by John Irving
And for me to continue coaching wrestling, when there was no longer any financial need, was not a strain; coaching was never as time-consuming as teaching. At the prep-school level, where I chiefly coached, wrestling is a seasonal sport; and neither my presence in the gym nor the hours riding on the team bus took anything away from that part of me that was a writer--on the contrary, wrestling was an escape from writing; it was a release--whereas talking about writing, as one must to "teach" it, exercised many of the same muscles I needed for my own work.
Another factor, the videocassette recorder, has entered the world of coaching--the coaching of any sport. To my knowledge, there is no such handy tool available for Creative Writing classes. For example: my 189-pounder walks dejectedly off the mat, once more a loser, and once again because every time he stands up to escape from the bottom position his elbows are flailing a foot away from his rib cage--therefore, he is easily tight-waisted and thrown to his face. When I would invariably point out to him that even an object as large as his head could have passed through the space left between his elbows and his ribs (during his feeble standup attempt), he would say, "My elbows were tight to my sides, Coach--he just did something to them!"
But then would come the next day's film session, where, in front of his snickering teammates, I would show my 189-pounder the footage of his pathetic standup (with his elbows flapping as far from his body as a chicken's clipped wings in mock flight). I would slow-motion it, I would rewind it and slow-motion it again; in later years I could freeze-frame it, too--and that would be the end of arguing with him (until, naturally, he did it again). But I had a backup: the camera made my criticism valid.
There is no such indisputable backup in Creative Writing classes; frequently the student who perpetrates the deeply flawed story is adored and supported by his or her peers. A teacher's triumphs are few. You say: "When the father drops dead with an apple in his mouth while urinating on the front fender of his mother-in-law's car . . . uh, well, I just had trouble seeing it." Whereupon the student breaks into tears and confesses that this actually happened to her own father, in exactly the way she described it; and there then must follow, always unsatisfactorily, the timeless explanation that "real life" must be made to seem real--it is not believable solely for the fact that it happened. The truth is, the imagination can select more plausible details than those incredible-but-true details that we remember.
This is a tough sell to students rooted in social realism, and young writers without the imagination to move beyond autobiographical fiction--namely, to that host of first novelists who treat a novel as nothing but a thinly masked rendition of their lives up to that point.
Nor are the earliest efforts young writers make to escape autobiographical fiction necessarily successful. A student of mine at Iowa--a brilliant fellow, academically; he would go on to earn a Ph.D. in something I can't even pronounce or spell--wrote an accomplished, lucid short story about a dinner party from the point of view of the hostess's fork.
If you think this sounds fascinating, my case is already lost. Indeed, the young writer's fellow students worshiped this story and the young genius who wrote it; they regarded my all-too-apparent indifference to the fork story as an insult not only to the author but to all of them. Ah, to almost all of them, for I was saved by a most unlikely and usually most silent member of the class. He was an Indian from Kerala, a devout Christian, and his accent and word order caused him to be treated dismissively--as someone who was struggling with English as a second language, although this was not the case. English was his first language, and he spoke and wrote it very well; the unfamiliarity of his accent and the cadence, even of his written sentences, made the other students regard him lightly.
Into the sea of approval that the fork story was receiving, and while my "but . . ." was repeatedly drowned out by the boisterous air of celebration in the class, the Indian Christian from Kerala said, "Excuse me, but perhaps I would have been moved if I were a fork. Unfortunately, I am merely a human being."
That day, and perhaps forever after, he should have been the teacher and I should have given my complete attention to him. He is not a writer these days, except on the faithful Christmas cards he sends from India, where he is a doctor. Under the usual holiday greetings, and the annual photograph of his increasing family, he writes in a firm, readable hand: "Still merely a human being."
On my Christmas cards to him, I write: "Not yet a fork."
