All hail Laurie Stone for her ironic commendation of that Times piece about men’s reactions to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade: “After enslaved people were emancipated, the NYT similarly sent reporters to the South and ran a piece about the difficult times and twinges of what the fuck ever felt by the owners of plantations.” I can’t go on, I’ll go on (but not for long)…
I don’t hate the “moderate” approach to framing the abortion issue adopted by Bill Clinton in the 90s: “Abortion should be safe, legal and rare.” One argument against that formulation, though, is really strong. Even a hint of stigma may make “it even harder for people who already struggle to get the procedure — who are disproportionately likely to be poor, people of color, LGBTQ, immigrants, or belong to more than one of these groups — to push for their right to get it.” It seems likely there are no longer practical political reasons to go with the older framing, yet I’m not sure moral questions (as opposed to legal ones) raised by abortion are no-brainers. That’s why I’m reposting Benjamin DeMott’s thoughtful review of John Irving’s novel, The Cider House Rules (1985). I doubt my late father would disavow anything in this mid-80s piece, but if he were writing now I bet he’d double down on the need to fight for women’s freedom and against high patriarchs. When it comes to our Supreme scum, a line from The Cider House Rules seems on point: “You’re not God.” B.D.
By turns witty, tenderhearted, fervent and scarifying, The Cider House Rules is, for me, John Irving’s first truly valuable book.
The storytelling is straightforward — not the case with his huge commercial success, The World According to Garp (1978). The theme is in firm focus — not the case with The Hotel New Hampshire (1981). The novelist’s often-deplored weakness for the cute and trendy, although still evident, is here less troubling.
Far more important, ‘The Cider House Rules‘ has a public dimension — could, indeed, play a significantly assuasive role in an American social conflict that is now dangerously exacerbated. The book is, to be sure, a novel (the author’s sixth), not a tract; it follows several human lives from youth to maturity, gripping our attention as chronicle rather than argument.
But it is also a book about abortion, and the knowledge and sympathy directing Mr. Irving’s exploration of the issue are exceptional. Pertinent history, the specifics of surgical procedure, the irrecusable sorrow of guilt and humiliation, the needs and rights of children — their weight is palpable in these pages. Responsive to the ideals and passions that drive both parties — pro-life, pro-choice — the author does not tease himself with delusions that a sunny negotiated accord waits just down the road. There is no maddeningly abstract prattle about the possibility of determining, ”scientifically,” the precise moment at which ”the fetus becomes human.” But Mr. Irving draws readers close, in the space of his imagination, to an understanding of essential links, commonalities — even unities — between factions now seething with hatred for each other. I have to record, at the risk of a pompous sound, that the novel’s potential political consequence — as an approach to reconciliation based on clarification of shared moral objectives — moved me to gratitude as I read.
The time frame extends from the first through the sixth decades of the 20th century (we stop well short of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion). There are two heroes: the book’s first half is dominated by Dr. Wilbur Larch, a celibate physician who directs an orphanage, delivers babies and performs abortions illegally (”when he was asked and when it was safe”). The second half belongs to the orphaned, ”unadoptable” Homer Wells, whom Larch loves as a spiritual son and schools informally as a gynecological surgeon. The setting is Maine, or rather the two Maines, dark and light. Larch’s orphanage, St. Cloud’s, is located in a dank, stripped, far northern river town founded as a logging camp and plunged into decline when a paper company moves downstream. Wells spends his 20’s and 30’s on a seaside farm where Atlantic breezes clean the air and apple and lobster harvests alike confirm the rightness of hope. W ars, elections, public personages obtrude intermittently. It is in letters to F.D.R., for instance, that Larch presses his full argument for the legalization of abortion. (”Mr. Roosevelt — you, of all people! — you should know that the unborn are not as wretched or as in need of our assistance as the born! Please take pity on the born!”) There is wry scrutiny of several cultural innovations relevant to the book’s subject, including drive-in theaters. There are striking successes in evoking, unsentimentally, the imaginative lives of the poor. (Especially admirable is an easygoing description of migrant workers entertaining themselves on the roof of the cider press that gives the book its title, observing the magical lights of a distant county fair and explaining their meaning to one another.) And there are a half-dozen or more love stories. (The two most affecting portray the unrequited passion of a pugnacious, winningly lewd orphan named Melony for Homer Wells, and the unrequited but doomed passion — years later — of Homer Wells’s son for a black woman sexually abused by her father.) But the novel’s core is the developing conflict between Larch and Wells, spiritual father and son, concerning the unlawful termination of pregnancies. Through a series of complicated schemes — Mr. Irving, the inventive, clever-zany wit is in clear sight here — Larch not only trains the orphaned lad as surgeon, but arranges an alternative identity for him as a licensed physician. Pushed further by the need to allay suspicion among the clinic-orphanage’s trustees, he fabricates a record of antiabortion statements for the younger man. The goal is to insure that, after Larch is gone, help will still be available to poor women facing unwanted pregnancies. But it emerges that the cliche-ridden pro-life statements sardonically fabricated for Wells are not at total variance with his views. Repelled by the surgical procedures of abortion, persuaded that ”the fetus has a soul,” Wells pulls back from the place prepared for him, and a contest of wills ensues.
