The Books: “The World According to Garp” (John Irving)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Excerpt from The World According to Garp – by John Irving

Ah, Garp. What a book. I come from a huge family of John Irving fans – and Mitchell and David and I were always neck and neck when reading Irving books – racing to the finish. “Don’t tell me what happens!” we would shout at each other. To me, a new John Irving book is like an event. I think John Irving will be read and revered long after we are all dust. I wrote some of my thoughts about him here.

Prayer for Owen Meany was one of those books (like Geek Love – which I wrote about here) – where I can still remember where I was when I finished it. Atonement‘s another one. Vivid memory of finishing that book. I read Owen Meany when I was right out of college. My boyfriend and I read it together – I remember the two of us sitting on the beach in the summer, both with our copies resting on our knees, GUFFAWING with laughter because we had both reached the infamous Christmas pageant scene which is, to this day, one of the funniest pieces of writing I have ever read.

I read Garp in high school – and it was one of those weird things where I saw the movie first. I remember seeing Garp at Edwards Hall – up on the college campus – where they (used to? Do they anymore?) showed movies on Friday nights. Not first-run movies, there was always a bit of a delay before they were shown at Edwards. The sound system was terrible – they basically just had big stereo speakers, and they projected the film onto a large screen, like you would use in a Geology 101 course or something. There was a big balcony, which is where we all used to sit. It was mainly a college crowd in attendance but we in high school always went, too. I remember people smoking pot around us. People brought in beer. I often wonder if my parents had ANY idea the debauched atmosphere that really went on at Edwards. I went on my first “real” date to Edwards. We sat in the balcony and hung our feet over the railing. We both had on high-top sneakers. Memories! I saw some pretty damn good movies there in that crazy atmosphere! I saw Ordinary People there for the first time. I saw Sophie’s Choice there. They played some heavy-hitters! And I saw Garp the movie there. I had read no John Irving. I probably hadn’t even talked to my dad about it because Irving wasn’t on my radar, and I was also just in high school and not the chatty Kathy that I am now. But that movie – my GOD that movie!!!! I still love that movie. It absolutely riveted me. Garp chasing after cars that drove too fast? John Lithgow in a dress? Glenn freakin’ Close in what has to be one of the most startling film debuts since Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Like – no WAY was that woman NOT going to be a star! Hard to believe it was her first movie – her acting is so sure, so complex, so … biZARRE. Anyway, it totally caught my attention. So I read the book. And that was my introduction to John Irving.

Garp blew me away. I was 16, 17 when I read it – so much of it was lost to me – I was an innocent yount thing – but still: the book! The writing! The books within books – where we get to read Garp’s writing, and see his obsessions. The spectre of rape that hangs over the entire book. Garp’s obsession with rape. Also, just the writing – God, Irving is good. He’s one of the best. He creates complex living characters who are completely themselves. Like – Hester the Molester in Owen Meany is like nobody else. I would recognize Hester if I met her in real life, she’s that real to me. Same with all of his characters. I don’t know how he does it. I know I’m not the first person to make this comparison – but since I’m reading Bleak House right now, it’s on my mind: When Dickens describes a character – he does so in total freedom, as though he is describing someone real. His imagination is that strong. Many writers can’t do that. Their characters are archetypes – or ciphers – even when they are interesting. But Dickens launches into these detailed descriptions of what some dude’s face looks like, and how his hands move, and what his eyes are like, etc. – and it’s so damn good, it’s like a perfect portrait of a full human being. We may never know what is in his heart – but we certainly GET his surface, in a way that very few writers can do. John Irving, to me, has the same freedom with his imagination. Like – the cast of characters he has created … and how he writes about them, how detailed, how intricate, how funny, how tragic … This is a man who is at the top of his game. I am in awe of him.

Not to mention his sheer writing chops. The dude can WRITE. Nobody begins a book like John Irving, and nobody ends a book like Irving. He knows how to craft his story, he knows how to end properly (very very difficult). That’s why Owen Meany packs such a huge punch. It’s the cumulation of the whole thing, of course – we realize we have been building up to that ending all along – but it’s HOW he gets us there. I love him.