(I used to say this to my students in Creative Writing: the wonderful and terrifying thing about the first page of paper that awaits the first sentence of your next book is that this clean piece of paper is completely unimpressed by your reputation, or lack thereof; that blank page has not read your previous work--it is neither comparing you to its favorite among your earlier novels nor is it sneering in memory of your past failures. That is the absolutely exhilarating and totally frightening thing about beginning--I mean each and every new beginning. That is when even the most experienced teacher becomes a student again and again.)
And what about the fork author--where is he today? In Boston, I believe; more pertinent, he's a published novelist--and a good one. I much admired his first novel, and was overall relieved to see that the characters in it were human beings--no cutlery among them.
Alas, these generally pleasant memories should not conceal the fact that I must have played the Nelson Algren role to more than one of my writing students. I'm certain that I've hurt the feelings of young writers who were more serious and gifted than I judged them to be. But just as Mr. Algren didn't harm me by his blunt and (I think) unfair assessment, I doubt that I have harmed any real writers; real writers, after all, had better get used to being misunderstood.
When it happens to me, I just remind myself of what Ted Seabrooke told me: "That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it."
The Imaginary Girlfriend (1995)
AUTHOR'S NOTES
A few pages of this memoir were written as a letter to John Baker, Editorial Director at Publishers Weekly; John published parts of my letter to him in an article he wrote for PW (June 5, 1995). Portions of my remembrance of Don Hendrie were published in the form of an obituary for Hendrie that I wrote for The Exeter Bulletin (Fall 1995). And an excerpt from "The Imaginary Girlfriend" appeared in a fall '95 issue of The New Yorker
I am grateful to Deborah Garrison at The New Yorker and to my wife, Janet, for their editorial response to an earlier draft of this autobiography, which was called "Mentors" and (believe it or not) contained fewer than 10 pages about wrestling. Deb and Janet ganged up on me; they said, in effect, "Are you kidding? Where's the wrestling?"
The reason this memoir was written at all is because I had shoulder surgery a week before Christmas, 1994. I was completely unprepared for how many hours a day, and for how many months, I would be rehabilitating my shoulder; I had anticipated an easier recovery. I knew there would be a little bone sawing in the area of the acromion-clavical joint, and I knew I had a torn rotator-cuff tendon; I didn }t know that the tendon was detached from the humerus--nor did the surgeon, until he got in there.
With four hours of physical therapy a day, for four months, I didn't feel the time was right for me to begin a new novel, which I'd planned to begin after Christmas; I had about 200 pages of notes for the novel, and a halfway-decent first sentence, but the shoulder rehabilitation was too distracting.
One day in January of '95 I was making a nuisance of myself in my wife's office; I was aimlessly bothering Janet and her assistant--poking my nose into the pile of manuscripts that are always waiting to be read in the office of a literary agent. The stitches had only recently been removed from my shoulder and I had just begun the requisite physical therapy; I was still wearing a sling, and I was bored.
Janet doesn't like it when I hang around her office. "Why don't you get out of here?" she said. "Go write a novel."
Summoning my most self-pitying voice, I said, "I can't write a novel with one arm and four hour
s a day of rehabilitation."
"Then go write a memoir, or something," Janet said. "Just get out of here."
My goal was to write an autobiography of 100 pages in four months. It took five months, and the finished manuscript was 101 pages--not counting the photographs.
And so the winter of '95 was one of recovery (April counts as a winter month in Vermont). I would see the physical therapist first thing in the morning; she would "manipulate" my shoulder and prescribe the stretching exercises and the weight lifting that she wanted me to do in the afternoon. I would write my memoir in the middle of the day; in the late afternoon or early evening I would go to my wrestling room and follow the orders of the physical therapist.
To explain "my" wrestling room--it is about 25 feet from my office in the Vermont house. (Between the office and the wrestling room is a small locker room: a toilet, three sinks, two showers, a sauna.) My wrestling mat is equivalent to the in-bounds area of a regulation mat. About a dozen jump ropes, of varying lengths, hang from pegs at one end of the room; at the other end is an area for weight lifting--a couple of weight benches and two racks of free weights. There's also a stationary bike and a treadmill, and lots of shelves for knee pads, elbow pads, head gear, spools of tape--and about a dozen pairs of wrestling shoes, in a somewhat limited range of sizes. (Brendan's feet are only a little bigger than mine; Colin's are only a little bigger than Brendan's.)
