The World According To Garp (57 page)

But Garp often wondered about the first chapter of
The World According to Bensenhaver
, which had been published in
Crotch Shots
. If it had been read at all. If anyone who bought those magazines ever looked at the words.

“Perhaps they read some of the stories after they masturbate to the pictures,” Garp wrote to John Wolf. He wondered if that was a good mood to be read in: after masturbation, the reader was at least relaxed, possibly lonely (“a good state in which to read,” Garp told John Wolf). But maybe the reader felt guilty, too, and humiliated, and overwhelmingly responsible (that was not such a good condition in which to read, Garp thought). In fact, he knew, it was not a good condition in which to
write
.

The World According to Bensenhaver
is about the impossible desire of the husband, Dorsey Standish, to protect his wife and child from the brutal world; thus Arden Bensenhaver (who is forced to retire from the police, for repeated unorthodoxy in his methods of arrest) is hired to live like an armed uncle in the house with the Standish family—he becomes the lovable family bodyguard, whom Hope must finally reject. Though the worst of the real world has been visited upon Hope, it is her husband who
fears
the world most. After Hope insists that Bensenhaver not live with them, Standish continues to support the old policeman as a kind of hovering angel. Bensenhaver is paid to tail the child, Nicky, but Bensenhaver is an aloof and curious kind of watchdog, subject to fits of his own awful memories; he gradually seems more of a menace to the Standishes than he seems a protector. He is described as “a lurker at the last edge of light—a retired enforcer, barely alive on the rim of darkness.”

Hope counters her husband’s anxiety by insisting they have a second child. The child is born, but Standish seems destined to create one monster of paranoia after another; now more relaxed about possible assaults upon his wife and children, he begins to suspect that Hope is having an affair. Slowly, he realizes that this would wound him more than if she were raped (again). Thus he doubts his love for her, and doubts himself; guiltily, he begs Bensenhaver to spy on Hope and determine if she is faithful. But Arden Bensenhaver will no longer do Dorsey’s worry work for him. The old policeman argues that he was hired to protect Standish’s family from the outside world—not to restrict the free choices of the family to live as it wants. Without Bensenhaver’s support, Dorsey Standish panics. One night he leaves the house (and the children) unprotected while he goes out to spy on his wife. While Dorsey is gone, the younger child chokes to death on a piece of Nicky’s chewing gum.

Guilt abounds. In Garp’s work, guilt always abounds. With Hope, too—because she
was
seeing someone (although who could blame her). Bensenhaver, morbid with responsibility, has a stroke. Partially paralyzed, he moves back in with the Standishes; Dorsey feels responsible for him. Hope insists they have
another
child, but the events have made Standish determinedly sterile.

He agrees that Hope should encourage her lover—but merely to “impregnate” herself, as he puts it. (Ironically, this was the
only
part of the book that Jenny Fields called “farfetched.”)

Once again, Dorsey Standish seeks “a control situation—more like a laboratory experiment at life than life itself,” Garp wrote. Hope cannot adjust to such a clinical arrangement; emotionally, either she has a lover or she doesn’t. Insisting that the lovers meet for the sole purpose of “impregnating” Hope, Dorsey tries to control the whereabouts, the number and length of their meetings. Suspecting that Hope is meeting her lover clandestinely, as well as according to plan, Standish alerts the senile Bensenhaver to the existence of a prowler, a potential kidnapper and rapist, whose presence in the neighborhood has already been detected.

Still not satisfied, Dorsey Standish takes to sudden, unannounced visits at his own house (at times when he’s least expected home); he never catches Hope at anything, but Bensenhaver, armed and deadly with senility, catches Dorsey. A cunning invalid, Arden Bensenhaver is surprisingly mobile and silent in his wheelchair; he is also still unorthodox in his methods of arrest. In fact, Bensenhaver shoots Dorsey Standish with a twelve-gauge shotgun from a distance of less than six feet. Dorsey had been hiding in the upstairs cedar closet, stumbling among his wife’s shoes, waiting for her to make a phone call from the bedroom, which—from the closet—he could overhear. He deserves to be shot, of course.

