The book he supposedly was writing was never seen, and no one knows what happened to him.
If the world of the reviewer seemed content, after the publication of My Father's Illusions, to call Garp merely an “eccentric writer,” a “good but not a great writer,” Duncan didn't mind. In Duncan's own words, Garp was “original” and “the real thing.” Garp had been the type, after all, to compel blind loyalty.
“One-eyed loyalty,” Duncan called it.
He had a long-standing code with his sister, Jenny, and with Ellen James; the three of them were as thick as thieves.
“Here's to Captain Energy!” they would say, when they were drinking together.
“There's no sex like transsex!” they would shout, when they were drunk, which occasionally embarrassed Duncan's wife—although she certainly agreed.
“How's the energy?” they would write and phone and telegraph each other, when they wanted to know what was up. And when they had plenty of energy, they would describe each other as “full of Garp.”
Although Duncan would live a long, long time, he would die unnecessarily and, ironically, because of his good sense of humor. He would die laughing at one of his own jokes, which was surely a Garp-family thing to do. It was at a kind of coming-out party for a new transsexual, a friend of his wife's. Duncan aspirated an olive and choked to death in just a few seconds of violent laughter. That is a horrible and stupid way to die, but everyone who knew him said that Duncan would not have objected—either to that form of death, or to the life he'd had. Duncan Garp always said that his father suffered the death of Walt more than anyone in the family suffered anything else. And among the chosen forms of death, death finally was the same. “Between men and women,” as Jenny Fields once said, “only death is shared equally.”
Jenny Garp, who in the field of death had much more specific training than her famous grandmother, would not have agreed. Young Jenny knew that, between men and women, not even death gets shared equally. Men get to die more, too.
JENNY GARP would outlive them all. If she had been at the party where her brother choked to death, she probably could have saved him. At least she would have known exactly what to do. She was a doctor. She always said it was her time in the Vermont hospital, looking after Duncan, that had made up her mind to turn to medicine—not her famous grandmother's history of nursing, because Jenny Garp know that only secondhand.
Young Jenny was a brilliant student; like her mother, she absorbed everything—and everything she learned she could redeliver. Like Jenny Fields, she got her feeling for people as a roamer of hospitals—inching what kindness was possible, and recognizing what wasn't.
While she was an intern, she married another young doctor. Jenny Garp would not give up her name, however; she stayed a Garp, and, in a frightful war with her husband, she saw that her three children would all be Garps, too. She would divorce, eventually—and remarry, but in no hurry. That second time would suit her. He was a painter, much older than herself, and if any of her family had been alive to nag her, they would have no doubt warned her that she was imagining something of Duncan in the man.
“So what?” she would have said. Like her mother, she had her own mind; like Jenny Fields, she kept her own name.
And her father? In what way was Jenny Garp even slightly like him—whom she never really knew? She was only a baby, after all, when he died.
Well, she was eccentric. She made a point of going into every bookstore and asking for her father's books. If the store was out of stock, she would order. She had a writer's sense of immortality: if you're in print and on the shelves, you're alive. Jenny Garp left fake names and addresses all over America; the books she ordered would be sold to someone, she reasoned. T. S. Garp would not go out of print—at least not in his daughter's lifetime.
She was also avid in her support of the famous feminist, her grandmother, Jenny Fields; but like her father, Jenny Garp did not put much stock in the writing of Jenny Fields. She did not bother bookstores about keeping A Sexual Suspect on the shelves.
Most of all, she resembled her father in the kind of doctor she became. Jenny Garp would turn her medical mind to research. She would not have a private practice. She would go to hospitals only when she was sick. Instead, Jenny spent a number of years working closely with the Connecticut Tumor Registry; she would eventually direct a branch of the National Cancer Institute. Like a good writer, who must love and worry each detail, Jenny Garp would spend hours noticing the habits of a single human cell. Like a good writer, she was ambitious; she hoped she would get to the bottom of cancer. In a sense, she would. She would die of it.
Like other doctors, Jenny Garp took that sacred oath of Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, wherein she agreed to devote herself to something like the life Garp once described to young Whitcomb—although Garp was concerned with a writer's ambitions ("...trying everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive”). Thus, cancer research did not depress Jenny Garp, who liked to describe herself as her father had described a novelist.
“A doctor who sees only terminal cases.”
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
Also by John Irving
SETTING FREE THE BEARS
THE WATER-METHOD MAN
THE 158-POUND MARRIAGE
Copyright
A Henry Robbins Book
E.P.Dutton, New York
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “The Plot against the Giant.” Copyright 1923, 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Portions of this book have appeared in different form in the following magazines: Antaeus, Esquire, Gallery, Penthouse, Playboy, Ploughshares, and Swank.
Copyright @ 1976, 1977, 1978 by John Irving
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Irving, John, 1942-
The World According to Garp.
"A Henri Robbins book.”
I. Title.
PZ4.I714Wo 1978 [PS3559.R68] 813'.5'4 77-15564
ISBN: 0-525-23770-4
Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, Toronto and Vancouver
Designed by Herb Johnson