There are over 300 photographs on the walls; there aren't many of me, and even fewer of Everett--and not a lot of room remaining for the photos of Everett, which I presume will come. Most of the pictures are of Colin and Brendan, together with the bracket sheets from the tournaments they won. There are twelve medals, five trophies, and one plaque; only the plaque is mine. I never won any medals or trophies, because I never won a wrestling tournament.
I didn't really "win" the plaque. In 1992,1 was selected as one of the first 10 members in the Hall of Outstanding Americans by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. These "Outstanding Americans" were not necessarily outstanding wrestlers, although a few of them were; we were all chosen for being outstanding at something else, and for having also (in our fashion) wrestled.
I am honored to be a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, although I'm embarrassed to have gained entry through the back door--meaning for my other accomplishments, not my wrestling or my coaching. I feel privileged to have been in the same wrestling room with some of the wrestling and coaching members of the Hall of Fame--George Martin, Dave McCuskey, Rex Peery, Dan Gable.
You may be surprised to learn of a couple of other "Outstanding Americans" whom the National Wrestling Hall of Fame has honored: Kirk Douglas and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. I'm surprised that, as of this writing, my fellow novelist Ken Kesey hasn't been selected as a member; Mr. Kesey's wrestling credentials are a whole lot better than mine. He is still ranked as one of the top 10 wrestlers (most career wins) at the University of Oregon, where he graduated in '57. And in '82, at the age of 47, Kesey won the AAU Masters Championships at 198 pounds.
I suspect that after the Senate confirms General Charles C. ("Brute") Krulak's promotion to four-star rank, and General Krulak is officially serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the new Commandant of the Marines will also become a member in the Hall of Outstanding Americans at Stillwater. Described by The New York Times as "a diminutive dynamo of a man"--he was a 121-pounder at Exeter and a 123-pounder at Navy--Chuck was a platoon leader and company commander during two tours of duty in the Vietnam War, and later served as commander of the counterguerrilla-warfare school in Okinawa. Thereafter, General Krulak was commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia, and--just prior to President Clinton's nominating him as the next Commandant of the Marines--Krulak commanded 82,000 marines and 600 combat aircraft in the Pacific. (In the event of war in Korea or the Persian Gulf, General Krulak would have commanded all the marines there.) But as a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, which I assume he will be, Chuck Krulak will probably feel as I do: namely, that the honor is undeserved.
Thus my plaque from the National Wrestling Hall of Fame occupies the far corner of a shelf in my wrestling room, where it stands a little sheepishly, looking unearned beside the hardware and the ribbons that Colin and Brendan won outright. I go to such lengths to describe the territory of my wrestling room and its proximity to my office because I want you to understand that the distance between my writing and my wrestling is never great; indeed, in the winter I was writing "The Imaginary Girlfriend," the distance was only 25 feet.
For four months, I didn't venture farther than that 25-foot path--with two exceptions. The first was a trip to Aspen in the middle of March. I spent less than a week with Colin and Brendan in Colorado. I couldn't ski; I went to the gym and repeated the rehabilitation exercises that my physical therapist in Vermont had given me, and I paddled around in the heated pool and the hot tub with Everett. I had some very pleasant dinners with the Salters, Kay and Jim, and then it was back to Vermont to finish the "Girlfriend"--only I couldn't finish it; not before leaving for France in April, for the French translation of A Son of the Circus.
After most of my interviews in Paris, in the lobby of the Hotel Lutetia, a photographer would drag me to a small plot of greenery (less than a park) off the boulevard Raspail and attempt to position me beside a statue of the French novelist Francois Mauriac. I refused to be photographed beside the statue of Mauriac, largely because the statue is 15 feet tall--you may recall that I'm only five feet eight--but also because I thought that Mauriac looked extremely undernourished and depressed. Possibly he was mortified to be photographed alongside every visiting author who was staying at the Lutetia.
