A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  JI: On this subject, above all, there is what Thomas Mann had to say. “We all bear wounds,” Mann observed. “Praise is a soothing if not necessarily healing balm for them. Nevertheless, if I may judge by my own experience, our receptivity for praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than the opposite. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength.”

  I believe that. We live in a time when the politics of envy are flourishing. In the name of equality, the neo-Marxists want to punish individual achievement and success. In book reviewing, “private rancors,” as Mann called them, abound. (There’s no small amount of envy in book reviews, too.)

  My writing has never been an acquired taste; I have always had, and will always have, mixed reviews. Many readers, and critics, love my novels; other readers, and many critics, despise every word I write. I don’t inspire indifference; nobody is neutral to John Irving. I write long, explicit, plot-driven novels; I intend to move you to laughter and to tears. My language goes to extremes; to move the reader, emotionally, means more to me than persuading the reader intellectually. I have said the same of Charles Dickens; he had his fans and his enemies, too.

  Jean Cocteau once advised young writers to pay very close attention to what the critics disliked about their work; he believed that what the critics disliked about you was the only original thing about you. I think this gives critics too much credit. I don’t interrupt my writing to read my reviews, but—at the end of the day—I read them.

  A book reviewer’s animosity does my heart good. Praise is fuel, but so is anger. Reading something about myself that is infuriatingly stupid, or something that is seething with personal nastiness, is honestly energizing; it’s a different kind of energy than I derive from praise, but I can still use it.

  In terms of understanding the effect of my novels, I learn much more from the letters readers write to me than I learn from book reviews. You don’t read a book the way a reader reads a book when you know you’re going to write about it. I know—I’ve been a reviewer, too, after all.

  Book reviews are more important, even tragically important, to young, unknown writers; they depend on good reviews. But the word of mouth about a book, among readers, is more important to me than reviews. Of course that’s easy for me to say—I have lots of readers. When I publish a new novel, I keep a very close watch on the best-seller lists; I’m not ashamed to say that they mean a great deal more to me than reviews.

  HG: You are often accused of being a sentimentalist, as if that were a bad thing. Do you regard yourself as a sentimentalist, and, if so, how would you define the word?

  JI: I’ve already defined the word by admitting that it is my intention, as a novelist, to move you to laughter and to tears, and that I use the language to persuade you emotionally, not intellectually. In Great Expectations, Dickens wrote: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.” But we are ashamed of our tears. We live at a time when critical taste tells us that to be softhearted is akin to doltishness; we’re so influenced by the junk on television and in the movies that even in reacting against it we overreact—we conclude that any attempt to move an audience to laughter or to tears is shameless crowd-pleasing, is akin to sitcom or soap opera or melodrama.

  To the modern critic, when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty. But, for a writer, it is craven to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. To be emotionally inscrutable has become a predictable fingerprint of the “literary” author. I wouldn’t want to be married to someone who was emotionally inscrutable. Who would ever want to be in a relationship like that? Well, I don’t want a novelist to be emotionally inscrutable, either. In a novel, sentimental risks are essential; concealing one’s emotions is a form of political correctness, which is a kind of cowardice.

  HG: While you were writing A Widow for One Year, you were also working on movie scripts of two of your other books. What are the major differences in your approaches to a script and to a book, considering that almost any scene in your novels—take the ones at Mrs. Vaughn’s house as examples—is filmable as written.

  JI: “Filmable as written” only in the sense that I am a visual writer. I want the reader to see vividly the action in a scene—as you say, like those scenes with Mrs. Vaughn. But what makes the conclusion of the Mrs. Vaughn episode work is the lengthy buildup to that chase scene, when Ted escapes her; a lot of foreground has gone into Ted’s character and Eddie’s, in order to present Mrs. Vaughn in her far-flung rage. And a lot of anticipation has been built into Ted’s pornographic drawings, so that to see them in tatters, in a swirl of litter surrounding Ted’s car ride home with Glorie and her mother—not to mention their earlier effect on Eduardo—is the result of many layers of storytelling.

  Unfortunately, those layers aren’t “filmable as written.” Much of my writing, although visual, is multilayered; it is also dependent on the effects of the passage of time on the major characters. That passage of time has an emotional effect on the reader, too. Hence when Marion says, “Don’t cry, honey, it’s just Eddie and me,” not only do we hear the echo and remember the circumstances of when we first heard that line, we also recognize how much of the lengthy passage of Marion’s life is captured in that sad, resigned assurance to her daughter. In a film, how do you get a line like that to work? It needs the understanding of time, and time’s effects, to give it weight.

