The World According to Garp

was on its way.

Soon Garp stopped kicking. He still got his oxygen by breathing air with his lungs, but Jenny knew this was simply an example of human adaptability. He wouldn't eat; they had to feed him intravenously, so once again he was attached to a kind of umbilical cord. Jenny anticipated his last phase with some anxiousness. Would there be a struggle at the end, like the sperm's frantic struggle? Would the sperm shield be lifted and the naked egg wait, expectantly, for death? In little Garp's return trip, how would his soul at last divide? But the phase passed without Jenny's observation. One day, when she was off duty, Technical Sergeant Garp died.

“When else could he have died?” Garp has written. “With my mother off duty was the only way he could escape.”

“Of course I felt something when he died,” Jenny Fields wrote in her famous autobiography. “But the best of him was inside me. That was the best thing for both of us, the only way he could go on living, the only way I wanted to have a child. That the rest of the world finds this an immoral act only shows me that the rest of the world doesn't respect the rights of an individual.”

It was 1943. When Jenny's pregnancy was apparent, she lost her job. Of course, it was all that her parents and brothers had expected; they weren't surprised. Jenny had long ago stopped trying to convince them of her purity. She moved through the big corridors in the parental estate at Dog's Head Harbor like a satisfied ghost. Her composure alarmed her family, and they left her alone. Secretly, Jenny was quite happy, but with all the musing she must have done about this expected child, it's a wonder she never gave a thought to names.

Because, when Jenny Fields gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy, she had no name in mind. Jenny's mother asked her what she wanted to name him, but Jenny had just delivered and had just received her sedative; she was not cooperative.

“Garp,” she said.

Her father, the footwear king, thought she had burped, but her mother whispered to him, “The name is Garp.”

“Garp?” he said. They knew they might find out who this baby's father was, this way. Jenny, of course, had not admitted a thing.

“Find out if that's the son of a bitch's first name or last name,” Jenny's father whispered to Jenny's mother.

“Is that a first name or a last name, dear?” Jenny's mother asked her.

Jenny was very sleepy. “It's Garp,” she said. “Just Garp. That's the whole thing.”

“I think it's a last name,” Jenny's mother told Jenny's father.

“What's his first name?” Jenny's father asked crossly.

“I never knew,” Jenny mumbled. This is true; she never did.

“She never knew his first name!” her father roared.

“Please, dear,” her mother said. “He must have a first name.”

“Technical Sergeant Garp,” said Jenny Fields.

“A goddamn soldier, I knew it!” her father said.

“Technical Sergeant?” Jenny's mother asked her.

“T. S.,” Jenny Fields said. “T. S. Garp. That's my baby's name.” She fell asleep.

Her father was furious. “T. S. Garp!” he hollered. “What kind of a name for a baby is that?”

“All his own,” Jenny told him, later. “It's his own goddamn name, all his own.”

“It was great fun going to school with a name like that,” Garp has written. “The teachers would ask you what the initials stood for. First I used to say that they were just initials, but they never believed me. So I'd have to say, “Call my mom. She'll tell you.” And they would. And old Jenny would give them a piece of her mind.”

Thus was the world given T. S. Garp: born from a good nurse with a will of her own, and the seed of a ball turret gunner—his last shot.

2. BLOOD AND BLUE

T. S. GARP always suspected he would die young. “Like my father,” Garp wrote, “I believe I have a knack for brevity. I'm a one-shot man.”

Garp narrowly escaped growing up on the grounds of an all-girls' school, where his mother was offered the position of school nurse. But Jenny Fields saw the possibly harrowing future that would have been involved in this decision: her little Garp surrounded by women (Jenny and Garp were offered an apartment in one of the dorms). She imagined her son's first sexual experience: a fantasy inspired by the sight and feel of the all-girls' laundry room, where, as a game, the girls would bury the child in soft mountains of young women's underwear. Jenny would have liked the job, but it was for Garp's sake that she turned down the offer. She was hired instead by the vast and famous Steering School, where she would be simply one more school nurse among many, and where the apartment offered her and Garp was in the cold, prison-windowed wing of the school's infirmary annex.

“Never mind,” her father told her. He was irritated with her that she chose to work at all; there was money enough, and he'd have been happier if she'd gone into hiding at the family estate in Dog's Head Harbor until her bastard son had grown up and moved away. “If the child has any native intelligence,” Jenny's father told her, “he should eventually attend Steering, but in the meantime, I suppose, there's no better atmosphere for a boy to be raised in.”

“Native intelligence” was one of the ways her father had of referring to Garp's dubious genetic background. The Steering School, where Jenny's father and brothers had gone, was at that time an all-boys' school. Jenny believed that if she could endure her confinement there—through young Garp's prep school years—she would be doing her best for her son. “To make up for denying him a father,” as her father put it to her.

“It's odd,” Garp wrote, “that my mother, who perceived herself well enough to know that she wanted nothing to do with living with a man, ended up living with eight hundred boys.”

So young Garp grew up with his mother in the infirmary annex of the Steering School. He was not exactly treated as a “faculty brat'—the students' term for all the underage children of the faculty and staff. A school nurse was not considered in quite the same class or category as a faculty member. Moreover, Jenny made no attempt to invent a mythology for Garp's father—to make up a marriage story for herself, to legitimize her son. She was a Fields, she made a point of telling you her name. Her son was a Garp. She made a point of telling you his name. “It's his own name,” she said.

Everyone got the picture. Not only were certain kinds of arrogance tolerated by the society of the Steering School, certain kinds were encouraged; but acceptable arrogance was a matter of taste and style. What you were arrogant about had to appear worthy—of higher purpose—and the manner in which you were arrogant was supposed to be charming. Wit did not come naturally to Jenny Fields. Garp wrote that his mother “never chose to be arrogant but was only arrogant under duress.” Pride was well loved in the community of the Steering School, but Jenny Fields appeared to be proud of an illegitimate child. Nothing to hang her head about, perhaps; however, she might show a little humility.

But Jenny was not only proud of Garp, she was especially pleased with the manner in which she had gotten him. The world did not know that manner, yet; Jenny had not brought out her autobiography—she hadn't begun to write it, in fact. She was waiting for Garp to be old enough to appreciate the story.

The story Garp knew was all that Jenny would tell anyone who was bold enough to ask. Jenny's story was a sober three sentences long.

1. The father of Garp was a soldier.

2. The war killed him.

3. Who took the time for weddings when there was a war?

Both the precision and mystery of this story might have been interpreted romantically. After all, given the mere facts, the father might have been a war hero. A doomed love affair could be imagined. Nurse Fields might have been a field nurse. She might have fallen in love “at the front.” And the father of Garp might have felt he owed one last mission “to the men.” But Jenny Fields did not inspire the imagination of such a melodrama. For one thing,