HG: What made you decide to write a novel in which the central character is both a woman and a novelist?
JI: The decision to make Ruth Cole a novelist was secondary. She was always a woman, and one who was successful in her career; for a while, in the first few months of taking notes for the novel, I was uncertain of her profession. But everything that haunts her and fills her with self-doubt is something that women think about and worry about more than men. Men don’t hold themselves accountable for sexual misjudgment—or they don’t hold themselves as accountable as women do. Many men have made countless bad-girlfriend choices; they tend to shrug them off.
We live in a world where it’s permitted for a man to have a sexual history, a sexual past; provided he doesn’t keep repeating it, a sexual past often enhances a man’s image. But if a woman has a sexual past, she’d better keep quiet about it.
Ted Cole kills himself because he sees how his own sexual misconduct has influenced his daughter’s sexual choices— not because he feels guilty for sleeping with his daughter’s best friend. How many men kill themselves because their sons have made bad-girlfriend decisions?
And everything Ruth witnesses in Amsterdam, even what she only intends to witness, is more self-damaging (in her mind) because she is a woman. As Ruth observes of Graham Green: it’s entirely permissible for a man to explore the sordid and the unseemly—it’s even expected territory for male writers to explore. For women, it’s forbidden. Ruth feels ashamed.
So many women today have careers that are in advance of their personal lives, or at the expense of their personal lives. Men, too—but men concern themselves about this less. If a man is successful, and has been married three times, and has not a single speaking relationship with any of his children from these fallen marriages, the foremost thing about him is still his success. But a woman, no matter how successful she is—in any career—sees herself as a failure if her personal life is unsatisfying, or if she’s ashamed of it. Other people, men and women, tend to look upon such a woman as a failure, too.
And Ruth’s mother, Marion, cannot recover from a tragedy that (relatively speaking) Ruth’s father, Ted, allows to roll off his back. What amount to superficial wounds to men are often mortal injuries to women.
As for Ruth’s being a novelist, I began with her father as a successful children’s book author and illustrator. I knew I wanted Ruth to be better than her father, and to feel driven to compete with him—to have conflicted feelings for him, too. (The squash was only one area of competition between them.) Why not make Ruth a better writer than her father? I thought. Why not make her less superficial than he is, in every way?
HG: At least four of your major characters—Ruth and Ted, of course, but also Eddie and Marion—are writers of fiction, and you quote and summarize their works at length. Is this merely a plot device, or did you have something else in mind?
JI: Once I made Ruth and her father writers, I thought that everyone should be a writer—partly out of mischief, knowing what fun I would have comparing and contrasting the kinds of writers they are, but also because making the four of them writers allowed me to intertwine their lives with what they wrote about. Ted’s stories for children are arguably stories for young mothers: the young mothers are Ted’s principal targets—both his principal book buyers and his sexual prey. The creepiness of Ted’s children’s-story voice was also a way of setting up the detachment with which he tells Eddie and Ruth the story of the death of his sons.
Ruth is more autobiographical as a novelist than she is willing to admit, but her fiction goes far beyond her personal life; it is much more imagined than it is strictly autobiographical. Eddie, of course, cannot imagine anything. And Ruth’s mother, Marion . . . well, her writing is painful. It’s storytelling as therapy. I say, if it does her good, let her do it.
I tried not to be condescending. Eddie may be a bad, even (at times) a laughably bad writer, but he is a decent guy, a compassionate man, and a good friend. (He’s certainly a lot warmer than Ruth is!) And Ted, despite his creepiness—both as a writer for children and as a man—is a riveting storyteller. He gets your attention and keeps it. And, as a father, he’s halfway decent; as Ruth says, at least he was there.
By making
four of the principal characters fiction writers, I was able not only to connect their lives but also to connect their various interpretations of their lives. D. H. Lawrence once said that a novel was the most subtle form we had to demonstrate the interconnectedness of things. Well, that’s true, but a novel needn’t be subtle. A Widow for One Year (or any other novel by John Irving) isn’t subtle.
HG: Apart from the facts that you moved from Sagaponack to Vermont, and that you have a son exactly Graham’s age (and Ruth’s age as a child), what other autobiographical elements are there in the novel?
JI: There are many autobiographical elements in the novel. Like Eddie, I went to Exeter, and my father taught there. He was one of the school’s most popular teachers, however; unlike Minty O’Hare, my father never bored anyone. And, like Ruth, I found my love story somewhat later in my life. I was forty-four when I met my second wife; I’d been divorced from my first wife for five years. (Like Ruth, I’m not proud of my sexual past—I mean the years between my first marriage and my second, but not exclusively. I don’t think I should elaborate.)
