The Imaginary Girlfriend

by John Irving

  But I stopped neither writing nor wrestling as a result of these discouragements. I retreated to my home state of New Hampshire, not necessarily to lick my wounds. Even with my unimpressive grades at Pitt, the University of New Hampshire was obliged to admit me because of my in-state residency, and it was there that I took my first Creative Writing class by name. The teacher was a Southern novelist named John Yount--an engaging, good-humored, and good-hearted man who didn't bat an eye at my semicolons.

  At the same time I became an extra coach in the wrestling room at Exeter, and I competed "unattached" in various "open" wrestling tournaments around New England and New York State; the University of New Hampshire had no wrestling team.

  The competition in so-called open tournaments was a mixed bag: some of the entries were the better, more mature high-school wrestlers; there were lots of college freshmen and nonstarters on college teams; and always a few older, postcollege competitors--some of these wrestlers were very good, often the best in such tournaments, but others were . . . well, too old, or simply out-of-shape. I was in halfway-decent shape--not in Pittsburgh shape, but this wasn't Pittsburgh.

  Although I was not attached to any team, I competed in my old Exeter uniform--with Ted Seabrooke's blessing. For takedowns, I had fair success with Warnick's arm-drag and Johnson's duck-under and with my own low, outside single-leg; defensively, on my feet--in the neutral position--I had a pretty good whizzer. Sherman Moyer had taught me the value of hand control; on top, I was hard to get away from but I was no pinner, and on the bottom I was difficult to hold down--although Moyer had managed to ride me until the clock ran out.

  In lieu of cutting weight, I started lifting weights: if I couldn't make the cut to the 130-pound class, I would make myself strong enough to wrestle at 137 or 147. (In the open tournaments, the weight classes varied between collegiate and freestyle--sometimes I wrestled at 136/2 or 137, other times at 147 or 149&) A factor in what I weighed was beer; I turned 21 in the middle of the '63 wrestling season--at about the same time I gave up cigarettes, I took up beer.

  Not surprisingly, the writers (and would-be writers) at the University of New Hampshire all smoked and drank; that I drove 45 minutes every day from Durham to Exeter for wrestling practice, and that I traveled on many weekends to wrestling tournaments, struck both me and my new writer friends as exceedingly unliterary. It was my earliest indication that my writing friends and my wrestling friends would rarely mix; for a brief period of time, I would give up the mixture myself--I was convinced that I could be a wrestler or a writer, but not both.

  That March of '63, Ted Seabrooke and I drove out to Kent State University in Ohio to see the NCAA tournament. From the stands, I watched my old teammates at Pitt become All-Americans: Jim Harrison won the championship, Mike Johnson lost in the finals, Timothy Gay placed fifth, and Kenneth Barr was sixth. (I believe that the NCAA Division I tournament is the toughest in wrestling; it is both mentally and physically a tougher tournament than the Olympics--first of all, because of the tremendous pressure college wrestlers put on themselves to become Ail-Americans, but also because of how evenly matched many of the competitors are. In the 1995 tournament, there were six returning national champions; only two of them managed to defend their titles--and, out of 10 weight classes, only four of the number-one seeds finished first.)

  A year away from Pittsburgh, I saw how far I stood from the top level of competition; it depressed me--I was 21, but I felt I'd failed at the one thing I'd been any good at. Worse than "failed"--I had quit. On our way home from Kent State, Ted told me that he'd talked with my Pitt coach, Rex Peery; Rex had been kind to me, as always--he had expressed his hope to Ted that I'd solved my "girlfriend problem."

  "What 'girlfriend problem?" Ted asked me.

  I had to confess to Coach Seabrooke that I'd lied to Coach Peery about my reasons for leaving Pittsburgh. Mike Johnson had just finished second in the nation; yet I'd quit the Pitt team because I couldn't accept the role of spending four years as Johnson's workout partner. Far less honorable than being a backup to Mike Johnson was that I'd lied to Rex--I had made up a girlfriend, of all things.

  "Johnny, Johnny," Ted Seabrooke said to me. (We were standing side by side at a urinal, still in Ohio.) "You don't have to give up wrestling because you're not the best wrestler," Ted told me. "You can still do it. And you're always going to love it--you can't help that."

