Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Page 16

  That’s the irony of the fantasy of refuge that Gaudy Night offers: like the dream of rescue, its pleasures are momentary and don’t bear up under scrutiny. Sayers seems to be dramatizing Virginia Woolf’s immortal pronouncement that, to write, a woman needs “a room of her own.”7 (A pronouncement Woolf made, by the way, in the course of two lectures she delivered in 1928 at Oxford. Woolf was thinking of the “room” she had been denied at university.) Fair enough. But most women writers aren’t used to rooms of their own, and Harriet, for one, doesn’t do her best work when she’s uncharacteristically undistracted. No matter how hard Sayers tries in Gaudy Night, she can’t make that monograph sound compelling. Harriet herself is pleased with her piddling literary output because it’s highbrow, but the mysteries she’s managed to write in her London flat with the hubbub of her real-life responsibilities swirling about her are more inventive than her tortuous efforts at Oxford. Perhaps, because the room of her own she inhabits at Oxford is relatively airless, so is the writing she produces there.

  The vast majority of women writers throughout the ages have had to “make do,” sneak in a few scribbling hours here and there, fit in writing after the “necessary” work of the day was done. For almost all of their adult lives, the Brontë sisters were cooped up together in that parsonage tending to the needs of Papa Patrick and drunkard brother Branwell or sent out to earn their keep as governesses. While entertaining her brother Frank, his family, and several visitors over the course of weeks, the forty-year-old Jane Austen wrote her sister, Cassandra, that she yearned for “a few days quiet, & exception from the Thought & contrivances which any sort of company gives—I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the House. . . . Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb.”8

  Like the Brontës, Louisa May Alcott sang for her supper by writing those breast-heaving thrillers that are still coming to light in order to make up for the economic deficiencies of her philosopher father, Bronson. Sure, there have always been exceptions. Lots of men—John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens—have scrambled to write while making a living doing something else. Then there are those cagey female invalids, like Emily Dickinson, who have made productive use of sickness (Alice James and Virginia Woolf are also in this passionately frail company). Some lucky female writers, such as Mrs. Gaskell and Edith Wharton, were emancipated from the distracting demands of work inside and/or outside the home by their personal fortunes. But historically, male writers have an easier time taking themselves seriously, while society still doesn’t encourage women to give themselves over to Art. I’m reminded of that crucial moment when Dashiell Hammett quit his job as an advertising copywriter, moved out on his wife and baby daughter to take an apartment by himself in San Francisco, and threw himself into writing. Granted, Hammett had been told by his doctors that he was a “lunger”—a tuberculosis victim—so he decided (erroneously) that he had only a few years left to prove himself as a writer. In the detective-fiction classes I teach, I’ve always talked about that episode in Hammett’s life with admiration. Yet when Agatha Christie skipped out on her personal responsibilities—for eleven days—she would never be allowed to forget it. After the death of her mother and the infidelity of her first husband became too much to bear, Christie left her baby daughter in the care of the nanny and “went missing” for those infamous eleven days in 1926. The widely publicized episode dogged her for the rest of her life.

  Judging from the lives of many twentieth-century literary women, “the second shift” isn’t about to be phased out anytime soon. Stevie Smith did office work and cared for her aged “Lion Aunt” at home; Toni Morrison worked for years as an editor while she was writing; Eudora Welty tended to her ailing mother and brothers for more than a decade in the middle of her by then flourishing writing career; Anne Lamott teaches and is a single mother to Sam, the son she made famous in her wonderful memoir, Operating Instructions. Mary Higgins Clark, America’s reigning “Queen of Suspense,” was a young widow raising five young children on her own and holding down a full-time job writing radio scripts when she began rising before dawn to write her first mystery, Where Are the Children?, published in 1975. The writer many critics, including me, regard as Sayers’s latter-day inheritor, P. D. James, began her detective-fiction career while her husband, whose schizophrenia surfaced after his service in World War II, languished at home and in mental institutions. I had the thrill of interviewing James face-to-face for Fresh Air when her 1997 novel, A Certain Justice, came out. She was gracious and erudite, and she wore tweeds. I fell at her feet. In that interview—and in the hundreds of others that she’s given—James recounted how she started writing her first novel, Cover Her Face (completed in 1960 and published two years later), at the kitchen table in the early morning, before she went off to her day job as a bureaucrat in the National Health Service. Because of the hectic circumstances of her early life (she also pretty much raised her two daughters single-handedly), James didn’t begin writing until she was thirty-nine. But as so many of her deliriously enthusiastic critics have observed, her inside knowledge of government departments and hospitals and human suffering graces her mysteries with a hard-won authenticity.

