In 2001, John Irving was holding forth at a Q&A at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and one of the questions had to do with the degree to which Irving’s fiction is autobiographical. After all, if you look at just about all of his novels, the main character has a father who is either completely absent, handicapped, or just incompetent; the setting includes a New England prep school, Toronto, or Vienna (or a combination of the three); the main character has an interest in wrestling; and the plot and themes of the novel have a connection to sexual boundaries. Mr. Irving has said in several different interviews that he does not believe that his work is particularly autobiographical in nature, though – at this particular session, he answered that his life did not have a great amount of interesting detail; indeed, in his opinion, “in the world of writing about writers, personal experience is, in my view, always overesteemed, and the imagination is almost always devalued” (Kakutani, 2009a). However, a quick look at Irving’s life reveals that he did not know who his own father was; that he is in the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame, and even played a cameo as a wrestling referee in the film adaptation of The World According to Garp; that he studied at prep schools in the Northeast (as well as spending time in Canada and Austria); and that his writing has shown a consistent interest in the boundaries of what society considers normal, or acceptable, in sexual matters. In The World According to Garp, all of these matters come into play, and they significantly inform everything from the plot itself to the expression of themes.
In John Irving’s own life, he did not know who his father was; indeed, he claims to have felt no temptation to look his father up, because his life with his mother and stepfather was satisfactory. He claims not to have felt much of a void without knowing his real father, because of the role that his stepfather played in raising him.
In The World According to Garp, the main character, T S Garp, is the illegitimate son of the nurse Jenny Fields and an unnamed technical sergeant who was suffering irreversible brain damage as the result of shrapnel to the skull. The shards were working their way toward the middle of the brain, and the soldier was slowly losing his ability to speak. His own name was Garp, but gradually he loses the ability to say his name, one letter at a time, until all he can say is “Ahh.” Jenny Fields (who would, later in the novel, write her own memoir, entitled A Sexual Suspect, but we will cover that later in this paper) wants to have a child, but she does not want to marry. Even in modern times, that is seen as a controversial choice; for a single woman living in the 1940’s, that was a scandalous decision. This was before the development of the sperm bank, and so she decides to have sex with this soldier. While he has lost other faculties, he has surprisingly large erections. Sometimes, Jenny will help him reach orgasm with her hands; one night, she climbs atop him, and he impregnates her, briefly regaining his speech long enough to murmur the word “Good.”1 She decides to raise T S Garp on her own, securing work as a nurse at a boarding school so that her son will receive a quality education. While Jenny Fields does make sure that Garp receives an academic education, her notions about preparing her son for his own sexuality are highly irregular, as she even offers to buy him a prostitute when the two of them are in Vienna. The absent father here is quite similar to Irving’s own life, but in the novel it is the mother’s decision that there not be an active father; in Irving’s own life, his father simply abandoned the family.
John Irving has shown a striking curiosity about sexual matters throughout his entire writing career – particularly, areas of taboo sexuality. This started with a look at adultery in The Water-Method Man, grew to couple-swapping in The 158-Pound Marriage and then to sibling incest in The Hotel New Hampshire. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, this took the form of a Christ figure having a live-in sexual relationship; in A Widow for One Year, it takes the form of an older woman having sex with a high school student to assuage her grief for the death of her own son. In Until I Find You, there is an androgynous main character who uses various forms of sexual expression to discover himself. In many of Irving’s novels, prostitution receives considerable treatment. In The World According to Garp, the young Garp visits a prostitute, and one of his closest friends, Roberta Muldoon, used to be Robert Muldoon, a player for the Philadelphia Eagles. The struggles that Muldoon faces in finding acceptance as a transsexual is one of the themes in this book; taken together with Jenny Fields’ decision to use sex only for procreation, and then to leave it alone entirely, the book has to do with different forms of sexual expression, and the problems that mainstream society has with that. It is difficult to determine the specific degree to which this matches Irving’s own life; however, the fact that this theme keeps recurring throughout his works (indeed, his upcoming release, In One Person, has to do with a bisexual man who is the same age as Irving himself, coming to terms with his own sexual identity) is highly suggestive of the conflicts taking place within the author himself. At age 11, Irving was abused by an older woman who was a family friend (Smith, 2005), and the abuse went on for some time. While this abuse appears as more of a literal autobiographical reflection in some of Irving’s other works, the taboo plays itself out in Garp through the establishment of the rape and abuse crisis center that Jenny Fields starts, and the murder of Garp himself; his attacker had thought that Garp raped her sister, when in fact the sex had been consensual (initiated, even, by the girl). However, her promiscuity rattled her entire family. The angry quotation “FUCK YOU TO DEATH!” appears throughout the angrier parts of the novel, suggesting the idea that sex can be a weapon – and a particularly violent one, at that.
