That Night I Had Dinner with John Irving

One of my favorite perquisites of working for a large company resulted from serving on a Community Affairs Committee for AMD.  AMD at that time had a solid reputation in all the communities in which we operated as a company that “gave back” to the community.  We had a team of professionals who received and evaluated requests for money and in-kind donations as well as volunteers and that team made choices and recommended to a group of executives (including me) how AMD should respond.  The professionals serving on this team were so good that we as a committee mostly just rubber stamped their recommendations.  Another of our duties as committee members was to represent AMD in photo ops with the non-profits we supported so I have numerous photos of me handing a huge oversized check to some executive director or board chairperson.  In the photo shown here Karin Dicks one of the professionals I was talking about and I flank Father Jaime Case, then the Executive Director of El Buen Samaritano before we presented a large check to El Buen.

This kind of activity was fun but even greater fun resulted from an event we sponsored at the LBJ Library called the Distinguished Speaker Series.  Because of AMD’s sponsorship, we received several tickets to meet the speakers in the “Green Room” for drinks and canapes before the speaker was introduced to the crowd. Just before they were introduced we entered the auditorium and walked to our second or third-row seats in the center section to listen to the speaker(s) we had just met and with whom we had a short awkward conversation.  During the series, I met Tucker Carlson the night he and Paul Begala appeared for a “debate or discussion” of political events of the day. I took the priest from the Episcopal church I attended to meet Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun who wrote about fundamentalism and modernity.  I was able to meet Richard Florida who at that time was fascinated with Austin and whose book had named Austin as the number one “Creative City” in the US. While fun and enlightening I have to say that my favorite “meet the speaker” ever took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin because the author/speaker hated those “Green Room Meet and Greet Events.”  That author was John Irving, one of my favorite American authors.

Irving rejected the idea of the meet and greet but was told that his contract required him to be available to meet with the large corporate and personal donors.  He proposed instead of drinks and canapes to host a full dinner at his hotel for twenty people.  AMD received four tickets which amazingly the most senior executives at AMD turned down.  Two of the Community Affairs professionals, a PR professional and I took the tickets and were delighted to be able to attend the dinner with Irving as well as the Mayor’s wife, the editor of the Austin Chronicle, the CEO of our local NPR station, several very wealthy philanthropists, etc. I was seated between the Mayor’s wife and a prominent Austin attorney.

John Irving came in and met each of us and we were seated to enjoy our dinner and to ask any questions we deemed fit.  As one would expect the questions initially were somewhat stilted, with lots of nervous laughter until our PR guy asked him if he had a son who several years before had worked as a ski-instructor in Aspen.  Irving seemed a little surprised when he acknowledged that his son had done that and wondered how the questioner knew.  Our PR guy confessed that he had worked with the younger Irving but had never believed that he was actually the author’s son.  The laughter seemed to loosen everyone up or perhaps the wine was just starting to kick in.

I can’t remember who asked the next question, but it was about Irving’s use of words and his “art” of writing.  Irving quickly moved to correct the questioner that writing is not an art but a craft.  He then explained his “process” for writing to prove his point.

Monday through Friday John Irving rises early, exercises, eats breakfast with his family and then takes a cup of coffee out past the swimming pool to his writing cottage.  On yellow legal pads using wooden pencils, he writes until lunch.  The way he starts a book is by writing the last sentence of the book first.  He explained that for months or in some cases years he has been thinking about the story and the characters, so he has it framed more-or-less completely before he writes a word.  Writing that last sentence in the book gives him a target toward which he writes the last chapter of the book.  Looking at the opening sentence of that final chapter he then writes the last sentence of the penultimate chapter several times until he is satisfied and then writes the chapter that would lead to that last sentence. 

After a lunch break, he repeats the process until roughly five o’clock and then stops to rejoin the family for the evening. An assistant picks up the penciled legal pages and overnight types up everything Irving wrote the previous day.  The document is triple spaced so he can use his pencils to rewrite and edit.  He rewrites every sentence a minimum of three times even if he liked the original he forces himself to try to make three new versions each one better than the previous.  Looking at the resulting sentences he picks the best and scratches through the rest.  The next day he will take the results of all that writing and read through the newly typed pages from start to finish to do more traditional editing.

I was struck by the incredible discipline he must have to do this work five days a week.  At the same time, it became clear to me why reading his books I often reread a paragraph or a sentence just because I’m stunned by the artistry of his writing or I guess technically I’m struck by the discipline with which he practices his craft.  Of all the distinguished speakers I met through that series John Irving is the one I most remember.