John Irving at Iowa

I first met him in the fall of 1972. I was one month free of the army in Arizona, the government having decided there was an overabundance of lieutenants and that letting me head off to graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop would be just fine. I had been accepted into the MFA program in 1970, an acceptance continued into 1972 as I fulfilled my military obligation, and I used the final months of my tour of duty to diligently read novels by the workshop fiction faculty: Jack Leggett’s Wilder Stone, Gail Godwin’s The Perfectionists, Vance Bourjaily’s Brill Among the Ruins, and John Irving’s comic and dark historical novel, Setting Free the Bears, set in Vienna.

The book was the first example of the fictional method that would characterize John Irving’s work, with its undercurrent of what he called “lunacy and sorrow.” In Setting Free the Bears, Hannes Graff and his crazy friend Siggy Javotnik are on a helter-skelter motorcycle adventure across Europe that ends with the nighttime liberation of animals from the Schönbrunn Zoo. I was stunned by the novel’s storytelling craft, and I sought to meet its author.

That happened at the start of the University of Iowa academic year, when first- and second-year grad students assembled in the afternoon in a classroom facing Vance, Gail, and Jack, a former Houghton-Mifflin book editor and now director of the Workshop, who greeted us in his customary suave, ironic, and East Coast way. They were the first fiction writers I’d ever encountered. And suddenly, a few minutes late, John was there, a handsome, very fit five-foot-seven, hurriedly striding into the meeting room in the first Adidas running shoes I’d ever seen, plus slim blue jeans and a rough white shirt that could have belonged to a Spanish troubadour or a sixteenth-century pirate. Slung over his shoulder was a large canvas tote bag that probably carried books and his workout clothes.