The Imaginary Girlfriend

by John Irving

  Tom Williams once told me that I had a habit of attributing mythological proportions and legendary status to my characters--he meant before my characters had done anything to earn such attribution. (The same could be said of Garcia Marquez, but in my case Mr. Williams's criticism was valid.) And Kurt Vonnegut once asked me if I thought there was something intrinsically funny about the verbs "peek" and "peer." (What could be "intrinsically funny" about verbs? I thought. But Mr. Vonnegut meant that I overused these verbs to a point of self-conscious cuteness; he was right.)

  When I was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Gail Godwin was a student there, and the future (1989) National Book Award winner, John Casey, was in my class--Gail and John were "taught" by Kurt Vonnegut, too.

  Mr. Casey recently reminded me that Ms. Godwin was, upon her arrival in Iowa City, already a writer to take seriously. Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless.

  "Please leave me alone," Ms. Godwin warned the offending student, "or I shall be forced to wound you with a weapon you can ill afford to be wounded by in a town this small."

  The threat was most mysterious, not to mention writerly, but the oafish lecher was not easily deterred. "And what might that weapon be, little lady?" the lout allegedly asked.

  "Gossip," Gail Godwin replied.

  Andre Dubus and James Crumley were also students at the Writers' Workshop then. I remember a picnic at Vance Bourjaily's farm, where a friendly pie-fight ensued; Dubus or Crumley, bare-chested and reasonably hairy, was struck in the chest by a Boston cream pie. Who threw the pie, and why, escapes my ever-failing memory--I swear I didn't do it. David Plimpton is a possible candidate. Plimpton and I were wrestling teammates at Exeter--he was the team captain a year ahead of me--and our being together in Iowa seemed an unlikely irony to us both. (Plimpton had wrestled at Yale.)

  These were the days before the fabulous Carver-Hawkeye Arena; the Iowa wrestling room was up among the girders of the old fieldhouse. Dave McCuskey was the coach; he was friendly to me, but ever-critical of my physical condition. I was capable of wrestling, hard, with Coach McCuskey's boys, but only for three or four minutes; then I needed to sit down and rest on the mat with my back against the wrestling-room wall. McCuskey frowned upon this behavior: if I wasn't in shape to go head to head with his boys for "the full nine minutes," then I shouldn't be wrestling at all. I was content to shoot takedowns until I got tired; then I'd rest against the wall--and then I'd shoot a few more takedowns. Coach McCuskey didn't like me resting against the wall.

  David Plimpton, who was as out-of-shape as I was, also enjoyed sparring with Coach McCuskey's Iowa wrestlers. Plimpton told me that McCuskey was similarly disapproving of him. From Plimpton's and my point of view, we were making a contribution: we were offering our aging bodies as extra workout partners for McCuskey's kids. But it was Coach McCuskey's wrestling room; he set the tone--and I respected him. No resting against the wall. As a consequence, my appearances (and Plimpton's) in the Iowa wrestling room were sporadic--I went there only when I wanted to punish myself.

  A happy solution might have been for Plimpton and me to wrestle together, but Plimpton had been a 191-pounder at Yale (when I'd been a 130-pounder at Pitt); we'd both put on 15 or 20 pounds since then, but we couldn't wrestle together--there was about a 60-pound difference between us.

  Seven years later, when I would go back to Iowa to teach at the Writers' Workshop, the wrestling room was still in the girders of the old fieldhouse but the atmosphere in the room had changed. Gary Kurdelmeir, a former national champion for Iowa in 1958, was the head coach. In '72, Kurdelmeir's new assistant coach arrived in Iowa City--Dan Gable, fresh from a Gold-Medal performance in the Munich Olympics at 1491/2 pounds. In Kurdelmeir and Gable's wrestling room, there were lots of "graduate students" (as Plimpton and I had been in 1965-67) and other postcollege wrestlers. The years I taught at the Workshop (1972-75) were the beginning of Iowa's dominance of collegiate wrestling under Dan Gable. (As the head coach, Gary Kurdlemeir won two national team titles for Iowa--in '75 and '76--but the head-coaching job would soon be Gable's; he won his first team championship in '78. J. Robinson, now the head coach at the University of Minnesota, became Gable's assistant.)

