John Gardner and MSS

JOHN GARDNER AND MSS I LM. Rosenberg Because I am terrified of public speaking, I have written down what I wanted to say—also, it is my way of sneaking in a small tribute. I'd like to begin by talking about the late founder of MSS magazine, the novelist John Gardner, who was and still is the guiding spirit of the publication. I think that if I can explain a little of what he was like and how he worked as an editor, I can reveal not only something about the nature of the magazine, but why I feel about it as I do. John Gardner was my co-editor at MSS magazine, a colleague at the State University of New York at Binghamton, my teacher, my exhusband , and my beloved best friend. I don't pretend to be objective about him. I have tried to keep facts and figures straight, but John lied a great deal about the past, and so even here I may be inaccurate. As far as I can tell, John started MSS magazine in 1961, in Chico, California, with the help and support of his first wife Joan, and several editors—among them, Donald Finckel and Lennis Dunlap. John was twenty-eight years old in 1961. He had written four novels—among them The Resurrection and Nickel Mountain—and had published virtually nothing except a few poems and stories in school literary magazines. He'd just been fired from Oberlin College and when he left Chico in 1962, he moved to San Francisco, taking MSS with him, and paying for it out of his own fairly shabby pockets. John was angry about his own experience with publishers, and about the publishing situation in general, but he was also excited about the potential and talent that he saw in the work of other little-known and little-published writers. In these first issues of the original MSS, John chose the work of writers who didn't fit the conventional models of publishing taste at the time, comparative unknowns like Joyce Carol Oates, William Stafford, William Gass, John Hawkes, WS. Merwin. Their work was brilliant and unproven, as unlike one another's as it was unlike the kind of work most popular in commercial magazines of the time. Some of it was considered unacceptable: when MSS published William Gass's long story "The Pederson Kid," the post office slapped the magazine with more than thirty charges of obscenity, one of which was "nape," as in neck. The magazine could not afford the burden of the fines, and so it folded in 1964. Lennis Dunlap describes working with John on MSS in those early days: John liked to work all night. He would buy a loaf of some pullman bread—Wonder or Rainbo or something—and fan the The Missouri Review · 227 slices out like a deck of cards. Then he'd coat each slice with peanut butter and stack them—no waxed paper or anything. Then he would produce a box of Baby Ruth or Snickers bars and put on a thirty-cup pot of coffee. He could go for three days, but around dawn I'd be exhausted. I'd get cold and start to shiver. Twelve hours was my limit. Working with John on MSS twenty years later was not terribly different. Though his dietary habits had changed, the direction of his energy had not. I fell asleep to the sound of his machine-gun style typing every night, and woke to the same sound, steady as Binghamton rain, every morning. When John and I first came to teach at SUNY Binghamton in 1979, MSS had been defunct for fifteen years. In that time, John had taught at more than a dozen universities. He'd lectured and read and visited coUeges and workshops all around the country; he'd met a great many young writers, and he'd encouraged the best of them to send their work to publishers. What drifted back were reports of rejection slips or, worse, well-meant rejection letters with comments as helpful or clear as the messages on fortune cookies: "You need more time to ripen," "This is just...