The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  The World According to Bensenhaver is about the impossible desire of the husband, Dorsey Standish, to protect his wife and child from the brutal world; thus Arden Bensenhaver (who is forced to retire from the police, for repeated unorthodoxy in his methods of arrest) is hired to live like an armed uncle in the house with the Standish family—he becomes the lovable family bodyguard, whom Hope must finally reject. Though the worst of the real world has been visited upon Hope, it is her husband who fears the world most. After Hope insists that Bensenhaver not live with them, Standish continues to support the old policeman as a kind of hovering angel. Bensenhaver is paid to tail the child, Nicky, but Bensenhaver is an aloof and curious kind of watchdog, subject to fits of his own awful memories; he gradually seems more of a menace to the Standishes than he seems a protector. He is described as “a lurker at the last edge of light—a retired enforcer, barely alive on the rim of darkness.”

  Hope counters her husband's anxiety by insisting they have a second child. The child is born, but Standish seems destined to create one monster of paranoia after another; now more relaxed about possible assaults upon his wife and children, he begins to suspect that Hope is having an affair. Slowly, he realizes that this would wound him more than if she were raped (again). Thus he doubts his love for her, and doubts himself; guiltily, he begs Bensenhaver to spy on Hope and determine if she is faithful. But Arden Bensenhaver will no longer do Dorsey's worry work for him. The old policeman argues that he was hired to protect Standish's family from the outside world—not to restrict the free choices of the family to live as it wants. Without Bensenhaver's support, Dorsey Standish panics. One night he leaves the house (and the children) unprotected while he goes out to spy on his wife. While Dorsey is gone, the younger child chokes to death on a piece of Nicky's chewing gum.

  Guilt abounds. In Garp's work, guilt always abounds. With Hope, too—because she was seeing someone (although who could blame her). Bensenhaver, morbid with responsibility, has a stroke. Partially paralyzed, he moves back in with the Standishes; Dorsey feels responsible for him. Hope insists they have another child, but the events have made Standish determinedly sterile.

  He agrees that Hope should encourage her lover—but merely to “impregnate” herself, as he puts it. (Ironically, this was the only part of the book that Jenny Fields called “farfetched.")

  Once again, Dorsey Standish seeks “a control situation—more like a laboratory experiment at life than life itself,” Garp wrote. Hope cannot adjust to such a clinical arrangement; emotionally, either she has a lover or she doesn't. Insisting that the lovers meet for the sole purpose of “impregnating” Hope, Dorsey tries to control the whereabouts, the number and length of their meetings. Suspecting that Hope is meeting her lover clandestinely, as well as according to plan, Standish alerts the senile Bensenhaver to the existence of a prowler, a potential kidnapper and rapist, whose presence in the neighborhood has already been detected.

  Still not satisfied, Dorsey Standish takes to sudden, unannounced visits at his own house (at times when he's least expected home); he never catches Hope at anything, but Bensenhaver, armed and deadly with senility, catches Dorsey. A cunning invalid, Arden Bensenhaver is surprisingly mobile and silent in his wheelchair; he is also still unorthodox in his methods of arrest. In fact, Bensenhaver shoots Dorsey Standish with a twelve-gauge shotgun from a distance of less than six feet. Dorsey had been hiding in the upstairs cedar closet, stumbling among his wife's shoes, waiting for her to make a phone call from the bedroom, which—from the closet—he could overhear. He deserves to be shot, of course.

  The wound is fatal. Arden Bensenhaver, thoroughly mad, is taken away. Hope is pregnant with her lover's child. When the child is born, Nicky—now twelve—feels unburdened by the relaxing tension in the family. The terrible anxiety of Dorsey Standish, which has been so crippling to all their lives, is at last lifted from them. Hope and her children live on, even cheerfully dealing with the wild rantings of old Bensenhaver, too tough to die, who goes on and on with his versions of the nightmarish world from his wheelchair in an old-age home for the criminally insane. He is seen, finally, as belonging where he is. Hope and her children visit him often, not merely out of kindness—for they are kind—but also to remind themselves of their own precious sanity. Hope's endurance, and the survival of her two children, make the old man's ravings tolerable, finally even comic to her.

