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By Root 1178 0

hair on the sides but was going bald on top, reputedly had had a colostomy, drove a motorcycle. He had a girlfriend, Liz Rosenberg, who was a grad student in poetry at Johns Hopkins. Later she became a professor at Binghamton University. I think Gardner was jealous of John Barth’s influence over her. He’d attacked Barth’s writing in On Moral Fiction, which had just recently come out, after Gardner had been invited to speak at Johns Hopkins. Barth announced to his staff that he would not be host of the luncheon for Gardner (I had to do the honors), but that he would attend. Barth lay down only one rule—Gardner could not discuss Barth’s writing before Barth’s own students. During the lunch Gardner told me that my own writing was “immoral.” I assumed he meant because it was homosexual. Not at all, Gardner assured me. What was immoral is that the father in Nocturnes for the King of Naples is not angry when he discovers his son’s homosexuality but rather pleased, since that means more women for himself and no competition from a younger man. In the novel the father is represented as a total roué who shoots heroin, drinks to excess, stages orgies in a rented villa in Spain…

Gardner: “You know your own father would never have reacted that way.”

Me: “That’s true. In real life he was very upset. But the father in my book is a character—”

Gardner: “Who never existed, who never would exist. No father would react that way. That’s why your book is immoral.”

I was amazed that he’d bothered to read that far in my book (which was virtually unknown), and his objections to it were less impressive to me than the seriousness with which he took it. I did, however, point out that not all fathers were middle-class Americans and that my character was an invention, someone I’d imagined—

But no, Gardner didn’t want to hear that. I was immoral, but I was of course in good company, along with most other American novelists of the day, especially the reprehensible Barth and Updike, though I hadn’t rated a mention in his version of Who’s Who in Hell. What was fascinating to me in later years was how this one book, On Moral Fiction, remained something serious people read long after they’d forgotten Gardner’s fiction. Despite its Puritanism and narrow, hectoring tone, it nevertheless took a firm stand and pursued its point. My theory is that readers, especially serious young students of literature, are so at a loss as to how to evaluate fiction that they will respond to any critic (F. R. Leavis, Harold Bloom, John Gardner) who tells them what to think, has a simple principle for determining quality, and uses often and forcefully the word great.

Although Gardner had promised not to mention Barth’s fiction, the very first thing he did in front of Barth’s students was to attack John Barth. Barth, who was sitting toward the front of the crowded room, objected, but Gardner plowed on. Angry words were exchanged between the two great men. A reporter from the Baltimore Sun was sitting in the back and furiously scribbling notes—and soon the story had gone national.

A confrontation of this sort was especially dramatic in Baltimore. In crowded, pedestrian New York where everyone was a loudmouth and defended his or her turf with a ferocity unknown to mild auslander, verbal fights occurred daily. The leader of the New York teachers’ union would attack a black educator who’d proposed that Ebonics be taught in the public schools. In the spring of 1970 Earth Day was celebrated, one of the first mass demonstrations in favor of the environment. Gay Day, anti–Vietnam War protests—every month brought another huge march.

But in the rest of the country (this melancholy, lonely country) the streets were empty, people were sealed off in their offices or cars or houses, no one saw anyone outside his or her circle or had any contact with strangers. Suburbia, television, and the automobile had isolated everyone—perhaps a good thing in such a potentially violent country. Even in gated communities, miles and miles away from the nearest ghetto, the frightened golden-agers were