A Widow for One Year (88 page)

HG: 
You seem to take a dim, even moralistic view of promiscuous sex in the cases of Ted, Hannah, and even Ruth in her encounter with Scott. Yet, at the same time, you treat the prostitutes in Amsterdam with something close to affection. How do you reconcile these different outlooks?

JI:  
I would agree that I take a “dim, even moralistic view of promiscuous sex,” but I also take a comic view of it. Ted’s encounter with Mrs. Vaughn is funny; Hannah’s perpetual escapades are also comic, but there’s a sad side to Hannah, which I hope is redeeming to her character. And she’s a lot more fun to be around than Ruth is. (Wouldn’t most men rather date Hannah than Ruth? Maybe not marry her, but that’s another story.)

I’m a New Englander. Perhaps the sexual disapproval of the Puritan fathers has seeped into my core. Promiscuous sex is invariably punished in my novels. (I’m not entirely comfortable about this.) And my two most saintly
characters, Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother in
The World According to Garp,
and Dr. Larch in
The Cider House Rules,
are both sexually abstemious. They have sex only once in their lives; then they stop. I don’t recommend this.
Personally, I am not moralistic about sex. What revolted me about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was the righteousness of the media. The thought of journalists as moral arbiters in the field of extramarital sex is repugnant. The thought of journalists as moral arbiters in
any
field is reprehensible to me. That’s one of the reasons I made Hannah a journalist. Imagine Hannah as a moral arbiter!
As for the prostitutes in Amsterdam, I spent four years going to Amsterdam for two weeks at a time (at different times of the year each time). I spent a lot of hours with one policeman, and with a woman who was then the head of a prostitutes’ rights organization—she’s a former prostitute. I wanted to get the cop right, and I wanted to get the whore right. I wanted their stories to ring true with other cops and whores. Both policemen and prostitutes have assured me that Harry and Rooie are true to life.
In Amsterdam, the publication party for the Dutch translation of
A Widow for One Year
was held at the police station in the red-light district. It was well attended by policemen—less well attended by prostitutes. One prostitute who did attend told me that many of her colleagues were not in the habit of coming to the police station of their own free will.
The business of turning the shoes in Rooie’s wardrobe closet, so that Ruth can better conceal herself there . . . well, I’m especially proud of that detail. I invented it, and when I asked several prostitutes what they thought of it— did they think it would work, and so forth—they were very excited by the idea. One of them told me later that she was using the method herself. A case of fiction writing influencing another profession—most rewarding.
A sadder truth, about Rooie, is her need to make up a life for herself. Like Rooie, prostitutes need to invent their lives. They need to lie. That’s just an observable fact. I don’t disapprove of prostitutes
or
the men who go to them. It strikes me as a relatively honest sexual transaction. Compared to harmfully misleading or deliberately deceitful love affairs, the prostitute-client relationship is both forthright and unmessy. The shame commonly attached to it is a mystery to me. As opposed to declaring your love for someone when you don’t feel it, or when you feel it for a different partner every few months, what’s wrong with paying a prostitute for sex?
I don’t find these “different outlooks,” as you call them, difficult to “ reconcile” at all.
If Ted Cole had lived in Amsterdam, and if he had visited a prostitute—even a different prostitute, as often as three or four times a week—think of how many lives he
wouldn’t
have messed up.
I have never understood the objection to prostitution. To make it a criminal act, to drive it underground—
that
is what is criminal. That is also what makes it dangerous, both for the prostitutes and for their clients. The Dutch way isn’t perfect. What sexual transactions are? But it’s a better way to handle the situation than any other way I’ve observed.

HG: 
Even though Eddie is basically a comic character, you engender a great deal of reader sympathy for him. How do you turn a comic character into a sympathetic one?

JI:  
A part of what’s comic about Eddie is also what’s sympathetic about him: namely, he’s vulnerable, and his haplessness survives his youth. In middle age, Eddie suffers the same awkwardness boarding a bus in Manhattan that afflicts him when we first see him as a teenager in love with Marion. And Eddie’s love of older women is sincere. How many men have such enduring sexual attractions? It may require some imagination on the reader’s part to believe in Eddie’s steadfast attraction to older and older women, but it’s not hard to imagine what older women love about Eddie.

I’ve had a lot of mail from older women lately. “Haven’t met any Eddies,” one letter said. And there was this one: “If you know a real Eddie, would you introduce me?”
Eddie is domestically heroic. His novels are transparent, his attachments strike Hannah (and probably many readers) as pathetic, but Eddie literally means what he says, and he does what he says he’ll do.
Marion tells Eddie that she came back because she heard that the house was for sale. It’s a good line, but she really comes back because Ruth wrote her and told her that Eddie still loved her; Marion needed to hear that
someone
did.
Ruth finds her Harry in the end—she gets to have her love story. But there’s more emotion in Eddie’s enduring infatuation with Marion, and in Marion’s coming back, than there is in all of Ruth and Harry’s love story. Marion is a much more moving character than Ruth, partly
because of
Eddie.
Of course there’s a simpler explanation for Eddie’s transformation from clown to compassionate hero: he grows up. Rather than see himself as a victim of what happens to him when an older woman takes up with him and then abandons him, he upholds his reverence for her as the guiding light of his life. That in itself may be absurd, but Eddie’s convictions are true; he’s not
fickle. And there’s something more about Eddie than at first meets the eye. His laughable qualities as a teenager—his innocence and oversensitivity, and how easily manipulated he is—are qualities that are admirable in him as an adult. He lets people use him (even Hannah); that’s not an altogether unlikable quality. In Eddie’s case, it’s even brave. He lets Marion use him. It’s a good thing for her that he does.

