John Irving - The World According to Garp

“Why?” John Wolf asked.

“Lawd,” Jillsy said, tiredly, as if she were finally impatient with him. “It feels so true ,” she crooned, making the word true cry like a loon over a lake at night.

“It feels so true,” John Wolf repeated.

“Lawd, don't you know it is?” Jillsy asked him. “If you don't know when a book's true ,” Jillsy sang to him, “we really ought to trade jobs.” She laughed now, the stout three-pronged plug for the vacuum-cleaner cord clutched like a gun in her fist. “I do wonder, Mr. Wolf,” she said, sweetly, “if you'd know when a bathroom was clean .” She went over and peered in his wastebasket. “Or when a wastebasket was empty,” she said. “A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book's true when you can say, “Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.” Then you know it's true,” Jillsy said.

Leaning over the wastebasket, she seized the one scrap of paper lying alone on the bottom of the basket; she stuffed it into her cleaning apron. It was the crumpled-up first page of the letter John Wolf had tried to compose to Garp.

Months later, when The World According to Bensenhaver was going to the printers, Garp complained to John Wolf that there was no one to dedicate the book to. He would not have it in memory of Walt, because Garp hated that kind of thing: “that cheap capitalizing,” as he called it, “on one's autobiographical accidents—to try to hook the reader into thinking you're a more serious writer than you are.” And he would not dedicate a book to his mother, because he hated, as he called it, “the free ride everyone else gets on the name of Jenny Fields.” Helen, of course, was out of the question, and Garp felt, with some shame, that he couldn't dedicate a book to Duncan if it was a book he would not allow Duncan to read. The child wasn't old enough. He felt some distaste, as a father, for writing something he would forbid his own children to read.

The Fletchers, he knew, would be uncomfortable with a book dedicated to them, as a couple; and to dedicate a book to Alice, alone, might be insulting to Harry.

“Not to me ,” John Wolf said. “Not this one.”

“I wasn't thinking of you,” Garp lied.

“How about Roberta Muldoon?” John Wolf said.

“The book has absolutely nothing to do with Roberta,” Garp said. Though Garp knew that Roberta, at least, wouldn't object to the dedication. How funny to write a book really no one would like to have dedicated to them!

“Maybe I'll dedicate it to the Ellen Jamesians,” Garp said, bitterly.

“Don't make trouble for yourself,” John Wolf said. “That's just plain stupid.”

Garp sulked.

For Mrs. Ralph?

he thought. But he still didn't know her real name. There was Helen's father—his good old wrestling coach, Ernie Holm—but Ernie wouldn't understand the gesture; it would hardly be a book Ernie would like. Garp hoped, in fact, that Ernie wouldn't read it. How funny to write a book you hope someone doesn't read!

To Fat Stew

he thought.

For Michael Milton

In Memory of Bonkers

He bogged down. He could think of no one.

“I know someone,” John Wolf said. “I could ask her if she'd mind.”

“Very funny,” Garp said.

But John Wolf was thinking of Jillsy Sloper, the person, he knew, who was responsible for getting this book of Garp's published at all.

“She's a very special woman who loved the book,” John Wolf told Garp. “She said it was so “true.”

Garp was interested in the idea.

“I gave her the manuscript for one weekend,” John Wolf said, “and she couldn't put it down.”

“Why'd you give her the manuscript?” Garp asked.

“She just seemed right for it,” John Wolf said. A good editor will not share all his secrets with anyone.

“Well, okay,” Garp said. “It seems naked , having no one. Tell her I'd appreciate it. She's a close friend of yours?” Garp asked. Garp's editor winked at him and Garp nodded.

“What's it all mean, anyway?” Jillsy Sloper asked John Wolf, suspiciously. “What's it mean, he wants to “dedicate” that terrible book to me?”

“It means, that your response was valuable to him,” John Wolf said. “He thinks the book was written almost with you in mind.”

“Lawd,” Jillsy said. “With me in mind? What's that mean?”

“I told him how you responded to his book,” John Wolf said, “and he thinks you're the perfect audience, I guess.”

“The perfect audience?” Jillsy said. “Lawd, he is crazy, isn't he?”

“He's got no one else to dedicate it to,” John Wolf admitted.

“Kind of like needin' a witness for a weddin'?” Jillsy Sloper asked.

“Kind of,” John Wolf guessed.

“It don't mean I approve of the book?” Jillsy asked.

“Lord, no,” John Wolf said.

“Lawd, no, huh?” Jillsy said.

“No one's going to blame you for anything in the book, if that's what you mean,” John Wolf said.

“Well,” said Jillsy.

John Wolf showed Jillsy where the dedication would be; he showed her other dedications in other books. They all looked nice to Jillsy Sloper and she nodded her head, gradually pleased by the idea.

“One thing,” she said. “I won't have to meet him, or anythin', will I?”

“Lord, no,” said John Wolf, so Jillsy agreed.

There remained only one more stroke of genius to launch The World According to Bensenhaver into that uncanny half-light where occasional “serious” books glow, for a time, as also “popular” books. John Wolf was a smart and cynical man. He knew about all the shitty autobiographical associations that make those rabid readers of gossip warm to an occasional fiction.

Years later, Helen would remark that the success of The World According to Bensenhaver lay entirely in the book jacket. John Wolf was in the habit of letting Garp write his own jacket flaps, but Garp's description of his own book was so ponderous and glum that John Wolf took matters into his own hands; he went straight to the dubious heart of the matter.

“ The World According to Bensenhaver ,” the book jacket flap said, “is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do.

“T. S. Garp,” the jacket flap went on, “is the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields.” John Wolf shivered slightly when he saw this in print, because although he had written it, and although he knew very well why he had written it, he also knew that it was information Garp never wanted mentioned in connection with his own work. “T. S. Garp is also a father,” the jacket flap said. And John Wolf shook his head in shame to see the garbage he had written there. “He is a father who has recently suffered the tragic loss of a five-year-old son. Out of the anguish that a father endures in the aftermath of an accident, this tortured novel emerges...” And so forth.

It was, in Garp's opinion, the cheapest reason to read of all. Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was “true"—how much of it was based on “personal experience.” True —not in the good way that Jillsy Sloper used it, but true as in “real life.” Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis—if there even was one—was the least interesting level on which to read a novel. He would always say that the art of fiction was the act of imagining truly—was, like any art, a process of selection. Memories and personal histories—"all the recollected traumas of our unmemorable lives"—were suspicious models for fiction, Garp would say. “Fiction has to be better made than life,” Garp wrote. And he consistently detested what he called “the phony mileage of personal hardship"—writers whose books were “important” because something important had happened in their lives. He wrote that the worst reason for anything being part of a novel was that it really happened. “ Everything has really happened, sometime!” he fumed. “The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it's the perfect thing to have happen at that time.