Not sure which of his is my favorite of his books – there are some that I have missed.

I read Garp probably before I was “ready” to. Movies have done that for me a lot. I read Oliver Twist at age 10 because I had seen the musical and became obsessed. Much of the book was really difficult for me – the language – but I struggled through. I read All the President’s Men in 7th grade because I had seen the movie. HA! I remember my civics teacher being fascinated that this little 7th grader in a Fair Isle sweater with big thick glasses was reading this famous book of reportage. He kept coming over to me to ask me what part I was at in the book, etc. Too funny. There are more examples.

I found Garp challenging at the time – and even upsetting. It’s quite a violent book, if you think about it. I mean, just look at the last sentence. There are tongues cut out, rapes in laundromats, you know … the world is a terrible and violent and random place. This is why Garp chases down cars that drive too fast in his neighborhood. He can’t control much, but boy – he can try to control THAT.

Great great character.

Here’s an excerpt that makes me laugh. Jenny Fields. I mean, my God. What a character!! She is so WEIRD! But don’t you just love her? Jenny and Garp, mother and son, move to Vienna – to be writers together. Although Garp seems more baffled and dominated by her than anything else, and he keeps thinking about Helen, the girl he has a crush on back home. Jenny, all excited and evangelical, tells him about a writer’s room that was recreated perfectly in the Museum in Vienna. The writer’s name (and I am laughing out loud right now) was Franz Grillparzer.

I chose this excerpt because I think it’s funny and totally weird – but I also chose it because it’s about writing.

EXCERPT FROM The World According to Garp (Modern Library) – by John Irving

Franz Grillparzer died in 1872; he was an Austrian poet and dramatist, whom very few people outside Austria have ever heard of. He is one of those nineteenth-century writers who did not survive the nineteenth-century with any enduring popularity, and Garp would later argue that Grillparzer did not deserve to survive the nineteenth-century. Garp was not interested in plays and poems, but he went to the library and read what is considered to be Grillparzer’s outstanding prose work: the long short story “The Poor Fiddler”. Perhaps, Garp thought, his three years of Steering German were not enough to allow him to appreciate the story; in German, he hated it. He theen found an English translation of the story in a secondhand bookstore on Habsburgergrasse; he still hated it.

Garp thought that Grillparzer’s famous story was a ludicrous melodrama; he also thought it was ineptly told and baldly sentimental. It was only vaguely remindful to him of nineteenth-century Russian stories, where often the character is an indecisive procrastinator and a failure in every aspect of practical life; but Dostoevsky, in Garp’s opinion, could compel you to be interested in such a wretch; Grillparzer bored you with tearful trivia.

In the same secondhand bookstore Garp bought an English translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; he had been made to read Marcus Aurelius in a Latin class at Steering, but he had never read him in English before. He bought the book because the bookstore owner told Garp that Marcus Aurelius had died in Vienna.

“In the life of a man,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” Garp somehow thought that Marcus Aurelius must have lived in Vienna when he wrote that.

The subject of Marcus Aurelius’s dreary observations was certainly the subject of most serious writing, Garp thought; between Grillparzer and Dostoevsky the difference was not subject matter. The difference, Garp concluded, was intelligence and grace; the difference was art. Somehow this obvious discovery pleased him. Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer’s work that Grillparzer was “sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man.”

“Maybe so,” Garp wrote. “But he was also an extremely bad writer.”

Garp’s conviction that Franz Grillparzer was a “bad” writer seemed to provide the young man with his first real confidence as an artist – even before he had written anything. Perhaps in every writer’s life there needs to be that moment when some other writer is attacked as unworthy of the job. Garp’s killer instinct in regard to poor Grillparzer was almost a wrestling secret; it was as if Garp had observed an opponent in a match with another wrestler; spotting the weaknesses, Garp knew he could do better. He even forced Jenny to read “The Poor Fiddler”. It was one of the few times he would seek her literary judgment.

“Trash,” Jenny pronounced it. “Simplistic. Maudlin. Cream puff.”

They were both delighted.