  James especially came to mind one December a few years ago, when I skipped off to a junket for mystery writers and critics sponsored by, of all things, Club Med. Two male mystery writers, the bestselling Dennis Lehane and the lesser-known but very entertaining Lev Raphael, talked about taking the risky step of committing themselves full-time to their writing. Listening to them made me depressed. Maybe if I had gone to a women’s college like Shrewsbury or Bryn Mawr, I would have felt empowered to take myself and my work seriously, too. Maybe I would have risked a full-time writing career. I brought my husband and then two-year-old daughter along on that junket. On the first day, we were given a list of all the conference participants, their hotel-room numbers, and their affiliations. Next to my name, before the initials “NPR,” was one word: “Crib.” “Maureen Corrigan, Crib, NPR.” To me, that entry spoke reams about my own version of the contemporary female juggling act. Reading the biographies of Sayers and other multitasking women writers reminds us, as Yeats immortally said, that great art also arises out of “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”—as well as the typing pool and the Xerox room; the kitchen, the sickroom, and the nursery.

  As any self-respecting feminist would, Harriet dithers about being “rescued” by marriage to Wimsey; in the end she succumbs, no doubt hoping that Wimsey will make good on the promise of equality implicit in his form of proposal. Sayers couldn’t manage to conjure up such a marriage in her later writings about Harriet and Lord Peter—perhaps because human history up to Sayers’s own time gave her so few models to draw upon. As a female reader who was then, too, dithering about the threat of being overwhelmed by marriage, I appreciated seeing Harriet’s thoughtful deliberations dramatized on the pages of Gaudy Night—as well as in the Harriet/Lord Peter novels that preceded it. One of the great, largely unacknowledged advantages of series fiction is that a story line can be strung out over several novels, allowing a character to think, falter, and reverse direction, as Harriet does. Sometimes novels just companionably mirror your own confusion, and I think that’s what Gaudy Night did for me when I first read it in my late twenties.

  Retreating into the all-female haven of Bryn Mawr was never a real option for me, since, for one thing, I was never issued a permanent invitation, and unlike Harriet at Shrewsbury, I was plugging away at three jobs during my time there. The college’s isolated and serene atmosphere was something I experienced as a day worker rather than as a full-time resident. While teaching and functioning as a low-level administrator, I forced myself to finish my dissertation and wrote a lot of essay reviews for The Village Voice. My mother once excitedly reported to me that she saw a man on the New York subway reading my long review of Helen Vendler’s book on Keats’s sonnets. What a kick! I could nev
er agree with Harriet that penning a scholarly footnote was more rewarding than writing an essay thousands of people might read, even if they would throw it away a day later. An even greater thrill was the on-air reviews for Fresh Air I’d started doing. Adding to the thrill was the fact that, at the time I began contributing pieces to Fresh Air, the show’s regular book reviewer was John Leonard—then and now the greatest all-round popular critic of literature and culture in America.

