by John Irving
HG: Were there any places in the novel—or in any of your novels—where the characters took over what you had planned for them and started doing things that surprised you?
JI: No. Never.
Oh, all right, there have been small surprises, but the characters essentially remain as I have imagined them. I’ll tell you what I mean by a small surprise. I knew Marion would come back and buy Ruth’s house, with Eddie. I didn’t know that Eddie would be so smitten with the idea of owning Ruth’s house that he would go so far as to propose buying the house with Hannah. Naturally Hannah’s reaction to that idea wasn’t hard to imagine, but Eddie did surprise me in this one respect: he wanted that house badly enough to embark on this simply terrible proposition. It was a funny moment, and I decided to see where it took me.
I believe you earn those occasionally spontaneous moments only by carefully planning all that you can; if you’ve done your homework on your characters and their stories, a few good accidents will happen and you can take advantage of them. That’s a far cry from trusting in accidents.
A good story must feel to the reader that it happens naturally. But it’s not so natural being natural. In my case, it’s mostly planning.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. A passionate and complex theme throughout the book is the concept of a writer’s imagination. “Eddie O’Hare, who was doomed to be only autobiographical in his novels, knew better than to presume that Ruth Cole was writing about herself. He understood from the first time he read her that she was better than that” (p. 204). What role does imagination, lack of it, even fear of it, play in the lives and careers of the central characters?
2. Ruth, as a novelist, sees books as inventions based on both borrowed and imagined experiences—not necessarily personal ones. However, her best friend, Hannah, a journalist, presumes that all novels are substantially autobiographical; she sees in Ruth’s books a “Hannah” character, who is the adventurer, as well as a “Ruth” character, who holds herself back. Explore the ideas of fiction and imagination and the autobiographical ingredients of writing.
3. What is the meaning and symbolism of the “feet” photo? Why do you think it became kind of a talisman for Ruth? What emotions does the photo evoke in you as a reader?
4. Discuss the humor and the pathos of Ted Cole’s oeuvre. What about the humor and pathos of Ted himself? Where does Ted’s true imagination lie—if not in his writing? Is Ted’s real talent—his passion, his art—the seduction of the prettiest and unhappiest of young mothers? Doesn’t Ted pursue his seductions as passionately as his daughter will pursue her writing?
5. During that fateful summer, Eddie, the aspiring young writer, found his voice. Marion gave him his voice. “It was losing her that had given him something to say. It was the thought of his life without Marion that provided Eddie O’Hare with the authority to write” (p. 112). Discuss the life and writing career of Eddie O’Hare: his brilliance when being truly autobiographical, and his mediocrity when it came to believability in things that were “imagined.”
6. When Ted tells Eddie the “story” of Thomas and Timothy’s accident, he tells it in the third-person removed. “If Marion had ever told the story, she would have stood so close to it that, in the telling of it, she would have descended into a final madness—a madness much greater than whatever madness had caused Marion to abandon her only living child” (p. 154). Examine the madness. Discuss Ted’s ability—and Marion’s inability—to detach.
7. How is Eddie, who appears as the most benign of characters, often the most powerful? For example, beginning with the restaurant “fingerprinting” scene (p. 240), he gives Ruth the gift of her past, of her mother, of other realities. How does he open the door to her future?
8. Examine: “Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid” (p. 267).
Discuss the idea that the books in Ruth’s life and the characters in them were more fixed in Ruth’s life than the flesh-and-blood people closest to her— namely, her father and her best friend.
9. Why do you think Ruth decides to marry Allan? Why was he so safe? How was he different from her “type” of man—a type that disturbed her so?
10. Discuss the theme of humiliation in her novel-in-progress as well as Ruth’s own unconscious quest for humiliation. Examine the themes of women, humiliation, and control. In Amsterdam, Ruth writes in her diary: “The conventional wisdom is that prostitution is a kind of rape for money; in truth, in prostitution—maybe only in prostitution—the woman seems in charge” (p. 338). What do you think of this?
11. Examine the scene after she witnesses the murder. “At last she’d found the humiliation she was looking for, but of course this was one humiliation that she wouldn’t write about” (p. 375).
12. Examine the powerful car scene before Ted’s suicide. As Ted is driving, Ruth reveals the shocking incident with Scott. Her tale is one of degradation. Does it have the desired effect on her father? What does she want? Was this scene about revenge—about giving back the hurt done to her? Can matters of families, of love and hate (her father is the one she most loves and hates in her life), ever really be understood? Of course this scene mirrors the driving scene where Ted tells Ruth the details of her brothers’ death. Discuss.
