A Seer Or Just A Writer
John Gardner died an untimely death (although stricken earlier with cancer) riding his motorcycle through the Susquehanna hills south of Binghamton, New York where he taught at SUNY. This was 1981. His most popular novel, written in 1972, was The Sunlight Dialogues, set where he grew up in Batavia, New York.

I don’t try to track if his works are still read, except by me. I am an admirer. Now and then you find a writer who speaks to you with the sureness of a Tiger Woods putt. It’s a personal thing (What isn’t?).

He had an impressive body of work to his credit before his early demise at the age of forty-eight. The titles include Resurrection, The Wreckage of Agathon, Grendel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, October Light, Nickel Mountain, as well as children’s books, a biography of Chaucer, and a retelling of the myth of Gilgamesh. He was highly regarded as a teacher of writers of fiction, including a book titled On Becoming A Novelist. He also wrote several volumes of short stories, all memorable, and one indelibly imprinted on my brain called The Art Of Living. He had a strong enough following to merit a place for his works and personal papers in the archives of the University of Rochester for scholars to pursue.
This piece was prompted by my fourth reading of The Sunlight Dialogues. A book has to have something going for it to bring back any reader time and again. It is a complex novel populated by an unending stream of characters, each one brought fully to life. The plot is set in the time of its writing.. Need I remind you what was going on the early Seventies? The book is a mirror on that age.
There was then, I think, ample warning of this country’s downward drift . Gardner articulated it in the pages of The Sunlight Dialogues. The scene below describes a recollection that dated back to the 1930’s. It’s between the aging family patriarch and his eldest son.

"'Listen' he said. 'It's come to me that I made a mistake. Somewhere in the course of---' He tightened his lips, concentrating. 'All of us, or the times mebby. No matter who made it we have troubles coming. Troubles coming.' .................................

"The old man half-turned his head toward him impatiently. 'Who knows what kind of troubles?' he said. 'Germany.' .............................................

"'Suppose we were to have a war with Hitler, and suppose Hitler were to win?' he said.
'Dad, you're stewing again,' Hodge said. 'Let me help you inside.' Uncomfortably he glanced again at Tag (his brother)........................................

"'No!' his father roared. 'Not stewing. Thinking. Hitler could win. If not this one, the next one, or the next. From this point forward there'll be Hitlers for a thousand years.' He thumped the porch with his cane............................

".......................'Listen', he said. 'You believe in reason. You believe in democracy. Reflection of natural law, you think. But suppose people stopped being reasonable. Suppose they got spread too far apart to know what the balance of the country was thinking, or the balance of the world. E pluribus unum. Hah. Can India grow reasonable? China?..................

"......................'I say suppose all sides are right as it seems to them and they all blur together and their beliefs grow confused and the pluribus becomes so complicated and, more important, so dense that no human mind or even group of human minds can fathom the unum.'............................"

1972, the year of publication by Gardner, was not too early to see the horizon of 2009. The run-amok world population was as predictable then as it is obvious now. The confusion, delusion and animosity between the tribes that this mass of humanity has produced is all too clear. Just look around. No mystery. No solution either.
Will someone please bailout the human race!

The Entertaining Misanthrope.
Felt in the mood for Highsmith, a misanthropic female who, nevertheless, manages to go beyond the surface. Long dead, she knew her art, her music, her wines, her gardening, her European cities. The key to her appeal is detail about these things and the charm, manners, good taste, and sensitivity she imparts to Ripley who is willing to kill on the spot if he sees no other way to control events. She endows him with her tastes and knowledge, her misanthropy too.

Ripley is totally self-possessed and self-centered. He has a wife, but seems distanced from her. Yet he never thinks or speaks ill of her. He also clearly desires her. It is certainly not an American kind of relationship. It is subtle, sophisticated and supremely European. She goes away on long vacations without him, and it fazes him not at all; it suits him. You get the feeling that if she got in his way, he would dispatch her with the same cold efficiency he uses on relative strangers, probably right after he made love to her. Waste not, want not!
Highsmith also knew how to keep a plot in motion. The story moves with inexorable logic. The only difference is, unlike most of us who often want to kill but don’t out of fear or some sort of humanity, Ripley does the deed dispassionately when the logic of events and ploys to turn the situation in his favor are at a dead end.

Highsmith is interesting partly because she poses moral questions, which are clear until she offers another point of view, usually that of Ripley. In Ripley Underground Tom kills a man to suppress the uncovering of an art fraud. An exposed truth that forgeries exist will harm the artistic forger (who has achieved a sort of excellence of his own in the act of forging), and Ripley himself. The wrongness of the killing is evident. The man has been defrauded by being sold a fake; Ripley and his friends are behind the fraud. But in Ripley’s eyes the man is being unreasonable. And Ripley tries every sort of verbal persuasion over a period of days to talk the man out of pursuing the issue. Ripley weighs the harm to be done to his friends, the artist, and himself against the harm done to the man (who they are willing to recompense for his purchase), and decides to kill him.

Highsmith makes it seem almost justifiable. After all the fake painting is only a small injury to the man, who can more than afford it and its loss (besides, the forgery has value in itself), and in Ripley’s eyes he is just being stubborn. Moreover, the disclosure will completely disrupt the lives and fortunes of the perpetrators. The injury they will sustain is by far greater (in Ripley’s eyes) than the sin done to the buyer. Finally, Ripley feels he has no other choice than to stop the man, and the only way he can stop him is to kill him. All is casuistry! We reason to suit our limbic system.