  Although while working at Bryn Mawr I remained fitfully enthralled by what the late-Victorian novelist George Gissing would have called its “odd women” and the alternative family life they had constructed, that fascination, I noticed, was not shared by the contemporary novels I was reviewing at the time. In fact, new fiction made Gaudy Night look all the more radical in its feminist hesitation about romance and marriage. The books I was reading and reviewing were almost always concerned with one or two heterosexual people, their search for love, how the relationship went wrong, and how it was finally fixed or not. Sometimes, in a really ambitious novel, a dysfunctional nuclear family would be featured. Community, society, history, politics, work, and utopian alternatives to convention—all of these subjects seemed to have dropped out of the novel’s view. Or, I should say, the literary novel’s view. For here’s a development that I first became aware of in the mid-1980s or so: as literary fiction struggled to maintain its anorectic figure, a more expansive and daring vision of romantic and familial relationships was being developed in, of all places, the lowbrow form of popular American detective fiction.

  Yes, after my woozy seduction by Hammett and Chandler, I was still stuck on the tough guys—except that now, in the contemporary hard-boiled fiction I had worked my way up to, the tough guys were sometimes girls. Or gay. Or dark-skinned. The straight, white tough guy of yore hadn’t disappeared, he’d just moved over to accommodate a variety of colleagues in his bare-bones office. While the contemporary literary novel had grown more pinched, these ambitious hard-boiled mysteries injected sweeping social criticism into their suspense. That in itself was nothing new: as I’ve said earlier, the classic hard-boiled detective story has, from its earliest days, offered a utopian vision of work along with its shoot-’em-up scenes. The surprise about many of these post-1960s mysteries, however, was that so many of them were also suggesting alternatives to the nuclear family that the classic hard-boileds had demonized.

  The home base of the traditional tough guy had been a one-room dive outfitted with a rumpled Murphy bed, overflowing ashtrays, and a kitchenette stocked with liquor. As the social revolution of the 1960s began to infiltrate the very formula of detective fiction, however, a funny thing happened to the detective’s bachelor pad: it began to look less like a low-rent version of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and more like a hippie commune where gumshoes, their friends, and adopted family members dwelt in hard-boiled harmony. These days, post-1960s hard-boiled detectives have accumulated such large alternative families that it takes pages and pages at the beginning of each mystery just to catch up on everybody’s doings. Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, for instance, has dogs; a fatherfigure neighbor in Mr. Contreras; a mother-figure close friend in Lotty Herschel; and, occasionally, a steady boyfriend. Ditto for most of her contemporaries in the detecting business.

  The fellow chiefly to blame for the “family affair” atmosphere of post-1960s hard-boiled detective fiction is Robert B. Parker. When Parker introduced his sensitive male detective, Spenser, in The Godwulf Manuscript in 1973, he inaugurated a series that helped transform the macho politics of the private eye and also the profession’s preordained monkish lifestyle. For most of his series life, Spenser has maintained a committed (mostly) monogamous relationship with Susan Silverman, a Jewish feminist therapist. Almost as close to Spenser’s heart is his best friend, Hawk, a laconic African American gun-for-hire. In Early Autumn (1981), the seventh novel of the series, Spenser became an adoptive father to the teenaged Paul Giacomin, who grew up to be a professional dancer and choreographer. Other Spenser intimates include Rachel Wallace, a radical lesbian feminist writer; Henry Cimoli, a gym owner who talks like Huntz Hall; straight-arrow white cops Frank Belson and Marty Quirk; a gay cop named Lee Farrell; a Chicano mob enforcer called Chollo; and Pearl, a hunting dog the resolutely childless Spenser and Susan coyly refer to as their “baby.” Strictly speaking, Spenser does not live with any of these folks (he and Susan alternate sleepovers, and Paul visits Spenser periodically), but then again, how could he? The only space large enough to accommodate the Spenser clan would be one of those sprawling manor houses straight out of the pages of Golden Age mystery fiction.