  But I didn't know that then. I had room in me to do, and to love, only what I thought I could be the best at, and John Yount had told me I could be a writer.

  "So do it," Coach Seabrooke said.

  It was Ted's idea that I should get out of New Hampshire; that I shouldn't be living at home and hanging out in the wrestling room of my old school--that if I were going to give up wrestling, I should give up more than that. I should get away--far away. Pittsburgh, of course, had been "away," but not far enough.

  A Year Abroad

  It was with John Yount's encouragement that I applied to a study-abroad program; as it turned out, the Institute for European Studies in Vienna admitted me. I went off to Europe feeling, for the first time, "like a writer."

  I took 12 tutorial hours of German a week, but to this day I can speak the language only haltingly; I can barely understand German, when I'm spoken to, and reading German only serves to remind me of my dyslexia--all those verbs lurking at the end of the sentence, waiting to be reattached to the clauses they came from.

  My favorite courses at the Institute for European Studies were taught by an Englishman named Edward Mowatt, with whom I studied (not necessarily in this order) Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein and Greek Moral Philosophy. I also studied the Victorian Novel with Herr Doktor Felix Korninger from the University of Vienna. Professor Korninger was an Austrian who'd once taught at the University of Texas; he spoke English with a most original Texan-Austrian accent--a kind of conflation of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Arnold Schwartzenegger.

  In Vienna, I shared an apartment on the Schwindgasse, next to the Polish Reading Room, with a fellow American named Eric Ross; he was from Chicago. Eric was tall and athletic, with honey-colored, curly hair; on skis, especially, he was a picture of Aryan perfection, but of course he was Jewish--and most savvy of the myriad, insidious forms of anti-Semitism in Austria. I knew nothing about anti-Semites, but I learned. I was short and dark and my last name was Irving--a Scots name, but common enough as a Jewish first name so that several Viennese anti-Semites were confused. (This is on a level of intelligence with thinking that John Milton was Jewish because of Milton Friedman, but--as Eric Ross was wise to point out--no one ever said anti-Semites were smart.) Eric and I developed a routine for exposing anti-Semites. Whether I was mistreated by a waiter or a shopkeeper, or by a fellow student at the University of Vienna, it was only necessary for the faintest hint of an anti-Semitic slur to emerge; I would not infrequently miss the slur--my German being as flawed as it was--but Eric, whose German was much better than mine, would instantly alert me to the insult.

  "You're being treated like a Jew again," Eric would tell me.

  Whereupon, pointing to Eric, I would deliver my well-rehearsed line to the offending anti-Semite: "He's the Jew, you idiot." ("Er ist der Jude, Du Idiot") Eric always had to help me with the correct pronunciation, but we usually got our point across: Jew baiting was not merely distasteful--those with the inclination to do it were also stupid enough to think that they could tell who was Jewish and who wasn't.

  Eric and I traveled to Istanbul together, and to Athens; we often went skiing together, too--in Kaprun. But while we both loved the experience of being on our own in Europe, we did not love--we do not love--Vienna. It is a small town; its notorious anti-Semitism is only part of a mean-spirited provincialism--an overall xenophobia, a suspicion (leading to hatred) of all outsiders. "Das geht bei uns nicht," the Austrians say--"That doesn't go with us." "Auslander"--a "foreigner"--is always a derogatory word. Viennese Gemutlichkeit, a tourist attraction, is the false sweetness of basically
unhoflich people.

  I was last in Vienna to promote the German translation of A Prayer for Owen Meany, and I got in trouble with the media for saying these things; at the time, the revelations about Kurt Waldheim's role in World War II appeared to have enhanced Waldheim's popularity in Vienna--and I said so. I doubt I'll go back to Vienna again.

  When I was a student there, Freud's former apartment and office at 19 Berggasse was not open to the public; only the persistent efforts of Freud's daughter finally forced the Austrian government to let the modest Wohnung at 19 Berggasse stand for what it is: a most moving museum of an intellectual life interrupted by Nazi doctrine.

