The World According to Garp by John Irving
"Well, you finally got me," Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.
* * *
--
When Jenny's mother died, Jenny visited Helen and Garp more frequently, though Garp objected to what he called his mother's "entourage." Jenny Fields traveled with a small core of adorers, or with occasional other figures who felt they were part of what would be called the women's movement; they often wanted Jenny's support or her endorsement. There was often a case or a cause that needed Jenny's pure white uniform on the speaker's platform, although Jenny rarely spoke very much or for very long.
After the other speeches, they would introduce the author of A Sexual Suspect. In her nurse's uniform, she was instantly recognizable. Into her fifties, Jenny Fields would remain an athletically attractive woman, crisp and plain. She would rise and say, "This is right." Or, sometimes, "This is wrong"--depending on the occasion. She was the decision maker who'd made the hard choices in her own life and therefore she could be counted on to be on the right side of a woman's problem.
The logic behind all this made Garp fume and stew for days, and once an interviewer from a women's magazine asked if she could come interview him about what it was like to be the son of a famous feminist. When the interviewer discovered Garp's chosen life, his "housewife's role," as she gleefully called it, Garp blew up at her.
"I'm doing what I want to do," he said. "Don't call it by any other name. I'm just doing what I want to do--and that's all my mother ever did, too. Just what she wanted to do."
The interviewer pressed him; she said he sounded bitter. Of course, it must be hard, she suggested, being an unknown writer with a mother whose book was known around the world. Garp said it was mainly painful to be misunderstood, and that he did not resent his mother's success; he only occasionally disliked her new associates. "Those stooges who are living off her," he said.
The article in the women's magazine pointed out that Garp was also "living off" his mother, very comfortably, and that he had no right to be hostile toward the women's movement. That was the first time Garp heard of it: "the women's movement."
It was not many days after this that Jenny came to visit him. One of her goons, as Garp called them, was with her: a large, silent, sullen woman who lurked in the doorway of Garp's apartment and declined to take her coat off. She looked warily at little Duncan, as if she awaited, with extreme displeasure, the moment when the child might touch her.
"Helen's at the library," Garp told Jenny. "I was going to take Duncan for a walk. You want to come?" Jenny looked questioningly at the big woman with her; the woman shrugged. Garp thought that his mother's greatest weakness, since her success, was to be, in his words, "used by all the crippled and infirm women who wished they'd written A Sexual Suspect, or something equally successful."
Garp resented standing cowed in his own apartment by his mother's speechless companion, a woman large enough to be his mother's bodyguard. Perhaps that's what she is, he thought. And an unpleasant image of his mother with a tough dyke escort crossed his mind--a vicious killer who would keep the men's hands off Jenny's white uniform.
"Is there something the matter with that woman's tongue, Mom?" Garp whispered to Jenny. The superiority of the big woman's silence outraged him; Duncan was trying to talk with her, but the woman merely fixed the child with a quieting eye. Jenny quietly informed Garp that the woman wasn't talking because the woman was without a tongue. Literally.
"It was cut off," Jenny said.
"Jesus," Garp whispered. "How'd it happen?"
Jenny rolled her eyes; it was a habit she'd picked up from her son. "You really read nothing, don't you?" Jenny asked him. "You just never have bothered to keep up with what's going on." What was "going on," in Garp's opinion, was never as important as what he was making up--what he was working on. One of the things that upset him about his mother (since she'd been adopted by women's politics) was that she was always discussing the news.
"This is news, you mean?" Garp said. "It's such a famous tongue accident that I should have heard about it?"
"Oh, God," Jenny said wearily. "Not a famous accident. Very deliberate."
"Mother, did someone cut her tongue off?"
"Precisely," Jenny said.
"Jesus," Garp said.
"You haven't heard of Ellen James?" Jenny asked.
"No," Garp admitted.
"Well, there's a whole society of women now," Jenny informed him, "because of what happened to Ellen James."
"What happened to her?" Garp asked.
