John Wolf (5208b428)

John Wolf is T. S. Garp’s editor, publisher, and most enduring professional advocate: a careful reader who understands both the demands of literary work and the machinery that makes books succeed. His relationship with Garp is sustained by candor and loyalty, but also strained by commercial compromises, disagreements over the reception of Garp’s novels, and the distance between artistic merit and public fame.

Identity and Editorial Role

Wolf serves as Garp’s publisher and editor across the writer’s career. He reads Garp’s work closely, handles its publication, and acts as an intermediary between the author and a reading public often more interested in Garp’s identity as Jenny Fields’s son than in the novels themselves. Wolf recognizes that this interest can be useful in selling books even when it distorts how they are read.

His editorial judgment is distinct from a simple measure of literary quality. At his publishing house, he is known for predicting which books will become popular; he regards popularity as a separate question from whether a book is good or likable. That commercial acuity allows him to anticipate the fortunes of Garp’s later work, but it also places him in the position of engineering a public response that Garp may resent.

Early Publications and Critical Reception

When Garp’s first novel, Procrastination, receives attention, reviewers praise its historical research, originality, and unusual scope for a young novelist. Wolf had agreed with Garp not to mention on the jacket that the book was the first novel by Jenny Fields’s son, yet reviewers repeatedly foreground Garp’s relationship to his famous mother. Garp is angered that discussion of his identity overwhelms assessment of the work; Wolf explains that many readers are simply more interested in who the author is.

The next novel, Second Wind of the Cuckold, gives Wolf a more difficult editorial challenge. The book, about two married couples having an affair, confuses readers and reviewers and sells a few thousand fewer copies than Procrastination. Wolf reassures Garp that second novels often perform less well, but Garp experiences the result as his first failure. Wolf also shields him from a particularly hostile review until he fears Garp will encounter it by chance, then sends the clipping with a note explaining that he has heard the reviewer suffered a hormone imbalance. The review attacks Garp’s talent, his parentage, and the novel’s treatment of sex; even Helen does not like the book. Wolf’s effort to protect Garp does not prevent the criticism from deepening the author’s frustration.

Supporting Garp Through a Writing Crisis

After the reception of Second Wind of the Cuckold, Garp does not write for more than a year, then writes for another year and discards what he has produced. He sends Wolf long, difficult letters accusing him of failing to promote the novel adequately. Wolf replies that the book had been widely disliked and asks how it could have been pushed harder. The exchange shows how professional loyalty does not erase their disagreement: Garp interprets the book’s failure as a failure of support, while Wolf sees its reception as a practical limit on what promotion could accomplish.

Wolf also tries to steady Garp’s family during this period. Sensing that Helen is weary of Garp’s restlessness, he tells her that the third novel will be the important one and urges her to give Garp time. Garp angrily rejects the confidence as an editorial myth, pointing out that his third novel does not yet exist and that his second seems to have disappeared from consequence. Wolf’s encouragement nevertheless reflects his continuing belief in Garp’s prospects, even when Garp cannot share it.

Their working relationship continues through ordinary correspondence as well as major editorial decisions. Wolf struggles to answer Garp’s many letters, and the family’s mail includes the books Garp sends Helen to review. When Garp is occupied with other matters, he also writes letters trying to persuade people who have sent Jenny hostile mail to reconsider their hatred. Wolf remains the professional at the other end of Garp’s often intense written exchanges.

The World According to Bensenhaver and Its Success

When Wolf receives the opening chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver, he objects that it is already too much and questions how Garp can continue. Garp insists that the work continues. Wolf urges him to put it aside and take a trip, in part because he is concerned for Garp and Helen, but Garp does not abandon the project.

Wolf’s attempts to find an audience for the novel reveal how far its reception may diverge from Garp’s intentions. After trying other magazines, he arranges for its first chapter to appear in Crotch Shots, a publication whose surrounding material makes the story’s rape and revenge appear sensationalized. Wolf tells Garp this is the bottom of the list of possible outlets and the way the story has been interpreted. Garp objects that this is not what the book is about, and later worries whether anyone who bought the magazine read the story at all.

Wolf is privately skeptical of the finished novel. He fears its visceral language and intense characters may not lift it beyond the structure of a soap opera, and concludes that, despite the force of its prose, it is an X-rated soap opera. Yet he also understands how to position the book for readers. He takes over the jacket copy after judging Garp’s own description too ponderous and glum. The resulting jacket presents a man so afraid of harm coming to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere in which the feared events become more likely. Wolf’s framing turns the novel’s central pattern of anxiety into a concise selling point.

He also uses Garp’s biography to attract readers, invoking his status as Jenny Fields’s only child and the loss of his young son. Wolf knows that such personal associations interest readers with limited imaginations, even though they are largely irrelevant to the novel’s artistic achievement. He writes to Garp that the book is not his best but will be his biggest, warns that Garp may hate many of the reasons for its success, and advises him to leave the country and read only the reviews Wolf sends. The prediction proves sound: The World According to Bensenhaver sells widely, remains controversial for years, and is taught in colleges. Reviews also help establish the mistaken or oversimplified reputation of the book as a feminist novel. Garp is fortunate not to see an advertisement that exploits Jenny’s assassination, an approach Wolf himself later regrets.

Later Work, Death, and Editorial Legacy

Wolf remains involved in Garp’s work beyond the commercial triumph of The World According to Bensenhaver. When Garp proposes a father-and-son edition of The Pension Grillparzer, illustrated by Duncan, he argues that the story deserves a book of its own and that Duncan’s drawings are lovely. Wolf recognizes the publishing idea, though he judges the drawings fresh and unpretentious rather than accomplished; they are made by a boy not yet thirteen. He applies the Jillsy Sloper Test, and the story and illustrations pass with high praise, despite her reservations about some of Garp’s vocabulary. Wolf later regards the father-and-son edition as the publication he is proudest to have brought into the world.

Wolf also works on Garp’s unfinished My Father’s Illusions. For years he edits the messy first draft and consults Helen and Donald Whitcomb about the manuscript’s merits and faults. He sees the novel as Garp’s road back to his proper way of writing, while Helen believes Garp would not release a work he did not consider finished. Wolf dies before Helen; Whitcomb and Duncan eventually publish the manuscript posthumously.

Wolf’s own death comes from lung cancer in New York. He had been a careful, conscientious, attentive, and elegant professional, but spent much of his life smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, a habit described as a means of disguising deep restlessness and pessimism. Duncan spends substantial time with him during his final illness, when Wolf is in a private hospital and sometimes smokes through a plastic tube inserted in his throat.

After Wolf’s death, his associates publish Whitcomb’s official biography of Garp, Lunacy and Sorrow: The Life and Art of T. S. Garp. Wolf had contributed substantially to the book’s careful preparation and edited most of the manuscript. His career thus ends with the same commitment to editorial attention that marked his work with Garp: preserving, shaping, and bringing a writer’s work to readers, even when the public’s reasons for reading it are not the reasons its editor values it.