“How about Roberta Muldoon?” John Wolf said.
“The book has absolutely nothing to do with Roberta,” Garp said. Though Garp knew that Roberta, at least, wouldn't object to the dedication. How funny to write a book really no one would like to have dedicated to them!
“Maybe I'll dedicate it to the Ellen Jamesians,” Garp said, bitterly.
“Don't make trouble for yourself,” John Wolf said. “That's just plain stupid.”
Garp sulked.
For Mrs. Ralph?
he thought. But he still didn't know her real name. There was Helen's father—his good old wrestling coach, Ernie Holm—but Ernie wouldn't understand the gesture; it would hardly be a book Ernie would like. Garp hoped, in fact, that Ernie wouldn't read it. How funny to write a book you hope someone doesn't read!
To Fat Stew
he thought.
For Michael Milton
In Memory of Bonkers
He bogged down. He could think of no one.
“I know someone,” John Wolf said. “I could ask her if she'd mind.”
“Very funny,” Garp said.
But John Wolf was thinking of Jillsy Sloper, the person, he knew, who was responsible for getting this book of Garp's published at all.
“She's a very special woman who loved the book,” John Wolf told Garp. “She said it was so “true.”
Garp was interested in the idea.
“I gave her the manuscript for one weekend,” John Wolf said, “and she couldn't put it down.”
“Why'd you give her the manuscript?” Garp asked.
“She just seemed right for it,” John Wolf said. A good editor will not share all his secrets with anyone.
“Well, okay,” Garp said. “It seems naked, having no one. Tell her I'd appreciate it. She's a close friend of yours?” Garp asked. Garp's editor winked at him and Garp nodded.
“What's it all mean, anyway?” Jillsy Sloper asked John Wolf, suspiciously. “What's it mean, he wants to “dedicate” that terrible book to me?”
“It means, that your response was valuable to him,” John Wolf said. “He thinks the book was written almost with you in mind.”
“Lawd,” Jillsy said. “With me in mind? What's that mean?”
“I told him how you responded to his book,” John Wolf said, “and he thinks you're the perfect audience, I guess.”
“The perfect audience?” Jillsy said. “Lawd, he is crazy, isn't he?”
“He's got no one else to dedicate it to,” John Wolf admitted.
“Kind of like needin' a witness for a weddin'?” Jillsy Sloper asked.
“Kind of,” John Wolf guessed.
“It don't mean I approve of the book?” Jillsy asked.
“Lord, no,” John Wolf said.
“Lawd, no, huh?” Jillsy said.
“No one's going to blame you for anything in the book, if that's what you mean,” John Wolf said.
“Well,” said Jillsy.
John Wolf showed Jillsy where the dedication would be; he showed her other dedications in other books. They all looked nice to Jillsy Sloper and she nodded her head, gradually pleased by the idea.
“One thing,” she said. “I won't have to meet him, or anythin', will I?”
“Lord, no,” said John Wolf, so Jillsy agreed.
There remained only one more stroke of genius to launch The World According to Bensenhaver into that uncanny half-light where occasional “serious” books glow, for a time, as also “popular” books. John Wolf was a smart and cynical man. He knew about all the shitty autobiographical associations that make those rabid readers of gossip warm to an occasional fiction.
Years later, Helen would remark that the success of The World According to Bensenhaver lay entirely in the book jacket. John Wolf was in the habit of letting Garp write his own jacket flaps, but Garp's description of his own book was so ponderous and glum that John Wolf took matters into his own hands; he went straight to the dubious heart of the matter.
“The World According to Bensenhaver,” the book jacket flap said, “is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do.
“T. S. Garp,” the jacket flap went on, “is the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields.” John Wolf shivered slightly when he saw this in print, because although he had written it, and although he knew very well why he had written it, he also knew that it was information Garp never wanted mentioned in connection with his own work. “T. S. Garp is also a father,” the jacket flap said. And John Wolf shook his head in shame to see the garbage he had written there. “He is a father who has recently suffered the tragic loss of a five-year-old son. Out of the anguish that a father endures in the aftermath of an accident, this tortured novel emerges...” And so forth.