"Two men raped her when she was eleven years old," Jenny said. "Then they cut her tongue off so she couldn't tell anyone who they were or what they looked like. They were so stupid that they didn't know an eleven-year-old could write. Ellen James wrote a very careful description of the men, and they were caught, and they were tried and convicted. In jail, someone murdered them."
"Wow," Garp said. "So that's Ellen James?" he whispered, indicating the big quiet woman with new respect.
Jenny rolled her eyes again. "No," she said. "That is someone from the Ellen James Society. Ellen James is still a child; she's a wispy-looking little blond girl."
"You mean this Ellen James Society goes around not talking," Garp said, "as if they didn't have any tongues?"
"No, I mean they don't have any tongues," Jenny said. "People in the Ellen James Society have their tongues cut off. To protest what happened to Ellen James."
"Oh boy," Garp said, looking at the large woman with renewed dislike.
"They call themselves Ellen Jamesians," Jenny said.
"I don't want to hear any more of this shit, Mom," Garp said.
"Well, that woman there is an Ellen Jamesian," Jenny said. "You wanted to know."
"How old is Ellen James now?" Garp asked.
"She's twelve," Jenny said. "It happened only a year ago."
"And these Ellen Jamesians," Garp asked, "do they have meetings, and elect presidents and treasurers and stuff like that?"
"Why don't you ask her?" Jenny said, indicating the lunk by the door. "I thought you didn't want to hear any more about it."
"How can I ask her if she doesn't have a tongue to answer me?" Garp hissed.
"She writes," Jenny said. "All Ellen Jamesians carry little note pads around with them and they write you what they want to say. You know what writing is, don't you?"
Fortunately, Helen came home.
Garp would see more of the Ellen Jamesians. Although he felt deeply disturbed by what had happened to Ellen James, he felt only disgust at her grownup, sour imitators whose habit was to present you with a card. The card said something like:
Hello, I'm Martha. I'm an Ellen Jamesian. Do you know what an Ellen Jamesian is?
And if you didn't know, you were handed another card.
The Ellen Jamesians represented, for Garp, the kind of women who lionized his mother and sought to use her to help further their crude causes.
"I'll tell you something about those women, Mom," he said to Jenny once. "They were probably all lousy at talking, anyway; they probably never had a worthwhile thing to say in their lives--so their tongues were no great sacrifice; in fact, it probably saves them considerable embarrassment. If you see what I mean."
"You're a little short on sympathy," Jenny told him.
"I have lots of sympathy--for Ellen James," Garp said.
"These women must have suffered, in other ways, themselves," Jenny said. "That's what makes them want to get closer to each other."
"And inflict more suffering on themselves, Mom?"
"Rape is every woman's problem," Jenny said. Garp hated his mother's "everyone" language most of all. A case, he thought, of carrying democracy to an idiotic extreme.
"It's every man's problem, too, Mom. The next time there's a rape, suppose I cut my prick off and wear it around my neck. Would you respect that, too?"
"We're talking about sincere ge
"We're talking about stupid gestures," Garp said.
But he would always remember his first Ellen Jamesian--the big woman who came to his apartment with his mother; when she left, she wrote Garp out a note and slipped it into his hand as if it were a tip.
"Mom's got a new bodyguard," Garp whispered to Helen as they waved good-bye. Then he read the bodyguard's note.
Your mother is worth 2 of you,
the note said.
But he couldn't really complain about his mother; for the first five years Garp and Helen were married, Jenny paid their bills.
* * *
--
Garp joked that he called his first novel Procrastination because it had taken him so long to write it, but he had worked on it steadily and carefully; Garp was rarely a procrastinator.
The novel was called "historical." It is set in the Vienna of the war years, 1938-45, and through the period of the Russian occupation. The main character is a young anarchist who has to lie low, after the Anschluss, waiting for just the right blow he can strike against the Nazis. He waits too long. The point being, he should better have struck before the Nazi takeover; but there is nothing he can be sure of, then, and he is too young to recognize what is happening. Also, his mother--a widow--cherishes her private life; unconcerned with politics, she hoards her dead husband's money.
