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.