Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

by Maureen Corrigan

  Then, in 1983, Frank Lentricchia’s groundbreaking book, Criticism and Social Change, was published. Among other things, Lentricchia helped introduce blue-collar voices—chief among them, his own—into academic discourse. I reviewed Criticism and Social Change for The Village Voice and dubbed Lentricchia “the Dirty Harry of literary criticism,” a title he’s been known by ever since. His book, or more precisely his book-jacket photo—which showed Lentricchia in a T-shirt, leaning against a graffiti-stained brick wall with his hairy arms crossed, looking like one of the fathers of the Italian kids I grew up with—meant a lot to me, even if, by then, Lentricchia was the holder of an endowed chair at Duke and the book itself didn’t have anything to do with his roots. I came upon Lentricchia roughly around the same time I discovered hard-boiled detective fiction: both were psychological, emotional, and intellectual boons.

  And a funny thing happened as I fled into the novels of Hammett, Chandler, and the other great American tough-guy (and, later, gal) writers: to me, their detectives began to sound a lot like the great Victorian Sages. Sure, their dialect and diction were neighborhoods apart, but their criticisms of society frequently were eerily similar. Like Cobbett, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, detectives Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe denounced the soul-deadening effects of wage labor, the tackiness of the contemporary city landscape, and the evils that result from the unequal distribution of wealth.

  This is what I mean about finding the books you need when you need them: I turned to classic hard-boiled detective fiction as an escape, only to discover that it was a popular twentieth-century American expression of some of the same “high art” nineteenth-century British social criticism that I’d grown weary of reading and rereading for my dissertation. These days I teach courses on hard-boiled detective fiction, review mysteries, and write critical essays about them. With the late scholar and renaissance man Professor Robin Winks of Yale University, I edited a two-volume collection of critical essays on mystery and suspense fiction that won the 1999 Edgar Award in Criticism given by the Mystery Writers of America. It’s been almost two decades since I’ve written any scholarly criticism about Ruskin and company, and I’ve never taught one course exclusively on their work. Like Mike Hammer, I loved ’em and left ’em. But I never would have transferred my affections to hard-boiled mysteries, which are still widely regarded as the junkyard dogs of literature, had not their purebred literary relations, the Victorian Sages, alerted me to their worth.

  After twenty years of reading and studying detective fiction, I feel like I’ve only begun to probe the mysteries of the genre itself and how it has investigated American life over the past century. More and more, I’ve come to believe that detective fiction’s visions of work and family, racial and class tension, and sexual identity are analogous to the “purloined letter” in Poe’s famous story: American society—its problems and possibilities—has always been at the center of the hard-boiled novel, but we readers have been distracted by all that murder and mayhem lurking on the margins. Of course, murder must be given its due (if these books weren’t fun, no one, including me, would read them), but the narrative pleasures of detective fiction don’t stop when the shooting does.

  I think it was not only the working-class voice of these novels but the very unusual fact that these books focused on work itself as a subject that first made them so compelling to me. At a time when I was floundering around trying to figure out what to do with my life, I loved reading hard-boiled detective fiction because, among other things, it presented a utopian image of the kind of work everyone would like to have. Forget specific images of a private eye’s daily tasks (pistol-whipping bad guys, playing footsie with psychotic femmes fatales); I’m speaking in general terms. The work a detective does reunites head with hand, mental with physical labor. I think a lot of us fans find detective novels so riveting not because we care who-dun-it (in fact, with many of these novels, like Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, the crime is barely an issue) but because we care about how the detectives do it—how they work. Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon, is a classic example of the relatively bloodless crime novel: we readers tread over a few corpses but witness no “onstage” deaths. The central focus of Hammett’s novel, as with most hard-boiled fiction, is the detective at work—thinking, making phone calls, casing the crime scene, walking the beat, questioning witnesses, and, sometimes, punching out or shooting down evildoers. Hard-boiled detectives are the noble craftsmen of crime—unalienated laborers who are what they do.

  (Further evidence that crime is more of an occasioning excuse for the hard-boiled novel’s covert investigation of American society is the famous anecdote about the making of the movie version of The Big Sleep. As he neared the completion of filming, director Howard Hawks sent a telegram to Raymond Chandler asking who murdered Owen Taylor, the chauffeur who’s found drowned in the Sternwood-family limousine off a Los Angeles pier. Chandler studied his own novel, thought about the question, and wired back the answer, “I don’t know.”)

