The final representative figure in my reading, the late twentieth-century immigrant, plays with notions of the self and society, alienation and assimilation in recombined ways. Most obviously, the immigrant departs from his or her original home and traditions (like the new woman or the artist) and seeks to assimilate into a new society (like the orphan). The interplay of to and fro movement, however, is far more complex than this tidy formulation. In a world where, on the one hand, CNN is piped into Punjabi villages and, on the other, Londoner-born-and-bred Karim in The Buddha of Suburbia “plays” an Indian, what it means to be English or Indian, French or Algerian, American or Latino loses distinct edges, and the immigrant is caught in the trajectories of this confusion, someone living both in and between cultures, a transnational and hybrid figure. The immigrant narrative speaks for the age, for in this time of diaspora and globalization, especially now with all the instant connections of social media, hybridity becomes our cultural metaphor of choice.
BUT the book you read here is not, for better or worse, the study of English novels just described. It remains true to my original conception: I focus on my genealogy of fictional prime movers—the orphan, the new woman, the artist, and the immigrant—still interested in the ways these figures are both marginal and representative and create a historical line. But impersonality, it turned out, was not the best mode for me. As I went along, I found keeping to it hard—it seemed too dry, and perhaps I wasn’t done yet with my own story. The personal seeped back into my project and transformed it to “an odd mixture.”
My idea became to write a memoir of a life of reading. This would still be a study of literature, but it would document something intensely personal as well. It would be nonfiction about fiction, focusing on a key relationship—that between myself as reader and the object of my lifelong affection, novels—and honoring the remarkable literary characters, whom, ironically, I felt I knew and understood as well if not better than I had ever managed to know or understand those inevitably perplexing parents, lovers, children, and friends. Perhaps literary characters, intimately grasped in our reading, become transparent in ways that actual people, even our familiars, never can be. Also I could hope my story would be a means of communicating with other readers. I had been pleased when my books prompted people to speak or write to me about parallels in their own experience, confiding their stories of charismatic mothers or family secrets. Now as I put forward my fifty years of experience reading, studying, and teaching English literature, surely my account of a reading life would land me in good company—that of people who were not only readers but also readers in the same tradition—people for whom Shakespeare or Dickens were as contemporary as Roberto Bolaño or Jennifer Egan, for whom Becky Sharp was as engaging as Bridget Jones, for whom the fortunes of classical literary characters were as vivid as their own experience, indeed for whom such fortunes constituted part of their experience. In “The Decay of Lying” Oscar Wilde has his protagonist Vivian proclaim, as part of his extolling of Balzac, “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.” I hoped in my memoir of reading to understand the way certain books manage to compel and haunt us in this way.
My seemingly opposing schemes—scholarship and memoir—began to converge when I realized they involved the same books. While the scholarly work would trace the trajectory in English novels from orphan to immigrant, the memoir of reading, if limited to fiction, would show a similar chronology. I, too, as a lifelong reader had progressed “from orphan to immigrant.” The figures of the orphan, the artist, the new woman, the immigrant had each, in turn, absorbed me, marking a particular stage of my life and preoccupations. I had been a typical young girl reader of horse and dog books and then of the Landmark biographies that helped me to wonder if I could emulate Thomas Alva Edison or Clara Barton. Then my mother handed me a copy of David Copperfield. I was eleven, in sixth grade in 1950s California. From that entry point into Victorian fiction, the lives of David Copperfield and Pip and other orphan figures became my own life’s adventures and my proxies. Reaching across a century and a continent, they fought my battles, joining with me to defy an unreasonable adult, seek a little popularity at school, make choices as to where and where not to belong.
Beginning my senior year of high school and continuing into college, which I entered in 1960, I discovered the modernists. Myself then aloof and awkward, I identified with the artist who seeks “silence, exile, and cunning,” yet also, as with Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, looks longingly at the well-adjusted friends to whom he will always seem odd. I chose the modernists as my initial period of specialization in graduate school. They seemed to know everything there was to say about art and loneliness.
Up to this point in my reading, in keeping with the lack of awareness of the times, I hadn’t yet thought about implications of gender. (The orphans and artists that engaged me seemed essentially unmarked by gender; I hardly noticed that more often than not they were male.) But in the 1970s, stimulated by the exciting new energy of feminist theory as well as my personal struggle to balance a tottering marriage with a developing career, I thrilled to Nora’s walking out of the Doll’s House and creating new literary options for woman other than marriage or death. By then a teacher of college students, I devised a course on “The Heroine’s Progress,” centered on the late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century figure of the “new woman.”
That course, which included works by such authors as James, Chopin, Hardy, Gissing, and Virginia Woolf, would today be characterized as “Eurocentric.” And I would be, too. I had never traveled beyond Western Europe. Or read beyond it. Then in the 1990s in connection with a life-changing trip to India with a friend, I started reading novels by Indian authors who wrote in English and worked up a course on Indian English fiction. My department, seeking at that juncture to be more global in its offerings, was pleased to have me teach it. I realized, though, after teaching the course a few times that most of the writers on my syllabus no longer lived on the Asian subcontinent. They had moved to London or New York or Toronto or Berkeley. This awareness led me to develop yet another course on transnational narratives and identities, focused on late twentieth-century immigrant and transnational experience. The line from the orphan to the immigrant has thus become the arc of my own personal and professional journey.