Through the war years, the young anarchist works as a zookeeper at Schonbrunn. When the population of Vienna begins seriously starving, and midnight raids on the zoo are a common source of stolen food, the anarchist decides to liberate the remaining animals--who are, of course, innocent of his country's own procrastination and its acquiescence to Nazi Germany. But by then the animals themselves are starving; when the anarchist frees them, they eat him. "That was only natural," Garp wrote. The animals, in turn, are slaughtered easily by a starving mob now roaming Vienna for food--just ahead of the Russian forces. That, too, was "only natural."
The anarchist's mother survives the war and lives in the Russian zone of occupation (Garp gave her the same apartment he and his mother shared on the Schwindgasse); the miserly widow's tolerance is finally wearied by the repeated atrocities she now sees committed by the Soviets--rape, chief among them. She watches the city restored to moderation and complacency, and she remembers her own inertia during the Nazi rise to power with great regret. Finally, the Russians leave; it is 1956, and Vienna retreats into itself again. But the woman mourns her son and her damaged country; she strolls the partially rebuilt and once again healthy zoo at Schonbrunn every weekend, recalling her secretive visits to her son there, during the war. It is the Hungarian Revolution that prompts the old lady's final action. Hundreds of thousands of new refugees come into Vienna.
In an effort to awaken the complacent city--that it must not sit back and watch things develop again--the mother tries to do what her son did: she releases the animals in the Schonbrunn Zoo. But the animals are well fed and content now; only a few of them can even be goaded into leaving their cages, and those who do wander out are easily confined in the Schonbrunn paths and gardens; eventually they're returned to their cages, unharmed. One elderly bear suffers a bout of violent diarrhea. The old woman's gesture of liberation is well intended but it is completely meaningless and totally unrealized. The old woman is arrested and an examining police doctor discovers that she has cancer; she is a terminal case.
Finally, and ironically, her hoarded money is of some use to her. She dies in luxury--in Vienna's only private hospital, the Rudolfinerhaus. In her death dream she imagines that some animals escape from the zoo: a couple of young Asiatic Black Bears. She imagines them surviving and multiplying so successfully that they become famous as a new animal species in the valley of the Danube.
But this is only her imagination. The novel ends--after the old woman's death--with the death of the diarrhetic bear in the Schonbrunn Zoo. "So much for revolution in modern times," wrote one reviewer, who called Procrastination "an anti-Marxist novel."
The novel was praised for the accuracy of its historical research--a point of no particular interest to Garp. It was also cited for originality and for having unusual scope for a first novel by such a young author. John Wolf had been Garp's publisher, and although he had agreed with Garp not to mention on the jacket flap that this was the first novel by the son of the feminist heroine Jenny Fields, there were few reviewers who failed to sound that chime.
"It is amazing that the now-famous son of Jenny Fields," wrote one, "has actually grown up to be what he said he wanted to be when he grew up." This, and other irrelevant cuteness concerning Garp's relationship to Jenny, made Garp very angry that his book couldn't be read and discussed for its own faults and/or merits, but John Wolf explained to him the hard fact that most readers were probably more interested in who he was than in what he'd actually written.
"Young Mr. Garp is still writing about bears," chided one wit, who'd been energetic enough to uncover the Grillparzer story from its obscure publication. "Perhaps, when he grows up, he'll write something about people."
But altogether, it was a literary debut more astonishing than most--and more noticed. It was, of course, never a popular book, and it hardly made T. S. Garp into a brand name; it would not make him "the household product"--as he called her--that his mother had become. But it was not that kind of book; he was not that kind of writer, and never would be, John Wolf told him.
"What do you expect?" John Wolf wrote him. "If you want to be rich and famous, get in another line. If you're serious about it, don't bitch. You wrote a serious book, it was published seriously. If you want to make a living off it, you're talking about another world. And remember: you're twenty-four years old. I think you'll write a lot more books."
