The World According To Garp (58 page)

“You
read
it?” John Wolf said.

“Lawd!” Jills screamed. “You’d think it was
him
who got raped, the way he went on and on. If you ask me,” Jillsy said, “that’s just like men: rape you half to death one minute and the next minute go crazy fussin’ over who you’re
givin’
it to—of your own free will! It’s not
their
damn business, either way, is it?” Jillsy asked.

“I’m not sure,” said John Wolf, who sat bewildered at his desk. “You didn’t like the book.”

“
Like
it?” Jillsy cawed. “There’s nothin’ to like about it,” she said.

“But you
read
it,” John Wolf said. “Why’d you read it?”

“Lawd,” Jillsy said, as if she were sorry for John Wolf—that he was so hopelessly stupid. “I sometimes wonder if you know the first thing about all these books you’re makin’,” she said; she shook her head. “I sometimes wonder why
you’re
the one who’s makin’ the books and
I’m
the one who’s cleanin’ the bathrooms. Except I’d rather clean the bathrooms than read most of them,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, Lawd.”

“If you hated it, why’d you read it, Jillsy?” John Wolf asked her.

“Same reason I read anythin’ for,” Jillsy said. “To find out what
happens
.”

John Wolf stared at her.

“Most books you
know
nothin’s gonna happen,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, you know that. Other books,” she said, “you know just
what’s
gonna happen, so you don’t have to read them, either. But
this
book,” Jillsy said, “this book’s so
sick
you
know
somethin’s gonna happen, but you can’t imagine
what
. You got to be sick yourself to imagine what happens in this book,” Jillsy said.

“So you read it to find out?” John Wolf said.

“There surely ain’t no other reason to read a book, is there?” Jillsy Sloper said. She put the manuscript heavily (for it was large) on John Wolf’s desk and hitched up the long extension cord (for the vacuum cleaner) which Jillsy wore on Mondays like a belt around her broad middle. “When it’s a book,” she said, pointing to the manuscript, “I’d be happy if I could have a copy of my own. If it’s okay,” she added.

“You want a copy?” John Wolf asked.

“If it’s no trouble,” Jillsy said.

“Now that you know what happens,” John Wolf said, “what would you want to read it
again
for?”

“Well,” Jillsy said. She looked confused; John Wolf had never seen Jillsy Sloper look confused before—only sleepy. “Well, I might
lend
it,” she said. “There might be someone I know who needs to be reminded what men in this world is like,” she said.

“Would you ever read it again yourself?” John Wolf asked.

“Well,” Jillsy said. “Not
all
of it, I imagine. At least not all at once, or not right away.” Again, she looked confused. “Well,” she said, sheepishly, “I guess I mean there’s
parts
of it I wouldn’t mind readin’ again.”

“Why?” John Wolf asked.

“Lawd,” Jillsy said, tiredly, as if she were finally impatient with him. “It feels so
true
,” she crooned, making the word
true
cry like a loon over a lake at night.

“It feels so true,” John Wolf repeated.

“Lawd, don’t you
know
it is?” Jillsy asked him. “If you don’t know when a book’s
true
,” Jillsy sang to him, “we really
ought
to trade jobs.” She laughed now, the stout three-pronged plug for the vacuum-cleaner cord clutched like a gun in her fist. “I do wonder, Mr. Wolf,” she said, sweetly, “if you’d know when a bathroom was
clean
.” She went over and peered in his wastebasket. “Or when a wastebasket was empty,” she said. “A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book’s true when you can say, “Yeah! That’s just how damn people
behave
all the time.”
Then
you know it’s true,” Jillsy said.

Leaning over the wastebasket, she seized the one scrap of paper lying alone on the bottom of the basket; she stuffed it into her cleaning apron. It was the crumpled-up first page of the letter John Wolf had tried to compose to Garp.