To write about this journey is to create a counter-narrative—counter to the more scholarly book this might well have been and counter as well to a more conventional memoir of a person’s life and times. What does it mean to be immersed in fiction, especially when the works are ones of other eras and other places? Before she became a novelist, when she was still young, earnest, and devout, Marianne Evans wrote to a friend: “I shall carry to my grave the mental diseases with which they [novels] have contaminated me.” Because the writer of this prudish letter became the great novelist, unbeliever—and moralist—George Eliot, readers can enjoy the irony of her fearing the immoral influence of fiction. Few novelists have done more than she to shape readers’ explicitly moral sensibilities. Her great humanist moral vision became my own equivalent of a religion: the concern with how we might still aspire as secular people to rise to being our best selves and to touch and inspire one another. I try not to lose sight of this ideal. Yet I, too, shall carry to my grave the contamination, if you will, of reading fiction—serious fiction but fiction nonetheless, my stimulant and analgesic of choice. I have lived my life refracted through novels; they have shaped the terms of my existence. I think of their influence as positive, their place in my life a means of deepening understanding and compassion. But fiction is a realm into which I have escaped as well as one in which I have found myself.
When people ask me what it was like growing up in Beverly Hills, California, in the forties and fifties as the daughter of a nationally syndicated Hollywood columnist, I always feel
my answer will disappoint them. Yes, Marilyn Monroe came to parties at our house, and Hopalong Cassidy posed with my younger brother and me, all of us in black Hoppy outfits, six shooters drawn, under our Christmas tree. Our mother took us with her to movie premieres and famous restaurants and on trips abroad. Without doubt mine was an unusual and privileged childhood. But I have difficulty making vivid a world that always seemed to me at a remove. As soon as I could read to myself, I withdrew from it for long stretches every day. The adventures of the Five Little Peppers were far more engaging than the experience of attending Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Nicky Hilton. With the little Peppers—Ben, Polly, Joel, Davie, and Phronsie—and their neighbor, the wonderfully named Jasper, I felt I belonged. There was a comfort in entering their lives that I was far from feeling, say, as a child sitting in Liz’s dressing room before the ceremony while my mother interviewed the bride-to-be. At thirteen I passed up the chance to meet Elvis Presley to stay home and listen to my recording of Madama Butterfly. My heart could flow out to poor abandoned Cio-Cio San singing un bel dei vedremo, but it was never even faintly touched by the teen idol of my time. If I seem to be boasting, I’m not. It surely was a missed opportunity that I couldn’t let myself be more present in my actual surroundings. But I couldn’t. In many ways I still can’t. Or don’t as completely as I might. Living through all the interesting decades of my life from the forties to the turn of the twenty-first century, I have been, in an important sense, elsewhere. I wonder if because of my reading I have lived more fully or in some ways failed to live, at least in my own time and place.
I am helped in exploring this conundrum by the experience of other readers who have loved and lived in books—and not just any books but the same classic texts of English literature. On my desk lies a pile of literary studies and memoirs, testaments to others’ “contamination.” I quote from a few of them.
Rachel Brownstein in Becoming a Heroine, one of the first critical studies of texts to acknowledge the personal, writes of growing up in Queens:
Reading the novels of Henry James at fifteen, I experienced a miracle. Behind the locked bathroom door, sitting on the terry-cloth-covered toilet seat, I was transformed into someone older, more beautiful and graceful. I moved subtly among people who understood delicate and complex webs of feeling, patterned perceptions altogether foreign to my crude “real” life.
Leila Ahmed in her memoir A Border Passage writes of growing up in Alexandria:
Moving daily . . . under the blue skies of Egypt, we lived also in our heads and in the books we lost ourselves in, in a world peopled with children called Tom and Jane and Tim and Ann, and where there were moles and hedgehogs and grey skies and caves on the shore and tides that came in and out. And where houses had red roofs. Red roofs that seemed far better and more interesting and intriguing to me than roofs that were like, say, the terraced roof of our house in Alexandria.
Ahmed moved on, as I did, from children’s books such as The Wind in the Willows to the novels of Dickens and Thackeray. She writes, “I don’t know how I would have survived the loneliness of my teenage years without the companionship of such books.” Thinking of my own lonely teenage years, I don’t know either.
Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer traces her development from being a child who was “drawn to the work of the great escapist writers . . . , [loving] novels in which children stepped through portals—a garden door, a wardrobe—into an alternative universe,” to a preadolescent “with an interest in how far a book could take me from my own life and how long it could keep me there” to someone who became aware of language, marking up the pages of King Lear and Oedipus “with sweet embarrassing notes-to-self (‘irony?’ ‘recognition of fate?’) written in my rounded heartbreakingly neat schoolgirl print.”
Prose’s brief review of her reading life raises an interesting complication—the fact that we read differently at different stages of life. In her case she moves from being unaware of the power of language to “vaguely aware . . . but only dimly and only as it applied to whatever effect the book was having on [her]” to becoming the author of the text at hand, trained as she was in New Critical textual analysis, sophisticated and astute in her attentiveness to textual nuance—in short, able to read like a writer.
