An Interview with John Gardner

John Gardner is widely known as a novelist, critic, scholar, and writer of children's books. Among his novels are October Light, The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and Grendel. His critical works include the biography The Life and Times of Chaucer and On Moral Fiction. For children he has written Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales, Gudgekin the Thistle Girl and Other Tales, The King of the Hummingbirds, A Child's Bestiary, and most recently In the Suicide Mountains.

GD: We're doing this issue on writers who write both for children and adults, and I guess a good place to start is by asking why you write for children.

JG: It started accidentally, the way all my writing starts. When my kids were growing up, each year I would give them a Christmas present of a story. I'd always make up the stories. Then one day you make an especially polished one and you get to thinking about how a children's story ought to work to be really classic and especially interesting to kids. You want kids to love the story and to buy the book for their children and their grandchildren and their great great great grandchildren and so on. So, while I was making up those Christmas stories I got to thinking about it. And as I was doing children's stories and enjoying them I got to thinking about all the things that Bettelheim talks about—about the way you really can say things that are very important to kids in these stories. For instance, the book I got my daughter to grow up on was 1001 Nights. It seems to me that that's a wonderful book on how to be a girl—because you have to be cunning, you have to be graceful, but not weak. That's an amazing book. I feel that that book is about how to grow up a woman in a chauvinist society and not lose everything. And I think that the book to buy a boy is Malory's Morte D'Arthur so that he'll know he's supposed to be a knight. Anyway, then I started writing to issues. For instance, I heard that a kid in school who my children knew committed suicide, then I started hearing other kids talking about suicide, and I discovered that they think about it a lot. Then I started talking to people and I learned from a psychiatrist friend that an enormous number of people, I don't remember the statistics, but maybe two thirds of the people in America who commit suicide are sixteen or under. Which makes sense, because the kid has this problem, you know. He's too little to beat you up. He's too little to argue. And if you're completely unjust to him, as some school teachers and some parents are, all he can do is run away or put up with it. Anyway it suddenly struck me that it's very important and it's something that nobody talks about. And I thought, all these kids are going around agonizing about it. So then I started writing In the Suicide Mountains which has the surface of a story but is really a very close analysis of why a person would want to commit suicide. And why he shouldn't. So it's pretty moralistic I guess. But I think fiction is pretty moral; I think all art is pretty moral.

GD: Do you feel more moralistic when you're writing for children than for adults?

JG: No. And I don't think good fiction of any kind, for adults or children, tells lies. If you tell the absolute truth, it will be difficult and complex, but if you discuss the arguments against suicide, you can't cheat on the arguments that the kid already knows. The fundamental thing about suicide is that anyone who's ever been in that situation or even close to it knows you're so unhappy, so aching with misery, that you can burn your hand with a cigarette and it doesn't...