Lines I Wish I'd Written: Waiting on the Tarmac from John Gardner’s Nimram

This is from a short story by John Gardner, titled “Nimram,” from his short story collection, The Art of Living: & Other Stories.  John Gardner is best known for his novel Grendel, the retelling of the Beowulf story from the perspective of the monster.  That is a superb novel, but I my favorite memories of reading John Gardner are from reading his books on fiction writing.  His book titled On Moral Fiction is his most well-known of his fiction writing, non-fiction books because it insisted that fiction could only operate with a moral center or it would fail as fiction, a highly controversial idea to modern writers.  But my favorite of his books on writing is The Art of Fiction, where he outlines not just the basics of fiction but the aesthetics of what constitutes fiction.  I still have it on my book shelf after thirty years!

“Nimram” is a short story of a middle aged man named Benjamin Nimram, a concert conductor, who sits next to a sixteen year old terminally ill girl.  I may do a short story analysis of “Nimram” but for now I want to highlight a lovely quote from the story.  Nimram is waiting in the plane for it to take off while the ground crew are working outside in the rain. 

 

The rain fell steadily, figures and dark square tractors hurrying toward the belly of the plane and then away again, occasionally glowing under blooms of silent lightning, in the aisle behind him passengers still moving with the infinite patience of Tolstoy peasants toward their second-class seats. With a part of his mind he watched their reflections in the window and wondered idly how many of them, if any, had seen him conduct, seen anyone conduct, cared at all for the shimmering ghost he had staked his life on. None of them, so far as he could tell, had even noticed the Muzak leaking cheerfully, mindlessly, from the plane’s invisible speakers. It would be turned off when the plane was safely airborne, for which he was grateful, needless to say. Yet it was touching, in a way, that the airline should offer this feeble little gesture of reassurance—All will be well! Listen to the Muzak! All will be well! They scarcely heard it, these children of accident, old and young, setting out across the country in the middle of the night; yet perhaps it was true that they were comforted, lulled.

Such a beautifully drawn image of the crew with their tractor like equipment pulling back and forth from the belly of the plane, and coupled with the non-first class passenger—“Tolstoy peasants”—moving to the back of the plane as he sits in first class.  The contrast of he being a conductor of great music while having to listen to Muzak is delicious.  And the expression of reassurance—“ All will be well! Listen to the Muzak! All will be well!”—will accentuate and counterpoint the story’s theme concerning the terminally ill girl.  It’s a wonderful passage.