Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA

John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Episode Summary

In an early draft of one of Irving’s most beloved novels, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving’s reading makes Owen Meany come alive in a way that his reader may never have experienced before. Whether a long-time fan of Irving or Owen Meany or new to the novel, this reading captures why Irving is such an entertaining reader but also such a vital and natural storyteller. Irving’s reading was recorded in 1986 as part of Toronto’s International Readings at Harbourfront Series (now called TIFA) and is used with the kind permission of John Irving and the Turnbull Agency. It’s also made possible with the permission of Toronto International Festival of Authors.

Episode Notes

Works by John Irving

A Prayer for Owen Meany

The World According to Garp (book in various formats)

The World According to Gary (1982 film starring Robin Williams, Glenn Close and John Lithgow)

Avenue of Mysteries

The Cider House Rules

Last Night in Twisted River


Other Related Books or Materials

13 Facts about A Prayer for Owen Meany (link opens an article from Mental Floss from Apr 2015)

John Irving in 1990 (link opens TPL Special Collections page of the Toronto Star Archives featuring a 1990 photo of Irving by Doug Griffin)

Episode 162: A Prayer for Owen Meany (link opens a podcast episode by Overdue Podcast)

John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany (link opens a podcast episode by BBC Radio 4 Bookclub)

 

About the Host

Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.

Music is by Yuka

 

From the Archives

Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

Episode Transcription

Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA
Season 1, Episode 18
John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany

RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, produced by the Toronto Public Library. I'm Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, John Irving reads from a work-in-progress, at perfect pitch ....

John Irving: What could Mrs. Walker teach us about the Bible if she was stupid enough to think that Owen Meany had put himself up in the air. Owen was always dignified about it. He never said, "THEY DID IT, THEY ALWAYS DO IT. THEY PICK ME UP AND LOSE MY MONEY AND MESS UP MY CARDS AND THEY NEVER PUT ME DOWN WHEN I ASK THEM TO. WHAT DO YOU THINK, I FLEW UP HERE?"

RANDY: This is the eighteenth episode of this podcast series. Part of what makes each episode engaging is getting to hear how, when a writer comes off the page, the audience responds. Often this is with laughter, with sudden silence, with murmurs of emotion or surprise or understanding, and of course, consistently enough, with applause. And even if I don’t know how many more episodes this series will feature, I am willing to wager, right now, that none will begin with applause that goes on as long or rapturously as this one. This should tell you something about John Irving’s standing in the literary and wider worlds, in the middle of the 1980s. Of course, to this day he remains one of the most prominent and popular novelists in the world, but in a period extending from the late nineteen-seventies to the late nineteen eighties, Irving published four big, brawny, brilliantly funny and moving novels in close succession — The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Doing so put him on the cover of national magazines and in cameo roles in movie adaptations — fittingly, given his longstanding association with the sport, as the referee of a school wrestling match featuring Robin Williams as Garp. At base, Irving engaged and excited readers at a scale and scope very few living writers could match, then or now. As to how he did it, Irving more or less explained it himself once, in an admiring remembrance of the late Robertson Davies, published in Maclean’s magazine in 1995. Davies was a novelist that Irving considered — like Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and behind them, Charles Dickens — exemplary and inspiring. These writers collectively were interested in human life on a big scale paced to the beating of the human heart, as is John Irving. As for how Irving thought Davies did this so very well, listen to the following, and then, see if you agree that this same sense applies very much to Irving’s own work, including the sneak peak at A Prayer for Owen Meany that you're about to hear. This is Irving on Davies: “He expected the novel to perform for an audience—to be simultaneously entertaining and instructive; to be intellectually stimulating and emotionally cathartic. Like Dickens, he managed to mix social realism with those elements of storytelling that are basically magical: his portraits of society were lifelike, his caricatures wickedly accurate, but the source of his imagination was closer to myths and fairy tales and ghost stories than to the slice-of-life boredom of newspapers. Like Dickens, he viewed humanity with critical affection and with documentary authenticity; yet, also like Dickens, he was a mischiefmaker and a fantasist.” Finally, if, like me, you’ve already read A Prayer for Owen Meany, perhaps – again, like me – more than once, you may have wondered what Owen Meany sounds like, in light of how Irving presents his dialogue on the page. You’re about to find out, as part of a more broadly pitch-perfect reading by John Irving.