Months later, when
The World According to Bensenhaver
was going to the printers, Garp complained to John Wolf that there was no one to dedicate the book to. He would not have it
in memory of
Walt, because Garp hated that kind of thing: “that cheap capitalizing,” as he called it, “on one’s autobiographical accidents—to try to hook the reader into thinking you’re a more serious
writer
than you are.” And he would not dedicate a book to his mother, because he hated, as he called it, “the free ride everyone else gets on the name of Jenny Fields.” Helen, of course, was out of the question, and Garp felt, with some shame, that he couldn’t dedicate a book to Duncan if it was a book he would not allow Duncan to read. The child wasn’t old enough. He felt some distaste, as a father, for writing something he would forbid his own children to read.

The Fletchers, he knew, would be uncomfortable with a book dedicated to them, as a couple; and to dedicate a book to Alice, alone, might be insulting to Harry.

“Not to
me
,” John Wolf said. “Not this one.”

“I wasn’t thinking of you,” Garp lied.

“How about Roberta Muldoon?” John Wolf said.

“The book has absolutely nothing to
do
with Roberta,” Garp said. Though Garp knew that Roberta, at least, wouldn’t object to the dedication. How funny to write a book really no one would like to have dedicated to them!

“Maybe I’ll dedicate it to the Ellen Jamesians,” Garp said, bitterly.

“Don’t make trouble for yourself,” John Wolf said. “That’s just plain stupid.”

Garp sulked.

For Mrs. Ralph?

he thought. But he still didn’t know her real name. There was Helen’s father—his good old wrestling coach, Ernie Holm—but Ernie wouldn’t understand the gesture; it would hardly be a book Ernie would like. Garp hoped, in fact, that Ernie wouldn’t read it. How funny to write a book you hope someone doesn’t read!

To Fat Stew

he thought.

For Michael Milton

In Memory of Bonkers

He bogged down. He could think of no one.

“I know someone,” John Wolf said. “I could ask her if she’d mind.”

“Very funny,” Garp said.

But John Wolf was thinking of Jillsy Sloper, the person, he knew, who was responsible for getting this book of Garp’s published at all.

“She’s a very special woman who
loved
the book,” John Wolf told Garp. “She said it was so “true.”

Garp was interested in the idea.

“I gave her the manuscript for one weekend,” John Wolf said, “and she couldn’t put it down.”

“Why’d you give her the manuscript?” Garp asked.

“She just seemed
right
for it,” John Wolf said. A good editor will not share all his secrets with anyone.

“Well, okay,” Garp said. “It seems
naked
, having no one. Tell her I’d appreciate it. She’s a
close
friend of yours?” Garp asked. Garp’s editor winked at him and Garp nodded.

“What’s it all mean, anyway?” Jillsy Sloper asked John Wolf, suspiciously. “What’s it mean, he wants to “dedicate” that terrible book to me?”

“It means, that your response was valuable to him,” John Wolf said. “He thinks the book was written almost with you in mind.”

“Lawd,” Jillsy said. “With me in mind? What’s
that
mean?”

“I told him how you responded to his book,” John Wolf said, “and he thinks you’re the perfect audience, I guess.”

“The perfect audience?” Jillsy said. “Lawd, he
is
crazy, isn’t he?”

“He’s got no one else to dedicate it to,” John Wolf admitted.

“Kind of like needin’ a witness for a weddin’?” Jillsy Sloper asked.

“Kind of,” John Wolf guessed.

“It don’t mean I
approve
of the book?” Jillsy asked.

“Lord, no,” John Wolf said.

“Lawd, no, huh?” Jillsy said.

“No one’s going to blame you for anything in the book, if that’s what you mean,” John Wolf said.

“Well,” said Jillsy.

John Wolf showed Jillsy where the dedication would be; he showed her other dedications in other books. They all looked nice to Jillsy Sloper and she nodded her head, gradually pleased by the idea.

“One thing,” she said. “I won’t have to
meet
him, or anythin’, will I?”

“Lord, no,” said John Wolf, so Jillsy agreed.

There remained only one more stroke of genius to launch
The World According to Bensenhaver
into that uncanny half-light where occasional “serious” books glow, for a time, as also “popular” books. John Wolf was a smart and cynical man. He knew about all the shitty autobiographical associations that make those rabid readers of gossip warm to an occasional fiction.

