Executive Times
		2006 Book Reviews
		Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan
Rating:			***
		(Recommended)
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	Transported Avid readers will relish the debut offering by Maureen Corrigan titled, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books. Fans of the four minute book reviews she’s given over the past sixteen years on NPR’s Fresh Air, may find that the longer firm requires a bit more patience while Corrigan makes her point. Insight into why other readers select certain books can be fascinating, and I found Corrigan’s focus on mysteries to be especially resonant with some of my own reading tastes. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter Two, “Tales of Toil: What John Ruskin and Sam Spade Taught Me About Working for a Living,” pp. 61-65: Like Grandma Helen, who left Poland for America in the early years of the twentieth century, I packed my bags as a young woman and left family, friends, and native culture to seek a new life. Except that I boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and got off in Philadelphia. Grandma Helen’s epic journey was motivated by poverty and by the stories she’d heard about America; mine was inspired by an overwhelming—and overwhelmingly naïve—love of literature. At age twenty-one, I had been admitted to the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the big life questions that sometimes gnaws at me at three in the morning is whether or not entering that program was a Major Wrong Turning. “You earned a Ph.D. and read widely,” murmurs the angel sitting on the pillow by my right ear. “You spent your youth walled up in a library,” taunts the devil on my left. “You could have joined the Peace Corps or sailed around the world.” (The devil has read far too many male extreme-adventure tales.) Mistake or not, I did it, and so, like the young Grandma Helen, I, too, stepped into a foreign land where I didn’t speak the language. I adapted, as most immigrants do, and eventually found a way to make a meaningful working life for myself through reading. But not in the way I originally thought I would. Once again, books took me off course. Just as I think decades of avid reading are indirectly responsible for opening up my mind and heart to the idea of adopting my daughter from China, I think my discovery of and consuming love affair with detective fiction midway through graduate school steered me away from a career as a scholar. In both cases, books made me see myself differently and gave me a wider sense of possibilities. But I had to pay a price for the self-knowledge I gained in graduate school: the price was being in graduate school. I think of those years as my time served as a character immured in a Gothic novel. To give you a sense of how weird—indeed sometimes even sinister—this world of graduate school was, let’s journey back to the autumn of 1977. It’s four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and I’m standing in a small cluster of first-year graduate students who’ve been invited to the weekly “Sherry Hour” hosted by Penn’s English Department. The dark lounge in Bennett Hall where the gathering takes place resembles, to my delight, a shabby drawing room out of an Agatha Christie mystery. I’m quietly crowing to myself: I’ve gotten a fellowship into an Ivy League graduate school, and I’m on my way toward achieving my dream of becoming an English professor. A few years of classes, a dissertation (basically a very long term paper, no problem), and I’ll have my Ph.D. Then I’ll be in the same rarified realm as the English professors I idolized as an undergraduate at Fordham University~ Here I am already sipping sherry, for heaven’s sake! I don’t like it, but I’ll learn to and. . . wait a minute. Professor X, who’s holding court at the center of our little group, is saying something. I’ve been assigned to be his teaching assistant, so I’d better listen. Professor X knocks back another glass (what is this, his fourth?), stares over our heads at a spot on the wall, and mutters an oracular verdict: “None of you will ever come close to Ira Einhorn. He was the most brilliant student the department ever had.” Granted, those inspiring words were spoken before Holly Maddux’s body was actually discovered in a trunk in Einhorn’s apartment, but in the fall of 1977, Einhorn was widely regarded as the chief suspect in her disappearance. I should have gleaned two things from Professor X’s pronouncement—and then I should have grabbed my book bag, run down to nearby Thirtieth Street Station, and hopped on the first train back to New York. First, I should have realized that I had landed in a little pond still very much patrolled by big male fish. Sure, it was the late seventies and the Second Women’s Movement was thriving and Penn even had a prominent feminist scholar on its faculty (even if she dressed like Stevie Nicks and whispered animatedly to herself), but only male graduate students gained access to the select inner networking circles where they went out drinking, played racquetball, and, presumably, argued urgent matters of weighty intellectual portent with their mentors. We women could sleep with the faculty (that old story) and otherwise abase ourselves—I knew one nonsmoking woman who always had a book of matches at the ready in case her mentor wanted to light up—but in terms of intellectual community, we were mostly out in the cold. As Einhorn’s grisly tale eventually revealed, a woman could even be murdered and stuffed in a trunk, but if her boyfriend was “brilliant,” he was the one who would be mourned for having his promising career ruined; she was just an undistinguished student who had taken six years to graduate from Bryn Mawr. That’s the other thing the Einhorn tribute should have clued me in to: gender aside, the thing that mattered most in this elite