Benny Potter

Benny Potter is a former classmate of T. S. Garp at Steering School, remembered both as a born wise-ass and as the first person to tell Garp that Mr. Tinch had died. Potter’s jokes make him a source of classroom disruption, but his later encounter with Garp exposes the limits of their old antagonism: when Potter turns Tinch’s death into another punch line, Garp answers not with a debate but with physical intimidation.

Identity and Background

Potter is described as a born wise-ass, a reputation that Garp himself acknowledges even while disapproving of him. In the classroom, Garp uses a hard stare to silence Potter’s grin and prevent him from interrupting a moment involving Tinch. The gesture establishes their rivalry early: Potter is quick to turn a situation into comedy, while Garp is prepared to make the joke stop by force.

Potter’s later work is for a magazine in New York. Garp regards him with contempt, a view sharpened by his low opinion of magazines and his belief that Potter envies his more substantial output as a writer. Garp’s judgment is not simply that Potter writes badly or lacks ambition. He imagines Potter as someone with a dozen novels hidden in his drawers who would never dare show them to anyone. The accusation gives their antagonism a personal edge: Potter’s apparent wisecracking and Garp’s suspicion of concealed literary ambition sit beside Garp’s own reluctance, during his school years, to show his writing widely.

The Classroom and Mr. Tinch

Potter is present in a formative classroom exchange between Garp and Tinch. After Garp remarks that good and bad are matters of opinion, Tinch asks whether that is Garp’s opinion. Garp replies by praising Tinch’s breath as the best of any teacher at the school, a compliment delivered without batting an eye. Across the room, he looks directly at Potter and stares the grin from his face, making clear that Potter is not to laugh or speak.

Tinch thanks Garp, who has won the writing prize despite the note attached to his last paper. That note reveals the double meaning of Tinch’s thanks: he had lied in class because he did not want the other students to laugh at Garp, while privately acknowledging that Garp’s breath was genuinely bad. Potter’s suppressed grin thus belongs to a moment in which humor, embarrassment, and protection are entangled. Garp’s threat keeps the class from making sport of Tinch, and Tinch’s note preserves the joke without allowing the classroom to turn it against Garp.

Telling Garp of Tinch’s Death

Years after graduation, Garp continues to watch for news of Tinch, worried that the teacher might be terminally ill because of his bad breath. Tinch eventually dies for a wholly different reason. After a faculty party on a winter night, he slips on an icy path in the Steering quadrangle, knocks himself unconscious, and is not found by the night watchman until almost dawn. By then, he has frozen to death.

Potter is the first to bring the news to Garp. The meeting occurs in New York, where Potter works for a magazine. They are in the bar of a nice hotel somewhere between Park Avenue and Third Avenue; Garp has come to meet someone else for lunch, and Potter has brought him there. Garp never knows where he is when he is in New York, a detail that leaves the setting socially polished but imprecise, in contrast with the stark specificity of what Potter tells him.

Potter opens by asking whether Garp has heard, then calls Tinch Old Stench and says that he froze to death. When Garp asks what he said, Potter repeats the nickname and recounts the fall: Tinch had been drunk, had wobbled home through the quadrangle, cracked his head, and failed to wake in the morning. Garp has never liked the nickname. Potter’s blunt account therefore lands not as neutral news but as a deliberate return to the kind of mockery Garp had once prevented in the classroom.

Conflict and Narrative Role

Potter adds one last insult, suggesting that Tinch’s furnace-like mouth ought to have kept him warm. The joke connects the teacher’s death by freezing with the very breath that had furnished the earlier classroom exchange. What had once been an awkward private truth—Tinch’s bad breath—becomes, in Potter’s telling, material for a cruel public punch line. Garp’s anger registers how much the old joke has changed in meaning now that Tinch is dead.

Garp calls Potter an asshole, picks him up by the armpits, and sits him on the bar. He then calls him a little gnat. Potter answers that Garp never liked him, to which the narrative has already supplied ample evidence: Garp distrusted him as a wise-ass, resented what he took to be envy, and had once needed to stare down his grin. The physical act makes the conflict unmistakable, but the scene also recalls Garp’s earlier defense of Tinch. Potter has not merely delivered unwelcome news; by making Tinch’s death another occasion for ridicule, he has repeated the behavior Garp had once checked in the classroom.

Potter’s part in the story is brief but pointed. He links Garp’s school years to his later life as a writer, first through the classroom writing prize and later through the contrast Garp draws between his own literary output and Potter’s supposed hidden novels. More decisively, he carries Tinch’s death to Garp in a form that reopens an old moral distinction: wit can expose the absurdity of a situation, but Potter’s joke makes a dead teacher the target, and Garp’s response turns remembered hostility into an immediate physical confrontation.