John Wolf was an honorable and intelligent man, but Garp wasn't sure--and he wasn't content. He had made a little money, and now Helen had a salary; now that he didn't need Jenny's money, Garp felt all right about accepting some when she simply gave it out. And he felt he'd at least earned another reward to himself: he asked Helen to have another baby. Duncan was four; he was old enough to appreciate a brother or a sister. Helen agreed, knowing how easy Garp had made it for her to have Duncan. If he wanted to change diapers between the chapters of his next book, that was up to him.
But it was actually more than merely wanting a second child that prompted Garp to reproduce again. He knew he was an overwatchful, worrisome father and he felt he might relieve Duncan of some of the pressure of fatherly fears if there was another child to absorb some of Garp's excess anxiety.
"I'm very happy," Helen told him. "If you want another baby, we'll make one. I just wish you'd relax, I wish you'd be happier. You wrote a good book, now you'll write another one. Isn't it just what you always wanted?"
But he bitched about the reviews of Procrastination, and he moaned about the sales. He carped at his mother, and roared about her "sycophantic friends." Finally Helen said to him, "You want too much. Too much unqualified praise, or love--or something that's unqualified, anyway. You want the world to say, 'I love your writing, I love you,' and that's too much to want. That's really sick, in fact."
"That's what you said," he reminded her. "'I love your writing, I love you.' That's exactly what you said."
"But there can only be one of me," Helen reminded him.
Indeed, there would only be one of her, and he loved her very much. He would always call her "the wisest of my life's decisions." He made some unwise decisions, he would admit; but in the first five years of his marriage to Helen, he was unfaithful to her only once--and it was brief.
It was a baby-sitter from the college where Helen taught, a freshman girl from Helen's Freshman English class; she was nice with Duncan, though Helen said that the girl was not a very special student. Her name was Cindy; she had read Garp's Procrastination, and she'd been properly awed. When he drove her home, she would ask him one question after another about his writing: How did you think of THAT? and what made you do it T
Cindy was dropping out of school because she felt a women's college was not right for her; she needed to live with grownups, and with men, she said, and although the college allowed her to move off-campus--into her own apartment, in the second semester of her freshman year--still she felt the college was too "restricted" and she wanted to live in a "more real environment." She imagined that Garp's Vienna had been a "more real environment," though Garp struggled to assure her that it had not been. Little Squab Bones, Garp thought, was puppy-brained, and as soft and as easily influenced as a banana. But he wanted her, he realized, and he saw her as simply available--like the whores on the Karntnerstrasse, she would be there when he asked her. And she would cost him only lies.
Helen read him a review from a famous news magazine; the review called Procrastination "a complex and moving novel with sharp historic resonances...the drama encompasses the longings and agonies of youth."
"Oh fuck 'the longings and agonies of youth,'" Garp said. One of those youthful longings was embarrassing him now.
As for the "drama": in the first five years of his marriage to Helen, T. S. Garp experienced only one real-life drama, and it did not have that much to do with him.
* * *
--
Garp had been running in the city park when he found the girl, a naked ten-year-old running ahead of him on the bridle path. When she realized he was gaining on her, she fell down and covered her face, then covered her crotch, then tried to hide her insubstantial breasts. It was a cold day, late fall, and Garp saw the blood on the child's thighs and her frightened, swollen eyes. She screamed and screamed at him.
"What happened to you?" he asked, though he knew very well. He looked all around them, but there was no one there. She hugged her raw knees to her chest and screamed. "I won't hurt you," Garp said. "I want to help you." But the child wailed even louder. My God, of course! Garp thought: the terrible molester had probably said those very words to her, not long ago. "Where did he go?" Garp asked her. Then he changed his tone, trying to convince her he was on her side. "I'll kill him for you," he told her. She stared quietly at him, her head shaking and shaking, her fingers pinching and pinching the tight skin on her arms. "Please," Garp said, "can you tell me where your clothes are?" He had nothing to give her to wear except his sweaty T-shirt. He was dressed in his running shorts, his running shoes. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head and felt instantly cold; the girl cried out, awfully loud, and hid her face. "No, don't be frightened, it's for you to put on," Garp told her. He let the T-shirt drop on her but she writhed out from under it and kicked at it; then she opened her mouth very wide and bit her own fist.