As you may already know, I knew John Irving when he was practically an unknown novelist; he was my instructor when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.
As for what I learned from John, I remember him saying numerous times, "Writers spend a great deal of their time working alone. If you want to be a writer, you had better understand that."
Of course, we're probably all familiar with the notion of the novelist acting like the divine creator, God herself, in the microcosm of the story-universe she's creating. (You don't happen to believe that God is a "she?" Very well. I won't try to prove otherwise to you.)
I believe that as a novelist, John Irving was not naïve to the analogy of acting like God in reference to his specific characters and the overall stories he told. As I reported in another EWA, he often said, "Kill off characters when they stop being of use to you in your story." I never heard him say, although in light of many of his novels, he could have said, "Remove your characters' specific body parts (fingers, for example) for added reader interest."
I used to think it was strange but John often said that before he wrote the opening of a novel, he would not only know exactly how the story ended; he would have actually written the final paragraphs of the novel.
I would have never been capable of even thinking such a thought, no less knowing my characters well enough to be able to write the last page of a novel before writing the first.
Now, forty-eight years later, it doesn't strike me as strange at all that he would make a habit of doing that. John is well known to be an inveterate and in-depth outliner of his novels before writing an initial word of them. Once he completes the outline, writing the final paragraph or even the final sentence that appears on the final page of his novel is not that difficult a feat. For Irving, it's a pretty straightforward process.
I still would not be able to do such a thing; I couldn't even come close.
From the opening pages of Prayer for Owen Meaning, John suggests that the religion the story's narrator (who's first name is also coincidentally "John") and his friend Owen were exposed to as children taught God's plan for every individual was known to God and intricately planned out long before any of us human beings get to live it out. Everything is pre-ordained, including one's salvation.
This theology suggests to me that God, if she wished, would likewise be perfectly able to write the final page of the story of each of our lives as each of us is born, if she wished.
By the way, I don't believe John necessarily believed in predestination—quite the opposite. My belief is that he thought that that specific theological tenant was quaint; he found it difficult to take seriously. That explains the comic side of his novels. He loved poking fun at certain beliefs, among them, predestination.
Yet he knew full well that his outline method as a novelist gave the lie to his theological doubt because, in the micro-microcosm of John Irving's novels, he did to his characters precisely what he doubted God ever did to him or to any of us. He knew exactly what was going to happen to each one of his characters long before he finished writing the novel they appeared in. In that way I think he got to play with these ideas, i.e., poke fun at them while at the same time having fun trying them on. In this way he was able to consider the consequences of taking these beliefs seriously.
The challenge with all of this is when you turn to the "terms" of John Irving's youth—no doubt about it, he had dyslexia and he did not excel academically. With John, you don't see many obvious signs of a famous novelist in gestation. What I can report as I observed him in his mid-20s when he was my instructor at Iowa: He had a strong, steadfast, in fact, unwavering faith in his eventual success. I never thought that that opinion was based on an overblown ego—not at all; rather, I believed at a very early age he intuitively understood his material, as any comic novelist should (what was funny about it, poignant about it, rip-your-heart-out bitter-sweet about it); and from the start he had an intuitive understanding of how to go about describing his characters' struggles as they lived out their lives—never letting the tone get sappy or sentimental.
As Irving wrote in the opening chapter of his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, when he was growing up the son of a Phillips-Exeter Academy faculty instructor, attending that famed New Hampshire high school as a "townie," the essay was the reigning literary form, not the short story. It's no surprise to me that parts of A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules read like well written essays. Also apparent to me from page one of both novels: This writer has next-to-no interest in poetic language, in stringing together words that glitter like diamonds; rather Irving's words describe comic events that in Irving's telling become vividly visual and highly memorable. You laugh, but you also care; I do, at least.
By his example, John taught me great novels must always be about something. They must be ambitious and take up important issues just as The Cider House Rules takes on abortion and A Prayer for Owen Meany takes on faith in God and, as already mentioned, predestination.
Next month, more on what I learned from John Irving.
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