Lots of great American writers have written about the initial walk into a public library that transformed their lives, but certainly Richard Wright’s account in Black Boy is one of the most thrilling. Wright, of course, wasn’t just handed that first Pandora’s box of books; he had to snatch it across the color line by asking a semi-sympathetic white man for the loan of his library card. Here’s an excerpt from Wright’s description of first opening up and reading H. L. Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces:
What strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
As dawn broke I ate my pork and beans, feeling dopey, sleepy. I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white men were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.2
My own less dramatic early transformations through literature turned out to be—for me, personally—just as profound. “Yes’m.” I remember standing in the doorway of our kitchen and speaking that outmoded phrase to my mother, in answer to a question she’d just asked. I must have been about seven and had just finished reading some story where all the children said “Yes’m” to their mothers. “What did you say?” asked my baffled mother. I snapped back to my “old” self the next moment, but constant reading kept pulling me away from the world of my childhood, the world of my parents. Reading the Nancy Drew books made me emulate Nancy’s patrician manners, circa 1935, and regular visits via reading to her gracious home in leafy River Heights made me dissatisfied with our dark city apartment. Reading Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a junior in high school made me take myself and my writing ambitions seriously enough that I signed up that summer for a creative-writing course at the New School in Greenwich Village —hippie-infested terra incognita for a Catholic girl from working-class Sunnyside. (The teacher, as I remember, had another job, writing quiz-show questions; if I’d been smarter, I would have taken note of the fact that this published writer held down two day jobs to survive.) Eventually, I left my parents’ apartment and the close-knit community I grew up in, half consciously lured away by the promise of books and the wider, more intense life they seemed to offer. But not without a cost.
For all readers, male and female, there is a discrepancy between the possibilities offered by the world of the imagination and the possibilities offered by real life. That’s one of the reasons we read fiction: to fantasize about what might be. But, until the social revolution of the Second Women’s Movement, that discrepancy, generally speaking, had been more gaping for women readers. Because so many of fiction’s heroes are, well, heroes instead of heroines, women readers, out of pleasant necessity, have learned to step into the roomier footwear of the Deerslayer, Beowulf, Ulysses, Ishmael, David Copperfield, and so on. These heroes lead lives of on-the-road adventure, recklessness, and big dreams—all played out in the public sphere. And therein lies the bad-boy allure of these tales. Victorian and turn-of-the-century patriarchs worried that middle-class female readers would get all stirred up by “questionable” literature—like romances and adventure sagas—and, for a time, live through their imaginations like men. They would squeeze back into their own overstuffed parlors with their heads full of mutinous androgynous possibilities.
Some of Western literature’s greatest novelists, because they themselves were also avid readers, chronicled the particular dangers that fantasy fiction posed to nineteenth-century women. Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey goes gaga over Gothic novels, to the extent that she imagines skeletons in every closet and mad monks in every alcove; she also almost reads herself out of a good marriage match. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary reads herself into adultery and an early grave, so frustrated is she by the stultifying confines of her actual wifely existence. Of course, Bovary’s cautionary tale is over-the-top: her “death by books” is a fate threatening only the most susceptible of female readers. The more humdrum consequence of heavy reading is that it encourages lots of already shy girls—as it certainly encouraged me—to be dreamy solitaries who would rather be alone with a book than mingle with friends and family. In terms of traditional gender roles, women are supposed to be chatty and warm—bridge builders. Women who read seriously, however, are temporary recluses, antisocial loners.
Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March is certainly a contender for the most beloved heroine in Western literature. Nestled in the bosom of her sororial family, Jo, nevertheless, elects to spend hours isolated in the icy attic, scribbling away at her blood-and-thunder dramas. When she matures into a young lady, Jo makes a radical break from her dear mother, sisters, and neighbor, Laurie. She chooses to live alone in a faraway city, housed in a spinster’s bed-sitter, trying to secure her literary reputation by writing adult versions of her dramatic thrillers. She returns to the March manse eventually with that peculiar German professor, Mr. Bhaer, in tow (dubious marriage material at best, in the eyes of her solid New England family). Jo comes home, but she’s a different person from the adolescent madwoman-in-training who first began nursing her aspirations in the attic. Jo’s lengthy devotion to literature is to blame. Like every other bookwormish girl who’s ever encountered and worshipped Jo in Little Women, I identify with her; more than that, I feel like the broad plot of my life follows hers. A love of books gloriously screwed us both up; rendered us intermittent hermits holed up in corners of our childhood homes; snatched us from our bemused families and pushed us into distant, lonely, and often ludicrous tests of ambition and resolve; and made the return journey home (in my case, also, accompanied by a “stranger” to the tribe) fraught with difficulty.
If reading is a journey, it’s a dicey one. Books have lured me into tight jams, ego-shredding experiences, euphoric heights, and abysmal lows. Books have deeply enriched my life; they’ve also deluded me. Throughout this book, I’ll talk about the adventure of reading as well as some of the misadventures that reading has led me into.
But before we set out, I need to address the long-term damage that attending graduate school in English can wreak on one’s psyche. And the further toll that regular reviewing, relentlessly casting a cold eye on other people’s books in search of cracks and fissures, has taken on my courage. My own internal book critic has already anticipated any snide remarks that might be offered by other reviewers about this book. I’ve even come up with the perfect one-word negative review of Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: “Gladly.”
When I was on the academic-job market, I interviewed for a position as assistant professor at Columbia University. I wanted that job. Other English graduate students I knew at the University of Pennsylvania were counting themselves lucky to be deported to places like North Dakota for teaching jobs; I wanted to return to New York. I walked into the conference room where the interview was being held and was greeted by the assembled Big Names of the Columbia English Department. Carolyn Heilbrun was the only other woman present and the only professor who smiled as she shook my hand. I immediately developed an eye tic. Things went downhill from there. Late in the interview, Steven Marcus roused himself and asked, in regard to my Ph.D. dissertation: “Ms. Corrigan, does this dissertation have any methodology?” I should have toughed it out and said, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot’s famous remark about Aristotle: “Well, Professor, there is no method except to be very intelligent.” Instead, I smiled my best Mrs. Miniver smile and tried to pass myself off as a “soft” Marxist (not exactly what Lenin had in mind). Of course, I didn’t get the job. I’d failed the acade
mic bear-baiting test: I backed down, tried to be nice, and lost face professionally.
One of the pleasures of writing autobiographically, however, is that you get to revise the past—as long as you’re up-front about doing so. So, let’s try it again. Does this book have any methodology? Not much of one. It explores some major literary subjects and features some unexpected themes and repeated allusions: Ira Einhorn—the notorious New Age hippie who was recently extradited to the United States and convicted of the 1977 murder of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux—makes appearances in three of its four chapters. I had no idea, before sitting down to write, that he was such a creepy presence in my life. Class, Catholicism, work, and my dad are big subjects, and dermatological problems caused by anxiety are mentioned more than once. I have a fondness for the genre of serial fiction—mysteries and series novels make up about half of the literary references here. I’ve also noticed that I use semicolons a lot. That punctuational rut is partly a consequence of the years I spent reading Victorian nonfictional prose writers such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris, who were capable of raging on in page-length, semicolon-studded sentences about, say, the evils of the Industrial Revolution. But there’s more to it than that. The semicolon is my psychological metaphor, my mascot. It’s the punctuation mark that qualifies, hesitates, and ties together ideas and parts of a life that shoot off in different directions. I think my reliance on the semicolon signifies that I want to hold on to my background—honestly, without sentimentality or embarrassment—and yet, also transcend it. I come from, and still partly reside in, a world where most people, including my own parents, didn’t, and still don’t, read or hear what I have to say about books because they are oblivious to NPR, The New York Times, and all the other educated middle- and upper-class outlets where popular conversations about culture and literature take place. I now spend most of my time in a world where most people know who Stanley Fish is but have only the haziest notion of (and even less interest in) what a shop steward does.
