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John Irving
BIO
John Irving was born in New Hampshire. He studied at universities in America and Europe and published his first novel SETTING FREE THE BEARS, at the age of twenty-six. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, published in 1978 to phenomenal acclaim, firmly established him as one of the most inventive and talented novelists in America.
During the 1980s John Irving wrote a series of absorbing and celebrated books: THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, THE CIDER HOUSE RULES and A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. In these novels his originality and striking vision came brilliantly to the fore, along with his trademark subjects --- as wide-ranging as feminism, religion, wrestling, sex and New England life.
More recent novels include the complex bestseller A SON OF THE CIRCUS, the dark and funny novel A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR and THE FOURTH HAND, a black comedy that was another popular success.
Several of John Irving's novels have been made into films, and in 2000 he was awarded an Oscar for the screenplay for THE CIDER HOUSE RULES. He described the difficult, decade-long journey from page to screen in MY MOVIE BUSINESS. He is also the author of TRYING TO SAVE PIGGY SNEED and THE IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND, memoirs of writing and wrestling.
In 1992, John Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Vermont and Toronto.
UNTIL I FIND YOU is John Irving's eleventh novel.
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AUTHOR TALK
 July
2005
In this interview John Irving talks about the fascinating
worlds of tattooing and Hollywood, which are both recreated in his latest book,
UNTIL I FIND YOU. The acclaimed
author of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES touches briefly
on parallels between his own childhood and that of his protagonist, Jack Burns,
and shares with readers a particular moment in the novel that resonates with him
in a special way.
Question: Daughter Alice's strange and wonderful world of tattooing comes to life
in UNTIL I FIND YOU, from the "flash" tacked to the parlor walls to the bands
of fiercely loyal tattooists. What gave you the initial idea to set the novel
in this world?
John Irving: I build a novel from the back
to the front; I know the end of the story before I write the first sentence. I
try to write the last sentence first, even the last several paragraphs. I knew
that Jack's father, William Burns, was waiting for his son to find him; I knew
that William was institutionalized in a Swiss sanatorium, and that the final two
chapters of the novel would bring us there. I began with the life of this man
who has suffered losses --- his son, two women he loved, lastly his music. I began
with what physical manifestation his obsessive-compulsive disorder might take.
That led me to making him a full-body --- a tattoo addict. And that in turn led
me to make Alice a tattoo artist, and the daughter of the tattoo artist who gives
William his first tattoo.
Q: How did you research tattoo culture? Did you visit many parlors?
JI: In A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR, when I was doing
research in Amsterdam with a policeman --- about the details concerning the murder
of a prostitute --- the policeman introduced me to Amsterdam's most famous tattoo
artist, Henk Schiffmacher. His tattoo name is Hanky Panky, but the police in Amsterdam
used him as a handwriting analyst; he was also good at deciphering partial fingerprints.
I already knew him. He was the first person I turned to for my tattoo research.
Meeting Henk led me to making connections with other tattoo artists in those North
Sea ports. He knew everyone. I visited more than a dozen tattoo parlors in Europe;
several in the U.S. and Canada, too, and I went to many tattoo conventions. I
got two tattoos, so I knew what it felt like to be tattooed, and I learned how
to tattoo. I gave a woman in Amsterdam a tattoo on her forearm. It was a sprig
of holly to cover up a former boyfriend's name. She must not have liked my work,
because when I met her for dinner a few years later, she had covered up my cover-up
with a third tattoo.
Q: You say in the novel that tattooing is a "sentimental" pursuit; how so?
JI: Maritime tattooing, from the end of World
War I through the late 1960s or early 1970s, was chiefly souvenir shopping; one
marked the body the way people used to put travel stickers on their suitcases.
Ports of call, hearts (broken and otherwise), sailing ships, girls in grass skirts,
mermaids, sea monsters, pirates. And there were always religious tattoos --- 20
percent of all tattoos are religious. But all that has changed. The maritime world
is fading. The new tattoos are too various to name.
Q: Have you met any "collectors," like Jack's dad, William Burns? What do you
think drives this particular obsession?
