The World According to Garp

by John Irving

  "I've done all I want to do about me, already," Jenny told her son. "Now I'm interested in other people. You just worry about you," she said, gravely, as if in her opinion her son's introversion--his imaginative life--was the more dangerous way to live.

  Helen actually feared this, too--especially when Garp wasn't writing; and for more than a year after Second Wind of the Cuckold, Garp didn't write. Then he wrote for a year and threw it all away. He wrote letters to his editor; they were the most difficult letters John Wolf ever had to read, much less answer. Some of them were ten and twelve pages long; most of them accused John Wolf of not "pushing" Second Wind of the Cuckold as hard as he could have.

  "Everyone hated it," John Wolf reminded Garp. "How could we have pushed it?"

  "You never supported the book," Garp wrote.

  Helen wrote John Wolf that he must be patient with Garp, but John Wolf knew writers pretty well and he was as patient and as kind as he could be.

  Eventually, Garp wrote letters to other people. He answered some of his mother's hate mail--those rare cases with return addresses. He wrote long letters trying to talk these people out of their hatred. "You're becoming a social worker," Helen told him. But Garp even offered to answer some of Roberta Muldoon's hate mail; Roberta had a new lover, however, and her hate mail was rolling off her like water.

  "Jesus," Garp complained to her, "first a sex reassignment and now you're in love. For a tight end with tits, you're really boring, Roberta." They were very good friends and they played squash fervently whenever Roberta and Jenny came to town, but this was not frequently enough to occupy all of Garp's restless time. He spent hours playing games with Duncan--and waiting for Walt to get old enough to play games, too. He cooked up a storm.

  "The third novel's the big one," John Wolf told Helen, because he sensed she was wearying of Garp's restlessness and she was in need of a pep talk. "Give him time, it will come."

  "How's he know the third novel's the big one?" Garp fumed. "My third novel doesn't even exist. And the way it was published, my second novel might as well not exist. These editors are full of myths and self-fulfilling prophecies! If he knows so much about third novels, why doesn't he write his own third novel? Why doesn't he write his first?"

  But Helen smiled and kissed him and took up going to the movies with him, although she hated movies. She was happy with her job; the kids were happy. Garp was a good father and a good cook and he made love to her more elaborately when he wasn't writing than he did when he was hard at work. Let it come, Helen thought.

  Her father, good old Ernie Holm, had shown signs of early heart trouble, but her father was happy at Steering. He and Garp took a trip together, every winter, to see one of those big wrestling matches out in Iowa. Helen was sure that Garp's writing block was a small thing to endure.

  "It will come," Alice Fletcher told Garp, on the phone. "You can't forth it."

  "I'm not trying to force anything," he assured her. "There's just nothing there." But he thought that desirable Alice, who could never finish anything--not even her love for him--was a poor one to understand what he meant.

  Then Garp got some hate mail of his own. He was addressed in a lively letter by someone who took offense at Second Wind of the Cuckold. It was not a blind, stuttering, spastic farter--as you might imagine--either. It was just what Garp needed to lift himself out of his slump.

  Dear Shithead,

  [wrote the offended party]

  I have read your novel. You seem to find other people's problems very funny. I have seen your picture. With your fat head of hair I suppose you can laugh at bald persons. And in your cruel book you laugh at people who can't have orgasms, and people who aren't blessed with happy marriages, and people whose wives and husbands are unfaithful to each other. You ought to know that persons who have these problems do not think everything is so funny. Look at the world, shithead--it is a bed of pain, people suffering and nobody believing in God or bringing their children up right. You shithead, you don't have any problems so you can make fun of poor people who do!

  Yours sincerely,

  (Mrs.) I. B. Poole

  Findlay, Ohio

  That letter stung Garp like a slap; rarely had he felt so importantly misunderstood. Why did people insist that if you were "comic" you couldn't also be "serious"? Garp felt most people confused being profound with being sober, being earnest with being deep. Apparently, if you sounded serious, you were. Presumably, other animals could not laugh at themselves, and Garp believed that laughter was related to sympathy, which we were always needing more of. He had been, after all, a humorless child--and never religious--so perhaps he now took comedy more seriously than others.

