What I Read for Love by Dianne Pearce

 

In high school I remember that the boys seemed interested in girls, but that what seemed important to them was that there was a girl, there, for them, but not so much which particular one, or the permanence of it. The girls I knew were certainly different from that. What mattered to my female friends, and to me too, was yes, there must be a boy, but it must be a specific one, and never changing. What often happened was that girls did things they weren’t very interested in doing, like watching college football, or waited around doing nothing, just in case the guy wanted to hang out. In that time and place, and under those differing expectations, I think that the boys were generally happier than the girls.

And wasn't it the same in our homes?

We all had what you would reasonably describe as good fathers, but, to a man, they went off on most weekends to do their men things with other men. Sons, of a certain age, could sometimes go too, but the daughters and wives were left at home. And when any wife or daughter got some attention, it was very flattering, and very exciting.

Did they do it to us, our dads, set us up to be fans?

I know I was a huge fan of mine. It was best for me to watch stupid boring westerns curled up under my dad’s arm at night while my mother worked second shift as a telephone operator. Of course, my mother was the reader in our family, not my dad, and I caught the reading bug too. In a family that was often fractured because my dad felt free to go off and do men stuff with other men, or, gulp, other women, and because my mother absolutely wanted all the romance TV shows, books, doo-wop songs, and movies had promised her when she was a young girl, and was eternally disappointed and low-grade seething over it, inside books I felt more in control of my life. In my view my father was a great and strong man, and my mother was coquettish and disappointed, generally. Even the promise of doing something with my dad was better than an actual day with my mom. And so, in school, my girlfriends were always there, but what was really exciting was any time the boys were around.

In some ways I remember feeling that anything I wanted to do or be was somehow second to finding that special man, that guy who was going to just bring color to a black and white world, bring music to a quiet room, open the door to the house and let me out to roam the world… on his arm. So do we really wonder why, in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," Connie opens the door and goes out to Arnold? My students used to read that story and just think it was so messed up, but is it, really? It always seemed eerily on the nose to me.

Of course, in the K-12 world, boys weren't reading much. The girls were reading.

In college it was different.

In college the people teaching the literature classes, and then the creative writing classes, were men. K-12 the only men teachers were math and gym. But college brought the men with the books.

And in the classes were young men who loved reading, who aspired to be writers, like I did. And the male teachers just loved them. In high school I was the one who saved my teachers from the long awkward silence when they asked a question about a book nobody had read. I always had my hand up, always ready to discuss a book. In college I was fighting to get my hand noticed, waving it above my head like the flag of a very tiny, very unimpressive little country. 

Much later, when I got my MFA, it was the same: all the male authors were gods, unapproachable, and the arbiters of everything talented. All the women authors/teachers were the ones you went to for office hours, because they actually held office hours, but the men were the ones whose opinions of our work mattered to us all. 

It's possible this sounds crazy now, but I think it was really very well-accepted behavior when I was learning about which books to read, and how things shook out.

And I feel like this dynamic bled into every area of my life back then because, as much as I wanted the degrees, and the jobs, and to write, and to publish, I think I wanted the praise from the men more. And if that meant back-burnering everything on my list for everything on theirs, well, that was the cost of love.

And so I read everything any man I was impressed by read. I listened to their mix tapes of terrible music. And I watched everything they wanted me to watch.  In fact, I remember going to see movies like PINK FLAMINGOES and HAMBURGER HILL, and really hating every minute of them, and pretending to be very impressed after-the-fact. But,  it's the books I came here to talk about... the books.

The books were a mixed bag. I was a huge Agatha Christie fan, and a college boy I liked introduced me to Raymond Chandler, and I was hooked. I am grateful to this day for that introduction, but the fellow who insisted I must read Chandler, for him, never ever read an Agatha Christie, for me. Is that love?

My male teachers, oh, I loved them all, and for them I would read anything. I read Joyce, and though he bored me, I lied about it.

I read a short story collection by Gogol, and, I admit, I do faintly remember his stories, and remember them fondly for just how bleak they were, if it is possible to remember anything fondly for being bleak, because I had a thought, at the time, that they were so impossibly bleak that they were, just slightly… funny. I am certain that Gogol is not bleak and funny. But I don’t know for sure because I cannot conjure up, today, the desire to re-read him. So I'm going with bleak... and funny. Dark humor.