My own path of development is not unlike that of Prose. I learned to read ever more consciously, ever more critically, ever more aware of the components and strategies of literature. But doesn’t this development then skew one’s looking back? Trying, for example, to recover my eleven-year-old experience of David Copperfield, I must somehow uncover that first innocent reading through all the subsequent schooled and scholarly and writerly perspectives that overlie it. Ultimately reading David Copperfield at eleven is a memory, and memory, as we know, is highly unreliable. Nonetheless, I believe the warmth of that memory pervades my response to the book every time I teach it or make it the subject of a paper. And something of my original response to it persists in all rereadings. Something of the power books have in childhood remains at the heart of all our reading experience.
Instead of thinking of fiction as escape, Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran speaks of how she and her students “were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.” As I go back to Rachel Brownstein, I now see her reading of Henry James in Queens less as refuge from the quotidian than as the route to the quotidian’s transformation as well as her own. The person who emerges from the sanctuary of the bathroom grows up to write about reading Henry James in her seemingly banal setting. She “connects,” as E. M. Forster urges us to do in his famous epigram to Howards End, weaving together the different threads of her life. My book is at heart homage to the books that transform us, that shape our understanding of the world around us and lead us to make large and small connections. Through the books I have read you will know me. Without knowing these books, you cannot know me well.
If this volume is intended as an experiment in autobiography, both inner and outer, it’s also envisioned as an exercise in a freer, more personal kind of literary criticism than I was schooled in. As was typical for members of my generation, the first thirty years of my excellent standard education were spent drumming the personal voice out of me. In grade school my classmates and I competed in spelling bees, strove to perfect our penmanship, and threw ourselves into the joys of diagramming sentences. In high school, we honed further the faculty of memory to retain the myriad rules and facts that defined the world. My subjugation to these was so complete that, arriving at college and given an opportunity in a freshman English course to write a free theme, I could think of nothing more imaginative than to compare the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Fortunately, as I progressed, my topics became less stilted. But college and graduate school polish a mode of discourse in which the potentially unruly first-person pronoun is submerged. My writing was smooth. My points were clear. But who was writing? Who was reading? Someone called “One.” Was that “one” I? I acknowledge its serviceability, but to what extent did that depersonalized figure convey an authentic reading experience?
A challenge to my academic writing came when my mother declared (with what, at the time, seemed a hurtful lack of tact) that the opening paragraph of my masters thesis on Virginia Woolf failed to hook the reader. She pronounced it dull and lifeless. On some level I knew I agreed with her, but it was also important to defend myself against her blunt judgment. She was a journalist who liked to proclaim that she “thought in headlines.” Not only that. She had also spent thirty years writing her Hollywood gossip column, in which the string of short staccato items, separated from one another by ellipses, required pizzazz. Granted she was backed by the authority of her association with Fitzgerald and the College of One. He had even planned a graduation for her, complete with cap and gown, from the two-and a half-year program of study (though his death intervened to cancel the ceremony). But theirs had never been
truly academic study. It was more playful, more slanted to appreciation, as teacher and pupil recited poems together and pretended to be characters of their favorite books—Grushenka and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamozov, shortened to “Grue” and “Yosh,” Natasha and Pierre from War and Peace (my mother had rebelled against being cast as the worldly jaded Helene), Swann and Odette from Proust, Esther Summerson and Mr. Jarndyce or the Smallweeds slumped in their chairs from Bleak House, Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley from Vanity Fair, or, for a change, Scott would become fat Jos Sedley. Anecdotes of the education had brought my mother and Fitzgerald alive for me in their zest for one another and for literature. But despite an imagined Fitzgerald joining tacitly in her criticism, I managed, tenuously, to hold my ground. What did my mother, or even her attendant ghost, know of the expectations, indeed the requirements of serious scholarly work?
I followed the masters thesis on Woolf with a doctoral dissertation on George Eliot, a well-focused study with a cumbersome title. I didn’t show any of it to my mother, who in any case seemed content to bask in the solidity of my achievement in completing my PhD and then becoming a professor. Often, though, in my early experience as a teacher, assigning the kinds of papers I myself had been assigned on themes and imagery and literary structure, I found my students’ papers, dare I say, dull and lifeless. The better students made their points clearly, sometimes with grace, but seldom did their most vibrant energies seem engaged in the enterprise. As for weaker students, all too often I found them resorting to a desperate strategy of mimesis, imitating—badly—the kind of writing they thought was expected of them and failing to be either persuasive or genuine.
My dissatisfaction with academic discourse, long simmering, finally erupted in a plagiarism debacle. Halfway through a general education course that was part of our touted Core Curriculum at Brooklyn College, I assigned a paper on one of my favorite novels, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Four students in the class plagiarized from the Cliff Notes, turning in almost identical papers about Isabel Archer’s flaws and virtues as a heroine. The first paper I read seemed competent; by the third I had figured out the source and was forced to contemplate, among other things, my own failure to engage the students.
Bookmarked Page 2