The World According to Garp

John Wolf. “And I'm certainly well known enough for it to sell. Except for a little magazine, and an anthology or two, it's really never been published before. Besides, the drawings are lovely! And the story really holds up.

“I hate it when a writer starts cashing in on a reputation—publishing all the shit in his drawers, and republishing all the old shit that deserved to be missed. But this isn't a case of that, John; you know it isn't.”

John Wolf knew. He thought Duncan's drawings were fresh and unpretentious, but also not really very good; the boy was not yet thirteen—no matter how talented he was. But John Wolf also knew a good idea for publishing when he saw it. To be sure, of course, he gave the book the Secret Jillsy Sloper Test; Garp's story, and especially Duncan's drawings, passed Jillsy's scrutiny with the highest praise. Her only reservations concerned Garp's using too many words she didn't know.

A father and son book, John Wolf thought, would be nice for Christmas. And the sad gentleness of the story, its full pity and its mild violence, would perhaps ease the tension of Garp's war with the Ellen Jamesians.

The groin healed, and Garp ran the road from Steering to the sea all summer, nodding his recognition to the brooding Angus every day; they now had the safety of that fortunate stone wall in common, and Garp felt forever identified with these large, lucky animals. Happily grazed, and happily bred. And slaughtered, one day, quickly. Garp did not think of their slaughter. Or his own. He watched out for cars, but not nervously.

“An isolated act,” he told Helen and Roberta and Ellen James. They nodded, but Roberta ran with him whenever she could. Helen thought she would feel more at ease when the weather got cold again and Garp ran on the indoor track in the Miles Seabrook Field House. Or when he started wrestling again, and rarely went out at all. Those warm mats and that padded room were a safety symbol to Helen Holm, who had grown up in such an incubator.

Garp, too, looked forward to another wrestling season. And to the father and son publication of The Pension Grillparzer—a tale by T. S. Garp, illustrated by Duncan Garp. At last, a Garp book for children and for grownups! It was also, of course, like starting over. Going back to the beginning and getting a fresh start. What a world of illusions blossoms with the idea of “starting over.”

Suddenly, Garp started writing again.

He started by writing a letter to the magazine that had published his attack on the Ellen Jamesians. In the letter he apologized for the vehemence and self-righteousness of his remarks. “Although I believe Ellen James was used by these women, who had little concern for the real-life Ellen James, I can see that the need to use Ellen James in some way was genuine and great. I feel, of course, at least partially responsible for the death of that very needful and violent woman who felt provoked enough to try to kill me. I am sorry.”

Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers—or to anyone who believes in pure good, or in pure evil. The Ellen Jamesians who responded, in print, all said that Garp was obviously afraid for his own life; they said he obviously feared an endless line of hit men (or “hit persons') whom the Ellen Jamesians would send after him until they got him. They said that along with being a male swine, and a bully of women, T. S. Garp was clearly “a yellow chickenshit coward with no balls.”

If Garp saw these responses, he appeared not to care; it is likely that he never read them. He wrote to apologize, mainly, because of his writing; it was an act meant to clear his desk, not his conscience; he meant to rid his mind of the garden-tending, bookshelf-making trivia that had occupied his time while he was waiting to write seriously again. He thought he would make peace with the Ellen Jamesians and then forget them, although Helen could not forget them. Ellen James certainly could not forget them, either, and even Roberta was alert and edgy whenever she was out with Garp.

About a mile beyond the bull farm, one fine day when they were running toward the sea, Roberta felt suddenly convinced that the approaching Volkswagen housed another would-be assassin; she threw a magnificent cross-body block on Garp and belted him off the soft shoulder and down a twelve-foot embankment into a muddy ditch. Garp sprained an ankle and sat howling at Roberta from the stream bed. Roberta seized a rock, with which she threatened the Volkswagen, which was full of frightened teen-agers returning from a beach party; Roberta talked them into making room for Garp, whom they drove to the Jenny Fields Infirmary.

“You are a menace!” Garp told Roberta, but Helen was especially happy for Roberta's presence—her tight end's instinct for blind-side hits and cheap shots.

Garp's sprained ankle kept him off the road for two weeks and stepped up his writing. He was working on what he called his “father book,” or “the book of fathers'; it was the first of the three projects he had jauntily described to John Wolf the night before he left for Europe—this one was the novel to be called My Father's Illusions. Because he was inventing a father, Garp felt more in touch with the spirit of pure imagination that he felt had kindled “The Pension Grillparzer.” A long way from which he had been falsely led. He had been too impressed by what he now called the “mere accidents and casualties of daily life, and the understandable trauma resulting therefrom.” He felt cocky again, as if he could make up anything.

“My father wanted us all to have a better life,” Garp began, “but better than what—he was not so sure. I do not think that he knew what life was; only that he wanted it better.”

As he did in “The Pension Grillparzer,” he made up a family; he gave himself brothers and sisters and aunts —both an eccentric and an evil uncle—and he felt he was a novelist again. A plot, to his delight, thickened.

In the evenings Garp read aloud to Ellen James and Helen; sometimes Duncan stayed up and listened, and sometimes Roberta stayed for supper, and he would read to her, too. He became suddenly generous in all matters concerning the Fields Foundation. In fact, the other board members were exasperated with him: Garp wanted to give every applicant something. “She sounds sincere,” he kept saying. “Look, she's had a hard life,” he told them. “Isn't there enough money?”

“Not if we spend it this way,” Marcia Fox said.

“If we don't discriminate between these applicants more than you suggest,” said Hilma Bloch, “we are lost.”

“Lost?” Garp said. “How could we get lost?” Overnight, it seemed to them all (except Roberta), Garp had become the weakest sort of liberal: he would evaluate no one. But he was full of imagining the whole, sad histories of his fictional family; thus full of sympathy, he was a soft touch in the real world.

The anniversary of Jenny's murder, and of the sudden funerals for Ernie Holm and Stewart Percy, passed quickly for Garp in the midst of his renewed creative energy. Then the wrestling season was again upon him; Helen had never seen him so taken up, so completely focused and relentless. He became again the determined young Garp who had made her fall in love, and she felt so drawn to him that she often cried when she was alone—without knowing why. She was alone too much; now that Garp was busy again, Helen realized she had kept herself inactive too long. She agreed to let the Steering School employ her, so that she could teach and use her mind for her own ideas again.

She also taught Ellen James to drive a car and Ellen drove twice a week to the state university, where she took a creative writing course. “This family isn't big enough for two writers, Ellen,” Garp teased her. How they all cherished the good mood he was in! And now that Helen was working again, she was much less anxious.

In the world according to Garp, an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous.

Later, they would often remark (Roberta, too) how good it was that Garp got to see the first edition of The Pension Grillparzer—illustrated by Duncan Garp, and out in time for Christmas— before he saw the Under Toad.

LIFE AFTER GARP

HE loved epilogues, as he showed us in “The Pension Grillparzer.”

“An epilogue,” Garp wrote, “is more than a body count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really a way of warning us about the future.”

That February day, Helen heard him telling jokes to Ellen James and Duncan at breakfast; he certainly sounded as if he felt good about the future. Helen gave little Jenny Garp a bath, and powdered her and oiled her scalp and clipped her tiny fingernails and zipped her into a yellow playsuit that Walt once wore. Helen could smell