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Perhaps the most fundamental attribute of John Gardner’s writing is his emphasis on the morality of art. Much has been made of his 1978 essay On Moral Fiction , with considerably less attention paid to other published sources advancing the same message, and near total neglect of archival materials. This essay sets out to expand our understanding of Gardner’s moral theory by folding in unpublished manuscripts, plays, and letters¹  to what previously has been available in published novels, works of non-fiction, and interviews. The resulting analysis offers a clearer sense of his faith in the moral dimensions of human experience.

We are familiar with Gardner’s koan: "life follows art" ( In the Suicide Mountains 157). I think it appropriate, then, to explore his moral theory sequentially through the following levels: 1) how he lived those moral dimensions in his private life, 2) how he spoke about those dimensions, and 3) how he enacted and embodied those dimensions in his fiction. In this third level of analysis, I will offer a detailed reading of a series of four short stories about Queen Louisa and her family, using these fantasy tales as a microcosm of the world as Gardner envisioned it — not a landscape bereft of meaning or purpose, but a world enlarged by moral dimensions so momentous, so captivating, that only the imagination can grasp it all.

It often seems that one of the most difficult facets about John Gardner’s work is the fact that his public life (what he said and wrote) and private life (how he lived) were at odds. Or put simply, he talked morality but often didn’t live it. In fact, we might speak (following the lead of his fantasy tale, Vlemk the Box-Painter ) of Gardner’s "life box" versus his "art box." In terms of his "life box," Gardner was the first to admit that his personal life, especially his relationships with women, was often self-serving, unjust, even vicious. As a reader, I often feel the oppressive weight of those relationships; any discussion of his moral vision must acknowledge that weight.

First, Joan. In interviews Gardner often boasted that every female character in his fiction was based on his first wife, Joan. The relationship, however, was far from idyllic. Their twenty-three years together were punctuated by drunken arguments and physical abuse on both sides. In a notebook he kept while awaiting cancer surgery at Johns Hopkins in 1977, Gardner surveyed his failed marriage to Joan, reflecting on his insistence that they move the family from San Francisco (where Joan was succeeding as a pianist) to Carbondale, Illinois, where John was offered a better teaching position:

Few intensely serious novelists make good husbands .... Though I lied to myself just a little, perhaps, telling myself that Joan could do as well in Carbondale as anywhere ... I didn’t fool myself much….I was willing, like Melville, to leave lives strewn behind me like skeletons in the wake of a whaler. I was not just your common male chauvinist. For Joan, & to a lesser extent for my children, I was a fiery dragon of high–minded selfishness. So we fought, Joan & I, & though Joan was strong and fierce, I won. (Rochester 23.34)² 

After the couple’s separation in 1976, Gardner lived with poet Liz Rosenberg while waiting for Joan to sign the divorce papers. Some three years later, he was still waiting. In a letter dated April 24, 1979, he wrote to Joan:

If you refuse to deal with the divorce matter, I will have no choice but to use the only lever of persuasion I have available, money, or the absence thereof. I don’t want you to lose the house; I don’t want you to have to beg. But I want you to pay attention to what I have asked for some time now. (68.11)

In retaliation, during the 1980 Bread Loaf Conference, Joan hired a pilot to fly over the campus and drop leaflets that read: "‘Author of On Moral Fiction is immoral, a fraud who is late with his alimony, neglects his children’" (Thornton 44).³  A very public airing of a private tragedy.

Next, Liz Rosenberg and Susan Thornton, who shared Gardner’s life simultaneously. Rosenberg was by Gardner’s side during his cancer surgery and recuperation. But soon after their marriage, he found Thornton, who responded in kind to his "plain wide open, farm-boy sex" (Rochester 68.15).⁴  In interviews in 1982, Gardner framed his choice in this way: "‘Liz is ten thousand volts of electricity. Susan is peace. And I need peace in my life now. I need it for my work. Susan is peace’" (Thornton 242). But the night before he died in a motorcycle crash he told Rosenberg: "‘I love you desperately’" (264). In fact Thornton, set to marry Gardner on September 18th, the day he was buried, reflected years later: "In the grandiosity of his alcoholism he was unfair to both of us. He 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. In his pain and his disease he had become a moral monster, confused, compelling, grandly manipulative" (308).

For me, the weightiest of tragedies was Gardner’s four-year affair with Nancy Longwell (dramatized as Sarah Fenton in Stillness ). Gardner told Rosenberg that Longwell was "the strongest and weakest woman I’ve ever known" (Rochester 68.15). For years Longwell poured herself, body and soul, into their relationship, at various times realizing with shame the true nature of her servile position (when, for instance, Gardner would take Joan on extensive trips). She played an important role in the final weeks of Gardner’s first marriage, warning about his desperate emotional and material extravagances, his obsessive dissipation of energies, his competitiveness and loneliness; urging him to leave the marriage for his own mental and physical health; advising him to get some help and make difficult changes in his life for the sake of his art (20.1).⁵  When Gardner finally left Joan, he faced two alternatives: living with Liz Rosenberg or with Nancy Longwell. He was insulted when Longwell suggested a three-month trial period rather than pledging her undying devotion. Gardner told Rosenberg on February 27, 1977: "‘What a cage! I could live with her forever — I love her and she loves me — but I would never know from moment to moment whether or not it’s forever. Can you imagine a cage more terrifying?’" (68.15). Later Longwell died of leprosy contracted while doing relief work in India (Silesky 201).

