Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  I was last in Vienna to promote the German translation of A Prayer for Owen Meany, and I got in trouble with the media for saying these things; at the time, the revelations about Kurt Waldheim's role in World War II appeared to have enhanced Waldheim's popularity in Vienna -- and I said so. I doubt I'll go back to Vienna again.

  When I was a student there, Freud's former apartment and office at 19 Berggasse was not open to the public; only the persistent efforts of Freud's daughter finally forced the Austrian government to let the modest Wohnung at 19 Berggasse stand for what it is: a most moving museum of an intellectual life interrupted by Nazi doctrine.

  Freud was not mistaken to call Arthur Schnitzler a "colleague" in the study of the "underestimated and much-maligned erotic"; in my student days, this was doubtless the source of my fondness for Schnitzler -- the "underestimated and much-maligned erotic," which Schnitzler often juxtaposed with the oppressive but slowly changing social order of fin-de-siecle Vienna. But even The Road into the Open (1908) was steeped in the same sexually oppressive atmosphere that Eric Ross and I would encounter in Vienna more than half a century later.

  Observe young Baron Georg von Wergenthin looking out a window. "Outside, the park was rather empty. On a bench sat an old woman wearing an outmoded coat with black glass pearls. A governess walked by, a little boy on her hand, and another person, much smaller and in a hussar's uniform, with his saber buckled on and a pistol at his side, walked ahead, looked proudly around himself, and saluted an invalid who came down the path smoking. Deeper in the garden, around the kiosk, a few people sat drinking coffee and reading newspapers. The foliage was still rather thick, and the park seemed oppressed, dusty, and on the whole more summerlike than usual in late September." (Two pages later, young Georg is thinking about "the masquerade at the Ehrenbergs" and remembering "Sissy's fleeting kiss under the black lace of her mask.")

  True, the small man in the hussar's uniform with his saber and pistol was gone from the Stadtpark by the time Eric Ross and I arrived in Vienna, but the

  "oppressed" atmosphere was largely unchanged. Eric and I used to study in the evenings in a bar where the prostitutes waited for their customers out of the cold. Our landlady turned off the heat at night, and the coffeehouses frequented by students were too noisy for studying; besides, the Viennese students were too proper to be seen in a bar used by prostitutes-- except for the one or two well-to-do students who would appear at the bar in order to select a prostitute. (These students were always embarrassed to be seen by Eric or me.) As for the prostitutes, they recognized from the beginning that Eric and I could not afford their more intimate company. Occasionally, there was an older one -- my mother's age -- who would help me with my German.

  Baron von Wergenthin might first have attracted my interest in The Road into the Open because of his ceaseless fantasizing about women -- and the ongoing difficulty of his relationships with them -- but young Georg was also a Christian aristocrat whose principal friendships were with Jewish intellectuals, at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise. By the time Eric Ross and I arrived in Vienna, anti-Semitism had not only risen, it had arrived -- and it was intractable. It was also much more vulgar than my encounters with it in Schnitzler.

  Witness Georg's meeting with Willy Eissler in the Stadtpark. It is subtly uncomfortable how Willy defends his Jewishness. He says: "The fact that I once had differences with Captain Ladisc cannot keep me from observing that he's always been a drunken pig. I have an insurmountable revulsion, irredeemable even by blood, against people who associate with Jews when it's to their advantage, but who begin to revile them as soon as they're outside on the steps.

  One could at least wait until one got to the coffeehouse."

  Later, Baron von Wergenthin reflects that "he found it almost strange, as he often had before, that Willy was Jewish. The older Eissler, Willy's father, composer of charming Viennese waltzes and songs, distinguished art and antique collector and sometime dealer, with his giant's physique, had been known in his time as the foremost boxer in Vienna, and, with his long, full, gray beard and monocle, resembled more a Hungarian magnate than a Jewish patriarch. But talent, dilettantism, and an iron will had given Willy the affected image of a born cavalier. But what really distinguished him from other young people of his background and aspirations was the fact that he was content not to renounce his heritage; he pursued an explanation or reconciliation for every ambiguous smile, and in the face of pettiness or prejudice, by which he often appeared to be affected, he refused to make light of it whenever possible."

