Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Read online

  I discovered these books at a confusing time when I was trying to put together an adult life of my own—and a major part of that life would be work. I wanted work that would be creative and challenging and different each day. My father always said that part of the reason he decided, after World War II, to go to trade school and become a refrigeration-and-heating mechanic was that he didn’t want to be stuck inside an office. Like him, I wanted to roam around during the workday—even if only from classroom to library—and to be, to a certain extent, my own boss. Now, given the consumer-pleasing politics of today’s universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they’re sitting at the desks in front of me. If a teacher is not entertaining or lenient enough and her teaching evaluations plummet, she could lose the job. (Should that last statement strike you as paranoid, I refer you to the work of scholar and cultural critic Mark Edmundson, who writes for Harper’s and who recently published Teacher, a very wonderful and unsentimental memoir of the high school philosophy professor who changed him from a self-professed “football thug” into an intellectually curious student. Edmundson has incisively discussed the ways college campuses have grown akin to upscale retirement homes for the very young, where the promise of intellectually demanding courses ranks far below the lure of new gymnastic facilities.)

  I was immediately sold on hard-boiled detective fiction because of its focus on smart characters who spent the bulk of their days plugging away at work that gave them identity and purpose. I didn’t feel I had much control over, say, my romantic life, but my life as a wage earner was something I could, in part, shape, and I was exhilarated by these dark American romances about the thrills, the deep satisfactions, even the dangers of work. A lot of these thoughts about the lost fictional subject of work and its resurgence in the hard-boiled detective novel eventually got published in an essay I wrote in 1991 for The Village Voice Literary Supplement called “Tales of Toil: A Work Novel Is Hard to Find.”14 I consider that essay my real dissertation—a genuine piece of original scholarship and interpretation that contributed to the understanding of a certain type of literature. And, most important, it was intellectual work itself that engaged and satisfied me. My “real” dissertation had limped to a close a few years earlier.

  Just as my graduate-student career opened with a ghoulish scene— that English Department cocktail party featuring an encomium to Ira Einhorn—so it officially concluded with a Poe-like dash of the macabre. At Penn, as I think at most graduate programs, three professorial readers were required to sign off on a dissertation. The first two readers were supposed to be scholars in the designated field, in my case scholars of Victorian and Romantic literature, whom I’d invited to be on my dissertation committee. The department randomly appointed the third reader, who scrutinized the dissertation for any stray errors in grammar and format. As reader number three, I drew an old fellow, now deceased, whom I’ll refer to simply as Professor Y. Graduate students in the department at that time called him Tithonus, after the Tennyson poem about a mortal man, beloved of Eros, who is granted the gift of eternal life but not eternal youth.

  Professor Y suffered, as I did all throughout graduate school, from eczema. But Professor Y’s eczema was acute. From his scabrous scalp to his swollen red fingers, every inch of the visible skin on his body was inflamed and flaking. The poor man couldn’t stop scratching himself on his face and his hands. I would have felt sorry for Professor Y, especially given our kinship of dermatitis, but he was a martinet in matters of punctuation—a veritable Patton of the parenthesis, a de Sade of the semicolon. At the appointed time, I presented myself at his office and sat next to him for hours, going through the typescript of my dissertation, line by line, page by page, for some 266 pages. Every time he spotted an extra space after a semicolon (my trademark peccadillo) he would point a gnarled finger at the space and shake his head. And he would scratch. Gradually, every page of my dissertation became coated with flakes of dead skin.

