John Gardner a Fake?

I haven’t read enough Gardner to confirm this, but I suspect this fellow (John Crowley) is onto something. For me the first sign of Gardner’s going awry was that he slammed Percy’s Lancelot for failing to be a “moral” book.

John Gardner was, in fact, a fake. He was a terrible immoralist who dared to write a book called “On Moral Fiction”, and despite my general agreement with JM about writers sometimes writing against the person they are, that wasn’t a novel, it was a screed. It’s actually my belief that John Gardner sold his soul to the Devil (this would, actually make a fine story, which I don’t care to write). My first intimations of something wrong came when I saw that The Sunlight Dialogues first appeared in a gorgeous edition with illustrations. Who gets illustrations in common literary fiction? Then in a bus station in Indianapolis I found on the paperback rack a copy of his multi-thousand-line epic poem “Jason and Medea.” A mass market paperback? In a bus station? Who made that deal, I’d like to know? Then there was his successful descent into sloth, alcoholism, and self indulgence, a repellent figure who nonetheless got any woman he looked at, apparently, sometimes more than one at once–well it was the times, I guess, but then those huge unreadable books kept piling up, hypnotized editors continuing to publish them; he plagiarizes half his book about Chaucer and gets away with what’s ruined many a rep; continues admired, honored, even revered, and then came that dark night on the lonely road in the woods when his contract was up… How’s that for a Secret History?

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