JI: I have met a few collectors. They often
don't know why they can't stop; the reasons vary. People are obsessed by different
demons; it's impossible to generalize the motives of tattoo addicts, just as there
is no single reason, medically, why many full-body types feel cold. But many of
them do. Jack comes to the conclusion that his father has had the sort of life
that might make anyone feel cold; maybe the tattoos have nothing to do with it.
Q: Another fascinating world that is re-created in the novel is that of Hollywood,
as Jack embarks upon his film career. How did your experiences writing screenplays
and working with film agents influence your portrayal of Hollywood?
JI: My experiences in Hollywood --- the people,
producers, actors, and directors I have known --- certainly helped me shape a
life for Jack in L.A. My eldest son and his family live there. The film producer
Richard Gladstein, who made The Cider House Rules, has become a close friend
--- as have my agent at C.A.A., Bob Bookman, and my entertainment lawyer, Alan
Hergott. They're all in the novel. I love Los Angeles. I might not love it if
I lived there, or if the movie business were my only business. I like writing
screenplays and working in that world as an occasional change from the solitary
endeavor of writing a novel, but writing novels is my first love. I couldn't live
without writing novels; writing a movie is just for fun.
Q: What do you think Jack Burns would have become, had he not chosen acting?
JI: Maybe Jack would have been a writer if
he hadn't been an actor first. They are similar. Jack is most uncomfortable being
himself. Being someone else is easier. I invent whole lives for a living; I am
someone else, or several other people, every day.
Q: Along those lines, is there another career, other than writing, that you
yourself could have imagined undertaking?
JI: I might have been an actor; I was always
comfortable onstage, and my writing is always very visual-cinematic, really. Read
the opening "shot" (as I call it) to Hardy's TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES. It's a
movie. Were they alive today, both Hardy and Dickens would have written screenplays.
(I hope they would have written novels, too, of course.)
Q: Can you imagine a film being made of UNTIL I FIND YOU?
JI: I can easily imagine a film of UNTIL I
FIND YOU. It would begin at the end of the novel, or near the end --- in Part
V, anyway. It would begin with Jack talking to Dr. Garcia, deep in "therapy";
Jack's voice-over would narrate the story of his life in chronological order,
with occasional interruptions from Dr. Garcia. Since I wrote many drafts of this
novel in the first-person voice, I have in essence already written the voice-over.
The film ends when he calls Dr. Garcia from the hotel room in Zurich and leaves
a message for her on her answering machine. "Thank you for listening to me" etc.
Q: The sport of wrestling makes another appearance in your work, as Jack Burns
proves to be an accomplished wrestler in high school. Do you know the sport well?
JI: I've wrestled for twenty years.
Q: One particularly moving passage in the novel, that is also printed on the
back cover, reads: "In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood
is stolen from us --- not always in one momentous event but often in a series
of small robberies, which add up to the same loss." Do you think it's possible
to have a pure childhood in today's world? Do you think children grow up too fast,
even under the healthiest circumstances? Or is this loss, this growing up, just
a natural and inevitable part of childhood?
JI: No adult in my family would tell me anything
about who my father was --- not until I was thirty-nine and divorcing my first
wife. This was an immeasurable gift to my imagination; I have been inventing my
father most of my writing life. And I had sex with an older woman when I was eleven;
in UNTIL I FIND YOU, Jack is ten. This is not without effect. As a teenager, and
into my twenties and thirties I had an attraction to older women that I couldn't
understand or explain. I am an overprotective father --- even a paranoid one.
But human experience is individual. I am a novelist and occasional screenwriter
because I don't believe in generalizations; I believe in specific stories.
Q: We're always curious to know how a writer writes; would you mind sharing
a glimpse of your process and craft?
JI: I believe in plot. I must know where I'm
going before I start. When I start writing a book, the actual writing, I don't
want to be distracted from the sentences themselves. I want to know the story
ahead of me; I know all about the characters. I want to be thinking only about
the sentences --- writing them and rewriting them. Revision is more than half
of my work as a writer.
