George (Palmer Garrett Jr.) Biography

(1972) I feel I am only just beginning, still learning my craft, trying my hand at as many things, as many ways and means of telling as many stories as I'm able to. I hope that this will always be the case, that somehow I'll avoid the slow horror of repeating myself or the blind rigor of an obsession. I can't look back, I'm not ashamed of the work I've done, but it is done. And I am (I hope) moving ahead, growing and changing. Once I've seen something into print I do not re-read it. I have tried always to write out of experience, but that includes imaginative experience which is quite as "real" to me and for me as any other and, indeed, in no way divorces from the outward and visible which we often (and inaccurately) call reality. I only hope to continue to learn and to grow. And to share experience with my imaginary reader. I use the singular because a book is a direct encounter, a conversation between one writer and one reader. Though I couldn't care less how many, in raw numbers, read my work, I have the greatest respect for that one imaginary reader. I hope to manage to please that reader before I'm done, to give as much delight, or some sense of it, as I have received from reading good books by good writers.

(1986) Years and scars, and various and sundry books, later, I would not change much in my earlier statement, innocent as it was. Now that I am in my mid-fifties I would not use the word hope so much. Naturally I have less hope for myself; though I insist on maintaining high hopes for the best of the young writers I teach. And I have every intention, with and without hope, to continue working, trying to learn my craft always (never to master it), still seeking, sometimes finding my imaginary reader. I know more than a decade's worth of darker, sadder things than I did in 1972. So does the world. So goes the world. Well, I have learned a full deck of new jokes, also, and never ceased to taste good laughter. If some hopes have faded and been abandoned, faith, which is altogether something else, has replaced them. And the old dog learns new tricks. One: to turn to the light and live on it until it's gone. Another: to be as open as I can until my book is closed.

(1991) In 1989 I was suddenly 60 years old, older than I had planned to be or ever imagined. Not that a whole lot has changed (I was and am still a viable candidate for the American Tomb of the Unknown Writer); but I did finish my Elizabethan trilogy; and now I have a new publisher and have embarked on three related American novels, coming out of our recent history. I am not planning to live forever, but I would like to finish telling these stories and some others on my mind. Meantime I'm a grandfather and have the pleasure of seeing a generation and a half of former students writing and publishing books on their own. And I am sometimes surprised by the kindness of strangers. The world is not (all claims to the contrary) a kinder or gentler place; but, somewhat to my cynical chagrin, I keep discovering worthy and amazing creatures in it.

(1995) Is there anything to add? Years-now I'm 65 and counting. And still working as hard as I can, hoping to get the work done, hoping, from here on, the work will simply speak for itself.

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Directness, seriousness, a Chaucerian comic sense which in no way conflicts with that seriousness, imaginative vigor, sheer intelligence, and a rich variety of matter and manner—these qualities mark the fiction of George Garrett. An American, a southerner, Garrett has published seven novels, a collection of short novels, five collections of stories (including the major collection of new and selected stories, An Evening Performance), seven books of poems (including The Collected Poems), plays and screenplays, and a respectable body of critical work (including a biography of James Jones and a monograph on the fiction of Mary Lee Settle). This output reveals his energy and the scope of his interests, and they offer some indication of the seriousness with which he pursues his vocation as writer. Garrett approaches his world and his work with an Elizabethan forcefulness and range, directly and with all his strength.

Garrett is a Christian artist—not a pietist, but a writer whose very sense of the living world is infused with an Augustinian Christian understanding. He is a realist and not a fabulist, but, because of his Christian belief, his work is never far from parable, his direct reality always shaped by the enigmas of the spirit. His seven novels are very different each from each in subject and texture, but together they form a quest for a narrative structure sufficient to the expression of his increasingly more complex view of the ways of the world. The Finished Man is a novel of modern Florida politics; Which Ones Are the Enemy? takes place in Trieste during the American occupation following World War II; Do, Lord, Remember Me concerns the shattering visit of an evangelist to a small Southern town; Death of the Fox is an account of the events, exterior and interior, of the last two days of Sir Walter Raleigh's life; The Succession is a synoptic recreation of the events surrounding the succession of James I to the throne of Queen Elizabeth; Poison Pen (a new novel built upon the ruins of a larger, unfinished novel to have been called Life with Kim Novak Is Hell) is an acidly satirical examination of American public lives, illusion and reality, and the real and illusory nature of fiction itself; Entered from the Sun is an Elizabethan mystery novel which explores the illusion and impenetrable reality surrounding Christopher Marlowe's death. But they are all products of the same central concerns—a blessing of the dark and fallen world, a knowledge of the power of the imagination to enter that dark world and create and sustain values in it, a faith in the possibility of redemption and salvation even in the very process of the fall into sin and death, and a commitment to the individual moment as the sole window on eternity.

Garrett's major works thus far are the novels in his Elizabethan historical trilogy. In Death of the Fox all of his major thematic concerns come together in the person of Ralegh, the soldier, the politician, the sailor, the poet, and the morally creative man. In his imaginative union with Ralegh, Garrett fuses present and past into an artistic whole which is both truth and lie—the disappointing truth which nevertheless burns ideally in the imagination and dreams of the beholder (as in Garrett's earlier short story, "An Evening Performance") and the saving lie of love (as in his poem "Fig Leaves") which enables us "to live together." The Succession both extends and fulfills the stylistic and formal advances of Death of the Fox by presenting a thoroughly researched and vividly written account of English and Scottish life in the years succeeding, following, and pivoting upon the succession in 1603, and at the same time developing an aesthetic meditation on the creation and revelation of meaning in the succession of moments that makes up the nexus of time. Set in 1597, Entered from the Sun brings the trilogy round full circle, allowing Ralegh to be viewed this time from the outside rather than from within, and commenting both upon the way time conceals truth and the way the fictive imagination attempts to penetrate those concealing veils—commenting, therefore, upon itself and upon the trilogy as a whole.

How he will develop as he moves beyond these major milestones of his career (the Elizabethan trilogy, the collected stories, and the collected poems) is fascinating to contemplate. Garrett has always continued to grow and change in his work while so many of his contemporaries have faltered or simply repeated themselves book after book. His importance becomes clearer year by year as the magnitude of his exploration of reality (outward and inward) reveals itself with each new and startlingly original book.