Tuesday, April 28, 1998 | 10:12 a.m.
Running through John Irving's novels is the theme of lost children and absent parents: from the unknown father in "The World According to Garp" to "The Cider House Rules," in which "all the parents are missing." In Irving's new novel, "A Widow for One Year," a mother, severely depressed by the accidental death of her two sons, disappears for 37 years. A pivotal line in the book says, "The grief of lost children never dies."
As Irving talked about his work and himself - he was brought up by his mother and stepfather and has never known his real father - it was clear that this theme cuts deeply into his own life, too. Up to now, the subject of his father has been a closed book, at least publicly.
These thoughts gradually emerged in a series of recent conversations at his home in southern Vermont and later at Middlebury College, where he read from his new novel, due out next month from Random House. Although his books often have their roots in events and emotions in his life and that of his family, he said, they sharply diverge from specifics.
In using himself in his fiction, he said, "you can become tyrannized by the authenticity of what you remember." He is never tyrannized by the authenticity of what he imagines.
At 56, Irving, the author of nine novels, most of them best sellers, that have been printed in more than 30 languages, has both literary stature and worldwide popularity. Synchronized with the publication of "A Widow for One Year" is the 20th-anniversary Modern Library edition of "Garp," the book that made his name and fortune. In a new introduction, he says the novel is about a father's fears of the death of children.
With its principal theme and its structure, "A Widow" recalls "Garp." It is a richly textured narrative, covering four decades, and it deals with a family of writers. The new book is, he said, "a multiple love story." It revolves around four characters, a married woman, Marion Cole, who has an affair with a 16-year-old boy, Eddie O'Hare; her husband, and her daughter, who eventually becomes the pivotal figure.
"I always saw it as three views of a woman at crucial times in her life," he said, "the 4-year-old child the summer her mother leaves her, the 36-year-old unmarried woman and the 41-year-old widow with a child the same age as she was when her mother left her."
At least outwardly, Eddie bears some of the author's biography, as a student in the 1950s at Exeter, an exclusive all-male boarding school, and as a hopeful writer with lustful inclinations. The future novelist grew up in Exeter, N.H., where his stepfather taught history at the prep school.
Irving explained that his mother and father divorced before he was born. At birth, he said, his name was John Wallace Blunt Jr. When he was 6, his mother remarried, her husband adopted him, and his name was changed to John Winslow Irving. He said that he had never met his biological father or tried to find him, though some of his friends have encouraged him to do so.
"If I had been unhappy with my mother or my stepfather, I think the quest to find my missing father would have become crucial," he said.
When Irving and his first wife divorced in 1981, his mother gave him a package of letters between her and his father and newspaper clippings detailing his heroism during World War II. "The fact that she gave them to me then was an indication that she thought I was going through something that would make me better understand what she had gone through," he said.
His father was an Army Air Force pilot whose plane was shot down over Japanese-occupied Burma. Missing for 40 days, he and his flight crew walked to China. Irving took his father's story and gave it to the character of Wally Worthington in "The Cider House Rules."
"He might still be alive," he said about his father. "Whoever he is, to his credit, he didn't come looking for me either."
If he did, he would find his son in Vermont, where he lives with his wife and 6-year-old son. Built to the author's specifications on a hilltop with spectacular views of the Green Mountains, their home has the rustic, wood-hewn appearance of a mountain hideaway.
At "the guy's end of the house," Irving has a fully equipped gym. As large as an executive health club, it is centered around a regulation-size wrestling mat. Irving, who is America's foremost novelist-wrestler (is there any other?), works out here for two hours every day. He lifts weights, rides his exercise bicycles and - when no suitable opponent, like one of his two adult sons, is in the house - he wrestles with a lifelike dummy.
"He's getting the better of me now," he said of the dummy. "He never gets tired." Wrestling, he said, is what he does instead of meditating. Most of the day, he is at his desk writing, the first draft in longhand, then on his electric typewriter.
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