new world of mine was brainpower—or, at least, the projection of brainpower. Being a decent, truthful, charitable person—none of those traditional JudeoChristian virtues counted. Wit, verbal adroitness, a substantive intellectual background (or at least the illusion of one), and condescension toward one’s mental inferiors were the marks of distinction here. Theory, with its bizarre vocabulary of literary encryption, was just beginning to take root at Penn and other top graduate schools across the land. I was a pretty good close reader, so why didn’t I read the writing on the wall at that Penn Sherry Hour? Simple: I was blinded by desire. I longed for a community of fellow readers—people who, like me, wanted to read and talk about books all the time. Instead, what I mostly found in graduate school were some oddly assorted bookworms, each of us already isolated in our own anxiously declared literary “fields,” and a few ruthless careerists who, cannily assessing the shrinking academic job market, did things like razor out articles on reserve at the library for the master’s exam we were all required to take. I was imperfectly armored against the masculine bias of graduate school by all my years of practicing what literary scholar Nancy K. Miller has called a “learned androgyny”—that is, the ability to effect a sex-change operation of the imagination, an ability I, along with millions of other female readers, had developed over decades of reading books mostly featuring male heroes and antiheroes. With the courage of the deluded, I assumed that I could easily step into a man’s profession because I so easily stepped into men’s stories in literature. By the time I wised up, it felt too late to make a change. ‘While I worked at a bunch of part-time jobs, taught literature at colleges in the area, and, most happily, began writing book reviews for The Village Voice, I stayed officially registered as a graduate student at Penn for almost a decade. I stayed there out of inertia, because Penn was giving me a free financial ride, and because retreating home to Queens seemed like a defeat. And I stayed out of love, because even after a few ego-shredding years as a graduate student, I still couldn’t imagine a better line of work than to be an English professor, always lecturing and writing, surrounded by books. I’d had two especially inspiring and generous professors at Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx where I went as an undergraduate. They were—and remain—the best teachers I’ve ever had in my life, and I wanted to be like them. Professor Mary Fitzgerald taught Irish literature and looked like a heroine out of Celtic mythology—tall with pale skin and long, jet-black hair. In the summer of my junior year at Ford-ham, she invited me and a few other devoted English majors to go with her to Ireland; we studied at the Yeats Summer School and roamed around the country, meeting the poets and scholars who were her friends. We drank Guinness with Seamus Heaney (who rescued me one night at a dance from the drunken gyrations of a famous fellow poet) and talked incessantly about literature. I think about Mary these days when I’m in office hours with my own students at Georgetown. How did she put up with the company of a bunch of undergrads, no matter how enthusiastic, every day for a full month? Professor Jim Doyle was another glutton for punishment. A small, intense, brilliant, and very funny man, he taught modern poetry and nonfictional Victorian prose. My own dissertation topic—the medieval revival in art, literature, and politics in Victorian England—was Jim’s specialty. To Jim, literature mattered—the way I imagine literature mattered to the New York Intellectuals or the poets of the Enlightenment or World War I. I remember him, bedraggled, coming into a seminar class on Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and announcing, through drags on his ever-present cigarette, that he had stayed up all night, rereading the book and trying to revise his thoughts on it. No other adult I knew stayed up all night, thinking through intellectual problems. Neither Jim nor Mary, who were both junior faculty when I was their student, wound up getting tenure from Fordham—another sign I should have heeded. Jim, in fact, eventually fled academia altogether and moved with his family up to Vermont, further proof of his eminent sanity and wisdom. In the years since I graduated with a Ph.D., many of the teaching colleagues who’ve become my friends have shared their own horror stories about graduate school. At best, it seems a mixed experience. Nonetheless, I insist that Penn, in the years I was there, was uniquely awful because it was so nervously self-conscious about its own institutional status. In his recent memoir, The Road to Home, Vartan Gregorian, who served as provost of Penn during a good chunk of my time there, recalls how he was the odds-on favorite with faculty and students to be appointed president of the university in 1980. That is, until certain trustees voiced anxieties that Gregorian (who was born in Iran to Armenian parents) was “too ethnic.”! Penn ultimately appointed Sheldon Hackney, a straight-out-of-central-casting looking historian, to be its next president; Gregorian had the last laugh when he went on to serve, in turn, as president of the New York Public Library, Brown University, and, currently, the Carnegie Corporation. Books shape and change us. They can provide entertainment, escape and comfort. Corrigan takes readers inside her own development as a reader on the pages of Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, and the result is being transported into another’s journey in reading life. Some readers will come away with another list of books to read. So many books, so little time. Steve Hopkins, February 23, 2006
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