“I didn’t like his room, really,” Jenny told Garp. “It was just not a writer’s room.”

“Well, I don’t think that matters, Mom,” Garp said.

“But it was a very cramped room,” Jenny complained. “It was too dark, and it looked very fussy.”

Garp peered into his mother’s room. Over her bed and dresser, and taped to her wall mirror – nearly obscuring his mother’s own image – were the scattered pages of her incredibly long and messy manuscript. Garp didn’t think his mother’s room looked very much like a writer’s room either, but he didn’t say so.

He wrote Helen a long, cocky letter, quoting Marcus Aurelius and slamming Franz Grillparzer. In Garp’s opinion, “Franz Grillparzer died forever in 1872 and like a cheap local wine does not travel very far from Vienna without spoiling.” The letter was a kind of muscle-flexing; perhaps Helen knew that. The letter was calisthenics; Garp made a carbon copy of it and decided he liked it so well that he kept the original and sent Helen the carbon. “I feel a little like a library,” Helen wrote him. “It’s as if you intend to use me as your file drawer.”

Was Helen really complaining? Garp was not sensitive enough to Helen’s own life to bother to ask her. He merely wrote back that he was “getting ready to write”. He was confident she would like the results. Helen may have felt warned away from him, but she didn’t indicate any anxiety: at college, she was gobbling courses at nearly triple the average rate. Approaching the end of her first semester, she was about to become a second-semester junior. The self-absorption and ego of a young writer did not frighten Helen Holm; she was moving at her own remarkable pace, and she appreciated someone who was determined. Also, she liked Garp’s writing to her; she had an ego, too, and his letters, she kept telling him, were awfully well written.

In Vienna, Jenny and Garp went on a spree of Grillparzer jokes. They began to uncover little signs of the dead Grillparzer all over the city. There was a Grillparzergasse, there was a Kaffeehaus des Grillparzers; and one day in a pastry shop they were amazed to find a sort of layer cake named after him: Grillparzertorte! It was much too sweet. Thus, when Garp cooked for his mother, he asked her if she wanted her eggs soft-boiled or Grillparzered. And one day at the Schonbrunn Zoo they observed a particularly gangling antelope, its flanks spindly and beshitted; the antelope stood sadly in its narrow and foul winter quarters. Garp identified it: der Gnu des Grillparzers.

Of her own writing, Jenny one day remarked to Garp that she was guilty of “doing a Grillparzer.” She explained that this meant she had introduced a scene or a character “like an alarm going off.” The scene she had in mind was the scene in the movie house in Boston when the soldier had approached her. “At the movie,” wrote Jenny Fields, “a soldier consumed with lust approached me.”

“That’s awful, Mom,” Garp admitted. The phrase “consumed with lust” was what Jenny meant by “doing a Grillparzer”.

“But that’s what it was,” Jenny said. “It was lust, all right.”

“It’s better to say he was thick with lust,” Garp suggested.

“Yuck,” Jenny said. Another Grillparzer. It was the lust she didn’t care for, in general. They discussed lust, as best they could. Garp confessed his lust for Cushie Percy and rendered a suitably tame version of the consummation scene. Jenny did not like it. “And Helen?” Jenny asked. “Do you feel that for Helen?”

Garp admitted he did.

“How terrible,” Jenny said. She did not understand the feeling and did not see how Garp could ever associate it with pleasure, much less with affection.

” ‘All that is body is as coursing waters,’ ” Garp said lamely, quoting Marcus Aurelius; his mother just shook her head. They ate dinner in a very red restaurant in the vicinity of Blutgasse. “Blood Street,” Garp translated for her, happily.

“Stop translating everything,” Jenny told him. “I don’t want to know everything.” She thought the decor of the restaurant was too red and the food was too expensive. The service was slow and they started for home too late. It was very cold and the gay lights of the Karntnerstrasse did little to warm them.

“Let’s get a taxi,” Jenny said. But Garp insisted that in another five blocks they could take a streetcar just as easily. “You and your damn Strassenbahns,” Jenny said.

It was clear that the subject of “lust” had spoiled their evening.