This Day in Literary History (Alison Lurie, Smart, Tart Pulitzer Winner, Born)

Sept. 3, 1926—Alison Lurie, who used her longtime career in academe as material for critically acclaimed fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 novel Foreign Affairs, was born in Chicago.

I first encountered the work of Lurie in the mid-Seventies, with her biting academic satire The War Between the Tates. Though she had written four prior novels, this was the first to attract widespread attention—enough for it to land on the bestseller lists and to be adapted into a 1977 TV movie starring Elizabeth Ashley, Richard Crenna, and Annette O'Toole.

For anyone wanting to know what how the nation’s campuses were roiled in the late Sixties by the Vietnam War, women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, this insider’s take, with its cool irony, remains an excellent place to start.

Many neophyte authors follow the mantra “write about what you know,” but I was unaware until I started researching this post just how closely Ms. Lurie followed that.

Several of her novels (including The War Between the Tates) feature characters from Corinth University, a school that shares a classical association and upstate New York setting with the institution where Ms. Lurie taught for decades, Cornell University.

Her female protagonists (the same age, within a few years, of Ms. Lurie) are often involved with children’s literature—her academic specialty. She couldn’t help but regard with tart disdain how these books were viewed by her colleagues, as in this passage from Foreign Affairs:

“For the truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department –indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly siblings dine at the chairman’s table –though, to judge by enrollment figures, many of them must spout toads and lizards.”

With all of that said, readers should be careful not to construe her fiction as directly autobiographical. Maintaining the kind of ironic distance she was able to keep towards her characters would have been difficult, if not impossible, if they derived entirely from her experiences and emotions.

For instance, like Erica Tate in The War Between the Tates, Lurie suffered through the collapse of her marriage to another academic. But, while the marital conflict in the novel was brought to a boil by an extramarital affair, Lurie’s marriage deteriorated as her first husband underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism—a spiritual orientation that, as the child of religious skeptics, she had little or no use for.

Over the years, I have wondered why Ms. Lurie was unable to sustain her mid-career popularity. Some of it may relate to the fact that creators of so-called “literary fiction” don’t work in genres where they can become “brand authors.”

But I suspect most of the problem instead rests with her frequent recourse to the academic environment she knew so thoroughly—a setting outside the experience of many common readers in the U.S. Throughout most of her career, her popularity was higher in the U.K., where writers such as A.S. Byatt, Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Iris Murdoch have enjoyed success with “campus novels.”

Readers who do try Ms. Lurie will find a fiction writer able to put her literary influences to use in contemporary contexts:

*Her consistently wry narrative voice (you can practically see her narrators raise their eyebrows) is reminiscent of Jane Austen.

*With his “international novels” (featuring encounters between innocent Americans and more jaded British), interest in artists, and midlife fascination with the supernatural, Henry James provided Lurie with another template.

*And her intense study of children’s literature led Lurie to plumb the complex personalities and frequent fears of the very young.

Above all, Lurie exemplifies the tendency of so many writers—no matter their time or nation—to write from a personal wound. With Lurie, that wound began even before childhood, in birth. As she wrote in a 1982 essay for The New York Times Book Review:

“I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, ‘too clever for her own good,’ but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team.”

The precocious but lonely child took refuge in books, especially, at that young age, fairy tales. To her joy, she discovered her own personal superpower: “With a pencil and paper I could revise the world.”

It made the difference in her life, which ended six years ago in a hospice in Ithaca, NY.

Lurie would be delighted to know that admirers of her fiction are celebrating the centenary of her birth on both sides of the Atlantic this month. In New York City, the 92^nd Street Y will host “Alison Lurie at 100” on Tuesday, September 15, featuring authors Bruce Handy, Joanna Rakoff, and Micah Perks in conversation with Cody Upton.

And in London, the British Library hosts “An American in London: A Celebration of Alison Lurie” on September 29, with speakers including Amanda Craig, Elly Griffiths, and Dame Margaret Drabble.

Quote of the Day (Jessamyn West, on Faces Ruined by ‘Double-Dealing’)

“Nothing ruins a face so fast as double-dealing. Your face telling one story to the world. Your heart yanking your face to pieces, trying to let the truth be known. One eyelid'll hang down lower than the other, one side of your mouth'll stay stiff while the other smiles. I know a dozen cases like that.” —American novelist Jessamyn West (1902-1984), The Life I Really Lived (1979)

Flashback, August 1984: Jay McInerney’s Bestseller on the Darkness Behind ‘Bright Lights’

Acclaimed for its unusual second-person narration and its seriocomic take on a coke-addled literary wannabe, Bright Lights, Big City kick-started Random House’s high-quality paperback line, Vintage Contemporaries, when it was released in August 1984.

It also changed the life of its 29-year-old author, Jay McInerney, who was trying to make ends meet as a part-time clerk in a liquor-store while still a year and a half into a Ph.D. program in English literature at Syracuse University.

