The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving

unsuccessful days in Pittsburgh—represented my first encounter with a critic of an
un
constructive nature. I was attracted to Mr. Algren’s rough charm, but he didn’t much care for me or my writing. I was “too fancy” a writer for his taste, he told me; and, worse (I suspect), I was not a city boy who’d been schooled on the mean streets. I was a small-town boy and a private-school brat; I was even more privileged than Algren knew—I was a “faculty brat.” The best tutor for a young writer, in Mr. Algren’s clearly expressed view, was real life, by which I think he meant an
urban
life. In any case, my life had not been “real” enough to suit him; and it troubled him that I was a wrestler, not a boxer—the latter was superior to the former, in Mr. A.’s opinion. He was always good-natured in his teasing of me, but there was a detectable disdain behind his humor. And I was not a poker player, which I think further revealed to Algren the shallowness of my courage.
    My friend the poet Donald Justice (a very
good
poker player, I’m told) once confided to me that Mr. Algren lost a lot of money in Iowa City—coming down from Chicago, as he did, and expecting to find the town full of rubes. He took me for a rube—and certainly I
was
—but he caused me no lasting wounds. Creative Writing, if honest at all, must be an occasionally unwelcoming experience. I appreciated Mr. Algren’s honesty; his abrasiveness couldn’t keep me from liking him.
    I would not see Nelson Algren again until shortly before his death, when he moved to Sag Harbor and Kurt Vonnegut brought him to my house in Sagaponack for dinner. Again I liked him, and again he teased me; he was good at it. This time he claimed not to remember me from our Iowa days, although I went out of my way to remind him of our conversations; admittedly, since they had been few and brief, it’s possible that Algren
didn’t
remember me. But in saying goodnight he pretended to confuse me with
Clifford
Irving, the perpetrator of that notorious Howard Hughes hoax; he appreciated a good scam, Mr. Algren said. And when Vonnegut explained to him that I was not
that
Irving, Algren winked at me—he was still teasing me. (You shouldn’t take a Creative Writing course, much less entertain the notion of becoming a writer, if you can’t take a little teasing—or even a lot.)
    But, thankfully, there were other teachers at Iowa. I was tempted to study with José Donoso, for I admired his writing and found him gracious—in every way that Nelson Algren was not. Then, upon first sight, I developed a schoolboy’s unspoken crush on Mr. Donoso’s wife; thereafter I could never look him in the eyes, which would not have made for a successful student-teacher relationship. And so my principal teacher and mentor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop became Kurt Vonnegut. (I once had a brawl in a pool hall—convincingly demonstrating, although never to Nelson Algren and not in his presence, that wrestling is superior to boxing—because a fellow student at Iowa, a boxer, had called Mr. Vonnegut a “science-fiction hack”; this false charge was made without the offending student’s having read a single one of Kurt’s books, “only the covers.”)
    Did Kurt Vonnegut “teach” me how to write? Certainly not; yet Mr. Vonnegut saved me time, and he encouraged me. He pointed out some bad habits in my early work (in my first novel-in-progress), and he also pointed out those areas of storytelling and characterization that were developing agreeably enough. I would doubtless have made these discoveries on my own, but later—maybe much later. And
time
, to young and old writers alike, is valuable.
    Later, as a teacher—I taught at the Workshop from 1972 until 1975—I encountered many future writers among my students at Iowa. I didn’t “teach” Ron