Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Page 13
The second half of The Big Sleep, what many scholars consider the greatest hard-boiled detective novel of all time (I vote for The Maltese Falcon), takes place only because Marlowe alone decides the work must go on. This and a hundred other examples from a hundred other hard-boiled novels lead me to insist that, as a group, tough-guy detectives are the ultimate independent contractors. If a detective takes on an assignment, he takes charge. As in the idealistic world of Morris’s News from Nowhere, money is not the motivating force behind a detective’s work. Professional pride, a quest for the truth, integrity—those are the forces that propel a detective up from his desk chair, away from that whiskey bottle, and out into the cold fog.
Where, these days, they’d probably run into their female counterparts skulking in the shadows and puzzling over the age-old problem of how to pee while conducting surveillance. In the wake of the Second Women’s Movement, a new type of female detective—liberated from the sleuthing spinster niceties of Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple and the sex-kitten decorativeness of a Honey West—has gotten to talk tough, dirty her hands, mouth off to her employers, and use her brains. American Marcia Muller and Brit legend P. D. James share the laurel crown for creating this new species of female detective: Muller introduced her investigator, Sharon McCone, in the 1977 novel Edwin of the Iron Shoes; P. D. James’s private eye, Cordelia Grey, debuted in the 1972 masterpiece An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Since then hundreds upon hundreds of female detectives, professional and amateur, have crowded into the canon, and most have brought a consciously feminist edge to the issues of work and autonomy.
Whenever a spare half hour or so opens up in my day, I dive into the mystery novels written by modern masters of the form, writers such as Robert B. Parker, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, George Pelecanos, Laurie King, Richard Stevenson, Peter Lovesey, Liza Cody, Lisa Scottoline, Henning Mankell, Ian Rankin, and Val McDermid. Among other things, they give shape to an empowering fantasy for overextended readers like myself: the fantasy of being in control of your work life, of calling the shots, of using your brains as well as whatever brawn you possess to get your own way. Take Scottoline, whose legal suspense novels, featuring the all-woman Philadelphia law firm Rosato & Associates, confront with hip humor the on-the-job aggravation that “lady lawyers” face—from patronizing old-boy judges to short-waisted pantyhose. One of her recurring characters, attorney Judy Carrier, has taped the empowering motto “Don’t ask permission, apologize later” above her desk. Scottoline’s “mouthpieces,” like most other post-sixties female detectives and suspense heroines, really do get to mouth off to obnoxious clients, as well as to cops and other authority figures. That’s a tantalizing carrot, I think, that female detective fiction deliberately dangles in front of its women readers: the vision of women who say what they think and damn the consequences. Unlike those tight-lipped men who’ve long dominated detective fiction (Sam Spade was the almost silent center of The Maltese Falcon, and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser is distinguished by his one-sentence witticisms), feminist female sleuths use their words as one of their chief weapons.
