Offhand observations often reveal truths about people and the times. When I was a child it was quite common to witness someone strolling along the street whistling a tune. No one whistles (or strolls) today.

Whistling is an unconscious gesture, usually a positive signal that everything is satisfactory. We all recognize, however, that there's little worth whistling about anymore. And each has his own way of handling this disheartening fact. Some refuse to confront, some maintain indifference, and some avoid despair by adopting the pitying, most damnable emotion, cynicism.

To me it is encouraging that someone who has the burden of seeing the truth in life so much more accurately than most of us, and feels it more poignantly, takes none of these approaches. George Garrett's very appearance gives him away. There is honesty in his eyes; a brightness, a glance suggesting a sense of humor, a steadiness that identifies him as a man who possesses a correct picture of this existence we find ourselves in: "sometimes neat and soft / as a puff of smoke / more often unkempt / extravagant and formless" (from an early poem, "Forsythia"). There is always the notion with this man that something can be done, and that when a resolution is reached it will be worked out by man himself in terms recognizable and meaningful.

George Garrett delivers the goods. He is a writer whose realistic statement dispels illusions yet encourages hope, as in the poem for his sons: "Nothing of earned wisdom I can give you / . . . I am a foolish father like all the rest, / would put my flesh, my shadow in between / you and the light that wounds and blesses."

Garrett refuses to become one of those writers who produce to public specification. "For the aim of these," he states in the introduction to For a Bitter Season, his third book of poetry, "is to make the poet, whether a prophet or charmer, into a respected and respectable citizen. At the moment of Truth the Priests and the Pharisees, like the King and the Procurator and even the dancing Princess, are conspicuously absent. Under the circumstances, it seems better to kneel in the shadow with the rest of the common soldiers and shoot craps, better in fact to crap out and lose all when the prize is beyond all price."

This acknowledgement accounts in part for his many experiments in prose, his three books of poetry, a children's play, as well as movie scripts for Hollywood and television. That he doesn't depend on a once successful formula is admirable and risky. For example, the stance he takes in Death of the Fox produces a flavor Elizabethan enough to deliver the reader into the age, but not to abandon him there—a crafty technique that allows the reader to maintain proper distance without losing interest and without becoming immersed, thus to forfeit perspective: just involved sufficiently to care about his subject matter and be thankful he isn't part of it.

Other innovations of style in Death of the Fox, such as sentence fragments and archaisms which provide the effect of immediacy, work successfully and fall in proportion to purpose. Of course, the greatest risk of all lies in attempting to write an historical novel in the first place. At the outset the author is already aware that he won't be taken seriously by scholars of the period or historians, and that he will be ignored by the popular reader confronted with such depth and exposition. Nor will the commercial reader have any idea of the research required to blend historical facts and imagination into a readable narrative.

The nerve to experiment is part of a writer's charm. We are naturally drawn to someone who takes a chance. Each of the narrators, seven or eight of them in all, in Garrett's experimental third novel, Do, Lord, Remember Me, contributes to the total plot through a monologue of his own that has no truth in it. Yet finally the whole narrative takes shape for the reader. Not only does the technique make sense after the reader participates and learns the rules of the game, but each of the fabricating narrators reaches a point of development as well.

Perhaps this impulse to experiment also accounts for the unfinished quality of some of Garrett's work. But George Garrett is not an average writer. He does not see life only as it relates to literature or to public appeal. The Magic Striptease, his latest book, three novellas under one cover, is so outlandish and mischievous that the reader really questions its intention, but again the imagination of the author fascinates—especially in the book's first novella, about a man named Jacob Quirk, who can change himself into another person, and not simply another flesh and blood human being, but a character in fiction. Ridiculous, extravagant, and successful, The Magic Striptease fulfills the basic requirement of all good fiction: the reader wonders what in the world is going to happen next—and keeps flipping the pages. And it is not the least bit inconsistent with George Garrett's versatility that the hilarious Magic Striptease follows right on the heels of the sober Death of the Fox.

Of course every type of writing calls for a different style, and often these changes (necessary to accommodate purpose) flirt with disaster. In Death of the Fox one sometimes finds himself irritated by more supportive material than he can reasonably suffer. He feels that he wants more narration, less information; he is uneasy in the presence of a quantity of material that would appear impossible ever to carry out to a proper resolution. But the prose is engaging, and at the end of the book the reader leaves with a satisfaction that he suddenly, strangely though gratefully, understands could never have been his had he not been required to encounter and endure the shock and frustration. At the end of Death of the Fox the reader is content: something has ended.

Sometimes Garrett's poetry, in its flash, seems a bit quick, not resolved sufficiently to suit our sensibilities:

I am amazed. I wonder
even in a dream,
what the image with my face
will ever be able to answer.
Awake, I'm usually tactful
and much too often polite.
I wouldn't know what to say
if somebody popped that question.
In dreams at least I' m definite.

(from "Anthology")

It is the truth in statement, though, the accuracy of the word arrangements, and the familiarity of the images (they are close to home) that convince. The responses the poetry provokes are deep and honest ones. The images work because they call forth feelings the reader didn't know he had, or more significantly, had forgotten he had. The suggestions the images and statements make connect.

Still it is difficult to explain the appeal of the poetry, for it is rarely polished sufficiently to feel comfortable settling in with on a rainy afternoon. It is lyrical, sometimes graceful, often rough; yet one feels this is the way he would have it—he knows that he is in the hands of someone who has been there, who has the equipment to register the happinesses and disappointments of life as we know it (without the imposition of clever nuances and dead-end mannerisms) as he could never do. He finds himself faced with human emotions that matter:

Now that was a long time ago.
And now I know them for what they were . . .

Still I would have them back.
Let them be wooden and absurd again
in all the painted glory that a child
could love. Let me be one of them.
Let me step forward once more awkwardly
and stammer and choke on a prepared speech.
Let me bring gold again and kneel
foolish and adoring in the dirty straw.

("The Magi")

Poetry such as this reflects the understanding of a man of travel, experience, and friends. The poet has other things to do than dicker with words on a page, and this is part of the reason that he can size up a situation so correctly.

The reader feels that the solid word choices, mostly nouns, which construct the images are the right ones for him. They are delivered and set up for him so that the background he brings to the poem will take it from there: now they are his. He is grateful to be associated with a poet who doesn't heed the modern obligation to try to reduce an image to its core. Possessed of a genuine tenderness, the poetry is as honest as the man behind it.

It is tone that is most likely to be the key to the man. A tone of concern, without the denying pessimism that cuts the heart out of significance, underlies all the work of George Garrett, a legitimate concern indicative of hope, hope of a moral quality. This is why Sir Walter Ralegh is Garrett's man, to return to his greatest work, Death of the Fox. It is right that the two men should be associated, because, as did Ralegh, George Garrett represents amid the limitations and disappointments of our society, a spiritual hope, an example of dignity in a period that hardly any longer knows the meaning of the word. Sir Walter Ralegh maintained a courageous poise in an age that was losing it all—just as George Garrett does today, though he knows that he is casting in the dark.