What author John Irving has learned from Dan Gable and why it could become a movie

John Irving was born in New Hampshire and today lives in Toronto. But Iowa can make a claim on him, as he appears to accept the Iowa Author Award on Tuesday at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines.

Irving knows Iowa intimately and especially what lies at its heart in Iowa City — writing and wrestling. He attended and taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. And he spent a good part of his younger years wrestling and coaching wrestling. He’s been working on a screenplay on his friend, wrestling icon Dan Gable.

Many of his books mention Iowa or were a setting for them, including his newest, “Avenue of Mysteries.” It tells the story of Juan Diego, who spent part of his childhood in a Mexico dump with his sister before being rescued by a man from Iowa. Juan Diego came of age in Iowa City, looking out from his porch on Melrose Avenue at the crowds going to football games at Kinnick Stadium.

Irving, 75, has written 14 novels and achieved a distinction of author fame in America: People who don’t read books know his work.

His novels “The World According to Garp” (1978), which won the National Book Award, “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989) and “The Cider House Rules” (1985) all became critically acclaimed films. He won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Cider House.”

He provided the Register with insight into his connections to Iowa and his work before his appearance in Des Moines, which benefits the Des Moines Library Foundation.

As you know, wrestling is king in Iowa, and you have a fan in an Iowa wrestling icon, Dan Gable. What is it about wrestling that you admire so much and how has it influenced your writing?

Every screenwriter has written more than one unmade movie. Although being a novelist is my day job, I was lucky to have learned how to write a screenplay when I sold the film rights to my first novel and went to work on adapting it with the director Irvin Kershner. He taught me how to write a screenplay. I was bitterly disappointed when that movie was never made; for a while, I wanted nothing more to do with writing screenplays. But I didn’t realize that unmade movies are part of the learning process every screenwriter lives with. I declined to write the screenplays for “The World According to Garp” and “The Hotel New Hampshire,” although both George Roy Hill and Tony Richardson (the directors) asked me. I didn’t want to write a screenplay again until my sixth novel, “The Cider House Rules.” I’ll forever be grateful to Irvin Kershner — my teacher when I was writing the adaptation of “Setting Free the Bears.” By the time I wrote the script for “Cider House,” I knew how.

But the unmade movies pile up. Dan Gable is both a friend and a hero of mine. Most of my heroes aren’t living, but I met Dan at a time in my life when I was really down. Self-pity doesn’t work with Dan. As I’ve heard him say, “Adversity. Here’s what I know — you take it on or it takes you over.” The most recent draft of my screenplay about Dan’s life is from January 2013. Nobody has made the movie. It’s time I wrote a new draft. I haven’t quit. Rewriting is what I do, but it’s a slow process.

There’s more practice time in wrestling than a lifetime of matches. Repetition is what wrestlers do — what you do best, you have to keep redoing. That’s what all the drilling is for — to make difficult moves look easy, to make learned responses look natural. I met Dan in the Iowa wrestling room in 1972, shortly after he won the gold medal in Munich. Even then, you could see how much he loved to practice; he was coaching, but he was still practicing. If I have more stamina for revision than a lot of writers, I give the credit for that to wrestling. Every wrestler understands rewriting — they do it every practice.

Speaking of Iowa, describe your time living here and how it emerges in your fiction, the settings and subjects of your books, including the recent “Avenue of Mysteries?”

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop has been good to me, both when I was a student and when I taught there. Kurt Vonnegut was my teacher, my mentor — later, my friend. I was very fortunate to have Kurt as the first reader of my first novel. This was the 1960s. He had a thing about kindness. “You’ve got to be kind,” he would say. He questioned the kindness of free enterprise. He thought free enterprise was unkind to too many people. “I would like to see America try socialism,” he liked to say. It sounded radical then. Boy, does it make a lot of sense today! We can’t even manage to inject a little kindness into health care.

In "Avenue," an Iowan who is a Jesuit leaves the faith for a transgender prostitute. Long ago, you were writing about transgender characters ("The World According to Garp.") Why were you drawn to writing about sexual minorities, long before it became widely discussed, and still do today?

You point out that I’ve been writing about transgender characters since “The World According to Garp”, and there's “In One Person” (2012) and “Avenue of Mysteries” (2015). What’s with the sexual minorities? Well, I would say that the mistreatment of sexual minorities — the discrimination against them — hasn’t gone away. As long as sexual hatred endures, it will be one of my subjects. The “World According to Garp” was, in part, about the treatment of women as a sexual minority — a mother is murdered by a man who hates women, and her son is killed by a woman who hates him. There was a lot of misogyny in evidence in the last presidential election — it hasn’t gone away. And the U.S. attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has recently reversed a federal government policy that protected transgender workers from discrimination (under a 1964 civil rights law). Sessions has decided that “prohibition on sex discrimination encompasses discrimination between men and women but does not encompass discrimination based on gender identity per se, including transgender status.” Who doesn’t recognize this as sexual bigotry? Are transgender citizens a small enough sexual minority that the attorney general thinks picking on them is fair? Do I repeat myself in my fiction? Yes, I do. Does sexual bigotry persist? Yes, it does.

You have said that you avoid Hemingway’s advice of writing what you know. Why?

