The World According To Garp (16 page)

But Jenny suffered her writing problems silently; she was cheerful with Garp, even if she was rarely very attentive. Jenny Fields felt all her life that things began and came to an end. Like Garp’s education—like her own. Like Sergeant Garp. She had not lost any affection for her son, but she felt that a phase of her mothering him was over; she felt she had brought Garp along this far, and now she should let him find something to do by himself. She could not go through their lives signing him up for wrestling, or for something else. Jenny liked living with her son; in fact, it didn’t occur to her that they would ever live apart. But Jenny expected Garp to entertain himself every day in Vienna, and so Garp did.

He had gotten no further with his story about a close, interesting family except that he had found something interesting for them to do. The father of the family was some sort of inspector and his family went with him when he did his job. The job involved scrutinizing all the restaurants and hotels and pensions in Austria—evaluating them and giving them a rating according to A, B, C. It was a job Garp imagined that
he’d
like to have. In a country like Austria, so dependent on tourism, the classification and reclassification of the places the tourists ate in and slept in
should
have a kind of desperate importance, but Garp couldn’t imagine what could be important about it—or for whom. So far all he had was this family: they had a funny job. They exposed flaws; they gave out the grades. So what? It was easier to write to Helen.

That late summer and early fall, Garp walked and rode the trolleys all over Vienna, meeting no one. He wrote Helen that “a part of adolescence is feeling that there’s no one else around who’s enough like yourself to understand you”. Garp wrote that he believed Vienna enhanced that feeling in him “because in Vienna there really
isn’t
anyone like myself around.”

His perception was at least numerically correct. There were very few people in Vienna who were even the same age as Garp. Not many Viennese were born in 1943, for that matter, not many Viennese were born from the start of the Nazi occupation in 1938 through the end of the war in 1945. And although there were a surprising number of babies born out of rapes, not many Viennese
wanted
babies until after 1955—the end of the Russian occupation. Vienna was a city occupied by foreigners for seventeen years. To most Viennese, it is understandable, those seventeen years did not seem like a good and wise time to have children. It was Garp’s experience to live in a city that made him feel peculiar to be eighteen years old. This must have made him grow older faster, and this must have contributed to his increasing sense that Vienna was more of “a museum housing a dead city”—as he wrote Helen—than it was a city that was still alive.

Garp’s observation was not offered as criticism. Garp
liked
wandering around in a museum. “A more real city might not have suited me so well,” he later wrote. “But Vienna was in its death phase, it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a
living
city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don’t hold still.”

Thus T. S. Garp spent the warm months
noticing
Vienna, writing letters to Helen Holm, and managing the domestic life of his mother who had added the isolation of writing to her chosen life of solitude. “My mother, the writer,” Garp referred to her, facetiously, in countless letters to Helen. But he envied Jenny, that she was writing at all. He felt stuck with his story. He realized he could go on giving his made-up family one adventure after another, but where were they going? To one more B restaurant with such a weakness in their desserts that an A rating was a lifetime out of reach; to one more B hotel, sliding to C as surely as the mildew smell in the lobby would never go away. Perhaps someone in the inspector’s family could be poisoned, in a class A restaurant, but what would it
mean
? And there could be crazy people, or even criminals, hiding out in one of the pensions, but what would they have to do with the scheme of things?

Garp knew that he did not have a scheme of things.

He saw a four-member circus unload from Hungary, or Yugoslavia, at a railroad station. He tried to imagine
them
in his story. There had been a bear who rode a motorcycle, around and around a parking lot. A small crowd gathered and a man who walked on his hands collected money for the bear’s performance in a pot balanced on the soles of his feet; he fell, occasionally, but so did the bear.

Finally, the motorcycle wouldn’t start anymore. It never became clear what the two other members of this circus did; just as they were meant to take over for the bear and the man who walked on his hands, the police came and asked them to fill out a lot of forms. That had not been interesting to watch and the crowd—what there was of one—had gone away. Garp had stayed the longest, not because he was interested in further performances by this decrepit circus but because he was interested in getting them into his story. He couldn’t imagine how. As Garp was leaving the railroad station, he could hear the bear throwing up.

