Read Online The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving - Free Book Online Page A

kickstand, which for reasons peculiar to Eric was never replaced; the Horex was always falling down. My motorcycle was second-best among our three: a Yugoslavian Jawa—or maybe it was Czech? And David drove a terrible Triumph; it was always dying on him—it preferred stranding him on the autobahn to other places.
    Anyway, for no good reason—except that I had gotten away
(far
away) from New Hampshire—I started to write. I had Ted Seabrooke and John Yount to thank for the move.
    It was also John Yount who encouraged me to stay in Europe, at a later time (that same year) when I was homesick; I was missing, among other things, both wrestling and a girlfriend who would become my first wife. I had met Shyla Leary in Cambridge in the summer of ‘63, just before I left for Vienna—I was taking a crash course in German at Harvard summer school. It seems idiotic, but I think it’s fairly common that we meet people of importance to us just before we are going away somewhere. Within a year, in the summer of ‘64, I would marry her—in Greece.
    â€œStay in Europe for a while,” Mr. Yount wrote to me. “Melancholy is good for the soul.”
    Surely this was good and true advice, and beyond the call of duty of Creative Writing teachers. I see now that John Yount was, if not my first mentor, the first
writer
I was conscious of as a mentor; he made a world of difference to me—largely by impressing upon me that anything I did except writing would be unsatisfying. Even so, I didn’t take his advice—I didn’t stay in Europe.
    I had tried another language, and I was uncomfortable with it; English was my
only
language, and—as a writer—I wanted it to be the language I lived with. Besides, Shyla and I had returned to Vienna from Greece—and she was already pregnant with Colin. I wanted to be a father, but only in my own country.

No Vietnam; No More Motorcyles
    When I came back to the States, and to the University of New Hampshire, it was another writer who took me under his wing. Thomas Williams was much more to me than a teacher; his wife, Liz, would be the godmother of my first child, and Mr. Williams remained, until his death, my sternest and most passionate critic. Tom had a lifelong quarrel with my fondness for imitation—specifically, for imitating the narrative voices of many 19th-century novelists. He would not infrequently write in the margins of my manuscripts: “Who are you imitating now?” But his affection for me was genuine, as was mine for him; and his loyalty to me, when other critics would attack me, was steadfast. Tom Williams was a good friend, and it was on the strength of his reputation and his recommendation that I was given a teaching-writing fellowship to attend the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. (Already married as an undergraduate, and with one child, I could not have afforded Iowa without the fellowship.) And it was Tom’s agent who sold my first short story to
Redbook
for a whopping, at the time, $1,000. This sale occurred before I graduated from the University of New Hampshire, which caused me to be cordially loathed by my fellow students. But I was on my way to Iowa—what did I care?
    That year in New Hampshire (my last) was a watershed for me. Not only did I become a published writer and a father, but the birth of my son Colin would change my draft status to 3A—“married with child”—which would forever isolate me from the dilemma facing my generation of American males; I would never have to make up my mind about Vietnam, because I couldn’t be drafted. If Colin kept me out of Vietnam, the combination of being married and a father,
and
my return to the world of wrestling, kept me from experimenting with the most seductive hallmarks of my ‘60s generation: sex and drugs. I was a husband and a daddy and a jock—and, only recently, a writer.
    I had just turned 23 when Colin