It isn’t my place (or any scholar’s place) to judge Gardner personally. And it isn’t my intent to minimize the importance of moral-integrity-in-action. But two things are clear in terms of Gardner’s private life. First, his relationships with women dramatize the double-edged sword of human interaction. They are exhilarating, joyful, fulfilling—perhaps the closest thing to paradise we have. They can also be destructive, imprisoning, manipulative, and degrading. Readers of his fiction (especially Nickel Mountain, The Sunlight Dialogues, October Light, and Mickelsson’s Ghost ) can easily cite examples on both sides of this sword. Second, no one who works with this body of writing can avoid the central fact of his personal life: the death of his brother Gilbert. As Gardner explained to Thornton:

"Comes the day you accidentally kill your brother, and it’s incredible that the pastoral life is over — no reason it should be, but it is. Your father the best man in the world lies in the gutter with the manure, crying, and you know it’s your fault, though it was all an accident, and you know for all time you’re monstrous." (Thornton 167)

There seems an underlying sense — interwoven in Gardner’s behavior and remarks — that he is unlovable (Rochester 68.15) because he bears the mark of Cain. The specter of Death hounds his every move.

And here private and public life merge. As in his life, death is the "central antagonist" in his fiction (Mitcham and Richard 131). For Gardner — this tormented Cain-figure —"Art is about atonement" (Gardner, The Resurrection 147). Thus, standing alongside guilt in Gardner’s "life box" is a second pillar — hope of redemption — that emerges from his "art box." Gardner’s aesthetic worldview holds that humankind is redeemed through acts of imagination (Chavkin 14) and that great stories are "soul-redeeming" (Rochester 48.1). Writers, then, form a kind of priesthood and serve the reader’s need not only for entertainment, escape, and pleasure, but also for heroic examples, for philosophic inquiry, for pathways to a better way of relating to one another.

Gardner fell out of favor in the academic world with the publication of On Moral Fiction in 1978. The main ideas and various draft versions of this manuscript were formulated many years before its publication.⁶  The emphasis on the morality of art was not new, of course, with antecedents some sixteen years earlier in Gardner and Dunlap’s The Forms of Fiction , published in 1962. Here we find the argument that great literature "concerns itself with the real problems and values of men" (4), that "most good writers write partly to find out what they think" (7-8), and therefore fiction is "a kind of laboratory experiment" wherein the writer explores the potentialities of his/her theme "with strict fidelity to a temporal and spatial setting or the experiment will be worthless" (8). There was, to my knowledge, no uproar about Gardner’s sense of moral art at this juncture (or any other) until in Moral Fiction he called an epic list of postmodern writers "a gang of absurdists and jubilant nihilists," including Stanley Elkin, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, Saul Bellow, William Gass, Tom Stoppard, Joan Didion, Walker Percy, E. L. Doctorow, Donald Barthelome, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Katherine Anne Porter, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon⁷  (54-55). He characterizes them as lacking truthfulness and compassion, and of believing that art is a morally indifferent act and fiction purely (and only) textures of language (56, 69).

Reactions to On Moral Fiction were (and still are) predictably mixed. Some reviewers believe that Gardner’s criticism had "needed saying for a long time" (Rochester 23.16) and that if these angry and desperate attacks are those of a lunatic, "his peculiar brand of lunacy [is] refreshing and encouraging" (23.16). Others found his moral reflections lacking rigor and organization (23.16). Those authors singled out for criticism responded in similar sorts of attacks upon Gardner’s fiction (though rarely upon his arguments about moral art or about postmodern nihilism),⁸  resulting in many strained encounters and in Gardner’s eventual recanting of his high-handed (and often mistaken) rants against fellow writers: "‘I’m ashamed of my mistakes and it’s full of them’" (Silesky 278).

But the most alienated group (attacked collectively and thus remaining anonymous) were literary critics, whom Gardner blamed for many ills. Assuming a theoretical focus "that would make even an intelligent cow suspicious," critics were abandoning discussions of plot, characterization, and theme for ideas like hermeneutic, heuristic, structuralism, and postmodernism ( On Moral Fiction 4). Gardner accused them of reducing a novel to their single view about it (that view stated as dogma), simplifying their discussions of how art works (rather than what work art ought to do), and deploying their theoretical tools like cookie-cutters (8, 14, 16, 129). In sum, criticism is too scientific, too neat; it has become "trivial" (4).

It is difficult to ascertain how subsequent negative reviews of Gardner’s novels mark pay-back time from these anonymous critics. What is clear, certainly, is that Gardner’s aesthetic view collided with a view he found destructive and nihilistic just as Postmodernism and Critical Theory were ascending to their unassailable orthodoxy in the coming decade. Gardner admitted that his "rant" was penned some 10 years before, just as his own fiction met with endless rejection letters because it didn’t fit with publishers’ lists. But even when he was making a name for himself as a novelist (ironically making the publication of On Moral Fiction possible), his faith in art as a moral act remained unwavering. That faith does not correspond to tenets of institutional religion, although he acknowledges his strong Presbyterian roots. It does not depend on any authority other than his own imagination, though he rejects the postmodern view of experience as solipsistic and subjective. Nor does that faith manifest itself in moral dictums, even though Gardner insisted that there are such things as human nature and universal human needs.

