Garp's observation was not offered as criticism. Garp liked wandering around in a museum. “A more real city might not have suited me so well,” he later wrote. “But Vienna was in its death phase, it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.”
Thus T. S. Garp spent the warm months noticing Vienna, writing letters to Helen Holm, and managing the domestic life of his mother who had added the isolation of writing to her chosen life of solitude. “My mother, the writer,” Garp referred to her, facetiously, in countless letters to Helen. But he envied Jenny, that she was writing at all. He felt stuck with his story. He realized he could go on giving his made-up family one adventure after another, but where were they going? To one more B restaurant with such a weakness in their desserts that an A rating was a lifetime out of reach; to one more B hotel, sliding to C as surely as the mildew smell in the lobby would never go away. Perhaps someone in the inspector's family could be poisoned, in a class A restaurant, but what would it mean? And there could be crazy people, or even criminals, hiding out in one of the pensions, but what would they have to do with the scheme of things?
Garp knew that he did not have a scheme of things.
He saw a four-member circus unload from Hungary, or Yugoslavia, at a railroad station. He tried to imagine them in his story. There had been a bear who rode a motorcycle, around and around a parking lot. A small crowd gathered and a man who walked on his hands collected money for the bear's performance in a pot balanced on the soles of his feet; he fell, occasionally, but so did the bear.
Finally, the motorcycle wouldn't start anymore. It never became clear what the two other members of this circus did; just as they were meant to take over for the bear and the man who walked on his hands, the police came and asked them to fill out a lot of forms. That had not been interesting to watch and the crowd—what there was of one—had gone away. Garp had stayed the longest, not because he was interested in further performances by this decrepit circus but because he was interested in getting them into his story. He couldn't imagine how. As Garp was leaving the railroad station, he could hear the bear throwing up.
For weeks Garp's only progress with his story was a title: “The Austrian Tourist Bureau.” He didn't like it. He went back to being a tourist instead of a writer.
But when the weather grew colder, Garp tired of tourism; he took to carping at Helen for not writing him back enough—a sign he was writing to her too much. She was much busier than he was; she was in college, where she'd been accepted with sophomore standing, and she was carrying more than double the average load of courses. If Helen and Garp were similar, in these early years, it was that they both behaved as if they were going somewhere in a hurry. “Leave poor Helen alone,” Jenny advised him. “I thought you were going to write something beside letters.” But Garp did not like to think of competing in the same apartment with his mother. Her typewriter never paused for thought; Garp knew that its steady pounding would probably end his career as a writer before he could properly begin. “My mother never knew about the silence of revision,” Garp once remarked.
By November Jenny had six hundred manuscript pages, but still she had the feeling that she had not really begun. Garp had no subject that could spill out of him in this fashion. Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.
His “breakthrough,” as he would call it when he wrote Helen, occurred one cold and snowy day in the Museum of the History of the City of Vienna. It was a museum within easy walking distance of the Schwindgasse; somehow he had skipped seeing it, knowing he could walk there any day. Jenny told him about it. It was one of the two or three places she had actually visited herself, only because it was right across the Karlsplatz and well within what she called her neighborhood.
She mentioned there was a writer's room in the museum; she forgot whose. She'd thought having a writer's room in a museum was an interesting idea.
“A writer's room, Mom?” Garp asked.
“Yes, it's a whole room,” Jenny said. “They took all the writer's furniture, and maybe the walls and floor, too. I don't know how they did it.”
“I don't know why they did it,” Garp said. “The whole room is in the museum?”
“Yes, I think it was a bedroom,” Jenny said, “but it was also where the writer actually wrote.”
Garp rolled his eyes. It sounded obscene to him. Would the writer's toothbrush be there? And the chamber pot?
It was a perfectly ordinary room, but the bed looked too small—like a child's bed. The writing table looked small, too. Not the bed or the table of an expansive writer, Garp thought. The wood was dark; everything looked easily breakable; Garp thought his mother had a better room to write in. The writer whose room was enshrined in the Museum of the History of the City of Vienna was named Franz Grillparzer; Garp had never heard of him.
Franz Grillparzer died in 1872; he was an Austrian poet and dramatist, whom very few people outside Austria have ever heard of. He is one of those nineteenth-century writers who did not survive the nineteenth century with any enduring popularity, and Garp would later argue that Grillparzer did not deserve to survive the nineteenth century. Garp was not interested in plays and poems, but he went to the library and read what is considered to be Grillparzer's outstanding prose work: the long short story “The Poor Fiddler.” Perhaps, Garp thought, his three years of Steering German were not enough to allow him to appreciate the story; in German, he hated it. He then found an English translation of the story, in a secondhand bookstore on Habsburgergasse: he still hated it.
Garp thought that Grillparzer's famous story was a ludicrous melodrama: he also thought it was ineptly told and baldly sentimental. It was only vaguely remindful to him of nineteenth-century Russian stories, where often the character is an indecisive procrastinator and a failure in every aspect of practical life: but Dostoevsky, in Garp's opinion, could compel you to be interested in such a wretch; Grillparzer bored you with tearful trivia.
In the same secondhand bookstore Garp bought an English translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; he had been made to read Marcus Aurelius in a Latin class at Steering but he had never read him in English before. He bought the book because the bookstore owner told Garp that Marcus Aurelius had died in Vienna.
“In the life of a man,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” Garp somehow thought that Marcus Aurelius must have lived in Vienna when he wrote that.
The subject of Marcus Aurelius's dreary observations was certainly the subject of most serious writing, Garp thought; between Grillparzer and Dostoevsky the difference was not subject matter. The difference, Garp concluded, was intelligence and grace; the difference was art. Somehow this obvious discovery pleased him. Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer's work that Grillparzer was “sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man.”