by Lore Segal
It is from John’s wife, Joan Gardner, I learned that on hearing of David’s death, John had got on his horse and turned up a day later in the Carbondale hospital suffering from concussion.
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The Gardners did things ordinary people do not do. After the slow death from cancer of a Carbondale friend, John, Joan, and their children, Joel and Lucy, took the widow and her son on a Greek holiday. After David died, John walked into my apartment and stayed the week. Before he left he invited me and my children, eight-year-old Beatrice and six-year-old Jacob, to Carbondale. I might have looked puzzled. “It’s okay,” he promised me. “You’ll see.”
* * *
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Carbondale in the grip of an August dog day struck the New Yorkers as the world’s last outpost, and the Gardner house was some way out from the outpost. It was set in acres of rough terrain. There was a pond; there were horses. Coming inside from the bleached midday gave a sense of entering a spacious cave furnished, I seem to remember, with Victorian plush, patterned sofas, pillows, and a grand piano.
All the Gardner habitats that we were to visit over the following decades gave this same impression of plethora, of a lot of life being lived, of books and booze, of dogs, of friends dropping in and out. The phone kept ringing. I don’t remember if it was John or Joan who took it off the hook and let it dangle. I forget the attached story: some student, some neighbor, someone out of John’s past needed to be discouraged. It was up to her, Joan explained equably to me, to tidy up after him.
I was invited to give a reading at the university. There were dinners, a lot of cooking and talking and music. The two Gardner children had the two Segal children in tow and I trusted they were having adventures. Nights, the three grown-ups talked under the great trees, out front. We were introducing one another to our childhoods, which, by our late thirties and early forties, had turned into well-practiced anecdote. I’m sure I told my Viennese refugee stories. Joan told her family tales from upstate New York. She and John were cousins and had been put to nap in the same drawer in a chest in the house of John’s mother and father. John unburdened himself of his particular albatross. While his father had gone preaching round the countryside, young John had stayed at home to run—was it the harvester?—and also take care of his brother. The younger boy had fallen under the wheels and been killed. There were details. The room of the dead little brother had been kept intact. Joan was witness to John’s still waking, screaming in the night.
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Since my own writing depends on my sitting at my desk in my study five hours, seven mornings a week, I worried that our presence was getting in the way of John’s work. John told me he had written nothing in the last months and seemed not at all concerned: when the book brewing in his head was ready, nothing would be able to interfere. And indeed, somewhere around the third day of our visit, he brought his typewriter, set it down on the far side of the kitchen table, and began to type. My children slept upstairs with the Gardner children. A bed had been made up for me in an alcove divided from the kitchen by a door with a glass inset. I woke in the night and could see John typing at the kitchen table; I went back to sleep, woke, and John was typing. One time I saw him reach behind him for a pillow, put it on the table, lay his head down on it, and seem to fall immediately asleep. The next time I woke, day was dawning outside the window and John was typing. I believe it was Nickel Mountain he was writing.
During our stay the first copies of Grendel arrived. I read it with a thrill of astonishment.
* * *
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I remember the day we left for our visit to another set of friends. The train originated in Carbondale around five a.m. We sent the children to sleep in their street clothes. John and Joan and I never went to bed. The four Gardners came to see the three Segals off. In the car John complained of David’s dying, of the world’s indifference to the several unpublished novels in his drawers. Nobody knew that Grendel was about to make John Gardner a name and that every one of his early novels would eventually be published; that in the first flush of fame and money he would buy Joan an emerald ring and build a tower onto the Carbondale house before it turned out that an improper title search had brought his ownership in doubt; that John Gardner would henceforward find himself in litigation with the IRS.
To return for a moment to the Segals on the train that left Carbondale before dawn that morning in August 1971. Hour after hour, the unpeopled, undifferentiated American prairie passed outside the window. The monotony had grandeur. And I remember taking the children to the dining car when it finally opened and there being no coffee, no rolls, no toast. The choice was Coke and/or donuts.
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When John—or when John, Joan, and the children—came to New York, they stayed with me. One time, when I was seeing them off, standing in my doorway waiting with them at the elevator, I noted the glamor of their four heads shining under the hall light. Joan’s hair was copper, John’s silver, Lucy’s gold. Joel’s hair was the white one sees in albinos.
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The Gardners and Segals happened to be in London the same summer. Joan found us an apartment in the house they were staying in. We could hear the lions roaring in the Regent’s Park zoo. John found a meadow and negotiated an American/English cricket game. Jacob learned to run and carry the bat with him.
I have a memory of slim-waisted, golden Lucy, who never walked the straight sidewalk. Lucy levitated. She skipped along walls level with our eyes. I imagined a future Henry James heroine who would travel abroad and conquer Europe. Joel was a pale, very tall, very thin boy, extraordinarily sweet and clever, with an adult talent for sympathy.
