Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Read online

  But I don’t always feel so superior to the Bounderbys. The last time my husband and I moved—from a two-bedroom apartment to a nearby three-bedroom row house, the little house of my dreams, complete with a porch, perfect for reading on breezy afternoons—we had to buy and pack up some 150 boxes from the moving company to accommodate our three thousand odd books. The movers, three nice big guys, started at 8:30 A.M. and worked till 9:00 P.M. All because of the books. We certainly didn’t have much furniture. “The only job worse than this I ever worked,” said one of the guys, “was a lawyer’s house; he had all those big law books.” Some of our books went upstairs into the smallest bedroom, christened “the study.” Most of them wound up in a big room in the basement that we mistakenly assumed was dry. Five years have gone by since we moved into our house, and about twenty boxes of books still remain to be squeezed into the bookshelves shoved up against the basement walls. It’s the first time in my adult life that I’m not living with books lining the walls of every room, and it’s nice to have a psychic break from them, some space that isn’t taken up by other people’s thoughts and fantasies. My daughter wants a playroom in the basement like her little neighborhood friends have. As soon as we clear out the remaining boxes, we can do some remodeling. (A chip off the old block, she naturally wants her Madeline, Arthur, and Junie B. Jones books shelved in a reading nook down there, next to the armless Barbies and dried-up Play-Doh containers.) But those overloaded bookshelves teeter-totter. We’ll need to hire a handyman to drill holes in the cement walls and anchor the bookcases with wires and bolts. Otherwise, there might well be another, much more horrific book accident—this time involving a child, a training-wheel bicycle, and a wobbling bookcase.

  The Bounderbys would be disgusted. So much money spent to move all those books! And we wound up just throwing away a lot of those empty cardboard book boxes we paid for, since we resolved never to move again. Those books are cluttering up good income-generating space. There’s a bathroom down there, so the basement could be rented out. But for me and my husband—two people who met because of their shared love of reading—that basement is the messy, book-lined foundation of our lives together.

  My dad didn’t live long enough to see me fulfill the American Dream of home ownership. We bought our row house the autumn after he died. After Rich and I learned our bid on the house had been accepted, I called a close friend and heard myself excitedly describe the house to her as “shipshape.” That’s a term my dad might have used, but I don’t think I’d ever spoken it before. As an old Navy man, my dad would have lamented the semipermanent chaos of boxes and paper in our basement, but he would have loved all those books. In the years following my marriage, whenever my dad visited the apartment Rich and I lived in, he would run his hands over the volumes shelved in our living room, dining room, and tiny galley kitchen. Even books on literary theory or eighteenth-century novels that he’d have no interest in got a pat, sometimes even an automatic thumbing through. Book lovers always have to touch books.

  When I began to help my mother clear out the apartment in Queens she and my dad lived in for almost thirty years, I found out that he, too, was a pack rat, just a much tidier one than my husband. He’d saved all the letters, bound up in black electrical tape, that my mother had sent him during World War II; all his W-2 earnings statements dating back to the 1960s; the receipts for most of the appliances, large and small, he and my mother had bought throughout five decades of marriage. (The most thrilling find in the latter category was the title for our 1964 Rambler, a beloved big blue box of a car that my dad would exhume from the garage every weekend to take us on long drives to the beach or to Washington Irving’s house in Westchester or Teddy Roosevelt’s house in Oyster Bay on Long Island. I think my dad paid something like four thousand dollars for that car in 1964, but of course, I’ve already misplaced the title in the paper chaos of my own house.) In his bedroom were the boxes for many of the newer appliances. I’d always assumed he’d saved those boxes in case anything went wrong and he’d have to send the microwave or table fan back to the manufacturer. In his later years, my dad would have been too debilitated by dialysis to break up the boxes and carry them downstairs to the apartment house’s recycling can.

  When I opened the topmost box in one of these bedroom piles in order to begin the drudgery of breaking them up, I found a surprise. Books. Books, books, books. That box was filled with books; so were the boxes below that one and the boxes beside and under his bed. My dad had kept hardcovers and even proof copies of the mysteries and World War II adventure tales I’d given him. There were well-worn paperbacks of Revolutionary War novels by E. Van Wyck Mason and Kenneth Roberts, as well as the Horatio Hornblower books and the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain; there were hardcovers he’d bought at secondhand stores. My dad had mentioned to me a few times that when he liked a book, he would read it over and over again. Obviously. By keeping those books close by, he made sure that he could always reread a good story.

