Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.
* * *
--
In Vienna, Garp felt, the Under Toad was strong. Helen did not seem to feel it, and Duncan, like an eleven-year-old, passed from one feeling to the next. The return to the city, for Garp, was like returning to the Steering School. The streets, the buildings, even the paintings in the museums, were like his old teachers, grown older; he barely recognized them, and they did not know him at all. Helen and Duncan saw everything. Garp was content to walk with baby Jenny; he strolled her through the long, warm fall in a carriage as baroque as the city itself--he smiled and nodded to all the tongue-clucking elderly who peered into the carriage and approved of his new baby. The Viennese appeared well fed and comfortable with luxuries that looked new to Garp; the city was years away from the Russian occupation, the memory of the war, the reminders of ruins. If Vienna had been dying, or already dead, in his time there with his mother, Garp felt that something new but common had grown in the old city's place.
At the same time, Garp liked showing Duncan and Helen around. He enjoyed his personal history tour, mixed with the guidebook history of Vienna. "And this is where Hitler stood when he first addressed the city. And this is where I used to shop on Saturday mornings.
"This is the fourth district, a Russian zone of occupation; the famous Karlskirche is here, and the Lower and Upper Belvedere. And between the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, on your left, and the Argentinierstrasse is the little street where Mom and I..."
They rented some rooms in a nice pension in the fourth district. They discussed enrolling Duncan in an English-speaking school, but it was a long drive, or a long Strassenbahn ride every morning, and they didn't really plan on staying even half the year. Vaguely, they imagined Christmas at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny and Roberta and Ernie Holm.
John Wolf finally sent the book, complete book jacket and all, and Garp's sense of the Under Toad grew unbearably for a few days, then kicked deeper, beneath the surface. It appeared to be gone. Garp managed a restrained letter to his editor; he expressed his sense of personal hurt, his understanding that this had been done with the best intentions, businesswise. But...and so forth. How angry could he really be--at Wolf? Garp had provided the package; Wolf had only promoted it.
Garp heard from his mother that the first reviews were "not nice," but Jenny--on John Wolf's advice--did not enclose any reviews with her letter. John Wolf clipped the first rave from among the important New York reviews: "The women's movement has at last exhibited a significant influence on a significant male writer," wrote the reviewer, who was an associate professor of women's studies somewhere. She went on to say that The World According to Bensenhaver was "the first in-depth study, by a man, of the peculiarly male neurotic pressure many women are made to suffer." And so forth.
"Christ," Garp said, "it sounds as if I wrote a thesis. It's a fucking novel, it's a story, and I made it up!"
"Well, it sounds as if she liked it," Helen said.
"It's not it she liked," Garp said. "She liked something else."
But the review helped to establish the rumor that The World According to Bensenhaver was "a feminist novel."
"Like me," Jenny Fields wrote her son, "it appears you are going to be the beneficiary of one of the many popular misunderstandings of our time."
Other reviews called the book "paranoid, crazed, and crammed with gratuitous violence and sex." Garp was not shown most of those reviews, but they probably didn't hurt the sales, either.
One reviewer admitted that Garp was a serious writer whose "tendencies toward baroque exaggeration have run amuck." John Wolf couldn't resist sending Garp that review--probably because John Wolf agreed with it.
Jenny wrote that she was becoming "involved with" New Hampshire politics.
"The New Hampshire gubernatorial race is taking all our time," Roberta Muldoon wrote.
"How could anyone give all her time to a New Hampshire governor?" Garp wrote back.
There was, apparently, some feminist issue at stake, and some generally illiberal nonsense and crimes the incumbent governor was actually proud of. The administration boasted that a raped fourteen-year-old had been denied an abortion, thus stemming the tide of nationwide degeneracy. The governor truly was a crowing, reactionary moron. Among other things, he appeared to believe that poor people should not be helped by the state or federal government, largely because the condition of the poor seemed to the governor of New Hampshire to be a deserved punishment--the just and moral judgment of a Superior Being. The incumbent governor was obnoxious and clever; for example, the sense of fear that he successfully evoked: that New Hampshire was in danger of being victimized by teams of New York divorcees.
The divorced women from New York allegedly were moving into New Hampshire in droves. Their intentions were to turn New Hampshire women into lesbians, or at the very least to encourage them to be unfaithful to their New Hampshire husbands; their intentions also included the seduction of New Hampshire husbands, and New Hampshire high school boys. The New York divorcees apparently represented widespread promiscuity, socialism, alimony, and something ominously referred to, in the New Hampshire press, as "Group Female Living."
One of the centers for this alleged Group Female Living was Dog's Head Harbor, of course, "the den of the radical feminist Jenny Fields."
There had also been a widespread increase, the governor said, of venereal disease--"a known problem among these Liberationists." He was a terrific liar. The candidate running for governor against this well-liked fool was, apparently, a woman. Jenny and Roberta and (Jenny wrote) "teams of New York divorcees" were running her campaign.
Somehow, in the sole New Hampshire newspaper of statewide distribution, Garp's "degenerate" novel was referred to as "the new feminist Bible."
"A violent hymn to the moral depravity and sexual danger of our time," wrote one West Coast reviewer.
"A pained protest against the violence and sexual combat of our groping age," said another newspaper, some
where else.
Whether it was liked or disliked, the novel was largely looked upon as news. One way for novels to be successful is for the fiction to resemble somebody's version of the news. That is what happened to The World According to Bensenhaver; like the stupid governor of New Hampshire, Garp's book became news.
"New Hampshire is a backwoods state with base politics," Garp wrote his mother. "For God's sake, don't get involved."
"That's what you always say," Jenny wrote. "When you come home, you're going to be famous. Then let me see you try not to get involved."