It was on the radio hours after I left his home in Vermont. I had been thinking of something John Irving had said that would seem to sum up his philosophy as man and writer. Life was, he’d said, ‘far too random, too dangerous. More than that … coincidences are not coincidences. The bizarre is so commonplace we should stop calling it bizarre.” Hmm.
It suits his fiction, his storytelling, for the improbable to become probable: for happy accidents and awful fates to abut in every sentence, for dwarfs and bears and whores and cops, and sons and mothers, to lose and find and hurt and heal each other with serendipitous timing but … real life? Forget it. Life’s not like that. His latest book, The Fourth Hand (Bloomsbury), kicks off with a media celeb losing his left hand to a lion as the cameras roll. Come on. It’s wonderful, but it’s wonderful fiction. You could only make it up.
And then the radio started telling of the latest twist in the Phil Bronstein saga. Sharon Stone’s husband, executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, was arguing with a zookeeper about which of them had wrestled a Komodo Dragon to the ground after it bit Bronstein’s foot. Bronstein, who will not walk properly for four months, had been reported as having ‘prised open the dragon’s jaws”. Bullshit, said the keeper; Bronstein did nothing except stupidly go into the cage to get his foot bitten; the keeper was the one who overcame the 2m beast. I thought of Irving.
His most powerful concatenation of comedy and tragedy came in The World According to Garp, the 1976 bestseller that allowed him to give up teaching, begin writing full-time and start on his way to becoming one of America’s most respected (and commercially successful) storytellers … The Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules, which netted an Oscar for his own adapted screenplay.
In Garp, the standout moment — echoed in every book since in its tragicomic mix — is the driveway accident: Garp’s wife, performing fellatio on her boyfriend in a darkened car, bites right through as the car carrying Garp and the rest of the family rear-ends hers by mistake. A sentence or so later, the black humour simply turns black: Garp’s son is also dead.
‘Yes, that was conscious. I suppose I try to look for those things where the world turns on you. It’s every automobile accident, every accident at a party, you’re having a good time until suddenly you’re not.”
How had this become ‘his” theme? ‘Well, I don’t really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through. If you’re still wondering about details — how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever —when you’re writing, you can’t pay proper attention to the sentences themselves. You should be remembering a story, not inventing one. So I think of myself foremost as a storyteller, not an intellectual.
‘I have less consciousness of themes than I have of emotion. I’ve no objection if along the way I make a reader think, but it’s more important to me to make them laugh, or cry: to make them feel. I suppose, though, what is thematic about a writer will find its way automatically, repetitively, into every book — so yes, you’re right, there are refrains which matter to me.
‘I explore loss. Early loss. And the selectivity of memory, and the difference between people who change —sometimes all the time — and others who obdurately stay the same. And in most books the passage of time, and its effect, is almost a character. And, yes, the way life jumps you from behind.
‘I don’t really know why. I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness; a sense anything could happen. Then all of a sudden my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed [he was born John Wallace Blunt Jnr]. So the theme of the missing parent is recurrent, to such a degree you’d imagine I was obsessed by this unknown father. The irony is, I liked my stepdad so much I never really thought about it, I don’t think. But I must have, mustn’t I?
‘There’s also a movement in my books from the comedic to the sad. They always start out more comically than they end up.” In The Fourth Hand, for instance, the hero, the handless ‘lion guy”, seems to cope fine in the first half; only towards the end does Irving bring in the myriad problems of the disability. ‘And I like that; both a deception and a transition. I like to use that comedy to conceal what the real collision is, the real life-changing agenda, is. It’s not a story about a guy getting his hand back, but about acknowledging what else is missing from his life.”
This latest book is also something that, suddenly, just had to be written. He had spent 1998 researching what was going to be his next book, Until I Find You, traipsing through North Sea ports for background for a tale of a Leith choirgirl, an illegitimate child, a tattooed organist, passing decades and long searches through churches and tattoo parlours from Sweden to Nova Scotia.
He’s found fascinating links between church organ music and the art of the sailor’s tattoo: perfect Irving territory, even if as yet there’s no bear. ‘But I found myself worrying about details I couldn’t yet see. What, for instance, was the son’s profession?
‘Then, one night, Janet [his second wife] and I were watching TV, about America’s first hand transplant, and she said to me: ‘what if the donor’s widow wants visitation rights?’ And I was up all night, all night. I think in 48 hours’ time I knew more about that whole story than I knew about several missing ingredients to the book I’d already spent a year on. And so I went immediately to The Fourth Hand.”
Writing his initial notes in delightful little books — he’s a stationery fetishist — he then begins writing on a clunky electric typewriter, forcing himself to stop around teatime and go into his gym, complete with wrestling mat and mannequins (he has always adored, and written about, wrestling: the one tattoo he had done during his 1998 research is a large one, under his right bicep, of the wrestler’s starting circle). His assistant will put the final draft on to computer, and it will race, as it always does, up various world bestseller lists.
He is read, like his friend Salman Rushdie — he was one of the first to read the manuscript of Midnight’s Children, and they were dining together when Rushdie heard India had banned The Satanic Verses — by more women than men, for he doesn’t just tell tales, he tells emotional stories. Does he worry, at all, about the snobbery that can greet this? It’s stopped, mostly, now, as most critics finally accept a book can both head the New York Times bestseller list and be a literary novel; but there was carping, in the past, about simple storytelling rather than grand battles with themes.
‘Not usually; if someone doesn’t like me I lose interest in them. I was never one who stood outside the girlfriend’s window to be rejected again and again. But I got angered by Tom Wolfe.”
Wolfe dubbed Irving one of his ‘Three Stooges” after Irving — along with John Updike and Norman Mailer — responded angrily to a provocative article bemoaning the fact that no one was writing with enough sweep, or talent, or reportage, to do justice to the idea of ‘The American Novel”. The row has worn on since.
‘You see, Wolfe really foolishly and insultingly proclaimed to us all how we should be writing The American Novel. And Updike and Mailer and I are not alone in finding his strictures both pompous and puerile. No writer wants another writer to tell him how he should write and Wolfe, in his typically hyperbolic prose, has done exactly that. He’s cranked out a couple of freewheeling and generalising pieces, about the place of the American novel and how we’re somehow letting the beast die, and that we’re basically not writing like him.
‘And I’m not taking advice from someone whose sentences are as badly written as many of his are. And to say plot is dead, or the novel is dead, is just sophomoric. But he picked the fight. I wouldn’t have bothered to take a slap if I hadn’t had to listen to all this crap about how we should all be writing like him. But I have some fun with it. It’s like being a kid, poking a snake, waiting to see what he’s going to do.
‘And I don’t know that I’ve addressed America’s vastness. But I’ve certainly addressed her puritanism, her pettiness, her sexual anarchy, her dysfunctional families, her damaged children, her bullying patriotism. Are they not vast, those issues? They seem so to me.”