The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  He enjoyed his slight pain. He took pleasure in this silly self-denial—and more pleasure in his imagination of Tina, he suspected, than he ever could have derived from her vaguely gross flesh. The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave.

  What Garp was savoring was the beginning of a writer's long-sought trance, wherein the world falls under one embracing tone of voice. “All that is body is as coursing waters,” Garp remembered, “all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” It was July when Garp went back to work on “The Pension Grillparzer". His mother was finishing up the manuscript that would soon change both their lives.

  It was August when Jenny finished her book and announced that she was ready to travel, to at last see something of Europe—maybe Greece? she suggested. “Let's take the train somewhere,” she said. “I always wanted to take the Orient Express. Where's it go?”

  “From Paris to Istanbul, I think,” Garp said. “But you take it, Mom. I've got too much work to do.”

  Tit for tat, Jenny had to admit. She was so sick of A Sexual Suspect that she couldn't even proofread it one more time. She didn't even know what to do with it, now; did one just go to New York and hand over one's life story to a stranger? She wanted Garp to read it, but she saw that Garp was at last engrossed in a task of his own, she felt sbe shouldn't bother him. Besides, she was unsure; a large part of her life story was his life story, too—she thought the story might upset him.

  Garp worked through August on the conclusion of his short story, “The Pension Grillparzer.” Helen, exasperated, wrote to Jenny. “Is Garp dead?” she asked, “Kindly send details.” That Helen Holm is a bright girl, Jenny thought. Helen got more of an answer than she counted on. Jenny sent her a copy of the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect with a note explaining that this was what she'd been doing all year, and now Garp was writing something, too. Jenny said she would appreciate Helen's candid opinion of the manuscript. Perhaps, said Jenny, some of Helen's college teachers would know what one did with a finished book?

  Garp relaxed, when he wasn't writing, by going to the zoo: it was a part of the great grounds and gardens surrounding the Schцnbrunn Palace. It appeared to Garp that many of the buildings in the zoo were war ruins, three-quarters destroyed; they had been partially restored to house the animals. This gave Garp the eerie impression that the zoo still existed in Vienna's war period; it also interested him in the period. To fall asleep at night he took to reading some very specific, historical accounts of Vienna during the Nazi and the Russian occupations. This was not unrelated to the death themes that haunted his writing of “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else. Vienna was dying, the zoo was not as well restored from the war damage as the homes the people lived in; the history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. He felt the holes from the machine-gun fire in the stone walls of the lobby of the apartment on the Schwindgasse.

  Now he knew what the grandmother's dream meant.

  He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one's time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!

  Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan?

  He did not revise, at all, his letter back to her; he said he was too busy writing to take the time to explain it to her: she would have to read what he was working on and judge for herself how serious he was.

  “I don't doubt that you're quite serious,” she told him. “And right now I have more to read than I need to know.”

  She did not tell him that she was referring to Jenny's book, A Sexual Suspect; it was 1,158 manuscript pages long. Though Helen would later agree with Garp that it was no literary jewel, she had to admit that it was a very compelling story.

  While Garp put the finishing touches on his much shorter story, Jenny Fields plotted her next move. In her restlessness she had bought an American news magazine at a large Vienna newsstand, in it she had read that a courageous New York editor at a well-known publishing house had just rejected the manuscript submitted by an infamous former member of the government who had been convicted of stealing government money. The book was a thinly disguised “fiction” of the criminal's own sordid, pitty, political dealings. “It was a lousy novel,” the editor was quoted as saying. “The man can't write. Why should he make any money off his crummy life?” The book, of course, would be published elsewhere, and it would eventually make its despicable author and its publisher lots of money. “Sometimes I feel it is my responsibility to say no,” the editor was quoted as saying, “even if I know people do want to read this slop.” The slop, eventually, would be treated to several serious reviews, just as if it were a serious book, but Jenny was greatly impressed with the editor who had said no and she clipped the article out of the news magazine. She drew a circle around the editor's name—a plain name, almost like an actor's name, or the name of an animal in a children's book: John Wolf. There was a picture of John Wolf in the magazine; he looked like a man who took care of himself, and he was very well dressed; he looked like any number of people who work and live in New York—where good business and good sense suggest that you'd better take care of yourself and dress as well as you can—but to Jenny Fields he looked like an angel. He was going to be her publisher, she was sure. She was convinced that her life was not “crummy,” and that John Wolf would believe she deserved to make money off it.

  Garp had other ambitions for “The Pension Grillparzer.” It would never make him much money; it would first appear in a “serious” magazine where almost no one would read it. Years later, when he was better known, it would be published in a more attentive way, and several appreciative things, would be written about it, but in his lifetime “The Pension Grillparzer” wouldn't make Garp enough money to buy a good car. Garp, however, expected more than money or transportation from “The Pension Grillparzer.” Very simply, he expected to get Helen Holm to live with him—even marry him.