  “Congratulations on completing the requirements for your Ph.D.,” Professor Y formally said at the conclusion of that long afternoon. He slowly stood up and shook my hand. More dead-skin flakes. I was one of them now.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “They’re Writing Songs of Love, but Not for Me”: Gaudy Night and Other Alternatives to the Traditional “Mating, Dating, and Procreating” Plot

  Weddings are inherently comical events—mine certainly was—that’s why Shakespeare’s comedies routinely end in a marriage. The vast effort expended trying to “put on the dog” for the Big Day frequently backfires and produces moments of absurdity. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, most of my old gang of girlfriends from Sunnyside were getting married. Because they were, like me, Irish Catholic, their nuptials were distinguished by mediocre food, free-flowing liquor, pre-Riverdance-style step dancing, and their own peculiar strains of Gaelic piety. When my best friend, Mary Ellen, announced her engagement (a Catholic doctor! Bingo!), she was fêted at a bridal shower where one of her aunts, a nun, presented her with a macramé crucifix, complete with droplets of blood sewn in red yarn. When another close friend from St. Raphael’s, Cathy Sullivan, married Jim O’Brien, who was then a fireman at Kennedy airport, the wedding was held at Our Lady of the Skies Chapel at the airport (since demolished), where over the altar an aluminum statue of the Blessed Virgin stood on a propeller whose blades were positioned to form the shape of the cross. The wedding party was then raucously escorted to the reception in nearby Astoria, Queens, by a cortège of fire trucks, their sirens blaring. And on it went. Most of my college friends were married within a few years of graduation by the Jesuits who had taught us at Fordham University. I envied the apparent seamlessness of my friends’ lives—especially those of Cathy Sullivan and her sister, Pat, whose large Irish Catholic family I’d always half yearned to be a part of growing up. Everyone in their extended family was Catholic, and with the exception of a few abashed Italians, everyone was also Irish. They were like Sunnyside’s version of the Kennedys—insular, good-looking, and proud of their ethnic and religious identity. Indeed, pictures of President Kennedy and Pope John XXIII hung side by side over the couch in the Sullivans’ living room, as they did in Catholic living rooms across the country in the 1960s.

  It’s a gift of tranquillity when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don’t quite know why mine didn’t, although I think books, again, are partly to blame. I thought my mom and dad were tops, and I liked being Irish-Polish Catholic, but I do think my avid reading left me vulnerable to the temptations of what memoirist Kate Simon dubbed “the wider world.” Getting a fellowship to grad school at Penn placed me, nervously, into that wider world where, when I turned twenty-eight, I found my life’s partner and he found me. But, precisely because of where we found each other—in an Ivy League grad school rather than at my Catholic college or the neighborhood bar or political club—there were problems. He was Jewish and an atheist. In addition, we were both loner types prone to overintellectualizing. There was no war on to make us pledge our troth to each other quickly, as my parents had done. (After a romantic courtship of a few months, my father proposed to my mother, on bended knee, in a moonlit park in the vicinity of what is now Tudor City in Manhattan. The next week he sailed off to the war in the Pacific.) Rich and I mulled over our relationship for years and kept our separate apartments.

  I think reading at the very least intensified my hesitation to plunge headfirst into the heterosexual-female plot that culminates in marriage and children. Shy types like me tend to be drawn to solitary activities like reading, but reading also bolstered my predilection for solitude. I hated dating. Given the choice, I’d always opt for staying home and reading a book rather than going out to a bar or sitting winsomely on the Rocky steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a favorite Sunday-afternoon pickup spot during the years I lived in Philadelphia. “Mr. Wonderful isn’t just going to knock on the door,” a girlfriend once said, chiding me. “Why not?” I thought. T
hat’s the way people often meet in books—effortlessly, without guile or strategizing. The literary heroines I adored—Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw, Harriet Vane, and yes, even die-hard childhood series favorites like Nancy Drew—were simply “discovered” by their male soul mates, who usually lived in the house or estate next-door—or, in Heathcliff ’s case, the barn. These young women didn’t have to do anything to attract their suitors; they simply had to be. Most of these heroines are described by their creators as attractive but not outstandingly beautiful. (Catherine Earnshaw and Nancy Drew are the shimmering exceptions.) Elizabeth Bennet places second in the looks department, after her knockout older sister, Jane; plain Harriet Vane and downright mousy Jane Eyre are usually described as “neat” in appearance but nothing more. Rather, it’s their wit, their intelligence, their “pilgrim souls,” as W. B. Yeats said of (beautiful) Maud Gonne, that mesmerize the men in their lives.

