The King’s Indian – John Gardner, 1974 ★½

Pondering Life and Death with John Gardner

Sometimes, death is just the trick to lift a literary figure to greater prominence. Christopher Marlowe, Edgar Allen Poe, and Sylvia Plath exemplify the notion of toiling in obscurity, dying young, and leaving behind a legend to inspire fresh generations of readers and scholars.

Often, though, death is just death. Case in point: John Gardner.

There was a time that John Gardner was the biggest noise in American literature. By the late 1970s, it was common to see his novels ported about by grad students, Gardner himself staring out at you from the back cover with his long snowy locks like a pipe-smoking Charlie Rich.

His concepts, such as “moral fiction,” and his criticisms of authors he felt fell short of his standards in that department, were debated by serious scholars. His most famous work, Grendel, which took the story of Beowulf from the monster’s viewpoint, was considered a modern classic. There was even talk about a Nobel Prize…

Then he had a fatal accident whilst riding a motorcycle one late-summer day in 1982. He was just 49. Obviously a tragedy for Gardner and those who loved him, the wipeout also left behind a strangely reduced legacy. Strange, because sudden death and a seemingly uncaring cosmos were hallmark concerns of his work. A similar end to another fast-riding existentialist, 46-year-old Albert Camus, only gave that writer’s reputation a kind of exclamation point for his growing fanbase to ponder. Gardner’s reputation by contrast went into a decline, from which it has never emerged.

Why?

A reading of The King’s Indian, a collection of stories published at the height of Gardner’s fame, suggests an answer. Unlike the literary legends named above, Gardner in this book is hardly what you’d call accessible. He’s dense, focused on fiction as an intellectual exercise, and seldom much fun to read.

The King’s Indian might be loosely described as a kind of meta-fictional exercise, consisting of three sections. The first, “The Midnight Reader,” presents five stories involving men of different times and places coming to terms with dark mysteries that magnify their sense of being lost in reasonless void:

• Set in the then-present Illinois, “Pastoral Care” features a hip Protestant minister at a crossroads between hypocrisy and faith, who is confronted by a bearded stranger. “Your sermon really blew my mind,” the stranger says. Blowing things is something the stranger may know much about, given a rash of bombings in the area.

• “The Ravages Of Spring” is the story of a country doctor of the early 1800s who finds himself stranded by a storm in the company of a sinister couple who seem to have conquered time. “Nothing exists, Dr. Thorpe,” he is told. “We’re dreams in the mind of a sleeping dragon. That’s our hope.”

• “The Temptation Of St. Ivo” is set in a monastery in some distant place and time, where Brother Ivo’s mastery of the contemplative life is challenged by another monk, Brother Nicholas, who taunts him about the falsity of his beliefs and threatens to kill a mythical Phoenix. In time, Ivo suspects Nicholas is the Devil.

• “The Warden” is also seemingly set in a distant place and time, perhaps some Kafkaesque dungeon of central Europe. Here, an assistant warden comes to wonder about the mystery of his boss’s disappearance from view, and the mutterings of a prisoner, called “The Professor,” whose case for being jailed seems grossly unfair. “There is no immateriality,” the professor intones. “Mere words. Mere sound.”

• “John Napper Sailing Through The Universe” is a first-person account of someone Gardner apparently knew, an artist who impressed the narrator greatly, and whose death left a deep hole in the narrator’s life. “His hair was like a halo. His nose was the whole Platonic idea of royalty,” our narrator muses.

The stories all offer intriguing ideas for plots, but all follow the same circuitous route, that of a series of long internal monologues where the main character ponders the grey insignificance of his life and the hostile awesomeness of what lies beyond his ken. Gardner finds different ways of retailing the same concepts, scoring points for expression while losing them as a storyteller.

John Gardner in 1977, just three years after The King's Indian was published. You just knew he was a serious novelist because of that pipe; more commercial-minded fiction writers preferred cigarettes for book-jacket props. Image from Wikipedia.org.

The more I read, the more convinced I became that the stories were never more than secondary to Gardner; that they were merely dressings for multifaceted philosophical constructs and probings which concerned him more deeply than any character or situation. I had no idea what Gardner was getting at, only a faint sense that had Gardner known my confusion, it would have pleased him.