The firestorm surrounding On Moral Fiction comes down to this: Gardner’s view of art and style of writing went against the grain of his time. There are few such revolutionaries we can name who stand alone against a cultural tide they find heinous. But one other quickly comes to mind. J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) developed what he called a "mythology" of the world between 1917 and 1921. His legendarium resisted the gravitational pull of the Great War, an impetus that launched both post-war modernism, with its disenchanted, ironic eye toward life’s purpose and its despair of truth, and what Samuel Hynes calls "‘classic war writing’" in the style of Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon (qtd. in Garth 288). What their peers saw as Tolkien’s escapism — a regression back into the metanarratives or "masterplot" of the feudal world (see Brooks 6) — should be recognized as resistance to what Hugh Brogan calls the "‘intolerant orthodoxy’" of realism and modernism (qtd. in Garth 293). In a word, Tolkien made clear and deliberate choices to interpret the world against the grain of his times. In so doing, he produced medicinal texts — antidotes to a world bent on diminishing human life in both thought and deed.⁹ 

Some critics have accused Tolkien of disbursing fantasy like laudanum (noted in Garth 293), as if his moral universe is a contemporary "opium of the people." Frustration with his seeming retreat into feudalism may stem from the fact that he refused to follow the two courses defined by his contemporaries. As John Garth explains, Tolkien did not share Robert Graves’ belief that the age of disenchantment immediately after World War I was a necessary stage, given that Western nations lost their innocence, or that Faërie, in such an age, could only be anachronistic (303). The other course was the one mapped by Owen, Sassoon, and other war poets, who decried the cannibalistic appetites of nation states in graphic and brutal polemics (300-301). Such hard-earned wisdom from eye-witnesses fostered the modern, ironic style, as Paul Fussell noted in The Great War and Modern Memory , "ironic" because writers created protagonists who have "less power of action than ourselves," and are caught in a "scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity" (302).

Tolkien resisted the pressure to regard human experience, moral choice, and generous sacrifice as meaningless despite the fact that the story of Morgoth and the History of the Elves were generated during the war "in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut . . . even some down in dugouts under shell fire" ( Letters 78). He wrote out of the desire to express his feelings about good and evil, fair and foul in the world, "to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering" (78). In sum, Tolkien preferred heroic romance to modernism’s scorn and the cultural nihilism that followed it (Curry 36). His vision of human existence and purpose, grounded as it was in his personal faith, remained the truest, most adamant feature of his personal and public life.

Tolkien and Gardner are similar in their resistance to cultural tides, specifically, a form of despair called nihilism. In an interview with John Askins (March 1975), Gardner noted that in every one of his novels, he addresses the same philosophical issues: "‘about the nature of human experience in the 20th century and what’s wrong and how can it be fixed’" (qtd. in Chavkin 31). From Gardner’s perspective, people have been believing "stupid things" for some time (29), for so long that we are, in fact, hitting the bottom and "we’re just bouncing" (5). He admitted to hating nihilism, which he equated with cynicism, anger, and despair (165), though he could understand that its current guise — existentialism — made perfect sense at its originary point. For members of the French underground during World War II, who faced inevitable and hopeless defeat, survival depended upon believing that "‘your own past has nothing to do with what you decide to do today or tomorrow; you can change it all’" (132). To paraphrase Etienne Gilson, from Gardner’s point of view there is every reason in the world to be an Albert Camus or Jean Paul Sartre (or a Wilfred Owen or Jacques Derrida), but no reason whatsoever to embrace their kind of thinking.¹⁰ 

Along with their moral despair and rejection of history, Gardner also associated a mechanistic view of the world with the existentialists.

The idea of separateness — mechanical reality going click click click, causes producing effects which are new causes, meaningless, random, and wholly determined, not in the old Calvinist sense, but by some dark, mindless piston in space — that is the so-called reality that has made our ancient myths seem foolishness. It is itself, of course, a myth, created exactly like all other myths. (Rochester 45.24)

Insofar as it touted a world without direction, meaning, history, or values, Gardner found in this worldview a pernicious denial of the dignity of life (24c.56). From the perspective of his own values, he could not make sense of anyone living (or claiming to live) by such a vision. He observes: "‘Samuel Becket goes home to his wife . . . he lies down in bed with her, he puts his arms around her, and says, "No meaning again today." That’s insane. The meaning is right there in his arms!...He’s lying….he’s going to become, in spite of his great genius, a minor writer. Because great writers tell the truth’" (23.25).

Without a doubt Gardner was aware of the risk he took by using the term "moral" and was careful to distinguish "moral" from "moralistic." The only thing really wrong with ‘morality’ is that it’s been used as a cover "for political tyranny, self-righteous brutality, hypocrisy, and failed imagination" ( On Moral Fiction 23). To equate "moral" and "moralistic" is as nonsensical as turning against turnips "because Sherman sometimes ate them in his march through the South" (Rochester 49b.28). Indeed, his notion of morality precluded preaching, proselytizing, or advancing his discoveries in a didactic tone (Chavkin 49). For fiction to be "moral," it must merit the term in three facets: its process, its purpose, and its use.

The moral process: True art is original and important "precisely because it does not start out with clear knowledge of what it means to say" ( On Moral Fiction 13). If a writer knows before putting pen to paper what he/she intends to say, and so is unwilling for the mind to be changed by the process of telling a story, then such fiction is "merely first-class propaganda" (Rochester 49b.31). The insights of moral fiction are not random or chaotic, however, for it "discovers by its process what it can say. That is art’s morality" ( On Moral Fiction 14). That process demands a "careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values . . . . it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach" (19). The moral writer does not speak with authority (as do critics wielding the Right theory) or self-righteousness (as do preachers or pedants). Gardner insists that the writer’s sole authority is the imagination (115), used as an intellectual tool whereby the writer follows "‘the potential of the characters in their given situation’" (qtd. in Chavkin 155).

