John Irving: speaking where Rushdie was attacked felt ‘scary – anyone could get to you…’

‘I was about 18 years old when I tried to get my first tattoo,” says John Irving, “from an old maritime tattoo artist in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.” The boy who would grow up to write such immersive literary bestsellers as The Cider House Rules (1985) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) had just read Moby-Dick. He’d been “so deeply affected” by it that he wanted its final four words (“only found another orphan”) inked onto his arm, alongside an image of the monstrous sperm whale whose ghost can be found, more than 60 years later, diving and breaching through his new novel, The Last Chairlift.

“Well,” Irving recalls, “that tattoo artist looked at me, and shook his head and said: ‘I’ll give you the whale, kid, but I don’t know about that last line. You might want to wait until you’re a little older to make sure you’re always gonna like that book.’ I knew if I’d asked for a woman’s name across my heart, then he’d have done it. But a quotation from a novel sounded like trouble to him and that gave me doubts.”

The author turned 80 this year, and his weathered voice and drawn-out sentences recall the 19th-century classics that inspired his mission to write comparably weighty novels that incorporate “modern gender politics”. Even his current ­situation feels like a story: he’s Zooming from a private island on Canada’s Lake Huron that his ­second wife’s grandfather won in a 1920s poker game.

The Last Chairlift is his 15th novel and, Irving tells me, it will be his last on this scale. He is affably aware that regular readers will recognise in its many pages his recurring “themes and compulsions”. “Yes, yes, the elusive mother, the unknown father. It’s familiar ground. But I always try to change the cast of characters and alter the outcome.” By doing so, is he teasing out different versions of his own life? “Oh, the missing biological father in my own life is one of the few things people find interesting about me…”

Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, Irving is the only son of Helen Frances Winslow and John Wallace Blunt Sr, a writer and executive recruiter. His parents separated before he was born and his mother soon met and married Colin Irving, a history teacher at an elite local boarding school.

“By the time I was a teenager, I knew my biological father’s name and I knew that he had been in the military,” he says. “I could have gone and presented myself to him. But I didn’t, for two reasons. He had always respected my mother’s wish that he had no contact with me (although I learned much later in life that he came to my wrestling matches). And I thought: he hasn’t invaded my life, I don’t want to embarrass him by intruding on his.” His second reason: “I never wanted to give my stepfather – who is still alive and I only refer to as my ‘stepfather’ in interviews like this, for clarity – the iota of an idea that I was missing someone.”

Yet, like Ahab hunting his white whale, Irving has spent decades chasing absent fathers through his fiction. His novels were kick-started by the “fear” he felt on becoming a father himself, aged 22, when his first wife, Shyla Leary, whom he’d met while they were both students, gave birth to the first of their two sons. He tells me he felt “overwhelmed” by the vulnerability of his children and began to see the potential for tragedy around every corner. He had to offload the accidents and fatalities somehow, and so he did it with a pen.

By the time he published his fourth, breakthrough, novel, The World According to Garp in 1978, the father stuff had begun to stretch Irving’s imagination to its full bizarre, and tragicomic, potential. In the novel – which became an Oscar-nominated film, ­starring Robin Williams – the protagonist’s mother, Jenny, was a nurse who became pregnant by a severely brain-damaged army veteran in her care.

In Irving’s 2005 novel, Until I Find You, the hero finally discovers his missing father in a mental institution. The story was plotted before Irving learnt his own father was bipolar and had been hospitalised. He told the New York Times: “As hard as it was to hear that my father had been crazy, it confirmed what I had imagined about William Burns, the father in the novel. I thought, ‘Oh God! I got it right.’”

In The Last Chairlift, Irving’s latest writer-protagonist, Adam, has no idea who his father is. His mother is a brilliant downhill skier, named Rachel, after the ship that rescues the hero of Moby-Dick. Like so many of his female characters, Rachel (nicknamed “Little Ray”) is a dynamic and sexually unpredictable presence. She’s cruelly judged for ­sharing a bed with her little boy, and Irving is keen to tell me that he thinks this is part of a wonderful intimacy. But then she gives her son his first proper kiss in that bed. And that’s deeply unsettling.

“Well, there has to be something that takes you all the way to the Greeks,” laughs Irving, twitching back the sleeves of his plaid shirt. “If Ray didn’t occasionally go too far, she wouldn’t be Ray. She was a competitive racer. She pushes it. She has an independent streak that needs to be contained. I want my readers to have a sense of premonition that she’ll do almost anything.”