Q: After spending so much time with Jack Burns, inside his head, has he become
one of your favorite characters? Do you even have favorite characters --- or,
like children, do you simply love them all? Or, this might be fun: Do you have
a favorite minor character in the novel? One that others might overlook?
JI: Like children, I love all my characters,
but some were a bigger stretch for me than others. Dr. Larch in THE CIDER HOUSE
RULES, Dr. Daruwalla in A SON OF THE CIRCUS. I take pride in them. Jack Burns
was the hardest of them all because he's not a stretch; he was hard because
he was the most like me. Certain minor characters repeat themselves. Melony in
CIDER HOUSE is reborn as Hester in A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, and they are both
reborn and enlarged upon in the character of Emma in UNTIL I FIND YOU. Emma is
an achievement I'm proud of. I love her. In another way, for her power over Jack,
I love Emma's mother, Mrs. Oastler, too.
Q: Along those lines, is there a minor moment or scene in the novel that resonates
with you in a special way? Something others might overlook, but that you might
have a peculiar fancy for, or something that makes you laugh?
JI: In UNTIL I FIND YOU, Jack entertains the
illusion that he actually "remembers" his trip to the North Sea with his mom when
he was four --- he is confronted by the truth of how little he could possibly
have "remembered" only in Helsinki when he meets the four-year-old son of the
pregnant aerobics instructor. He sees himself in that boy. That's a huge moment
in the book for me.
Q: Are there particular books or authors that have influenced you? What is
your own favorite book?
JI: Dickens was and remains the most important
author for me. I have read his books many times, and have even purposely not read
one of them. I am saving it for a severe illness or a near-death experience. Something
I will read when I have to despair of doing anything else. I have not read OUR
MUTUAL FRIEND. That's the one I have saved.
© Copyright 2005 by Random House, Inc.
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here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
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AUTHOR TALK -- 1999
For
thirteen years I have been writing and rewriting my screenplay of THE CIDER HOUSE
RULES, for four different directors. The first, Phillip Borsos, died;
the fourth, the Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom, will direct the picture for
Miramax this September --- Richard Gladstein (the Film Colony) producer.
For eight years I have been writing and rewriting my screenplay of A SON OF THE CIRCUS for one director (Martin Bell) from the beginning. That film is supposed to go into production, in India, in January of '99 --- with Jeff Bridges in the role of the missionary.
And, since the winter of 1994, I have also begun and completed my ninth novel, A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR.
In short, I decided almost ten years ago that I was too busy to attempt to write a screenplay for A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, in addition to feeling that the issue of an alleged religious miracle would prove harder to film than it was to write about, and that I had neither the desire nor the stamina to revisit the Vietnam years. (In the sixties, I hated the sixties; in retrospect, I hate the decade even more.)
Therefore, when Mark Steven Johnson approached me not to write a screenplay for A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY but to allow him to write and direct the picture, I was very happy to let him try. My conditions were demanding. I am both surprised that Caravan accepted my terms and grateful to them that they did. I said I wanted to read the shooting script and decide at that time if I wanted them to use my titles and the names of my characters. Mark agreed.
I read the script, which I liked; it's a good story. But I felt that Mark's story was markedly different from the story of A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY; I felt it would mislead the novel's many readers to see a film of that same title which was so different from the book.
I respect Mark's decision not to include the Vietnam War as the period for the film, although that period was what compelled me to write the novel in the first place. It was not Mark's period. I also respect that he softened the degree to which Owen Meany/Simon Birch is himself a religious miracle. In for A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, Owen Meany is a miracle; in SIMON BIRCH, that character is prescient to an unusual degree but he is not literally miraculous. Yet Simon's curiosity regarding "God's plan" for him makes him more than a character in mere destiny's hands. That part of the film feels very close to the spirit of the novel, although there are (of course) literal differences. In any case, the larger differences between the novel and the screenplay --- Vietnam and the nature of a religious miracle --- made me ask Mark to come up with a different title for his movie, and to rename my characters.