The success of the novel—700,000 copies sold in its first year, and tens of thousands annually in the years since—enabled the author’s Williams College classmate and best friend Gary Fisketjon to bring a host of acclaimed other authors under his Vintage Contemporaries imprint, including McInerney’s mentor and grad school teacher Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Richard Russo, Don DeLillo, Peter Matthiessen, and Thomas McGuane.

But early fame also left McInerney with the kind of question that, for instance, John O’Hara had to deal with because of his debut, Appointment in Samarra: What do you do for an encore when many people consider your first book your best?

Or, just as telling: how do you keep from succumbing to the distractions and temptations of fame and success?

By McInerney’s own admission, none of his later works came as easily as Bright Lights, Big City. Its first line (“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning”) originated from a scrap of paper he’d written after returning from a nightclub at about four in the morning, when, with closing time night, he couldn’t find his cocaine, money, the girl he was pursuing, or his best friend.

Staying up all night, McInerney cranked out a short story, “It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?” that ended up accepted by Paris Review editor George Plimpton.

Thereafter, the plot for a full novel seemed to flow organically from that morning-after voice, he said in a 2020 Paris Review interview with Lucas Wittman—finished in six weeks.

Like the Jimmy Reed song that provided its title, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about the allures and dangers of urban life, and the personal losses and desperate need for help they occasion.

At the time, reviewers knew enough about McInerney’s life to know that it mirrored events and people in his debut novel, particularly in the unnamed protagonist’s job (soon lost) as a fact-checker at a New Yorker-style magazine:

·         “The Druid,” the publication’s editor-in-chief, is near-sighted, formal, and famously elusive, such that “While you have never actually seen a Victorian clerk, you believe this is what one would look like"—all of which sounds an awful lot like The New Yorker’s William Shawn.

·         “The Ghost,” a longtime staff member with an epic case of writer’s block, resembles Joseph Mitchell, who visited the offices daily for 30 years before his death without producing anything.

·        The narrator gets into trouble when his bosses discover that he lied on his resume about knowing French—just as McInerney did when, forced to check facts in a Jane Kramer piece about the French elections, he failed to catch major errors.

When I saw McInerney lecture at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) in the 1990s, he said he had not frankly admitted when the book came out that, like his narrator, he had taken cocaine. In the 1980s, he explained, a stigma still existed towards users.

I’m not sure that this initial coyness really mattered, however. So much else seemed to fit the facts of his life—to ring with a kind of special knowledge, put another way—that I believe nearly every reader assumed that McInerney was writing directly from experience.

Looking for a catch-all title for young writers with an urban sensibility, New York Magazine resorted to a trick it had used to (mis)classify up-and-coming actors. The “Literary Brat Pack” of McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Donna Tartt didn’t care for that label any more than Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Ally Sheedy, and Molly Ringwald had enjoyed being called “The Brat Pack.” 

It might have done McInerney more good if, in the several years immediately following Bright Lights, Big City, he had avoided further exploration of New York’s nightlife. He made himself an obvious target for critics more inclined to review who he was dating (e.g., after his second divorce, model Marla Hanson) or dining with (Ellis).

Brightness Falls (1992) furnished McInerney with the opportunity to take a more wide-angle view of the Reagan years by concentrating on a couple who were the envy of their friends. For a frank admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, comparisons to Tender Is the Night inevitably followed.

At the FDU lecture and book-signing, McInerney identified Brightness Falls as his favorite book. I don’t believe this was simply an author’s feeling that he had put all he had learned into what he had just finished, because McInerney has returned to his couple Russell and Corinne Calloway in two subsequent novels that examined how his generation coped with the necessary compromises involved with work, intimacy, and maturity: The Good Life (2006) and Bright Precious Days (2016).

Nevertheless, it remains the case that he remains overwhelmingly tied to his first book. In 2006, Time Magazine listed Bright Lights, Big City as one of nine generation-defining novels of the 20^th century.

It’s not because of the plot, which falls into a recognizable genre: a Bildungsroman (or “coming-of-age” tale) about a young person hitting rock bottom in a compressed period, like J.D. Salinger’s’ The Catcher in the Rye, or a cocaine equivalent of Charles Jackson’s pioneering tale of alcoholism, The Lost Weekend.

What made the novel distinctive was its voice—certainly the second-person narration, but not limited to that. Readers also took to the rich vein of comic irony referring to the “comet trail of white powder,” “Bolivian Marching Powder,” and the confusion inside the narrator’s head (“You are a republic of voices. Unfortunately, the republic is Italy”).

That tone is more subdued in his more expansive, ambitious later work. Critics continue to become caught up in McInerney’s personal life (his fourth and latest wife is the heiress Ann Hearst), and his two collections of wine essays, no matter how well written they might be, surely lead some observers to wonder if his attention and energy haven’t been diverted.

These critics might practice a bit more charity. Writing even one book is no easy feat. McInerney has written eight novels and one collection of short stories. Others have produced far less.

With that being said, I hope we see more of his work soon. Hard-won maturity may, in the long run, be better than being a “voice of a generation.” 

Quote of the Day (Flannery O'Connor, on Storytellers and the ‘Redemptive Act’)

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”—Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1969)