Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

cases, or to become famous and powerful politicians, or even to become rich. His grandfather and father were merely careful, honest farmers who kept their animals fed and sheltered, saw to the general upkeep of their land, kept the fences patched, and never sold a bushel of apples that wasn’t a firm, honest bushel. Neither his father nor his grandfather saw virtue in working harder than was necessary, violating the Sabbath, or neglecting the non-material needs of their families. Buddy’s Grandfather Davis, whom he never saw, was in a sense emblematic of what they all stood for. He was the best possible carpenter, which in his day was merely to say a good carpenter. His prices were fair, he understood his tools, he left no gouges, cracks, splinters, loose pegs, badly sunk screws, or carelessly unbeveled edges. The idea of greatness was inherently foreign to a family so firmly and even proudly middle class. Nor was it in their nature to pick and choose what kind of work, in their chosen professions, was worthy of them and what work not. When Charles E. Davis, carpenter, was hired to put the roof on the tower of the St. Louis railroad station, he looked up and sadly shook his head, thinking what a hell of a ways it would be if he happened to fall, then gathered together his tackle and went up, with his helpers, and put the roof on. The houses he built were square and true and had no foolishness in them except what some fool demanded and paid good money for. His sheds and barns were as steady and firm as any in Missouri, though no one could tell which barns were his and which ones were built by Clarence Rogers, his partner, or by Odell Crow, from across the river. He was a craftsman who worked by medieval standards, to whom it would have seemed a sacrilege to introduce some clever, original detail, some cunning device that might serve as a signature. Only time, he would have said, can determine value. In both style and structure, he approved what had been tested, what had proved inoffensive after years of looking at. When he fished he used cane poles, cotton lines, and corks made of cork, and made no concession to machine technology except metal fishhooks and lead eargrip sinkers. (As Martin Orrick would write, reconstructing his grandfather’s character on the basis of old letters and family talk, “He might have been persuaded, by the passage of an acceptable number of years, to give his tentative approval to the precision and intricacy of an Ambassadeur reel, the smooth hardness of monofilament line, but it would not have been within the twentieth century.”) With conservative care like a carpenter’s, with the determined, step-by-step diligence of a farmer in the days when men still ploughed with horses, Buddy Orrick—or rather Martin—would write his long, complex novels, constructing, half a page a day, his incredible interlace of literary theft and original labors of imagination, leaving drafts constructed from the center outward, intricate and messy as the confused, enormously serious web of a black widow spider, drafts so cluttered by cross-outs, inserts, and erasures, balloons and parenthetical questions or remarks, that no one but the author could figure them out, and not even he when as much as a day had passed. One looks in vain through the early drafts for any sign of brilliance or even common wit; one finds only corrections aimed at getting colors more exact, or changes in the estimates of a building’s height, or revisions of the weather. Surely any other writer would have quit in disgust a dozen times, but Orrick labors on, so that one begins to half believe—at least with regard to his own writings—his famous remark on literature, that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent obdurate stupidity.” In his teens, when writing poetry and fiction was still for him a casual hobby, he put this stubborn, almost mindless doggedness into playing the French horn. Yegudkin had of course been right, he lacked the true musician’s gift; but he had, as he would always have, amazing persistency, and playing allowed him not to think. On a summer evening after chores, he would sometimes walk out past the barn with his horn and climb the steep hill to the apple orchard and play—his father’s cows watching from the far side of the electric fence—until his lips felt flabby and he could hardly keep his eyes open. He would play scales, lip trills, open-horn arpeggios, études, fragments from concertos, orchestral snippets. Sometimes on clean-smelling warm summer nights he would walk farther, to the wide, high hill at the back of the farm from which he could see all the houses and villages for miles around, and there, in sight of his neighbors’ lights but as safely remote from their judgments and opinions as from the stars overhead, he would play his emotions without daring to name them, without even directly feeling them, lightly distracted—as once he had been by ensilage in his collar—by the exigencies of horn technique. He became in those moments, as he would become in his writing long afterward, a sort of human conduit, a spokesman for the ordinary human feelings coming up from the scattered lights below (and from his own chest) and a spokesman for the ice-cold absolutes in the black sky above him—though he felt himself separate from, rejected by both his neighbors and the stars; and because he was only a musician, not a philosopher, he had no real idea what it was—if anything at all—that his music was expressing. It would be the same when he was a famous novelist, years later. The stories he told would be intricate, elaborately plotted, complex; his characters would have the depth, the ambivalence, and the ultimate unpredictability we encounter in real people; the world he created would seem, in his best work, more solid than the world of the