Mary Shelley |
I
remember reading a racy novel about Jim Bowie (The Iron Mistress, by Paul Wellman). And, unaccountably, Jack
London’s autobiographical Martin Eden—a
novel that gripped me from first page to last, a novel whose ending shocked me:
a depressed Martin drowning himself at sea. The
hero killed himself! Killed
himself! This was unthinkable. Wild Bill never would have done it. Or
Buffalo Bill. Or Skip Turner, hardwood hero of Backboard Magic.
Even
more unaccountably, I read—in study hall at Hiram High School—Moby-Dick. All of it. I have no idea why.
But I did it, even though I couldn’t have ingested and digested more than a
nibble’s worth of Melville’s massive meal. Did I read it because I had liked
the Classics Illustrated cover? The one
that showed in the far background the doomed Pequod? In the near
background the white whale rising up
out of the water, capsizing a whaleboat?
With four whalers falling out, arms flailing? With Ahab in the foreground, poised to hurl a
harpoon at his enemy? Or did I read it
because the John Huston 1956 film (with Gregory Peck as Ahab) was still a
recent memory? I had seen it at the
Hiram College Cinema on Sunday night, 11 November 1956, my twelfth birthday. Or
because I was sick of hearing people allude to things I knew nothing
about? And did I notice that—at the
end—a lone man, Ishmael, is floating in the ocean, just as Martin Eden
did? (Though Ishmael is a survivor, not
a suicide.) Many years later I would
read Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter
Naslund’s sexy spinoff and laugh aloud when Ishmael, safely on land again,
finds and fucks Ahab’s wife. “I heard footsteps, which I knew well, pass
through the house,” writes Naslund in the voice of Una, Ahab’s wife. “From the
first night in my bed, we had known the depths of each other; my body had
whispered to me as his had to him: This is marriage. It needed no courtship.” Oh,
if I could have read that in 1961! And,
oh, if there had only been a Classics Illustrated version of it!
In
high school there was one English teacher I greatly admired (and feared):
Augustus H. Brunelle, who taught Latin and German as well. He was grumpy. He
was old. In his mid-sixties, about to
retire. We called him Gus—never to his face, though. (I was
amused, years later, when I learned that “Gus” was the name all his friends and
family called him—in fact, in college, he was “Gussie.” And here we thought
we’d thought we were being insulting.)
Anyway, although I respected Gus’ great knowledge (he seemed to have
read everything), his passion for
literature and language, his insistence on thoroughness, on excellence, I just wasn’t ready to adopt
his ways. Testosterone combers were still surging through me, their sounds and
slosh drowning all else.
In
college, my regular reading habits returned—and greatly expanded—mostly due to
the influence of Prof. Abe C. Ravitz, who taught American literature courses at
Hiram College. He demanded a lot of us—and got a lot. His required reading
lists often featured fifteen or twenty titles. (I remember he once assigned all
of The Sun Also Rises for the next
day’s class.) And Dr. Ravitz showed us
something else, too—the necessity for literary scholars to know all that a writer has written. It’s
insufficient, you see, to read only Moby-Dick;
you mustn’t neglect The Confidence-Man
and Clarel, not if you want to know
what Melville was really up to. And
you do want to know, don’t you?
And
so I adopted what I’ll call the Ravitz Method in, oh, about 1964, and have
remained true to it ever since. It’s very unusual for me to read only one book
by a writer. If I like him or her, I will read everything. All of Jack London, all of Shakespeare, all of Dickens,
Thackeray, Trollope (that tireless
talent wrote forty-seven novels!), Twain, Updike, Thomas Berger … I found myself applying the same principle to
popular and genre writers, too. And so I read all of Robert B. Parker, Michael
Connelly, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, and on and on and on. As
I write this first draft on 15 August 2011, I am halfway through the complete
works of John O’Hara, midway through his massive 897-page novel From the Terrace.
So
once I got interested in Mary Shelley, was there any chance I would not read all of her? And all of her
parents’ works? Her husband’s? Her friends’?
All
that reading would devour about four solid years of my life. And those books,
laid like flagstones on the earth and sea (some, obviously, could float),
formed my transatlantic walkway to Castle Frankenstein.
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