The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving

surprised,” Vonnegut told me. “I think capitalism is going to treat you okay.”

The Ph.D. Vote
    My first teaching job was at Windham College (now defunct) in Putney, Vermont. Windham was one of those colleges that prospered, briefly, during the time of the Vietnam War; it was richly populated with students who wouldn’t have been students if they hadn’t been trying to stay out of Vietnam, but some of these nonstudents were the best Creative Writing students I ever had—and one real student among them was my future business manager, Willard Saperston. When the war was over, Windham folded, but by then I had already resigned.
    There was no wrestling team at Windham when I came there. I prevailed upon the college to buy a wrestling mat, which I installed in a former storage room of the fieldhouse, where I coached wrestling as a so-called club sport. About a half-dozen former high-school wrestlers, including a couple of Vietnam vets, were the core of the club; compared to every wrestling room I had ever worked out in, it was unsatisfactory, but I had my workout partners—I couldn’t complain.
    When the college went belly-up and auctioned all of its portable holdings, I went to the auction with the hope that I could buy the wrestling mat. But the mat was sold to a college down South as part of a package of athletic equipment—the whirlpool baths from the training room, and three sets of Universal Gyms, and all the free weights from the weight room. I don’t think the buyer even wanted the mat—the college down South didn’t offer wrestling as a sport—but I was unable to extricate the mat from the overall package.
    Notwithstanding Windham’s collapse, Putney was a good home for my children, and my primary residence for the 18 years of my first marriage; my ex-wife, Shyla, still lives there. The same Windham student who would become my business manager was also handy as a carpenter; on my Putney property, Willard Saperston converted a tool shed—one of the small outbuildings beside the barn—into an office for me. I would write the better part of five novels in that tiny box of a building, which Shyla has now restored to what it originally was: a tool shed. As I’ve said, Willard Saperston, who created my first office, now “manages” my money. (I sense a kind of symmetry to this story, not unlike my old friend Don Hendrie dying within sight of the inn where he had his wedding reception and the house where I was born.)
    And despite Windham’s relatively short life, I would keep coming back to Putney. I went away for a year, to Vienna—where my second son, Brendan, was born in 1969—and I was three years away from Putney when I returned to Iowa to teach at the Workshop; there was another year away, when I first taught at Mount Holyoke; and another, when I taught at Brandeis. But in between those times away, I was in Putney, writing in the tool shed.
    For the writing of my first four novels
(The World According to Garp
was my fourth) I usually had a full-time job—the two exceptions being an award from the Rockefeller Foundation (they don’t give grants to individual writers anymore) and a Guggenheim Fellowship. I had only two years of being a full-time writer between 1967 and 1978; yet, in those 11 years, I wrote and published four novels.
    There was one other year when I didn’t teach Creative Writing or coach wrestling: that was when I took time off to write a screenplay of my first novel,
Setting Free the Bears.
In that year, I was never once paid at the agreed-upon time—I sent desperate telegrams from Vienna to Los Angeles, begging for the next installment of my screenwriting fee. Worse, I had no time for my day job, which was to write a second novel; and the screenplay, after five drafts, was never made into a film. The point being: this was less of a
writing
year than any year in which I taught and coached full-time.
    A