The World According to Garp

pockmark, harboring the neon of the city lights, was a greenish blue.

“Guten Abend, Herr Garp,” she said. “Guess what?”

Tina explained that Charlotte had bought Garp a favor. The favor was that Garp could have Tina and Wanga for free; he could have them one at a time or both together, Tina explained. Together, Tina thought, was more interesting—and quicker. But perhaps Garp did not like both of them. Garp admitted that Wanga did not appeal to him; she was too close to his own age, and though he would never say this if she were here and her feelings could be hurt, he did not care for the way the mayonnaise jar had pulled her lip askew.

“Then you can have me twice,” Tina said, cheerfully. “Once now, and once,” she added, “after you've had a long time to catch your breath. Forget Charlotte,” Tina said. Death happened to everyone, Tina explained. Even so, Garp politely declined the offer.

“Well, it's here,” Tina said. “When you want it.” She reached out and frankly cupped him in her warm palm; her big hand was an ample codpiece for him, but Garp only smiled and bowed to her—as the Viennese do—and walked home to his mother.

He enjoyed his slight pain. He took pleasure in this silly self-denial—and more pleasure in his imagination of Tina, he suspected, than he ever could have derived from her vaguely gross flesh. The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave.

What Garp was savoring was the beginning of a writer's long-sought trance, wherein the world falls under one embracing tone of voice. “All that is body is as coursing waters,” Garp remembered, “all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” It was July when Garp went back to work on “The Pension Grillparzer'. His mother was finishing up the manuscript that would soon change both their lives.

It was August when Jenny finished her book and announced that she was ready to travel, to at last see something of Europe—maybe Greece? she suggested. “Let's take the train somewhere,” she said. “I always wanted to take the Orient Express. Where's it go?”

“From Paris to Istanbul, I think,” Garp said. “But you take it, Mom. I've got too much work to do.”

Tit for tat, Jenny had to admit. She was so sick of A Sexual Suspect that she couldn't even proofread it one more time. She didn't even know what to do with it, now; did one just go to New York and hand over one's life story to a stranger? She wanted Garp to read it, but she saw that Garp was at last engrossed in a task of his own, she felt sbe shouldn't bother him. Besides, she was unsure; a large part of her life story was his life story, too—she thought the story might upset him.

Garp worked through August on the conclusion of his short story, “The Pension Grillparzer.” Helen, exasperated, wrote to Jenny. “Is Garp dead?” she asked, “Kindly send details.” That Helen Holm is a bright girl, Jenny thought. Helen got more of an answer than she counted on. Jenny sent her a copy of the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect with a note explaining that this was what she'd been doing all year, and now Garp was writing something, too. Jenny said she would appreciate Helen's candid opinion of the manuscript. Perhaps, said Jenny, some of Helen's college teachers would know what one did with a finished book?

Garp relaxed, when he wasn't writing, by going to the zoo: it was a part of the great grounds and gardens surrounding the Schцnbrunn Palace. It appeared to Garp that many of the buildings in the zoo were war ruins, three-quarters destroyed; they had been partially restored to house the animals. This gave Garp the eerie impression that the zoo still existed in Vienna's war period; it also interested him in the period. To fall asleep at night he took to reading some very specific, historical accounts of Vienna during the Nazi and the Russian occupations. This was not unrelated to the death themes that haunted his writing of “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else. Vienna was dying, the zoo was not as well restored from the war damage as the homes the people lived in; the history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. He felt the holes from the machine-gun fire in the stone walls of the lobby of the apartment on the Schwindgasse.

Now he knew what the grandmother's dream meant.

He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one's time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!

Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan?

He did not revise, at all, his letter back to her; he said he was too busy writing to take the time to explain it to her: she would have to read what he was working on and judge for herself how serious he was.

“I don't doubt that you're quite serious,” she told him. “And right now I have more to read than I need to know.”

She did not tell him that she was referring to Jenny's book, A Sexual Suspect; it was 1,158 manuscript pages long. Though Helen would later agree with Garp that it was no literary jewel, she had to admit that it was a very compelling story.

While Garp put the finishing touches on his much shorter story, Jenny Fields plotted her next move. In her restlessness she had bought an American news magazine at a large Vienna newsstand, in it she had read that a courageous New York editor at a well-known publishing house had just rejected the manuscript submitted by an infamous former member of the government who had been convicted of stealing government money. The book was a thinly disguised “fiction” of the criminal's own sordid, pitty, political dealings. “It was a lousy novel,” the editor was quoted as saying. “The man can't write. Why should he make any money off his crummy life?” The book, of course, would be published elsewhere, and it would eventually make its despicable author and its publisher lots of money. “Sometimes I feel it is my responsibility to say no,” the editor was quoted as saying, “even if I know people do want to read this slop.” The slop, eventually, would be treated to several serious reviews, just as if it were a serious book, but Jenny was greatly impressed with the editor who had said no and she clipped the article out of the news magazine. She drew a circle around the editor's name—a plain name, almost like an actor's name, or the name of an animal in a children's book: John Wolf. There was a picture of John Wolf in the magazine; he looked like a man who took care of himself, and he was very well dressed; he looked like any number of people who work and live in New York—where good business and good sense suggest that you'd better take care of yourself and dress as well as you can—but to Jenny Fields he looked like an angel. He was going to be her publisher, she was sure. She was convinced that her life was not “crummy,” and that John Wolf would believe she deserved to make money off it.

Garp had other ambitions for “The Pension Grillparzer.” It would never make him much money; it would first appear in a “serious” magazine where almost no one would read it. Years later, when he was better known, it would be published in a more attentive way, and several appreciative things, would be written about it, but in his lifetime “The Pension Grillparzer” wouldn't make Garp enough money to buy a good car. Garp, however, expected more than money or transportation from “The Pension Grillparzer.” Very simply, he expected to get Helen Holm to live with him—even marry him.

When he finished “The Pension Grillparzer,” he announced to his mother that he wanted to go home and see Helen; he would send her a copy of the story and she could have read it by the time he arrived back in the United States. Poor Helen, Jenny thought; Jenny knew that Helen had a lot to read. Jenny also worried how Garp referred to Steering as “home'; but she had reasons of her own for wanting to see Helen, and Ernie Holm would not mind their company for a few days. There was always the parental mansion at Dog's Head Harbor—if Garp and Jenny needed a place to recover, or to make their plans.

Garp and Jenny were such singularly obsessed people that they did not pause to wonder why they had seen so little of Europe, and now they were leaving. Jenny packed her nursing uniforms. There remained, in Garp's mind, only the favors that Charlotte had left up to Tina's devising.

Garp's imagination of these favors had sustained him during the writing of “The Pension Grillparzer,” but as