That was Paris: I was brooding about not having finished "The Imaginary Girlfriend" before I had to leave for France, and I was constantly and unsubtly being compared to Mauriac. One of his critics once said that God surely disapproved of what Mauriac had written, to which Mauriac admirably responded: "God doesn't care at all--what we write--but when we do it right, He can use it." (I kept telling one photographer after another that God couldn't possibly find a use for a photograph of John Irving with Francois Mauriac, but the photographers were uncomprehending; one of them misinterpreted my refusal to be photographed with Mauriac as a sure sign of religious zealotry.)
Back in Vermont, April dragged on--so did the "Girlfriend." In May I spent less than a week with Colin and Brendan in California. By then, my rehabilitation exercises were only two hours a day, and I discovered that I could once again carry Everett on my shoulders; we took him to Disneyland, where, admittedly, Colin and Brendan carried him around more often and more easily than I did. On the plane back East from L.A., I was still revising "The Imaginary Girlfriend," which I wouldn't finish before June.
An intractable phenomenon of writing an autobiography is that you begin to miss the people you are writing about; I don't ever miss the characters in my novels, although some of my readers have told me that they miss them. I found myself wanting to call up people I hadn't seen or spoken to in more than 30 years. In most cases, the motivation was more than nostalgia; I couldn't remember all the details--what was so-and-so's weight class, and did he win a Big 10 title, or did he even place?
I called Kay Gallagher, Cliff's widow, a couple of times. Cliff had done so many things I couldn't keep them all straight. It was nice to talk to Kay, but it made me miss Cliff.
As for coincidence, the novelist's companion, Don Hendrie's death (in March) coincided precisely with that point in my autobiography where Hendrie was to make his first appearance. My friend Phillip Borsos also died last winter; he was the movie director who made The Grey Fox, and with whom I'd been trying to make the film of The Cider House Rules--for almost 10 years. Phillip was only 41; his death (cancer), in addition to its own sadness, called back to mind the death of Tony Richardson. (Tony directed The Hotel New Hampshire--he died of AIDS in 1991. My friend George Roy Hill,
now debilitated with Parkinson's, directed The World According to Garp?) Tony used to call me rather late at night and ask me if I'd read anything good lately; he was a voracious reader. Thinking of Tony often puts me in a mood to call people, too. As I was coming to the end of "The Imaginary Girlfriend," I was calling people left and right.
On Memorial Day weekend, I called my old friend Eric Ross in Crested Butte. While I'd been in France, avoiding the Mauriac photo opportunities, Eric had been golfing in Ireland with a bad case of gout. I have never golfed, nor had gout, but the combination struck me as a cruel and comedic affliction.
Thus inspired, I decided to call Vincent Buonomano. I speculated, stupidly, that after Buonomano had graduated from Mount Pleasant High School, he'd never left the Providence area. I called information in Rhode Island and was informed that there was only one Vincent Buonomano in the environs of Providence; actually, he lived in Warwick. I made the call.
A girl answered; she sounded like a teenager. I asked for Vincent Buonomano. The girl said, "Who's calling?"
"He probably doesn't remember me," I said. "I haven't seen him since he was in high school."
She went off screaming for him. "Dad!" Or maybe she said, "Daddy!" I had the impression of a large house and a large family.
Mr. Buonomano was very friendly to me on the phone, but he wasn't the same Vincent Buonomano who'd pinned me in the pit--with less than a minute remaining in the third period. The nice man on the phone said that he occasionally got calls for the other Buonomano, the wrestler, and once some bills for "the wrestler" had been sent to the wrong Buonomano's address. The Mr. Buonomano who talked to me told me that he thought the Buonomano I was looking for had gone to college and was now a physician--because one of the bills was seeking repayment of a student loan, and because one of the bills was addressed to a Dr. Vincent Buonomano. (I speculated that he specialized in necks.) But I couldn't find him. He had slipped away, surely never remembering me.