  That peculiar old-age home for the criminally insane, by the way, bears an astonishing resemblance to Jenny Fields' hospital for wounded women at Dog's Head Harbor.

  It is not so much that “The World According to Bensenhaver” is wrong, or even misperceived, as it is out of proportion to the world's need for sensual pleasure, and the world's need and capacity for warmth. Dorsey Standish “is not true to the world,” either; he is too vulnerable to how delicately he loves his wife and children; he is seen, together with Bensenhaver, as “not well suited for life on this planet.” Where immunity counts.

  Hope—and, the reader hopes, her children—may have better chances. Somehow implicit in the novel is the sense that women are better equipped than men at enduring fear and brutality, and at containing the anxiousness of feeling how vulnerable we are to the people we love. Hope is seen as a strong survivor of a weak man's world.

  John Wolf sat in New York, hoping that the visceral reality of Garp's language, and the intensity of Garp's characters, somehow rescued the book from sheer soap opera. But, Wolf thought, one might as well call the thing Anxiousness of Life; it would make a fantastic series for daytime television, he thought—if suitably edited for invalids, senior citizens, and preschool children. John Wolf concluded that The World According to Bensenhaver, despite the “visceral reality of Garp's language,” and so forth, was an X-rated soap opera.

  Much later, of course, even Garp would agree; it was his worst work. “But the fucking world never gave me credit for the first two,” he wrote to John Wolf. “Thus I was owed.” That, Garp felt, was the way it worked most of the time.

  John Wolf was more basically concerned: that is, he wondered if he could justify the book's publication. With books he did not absolutely take to, John Wolf had a system that rarely failed him. At his publishing house, he was envied for his record of being right about those books destined to be popular. When he said a book was going to be popular—distinct from being good or likable or not—he was almost always right. There were many books that were popular without his saying so, of course, but no book he'd ever claimed would be popular was ever unpopular.

  Nobody knew how he did it.

  He did it first for Jenny Fields—and for certain, surprising books, every year or two, he had been doing it ever since.

  There was a woman who worked in the publishing house who once told John Wolf that she never read a book that didn't make her want to close it and go to sleep. She was a challenge to John Wolf, who loved books, and he spent many years giving this woman good books and bad books to read; the books were alike in that they put this woman to sleep. She just didn't like to read, she told John Wolf; but he would not give up on her. No one else in the publishing house ever asked this woman to read anything at all; in fact, they never asked this woman's opinion of anything. The woman moved through the books lying all around the publishing house as if these books were ashtrays and she was a nonsmoker. She was a cleaning woman. Every day she emptied the wastebaskets; she cleaned everyone's office when they went home at night. She vacuumed the rugs in the corridors every Monday, she dusted the display cases every Tuesday, and the secretaries' desks on Wednesdays; she scrubbed the bathrooms on Thursdays and sprayed air freshener on everything on Fridays—so that, she told John Wolf, the entire publishing house had the whole weekend to gather up a good smell for the next week. John Wolf had watched her for years and he'd never seen her so much as glance at a book.

  When he asked her about books and she told him how unlikable they were to her, he kept using her to test books he wasn't sure of—and the books he thou
ght he was very sure of, too. She was consistent in her dislike of books and John Wolf had almost given up on her when he gave her the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields.

  The cleaning woman read it overnight and asked John Wolf if she could have a copy of her very own to read—over and over again—when the book was published.

  After that, John Wolf sought her opinion scrupulously. She did not disappoint him. She did not like most things, but when she liked something, it meant to John Wolf that nearly everybody else was at least sure to be able to read it.

  It was almost by rote that John Wolf gave the cleaning woman The World According to Bensenhaver. Then he went home for the weekend and thought about it; he tried to call her and tell her not even to try to read it. He remembered the first chapter and he didn't want to offend the woman, who was somebody's grandmother, and (of course) somebody's mother, too—and, after all, she never knew she was paid to read all the stuff John Wolf gave her to read. That she had a rather whopping salary for a cleaning lady was known only to John Wolf. The woman thought all good cleaning ladies were well paid, and should be.

