The World According to Garp

"Jesus, Roberta," Garp said. And then he saw a light in this dark subject. For some reason, the Ellen Jamesians made him angrier than his image, even, of the Kenny Truckenmillers of this world; and although he saw that the Ellen Jamesians were fading from fashion, they could not fade fast enough to suit Garp. He wanted them gone; he wanted them more than gone--he wanted them disgraced. Helen had already told him that his hatred of them was inappropriate to what they were.

"It's just madness, and simple-minded--what they've done," Helen said. "Why can't you ignore them, and leave them alone?"

But Garp said, "Let's ask Ellen James. That's fair, isn't it? Let's ask Ellen James for her opinion of the Ellen Jamesians. Jesus, I'd like to publish her opinion of them. Do you know how they've made her feel?"

"This is too personal a matter," Hilma Bloch said. They had all met Ellen; they all knew that Ellen James hated being tongueless and hated the Ellen Jamesians.

"Let's back off this, for now," John Wolf said. "I move we table the motion."

"Damn," Garp said.

"All right, Garp," Roberta said. "Let's vote it, right now." They all knew they would vote it down. That would get rid of it.

"I withdraw the motion," Garp said, nastily. "Long live the Ellen Jamesians."

But he did not withdraw.

It was madness that had killed Jenny Fields, his mother. It was extremism. It was self-righteous, fanatical, and monstrous self-pity. Kenny Truckenmiller was only a special kind of moron: a true believer who was also a thug. He was a man who pitied himself so blindly that he could make absolute enem

ies out of people who contributed only the ideas to his undoing.

And how was an Ellen Jamesian any different? Was not her gesture as desperate, and as empty of an understanding of human complexity?

"Come on," John Wolf said. "They haven't murdered anyone."

"Not yet," Garp said. "They have the equipment. They are capable of making mindless decisions, and they believe they are so right."

"There's more to killing someone than that," Roberta said. They let Garp seethe. What else could they do? It was not one of Garp's better points: tolerance of the intolerant. Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving in to madness--in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

"Tolerance of the intolerant is a difficult task that the times asks of us," Helen said. Although Garp knew Helen was intelligent, and often more far-seeing than he was, he was rather blind about the Ellen Jamesians.

They, of course, were rather blind about him.

The most radical criticism of Garp--concerning his relationship to his mother and his own works--had come from various Ellen Jamesians. Baited by them, he baited them back. It was hard to see why it should have started, or if it should have, but Garp had become a case of controversy among feminists largely through the goading of Ellen Jamesians--and Garp goading them in return. For the very same reasons, Garp was liked by many feminists and disliked by as many.

As for the Ellen Jamesians, they were no more complicated in their feelings for Garp than they were complicated in their symbology: their tongues hacked off for the hacked-off tongue of Ellen James.

Ironically, it would be Ellen James who escalated this longtime cold war.

She was in the habit, constantly, of showing Garp her writing--her many stories, her remembrances of her parents, of Illinois; her poems; her painful analogies to speechlessness; her appreciations of the visual arts, and swimming. She wrote wisely and craftily and with penetrating energy.

"She's the real thing," Garp kept telling Helen. "She's got the ability, but she's also got the passion. And I believe she'll have the stamina."

The aforementioned "stamina" was a word Helen let slide away, because she feared for Garp that he had given up his. He certainly had the ability, and the passion; but she felt he'd also taken a narrow path--he'd been misdirected--and only stamina would let him grow back in all the other ways.

It saddened her. For the time being, Helen kept thinking, she would content herself with whatever Garp got passionate about--the wrestling, even the Ellen Jamesians. Because, Helen believed, energy begets energy--and sooner or later, she thought, he would write again.

So Helen did not interfere too vehemently when Garp got excited about the essay Ellen James showed him. The essay was: "Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian," by Ellen James. It was powerful and touching and it moved Garp to tears. It recounted her rape, her difficulty with it, her parents' difficulty with it; it made what the Ellen Jamesians did seem like a shallow, wholly political imitation of a very private trauma. Ellen James said that the Ellen Jamesians had only prolonged her anguish; they had made her into a very public casualty. Of course, Garp was susceptible to being moved by public casualties.

And of course, to be fair, the better of the Ellen Jamesians had meant to publicize the general dread that so brutally menaced women and girls. For many of the Ellen Jamesians, the imitation of the horrible untonguing had not been "wholly political." It had been a most personal identification. In some cases, of course, Ellen Jamesians were women who had also been raped; what they meant was that they felt as if their tongues were gone. In a world of men, they felt as if they had been shut up forever.

That the organization was full of crazies, no one would deny. Not even some Ellen Jamesians would have denied that. It was generally true that they were an inflammatory political group of feminist extremists who often detracted from the extreme seriousness of other women, and other feminists, around them. But Ellen James' attack on them was as inconsiderate of the occasional individuals among the Ellen Jamesians as the action of the group had been inconsiderate of Ellen James--not really thinking how an eleven-year-old girl would have preferred to get over her horror more privately.

Everyone in America knew how Ellen James had lost her tongue, except the younger generation, just now growing up, who often confused Ellen with the Ellen Jamesians; this was a most painful confusion for Ellen, because it meant that she was suspected of having done it to herself.

"It was a necessary rage for her to have," Helen said to Garp, about Ellen's essay. "I'm sure she needed to write it, and it's done her a world of good to say all this. I've told her that."

"I've told her she should publish it," Garp said.