Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

Mickelsson’s Ghosts

John Gardner

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1982 by John Gardner

photographs copyright © 1982 by Joel Gardner

cover design by Robin Bilardello

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0338-5

This 2010 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media180 Varick StreetNew York, NY 10014www.openroadmedia.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the songs sung in the fictional recital in this novel is adapted from “Agonies of Heaven,” by Hakim Yama Khayyam. For Mickelsson’s philosophical broodings I am especially in debt to R. M. Hare and to Daniel C. Maguire, whose writings I frequently quote, usually in altered form. I am indebted, too, to Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) I’ve borrowed ideas and good lines from various other philosophical writers and poets, past and present, notably Martin Luther (and one of his biographers, H. G. Heile), Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Norman O. Brown, Martin Heidegger, the late Walter Kaufmann (who would mainly not approve of my treatment of Nietzsche), and from numerous acquaintances, friends, and loved ones, especially my wife, L. M. Rosenberg. The diligent will perhaps discover that I have additional literary sources, more than I know myself, among those sources the fiction of John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates and some of the poems of Carl Dennis. I am also indebted to Jack Wilcox, who helped remove from the story some philosophical improbabilities, suggested books I might read, and so on. Any stupidities which survive must be blamed on the characters. Where this novel touches on historical Mormonism, I am indebted mainly to two books, Fawn M. Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, and William Wise’s Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Legend and a Monumental Crime. This novel’s incursions into the kingdom of the peacetime and wartime nuclear industry, the various industrial-waste depositors, and so on, are based on books and articles too numerous and various to cite. I would like to express special gratitude to Craig and Alice Gilborn, of the Adirondack Museum, who gave me a place to write, as well as friendship and inspiration, and the English Department at SUNY-Binghamton, who gave me time and mechanical assistance, as well as advice and encouragement. My special thanks, too, to Bernard and Evelyn Rosenthal, Pat Wilcox, Burton Weber, Carl Dennis, Susan Strehle, William Spanos, my children Joel and Lucy Gardner, and my wife, Liz, all of whom read the manuscript in various stages and helped me see mistakes—not that there aren’t still plenty.

Though based on and named for real places, the settings in this novel are essentially fictitious. I’ve moved things around (for instance the old Susquehanna depot restaurant and what locals call the Oakland block) to suit plot convenience. So far as I know there are no ghosts in Susque-hanna County, but looking at the place one feels there ought to be. If there are witches, I’ve never run into one.

The town of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, fictionalized setting of most of this novel’s action, is not, in real life, the dire, moribund place my story makes it, though at the time this story was set the town was endangered. It is a town that has more than once come close to extinction. In 1919, at the time of the great railroad strike in Susquehanna, the townspeople took the side of the striking railroad workers, fought the scabs and resisted the railroad executives, with the result that the railroad made a decision to abandon the town. The railroad then employed some two thousand Susquehanna workers and indirectly supported many more. When the railroad broke off all dealings with the town, Susquehanna staggered but somehow remained on its feet. It has similarly resisted more recent strokes of bad luck, mainly thanks to the town’s pervasive sense of humor and stubborn independence, and the urgent concern with which people take care of one another. As of this writing the old railroad depot (which was not in fact demolished, though it was badly decayed) is being restored to its former grandeur by a local businessman, Mike Matis. It will be the last Victorian railroad hotel in America, and it was from the beginning one of the most grand and beautiful, an architectural wonder worthy to stand, as it does, not far from the immense and justly famous stone-hewn Starucca Viaduct. And a local park and dam project promises to free Susquehanna from dependence on outsiders for electricity. So this novel, insofar as it treats Susquehanna as a gloomy, dying place, is fiction, or fictionalized recent history. It tells of what might have happened and nearly did, but didn’t. The old rusted sign mentioned in this story—VACATION IN THE ENDLESS MOUNTAINS—gives good advice. If any neighbor, having heard me say this, still feels ill-served, let him be angry at Peter Mickelsson, the “hero,” so to speak, of this novel. I’ve done my best with him, but the man’s a lunatic. May he get his just deserts hereafter.

To Liz

PART ONE

1

Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances had forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house on Binghamton’s West Side—“the nice part of town,” everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts)—made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment