The World According to Garp
by John Irving
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 437
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345418018
Publisher: Ballantine
Born in New Hampshire, John Irving is the author of nine novels, among them The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year. Mr. Irving is married and has three sons; he lives in Vermont and in Toronto.
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In 1996, on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The World According to Garp, John Irving
described the experience of writing Garp, its reception, and its meaning.
Here are his thoughts.
The World According to Garp: An Afterword
TWENTY YEARS AGO BY JOHN IRVING
My eldest son, Colin, who is now thirty-three, was twelve when he first read The World According
to Garp--in manuscript, and with me anxiously awaiting his reaction. (I
still believe there are scenes in the book that are unsuitable for twelve-year-olds.)
Although Garp was my fourth novel, it was the first one Colin could read,
and I remember feeling both proud and nervous at the prospect of being
judged by one of my children; that the book was dedicated to Colin, and
to his younger brother Brendan, made the moment even more tense and exciting.
Surely everyone knows the two most common questions that are asked of any novelist. What is
your book about? And is it autobiographical? These questions and their
answers have never been of compelling interest to me--if it's a good novel,
both the questions and the answers are irrelevant--but while my twelve-year-old
son was reading The World According to Garp, I anticipated that these
were the very questions he would ask me, and I thought very hard about
how I might answer him.
Now, twenty years later--and having written nine novels--it occurs to me that I have never
thought as hard about my answers to those "irrelevant" questions as I
did when Colin was reading Garp. What I mean, of course, is that it's
perfectly understandable and completely permissible for a twelve-year-old
to ask those questions, whereas (in my opinion) an adult has no business
asking them. An adult who reads a novel should know what the book is "about";
an adult should also know that whether a novel is autobiographical or
not is beside the point--unless the alleged adult is hopelessly inexperienced
or totally innocent of the ways of fiction.
Anyway, while Colin was off in his room reading the manuscript of Garp, I found myself agonizing
over what the novel was "about." To my horror, and full of self-loathing,
I jumped to the conclusion that the book was about the temptations of
lust--lust leads just about everyone to a miserable end. There is even
a chapter called "More Lust," as if there weren't enough already. I was
positively ashamed of how much lust was in the book, not to mention how
punitive a novel I thought it was; indeed, every character in the story
who indulges his or her lust is severely punished. And, among the culprits
and the victims, physical mutilations abound: characters lose eyes and
arms and tongues--even penises!
It had seemed at one time, when I was beginning the novel, that the polarization of the
sexes was a dominant theme; the story was about men and women growing
farther and farther apart. Just look at the plot: a remarkable, albeit
outspoken, woman (Garp's mother, Jenny Fields) is killed by a lunatic
male who hates women; and Garp himself is assassinated by a lunatic female
who hates men.
"In this dirty-minded world," Jenny thinks, "you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore--or
fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either
category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong
with you." But there is nothing wrong with Garp's mother. In her autobiography,
Jenny writes: "I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me
a sexual suspect. Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share
my body or my life to have one. That made me a sexual suspect, too." And
being what she calls "a sexual suspect" also makes Jenny a target of antifeminist
hatred--just as Garp, her son, becomes a target of radical feminists.
But the principal point about Garp's mother is stated in the first chapter: "Jenny Fields
discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you
got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy." Today, twenty
years later, Jenny's discovery seems more true--not to mention more defensible--than
it seemed to me in 1978. And I don't always agree with Jenny. "Between
men and women," she says, "only death is shared equally." Late in the
novel, in the last chapter, I disagree with her as follows: ". . . between
men and women, not even death gets shared equally. Men get to die more,
too."
There was a time when Jenny threatened to take over the novel, when I wasn't at all sure
if Garp or his mother was the main character; something of my indecision
remains. I once wanted to begin the book with Chapter 11 (the "Mrs. Ralph"
chapter), but that would have necessitated a flashback of 278 pages. I
next tried beginning the novel with Chapter 9, the chapter called "The
Eternal Husband." My first sentence was: "In the Yellow Pages of Garp's
phone directory, Marriage was listed near Lumber." I used to think the
novel was about marriage, specifically the perils of marriage--more specifically,
the threat of lust to marriage. "Garp had never realized," I wrote, "that
there were more marriage counselors than lumber-yards." (Is it any wonder
I was anxious that a twelve-year-old was reading this book?)
And, at another time, The World According to Garp began with Chapter 3 ("What He Wanted to Be
When He Grew Up")--for isn't the novel also about that? Garp wants to
be a writer; it is a novel about a novelist, although almost no reader
of the book remembers it as such. Yet Garp's origins as an author are
crucial to the story--"the beginning of a writer's long-sought trance,
wherein the world falls under one embracing tone of voice." And from the
beginning, there was an epilogue. I knew everything that happened before
I began--I always do. "An epilogue," Garp writes, "is more than a body
count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really
a way of warning us about the future."
But to begin the novel as I once tried, with Chapter 3, was too historical, too emotionally
remote. "In 1781 the widow and children of Everett Steering founded Steering
Academy, as it was first called, because Everett Steering had announced
to his family, while carving his last Christmas goose, that his only disappointment
with his town was that he had not provided his boys with an academy capable
of preparing them for a higher education. He did not mention his girls."