The film is essentially true --- indeed, it is very faithful --- to the novel's first chapter, and to the situation of the narrator not knowing who is father is at the time of his mother's death. Mark was honest with me from the beginning that this was his principal interest, and I think he told that story extremely well.
I also like how he changed Owen's obsession with dunking a basketball to holding his breath underwater --- brilliant! That works very well, and the feeling is the same.
But SIMON BIRCH is really Mark Steven Johnson's story --- with OWEN MEANY's beginning. I think it was, therefore, a happy resolution for both Mark and me that he was able to make his film, which clearly was "suggested by" (as the credits say) A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, but which is clearly not A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY.
I saw the film on Monday, August 24th in Los Angeles. It was what I expected to see --- a good, new story that takes as its starting point the first chapter of A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY and goes somewhere else with it. I enjoyed it. I thought Ashley Judd was terrific as the mother and Oliver Platt was wonderful as the mother's suitor. (Naturally I like the Voice Over, too.)
Another noteworthy point of difference between the novel and the film is the sense of humor. Mark's character of Simon is a virtual stand-up comic --- much of the comedy in the film comes from one-liners. The comedy of the novel comes less from dialogue than from the overall situation the characters find themselves in. Mark also does this well. The Sunday-school teacher is more than a memorable character; she's a great situation. (The humor in dialogue was also a sizable difference between the film of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP and that novel, too. Steve Tesich's GARP screenplay made a similar use of one-liners. I don't really write comic dialogue.)
And, in the case of OWEN MEANY/SIMON BIRCH, the uses made of the Christmas pageant scene are also very different; both scenes are interesting, maybe more so for their difference. I took my seven-year-old to both a theatrical version of Owen Meany's Christmas pageant (in Seattle, last Christmas) and to the SIMON BIRCH film. He loved them both.
I think Mark and I have had an admirable relationship. We've been candid to each other --- we've never concealed our differences --- and we respect each other. It was simply impossible for me to be close to, or feel involved with, a production of OWEN MEANY as a film --- not while I was writing two other screenplays and a new novel.
I think it took a lot of courage for Mark to push ahead with his vision of OWEN MEANY, knowing from the beginning that it was unlikely I would permit him to use my title or the names of my characters. I like SIMON BIRCH as a title too. Mark and I discussed many other possible titles, among them A SMALL MIRACLE, which was my idea, but I like his idea better.
I wish the film well, and I tell readers of OWEN MEANY that they should go see it. They'll find much in it that is remindful of the novel, and sizable differences too. I think the film as more of an interpretation of the novel than as a movie "based on" a novel. I know Mark would agree.
As for the more general topic of the translation of novel to film, I can speak with more authority on that subject in the cases of the two novels of mine that I have adapted for the screen --- as I told you, CIDER HOUSE RULES and A SON OF THE CIRCUS --- but the proper time to address that subject is when those films have been shot and are ready to be released.
--- by John Irving
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ARTICLE
My first encounter with John Irving's work was when my son, Steve, then a freshman in college, pressed THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP into my hands and said, "Mom --- you have to read this!" Steve had been an avid reader since preschool when he used to read off the ingredients of breakfast food cereals, which made me wonder if he might not someday become a chemist. In high school he never left home without a flowered towel --- on the advice of author Douglas Adams (when I asked why, he pressed THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY on me and I enjoyed it), so I read GARP. Besides, I had just stayed up for two nights reading Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED, and he thought I needed to expand my horizons.
Expand them I did. The only comparison I can reach between John Irving and Ayn Rand is that they both render long, thought provoking novels. When I entered the world of Garp, I was hooked as a full-fledged Irving fan. From there I progressed to THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE and laughed and cried with the beleaguered Berry family. "Don't pass by any open windows" has stuck with me through many a trying time in the years since Franny and Susie the Bear and Sorrow defined dysfunctional families in ways undreamed of in my banal life.