13. What changes occur in Ruth after she becomes a widow? How do these changes finally free her to fall in love at last?
14. What kind of emotions do you feel at the ending of the book? How have the characters of Ruth, Marion, and Eddie found, in essence, their way back? How has Marion, through her books, come to terms with her grief? When she reveals to Eddie that “grief is contagious,” is she effectively saying that her absence from her daughter’s life was the only way she could love her or the only way she could not destroy her daughter?
AN EXCERPT FROM JOHN IRVING’S NEXT BOOK, IN ONE PERSON,
COMING FROM SIMON & SCHUSTER IN MAY 2012.
Chapter 1
AN UNSUCCESSFUL CASTING CALL
I’m going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost—not necessarily in that order.
I met Miss Frost in a library. I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word—both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part—people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who’ve treated me—alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to “severe speech impairments”—an overstatement. I’m now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I’ve ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)
I don’t even try to say the etiology word, but I can manage to struggle through a comprehensible mispronunciation of library or libraries—the botched word emerging as an unknown fruit. (“Liberry,” or “liberries,” I say—the way children do.)
It’s all the more ironic that my first library was undistinguished. This was the public library in the small town of First Sister, Vermont—a compact red-brick building on the same street where my grandparents lived. I lived in their house on River Street—until I was fifteen, when my mom remarried. My mother met my stepfather in a play.
The town’s amateur theatrical society was called the First Sister Players; for as far back as I can remem
ber, I saw all the plays in our town’s little theater. My mom was the prompter—if you forgot your lines, she told you what to say. (It being an amateur theater, there were a lot of forgotten lines.) For years, I thought the prompter was one of the actors—someone mysteriously offstage, and not in costume, but a necessary contributor to the dialogue.
My stepfather was a new actor in the First Sister Players when my mother met him. He had come to town to teach at Favorite River Academy—the almost-prestigious private school, which was then all boys. For much of my young life (most certainly, by the time I was ten or eleven), I must have known that eventually, when I was “old enough,” I would go to the academy. There was a more modern and better-lit library at the prep school, but the public library in the town of First Sister was my first library, and the librarian there was my first librarian. (Incidentally, I’ve never had any trouble saying the librarian word.)
Needless to say, Miss Frost was a more memorable experience than the library. Inexcusably, it was long after meeting her that I learned her first name. Everyone called her Miss Frost, and she seemed to me to be my mom’s age—or a little younger—when I belatedly got my first library card and met her. My aunt, a most imperious person, had told me that Miss Frost “used to be very good-looking,” but it was impossible for me to imagine that Miss Frost could ever have been better-looking than she was when I met her—notwithstanding that, even as a kid, all I did was imagine things. My aunt claimed that the available men in the town used to fall all over themselves when they met Miss Frost. When one of them got up the nerve to introduce himself—to actually tell Miss Frost his name—the then-beautiful librarian would look at him coldly and icily say, “My name is Miss Frost. Never been married, never want to be.”
With that attitude, Miss Frost was still unmarried when I met her; inconceivably, to me, the available men in the town of First Sister had long stopped introducing themselves to her.
• • •
THE CRUCIAL DICKENS NOVEL—THE one that made me want to be a writer, or so I’m always saying—was Great Expectations. I’m sure I was fifteen, both when I first read it and when I first reread it. I know this was before I began to attend the academy, because I got the book from the First Sister town library—twice. I won’t forget the day I showed up at the library to take that book out a second time; I’d never wanted to reread an entire novel before.
Miss Frost gave me a penetrating look. At the time, I doubt I was as tall as her shoulders. “Miss Frost was once what they call ‘statuesque,’ “ my aunt had told me, as if even Miss Frost’s height and shape existed only in the past. (She was forever statuesque to me.)
Miss Frost was a woman with an erect posture and broad shoulders, though it was chiefly her small but pretty breasts that got my attention. In seeming contrast to her mannish size and obvious physical strength, Miss Frost’s breasts had a newly developed appearance—the improbable but budding look of a young girl’s. I couldn’t understand how it was possible for an older woman to have achieved this look, but surely her breasts had seized the imagination of every teenage boy who’d encountered her, or so I believed when I met her—when was it?—in 1955. Furthermore, you must understand that Miss Frost never dressed suggestively, at least not in the imposed silence of the forlorn First Sister Public Library; day or night, no matter the hour, there was scarcely anyone there.
I had overheard my imperious aunt say (to my mother): “Miss Frost is past an age where training bras suffice.” At thirteen, I’d taken this to mean that—in my judgmental aunt’s opinion—Miss Frost’s bras were all wrong for her breasts, or vice versa. I thought not! And the entire time I was internally agonizing over my and my aunt’s different fixations with Miss Frost’s breasts, the daunting librarian went on giving me the aforementioned penetrating look.
I’d met her at thirteen; at this intimidating moment, I was fifteen, but given the invasiveness of Miss Frost’s long, lingering stare, it felt like a two-year penetrating look to me. Finally she said, in regard to my wanting to read Great Expectations again, “You’ve already read this one, William.”
“Yes, I loved it,” I told her—this in lieu of blurting out, as I almost did, that I loved her. She was austerely formal—the first person to unfailingly address me as William. I was always called Bill, or Billy, by my family and friends.
I wanted to see Miss Frost wearing only her bra, which (in my interfering aunt’s view) offered insufficient restraint. Yet, in lieu of blurting out such an indiscretion as that, I said: “I want to reread Great Expectations.” (Not a word about my premonition that Miss Frost had made an impression on me that would be no less devastating than the one that Estella makes on poor Pip.)
“So soon?” Miss Frost asked. “You read Great Expectations only a month ago!”
“I can’t wait to reread it,” I said.
“There are a lot of books by Charles Dickens,” Miss Frost told me. “You should try a different one, William.”
“Oh, I will,” I assured her, “but first I want to reread this one.”
Miss Frost’s second reference to me as William had given me an instant erection—though, at fifteen, I had a small penis and a laughably disappointing hard-on. (Suffice it to say, Miss Frost was in no danger of noticing that I had an erection.)
My all-knowing aunt had told my mother I was underdeveloped for my age. Naturally, my aunt had meant “underdeveloped” in other (or in all) ways; to my knowledge, she’d not seen my penis since I’d been an infant—if then. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the penis word. For now, it’s enough that you know I have extreme difficulty pronouncing “penis,” which in my tortured utterance emerges—when I can manage to give voice to it at all—as “penith.” This rhymes with “zenith,” if you’re wondering. (I go to great lengths to avoid the plural.)
In any case, Miss Frost knew nothing of my sexual anguish while I was attempting to check out Great Expectations a second time. In fact, Miss Frost gave me the impression that, with so many books in the library, it was an immoral waste of time to reread any of them.
“What’s so special about Great Expectations?” she asked me.
She was the first person I told that I wanted to be a writer “because of” Great Expectations, but it was really because of her.
“You want to be a writer!” Miss Frost exclaimed; she didn’t sound happy about it. (Years later, I would wonder if Miss Frost might have expressed indignation at the sodomizer word had I suggested that as a profession.)
“Yes, a writer—I think so,” I said to her.
“You can’t possibly know that you’re going to be a writer!” Miss Frost said. “It’s not a career choice.”
She was certainly right about that, but I didn’t know it at the time. And I wasn’t pleading with her only so she would let me reread Great Expectations; my pleas were especially ardent, in part, because the more exasperated Miss Frost became with me, the more I appreciated the sudden intake of her breath—not to mention the resultant rise and fall of her surprisingly girlish breasts.
At fifteen, I was as smitten and undone by her as I’d been two years earlier. No, I must revise that: I was altogether more captivated by her at fifteen than I was at thirteen, when I’d been merely fantasizing about having sex with her and becoming a writer—whereas, at fifteen, the imagined sex was more developed (there were more concrete details) and I had already written a few sentences I admired.
Both the sex with Miss Frost and actually being a writer were unlikely, of course—but were they remotely possible? Curiously, I had enough hubris to believe so. As for where such an exaggerated pride or unearned self-confidence came from—well, I could only guess that genes had something to do with it.
I don’t mean my mother’s; I saw no hubris in her backstage role of the prompter. After all, I spent most of my evenings with my mom in that safe haven for those variously talented (and untalented) members of our town’s amateur theatrical society. That little playhouse was not a uniformly pride
ful or brimming-with-confidence kind of place—hence the prompter.
If my hubris was genetic, it surely came from my biological father. I was told I’d never met him; I knew him only by his reputation, which didn’t sound great.
“The code-boy,” as my grandfather referred to him—or, less often, “the sergeant.” My mom had left college because of the sergeant, my grandmother said. (She preferred “sergeant,” which she always said disparagingly, to “code-boy.”) Whether William Francis Dean was the contributing cause of my mom leaving college, I didn’t really know; she’d gone to secretarial school instead, but not before he’d gotten her pregnant with me. Consequently, my mother would leave secretarial school, too.
My mom told me that she’d married my dad in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in April 1943—a little late for a shotgun wedding, because I’d been born in First Sister, Vermont, back in March of ‘42. I was already a year old when she married him, and the “wedding” (it was a town-clerk or justice-of-the-peace deal) had been chiefly my grandmother’s idea—or so my aunt Muriel said. It was implied to me that William Francis Dean hadn’t entered into the marriage all that willingly.
“We were divorced before you were two,” my mom had told me. I’d seen the marriage certificate, which was why I remembered the seemingly exotic and far-from-Vermont location of Atlantic City, New Jersey; my father had been in basic training there. No one had shown me the divorce records.