if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn’t care about or believe in; then nobody could ever care anything about it.”

The attention and sermons must have helped, along with the teacher’s generous loan of his office and typewriter. At the time of his own early death in 1988, Carver was probably the country’s premier short story writer and seemed to have transcended a rumbling and sometimes roaring life himself.

It’s an old tale, almost a clichéthe turbulent and often truncated lives of American writers, and it’s easy to miss the obvious. In Gardner’s case the tremendous, possibly manic energy was directed against chaos, violence, and the ravages of time, or “perpetual perishing,” what Grendel calls “the mindless, mechanical bruteness of things,” for the artist is, in the monster’s unmonstrous phrase, “the pattern maker,” and the rumbling and roaring are part of a drive for order and the tranquillity it brings. To see the writer and not the work is to invite caricature and superficiality, missing that astonishing anti-self that craves the perfection of art, so akin to the deepest silence.

Clark Brown, English Department