The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  “I was trained to be a nurse,” she said later, in one of her disarming interviews. “Nursing was the first thing I took to, and the first thing I ever wanted to do. It simply seemed very practical, to me, for someone who was healthy—and I have always been bealthy—to help people who weren't healthy or who couldn't help themselves. I think it was simply in that spirit that I wanted to write a book, too.”

  In Garp's opinion, his mother never stopped being a nurse. She had nursed him through the Steering School; she had been a plodding midwife to her own strange life story; finally, she became a kind of nurse to women with problems. She became a figure of famous strength; women sought her advice. With the sudden success of A Sexual Suspect, Jenny Fields uncovered a nation of women who faced making choices about how to live; these women felt encouraged by Jenny's own example of making unpopular decisions.

  She could have started an advice column for any newspaper, but Jenny Fields felt through with writing, now—just as she'd decided, once before, that she was through with education; just as she'd decided she was through with Europe. In a way, she was never through with nursing. Her father, the shocked shoe king, died of a heart attack shortly after the publication of A Sexual Suspect; although Jenny's mother never blamed Jenny's book for the tragedy—and Jenny never blamed herself—Jenny knew that her mother could not live alone. Unlike Jenny Fields, Jenny's mother had developed a habit of living with someone else; she was old now, and Jenny thought of her as rattling about in the great rooms at Dog's Head Harbor, purposeless and wholly without her few remaining wits in the absence of her mate.

  Jenny went to care for her, and it was at the Dog's Head Harbor Mansion that Jenny first began her role as counselor to the women who sought some comfort from her no-nonsense ability to make decisions.

  “Even weird decisions!” Garp wailed, but he was happy, and taken care of. He and Helen had their first child, almost immediately. It was a boy named Duncan. Garp often joked that the reason his first novel was written with so many short chapters was because of Duncan. Garp wrote between feedings and naps and changes of diapers. “It was a novel of short takes,” he claimed, later, “and the credit is wholly Duncan's.” Helen was at school every day; she had agreed to have a child only if Garp would agree to take care of it. Garp loved the idea of never having to go out. He wrote and took care of Duncan; he cooked and wrote and took care of Duncan some more. When Helen came home, she came home to a reasonably happy homemaker; as long as Garp's novel progressed, no routine, however mindless, could upset him. In fact, the more mindless, the better. He left Duncan for two hours every day with the woman in the downstairs apartment; he went to the gym. He later became an oddity at the women's college where Helen taught—running endless laps around the field hockey field, or jumping rope for half an hour in a corner of the gymnasium reserved for gymnastics. He missed wrestling and complained to Helen that she should have gotten a job somewhere where there was a wrestling team; Helen complained that the English Department was too small, and she disliked having no male students in her classes, but it was a good job and she would keep it until something better came along.

  Everything in New England is at least near everything else. They got to visit Jenny at the shore and Ernie at Steering. Garp would take Duncan to the Steering wrestling room and roll him around like a ball. “This is where your daddy wrestled,” he told him.

  “It's where your daddy did everything,” Helen told Duncan, referring—of course—to Duncan's own conception, and to her first rainy night with Garp in the locked and empty Seabrook Gymnasium, on the warm crimson mats stretching wall to wall.

  “Well, you finally got me,” Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.

  When Jenny's mother died, Jenny visited Helen and Garp more frequently, though Garp objected to what he called his mother's “entourage.” Jenny Fields traveled with a small core of adorers, or with occasional other figures who felt they were part of what would be called the women's movement; they often wanted Jenny's support or her endorsement. There was often a case or a cause that needed Jenny's pure white uniform on the speaker's platform, although Jenny rarely spoke very much or for very long.

  After the other speeches, they would introduce the author of A Sexual Suspect. In her nurse's uniform, she was instantly recognizable. Into her fifties, Jenny Fields would remain an athletically attractive woman, crisp and plain. She would rise and say, “This is right.” Or, sometimes, “This is wrong"—depending on the occasion. She was the decision maker who'd made the hard choices in her own life and therefore she could be counted on to be on the right side of a woman's problem.