The most vivid, perhaps, of all the Gardners was copper-haired Joan. Her soft, uninflected voice created a continuous background of hilarious, often scurrilous comment on her husband, her friends not excluding the visitor, on the neighborhood and whatever happened to be going forward. Her bouts of chronic physical pain constituted one of the elements in the Gardner experience.
It was during this period that John developed the style we remember. He grew his boyish silver hair into a page with a fringe across the brow and wore his leather tunic on the hottest summer days—a modern incarnation of the medieval prince. His voice was soft, his manner laid back. He defended his strong opinions with an air of apology. I look nostalgically backward to that twenty-year-long conversation: whether serious or light; whether we talked of books, or our own writing, about the world or our moral and immoral selves, we were figuring what it was that we were thinking.
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Gardner legend says it was my stint of teaching at Bennington College and bringing John there to do a reading that led to his appointment to the faculty. The Gardners gave up the Illinois house with the tower and moved east.
Beatrice, Jacob, and I spent their first Bennington Christmas with them in a rented house full, once again, of activity and people. Here were the widow and son whom the Gardners had taken to Greece. Here were two of John’s old students. One, some years later, became a permanent member of the Gardner household. Here was Bennington, the new puppy, who was not yet house trained. Everyone got not one present, but a multiplicity of presents—wall to wall presents including four purple sweaters plus four purple knit hats which the four children wore the rest of the week. If one opened a door and there were people making love, one said sorry, backed out, and closed the door. And, as I have said, there was Bennington, the dog, not yet house trained.
One day there dropped in the composer with whom John was projecting an opera trilogy. The protagonist of the work was to be the Russian monk Rasputin. Here was the moral conundrum that engaged John: If a man was a holy man, must not the wickedest, the most destructive of his actions be, by definition, a holy action? John said that his father was such a holy man.
Joan had many acerb comments on that subject.
* * *
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By our next visit, the Gardners had moved into the great white mansion next to the white church and overlooking the green old graveyard. This was my American dream house.
I belong to a subgroup of nonbelievers who don’t understand why they like religions. John and I and the children went to Sunday service. It was a meeting-house church. The inside was white, sober, and comfortable. We settled ourselves in a space like a carrel. Do I correctly remember purple velvet seat cushions? Beatrice and Lucy played tick-tack-toe while the minister addressed his sermon to John, that is to say to the members of the congregation from whose fame, fortune, and talents much would be required. John listened with his chin lifted toward the mentoring voice. He knew and sang all the hymns.
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The puppy, Bennington, had not survived, but there were two large dogs. The black one had a reputation for biting people. There were always plenty of people. There were dinners and good food and good wines. I can’t remember that any of us cleaned up afterward, or not till days later. I asked Joan how it was that the polished silver objects on her mantel—the jugs, napkin rings, sugar tongs—were beautiful when a similar arrangement in my or in anybody else’s house would have suggested a display in a shop window. Joan said it was because the pieces were in daily use.
John spent part of every day in the ample attic that had been turned into a study for him. He complained of envy of the life continuing to go forward in the well of the great house. Had he been happier with his typewriter at one end of the Carbondale kitchen table?
The Bennington house had not one, it had two grand pianos, one in the living room and one in the music room where, one evening, the Gardners happened into a full-scale performance with Joan at the piano, John and Joel quite accomplished on their French horns, Lucy at her golden harp. It was Bach. They were playing out some dream of my own. I confess to slinking up the stairs in a rare state of full-scale envy.
* * *
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There were the summers John and I taught at the writers’ week at Bread Loaf. I had a room in the faculty house, and Beatrice and Jacob stayed with the Gardners, who had been assigned one of the houses reserved for faculty with children. The living room was the size of a garage. Was it made of the unhewn logs that I remember? Had it a room-sized fireplace? Bread Loaf serves drinks before lunch, drinks before dinner, drinks after dinner. One night I was fetched out of bed to stay with the children while John took Joan to the hospital after some family accident.
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I discover a reluctance, an inhibition: Let someone else tell the facts of the Gardner drama. I want to tell the feel of that long friendship. Subsequent Bennington visits were to John, Joan, and Gene, eventually to Joan and Gene. John was teaching in Binghamton. When he invited me to give a reading, I stayed with him and his new wife in another house way out of town and set on the face of a rough hillside. There was a time John brought the next prospective wife to dinner in New York, but that marriage never happened. Joan made it known that she had taken out an injunction to prevent John from endangering himself and others by riding his motorcycle in the State of Vermont; she could not prevent the accident that took his life in Pennsylvania.
John Gardner was buried in his rural upstate New York hometown that figured in his conversation and his writing. The funeral was followed by a lunch laid on in the facilities back of the church. Here were the legendary ancient aunts, the red-haired policeman brother; here were John’s mother and father, heads bowed over their plates. John’s father, who had suffered a stroke, was having trouble getting his food speared onto his fork.