  Like Hammett and Chandler and others in the hard-boiled genre, the Victorian Sages worried a lot about what constituted good work, reeling as they were from the Industrial Revolution and its corrosive effects on ordinary people. So righteously entranced were these upper-class intellectuals with the idea of the dignity of physical labor that, in one famous episode, some of them even shouldered picks and spades and backed up their convictions with sweat. In 1874, anticipating the spirit of Mao’s Cultural Revolution by nearly a century, John Ruskin, who was then the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, “taught” an outdoor class in road mending. Clad in straw hats, his undergraduate chain gang composed of, among others, Arnold Toynbee and Oscar Wilde, hacked away ineffectually at a rutted lane on the outskirts of Oxford. The diggers, with good reason, were lampooned in the London press, but the impetus behind all this mucking about was one I admired. As Professor of Fine Art, Ruskin believed his privileged students needed to learn that, in the words of one of his most respected biographers, John D. Rosenberg, “labor without art is brutality and art without labor is guilt.”6

  Ruskin’s most avid pupil was the socialist, artist, writer, and crafts-man William Morris, now known to most people, if at all, for his wallpaper designs. Morris’s utopian romance, News from Nowhere, is my favorite Victorian Sage rant on the subject of work. In it, a Morris-like hero identified only as “Guest” falls asleep and wakes up in the brave new world of England in 2102, which looks a lot like a prettified version of England in the Middle Ages and prefigures some aspects of England during the Swinging Sixties. Free love reigns among the inhabitants of Nowhere who wander about in arty Pre-Raphaelite getups, eating organic food in communal dining halls, sitting on handcrafted furniture, and, in general, just smelling the roses. Money is unheard of in Nowhere: when Guest enters a tobacco store, he learns that all he has to do is ask for the items he wants and he shall receive. And since money— as well as private property—has been abolished, so has crime.

  What makes the nirvana of Nowhere possible is the fact that everyone does the work that he or she feels most drawn to and can change jobs at will. If you’ve been working as a boatman in Nowhere and want to learn the trash-removal trade, no problem. Of course, all of the female residents of Nowhere are conveniently drawn to cooking, serving food, and cleaning up after the men and children. Morris was a prophet of the possible, but he couldn’t quite envision any more adventurous roles for women. There are several other aspects of his socialist utopia that Morris didn’t quite think through. What do you do with antisocial loners? The chronically inept? Or people who just want to read all day long? But whenever I reread News from Nowhere, I’m always buoyed by this idea of a society founded on meaningful, creative work for all. As Guest says in the final sentence of the romance, after he’s been whisked back to the gray nineteenth-century present, “Yes, surely! And if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”7

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p; I reread News from Nowhere frequently because I stubbornly teach it to my freshman and sophomore students at Georgetown. Most of them don’t like it, but it makes for lively classroom discussions. They find the characters thin (true), the writing too preachy (mostly true), and Morris himself naïve for believing in the essential decency of his fellow human beings and the possibility of a society grounded upon meaningful work for all. (“No, not true,” I argue back, trying not to sound like that other dreamer John Lennon, singing “Imagine.”) I find it hard to stomach the fact that most of my not-yet-twenty-something students are already reconciled to doing boring jobs that do nothing to make the world a better place in return for earning obscenely high salaries. They, in turn, look at me and probably think, “That sweater is from the Gap, the handbag is a sidewalk Prada knockoff; I’d never be an English professor, making nothing.” Determined to back up Morris, I scrawl on the blackboard a quote from Sitting Bull: “The love of possession is a disease with them,” also quoting the title of an old book by Tom Hayden. My students dutifully copy down the quote in preparation for the midterm exam and probably think to themselves, “Sitting Bull didn’t make any money either.”

  Nevertheless, I keep on assigning News from Nowhere because students are at that life stage where they’re faced with having to answer the daunting question “What shall I be when I grow up?” Throughout much of human history—and for billions of people in the world today—this question was and is an unimaginable luxury. Even my grandmother’s flight from the Old Country, and from the farm labor that my Polish peasant ancestors no doubt had done for centuries, ended in the New World in a succession of cleaning jobs that “chose her,” not the other way around. But I was lucky enough to have some freedom in determining what kind of work I would do, and so are my students. For me, it was a long process full of self-doubt, and I can tell that for all but a few of my students the decision of what to be is also scary. I hear the fear in their awkward laughter during class discussions of Nowhere and also sense it by the fact that when they volunteer a career choice, they almost always do so in the form of a question. (“I’m going to go to law school?” “Grad school in foreign service?”) My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you’ll do to a great extent means choosing who you’ll be. This rite of passage may be a mundane, rather than an extreme, adventure, but it is, nevertheless, one of the great adventures of privileged young adulthood. And it’s an adventure whose “conclusion”—the daily performance of work—has gone relatively unchronicled in literature.

  That’s why I have my students read News from Nowhere: because it discusses work that’s a satisfying end in itself. The fact that Nowhere talks about, rather than dramatizes, such work is a literary flaw I can forgive. My students, harsher critics of all that is not perfect in life and art, pay me back for this long march through a book they find dull when, at the end of the term, they scrawl minireviews like “Nowhere SUCKS!” on their course-evaluation forms.