  The logic behind all this made Garp fume and stew for days, and once an interviewer from a women's magazine asked if she could come interview him about what it was like to be the son of a famous feminist. When the interviewer discovered Garp's chosen life, his “housewife's role,” as she gleefully called it, Garp blew up at her.

  “I'm doing what I want to do,” he said. “Don't call it by any other name. I'm just doing what I want to do—and that's all my mother ever did, too. Just what she wanted to do.”

  The interviewer pressed him; she said he sounded bitter. Of course, it must be hard, she suggested, being an unknown writer with a mother whose book was known around the world. Garp said it was mainly painful to be misunderstood, and that he did not resent his mother's success; he only occasionally disliked her new associates. “Those stooges who are living off her,” he said.

  The article in the women's magazine pointed out that Garp was also “living off” his mother, very comfortably, and that he had no right to be hostile toward the women's movement. That was the first time Garp heard of it: “the women's movement.”

  It was not many days after this that Jenny came to visit him. One of her goons, as Garp called them, was with her: a large, silent, sullen woman who lurked in the doorway of Garp's apartment and declined to take her coat off. She looked warily at little Duncan, as if she awaited, with extreme displeasure, the moment when the child might touch her.

  “Helen's at the library,” Garp told Jenny. “I was going to take Duncan for a walk. You want to come?” Jenny looked questioningly at the big woman with her; the woman shrugged. Garp thought that mother's greatest weakness, since her success, was to be, in his words, “used by all the crippled and infirm women who wished they'd written A Sexual Suspect, or something equally successful.”

  Garp resented standing cowed in his own apartment by his mother's speechless companion, a woman large enough to be his mother's bodyguard. Perhaps that's what she is, he thought. And an unpleasant image of his mother with a tough dyke escort crossed his mind—a vicious killer who would keep the men's hands off Jenny's white uniform.

  “Is there something the matter with that woman's tongue, Mom?” Garp whispered to Jenny. The superiority of the big woman's silence outraged him; Duncan was trying to talk with her, but the woman merely fixed the child with a quieting eye. Jenny quietly informed Garp that the woman wasn't talking because the woman was without a tongue. Literally.

  “It was cut off,” Jenny said.

  “Jesus,” Garp whispered. “How'd it happen?”

  Jenny rolled her eyes; it was a habit she'd picked up from her son. “You really read nothing, don't you?” Jenny asked him. “You just never have bothered to keep up with what's going on.” What was “going on,” in Garp's opinion, was never as important as what he was making up—what he was working on. One of the things that upset him about his mother (since she'd been adopted by women's politics) was that she was always discussing the news.

  “This is news, you mean?” Garp said. “It's such a famous tongue accident that I should have heard about it?”

  “Oh, God,” Jenny said wearily. “Not a famous accident. Very deliberate.”

  “Mother, did someone cut her tongue off?”

  “Precisely.” Jenny said.

 
; “Jesus,” Garp said.

  “You haven't heard of Ellen James?” Jenny asked.

  “No.” Garp admitted.

  “Well, there's a whole society of women now,” Jenny informed him, “because of what happened to Ellen James.”

  “What happened to her?” Garp asked.

  “Two men raped her when she was eleven years old,” Jenny said. “Then they cut her tongue off so she couldn't tell anyone who they were or what they looked like. They were so stupid that they didn't know an eleven-year-old could write. Ellen James wrote a very careful description of the men, and they were caught, and they were tried and convicted. In jail, someone murdered them.”

  “Wow,” Garp said. “So that's Ellen James?” he whispered, indicating the big quiet woman with new respect.

  Jenny rolled her eyes again. “No,” she said. “That is someone from the Ellen James Society. Ellen James is still a child, she's a wispy-looking little blond girl.”

  “You mean this Ellen James Society goes around not talking,” Garp said, “as if they didn't have any tongues?”