The moral purpose: True art seeks to improve and affirm life, not debase it ( On Moral Fiction 5). He calls moral fiction a game played against cynicism, chaos, entropy and death (6). "Art rediscovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness" (6). It is life-giving in what it has to say (15), despite clear evidence of human evil, of forces bent on destruction, of pain caused by good intentions. The black abyss is there, and existentialists find it fascinating. "But the black abyss is merely life as it is or as it soon may become, and staring at it does nothing, merely confirms that it is there" (126), or worse, validates the status quo with an ideology ultimately conservative in nature. Moral fiction, then, is a mode of thought — a process of discovery — the fruits of which communicate meaning (108). As a writer, Gardner’s hope is that the reader will consider his discoveries about human experience and choose to act in life-affirming ways (106) because art doesn’t imitate life, it "‘makes people do things’" (qtd. in Chavkin 41).

The moral use: Insofar as moral fiction explores the potential of human action and choice, and tests values in imagined but realistic situations, his/her text becomes a sort of laboratory (Rochester 23.25). Fiction, Gardner believed, is a special kind of philosophical inquiry "‘in that the writer not only considers a philosophical problem, but does so by thinking it through in a concrete situation’" (qtd. in Chavkin 58). Nietzsche defines the Superman; Dostoyevsky tests it. Proust tested Bergson, Beckett tested Descartes (58). One important result of this "laboratory" is the moral development of the writer, as Gardner told Thomas LeClair in 1978: "‘I believe that we revise our lives in our work and with each revision we find a mistake we don’t have to make again’" (179). If the writer is fair to his characters and honest in his exploration, the reader can go through that same process and discover as the writer discovers "‘what it is that can be said, without exaggeration and without oversimplication’" (199).

While there are similarities between the resistance of Tolkien and the resistance of Gardner, it is also true that they were caught in the cultural impact of two very different wars: for Tolkien, World Wars I and II, for Gardner, the horror of Viet Nam. Reflecting on the carnage of the 1970s, Gardner notes that during the Cold War people turned to a tyrant to feel safe, when "‘everything is so hopeless ... you just turn to a strong man’" (qtd. in Winther 523). Once empowered, the tyrant-led state evolves from a people of "faith, self-respect, & respect for everything & everyone that lives" (Rochester 48.15) to "‘an organization of violence, a monopoly in what it is pleased to call legitimate violence’" ( Grendel 104).

It is not simply a case of fear (or nihilism) leading to our nation’s disregard for millions of Vietnamese lives. The causal chain is more complicated than that, since "life follows art." What has been written since World War II fuels fear and nihilism—conditions that engender certain choices and actions. In an address delivered at the Wilson Day celebration at the University of Rochester (published in the University Currents, November 1973), Gardner argued:

The Devil’s myth of blind mechanics, the universe as a rumble of stones….It gives comfort to the unprincipled capitalist, the Pentagon liar, the dope pusher, the phony revivalist and the big-time political, the professional murderer, the medical doctor in his big brick house. The myth of blind chance, dog-eat-dog, helplessness, and irresponsibility … is peculiarly suited to our present age and tastes …. It’s partly thanks to Vietnam that the myth has taken hold so firmly in recent years. (Rochester 45.24)

The realistic movement in literature of the 1950s and 60s was incapable of dealing with American experience in the period of the Korean & Vietnamese wars. Gardner argued that Americans have always had a need "to believe themselves good guys …. [The truth about World War II placed us] in the middle of a national nightmare—most of the country had not yet awakened" (48.15). In the 1970s, Gardner saw two movements "gathering their coils to strike."

One is a movement to celebrate and enforce without mercy or thought all that’s foul and mindless in the American heritage (the serpent on the Right). The other is a movement to "demythologize" those eighteenth century heroes who’ve been foully, mindlessly adored, and supplant their myth with a new myth, America as bullshit (the serpent on the Left). (45.26)

Gardner refused to see the turbulent 60s as a choice between conservatives and liberals, however. Something much more significant was at stake, not simply opposing politics but metaphysical values, as "two great myths stand slugging it out — the myth (or fiction or lunatic vision) that all life is holy and that man is responsible for himself and all that lives, and the dark, evil myth that all the universe is a war of little dots" (45.24). He believed that the evils of his age were expunge-able, but they needed to be noticed and revealed for what they are (45.24).

Then who (or what) is best suited to play the prophet? Institutional religion, that guardian of revealed truth and virtuous behavior? Much of Gardner’s unpublished materials reveals a respect, even a veneration, for Christian teaching. He admired its emphasis on individual fulfillment and social harmony (Chavkin 219). Since his personal "faith" reverenced patience, tolerance, understanding, and empathy (23), he appreciated moral values (like Beauty, Goodness, and Truth) that were once thought of as subsistent entities and now are seen as psychological effects ( The Sunlight Dialogues 238-9), perhaps even myths or lies. But these "lies" serve an important purpose. Gardner told Frank McConnell in 1973: "‘I really believe in those old values, even if they may be lies . . . . But what’s wrong with lies? If you try to live without them, you become a selfish Bastard’" (Rochester 23.24).

In a creative essay entitled "St. Guthlac’s Dream," Gardner conjures a vision of Judas the traitor, who addresses readers:

"I knew, from the moment I first laid eyes on the man, this was the Christ. I was surer than he was himself. Squeezed small in imprisoning flesh — staggering, carrying the load of our shameful indignities, pissing and shitting. . . . He couldn’t remember, at first, his airy lineage. But everything played to his hand; every creature alive or dead perked up its ears at his footfall, awaiting its orders . . . . He ought to have died long since by suffocation, like the others, his stretched-taut arms refusing play to his chest and lungs, exhaustion draining from his heart all will. But his heart banged on." (41b.22)

As with many references to Christian heroes, Gardner revered the Great Heart —symbol of life and of love (39.24).

