Freddy's Book by John Gardner

First published: 1980

Type of plot: Novel of ideas

Time of work: The 1970’s and the sixteenth century

Locale: Madison, Wisconsin, and Sweden

Principal Characters:

• Jack Winesap, a psychohistorian and lecturer
• Sven Agaard, a traditional historian, an expert in Scandinavian history
• Freddy Agaard, Sven Agaard’s reclusive, eight-foot-tall son
• Gustav Eriksson Vasa, a sixteenth century Swedish nobleman, the first king of independent Sweden
• Lars-Goren Bergquist, his cousin and best friend
• The Devil, and
• Hans Brask, Bishop of Linkoping

The Novel

Freddy’s Book is a dual fiction, a contemporary story that includes a historical novel with fantastic elements. The book probes the relationships of art to life and of human beings to one another. The first section, “Freddy,” takes up roughly a quarter of the entire work and serves as an introduction to the longer second half, “Freddy’s Book,” which is subtitled “King Gustav and the Devil.” “Freddy” not only sets up the longer section but also places it in context by introducing the themes that flow throughout the entire work. As the book begins, Jack Winesap, a psychohistorian and popular figure on the academic lecture circuit, has just finished speaking at a college in Madison, Wisconsin, when he meets Sven Agaard, an old-line traditionalist historian who believes that Winesap’s methods are dubious and their results harmful to true historical and human understanding. Winesap agrees to be Agaard’s guest at the older man’s home during his visit, and while he is there, the debate between the two men continues, introducing many of the themes that are developed in the second half of the book. In particular, the two historians confront such basic issues as what constitutes truth in human experience and what role language plays in relaying that truth. During their conversation, Agaard reveals that his son, Freddy, is a “monster.” At first, Winesap dismisses this as exaggeration, but he later learns that it is in some ways true. Freddy Agaard is an eight-foot-tall recluse given to intense inner reflections. He is also an artist in his own right, and later, when Winesap is alone in the bedroom Sven Agaard has provided him, Freddy slips into the room and shyly deposits a manuscript. It is entitled “King Gustav and the Devil,” and it is the second half of the novel. “Freddy’s Book,” as Gardner entitles the section, recounts how Gustav Eriksson Vasa, a Swedish nobleman and patriot, leads a revolt against the ruling Danes in the sixteenth century to secure independence for his country. The struggle is a violent one, marked with vicious fighting and massacres, and Gustav triumphs only because he is aided by the Devil himself. Once in power, however, Gustav is obsessed with creating what he terms a “masterpiece,” a government that will prove itself worthy of the Swedish people and provide for their lasting good. To accomplish this, Gustav realizes that he must cast his ally, the Devil, out of the Swedish kingdom. This task Gustav assigns to two very different men, his cousin and closest friend, Lars-Goren Bergquist, and Hans Brask, the elderly, disillusioned Bishop of Linkoping. Bergquist, who, like Freddy Agaard, is an eight-foot giant of a man, believes in the power and goodness of the human spirit, but he has begun to question its effectiveness in the wider world. The brilliant cleric Brask, on the other hand, has felt his own spirit become dry and hard, a victim of the power of his intellect and his ability to manipulate rhetorical language to prove any point, however little he might believe it in spirit. Together, Lars-Goren and Bishop Brask ride north to Lapland, where the Devil has established the seat of his power. Along the way, they engage in a continual series of philosophical discussions, the sort of dialogues that are common in Gardner’s writings; the disputes between Grendel and the Dragon in Grendel (1971) and between the Sunlight Man and Police Chief Clumly in The Sunlight Dialogues (1972) are further examples of these intellectual exchanges. In these debates, the participants discuss key points that concerned Gardner throughout his career, especially the role of “moral” art in society, and how such art can not only comment upon the human condition but also actually improve it. The moment for discussion ends when Lars-Goren and Bishop Brask pierce the white, snowy vastness of Lapland to confront the Devil in his lair. Although the narrative raises the possibility that this creature is only a devil, and not the Devil of Scripture, it is a monster of immense power and cunning, able for a while to hold both men at bay. Then Bishop Brask, breaking through his own world-weariness to a fresh hope in the triumph of good over evil, distracts the beast long enough for Lars-Goren to slash the Devil’s throat with a knife made of Lapp reindeer horn. The Bishop, however, dies with his adversary in the struggle, and Lars-Goren and King Gustav are left to live in a world that has paradoxically lost both primeval evil and original innocence. “History,” in the modern sense of the word, has begun, and human beings are on their own.

