Alison Freeland

INTERVIEWER: Your most recent book, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, combines memoirs, stories, and literary essays. Could you talk a bit about how the book came together?

JOHN IRVING: The care that I put into this collection is not the kind of care I would usually take for a kind of family scrapbook such as this. I think a writer should be writing new things and not necessarily taking as much time as I took, in the case of this book, to compose what I call author's notes to pieces I wrote twenty, thirty years ago. But the circumstances that really precipitated the writing of the memoir, which is the longest part of the book, and what I'd call the core of this collection, the piece called "The Imaginary Girlfriend"--the circumstances that precipitated my writing that at all were unusual. I had had some shoulder surgery, and the physical therapy required, the rehabilitation program that I was put on, simply took so much of my time--four hours a day for more than four months--that I wasn't in any kind of shape to begin a new novel. Out of frustration I thought, well, let me try to write something that's manageable, that I can do having only half days or third days in which to work while I was recovering from this operation.

INT: Was the writing of a memoir something easier, then?

IRVING: To me the voice of the memoir is the opposite of working. I'm always concerned when I'm writing fiction what the voice is, but the voice of a memoir is the voice in which I write a letter to a friend. I thought of this as a long letter to a friend, but because I was mentioning things that were dated in time, the friend needed to be reminded of things. I couldn't sort of rely on the friend to know these things.

It's a very casual voice. It's much more casual than the voice of the essay, especially the literary essay when you're writing about another writer, say, or the book reviewer's voice when you're writing about a specific book.

And so in the spirit of [ "The Imaginary Girlfriend"], which is the newest part of the collection, I tried to take that voice and add it, in the form of author's notes, to all the older pieces too. For two reasons: to give those pieces a perspective for the reader in terms of between which novels they were written, for how long they went unpublished and why, and where they were published the first time--to give them not only a factual perspective, but also to put a voice to the end of each of those pieces that was recognizably the same voice as in the principal memoir of the collection.

Which is a way of taking the disparate voices of thirty years of writing, fiction and nonfiction, and trying to make them all sound the same, and that took a little more care and attention to a collection than most grab-bag collections have. It certainly has made the pieces in this book more accessible to readers, and almost put the whole book into the voice of a memoir, even though half of the pieces in this book are fiction. There are six short stories, there are three memoirs, and then three essays about other writers--two on Dickens, one on Grass--but I think the feeling of the book as a whole is the feeling of a memoir.

INT: Is this the first bit of autobiography you've published?

IRVING: In book form, you mean? Yeah, in book form. Of the three memoirs, the piece about my grandmother was published previously in The New York Times Book Review, in the context of an essay about becoming a writer. And then there's a piece about having dinner with Mr. Reagan at the White House, which I published in a Canadian magazine at the time of the Bush / Clinton campaign, as a way of sort of introducing American politics to Canadian readers. But yes, as a book, even though of the dozen pieces only three of them are autobiographical or memoirs, you could certainly say this is the first time. And I try to contribute autobiographical notes to each of the pieces. I don't know if that's particularly of significance.

Part of the reason for wanting to do this is that it's frankly frustrating with many of my novels to always be asked the autobiographical question. Even in the case of the last novel about an Indian-born orthopedic surgeon, born in Bombay and living in Toronto. I thought, well there, damn it, nobody's going to ask me an autobiographical question about A Son of the Circus; but oh yes they did. And I thought, well, maybe I can dispense with all of that by giving them frankly all the answers they need to know. And if people ask me an autobiographical question after the publication of my next novel, I'll say, "Have you read Trying to Save Piggy Sneed? Go read it."

INT: Were you ever uncomfortable with the idea of writing autobiographically-opening up parts of your life to the public, making yourself vulnerable to all these readers?

IRVING: To be truthful, I haven't revealed anything in this autobiography that I don't want to--I haven't written about my divorce. I haven't written about the girlfriends I had between divorcing my first wife and marrying my second wife. I probably have left out all of the things that are of prurient interest to readers of autobiography in general. I'm sure that in that light this book will be terribly disappointing to those people who have any expectations that I've told them anything of a dirty laundry interest, because I haven't.

I have emphasized things that are very important, were very important to me, the sort of lifelong question I have suffered in interviews because I was so serious about the sport of wrestling for so many years, coaching it until I was forty-seven, competing until I was thirty-four. That's a long time to be involved in a sport, and not in a dilettantish fashion, and I just got tired of the questions--you know, what relationship does wrestling have to writing? And so I thought, well, why don't I write about that, and the other question one is asked--if you have any connection whatsoever with creative writing programs, with the business of teaching writing or being a student of writing--is that sort of lame and tiresome question, "Can writing be taught?" or "Were you ever really taught anything?" or "Did you ever really teach anybody anything?" And I thought, maybe if I put that in the form of a memoir too, then I will have given my answer to that question which I've been asked too many times.