  I should probably ditch Nowhere and instead assign Dashiell Hammett’s classic 1925 short story, “The Gutting of Couffignal.” Here his detective, the Continental Op, delivers a terse, two-fisted manifesto on work that encapsulates most of Morris’s utopian ideas about the centrality of meaningful work to a meaningful life.

  The plot is unapologetically wild and wooly. The Op has been called out to the island of Couffignal, an isolated, wedge-shaped spit of land off the coast of California, to act as a guard at a society wedding. After the reception ends and the newlyweds and guests depart into the rain-swept darkness, the Op settles down for an overnight watch next to a table where the expensive wedding presents have been piled high. Suddenly, the lights go out and the Op hears explosions and gunshots from the nearby town on the island. He rushes out to investigate and finds bodies littering the streets and the bank plundered. To cut to the chase of this shoot-’em-up tale, the crooks turn out to be a bunch of White Russians looking for some easy way of making enough money to keep them in the comfort they grew accustomed to before the Revolution came along and stripped them of their ermines and caviar. The contempt the Op has for such titled parasites knows no bounds. He’s further enraged when a Russian femme fatale named Princess Zhukovski tries to seduce him away from his assignment. It’s not that the Op is a saint; rather, he’s a man whose sense of identity and purpose derives from his work. Here’s the crucial speech he delivers to the seductress— before he shoots her:

  Let me straighten this out for you. . . . We’ll disregard whatever honesty I happen to have, sense of loyalty to employers, and so on. You might doubt them, so we’ll throw them out. Now, I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. It pays me a fair salary, but I could find other jobs that would pay more. Even a hundred dollars more a month would be twelve hundred a year. Say twenty-five or thirty thousand in the years between now and my sixtieth birthday.

  Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else. You can’t weigh that against any sum of money. Money is good stuff. I haven’t anything against it. But in the past eighteen years I’ve been getting my fun out of chasing crooks and tackling puzzles, my satisfaction out of catching crooks and solving riddles. It’s the only kind of sport I know anything about, and I can’t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it. I’m not going to blow that up!8

  My old dissertation director was fond of referring to “the Moment” when a new idea or type of art emerged in the culture. I’m borrowing his phrase and claiming that the Op’s 1925 speech is the Moment when the infant genre of hard-boiled detective fiction explicitly declares that it’s interested in investigating bigger questions than who killed Colonel Mustard in the library with a knife. To put it bluntly, as the Op does in his speech to Princess Zhukovski, hard-boiled detective fiction set out in the early decades of the twentieth century to investigate America—and topping the list of subjects to be investigated was work. For its founding inspiration, hard-boiled detective fiction is probably just as much indebted to the two-century-old, mostly British tradition of novels about the condition of the working class as it is to the British “Golden Age” mystery tradition.

  Like other novels by and about the working class, the hard-boiled detective novel offers an unadorned picture of class tensions—the antagonism between those people who sweat to make a living and those who can afford to hire them. The class-conscious sentiments of your average gumshoe toward his or her wealthy clients would do a radical like William Morris proud. With “contemptuous tolerance”9 in his heart and a snappy put-down ever ready on his lips, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer is always venturing into some moneyed enclave in the California suburbs where he’s hired to tidy up some dysfunctional family’s dirty laundry. The message of the grand tradition of American hard-boiled detective fiction—from Hammett to Chandler to Macdonald to Chester Himes to Robert B. Parker to their many contemporary inheritors—is clear: too much money corrupts the soul. It makes men soft, even emasculates them, and the leisure lifestyle it buys is un-American.

  Here’s another clue that points to the fact that hard-boiled detective novels are modern utopian fantasies about work wrapped in a trench-coat. Detecting is a fantastically autonomous line of work: gumshoes get to name their price, determine the conditions of their labor, and decide if a case is really closed or not. Even more striking is the fact that that autonomy is deeply embedded in the very plots of most hard-boiled novels. One of the baldest examples occurs in Chandler’s masterpiece, The Big Sleep. By Chapter 21, pretty much the dead center of the novel, Philip Marlowe’s work is officially done. He’s been hired by the dying General Sternwood to find out who’s blackmailing the old man’s younger daughter, a sexy sociopath named Carmen. Marlowe efficiently sweeps up the blackmailing mess and is paid off on page 78 by
the general’s butler. On page 79, he decides to keep on investigating a few mysteries connected with the Sternwoods that still bug him, personally. His fateful decision to dictate how long his job assignment will last occurs in the gap between two wisecracking sentences:

  I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar check coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess.

  That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming down to Las Olindas that evening to talk to him. That was how smart I was.10