by John Irving
(p. 148) All orchards have names; it is common practice, too, for farmers to name their buildings. This is necessary for the shorthand language of simple directions, as in: “The Deere has a flat and needs fixing in the Frying Pan”; or, “I left the Dodge in Number Two because Wally is spraying in the Sanborn and he’ll need a ride back.” In the orchard where I worked, there was a building called Number Two—although there was no Number Three and I don’t remember a Number One. Many of the orchards were named after the families who’d been the original homesteaders on that particular piece of land (Brown, Eaton, Coburn, and Curtis are some local names I remember). There was an orchard called Twenty Acres and another one called Nineteen, and there were the plainer names—an orchard called the Field, one called the Fountain, one called the Spring, and one called Old-New (because it was half old trees and half newly planted). The Frying Pan is also called Frying Pan—without the article.
(p. 155) Anyone who grew up near the ocean, as I did, could detect a sea breeze in Iowa (if one was blowing).
(p. 210) The prayer that Mrs. Grogan recites is credited to John Henry (Cardinal) Newman, the English theologian and author (1801–90); I’m told that the prayer was originally part of one of Cardinal Newman’s sermons. It was also what served my family as a family prayer and was spoken at the graveside of my maternal grandmother—it was her favorite. Her name was Helen Bates Winslow, and she died just a month short of her hundredth birthday; the festivities the family had planned for that event would doubtlessly have killed my grandmother, had she lived until then. Cardinal Newman’s prayer must be a very good one, or at least it worked very well—and for a very long time—for my grandmother, who was devoted to it. I was devoted to her.
(pp. 226–27) Alzheimer described the disease he called presenile dementia in 1907. “Deterioration in cognition” occurs relatively early in the disease and is marked by a disturbance of recent memory and a loss of the ability to learn new things. Dr. Nuland of Yale also states that some patients are more likely to begin with personality changes and some with intellectual changes. The advance of the disease, in either case, is marked by a lowering threshold of frustration. Dr. Nuland notes that the sequence in which certain small jobs need to be done would be difficult to follow and that complex ideas are hard to comprehend and impossible to explain to others. It is a rapid deterioration that advances in Alzheimer victims: the average life-span, from the time of diagnosis, is approximately seven years; there are patients who live much longer, and many who die within a few months. In recent years, it has been recognized that Alzheimer’s is not only an uncommon disease that affects people in midlife, but also a relatively frequent cause of mental and physical degeneration in the elderly—many of whom were previously thought to have simple hardening of the arteries (arteriosclerosis).
(p. 276) The famous Paris edition of 1957 (which was privately printed) collected seventeen hundred examples of the limerick. This limerick, which is categorized as an “organ limerick,” originated in print in 1939; it may have been in spoken circulation earlier. In 194_, when Senior and Wally are saying it to each other, it would have been only a few years old.
(p. 292) Benjamin Arthur Bensley’s Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit is a real book, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1918. Bensley is a clear, no-nonsense writer; his book, which he calls “an elementary laboratory textbook in mammalian anatomy,” employs the anatomy of the rabbit as an introduction to an understanding of human anatomy. Bensley’s is not Gray’s, but Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit is a good book of its kind. As a very “elementary” student of anatomy, I learned a lot from Bensley—his book made reading Gray’s much easier for me.
(p. 302) The McIntosh apple was developed in Ontario, where the climate is similar to New England and New York’s Hudson and Champlain valleys (where the apple has flourished).
(p. 320) In Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit, Bensley describes the ovary and oviducts of the rabbit and compares his findings to the same equipment in other animals.
(pp. 348–49) The Exeter limerick is dated 1927–41; the town of Exeter appears in many limericks because it rhymes with “sex at her”—as in, “It was then that Jones pointed his sex at her!” (A famous last line.) I always heard a lot of Exeter limericks because I was born and grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire.
The Brent limerick is dated 1941. It is a classic “organ limerick,” so called because there is a special category of limericks devoted to the peculiarities of the male and female organs. As in,
There was a young fellow named Cribbs
Whose cock was so big it had ribs.
(1944–51)
And in the famous 1938 limerick that was voted Best Limerick by one of the graduating classes of Princeton:
There once was a Queen of Bulgaria
Whose bush had grown hairier and hairier,
Till a Prince from Peru
Who came up for a screw
Had to hunt for her cunt with a terrier.
The Toronto limerick is circa 1941.
(p. 367) The Bombay limerick is dated 1879—an old one.
(p. 382) Dr. Larch would have been surprised to learn that his condemning statistics of unwanted children were still accurate in 1965. Dr. Charles F. Westoff of Princeton’s Office of Population Research, and the co-director of the 1965 National Fertility Study, concluded that 750,000 to a million children—born to married couples between 1960 and 1965—were unwanted. This estimate is low. Even in a poll, many parents are unwilling to admit that any child of theirs was unwanted. Furthermore, unwed or abandoned mothers were not included in the survey; their opinions regarding how many of their children were unwanted were never counted. For more information on this subject, see James Trager’s The Bellybook (1972).