I don’t tell other writers how to write. I don’t tell them to do it my way, or that my way is best. When I’m asked about my process as a writer, I try to explain my process in the clearest way I can, but I do not prescribe a method. I often do a lot of research before I write a novel. I like the learning process that precedes many of the novels I’ve written: I like what I have to learn in order to truly imagine myself in someone else’s shoes. What is it like to be a female tattoo artist? What is like to be an OB-GYN in an orphanage—one who also performs abortions, at a time when that procedure is illegal? What would it be like to be a bisexual boy who falls in love with a transgender woman, not knowing she is trans, in the pre-AIDS era? What would it be like to be un niño de la basura — “a child of the rubbish,” a dump kid, one of those children who live and work in the dump (el basurero) in Mexico, at that time when the dump fires were always burning, when you were permitted to burn anything? I use, in my fiction, both personal experience and what I’ve taken the pains to study and learn. And I often alter (even completely change) my personal experience — to the degree that it doesn’t reflect what actually happened to me, but what might have happened to anyone. I make my personal experiences better (or worse) than they were, for the sake of the story. I make a lot of things up — including things “based on” personal experience. Did Sophocles actually kill his father and have children with his mother? Probably not. Did Shakespeare hang out with a lot of kings and queens and other royalty? I don’t imagine he did. But writers who lack imagination — writers who can only write what they’ve “experienced” — are often the first tell us that their way is the only valid way to write: namely, from experience. Why is it that the autofiction school is always telling us we’re not allowed to make things up? I don’t tell them that autobiographical fiction is like riding a dead horse. And I have other complaints about Hemingway. Sentences that are short and uninspired sound like advertising copy. Why write a novel that sounds as if it were written under deadline?

An Iowa mother of a daughter who is dyslexic has asked me to pose this question to you: How has your dyslexia been a gift?

Having a learning disability — in my case, as a student, undiagnosed as such, at that time — made it hard to be a good student. Multitasking was never my friend. Going to school requires a lot of changing of the subjects you are concentrating on. I would ask a friend, “How long did the history take you?” If he said, “An hour,” I knew I needed to give myself three hours. Everything took me more time. Dyslexia is no gift when you’re in school; you just have to work longer hours to compensate for your slowness. But from the moment I began to concentrate on one thing — when I started the M.F.A. program at Iowa, and all I had to do was write my own work — well, then I realized I had learned to concentrate more than most. When I had one subject, I could keep focused forever. I still make mistakes when I transcribe numbers. My wife and children know better than to trust me with dates. I’m always wrong about dates and numbers. I can live with that. Right now, I’m always writing a novel — never more than one at a time — but, simultaneously, there is also always something I’m writing for the screen, for film or television. That’s about all the multitasking I can handle: writing a novel simultaneously with a screenplay or a teleplay I’m working on. I can go back and forth between those two things, pretty smoothly. Right now I’m writing my 15th novel, a ghost story called “Darkness as a Bride” — from those lines in Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure.”

If I must die,

I will encounter darkness as a bride,

And hug it in mine arms.

And I’ve written a teleplay, an adaptation of “The World According to Garp” as a miniseries. There are five episodes — each one is 55 minutes long. We’ll see what comes of it. Maybe nothing. “Avenue of Mysteries” was a screenplay — just a screenplay, not a novel — for twenty years. Then I saw something I could do to make it a novel. And there’s an original screenplay — another unmade movie — waiting for me at the end of “Darkness as a Bride.” I’ve learned that unmade movies aren’t all bad; something can come of them, but you have to be patient. Sometimes it’s useful to put a piece of writing aside, but you can’t quit.

With Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and John Updike dead and Philip Roth retired, The Guardian called you “the last of the great white writers.” How do you respond to that and how do you see your place among contemporary authors?

The category of “the last of the great white writers” is not a category that has any meaning to me — no more than “the great American novel” ever made any sense to me. Who cares how American it is? Just plain great will suffice. Do we really have to drag nationality into literature? Does American writing have to be patriotic? I didn’t have a say in my being “white”; I wasn’t given a choice in the matter. I have imagined lives I haven’t lived, and I’ve done the necessary homework to have imagined those lives truthfully. I’m glad someone at The Guardian likes me, but “the last of the great white writers” sounds like an endangered school of fish. I don’t want to be part of an endangered school of writers. I wouldn’t call Edmund White “the greatest living gay writer.” What I have called Edmund is one of our greatest writers — one of the few today who has written great fiction, great biography, and great memoirs. In the sports world, Edmund would likely be regarded as “a triple threat.” And he happens to be gay.

You have said there is a tendency to live in the past as you grow older, a characteristic of Juan Diego, the Mexican slumdog who becomes a famous novelist and spends considerable time reflecting on his childhood in in “Avenue of Mysteries.” Do you find that true in your life and how do you maintain the passion and energy to keep writing in the present?

As a writer, you don’t have to be — like Juan Diego in “Avenue of Mysteries” — a Mexican slumdog in order be most alive in childhood. As John Irving, I don’t live in my childhood. As I writer, I keep reimagining my childhood — with different mothers and fathers, with different turns in the road, with different formative experiences. I can’t think of a moment in my childhood that was truly “formative.” It is as a fiction writer that I believe in such moments. There’s a chapter in my novel-in-progress, the one I’m writing now — the chapter begins like this.

“Yes, I know — we are who we were. The things that happen to us as children and adolescents, the families we grow up in — they form us.”

Well, that sounds like a sentence from any of my novels, doesn’t it? It is true to the way I like to tell a story, but I don’t believe it is true of me — not personally. As a storyteller, I love childhood and early adolescence. Frankly, not much happened in mine!

As for Juan Diego, I gave him a childhood that none of us could completely recover from. As a writer, the worst-case scenarios are the best kind for me. My job is to imagine the worst things that can happen.