INT: In "The Imaginary Girlfriend" you answer those questions, in part by talking about several teachers who played the role of mentor for you in your early writing days; you also talk a little about your experience as a teacher, and what you hope to have given to your students. Are both of those experiences solely in the past now, or are you still, in any way, teaching or being taught?

IRVING: What I've said repeatedly since I've stopped teaching creative writing, in 1979 I think, what I've said repeatedly to people who have sent me manuscripts, and asked me to comment on their manuscripts, is that I'm not a teacher anymore. I really believe that teaching, like any other activity mental or physical, is something that you have to be doing regularly to be good at. And if you step away from it, you forget how to do it, you forget how it's done. You forget the combination of being gentle, being constructive, and also being truthful. Being good at talking to younger writers about their work takes some practice and requires some experience, and if you step away from the experience, you don't do very well. It's like giving up tennis for three years and then stepping out on the court one weekend and imagining that whatever feeble skills at this game you once had are going to be miraculously returned to you intact. It doesn't happen that way.

So I refuse, when people send me their manuscript or their first novels and say, "I like you, I like your work, and I'd just like to know what you think of my work." I just don't do it, I won't play that role. I do, of course, play that role for people I've always played it with, which is to say with close friends: the writer Gail Godwin, the writer Peter Matthiessen. We're people who've been sort of showing each other manuscripts for a long, long time, and we'll probably keep doing it because we don't have to put the gloves on. We know each other well enough, and we have the utmost respect for each other's work, so we can say, "This is a really terrible moment in this book and you've really just got to get it out of there, and this is a really horrible character and every time he's in the book, he's disrupting what you want to happen." We can talk like that to each other. But I don't need many other readers among my fellow writers because I've always had an editor that I work very closely with as well.

In the case of the last three novels The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany and A Son of the Circus, I've been dealing with material of one kind or another that is foreign enough to my own experience and my own background, so that in addition to those literary readers, there have been what I call expert readers. If you're writing about a doctor, for instance, you want a couple of doctors to read that manuscript and tell you if the episiotomies are running the right way or the wrong way, or whether you've got these things right. You don't want to write a book about an obstetrician and offend every obstetrician who reads the book.

INT: Throughout Piggy Sneed you often talk about your imagination, to the point that it seems you regard it as not just as a tool, but almost as an entity with its own separate life. Would you talk for a minute about how your own imagination figures in your work?

IRVING: I don't think it's discussible. I tried a little bit in "The Imaginary Girlfriend" to address those elements of writing which are teachable, which can be learned, which can be taught. I did not really address by choice those elements of writing which I believe can't be taught, can't be learned. You either have it or you don't. There are a number of things that older, more senior writers can help younger writers with in terms of their own writing. Creative writing is not a fraudulent enterprise by any means. It's good for the serious grown-up writer who needs some form of employment that leaves him sufficient time to write. But it's also good for the good students. And that's not of special benefit to the students who aren't any good--I don't think that's any different in creative writing than it is in math, or chemistry, or history, or political science, or any other field. The students who aren't very good aren't really going to benefit from what the teacher says anyway. It's only the students who are good, who already have some abilities of their own who are going to benefit from the things that can be taught. There are many things about writing that can be taught. You can learn to improve your prose. Your prose can get better. You can learn to develop a prose style, a voice, that is close enough to your own natural voice so that it doesn't sound fake, or put on, or borrowed from someone else. Some of these things can come from hard work, from practice, from the thing that happens most of all in the course of a writer's life, which is repetition. But you can't teach anyone to have an imagination. You can't learn how to have an imagination. You can't learn to develop or expand your imagination.

And there's another element of writing that is unteachable, that can't be taught, can't be learned, you have to have it. And that I think is a sense of pace. By pace I mean narrative pace. What is it that creates narrative momentum in storytelling? What is it that makes a novel of more interest to a reader on page 300 than it was on page 30? Because any novel of length that isn't better on page 300 than it was on page 30 will never be finished, hence never be read. The only books that are memorable are the ones you finish, and you don't finish them if they don't get better. That has to happen. I could never teach that. I could point out its lack. I could point out its absence when I looked at novels by younger writers, but I couldn't ever tell anyone else how to do it. In the voice of "The Imaginary Girlfriend," I'm being fairly consistently selfdeprecating, both about my talents as a wrestler, and concerning my talents as a writer--when I talk about my talents as a writer, I restrict myself to my talents with language, sentence structure, paragraph structure, very technical things--but I do have an imagination. No one taught it to me. And I don't know how to teach it to anybody else.