Sara Paretsky has talked in interviews about how she consciously fashioned her lippy detective, V. I. Warshawski, to be the antithesis of the quiet good girl. Sue Grafton’s enormously popular Rosie the Riveter–type tough gal, Kinsey Milhone, can’t keep her big trap shut even in situations when speaking up means getting fired. In a recent alphabet outing, P is for Peril, Kinsey struggles to rein in her sass in the presence of her employer, a bejeweled widow named Fiona Purcell. After Fiona gives her a dressing-down for some minor infraction of their contract, Kinsey grimly reflects that she can’t afford to refund Fiona her retainer and, thus, wash her hands of this troublesome boss. A nice, realistic aspect of the detective novel, male and female, as a utopian fantasy about work is that the detective’s freedom is usually abridged by the need to make a living. Kinsey gives herself a sensible mini-lecture on the necessity of being a humble worker bee, but autonomy and professional honor triumph: “My temper emerged hard on the heels of injury and I had to bite my tongue bloody to keep from telling her where to stick it. This resolution lasted until I opened my mouth. ‘You know what? Fun as this is, I’m already tired of taking crap from you. I’ve worked my butt off this weekend and if my methods don’t suit you, I’m out of here.’ ”11
Who wouldn’t vicariously thrill to scenes like that one in feminist mystery fiction where the heroines let ’er rip? Like many women, in tense conversations I tend to get quiet or stammer, or ten minutes later, after the other person has walked off, I think of the devastating remark I should have made. One of the great pleasures of writing book reviews is that I get to say what I think when I also have the time and space to say it right. Nobody interrupts or intimidates—it’s just me and my computer. But I’m much more comfortable voicing my opinions, especially the controversial ones, in print than in person. So when I read novels by Paretsky and the rest of her sisters in crime, I’m raring to become one of their cheeky heroines and get a taste of a way I’ll never be. I also get a taste of what it’s like to confront physical danger, psychological distress, overwhelming exhaustion, and the eventual elation of surviving near-fatal situations. Sound familiar? Well, yes, we’re back in the literary territory of the female extreme-adventure tale. I said earlier that female extreme-adventure tales written in the wake of feminism feature heroines who don’t “simply” endure but who also act. I think that contemporary women’s detective fiction is a fantasy version of this “second wave” female extreme-adventure tale. The detectives in these tales don’t simply endure, nor do they simply act; instead, they retaliate, kick butt, and set a world gone wrong to rights. Feminist detective-fiction heroines take a lickin’, but they always come up tickin’, ultimately (if only temporarily) clearing their patch of the evil infestation of the patriarchy.
At considerable risk to life and legal practices, for instance, Scottoline’s lawyers get to live out the dream of taking the law into their own hands and do well for themselves and for society. Feminist detectives like V. I. Warshawski and Kinsey Milhone dodge bullets and disarm thugs to aim their own suggestively phallic pistols at male-dominated institutions like the Catholic Church and the banking and insurance industries that have given women grief for so long. Living on the fringe of society in a broken-down trailer powered by illegal electricity, Liza Cody’s amateur detective and wrestling champion, Eva Wylie, uses her muscles and her thick head to batter male parasites who’ve screwed up the lives of the women and children she cares about. Sure, it’s all make-believe, but what great and empowering fantasies these contemporary female mysteries/fantasy female extreme-adventure tales conjure up.
I had begun some detecting work of my own on and off during the final years of graduate school. It was a missing-subgenre case. Years before that momentous night when I ran into the Continental Op, I had started to be puzzled by the mystery of what had happened to the novel about work, which had appeared sporadically during the past three centuries and then vanished with barely a trace after the 1960s. Given my own class background and the importance that physical work played in the lives of the adults I knew growing up, it was more and more disturbing to me that almost none of the literature I was reading in graduate school contained representations of the realm of work as it would have been understood by the people I knew back in Sunnyside. The kind of work done by the privileged classes—artists, writers, politicians, the landed gentry—was the focus of most of the fiction and nonfiction I was reading. Few pages, if any, were devoted to the kind of skilled and semiskilled labor that, for centuries, has put calluses on the hands of the working class. So I was determined to find out if the novel about work was really sleeping the Big Sleep or if it was living in disguise, maybe holed up in a forgotten section of the local bookstore.
My first clue was a strange passage in Ian Watt’s important book, The Rise of the Novel, which, even these days I think, most graduate students in English at least glance at before
they hurry on to the works of the more au courant theory heads. Watt, who long reigned as the dean of eighteenth-century scholars, claimed that the reason the novel was novel was because of its interest in work. He nominated Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as the first novel, bizarrely constructing a definition of the novel that only fit Robinson Crusoe and the handful of other novels in English that place representations of work at the center of their stories. Here’s the odd pronouncement that Watt made in The Rise of the Novel:
Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person’s daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention. . . . The Puritan conception of the dignity of labour helped to bring into being the novel’s general premise that the individual’s daily life is of sufficient importance and interest to be the proper subject of literature.12
The funny thing is that Watt’s Crusoe-inspired definition doesn’t make much sense even when applied to Defoe’s next novel, about that resilient lady of pleasure, Moll Flanders. The record of “an ordinary person’s daily activities” is also conspicuously absent from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary bodice rippers, Pamela and Clarissa; Henry Fielding’s on-the-road epics, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones; and Laurence Sterne’s psychedelic farce, Tristram Shandy. If we stick with Watt’s choice of Robinson Crusoe as the first novel in English (and almost everybody does, except for a few cranky medievalists who lobby for The Canterbury Tales), then we’re left with a puzzling history of the genre, for at the very moment of its inception, the novel picked up and almost immediately discarded the everyday work of ordinary people as a fit subject for delineation.