But it should come as no surprise that Gardner distrusts priests and theologians because they must, by virtue of their vocation, defend the faith against heresy, or truth as it is defined and not as it might be discovered (23.25). Theologians may or may not be "religious," by which Gardner means the aptitude (or desire) to see life "as holy, at least faintly mysterious, and good — indeed, better than human beings can fully understand" (49c.72). But a theologian must simplify so as to codify the values and truths of the Bible, truths "too vast and obscure for the human mind to fathom" (49c.72).

For similar reasons, Gardner found philosophy lacking, even though he regarded the choices we face in life fundamentally philosophic in nature. Gardner argued that "the Good" cannot be treated as an abstraction; it can only be approached by the imagination "because our understanding of it arises out of our experience of an infinite number of particular human situations" ("The Idea of Moral Criticism" 105-6). Because each human choice, each action, reveals the infinite complexity of morality, only writers of fiction can approximate a description of it, since their purpose is understanding, not knowledge (102).¹¹ 

In Gardner’s narrative of cultural paradigms, the Romans corrected the Greeks, the Christians corrected the Jews. "‘But each had a flaw in turn, which destroyed them. If modes of behavior are flawed, they will disappear’" (qtd. in Chavkin 127-28). For Gardner, then, fiction is the only viable religion (xvii). And though, as I have noted earlier, he could cast himself in the role of priest, he did not relegate morality to the realm of a select, Gnostic circle. "Morality doesn’t have to be abandoned when the ‘sky comes to be ungodded’" ( On Moral Fiction 35), he insisted. Neither should the challenge of being moral be articulated and embodied only by a few. Every artist makes dozens of value decisions each day, for "‘artistic choices are moral choices’" (qtd. in Chavkin 280). Does a writer affirm life or affirm death? Does one believe in chaos, or insist there is meaning to human life? Does one make or destroy, instill hope or despair? (168). To Gardner’s mind, "Writing is nothing if not moral" (Rochester 48.1).

Here we have reached the core of Gardner’s faith. He believed in the holiness of what he did as a writer (Chavkin 301). He never abandoned his "‘deep and intuitive sense of people in all their fallibility and beauty, ludicrousness and grandeur’" (Rochester 86.3). He wrote, as he confessed to William Gass (Nov 1971), to preserve what should be valued: people, places, modes of feeling (48.1). That mission entailed grave responsibilities: "‘If I don’t teach and get my point of view across to younger writers,’" Gardner mused, "‘I will burn in hell for a thousand years’" (Chavkin xvii). Yet this "priest" of moral fiction felt fully rewarded, even fulfilled, by his efforts. His sort of fiction was sane and healthy in its affirmation of beliefs that don’t kill the "flowering of sensation and consciousness" (Rochester 49b.37). He sought (and found) "intoxicating and soul-redeeming" stories (48.1) and so achieved, in his words, "the highest form of freedom" (48.25). Not to mention joy. "‘Art has filled my life with joy,’" Gardner told Stephen Singular in July 1979, for through his art he was able to join the "‘great conversation’" (qtd. in Chavkin 233, 234).

All this is what Gardner achieved (or sought to achieve) for himself as a moral artist. What did he want for his readers? First, he offered a vision of heroic action, the antidote to the black abyss of existentialist despair. Unless one reads of heroism, Gardner believed, he or she can’t be a hero (Chavkin 68). A great writer reminds readers of what’s possible. "How good you can be. He reminds you of the value of faithfulness .... And he makes it seem attractive to behave the way the hero behaves" (Rochester 23.25). Gardner also sought a specific kind of relationship with readers, one that prompts them to examine what they believe, one that reinforces their noblest qualities, one that allows them to recover from failings (Morace and VanSpanckeren xxii). But such interaction cannot be forced. Gardner believed that

"the relationship between a writer and reader ought to be a model love relationship. It ought not to be a rape, which is what happens when the writer’s tricking the reader, pushing the reader on, making the reader angry. It ought not to be a cruel and cunning seduction, something very clever at the beginning that will seduce the reader into reading the story. It’s a love relationship in which you give the reader the best story you can think of." (qtd. in Chavkin 184)

Gardner’s vision of moral art, then, also entails a vision of moral obligation to his art, to himself, and to his reader. It may be, in actuality, that the highest form of love in his life was not his relationships with wives and lovers, but with readers.

As a writer, Gardner was more aware of the process or experience of creating moral fiction, it seems, than worrying about what the end result of the moral imagination might be like in terms of organization or theme. "‘Every writer has particular things that bother him in his life, things that he hasn’t resolved,’" he told Don Edwards and Carol Polsgrove in 1977. "‘So every time I find the situation which is a kind of perfect expression of that war in my own personality — because I feel very strongly on both sides [then] a plot comes along and that’s the essential feeling in it’" (qtd. in Chavkin 41). In writing On Moral Fiction Gardner claims he didn’t consider if (or how) his theory of moral art applied to his own fiction, and in fact thought that Freddy’s Book violated his own theory (133).

