- I'm not at least consciously creating eccentrics.

We live in a country where a not very good actor is our president.

If you don't think that's eccentric.

(audience laughing) We unfortunately live in a country where you're entitled to that opinion, so far.

(gentle music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - Hello, I'm George Plimpton, and our guest today on "Writer's Workshop" is a novelist who moved almost overnight from a position of literary obscurity to the kind of success that most writers only dream of.

That change came with the publication of his fourth novel, "The World According to Garp."

And the writer's name, as you've probably guessed by now, is John Irving.

And very much like his books, Irving is full of surprises.

His writing methods are quite unusual.

In fact, the way he creates a novel would almost be like working backwards for most writers.

And his attitudes to his own work are equally surprising.

You see, in spite of all the marvelous characters and the out-of-ordinary events in his fiction, John Irving insisted that he has no interest in zany or eccentric lives.

He describes his own work as altogether pleasant and fairly tame.

And you may agree with that appraisal when you discover what he's comparing it to, as we'll hear him explain to William Price Fox and the students on today's "Writer's Workshop."

- Seems like one's family background or the history of one's family and the way you start off, "The Hotel in New Hampshire", telling how the father and mother met.

And then in "The World According to Garp", of course, that's very important, the mother's history, et cetera.

Do you consider this to be just extremely important?

- Well, family has been and continues to be important in my own life.

I came from a family with a brother and sisters and I have a family, and had a family, had children when I was quite young.

But there's a wonderful essay that Eudora Welty wrote about Jane Austen's work, and in which Welty says that a writer of rural background as Jane Austen was and is Ms.

Welty herself is, assumes that family relationships really are the only necessary relationships to know anything about that all other relationships somehow can be imagined or understood, if you have a good understanding of the relationships within a family.

I believe that, and I grew up in a small town.

A small town is a family, and it's very easy for me to make that conversion with relationships I have and relationships I write about.

So, it's simply where things begin.

If I should point out that my first novel though, like a lot of contemporary novels, is more a novel I imagine from what I read than from feelings really central to my own experience.

That is it's a more literary novel than some of the later ones.

It has not so much at all to do with family and this maxim of family is much more evident in "The World According to Garp" and "The Hotel New Hampshire", which are the fourth and fifth novels of five.

So, it took me a while to feel that there was something basically important about treating a family as a chronological event and letting people grow naturally older.

If you will, my first three novels were much more modern or contemporary in the general landscape of fiction than the last two have been.

The last two I seem to have worked my way back toward the books I first read as a child and liked as a child and I'm much more now an old fashioned or a 19th-century writer than I began by being.

My reading tastes have gone back too when I was a student.

I liked very contemporary things.

I'm less fond of contemporary things now, and when I have time to read for pleasure, I tend to read novels I read when I was a kid.

- Century Magazine wrote a very favorable review about your recent book.

In that review, they said, you really aren't writing about bears and dogs and weird families, but that you're really making a personal statement about the human spirit and the grace abounds in your book.

If you agree with that, would you comment?

Are you trying to make a statement about the human spirit?

- Well, it's such a general subject though often neglected, the human spirit.

I don't know the review.

It's certainly true that I'm not trying to write about zany lives or eccentric lives.

I'm amused that people find my work so eccentric.

I can't imagine that they read the same news I read.

It seems to me that in proportion to the way the real world is, my work is fairly tame, generous, optimistic, altogether pleasant.

I think I'm much more of a realist than I've heard myself described.

So, I'm happy to hear that reviews exist that think that I'm not at least consciously creating eccentrics.

We live in a country where a not very good actor is our president.

If you don't think that's eccentric.

(audience laughing) We fortunately live in a country where you're entitled to that opinion, so far.

(audience laughing) If there's spirit in my work, I hope that I try to find some balance of an uplifting or of an optimistic sort to offer a reader or an audience some consolation for what appears to me to be only the plain truth that I've told them that tragedy is commonplace, that accidents are random, that most of us who come from families of three and four and have families that will endure for three or four generations will lose two or three or four of those family members horribly.