  Brad Smith, Chuck Yagla, Dan Holm, Chris Campbell--they were all in the Iowa wrestling room at that time, and they would all become national champions. That wrestling room was the most intense wrestling room I have ever seen; yet Gable and Kurdlemeir were happy to have you there, contributing--even if you were good for no more than two minutes before you had to go rest against the wall. In that room, two minutes was all I was good for.

  At several of Iowa's dual meets, I sat beside the former Iowa coach, Dave McCuskey, who was retired; as fellow spectators, Coach McCuskey and I had no philosophical differences of opinion. Everyone admired Gable: with three national collegiate titles at Iowa State (just one loss in his entire college career), he drew a crowd--not only at Iowa's matches but in the wrestling room. Everyone wanted to wrestle with him--if only for two minutes. In those years, I generally chose easier workout partners, but there were no easy workout partners in that Iowa room. Like everyone else, I couldn't resist the occasional thrill (and instant humiliation) of wrestling Dan Gable. I never scored a point on him, of course. In this failure, I was in good company: in the 1972 Olympics at Munich, where Gable won the Gold Medal, none of his opponents scored a point on him either.

  To win the Olympics in freestyle wrestling without losing a single point is akin to winning the men's final at Wimbledon in straight sets, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0; or perhaps a four-game sweep of the World Series, while holding the losing team scoreless. It's rarer still that Gable's dominance as a wrestler has undergone the transition from competitor to coach with equal success: in 1995, Iowa won its fourth NCAA title of the last five years--and its fifteenth national championship of the last 21. In '95, Iowa also captured its 22nd straight Big 10 crown; I believe that's a record for consecutive collegiate championships--in any conference, in any sport. Out of 10 weight classes, the '95 Iowa team advanced seven wrestlers to the semifinal round of the NCAA tournament. Ever the perfectionist, Dan Gable was disappointed: Iowa's 150-pounder and 190-pounder were both defending national champions--in the finals, they both lost.

  It's always the wrestling I remember; it marks the years. My memories of being a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and of being a teacher there, frequently intermingle; I even confuse my fellow students with my students. But I can manage to sort out the years (not only in Iowa) by the workout partners that I had, and by recalling who the coach was--and in which wrestling room I worked out. And possibly it is a testimony to the practical, businesslike atmosphere of the Writers' Workshop that I remember my student days and my teaching days as much the same. I felt fortunate to be at Iowa--in both capacities.

  The Death of a Friend

  Don Hendrie, Jr., who was a classmate of mine at Exeter, although I hardly knew him there, was another student at the Iowa Workshop (in my student days); he is the author of four novels and one collection of short stories--in addition to serving for several years as the director of the graduate writing program at the University of Alabama. The coincidence of my being at Iowa with Don Hendrie is an even more unlikely irony than my being there with David Plimpton, because, when Hendrie and I were students at Exeter, we both sought the affections of the same young woman; she married Hendrie, who in Iowa became my closest friend. Our children would grow up together. When I was teaching and coaching at a small college in Vermont, Hendrie would be teaching at a small college in New Hampshire--about an hour's distance. When he taught at Mount Holyoke College, I followed him there.

  Hendrie had a habit of including the physical descriptions of his friends in his novels, where we would appear as characters under fictional names; this never offended me, because Hendrie's narrative voice was consistently teasin
g and affectionate. My last appearance in a Don Hendrie novel was as a character named Barry Kessler, a screenwriter, in A Survey of the Atlantic Beaches. He saw me as "a rabid, middle-aged athlete given to the long run and the heavy weight."

  We had a lifelong argument about Oscar Wilde--Hendrie liked him, I don't. By the way, I bear no loathing for writers because they are minor; it isn't Wilde's being minor that troubles me. And my dislike of Wilde was never fueled by his homosexuality--that "gross indecency," as it was called in Britain at the time Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison, from which he never recovered. On the contrary, one has to like Oscar Wilde for championing "obscenity," as sodomy was then presumed to be. But what I hate about Wilde is that he was an inferior writer who delighted in aiming his one-liner wit at his superiors; did he so envy Dickens and Flaubert that he felt compelled to scorn them?