  What a welcome fantasy that was for someone like me who always felt phony flirting and rated herself as sort of good-looking but nothing spectacular. Like my literary role models, however, I knew I was smart and funny. Not smart enough, though, to figure out that, apart from Nancy Drew—who was the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, also the originator of the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and a host of other series-fiction favorites—all of these heroines were created by mediocre-looking but brilliant single women who were, undoubtedly, spinning out for their own comfort a fairy-tale fantasy of being chosen by Prince Charming. Because that’s the politically incorrect angle of these progressive literary courtships in which the woman is valued for the radiance of her mind, not the radius of her bosom: the men in these novels still possess all or most of the traditional attributes of “a good catch.” Mr. Darcy is moody, but his dark good looks and fat wallet more than make up for his cranky disposition. “And of this place, . . . I might have been mistress, ”1 muses Elizabeth when she catches her first glimpse of Darcy’s splendid estate, Pemberley, and begins to regret her rebuff of his first proposal. Mr. Rochester is no beauty, but he, too, is conventionally wealthy and virile. The first time Jane encounters her future husband, he towers over her on a tall steed that behaves in an overtly phallic manner, rearing up and bucking. Lord Peter Wimsey boasts an aristocratic title, a bonny countenance, and an irresistible air of arrogance. He literally saves Harriet Vane from the gallows in Strong Poison, rendering his courtship of her perilously close to a conventional female rescue fantasy. Heathcliff starts out life without a nickel, but he eventually becomes wealthy; he’s also a hunk as well as an unreconstructed “bad boy.”

  Leaving juvenile fiction aside for the moment, I do think Austen and her sisters envisioned something much more ambitious in their novels than a bit of literary beefcake served up with a side of clever repartee. These romances continue to captivate readers because they throw together adult men and women with complicated pasts who have to painstakingly work out the terms of their relationships before they achieve wedded harmony. That’s the realistic, strikingly contemporary angle to these romances; the fairy-tale aspect enters in when these mostly plain-to-pleasant-looking poor girls win the alpha males by dazzling them with their smarts. The faithful and hot romantic partners that grinds like Jane Austen and Dorothy Sayers couldn’t find in real life, they created. After all, to paraphrase another sharp Dorothy: “Men don’t make passes / at [poor] girls who wear glasses.”

  Of course, once safely tucked away in their marriages, our heroines, like fireflies trapped in a bottle, flicker and fade into gray domesticity. Austen and company devote, at most, a couple of pages to imagining the postnuptial lives of their lucky brides—and with good reason. Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet spawn children, tend to their peevish husbands (Mr. Rochester probably made even more so by his temporary blindness), and carry on the debilitating round of social visits expected of upper-crust ladies. Nancy Drew fortunately remains frozen at age eighteen; although, as Bobbie Ann Mason observes in her terrific book The Girl Sleuth, even in her chaste late adolescence, Nancy displays incipient tendencies toward becoming another proper Mrs. Bobbsey. Harriet Vane makes a wan postnuptial impression in Busman’s Honeymoon, where she defers to Lord Peter in the detecting department. In her last published literary appearance, a short story entitled “The Haunted Policeman,” Harriet is not seen at all. She’s secreted away in a back bedroom in the Wimsey mansion giving birth to a male heir as the sleepless Lord Peter directs his urbane attention to solving a neighborhood crime. Only Catherine Earnshaw’s mystical marriage with Heathcliff, which takes place in the netherworld after her premature death, can be described as truly “blissful.”

  It would be too pat to say that witnessing this grim literary wedding march made me skittish about serious relationships myself. More accurately, it was probably the fact that I was someone who spent so much of her time reading, standing apart, and observing that made me hold myself aloof. If I was, indeed, influenced by the literary heroines I loved, it was in the low-level way of wanting to remain in a heady state of becoming, rather than “settling down” or “for.” Maybe reading Laurie Colwin’s magical short stories, which usually feature happily mated, yet complicated and vital female characters, would have helped nudge me out of my singleness, but I didn’t know that wonderful writer back then.