  Her name was Jillsy Sloper, and John Wolf marveled to note that there was not one Sloper with even the first initial of J. in the New York phone directory. Apparently Jillsy didn't like phone calls any more than she liked books. John Wolf made a note to apologize to Jillsy the first thing Monday morning. He spent the rest of a miserable weekend trying to phrase to himself exactly how he would tell T. S. Garp that he believed it was in his own best interests, and certainly in the best interests of the publishing house, NOT to publish The World According to Bensenhaver.

  It was a hard weekend for him, because John Wolf liked Garp and he believed in Garp, and he also knew that Garp had no friends who could advise him against embarrassing himself—which is one of the valuable things friends are for. There was only Alice Fletcher, who so loved Garp that she would love, indiscriminately, everything he uttered—or else she would be silent. And there was Roberta Muldoon, whose literary judgment, John Wolf suspected, was even more newfound and awkward (if existent at all) than her adopted sex. And Helen wouldn't read it. And Jenny Fields, John Wolf knew, was not biased toward her son in the way a mother is usually biased; she had demonstrated the dubious taste to dislike some of the better things her son had written. The problem with Jenny, John Wolf knew, was one of subject matter. A book about an important subject was, to Jenny Fields, an important book. And Jenny Fields thought that Garp's new book was all about the stupid male anxieties that women are asked to suffer and endure. How a book was written never mattered to Jenny.

  That was one thread that interested John Wolf in publishing the book. If Jenny Fields liked The World According to Bensenhaver, it was at least a potentially controversial book. But John Wolf, like Garp, knew that Jenny's status as a political figure was due largely to a general, hazy misunderstanding of Jenny.

  Wolf thought and thought about it, all weekend, and he completely forgot to apologize to Jillsy Sloper the first thing Monday morning. Suddenly there was Jillsy, red-eyed and twitching like a squirrel, the ratted manuscript pages of The World According to Bensenhaver held fast in her rough brown hands.

  “Lawd,” Jillsy said. She rolled her eyes; she shook the manuscript in her hands.

  “Oh, Jillsy,” John Wolf said. “I'm sorry.”

  “Lawd!” Jillsy crowed. “I never had a worse weekend. I got no sleep, I got no food, I got no trips to the cemetery to see my family and my friends.”

  The pattern of Jillsy Sloper's weekend seemed strange to John Wolf but he said nothing; he just listened to her, as he had listened to her for more than a dozen years.

  “This man's crazy,” Jillsy said. “Nobody sane ever wrote a book like this.”

  “I shouldn't have given it to you, Jillsy,” John Wolf said. “I should have remembered that first chapter.”

  “First chapter ain't so bad,” Jillsy said. “That first chapter ain't nothin'. It's that nineteenth chapter that got me,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, Lawd!” she crowed.

  “You read nineteen chapters?” John Wolf asked.

  “You didn't give me no more than nineteen chapters,” Jillsy said. “Jesus Lawd, is there another chapter? Do it keep goin' on?”

  “No, no,” John Wolf said. “That's the end of it. That's all there is.”

  “I should hope so,” Jillsy said. “Ain't nothin' left to go on with. Got that crazy old cop where he belongs—at long last—and that crazy husband with his head blowed off. That's the only proper state for that husband's head, if you ask me: blowed off.”

  “You read it?” John Wolf said.

  “Lawd!” Jills screamed. “You'd think it was him who got raped, the way he went on and on. If you ask me,” Jillsy said, “that's just like men: rape you half to death one minute and the next minute go crazy fussin' over who you're givin' it to—of your own free will! It's not their damn business, either way, is it?” Jillsy asked.

  “I'm not sure,” said John Wolf, who sat bewildered at his desk. “You didn't like the book.”

  “Like it?” Jillsy cawed. “There's nothin' to like about it,” she said.