Critics, however, have rightfully measured Gardner’s fiction against the principles set out in On Moral Fiction — not simply those novels published during or after OMF , but those published before it, since Gardner’s moral theory can be traced back as early as his first publications. See, for instance, Robert Merrill on Grendel , Gregory Morris and Leonard Butts on October Light , Craig Barrows on Mickelsson’s Ghost. But I would argue that even his minor works (infrequently discussed by scholars) bear the imprint of moral theory. In fact the character who most embodies Gardner’s faith in the moral purpose of art and the powers of imagination is Queen Louisa, who appears in four separate stories: "Queen Louisa," "King Gregor and the Fool,"¹²  and "Muriel" (all in Book Two of The King’s Indian ) and "Trumpeter" (in The Art of Living ).¹³ 

The character of Queen Louisa embodies the attributes of all that Gardner claims about the moral artist. While she is surrounded by subjects who are "dependent as children, hopelessly shackled in rules and procedures, wholly unprepared for the rich and strange" ("Queen Louisa" 141), and by a watchdog who is loyal but has no understanding of singing or theatre — in fact, no imagination whatsoever ("Trumpeter" 85)¹⁴ — Louisa proves the hero for two reasons. First, she recognizes that bad philosophy is as deadly an enemy as witches, wolves, and anarchists. Second, she finds real-life solutions because she can imagine a better, more fulfilling and just way to live. Hers was therefore "a balanced kingdom, the only kingdom in the world where art reigned supreme" (87).

Simply put, Queen Louisa is an artist, or as Gregory Morris dubs her, "the transforming, transmorgrifying, light-bearing artist" (137). More specifically, she is a moral artist in the way Gardner has defined it. The parallels to Gardner’s own life are unmistakable. She is traumatized by the death of a loved one. She is engulfed by a senseless war. She is surrounded by deadly ideas. She longs for peace in a world filled with injustice caused by "soreheads." She lives in a fallen world wherein art can save the day. And she can imagine a better world and help that world come into being.

How does Gardner reveal to readers a moral universe at work in these stories? First, in true pastoral fashion, Queen Louisa leads a double existence, due perhaps to her lineage, having a dragon for a father and an Irish Catholic for a mother. She can appear as a "giant, sleepy-eyed toad in spectacles" ("Queen Louisa" 137) or as a beautiful red-headed woman. She is believed to be mad, and in truth, she herself is never sure if her perceptions of reality are reliable (just as her father had admonished her would be the case).¹⁵  Her husband loves her, but is distracted by her embarrassing antics, like inviting the court to skinny-dip with her, disrobing and stroking her way through the air.

But being a toad, even a mad toad, isn’t what makes Louisa unique, for each character in these stories has two sides: the confident and blusterous King Gregor finds himself turned into a red hound, the kingdom’s justices behave (and look) like sheep, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting (Madame Logre) can appear witchlike, the King’s Fool conducts himself like a monkey, and hermits turn into wolves (and back again). A strange place, comic but not sinister, ridiculous but not dangerous — and certainly not real.

Or is it? Queen Louisa, we learn, was mother to a princess, a pale girl with yellow hair, who "disappeared." We are not told what happened to her, but because Trumpeter, the palace watchdog, frequents the cemetery and thinks often of the lost girl, we can only surmise that Louisa’s daughter died, and that her death preceded the Queen’s madness. Now each morning the Queen anxiously searches "for the deeply buried secret of her soul’s unrest" (137), which stems not from fear but from loss.

The princess’s death also transforms King Gregor, who reacts to his daughter’s loss by giving in to "‘this awful lust — this ridiculous hunger for experience’" ("King Gregor and the Fool" 152). And there are other problems. Gregor prides himself as a sensible man. But living with mad Louisa is like Sisyphus trying to roll the boulder of reason up a slippery slope. True, he joins in with the court "swimming" naked around the palace, as any good host would. He carries on his war with the neighboring kingdom as any king should. But when alone, Gregor feels that he is not really in control, that he had made some fundamental error — or perhaps all humankind has done so. "‘My people. My people!’" (158), he cries. As with many of Gardner’s fantasy tales, beneath the comic tone and surreal setting lurks a deep and fundamental struggle. Despite the fact that the protagonist is (part time) a large toad, and that the creature nearest of kin to her (in his ability to sniff out moral evil) is her dog Trumpeter, these tales enact three grave challenges that Queen Louisa succeeds in overcoming.

The first of those challenges is an encounter in mid-winter with her lady-in-waiting, disguised as a witch, who is attempting to fell with an axe a "glorious rosebush in triumphant bloom, such bloom as would hardly be natural on even the warmest summer day" ("Queen Louisa"145). The witch addresses the Queen as her ancient enemy: "‘Your whole life has been a terrible mistake! The forces of evil do exist! Ha Ha! .... We’re cosmic accidents .... Life is gratuitous, it has no meaning till we make one up by our intensity’" (151). Louisa calls in her knights to put an end to the attack. But she pities the nihilistic witch, who would deny the idea of beauty with the rose at her fingertips, but who can’t eliminate from the world a mere rosebush.

The next challenge involves Gregor’s war with his friend, King John. There seems to be no purpose behind it. Gregor and John are good friends. Dukes shake hands before battle; knights break from the fray for lunch. In truth, it is a senseless war fought out of pride and unchecked inertia. One afternoon when Louisa and Muriel come out to watch, Gregor is embarrassed not because knights are killing each other, but because they are killing badly, in a travesty of a battle ("King Gregor" 163). That kings would send their people to die for no reason, yet take pride in the art of killing, offends not only Louisa’s sense of morality but her sense of sanity: "‘You people are all crazy’" (165), she chides her husband. Gregor hates being shamed in public by his wife, and contemplates executing his Fool for filling Louisa’s head with seditious poetry like:

"‘You think I’m small because I’m lazy; But big brave knights get killed. That’s crazy!?’" (167)

Both Queen and Fool are spared Gregor’s wrath once King John verifies that the rhyme is from the Bible ("loosely translated"). Gregor is appeased since, as the adage of the kingdom goes, "Old ways are the best ways" (166). What could be more traditional than war except the Bible?