INT: When you write about Dickens in your book, you point out how spontaneous he can be in rendering a situation at once sympathetic and hilarious, and you describe one writer as "Dickensian" in the way that he combines dark satire with the most earthy affection. Doesn't this also describe your own work?

IRVING: I think that in general writers aren't as good at recognizing the elements of their own work as they are at recognizing particular elements in the work of other writers they admire. So it's no surprise to me that I would at least strive -- succeeding is another matter -- to imitate those things that I most admire in the writing of others.

When it comes to Dickens, I would certainly hope that my own work offers (as I say his does) a spontaneous combination of the comic and the realistic--the very realistic; and I would hope that this combination seems natural. I certainly find it most natural when I'm reading him. As for my use of the adjective "Dickensian," I was using it to describe the writer Günter Grass. But I would say that under my definition Garcia Márquez is also a Dickensian writer, as is Salman Rushdie, and Robertson Davies. All of them are imitating, relishing, making their own versions of those labyrinthine nineteenth-century narratives, and they're all comic novelists. It's no surprise that the people I tend to like most are novelists of a nineteenth-century narrative, comic vein. Dickens is the source writer for that definition, but the writers I've named all qualify. Their works aren't examples of the cool, slender, restrained, detached, plotless, characterless modernism that makes up so much of contemporary literature. They're old-fashioned.

INT: People sometimes ask you, "How can plots like this be believed?" You respond: "It's very simple. You accept as a fact that anyone of any emotional importance to you is related to everyone else of any emotional importance to you." When did you figure that out?

IRVING: When I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. I couldn't render it--that is, I couldn't make that happen in my own work at that age; but I certainly recognized then that the connections in a story, in a novel--the stuff that bound characters to other characters--constituted a kind of emotional glue. Very simply, what separates the novel from the short story is that it is only in the novel that you can provide the kind of depth of character that makes characters emotionally unforgettable, emotionally memorable. No matter how much craft or attention or wonderful language you may have in a short story, you cannot create a character to the degree that the passage of time and levels of meaning and depth of exposure will allow you to do in a novel. You have to re-read a novel like Great Expectations every couple of years in order to remember the plot, but you'll always remember--even if you only read it in school, and even if that was twenty or thirty years ago--you will always remember the emotional effect of that convict on that little boy, of that horrible evil woman in her wedding dress on that little boy, of that woman Estella who has been created by the horrible evil woman in the wedding dress on that little boy. What you remember about a novel is the emotional effect that the characters had on you. Long after the story, the plot, the intricacies of what happens, to whom, when--long after that stuff is out of mind, out of memory, and you really need to read the book again in order to familiarize yourself with exactly how the story unfolds, a novel keeps working its magic on readers because of the emotional impact of characters that just can't be duplicated in a short story, even a short novel.

INT: As a student at Exeter, you struggled academically, and later were diagnosed as dyslexic. What effect does that learning disability have now on the way that you write or the way that you work?

-IRVING: Well, there's a serious answer and a comic answer. The comic answer is that everyone in the family knows that I'm dangerous when it comes to phone numbers or dinner invitations. If somebody calls and says do you want to go out to dinner on the 27th, I'll say sure, and then I'll write it down on the calendar that we're going on the 17th. I hate it when people call and give me telephone numbers over the phone because I can't transcribe numbers at all correctly. I'm bad at grocery lists. My wife says we need tomatoes, I write potatoes. I'm not kidding. That happens. I do that. So in the casual everyday details of living, I am reminded of my dyslexia, if not every day, at least every week. It doesn't go away.

In terms of my writing, as I say in the memoir part of Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, I think in the long run it's been terribly beneficial. It's given me something that no writer can have a surfeit of, which is an enormous humility when it comes to judging the quality of first-draft material. You'll never be better than sort of second-rate--or worse--as a writer if you value with any sincerity what you write in first draft. It's a help to me to be suspicious of every sentence, of every word I write in first-draft material. That was drummed into me in school because I did make so many errors. I did make so many mistakes. Now, because I write every day, and I've written every day for a long time, when I'm sitting at my desk writing, I don't make the same kinds of mistakes that I do when I'm talking on the phone, taking down a phone number, or fooling around with a grocery list. My concentration is better. So I don't make the same number of mistakes, or to the same degree as I did when I was a school boy. Practice does make better, if not perfect. The effect of having that so-called learning disability has been that I'm always willing to look again--not only willing, but I presume that everything must be looked at a second time, a third time, everything must be revised four, five, six times. I say of myself that I don't think I'm very naturally gifted as a writer. I do think I am good at rewriting. I've learned that I have to be a rewriter. I can revise like crazy. I can go back to something and do it again--I believe on the evidence of what I read of others, more than other people do. I revise more. I don't write more, but I rewrite more. I owe that to a very concrete disability. Because I know I make mistakes all the time, I have no problem going over something again and again and again. I believe that a piece of writing is only good when you've rewritten and reshaped it so many times that you've really exhausted every possible way to describe that moment, to punctuate that sentence, to conclude that paragraph. So, in the long run it's been a benefit. It's tough to be a student with dyslexia, but it's not so hard to be a writer with it. In fact, it's only helped me as a writer.

