HG: Even though Eddie is basically a comic character, you engender a great deal of reader sympathy for him. How do you turn a comic character into a sympathetic one?
JI: A part of what’s comic about Eddie is also what’s sympathetic about him: namely, he’s vulnerable, and his haplessness survives his youth. In middle age, Eddie suffers the same awkwardness boarding a bus in Manhattan that afflicts him when we first see him as a teenager in love with Marion. And Eddie’s love of older women is sincere. How many men have such enduring sexual attractions? It may require some imagination on the reader’s part to believe in Eddie’s steadfast attraction to older and older women, but it’s not hard to imagine what older women love about Eddie.
I’ve had a lot of mail from older women lately. “Haven’t met any Eddies,” one letter said. And there was this one: “If you know a real Eddie, would you introduce me?”
Eddie is domestically heroic. His novels are transparent, his attachments strike Hannah (and probably many readers) as pathetic, but Eddie literally means what he says, and he does what he says he’ll do.
Marion tells Eddie that she came back because she heard that the house was for sale. It’s a good line, but she really comes back because Ruth wrote her and told her that Eddie still loved her; Marion needed to hear that someone did.
Ruth finds her Harry in the end—she gets to have her love story. But there’s more emotion in Eddie’s enduring infatuation with Marion, and in Marion’s coming back, than there is in all of Ruth and Harry’s love story. Marion is a much more moving character than Ruth, partly because of Eddie.
Of course there’s a simpler explanation for Eddie’s transformation from clown to compassionate hero: he grows up. Rather than see himself as a victim of what happens to him when an older woman takes up with him and then abandons him, he upholds his reverence for her as the guiding light of his life. That in itself may be absurd, but Eddie’s convictions are true; he’s not fickle. And there’s something more about Eddie than at first meets the eye. His laughable qualities as a teenager—his innocence and oversensiti
vity, and how easily manipulated he is—are qualities that are admirable in him as an adult. He lets people use him (even Hannah); that’s not an altogether unlikable quality. In Eddie’s case, it’s even brave. He lets Marion use him. It’s a good thing for her that he does.
HG: Ruth has a strong punitive streak in her. In view of her childhood, that is certainly justifiable, but do you also find it admirable?
JI: Oh yes, I do! What idiot said that revenge was a dish best served cold? What matters is that you get the opportunity to serve it—who cares whether it’s hot or cold? Ruth does have every reason to be punitive, to be more than a little rough (or crude) around the edges. Her revenge on Scott Saunders and on her father is, in my view, justified. So what if she goes a little too far? She didn’t strike the first blow, did she? If she overreacts (a little) to what’s been done to her, it doesn’t bother me.
If people take a piece out of you, what’s wrong with taking a piece and a half or two pieces out of them? I don’t pick fights. I do fight back.
HG: Ruth does not pay attention to the reviews of her books. Do you think this is good advice for a writer, and do you follow it yourself?
JI: On this subject, above all, there is what Thomas Mann had to say. “We all bear wounds,” Mann observed. “Praise is a soothing if not necessarily healing balm for them. Nevertheless, if I may judge by my own experience, our receptivity for praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than the opposite. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength.”
I believe that. We live in a time when the politics of envy are flourishing. In the name of equality, the neo-Marxists want to punish individual achievement and success. In book reviewing, “private rancors,” as Mann called them, abound. (There’s no small amount of envy in book reviews, too.)
My writing has never been an acquired taste; I have always had, and will always have, mixed reviews. Many readers, and critics, love my novels; other readers, and many critics, despise every word I write. I don’t inspire indifference; nobody is neutral to John Irving. I write long, explicit, plot-driven novels; I intend to move you to laughter and to tears. My language goes to extremes; to move the reader, emotionally, means more to me than persuading the reader intellectually. I have said the same of Charles Dickens; he had his fans and his enemies, too.
Jean Cocteau once advised young writers to pay very close attention to what the critics disliked about their work; he believed that what the critics disliked about you was the only original thing about you. I think this gives critics too much credit. I don’t interrupt my writing to read my reviews, but—at the end of the day—I read them.
A book reviewer’s animosity does my heart good. Praise is fuel, but so is anger. Reading something about myself that is infuriatingly stupid, or something that is seething with personal nastiness, is honestly energizing; it’s a different kind of energy than I derive from praise, but I can still use it.
In terms of understanding the effect of my novels, I learn much more from the letters readers write to me than I learn from book reviews. You don’t read a book the way a reader reads a book when you know you’re going to write about it. I know—I’ve been a reviewer, too, after all.