HG: 
Ruth has a strong punitive streak in her. In view of her childhood, that is certainly justifiable, but do you also find it admirable?

JI:  
Oh yes, I do! What idiot said that revenge was a dish best served cold? What matters is that you get the opportunity to serve it—who cares whether it’s hot or cold? Ruth
does
have every reason to be punitive, to be more than a little rough (or crude) around the edges. Her revenge on Scott Saunders
and
on her father is, in my view, justified. So what if she goes a little too far? She didn’t strike the first blow, did she? If she overreacts (a little) to what’s been done to her, it doesn’t bother me.

If people take a piece out of you, what’s wrong with taking a piece and a half or two pieces out of them? I don’t pick fights. I do fight back.

HG: 
Ruth does not pay attention to the reviews of her books. Do you think this is good advice for a writer, and do you follow it yourself?

JI:  
On this subject, above all, there is what Thomas Mann had to say. “We all bear wounds,” Mann observed. “Praise is a soothing if not necessarily healing balm for them. Nevertheless, if I may judge by my own experience, our receptivity for 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 the opposite. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength.”

I believe that. We live in a time when the politics of envy are flourishing. In the name of equality, the neo-Marxists want to punish individual achievement and success. In book reviewing, “private rancors,” as Mann called them, abound. (There’s no small amount of envy in book reviews, too.)
My writing has never been an acquired taste; I have always had, and will always have, mixed reviews. Many readers, and critics, love my novels; other readers, and many critics, despise every word I write. I don’t inspire indifference; nobody is neutral to John Irving. I write long, explicit, plot-driven novels; I intend to move you to laughter and to tears. My language goes to extremes; to move the reader, emotionally, means more to me than persuading
the reader intellectually. I have said the same of Charles Dickens; he had his fans and his enemies, too.
Jean Cocteau once advised young writers to pay very close attention to what the critics disliked about their work; he believed that what the critics disliked about you was the only original thing about you. I think this gives critics too much credit. I don’t interrupt my writing to read my reviews, but—at the end of the day—I read them.
A book reviewer’s animosity does my heart good. Praise is fuel, but so is anger. Reading something about myself that is infuriatingly stupid, or something that is seething with personal nastiness, is honestly energizing; it’s a different kind of energy than I derive from praise, but I can still use it.
In terms of understanding the effect of my novels, I learn much more from the letters readers write to me than I learn from book reviews. You don’t read a book the way a
reader
reads a book when you know you’re going to write about it. I know—I’ve been a reviewer, too, after all.
Book reviews are more important, even tragically important, to young, unknown writers; they depend on good reviews. But the word of mouth about a book, among readers, is more important to me than reviews. Of course that’s easy for me to say—I have lots of readers. When I publish a new novel, I keep a very close watch on the best-seller lists; I’m not ashamed to say that they mean a great deal more to me than reviews.

HG: 
You are often accused of being a sentimentalist, as if that were a bad thing.
Do you regard yourself as a sentimentalist, and, if so, how would you define the word?

JI:  
I’ve already defined the word by admitting that it is my intention, as a novelist, to move you to laughter and to tears, and that I use the language to persuade you emotionally, not intellectually. In
Great Expectations,
Dickens wrote: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.” But we
are
ashamed of our tears. We live at a time when critical taste tells us that to be softhearted is akin to doltishness; we’re so influenced by the junk on television and in the movies that even in reacting against it we overreact—we conclude that any attempt to move an audience to laughter or to tears is shameless crowd-pleasing, is akin to sitcom or soap opera or melodrama.

To the modern critic, when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty. But, for a writer, it is craven to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. To be emotionally inscrutable has become a predictable fingerprint of the “literary” author. I wouldn’t want to be married to someone
who was emotionally inscrutable. Who would ever want to be in a relationship like that? Well, I don’t want a novelist to be emotionally inscrutable, either. In a novel, sentimental risks are essential; concealing one’s emotions is a form of political correctness, which is a kind of cowardice.

HG: 
While you were writing
A Widow for One Year,
you were also working on movie scripts of two of your other books. What are the major differences in your approaches to a script and to a book, considering that almost any scene in your novels—take the ones at Mrs. Vaughn’s house as examples—is filmable as written.

JI:  
“Filmable as written” only in the sense that I am a visual writer. I want the reader to see
vividly
the action in a scene—as you say, like those scenes with Mrs. Vaughn. But what makes the conclusion of the Mrs. Vaughn episode work is the lengthy buildup to that chase scene, when Ted escapes her; a lot of foreground has gone into Ted’s character and Eddie’s, in order to present Mrs. Vaughn in her far-flung rage. And a lot of anticipation has been built into Ted’s pornographic drawings, so that to see them in tatters, in a swirl of litter surrounding Ted’s car ride home with Glorie and her mother—not to mention their earlier effect on Eduardo—is the result of many layers of storytelling.