I was young and restless and intrigued by this literary mystery, so I would mull it over during endless afternoons otherwise spent picking at the splinters on my library carrel. The answer to the whodunit of why work was dumped as the novel’s main subject had to do with centuries of theorizing about the function of art intersecting with the dawning of modern capitalism. From Plato onward, philosophers and poets insisted that art should enlighten and elevate. Art has always belonged to the realm of freedom, while work, particularly at the close of the eighteenth century, moved further and further into the realm of necessity. Industrial capitalism made work an even less appealing focus for art because it changed the very nature of work by divorcing the head from the hand. The development of the novel paralleled this split by delving deeper into the head and caring less about what the hand was doing. The public and private spheres also became more rigidly separated under industrial capitalism: the mill was where people had to go for a certain number of hours every day in order to make a living; but that by-product of work—a living—was consumed at home. Storytellers, always on the lookout for a good time, found the private sphere much more diverting than they did the cramped and coerced public sphere of work.
Other culprits also had a hand in shanghaiing work out of the novel. The people who determined aesthetic values and the people who wrote novels were not, in most instances, the kind of people who worked in the fields or, later, the factories. The novel didn’t have to ignore physical labor, but most middle- and upper-class novelists were strictly brain-workers who failed to see the imaginative possibilities in other forms of work. It’s not surprising that the early novelists, heirs to some two thousand years of elitist aesthetic theory, should dismiss common toil as an unworthy subject of contemplation. What is surprising is that the very first novel explicitly focused on the barbarism of its own artistic origins. Robinson Crusoe entertains, elevates, and educates us as it imagines what one man does with his mind and hands every day. Defoe managed the near impossible because he set his novel about work on a remote island where he could elaborate on his utopian vision of work as both essential and satisfying, giving his well-bred hero an “excuse” to engage in manual as well as mental labor.
Readers misled by the Fantasy Island locale think of Robinson Crusoe primarily as a travel tale or extreme-adventure narrative. They should think again. It takes Crusoe only five chapters to “commute” to work on his island. For the next twenty-five chapters—and thirty-five years— he’s a regular Mr. Fix-It: in addition to building a fortress, he catches and cooks turtles, dolphins, and goats; he makes furniture, clothes, and a canoe; he sows corn and bakes bread; he surveys the island and keeps a journal. Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe’s essential, civilization-building chores.
But Crusoe’s fictional defenses don’t hold. Moll Flanders, Pamela, Tom Jones—the whole crew go over the top, oust Crusoe and Friday, and settle themselves and their exceptional tales of mistaken identity, romance, and adventure into the charmed circle of the mundane that Crusoe staked out. The great Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams claimed that the inheritance plot and the marital-property settlement furnished roughly 90 percent of the basic plot structures of the nineteenth-century novel. This pattern holds true even for most nineteenth- and twentieth-century working-class fiction, which tended to reproduce dominant bourgeois forms. (The masons, yeomen, gardeners, and miners of Hardy, Lawrence, and Richard Llewellyn tell us less about how they work than about how they escape work through love and university scholarships.) Even that pantheon of English industrial-reform novels—books like Mary Barton, Shirley, Hard Times, and Felix Holt, the Radical—concentrates on class relations, which often translate as interclass romances, rather than on the hard day’s work the characters do.