Years later, Helen would remark that the success of
The World According to Bensenhaver
lay entirely in the book jacket. John Wolf was in the habit of letting Garp write his own jacket flaps, but Garp’s description of his own book was so ponderous and glum that John Wolf took matters into his own hands; he went straight to the dubious heart of the matter.

“
The World According to Bensenhaver
,” the book jacket flap said, “is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do.

“T. S. Garp,” the jacket flap went on, “is the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields.” John Wolf shivered slightly when he saw this in print, because although he had written it, and although he knew very well
why
he had written it, he also knew that it was information Garp
never
wanted mentioned in connection with his own work. “T. S. Garp is also a father,” the jacket flap said. And John Wolf shook his head in shame to see the garbage he had written there. “He is a father who has recently suffered the tragic loss of a five-year-old son. Out of the anguish that a father endures in the aftermath of an accident, this tortured novel emerges…” And so forth.

It was, in Garp’s opinion, the cheapest reason to read of all. Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was “true”—how much of it was based on “personal experience.”
True
—not in the good way that Jillsy Sloper used it, but true as in “real life.” Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis—if there even was one—was the least interesting level on which to read a novel. He would always say that the art of fiction was the act of
imagining
truly—was, like any art, a process of selection. Memories and personal histories—”all the recollected traumas of our unmemorable lives”—were suspicious models for fiction, Garp would say. “Fiction has to be better made than life,” Garp wrote. And he consistently detested what he called “the phony mileage of personal hardship”—writers whose books were “important” because something important had happened in their lives. He wrote that the worst reason for anything being part of a novel was that it really happened. “
Everything
has really happened, sometime!” he fumed. “The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it’s the perfect thing to have happen at that time.

“Tell me
anything
that’s ever happened to you,” Garp told an interviewer once, “and I can improve upon the story; I can make the details better than they were.” The interviewer, a divorced woman with four young children, one of whom was dying of cancer, had her face firmly fixed in disbelief. Garp saw her determined unhappiness, and its terrible importance to her, and he said to her, gently, “If it’s sad—even if it’s
very
sad—I can make up a story that’s sadder.” But he saw in her face that she would never believe him; she wasn’t even writing it down. It wouldn’t even be a part of her interview.

And John Wolf knew this: one of the first things most readers
want
to know is everything they can about a writer’s
life
. John Wolf wrote Garp: “For most people, with limited imaginations, the idea of improving on reality is pure bunk.” On the book jacket flap of
The World According to Bensenhaver
, John Wolf created a bogus sense of Garp’s importance (“the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields”) and a sentimental sympathy for Garp’s personal experience (“the tragic loss of a five-year-old son”). That both pieces of information were essentially irrelevant to the art of Garp’s novel did not deeply concern John Wolf. Garp had made John Wolf sore with all his talk about preferring riches to seriousness.

“It’s not your best book,” John Wolf wrote Garp, when he sent the galleys for Garp to proofread. “One day you’ll know that, too. But it
is
going to be your biggest book; just wait and see. You can’t imagine, yet, how you’re going to hate many of the reasons for your success, so I advise you to leave the country for a few months. I advise you to read only the reviews I send to you. And when it blows over—because everything blows over—you can come back home and pick up your considerable surprise at the bank. And you can hope that
Bensenhaver’s
popularity is big enough to make people go back and read the first two novels—for which you
deserve
to be better known.

“Tell Helen I am
sorry
, Garp, but I think you must know: I have always had your own interests at heart. If you want to
sell
this book, we’ll sell it. “Every business is a shitty business,” Garp. I am quoting
you
.”

Garp was very puzzled by the letter; John Wolf, of course, had not shown him the jacket flaps.

“Why are you
sorry
?” Garp wrote back. “Don’t weep; just sell it.”

“Every business is a shitty business,” Wolf repeated.

“I know, I
know
,” Garp said.

“Take my advice,” Wolf said.

“I
like
reading the reviews,” Garp protested.