There again is the sexual-polarization theme--as early as 1781!
Meanwhile, in the privacy of his room, Colin was reading on and on. The World According
to Garp would never have satisfied a twelve-year-old if it had been only
a novel about a novelist, although much of what mattered to me about the
book was exactly that. I shall always see Garp prowling in his neighborhood
at night, taking a dim view of his neighbors' television sets. "There
is the faint, trapped warble from some televisions tuned in to The Late
Show, and the blue-gray glow from the picture tubes throbs from a few
of the houses. To Garp this glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing,
putting the world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks;
but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever
the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading."
And what of the Under Toad? Colin was familiar with its source. It was his brother Brendan who
misunderstood him one summer at the beach on Long Island. "Watch out for
the undertow, Brendan," Colin warned him--at the time, Brendan was six.
(Colin was ten.) Brendan had never heard of an undertow; he thought Colin
said Under Toad. Somewhere, under the water, lurked a dangerous toad.
"What can it do to you?" Brendan asked his brother.
"Pull you under, suck you out to sea," Colin said.
That did it for Brendan at the beach--he wouldn't go near the ocean. It was weeks later when I
saw him standing at some distance from the water's edge, staring into the waves.
"What are you doing?" I asked him.
"I'm looking for the Under Toad," Brendan said. "How big is it? What color is it? How fast
can it swim?"
The World According to Garp wouldn't exist without the Under Toad. Brendan got me started.
To my surprise, Colin didn't ask me what the book was "about"--he told
me. "It's about the fear of death, I think," Colin began. "Maybe more
accurately, the fear of the death of children--or of anyone you love."
I remembered then that, among my other attempts to begin the novel, I had long ago begun
with what would become the last sentence (". . . in the world according
to Garp, we are all terminal cases"), and I recalled how that sentence
had moved through the book; I kept pushing it ahead. It was once the first
sentence of the second chapter; later it was the last sentence of the
tenth chapter, and so on, until it became the end of the novel--the only
possible ending. Not surprisingly, Garp describes a novelist as "a doctor
who sees only terminal cases."
Yet Colin, my twelve-year-old, surprised me by telling me what my book was about. The "Mrs. Ralph" chapter,
my first false beginning, begins as follows: "If Garp could have been
granted one vast and naive wish, it would have been that he could make
the world safe. For children and for grownups. The world struck Garp as
unnecessarily perilous for both." At age twelve, Colin had zeroed in on
that. Garp lives in "a safe suburb of a small, safe city," but neither
he nor his children are safe. The Under Toad will get him in the end--as
it gets his mother, as it gets his younger son. "Just be careful!" Garp
is always telling his children, as I am still telling mine.
It is a novel about being careful, and about that not being enough.
The real beginning to the book, the one I finally chose, describes Jenny's habit of carrying
a scalpel in her purse. Jenny is a nurse, and an unmarried woman who wants
nothing to do with men; she carries the scalpel for self-defense. And
so The World According to Garp begins with an act of violence--Jenny cuts
a soldier, a stranger who thrusts his hand under her dress (her nurse's
uniform). "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942
for wounding a man in a movie theater." Finally, it was just that simple;
I began at the beginning of the main story, before Jenny is pregnant with
Garp--at the moment she decides she wants to have a baby without having
a husband.
Interestingly, Colin never asked me if the novel was autobiographical. But a year after the
publication of The World According to Garp, I visited the Northfield Mount
Hermon School--a private secondary school in Massachusetts. I had been
invited to give a reading to the students, and I'd accepted the invitation
because Colin had recently been admitted to the school--he would be a
student there in the coming academic year--and I thought it would be an
opportunity for Colin to see something of the place and meet a few of
the young men and women who would soon be his fellow students. Therefore
Colin came with me to the reading, after which there were some questions
from the audience. (It had been announced to the audience that Colin would
be attending Northfield Mount Hermon in the fall--he'd already been introduced
to the crowd.) Unexpectedly, a very pretty young woman asked Colin a question--she
didn't ask me.
"Is Garp your dad--is your father Garp?" the girl asked.
Poor Colin! He must have been embarrassed, but you would not have known it from his unflappable
composure; he was a little younger than the assembled students, but he
suddenly struck me as much older and more wary than most of them. Furthermore,
he was an expert on The World According to Garp.
"No, my dad isn't Garp," Colin replied, "but my father's fears are Garp's fears--they are
any father's fears." (Colin was fourteen, going on thirty-three.)
So that's what The World According to Garp is about--a father's fears. As such, the novel
is and isn't "autobiographical." Just ask Colin, or Brendan, or--in a
few years, when he's old enough to read it--my youngest son, Everett.
(As of this writing, Everett is six.)
I may have written this novel twenty years ago, but I go back there almost every day--back
to those fears. Even the smallest detail of The World According to Garp
is an expression of fear; even the curious pockmark on the face of the
Viennese prostitute--it is also an expression of that most terrible fear.
"The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her
pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave." A child's grave . . .
When Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. "I lost one, too," they told me.
I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father
with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day.
May 1998
Excerpted from The World According to Garp © Copyright 2008 by John Irving. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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