Ben Franklin was the fifteenth of seventeen children; his faith in rapid population growth was declared in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1755).
(pp. 400–401) My source for this delivery is Chapter XV, “Conduct of Normal Labor,” Williams Obstetrics, Henricus J. Stander—circa 1936. I base the described procedure on such a dated source—it is performed in my story in 1943—because I wish to emphasize that Homer’s procedure, which has been learned from Dr. Larch, is somewhat old-fashioned but nonetheless correct.
(p. 408) “I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas.” From David Copperfield, Chapter 1 (“I Am Born”). The caul is the membrane that is usually ruptured and expelled at the onset of bearing-down pains but that in rare cases does not rupture—the child coming into the world surrounded by membrane. In the time of Dickens, this protective shroud was taken as a sign that the child would be lucky in life—and, more specifically, never be drowned. In the story of David Copperfield, this is an early indication that our hero will find his way and not meet with the form of poor Steerforth’s undoing (Steerforth drowns).
Homer Wells, very familiar with David Copperfield, is interpreting the drop of sweat that prematurely baptizes his birthing child as having similar protective powers. Homer’s child will be lucky in life; Angel will not drown.
(p. 420) The first edition of Greenhill’s Office Gynecology was published in 1939; the eighth edition of Diseases of Women (Roquist, Clayton and Lewis) was published in 1949.
The medical journals that Larch would always have had on hand—in addition to The New England Journal of Medicine—are The Journal of the American Medical Association (in doctors’ shorthand this is always called JAMA), The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (it has the most vivid illustrations), The Lancet (a British journal), and Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics (in doctors’ shorthand this is always called S, G and O; in 194_, lots of surgeons did gynecology, too).
P.S.
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About the author
Meet John Irving
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John
Irving’s fourth novel and his first international bestseller; it also became a George Roy Hill film. Tony Richardson wrote and directed the adaptation for the screen of The Hotel New Hampshire (1984). Irving’s novels are now translated into thirty-five languages, and he has had nine international bestsellers. Worldwide, the Irving novel most often called “an American classic” is A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), the portrayal of an enduring friendship at that time when the Vietnam War had its most divisive effect on the United States. In 1992, John Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. (He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, until he was thirty-four, and coached the sport until he was forty-seven.) In 2000, Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules—a Lasse Hallström film that earned seven Academy Award nominations. Tod Williams wrote and directed The Door in the Floor—the 2004 film adapted from Mr. Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year. In One Person (2012) is John Irving’s thirteenth novel.
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Read on
An excerpt from A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving’s beloved classic
I
The Foul Ball
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ—and certainly not for Christ, which I’ve heard some zealots claim. I’m not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I’ve not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church. I’m somewhat more familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in The Book of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days—the prayer book is so much more orderly.
I’ve always been a pretty regular churchgoer. I used to be a Congregationalist—I was baptized in the Congregational Church, and after some years of fraternity with Episcopalians (I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, too), I became rather vague in my religion: in my teens I attended a “nondenominational” church. Then I became an Anglican; the Anglican Church of Canada has been my church—ever since I left the United States, about twenty years ago. Being an Anglican is a lot like being an Episcopalian—so much so that being an Anglican occasionally impresses upon me the suspicion that I have simply become an Episcopalian again. Anyway, I left the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians—and my country once and for all.
When I die, I shall attempt to be buried in New Hampshire—alongside my mother—but the Anglican Church will perform the necessary service before my body suffers the indignity of trying to be sneaked through U.S. Customs. My selections from the Order for the Burial of the Dead are entirely conventional and can be found, in the order that I shall have them read—not sung—in The Book of Common Prayer. Almost everyone I know will be familiar with the passages from John, beginning with “. . . whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” And then there’s “. . . in my Father’s house are many mansions: If it were not so, I would have told you.” And I have always appreciated the frankness expressed in that passage from Timothy, the one that goes “. . . we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” It will be a by-the-book Anglican service, the kind that would make my former fellow Congregationalists fidget in their pews. I am an Anglican now, and I shall die an Anglican. But I skip a Sunday service now and then; I make no claims to be especially pious; I have a church-rummage faith—the kind that needs patching up every weekend. What faith I have I owe to Owen Meany, a boy I grew up with. It is Owen who made me a believer.
In Sunday school, we developed a form of entertainment based on abusing Owen Meany, who was so small that not only did his feet not touch the floor when he sat in his chair—his knees did not extend to the edge of his seat; therefore, his legs stuck out straight, like the legs of a doll. It was as if Owen Meany had been born without realistic joints.