And we need all the consolation we can get.

Perhaps what they call spirit is humor, which to me is simply another form of sympathy.

Perhaps the most successful form of sympathy in contemporary letters.

But from what you describe, I guess I'd have to agree with the review.

(audience laughing) - Some of the early reviews of the early books were very good.

Yet, you didn't have a big success until "Garp".

What kept you going through those years?

- I think what has helped me as a writer, is that I've never had a lot of options.

I think, being a teacher for 12 or 14 years at the college, the university level, I've noticed that there very simply are two kinds of good writers among my students.

There are good writers who are good students and who would be good at whatever they did.

And there happen to be good writers when they're interested in it and when they're not interested in it or if they drop their interest in it, they'll take up law or medicine or something.

They'll be good at it.

And the other kind of good writers among students are people who can't do anything but write.

And I think that's largely true among the world of writers, except the statistics change.

The people who keep writing are largely people who can't do anything but write.

And I think the people who have more staying power at writing are the people who can't ever be seduced by the possibility that there is another life that could ever satisfy 'em or make them happy.

I was a mediocre to halfway decent wrestler, but the only thing I ever did well was write, and that's been a big help to me.

It's easy to become discouraged by anything when you don't get a lot of support for it, especially in this country as you get older financial support.

It didn't bother me that I didn't have any money as a young writer.

Young writers aren't supposed to have any money.

But when I'd written three books and I recognized among my classmates people who felt they had deserved financially their success as lawyers and doctors by their apprenticeship.

And when I was not only untenured, but not even on tenure track (audience laughing) and living on less than an average assistant professor's salary, while watching my hair grow gray, I resented the lack of success I had.

I think that there's a delicate line between anger and self-pity.

Self-pity in my experience has never produced anything.

It's a really crippling emotion.

It's not a worthwhile emotion.

Writers can convert most emotions to some form of writing, but self-pity is really nonconvertible, but anger is good.

If you're angry, and I was angry, it helps.

It's another kind of fuel.

Success is fuel, money is fuel, but lack of success, if it makes you angry instead of making you feel sorry for yourself, that's also energizing and you just need energy.

But I never could entertain the idea that I could do anything else.

There was no serious evidence for it.

So, I had to just keep doing it.

I don't know what else I would've done.

I'm not very employable.

- Wrestling, you could wrestle.

At what point did you know in advance that "Garp" was going to be a success, a big success?

- No.

- Did you feel it at all?

- Well, I think that the books a writer writes are really like children of the same family.

You have to recognize that some of those children are more likable or successful in the outside world, but you are the last one to see their differences.

If they're your children, you love them all and you may be the last person to understand why some people are overwhelmingly happy in the presence of one of these children.

and don't hit it off at all with another.

I thought "The Water-Method Man", my second novel, was going to be a very successful novel.

It was a critically successful novel, which rather surprised me.

I did not expect it to be a critically successful novel.

It seemed to me that it was too funny, too vulgar, too easy to read.

But when "The Water-Method Man" was not financially or commercially successful, I simply stopped thinking that I would ever be commercially successful.

I knew I would never write a pleasanter book than that.

I knew I would never write a book with such a happy ending.

I knew I would never write a funnier book than that.

And I thought, well, if this doesn't sort of gather me an audience, then I can assume like every poet and like most serious writers of fiction in this country that I'll simply have a small critical audience, and so be it.

I certainly felt when I finished the manuscript of "Garp", that there were a number of things in it that absolutely would prevent it from becoming a popular success.

I thought there were parts of it that people simply wouldn't read in a popular way.

And I was very pleased with the novel, but I had no illusions about it being successful.

My editor at Dutton was the first person who told me that he thought it would be a best seller.

- [William] Who was that again, was that?

