A Widow for One Year

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.

  Unfortunately, those layers aren't "filmable as written." Much of my writing,

  although visual, is multilayered; it is also dependent on the effects of the

  passage of time on the major characters. That passage of time has an emotional

  effect on the reader, too. Hence when Marion says, "Don't cry, honey, it's just

  Eddie and me," not only do we hear the echo and remember the

  circumstances of when we first heard that line, we also recognize how much of the

  lengthy passage of Marion's life is captured in that sad, resigned assurance to

  her daughter. In a film, how do you get a line like that to work? It needs the

  understanding of time, and time's effects, to give it weight.

  And because my novels are not only long, they're also plot-driven, in

  compressing the story to fit into the time restrictions of a feature-length film I am

  faced with losing whole characters and the story lines that accompany them.

  The process of making a screenplay from one of my novels begins with the

  decision of which two-thirds of the novel I am going to lose.

  If I wrote shorter novels, I might find the process of translating a novel into a film more gratifying.

  In the case of The Cider House Rules, which I have been writing and

  rewriting for four different directors over thirteen years, not only have I lost the

  major minor character of Melony, a moral and sexual force in the novel, but

  I have reduced a fifteen-year love affair to eighteen months. (Movies don't

  handle the passage of time at all well.) In the case of A Son of the Circus,

  which I have been writing as a screenplay for a mere eight years, I have made

  the main character, Dr. Daruwalla, a minor character in the film; two minor

  characters from the novel, the children who are sold to the circus, have

  become major, and another minor character, the Jesuit missionary, has

  become the hero of a romantic comedy--the missionary is the movie's

  actual star.

  While the film credits will doubtless say, "based on the novel by John Irving,"

  I think a more apt description of both my screenplays is that they are

  interpretations of my novels, not the novels themselves.

  I'm pleased with both screenplays, but I like my day job better. I doubt that

  I'll write another screenplay. I enjoy writing novels more. And in the time I

  have given to these two screenplays, I could easily have written another

  novel. Relatively speaking, it is easy to write a screenplay--far easier than

  writing a novel--but what is difficult, especially for a semireclusive novelist,

  is the wasteful social intercourse that is required to get a screenplay

  produced.

  You know how we work together as author and editor. I give you my

  manuscript . . . you mark it up. I respond to about two-fifths of your suggestions,

  ignoring the others. In the case of A Widow for One Year, I might have

  responded to as many as half your suggestions. But that's it. Nobody is

  looking over our shoulders. And that's the way it should be.

  With a screenplay, more people read it before it's produced than I could ever

  remember; people I don't even know, people who remain nameless but have

  nonetheless contributed this or that note about the script, people

  complaining about this or that scene for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with

  the quality or the integrity of the overall story--lawyers, secretaries, business

  executives, bankers, actors' agents, assistants to assistants, and just plain jerks

  (in addition to the director and the producer). In short, every script, before

  it's produced, has suffered the comments of a veritable committee!

  A novel is a single voice, made better by an editor who has the author's

  interests and intentions at heart--an editor who knows the author's interests and

  intentions as well as the author knows them. That is a creative relationship.

  At some level, the relationship between a director and a screenwriter is also

  creative, but that relationship is invaded, time and time again, by teams of

  people with conflicting agendas. It's like trying to build and fly a kite with

  the unwelcome "help" of a bunch of retired 747 pilots.

  HG: You are known as a great defender of the nineteenth-century
novel,

  particularly the works of Dickens and Thomas Hardy. What virtues do you find

  there that you feel are missing in contemporary fiction, and which

  contemporary novelists do you think fulfill--or come closest to fulfilling--these

  virtues?

  JI: Thomas Hardy insisted that a novel had to be a better story than something

  you might happen upon in a newspaper. He meant "better" in every way:

  bigger, more complex, more connected, and also having a kind of symmetry or

  closure--even achieving a kind of justice, or at least an inevitability, in the

  end.

  George Eliot, too--and of course Dickens. Their novels were designed . David

  Copperfield once remarked that he found real life a whole lot messier than

  he expected to find it. Modernism in literature upholds the theory that a

  novel can be a patternless mess (without a plot) because real life is like that.

  Well, good novels, in my view, are better made than real life.

  If I like Dickens better than Hardy or Eliot, it is chiefly because Dickens is also comic. Even the contemporary novelists I most admire are

  nineteenth-century storytellers: Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel GarcIa

  Marquez, Robertson Davies. They all love plot, developed characters with

  interconnected stories, and the passage of time and its effects; not

  surprisingly, given my taste, they are all comic novelists, too.

  I think the most modern novelist I admire is Graham Greene--"modern" in

  the sense that his emotions are inscrutable and, at least compared to the

  abovementioned four, he is very spare. But Greene was also a good

  storyteller, and he sought a symmetry or closure to his novels; the architecture

  mattered to him.

  Good stories are constructed --they have a structure.

  HG: You are certainly successful in the United States, but you are even more

  successful--both critically and commercially--in Canada and many European

  countries. Do you have any theories about why that should be true?

  JI: Oh, there are many theories, but they're not all mine. My foreign publishers

  have their own theories about why this is so, and other authors have

  suggested reasons to me, too. I don't subscribe wholeheartedly to one answer,

  because there seem to be so many.

  Here is what some other authors have demonstrated to me. Gunter Grass is widely hated in both literary and political circles in Germany today. The Tin

  Drum is arguably the best novel ever written about World War II, certainly

  the best from a German perspective, and when Grass was exposing the

  Germany of World War II to his fellow Germans, his fellow Germans--like

  the rest of the world--loved and admired him.

