Issue 100, Summer-Fall 1986
John Irving was interviewed in the cramped back room of his otherwise large and luxurious apartment in Manhattan. A jump rope hangs on the door, a heavy set of weights “is always in the way” on the floor, and by one window is a stationary bike that Irving uses on days he doesn’t go to his private athletic club or jog in Central Park. He writes at a blue IBM typewriter beneath color photographs of his sons wrestling in prep-school competitions and black-and-white photographs of himself in prep-school and college matches. Among a great many books in the high bookcases are foreign editions of his novels in fifteen languages.
On the day of this interview, he wore a tweed coat, a green plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes. Irving is a vigorous, brawny man with brown hair that is increasingly gray. His height is probably five-feet-eight and he weighs only twenty-five pounds more than the 136 1/2 pounds he wrestled at years ago. He’s a storyteller and a generous teacher; when asked a question, Irving pauses for so long a time it nearly seems his inner works have stopped, but once his reply has been fully considered, he replies at length in a gentlemanly, New England voice.
INTERVIEWER
You’re only forty-four and yet you’ve already published six big and important novels as well as a great many uncollected essays, stories, and reviews. How do you get so much work done?
JOHN IRVING
I don’t give myself time off or make myself work; I have no work routine. I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it. A novel is such a long involvement; when I’m beginning a book, I can’t work more than two or three hours a day. I don’t know more than two or three hours a day about a new novel. Then there’s the middle of a book. I can work eight, nine, twelve hours then, seven days a week—if my children let me; they usually don’t. One luxury of making enough money to support myself as a writer is that I can afford to have those eight-, nine-, and twelve-hour days. I resented having to teach and coach, not because I disliked teaching or coaching or wrestling but because I had no time to write. Ask a doctor to be a doctor two hours a day. An eight-hour day at the typewriter is easy; and two hours of reading over material in the evening, too. That’s routine. Then when the time to finish the book comes, it’s back to those two- and three-hour days. Finishing, like beginning, is more careful work. I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin a book?
IRVING
Not until I know as much as I can stand to know without putting anything down on paper. Henry Robbins, my late editor at E. P. Dutton, called this my enema theory: keep from writing the book as long as you can, make yourself not begin, store it up. This is an advantage in historical novels. Setting Free the Bears and The Cider House Rules, for example. I had to learn so much before I could begin those books; I had to gather so much information, take so many notes, see, witness, observe, study—whatever—that when I finally was able to begin writing, I knew everything that was going to happen, in advance. That never hurts. I want to know how a book feels after the main events are over. The authority of the storyteller’s voice—of mine, anyway—comes from knowing how it all comes out before you begin. It’s very plodding work, really.
INTERVIEWER
Have any of your novels changed drastically as you created them?
IRVING
Along the way accidents happen, detours get taken—the accidents turn out to be some of the best things. But these are not “divine” accidents; I don’t believe in those. I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you’ll recognize that and make the necessary revisions. The more you know about a book, the freer you can be to fool around. The less you know, the tighter you get.
INTERVIEWER
Could you give an example of one of those accidents?
IRVING
One such accident was Melony. I knew she was the force in The Cider House Rules that would get Homer Wells back to St. Cloud’s; at first, of course, the reader is supposed to think that if Melony ever finds Homer, she’ll kill him. And in a way, she does; she has the power to bring him up short. But what she kills is his illusion that he’s living a good life. She’s a moral force, not a lethal one; she’s just as devastating to him as she would be if she were trying to kill him, really. She’s the one who tells him his life is shabby and ordinary. She has the power to do that. I didn’t know exactly what she would do, I mean physically, when she found him; then I thought of her frustrated rage in his bathroom, her very particular handling and dismantling of his things. I thought of that ugly, frightening weapon she constructs out of a toothbrush and a razor blade; she melts the toothbrush handle until it’s soft enough to stick a blade in it; when the plastic hardens, she’s got a lethal weapon. That’s a frightening moment, but she just leaves it in his bathroom medicine cabinet; he cuts himself on it, by accident. “By accident,” but it’s no accident; it’s a reminder to him of her potential for violence. That was a lucky discovery; it just fit perfectly.
INTERVIEWER
Except for The Water-Method Man, which you’ve said was called Fucking Up as you wrote it, you seem to know your novel’s title very early in your conception of it. Is it crucial to you to have a working title before you begin a project?
IRVING
Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue. I love plot, and how can you plot a novel if you don’t know the ending first? How do you know how to introduce a character if you don’t know how he ends up? You might say I back into a novel. All the important discoveries—at the end of a book—those are the things I have to know before I know where to begin. I knew that Garp’s mother would be killed by a stupid man who blindly hates women; I knew Garp would be killed by a stupid woman who blindly hates men. I didn’t even know which of them would be killed first; I had to wait to see which of them was the main character. At first I thought Jenny was the main character; but she was too much of a saint for a main character—in the way that Wilbur Larch is too much of a saint to be the main character of The Cider House Rules. Garp and Homer Wells are flawed; by comparison to Jenny and Dr. Larch, they’re weak. They’re main characters. Actors know how they end up—I mean how their characters end up— before they speak the opening lines. Shouldn’t writers know at least as much about their characters as actors know? I think so. But I’m a dinosaur.
INTERVIEWER
How do you mean?
IRVING
I’m not a twentieth-century novelist, I’m not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst and I’m not an intellectual.
INTERVIEWER
How about the analysts and intellectuals? Have you ever learned anything from reading criticism about your work? Do reviews please or annoy you, or do you pay too little attention to them for that?
IRVING
Reviews are only important when no one knows who you are. In a perfect world all writers would be well-enough known to not need reviewers. As Thomas Mann has written: “Our receptivity to praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than praise. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength.” I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros—but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds. Reviewers perform no service to the writer and are noticed too much. I like what Cocteau said about them. “Listen very carefully to the first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work that the reviewers don’t like; it may be the only thing in your work that is original and worthwhile.”
INTERVIEWER
And yet you review books yourself.
IRVING
I write only favorable reviews. A writer of fiction whose own fiction comes first is just too subjective a reader to allow himself to write a negative review. And there are already plenty of professional reviewers eager to be negative. If I get a book to review and I don’t like it, I return it; I only review the book if I love it. Hence I’ve written very few reviews, and those are really just songs of praise or rather long, retrospective reviews of all the writer’s works: of John Cheever, Kurt Vonnegut, and Günter Grass, for example. And then there is the occasional “younger” writer whom I introduce to readers, such as Jayne Anne Phillips and Craig Nova. Another thing about not writing negative reviews: grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like. You know, if I were a critic, I’d be angry and vicious, too; it makes poor critics angry and vicious—to have to finish all those books they’re not enjoying. What a silly job criticism is! What unnatural work it is! It is certainly not work for a grown-up.