It is not so much that "the world according to Bensenhaver" is wrong, or even misperceived, as it is out of proportion to the world's need for sensual pleasure, and the world's need and capacity for warmth. Dorsey Standish "is not true to the world," either; he is too vulnerable to how delicately he loves his wife and children; he is seen, together with Bensenhaver, as "not well suited for life on this planet." Where immunity counts.
Hope--and, the reader hopes, her children--may have better chances. Somehow implicit in the novel is the sense that women are better equipped than men at enduring fear and brutality, and at containing the anxiousness of feeling how vulnerab
le we are to the people we love. Hope is seen as a strong survivor of a weak man's world.
* * *
--
John Wolf sat in New York, hoping that the visceral reality of Garp's language, and the intensity of Garp's characters, somehow rescued the book from sheer soap opera. But, Wolf thought, one might as well call the thing Anxiousness of Life; it would make a fantastic series for daytime television, he thought--if suitably edited for invalids, senior citizens, and preschool children. John Wolf concluded that The World According to Bensenhaver, despite the "visceral reality of Garp's language," and so forth, was an X-rated soap opera.
Much later, of course, even Garp would agree; it was his worst work. "But the fucking world never gave me credit for the first two," he wrote to John Wolf. "Thus I was owed." That, Garp felt, was the way it worked most of the time.
John Wolf was more basically concerned: that is, he wondered if he could justify the book's publication. With books he did not absolutely take to, John Wolf had a system that rarely failed him. At his publishing house, he was envied for his record of being right about those books destined to be popular. When he said a book was going to be popular--distinct from being good or likable or not--he was almost always right. There were many books that were popular without his saying so, of course, but no book he'd ever claimed would be popular was ever unpopular.
Nobody knew how he did it.
He did it first for Jenny Fields--and for certain, surprising books, every year or two, he had been doing it ever since.
There was a woman who worked in the publishing house who once told John Wolf that she never read a book that didn't make her want to close it and go to sleep. She was a challenge to John Wolf, who loved books, and he spent many years giving this woman good books and bad books to read; the books were alike in that they put this woman to sleep. She just didn't like to read, she told John Wolf; but he would not give up on her. No one else in the publishing house ever asked this woman to read anything at all; in fact, they never asked this woman's opinion of anything. The woman moved through the books lying all around the publishing house as if these books were ashtrays and she was a nonsmoker. She was a cleaning woman. Every day she emptied the wastebaskets; she cleaned everyone's office when they went home at night. She vacuumed the rugs in the corridors every Monday, she dusted the display cases every Tuesday, and the secretaries' desks on Wednesdays; she scrubbed the bathrooms on Thursdays and sprayed air freshener on everything on Fridays--so that, she told John Wolf, the entire publishing house had the whole weekend to gather up a good smell for the next week. John Wolf had watched her for years and he'd never seen her so much as glance at a book.
When he asked her about books and she told him how unlikable they were to her, he kept using her to test books he wasn't sure of--and the books he thought he was very sure of, too. She was consistent in her dislike of books and John Wolf had almost given up on her when he gave her the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields.
The cleaning woman read it overnight and asked John Wolf if she could have a copy of her very own to read--over and over again--when the book was published.
After that, John Wolf sought her opinion scrupulously. She did not disappoint him. She did not like most things, but when she liked something, it meant to John Wolf that nearly everybody else was at least sure to be able to read it.
It was almost by rote that John Wolf gave the cleaning woman The World According to Bensenhaver. Then he went home for the weekend and thought about it; he tried to call her and tell her not even to try to read it. He remembered the first chapter and he didn't want to offend the woman, who was somebody's grandmother, and (of course) somebody's mother, too--and, after all, she never knew she was paid to read all the stuff John Wolf gave her to read. That she had a rather whopping salary for a cleaning lady was known only to John Wolf. The woman thought all good cleaning ladies were well paid, and should be.
Her name was Jillsy Sloper, and John Wolf marveled to note that there was not one Sloper with even the first initial of J. in the New York phone directory. Apparently Jillsy didn't like phone calls any more than she liked books. John Wolf made a note to apologize to Jillsy the first thing Monday morning. He spent the rest of a miserable weekend trying to phrase to himself exactly how he would tell T. S. Garp that he believed it was in his own best interests, and certainly in the best interests of the publishing house, NOT to publish The World According to Bensenhaver.
It was a hard weekend for him, because John Wolf liked Garp and he believed in Garp, and he also knew that Garp had no friends who could advise him against embarrassing himself--which is one of the valuable things friends are for. There was only Alice Fletcher, who so loved Garp that she would love, indiscriminately, everything he uttered--or else she would be silent. And there was Roberta Muldoon, whose literary judgment, John Wolf suspected, was even more newfound and awkward (if existent at all) than her adopted sex. And Helen wouldn't read it. And Jenny Fields, John Wolf knew, was not biased toward her son in the way a mother is usually biased; she had demonstrated the dubious taste to dislike some of the better things her son had written. The problem with Jenny, John Wolf knew, was one of subject matter. A book about an important subject was, to Jenny Fields, an important book. And Jenny Fields thought that Garp's new book was all about the stupid male anxieties that women are asked to suffer and endure. How a book was written never mattered to Jenny.
That was one thread that interested John Wolf in publishing the book. If Jenny Fields liked The World According to Bensenhaver, it was at least a potentially controversial book. But John Wolf, like Garp, knew that Jenny's status as a political figure was due largely to a general, hazy misunderstanding of Jenny.
Wolf thought and thought about it, all weekend, and he completely forgot to apologize to Jillsy Sloper the first thing Monday morning. Suddenly there was Jillsy, red-eyed and twitching like a squirrel, the ratted manuscript pages of The World According to Bensenhaver held fast in her rough brown hands.
"Lawd," Jillsy said. She rolled her eyes; she shook the manuscript in her hands.
"Oh, Jillsy," John Wolf said. "I'm sorry."
"Lawd!" Jillsy crowed. "I never had a worse weekend. I got no sleep, I got no food, I got no trips to the cemetery to see my family and my friends."
The pattern of Jillsy Sloper's weekend seemed strange to John Wolf but he said nothing; he just listened to her, as he had listened to her for more than a dozen years.
"This man's crazy," Jillsy said. "Nobody sane ever wrote a book like this."
"I shouldn't have given it to you, Jillsy," John Wolf said. "I should have remembered that first chapter."
"First chapter ain't so bad," Jillsy said. "That first chapter ain't nothin'. It's that nineteenth chapter that got me," Jillsy said. "Lawd, Lawd!" she crowed.
"You read nineteen chapters?" John Wolf asked.
"You didn't give me no more than nineteen chapters," Jillsy said. "Jesus Lawd, is there another chapter? Do it keep goin' on?"
"No, no," John Wolf said. "That's the end of it. That's all there is."
"I should hope so," Jillsy said. "Ain't nothin' left to go on with. Got that crazy old cop where he belongs--at long last--and that crazy husband with his head blowed off. That's the only proper state for that husband's head, if you ask me: blowed off."