It was, in Garp's opinion, the cheapest reason to read of all. Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was “true"—how much of it was based on “personal experience.” True—not in the good way that Jillsy Sloper used it, but true as in “real life.” Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis—if there even was one—was the least interesting level on which to read a novel. He would always say that the art of fiction was the act of imagining truly—was, like any art, a process of selection. Memories and personal histories—"all the recollected traumas of our unmemorable lives"—were suspicious models for fiction, Garp would say. “Fiction has to be better made than life,” Garp wrote. And he consistently detested what he called “the phony mileage of personal hardship"—writers whose books were “important” because something important had happened in their lives. He wrote that the worst reason for anything being part of a novel was that it really happened. “Everything has really happened, sometime!” he fumed. “The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it's the perfect thing to have happen at that time.
“Tell me anything that's ever happened to you,” Garp told an interviewer once, “and I can improve upon the story; I can make the details better than they were.” The interviewer, a divorced woman with four young children, one of whom was dying of cancer, had her face firmly fixed in disbelief. Garp saw her determined unhappiness, and its terrible importance to her, and he said to her, gently, “If it's sad—even if it's very sad—I can make up a story that's sadder.” But he saw in her face that she would never believe him; she wasn't even writing it down. It wouldn't even be a part of her interview.
And John Wolf knew this: one of the first things most readers want to know is everything they can about a writer's life. John Wolf wrote Garp: “For most people, with limited imaginations, the idea of improving on reality is pure bunk.” On the book jacket flap of The World According to Bensenhaver, John Wolf created a bogus sense of Garp's importance ("the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields") and a sentimental sympathy for Garp's personal experience ("the tragic loss of a five-year-old son"). That both pieces of information were essentially irrelevant to the art of Garp's novel did not deeply concern John Wolf. Garp had made John Wolf sore with all his talk about preferring riches to seriousness.
“It's not your best book,” John Wolf wrote Garp, when he sent the galleys for Garp to proofread. “One day you'll know that, too. But it is going to be your biggest book; just wait and see. You can't imagine, yet, how you're going to hate many of the reasons for your success, so I advise you to leave the country for a few months. I advise you to read only the reviews I send to you. And when it blows over—because everything blows over—you can come back home and pick up your considerable surprise at the bank. And you can hope that Bensenhaver's popularity is big enough to make people go back and read the first two novels—for which you deserve to be better known.
“Tell Helen I am sorry, Garp, but I think you must know: I have always had your own interests at heart. If you want to sell this book, we'll sell it. “Ev
ery business is a shitty business,” Garp. I am quoting you.”
Garp was very puzzled by the letter; John Wolf, of course, had not shown him the jacket flaps.
“Why are you sorry?” Garp wrote back. “Don't weep; just sell it.”
“Every business is a shitty business,” Wolf repeated.
“I know, I know,” Garp said.
“Take my advice,” Wolf said.
“I like reading the reviews,” Garp protested.
“Not these, you won't,” John Wolf said. “Take a trip. Please.” Then John Wolf sent the jacket flap copy to Jenny Fields. He asked her for her confidence, and her help in getting Garp to leave the country.
“Leave the country,” Jenny said to her son. “It's the best thing you can do for yourself and your family.” Helen was actually keen on the idea; she'd never been abroad. Duncan had read his father's first story, “The Pension Grillparzer,” and he wanted to go to Vienna.
“Vienna's not really like that,” Garp told Duncan, but it touched Garp very much that the boy liked the old story. Garp liked it, too. In fact, he was beginning to wish that he liked everything else he had written half as much.
“With a new baby, why go to Europe?” Garp complained. “I don't know. It's complicated. The passports—and the baby will need lots of shots, or something.”
“You need some shots yourself,” said Jenny Fields. “The baby will be perfectly safe.”