Owen was so tiny, we loved to pick him up; in truth, we couldn’t resist picking him up. We thought it was a miracle: how little he weighed. This was also incongruous because Owen came from a family in the granite business. The Meany Granite Quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was heavy and dangerous-looking; granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock. But the only aura of the granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes whenever we lifted him up. He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times—especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon).
His vocal cords had not developed fully, or else his voice had been injured by the rock dust of his family’s business. Maybe he had larynx damage, or a destroyed trachea; maybe he’d been hit in the throat by a chunk of granite. To be heard at all, Owen had to shout through his nose.
Yet he was dear to us—“a little doll,” the girls called him, while he squirmed to get away from them; and from all of us.
I don’t remember how our game of lifting Owen began.
This was Christ Church, the Episcopal Church of Gravesend, New Hampshire. Our Sunday school teacher was a strained, unhappy-looking woman named Mrs. Walker. We thought this name suited her because her method of teaching involved a lot of walking out of class. Mrs. Walker would read us an instructive passage from the Bible. She would then ask us to think seriously about what we had heard—“Silently and seriously, that’s how I want you to think!” she would say. “I’m going to leave you alone with your thoughts, now,” she would tell us ominously—as if our thoughts were capable of driving us over the edge. “I want you to think very hard,” Mrs. Walker would say. Then she’d walk out on us. I think she was a smoker, and she couldn’t allow herself to smoke in front of us. “When I come back,” she’d say, “we’ll talk about it.”
By the time she came back, of course, we’d forgotten everything about whatever it was—because as soon as she left the room, we would fool around with a frenzy. Because being alone with our thoughts was no fun, we would pick up Owen Meany and pass him back and forth, overhead. We managed this while remaining seated in our chairs—that was the challenge of the game. Someone—I forget who started it—would get up, seize Owen, sit back down with him, pass him to the next person, who would pass him on, and so forth. The girls were included in this game; some of the girls were the most enthusiastic about it. Everyone could lift up Owen. We were very careful; we never dropped him. His shirt might become a little rumpled. His necktie was so long, Owen tucked it into his trousers—or else it would have hung to his knees—and his necktie often came untucked; sometimes his change would fall out (in our faces). We always gave him his money back.
If he had his baseball cards with him, they, too, would fall out of his pockets. This made him cross because the cards were alphabetized, or ordered under another system—all the infielders together, maybe. We didn’t know what the system was, but obviously Owen had a system, because when Mrs. Walker came back to the room—when Owen returned to his chair and we passed his nickels and dimes and his baseball cards back to him—he would sit shuffling through the cards with a grim, silent fury.
He was not a good baseball player, but he did have a very small strike zone and as a consequence he was often used as a pinch hitter—not because he ever hit the ball with any authority (in fact, he was instructed never to swing at the ball), but because he could be relied upon to earn a walk, a base on balls. In Little League games he resented this exploitation and once refused to come to bat unless he was allowed to swing at the pitches. But there was no bat small enou
gh for him to swing that didn’t hurl his tiny body after it—that didn’t thump him on the back and knock him out of the batter’s box and flat upon the ground. So, after the humiliation of swinging at a few pitches, and missing them, and whacking himself off his feet, Owen Meany selected that other humiliation of standing motionless and crouched at home plate while the pitcher aimed the ball at Owen’s strike zone—and missed it, almost every time.
Yet Owen loved his baseball cards—and, for some reason, he clearly loved the game of baseball itself, although the game was cruel to him. Opposing pitchers would threaten him. They’d tell him that if he didn’t swing at their pitches, they’d hit him with the ball. “Your head’s bigger than your strike zone, pal,” one pitcher told him. So Owen Meany made his way to first base after being struck by pitches, too.
Once on base, he was a star. No one could run the bases like Owen. If our team could stay at bat long enough, Owen Meany could steal home. He was used as a pinch runner in the late innings, too; pinch runner and pinch hitter Meany—pinch walker Meany, we called him. In the field, he was hopeless. He was afraid of the ball; he shut his eyes when it came anywhere near him. And if by some miracle he managed to catch it, he couldn’t throw it; his hand was too small to get a good grip. But he was no ordinary complainer; if he was self-pitying, his voice was so original in its expression of complaint that he managed to make whining lovable.
In Sunday school, when we held Owen up in the air—especially, in the air!—he protested so uniquely. We tortured him, I think, in order to hear his voice; I used to think his voice came from another planet. Now I’m convinced it was a voice not entirely of this world.
“PUT ME DOWN!” he would say in a strangled, emphatic falsetto. “CUT IT OUT! I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. PUT ME DOWN! YOU ASSHOLES!”