  But for Garp to see his vision interpreted as making fun of people was painful to him; and to realize that his art had made him appear cruel gave Garp a keen sense of failure. Very carefully, as if he were speaking to a potential suicide high up in a foreign and unfamiliar hotel, Garp wrote to his reader in Findlay, Ohio.

  Dear Mrs. Poole:

  The world is a bed of pain, people suffer terribly, few of us believe in God or bring up our children very well; you're right about that. It is also true that people who have problems do not, as a rule, think their problems are "funny."

  Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel. I hope you'll agree with me that Horace Walpole somewhat simplifies the world by saying this. Surely both of us think and feel; in regard to what's comic and what's tragic, Mrs. Poole, the world is all mixed up. For this reason I have never understood why "serious" and "funny" are thought to be opposites. It is simply a truthful contradiction to me that people's problems are often funny and that the people are often and nonetheless sad.

  I am ashamed, however, that you think I am laughing at people, or making fun of them. I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave--and nothing but laughter to console them with.

  Laughter is my religion, Mrs. Poole. In the manner of most religions, I admit that my laughter is pretty desperate. I want to tell you a little story to illustrate what I mean. The story takes place in Bombay, India, where many people starve to death every day; but not all the people in Bombay are starving.

  Among the nonstarving population of Bombay, India, there was a wedding, and a party was thrown in honor of the bride and groom. Some of the wedding guests brought elephants to the party. They weren't really conscious of showing off, they were just using the elephants for transportation. Although that may strike us as a big-shot way to travel around, I don't think these wedding guests saw themselves that way. Most of them were probably not directly responsible for the vast numbers of their fellow Indians who were starving all around them; most of them were just calling "time out" from their own problems, and the problems of the world, to celebrate the wedding of a friend. But if you were a member of the starving Indians, and you hobbled past that wedding party and saw all those elephants parked outside, you probably would have felt some disgruntlement.

  Furthermore, some of the revelers at the wedding got drunk and began feeding beer to their elephant. They emptied an ice bucket and filled it with beer, and they went tittering out to the parking lot and fed their hot elephant the whole bucket. The elephant liked it. So the revelers gave him several more buckets of beer.

  Who knows how beer will affect an elephant? These people meant no harm, they were just having fun--and chances are fairly good that the rest of their lives weren't one hundred percent fun. They probably needed this party. But the people were also being stupid and irresponsible.

  If one of those many starving Indians had dragged himself through the parking lot and seen these drunken wedding guests filling up an elephant with beer, I'll bet he would have felt resentful. But I hope you see I am not making fun of anyone.

  What happens next is that the drunken revelers are asked to leave the party because their behavior with their elephant is
obnoxious to the other wedding guests. No one can blame the other guests for feeling this way; some of them may have actually thought that they were preventing things from getting "out of hand," although people have never been very successful at preventing this.

  Huffy and brave with beer, the revelers struggled up on their elephant and veered away from the parking lot--a large exhibition of happiness, surely--bumping into a few other elephants and things, because the revelers' elephant plowed from side to side in a lumbering wooze, bleary and bloated with buckets of beer. His trunk lashed back and forth like a badly fastened artificial limb. The great beast was so unsteady that he struck an electric utility pole, shearing it cleanly and bringing down the live wires on his massive head--which killed him, and the wedding guests who were riding him, instantly.

  Mrs. Poole, please believe me: I don't think that's "funny." But along comes one of those starving Indians. He sees all the wedding guests mourning the death of their friends, and their friends' elephant; much wailing, rending of fine clothes, spilling of good food and drink. The first thing he does is to take the opportunity to slip into the wedding while the guests are distracted and steal a little of the good food and drink for his starving family. The second thing he does is start to laugh himself sick about the manner in which the revelers disposed of themselves and their elephant. Alongside death by starvation, this method of enormous dying must seem funny, or at least quick, to the undernourished Indian. But the wedding guests don't see it that way. It is already a tragedy to them; they are already talking about "this tragic event," and although they could perhaps forgive the presence of a "mangy beggar" at their party--and even have tolerated his stealing their food--they cannot forgive him for laughing at their dead friends and their dead friends' elephant.

