Bloom Period

Bloom Period is Donald Whitcomb’s retrospective name for the renewed creative phase in Garp’s writing, a period the novel links to mortality and the attempt on Garp’s life. Its defining tension is between Whitcomb’s biographical explanation—that the attack gave Garp the urgency to write again—and the possibility that Garp himself had simply returned to imaginative invention without consciously connecting it to danger.

Naming the Period

The label belongs to Whitcomb, a young English Department teacher who listened as Garp discussed the beginnings of a novel. Whitcomb would later write a biography of Garp, one that subsequent would-be biographers envied and despised. It was in that later account that he called this creative phase the Bloom Period and interpreted its source.

Mortality and Renewed Writing

Whitcomb attributed the period to Garp’s sense of mortality. In his account, the attempt on Garp’s life by an Ellen Jamesian driving a dirty-white Saab supplied the urgency that made Garp write again. Helen endorsed Whitcomb’s thesis, lending it weight within the family’s understanding of Garp’s return to work.

The explanation is plausible, but the narrative does not present it as a conscious decision by Garp. He had forgotten the Ellen Jamesians and was not watching for another attack. The text allows that some unrecognized urgency may nevertheless have remained with him, preserving a distinction between the cause Whitcomb later assigned to the writing and what Garp himself knew or intended.

The Work of Keeping People Alive

A conversation with Whitcomb gives the period a more intimate formulation. Garp first described novel-writing as an effort to make the dead come alive, then revised the thought: it was more like trying to keep everyone alive forever, including those who must die at the end. He settled on the image of the novelist as a doctor who sees only terminal cases, and Whitcomb was awed enough to write the phrase down.

That account makes mortality more than Whitcomb’s retrospective theory: it is also the subject through which Garp describes the novelist’s task. Fiction cannot prevent death, but it can hold its characters in imaginative life. The period’s name therefore gathers together a renewed act of creation and an awareness of endings, without reducing Garp’s return to writing to a single proven motive.