  “No, I mean they don't have any tongues,” Jenny said. “People in the Ellen James Society have their tongues cut off. To protest what happened to Ellen James.”

  “Oh boy,” Garp said, looking at the large woman with renewed dislike.

  “They call themselves Ellen Jamesians,” Jenny said.

  “I don't want to hear any more of this shit, Mom,” Garp said.

  “Well, that woman there is an Ellen Jamesian,” Jenny said. “You wanted to know.”

  “How old is Ellen James now?” Garp asked.

  “She's twelve,” Jenny said. “It happened only a year ago.”

  “And these Ellen Jamesians,” Garp asked, “do they have meetings, and elect presidents and treasurers and stuff like that?”

  “Why don't you ask her?” Jenny said, indicating the lunk by the door. “I thought you didn't want to hear any more about it.”

  “How can I ask her if she doesn't have a tongue to answer me?” Garp hissed.

  “She writes,” Jenny said. “All Ellen Jamesians carry little note pads around with them and they write you what they want to say. You know what writing is, don't you?”

  Fortunately, Helen came home.

  Garp would see more of the Ellen Jamesians. Although he felt deeply disturbed by what had happened to Ellen James, he felt only disgust at her grown-up, sour imitators whose habit was to present you with a card. The card said something like:

  Hello, I'm Martha. I'm an Ellen Jamesian. Do you know what an Ellen Jamesian is?

  And if you didn't know, you were handed another card.

  The Ellen Jamesians represented, for Garp, the kind of women who lionized his mother and sought to use her to help further their crude causes.

  “I'll tell you something about those women, Mom,” he said to Jenny once. They were probably all lousy at talking, anyway; they probably never had a worthwhile thing to say in their lives—so their tongues were no great sacrifice; in fact, it probably saves them considerable embarrassment. If you see what I mean.”

  “You're a little short on sympathy,” Jenny told him.

  “I have lots of sympathy—for Ellen James,” Garp said.

  “These women must have suffered, in other ways, themselves,” Jenny said. “That's what makes them want to get closer to each other.”

  “And inflict more suffering on themselves, Mom?”

  “Rape is every woman's problem,” Jenny said. Garp hated his mother's “everyone” language most of all. A case, he thought, of carrying democracy to an idiotic extreme.

  “It's every man's problem, too, Mom. The next time there's a rape, suppose I cut my prick off and wear it around my neck. Would you respect that, too?”

  “We're talking about sincere gestures,” Jenny said.

  “We're talking about stupid gestures,” Garp said.

  But he would always remember his first Ellen Jamesian—the big woman who came to his apartment with his mother; when she left, she wrote Garp out a note and slipped it into his hand as if it were a tip. ”

  Mom's got a new bodyguard,” Garp whispered to Helen as they waved good-bye. Then he read the bodyguard's note.

  Your mother is worth 2 of you,

  the note said.

  But he couldn't really complain about his mother; for the first five years Garp and Helen were married, Jenny paid their bills.

  Garp joked that he called his first novel Procrastination because it had taken him so long to write it, but he had worked on it steadily and carefully; Garp was rarely a procrastinator.

  The novel was called “historical.” It is set in the Vienna of the war years, 1938-45, and through the period of the Russian occupation. The main character is a young anarchist who has to lie low, after the Anschluss, waiting for just the right blow he can strike against the Nazis. He waits too long. The point being, he should better have struck before the Nazi takeover; but there is nothing he can be sure of, then, and he is too young to recognize what is happening. Also, his mother—a widow—cherishes her private life; unconcerned with politics, she hoards her dead husband's money.

  Through the war years, the young anarchist works as a zookeeper at Schцnbrunn. When the population of Vienna begins seriously starving, and midnight raids on the zoo are a common source of stolen food, the anarchist decides to liberate the remaining animals—who are, of course, innocent of his country's own procrastination and its acquiescence to Nazi Germany. But by then the animals themselves are starving; when the anarchist frees them, they eat him. “That was only natural,” Garp wrote. The animals, in turn, are slaughtered easily by a starving mob now roaming Vienna for food—just ahead of the Russian forces. That, too, was “only natural.”

