The Cider House Rules (90 page)

The reason you wax the press boards before: the first press is that you don't want to take the time to do it once the 726 harvest has begun. And you're running the cider mill during the harvest maybe as much as every other night, and every day that it rains—when you can't pick apples. In the 1940s and the 1950s, the last good press would have come in January.

I'm indebted to my old friends Ben and Peter Wagner and to their mother, Jean, for this and other applefarming information. The Wagners run the Applecrest Farm Orchards in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, where I worked when I was a boy; Jean and her late husband, Bill, gave me my first job.

(p 198) All orchards have names; it is common practice, too, for farmers to name their buildings. This is necessary for the shorthand language of simple directions, as in: 'The Deere has a flat and needs fixing in the Frying Pan'; or, 'I left the Dodge in Number Two because Wally is spraying in the Sanborn and he'll need a ride back.' In the orchard where I worked, there was a building called Number Two—although there was no Number Three and I don't remember a Number One. Many of the orchards were named after the families who'd been the original homesteaders on that particular piece of land (Brown, Eaton, Coburn, and Curtis are some local names I remember). There was an orchard called Twenty Acres and another one called Nineteen, and there were the plainer names—an orchard called the Field, one called the Fountain, one called the Spring, and one called Old-New (because it was half old trees and half newly planted). The Frying Pan is also called Frying Pan—without the article.

(p 207) Anyone who grew up near the ocean, as I did, could detect a sea breeze in Iowa (if one was blowing).

(p 278) The prayer that Mrs. Grogan recites is credited to John Henry (Cardinal) Newman, the English theologian and author (1801-90); I'm told that the prayer was originally part of one of Cardinal Newman's sermons. It was also what served my family as a family prayer and was spoken at the graveside of my maternal grandmother 727 —it was her favorite. Her name was Helen Bates Winslow, and she died just a month short of her hundredth birthday; the festivities the family had planned for that event would doubtlessly have killed my grandmother, had she lived until then. Cardinal Newman's prayer must be a very good one, or at least it worked very well—and for a very long time—for my grandmother, who was devoted to it. I was devoted to her.

(pp 298-9) Alzheimer described the disease he called presenile dementia in 1907. 'Deterioration in cognition' occurs relatively early in the disease and is marked by a disturbance of recent memory and a loss of the ability to learn new things. Dr. Nuland of Yale also states that some patients are more likely to begin with personality changes and some with intellectual changes. The advance of the disease, in either case, is marked by a lowering threshold of frustration. Dr. Nuland notes that the sequence in which certain small jobs need to be done would be difficult to follow and that complex ideas are hard to comprehend and impossible to explain to others. It is a rapid deterioration that advances in Alzheimer victims: the average life-span, from the time of diagnosis, is approximately seven years; there are patients who live much longer, and many who die within
a
few months. In recent years, it has been recognized that Alzheimer's is not only an uncommon disease that affects people in midlife, but also a relatively frequent cause of mental and physical degeneration in the elderly— many of whom were previously thought to have simple hardening of the arteries (arteriosclerosis).

(p 360) The famous Paris edition of 1957 (which was privately printed) collected seventeen hundred examples of the limerick. This limerick, which is categorized as an 'organ limerick,' originated in print in 1939; it may have been in spoken circulation earlier. In 194-, when Senior and Wally are saying it to each other, it would have been only a few years old.

(p 381) Benjamin Arthur Bensley's
Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit
{728} is a real book, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1918. Bensley is a clear, no-nonsense writer; his book, which he calls 'an elementary laboratory textbook in mammalian anatomy,' employs the anatomy of the rabbit as an introduction to an understanding of human anatomy. Bensley's is not Gray's, but
Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit
is a good book of its kind. As a very 'elementary' student of anatomy, I learned a lot from Bensley—his book made reading
Gray's
much easier for me.

(p 394) The Mclntosh apple was developed in Ontario, where the climate is similar to New England and New York's Hudson and Champlain valleys (where the apple has flourished).

(pp 416-7)
In Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit,
Bensley describes the ovary and oviducts of the rabbit and compares his findings to the same equipment in other animals.