  The wedding guests--outraged at the beggar's behavior (at his laughter, not his thievery and not his rags)--drown him in one of the beer buckets that the late revelers used to water their elephant. They construe this to represent "justice." We see that the story is about the class struggle--and, of course, "serious," after all. But I like to consider it a comedy about a natural disaster: they are just people rather foolishly attempting to "take charge" of a situation whose complexity is beyond them--a situation composed of eternal and trivial parts. After all, with something as large as an elephant, it could have been much worse.

  I hope, Mrs. Poole, that I have made what I mean clearer to you. In any case, I thank you for taking the time to write to me, because I appreciate hearing from my audience--even critically.

  Yours truly,

  "Shithead"

  Garp was an excessive man. He made everything baroque, he believed in exaggeration; his fiction was also extremist. Garp never forgot his failure with Mrs. Poole; she worried him, often, and her reply to his pompous letter must have upset him further.

  Dear Mr. Garp,

  [Mrs. Poole replied]

  I never thought you would take the trouble to write me a letter. You must be a sick man. I can see by your letter that you believe in yourself, and I guess that's good. But the things you say are mostly garbage and nonsense to me, and I don't want you to try to explain anything to me again, because it is boring and an insult to my intelligence.

  Yours,

  Irene Poole

  Garp was, like his beliefs, self-contradictory. He was very generous with other people, but he was horribly impatient. He set his own standards for how much of his time and patience everyone deserved. He could be painstakingly sweet, until he decided he'd been sweet enough. Then he turned and came roaring back the other way.

  Dear Irene:

  [Garp wrote to Mrs. Poole]

  You should either stop trying to read books, or you should try a lot harder.

  Dear Shithead,

  [wrote Irene Poole]

  My husband says that if you write to me again, he'll beat your brains to a pulp.

  Very sincerely,

  Mrs. Fitz Poole

  Dear Fitzy & Irene:

  [Garp shot right back]

  Fuck you.

  Thus was his sense of humor lost, and his sympathy taken from the world.

  In "The Pension Grillparzer" Garp had somehow struck the chord of comedy (on the one hand) and compassion (on the other). The story did not belittle the people in the story--either with forced cuteness or with any other exaggeration rational ized as necessary for making a point. Neither did the story sentimentalize the people, or otherwise cheapen their sadness.

  But the balance of this power in storytelling felt lost to Garp now. His first novel, Procrastination--in his opinion--suffered from the pretentious weight of all that fascist history he had taken no real part in. His second novel suffered his failure at imagining enough--that is, he felt he had not imagined far enough beyond his own fairly ordinary experience. Second Wind of the Cuckold came off rather coldly to him; it seemed just another "real" but rather common experience.

  In fact, it seemed to Garp now that he was too full of his own lucky life (with Helen and their children). He felt he was in danger of limiting his ability as a writer in a fairly usual way: writing, essentially, about himself. Yet when he looked very far outside himself, Garp saw there only the invitation to pretention. His imagination was failing him--"his sense a dim rushlight." When anyone asked him how his writing was coming, he managed only a short, cruel imitation of poor Alice Fletcher.

  "I've thtopped," Garp said.

  9

  THE ETERNAL HUSBAND

  In the Yellow Pages of Garp's phone directory, Marriage was listed near Lumber. After Lumber came Machine Shops, Mail Order Houses, Manholes, Maple Sugar, and Marine Equipment; then came Marriage and Family Counselors. Garp was looking for Lumber when he discovered Marriage; he had some innocent questions to ask about two-by-fours when Marriage caught his eye and raised more interesting and disturbing questions. Garp had never realized, for example, that there were more marriage counselors than lumberyards. But this surely depends on where you live, he thought. In the country, wouldn't people have more to do with lumber?

