The World According to Garp

"We've got to do and do it," Alice said, fervently. "Do it while we can."

"You know, this can't last," Garp tried to warn Harry, while they were playing squash.

"I know, I know," Harry said, "but it's great while it lasts, isn't it?"

"Isn't it?" Alice demanded. Did Garp love Alice? Oh yeth.

"Yes, yes," Garp said, shaking his head. He thought he did.

But Helen, enjoying it the least of them, suffered it the most; when she finally called an end to it, she couldn't help but show her euphoria. The other three couldn't help but show their resentment: that she should appear so uplifted while they were cast into such gloom. Without formal imposition there existed a six-month moratorium on the couples' seeing each other, except by chance. Naturally, Helen and Harry ran into each other at the English Department. Garp encountered Alice in the supermarket. Once she deliberately crashed her shopping cart into his; little Walt was jarred among the produce and the juice cans, and Alice's daughter looked equally alarmed at the collision.

"I felt the need of thum contact," Alice said. And she called the Garps one night, very late, after Garp and Helen had gone to bed. Helen answered the phone.

"Is Harrithon there?" she asked Helen.

"No, Alice," Helen said. "Is something wrong?"

"He's not here," Alice said. "I haven't theen Harrithon all night!"

"Let me come over and sit with you," Helen suggested. "Garp can go look for Harrison."

"Can't Garp come over and thit with me?" Alice asked. "You look for Harrithon."

"No, I'll come over and sit with you," Helen said. "I think that's better. Garp can go look for Harrison."

"I want Garp," Alice said.

"I'm sorry that you can't have him," Helen said.

"I'm thorry, Helen," Alice said. She cried into the phone and said a stream of things that Helen couldn't understand. Helen gave the phone to Garp.

Garp talked to Alice, and listened to her, for about an hour. Nobody looked for "Harrithon." Helen felt she had done a good job of holding herself together for the six months she'd allowed it all to continue; she expected them all to at least control themselves adequately, now that it was over.

"If Harrison is out screwing students, I'm really going to cross him off," Helen said. "That asshole! And if Alice calls herself a writer, why isn't she writing? If she's got so much to thay, why waste saying it on the phone?"

Time, Garp knew, would ease everything. Time would also prove him wrong about Alice's writing. She may have had a pretty voice but she couldn't complete anything; she never finished her second novel, not in all the years that the Garps would know the Fletchers--or in all the years after. She could say everything beautifully, but--as Garp remarked to Helen, when he was finally exasperated with Alice--she couldn't get to the end of anything. She couldn't thtop.

Harry, too, would not play his cards wisely or well. The university would deny him tenure--a bitter loss for Helen, because she truly loved having Harrison for a friend. But the student Harry had thrown over for Helen had not been let down so easy; she bitched about her seduction to the English Department--although, of course, it was her jilting that really made her bitch. This raised eyebrows among Harry's colleagues. And, of course, Helen's support of Harrison Fletcher's case for tenure was quietly not taken seriously--her relationship with Harry having also been made clear by the jilted student.

Even Garp's mother, Jenny Fields--with all she stood up for, for women--agreed with Garp that Helen's own tenure at the university, so easily granted her when she was younger than poor Harry, had been a token gesture on the part of the English Department. Someone had probably told them that they needed a woman on the department at the associate professor level, and Helen had come along. Although Helen did not doubt her own qualifications, she knew it hadn't been her quality that had gotten her tenure.

But Helen had not slept with any students; not yet. Harrison Fletcher had, unforgivably, allowed his sex life to be more special to him than his job. He got another job, anyway. And perhaps what remained of the friendship between the Garps and the Fletchers was actually saved by the Fletchers' having to move away. This way, the couples saw each other about twice a year; distance diffused what might have been hard feelings. Alice could speak her flawless prose to Garp--in letters. The temptation to touch each other, even to bash their shopping carts together, was removed from them, and they all settled into being the kind of friends many old friends become: that is, they were friends when they heard from each other--or when, occasionally, they got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

Garp threw away his second novel and began a second second novel. Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer--not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, "You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else." Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

His second book was swollen, he knew, with the energy he had left over from Alice.

* * *

--

It was a book full of wounding dialogue and sex that left the partners smarting; sex in the book also left the partners guilty, and usually wanting more sex. This paradox was cited by several reviewers who called the phenomenon, alternately, "brilliant" and "dumb." One reviewer called the novel "bitterly truthful," but he hastened to point out that the bitterness doomed the novel to the status of "only a minor classic." If more of the bitterness had been "refined away," the reviewer theorized, "a purer truth would have emerged."

More nonsense was compiled concerning the novel's "thesis." One reviewer struggled with the idea that the novel seemed to be saying that only sexual relationships could profoundly reveal people to themselves; yet it was during sexual relationships that people appeared to lose what profundity they had. Garp said he never had a thesis and he grumpily told an interviewer that he had written "a serious comedy about marriage, but a sexual farce." Later he wrote that "human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions."

But no matter what Garp said--or the reviewers, either--the book was not a success. Titled Second Wind of the Cuckold, the novel confused nearly everyone; even its reviews were conf

using. It undersold Procrastination by a few thousand copies, and even though John Wolf assured Garp that this was what often happened to second novels, Garp--for the first time in his life--felt he had failed.