(p 452) The Exeter limerick is dated 1927-41; the town of Exeter appears in many limericks because it rhymes with 'sex at her'—as in, 'It was then that Jones pointed his sex at her!' (A famous last line.) I always heard a lot of Exeter limericks because I was born and grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire.

The Brent limerick is dated 1941. It is a classic 'organ limerick,' so called because there is a special category of limericks devoted to the peculiarities of the male and female organs. As in,

There was a young fellow named Cribbs

Whose cock was so big it had ribs.

(1944-51)

And in the famous 1938 limerick that was voted Best Limerick by one of the graduating classes of Princeton:

There once was a Queen of Bulgaria

Whose bush had grown hairier and hairier,

Till a Prince from Peru,

Who came up for a screw

Had to hunt for her cunt with a terrier.

{729}

The Toronto limerick is circa 1941.

(p 476) The Bombay limerick is dated 1879—an old one.

(pp 494-5) Dr. Larch would have been surprised to learn that his condemning statistics of unwanted children were still accurate in 1965. Dr. Charles F. Westoff of Princeton's Office of Population Research, and the co-director of the 1965 National Fertility Study, concluded that 750,000 to a million children—born to married couples between 1960 and 1965—were unwanted. This estimate is low. Even in a poll, many parents are unwilling to admit that any child of theirs was unwanted. Furthermore, unwed or abandoned mothers were not included in the survey; their opinions regarding how many of their children were unwanted were never counted. For more information on this subject, see Jarnes Trager's
The Bellybook
(1972).

Ben Franklin was the fifteenth of seventeen children; his faith in rapid population growth was declared in his
Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind
(1755).

(pp 517-8) My source for this delivery is Chapter XV, 'Conduct of Normal Labor,'
Williams Obstetrics,
Henricus J. Stander—circa 1936. I base the described procedure on such a dated source—it is performed in my story in 1943—because I wish to emphasise that Homer's procedure, which has been learned from Dr. Larch, is somewhat old-fashioned but nonetheless correct.

(p 528) 'I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas.' From
David Copperfield,
Chapter 1 ('I Am Born'). The caul is the membrane that is usually ruptured and expelled at the onset of bearing-down pains but that in rare cases does not rupture—the child coming into the world surrounded by membrane. In the time of Dickens, this protective shroud was taken as a sign that the child would be lucky in life—and, more specifically, never be drowned. In the story of
David Copperfield,
this is an early indication that our hero will find his way and {730} not meet with the form of poor Steerforth's undoing (Steerforth drowns).

Homer Wells, very familiar with
David Copperfield,
is interpreting the drop of sweat that prematurely baptizes his birthing child as having similar protective powers. Homer's child will be lucky in life; Angel will not drown.

(p 542) The first edition of Greenhill's
Office Gynecology
was published in 1939; the eighth edition of
Diseases of Women
(Roquist, Clayton and Lewis) was published in 1949.

The medical journals that Larch would always have had on hand—in addition to
The New England Journal of Medicine
—are
The Journal of the American Medical Association
(in doctors' shorthand this is always called
JAMA
),
The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology
(it has the most vivid illustrations),
The Lancet
(a British journal), and
Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics
(in doctors' shorthand this is always called
S, G and O;
in 194-, lots of surgeons did gynecology, too).

About the Author

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. 'It was so simple,' he remembers. 'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.'

In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel,
Setting Free the Bears,
about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by
The Water-Method Man,
a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and
The 158-Pound Marriage,
which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with
The World According to Garp,
which he hoped would 'cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts'.

The Hotel New Hampshire
is a startingly original family saga, and
The Cider House Rules
is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch — saint, obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist - and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.
A Prayer for Owen Meany
features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created.
A Son of the Circus
is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. John Irving's latest and most ambitious novel is
A Widow for One Year.

A collection of John Irving's shorter writing,
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed,
was published in 1993; Irving has also written the screenplays for
The Cider House Rules
and
A Son of the Circus,
and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir
My Movie Business.

Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of
The World According to Garp.
In his memoir,
The Imaginary Girlfriend,
John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes full-time, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.