  When I began reading them, the Spenser novels were pretty much out there in terms of their depiction of utopian alternatives to the traditional nuclear family. It was a subject that intrigued me, particularly at the time, because I found myself in an alternative-family environment at Bryn Mawr and because I was semiconsciously struggling with my own feelings about marriage and children. The Spenser books were investigating the crucial mystery of how to be emotionally committed to another human being without allowing oneself to be swallowed up. (As is well known to fans of the series, Parker himself lives in semi-autonomous harmony with his longtime wife, Joan, in a Victorian mansion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that has been divided into “his” and “hers” apartments.) Whenever a new Spenser novel appears, usually every spring, I still read it in one or two sittings. By now, the plot is almost beside the point. Instead, I read the latest greatly diminished Spenser novels to check in with his extended alternative family: I’m curious about what Hawk is up to these days and about Paul’s ongoing search for love and Susan’s latest home purchase. Reading the Spenser novels now is a little like reading one of those chatty holiday letters that come tucked in Christmas cards. The story lines are predictable, but still, it’s nice to keep up with who’s lost weight, gotten married, or had a set of brass knuckles smashed into his face.

  The question of the literary value of mysteries and whether or not reading them—as much as I do—is mere escapism or just as worthwhile as reading highbrow fiction really comes to the fore with the Spenser series. Lots of critics sneer at Parker, claiming his novels are, at best, interesting for their sociological content. Similarly, lots of critics and readers look down their noses at the entire genre of detective fiction, disparaging it as “beach reading.” A standard cliché in positive reviews of mystery fiction is to claim that a particular book “transcends the genre.” As someone who teaches college-level courses in detective fiction, who’s co-edited a two-volume scholarly book on them, and who reads and reviews them constantly, I’d say, in ruminating on this charge that mysteries are junk, that sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. Just like autobiographies, literary fiction, ghost stories, biographies, and books of every other literary genre, mysteries can be stunning or simply awful. Both Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and many of those candy-colored bodice rippers displayed on supermarket shelves are, strictly speaking, Gothic novels. No genre is inherently beneath contempt.

  When mysteries are great, they’re some of the most magical, psychologically insightful, metaphysically complex, and narratively sophisticated novels ever written. Take one of my most beloved classic mystery tales, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Its subject, aside from the entertaining MacGuffin of that supernatural hound, is epistemology, the study of knowledge itself. Throughout that tale, Holmes—the great defender of reason as the pathway to truth— struggles against the forces of chaos and primitive irrationality as represented by the Great Grimpen Mire, a formless bog that sits in the center of the action. The Mire, and the novel’s obsessive focus on it, owes something to Freud’s theories about the id, which were becoming popularized in 1902 when The Hound was published. Toward the end of the tale, Holmes just barely escapes being sucked down by the Mire, and ultimately the contest ends in a draw. What a subject. And what profoundly evocative language and symbolism grace this tale that
the unenlightened dismiss as a traditional kind of boys’ blood-and-thunder story.

  My dad was an enthusiastic reader of the Holmes stories and a faithful follower of the Spenser series, too. In the fall of 1997 I interviewed Robert B. Parker onstage for the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. My father was very weak from the combined effects of a year of dialysis and nearly six decades of cigarette smoking. He wanted very badly to take the train down from New York to see me talk to this author he admired. “I’d give my right arm to be there,” he told me on the phone. It was just as well he missed the event. I played pedantic stooge to Parker’s “aw, shucks,” unreflective natural man of letters. (No hard feelings, Bob.) It’s odd that my dad liked the Spenser mysteries as much as he did. While he was no racist, he certainly wasn’t socially progressive. Similarly, his unspoken policy on “women’s libbers” and the differently sexually-oriented seems to have been to express disapproval from afar and, in personal encounters, to take individuals as they came. He once drove down to the Steamfitters’ union hall in Manhattan to confront the bureaucrats there who had denied his black partner, Adam, membership in the union. “If he’s doing the job, he should be in the union,” said my dad, who also, paradoxically, identified with Archie Bunker when All in the Family was a hit. Another time, when he and my mother had some problems with their old console television, they called a neighborhood repair store. An hour or so later, they buzzed a repairman into their apartment house. They heard the clatter of high heels coming up the stairs, and then there before them was a transvestite TV repairman in full drag. “But she did a really good job,” my dad conceded later, still shaking his head in disbelief whenever he told the story.