Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Read online

  Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in. In graduate school, I learned how to swallow. The product of all my years at Penn was a mixture of education and affectation; trash and treasure. I enjoyed the luxury of time to read things like John Ruskin’s Modern Painters and all of Jane Austen. Just as their literary stocks were sinking, I became an expert on the moldy poetic trio of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. A Robert Browning revival, anyone? Predictably enough, I began going to foreign films (Werner Herzog was big) and caught on that it was hip to instantaneously dismiss any work of art that had mass appeal. I got my Ph.D. just before the cultural-studies tsunami belatedly rushed toward Penn. During my first years there, I attended a lecture on Victorian literature given by some visiting Big Name and watched in horror as my own dissertation advisor, a nice man and a waning Big Name himself, stood up during the question-and-answer period and made some erudite connection between, I think, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and an episode of The Incredible Hulk he’d watched with his young son. (Back then, you always needed an excuse to go slumming.) “Did anyone else see the show?” my advisor asked. The entire audience, perhaps some three hundred people, remained motionless and silent. I had watched the show (sans excuse), but if I had raised my hand in an act of support, my intellectual cred would have been wiped out.

  Books got me into this mess, and books got me through. When I announced to my professors at Fordham that I had gotten a fellowship for grad school at Penn, a professor within earshot, whom I didn’t know too well, walked over and said, “You’ve got to read Lucky Jim.” Always a dutiful student, I bought a copy of Kingsley Amis’s classic 1954 novel about academia and social class and I read it my first year at Penn. I reread it at least once during every year of graduate school, and I still reread it frequently. So far, I think it’s the funniest novel in the English language—at least the funniest I’ve ever read—and it contains the funniest sentence: “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.”2 That sentence appears in the middle of a paragraph describing a gargantuan hangover suffered by the novel’s hero, Jim Dixon, a hapless junior lecturer in history at an undistinguished university in England. Dixon, who’s from a lower-middle-class background, got his degree at a redbrick university on the equivalent of Britain’s GI Bill and fell into teaching for lack of a better idea. He’s a decent fellow utterly out of his element in the snooty university world of chamber music and medieval festivals. Like Penn did during my time there, Dixon’s unnamed university tries extra hard to mimic elite forms of behavior because it’s not quite a first-rate place.

  Forcing himself to jump through the academic hoops so that he’ll keep his job, Dixon authors an article entitled “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1470 to 1485,” which gets accepted by a little-known scholarly journal. The title, Dixon thinks to himself, was:

  perfect . . . , in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindless-ness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. . . . His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.3

  Dixon’s academic success is short-lived, however, because the editor of the journal turns around and plagiarizes the article, publishing it as his own in an Italian historical review. Poor Dixon then commits professional hari-kari by getting so desperately drunk immediately before the keynote university lecture he’s been invited to give on the topic of “Merrie England” that he passes out at the podium—but not before doing spot-on inebriated imitations of all the scholarly boobs he’s been forced to kowtow to throughout the story.

  I’ve read other fine academic farces written after Lucky Jim —David Lodge’s books and Richard Russo’s Straight Man and James Hynes’s supernaturally inflected satires, Publish and Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale (as well as Randall Jarrell’s much revered Pictures from an Institution, which I didn’t think was funny at all), but none come close to the Olympian comic heights of Lucky Jim. There are pages of that novel I can’t read in public—I snort and hock up helplessly with laughter. Why do I love Lucky Jim so? I know I immediately identified with Jim’s passive-aggressive maneuver of making faces (his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face, his Edith Sitwell face) behind his antagonists’ backs. I also marveled at Amis’s pitch-perfect ability to capture the bizarre quality of academic conversations, where one person has no idea what the other person is talking about because the latter’s vocabulary is so archly allusive. My dissertation advisor at Penn had a fondness for using arcane Victorian slang, so that often I left conferences in his office feeling clueless, like a newly arrived immigrant who couldn’t grasp her American employer’s housecleaning instructions. Years after I left Penn, he sent me a note about my review of Camille Paglia’s book Sexual Personae, which he’d heard on NPR. “You did her up brown!” he exclaimed. I was touched that he wrote and I understood that he was offering me a compliment, but once again, I had no idea what the man was saying.

  What I did come to understand as I sat through classes at Penn is that reading good books doesn’t necessarily make one a good person— or a smarter, funnier, or more cultivated person, either. This was a major epiphany for me—one I still struggle to come to terms with, since, as a teacher, I also have to believe that reading good books has some kind of influence on my students. We just can’t be sure what it might be. Books are powerful. On that point, conservative culture cranks like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney and I agree. But, unlike those two purveyors of literary uplift, I think the influence of books is neither direct nor predictable. (Got a whiney kid on your hands? Give him a purgative dose of Oliver Twist or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, advise these literature doctors, and he’ll straighten out just fine.)

  Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers. As critic Greil Marcus said in Mystery Train, his marvelous book on the development of rock and roll: “Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their lives in all sorts of different ways.”4 Over the years I’ve met people—pretentious people, apparently humorless people—who, I’ve somehow discovered, call Lucky Jim one of their favorite books, too. How can the kind of people who are pilloried in Lucky Jim enjoy it? More puzzling still is the mystery of what happened to Kingsley Amis himself after writing his masterpiece. Amis transformed from an Angry Young Man to a club-going, Merrie Olde England Tory bag of wind. How can such things be? Similar invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-type conversions besmirch literary history: the defection of New York Intellectual Norman Podhoretz to the right; the mutation of progressive reporter Joe Klein, who had written a moving biography of Woody Guthrie, no less, into a centrist pundit and author of the anonymous Clinton parodic novel Primary Colors . Why? Why? Why? If reading good books doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, apparently neither does writing them.

  At the end of Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon makes his escape from academe—hence the title. Many of the abominable professional mistakes he’s committed have been closely observed by a wealthy benefactor of the college, a Mr. Gore-Urquhart. When Dixon is sacked after his sodden lecture performance, he receives a phone call from Gore-Urquhart inviting him to come up to London to take a position as the rich man’s private secretary, in reality his “bullshit detector.” The final, exhilarating scene of the novel finds Dixon holding hands with Gore-Urquhart’s lissome niece as they prepare to board a train to London together, leaving the academic world in the dust.

  Lucky Jim is a male fairy tale—Dixon gets the job and the girl. In order to identify so fully with the hero of such a phallocentric (and sexist) story, I had to rely on my “lear
ned androgyny.” No problem. I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard round Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.” Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own.

  Besides, back to the case of Lucky Jim and its lesser inheritors, what choice did I have? All the academic farces I’ve ever read have been by and about men. Pontificating for a living, historically, has been a man’s job, but now that female professors have been occupying the podium for a couple of decades, you’d think that a send-up of academe from a female perspective would be a natural. Since my graduate-student days when I held on to Lucky Jim like a life preserver, there have been a few female memoirs about academe (Marianna De Marco Torgovnick’s Crossing Ocean Parkway, Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons, Lorna Sage’s superb Bad Blood) and lots of female murder mysteries set in academe (Dorothy Sayers’s classic Gaudy Night, Valerie Miner’s amusing Murder in the English Department, Carolyn Heilbrun’s effete Amanda Cross series), but no out-and-out farces that I know of. Odd, because the smart, sane female academics that I know have a library’s worth of funny/awful roman à clef tales to tell out of school.

  Nor are there many fictional sagas—period—that feature working-class women at the center. (Autobiographies have been more class-inclusive because, for so long, they were seen as the literary recourse of the unsophisticated.) Moll Flanders is the originating exception, but most up-from-the-working-class tales feature male protagonists. In those rare literary instances when a blue-collar gal does serve as a heroine, she almost always has to be gorgeous and preternaturally poised, a clear genetic aberration who deserves to be airlifted out of her squalid surroundings. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian melodrama Mary Barton provides the template for this kind of fantasy. Mary is beautiful, kind, and naturally refined; she’s a working-class “exception” who wouldn’t offend the sensibilities of Gaskell’s cultivated middle- and upper-class lady readers. The lesson I was constantly learning from literature and popular culture was that if you were a working-class young woman, you could be mouthy and shrewd like Moll Flanders (and her later real-life inheritors Roseanne Arnold and Tonya Harding) or demure and pretty (like Mary Barton’s contemporary human doppelgänger Nancy Kerrigan), but the one thing you couldn’t be was even vaguely intellectual.

  Working-class men such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure could think their way up from the fields and shop floor, but literary fiction was devoid of women who’d made the same thoughtful journey. Working-class women could be street-smart but not intelligent or bookish. Not until I began reading women’s detective novels late in my graduate-student days did I encounter women characters in the mysteries of Dorothy Sayers and Sara Paretsky—and, still later, Lisa Scottoline— who came from “distressed” or blue-collar backgrounds and who, through brains and hard work, had propelled themselves into the professional classes. These characters enlarge the menu and stretch the possibilities for how women can be in fiction; they also make women readers like me who’ve made the same kind of journey feel less lonely, less freakish. I wish I’d met them in the books I was reading at the beginning of graduate school, but, except for Sayers’s Harriet Vane, they didn’t exist yet. It took the Second Women’s Movement and the amazing transformations that it helped bring about in detective fiction to create a space for these kinds of street-smart and book-smart female characters.