“Don't you want to see Vienna again?” Helen asked Garp.
“Ah, just imagine, the scene of your old crimes!” John Wolf said heartily.
“Old, crimes?” Garp mumbled. “I don't know.”
“Please, Dad,” Duncan said. Garp was a sucker to what Duncan wanted; he agreed.
Helen cheered up and even took a glance at the galleys of The World According to Bensenhaver, though it was a quick, nervous glance, and she had no intention of doing any real reading therein. The first thing she saw was the dedication.
For Jillsy Sloper
“Who in God's name is Jillsy Sloper?” she asked Garp.
“I don't know, really,” Garp said; Helen frowned at him. “No, really,” he said. “It's some girl friend of John's; he said she loved the book—couldn't put it down. Wolf took it as a kind of omen, I guess; it was his suggestion, anyway,” Garp said. “And I thought it was nice.”
“Hm,” said Helen; she put the galleys aside.
They both imagined John Wolf's girl friend in silence. John Wolf had been divorced before they met him; though the Garps had gotten to meet some of Wolf's grown-up children, they had never met his first and only wife. There had been a conservative number of girl friends, all smart and sleekly attractive women—all younger than John Wolf. Some working girls, in the publishing business, but mostly young women with divorces of their own, and money—always money, or always the look of money. Garp remembered most of them by how nicely they smelled, and how their lipstick tasted—and the high-gloss, touchable quality of their clothes.
Neither Garp nor Helen could ever have imagined Jillsy Sloper, the offspring of a white person and a quadroon—which made Jillsy an octoroon, or one eighth Negro. Her skin was a sallow brown, like a lightly stained pine board. Her hair was straight and short and waxy-black, beginning to gray at her bangs, which were coarsely chopped above her shining, wrinkled forehead. She was short, with long arms, and her ring finger was missing from her left hand. By the deep scar on her right cheek, one could imagine that the ring finger had been cut off in the same battle, by the same weapon—perhaps during a bad marriage, for she had certainly had a bad marriage. Which she never spoke of.
She was about forty-five and looked sixty. She had the trunk of a Labrador retriever about to have puppies, and she shuffled whenever and wherever she walked because her feet killed her. In a few years she would so long ignore the lump she could feel in her own breast, which no one else ever felt, that she would die needlessly of cancer.
She had an unlisted phone number (as John discovered) only because her former husband threatened to kill her every few months, and she tired of hearing from him; the reason she had a phone at all was that her children needed a place to call collect so that they could ask her to send them money.
But Helen and Garp, when they imagined Jillsy Sloper, did not for a moment see anyone approximating this sad, hard-working octoroon. “John Wolf seems to be doing everything for this book except writing it,” Helen said.
“I wish he had written it,” Garp suddenly said. Garp had reread the book, and he felt full of doubt. In “The Pension Grillparzer,” Garp thought, there was a certainty concerning how the world behaved. In The World According to Bensenhaver, Garp had felt less certain—an indication he was getting older, of course; but artists, he knew, should also get better.
With baby Jenny and one-eyed Duncan, Garp and Helen left for Europe out of a cool New England August; most transatlantic travelers were headed the other way.
“Why not wait until after Thanksgiving?” Ernie Holm asked them. But The World According to Bensenhaver would be published in October. John Wolf had received various responses to the uncorrected proofs he circulated through the summer; they had all been enthusiastic responses—enthusiastically praising the book, or enthusiastically condemning it.
He'd had difficulty keeping Garp from seeing the advance copies of the actual book—the book jacket, for example. But Garp's own enthusiasm for the book was so sporadic, and generally low, that John Wolf had been able to stall him.
Garp was now excited about the trip, and he was talking about other books he was going to write. ("A good sign,” John Wolf told Helen.)
Jenny and Roberta drove the Garps to Boston, where they took a plane to New York. “Don't worry about the airplane,” Jenny said. “It won't fall.”