How do you own what you’ve become without losing what you were—and want to keep on being, too? I’m an NPR contributor, college professor, feminist, leftist, person ambivalent about the constraints of family and community; I’m a child of the working class, a mother, a good daughter, a skeptical Catholic, a Queens booster, and a flag waver on the Fourth of July and other national holidays, even before September 11. (Why should the right own the flag?) Hence, that semicolon trying to link things that otherwise would spin off and settle into disparate categories.
The only conscious literary methodology lurking around here is this one: I’ve read all these books carefully and thought about them and what they have to do with life, including my life and the world around me. It’s an old and venerable methodology, by the way, that seems to be enjoying a comeback. Formidable literary critics such as Frank Lentricchia and Harold Bloom have, in the past few years, cast off theory and resolved to wrestle with books bare-handed, mano a mano. I prefer the family metaphor. Like Wrong-Way Corrigan, I take off on a series of literary journeys and life adventures in this book. Also, like my notorious kinsman (who supposedly engineered that “mistake” of landing in Ireland instead of California), I’ve planned on arriving at some of the unlikely destinations in the following chapters. But every time I’ve reread the great books I discuss here, I’ve found new areas to explore; I imagine my readers will have similar experiences. We’ll all be making some unscheduled stops, some emergency landings. Where we finally wind up is anybody’s guess.
CHAPTER ONE
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough: Women’s Extreme-Adventure Stories (and One of My Own)
Among the many dangers of being an obsessive reader is that you tend to mediate your life through books, filter your experiences through plots, so that the boundary between fiction and fact becomes porous. One evening, during the years I was living as a graduate student in Philadelphia, I was watching TV when a commercial for the local electric company came on. The commercial was promoting a program to help addled senior citizens keep track of their bills. On the screen was an elderly man sitting at a dining room table, staring at a pile of windowed envelopes. He looked a little bit like my dad, and sure enough, as the screen widened out to include the rest of the room, there was a big black-and-white photograph of my father as a toddler, dressed in a sailor suit, surrounded by his two older sisters and their parents. “Oh, there’s the photograph,” I thought to myself. I had a framed copy in my living room—all the Corrigans and their descendants have a copy of that photograph hanging somewhere in their homes. Aside from being a striking image— my grandfather with his handlebar mustache staring soberly into the camera; my grandmother in a long dark dress with a lace collar, holding my dad on her lap; my two aunts, smiling, one in a First Communion dress—it was a picture occasioned by tragedy. My grandmother Margaret had been diagnosed with cancer, and she and my grandfather John had the photograph taken to help the children remember her. She died in 1925, when my father was five years old.
“Oh, there’s the photograph.” It took me at least a full minute to realize that the Corrigan-family photograph was on TV. I was like those American soldiers described in Dispatches, Michael Herr’s great book about Vietnam, who, as they ran into enemy fire, shouted “Cover me!”—a line they’d absorbed from countless World War II movies. I, too, had gone to a lot of movies and watched too much TV. My fuzziness in distinguishing between reality and simulacrum was a postmodern condition shared by all of us who’d come of age in the culture of spectacle. But in my case, books were the worst troublemakers when it came to wreaking havoc with my head. From adolescence on, at least, I’ve read my life in terms of fiction, and so that evening, when I saw a personal object from my life turn up in a TV commercial, it seemed, at first, natural. (By the way, after calling the electric company’s public-relations office, I learned that the photograph had been found in a secondhand-furniture store on Arch Street in Philadelphia. The location made sense. The one-two punch of my grandmother’s death followed by the Great Depression a few years later knocked the Corrigan family down. House and car disappeared and my grandfather John, taking advantage of the first month’s free rent offered by desperate landlords, moved with the children into a series of apartments in West Philadelphia. A lot of family treasures, like the photograph, were put into storage, never to be rescued.)