The final challenge involves Louisa’s surrogate daughter Tanya,¹⁶  the chambermaid adopted as Princess Muriel. The father of her child, the anarchist Vrokror, had contemplated human existence and "penetrated the grotesque stupidity of things as they are" ("Muriel" 188).¹⁷  He moves from his life as rapist and thief to assassin, kidnapping Muriel in order to set up ambush for Louisa. The girl feels caught between her lover and her adopted mother: "Was anyone ever more lost and helpless in a senseless and lawless universe?" (183), she wonders. His trap is thwarted, however, by Muriel’s quick thinking as she insists on inserting a line of poetry into the note that will trick Louisa into coming.¹⁸  Instead of killing Louisa, Vrokror faces Gregor and his knights, and barely manages to escape. Louisa is convinced that such violent methods are the fault of "‘tiresome and ultimately dangerous ideas’" (193). While Vrokror’s vision for a classless society may have merit, his methods injure only his followers, not his enemies. Louisa quips: "‘All error begins…with soreheads’" (194). She then adopts Muriel’s/Tanya’s friends (Djubkin, Dobremish, and Pretty Polly and the rest), and instates them in the palace as princes and princesses. And why not? Commoners are royalty when they are recognized as such (181). All is well.

But not quite. Trumpeter, Louisa’s faithful guard dog, senses a tension he cannot identify. In his wanderings down to the wharf and through the marketplace, he keeps watch, lifting his leg to leave his warning on lampposts and walls ("Trumpeter" 77). In truth, the kingdom suffers "grave troubles" (80). Servants resent masters, merchants cheat merchants, pirates rob pirates, cutpurses lust after silver coins in the market. The world is insane in this "‘madness against madness’" (80). Even the Queen’s ball, open to all royalty and commoners alike, does not defuse the tension, although each prince finds a merchant’s daughter, each merchant finds a princess, each maid a prince. And so Queen Louisa takes an additional, radical step: "‘We must show them we love them and think of them as equals’" (85). She empties the royal treasury, sharing her own riches among her people. Finally there is peace because there is justice.

All because a frog dreamed of a harmonious world, and then fashioned one. Louisa reigns over a better real world because she imagined how her world could be improved, then acted to make what she imagined real. Writing in the fantasy mode allows Gardner to elide the details of how such a fallen world is redeemed by Queen Louisa’s risky gesture. In fantasy the madness of the artist is the point, not a realistic depiction of her kingdom’s transformation. True to Gardner’s moral vision, he fulfills his artistic responsibility by envisioning a better world, then embodying that world in fiction. Readers are free to embrace and actualize the vision in their lives through their personal choices. If we fail to do so, then we may find ourselves akin to Gardner, with our personal lives falling short of the better world etched in fiction.

Nothing becomes real that is not first imagined. But were it that simple to turn over the world to moral artists! As Gardner’s character in "Pastoral Care" reflects: "Who’d need salvation if life were art?" ( The Knight’s Indian 13). And who would need literary critics? As it is, critics (of Gardner’s day, at least) treated "the only true magic in the world as though it were done with wires" ( On Moral Fiction 146). For all of the negative press that Gardner received with the publication of On Moral Fiction , it is no wonder that he trusted his visions for a moral world to fiction — where they were safe ( Stillness and Shadows 29).

Works Cited

Barrows, Craig. "On a Moral Fiction Writer’s Last Novel: Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghost. " Critique 26.2 (1985): 49-56.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.

Butts, Leonard C. "Locking and Unlocking: Nature as Moral Center in John Gardner’s October Light. " Critique 22.2 (1980): 47-60.

Chavkin, Allan, ed. Conversations with John Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi: 1990.

Curry, Patrick. "Modernity in Middle-Earth" in Tolkien, A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy , ed. Joseph Pearce. San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1999. 34-39.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
   ———. The Art of Living . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
   ———. Grendel . New York: Ballantine Books, 1971.
   ———. "The Idea of Moral Criticism." Western Humanities Review 21.2 (1977): 97-109.
   ———. In the Suicide Mountains. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company , 1977.
   ———. "King Gregor and the Fool." The King’s Indian . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. 153-170.
   ———. "Muriel." The King’s Indian . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. 171-14.
   ———. On Becoming a Novelist. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1983.
   ———. On Moral Fiction . New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978.
   ———. On Writers & Writin g. New York: MJF Books, 1994.
   ———. "Queen Louisa." The King’s Indian . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. 137-152.
   ———. The Resurrection . New York: Random House, 1987 (1966).
   ———. Stillness and Shadows. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
   ———. The Sunlight Dialogues . New York: Alfred a. Knopf, 1973.
   ———. "Trumpeter." The Art of Living . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. 77-87.
   ———. Vlemk the Box-Painter . Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1979.

Gardner, John and Lennis Dunlap. The Forms of Fiction . New York: Random House: 1962.

Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.

Gilson, Etienne. The Unity of Philosophical Experience. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965.

Hayslip, Le Li. When Heaven & Earth Changed Places. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Henderson, Jeff. John Gardner: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Hiortdahl, Sandy. "In Thor’s Defense: the On Moral Fiction Debate Revisited." Proceedings of the First Annual John Gardner Conference. Ed. Jim Fessenden. Batavia: John Gardner Society, 1999.

Howell, John. Understanding John Gardner. University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

Merrill, Robert. "John Gardner’s Grendel and the Interpretation of Modern Fables." American Literature 56.2 (1984): 162-180.