  The anarchist's mother survives the war and lives in the Russian zone of occupation (Garp gave her the same apartment he and his mother shared on the Schwindgasse); the miserly widow's tolerance is finally wearied by the repeated atrocities she now sees committed by the Soviets—rape, chief among them. She watches the city restored to moderation and complacency, and she remembers her own inertia during the Nazi rise to power with great regret. Finally, the Russians leave; it is 1956, and Vienna retreats into itself again. But the woman mourns her son and her damaged country; she strolls the partially rebuilt and once again healthy zoo at Schцnbrunn every weekend, recalling her secretive visits to her son there, during the war. It is the Hungarian Revolution that prompts the old lady's final action. Hundreds of thousands of new refugees come into Vienna.

  In an effort to awaken the complacent city—that it must not sit back and watch things develop again—the mother tries to do what her son did: she releases the animals in the Schцnbrunn Zoo. But the animals are well fed and content now; only a few of them can even be goaded into leaving their cages, and those who do wander out are easily confined in the Schцnbrunn paths and gardens; eventually they're returned to their cages, unharmed. One elderly bear suffers a bout of violent diarrhea. The old woman's gesture of liberation is well intended but it is completely meaningless and totally unrealized. The old woman is arrested and an examining police doctor discovers that she has cancer; she is a terminal case.

  Finally, and ironically, her hoarded money is of some use to her. She dies in luxury—in Vienna's only private hospital, the Rudolfinerhaus. In her death dream she imagines that some animals escape from the zoo: a couple of young Asiatic Black Bears. She imagines them surviving and multiplying so successfully that they become famous as a new animal species in the valley of the Danube.

  But this is only her imagination. The novel ends—after the old woman's death—with the death of the diarrhetic bear in the Schцnbrunn Zoo. “So much for revolution in modern times,” wrote one reviewer, who called Procrastination “an anti-Marxist novel.”

  The novel was praised for the accuracy of its historical research—a point of no particular interest to Garp. It was also cited for originality and for having unusual scope for a fi
rst novel by such a young author. John Wolf had been Garp's publisher, and although he had agreed with Garp not to mention on the jacket flap that this was the first novel by the son of the feminist heroine Jenny Fields, there were few reviewers who failed to sound that chime.

  “It is amazing that the now-famous son of Jenny Fields,” wrote one, “has actually grown up to be what he said he wanted to be when be grew up.” This, and other irrelevant cuteness concerning Garp's relationship to Jenny., made Garp very angry that his book couldn't be read and discussed for its own faults and/or merits, but John Wolf explained to him the hard fact that most readers were probably more interested in who he was than in what he'd actually written.

  “Young Mr. Garp is still writing about bears,” chided one wit, who'd been energetic enough to uncover the Grillparzer story from its obscure publication. “Perhaps, when he grows up, he'll write something about people.”

  But altogether, it was a literary debut more astonishing than most and more noticed. It was, of course, never a popular book, and it hardly made T. S. Garp into a brand name; it would not make him “the household product"—as he called her—that his mother had become. But it was not that kind of book; he was not that kind of writer, and never would be, John Wolf told him.

  “What do you expect?” John Wolf wrote him. “If you want to be rich and famous, get in another line. If you're serious about it, don't bitch. You wrote a serious book, it was published seriously. If you want to make a living off it, you're talking about another world. And remember: you're twenty-four years old. I think you'll write a lot more books.”

  John Wolf was an honorable and intelligent man, but Garp wasn't sure—and he wasn't content. He had made a little money, and now Helen had a salary; now that he didn't need Jenny's money, Garp felt all right about accepting some when she simply gave it out. And he felt he'd at least earned another reward to himself: he asked Helen to have another baby. Duncan was four; he was old enough to appreciate a brother or a sister. Helen agreed, knowing how easy Garp had made it for her to have Duncan. If he wanted to change diapers between the chapters of his next book, that was up to him.