___

GREG GATENBY (GG): Those of you who were at John Irving's last reading at Harbourfront in Toronto a few years ago may know that I seemed to go on inordinately long with my introduction. It was because just before I went on stage, John said, "Well, I'm just going to run down to the loo and I'll be back in a sec," and he was going to stand right over here, and in fact, it was at the other end of the building, but he'd be in the wings and I'd see him and then I could introduce him.

GG: It turned out he was stuck in the cubicle. The door wouldn't open for some reason, so he says, and 20 minutes of introduction is really hard to take when you're waiting for John Irving. You'll be pleased to know that we didn't let him go to the bathroom. I also want to mention of the autograph earlier actually reminds me that we have had John working all afternoon to sign copies of The Cider House Rules and they're on sale over here, the book table set up by the good people from Pages. So we do urge you after the reading to pick up your copy of the autographed Cider House Rules, and please welcome its author now, John Irving.

[applause]

JOHN IRVING (JI): Thank you. It's not true about the cubicle. It's partially true. It's my habit to read from a novel in progress only from those pages that are newest to me. And sometimes you are the beneficiary of this dubious wisdom and other times you must suffer.

JI: It just so happens that I'm about 175-180 pages into this novel and I've just finished the beginning of chapter 4, and so that's what I'm going to read. It's going to be necessary that you hear a little prologue, therefore, because you won't know, understandably, what's going on. Doing you a great favour, I will read the first couple of pages at the beginning of the book, so that you have some sense of, which I think everyone ought to have, of how a book begins. I'm not going to read more than four pages because I'm very familiar myself with how this book begins and I don't need to remind myself about it anymore, but I think it's the only way that you're ever going to understand.

JI: I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice, not because of his voice or because he was the smallest person I ever knew or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, with Christ, certainly not for Christ, as I've heard some zealots claim. I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament. I've not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church.

JI: I'm a pretty regular church-goer, a congregationalist. I was baptized in the congregational church, and after some years of fraternity with Episcopalians I've returned to the Congregationalists with renewed conviction, but I skip a Sunday worship now and then. I make no claims to be especially pious. I have a church rummage faith, the kind that needs patching up every weekend. But what faith I have, I owe to Owen Meany, a boy I grew up with. It is Owen Meany who made me a believer.

JI: In Sunday school, we developed a form of entertainment based on abusing Owen Meany, who was so small that not only did his feet not touch the floor when he sat in his chair, his knees did not extend to the edge of his seat. Therefore, his legs stuck out straight, like the legs of a doll. It was as if Owen Meany had been born without realistic joints. He was so tiny we loved to pick him up; in fact, we couldn't resist picking him up, we thought it was a miracle how little he weighed. This was also incongruous because Owen came from a family in the granite business. The Meany granite quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was heavy and dangerous-looking. Granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock, but the only aura of the granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes whenever we lifted him up.

JI: He was the color of a grave stone, light seemed to be both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times, especially at his temples, where his little blue veins showed through his skin as though in addition to his extraordinary size there was other evidence that he was born too soon.

JI: His vocal cords had not developed fully, or else his voice had been injured by the rock dust of his family's business. Maybe he had larynx damage or destroyed trachea; perhaps he'd been hit in a throat by a chunk of granite. To be heard at all, Owen had to shout through his nose.

JI: Yet he was dear to us, a little doll, the girls called him while he squirmed to get away from them and from all of us. I don't remember how our game of lifting Owen began. This was Christ Church, the Episcopal church of Gravesend, New Hampshire. Our Sunday school teacher was a strained, unhappy-looking woman named Mrs. Walker. We thought this name suited her because her method of teaching involved a lot of walking out of class. Mrs. Walker would read us an instructive passage from the Bible. She would then ask us to think seriously about what we'd heard. "Silently and seriously, that's how I want you to think," she would say. "I'm going to leave you alone with your thoughts now," she would tell us, ominously, as if our thoughts were capable of driving us over the edge. "I want you to think very hard," Mrs. Walker would say, and then she'd walk out on us.

JI: I think she was a smoker and she couldn't allow herself to smoke in front of us. "When I come back," she'd say, "We'll talk about it." By the time she came back, of course, we'd forgotten everything about whatever it was, because as soon as she left the room, we would fool around with a frenzy. Being alone with our thoughts was no fun. As soon as Mrs. Walker left the room, we would pick up Owen Meany and pass them back and forth over head. We managed this while remaining seated in our chairs. That was the challenge of the game. Someone, I forget who started it, someone would get up, seize Owen, sit back down with him, pass him to the next person, who would pass him on and so forth.