  Freud was not mistaken to call Arthur Schnitzler a "colleague" in the study of the "underestimated and much-maligned erotic"; in my student days, this was doubtless the source of my fondness for Schnitzler--the "underestimated and much-maligned erotic," which Schnitzler often juxtaposed with the oppressive but slowly changing social order of fin-de-siecle Vienna. But even The Road into the Open (1908) was steeped in the same sexually oppressive atmosphere that Eric Ross and I would encounter in Vienna more than half a century later.

  Observe young Baron Georg von Wergenthin looking out a window. "Outside, the park was rather empty. On a bench sat an old woman wearing an outmoded coat with black glass pearls. A governess walked by, a little boy on her hand, and another person, much smaller and in a hussar's uniform, with his saber buckled on and a pistol at his side, walked ahead, looked proudly around himself, and saluted an invalid who came down the path smoking. Deeper in the garden, around the kiosk, a few people sat drinking coffee and reading newspapers. The foliage was still rather thick, and the park seemed oppressed, dusty, and on the whole more summerlike than usual in late September." (Two pages later, young Georg is thinking about "the masquerade at the Ehrenbergs" and remembering "Sissy's fleeting kiss under the black lace of her mask.")

  True, the small man in the hussar's uniform with his saber and pistol was gone from the Stadtpark by the time Eric Ross and I arrived in Vienna, but the "oppressed" atmosphere was largely unchanged. Eric and I used to study in the evenings in a bar where the prostitutes waited for their customers out of the cold. Our landlady turned off the heat at night, and the coffeehouses frequented by students were too noisy for studying; besides, the Viennese students were too proper to be seen in a bar used by prostitutes--except for the one or two well-to-do students who would appear at the bar in order to select a prostitute. (These students were always embarrassed to be seen by Eric or me.) As for the prostitutes, they recognized from the beginning that Eric and I could not afford their more intimate company. Occasionally, there was an older one--my mother's age--who would help me with my German.

  Baron von Wergenthin might first have attracted my interest in The Road into the Open because of his ceaseless fantasizing about women--and the ongoing difficulty of his relationships with them--but young Georg was also a Christian aristocrat whose principal friendships were with Jewish intellectuals, at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise. By the time Eric Ross and I arrived in Vienna, anti-Semitism had not only risen, it had arrived--and it was intractable. It was also much more vulgar than my encounters with it in Schnitzler.

  Witness Georg's meeting with Willy Eissler in the Stadtpark. It is subtly uncomfortable how Willy defends his Jewishness. He says: "The fact that I once had differences with Captain Ladisc cannot keep me from observing that he's always been a drunken pig. I have an insurmountable revulsion, irredeemable even by blood, against people who associate with Jews when it's to their advantage, but who begin to revile them as soon as they're outside on the steps.

  One could at least wait until one got to the coffeehouse."

  Later, Baron von Wergenthin reflects that "he found it almost strange, as he often had before, that Willy was Jewish. The older Eissler, Willy's father, composer of charming Viennese waltzes and songs, distinguished art and antique collector and sometime dealer, with his giant's physique, had been known in his time as the foremost boxer in Vienna, and, with his long, full, gray beard and monocle, resembled more a Hungarian magnate than a Jewish patriarch. But talent, dilettantism, and an iron will had given Willy the affected image of a born cavalier. But what really distinguished him from other young people of his background and aspirations was the fact that he was content not to renounce his heritage; he pursued an explanation or reconciliation for every ambiguous smile, and in the face of pettiness or prejudice, by which he often appeared to be affected, he refused to make light of it whenever possible."

  By the time Eric Ross and I arrived in Vienna, the anti-Semitism had long been administered by means more severe than the "ambiguous smile"; it had degenerated to base thuggery--it was impossible "to make light of it." Skinheads with swastika earrings, while not unusual, were not commonplace; what were commonplace were the shy citizens who looked away from the skinheads, pretending not to have seen them. As young, idealistic Americans, Eric and I could do no more than hold up a mirror to this inexplicable tolerance of intolerance. More than 30 years later, it is still a frequent topic of conversation between Eric and me: not simple intolerance but the tolerance of intolerance, which allows the intolerance to persist.