  By the time Eric Ross and I arrived in Vienna, the anti-Semitism had long been administered by means more severe than the "ambiguous smile"; it had degenerated to base thuggery -- it was impossible "to make light of it." Skinheads with swastika earrings, while not unusual, were not commonplace; what were commonplace were the shy citizens who looked away from the skinheads, pretending not to have seen them. As young, idealistic Americans, Eric and I could do no more than hold up a mirror to this inexplicable tolerance of intolerance. More than 30 years later, it is still a frequent topic of conversation between Eric and me: not simple intolerance but the tolerance of intolerance, which allows the intolerance to persist.

  Eric Ross went into the advertising business in Chicago; then he moved to Crested Butte, Colorado, where he was a ski patrolman and a folksinger for many years. Eric still lives in Crested Butte, where he is a tireless contributor (both as an actor and a director) to the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre; and he's back writing ads again, when he's not writing letters to me -- he's a most faithful correspondent. We try to see each other every year, together with our mutual best friend, David Warren. David is from Ithaca, New York -- he was Eric's and my nearly constant companion in Vienna, and the best student among us.

  Eric had the best motorcycle -- a German Horex. However, the Horex lacked a kickstand, which for reasons peculiar to Eric was never replaced; the Horex was always falling down. My motorcycle was second-best among our three: a Yugoslavian Jawa -- or maybe it was Czech? And David drove a terrible Triumph; it was always dying on him -- it preferred stranding him on the autobahn to other places.

  Anyway, for no good reason -- except that I had gotten away (far away) from New Hampshire -- I started to write. I had Ted Seabrooke and John Yount to thank for the move.

  It was also John Yount who encouraged me to stay in Europe, at a later time (that same year) when I was homesick; I was missing, among other things, both wrestling and a girlfriend who would become my first wife. I had met Shyla Leary in Cambridge in the summer of '63, just before I left for Vienna -- I was taking a crash course in German at Harvard summer school. It seems idiotic, but I think it's fairly common that we meet people of importance to us just before we are going away somewhere. Within a year, in the summer of '64, I would marry her -- in Greece.

  "Stay in Europe for a while," Mr. Yount wrote to me. "Melancholy is good for the soul."

  Surely this was good and true advice, and beyond the call of duty of Creative Writing teachers. I see now that John Yount was, if not my first mentor, the first writer I was conscious of as a mentor; he made a world of difference to me -- largely by impressing upon me that anything I did except writing would be unsatisfying. Even so, I didn't take his advice -- I didn't stay in Europe.

  I had tried another language, and I was uncomfortable with it; English was my only language, and -- as a writer -- I wanted it to be the language I lived with. Besides, Shyla and I had returned to Vienna from Greece -- and she was already pregnant with Colin. I wanted to be a father, but only in my own country.

  No Vietnam; No More Motorcyles

  When I came back to the States, and to the University of New Hampshire, it was another writer who took me under his wing. Thomas Williams was much more to me than a teacher; his wife, Liz, would be the godmother of my first child, and Mr. Williams remained, until his death, my sternest and most passionate critic. Tom had a lifelong quarrel with my fondness for imitation -- specif
ically, for imitating the narrative voices of many 19th-century novelists. He would not infrequently write in the margins of my manuscripts: "Who are you imitating now?" But his affection for me was genuine, as was mine for him; and his loyalty to me, when other critics would attack me, was steadfast. Tom Williams was a good friend, and it was on the strength of his reputation and his recommendation that I was given a teaching-writing fellowship to attend the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. (Already married as an undergraduate, and with one child, I could not have afforded Iowa without the fellowship.) And it was Tom's agent who sold my first short story to Redbook for a whopping, at the time, $1,000. This sale occurred before I graduated from the University of New Hampshire, which caused me to be cordially loathed by my fellow students. But I was on my way to Iowa -- what did I care?

