A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  The front door opened behind them, and Harry stood sweating in the doorway, holding his beloved splitting wedge. Eddie would have introduced Marion to Harry, but suddenly—at the kitchen-end of the front hall—there was Ruth. She’d just washed her hair. “Hi!” Ruth said to Eddie. Then she saw her mother.

  From the doorway, Harry said: “It’s a buyer for the house. An actual buyer.” But Ruth didn’t hear him.

  “Hello, honey,” Marion said to Ruth.

  “Mommy . . .” Ruth managed to say.

  Graham ran to Ruth. The four-year-old was still the age for clinging to her hips, which he did, and Ruth instinctively bent to pick him up. But her whole body stopped; she simply didn’t have the strength to lift him. Ruth rested one hand on Graham’s small shoulder; with the back of her other hand, she made a halfhearted attempt to wipe away her tears. Then she stopped trying—she let the tears come.

  In the doorway, the artful Dutchman didn’t move. Harry knew better than to move.

  Hannah was wrong, Eddie knew. There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments.

  “Don’t cry, honey,” Marion told her only daughter. “It’s just Eddie and me.”

  For Janet,

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful for my many visits to Amsterdam during the four years I spent writing this novel, and I’m especially indebted to the patience and generosity of brigadier Joep de Groot of the District 2 police; without Joep’s advice, this book couldn’t have been written. I’m also indebted to the help given me by Margot Alvarez, formerly of De Rode Draad—an organization for prostitutes’ rights in Amsterdam. And most of all—for the time and care that he devoted to the manuscript—I want to thank Robbert Ammerlaan, my Dutch publisher. Regarding the Amsterdam sections in this book, I owe these three Amsterdammers incalculable thanks. For what I may have managed to get right, the credit belongs to them; if there are errors, the fault is mine.

  As for the numerous parts of this novel not set in Amsterdam, I have relied on the expertise of Anna von Planta in Geneva, Anne Freyer in Paris, Ruth Geiger in Zurich, Harvey Loomis in Sagaponack, and Alison Gordon in Toronto. I must also cite the attention to detail that was ably demonstrated by three outstanding assistants: Lewis Robinson, Dana Wagner, and Chloe Bland: I commend Lewis and Dana and Chloe for the irreproachable carefulness of their work.

  An oddity worth mentioning: the chapter called “The Red and Blue Air Mattress” was previously published—in slightly different form, and in German—in the S¸ddeutsche Zeitung, July 27, 1994, under the title “Die blaurote Luftmatratze.”

  — J.I.

  ALSO BY JOHN IRVING

  Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

  A Son of the Circus

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  The Cider House Rules

  The Hotel New Hampshire

  The World According to Garp

  The 158-Pound Marriage

  The Water-Method Man

  Setting Free the Bears

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOHN WINSLOW IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. He is the author of nine novels, among them The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Son of the Circus. Mr. Irving is married and has three sons; he lives in Toronto and in southern Vermont.

  A Widow for One Year

  JOHN IRVING

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with John Irving

  Harvey Ginsberg has been John Irving’s close friend and editor for more than fifteen years. He edited the manuscripts of Mr. Irving’s last four novels, beginning with The Cider House Rules, and including A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Son of the Circus, and A Widow for One Year.

  HG: What made you decide to write a novel in which the central character is both a woman and a novelist?

  JI: The decision to make Ruth Cole a novelist was secondary. She was always a woman, and one who was successful in her career; for a while, in the first few months of taking notes for the novel, I was uncertain of her profession. But everything that haunts her and fills her with self-doubt is something that women think about and worry about more than men. Men don’t hold themselves accountable for sexual misjudgment—or they don’t hold themselves as accountable as women do. Many men have made countless bad-girlfriend choices; they tend to shrug them off.

  We live in a world where it’s permitted for a man to have a sexual history, a sexual past; provided he doesn’t keep repeating it, a sexual past often enhances a man’s image. But if a woman has a sexual past, she’d better keep quiet about it.

  Ted Cole kills himself because he sees how his own sexual misconduct has influenced his daughter’s sexual choices— not because he feels guilty for sleeping with his daughter’s best friend. How many men kill themselves because their sons have made bad-girlfriend decisions?

  And everything Ruth witnesses in Amsterdam, even what she only intends to witness, is more self-damaging (in her mind) because she is a woman. As Ruth observes of Graham Green: it’s entirely permissible for a man to explore the sordid and the unseemly—it’s even expected territory for male writers to explore. For women, it’s forbidden. Ruth feels ashamed.

  So many women today have careers that are in advance of their personal lives, or at the expense of their personal lives. Men, too—but men concern themselves about this less. If a man is successful, and has been married three times, and has not a single speaking relationship with any of his children from these fallen marriages, the foremost thing about him is still his success. But a woman, no matter how successful she is—in any career—sees herself as a failure if her personal life is unsatisfying, or if she’s ashamed of it. Other people, men and women, tend to look upon such a woman as a failure, too.

  And Ruth’s mother, Marion, cannot recover from a tragedy that (relatively speaking) Ruth’s father, Ted, allows to roll off his back. What amount to superficial wounds to men are often mortal injuries to women.

  As for Ruth’s being a novelist, I began with her father as a successful children’s book author and illustrator. I knew I wanted Ruth to be better than her father, and to feel driven to compete with him—to have conflicted feelings for him, too. (The squash was only one area of competition between them.) Why not make Ruth a better writer than her father? I thought. Why not make her less superficial than he is, in every way?

  HG: At least four of your major characters—Ruth and Ted, of course, but also Eddie and Marion—are writers of fiction, and you quote and summarize their works at length. Is this merely a plot device, or did you have something else in mind?

  JI: Once I made Ruth and her father writers, I thought that everyone should be a writer—partly out of mischief, knowing what fun I would have comparing and contrasting the kinds of writers they are, but also because making the four of them writers allowed me to intertwine their lives with what they wrote about. Ted’s stories for children are arguably stories for young mothers: the young mothers are Ted’s principal targets—both his principal book buyers and his sexual prey. The creepiness of Ted’s children’s-story voice was also a way of setting up the detachment with which he tells Eddie and Ruth the story of the death of his sons.

  Ruth is more autobiographical as a novelist than she is willing to admit, but her fiction goes far beyond her personal life; it is much more imagined than it is strictly autobiographical. Eddie, of course, cannot imagine anything. And Ruth’s mother, Marion . . . well, her writing is painful. It’s storytelling as therapy. I say, if it does her good, let her do it.

  I tried not to be condescending. Eddie may be a bad, even (at times) a laughably bad writer, but he is a decent guy, a compassionate man, and a good friend. (He’s certainly a lot warmer than Ruth is!) And Ted, despite his creepiness—both as a writer for children and as a man—is a riveting storyteller. He gets your attention and keeps it. And, as a father, he’s halfway decent; as Ruth says, at least he was there.

  By making
four of the principal characters fiction writers, I was able not only to connect their lives but also to connect their various interpretations of their lives. D. H. Lawrence once said that a novel was the most subtle form we had to demonstrate the interconnectedness of things. Well, that’s true, but a novel needn’t be subtle. A Widow for One Year (or any other novel by John Irving) isn’t subtle.

  HG: Apart from the facts that you moved from Sagaponack to Vermont, and that you have a son exactly Graham’s age (and Ruth’s age as a child), what other autobiographical elements are there in the novel?

  JI: There are many autobiographical elements in the novel. Like Eddie, I went to Exeter, and my father taught there. He was one of the school’s most popular teachers, however; unlike Minty O’Hare, my father never bored anyone. And, like Ruth, I found my love story somewhat later in my life. I was forty-four when I met my second wife; I’d been divorced from my first wife for five years. (Like Ruth, I’m not proud of my sexual past—I mean the years between my first marriage and my second, but not exclusively. I don’t think I should elaborate.)

  As for the choice to make Ruth the age she is when the novel begins—she’s four—it was calculated not because I had a four-year-old at the time but because four is the age when memory begins. Most children don’t remember much about being three. Four is when memory starts, but the memories from one’s fourth year are not complete. I wanted Ruth’s memories of the summer of ’58, when her mother has the affair with Eddie and then leaves, to be present but incomplete.

  Regarding Graham, it’s true that my son Everett was exactly that age as I was writing the novel—hence I felt qualified to write Graham’s dialogue (and Ruth’s, as a child). Children of that age are impressively perceptive, but their language hasn’t caught up with their perceptions.

  It was vital to the novel that Ruth have a child the same age she was when her mother left her, because I wanted Marion to have to come back and face that child.

  HG: You seem to take a dim, even moralistic view of promiscuous sex in the cases of Ted, Hannah, and even Ruth in her encounter with Scott. Yet, at the same time, you treat the prostitutes in Amsterdam with something close to affection. How do you reconcile these different outlooks?

  JI: I would agree that I take a “dim, even moralistic view of promiscuous sex,” but I also take a comic view of it. Ted’s encounter with Mrs. Vaughn is funny; Hannah’s perpetual escapades are also comic, but there’s a sad side to Hannah, which I hope is redeeming to her character. And she’s a lot more fun to be around than Ruth is. (Wouldn’t most men rather date Hannah than Ruth? Maybe not marry her, but that’s another story.)

  I’m a New Englander. Perhaps the sexual disapproval of the Puritan fathers has seeped into my core. Promiscuous sex is invariably punished in my novels. (I’m not entirely comfortable about this.) And my two most saintly characters, Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother in The World According to Garp, and Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules, are both sexually abstemious. They have sex only once in their lives; then they stop. I don’t recommend this.

  Personally, I am not moralistic about sex. What revolted me about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was the righteousness of the media. The thought of journalists as moral arbiters in the field of extramarital sex is repugnant. The thought of journalists as moral arbiters in any field is reprehensible to me. That’s one of the reasons I made Hannah a journalist. Imagine Hannah as a moral arbiter!

  As for the prostitutes in Amsterdam, I spent four years going to Amsterdam for two weeks at a time (at different times of the year each time). I spent a lot of hours with one policeman, and with a woman who was then the head of a prostitutes’ rights organization—she’s a former prostitute. I wanted to get the cop right, and I wanted to get the whore right. I wanted their stories to ring true with other cops and whores. Both policemen and prostitutes have assured me that Harry and Rooie are true to life.

  In Amsterdam, the publication party for the Dutch translation of A Widow for One Year was held at the police station in the red-light district. It was well attended by policemen—less well attended by prostitutes. One prostitute who did attend told me that many of her colleagues were not in the habit of coming to the police station of their own free will.

  The business of turning the shoes in Rooie’s wardrobe closet, so that Ruth can better conceal herself there . . . well, I’m especially proud of that detail. I invented it, and when I asked several prostitutes what they thought of it— did they think it would work, and so forth—they were very excited by the idea. One of them told me later that she was using the method herself. A case of fiction writing influencing another profession—most rewarding.

  A sadder truth, about Rooie, is her need to make up a life for herself. Like Rooie, prostitutes need to invent their lives. They need to lie. That’s just an observable fact. I don’t disapprove of prostitutes or the men who go to them. It strikes me as a relatively honest sexual transaction. Compared to harmfully misleading or deliberately deceitful love affairs, the prostitute-client relationship is both forthright and unmessy. The shame commonly attached to it is a mystery to me. As opposed to declaring your love for someone when you don’t feel it, or when you feel it for a different partner every few months, what’s wrong with paying a prostitute for sex?

  I don’t find these “different outlooks,” as you call them, difficult to “ reconcile” at all.

  If Ted Cole had lived in Amsterdam, and if he had visited a prostitute—even a different prostitute, as often as three or four times a week—think of how many lives he wouldn’t have messed up.

  I have never understood the objection to prostitution. To make it a criminal act, to drive it underground— that is what is criminal. That is also what makes it dangerous, both for the prostitutes and for their clients. The Dutch way isn’t perfect. What sexual transactions are? But it’s a better way to handle the situation than any other way I’ve observed.

  HG: Even though Eddie is basically a comic character, you engender a great deal of reader sympathy for him. How do you turn a comic character into a sympathetic one?

  JI: A part of what’s comic about Eddie is also what’s sympathetic about him: namely, he’s vulnerable, and his haplessness survives his youth. In middle age, Eddie suffers the same awkwardness boarding a bus in Manhattan that afflicts him when we first see him as a teenager in love with Marion. And Eddie’s love of older women is sincere. How many men have such enduring sexual attractions? It may require some imagination on the reader’s part to believe in Eddie’s steadfast attraction to older and older women, but it’s not hard to imagine what older women love about Eddie.

  I’ve had a lot of mail from older women lately. “Haven’t met any Eddies,” one letter said. And there was this one: “If you know a real Eddie, would you introduce me?”

  Eddie is domestically heroic. His novels are transparent, his attachments strike Hannah (and probably many readers) as pathetic, but Eddie literally means what he says, and he does what he says he’ll do.

  Marion tells Eddie that she came back because she heard that the house was for sale. It’s a good line, but she really comes back because Ruth wrote her and told her that Eddie still loved her; Marion needed to hear that someone did.

  Ruth finds her Harry in the end—she gets to have her love story. But there’s more emotion in Eddie’s enduring infatuation with Marion, and in Marion’s coming back, than there is in all of Ruth and Harry’s love story. Marion is a much more moving character than Ruth, partly because of Eddie.

  Of course there’s a simpler explanation for Eddie’s transformation from clown to compassionate hero: he grows up. Rather than see himself as a victim of what happens to him when an older woman takes up with him and then abandons him, he upholds his reverence for her as the guiding light of his life. That in itself may be absurd, but Eddie’s convictions are true; he’s not fickle. And there’s something more about Eddie than at first meets the eye. His laughable qualities as a teenager—his innocence and oversensiti
vity, and how easily manipulated he is—are qualities that are admirable in him as an adult. He lets people use him (even Hannah); that’s not an altogether unlikable quality. In Eddie’s case, it’s even brave. He lets Marion use him. It’s a good thing for her that he does.

  HG: Ruth has a strong punitive streak in her. In view of her childhood, that is certainly justifiable, but do you also find it admirable?

  JI: Oh yes, I do! What idiot said that revenge was a dish best served cold? What matters is that you get the opportunity to serve it—who cares whether it’s hot or cold? Ruth does have every reason to be punitive, to be more than a little rough (or crude) around the edges. Her revenge on Scott Saunders and on her father is, in my view, justified. So what if she goes a little too far? She didn’t strike the first blow, did she? If she overreacts (a little) to what’s been done to her, it doesn’t bother me.

  If people take a piece out of you, what’s wrong with taking a piece and a half or two pieces out of them? I don’t pick fights. I do fight back.

  HG: Ruth does not pay attention to the reviews of her books. Do you think this is good advice for a writer, and do you follow it yourself?