Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

all hedged and fenced or hurled into the world like a Mississippi flood by mincing or bellowing rhetoric. He’d written such novels and would no doubt write more of them. But they left him angry, dissatisfied. Why shouldn’t a man’s life develop reasonably, like a plot, with choices along the way, and antagonists with names, and some grand, compelling purpose, and a ringing final line? But he knew, no one better, that the question was foolish. All art, even music, is invented from scratch, has nothing to do with birds or the rumble of thunder. The urge to make art discover truth was a childish, wrongheaded urge, as his friend Bill Gass kept crabbily insisting in article after article for The New York Review, as if hoping if he said it enough he’d at last grow resigned to it. Well, not Martin Orrick. It filled him with the rage of a hurt rhinoceros—though he’d admit it was true—that human consciousness had no business in the world, that the world was its relative only by accident, and a relative no more friendly than Joan’s sunken-eyed, long-black-bearded, snarling uncle Zack. Writing his fiction, struggling for hours to get a gesture just right, or to translate into English the exact sound of the first large drops of an August rain on a burdock leaf, he would look up suddenly with a heart full of anger and a belly full of acid from too much black coffee, too many hours at his pipe, remembering again that all he so tirelessly struggled for was false from its engendering: he was tortuously authenticating by weight of detail, by linguistic sleight-of-wit, actions that never took place on this earth since Time began and never would, never could. Nature’s love stories had nothing to do with those novelists make up; nature’s suspense has no meaning beyond the obvious, that that which is mindlessly, inexorably coming has, for better or worse, not yet arrived. It was finally the same in all the arts, no doubt: all composers wrote country dances, all painters made their names on descents from the cross. If they broke with tradition, seized truth by the throat, they ended up mere oddities, bold revealers not of truth but of their personal quirks, painters of pictures at their best under black lights, writers of endless metaphysical novels in baby talk. Tradition doomed you, escape doomed you, and straddling the charging horns of a dilemma was a patently bad idea.

The children were asleep, their blond heads fallen toward one another, their books in their legs. Paul was mixing a martini in the pitcher. The music had gone off.

He carefully relit his pipe, then said, “Once when I was teaching at San Francisco State I had an interesting student. She was middle-aged or so, from New Orleans. It was a class in creative writing and I was talking for some reason about astrology. To make my students wake up more to differences in character, I think. Anyway, I was busy disclaiming any interest in whether or not astrological theory was true, arguing merely that reading descriptions of the various types would help them to notice more things about people, and this middle-aged student said—her name was Myrtle Payne—‘You can always tell what sign a person was bone undah, you know, once you’ve gotten acquainted with them.’ I said, of course, ‘Mm, yes,’ politely. Except for San Francisco hippies and teachers who wanted to be their friends, nobody in those days would flat-out admit he believed in astrology. Except my uncle George, maybe; but for his opinions I had a special box. —But she wouldn’t let it go. She was a very nice lady, an ex-schoolteacher—dressed and talked like any other clean, middle-aged, intelligent southern schoolteacher—and I’d never seen a sign before that night that she might be slightly bonkers. She said—we were halfway through the semester at the time—‘For instance, I b’lieve I could guess the sign of almost everone in this room.’ I thought we were in for an embarrassing situation, but what could I do? I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Would you like me to try?’ she said. ‘You’re a Cancer, of course.’ And she told me what it meant to be a Cancer.

“Crazy as it sounds, she went through the whole class—maybe twelve, fifteen kids. I missed half of it, trying all the time to figure out how she’d done it, that is, how she’d gotten ahold of all our birth dates—not that she named the exact day. Anyway, I was wrong, I think now. She really knew. John Napper could do it too.”

Paul nodded. He’d stayed with them for a few weeks in London and had seen John Napper often. He said, “And his brother Pat had that horoscope description of his son, remember?”

Martin glanced at him. “I’d forgotten you saw that.” It had been made a few days after the child was born, then put away, unread, in a bank for six years. It was like witchcraft. He raised his drink, just tasted it, thinking. Joan was leaning back into her pillows, eyes closed. He said, “I read about you, my Virgo friend. Or Joan or the kids or—” He let it trail off; then: “It’s mildly uncanny. I know all the arguments against it. They read like the French Academy’s debunking of hypnotism. For instance, the argument that what influences a child born in the northern hemisphere couldn’t influence one born in the southern, which is sort of like saying that mustard gas can kill you only if you’re facing it. Anyway, I no longer resist it. I’m as ruled from outside as any character in a book, and not just physically, like Newton’s cannonball, but ruled where it matters most. I don’t like it much, but it makes it hard for me to look at, for instance, the Winged Victory and solemnly resolve to change my life.”

Paul Brotsky blew out smoke, tamping out his cigarette, and reached, mechanical as a German clockmaker’s piano player,