  So, what am I going to do with all those books? I’ve donated some to the library; but otherwise, our basement collection of books on world history and politics and modern American and European literature is being augmented by titles like Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn, Convoy of Fear by Philip McCutchan, Fall from Grace by Larry Collins, and Torpedo Junction by Robert Casey. I’m reading my way through some of them; so far, they’re all good stories, and I’ve even read the Larry Collins novel twice. (It’s a terrific World War II suspense story featuring a female spy.) They’re in piles on the floor, next to the cherished Nancy Drew novels that my dad saved for me after I “outgrew” them in adolescence. My dad’s books make the basement a still more hazardous place for my daughter to play. They’re also upright memorials to the wonderful grandfather she’ll only get to know now through stories.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tales of Toil: What John Ruskin and Sam Spade Taught Me About Working for a Living

  Like Grandma Helen, who left Poland for America in the early years of the twentieth century, I packed my bags as a young woman and left family, friends, and native culture to seek a new life. Except that I boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and got off in Philadelphia. Grandma Helen’s epic journey was motivated by poverty and by the stories she’d heard about America; mine was inspired by an overwhelming—and overwhelmingly naïve—love of literature. At age twenty-one, I had been admitted to the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the big life questions that sometimes gnaws at me at three in the morning is whether or not entering that program was a Major Wrong Turning. “You earned a Ph.D. and read widely,” murmurs the angel sitting on the pillow by my right ear. “You spent your youth walled up in a library,” taunts the devil on my left. “You could have joined the Peace Corps or sailed around the world.” (The devil has read far too many male extreme-adventure tales.) Mistake or not, I did it, and so, like the young Grandma Helen, I, too, stepped into a foreign land where I didn’t speak the language. I adapted, as most immigrants do, and eventually found a way to make a meaningful working life for myself through reading. But not in the way I originally thought I would. Once again, books took me off course. Just as I think decades of avid reading are indirectly responsible for opening up my mind and heart to the idea of adopting my daughter from China, I think my discovery of and consuming love affair with detective fiction midway through graduate school steered me away from a career as a scholar. In both cases, books made me see myself differently and gave me a wider sense of possibilities.

  But I had to pay a price for the self-knowledge I gained in graduate school: the price was being in graduate school. I think of those years as my time served as a character immured in a Gothic novel. To give you a sense of how weird—indeed sometimes even sinister—this world of graduate school was, let’s journey back to the autumn of 1977. It’s four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and I’m standing in a small cluster of first-year graduate students who’ve been invited to the weekly “She
rry Hour” hosted by Penn’s English Department. The dark lounge in Bennett Hall where the gathering takes place resembles, to my delight, a shabby drawing room out of an Agatha Christie mystery. I’m quietly crowing to myself: I’ve gotten a fellowship into an Ivy League graduate school, and I’m on my way toward achieving my dream of becoming an English professor. A few years of classes, a dissertation (basically a very long term paper, no problem), and I’ll have my Ph.D. Then I’ll be in the same rarified realm as the English professors I idolized as an undergraduate at Fordham University. Here I am already sipping sherry, for heaven’s sake! I don’t like it, but I’ll learn to and . . . wait a minute. Professor X, who’s holding court at the center of our little group, is saying something. I’ve been assigned to be his teaching assistant, so I’d better listen. Professor X knocks back another glass (what is this, his fourth?), stares over our heads at a spot on the wall, and mutters an oracular verdict: “None of you will ever come close to Ira Einhorn. He was the most brilliant student the department ever had.”

  Granted, those inspiring words were spoken before Holly Maddux’s body was actually discovered in a trunk in Einhorn’s apartment, but in the fall of 1977, Einhorn was widely regarded as the chief suspect in her disappearance. I should have gleaned two things from Professor X’s pronouncement—and then I should have grabbed my book bag, run down to nearby Thirtieth Street Station, and hopped on the first train back to New York. First, I should have realized that I had landed in a little pond still very much patrolled by big male fish. Sure, it was the late seventies and the Second Women’s Movement was thriving and Penn even had a prominent feminist scholar on its faculty (even if she dressed like Stevie Nicks and whispered animatedly to herself), but only male graduate students gained access to the select inner networking circles where they went out drinking, played racquetball, and, presumably, argued urgent matters of weighty intellectual portent with their mentors. We women could sleep with the faculty (that old story) and otherwise abase ourselves—I knew one nonsmoking woman who always had a book of matches at the ready in case her mentor wanted to light up—but in terms of intellectual community, we were mostly out in the cold. As Einhorn’s grisly tale eventually revealed, a woman could even be murdered and stuffed in a trunk, but if her boyfriend was “brilliant,” he was the one who would be mourned for having his promising career ruined; she was just an undistinguished student who had taken six years to graduate from Bryn Mawr.

  That’s the other thing the Einhorn tribute should have clued me in to: gender aside, the thing that mattered most in this elite new world of mine was brainpower—or, at least, the projection of brainpower. Being a decent, truthful, charitable person—none of those traditional Judeo-Christian virtues counted. Wit, verbal adroitness, a substantive intellectual background (or at least the illusion of one), and condescension toward one’s mental inferiors were the marks of distinction here. Theory, with its bizarre vocabulary of literary encryption, was just beginning to take root at Penn and other top graduate schools across the land.