JI: The girls were included in this game. In fact, some of the girls were the most enthusiastic about it. Everyone could lift up Owen. We were very careful, we never dropped him. His shirt might become a little untucked, his neck tie was so long, Owen tucked it into his trousers or else it would have hung to his knees, and his neck tie often came untucked and sometimes his change would fall out in our faces. We always gave him his money back.

JI: Sometimes he had baseball cards with him and they would fall out of his pockets too. This made him cross because the cards were alphabetized or perhaps ordered under another system, all the infielders together, maybe. We didn't know what his system was, but obviously Owen had a system because when Mrs. Walker came back to the room, when Owen returned to his chair and we passed his nickels and dimes and baseball cards back to him, he would sit shuffling through his cards with a grim, silent fury.

JI: He was no ordinary complainer. If he was self-pitying, his voice was so original in its expression of complaint that he managed to make whining almost lovable. In Sunday school, when we held Owen up in the air, especially in the air, he protested so uniquely. We tortured him, I think, in order to hear his voice. I used to think, his voice came from another planet. Now I'm convinced it was a voice not entirely of this world.

JI: "PUT ME DOWN," he would say. "CUT IT OUT. I DON'T WANNA DO THIS ANYMORE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, PUT ME DOWN, ASSHOLES." But we just passed him around and around. He grew more fatalistic about it each time. His body was rigid, he wouldn't struggle once we had him in the air, he folded his arms defiantly on his chest, he scowled at the ceiling. Sometimes he grabbed hold of his chair the instant Mrs. Walker left the room. He'd cling like a bird to a swing in its cage but he was easy to dislodge from his chair because he was ticklish. A girl named Suki Swift was especially deft tickling Owen. Instantly his arms and legs would stick straight out and we'd have him up in the air again.

JI: "NO TICKLING," he'd say. But the rules to this game were our rules, we never listened to Owen. Inevitably Mrs. Walker would return to the room when Owen was in the air. Given the biblical nature of her instructions to us to think very hard, she might have imagined that by a supreme act of our combined and hardest thoughts we had succeeded in levitating Owen Meany. She might have had the wit to suspect that Owen and was reaching toward heaven as a direct result of leaving us alone with our thoughts, but Mrs. Walker's response was always the same: Brutish, unimaginative incredibly dense. "Owen," she would snap. "Owen Meany, you get back to your seat, you get down from up there."

JI: What could Mrs. Walker teach us about the Bible if she was stupid enough to think that Owen Meany had put himself up in the air. Owen was always dignified about it. He never said, "THEY DID IT, THEY ALWAYS DO IT. THEY PICK ME UP AND LOSE MY MONEY AND MESS UP MY CARDS AND THEY NEVER PUT ME DOWN WHEN I ASK THEM TO. WHAT DO YOU THINK, I FLEW UP HERE?"

JI: But although Owen would complain to us, he would never complain about us. If he was occasionally capable of being a stoic in the air, he was always a stoic when Mrs. Walker accused him of childish behavior. He would never accuse us. He was no rat. As vividly as any number of the stories in the Bible, Owen Meany showed us what a martyr was.

[applause]

JI: Chapter 1 of this book is called The Foul Ball. The foul ball, unfortunately, is hit at a little league game by Owen Meany and it kills the narrator's mother. This is a double misfortune, because not only is the mother a lovable character, and not only does she mean quite everything to the narrator of the novel, whose name is John, but she is also a kind of surrogate mother to Owen, who is as fond of her as if she were his own mother. And in addition to this, she's never told John, our narrator, who his father is. John assumes that she's waiting for him to be old enough.

JI: In other words, that the scandal attached to his birth is the kind of thing you have to be old enough to hear. But in their last year of little league when John and Owen are both 11, apparently the mother doesn't think he's old enough and so she's struck and killed by the foul ball before she gets to tell John the news.

JI: So in a sense, in the narrator's opinion he has not only lost his mother to a foul ball hit by his best friend, he's lost the hope of ever learning who his father is. "NOT SO," Owen tells him, "GOD WILL TELL YOU WHO YOUR FATHER IS." And that, greatly simplified, is the plot of the book. God does tell John who his father is, if you believe Owen.

JI: It's referred to by Owen only as a dark and unspeakable outrage that his family suffered at the hands of the Catholics, and his anti-Catholic mutterings are to this point in the novel where I'm going to begin reading to you not explained. You will find it out, but you don't find it out now.