  When he finished “The Pension Grillparzer,” he announced to his mother that he wanted to go home and see Helen; he would send her a copy of the story and she could have read it by the time he arrived back in the United States. Poor Helen, Jenny thought; Jenny knew that Helen had a lot to read. Jenny also worried how Garp referred to Steering as “home"; but she had reasons of her own for wanting to see Helen, and Ernie Holm would not mind their company for a few days. There was always the parental mansion at Dog's Head Harbor—if Garp and Jenny needed a place to recover, or to make their plans.

  Garp and Jenny were such singularly obsessed people that they did not pause to wonder why they had seen so little of Europe, and now they were leaving. Jenny packed her nursing uniforms. There remained, in Garp's mind, only the favors that Charlotte had left up to Tina's devising.

  Garp's imagination of these favors had sustained him during the writing of “The Pension Grillparzer,” but as he would learn all his life, the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar. His imagination sustained him when he was writing; now that he wasn't writing, he wanted Tina. He went to look for her on the Kдrntnerstrasse, but the mayonnaise-jar whore, who spoke English, told him that Tina had moved from the first district.

  “So goes it,” Wanga said. “Forget Tina.”

  Garp found that he could forget her; lust, as his m
other called it, was tricky that way. And time, he discovered, had softened his dislike of Wanga's mayonnaise-jar lip, suddenly, he liked it. And so he had her, twice, and as he would learn all his life, nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

  Garp and Jenny had spent fifteen months in Vienna. It was September. Garp and Helen were only nineteen, and Helen would be going back to college very soon. The plane flew from Vienna to Frankfurt. The slight tingling (that was Wanga) quietly left Garp's flesh. When Garp thought of Charlotte, he imagined that Charlotte had been happy. After all, she had never had to leave the first district.

  The plane flew from Frankfurt to London, Garp reread “The Pension Grillparzer” and hoped that Helen would not turn him down. From London to New York, Jenny read her son's story. In terms of what she'd spent more than a year doing, Garp's story struck Jenny as rather unreal. But her taste for literature was never keen and she marveled at her son's imagination. Later she would say that “The Pension Grillparzer” was just the sort of story she'd expect a boy without a proper family to make up.

  Maybe so. Helen would later say that it is in the conclusion of “The Pension Grillparzer” that we can glimpse what the world according to Garp would be like.

  The Pension Grillparzer [Conclusion]

  In the breakfast room of the Pension Grillparzer we confronted Herr Theobald with the menagerie of his other guests who had disrupted our evening. I knew that (as never before) my father was planning to reveal himself as a Tourist Bureau spy.

  “Men walking about on their hands,” said Father.

  “Men looking under the floor of the W.C.,” said Grandmother.

  “That man,” I said, and pointed to the small, sulking fellow at the corner table, seated for breakfast with his cohorts—the dream man and the Hungarian singer.

  “He does it for his living,” Herr Theobold told us, and as if to demonstrate that this was so, the man who stood on his hands began to stand on his hands.

  “Make him stop that,” Father said. “We know he can do it.”

  “But did you know that he can't do it any other way?” the dream man asked suddenly. “Did you know his legs were useless? He has no shinbones. It is wonderful that he can walk on his hands! Otherwise, he wouldn't walk at all.” The man, although it was clearly hard to do while standing on his hands, nodded his head.

  “Please sit down,” Mother said.

  “It is perfectly all right to be crippled,” Grandmother said, boldly. “But you are evil,” she told the dream man. “You know things you have no right to know. He knew my dream,” she told Herr Theobald, as if she were reporting a theft from her room.

  “He is a little evil, I know,” Theobald admitted. “But not usually! And he behaves better and better. He can't help what he knows.”

  “I was just trying to straighten you out,” the dream man told Grandmother. “I thought it would do you good. Your husband has been dead quite a while, after all, and it's about time you stopped making so much of that dream. You're not the only person who's had such a dream.”

  “Stop it,” Grandmother said.

  “Well, you ought to know,” said the dream man.

  “No, be quiet, please,” Herr Theobald told him.

  “I am from the Tourist Bureau,” Father announced, probably because he couldn't think of anything else to say.

  “Oh my God shit!” Herr Theobald said.

  “It's not Theobald's fault,” said the singer. “It's our fault. He's nice to put up with us, though it costs him his reputation.”

  “They married my sister,” Theobald told us. “They are family, you see. What can I do?”

  “They married your sister?” Mother said.

  “Well, she married me first,” said the dream man.

  “And then she heard me sing!” the singer said.

  “She's never been married to the other one,” Theobald said, and everyone looked apologetically toward the man who could only walk on his hands.

  Theobald said, “They were once a circus act, but politics got them in trouble.”

  “We were the best in Hungary,” said the singer. “You ever hear of the Circus Szolnok?”

  “No, I'm afraid not,” Father said, seriously.

  “We played in Miskolc, in Szeged, in Debrecen,” said the dream man.

  “Twice in Szeged,” the singer said.

  “We would have made it to Budapest if it hadn't been for the Russians,” said the man who walked on his hands.

