The condensed John Irving

There is no use pretending that you’ve read more of John Irving’s work than you really have: he will catch you. Not only that, but he will lay a trap, said his son Everett, 19. “Do you remember that part in the book where Fergus dies?” John Irving might ask an interviewer. “Yes, of course,” the interviewer bluffs. “I didn’t write that,” says the author of The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and ten more novels. Snap.

 The Irvings—John, his wife Janet, and Everett, are traveling around the Philippines with their family friends the Dancels—Richard, a psychiatrist, Minnie Domingo, an OB-gynecologist, and their daughter Nicole, 20, who is Everett’s best friend. Arriving in the Philippines after getting stuck for 30 hours at JFK airport during the blizzard in New York, they proceeded to Sitio Remedios in Currimao, which is owned by Minnie’s former professor Dr. Joven Cuanang, the neurologist, art collector, and medical director of St. Luke’s Hospital. On Monday night, Dr. Cuanang hosted a dinner for the whole group at his fabulous Pinto Art Museum in Antipolo.

 BenCab, our national artist for the visual arts, was supposed to sit on John Irving’s left but decided to sit closer to the buffet. That’s how I ended up sitting next to Mr. Irving. And I had come prepared, I had a good question for him. What do you ask someone who has probably fielded every question interviewers could throw at him for the last four decades?

“Mr. Irving, what was your win-loss record at competitive wrestling?” That got the conversation started. To recap:

(1) His win-loss record in wrestling (the classic type, not the kind with overacting) was 167-35. That’s amazing. He won 82 percent of all his matches! Irving noted that most of the losses came when he was in his 30s—he went on competing until age 34 when most wrestlers stop in their late 20s.

 He has a tattoo on the inside of his right arm of a circle with a rectangle inside it. It is a diagram of a wrestling ring.

 John Irving is in the Wrestling Hall of Fame. Norman Mailer boxed, Ernest Hemingway fished, Martin Amis plays tennis, Haruki Murakami runs, John Irving wrestled.

(2) He likes San Miguel Beer Pale Pilsen, and knows a lot about beer in general. He also likes Cerveza Negra, and when I said it used to be recommended for lactating mothers he said it’s because it has a lower alcohol content and beer in general stimulates lactation. (Yeah, that’s what you discuss with the author of Garp: breastfeeding.)

(3) “I don’t care for movies,” he declared when I asked about the film adaptations of his novels. “Then why do you write them?” I wanted to ask, but I was surrounded by his fans. 

A son of the circus: John Irving with his son Everett

John Irving likes only two of the movies based on his books—The Cider House Rules, for which he wrote the screenplay, and A Door In The Floor, based on one-third of A Widow For One Year. “Movies don’t do passage of time well at all,” he notes. “I reduced the passage of time in Cider House Rules to 18 months.”

He does not have a high opinion of Hollywood’s intelligence. “The writers are the least valued part of the process in the moviemaking business. It’s a business run by a committee. No good decisions are going to be made by eight to ten people.

“If I am serious, which I rarely am, about a movie the only way to be serious about it is not to get paid.” In order to maintain control over your work, he says Take No Money. That way, the studios do not own the material.

 He spent 13 years developing Cider House Rules, which was eventually filmed by Lasse Hallstrom starring Tobey Maguire, and has spent the last 10 developing A Son of the Circus. (That’s 23 years developing material in a medium he doesn’t care for. I’ll shut up now.)

(4) Irving wanted A Son of the Circus to be filmed in India, but was constantly running into problems with censors. He is now relocating the action to another country. “There are three qualifications,” he says. “It has to happen in a country where the Jesuits have been of significant influence.”

 “The Philippines!” I suggest.

“It has to happen in a country where the influence of the Catholic Church is resented by some of the natives.”

“The Philippines!”

 “It needs to happen in a country where the principal performers in the circus are children.”

“The Philippines!”

 “There’s only one other country that has these qualifications,” Irving says. “Mexico.”

(5) In 1999, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. He and Janet attended the ceremony. On entering the theatre Janet was shunted aside by the security guards, who recognized only the stars.

 Then John Irving won the Oscar. They discovered that if you’re holding an Oscar, the crowd parts like the Red Sea for Moses. The Oscar rode in front of their limo—they were at the after-party in no time at all.

(6) According to Janet, whom he met when she was his literary agent, the first thing John Irving does when he arrives in a different country is to look for the gym. There is no gym in Sitio Remedios, so he ran on the beach every day. “Eight neighborhood dogs followed me,” he laughs.

 (7) Irving turns 70 next year. We readers like to amuse ourselves by comparing the authors’ photos on the backs of their books with how the authors look in person. Oh, the wonders of Photoshop. John Irving looks exactly like his book photos. He is a handsome man with a slightly gruff voice. He speaks slowly at first, as if he were carefully choosing his words, but picks up speed when he gets more comfortable with the company.

(8) The author writes every day, eight hours a day, longhand. “I write in longhand because if I do that I’m writing at the proper speed. I’ve been typing since I was eight, I type really fast, but I don’t want to write a book that way. I’m not in a hurry.” The first draft of a novel is about a foot-and-a-half tall. “I’ve written some books in pencil, some in pen. Pens get better and better. I like those rollerball pens.”

(9) The whole time his family is touring the Philippines—Pagudpud, Vigan, Bohol, Palawan—he stays in his room, writing. “When I wrote my first three novels, I was teaching at universities and coaching wrestling and I felt I never had enough time to write,” he recalls.

 In 1979 The World According to Garp became a worldwide bestseller and literally changed his life—he became independently wealthy. “I could do what I’ve always wanted to do. Write.”

(10) His main problem with digital technology, the Internet, and online publishing is that it becomes ridiculously easy to condense what you have written. “People can just read a few paragraphs and think they know the whole book. But you can’t hold the Internet responsible for people’s laziness.”