JI: John himself has just moved churches, although his move is ecclesiastically less traumatic. He's moved from the Congregationalists, which he always liked, to the Episcopalians. So as Owen puts it, for John, it's a move upward in hocus pocus; for Owen it's a move down.

JI: But at the point at which I'm telling you this story, it is a given that Owen Meany is a believer, and the narrator, only four chapters into the tale, is not. That's a distinction to keep in mind. My friend and, in my opinion, the best living writer in English, Robertson Davies, and I had lunch today and I was reminded thinking of this reading of something he wrote once about coincidence, a useful dismissive word, he said, for people who cannot bear the idea of pattern shaping their lives.

JI: Owen Meany is convinced that a pattern shapes his life, that he is on an angel or a devil of task. This is not so unique, you know, to the process of writing a novel itself. It's almost a redundancy to say I'm writing a novel about predetermination or I'm writing a kind of Calvinist novel, you know, predestination and all that. Because to an extent every novel you write, at least in the novelist's view, is predestined. It's nothing new for me to think of the characters in a novel as being predestined, at least not in any novel with a plot. So this from the point of view of craft is not so religious an undertaking as you might tend to think of it.

JI: Now, let's see, some of the problems with the Episcopalians that John is suffering have not only to do with what he feels is a move upward in hocus pocus, but has to do with the nature of the rector of the Episcopal church himself. His name is Wiggin, the Reverend or Rector Wiggin. He is an ex-pilot, he is not, so to speak, long in the church, but recently there come, and there is some suspicion that his religious conversion is conceivably a result of some accident that's happened to him in the sky. His wife is a former stewardess, and they are mocked in the voice of this novel by a narrator who is determinedly a snob.

JI: He likes the pastor of the Congregational church because he is a properly educated minister: Princeton, Union Theological, all of that, you know. But this ex-pilot with his pulpit-thumping homilies badly affects the sort of upper class sense he has of what religion should be; in his view, not too pushy. And the Reverend Wiggin is pushy. So that's an immediate dislike that is already operative by the fourth chapter.

JI: The narrator gets his snobbism from his grandmother, with whom he lives half the time after his mother is killed. He lives the rest of the time with his mother's new-found husband, his stepfather. And I should say just a word about the stepfather, whose name is Dan Needham, only because he's a good stepfather, he's a stepfather, it will turn out, who is a much nicer guy than the man the real father turns out to be. I've always thought that step-parents have been given a very bad rap in literature, much in the way I felt in writing The Cider House Rules that directors of orphanages were always cast as ogres, and it pleased me in the case of the last book to conceive of the director of an orphanage and even an abortionist who was in my view a saintly character and not an ogre.

JI: And in this book it's given me some pleasure to write about a stepfather who's a nice guy and a good father in addition to that.

JI: The town of Gravesend has in it a private school. It is not a private school to those of you familiar with The Hotel New Hampshire that bears any resemblance whatsoever to the Dairy school. The private school in Gravesend, which is called Gravesend Academy, is a good school, and those of you who are so light in the tread you take through a book to think that one prep school is the same as another, be forewarned: A good school is different from a bad school. I've been in both, and there's a great deal of difference.

JI: I don't think you need to know a whole lot else. At the end of the first chapter in addition to Owen Meany hitting the ball that kills the mother, the ball is missing. The primary suspect as to who has the ball is Owen, himself, who has a reputation for being something of a collector, as witnessed by his baseball cards and by other little shrines he's made in his room. It's not especially disturbing to John that Owen would want for some reason or another to have kept the ball that killed his mother. But in truth, the reader by this point should already be suspecting if that is the case. What John doesn't know at the age of 11 is that there are a lot of people in Gravesend who would cherish to have that ball that killed that mother, and that ball that's missing of course has some connection with who the missing father is.

JI: There's a lot of mysteries in the early part of this book, which is why I have to talk about it not having had the pleasure of reading you the first three chapters. It's 1953. Please remember these boys are 11, the mother has just died. The structure of the book is quite simple; every chapter begins when the mother is alive or shortly after she's dead and ends decidedly after she's been dead, so there is that going and coming to it. The grandmother's maid is named Lydia, she has one leg. I'm not going to tell you about that.