- Henry Robbins?

- [William] Oh, yeah, yeah.

- It was the first book of mine that Henry had published.

And so, I thought Henry was deeply diluted when he said, "I not only liked the book, but I think we're going to make a lot of money on this."

I remember telling my wife that Henry Robbins was a sweet man and very supportive, but he didn't know anything about popular taste.

So, it was a complete surprise to me really.

- [Audience Member] In "Garp", Garp has the privilege of being able to reject a publisher who had earlier rejected him.

Have you ever been able to do this?

- Yes.

(audience laughing) - Does it feel wonderful?

- Yes, it still is with me.

(audience laughing) There's an inner glow.

You know, and on nights when one inexplicably wakes up and can't sleep, it's one of the things that you can dwell on and feel good about.

And I don't mind in any way naming the publisher.

It's a magazine that gets worse every time it's published, it's Esquire.

And they've published a lot of my things, and due to financial considerations, as they say in court beyond my control, I was forced to put up with a lot of their editorial suggestions and do things that were aesthetically against my best instincts.

And in general, swallow a lot of crap from a lot of people who knew a lot less than I did.

And it was a moment of keen pleasure when they had first seemed to understand the terms that if they were to publish "The Hotel New Hampshire" they would publish only chapter one.

And they would publish it as chapter one as it was in the book and make no editings for the magazine.

And I said I was unsure that I wanted them to publish it in the first place, but that they had to understand that, that was how it was to be done.

And understanding that in writing and understanding that verbally, they then proceeded to edit the piece.

And it is great pleasure that, and I was very lucky.

I am very privileged to be a writer of enough standing and also of enough financial success so that I could afford to tell them to go blank themselves and take the piece with great pleasure to Rolling Stone who published it with integrity, and as I asked them to.

And I have good feelings about Rolling Stone since they've always treated me and my things correctly.

And they're one of the few publications that don't edit things for length.

If there's a good piece, and it's long, they print it long.

Magazines are atrocious.

I can say that without qualification.

And it's nice when they need you more than you need them.

Unfortunately, there are so many magazines in part, because there are so many writers who need them.

And so magazines can get away with absolutely unforgivable acts of aggression on writers, and they do it all the time.

They're not to be forgiven any of them.

And I feel extraordinarily lucky that I have the occasional opportunity to say this about them and extraordinarily lucky that I don't need them, that I don't need to excerpt my work and carve it up in front of someone who treats prose in the manner of fast food.

- How much does just everyday experience play in, or do you like to rely real heavily on your imagination and come up with something that's very, very new?

- In my own case, I must say I don't separate, I don't compartmentalize the parts of memory and the parts of imagination, or the acts of memory and the acts of imagination, or the contribution of experience and the contribution of imagination.

What's essential in a piece of writing is that it all seem real.

What's essential in a piece of writing fiction or nonfiction, is that it be authentic.

And in some cases this, when you're writing not from experience, this does call upon a kind of research in what I write.

Very little does it call upon that.

It usually makes a demand as most good writing makes a demand on language.

If the language is vivid, if the language is precise, people believe it.

And so, I quickly lose track of the source to be perfectly frank.

I don't care about the source.

I'm fairly ruthless about sources.

If I read it and it made a vivid impression that's good enough.

If it happened to me and it made a vivid impression that's good enough.

And if I invented it out of the sky and it made a vivid impression, that's good enough.

What's important is that when it's rendered in prose, the prose be vivid enough.

If it's vivid enough, you'll believe it.

There should never be an instance in one's fiction where either the writer or the writer's audience can somehow discern the difference between those things, which were "real" and those things which were made up.

It's slightly irritating to me that because, and this is not meant as a derogatory of a remark.

Because imagination is not a quality that most people possess in abundance, nor is it a quality that most people need for what it is they do.

That imagination is frequently doubted as the source for most or the best of imaginative literature.