  Eric Ross went into the advertising business in Chicago; then he moved to Crested Butte, Colorado, where he was a ski patrolman and a folksinger for many years. Eric still lives in Crested Butte, where he is a tireless contributor (both as an actor and a director) to the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre; and he's back writing ads again, when he's not writing letters to me--he's a most faithful correspondent. We try to see each other every year, together with our mutual best friend, David Warren. David is from Ithaca, New York--he was Eric's and my nearly constant companion in Vienna, and the best student among us.

  Eric had the best motorcycle--a German Horex. However, the Horex lacked a kickstand, which for reasons peculiar to Eric was never replaced; the Horex was always falling down. My motorcycle was second-best among our three: a Yugoslavian Jawa--or maybe it was Czech? And David drove a terrible Triumph; it was always dying on him--it preferred stranding him on the autobahn to other places.

  Anyway, for no good reason--except that I had gotten away (far away) from New Hampshire--I started to write. I had Ted Seabrooke and John Yount to thank for the move.

  It was also John Yount who encouraged me to stay in Europe, at a later time (that same year) when I was homesick; I was missing, among other things, both wrestling and a girlfriend who would become my first wife. I had met Shyla Leary in Cambridge in the summer of '63, just before I left for Vienna--I was taking a crash course in German at Harvard summer school. It seems idiotic, but I think it's fairly common that we meet people of importance to us just before we are going away somewhere. Within a year, in the summer of '64, I would marry her--in Greece.

  "Stay in Europe for a while," Mr. Yount wrote to me. "Melancholy is good for the soul."

  Surely this was good and true advice, and beyond the call of duty of Creative Writing teachers. I see now that John Yount was, if not my first mentor, the first writer I was conscious of as a mentor; he made a world of difference to me--largely by impressing upon me that anything I did except writing would be unsatisfying. Even so, I didn't take his advice--I didn't stay in Europe.

  I had tried another language, and I was uncomfortable with it; English was my only language, and--as a writer--I wanted it to be the language I lived with. Besides, Shyla and I had returned to Vienna from Greece--and she was already pregnant with Colin. I wanted to be a father, but only in my own country.

  No Vietnam; No More Motorcyles

  When I came back to the States, and to the University of New Hampshire, it was another writer who took me under his wing. Thomas Williams was much more to me than a teacher; his wife, Liz, would be the godmother of my first child, and Mr. Williams remained, until his death, my sternest and most passionate critic. Tom had a lifelong quarrel with my fondness for imitation--specifically, for imitating the narrative voices of ma
ny 19th-century novelists. He would not infrequently write in the margins of my manuscripts: "Who are you imitating now?" But his affection for me was genuine, as was mine for him; and his loyalty to me, when other critics would attack me, was steadfast. Tom Williams was a good friend, and it was on the strength of his reputation and his recommendation that I was given a teaching-writing fellowship to attend the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. (Already married as an undergraduate, and with one child, I could not have afforded Iowa without the fellowship.) And it was Tom's agent who sold my first short story to Redbook for a whopping, at the time, $1,000. This sale occurred before I graduated from the University of New Hampshire, which caused me to be cordially loathed by my fellow students. But I was on my way to Iowa--what did I care?

  That year in New Hampshire (my last) was a watershed for me. Not only did I become a published writer and a father, but the birth of my son Colin would change my draft status to 3A--"married with child"--which would forever isolate me from the dilemma facing my generation of American males; I would never have to make up my mind about Vietnam, because I couldn't be drafted. If Colin kept me out of Vietnam, the combination of being married and a father, and my return to the world of wrestling, kept me from experimenting with the most seductive hallmarks of my '60s generation: sex and drugs. I was a husband and a daddy and a jock--and, only recently, a writer.

  I had just turned 23 when Colin was born. It was late March, which is not spring in New Hampshire. I remember driving my motorcycle home from the hospital. (A friend had driven Shyla to the hospital, because I'd been in class--in Tom Williams's Creative Writing class.) I remember watching out for the patches of ice and snow that were still evident on the roads; I drove home very slowly, put the motorcycle in the garage, and never drove it again--I would sell it that summer. It was a 750cc Royal Enfield, black and chrome, with a customized tomato-red gas tank the shape of a teardrop--I would never miss it. I was a father; fathers didn't drive motorcycles.