JI: The name of the book is A Prayer for Owen Meany. Chapter 1, The Foul Ball. Chapter 2, The Armadillo, the first present that John's stepfather gives him. Chapter 3, The Angel, the mother is visited by the angel of death, Owen thinks, Owen interrupts the angel of death by asking the mother for a glass of water and in Owen's view, he has been reassigned the angel's task. The angel of death comes once, so Owen interrupted her and the angel said, "OKAY, PAL, YOU DO IT." That's what Owen thinks, okay. That's chapter three, The Angel. Chapter 4 is called The Little Lord Jesus.

JI: “The first Christmas following my mother's death was the first Christmas I didn't spend in Sawyers Depot. My grandmother told Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred that if the family were all together, my mother's absence would be too apparent. If Dan and grandmother and I were alone in Gravesend and if the Eastmans were alone in Sawyer Depot, my grandmother argued that we would all miss each other, then, she reasoned, we wouldn't miss my mother so much.

JI: Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide in America is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection. The so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving. Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who is not home.

JI: Dividing my time between my grandmother's house on 80 Front Street and the abandoned dormitory where Dan had his little apartment also gave me my first impressions of Gravesend Academy at Christmas when all the boarders had gone home. The bleak brick and stone, the ivy frosted with snow, the dormitories and classroom buildings with their windows all equally closed with a penitentiary sameness gave the campus the aura of a prison enduring a hunger strike. And without the students hurrying on the quadrangle paths, the bare, bone-colored birches stood out in black and white against the snow like charcoal drawings of themselves or skeletons of the alumni.

JI: The ringing of the chapel bell and the bell for class hours was suspended, and so my mother's absence was underlined by the absence of Gravesend's most routine music, the academy chimes I'd taken for granted until I couldn't hear them. There was only the solemn hourly bonging of the great clock in the bell tower of Hurd's church, especially on the most brittle cold days of December. And against the landscape of old snow, thawed and refrozen to the silver gray sheen of a pearl, the clock bell of Hurd's church tolled the time like a death knell. It was not the season to be jolly, although dear Dan Needham tried; at least Dan drank too much and he filled the empty echoing dormitory with his strident caroling.

JI: His memory of the words to the Christmas carols, not to mention his voice, was quite painfully a far cry from my mother's singing and whenever Owen would join Dan for a verse of God Rest You Merry Gentlemen or, worse, It Came Upon The Midnight Clear, the old stone stairwells of Dan's dorm resounded with a dirgeful music that was not at all Christmassy but mournful. They were the voices, I thought, of the ghosts of those Gravesend boys unable to go home for Christmas, singing to their faraway families.

JI: The Gravesend dormitories were named after the long dead former faculty and headmasters of the school. Abbot, Amon, Bancroft, Gilman, Goram, Hooper, Porter, Quincy, Scott. Dan Needham lived in Waterhouse Hall, named after some old curmudgeon of a classicist, a long dead Latin teacher named Amos Waterhouse whose rendering of Christmas carols in Latin I was sure could not have been worse than the gloomy muddle made of them by Dan and Owen Meany.

JI: Grandmother's response to my mother being dead for Christmas was to refuse to participate in the seasonal decoration of 80 Front Street. The wreaths were nailed too low on the doors and the bottom half of the Christmas tree was overhung with tinsel and ornaments, the result of Lydia applying her heavy-handed touch at wheelchair level.

JI: "We'd all have been better off at Sawyers Depot," Dan Needham announced in his cups. Owen sighed. "I guess I'll never get to go to Sawyer Depot," he said. Where Owen and I went instead was into every room of every boy who'd gone home for Christmas from Waterhouse Hall; Dan Needham had a master key.

JI: Almost every afternoon Dan rehearsed the Gravesend players for their annual version of A Christmas Carol. It was becoming old hat for many of the players, but to freshen their performances, Dan made them change roles from one Christmas to the next. Hence Mr. Fish, who one year had been Marley's Ghost, and in another year, the Ghost of Christmas Past, was now Scrooge himself. After years of using conventionally adorable children who muffed their lines, Dan begged Owen to be Tiny Tim. But Owen said that everyone would laugh at him, if not on sight, at least when he first spoke. And besides, Mrs. Walker was playing Tiny Tim's mother. That, Owen claimed, would give him the shivers.

JI: It was bad enough, Owen maintained, that he was subject to seasonal ridicule for the role he played in the Christ Church Christmas pageant. "JUST YOU WAIT," he said darkly to me. "THE WIGGINS ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE ME THE STUPID ANGEL AGAIN."

