John Irving - The World According to Garp

“Jesus,” Garp complained to her, “first a sex reassignment and now you're in love. For a tight end with tits, you're really boring, Roberta.” They were very good friends and they played squash fervently whenever Roberta and Jenny came to town, but this was not frequently enough to occupy all of Garp's restless time. He spent hours playing games with Duncan—and waiting for Walt to get old enough to play games, too. He cooked up a storm.

“The third novel's the big one,” John Wolf told Helen, because he sensed she was wearying of Garp's restlessness and she was in need of a pep talk. “Give him time, it will come.”

“How's he know the third novel's the big one?” Garp fumed. “My third novel doesn't even exist. And the way it was published, my second novel might as well not exist. These editors are full of myths and self-fulfilling prophecies! If he knows so much about third novels, why doesn't he write his own third novel? Why doesn't he write his first ?”

But Helen smiled and kissed him and took up going to the movies with him, although she hated movies. She was happy with her job; the kids were happy. Garp was a good father and a good cook and he made love to her more elaborately when he wasn't writing than he did when he was hard at work. Let it come, Helen thought.

Her father, good old Ernie Holm, had shown signs of early heart trouble, but her father was happy at Steering. He and Garp took a trip together, every winter, to see one of those big wrestling matches out in Iowa. Helen was sure that Garp's writing block was a small thing to endure.

“It will come,” Alice Fletcher told Garp, on the phone. “You can't forth it.”

“I'm not trying to force anything,” he assured her. “There's just nothing there.” But he thought that desirable Alice, who could never finish anything—not even her love for him—was a poor one to understand what he meant.

Then Garp got some hate mail of his own. He was addressed in a lively letter by someone who took offense at Second Wind of the Cuckold . It was not a blind, stuttering, spastic farter—as you might imagine—either. It was just what Garp needed to lift himself out of his slump.

Dear Shithead,

[wrote the offended party]

I have read your novel. You seem to find other people's problems very funny. I have seen your picture. With your fat head of hair I suppose you can laugh at bald persons. And in your cruel book you laugh at people who can't have orgasms, and people who aren't blessed with happy marriages, and people whose wives and husbands are unfaithful to each other. You ought to know that persons who have these problems do not think everything is so funny. Look at the world, shithead—it is a bed of pain, people suffering and nobody believing in God or bringing their children up right. You shithead, you don't have any problems so you can make fun of poor people who do!

That letter stung Garp like a slap; rarely had he felt so importantly misunderstood. Why did people insist that if you were “comic” you couldn't also be “serious"? Garp felt most people confused being profound with being sober, being earnest with being deep. Apparently, if you sounded serious, you were. Presumably, other animals could not laugh at themselves, and Garp believed that laughter was related to sympathy, which we were always needing more of. He had been, after all, a humorless child—and never religious—so perhaps he now took comedy more seriously than others.

But for Garp to see his vision interpreted as making fun of people was painful to him; and to realize that his art had made him appear cruel gave Garp a keen sense of failure. Very carefully, as if he were speaking to a potential suicide high up in a foreign and unfamiliar hotel, Garp wrote to his reader in Findlay, Ohio.

Dear Mrs. Poole:

The world is a bed of pain, people suffer terribly, few of us believe in God or bring up our children very well, you're right about that. It is also true that people who have problems do not, as a rule, think their problems are funny.

Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel. I hope you'll agree with me that Horace Walpole somewhat simplifies the world by saying this. Surely both of us think and feel; in regard to what's comic and what's tragic, Mrs. Poole, the world is all mixed up. For this reason I have never understood why “serious” and “funny” are thought to be opposites. It is simply a truthful contradiction to me that people's problems are often funny and that the people are often and nonetheless sad.

I am ashamed, however, that you think I am laughing at people, or making fun of them. I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave—and nothing but laughter to console them with.

Laughter is my religion, Mrs. Poole. In the manner of most religions, I admit that my laughter is pretty desperate. I want to tell you a little story to illustrate what I mean. The story takes place in Bombay, India, where many people starve to death every day; but not all the people in Bombay are starving.

Among the nonstarving population of Bombay, India, there was a wedding, and a party was thrown in honor of the bride and groom. Some of the wedding guests brought elephants to the party. They weren't really conscious of showing off, they were just using the elephants for transportation. Although that may strike us as a big-shot way to travel around, I don't think these wedding guests saw themselves that way. Most of them were probably not directly responsible for the vast numbers of their fellow Indians who were starving all around them: most of them were just calling “time out” from their own problems, and the problems of the world, to celebrate the wedding of a friend. But if you were a member of the starving Indians, and you hobbled past that wedding party and saw all those elephants parked outside, you probably would have felt some disgruntlement.

Furthermore, some of the revelers at the wedding got drunk and began feeding beer to their elephant. They emptied an ice bucket and filled it with beer, and they went tittering out to the parking lot and fed their hot elephant the whole bucket. The elephant liked it. So the revelers gave him several more buckets of beer.

Who knows how beer will affect an elephant? These people meant no harm, they were just having fun—and chances are fairly good that the rest of their lives weren't one hundred percent fun. They probably needed this party. But the people were also being stupid and irresponsible.

If one of those many starving Indians had dragged himself through the parking lot and seen these drunken wedding guests filling up an elephant with beer, I'll bet he would have felt resentful. But I hope you see I am not making fun of anyone.

What happens next is that the drunken revelers are asked to leave the party because their behavior with their elephant is obnoxious to the other wedding guests. No one can blame the other guests for feeling this way; some of them may have actually thought that they were preventing things from getting “out of hand,” although people have never been very successful at preventing this.

Huffy and brave with beer, the revelers struggled tip on their elephant and veered away from the parking lot—a large exhibition of happiness, surely—bumping into a few other elephants and things, because the revelers' elephant plowed from side to side in a lumbering wooze, bleary and bloated with buckets of beer. His trunk lashed back and forth like a badly fastened artificial limb. The great beast was so unsteady that he struck an electric utility pole, shearing it cleanly and bringing down the live wires on his massive head—which killed him, and the wedding guests who were riding him, instantly.