My Catholic girlhood, my school days, my first forays into dating, college and graduate school, tortured love affairs, jobs, teaching, marriage—all these events had been mirrored in, even anticipated by, the books I read. When I worked in a five-and-ten during the latter part of high school, I thought of myself as young David Copperfield wasting away in the blacking factory. When I found myself marooned, night after night, in a one-room graduate-school apartment that basically consisted of a bay window and some linoleum, I thought of myself as Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot, trapped in glass. Jo March, Holden Caulfield, Lucky Jim, Nancy Drew, Elizabeth Bennet—I thought of myself, at one time or other, as all of them . . . and still do. But, then, at the age of forty-three, after at least three decades of understanding my life through literary analogues—indeed, sometimes shaping my life in the image of fiction—I arrived at a crucial moment that I couldn’t “read” through books. To return to the “Wrong-Way” Corrigan metaphor, I felt as though I were flying blind. For years leading up to the moment I received that life-changing phone call from the adoption agency, I had been living a classic version of the female extreme-adventure tale— a veiled narrative that I had begun to recognize as an essential component of many women’s stories, old and new. By the time that realization dawned, however, I was about to set out on another kind of adventure altogether.
The traditionally male extreme adventure has been the trend in nonfiction writing—apart from autobiographies—for roughly the past decade. I can make this pronouncement with confidence because I must get one or two new specimens of this kind of book delivered to my house every week. Jon Krakau
er contributed to the increasing demand for this genre of saved-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth new journalism with his two bestsellers Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Sebastien Junger’s superb book, The Perfect Storm, is, perhaps, the apotheosis of this genre, which, as yet, shows no signs of waning popularity with he-man firstperson sagas about polar explorations, solo round-the-world sails, rodeo riding, and firefighting steadily muscling their way into bookstores along with more scholarly works like Nathaniel Philbrick’s award-winning In the Heart of the Sea, a true-life saga about the whale ship Essex that inspired Melville’s better-known fictional extreme-adventure tale, Moby-Dick.
The traditional extreme-adventure story is a one-shot testosterone expenditure of physical courage that pits man against nature/man/himself, with man (the narrator usually) left standing, bloody but unbowed, amidst the wreckage of his fancy sporting gear. Scale the mountain; weather the storm at sea (or not); fight the war, the fire, the flood; carry out manifest destiny; be the first to fly over the ocean or to the moon; climb down into volcanoes and Egyptian tombs; or simply learn to survive with the intestinal fortitude of a Crusoe, Kurtz, or Leatherstocking.
Granted, there have always been women, real and fictive, who’ve grabbed the spotlight by playing boys’ rough games by boys’ rules. These women enter the fray with gusto, but they never stray so far out of the gender borders that they’re dismissed as freaks. That most famous of all woman warriors, Joan of Arc, would have really shaken things up if she had led her armies in female dress; outfitted as an honorary male, she reaffirmed the militaristic status quo—although even that sartorial sleight of hand didn’t save her from the stake. Harriet Tubman, “the Mother of the Underground Railroad,” made solo rescue missions to the South every winter for a decade after she herself escaped from slavery. Armed with a pistol and her nerves of steel, she led more than a hundred slaves to freedom in Canada and then went on to serve as a Union spy during the Civil War. Because her missions in both arenas were clandestine and largely undocumented, the specific details of most of Tubman’s astonishing exploits have been lost to history. Aviatrixes Amelia Earhart and Beryl Markham also wore men’s clothes when they flew off to distant horizons, but out of the cockpit they made sure they were photographed in ladylike costumes. (The lithe Earhart never looked as ungainly as she did in those trumpet skirts and heels she trussed herself up in for public appearances.) Then there’s my personal favorite female buccaneer, Nellie Bly. I first learned about the turn-of-the-century “mother” of investigative stunt journalism by reading a juvenile biography of her that was shelved (improbably) in the makeshift library at St. Raphael’s School. I remember being so excited to find out there was such a woman—a journalist who made her living by writing (like I dreamed of doing) who also lived a life of adventure (like every kid dreams of doing). Bly first made a name for herself by posing as a deranged immigrant woman and getting herself committed to New York’s infamous Blackwell’s Island. Only her editor knew of her exploit; if he had suffered, say, a fatal heart attack while Bly was buried in Blackwell’s, she might have spent the rest of her life there.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Page 3