The wound is fatal. Arden Bensenhaver, thoroughly mad, is taken away. Hope is pregnant with her lover’s child. When the child is born, Nicky—now twelve—feels unburdened by the relaxing tension in the family. The terrible anxiety of Dorsey Standish, which has been so crippling to all their lives, is at last lifted from them. Hope and her children live on, even cheerfully dealing with the wild rantings of old Bensenhaver, too tough to die, who goes on and on with his versions of the nightmarish world from his wheelchair in an old-age home for the criminally insane. He is seen, finally, as belonging where he is. Hope and her children visit him often, not merely out of kindness—for they are kind—but also to remind themselves of their own precious sanity. Hope’s endurance, and the survival of her two children, make the old man’s ravings tolerable, finally even comic to her.

That peculiar old-age home for the criminally insane, by the way, bears an astonishing resemblance to Jenny Fields’ hospital for wounded women at Dog’s Head Harbor.

It is not so much that “The World According to Bensenhaver” is
wrong
, or even misperceived, as it is out of proportion to the world’s need for sensual pleasure, and the world’s need and capacity for warmth. Dorsey Standish “is not true to the world,” either; he is too vulnerable to how
delicately
he loves his wife and children; he is seen, together with Bensenhaver, as “not well suited for life on this planet.” Where immunity counts.

Hope—and, the reader hopes, her children—may have better chances. Somehow implicit in the novel is the sense that women are better equipped than men at enduring fear and brutality, and at containing the anxiousness of feeling how vulnerable we are to the people we love. Hope is seen as a strong survivor of a weak man’s world.

John Wolf sat in New York, hoping that the visceral reality of Garp’s language, and the intensity of Garp’s characters, somehow rescued the book from sheer soap opera. But, Wolf thought, one might as well call the thing
Anxiousness of Life
; it would make a fantastic series for daytime television, he thought—if suitably edited for invalids, senior citizens, and preschool children. John Wolf concluded that
The World According to Bensenhaver
, despite the “visceral reality of Garp’s language,” and so forth, was an X-rated soap opera.

Much later, of course, even Garp would agree; it was his worst work. “But the fucking world never gave me credit for the first two,” he wrote to John Wolf. “Thus I was owed.” That, Garp felt, was the way it worked most of the time.

John Wolf was more basically concerned: that is, he wondered if he could justify the book’s publication. With books he did not absolutely take to, John Wolf had a system that rarely failed him. At his publishing house, he was envied for his record of being right about those books destined to be popular. When he said a book was going to be popular—distinct from being good or likable or not—he was almost always right. There were many books that were popular without his saying so, of course, but no book he’d ever claimed
would
be popular was ever
unpopular
.

Nobody knew how he did it.

He did it first for Jenny Fields—and for certain, surprising books, every year or two, he had been doing it ever since.

There was a woman who worked in the publishing house who once told John Wolf that she never read a book that didn’t make her want to close it and go to sleep. She was a challenge to John Wolf, who loved books, and he spent many years giving this woman good books and bad books to read; the books were alike in that they put this woman to sleep. She just didn’t like to read, she told John Wolf; but he would not give up on her. No one else in the publishing house ever asked this woman to read anything at all; in fact, they never asked this woman’s opinion of
anything
. The woman moved through the books lying all around the publishing house as if these books were ashtrays and she was a nonsmoker. She was a cleaning woman. Every day she emptied the wastebaskets; she cleaned everyone’s office when they went home at night. She vacuumed the rugs in the corridors every Monday, she dusted the display cases every Tuesday, and the secretaries’ desks on Wednesdays; she scrubbed the bathrooms on Thursdays and sprayed air freshener on everything on Fridays—so that, she told John Wolf, the entire publishing house had the whole weekend to gather up a good smell for the next week. John Wolf had watched her for years and he’d never seen her so much as glance at a book.

When he asked her about books and she told him how unlikable they were to her, he kept using her to test books he wasn’t sure of—and the books he thought he was very sure of, too. She was consistent in her dislike of books and John Wolf had almost given up on her when he gave her the manuscript of
A Sexual Suspect
, the autobiography of Jenny Fields.

The cleaning woman read it overnight and asked John Wolf if she could have a copy of her very own to read—over and over again—when the book was published.

After that, John Wolf sought her opinion scrupulously. She did not disappoint him. She did not like most things, but when she liked something, it meant to John Wolf that nearly everybody else was at least sure to be able to read it.

It was almost by rote that John Wolf gave the cleaning woman
The World According to Bensenhaver
. Then he went home for the weekend and thought about it; he tried to call her and tell her not even to try to read it. He remembered the first chapter and he didn’t want to offend the woman, who was somebody’s grandmother, and (of course) somebody’s mother, too—and, after all, she never knew she was
paid
to read all the stuff John Wolf gave her to read. That she had a rather whopping salary for a cleaning lady was known only to John Wolf. The woman thought
all
good cleaning ladies were well paid, and
should
be.

Her name was Jillsy Sloper, and John Wolf marveled to note that there was not one Sloper with even the first initial of J. in the New York phone directory. Apparently Jillsy didn’t like phone calls any more than she liked books. John Wolf made a note to apologize to Jillsy the first thing Monday morning. He spent the rest of a miserable weekend trying to phrase to himself exactly how he would tell T. S. Garp that he believed it was in his own best interests, and certainly in the best interests of the publishing house,
NOT
to publish
The World According to Bensenhaver
.

It was a hard weekend for him, because John Wolf liked Garp and he believed in Garp, and he also knew that Garp had no friends who could advise him against embarrassing himself—which is one of the valuable things friends are for. There was only Alice Fletcher, who so loved Garp that she would love, indiscriminately, everything he uttered—or else she would be silent. And there was Roberta Muldoon, whose literary judgment, John Wolf suspected, was even more newfound and awkward (if existent at all) than her adopted sex. And Helen wouldn’t read it. And Jenny Fields, John Wolf knew, was not biased toward her son in the way a mother is usually biased; she had demonstrated the dubious taste to
dislike
some of the better things her son had written. The problem with Jenny, John Wolf knew, was one of subject matter. A book
about
an important subject was, to Jenny Fields, an important book. And Jenny Fields thought that Garp’s new book was all about the stupid male anxieties that women are asked to suffer and endure. How a book was written never mattered to Jenny.

That was one thread that interested John Wolf in publishing the book. If Jenny Fields liked
The World According to Bensenhaver
, it was at least a potentially controversial book. But John Wolf, like Garp, knew that Jenny’s status as a political figure was due largely to a general, hazy misunderstanding of Jenny.

Wolf thought and thought about it, all weekend, and he completely forgot to apologize to Jillsy Sloper the first thing Monday morning. Suddenly there was Jillsy, red-eyed and twitching like a squirrel, the ratted manuscript pages of
The World According to Bensenhaver
held fast in her rough brown hands.

“Lawd,” Jillsy said. She rolled her eyes; she shook the manuscript in her hands.

“Oh, Jillsy,” John Wolf said. “I’m sorry.”

“Lawd!” Jillsy crowed. “I never had a worse weekend. I got
no
sleep, I got
no
food, I got
no
trips to the cemetery to see my family and my friends.”

The pattern of Jillsy Sloper’s weekend seemed strange to John Wolf but he said nothing; he just listened to her, as he had listened to her for more than a dozen years.

“This man’s
crazy
,” Jillsy said. “Nobody sane ever wrote a book like this.”

“I shouldn’t have given it to you, Jillsy,” John Wolf said. “I should have remembered that first chapter.”

“
First
chapter ain’t so bad,” Jillsy said. “That first chapter ain’t
nothin’
. It’s that
nineteenth
chapter that got me,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, Lawd!” she crowed.

“You read nineteen chapters?” John Wolf asked.

“You didn’t give me no more than nineteen chapters,” Jillsy said. “Jesus Lawd, is there
another
chapter? Do it keep goin’
on
?”

“No, no,” John Wolf said. “That’s the end of it. That’s all there is.”

“I should hope so,” Jillsy said. “Ain’t nothin’ left to go on
with
. Got that crazy old cop where he belongs—at long last—and that crazy husband with his head blowed off. That’s the
only
proper state for that husband’s head, if you ask me: blowed off.”