  “But you read it,” John Wolf said. “Why'd you read it?”

  “Lawd,” Jillsy said, as if she were sorry for John Wolf—that he was so hopelessly stupid. “I sometimes wonder if you know the first thing about all these books you're makin',” she said; she shook her head. “I sometimes wonder why you're the one who's makin' the books and I'm the one who's cleanin' the bathrooms. Except I'd rather clean the bathrooms than read most of them,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, Lawd.”

  “If you hated it, why'd you read it, Jillsy?” John Wolf asked her.

  “Same reason I read anythin' for,” Jillsy said. “To find out what happens.”

  John Wolf stared at her.

  “Most books you know nothin's gonna happen,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, you know that. Other books,” she said, “you know just what's gonna happen, so you don't have to read them, either. But this book,” Jillsy said, “this book's so sick you know somethin's gonna happen, but you can't imagine what. You got to be sick yourself to imagine what happens in this book,” Jillsy said.

  “So you read it to find out?” John Wolf said.

  “There surely ain't no other reason to read a book, is there?” Jillsy Sloper said. She put the manuscript heavily (for it was large) on John Wolf's desk and hitched up the long extension cord (for the vacuum cleaner) which Jillsy wore on Mondays like a belt around her broad middle. “When it's a book,” she said, pointing to the manuscript, “I'd be happy if I could have a copy of my own. If it's okay,” she added.

  “You want a copy?” John Wolf asked.

  “If it's no trouble,” Jillsy said.

  “Now that you know what happens,” John Wolf said, “what would you want to read it again for?”

  “Well,” Jillsy said. She looked confused; John Wolf had never seen Jillsy Sloper look confused before—only sleepy. “Well, I might lend it,” she said. “There might be someone I know who needs to be reminded what men in this world is like,” she said.

  “Would you ever read it again yourself?” John Wolf asked.

  “Well,” Jillsy said. “Not all of it, I imagine. At least not all at once, or not right away.” Again, she looked confused. “Well,” she said, sheepishly, “I guess I mean there's parts of it I wouldn't mind readin' again.”

  “Why?” John Wolf asked.

  “Lawd,” Jillsy said, tiredly, as if she were finally impatient with him. “It feels so true,” she crooned, making the word true cry like a loon over a lake at night.

  “It feels so true,” John Wolf repeated.

  “Lawd, don't you know it is?” Jillsy asked him. “If you don't know when a book's true,” Jillsy sang to him, “we really ought to trade jobs.” She laughed now, the stout three-pronged plug for the vacuum-cleaner cord clutched like a gun in her fist. “I do wonder, Mr. Wolf,” she said, sweetly, “if you'd know whe
n a bathroom was clean.” She went over and peered in his wastebasket. “Or when a wastebasket was empty,” she said. “A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book's true when you can say, “Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.” Then you know it's true,” Jillsy said.

  Leaning over the wastebasket, she seized the one scrap of paper lying alone on the bottom of the basket; she stuffed it into her cleaning apron. It was the crumpled-up first page of the letter John Wolf had tried to compose to Garp.

  Months later, when The World According to Bensenhaver was going to the printers, Garp complained to John Wolf that there was no one to dedicate the book to. He would not have it in memory of Walt, because Garp hated that kind of thing: “that cheap capitalizing,” as he called it, “on one's autobiographical accidents—to try to hook the reader into thinking you're a more serious writer than you are.” And he would not dedicate a book to his mother, because he hated, as he called it, “the free ride everyone else gets on the name of Jenny Fields.” Helen, of course, was out of the question, and Garp felt, with some shame, that he couldn't dedicate a book to Duncan if it was a book he would not allow Duncan to read. The child wasn't old enough. He felt some distaste, as a father, for writing something he would forbid his own children to read.

  The Fletchers, he knew, would be uncomfortable with a book dedicated to them, as a couple; and to dedicate a book to Alice, alone, might be insulting to Harry.

  “Not to me,” John Wolf said. “Not this one.”

  “I wasn't thinking of you,” Garp lied.