But if Rachel kissing her son muddies the novel’s moral waters, it’s a confusion we can also trace back to Irving’s own childhood. When he published Until I Find You, he first began speaking ­publicly about how, when he was 11, he was sexually abused by an older woman. In that novel, the hero, whose mother is a famous ­tattoo artist, is also abused by an older woman in childhood. It’s imposs­ible to read his books without ­wondering, both about that older woman and about his mother. “Of course,” he nods. “Of course. That’s only human.”

Irving, who was a keen wrestler in his youth, tells me that his mother, Helen, was “wonderful. My wrestling teammates all loved her. Not just because she was a pretty woman, which she was, but because she was outrageously out of control at wrestling matches. They all thought that was ­won­derful, even though that could at times be embarrassing to me.”

But he still feels guilty that his mother – who he says had zero interest in literature – felt “obligated” to read his books. With no other fiction in her life, she had nothing to which she could compare her son’s work and was, he says, “always dismayed that she wasn’t the mother” in the stories.

“‘Who are these mothers?’ she would say. ‘That’s not what I was like, I didn’t do that!’ I would say, ‘Of course you’re not. There’s a thread of circumstance that is the same, but I changed everything else.’ But she would be perturbed about it.” He pauses. “Now that she’s gone I… I think of my mother more. In the back of my mind, I feel a little sad… I do believe my mother just might have liked Little Ray the best.”

It’s no big spoiler for me to tell you now that Little Ray is gay. She’s in a long-term relationship with a very steady woman called Molly, and she marries a man (nicknamed the Snowshoer) who eventually transitions to become a woman.

Although uninitiated readers might expect social conservatism of such an ostensibly Straight White Male and Great American Novelist, Irving has long been a champion of the LGBTQ community. Garp features a marvellous transgender character called Roberta. Today, he tells me that he refused to write the script for the Hollywood adaptation when he realised that the director, George Roy Hill, “was so much of an old school, World War II guy” that he “wasn’t able to see beyond the com­edic properties of a transgender former football player like Roberta”.

Irving thinks the eventual film, which alongside the “too sweet” Williams in the title role also starred John Lithgow as Roberta, “was a great waste of Lithgow’s talent. He could have easily brought empathy to the character. In fact, Lithgow said something brilliant in an interview. He was asked if it was really weird to play a trans woman and he, very wisely and correctly, said it wasn’t hard at all, Roberta is the most ­normal character in the film. That’s absolutely true. Everybody else is angry, but Roberta is the peacemaker.”

What Irving didn’t know when he wrote Garp was that his youngest child – with his second wife (and former publisher), Janet ­Turnbull – would one day tran­sition from “Everett” to “Eva”. “It’s not a secret,” he says, “but not ­everyone knows that I have a trans daughter, of whom I am very proud. She is a writer, and it’s wonderful to have another writer in the family. All the love and under­standing that I hope is invested in the Snowshoer is a reflection of my love and ­admiration for Eva.”

Irving gets angry when I try to raise the backlash against the liberties for which he has so long campaigned. The anti-trans movement, the overturning of Roe v Wade, this summer’s attack on his old friend Salman Rushdie – all make him feel that “the divisiveness I see in the country of my birth seems more extreme than I recall it being heretofore. I remember, at the time of Vietnam, thinking that I would never again see my country as divided as it was then. Well, huh, wrong! Things are worse now and people are divided over many more subjects. They’re banning abortion. Banning books with LGBTQ themes in public schools and libraries – to what end? To make gay, lesbian and trans kids feel more isolated and alone than they already do. To cut them off. It’s driven by cruelty.”

In the wake of the attack on Rushdie – who was stabbed at a literary event in New York State, more than 30 years after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his assassination – I ask if Irving feels he is putting himself at risk by speaking out. He waves off that concern, but then admits that when he once appeared at Chautauqua’s outdoor amphitheatre, where Rushdie was attacked, he found it “a little scary. It reminded me of how exposed you are on a wrestling mat. You were so exposed to the crowd, there were no fences or barriers, and the seats were close to the mat. Anyone could get to you.”

Irving has been emailing Rushdie since the attack, but doesn’t “expect an answer any time soon. I remember him coming to stay with me in Vermont, early in the fatwa, with his son, Zafar. He was teaching him to drive on the backroads. It was a respite. He felt safe there. Knowing me, I was looking over his shoulder the whole time. Although, actually, I felt much safer with Zafar driving than with Salman!”

He leans towards his webcam, and I notice a mark on his arm that I suspect is the whale. “Oh, I got both the whale and the line – in the end,” he says. “In my late 70s, I think. But I knew at 18 that the ending of Moby-Dick is the best… the most foretold, most perfectly constructed ending in fiction. It became the model, in my imagination. At 18, I realised: know the ending before you begin.”

The Last Chairlift by John Irving is published by Scribner at £25