  Wilde shouldn't have spent a day in jail for being "obscene," but posterity will relegate Wilde to where he belongs, which is where he can already be most widely found: in coffee-table books of harmless quotations. By comparison, Flaubert and Dickens still have actual readers. (What is ordinary about Wilde is that there's no shortage of writers whose lifestyles are more deserving of attention than their work.)

  I say all this because the centenary of Oscar Wilde's wrongful imprisonment occurred as I was rewriting this memoir; predictably, the centenary was not allowed to pass without all manner of overpraise being heaped upon Wilde. Whereas I was prepared to read that "Wilde's imprisonment ranks as one of literature's greatest tragedies," I was not prepared to suffer the Wilde centenary hyperbole in silence; yet my friend Don Hendrie had died--there was no one else I wanted to argue about Oscar Wilde with.

  Hendrie often found a means of furthering personal disputes in his fiction, which I accepted as a charming eccentricity. "Barry Kessler posed in the doorway with his hands on his hips," Hendrie wrote. "He wore running shoes, fresh white socks to his knees, filmy green shorts, and an immaculate T-shirt with the words Oscar Wilde Sucks' in diminutive letters over the breast pocket. A short man, narrow of waist, large of chest, he had the gone-craggy face of a former (and successful) child actor who had kept his confidence and improved upon it with a great deal of strenuous effort."

  Don Hendrie died in March of '95, just two days before my son Colin's 30th birthday. Suffering from Parkinson's, Hendrie had lost his fine grasp of the language in a stroke four years earlier; his vocabulary had abandoned him. As a fellow writer, I admired how courageous and uncomplaining he was about losing his words. Only a month before he died, we were talking in my house in Vermont, and Hendrie--at a loss for the word he wanted--left the dinner table and walked into the kitchen. There he patiently patted the refrigerator. "This thing," he said, "where the food goes to be cold."

  He had an automobile accident, in Maine, about a week or so later. When he was released from the hospital, he was frail and disoriented; in addition to the debilitation of the Parkinson's, something was wrong with his heart. He spent the night before he died at his ex-mother-in-law's house in Exeter with his elder son; they had breakfast together the next morning, and Hendrie died of a heart attack while walking around the block. He fell over on Front Street, the same street where I had grown up in my grandmother's house. (Hendrie wasn't a native of Exeter; he had attended the academy and married a town girl, but over the years Exeter had become a kind of home to him.)

  It was Hendrie I sold my motorcycle to, when I became a father. We were married within a couple of years of each other; I was an usher at his wedding, in Exeter--the wedding-reception was at the Exeter Inn, which is also on Front Street, where he died. (We were divorced within a couple of years of each other, too.)

  I miss him. And when I think of him, I see him as a student at Iowa when I was a student, too, and we would read aloud what we'd written to each other, and say things of small importance--such as, "Oscar Wilde sucks"--which, of course, were things we thought were of no small importance then.

  I was newly married, and recently a father for the first time; Hendrie was in love, and about to be married--and soon to be a father, too. And, as writers--actually, would-be writers--we were just getting started. We both had jobs in the university library, restacking the returned books. We both had football-season jobs, selling pennants and buttons and stadium cushions and cowhorns and bells at the Iowa home games. We both worked as waiters in a nauseating restaurant out on the Coralville strip. The point is, Hendrie and I saw each other every day, and we were doing a variety of mindless things, but every day we were excited, because we were going to be writers. That's how I want to remember him.

  What Vonnegut Said

  I don't remember my fellow student Tom McHale, the future author of Farragan's Retreat and Principato. I must have met him in Iowa City, but I never really knew him, nor do I recall McHale's "terrific Belgian girlfriend"; the description is John Casey's--John has expressed his surprise that I fail to remember her. (Tom McHale died, an apparent suicide, in 1982; some say he had a heart attack.)

