The World According to Garp

She could also walk to the Karlskirche, and there were some interesting-looking embassy buildings a short distance up Argentinierstrasse. The Bulgarian Embassy was right across the street from their apartment on the Schwindgasse. Jenny said she liked staying in her own neighborhood. There was a coffeehouse a block away and she sometimes went there and read the newspapers in English. She never went out to eat anywhere unless Garp took her; and unless he cooked for her in their apartment, she didn't eat anything at home. She was completely taken with the idea of writing something—more taken at this phase, than Garp.

“I don't have time to be a tourist at this point in my life,” she told her son. “But you go ahead, soak up the culture. That's what you should be doing.”

“Absorb, ab-ab-absorb,” Tinch had told them. That seemed to Jenny to be just what Garp should do; for herself, she found she'd already absorbed enough to have plenty to say. Jenny Fields was forty-one. She imagined that the interesting part of her life was behind her; all she wanted to do was write about it.

Garp gave her a piece of paper to carry with her. It had her address written on it, in case she got lost: Schwindgasse 15/2, Wien IV. Garp had to teach her how to pronounce her address—a tedious lesson. “Schwindgassefьnfzehnzwei!” Jenny spat.

“Again,” Garp said. “Do you want to stay lost when you get lost?”

Garp investigated the city by day and found places to take Jenny to at night, and in the late afternoons when she was through her writing; they would have a beer, or a glass of wine, and Garp would describe his whole day to her. Jenny listened politely. Wine or beer made her sleepy. Usually they ate a nice dinner somewhere and Garp escorted Jenny home on the Strassenbahn; he took special pride in never using taxis, because he had learned the streetcar system so thoroughly. Sometimes he went to the open markets in the morning and came home early and cooked all afternoon. Jenny never complained; it didn't matter to her whether they ate in or out.

“This is a Gumpoldskirchner,” Garp would say, explaining the wine. “It goes very well with the Schweinebraten.”

“What funny words,” Jenny remarked.

In a typical evaluation of Jenny's prose style, Garp later wrote: “My mother had such a struggle with her English, it's no wonder she never bothered to learn German.”

Although Jenny Fields sat every day at her typewriter, she did not know how to write. Although she was— physically—writing, she did not enjoy reading over what she'd written. Before long, she tried to remember the good things she'd read and what made them different from her own first-draft attempt. She'd simply begun at the beginning. “I was born,” and so forth. “My parents wanted me to stay at Wellesley: however...” And, of course: “I decided I wanted a child of my own and eventually got one in the following manner...” But Jenny had read enough good stories to know that hers didn't sound like the good stories in her memory. She wondered what could be wrong, and she frequently sent Garp on errands to the few bookstores that sold books in English. She wanted to look more closely at how books began: she had quickly produced over three hundred typed pages, yet she felt that her book never really started.

But Jenny suffered her writing problems silently; she was cheerful with Garp, even if she was rarely very attentive. Jenny Fields felt all her life that things began and came to an end. Like Garp's education—like her own. Like Sergeant Garp. She had not lost any affection for her son, but she felt that a phase of her mothering him was over; she felt she had brought Garp along this far, and now she should let him find something to do by himself. She could not go through their lives signing him up for wrestling, or for something else. Jenny liked living with her son; in fact, it didn't occur to her that they would ever live apart. But Jenny expected Garp to entertain himself every day in Vienna, and so Garp did.

He had gotten no further with his story about a close, interesting family except that he had found something interesting for them to do. The father of the family was some sort of inspector and his family went with him when he did his job. The job involved scrutinizing all the restaurants and hotels and pensions in Austria—evaluating them and giving them a rating according to A, B, C. It was a job Garp imagined that he'd like to have. In a country like Austria, so dependent on tourism, the classification and reclassification of the places the tourists ate in and slept in should have a kind of desperate importance, but Garp couldn't imagine what could be important about it—or for whom. So far all he had was this family: they had a funny job. They exposed flaws; they gave out the grades. So what? It was easier to write to Helen.

That late summer and early fall, Garp walked and rode the trolleys all over Vienna, meeting no one. He wrote Helen that “a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you'. Garp wrote that he believed Vienna enhanced that feeling in him “because in Vienna there really isn't anyone like myself around.”

His perception was at least numerically correct. There were very few people in Vienna who were even the same age as Garp. Not many Viennese were born in 1943, for that matter, not many Viennese were born from the start of the Nazi occupation in 1938 through the end of the war in 1945. And although there were a surprising number of babies born out of rapes, not many Viennese wanted babies until after 1955— the end of the Russian occupation. Vienna was a city occupied by foreigners for seventeen years. To most Viennese, it is understandable, those seventeen years did not seem like a good and wise time to have children. It was Garp's experience to live in a city that made him feel peculiar to be eighteen years old. This must have made him grow older faster, and this must have contributed to his increasing sense that Vienna was more of “a museum housing a dead city'—as he wrote Helen—than it was a city that was still alive.

Garp's observation was not offered as criticism. Garp liked wandering around in a museum. “A more real city might not have suited me so well,” he later wrote. “But Vienna was in its death phase, it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.”

Thus T. S. Garp spent the warm months noticing Vienna, writing letters to Helen Holm, and managing the domestic life of his mother who had added the isolation of writing to her chosen life of solitude. “My mother, the writer,” Garp referred to her, facetiously, in countless letters to Helen. But he envied Jenny, that she was writing at all. He felt stuck with his story. He realized he could go on giving his made-up family one adventure after another, but where were they going? To one more B restaurant with such a weakness in their desserts that an A rating was a lifetime out of reach; to one more B hotel, sliding to C as surely as the mildew smell in the lobby would never go away. Perhaps someone in the inspector's family could be poisoned, in a class A restaurant, but what would it mean? And there could be crazy people, or even criminals, hiding out in one of the pensions, but what would they have to do with the scheme of things?

Garp knew that he did not have a scheme of things.

He saw a four-member circus unload from Hungary, or Yugoslavia, at a railroad station. He tried to imagine them in his story. There had been a bear who rode a motorcycle, around and around a parking lot. A small crowd gathered and a man who walked on his hands collected money for the bear's performance in a pot balanced on the soles of his feet; he fell, occasionally, but so did the bear.

Finally, the motorcycle wouldn't start anymore. It never became clear what the two other members of this circus did; just as they were meant to take over for the bear and the man who walked on his hands, the police came and asked them to fill out a lot of forms. That had not been interesting to watch and the crowd—what there was of one—had gone away. Garp had stayed the longest, not because he was interested in further performances by this decrepit circus but because he was interested in getting them into his story. He couldn't imagine how. As Garp was leaving the railroad station, he could hear the bear throwing up.

For weeks Garp's only progress with his story was a title: “The Austrian Tourist Bureau.” He didn't like it. He went back to being a tourist instead of a writer.

But when the weather grew colder, Garp tired of tourism; he took to carping at Helen for not writing him back enough—a sign he was writing to her too much. She was much busier than he was; she was in college, where she'd been accepted with sophomore standing, and she was carrying more than double the average load of courses. If Helen and Garp were similar, in these early years, it was that they both behaved as if they were going somewhere in a hurry. “Leave poor Helen alone,” Jenny advised him. “I thought you were going to write something beside letters.” But Garp did not like to think of competing in the same apartment with his mother. Her typewriter never paused for thought; Garp knew that its steady pounding would probably end his career as a writer before he could properly begin. “My mother never knew about the silence of revision,” Garp once remarked.

By November Jenny had six hundred manuscript pages, but still she had the feeling that she had not really