On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner/Susan Thornton: Reflections

I find myself reading John Gardner these days—his thoughts about writing, his encouragements about teaching, a little of his work itself.  Last night, while waiting for an event to begin, I sat down with On Broken Glass, Susan Thornton's memoir about her tangled affair with John Gardner before, throughout, and after his marriage to the talented writer and teacher Liz Rosenberg—right up, indeed, to the day when a motorcycle accident took Gardner's life and foiled the plans for his wedding to Thornton.

Thornton, who had met Gardner at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, was an aspiring writer.  Transfixed by the white-haired man who seemed to know something about everything (perhaps even a lot about everything), she became his friend and then his lover, absorbing the sorts of inconstancy and intensity that might be expected of the idealizing mistress of a man who, in Thornton's words, "liked to set up close, incestuous love relationships where the women involved knew each other, were kept off balance, were expected to bow to his demands." Herself a drinker, she tolerated Gardner's excesses.  In love with a man who was not properly hers, she tolerated, or at least learned to live with, his many indiscretions.

On Broken Glass is not, by any stretch a lyrical memoir, nor one that aspires to universal proportions.  It is instead Thornton's story, studiously recalled.  Reading through, I wondered about many things—about the damage we do to one another, about why we allow so much damage to be done to ourselves.  But I also wondered about passages such as this one, wedged within the final pages: 

Gerry (Thornton's current husband) and I have worked hard to build a partnership.  Early in our marriage I idealized John, wished he had not died, yearned for his charisma, his charm, the sense that I had with him that anything was possible.  It has been very difficult for Gerry to live with a woman who yearned after a lost, perfect partner.  Until I became sober, I could not see the unmanageability of John's life, how his drinking damaged him, how it twisted his thinking and his relationships, how my drinking damaged me.  In our married life, Gerry and I have faced genuine hardship.... For a long time I lost hope.  I felt I would be unable to use the gift God had given me, the gift of expression in writing, that I would ultimately fail at what I had felt so strongly was my life's purpose.

Can writing be our life's purpose? I wondered.  Should it be?  And how best for a writer to speak (if at all) of his or her own gifts?

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Classic texts: On Becoming a Novelist

Among the many books I read or began reading this weekend was an old one by John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist.  I don't seem to do many things in the right order in this life of mine, and I should have probably read a few how-to's, or at least taken a university class, or something, before plunging into this writerly life of mine.  And yet, there's something very sweet about discovering, in Gardner, the sort of instructions or notions that I've stumbled my way toward by virtue of writing poorly for a long time and reading handsomely well.

From Raymond Carver's introduction to Gardner's text:

It was his conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a serious handicap.  But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs:  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.

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English 145 (9): Stationing the Mind, Readying the Heart

We saved Terrence Des Pres for last in English 145—"Writing into the World" and "Accident and its Scene: Reflections on the Death of John Gardner." He had so much to teach us, Des Pres. So much integrity as a scholar and witness. So much urgency toward imagining the truth:

"Transcendence, art for art's sake, writing for the ages—these take care of themselves. Good writing will always survive. Meanwhile, the prose of witness responds to the world, finds its work in the occasions that call it forth. Its method is exact attention to the actual. It depends on respectful reading of detail; on imagination making connections and seeing what's there. It also depends upon art—right words to station the mind and hold the heart ready."

One reads Des Pres's reflections on John Gardner's ultimately inexplicable early death with a heart made heavy with the knowledge of Des Pres's own far-too-soon, and essentially unreadable, passing. One leans toward the faith Des Pres held in this strange and beautiful thing we writers do: "Few of us believe anymore that through art our sins shall be forgiven us, but perhaps it's not too much to think that through art a state of provisional grace can be gained, a kind of redemption renewed daily in the practice of one's craft." One reads "Ourselves or Nothing," the poem Carolyn Forche wrote to honor Des Pres, and wishes, fervently, that Des Pres were still among us.

All of this we do—we did yesterday—in English 145, on a rainy day, in a quiet room, against the backdrop of the very real and pressing news of the too-soon passing of a student on campus just the day before. How did the end come early to this student? Why? How is one to speak of it? To whom does such sadness belong?

Knowing, in the end, isn't everything. Wanting to know matters more. I love my students for wanting to know. For being who they are. Right now.

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The Teacherly Personality

In "Show and Tell," the Louis Menand/New Yorker essay on creative writing programs (June 8/15, 2009), these words arise:

Personality is a job requirement for the workshop teacher, and it doesn't matter what sort. Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be—a published writer.

John Gardner, Menand says, "was a flamboyant and intensely personal teacher. His preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples." Donald Barthelme, for his part, "assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashberry's 'Three Poems'." And then there was Gordon Lish, who "had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence."

I'll be teaching the advanced nonfiction workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, and so Menand's essay gave me pause. I hadn't, for example, planned on having my students empty out the nearest liquor store. I also thought that I might give my students more leash than the first few words. But more than that, I plan to teach, along with the writing, so much essential reading, for it is only by reading that writers—aspiring or not—gain footholds against language and idea. I'll be encouraging students to read not me, but the books that I believe will matter most in their long-long evolution.

My course description for the few who bravely enter in:

“Maybe the best we can do is leave ourselves unprotected…” the poet-novelist Forrest Gander has written. “To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain.” In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will seek, and leverage, exposure. We’ll be reading writers contemplating writing—Natalia Ginzburg, Larry Woiwode, Vivian Gornick, Terrence des Pres, Annie Dillard. We’ll be reading writers writing their own lives—Gretel Ehrlich, Anthony Doerr, Stanley Kunitz, Brooks Hansen, Jean-Dominique Bauby—as well as writers writing the lives of others—Frederick Busch on Terrence des Pres, for example, Patricia Hampl on her parents, Michael Ondaatje on the utterly cinematic characters of his childhood. The point will be to get close to the bone of things. Students should each be prepared to craft and to workshop six new short pieces of analysis, memoir, and literary reportage.

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