  That year in New Hampshire (my last) was a watershed for me. Not only did I become a published writer and a father, but the birth of my son Colin would change my draft status to 3A -- "married with child" -- which would forever isolate me from the dilemma facing my generation of American males; I would never have to make up my mind about Vietnam, because I couldn't be drafted. If Colin kept me out of Vietnam, the combination of being married and a father, and my return to the world of wrestling, kept me from experimenting with the most seductive hallmarks of my '60s generation: sex and drugs. I was a husband and a daddy and a jock -- and, only recently, a writer.

  I had just turned 23 when Colin was born. It was late March, which is not spring in New Hampshire. I remember driving my motorcycle home from the hospital. (A friend had driven Shyla to the hospital, because I'd been in class -- in Tom Williams's Creative Writing class.) I remember watching out for the patches of ice and snow that were still evident on the roads; I drove home very slowly, put the motorcycle in the garage, and never drove it again -- I would sell it that summer. It was a 750cc Royal Enfield, black and chrome, with a customized tomato-red gas tank the shape of a teardrop -- I would never miss it. I was a father; fathers didn't drive motorcycles.

  The night Colin was born, George Bennett died in the same hospital; I have called George my first "critic and encourager" -- he was my first reader. I remember going back and forth in the hospital between Shyla and Colin and George. During the years I'd grown up in Exeter, especially before I attended the academy, George's son had been my best friend. (I would dedicate my first novel in memory of George, and to his widow and son.)

  George Bennett took me to my first Ingmar Bergman film; it would have been 1958 or '59 when I saw The Seventh Seal -- the movie was almost new (it was released in the U.S. in '57). It's not psychologically complicated why, when Death came for George, I saw Death as that relentless chess player in the black robe (Bengt Ekerot) who defeats the Knight (Max von Sydow) and claims the lives of the Knight's wife and the Knight's squire, too.

  I have since read that The Seventh Seal is a "medieval fantasy," and this I don't understand at all... well, "medieval," maybe, although most of Bergman's work is timeless to me. But The Seventh Seal is no "fantasy." That Death takes the Knight and allows the young family to live ... well, that was how it happened to me, too. At the moment my son Colin was born, George was gone.

  In 1982, when Ingmar Bergman retired as a filmmaker -- with Fanny and Alexander, the stunning memoir of his childhood -- I felt another loss. Bergman was the only major novelist making movies. My interest in the movies, which was never great, has grown fainter since his retirement. I hope that Mr. Bergman is happy in the theater (where he continues to direct), although I have difficulty seeing him there -- my interest in the theater was never great either.

  Not Even A Zebra

  Upon my return from Europe, Ted Seabrooke had made me feel welcome in the Exeter wrestling room, but something had changed in me; I was so happy to be wrestling again I didn't care how I compared to the competition -- I didn't enter a single tournament. I worked out, hard, every day; I coached the kids at Exeter -- I thought more about their wrestling than I did about mine -- and I became certified as a referee. (I'd always disliked referees until I became one.)

  That winter of '65, there was an additional wrestling coach in the Exeter room -- a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, Cliff Gallagher. Cliff was the famous Ed Gallagher's brother. (Between 1928 and 1940, E. C. Gallagher coached Oklahoma State to 11 national team titles.) Born in Kansas, Cliff had wrestled at Oklahoma A & M -- he was never beaten in a wrestling match -- and he'd played football at Kansas State (he was a All-American halfback). Cliff had once held the world record in the 50-yard low hurdles, too, and he'd received a doctorate from Kansas State in 1921--in veterinary medicine, although he'd never been a practicing veterinarian. Cliff Gallagher was also a certified referee. We frequently refereed tournaments together.

  As a wrestling coach, Cliff was a little dangerous; he showed the Exeter boys a great number of holds that had been illegal for many years -- the key-lock, the Japanese wrist-lock, various choke-holds and other holds that dated from a time when it had been legal to coax your opponent to his back by applying pain or the threat of asphyxiation instead of leverage. Ted explained to me that he always allowed Cliff to demonstrate these holds to the boys; at some point, following Cliffs demonstration, Ted would quietly take the time to tell the boys: "Not that one." The boys, of course, were eager to learn anything new, and Cliff had much to teach that I'd never seen before; some of Cliffs holds were new to Ted, too.

  We had to be on our toes in the Exeter wrestling room that year. There would be some kid twisting another kid's head off, and Ted or I would jump in and break it up. We'd always ask, "Did Cliff show you that?"