Another guy, from photography class, actually, and dabbling in writing on the side, got me reading Herman Hesse. For years I told anyone and everyone that STEPPENWOLF was my favorite novel. I read my way through the majority of Hesse's books, but I barely remember them now, beyond their names. The same must be said of the other books the young men in my life recommended: A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, lordy! THE STERILE CUCKOO! Why were young men of the 1980s bleak? (And can we blame Reagan?)

My teachers were not much better. I read a lot of John Cheever for a creative writing teacher who was an odd, extremely introverted man who, I could see, just found it so painful and disconcerting, really, to be in the front of the room speaking, and who I just adored. But his ultimate beloved, Cheever, not so much. I faked it, but I would have done anything I felt might have helped that teacher be more comfortable teaching the class, and anything that might have encouraged him to talk to me after class, and tell me more about Cheever. I just knew that anyone that aloof and uncomfortable had to be really deep. Like you-need-a-shovel deep. I wanted to be deep too.

There was all the stupid Bukowski the poetry teachers always taught. Yes, I wrote that. Stukowski, I think he should be called. All the earnest young men and the serious poetry teachers who seriously loved that man. What was that about? Not to mention all the Faulkner that I would have gone to my grave swearing was genius, but cannot remember in any meaningful way now. In my opinion John Updike could be used as anesthesia before surgery. Why were the men so taken with Updike??? Hemingway, well, he's supposed to be the best, right? I did genuinely really like his short stories, but the novels... lord help me it felt like walking through a peanut butter swamp.

I have to admit my hero worship of male teachers and their favorite male students in my classes continued, pretty much unabated, all the way through three college degrees. At one point in grad school I signed up for a course on women poets, taught by a woman from Australia (her accent was amazing!), and I was so excited to get in with the girls, to hear about the other side of the coin, but, sadly, she reminded me so much of my mother, coquettish, always flitting around the male teachers, really dismissive and reductive about the women writers she taught, leaving me with the impression that  all women writers were damaged goods. 

I do, however, thank her for sharing with me this poem, though I don’t know if she meant for me to really like it, as I do:

Meditation at Kew
by Anna Wickham

Alas! for all the pretty women who marry dull men,
Go into the suburbs and never come out again,
Who lose their pretty faces, and dim their pretty eyes,
Because no one has skill or courage to organize.
 
What do these pretty women suffer when they marry?
They bear a boy who is like Uncle Harry,
A girl, who is like Aunt Eliza, and not new.
These old dull races must breed true.
 
I would enclose a common in the sun,
And let the young wives out to laugh and run;
I would steal their dull clothes and go away,
And leave the pretty naked things to play.
 
Then I would make a contract with hard Fate
That they see all the men in the world and choose a mate,
And I would summon all the pipers in the town
That they dance with Love at a feast, and dance him down.
 
From the gay unions of choice
We'd have a race of splendid beauty, and of thrilling voice.
The World whips frank gay love with rods,
But frankly gaily shall be got the gods.
 

What a great piece of writing. And I leave it to you to interpret it as you will....
 
In all those years of being influenced by the men in my life, there was one guy who introduced me to many books, and, frankly, I would have read anything he suggested. I was much in the same boat as always: it was a bit my job to be interested and impressed no matter what I thought of the books he gave me to read, but I think he was a little more kindred to me in his tastes, as I still love many of the authors he introduced me to, among them some of my favorites, and some of his recommendations were for women authors too. He found me Tom Robbins, Walter Mosely, Marilynne Robinson, Harriett Doer, Flannery O’Connor, and, yes indeed, Kinky Friedman. But I regret all the sadness of the Richard Brautigan and Cormac McCarthy he loved, and the sort of view of life as essentially failed that I think he may have eventually bought into. It seemed such a universal thing to me at the time though: men disillusioned with the world they were in, teaching books, written by men, who wrote about men being disillusioned with the world they were in. And I loved all those men, to a greater or lesser extent, the writers, the teachers, the skinny boys with no chest hair to speak of carrying books in back pockets.  I thought they were more …. something than I was, and I would have done anything, read anything, for them, to be with them, to be like them, to be liked by them. For love, such as it was. My love, not theirs, I realize now.

 
What, I wonder, have you read not for yourself, but for another person, read for the the promise, however faint, the hope, the need, the slightest whiff, of love?