INT: You've said that after reading The Tin Drum, you resolved to stay funny and angry. What is it that you're angry at?

IRVING: I don't think anger is anything but detrimental to your writing if it's too specific--I think if you're too specifically angry, if your anger is merely issue-oriented, as so many people's anger today is, it can really harm your writing. It can really get in the way of your writing. A novel is not single-issue politics, or if it is, it's not a novel. In fact, I think, you have to be very careful in novels that touch upon those issues which matter to you greatly. You have to be very careful to touch upon them very indirectly, to conceal from the reader exactly how angry you really are. You have to go out of your way to pretend not to be as angry as you are. Abortion rights, for example--The Cider House Rules, if it is a good novel, is a good novel on the subject of abortion because you don't know it's about that subject for the longest time. And it's not only about that subject. It begins as a novel about the relationship between a young man in an orphanage, a young man who is never adopted, whose adoptions fail, to the degree that he keeps returning to the orphanage which he will in essence never leave--the novel centers on that orphan's relationship with the orphanage physician, who is himself a man without children of his own. Between them develops a father/son relationship which is stronger, but also more bitter, more conflicted, more affectionate and more conflicted than most father/son relationships get to be. And without that emotional bond to the storytelling, without that emotional connection to those two characters, I think it would fail as a novel.

The political agenda for The Cider House Rules is, I think, pretty well hidden. Many blunt and insensitive reviewers, among them reviewers who liked the book and meant me well, kind of spoiled that concealment for me, by announcing that the book was about the abortion issue right off the top. So that readers, in reading too many reviews of that book, might have gone into the novel sort of over-prepared to find that subject lurking behind every page. But that's just where it is--it's lurking behind every page, it's not at the top of every page.

The loathing for the 1960s, for the shallowness of that decade, is apparent in Owen Meany. I choose to express it through a man who is certifiably nuts. He's crazy, so everything he says has to be taken with a grain of salt. Like many young people, he's devoted in his high school years to the enormous effort it takes to have sex, but for the rest of his life, for all of his life, he never has sex. So if he's devoted all of his high school years to trying to have sex, he devotes the rest of his life to trying not to have sex. This is not a man who we would necessarily feel is an authority on any subject. But having him there in the book is a way that one can deflect one's loathing for the Vietnam issue and how it divided this country, and I think continues to divide this country. It's a very angry book, really, but the principal character of the book is not angry. Owen Meany is this little saint. The anger is deflected into that seething nutcase of a narrator.

It's a subject that moves around, anger. If it's specific you have to hide it; if it's nonspecific, you can bring it across as a kind of overall unfairness. There are no specific politics, not of the abortion or the Vietnam kind, in The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, or A Son of the Circus, but they are very much political novels in the social sense. Garp is about the destructiveness of sexual stereotyping, sexual polarization: although it was more rampant in the seventies, it's still sort of working its destructive magic today.

The extreme feeling of foreignness, of not belonging either where he's from or where he's gone, that is felt by the main character in A Son of the Circus, Dr. Daruwalla, is very much a social malaise, a political malaise of our future, and of our present for many people of the third world trying to live in the so-called West. But it will become, I think, a state of alienation that will be terribly common in the twenty-first century-that feeling people have who are born one place, educated in a second place, married in a third place, and who end up living in a fourth, fifth, sixth place, so that they are grounded nowhere. They're without roots, without a real degree of assimilation wherever they've ended up. That's a political subject. But the anger behind it is not directed at any specific villain; it doesn't come from any specific cause.

INT: What about the book you're working on now?

IRVING: The one I'm working on now is really simpler, certainly by comparison to the last three novels. It will also be shorter: the premise is very simple--it's about a woman's life at a moment of crisis. She's just become a widow at the moment in her life when she's really down. Unfortunately, this event coincides with an event from her past which she's most shamed by, embarrassed by, and that event comes back to haunt her. None of the things that happen to her would happen to her if she were a man. If what has bothered her about the past had happened to her and she had been a man, she wouldn't even be worrying about it. I suppose it's a cranky or angry way of saying, so you think men and women are the same now? Equal now? It's as easy to be a woman now as to be a man? Guess again.

INT: You could live anywhere and write, and you've chosen to come back to a state where you lived for eighteen years, to Vermont. Why here?