Book reviews are more important, even tragically important, to young, unknown writers; they depend on good reviews. But the word of mouth about a book, among readers, is more important to me than reviews. Of course that’s easy for me to say—I have lots of readers. When I publish a new novel, I keep a very close watch on the best-seller lists; I’m not ashamed to say that they mean a great deal more to me than reviews.
HG: You are often accused of being a sentimentalist, as if that were a bad thing. Do you regard yourself as a sentimentalist, and, if so, how would you define the word?
JI: I’ve already defined the word by admitting that it is my intention, as a novelist, to move you to laughter and to tears, and that I use the language to persuade you emotionally, not intellectually. In Great Expectations, Dickens wrote: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.” But we are ashamed of our tears. We live at a time when critical taste tells us that to be softhearted is akin to doltishness; we’re so influenced by the junk on television and in the movies that even in reacting against it we overreact—we conclude that any attempt to move an audience to laughter or to tears is shameless crowd-pleasing, is akin to sitcom or soap opera or melodrama.
To the modern critic, when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty. But, for a writer, it is craven to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. To be emotionally inscrutable has become a predictable fingerprint of the “literary” author. I wouldn’t want to be married to someone who was emotionally inscrutable. Who would ever want to be in a relationship like that? Well, I don’t want a novelist to be emotionally inscrutable, either. In a novel, sentimental risks are essential; concealing one’s emotions is a form of political correctness, which is a kind of cowardice.
HG: While you were writing A Widow for One Year, you were also working on movie scripts of two of your other books. What are the major differences in your approaches to a script and to a book, considering that almost any scene in your novels—take the ones at Mrs. Vaughn’s house as examples—is filmable as written.
JI: “Filmable as written” only in the sense that I am a visual writer. I want the reader to see vividly the action in a scene—as you say, like those scenes with Mrs. Vaughn. But what makes the conclusion of the Mrs. Vaughn episode work is the lengthy buildup to that chase scene, when Ted escapes her; a lot of foreground has gone into Ted’s character and Eddie’s, in order to present Mrs. Vaughn in her far-flung rage. And a lot of anticipation has been built into Ted’s pornographic drawings, so that to see them in tatters, in a swirl of litter surrounding Ted’s car ride home with Glorie and her mother—not to mention their earlier effect on Eduardo—is the result of many layers of storytelling.
Unfortunately, those layers aren’t “filmable as written.” Much of my writing, although visual, is multilayered; it is also dependent on the effects of the passage of time on the major characters. That passage of time has an emotional effect on the reader, too. Hence when Marion says, “Don’t cry, honey, it’s just Eddie and me,” not only do we hear the echo and remember the circumstances of when we first heard that line, we also recognize how much of the lengthy passage of Marion’s life is captured in that sad, resigned assurance to her daughter. In a film, how do you get a line like that to work? It needs the understanding of time, and time’s effects, to give it weight.
And because my novels are not only long, they’re also plot-driven, in compressing the story to fit into the time restrictions of a feature-length film I am faced with losing whole characters and the story lines that accompany them. The process of making a screenplay from one of my novels begins with the decision of which two-thirds of the novel I am going to lose.
If I wrote shorter novels, I might find the process of translating a novel into a film more gratifying.
In the case of The Cider House Rules, which I have been writing and rewriting for four different directors over thirteen years, not only have I lost the major minor character of Melony, a moral and sexual force in the novel, but I have reduced a fifteen-year love affair to eighteen months. (Movies don’t handle the passage of time at all well.) In the case of A Son of the Circus, which I have been writing as a screenplay for a mere eight years, I have made the main character, Dr. Daruwalla, a minor character in the film; two minor characters from the novel, the children who are sold to the circus, have become major, and another minor character, the Jesuit missionary, has become the hero of a romantic comedy—the missionary is the movie’s actual star.
While the film credits will doubtless say, “based on the novel by John Irving,” I think a more apt description of both my screenplays is that they are interpretations of my novels, not the novels themselves.
I’m pleased with both screenplays, but I like my day job better. I doubt that I’ll write another screenplay. I enjoy writing novels more. And in the time I have given to these two screenplays, I could easily have written another novel. Relatively speaking, it is easy to write a screenplay—far easier than writing a novel—but what is difficult, especially for a semireclusive novelist, is the wasteful social intercourse that is required to get a screenplay produced.