The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving

Author:John Irving [Irving, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62872-412-7
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-12-04T23:00:00+00:00

The Gold Medalist

In Iowa—I was a student at the Writers’ Workshop from 1965 until 1967—Vance Bourjaily befriended me, but Vance was not my principal teacher. For a brief moment I tried working with Nelson Algren, who—except for the unnamed Instructor C- from my unsuccessful days in Pittsburgh—represented my first encounter with a critic of an unconstructive nature. I was attracted to Mr. Algren’s rough charm, but he didn’t much care for me or my writing. I was “too fancy” a writer for his taste, he told me; and, worse (I suspect), I was not a city boy who’d been schooled on the mean streets. I was a small-town boy and a private-school brat; I was even more privileged than Algren knew—I was a “faculty brat.” The best tutor for a young writer, in Mr. Algren’s clearly expressed view, was real life, by which I think he meant an urban life. In any case, my life had not been “real” enough to suit him; and it troubled him that I was a wrestler, not a boxer—the latter was superior to the former, in Mr. A.’s opinion. He was always good-natured in his teasing of me, but there was a detectable disdain behind his humor. And I was not a poker player, which I think further revealed to Algren the shallowness of my courage.

My friend the poet Donald Justice (a very good poker player, I’m told) once confided to me that Mr. Algren lost a lot of money in Iowa City—coming down from Chicago, as he did, and expecting to find the town full of rubes. He took me for a rube—and certainly I was—but he caused me no lasting wounds. Creative Writing, if honest at all, must be an occasionally unwelcoming experience. I appreciated Mr. Algren’s honesty; his abrasiveness couldn’t keep me from liking him.

I would not see Nelson Algren again until shortly before his death, when he moved to Sag Harbor and Kurt Vonnegut brought him to my house in Sagaponack for dinner. Again I liked him, and again he teased me; he was good at it. This time he claimed not to remember me from our Iowa days, although I went out of my way to remind him of our conversations; admittedly, since they had been few and brief, it’s possible that Algren didn’t remember me. But in saying goodnight he pretended to confuse me with Clifford Irving, the perpetrator of that notorious Howard Hughes hoax; he appreciated a good scam, Mr. Algren said. And when Vonnegut explained to him that I was not that Irving, Algren winked at me—he was still teasing me. (You shouldn’t take a Creative Writing course, much less entertain the notion of becoming a writer, if you can’t take a little teasing—or even a lot.)

But, thankfully, there were other teachers at Iowa. I was tempted to study with José Donoso, for I admired his writing and found him gracious—in every way that Nelson Algren was not. Then, upon first sight, I developed a schoolboy’s unspoken crush on Mr.

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