The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving Page B

wrestling room—to a great number and variety of wrestling rooms—and I forgot about everything for two hours. Fortunately for me, this meant I hurried my writing for no one. And I could turn a deaf ear to that contact with the university community which I know is truly odious and intolerable to many writers. The point being: writers
usually
need to support themselves by means other than that writing which they most desire to do. And the economics of being a writer aren’t getting any better—except for the lucky few, like me.

My First Novel
    In 1968 I was paid an advance of $7,500 for my first novel, which Random House published in 1969. Joe Fox was my editor. Still at Random House, and still my in-house editor there, Mr. Fox told me that the average advance for a literary first novel today—“with expectations similar to the expectations that I had for
Setting Free the Bears”
—is $12,500. (Richard Seaver, my editor at Arcade, disputes Mr. Fox’s figures; Mr. Seaver argues that the more common figure today is
still
$7,500.)
    In 1968, with a wife and one child, I could
almost
have lived for a year on $7,500, but the pressures this would have put on me to too-hastily produce a second novel were unwelcome. I kept my teaching and coaching jobs, and I wrote my second novel—and my third and fourth—at a restrained pace.
    Trust me: it was more possible for a family of three to live on $7,500 in 1968 than it is even imaginable for a family of three to survive on $12,500 today—for the moment assuming that Joe Fox’s higher figure for an “average advance” is correct. And what did
Setting Free the Bears
actually sell? About 8,000 hardcover copies—a good number for that time, far exceeding both my publisher’s and my own expectations. A first printing of a novel of a similar kind, today, would run between 7,500 and 10,000 copies—with the notable difference that,
today
, a sale of 8,000 copies would make neither the publisher nor the author feel at all as secure as Joe Fox and I were made to feel in 1969.
    (I never expected, not quite 10 years later, that
The World According to Garp
would enable me to support myself by my writing alone. I don’t miss teaching Creative Writing—it was hard and time-consuming work. But it was honorable, worthwhile work, and of use to my students—if only to a few of them.)
    In a separate conversation I asked Mr. Fox if he would publish
Setting Free the Bears
if it came across his desk at Random House today. My friend Joe hesitated, just a moment too long, before saying, “Well, yes,
but
. . .” I think the answer is no.

My Two Champions
    I taught Creative Writing, at one place or another, for a total of 11 years; yet I continued to coach wrestling long after the publication of
The World According to Garp
freed me of the financial need for an outside job. I coached until 1989, when I was 47, not only because I preferred coaching to teaching but for a variety of other reasons; the foremost reason was the success of my two elder sons in the sport—they were better wrestlers (and better athletes) than I had been, and coaching them meant more to me than my own modest accomplishments as a competitor.
    Colin, who wrestled at Northfield Mount Hermon, was a prep-school All-American at 152 pounds—at the annual Lehigh tournament in 1983. Colin also won the New England Class A title at l60 pounds in ‘83; ironically, he pinned a guy from Exeter in the finals. Colin was voted the Outstanding Wrestler in the Class A tournament, for which he received the Ted Seabrooke Memorial trophy. I would have been happier if Ted had been alive to see Colin win the championship. Ted had seen Colin wrestle only once, when Colin was just starting the sport.
    â€œHe’s got much longer arms than
you
ever had,” Coach Seabrooke told me. “You ought to show him a crossface-cradle.” By the time Colin was a