John Champlin Gardner Jr. photo

John Champlin Gardner Jr.

John Champlin Gardner was a well-known and controversial American novelist and university professor, best known for his novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth.

Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father was a lay preacher and dairy farmer, and his mother taught English at a local school. Both parents were fond of Shakespeare and often recited literature together. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April of 1945, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker. Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried guilt for his brother's death throughout his life, suffering nightmares and flashbacks. The incident informed much of Gardner's fiction and criticism — most directly in the 1977 short story "Redemption," which included a fictionalized recounting of the accident.

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gar...


“I have eaten several priests. They sit on the stomach like duck eggs.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“tedium is the worst pain. the mind lays out the world in blocks, and the hushed blood waits for revenge. all order, i've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal - a harmless sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world - two snake pits.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“they hacked down trees widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigeon fences till the forest looked like an old dog dying of mange. they thinned out the game, killed birds for sport, set accidental fire that would burn for days. their sheep killed hedges, snipped valleys bare, and their pigs nosed up the very roots of what might have grown. hrothgar's tribe made boats to drive farther north and west. there was nothing to stop the advance of man. huge boars fled at the click of a harness. wolves would cower in the glens like foxes when they caught that deadly scent. i was filled with a wordless, obscurely murderous unrest.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“i understand that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. i understood that, finally and absolutely, i alone exist. all the rest, i saw, is merely what pushes me, or what i push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. i create the whole universe, blink by blink.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on.If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“In a world where nearly everything that passes for art is tinny and commercial and often, in addition, hollow and academic, I argue--by reason and by banging the table--for an old-fashioned view of what art is and does and what the fundamental business of critics ought therefore to be. Not that I want joy taken out of the arts; but even frothy entertainment is not harmed by a touch of moral responsibility, at least an evasion of too fashionable simplifications.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“There is no limit to desire but desire's needs.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“Our noblest hopes grow teeth and pursue us like tigers.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“What art ought to do is tell stories which are moment-by-moment wonderful, which are true to human experience, and which in no way explain human experience.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words--changing nothing.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“I should have cracked his skull mid song and sent his blood spraying out wet through the mead hall like a shocking change of key.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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“Standing on an open hill, I imagine muffled footsteps overhead.”
John Champlin Gardner Jr.
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