Bestselling author John Irving makes appearance at the Jerusalem Writers Festival

‘Thank you for being there even though it’s only a virtual me – I’m not really any better in person,” said legendary American novelist John Irving at the conclusion of an event at the Jerusalem Writers Festival, which ran from May 27-30 at Mishkenot Sha’ananim. 

The author, who appeared on Zoom from his home in Canada because he had just caught a case of COVID, had planned to attend the festival in person – and promised his interviewer, Israeli director/screenwriter Ari Folman (best known for Waltz with Bashir), that he would be coming to Israel as soon as his health permitted.

Irving, best known for the bestselling novels, The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, and A Widow for One Year, characterized by their wildly imaginative plots and subversive humor, told the audience that his new novel was called Queen Esther, and that the last chapter would take place in Jerusalem in the 1980s, which was “the last time I was there.” 

Irving continues to work on his writing 

As a rule, he said, he prefers not to speak in detail about his works-in-progress: “It’s impossible to talk about in a way that doesn’t give the story away... I’ve written half of the last chapter before I go to Jerusalem [to finish it].”

However, he did agree to say: “Queen Esther is named after Esther in the Old Testament and the Scroll of Esther, and like the character she is named for, she is a model of hiddenness and purposefulness. And she will only in her own good time reveal herself.”

SPEAKING ABOUT how he prefers to start his books at the end, a process that has been slowed down with Queen Esther because of his need to visit Jerusalem and see the city again firsthand, he said, “The first couple of times, I thought it was an accident. And because my first novel was historical, well, I knew the end: I knew what happened historically.” But the idea, “know the end before you begin,” became a key part of his process. 

He spoke about his love of Charles Dickens, who inspired him to become a writer, but said that Dickens, “who wrote by the seat of his pants... didn’t know where he was going” in many of his books. “But it was Melville, and Moby Dick, that showed me, ‘Oh, this guy knew, from the earliest chapters, exactly how the novel would end.’ You could see it from the earliest chapters... Oh, this is the way to do it: Write toward something you know.”

He spoke about working habits and the discipline he learned as a wrestler in high school that transferred over into his writing life. “So much of my process is re-writing, is re-doing, is re-thinking. It was just good luck these two disciplines were on parallel tracks from my life as an early teenager – it was a good way to get started,” he said. 

“I work seven days a week, I work eight or nine hours a day, unless things interrupt me,” Irving said. “And it wasn’t until my fourth novel, The World According to Garp, that I became self-sufficient, which has made a huge difference in my work patterns. I thought I would always be teaching and coaching wrestling and that I would be writing in my spare time, but that changed.”

THE MAIN focus of Folman’s questions was not Irving’s writing process or his novels, though, but “the intersections of writing and cinema,” as described in the program. And because there was so much Hollywood talk, the evening may have been the first time that Paul Newman was mentioned at a Jerusalem Writers Festival event – and certainly the only time the great blue-eyed Jewish actor was brought up twice.

The first mention was in response to a question about who accompanied him to the screening of The World According to Garp, the film starring Robin Williams and based on Irving’s breakthrough novel, which made the author a hot commodity in the entertainment as well as the literary world. The answer was Newman, along with Irving’s mentor and teacher Kurt Vonnegut. 

Irving said that he had consulted Newman for advice when he was trying to adapt Garp into a screenplay for director George Roy Hill, with whom the famous actor had collaborated on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. 

Hill “was an old Marine, and he did things his way and I was afraid that he had marginalized the transwoman character, Roberta, and made her or seen her as a strictly comic character, which I didn’t like,” Irving recalled. 

“I thought she was the voice of reason between Garp and his mother, and I also thought that John Lithgow [who portrayed Roberta] was the best of all the actors he had cast, and Lithgow could have done Roberta as I had written her. But George and I didn’t see eye-to-eye about the sexual politics of that story. And I asked our mutual friend Paul Newman... what my chances were – could I over time persuade George? And Newman said, essentially, ‘Are you kidding? He’s a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel: You’re not going to convince him of anything.’”

Irving said he stepped away and allowed Steve Tesich to replace him writing the screenplay, but that he felt Tesich concentrated on sophomoric humor and sacrificed depth. This would have been a great opportunity to hear a little about how Irving presciently developed this iconic trans character at a time when few Americans knew much about transgender issues, but Folman moved on to more questions about casting and screenplays.

NEWMAN’S NAME came up again when Irving spoke about a reading of The Cider Rules screenplay at the home of Newman and his wife, actress Joanne Woodward, when he was hoping that Newman would play the key role of Dr. Larch, an obstetrician who performs abortions. 

But Irving intuited some tension between the couple and Woodward eventually said, “‘I will not let him do this part. Someone will kill him’.... As it turned out, not a single American actor who was shown the part of Larch accepted the role.” 

Larch was played by Michael Caine, who won an Oscar for the role. Because of anti-abortion extremists, Irving said, “he was the one who had to change hotel rooms when we were in Los Angeles for the Academy Awards because the anti-abortion people were stalking Michael Caine... The anti-abortion people don’t go away.”

The author credited his mother, a nurse’s aide who worked in a family counseling service, both before abortion was legal and afterwards, for making him “adamantly pro-choice.”

During breaks in the interview, two actors, Yossi Marshak and Adi Gilat, read passages – in Hebrew – from the novels The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, and The Cider House Rules, which contained some of Irving’s most transgressive and outrageous prose. 

Irving listened politely but did not seem to have been told which excerpts were being read and didn’t comment on the readings.

Perhaps there will soon be more opportunities to hear from the genial 82-year-old author, who said, “I was really looking forward to coming back to Jerusalem. I had a wonderful time in Jerusalem, I’m still coming back, and I’ll be there soon.”