Full Body

I spent my last two years as an undergraduate at Windham College in Putney, Vt., a small liberal arts college that is no longer. In my junior year, I was told that a young novelist, John Irving, taught there, though he was on sabbatical. I found this very exciting. I knew comic-book and science-fiction writers, but took them for granted – America’s young novelists, I lionized. I had read glowing reviews of Irving’s 1968 debut, Setting Free the Bears, before I heard this news, but finally got around to reading it. I was, of course, impressed. Irving taught a creative writing seminar for which I was lucky enough to be accepted. It was a great experience at the time, but over the next decades, I’ve kept coming back to it. The point of the seminar was not just good writing and strong narrative, it was that writing is a job. A job you can prepare yourself for and get better at. A job you have to work at every day. It was easily the best writing course I ever took.

During the class, Irving finished his second novel and tried out titles on us. I voted against The Water-Method Man (1972), the title ultimately chosen. I pointed out that it was a bit too much like the film The Watermelon Man. Irving agreed, but suggested that the film was really not that well known or engraved in the public’s mind. The novel, though excellent, didn’t attract undue attention. The 158-Pound Marriage (1973), the next novel, I didn’t like much, though I bet if I reread it now I would feel differently. The World According to Garp (1976), Irving’s fourth effort, I finished early in the morning having read through the night. I felt exhilarated, reborn, blessed, and somehow much more mature and weathered by the end. Several generations of readers now have had similar experiences. I’ve finished many of Irving’s other novels at dawn, most recently 1998’s A Widow for One Year.

Since the early Seventies, I’d only visited with John once, when he came through town in 1984 reading from his upcoming The Cider House Rules. I did a phone interview with him last week in preparation for his Monday, Feb. 28, appearance as part of the KLRU Distinguished Speaker Series. He was, as always, brilliant and insightful about the art of writing. As with many of our conversations, it ended up being more about movies than fiction (when I knew him he was working with director Irvin Kershner on an adaptation of Setting Free the Bears that was never produced; several of his novels since have gone on to become big-screen successes), but I’ve left most of that out. The following are Irving’s words, though I’ve cut and pasted paragraphs and sentences, as well as cleared up some language, in order to make it relevant and concise. I began by asking him whether he would give a talk or a reading in Austin. It turns out that he is planning to do both.

John Irving: The talk will be about the writing process, about my process in particular. It’s how I construct a chapter, how I construct a book. I will read the first chapter, but that’s only a little more than half of what I’ll do. … The title of my book is Until I Find You, which I’ve been working on six years now. I had begun this novel, and made some considerable progress with it, but there were still some things, some elements about it that I was unsure about, and I had a lot more research to do.

The Fourth Hand [2001] was an idea that sort of emerged in toto. In other words, the whole thing was there. Not only a short book for me, but relatively speaking, an easy one, a novel that was two years in the writing, as opposed to this one. … I thought that it would serve this longer, more difficult novel well if I stepped away from it for a while, and didn’t keep pushing ahead. The issue of hand transplant surgery was something that was likely to change, and I wanted to write The Fourth Hand at a time when the hand surgery described in that novel was still relevant.

Until I Find You is about the relationship between a female tattoo artist and a church organist, a man who is addicted to being tattooed. The story is in the point of view of their child, who grows up with his mother, but never knows or sees his father. Upon his mother’s death, he learns that some things she’s told him about his father were not true. So he sets out to find the father.

I’m really more interested in the psychology of this guy than I am in his tattoos. I learned something about tattooing some years ago and a phenomenon that always interested me, which is that many people who have full body tattoos, the full body completely covered, feel cold – for no dermatological reason. It’s in their mind. Their tattoos don’t make them feel cold, but the incidence of people with full-body tattoos, I mean head to toe, who feel cold, or who are cold, is remarkably high. Not everyone, but most. This includes someone who would be completely tattooed, as well as even those completely tattooed everywhere that their clothes cover: not your hands, not your face, not your neck, but everything else. The reality about the people who do that is they’re educated, they’re usually highly professional people. We’re not talking sailor tattoos or biker tattoos here. Those people who sort of traditionally have lots of tattoos are people who like to show them. Part of having a tattoo is to show it, right? But I’m talking about people whose tattoos are total, but private. Which is for the most part, a white-collar obsession. I got interested in the obsessive-compulsiveness of it, because the obsessive-compulsive disorder is what’s permanent, it’s as permanent as the tattoos.

It’s a psychological novel, an emotional novel, and it’s one of my bigger novels. It’s 320,000 words, which, to give you some measure of comparison, my longest novel until this one was Son of the Circus [1994], and that was only 258,000 words. I spend more time rewriting novels than I do writing first drafts anyway, but in this case, it had quite a remarkable rewriting history. I finished this novel, or thought I finished this novel, in April of last year. My wife, who’s my agent, submitted it to Random House. Random House loved it, made an offer on the book. We accepted the offer.

Two days later, I woke up and said, “Oh no.” I decided that the novel, which was my first first-person novel since A Prayer for Owen Meany [1989], should be in the third person. So I said give it back. And they did, Random House did. They all thought I had a small stroke overnight and no one realized it. But then, once they saw the first chapter and how it changed, they got it. They said, “Oh, yeah, it is better.”

Between April of last year, and the end of October, I literally rewrote every sentence from the first to the third-person voice. And that isn’t as easy as changing “I” to “he” or “me” to “him.” Because often when you change the voice, the tense changes. I found it interesting that there were some elements of the first person, the personal content of it, that you could still keep, but they had a different strength, or a different weight, in a third-person voice. They stood out some more. It was an interesting process, it just took a long time. …

I always know what I’m going to do next; in fact, it’s often a decision as to which of the books in my mind I’m going to begin next. I almost began the book I’m going to write next before I began this one. But then I realized that this book was so difficult, and demanded so much of me, both emotionally and psychologically, but also, I knew it would be long. I knew it was a task to research. I knew there was going to be a lot of traveling; I needed to consult with a lot of people. I just thought, Jesus, this book looks so daunting in terms of degree of difficulty, I better do it when I’m younger rather than when I’m old. …

It’s just that I’m also writing screenplays concurrently with whatever novel I’m writing, and I’ve been doing that now for almost 20 years. There are three screenplays that I have that are in varying degrees of completion. The likelihood is that before I begin this next novel, what will be the 12th novel, one or more of those screenplays is going to take my attention first.

If I’d had no success with my screenplays, if Cider House had never been made, I would still say that the exercise of doing something that’s different from writing a novel is valuable. I began writing the early drafts of the Cider House screenplay when I was in an early draft of A Prayer for Owen Meany, the novel. I barely penetrated that novel, and interrupted it and wrote the first couple of drafts of the screenplay, then went back to Owen Meany, then went back to the screenplay. I’ve been doing it like that since then. And it’s a good exercise. Now, because of Cider House, I’ve met some people, know some people I like working with, want to work with more.

The part about a collaboration that’s painful is the wrong collaborators. When you have a collaboration with people that works, that you really like, you want to work with them again. It’s been great for me. The relationship I had with Lasse Hallström and Richard Gladstein on Cider House was terrific. I’m working with Richard on two other films. I’m pretty sure I’ll work with Lasse again. We have an original screenplay that we’ve been bandying around for a while. Tod Williams, the young writer/director who adapted A Widow for One Year into the film The Door in the Floor [2004], I worked with for four years on his idea, on his script. I liked working with him so much, especially in the postproduction, the editing of that film, that we’re working together again – this time on my screenplay of The Fourth Hand.

This article appears in February 25 • 2005.