THE CIDER HOUSE RULES was his next venture and remains, alongside OWEN MEANY, my favorite of his nine novels. CIDER HOUSE is about to be released as a movie, starring Michael Caine as Dr. Larch. Irving wrote the screenplay and discusses in MY MOVIE BUSINESS: A MEMOIR, the agonizing process of choosing which characters and plot lines to keep and which to abort to fit the confines of two hours on the silver screen. MY MOVIE BUSINESS is due for publication at the same time the movie is released in November of 1999. Irving discusses screenwriting not only for CIDER HOUSE but also HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, GARP, and A SON OF THE CIRCUS.
By the time A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY was published in 1989, I was in a state of high anticipation for any new offering from Irving. I was unprepared, however, for the impact that OWEN MEANY would have on me, and apparently, over the years, on thousands of other readers. Thought by many to be Irving's tour de force, OWEN MEANY tops the lists of all-time favorite books by many TBR readers. Some of the faithful refused to see the movie Simon Birch because it was based on one small segment of OWEN MEANY and they knew it could never hold up to the original. I was not dissuaded, however, and enjoyed Simon Birch on its own merits as a variation on a theme and a tribute to Irving's genius.
I was immediately enchanted by the sensitive, East Indian ex-patriot orthopedic surgeon in A SON OF THE CIRCUS, who, through his zeal to discover the gene for dwarfism, gets caught up in the strange, destitute, painful underworld of the land of his ancestors. Nowhere is Irving's diligent research as evident as it is in CIRCUS. A thread of his personal background runs through most of his other novels. He was born and raised in Exeter, New Hampshire, where HOTEL, GARP, OWEN MEANY, and A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR are loosely based. He says that his books are not autobiographical, but admits of OWEN MEANY, that if there is a "voice" that is his, it's that of the grandmother.
THE 158-POUND MARRIAGE and THE WATER-METHOD MAN are rooted in one way or another in Iowa, where Irving spent many years in post graduate work in Iowa City, and are related to wrestling which remains a passion. He says that writing only what you know would be boring. He asks rhetorically in a recent interview: "Stay in Vermont and write about a writer watching the snow falling or teaching his youngest son how to ski? Boy, that would be interesting!" CIRCUS, however, takes place in Toronto, and India --- an India of Irving's fertile imagination. The characters in CIRCUS, as in all the other Irving novels, stay with you. Is this not a mark of a great storyteller?
A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR, Irving's latest full novel, is pure Irving from cover to cover. Somehow, though, my awe in Irving's inspired writing in OWEN MEANY and CIDER HOUSE was not rekindled with WIDOW. Clearly, he did his usual yeoman's work in exquisite research which translates into characterizations of great depth and Quixotic personalities --- the Amsterdam cop and the prostitute stand out as the strongest and most compelling characters. But isn't that the charm of Irving's work? His characters are usually afflicted in some debilitating way, be it emotionally or physically. Their conflicts, trials and often heroic approach to life, as twisted and tormented as they are, usually prove to be uplifting, often in a tragic-comic way.
Irving does not hint at a new novel. He has been hard at work over the past ten years on getting SON OF THE CIRCUS and A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR into print, and CIDER HOUSE RULES onto film. He's still working on the screenplay for SON OF THE CIRCUS.
He says in MY MOVIE BUSINESS, "However many months I spend writing a screenplay, I never feel as if I've been writing at all. I've been constructing a story --- that's true --- but without language . . . I always write a lot of letters when I'm working on a screenplay because I miss using language. When I'm writing a novel, I write very few letters; my language is all used up."
We hope that Irving will soon yearn to set his language to work on his next novel. At age 57, he must have at least several more left in him.
--- Roz Shea
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FAST FACTS
- John Winslow Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1942.
- He grew up a faculty brat in an Exeter prep-school where his stepfather --- a Harvard graduate --- taught history.
- Irving became a bookworm despite his dyslexia.
- Irving married while an undergraduate and had the first of three sons at 23.
- His first teaching job was at Windham College in Vermont.
- He worked as assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
- In 1981, Irving divorced his first wife. He remarried to Janet Turnbull, his agent, a Canadian.
- He currently coaches wrestling in addition to his literary duties.
- Irving and his wife, Janet, live in Toronto and southern Vermont.
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