For weeks Garp’s only progress with his story was a title: “The Austrian Tourist Bureau.” He didn’t like it. He went back to being a tourist instead of a writer.

But when the weather grew colder, Garp tired of tourism; he took to carping at Helen for not writing him back enough—a sign he was writing to her too much. She was much busier than he was; she was in college, where she’d been accepted with sophomore standing, and she was carrying more than double the average load of courses. If Helen and Garp were similar, in these early years, it was that they both behaved as if they were going somewhere in a
hurry
. “Leave poor Helen alone,” Jenny advised him. “I thought you were going to write something beside letters.” But Garp did not like to think of competing in the same apartment with his mother. Her typewriter never paused for thought; Garp knew that its steady pounding would probably end his career as a writer before he could properly begin. “My mother never knew about the silence of revision,” Garp once remarked.

By November Jenny had six hundred manuscript pages, but still she had the feeling that she had not really begun. Garp had no subject that could spill out of him in this fashion. Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.

His “breakthrough,” as he would call it when he wrote Helen, occurred one cold and snowy day in the Museum of the History of the City of Vienna. It was a museum within easy walking distance of the Schwindgasse; somehow he had skipped seeing it, knowing he could walk there any day. Jenny told him about it. It was one of the two or three places she had actually visited herself, only because it was right across the Karlsplatz and well within what she called her neighborhood.

She mentioned there was a writer’s room in the museum; she forgot whose. She’d thought having a writer’s room in a museum was an interesting idea.

“A writer’s
room
, Mom?” Garp asked.

“Yes, it’s a whole room,” Jenny said. “They took all the writer’s furniture, and maybe the walls and floor, too. I don’t know how they did it.”

“I don’t know
why
they did it,” Garp said. “The whole room is in the museum?”

“Yes, I think it was a bedroom,” Jenny said, “but it was also where the writer actually
wrote
.”

Garp rolled his eyes. It sounded obscene to him. Would the writer’s toothbrush be there? And the chamber pot?

It was a perfectly ordinary room, but the bed looked too small—like a child’s bed. The writing table looked small, too. Not the bed or the table of an expansive writer, Garp thought. The wood was dark; everything looked easily breakable; Garp thought his mother had a better room to write in. The writer whose room was enshrined in the Museum of the History of the City of Vienna was named Franz Grillparzer; Garp had never heard of him.

Franz Grillparzer died in 1872; he was an Austrian poet and dramatist, whom very few people outside Austria have ever heard of. He is one of those nineteenth-century writers who did not survive the nineteenth century with any enduring popularity, and Garp would later argue that Grillparzer did not deserve to survive the nineteenth century. Garp was not interested in plays and poems, but he went to the library and read what is considered to be Grillparzer’s outstanding prose work: the long short story “The Poor Fiddler.” Perhaps, Garp thought, his three years of Steering German were not enough to allow him to appreciate the story; in German, he hated it. He then found an English translation of the story, in a secondhand bookstore on Habsburgergasse: he still hated it.

Garp thought that Grillparzer’s famous story was a ludicrous melodrama: he also thought it was ineptly told and baldly sentimental. It was only vaguely remindful to him of nineteenth-century Russian stories, where often the character is an indecisive procrastinator and a failure in every aspect of practical life: but Dostoevsky, in Garp’s opinion, could compel you to be interested in such a wretch; Grillparzer bored you with tearful trivia.

In the same secondhand bookstore Garp bought an English translation of the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius; he had been made to read Marcus Aurelius in a Latin class at Steering but he had never read him in English before. He bought the book because the bookstore owner told Garp that Marcus Aurelius had died in Vienna.