  But in my eagerness to leave the unpleasantness of graduate school behind, I’m getting ahead of my story. I said that Jim Dixon makes his escape from academe at the end of the novel, but that’s not quite what happens. Dixon doesn’t escape; he’s delivered by a stroke of good fortune. So many characters in literature are “delivered” by fate, in the form of love or money. For impressionable readers like myself, that’s another bad side effect of reading a lot. We bookworms think that something or someone just has to come along to save us, because, after all, that’s the traditional trajectory of fictional plots and we tend to read our lives through literature. In my own particular case, literary passivity went hand in hand with Catholic mysticism (Somebody is always watching and He knows that I’m stuck, so, surely, something or somebody will appear to rescue me from this swamp of graduate school). Unlike Jim Dixon, I waited a long time to be liberated, but the cavalry—in circumstantial and human form—did finally arrive. I slowly finished my dissertation and got that academic monkey off my back. A friend of mine landed a job at The Village Voice and assigned me some book reviews to write, so I discovered the pleasure of finding my voice in print while being published in a venue that an educated audience of nonspecialists actually read. I also met my future husband when both of us were called upon by this same friend to “help” with the take-home editing test that the Voice gave her. Deliverance also came in the form of a hitherto unknown (to me) genre of literature.

  It was a dark and rainy Saturday night, and I was sitting at the kitchen table of my one-room apartment in West Philly scratching out my dissertation on a yellow legal pad. I was bored and lonely. I had been reading and thinking about William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, William Morris, and other Victorian gloom-and-doom social critics for so long that I felt (incorrectly, I know) I had nothing left to learn by writing about them. The best thing I could say about my dissertation was that it was ambitious: “Medievalism and the Myth of Revival in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Thought.” None of those prissy little readings of Shelley’s cave (or was it cloud?) imagery in scene 2 of Prometheus Unbound for me. My dissertation might have been dull, but it was historically sweeping in its dullness. I remember standing up from my kitchen table and abandoning whatever argument about Sartor Resartus or The Stones of Venice I was belaboring and doing a swan dive onto my daybed, where I lost myself in a paperback of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest that I’d picked up earlier that day. Someone had recommended Hammett to me, and since the plot synopsis on the back cover had mentioned something about labor unions, I bought it. (My dad was a lifelong union member and had served for years as the shop steward of his Steamfitters local.) What a relief it was to turn from the stirring but sepulchral tones of the Victorian Sages to this, the voice of Hammett’s detective hero, the Continental Op:

  I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.5

  That’s the opening paragraph of Red Harvest, where the Continental Op, Hammett’s otherwise unnamed, fat, middle-aged detective hero, makes his worldview known. To me, the Op’s was the voice in the wilderness: smart, tough, direct, and sassy. I missed the sound of that voice in the literature I read in graduate school as well as in the people I met there. And, of course, I fell in love with Dashiell Hammett himself. Self-educated, self-destructive, faithless, brilliant, and handsome—what dame could resist him? I followed up Hammett’s books with Raymo
nd Chandler’s sublime Philip Marlowe novels and, eventually, I’ll admit it, Mickey Spillane’s fascist fictions. (Years later I came across this Ogden Nash jingle: “The Marquis de Sade / Wasn’t always mad / What addled his brain / Was Mickey Spillane.”) By day, I shambled listlessly around Penn; by night, I walked down the mean streets of hard-boiled heaven.

  It’s probably the sturdy influence of the Catholic belief in a Big Plan that accounts for my own enduring faith that you find the books you need when you need them—even if they’re not the books you start out thinking you need. Along with my burgeoning career as a book reviewer, my discovery of and subsequent addiction to hard-boiled detective fiction delayed the completion of my dissertation. But it was the kind of literature I needed to read during those rough grad-school years. The “gals, guts, and guns” school of American mystery fiction supplied me with wonderful revenge fantasies at a time when I was feeling beaten down by the academic system. Imagine Spillane’s Mike Hammer on a panel at the Modern Language Association Convention. One snide question from some wise guy in the audience and—bam!—Mike would be feeding him a knuckle sandwich. I also really needed to hear some working-class voices in literature. I’m not reneging on my earlier dismissal of identity politics here, but I was so very conscious of my blue-collar background amidst a crowd of fellow graduate students and professors who all seemed to be deft artichoke eaters that I think I was looking for some small measure of class confirmation from the books I was immersed in.

  These days, it’s cool to be a working-class hero in the academy. Race, class, and gender are the Manny, Moe, and Jack of current professorial pep talk—even if most academics, like most Americans, have only the haziest understanding of the all-pervasive effects of class on American society. As Richard Rodriguez points out in his beautiful and incisive memoir Hunger of Memory, when academics now talk on about race, class, and gender, what they’re usually talking about is race and gender. If I were so inclined, maybe I could become an Angry Young Woman and exaggerate my Queens accent, trick myself out as a tough girl with a bad attitude, and make a working-class approach to literature my “field.” It’s weird to make oneself one’s “field,” but lots of academics these days are doing it—industriously promoting their own race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and/or religion as their intellectual specialty. One of the many drawbacks of this “I teach what I am” approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor’s expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack. When I was in graduate school, the attitude of working-class academics to their own backgrounds was equally suspect: rather than advertising their “up from the shop floor” roots, they transcended them (and, of course, many people, academics and civilians alike, still do) with an overlay of cultivated mid-Atlantic speech and careful attention to WASP rituals of dress and behavior.