Mitcham, Justin and William Richard. Interview with John Gardner. New Orleans Review 8.2 (1981): 125-133.

Morace, Robert A. and Kathryn VanSpanckeren, eds. John Gardner: Critical Perspectives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982.

Morris, Gregory L. A World of Order and Light: the Fiction of John Gardner. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1984.

Pearce, Joseph, ed. Tolkien: A Celebration. San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1999.

Silesky, Barry. John Gardner: Literary Outlaw . Chapel Hill: Algonguin, 2004.

Thornton, Susan. On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner. New York: Carroll & Graff Publishing, Inc., 2000.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien . ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981.

White, Michael. Tolkien: A Biography . London: Brown Little & Co., 2001.

Winther, Per. "An Interview with John Gardner." English Studies 62.6 (1981): 509-524.

 1 The unpublished materials are housed in the John Gardner Collection at the University of Rochester, which consists of some 67 boxes of materials, including letters (these are indexed by keywords in an on-site database), typescripts of novels, plays, and poetry, as well as an assortment of secondary sources. Permission to quote from this material is granted by the Estate of John Gardner. My thanks to Phyllis Andrews and the archival staff for their help and support, and to Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi for funding my research in Rochester.

 2 Citations from the Gardner Archives are cited by box and folder numbers.

 3 The conference staff gathered them up and destroyed them before anyone else could see them.

 4 From a letter to Liz Rosenberg dated 1 August 1982. In a second letter to Rosenberg that same date Gardner refers to himself as "a farmboy sheepfucker" (Rochester 68.15).

 5 I have summarized briefly rather than quoting extensively from Longwell’s powerful and articulate letters in an attempt to respect her wishes when she told Gardner in a letter dated 22 February 1974: "I do not want to be a literary source for you….I do not want to be read about. You speak of the inalienable right to privacy. This is mine" (Rochester 20.1).

 6 As John M. Howell traces, earlier versions of chapters appeared in the Hudson Review (1976-77), Western Humanities Review (1977), Critical Inquiry (1977), and Saturday Review (1978; Howell 59). The main tenets of his worldview emerge much earlier. See the following materials in the Rochester archives: Gardner’s letter to William Gass dated Nov 18, 1971 (48.1); his address for Wilson Day at the University of Rochester in 1973 (45.24); lecture notes entitled "American Writing in the Seventies" (48.15), an essay called "The Idea of a Philosopher Poet" (48.25); and various chapter-length drafts entitled "Notes toward a Moralist Manifesto" (49b.30), "The Writing of Fiction as a Mode of Thought" (49b.31), "The Trouble with Criticism" (49b.34), "Art and Insanity" (49b.37), and "Criticism and Morality" (49b.44). Much of the same ideas were published after On Moral Fiction as well: in On Becoming a Novelist (1983), The Art of Fiction (1984), and On Writers and Writing (1994).

 7 Inexplicably, Gardner praises many of these same authors in his Bicentennial essay, "American Writing in the Seventies." He identifies himself with writers who operate outside of the realistic tradition. Once verisimilitude is abandoned, the writer "can go wild with his style, and this wildness is joy in pure language, is one of the finest features of the new writing" (Rochester 48.15).

 8 See Sandy Hiortdahl’s essay, "In Thor’s Defense: the On Moral Fiction Debate Revisited" (17). Hiortdahl argues that postmoderns excuse themselves from the moral debate because of their denial of any moral underpinning to human existence; such a debate would be meaningless.

 9 Tolkien’s use of mythology and his decision to write within the "Faërie" genre has been derided for what Germaine Greer termed his "flight from reality" (Pearce 6) and Edmund Wilson found to be "balderdash" and "juvenile trash" (White 200). Abhorrent, too, was Tolkien’s sense of politics saturated by "religious sensibility" (Pearce 7). Tolkien, however, defended Middle Earth as a unique kind of realism. "I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth,’" he wrote to Milton Waldman in 1950 ( Letters 147). The historical period is imagined, but otherwise Middle Earth is an "objectively real world" in terms of its depiction of human weakness and human dignity, its conception of the nature of evil, and its insight about how historical events are shaped (239).

 10 Gilson’s statement runs: "There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatsoever for being a Cartesian" (7).

 11 In fact Gardner goes so far as to argue that philosophy is possible, but not for philosophers (Rochester 48.25).

 12 Originally titled "King Gregor and the Magic Cow" (Rochester 36.23).

 13 Henderson views these stories as parables or exempla, or more accurately, "allegorical representation of the results of ‘making life art’" (33).

 14 For this reason, Henderson argues, Trumpeter’s story ends with him howling at the moon, signifying life without consolation (73).

 15 Her dragon father had asked her: "‘Who can swear that his own apprehension of reality is valid?’" (144).

 16 Jeff Henderson argues that the name "Tanya" is based on Patricia Hearst’s nickname Tania after she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (37). While this is possible, it seems more likely that Gardner used "Tanya" as a short form of Isak Dinesen’s family name "Titania." Gardner admired Dinesen for the "mythic cast of her mind, the lofty diction of her storytelling" (Thornton141). In a 1977 interview with Larry Swindell, he remarks that he is closer to Isak Dinesen’s writing "‘than to any other’" (Chavkin 36).

 17 If Gregory Morris is correct in observing that "the anarchist is merely the artist who finds illusion contemptible" (129), then Vrokror is the failed artist in the story and thereby acts as a foil to Louisa.

 18 The line is: "Your eyes are like mystic pantarb suns’" (177), from a love poem familiar to Muriel and Louisa, since the knight had sent the same poem to both of them.