  If a young woman doesn’t marry and start a family at some point in her twenties, she detours around the age-old normative markers of female adulthood. It’s harder to discern, then, exactly when one becomes a grown-up—especially if, as in my case, the young woman in question is still in school throughout her twenties. Even when I finally was awarded my Ph.D. at thirty-two, I hadn’t yet held down what my parents considered a “real” job. For years before and after I officially became Dr. Corrigan, I was what they call in the profession a “gypsy scholar”— one of a multitude of excess eggheads who roam from campus to campus, teaching introductory courses like “Composition.” I became practiced at moving into temporary teaching positions and other people’s offices. Once, at Haverford College outside Philadelphia, I was assigned the office of a recently deceased faculty member; the office hadn’t been cleaned out yet, and a few days before the fall term began, I unlocked the door to find a dirty room whose bookshelves were crammed with empty bourbon bottles and crucifixes—mute testimony to the limits of literature as a sustaining comfort in life.

  “It didn’t get you anywhere, did it?” my mom worried aloud when I’d announced to her that I’d gotten my Ph.D. The question stung at the time, but she was right. Adventures are supposed to achieve something in the end, and it wasn’t clear, even by the time I’d accepted Professor Y’s scaly congratulations, what I’d gained by the great solo adventure of my young womanhood. It took me several years more—years of consistently bombing out on interviews for tenure-track jobs—to realize the great lesson that my unhappy graduate-school years had taught me about my own inclinations and limits: that is, that in an age of specialists, I was most happy being a generalist. Much as I admired those scholars who lived and breathed their subjects, who immersed themselves, as, say, my old dissertation director did, in the work of John Henry Newman or Walter Pater, I gradually came to terms with the awareness that that kind of holy intellectual devotion was just not for me. Instead, I happily spent more and more time reviewing a hodgepodge of books for The Village Voice, roaming from the popular to the canonical and making connections between the two. I also loved being able to talk about those books in educated but accessible language. Without being conscious of moving in any particular direction, I began to put together a career that allowed me to be part of the academy but also to stand outside it—a career in which I could make a living talking about all kinds of books to a wide range of people. By becoming a book reviewer, I finally discovered that community of readers I had originally hungered for when I entered graduate school—even if that “community” was linked by the printed page and, later, in the case of Fresh Air, by satellite transmission and the Internet.
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br />   Since writing those early reviews for the Voice didn’t cover the grocery bills, I also worked during and after graduate school at a succession of odd jobs. I mean “odd” in the primary sense. I picked up part-time work at a few only-in-Philadelphia places that were guaranteed to rattle my nerves, already plenty shaken up by the Touch of Evil atmosphere of graduate school. I worked for a couple of years as a proofreader at Lippincott Publishers, scrutinizing the proofs of medical textbooks packed with illustrations of skin cancer and venereal disease. Also in the medical line, I worked as a temporary curator’s assistant at the Mütter Museum, a medical museum founded in the eighteenth century and tucked away on a quiet street in downtown Philadelphia. The Mütter Museum since my tenure there has been “discovered”—its current curator has even made several guest appearances on Letterman. But back in the early 1980s, it was a little-known local curiosity. Housed in a marble-halled mansion, it often rented out its upper floors for weddings; its basement, though, contained a semisecret chamber of medical horrors. Visitors could see centuries-old tumors afloat in glass bottles and pickled in gin; a chair used by the famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins, Chang and Eng; skeletons of nineteenth-century ladies whose rib cages had been deformed by too-tight corset stays; and John Wilkes Booth’s shattered tibia bone. One of my chores was to regularly dust these and other gruesome exhibits, and in the course of my cleaning, I must have come into contact with some hardy eighteenth-century spore because my legs broke out in a vicious pox that none of the dermatologists I consulted could cure.