A Widow for One Year
JI: The decision to make Ruth Cole a novelist was secondary. She was always a
woman, and one who was successful in her career; for a while, in the first few
months of taking notes for the novel, I was uncertain of her profession. But
everything that haunts her and fills her with self-doubt is something that
women think about and worry about more than men. Men don't hold
themselves accountable for sexual misjudgment--or they don't hold themselves as
accountable as women do. Many men have made countless bad-girlfriend
choices; they tend to shrug them off.
We live in a world where it's permitted for a man to have a sexual history, a sexual past; provided he doesn't keep repeating it, a sexual past often
enhances a man's image. But if a woman has a sexual past, she'd better keep
quiet about it.
Ted Cole kills himself because he sees how his own sexual misconduct has
influenced his daughter's sexual choices-- not because he feels guilty for
sleeping with his daughter's best friend. How many men kill themselves
because their sons have made bad-girlfriend decisions?
And everything Ruth witnesses in Amsterdam, even what she only intends
to witness, is more self-damaging (in her mind) because she is a woman. As
Ruth observes of Graham Green: it's entirely permissible for a man to explore
the sordid and the unseemly--it's even expected territory for male writers to
explore. For women, it's forbidden. Ruth feels ashamed.
So many women today have careers that are in advance of their personal
lives, or at the expense of their personal lives. Men, too--but men concern
themselves about this less. If a man is successful, and has been married three
times, and has not a single speaking relationship with any of his children
from these fallen marriages, the foremost thing about him is still his success.
But a woman, no matter how successful she is--in any career--sees herself as
a failure if her personal life is unsatisfying, or if she's ashamed of it. Other
people, men and women, tend to look upon such a woman as a failure, too.
And Ruth's mother, Marion, cannot recover from a tragedy that (relatively speaking) Ruth's father, Ted, allows to roll off his back. What amount to
superficial wounds to men are often mortal injuries to women.
As for Ruth's being a novelist, I began with her father as a successful
children's book author and illustrator. I knew I wanted Ruth to be better than
her father, and to feel driven to compete with him--to have conflicted
feelings for him, too. (The squash was only one area of competition between
them.) Why not make Ruth a better writer than her father? I thought. Why
not make her less superficial than he is, in every way?
HG: At least four of your major characters--Ruth and Ted, of course, but also Eddie and Marion--are writers of fiction, and you quote and summarize their
works at length. Is this merely a plot device, or did you have something else
in mind?
JI: Once I made Ruth and her father writers, I thought that everyone should be
a writer--partly out of mischief, knowing what fun I would have comparing
and contrasting the kinds of writers they are, but also because making the
four of them writers allowed me to intertwine their lives with what they
wrote about. Ted's stories for children are arguably stories for young mothers:
the young mothers are Ted's principal targets--both his principal book
buyers and his sexual prey. The creepiness of Ted's children's-story voice was also
a way of setting up the detachment with which he tells Eddie and Ruth the
story of the death of his sons.
Ruth is more autobiographical as a novelist than she is willing to admit, but her fiction goes far beyond her personal life; it is much more imagined than
it is strictly autobiographical. Eddie, of course, cannot imagine anything.
And Ruth's mother, Marion . . . well, her writing is painful. It's storytelling
as therapy. I say, if it does her good, let her do it.
I tried not to be condescending. Eddie may be a bad, even (at times) a
laughably bad writer, but he is a decent guy, a compassionate man, and a good
friend. (He's certainly a lot warmer than Ruth is!) And Ted, despite his
creepiness--both as a writer for children and as a man--is a riveting
storyteller. He gets your attention and keeps it. And, as a father, he's halfway
decent; as Ruth says, at least he was there.
By making four of the principal characters fiction writers, I was able not only to connect their lives but also to connect their various interpretations of their
lives. D. H. Lawrence once said that a novel was the most subtle form we had
to demonstrate the interconnectedness of things. Well, that's true, but a
novel needn't be subtle. A Widow for One Year (or any other novel by John
Irving) isn't subtle.
HG: Apart from the facts that you moved from Sagaponack to Vermont, and that
you have a son exactly Graham's age (and Ruth's age as a child), what other
autobiographical elements are there in the novel?
JI: There are many autobiographical elements in the novel. Like Eddie, I went
to Exeter, and my father taught there. He was one of the school's most
popular teachers, however; unlike Minty O'Hare, my father never bored anyone.
And, like Ruth, I found my love story somewhat later in my life. I was
forty-four when I met my second wife; I'd been divorced from my first wife for five
years. (Like Ruth, I'm not proud of my sexual past--I mean the years
between my first marriage and my second, but not exclusively. I don't think
I should elaborate.)
As for the choice to make Ruth the age she is when the novel begins--she's four--it was calculated not because I had a four-year-old at the time but
because four is the age when memory begins. Most children don't remember
much about being three. Four is when memory starts, but the memories from
one's fourth year are not complete. I wanted Ruth's memories of the summer
of '58, when her mother has the affair with Eddie and then leaves, to be
present but incomplete.
Regarding Graham, it's true that my son Everett was exactly that age as I was
writing the novel--hence I felt qualified to write Graham's dialogue (and
Ruth's, as a child). Children of that age are impressively perceptive, but their
language hasn't caught up with their perceptions.
It was vital to the novel that Ruth have a child the same age she was when
her mother left her, because I wanted Marion to have to come back and face
that child.
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 abus
e. 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