  But Grass shifted his penetrating gaze to contemporary Germany, and to a deeply historical and psychological analysis of what makes Germans so . . .

  well, German. Now the Germans don't like what they're hearing from him.

  They want him to stop punishing them with his visions. That everything he

  predicted about German reunification has largely proved true . . . well,

  naturally this doesn't make him popular, either. He is a great writer who is

  revered outside Germany, but despised within.

  And Grass is not an isolated example. We have our own--Kurt Vonnegut.

  He is regarded outside the United States as a virtual prophet; he is often

  ridiculed at home. To a lesser degree--meaning less praised abroad, but also

  less condemned in the United States--Joseph Heller is like that. In my view,

  Vonnegut and Heller are this country's most original novelists; we should

  treasure them, but we don't. And then there's Salman Rushdie. In England

  they write terrible things about him, but here we love him--as we should.

  So a part of my being more popular away from home is nothing more than

  that. Novels like The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany are

  certainly critical of the United States--the abortion history in the former

  case, the Vietnam period in the latter. And even Garp was read (especially

  abroad) as a kind of sociology of the polarization of the sexes in North

  America.

  I am not an anti-American--although many Europeans see me that way, and

  I'm probably more popular in Europe because of it.

  Harder to explain is that A Son of the Circus was sixty-three consecutive

  weeks on the German best-seller lists, making Germany a bigger country for

  me, saleswise, than any other country in the world. Do Germans like "

  difficult" books more than Americans do? Surely they must. One look at the

  German best-seller lists--even forgetting my position on those lists--is a

  lesson in cultural differences. Lots of literary titles are on those German lists,

  and lots of hard-to-read books, too. The same is true in France. And in the

  Netherlands, and in the Scandinavian countries, the numbers of readers of

  serious fiction are huge. Canada's best-seller lists are much more impressive

  than ours--meaning many more literary novels are represented.

  What can I say? Most Americans who read at all read junk. The British

  best-seller lists are also disgraceful.

  I think it is a fair generalization to say that European readers of fiction like novels to be challenging, to be demanding; nor do they follow trends or

  fashions in reading taste in the lemminglike manner of many readers in the

  United States. The media bears some responsibility for this. I have been

  interviewed in many foreign countries, and in the United States; the

  European journalists are more literary--meaning they've read more novels,

  more good ones, and they write about books in a more literary way.

  The prevailing attention given to authors in this country concerns little

  more than the perpetual question concerning what is autobiographical in

  their novels. Authors are minor celebrities here, or else they're entirely

  unknown. And authors' lives are the subject of most interviews here--when

  authors are the subjects of interviews at all. We're certainly not as important

  in American culture as film and television celebrities or sports heroes.

  In Europe, authors are important to the culture. I don't mean, either, that

  authors are more celebrated as celebrities there--not at all. Our books are

  more celebrated in Europe; books and authors are central to European

  culture. Here (in the United States) I feel that most interviews I have given

  have trivialized my novels; the journalists are looking for superficial

  autobiographical levers with which they can pry open my books. But novels aren't

  secrets. The good ones aren't gossip. Maybe the simplest way to put it is that

  the journalists who write about novels and novelists in Europe, and in

  Canada, are better than they are in the United States.

  With very few exceptions, that has been my experience.

  HG: I have the impression that, when you sit down to write, the sentences, even

  the paragraphs, are already formed in your head. Is this so?

  JI: Many times, yes. I spend more than a year, sometimes two, just taking notes.

  I don't like to begin a novel until I know the story, know the principal

  characters, know how and when they meet each other, and when and how their

  paths cross again. I have to know the end of a story before I can imagine the

  best beginning. I come to the beg
inning last.

  Your impression is largely correct. When I start telling a story, I already know the story. There must be authority and authenticity in a storyteller's voice;

  readers must trust that the storyteller is an expert, at least on this particular

  story. How can you be an expert if you don't know what happens?

  By the time I write the first sentence of a novel, I don't want to be inventing anymore; the invention is largely behind me by the time I begin. I am just

  trying to remember what I've already imagined, in the order I've already

  selected as best for the reader. Telling a story is as much knowing what

  information to withhold as it is knowing what to tell.

  In the case of A Widow . . . , I knew that Marion's coming back, and Ruth's

  seeing her and starting to cry, was where the story had to end. I knew what I

  wanted Marion to say, and that this would be an echo of what we'd already

  heard her say to Ruth as a child. But it took me the longest time to work my

  way back to the beginning, to find the first occasion for Marion to say

  something like "Don't cry, honey, it's just Eddie and me."

  I'd been taking notes for a year and a half--I knew everything about Harry,

  and the death of the boys, and all about Ted, and even Hannah--but I still

  hadn't found the episode that is now the beginning of the novel, when Ruth

  catches her mother making love and Marion says, "Don't scream, honey . . ."

  and so forth. When I found it, I knew I was ready to begin. "One night when

  she was four . . ." and so on. That was a hard line to get to. All the rest just

  followed; they were waiting in place.

  HG: Were there any places in the novel--or in any of your novels--where the

  characters took over what you had planned for them and started doing things

  that surprised you?

  JI: No. Never.

  Oh, all right, there have been small surprises, but the characters essentially

  remain as I have imagined them. I'll tell you what I mean by a small surprise.

  I knew Marion would come back and buy Ruth's house, with Eddie. I didn't

  know that Eddie would be so smitten with the idea of owning Ruth's house