As for the choice to make Ruth the age she is when the novel begins—she’s four—it was calculated not because I had a four-year-old at the time but because four is the age when memory begins. Most children don’t remember much about being three. Four is when memory starts, but the memories from one’s fourth year are not complete. I wanted Ruth’s memories of the summer of ’58, when her mother has the affair with Eddie and then leaves, to be present but incomplete.
Regarding Graham, it’s true that my son Everett was exactly that age as I was writing the novel—hence I felt qualified to write Graham’s dialogue (and Ruth’s, as a child). Children of that age are impressively perceptive, but their language hasn’t caught up with their perceptions.
It was vital to the novel that Ruth have a child the same age she was when her mother left her, because I wanted Marion to have to come back and face that child.
HG: You seem to take a dim, even moralistic view of promiscuous sex in the cases of Ted, Hannah, and even Ruth in her encounter with Scott. Yet, at the same time, you treat the prostitutes in Amsterdam with something close to affection. How do you reconcile these different outlooks?
JI: I would agree that I take a “dim, even moralistic view of promiscuous sex,” but I also take a comic view of it. Ted’s encounter with Mrs. Vaughn is funny; Hannah’s perpetual escapades are also comic, but there’s a sad side to Hannah, which I hope is redeeming to her character. And she’s a lot more fun to be around than Ruth is. (Wouldn’t most men rather date Hannah than Ruth? Maybe not marry her, but that’s another story.)
I’m a New Englander. Perhaps the sexual disapproval of the Puritan fathers has seeped into my core. Promiscuous sex is invariably punished in my novels. (I’m not entirely comfortable about this.) And my two most saintly characters, Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother in The World According to Garp, and Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules, are both sexually abstemious. They have sex only once in their lives; then they stop. I don’t recommend this.
Personally, I am not moralistic about sex. What revolted me about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was the righteousness of the media. The thought of journalists as moral arbiters in the field of extramarital sex is repugnant. The thought of journalists as moral arbiters in any field is reprehensible to me. That’s one of the reasons I made Hannah a journalist. Imagine Hannah as a moral arbiter!
As for the prostitutes in Amsterdam, I spent four years going to Amsterdam for two weeks at a time (at different times of the year each time). I spent a lot of hours with one policeman, and with a woman who was then the head of a prostitutes’ rights organization—she’s a former prostitute. I wanted to get the cop right, and I wanted to get the whore right. I wanted their stories to ring true with other cops and whores. Both policemen and prostitutes have assured me that Harry and Rooie are true to life.
In Amsterdam, the publication party for the Dutch translation of A Widow for One Year was held at the police station in the red-light district. It was well attended by policemen—less well attended by prostitutes. One prostitute who did attend told me that many of her colleagues were not in the habit of coming to the police station of their own free will.
The business of turning the shoes in Rooie’s wardrobe closet, so that Ruth can better conceal herself there . . . well, I’m especially proud of that detail. I invented it, and when I asked several prostitutes what they thought of it— did they think it would work, and so forth—they were very excited by the idea. One of them told me later that she was using the method herself. A case of fiction writing influencing another profession—most rewarding.
A sadder truth, about Rooie, is her need to make up a life for herself. Like Rooie, prostitutes need to invent their lives. They need to lie. That’s just an observable fact. I don’t disapprove of prostitutes or the men who go to them. It strikes me as a relatively honest sexual transaction. Compared to harmfully misleading or deliberately deceitful love affairs, the prostitute-client relationship is both forthright and unmessy. The shame commonly attached to it is a mystery to me. As opposed to declaring your love for someone when you don’t feel it, or when you feel it for a different partner every few months, what’s wrong with paying a prostitute for sex?
I don’t find these “different outlooks,” as you call them, difficult to “ reconcile” at all.
If Ted Cole had lived in Amsterdam, and if he had visited a prostitute—even a different prostitute, as often as three or four times a week—think of how many lives he wouldn’t have messed up.
I have never understood the objection to prostitution. To make it a criminal act, to drive it underground— that is what is criminal. That is also what makes it dangerous, both for the prostitutes and for their clients. The Dutch way isn’t perfect. What sexual transactions are? But it’s a better way to handle the situation than any other way I’ve observed.