“In the life of a man,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” Garp somehow thought that Marcus Aurelius must have lived in Vienna when he wrote that.

The subject of Marcus Aurelius’s dreary observations was certainly the
subject
of most serious writing, Garp thought; between Grillparzer and Dostoevsky the difference was not subject matter. The difference, Garp concluded, was intelligence and grace; the difference was art. Somehow this obvious discovery pleased him. Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer’s work that Grillparzer was “sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man.”

“Maybe so,” Garp wrote. “But he was also an extremely bad writer.”

Garp’s conviction that Franz Grillparzer was a “bad” writer seemed to provide the young man with his first real confidence as an artist—even before he had written anything. Perhaps in every writer’s life there needs to be that moment when some other writer is attacked as unworthy of the job. Garp’s killer instinct in regard to poor Grillparzer was almost a wrestling secret; it was as if Garp had observed an opponent in a match with another wrestler; spotting the weaknesses, Garp
knew
he could do better. He even forced Jenny to read “The Poor Fiddler.” It was one of the few times he would seek her
literary
judgment.

“Trash,” Jenny pronounced it. “Simplistic. Maudlin. Cream puff.”

They were
both
delighted.

“I didn’t like his room, really,” Jenny told Garp. “It was just not a writer’s room.”

“Well, I don’t think that matters, Mom,” Garp said.

“But it was a very cramped room,” Jenny complained. “It was too dark, and it looked very
fussy
.”

Garp peered into his mother’s room. Over her bed and dresser, and taped to her wall mirror—nearly obscuring his mother’s own image—were the scattered pages of her incredibly long and messy manuscript. Garp didn’t think his mother’s room looked very much like a writer’s room, either, but he didn’t say so.

He wrote Helen a long, cocky letter, quoting Marcus Aurelius and slamming Franz Grillparzer. In Garp’s opinion, “Franz Grillparzer died forever in 1872 and like a cheap local wine does not travel very far from Vienna without spoiling.” The letter was a kind of muscle-flexing; perhaps Helen knew that. The letter was calisthenics; Garp made a carbon copy of it and decided he liked it so well that he kept the original and sent Helen the carbon. “I feel a little like a library,” Helen wrote him. “It’s as if you intend to use me as your file drawer.”

Was Helen really complaining? Garp was not sensitive enough to Helen’s own life to bother to ask her. He merely wrote back that he was “getting ready to write.” He was confident she would like the results. Helen may have felt warned away from him, but she didn’t indicate any anxiety. At college she was gobbling courses at nearly triple the average rate. Approaching the end of her first semester, she was about to become a second-semester junior. The self-absorption and ego of a young writer did not frighten Helen Holm, she was moving at her own remarkable pace and she appreciated someone who was determined. Also she liked Garp’s writing to her: she had an ego, too, and his letters, she kept telling him, were awfully well written.

In Vienna Jenny and Garp went on a spree of Grillparzer jokes. They began to uncover little signs of the dead Grillparzer all over the city. There was a Grillparzergasse, there was a Kaffeehaus des Grillparzers; and one day in a pastry shop they were amazed to find a sort of layer cake named after him: Grillparzertorte! It was much too sweet. Thus, when Garp cooked for his mother, he asked her if she wanted her egg soft-boiled or Grillparzered. And one day, at the Schönbrunn Zoo, they observed a particularly gangling antelope, its flanks spindly and beshitted; the antelope stood sadly in its narrow and foul winter quarters. Garp identified it: der Gnu des Grillparzers.

Of her own writing, Jenny one day remarked to Garp that she was guilty of “doing a Grillparzer.” She explained that this meant she had introduced a scene or a character “like an alarm going off.” The scene she had in mind was the scene in the movie house in Boston when the soldier had approached her. “At the movie,” wrote Jenny Fields, “a soldier consumed with lust approached me.”

“That’s awful, Mom,” Garp admitted. The phrase “consumed with lust” was what Jenny meant by “doing a Grillparzer.”