  I do remember Jonathan Penner--tall and particularly striking-looking in profile. I recall him running laps on the indoor track, where I ran every day; in my memory, Penner was a strong and tireless runner--and a lot faster than I was. But my principal attentions at Iowa were given to my developing writing; in writers' memories, real people are often not as clear as our created characters. It wouldn't surprise me if Penner were to ring me up, upon reading this, and tell me that he never ran at all--not one lap. (It would amaze me, however, to hear that Jonathan Penner is a short person.)

  Of course I could phone Andre Dubus and ask him if it was his chest or Crumley's that was splattered with Boston cream pie; I could call David Plimpton and ask him if he threw the pie, and whose chest he hit. But I believe the gaps and even the errors in my memory are truthfulness of another kind: what we fiction writers forget, or what we get wrong, is part of what a "memoir" means to us. (I do recall that Plimpton caused both envy and indignation by selling a short story to one of those magazines that are routinely concealed from wives and children, and that he spent the money on a shotgun, which prompted one sour fellow student to express the hope that Plimpton would use his new weapon on himself.)

  And what of my classmates at Iowa who did not become writers? One of them is a high-school English teacher, and one of them is a law-school professor, and another one is a clinical psychologist. (The psychologist is David Plimpton.)

  In addition to the many published writers among my students at Iowa, my two best students at Bread Loaf, Patty Dann and Elisabeth Hyde, and my best student at Brandeis, Carol Markson, are working novelists. But what about those Creative Writing students of mine--not only at Iowa but elsewhere--who did not go forth to take the literary world by storm? One of them is a highly respected editor in a venerable New York publishing house; another makes a rather good living writing Westerns; a third is the headmaster of a distinguished private school; many are English teachers, at both the high-school and the college level; and last but not least--in fact, this is someone I am particularly proud of--is a champion-class female bodybuilder, Karen Andes, who has written a book about strength conditioning for women. I was not of much help to Karen with her first novel, which remains unpublished, but I was the first person who took her to a gym and put a dumbbell in her hand. Now I am learning from her, for--at my age (I am 53)--a book about strength conditioning for female bodybuilders is considerably above my present capacities.

  Yet what I remember best about being a student at Iowa was that sense of myself as being married, and being a father. It separated me from the majority of the other students; they had the time to talk about writing--my impression was that they talked about it endlessly. Except with Hendrie, I had no time for talking; I taught only one undergraduate writing course but I had three part-time jobs. When I wasn't working, I was either looking after my son Colin or I was writing.

  We didn't have a television. When there was something of interest on TV, I put
Colin in the stroller and walked around the block to the Vonneguts' house. It was in Kurt's house that I watched the Six Day War, holding Colin on my lap. It was on the occasion of another television event, with Colin again on my lap or destroying some household possession of the Vonneguts', that I remember having a conversation with Kurt about what I would do to support my writing habit.

  Teachers and coaches had been good to me, Kurt included. I presumed I would get a teaching job, and I would coach wrestling. I certainly had no illusions about my writing being self-supporting. I told Kurt that I wasn't going to make myself miserable by even imagining that I would make a living from my writing.

  "You may be surprised," Vonnegut told me. "I think capitalism is going to treat you okay."

  The Ph.D. Vote

  My first teaching job was at Windham College (now defunct) in Putney, Vermont. Windham was one of those colleges that prospered, briefly, during the time of the Vietnam War; it was richly populated with students who wouldn't have been students if they hadn't been trying to stay out of Vietnam, but some of these nonstudents were the best Creative Writing students I ever had--and one real student among them was my future business manager, Willard Saperston. When the war was over, Windham folded, but by then I had already resigned.

  There was no wrestling team at Windham when I came there. I prevailed upon the college to buy a wrestling mat, which I installed in a former storage room of the fieldhouse, where I coached wrestling as a so-called club sport. About a half-dozen former high-school wrestlers, including a couple of Vietnam vets, were the core of the club; compared to every wrestling room I had ever worked out in, it was unsatisfactory, but I had my workout partners--I couldn't complain.