“Jesus, Mom,” Garp said. “What do you know about airplanes? They fall all the time.”
“Keep your arms in constant motion, like wings,” Roberta told Duncan.
“Don't scare him, Roberta,” Helen said.
“I'm not scared,” Duncan said.
“If your father keeps talking, you can't fall,” Jenny said.
“If he keeps talking,” Helen said, “we'll never land.” They could see that Garp was all wound up.
“I'll fart all the way, if you don't leave me alone,” Garp said, “and we'll go in a great explosion.”
“You better write often,” Jenny said.
Remembering dear old Tinch, and his last trip to Europe, Garp told his mother, “This time I'm just going to ab-ab-absorb a lot, Mom. I'm not going to write a w-w-word.” They both laughed at this, and Jenny Fields even cried a little, although only Garp noticed; he kissed his mother good-bye. Roberta, whose sex reassignment had made her a dynamite kisser, kissed everyone several times.
“Jesus, Roberta,” Garp said.
“I'll look after the old girl while you're gone,” Roberta said, her giant arm dwarfing Jenny, who looked so small and suddenly very gray beside her.
“I don't need any looking after,” Jenny Fields said.
“It's Mom who looks after everyone else,” Garp said.
Helen hugged Jenny, because she knew how true that was. From the airplane, Garp and Duncan could see Jenny and Roberta waving from the observation deck. There had been some seat changes because Duncan had wanted a window seat on the left-hand side of the plane. “The right-hand side is just as nice,” a stewardess said.
“Not if you don't have a right eye,” Duncan told her, pleasantly, and Garp admired how the boy was feeling so bold about himself.
Helen and the baby sat across the aisle from them. “Can you see Grandma?” Helen asked Duncan.
“Yes,” Duncan said.
Although the observation deck was suddenly overrun with people wanting to see the takeoff, Jenny Fields—as always—stood out in her white uniform, even though she was short. “Why does Nana look so tall?” Duncan asked Garp, and it was true: Jenny Fields towered head and shoulders above the crowd. Garp, r
ealized that Roberta was lifting his mother up as if his mother were a child. “Oh, Roberta's got her!” Duncan cried. Garp looked at his mother hefted up in the air to wave goodbye to him, safe in the arms of the old tight end; Jenny's shy, confident smile touched him, and he waved out the window to her, although Garp knew that Jenny couldn't see inside the plane. For the first time, his mother looked old to him; he looked away—across the aisle, at Helen with their new child.
“Here we go,” Helen said. Helen and Garp held hands across the aisle when the plane lifted off, because, Garp knew, Helen was terrified of flying.
In New York, John Wolf put them up in his apartment; he gave Garp and Helen and baby Jenny his own bedroom and graciously offered to share the guest room with Duncan.
The grownups had a late dinner and too much cognac. Garp told John Wolf about the next three novels he was going to write.
“The first one is called My Father's Illusions,” Garp said. “It's about an idealistic father who has many children. He keeps establishing little utopias for his kids to grow up in, and after his kids grow up he becomes a founder of small colleges. But all of them go broke—the colleges and the kids. The father keeps trying to give a speech at the U.N., but they keep throwing him out; it's the same speech—he keeps revising and revising it. Then he tries to run a free hospital; it's a disaster. Then he tries to institute a nationwide free-transportation system. Meanwhile, his wife divorces him and his children keep growing older, and turning out unhappy, or fucked-up—or just perfectly normal, you know. The only thing the children have in common are these dreadful memories of the utopias their father tried to have them grow up in. Finally, the father becomes the governor of Vermont.”
“Vermont?” John Wolf asked.
“Yes, Vermont,” Garp said. “He becomes governor of Vermont, but he really thinks of himself as a king. More utopias, you see.”
“The King of Vermont!” John Wolf said. “That's a better title.”
“No, no,” Garp said. “That's another book. No relation. The second book, after My Father's Illusions, will be called The Death of Vermont.”
“Same cast of characters?” Helen asked.
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