Ditto for our side of the Atlantic. Moby-Dick gets points for those chapters that describe the actual work of whaling, such as “Stowing Down and Clearing Up” and the famously homoerotic meditation on working with whale blubber, “A Squeeze of the Hand.” But its representations of work are chiefly relegated to steerage, below the political and cosmic allegories stowed aboard the Pequod. Louisa May Alcott’s autobiographical novel, Work, which she began writing in 1863, is a more promising contender. It chronicles the trials of heroine Christie Devon as she builds up an impressive résumé: servant girl, actress, seamstress, and, finally, stump speaker for the First Women’s Movement. Work owes its realistic glimpses of life in the sweatshop and scullery to Alcott’s own experience. Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s philosopher papa, was too busy transcendentalizing to stoop to conventional employment. So, from the age of sixteen onward, Alcott contributed to her family’s survival by seeking waged work. Like Moby-Dick, however, Work winds up subordinating its depictions of Christie’s toil to grander plot concerns: an updating of The Pilgrim’s Progress with a dash of romance for the ladies.
By the time I’d read all these alleged work novels, I’d become as single-minded about tracking down traces of work in literature as Sam Spade is with finding that falcon. I skimmed the mustiest books, for instance, those “below-stairs” reminiscences written by butlers and parlor maids from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth with stirring titles such as Life of a Licensed Victualer’s Daughter or The Diary of William Tyler, Footman, 1837. Then someone told me about Robert Tressell’s bizarre 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Just as James Joyce and the rest of the modernist gang were about to nudge the novel even further away from realistic representations of work, Tressell’s book appeared—a six-hundred-page chronicle of the daily laboring lives of a group of English housepainters and renovators. It’s an epic of spackling, stripping, and socialism.
I was so bowled over by The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists when I first read it that I even insisted that my first-year English class at Bryn Mawr, where I was then teaching, read the whole book. Belated apologies, ladies. Then again, maybe they got something out of the book that they couldn’t have found in the much more familiar and polished novels of Dickens or Austen. I now concede that, storywise, Tressell’s tour de force is boring. No romances, no inheritance plots. Just this same work plot, over and over and over:
As a rule [the workers] worked till half-past five in the evening, and by th
e time they reached home it was six o’clock. When they had taken their evening meal and had a wash it was nearly eight; about nine most of them went to bed so as to be able to get up about half-past four the next morning to make a cup of tea before leaving home at half-past five to go to work again.13
The narrator, knowing full well that novel readers expect more exotic goings-on, often sardonically apologizes for the book’s obsession with the ordinary. “This is an even more unusually dull and uninteresting chapter”; “At the risk of wearying the long-suffering reader, mention must be made of an affair that happened at this particular ‘job.’ ” And away we go into a long description of fitting venetian blinds. We’re also told about how the workers clean drains, burn old paint off ceilings with paraffin torches, whitewash, apply stencils, and mix paint. Often the novel tells us about these processes more than once, because the workers perform these jobs over and over, day after day.
I dutifully read and reread Tressell, but I still wanted to see where writing about work had last been sighted, so I kept nosing around. Predictably, I ran into Britain’s Angry Young Men of the 1950s, who carried forward Tressell’s politics in their novels but couldn’t sustain his aesthetic focus. And that’s about where I came to the end of the line in my investigations. I dipped into the novels of Harvey Swados, Marge Piercy, John Sayles, Don DeLillo, and Nelson Algren and decided that, whatever their virtues, their writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself. Somewhere in the midst of this quest came the moment when I discovered the novels of Dashiell Hammett and his inheritors and eventually realized that the literary subject of work was staring me right in the face. Like Crusoe, the Op and his fellow detective heroes throw themselves into a diverse round of tasks designed to rebuild civilization or at least fortify it against the wildness lurking in the shadows. Hard-boiled detective fiction, more than almost every other kind of novel that’s followed Robinson Crusoe in the Anglo-American tradition, attempts to return us to Defoe’s enclosed circle of normalcy where our greatest pleasure, as readers, arises out of watching a pro at work.