A few of us drove out to the family farm. I don’t know if I remember seeing—or seeing Joel’s photograph of—an abandoned harvester overgrown by long, lush grasses.
The parents’ living room was full of tables, lamps, stuffed chairs, medicine bottles, stacks of John’s books and old papers with articles about John Gardner. Years must have passed since anyone had enough strength to clear things away—to throw anything out. The clutter starting round the edge along the walls was creeping inward, taking the room over, leaving a smaller and smaller clearing for John’s father and mother to go on living in.
We need an ending?
Beatrice visited the now married Lucy shortly before Joan and Gene moved to the new house that will be more affordable and easier to keep up. Joan sent me a small piece of the old, great house—a white architectural curl with a penciled message: “Love from Bennington.” It holds upright a row of books on a shelf over my desk.
JANE AUSTEN ON OUR
UNWILLINGNESS TO BE PARTED
FROM OUR MONEY
“The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large…” So begins Sense and Sensibility. The modern novel is unlikely to introduce its characters in terms of their financial situation, but Jane Austen goes on to give the details. The head of the family is old and single and has “received into the house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate…By a former marriage, Mr. Henry Dashwood had one son amply provided for by the fortune of his mother…By his own marriage…he added to his wealth.” We are given to understand that John Dashwood, the son, does not depend on the inheritance of the Norland property, which represents the livelihood of his father’s present wife and three daughters.
Jane Austen has taught her readers about the nineteenth-century gentleman’s relation to his money: he has to have inherited, not made, it. His gentility is measured by his money’s chronological distance from its origin in commerce; if labor made it, he’s no gentleman. (Edward Said has been severe upon the morally respectable proprietor of Mansfield Park because his wealth derives from the colonies.) An eldest son inherits the title and name, the estate and its rents. Impoverished heads of family might resort to the shame of selling parcels of the family land, unless, as in the case of Mr. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, the property is entailed, or the terms of the bequest, as willed to Mr. Henry Dashwood, prevent his providing for his wife and daughters in such a manner.
The professions open to the gentry were limited. There was the church, and the law. It required money or connections to obtain a commission in the army. A young navy officer, like Captain Wentworth of Persuasion, might make his fortune if he’s lucky and there’s a war on and he captures an enemy ship and wins the consequent “prizes.” Oldest sons as well as younger, both the moneyed and the moneyless, were meant to marry money. It’s what the respectable John Dashwood has done, and what his father, Henry Dashwood, has not.
Henry Dashwood’s three daughters are Elinor (Sense), Marianne (Sensibility), and Margaret, “a good humored, well disposed girl” with whom her author failed to figure anything to do. The girls’ only prospect for a respectable life is matrimony. The only profession open to a portionless, unmarried girl of the gentle classes was that of governess. This is the fate that looms before the elegant and accomplished Jane Fairfax in Emma, and it rouses her creator to a rare passion: “The very few hundred pounds which [Jane] inherited from her father, making independence impossible [she had] with the fortitude of a devoted novitiate…resolved, at one-and-twenty, to complete the sacrifice and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.”
Back in Sense and Sensibility, the old gentleman has died. The will is read. The estate has been left to Henry Dashwood for his lifetime, whereafter it devolves upon his son John and John’s son, “a child of four years old…who, in occasional visits…at Norland had…gained the affections of his uncle, by such attractions as are by no means unusual in children of two or three years old; an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise…He [the uncle] meant not to be unkind, however, and, as a mark of his affection for the three girls, he left them a thousand pounds apiece.”
; Henry Dashwood, dying a mere twelvemonth after his uncle, sends for John and recommends to him “with all the strength and urgency which illness could command, the interest of his mother-in-law and sisters.” John Dashwood “promised to do everything in his power to make them comfortable,” and decides to increase the fortune of his sisters by the present of a thousand apiece. Young Mrs. Dashwood promptly, perfectly legally, perfectly heartlessly, installs herself as mistress of Norland, turning Henry’s grieving widow and daughters into visitors in their own home.
Young Mrs. John does not approve of her husband’s plan to share his inheritance with his indigent sisters. For John to “take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy,” she contends, could not be what his father had in mind: “ten to one, but he was lightheaded at the time.” It’s true, agrees John, that the request stipulated no particular sum, merely that “something must be done for them whenever they…settle in a new home.” “Consider,” urges Mrs. John, “that when the money is once parted with, it never can return.” “‘Why, to be sure,’ said her husband, very gravely…‘If [Harry] should have a numerous family…it would be a very convenient addition.’” He proposes to halve the gift. “Even themselves, they can hardly expect more.” “There’s no knowing what they may expect,” responds Mrs. John Dashwood. “The question is, what you can afford to do.” “If they marry,” she goes on to argue, “they will be sure of doing well,” which is disingenuous of her for she knows—nobody better—that men of fashion, of property, of “consequence” don’t marry girls who haven’t any money. Mrs. John adds, “If they do not [marry] they may all live very comfortably together on the interest…”