The repetition of settings also in an element of Irving’s work that is highly biographical in nature. Clearly, the time that Irving spent in Austria was one of the most formative periods of his life, as major portions of Setting Free the Bears, The Water-Method Man, The Hotel New Hampshire, and The World According to Garp all take place there. While prostitution is one of the primary areas of curiosity, some of the oddities of travel in that part of the world also appear in different ways: the fact that one has to go to the bathroom down the hall, instead of having a private bathroom, as in American hotels; the scars left by World War II, whether in the form of a bomb plot to detonate the Vienna Opera House, or the driving of a Zorn-Witwer (literally, torn widow) automobile, or a mythical tank that was forced out onto the frozen surface of the Danube before a riotous crowd rolled grenades out onto the ice, exploding the surface and sinking the tank to the bottom. In addition to the sexual freedom that appeared to be prevalent in Europe, in comparison to America, the beauty that was present in the buildings and even the arrangement of cities in Europe clearly spoke to Irving, as such scenes as Garp’s long strolls through Vienna in the evenings teem with evocative imagery of a part of the world that has millennia more in history than the United States does.
Wrestling is another autobiographical element of Irving’s work that comes into play in many of his novels. As an extended metaphor, wrestling works extremely well in a number of ways. The first, of course, is the intense conditioning and discipline that a wrestler must maintain in order to compete on a consistent basis. The weight classes in which a wrestler must compete are fairly narrow, as far as the range of pounds, and it doesn’t take too much overeating for a wrestler to pop up into the next weight class – indeed, it might just be a particularly salty meal that sends a wrestler into danger for his next meet. As a result, constant training is critical – running, lifting weights, and practicing moves on the mat. This intense discipline appears in The World According to Garp in a number of ways. First, his own career as a wrestler and as a wrestling coach teach him the importance of this discipline. Wrestling occurs to him naturally as a sport, because he finds that any sport that uses balls puts too much distance between the competitor and the task at hand; the grappling that goes along with wrestling is what he enjoys, what makes the training worthwhile. Even as an adult, he hates missing the routine of his workouts, and he incorporates it into his life as a househusband/writer, then later as a coach. This discipline also pushes him as a writer, and it informs his philosophy about living with energy and intensity. On a metaphorical level, the wrestling arena also serves a valuable purpose. The mats on the floor and walls are a deep crimson, and the entire wrestling room is kept at a warmer temperature than the rest of the buildings, so that it could have been said to serve as a womb, in a number of ways. Garp and Helen conceive their first child there; Garp lets his children roll around in there while he is running practice, because they will be safe in there – it is a room without sharp objects or danger of any kind. Ironically, though, it is where Bainbridge Percy finds him – and shoots him. The upshot, of course, is that nothing sexual is safe – or perhaps even that no place is completely safe from the dark forces that threaten innocence. For a victim of childhood sexual abuse, that is a completely understandable application to take from one’s childhood.
One of the most intriguing facts about The World According to Garp, from the perspective of biographical criticism, is that the book is written along two different structural lines: first, as a novel, but second, as a biography. As Kim McKay observes, the narrator of the novel is also supposed to be the official biographer of Garp’s life (1992, p. 457). Many of the sources of the novel come from conversations with people who knew Garp, and in many places throughout the story, the prose takes on the language of a biography. The result is a protagonist who is not necessarily a character in fiction, but instead a figure suited for historical study by future generations. However, at other points in the novel, Garp is treated like a character, and the nature of the prose changes accordingly. In these parts of the book, the story teems with figurative language, comedy and satire. The simplest way to tell the difference, of course, is in the tense: in the parts of the text that are to be more like a novel, the story is told in the present tense; in those parts of the book that are to mimic biography, the story switches to the past tense. The conflict of memory and imagination is symbolized in this book by more than the switch between genres, though – as Garp ages, he can imagine less and less. As a result, more and more of his writing appears to be coming from memory (McKay, 1992, p. 458). If one follows the trajectory of Irving’s novels, the trajectory is similar; while the sexual taboo is always present, the exact incidence of that taboo comes closer and closer to home. Sexual abuse of a male child by an elder woman does not come until fairly late in Irving’s body of work – he starts out with adultery and then works his way further and further into the taboo. It remains to be seen whether the bisexuality that appears in In One Person will turn out to have been true for Irving – or whether it still is true. One theme, to which John Irving has also been true his entire life, is that there is very little time to be spent dwelling on the past, because the present is so engaging. It is this philosophy that earns Roberta Muldoon the nickname Captain Energy from her friends; it is this energy that drove Garp to say that “the thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life” (Irving, 1980, p. 368). It might be this theme that is the most autobiographical of them all.
Works Cited
Irving, John. The World According to Garp. New York: Putnam, 1980.
Kakutani, Michiko. “John Irving.” New York Times 27 October 2009. Web. Retrieved 3 April
2012 from
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/i/john_irving/index.html
McKay, Kim. “Double Discourses in John Irving’s The World According to Garp.” Twentieth
Century Literature Vol. 38 (4): 457-475.
Smith, Dintia. “While Excavating Past, John Irving Finds his Family.” New York Times 28 June
2005. Web. Retrieved 3 April 2012 from
< http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/books/28irvi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=johnir
ving >