  I was a pretty good close reader, so why didn’t I read the writing on the wall at that Penn Sherry Hour? Simple: I was blinded by desire. I longed for a community of fellow readers—people who, like me, wanted to read and talk about books all the time. Instead, what I mostly found in graduate school were some oddly assorted bookworms, each of us already isolated in our own anxiously declared literary “fields,” and a few ruthless careerists who, cannily assessing the shrinking academic job market, did things like razor out articles on reserve at the library for the master’s exam we were all required to take. I was imperfectly armored against the masculine bias of graduate school by all my years of practicing what literary scholar Nancy K. Miller has called a “learned androgyny”—that is, the ability to effect a sex-change operation of the imagination, an ability I, along with millions of other female readers, had developed over decades of reading books mostly featuring male heroes and antiheroes. With the courage of the deluded, I assumed that I could easily step into a man’s profession because I so easily stepped into men’s stories in literature.

  By the time I wised up, it felt too late to make a change. While I worked at a bunch of part-time jobs, taught literature at colleges in the area, and, most happily, began writing book reviews for The Village Voice, I stayed officially registered as a graduate student at Penn for almost a decade. I stayed there out of inertia, because Penn was giving me a free financial ride, and because retreating home to Queens seemed like a defeat. And I stayed out of love, because even after a few ego-shredding years as a graduate student, I still couldn’t imagine a better line of work than to be an English professor, always lecturing and writing, surrounded by books.

  I’d had two especially inspiring and generous professors at Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx where I went as an undergraduate. They were—and remain—the best teachers I’ve ever had in my life, and I wanted to be like them. Professor Mary Fitzgerald taught Irish literature and looked like a heroine out of Celtic mythology—tall with pale skin and long, jet-black hair. In the summer of my junior year at Fordham, she invited me and a few other devoted English majors to go with her to Ireland; we studied at the Yeats Summer School and roamed around the country, meeting the poets and scholars who were her friends. We drank Guinness with Seamus Heaney (who rescued me one night at a dance from the drunken gyrations of a famous fellow poet) and talked incessantly about literature. I think about Mary these days when I’m in office hours with my own students at Georgetown. How did she put up with the company of a bunch of undergrads, no matter how enthusiastic, every day for a full month? Professor Jim Doyle was another glutton for punishment. A small, intense, brilliant, and very funny man, he taught modern poetry and nonfictional Victorian prose. My own dissertation topic—the medieval revival in art, literature, and politics in Victorian England—was Jim’s specialty. To Jim, literature mattered—the way I imagine literature mattered to the New York Intellectuals or the poets of the Enlightenment or World War I. I remember him, bedraggled, coming into a seminar class on Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and announcing, through drags on his ever-present cigarette, that he had stayed up all night, rereading the book and trying to revise his thoughts on it. No other adult I knew stayed up all night, thinking through intellectual problems.

  In the years since I graduated with a Ph.D., many of the teaching colleagues who’ve become my friends have shared their own horror stories about graduate school. At best, it seems a mixed experience. Nonetheless, I insist that Penn, in the years I was there, was uniquely awful because it was so nervously self-conscious about its own institutional status. In his recent memoir, The Road to Home, Vartan Gregorian, who served as provost of Penn during a good chunk of my time there, recalls how he was the odds-on favorite with faculty and students to be appointed president of the university in 1980. That is, until certain trustees voiced anxieties that Gregorian (who was born in Iran to Armenian parents) was “too ethnic.”1 Penn ultimately appointed Sheldon Hackney, a straight-out-of-central-casting-looking historian, to be its next president; Gregorian had the last laugh when he went on to serve, in turn, as president of the New York Public Library, Brown University, and, currently, the Carnegie Corporation.

  The average citizen routinely confused Penn with Penn State. Then there were intuitively wise people like my mother, who, upon hearing where I was going to graduate school, said, “That sounds like a prison.” So Penn tried to ameliorate its shortcomings by issuing sweatshirts emblazoned with the phrase NOT PENN STATE and attempting to out-Ivy the other Ivy League schools. Hence, ersatz Oxbridge customs, such as the English Department’s weekly Sherry Hour. Adding to Penn’s jitters was its location. Situated in West Philadelphia, across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia proper, the campus was surrounded by a ring of crumbling row houses, bars, and twenty-four-hour robbery-friendly convenience stores that spread outward into slums and industrial waste-lands. The area looked dingy and, at night, menacing. I mostly sha
red apartments with friends during graduate school, but for a couple of particularly glum years I lived alone in a one-room apartment that was basically the bay window of one of these sagging West Philly row houses.

  It’s pretty clear to me now that my own class insecurities were exacerbated by Penn’s overcompensating behavior. I remember retreating one afternoon to the solitary refuge of the university library, where, in the English Seminar Room, I stared for a long time at the JOIN THE NAVY! poster that some canny recruiter had tacked up on the wall. Maybe, I thought, I could re-create my dad’s early adult life instead of the alienating one I was currently living. My first academic dinner party left me drenched in self-loathing, a feeling I waded around in for many of those years. The hors d’oeuvres tray featured artichokes—a vegetable that had never poked its fancy head into my mother’s Polish American kitchen. I watched how other people scooped up some dip with their artichoke leaves. I should have watched a little longer. When I began chewing a tough scale, I realized my mistake. Worried that my faux pas would become public, I chewed some more, took a deep breath, and gulped the whole fibrous mess down. I’m probably still digesting it.