The Characters

Jack Winesap and Sven Agaard are, in some ways, stock characters who represent philosophical positions in an ongoing debate about language as art and entertainment versus language as a guide to the truth. As is usually the case with Gardner’s fictions, however, both are also fully realized, individual human beings who have specific characters and desires. In the case of Winesap, the overriding drive is to be liked and accepted; for Agaard, to be recognized as an accomplished and honest scholar. Freddy Agaard can be seen as a synthesis of them, becoming in his writings the historian as creator, the artist who transmutes the dry facts of the archives into a re-creation of actual human beings. As an artist, he is also in some ways a “monster,” an individual set apart from the normal run of humanity. “Monster,” both in its strict linguistic derivation and as Gardner uses it, does not necessarily connote a sense of horror or fear but simply someone set apart by a special gift or talent to “show forth” or reveal something essential to human existence. It is in this sense that Freddy Agaard is a monster, and “King Gustav and the Devil” is his finest product of showing forth, or illustrating, the facts of the human condition. Within the confines of that book, Gustav Eriksson Vasa, the first king of Sweden, is a man torn between idealism and realism. Determined to create an independent nation with a monarchy that will serve his people, he finds that he must temper his noble nature by accommodating the brutal realities of politics, even if this means literally accepting the Devil himself as an ally. A master of political rhetoric, better known as propaganda, Gustav consoles himself with the rationalization that the end must justify the means for the cause of the greater good. Yet throughout the narrative he must constantly fight against self-doubt and even despair. A similar conflict confronts his cousin Lars-Goren Bergquist and the elderly Bishop of Linkoping, Hans Brask. Both men have openly sworn allegiance to what the world commonly accepts as the good—for Lars-Goren, the right of a people to be free, especially in spirit; for Brask, the revealed truths of the Christian faith—but each is tormented by the gulf between his belief and the world. Unlike Gustav, they have no convenient political excuse for their actions and must instead face their doubts on an individual level. Lars-Goren does this by retreating to the comfort of his family, while Brask uses intellectual brilliance as his prop against despair. It is only after their philosophical discussions on the ride north to face the Devil have forced a merger of sorts in the two men that either can realize that good intentions are useless without action and that intelligence, however profound, means nothing unless it serves other human beings.

Critical Context

Freddy’s Book was Gardner’s first volume after the publication of his controversial critical volume On Moral Fiction (1978), which dismissed most contemporary American writing as specious and insubstantial because it refused to treat important subjects in a worthy fashion. Gardner, who had been severely attacked on a number of fronts for the views he advanced in On Moral Fiction, seems to have used Freddy’s Book as a way to respond to his critics by demonstrating what moral fiction was, how it could be done, and what it should accomplish. First, moral fiction is serious, in that it deals with important issues that confront real human beings. When Jack Winesap and Sven Agaard talk, they are not merely discussing idle academic subjects but are debating what it means to know the past and what can be learned from it. In other words, they consider what history is in its truest sense. Freddy Agaard does not write a steamy historical potboiler but a true yet imaginative re-creation of a lost world that still has powerful and lasting impact on the way people think and live now. Even the characters in “King Gustav and the Devil” are not cardboard cutouts but fully realized human beings who confront the same sorts of passions and doubts and choices with which readers must grapple every day. In short, Freddy’s Book, while it appears to be the sort of clever “novel within a novel” artifice that Gardner roundly attacked in On Moral Fiction, is actually a serious, in-depth dialogue that leads toward that greater understanding that Gardner always maintained was the major, perhaps sole, purpose of the novel, indeed of all true art.

Bibliography

Butts, Leonard. The Novels of John Gardner: Making Life Art as a Moral Process. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Butts draws his argument from Gardner himself, specifically On Moral Fiction (that art is a moral process) and discusses the ten novels in pairs, focusing on the main characters as either artists or artist figures who to varying degrees succeed or fail in transforming themselves into Gardner’s “true artist.” As Butts defines it, moral fiction is not didactic but instead a matter of aesthetic wholeness.

Chavkin, Allan, ed. Conversations with John Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Reprints nineteen of the most important interviews (the majority from the crucial On Moral Fiction period) and adds one never before published interview. Chavkin’s introduction, which focuses on Gardner as he appears in these and his other numerous interviews, is especially noteworthy. The chronology updates the one in Howell (below).

Cowart, David. Arches and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Discusses the published novels through Mickelsson’s Ghosts, the two story collections, and the tales for children. As good as Cowart’s intelligent and certainly readable chapters are, they suffer (as does so much Gardner criticism) insofar as they are concerned with validating Gardner’s position on moral fiction as a valid alternative to existential despair.

Cowart, David, ed. Thor’s Hammer: Essays on John Gardner. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1985. Presents fifteen original essays of varying quality, including three on Grendel. The most important are John M. Howell’s biographical essay, Robert A. Morace’s on Gardner and his reviewers, Gregory Morris’s discussion of Gardner and “plagiarism,” Samuel Coale’s on dreams, Leonard Butts’s on Mickelsson’s Ghosts, and Charles Johnson’s “A Phenomenology of On Moral Fiction.”

Howell, John M. John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Howell’s detailed chronology and enumerative listing of works by Gardner (down to separate editions, printings, issues, and translations), as well as the afterword written by Gardner, make this an indispensable work for any Gardner student.

McWilliams, Dean. John Gardner. Boston: Twayne, 1990. McWilliams includes little biographical material, does not try to be at all comprehensive, yet has an interesting and certainly original thesis: that Gardner’s fiction may be more fruitfully approached via Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism than via On Moral Fiction. Unfortunately, the chapters (on the novels and Jason and Medeia) tend to be rather introductory in approach and only rarely dialogical in focus.

Morace, Robert A., and Kathryn VanSpanckeren, eds. John Gardner: Critical Perspectives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. This first critical book on Gardner’s work covers the full range of his literary endeavors, from his dissertation-novel “The Old Men” through his then most recent fictions, “Vlemk, The Box Painter” and Freddy’s Book, with separate essays on his “epic poem” Jason and Medeia; The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales; his children’s stories; libretti; pastoral novels; use of sources, parody, and embedding; and theory of moral fiction. The volume concludes with Gardner’s afterword.

Morris, Gregory L. A World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Like Butts and Cowart, Morris works well within the moral fiction framework which Gardner himself established. Unlike Cowart, however, Morris emphasizes moral art as a process by which order is discovered rather than (as Cowart contends) made. More specifically the novels (including Gardner’s dissertation novel “The Old Men”) and two collections of short fiction are discussed in terms of Gardner’s “luminous vision” and “magical landscapes.”