It is far easier for someone to believe if they read something and if what they read struck them as true.

It is far easier for the reader to believe that it happened than it is for the reader to believe that somebody thought it up.

The reader is frequently disappointed to learn that somebody thought it up.

If it felt true, they want to know it happened.

They said, "God, that had to be real, right?

That had to be real."

And when you say, "No, you know, nothing like that ever happened to me or any of my kin, and one night I thought it up."

Rather than say, "Good job, that's bravo."

You know, which is what you're sort of expecting hungrily, you know, immediately they doubt you.

Immediately they have that sour look on their face as if, well, I'll have to go look at it again.

(audience laughing) The imagination is after all our best tool.

Speaking are as if we're fiction writers, damn it.

And there are so many evidences in recent American fiction, particularly, that the first novel syndrome, which a number of people have called it that.

The assumption that in almost everyone's experience, there is sufficient experience to sort of eek a first novel out, but the second one gets tough.

(audience laughing) I can write 10 or 12 or 15 pages a day when things are going.

The important thing is I think not so much the hours writing, but the hours that you spend thinking about what you're going to write.

When my fingers move on the typewriter, my fingers don't do a lot of moving on the typewriter, but I do a lot of just plain sitting.

I do a lot of, I suppose what in some states of mind they call meditating.

I do a lot of just concentrating.

I just try and take one character or one vision, one day, one moment, one scene, and I shut my eyes very tight and I see if I can get all the way to the end of it.

And if I can, then I start, and if I can't, I don't.

I only begin when I think I know what the end of something is.

I know other people don't necessarily do that.

Some people do, but in my own case, technically, well, I can give you one credo that works for me.

I don't begin a chapter unless I've written the ending.

I don't begin a novel unless I think I've written the ending.

Of course, I'm not always right, but I'm not talking about just saying, oh, I know what happens at the end of the book.

He does this and she does that.

I'm talking about an actual piece of prose.

I'm talking about language always.

I mean, I'm saying, if you don't know the words for the thing, you don't know how it feels.

You don't know how you're instructing your reader to respond.

If the piece is mere paraphrase in your head, that's not sufficient voice, that's not sufficient tone, it's not sufficient point of view to know how possibly you might begin a story.

So, I have to write last sentences.

The first sentence I wrote for "The World According to Garp" was, "In the world according to Garp we are all terminal cases."

I thought, okay, I know how that sounds.

I know what it feels like, that sentence.

It means a lot of people have been lost here and there is need for some consolation.

I don't begin unless I think I know the ending.

And with chapters, I'm fairly religious about that.

I actually write a paragraph and I write toward an ending the way I presume some composers at least must write toward a musical note, an actual sound.

Of course, you have to be open that you might discover a better way to do it along the way, and sometimes that's true, but I write better, at least under the illusion, that I know how everything is gonna turn out.

I mean, you don't, you can't, but you've gotta think you do or you can't write with confidence or you can't write with voice.

I mean, how do you know how to begin a story, if you don't know who's dead at the end of it.

You begin with the ending and then you work back from there.

The hardest parts of books for me are the middles.

Once I know the ending, I know where to begin, and the beginning is fairly easy.

And the ending, because I've spent so much time writing it before I get there, is always a piece of cake.

But the hard part in novels for me is knowing how long the middle is.

What we're always trying to do is imitate the peaks in our own work or to close the distance between the peaks and to spend less time in the valleys.

I mean, you hold your own example of the best of your passages.

I think over you as something you constantly have to be repeating or topping.

Someone said after "Garp" was published to me, "Well, don't you find it hard now to, this book has been so successful.

Aren't you gonna find it hard to top that?"

It's a stupid question, frankly, because a book, page by page, scene by scene, is the act of always doing that.

I mean, if you're pleased enough with a scene to go onto the next scene, you've left yourself something to equal.

You've left yourself something to come up to.

- Won't you join us again next time on "Writer's Workshop"?

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