JI: It would be my first Christmas pageant, of course, since I was usually in Sawyers Depot for the last Sunday before Christmas. But Owen repeatedly complained that he was always cast as the Announcing Angel, a role forced upon him by the Reverend Wiggin and his wife, Barbara, who maintained there was no one cuter for the part than Owen, whose chore it was to descend in a pillar of light and with the substantial assistance of a crane-like apparatus with wires, to which he was attached to like a puppet.

JI: Owen was supposed to announce the wondrous new presence that lay in the manger in Bethlehem, all the while flapping his arms to draw attention to the giant wings glued to his choir robe and to attempt to quiet the giggles of the congregation.

JI: Every year, a grim group of shepherds huddled at the communion railing and displayed their cowardice of God's messenger. A motley crew, they tripped on their robes and knocked off each other's turbans and false beards with their staffs. Barb Wiggin had difficulty locating them in the pillar of light and also in an awkward, sometimes blinding shift in the light's focus and intensity in illuminating the descending angel, Owen Meany, as airborne as the dreaded seraphim.

JI: Reading from Luke, the Reverend Wiggin said, "And in that region, there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night, and an angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were filled with fear," whereupon Rector Wiggin paused for the full effect of the shepherds' cringing at the sight of Owen struggling to get his feet on the floor. Barb Wiggin operated the creaky apparatus that lowered Owen too, sometimes lowering him dangerously near the lit candles that simulated the camp fires around which the shepherds watched their flock.

JI: "BE NOT AFRAID," Owen announced, sometimes whilst still in the air. "FOR BEHOLD, I BRING YOU GOOD NEWS OF A GREAT JOY WHICH WILL COME TO ALL THE PEOPLE, FOR TO YOU IS BORN THIS DAY IN THE CITY OF DAVID A SAVIOR WHO IS CHRIST THE LORD, AND THIS WILL BE A SIGN FOR YOU, YOU WILL FIND A BABE WRAPPED IN SWADDLING CLOTHES AND LYING IN A MANGER." Whereupon the dazzling, if jerky, pillar of light flashed like lightning, or perhaps Christ Church suffered an electrical shortage, and Owen was raised into darkness, sometimes yanked into darkness, and once so quickly that one of his wings was torn from his back and fell along the confused shepherds who knelt in prayer or covered their faces to conceal their slipping beards or their laughter.

JI: The worst of it was that Owen had to remain in the air for the rest of the pageant, there being no method of lowering him out of the light. If he was to be concealed in darkness he had to stay suspended from the wires, above the babe lying in the manger, above the clumsy nodding donkeys, the stumbling shepherds, the little kings staggering under the weight of their crowns. The worst of it, Owen claimed, was that whoever played Joseph was always smirking, as if Joseph had anything to smirk about.

[applause]

RANDY: John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His mother remarried when Irving was very young, and he grew up in New England, wrestling while attending Philips Exeter, and eventually graduating from the University of New Hampshire and University of Iowa. He began publishing fiction in the late 1960s and was a wrestling coach until his late forties, eventually being admitted to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. His novels have been international bestsellers, translated into multiple languages, and won numerous awards, and been adapted for the screen, and Irving himself was awarded an Oscar, in 1999, for his screenplay adaptation of The Cider House Rules. The father of two sons, Brendan and Colin, and a daughter, Eva, John Irving lives in Toronto with his wife, the literary agent Janet Turnbull. In late 2019, a few miles, or kilometres west of their home, this great American novelist became a Canadian citizen.

I want to add a final point to this episode. The other voice you hear at the start of John Irving’s reading is that of Greg Gatenby, the Founding Artistic Director of Toronto’s longtime most prominent literary festival, and the man responsible for bringing some of the world’s best writers to the city during his long tenure as the Artistic Director of the Harbourfront Reading Series, later to become IFOA and what is now TIFA. His vision, drive, and charisma was essential ensuring that he was able to bring many of the best writers in the world to Toronto, making the city an essential place to visit, usually in October, for any writer with a new book looking for a serious and significant audience.

Thanks to John Irving for allowing us permission to use the audio for this episode from 1986 as part of the International Readings at Harbourfront Series - now called TIFA and, as always, thanks to TIFA, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, for allowing us access to their archives. Find out more at FestivalOfAuthors.ca

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Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou and Michelle De Marco, and marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.

For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library's podcasts series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts. 

Music is by YUKA.

I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA.