How great literature can change your life

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Friday

This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. Because an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother Eliza Scott means so much to me—she discusses the novels that were important to her as she grew up in Victorian England—I figured I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.

In the classic bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, the protagonist goes through an intense period of inner turmoil and discomfort before discovering his or her strengths and stepping out confidently into the world. Literary examples include Tom Jones, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Little Women, and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Leaving Carleton and entering what we college kids called “the real world” was my own discomfort. 

Carleton did its part in the task of my formation. Editing the Carletonian taught me leadership, my classes shaped my intellect, I developed lifelong friendships, and I met the love of my life. Little surprise that the prospect of leaving terrified me.

If I had gone directly into graduate school and the world of books, the transition would have been easier, but some deep part of me resisted that. If I was to grow up, I thought, I would need to explore alternatives to life as a professor. For a brief moment I considered publishing since I have been accepted into the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. Journalism also seemed a possibility, and a recruiter from Northwestern Journalism School assured me that I would be accepted.

But publishing proved too commercial for my tastes, and two years working on small town newspapers—the Pine City Pioneer in Pine City, Minnesota and the Winchester Herald-Chronicle in Winchester, Tennessee—let me know that devoting myself to everyday facts did not excite me. I learned that I was too gullible and too shy to be a good investigative reporter, and while I excelled at feature writing, I couldn’t see doing it for the rest of my life. Julia and I decided, therefore, that after two years of establishing herself as a middle school or high school teacher so that she could get a job anywhere, I would enter a graduate English program with the goal of becoming a professor.

Public school positions being scarce in 1973, Julia had to settle for a wretched post in east central Minnesota, with a principal who bullied first-year women teachers to maintain his self-esteem. I, meanwhile, first landed a job as proofreader for an advertising shopper (the Cambridge Scotsman) and then, a couple of months later, as the sole reporter and photographer for the Pioneer. While working for the shopper, where I cut and pasted grocery ads, I became convinced that my mind was deteriorating, and I read frantically. Unfortunately, one of the first works I read was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street since Sauk Center, Minnesota, where it is based, was only 100 miles away. Lewis’s vision of the rural Midwest as a cultural wasteland reenforced our own experience there and added to my panic.

Other works included John Knowles’s Separate Peace (through which I processed high school memories), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Studying for the literature Graduate Record Exam, I also went through the Norton anthologies, all but memorizing the extensive introductions while dipping into various works. As a result, I tested in the top 10%, even though I hadn’t majored in English. It helped that there were four questions on Vanity Fair.

The work that made the most positive impression was Tom Jones, a comic masterpiece. I loved the sophisticated humor, the sexual innuendo, the rambunctious protagonist, the beautiful and principled heroine, and the author’s good nature and big heart. Any century that can produce such a work, I decided, was worth studying further. As I was already well versed in the French 18^th century, it wasn’t much of a stretch to move across the channel. 

The Minnesota newspaper hadn’t had a full-time reporter for years—the owners were improving it in order to sell it, I later learned—so I had an entire untouched county about which to write feature stories, which I did. This provided me with the broad introduction to life that one finds in coming-of-age novels: I entered the lives of farmers, church ministers, small store owners, artists, car mechanics, garbage men, police officers, fast food franchise owners, piano tuners, and county politicians. Everyone is interesting enough to warrant a feature, I declared, and set out to prove it. I even wrote an article about the town dump. It was a fun experience, but I was let go after a few months after the newspaper changed hands and ran into financial difficulties. The new editor took over my writing and photography duties.

Here’s something I learned from this first year of work: although I liked to think of myself as staff, I automatically identified with management (which is why my firing came as a shock). A life of privilege will do this to you, and it would not be the last time I would be served this lesson.

Julia was desperately unhappy in her job and so was fortunate to find a more rewarding position the following year, teaching English and French at Grundy County High School in Appalachian Tennessee. (We had decided we wanted to spend the remaining year before graduate school close to either her parents or mine.) I, meanwhile, found a job at the biweekly Herald Chronicle. The year was 1974-75, and I can report that I heard the n-word on a daily basis—usually from the publisher—which is why I had fled to a northern college in the first place. I was able to continue writing feature stories, however, although two were suppressed (a profile on the remarkable chair of the local NAACP, who had spearheaded our integration efforts, and a where-are-they-now article on the Highlander Center, which had been run out of Grundy County by racists 15 years earlier).  At least I was adding experiences to my life basket.

My history major made it difficult to get into a graduate English program, especially since literary formalists pooh-poohed historical context. Luckily, Emory’s J. Paul Hunter, its 18^th century specialist, saw the history background as a plus, along with my interest in Tom Jones, so I attended Emory. Later, when I landed a job at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I would teach Tom Jones every other year in my “Couples Comedy in the British Restoration and 18^th Century.” The love affair lasted up until about 10 years ago, when Fielding’s gentry perspective came to seem a bit too entitled. By way of contrast, Jane Austen—whose Sense and Sensibility I always taught to conclude the course—has never let me down.

I realize that, in this post, I haven’t talked much about how I used literature to process my life, but that’s because at the time I saw literature mostly as a means of escaping life. It was a refuge, not a way to negotiate life’s challenges. It may be significant that, during lunch hours at the Winchester newspaper, I worked my way through Don Quixote, which is about a man who finds the world of books more fulfilling than reality.

I also, rather dangerously, attempted to memorize poetry during the dull commute to work, the equivalent of today’s texting while driving. I’ll end today’s essay with a story about how this practice ended when a tragedy occurred.

I was in the process of memorizing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and had the book propped in my lap. I would look down, grab a couple of lines, and refocus on the road. At one point I glanced up to see a puppy in front of me.

I simultaneously slammed on the brakes and honked the horn. Unfortunately, the dog froze when it heard the horn rather than continuing on, and to this day I can still feel the jolt as I went over it. A driver coming from the other direction shook his finger at me. 

Of course, the poem is about the mariner gratuitously killing an albatross, perhaps to show his power over nature or perhaps simply because he can. As punishment, his fellow sailors hang the bird around his neck, and I imagined the puppy being hung around my own. Because he has committed this sin, however, the mariner—after great suffering—comes to understand our connection with nature. “He prayeth well, who loveth well/ Both man and bird and beast,” he tells a young man who needs to learn the same lesson.

I can’t say that my puppy taught me this message. But what I was doing was dangerous so perhaps it lost its life to save me from a much more serious accident. I continue to be haunted, as the mariner is haunted, but I became a much more careful driver after that incident.

There’s no predicting how literature will enter our lives.