A key scene dramatizing that contest — Wells’s first expression of disapproval, Larch’s first self-defense — takes place in Larch’s clinic. He is performing an abortion with Wells as anesthetist; in the next room a nurse checks the contractions of an unwed mother; we have just heard, outside, the voices of orphanage children pleading for a chance to prove their qualities — ”I’m the best! I’m the best!” — to a couple newly arrived, theoretically in search of an ”adoptable.” Wells, whose attachment to Larch is deep, takes a stand — says aloud that he wishes to leave the operating room.
Continuing to scrape with the curette, Larch insists Wells must watch, must understand the process, must learn to perform it. Wells protests, Larch is obdurate. Anguish and suppressed rage intensify, and Larch finally cries out: ”Do I interfere? . . . When absolutely helpless women tell me that they simply can’t have an abortion, that they simply must go on through with having another — and yet another — orphan: do I interfere? Do I? I do not,” [Larch] said scraping. ”I deliver it. . . . And do you think there are largely happy histories for the babies born here? . . . But do I resist? I do not. I do not even recommend. I give them what they want: an orphan or an abortion.”
I am neutral: this is the claim. I am a teaching professional, I serve my patients’ will. Larch’s self-justifications have force and reason, but, as we listen, we understand that the man’s whole response to his work is not in his speech. And before the story is done we understand that its mission is to show us what is absent by revealing the full moral and psychological reality experienced by an altruist as abortionist.
What is absent, speaking bluntly, is suffering and guilt — Larch’s suffering and guilt. He began his career confidently but soon found himself fighting his abhorrence of his own surgical procedures. The words he addresses, late in the book, to Wells speak to his own history: ”If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice — and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.” How exactly has Larch been victimized? During his medical training he saw the fearful self-mutilation practiced by poor pregnant women. As orphanage director he observed firsthand the pathos of the lives and longings of children born unwanted and quickly abandoned. More than once in his career he dealt with class hypocrisy — the comfortable assumption that, for the Truly Nice, double standards are invariably appropriate. All that would bring a sensitive physician to a guiltlessness while breaking laws against abortion was, seemingly, part of Larch’s experience.
And yet he cannot feel guiltless, cannot endure his work, sees himself as trapped: here lies his victimization. The procedures of dilation and curettage, the sight of ”the products of conception” — limbs, organs, nascent features of expression — are, without anodyne, as unbearable to him as to Wells. The assurance his crustiness projects edges ever toward hysteria; he is addicted to ether; his altruism has, as its reverse side, a near incapacity to express feeling for others.
Implicit in Larch’s suffering is, I believe, Mr. Irving’s strong, simple theme: our learned forbearance and cultivated sensitivity lie at the root both of acceptance of abortion and repugnance for it. The orphanage at St. Cloud’s was founded long before the creation of aid-to-dependent-children programs, in a century during which moving crusades were launched to awaken public consciousness: obliviousness is cruelty, and forbearance creates obligations to the neighbors’ children, not merely to one’s own. Subtly, shrewdly, Mr. Irving evokes those crusades. The bedtime stories Larch reads aloud to the children in their dormitory are drawn from the novelists — Dickens and Charlotte Bronte — who taught their contemporaries to notice the waifs in their midst, to hesitate to scorn or cuff or starve or sell them into slavery as child miners or sweeps. Considered in this context, Larch’s kindly orphanage can be understood as a stage in the history of compassion. The same is true for the emergence, later on, of the initially confident altruist-abortionist.
And it is also true for the development of that figure, still later, into a person conscious of his guilt, suffering and victimization. What is felt in the grain of The Cider House Rules — in its study of rule-givers and rule-breakers — is that the history of compassion cannot have a stop and must perpetually demand larger generosities than those hitherto conceived. By responding to that demand we may, tomorrow, invent ways to abolish nightmare choices between born and unborn. Something akin to this faith seems alive, finally, in Larch’s successor, Homer Wells, at the close of the novel; in the process of deciding that he must perform abortions, he reaches a position on the ”issue” more humane than any summoned by standard pro-life, pro-choice campaign cries.
Viewed in literary terms, The Cider House Rules is hardly without defect. Its young hero and several lesser characters lack presence and independent vitality. The accounts of diseases, treatments and operations are impressively detailed — Mr. Irving acknowledges debts to his grandfather, an obstetrician and author of technical manuals, and to Dr. Richard Selzer, a surgeon and essayist — but improbabilities abound in the narrative. And there are other difficulties, none negligible. Often the tone wavers; the graphic mode gives way to ghoulishness or bawdy. And surely no other writer of literary reputation is as absurdly certain as Mr. Irving that the repetition of the words ”tears” and ”kisses” unfailingly summons emotion.
No one aware of the present literary climate, however, blames failures to sustain poised thematic seriousness solely on individual novelists. It is one thing to counsel an author choosing Mr. Irving’s themes to aim for the nobility, solemnity and heartbreakingly perfect restraint of, say, a masterwork like Rodin’s ”Mother With a Dying Child.” It is another to explain how these qualities are to be achieved in an age ill at ease with the notion that art can have a subject, an age half-persuaded, in fact, that no subjects exist except language, the death of feeling or the artist’s proud (or nervous) separation from society. For whole chapters at a time The Cider House Rules manages, despite the odds, to speak as though the tragedy of a country blinding itself to the history of its own moral progress mattered, and as though a writer’s work has to do not with exterminating pity and anger but with animating them. At its best, this novel is an example, now rare, of the courage of imaginative ardor.
Originally published in the New York Times.