John Irving - The World According to Garp

WHAT do you mean, “This is Chapter One"?” Garp's editor, John Wolf, wrote him. “How can there be any more of this ? There is entirely too much as it stands! How can you possibly go on?”

“It goes on,” Garp wrote back. “You'll see.”

“I don't want to see,” John Wolf told Garp on the phone. “Please drop it. At least put it aside. Why don't you take a trip? It would be good for you—and for Helen, I'm sure. And Duncan can travel now, can't he?”

But Garp not only insisted that The World According to Bensenhaver was going to be a novel; he insisted that John Wolf try to sell the first chapter to a magazine. Garp had never had an agent; John Wolf was the first man to deal with Garp's writing, and he managed everything for him, just as he managed everything for Jenny Fields.

“ Sell it?” John Wolf said.

“Yes, sell it,” Garp said. “Advance publicity for the novel.”

This had happened with Garp's first two books; excerpts had been sold to magazines. But John Wolf tried to tell Garp that this chapter was (1) unpublishable and (2) the worst possible publicity—should anyone be fool enough to publish it. He said that Garp had a “small but serious” reputation as a writer, that his first two novels had been decently reviewed—had won him respected supporters and a “small but serious” audience. Garp said he hated the reputation of “small but serious,” though he could see that this appealed to John Wolf.

“I would rather be rich and wholly outside caring about what the idiots call “serious,"” he told John Wolf. But who is ever outside caring about that?

Garp actually felt that he could buy a sort of isolation from the real and terrible world. He imagined a kind of fort where he and Duncan and Helen (and a new baby) could live unmolested, even untouched by what he called “the rest of life.”

“What are you talking about?” John Wolf asked him.

Helen asked him, too. And so did Jenny. But Jenny Fields liked the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver . She thought it had all its priorities in order—that it knew whom to heroize in such a situation, that it expressed the necessary outrage, that it made properly grotesque the vileness of lust . Actually, Jenny's fondness for the first chapter was more troubling to Garp than John Wolf's criticism. Garp suspected his mother's literary judgment above all things.

“My God, look at her book,” he kept saying to Helen, but Helen, as she promised, would not allow herself to be drawn in; she would not read Garp's new novel, not one word of it.

“Why does he suddenly want to be rich ?” John Wolf asked Helen. “What's all this about?”

“I don't know,” Helen said. “I think he believes it will protect him, and all of us.”

“From what ?” John Wolf said. “From whom ?”

“You'll have to wait until you read the whole book,” Garp said to his editor. “Every business is a shitty business. I am trying to treat this book like business, and I want you to treat it that way, too. I don't care if you like it; I want you to sell it.”

“I am not a vulgar publisher,” John Wolf said. “And you are not a vulgar writer, either. I'm sorry I have to remind you.” John Wolf's feelings were hurt, and he was angry at Garp for presuming to talk about a business that John Wolf understood far better than Garp. But he knew Garp had been through a bad time, he knew Garp was a good writer who would write more and (he thought) better books, and he wanted to continue publishing him.

“Every business is a shitty business,” Garp repeated. “If you think the book is vulgar, then you should have no trouble selling it.”

“That's not the only way it works,” Wolf said, sadly. “No one knows what makes books sell.”

“I've heard that before,” Garp said.

“You have no call to speak to me like this,” John Wolf said. “I'm your friend.” Garp knew that was true, so he hung up the telephone and answered no mail and finished The World According to Bensenhaver two weeks before Helen delivered, with only Jenny's help, their third child—a daughter, who spared Helen and Garp the problem of having to agree upon a boy's name that in no way resembled the name of Walt. The daughter was named Jenny Garp, which was the name Jenny Fields would have had if she had gone about the business of having Garp in a more conventional way.

Jenny was delighted to have someone at least partially named after her. “But there's going to be some confusion,” she warned, “with two of us around.”

“I've always called you “Mom,"” Garp reminded her. He did not remind his mother that a fashion designer had already named a dress after her. It was popular in New York for about a year: a white nurse's uniform with a bright red heart sewn over the left breast. A JENNY FIELDS ORIGINAL, the heart said.

When Jenny Garp was born, Helen said nothing. Helen was grateful; she felt for the first time since the accident that she was delivered from the insanity of grief that had crushed her with the loss of Walt.

The World According to Bensenhaver , which was Garp's deliverance from the same insanity, resided in New York, where John Wolf read it over and over again. He had arranged to have the first chapter published in a porno magazine of such loathsome crudity that he felt sure even Garp would be convinced of the book's doom. The magazine was called Crotch Shots , and it was full of exactly that—those wet, split beavers of Garp's childhood, between the pages of his story of violent rape and obvious revenge. At first Garp accused John Wolf of deliberately placing the chapter there, of not even trying the better magazines. But Wolf assured Garp that he had tried them all; that this was the bottom line of the list—this was exactly how Garp's story was interpreted. Lurid, sensational violence and sex of no redeeming value whatsoever.

“That's not what it's about,” Garp said “You'll see.”

But Garp often wondered about the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver , which had been published in Crotch Shots . If it had been read at all. If anyone who bought those magazines ever looked at the words.

“Perhaps they read some of the stories after they masturbate to the pictures,” Garp wrote to John Wolf. He wondered if that was a good mood to be read in: after masturbation, the reader was at least relaxed, possibly lonely ("a good state in which to read,” Garp told John Wolf). But maybe the reader felt guilty, too, and humiliated, and overwhelmingly responsible (that was not such a good condition in which to read, Garp thought). In fact, he knew, it was not a good condition in which to write .

The World According to Bensenhaver is about the impossible desire of the husband, Dorsey Standish, to protect his wife and child from the brutal world; thus Arden Bensenhaver (who is forced to retire from the police, for repeated unorthodoxy in his methods of arrest) is hired to live like an armed uncle in the house with the Standish family—he becomes the lovable family bodyguard, whom Hope must finally reject. Though the worst of the real world has been visited upon Hope, it is her husband who fears the world most. After Hope insists that Bensenhaver not live with them, Standish continues to support the old policeman as a kind of hovering angel. Bensenhaver is paid to tail the child, Nicky, but Bensenhaver is an aloof and curious kind of watchdog, subject to fits of his own awful memories; he gradually seems more of a menace to the Standishes than he seems a protector. He is described as “a lurker at the last edge of light—a retired enforcer, barely alive on the rim of darkness.”