When Jenny Garp was born, Helen said nothing. Helen was grateful; she felt for the first time since the accident that she was delivered from the insanity of grief that had crushed her with the loss of Walt.
The World According to Bensenhaver, which was Garp's deliverance from the same insanity, resided in New York, where John Wolf read it over and over again. He had arranged to have the first chapter published in a porno magazine of such loathsome crudity that he felt sure even Garp would be convinced of the book's doom. The magazine was called Crotch Shots, and it was full of exactly that—those wet, split beavers of Garp's childhood, between the pages of his story of violent rape and obvious revenge. At first Garp accused John Wolf of deliberately placing the chapter there, of not even trying the better magazines. But Wolf assured Garp that he had tried them all; that this was the bottom line of the list—this was exactly how Garp's story was interpreted. Lurid, sensational violence and sex of no redeeming value whatsoever.
“That's not what it's about,” Garp said “You'll see.”
But Garp often wondered about the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver, which had been published in Crotch Shots. If it had been read at all. If anyone who bought those magazines ever looked at the words.
“Perhaps they read some of the stories after they masturbate to the pictures,” Garp wrote to John Wolf. He wondered if that was a good mood to be read in: after masturbation, the reader was at least relaxed, possibly lonely ("a good state in which to read,” Garp told John Wolf). But maybe the reader felt guilty, too, and humiliated, and overwhelmingly responsible (that was not such a good condition in which to read, Garp thought). In fact, he knew, it was not a good condition in which to write.
The World According to Bensenhaver is about the impossible desire of the husband, Dorsey Standish, to protect his wife and child from the brutal world; thus Arden Bensenhaver (who is forced to retire from the police, for repeated unorthodoxy in his methods of arrest) is hired to live like an armed uncle in the house with the Standish family—he becomes the lovable family bodyguard, whom Hope must finally reject. Though the worst of the real world has been visited upon Hope, it is her husband who fears the world most. After Hope insists that Bensenhaver not live with them, Standish continues to support the old policeman as a kind of hovering angel. Bensenhaver is paid to tail the child, Nicky, but Bensenhaver is an aloof and curious kind of watchdog, subject to fits of his own awful memories; he gradually seems more of a menace to the Standishes than he seems a protector. He is described as “a lurker at the last edge of light—a retired enforcer, barely alive on the rim of darkness.”
Hope counters her husband's anxiety by insisting they have a second child. The child is born, but Standish seems destined to create one monster of paranoia after another; now more relaxed about possible assaults upon his wife and children, he begins to suspect that Hope is having an affair. Slowly, he realizes that this would wound him more than if she were raped (again). Thus he doubts his love for her, and doubts himself; guiltily, he begs Bensenhaver to spy on Hope and determine if she is faithful. But Arden Bensenhaver will no longer do Dorsey's worry work for him. The old policeman argues that he was hired to protect Standish's family from the outside world—not to restrict the free choices of the family to live as it wants. Without Bensenhaver's support, Dorsey Standish panics. One night he leaves the house (and the children) unprotected while he goes out to spy on his wife. While Dorsey is gone, the younger child chokes to death on a piece of Nicky's chewing gum.
Guilt abounds. In Garp's work, guilt always abounds. With Hope, too—because she was seeing someone (although who could blame her). Bensenhaver, morbid with responsibility, has a stroke. Partially paralyzed, he moves back in with the Standishes; Dorsey feels responsible for him. Hope insists they have another child, but the events have made Standish determinedly sterile.
He agrees that Hope should encourage her lover—but merely to “impregnate” herself, as he puts it. (Ironically, this was the only part of the book that Jenny Fields called “farfetched.")
Once again, Dorsey Standish seeks “a control situation—more like a laboratory experiment at life than life itself,” Garp wrote. Hope cannot adjust to such a clinical arrangement; emotionally, either she has a lover or she doesn't. Insisting that the lovers meet for the sole purpose of “impregnating” Hope, Dorsey tries to control the whereabouts, the number and length of their meetings. Suspecting that Hope is meeting her lover clandestinely, as well as according to plan, Standish alerts the senile Bensenhaver to the existence of a prowler, a potential kidnapper and rapist, whose presence in the neighborhood has already been detected.
Still not satisfied, Dorsey Standish takes to sudden, unannounced visits at his own house (at times when he's least expected home); he never catches Hope at anything, but Bensenhaver, armed and deadly with senility, catches Dorsey. A cunning invalid, Arden Bensenhaver is surprisingly mobile and silent in his wheelchair; he is also still unorthodox in his methods of arrest. In fact, Bensenhaver shoots Dorsey Standish with a twelve-gauge shotgun from a distance of less than six feet. Dorsey had been hiding in the upstairs cedar closet, stumbling among his wife's shoes, waiting for her to make a phone call from the bedroom, which—from the closet—he could overhear. He deserves to be shot, of course.
The wound is fatal. Arden Bensenhaver, thoroughly mad, is taken away. Hope is pregnant with her lover's child. When the child is born, Nicky—now twelve—feels unburdened by the relaxing tension in the family. The terrible anxiety of Dorsey Standish, which has been so crippling to all their lives, is at last lifted from them. Hope and her children live on, even cheerfully dealing with the wild rantings of old Bensenhaver, too tough to die, who goes on and on with his versions of the nightmarish world from his wheelchair in an old-age home for the criminally insane. He is seen, finally, as belonging where he is. Hope and her children visit him often, not merely out of kindness—for they are kind—but also to remind themselves of their own precious sanity. Hope's endurance, and the survival of her two children, make the old man's ravings tolerable, finally even comic to her.
That peculiar old-age home for the criminally insane, by the way, bears an astonishing resemblance to Jenny Fields' hospital for wounded women at Dog's Head Harbor.
It is not so much that “The World According to Bensenhaver” is wrong, or even misperceived, as it is out of proportion to the world's need for sensual pleasure, and the world's need and capacity for warmth. Dorsey Standish “is not true to the world,” either; he is too vulnerable to how delicately he loves his wife and children; he is seen, together with Bensenhaver, as “not well suited for life on this planet.” Where immunity counts.
Hope—and, the reader hopes, her children—may have better chances. Somehow implicit in the novel is the sense that women are better equipped than men at enduring fear and brutality, and at containing the anxiousness of feeling how vulnerable we are to the people we love. Hope is seen as a strong survivor of a weak man's world.
John Wolf sat in New York, hoping that the visceral reality of Garp's language, and the intensity of Garp's characters, somehow rescued the book from sheer soap opera. But, Wolf thought, one might as well call the thing Anxiousness of Life; it would make a fantastic series for daytime television, he thought—if suitably edited for invalids, senior citizens, and preschool children. John Wolf concluded that The World According to Bensenhaver, despite the “visceral reality of Garp's language,” and so forth, was an X-rated soap opera.