  And because my novels are not only long, they’re also plot-driven, in compressing the story to fit into the time restrictions of a feature-length film I am faced with losing whole characters and the story lines that accompany them. The process of making a screenplay from one of my novels begins with the decision of which two-thirds of the novel I am going to lose.

  If I wrote shorter novels, I might find the process of translating a novel into a film more gratifying.

  In the case of The Cider House Rules, which I have been writing and rewriting for four different directors over thirteen years, not only have I lost the major minor character of Melony, a moral and sexual force in the novel, but I have reduced a fifteen-year love affair to eighteen months. (Movies don’t handle the passage of time at all well.) In the case of A Son of the Circus, which I have been writing as a screenplay for a mere eight years, I have made the main character, Dr. Daruwalla, a minor character in the film; two minor characters from the novel, the children who are sold to the circus, have become major, and another minor character, the Jesuit missionary, has become the hero of a romantic comedy—the missionary is the movie’s actual star.

  While the film credits will doubtless say, “based on the novel by John Irving,” I think a more apt description of both my screenplays is that they are interpretations of my novels, not the novels themselves.

  I’m pleased with both screenplays, but I like my day job better. I doubt that I’ll write another screenplay. I enjoy writing novels more. And in the time I have given to these two screenplays, I could easily have written another novel. Relatively speaking, it is easy to write a screenplay—far easier than writing a novel—but what is difficult, especially for a semireclusive novelist, is the wasteful social intercourse that is required to get a screenplay produced.

  You know how we work together as author and editor. I give you my manuscript . . . you mark it up. I respond to about two-fifths of your suggestions, ignoring the others. In the case of A Widow for One Year, I might have responded to as many as half your suggestions. But that’s it. Nobody is looking over our shoulders. And that’s the way it should be.

  With a screenplay, more people read it before it’s produced than I could ever remember; people I don’t even know, people who remain nameless but have nonethe
less contributed this or that note about the script, people complaining about this or that scene for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality or the integrity of the overall story—lawyers, secretaries, business executives, bankers, actors’ agents, assistants to assistants, and just plain jerks (in addition to the director and the producer). In short, every script, before it’s produced, has suffered the comments of a veritable committee!

  A novel is a single voice, made better by an editor who has the author’s interests and intentions at heart—an editor who knows the author’s interests and intentions as well as the author knows them. That is a creative relationship. At some level, the relationship between a director and a screenwriter is also creative, but that relationship is invaded, time and time again, by teams of people with conflicting agendas. It’s like trying to build and fly a kite with the unwelcome “help” of a bunch of retired 747 pilots.

  HG: You are known as a great defender of the nineteenth-century novel, particularly the works of Dickens and Thomas Hardy. What virtues do you find there that you feel are missing in contemporary fiction, and which contemporary novelists do you think fulfill—or come closest to fulfilling—these virtues?

  JI: Thomas Hardy insisted that a novel had to be a better story than something you might happen upon in a newspaper. He meant “better” in every way: bigger, more complex, more connected, and also having a kind of symmetry or closure—even achieving a kind of justice, or at least an inevitability, in the end.

  George Eliot, too—and of course Dickens. Their novels were designed . David Copperfield once remarked that he found real life a whole lot messier than he expected to find it. Modernism in literature upholds the theory that a novel can be a patternless mess (without a plot) because real life is like that. Well, good novels, in my view, are better made than real life.

  If I like Dickens better than Hardy or Eliot, it is chiefly because Dickens is also comic. Even the contemporary novelists I most admire are nineteenth-century storytellers: Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel GarcÌa Marquez, Robertson Davies. They all love plot, developed characters with interconnected stories, and the passage of time and its effects; not surprisingly, given my taste, they are all comic novelists, too.

  I think the most modern novelist I admire is Graham Greene—“modern” in the sense that his emotions are inscrutable and, at least compared to the abovementioned four, he is very spare. But Greene was also a good storyteller, and he sought a symmetry or closure to his novels; the architecture mattered to him.

  Good stories are constructed —they have a structure.

  HG: You are certainly successful in the United States, but you are even more successful—both critically and commercially—in Canada and many European countries. Do you have any theories about why that should be true?

  JI: Oh, there are many theories, but they’re not all mine. My foreign publishers have their own theories about why this is so, and other authors have suggested reasons to me, too. I don’t subscribe wholeheartedly to one answer, because there seem to be so many.

  Here is what some other authors have demonstrated to me. Günter Grass is widely hated in both literary and political circles in Germany today. The Tin Drum is arguably the best novel ever written about World War II, certainly the best from a German perspective, and when Grass was exposing the Germany of World War II to his fellow Germans, his fellow Germans—like the rest of the world—loved and admired him.

  But Grass shifted his penetrating gaze to contemporary Germany, and to a deeply historical and psychological analysis of what makes Germans so . . . well, German. Now the Germans don’t like what they’re hearing from him. They want him to stop punishing them with his visions. That everything he predicted about German reunification has largely proved true . . . well, naturally this doesn’t make him popular, either. He is a great writer who is revered outside Germany, but despised within.

  And Grass is not an isolated example. We have our own—Kurt Vonnegut. He is regarded outside the United States as a virtual prophet; he is often ridiculed at home. To a lesser degree—meaning less praised abroad, but also less condemned in the United States—Joseph Heller is like that. In my view, Vonnegut and Heller are this country’s most original novelists; we should treasure them, but we don’t. And then there’s Salman Rushdie. In England they write terrible things about him, but here we love him—as we should.

  So a part of my being more popular away from home is nothing more than that. Novels like The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany are certainly critical of the United States—the abortion history in the former case, the Vietnam period in the latter. And even Garp was read (especially abroad) as a kind of sociology of the polarization of the sexes in North America.

  I am not an anti-American—although many Europeans see me that way, and I’m probably more popular in Europe because of it.

  Harder to explain is that A Son of the Circus was sixty-three consecutive weeks on the German best-seller lists, making Germany a bigger country for me, saleswise, than any other country in the world. Do Germans like “ difficult” books more than Americans do? Surely they must. One look at the German best-seller lists—even forgetting my position on those lists—is a lesson in cultural differences. Lots of literary titles are on those German lists, and lots of hard-to-read books, too. The same is true in France. And in the Netherlands, and in the Scandinavian countries, the numbers of readers of serious fiction are huge. Canada’s best-seller lists are much more impressive than ours—meaning many more literary novels are represented.

  What can I say? Most Americans who read at all read junk. The British best-seller lists are also disgraceful.

  I think it is a fair generalization to say that European readers of fiction like novels to be challenging, to be demanding; nor do they follow trends or fashions in reading taste in the lemminglike manner of many readers in the United States. The media bears some responsibility for this. I have been interviewed in many foreign countries, and in the United States; the European journalists are more literary—meaning they’ve read more novels, more good ones, and they write about books in a more literary way.

  The prevailing attention given to authors in this country concerns little more than the perpetual question concerning what is autobiographical in their novels. Authors are minor celebrities here, or else they’re entirely unknown. And authors’ lives are the subject of most interviews here—when authors are the subjects of interviews at all. We’re certainly not as important in American culture as film and television celebrities or sports heroes.

  In Europe, authors are important to the culture. I don’t mean, either, that authors are more celebrated as celebrities there—not at all. Our books are more celebrated in Europe; books and authors are central to European culture. Here (in the United States) I feel that most interviews I have given have trivialized my novels; the journalists are looking for superficial autobiographical levers with which they can pry open my books. But novels aren’t secrets. The good ones aren’t gossip. Maybe the simplest way to put it is that the journalists who write about novels and novelists in Europe, and in Canada, are better than they are in the United States.

  With very few exceptions, that has been my experience.

  HG: I have the impression that, when you sit down to write, the sentences, even the paragraphs, are already formed in your head. Is this so?

  JI: Many times, yes. I spend more than a year, sometimes two, just taking notes. I don’t like to begin a novel until I know the story, know the principal characters, know how and when they meet each other, and when and how their paths cross again. I have to know the end of a story before I can imagine the best beginning. I come to the beginning last.

  Your impression is largely correct. When I start telling a story, I already know the story. There must be authority and authenticity in a storyteller’s voice; readers must trust that the storyteller is an expert, at least on this particular story. How can you be an expert if you don’t know wh
at happens?

  By the time I write the first sentence of a novel, I don’t want to be inventing anymore; the invention is largely behind me by the time I begin. I am just trying to remember what I’ve already imagined, in the order I’ve already selected as best for the reader. Telling a story is as much knowing what information to withhold as it is knowing what to tell.

  In the case of A Widow . . . , I knew that Marion’s coming back, and Ruth’s seeing her and starting to cry, was where the story had to end. I knew what I wanted Marion to say, and that this would be an echo of what we’d already heard her say to Ruth as a child. But it took me the longest time to work my way back to the beginning, to find the first occasion for Marion to say something like “Don’t cry, honey, it’s just Eddie and me.”

  I’d been taking notes for a year and a half—I knew everything about Harry, and the death of the boys, and all about Ted, and even Hannah—but I still hadn’t found the episode that is now the beginning of the novel, when Ruth catches her mother making love and Marion says, “Don’t scream, honey . . .” and so forth. When I found it, I knew I was ready to begin. “One night when she was four . . .” and so on. That was a hard line to get to. All the rest just followed; they were waiting in place.