  “Yes, it was the Russians who removed his shinbones!” said the dream man.

  “Tell the truth,” the singer said. “He was born without shinbones. But it's true that we couldn't get along with the Russians.”

  “They tried to jail the bear,” said the dream man.

  “Tell the truth,” Theobald said.

  “We rescued his sister from them,” said the man who walked on his hands.

  “So of course I must put them up,” said Herr Theobald, “and they work as hard as they can. But who's interested in their act in this country? It's a Hungarian thing. There's no tradition of bears on unicycles here,” Theobald told us. “And the damn dreams mean nothing to us Viennese.”

  “Tell the truth,” said the dream man. “It is because I have told the wrong dreams. We worked a nightclub on the Kдrntnerstrasse, but then we got banned.”

  “You should never have told that dream,” the singer said gravely.

  “Well, it was your wife's responsibility, too!” the dream man said.

  “She was your wife, then,” the singer said.

  “Please stop it,” Theobald begged.

  “We get to do the balls for children's diseases,” the dream man said. “And some of the state hospitals—especially at Christmas.”

  “If you would only do more with the bear,” Herr Theobald advised them.

  “Speak to your sister about that,” said the singer. “It's her bear—she's trained him, she's let him get lazy and sloppy and full of bad habits.”

  “He is the only one of you who never makes fun of me,” said the man who could only walk on his hands.

  “I would like to leave all this,” Grandmother said. “This is, for me, an awful experience.”

  “Please, dear lady,” Herr Theobold said, “we only wanted to show you that we meant no offense. These are hard times. I need the B rating to attract more tourists, and I can't—in my heart—throw out the Circus Szolnok.”

  “In his heart, my ass!” said the dream man. “He's afraid of his sister. He wouldn't dream of throwing us out.”

  “If he dreamed it, you would know it!” cried the man on his hands.

  “I am afraid of the bear,” Herr Theobald said. “It does everything she tells it to do.”

  “Say “he", not “it",” said the man on his hands. “He is a fine bear, and he never hurt anybody. He has no claws, you know perfectly well—and very few teeth, either.”

  “The poor thing has a terribly hard time eating,” Herr Theobald admitted. “He is quite old, and he's messy.”

  Over my father's shoulder, I saw him write in the giant pad: “A depressed bear and an unemployed circus. This family is centered on the sister.”

  At that moment, out on the sidewalk, we could see her tending to the bear. It was early morning and the street was not especially busy. By law, of course, she had the bear on a leash, but it was a token control. In her startling red turban the woman walked up and down the sidewalk, following the lazy movements of the bear on his unicycle. The animal pedaled easily from parking meter to parking meter, sometimes leaning a paw on the meter as he turned. He was very talented on the unicycle, you could tell, but you could also tell that the unicycle was a dead end for him. You could see that the bear felt he could go no further with unicycling.

  “She should bring him off the street now,” Herr Theobald fretted. “The people in the pastry shop next door complain to me,” he told us. “They say the bear drives their customers away.”
/>   “That bear makes the customers come!” said the man on his hands.

  “It makes some people come, it turns some away,” said the dream man. He was suddenly somber, as if his profundity had depressed him.

  But we had been so taken up with the antics of the Circus Szolnok that we had neglected old Johanna. When my mother saw that Grandmother was quietly crying, she told me to bring the car around.

  “It's been too much for her,” my father whispered to Theobald. The Circus Szolnok looked ashamed of themselves.

  Outside on the sidewalk the bear pedaled up to me and handed me the keys; the car was parked at the curb. “Not everyone likes to be given the keys in that fashion,” Herr Theobald told his sister.

  “Oh, I thought he'd rather like it,” she said, rumpling my hair. She was as appealing as a barmaid, which is to say that she was more appealing at night; in the daylight I could see that she was older than her brother, and older than her husbands too—and in time, I imagined, she would cease being lover and sister to them, respectively, and become a mother to them all. She was already a mother to the bear.

  “Come over here,” she said to him. He pedaled listlessly in place on his unicycle, holding on to a parking meter for support. He licked the little glass face of the meter. She tugged his leash. He stared at her. She tugged again. Insolently, the bear began to pedal—first one way, then the next. It was as if he took interest, seeing that he had an audience. He began to show off.

  “Don't try anything,” the sister said to him, but the bear pedaled faster and faster, going forward, going backward, angling sharply and veering among the parking meters; the sister had to let go of the leash. “Duna, stop it!” she cried, but the bear was out of control. He let the wheel roll too close to the curb and the unicycle pitched him hard into the fender of a parked car. He sat on the sidewalk with the unicycle beside him; you could tell that he hadn't injured himself but he looked very embarrassed and nobody laughed. “Oh, Duna,” the sister said, scoldingly, but she went over and crouched beside him at the curb. “Duna, Duna,” she reproved him, gently. He shook his big head; he would not look at her. There was some saliva strung on the fur near his mouth and she wiped this away with her hand. He pushed her hand away with his paw.