  "Yes, sir," the boy would say. "I think it's called a Bulgarian head-and-elbow." Whatever it was called, Ted or I would put a stop to it, but we would never have criticized Cliff for his efforts -- Cliff was having a great time, and we adored him. So did the kids -- I'm sure they were putting the Bulgarian head-and-elbow to good use, probably in their dormitories.

  As a referee, Cliff was completely reliable. He had all the right instincts for when to stop a potentially dangerous situation, for how to anticipate an injury before it happened; he always knew where the edge of the mat was -- and which wrestler was using it, to what advantage -- and he never called stalling on the wrong wrestler (he always knew who was stalling). It was a mystery to me how Cliff had memorized the rule book; as a referee, he permitted not a single illegal hold. (As a coach, Cliff Gallagher taught every move and hold he knew -- legal or not.) Cliff taught me to be much better as a referee than I'd ever been as a wrestler. Refereeing is all technique; unlike wrestling, refereeing doesn't call upon superior athletic ability -- or expose the lack thereof.

  I will always remember a maniacally mismanaged high-school tournament in Maine -- Cliff and I were the only actual wrestlers among our fellow referees. In the preliminary rounds, Cliff and I were also the only referees who penalized a headlock without the arm contained -- if you lock up a man's head, you're supposed to include one of his arms in the headlock. To encircle your opponent's head -- just his head -- is illegal. For the benefit of the assembled coaches and our fellow referees, Cliff put on a clinic between rounds; he made special emphasis of the headlock with an arm. This information was dismaying to the other referees, and to most of the coaches. One of them said, "It's too late in the season to be showin' 'em somethin' new."

  "It's not new, it's legal," Cliff said.

  "It's new, too," the guy said -- I don't remember if he was a coach or a referee. In any case, he expressed the sentiment of the majority: they'd been using and accepting an illegal headlock all season -- probably for years -- and it was nothing but a nuisance to them to enforce the rule now.

  "Johnny and I are calling the illegal headlock -- is that clear enough?" Cliff told them. And so we did.

  The points for a repeated illegal hold can mount against a wrestler quickly. Repeated violations lead to disqualification. In no time, Cliff and I were penalizing and disqualifying half the state
of Maine. (We "disqualified" a few coaches who protested, too.) In the semifinals, I also disqualified a heavyweight for deliberately throwing his opponent on top of the scorer's table; I had twice warned and penalized this wrestler for continuing to wrestle off the mat -- after the whistle blew. I'd even asked his coach if the heavyweight in question was deaf.

  "No, he's just a little stupid," his coach replied.

  When I disqualified the heavyweight, his parents came out of the stands and confronted me in the middle of the mat. I had no trouble recognizing who they were -- they didn't have to introduce themselves. At a glance, I could see they'd swum forth from the same gene pool for enormity that had spawned their son. Cliff saved me.

  "If you understand nothing else, you can understand one rule," Cliff told the heavyweight's parents. "It's just one rule and I'm only going to tell you once." (I could see that he had their attention.) "This is a mat," Cliff said, pointing to where we were standing. "And that," Cliff said -- pointing to the scorer's table where the heavyweight had thrown his opponent -- "that is a goddamn table. In wrestling," Cliff said, "we do it on the mat. That's the rule." The heavyweight's parents shuffled away without a word. Cliff and I were alive until the finals.

  The finals were at night. Scary people from the middle of Maine emerged in the night. (My good friend Stephen King doesn't make up everything; he knows the people I mean.) The fans for the finals that night made the disqualified heavyweight's parents seem mildly civilized. In rebellion over the illegal headlock, our fellow referees had gone home; Cliff and I alternated refereeing the weight classes for the finals. When he was refereeing, I was the mat judge; Cliff was the mat judge when I was out on the mat refereeing. A mat judge can (but usually doesn't) overrule a referee's call; in a flurry of moves, sometimes the mat judge sees something the referee misses -- for example, illegally locked hands in the top position -- and in the area of determining the points scored (or not) on the edge of the mat, before the wrestlers are out of bounds, the mat judge can be especially effective.