Political procrastination

Political procrastination in T. S. Garp’s first novel, Procrastination, is not merely a habit of putting things off: it is the perilous wait for certainty while events take shape, followed by action that may come too late to matter. Set in Vienna from 1938 through the war and Russian occupation, the novel follows a young anarchist whose delayed resistance and his mother’s later, futile gesture make political inaction a pattern repeated across generations. Its ending sharply contrasts imagined liberation with the failure of a real revolt.

The Principle of Delay

Garp joked that he named his first novel Procrastination because it had taken him so long to write, although he had worked on it steadily and carefully and was rarely a procrastinator. The joke separates the writer’s deliberate labor from the political failure at the novel’s center: delay is not simply slowness, but a decision to wait when the opportunity to act may be disappearing.

The young anarchist waits after the Anschluss, hoping to strike the Nazis at exactly the right moment. He waits too long. The novel locates the missed opportunity earlier, before the Nazi takeover, but also shows why he fails to recognize it: he is young, and cannot be sure what is happening. His hesitation is therefore both personal and historical. The search for a moment of certainty becomes a reason for not acting before events have made resistance more desperate and less effective.

The Anarchist and the Zoo

During the war, the anarchist works as a zookeeper at Schönbrunn Zoo. As Vienna’s population begins to starve, midnight raids on the zoo become a regular source of stolen food. He eventually decides to release the remaining animals, which have had no part in the country’s political acquiescence. But by the time he acts, the animals are starving too; after he frees them, they eat him. The city’s hungry population then kills the animals for food as Russian forces approach.

The sequence gives political delay a brutal chain of consequences. The anarchist’s intended liberation cannot undo the conditions produced by years of inaction: the animals are already weakened, and the starving crowd turns their release into another struggle for survival. Garp’s novel calls each outcome “only natural,” making the phrase register not as approval but as the grim logic of a catastrophe allowed to develop. The animals’ innocence does not save them, and a late attempt to free them does not restore their freedom.

The Mother’s Repeated Attempt

The anarchist’s mother survives and remains in the Russian zone of occupation. Garp gives her the same apartment he and his mother shared on Schwindgasse. A widow who had cherished her private life and hoarded her husband’s money, she had been unconcerned with politics before the Nazi rise. The repeated abuses she witnesses under Soviet occupation, especially rape, wear down her tolerance. Seeing Vienna return to moderation and complacency, she remembers her own earlier inertia with regret.

After the Russians leave in 1956, the old woman mourns both her son and her damaged country. She visits the partially rebuilt, healthy Schönbrunn Zoo every weekend, recalling her secret visits to her son there during the war. The Hungarian Revolution brings hundreds of thousands of new refugees into Vienna and prompts her to act. Hoping to awaken a city that might again sit back and watch events unfold, she releases the zoo animals, repeating her son’s gesture in changed circumstances.

This second release exposes how little an act can accomplish when it no longer meets the moment it seeks to change. The animals are well fed and content; only a few leave their cages, and those that do are confined in the zoo’s paths and gardens and returned unharmed. An elderly bear suffers diarrhea, but the gesture produces no meaningful liberation. The mother’s intention is serious, yet the action is described as completely unrealized: history does not repeat itself in a form that can be corrected by simply repeating the earlier act.

Failure, Imagination, and Reception

The old woman is arrested, and an examining police doctor discovers that she has cancer: she is a terminal case. In an ironic reversal, the money she had hoarded finally provides a material benefit, allowing her to die in luxury at Vienna’s only private hospital, the Rudolfinerhaus. Her death dream imagines that two young Asiatic black bears escape, survive, and multiply until they become famous as a new species in the Danube valley. That imagined success offers a counter-image to the failed release, but it remains a dream rather than an outcome in the world of the novel.

After the old woman’s death, the book returns to the actual zoo and reports that the bear with diarrhea has died. A reviewer’s verdict, “So much for revolution in modern times,” turns this small, bleak ending into a comment on the distance between revolutionary intention and effective change. The novel’s political argument does not depend on a triumphant uprising; it rests on the contrast between the anarchist’s delayed resistance, his mother’s belated reenactment, and the bear’s death after a release that changes nothing.

The reception of Procrastination also revealed a different kind of delay: reviewers often placed Garp’s identity ahead of the work itself. They praised the accuracy of the historical research, its originality, and its unusual scope for a young writer’s first novel. Yet John Wolf had agreed with Garp not to advertise on the jacket that he was the son of the feminist heroine Jenny Fields, and reviewers nevertheless repeatedly emphasized that connection. Their interest in Garp’s relation to his mother frustrated his wish for the novel to be judged on its own merits. One critic, meanwhile, noticed the continuing presence of bears in his work. The novel’s political concern with belated action thus appeared alongside a dispute over whether readers would attend to the writing or keep returning to the writer’s public identity.