  Garp had been married nearly eleven years; in that time he had found little use for lumber, still less for counsel. It was not for personal problems that Garp took an interest in the long list of names in the Yellow Pages; it was because Garp spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it would be like to have a job.

  There was the Christian Counseling Center and the Community Pastoral Counseling Service; Garp imagined hearty ministers with their dry, fleshy hands constantly rubbing together. They spoke round, moist sentences, like soap bubbles, saying things like, "We have no illusions that the Church can be of very much assistance to individual problems, such as your own. Individuals must seek individual solutions, they must retain their individuality; however, it is our experience that many people have identified their own special individuality in the church."

  There sat the baffled couple who had hoped to discuss the simultaneous orgasm--myth or reality?

  Garp noticed that members of the clergy went in for counseling; there was a Lutheran Social Service, there was a Reverend Dwayne Kuntz (who was "certified") and a Louise Nagle who was an "All Souls Minister" associated with something called the United States Bureau of Marriage & Family Counselors (who had "certified" her). Garp took a pencil and drew little zeroes beside the names of the marriage counselors with religious affiliations. They would all offer fairly optimistic counsel, Garp believed.

  He was less sure of the point of view of the counselors with more "scientific" training; he was less sure of the training, too. One was a "certified clinical psychologist," another simply followed his name with "M.A., Clinical"; Garp knew that these things could mean anything, and that they could also mean nothing. A graduate student in sociology, a former business major. One said "B.S."--perhaps in Botany. One was a Ph.D.--in marriage? One was a "Doctor"--but a medical doctor or a Doctor of Philosophy? At marriage counseling, who would be better? One specialized in "group therapy"; someone, perhaps less ambitious,
promised only "psychological evaluation."

  Garp selected two favorites. The first was Dr. O. Rothrock--"self-esteem workshop; bank cards accepted."

  The second was M. Neff--"by appointment only." There was just a phone number after M. Neff's name. No qualifications, or supreme arrogance? Perhaps both. If I needed anybody, Garp thought, I would try M. Neff first. Dr. O. Rothrock with his bank cards and his self-esteem workshop was clearly a charlatan. But Mr. Neff was serious; M. Neff had a vision, Garp could tell.

  Garp wandered a bit past Marriage in the Yellow Pages. He came to Masonry, Maternity Apparel, and Mat Refinishing (only one listing, an out-of-town, Steering phone number: Garp's father-in-law, Ernie Holm, refinished wrestling mats as a slightly profitable hobby. Garp hadn't been thinking about his old coach; he passed over Mat Refinishing to Mattresses without recognizing Ernie's name). Then came Mausoleums and Meat Cutting Equipment--"See Saws." That was enough. The world was too complicated. Garp wandered back to Marriage.

  Then Duncan came home from school. Garp's older son was now ten years old; he was a tall boy with Helen Garp's bony, delicate face and her oval yellow-brown eyes. Helen had skin of a light-oak color and Duncan had her wonderful skin, too. From Garp he had gotten his nervousness, his stubbornness, his moods of black self-pity.

  "Dad?" he said. "Can I spend the night at Ralph's? It's very important."

  "What?" Garp said. "No. When?"

  "Have you been reading the phone book again?" Duncan asked his father. Whenever Garp read a phone book, Duncan knew, it was like trying to wake him up from a nap. He read the phone book often, for names. Garp got the names of his characters out of the phone book; when his writing was stuck, he read the phone book for more names; he revised the names of his characters over and over again. When Garp traveled, the first thing he looked for in the motel room was the phone book; he usually stole it.

  "Dad?" Duncan said; he assumed his father was in his phone book trance, living the lives of his fictional people. Garp had actually forgotten that he had nonfictional business with the phone book today; he had forgotten about the lumber and was thinking only about the audacity of M. Neff and what it would be like to be a marriage counselor. "Dad!" Duncan said. "If I don't call Ralph back before supper, his mother won't let me come over."