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The Quarterly Conversation & An Essay on Gardner and Gass

William Gass

The Winter issue of The Quarterly Conversation (a Website & Web Journal Everyone Should Know) appeared online Monday.

No surprise, I made a beeline to Nick Ripatrazone's essay, "Let Me Make a Snowman: John Gardner, William Gass, and 'The Pedersen Kid.'"  It details the differences between the two men's philosophies on writing, something merely gestured at in my post on Gardner's interview for The Paris Review.  What I appreciated in the piece was the story of their friendship, begun when Gardner solicited and published Gass's "The Pedersen Kid."

Structure is likely one of the reasons John Gardner published “The Pedersen Kid” in MSS; he certainly lauds that element of the work within The Art of Fiction. Although Gardner was one of Gass’s early publishers, their differences were more visible than their similarities. Gardner and Gass were frequent debaters during the 1970s, both in public and during “long lubricated arguments around kitchen tables.” Their classic dialogue at the 1978 University of Cincinnati Fiction Festival could be taken either as an afternoon of polemics or banter. Thomas LeClair organized the event, and noted that “this was the first fiction festival, and we wanted some sparks.”

Yet the writers’ respect for each other—and their shared history—complicates the printed criticisms. Gardner “heard about The Pedersen Kid from Stanley Elkin who read it while he was on the editorial staff of Accent magazine at the U. of Illinois.” Because Elkin first published Gass’s work at Accent, it may be assumed that “The Pedersen Kid” was part of Gass’s original submission to the magazine. Gardner solicited the work; Gass notes that Gardner “wrote to me and asked to see it.” According to Raymond Carver, then a student of Gardner’s at Chico State College, Gardner mentioned Gass during the course; in fact, Carver “began reading the story ["The Pedersen Kid"] in manuscript, but I didn’t understand it and again I complained to Gardner . . . he simply took the story away from me.”

Gardner wrote several letters to Gass, dated June 26 and August 28, 1961, and April 3, 1962, but Gass relates that the two did not meet “until he [Gardner] took a job at SIU [Southern Illinois University, Carbondale].” Gardner joined the SIU faculty in 1965, and some time later, Gass “drove down to Carbondale for a weekend at his [Gardner's] farm.” At this point, Gardner had finished his critical manifesto, On Moral Fiction, but, according to Stephen Singular, “no one would publish it; it was too heretical;” the book was finally released in 1978, and only after numerous revisions.

Along with his shelved manifesto, Gardner’s creative work had remained largely unpublished until 1966, when his friendship with Gass reaped dividends. Gardner related that Gass “mentioned me to David Segal, his editor at New American Library, and Segal eventually took The Resurrection, and then, shortly after that, Agathon, Grendel, and The Sunlight Dialogues.” Both Gass and Stanley Elkin, whom Gardner would later criticize in On Moral Fiction, “had written favorable reviews of Gardner’s early books.”

Ripatrazone goes on to discuss each of the writers' philosophies, then to tell the story of "The Pedersen Kid."  Since William Gass seems not to be found in The Paris Review Interviews, I will draw from Ripatrazone's essay once more to give Gass's view on characters -- a view in sharp contrast with Gardner's:

[Gass] "Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached. . . . the language of the novel will eddy about a certain incident or name. . . . In a perfectly organized novel, every word would ultimately qualify one thing, like the God of the metaphysician, at once the subject and the body of the whole."

{Ripatrazone]: Gass’s definition of character has two implications: it is not the primary function of a novelist to create dramatized, lifelike characters, and the perfect novel would contain one character engaging in a pure internal discourse. Characters, for Gass, are not mimetic, because the language of the novel stymies any pure communication between a novelist’s conception of a character and the reader’s perception of that character. Character is still important to Gass because “anything, indeed, which serves as a fixed point . . . functions as a character.” Character must always exist, Gass would argue, because the absence of character is a character itself.