The next section, “Tales Of Queen Louisa,” presents an often whimsical trio of surrealist stories set in a fairy-tale kingdom. They are less easy to summarize, as the stories are interlinked. “Queen Louisa” introduces us to the main character of the trilogy; while “King Gregor And The Fool” presents her often-absent, easily peeved, yet strangely relenting husband; and “Muriel” stars a lady-in-waiting that Louisa comes to believe is her daughter. They play out as fractured fairy tales set in a make-believe kingdom where madness rules, if of a gentler kind than in the rest of the book.

While just as random in construction, “Tales Of Queen Louisa” seemed aimed as much to amuse as to irritate. The story begins with the title character slipping in and out of the form of a lizard, apparently a mere matter of making up her mind.

 “It was a marriage no one believed would work,” Queen Louisa says. “Mother was Irish, and Father was a dragon.”

While these stories were a bit too haphazardly constructed to be classics, they were fun enough that I wish he had built the whole book around them. (According to one source, Gardner had written a fourth story to conclude the “Queen Louisa” stories, but it would have been much grimmer than the three we have and I wasn’t sorry to miss it.)

As with the other stories, things happen very randomly, especially with the last story, “Muriel,” which plays with the notion of radical ideology in a fairy-tale kingdom and seems loosely based on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, which had just unfolded around the time of the book’s publication. Like Patty, Muriel is known to the revolutionaries as “Tanya,” and is pressed into their service with both harangues and sexual gamesmanship that, in Muriel’s case, appears more consensual than forced.

“Is that all they do – just try on clothes and write meaningless poems and have charity balls and wars and things?” one of the revolutionaries asks Muriel, who had been made a princess by one of Queen Louisa’s mad whims.

“Well, they’re royalty, you know,” Muriel answers.

The logic streams here are just as fitful, and the characters as antic and hard to root for, but at least during the “Queen Louisa” tales the overall experience doesn’t seem so clenched in scholarly allusion and wordplay. It is easier to enjoy the ride when there is some forward momentum involved, not to mention humor. There was something else, too, a kind of warm feeling, locked in the sportive spirit of childhood, which took me back to my own fanciful notions of life when I was a boy. Justice is dispensed roughly, but mercy bestowed just as abruptly, in a way that makes for a refreshing break from the grimness of the rest of the book.

The last section consists of a single story, a novella which gives the book its title. Our protagonist in “The King’s Indian” is a man who puts to sea and finds himself part of a quest he little understands but becomes as obsessed with as anyone else.

“When I asked where the slip would put in, he answered, ‘Heaven if we’re lucky; more likely lower,’” Gardner has the protagonist of “King’s Indian” say at one point. I had similar trepidation before beginning this piece. Those worries were quickly validated.

More than with any other story, you wonder here what Gardner is trying to say, wondering also whether your wondering is part of his joke. Gardner regularly employs an intrusive narrative device to remind us we are reading fiction; at one point Gardner himself jumps in to expound on his fictional influences. Was he having me on?

And what did he mean with that title? A ‘shroom-ingesting Native American harpoonist does show up at one point, and there’s also a stray metaphor, typically resistant to figuring out: “I become, that instant, the King’s Indian: Nothing is waste, nothing unfecund. The future is the past, the past is present to my senses.” Later on, the term shows up again, in connection to a chess move that figures in the story’s resolution. But by that time I found it hard to care.

A convoluted story that eventually centers around mad mesmerists, automatons, and time travel, “The King’s Indian” seems to exist only as an excuse for Gardner to explain how he would have written Moby-Dick and The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym if Melville and Poe hadn’t beaten him to it.

“That’s how it is with this life,” the narrator tells us. “The part we understand is irrelevant.”

While Gardner’s philosophical notions, and ways of expressing them, grabbed me sometimes as bracing if not profound, and his “Queen Louisa” stories offered a solid jolt of good fun, overall I found this a real struggle to read, let alone process. Gardner’s sudden death has a random quality to it that still haunts; his subsequent fading from our cultural scene has more in the way of reason for me after reading this book.