That course, which included works by such authors as James, Chopin, Hardy, Gissing, and Virginia Woolf, would today be characterized as “Eurocentric.” And I would be, too. I had never traveled beyond Western Europe. Or read beyond it. Then in the 1990s in connection with a life-changing trip to India with a friend, I started reading novels by Indian authors who wrote in English and worked up a course on Indian English fiction. My department, seeking at that juncture to be more global in its offerings, was pleased to have me teach it. I realized, though, after teaching the course a few times that most of the writers on my syllabus no longer lived on the Asian subcontinent. They had moved to London or New York or Toronto or Berkeley. This awareness led me to develop yet another course on transnational narratives and identities, focused on late twentieth-century immigrant and transnational experience. The line from the orphan to the immigrant has thus become the arc of my own personal and professional journey.
To write about this journey is to create a counter-narrative—counter to the more scholarly book this might well have been and counter as well to a more conventional memoir of a person’s life and times. What does it mean to be immersed in fiction, especially when the works are ones of other eras and other places? Before she became a novelist, when she was still young, earnest, and devout, Marianne Evans wrote to a friend: “I shall carry to my grave the mental diseases with which they [novels] have contaminated me.” Because the writer of this prudish letter became the great novelist, unbeliever—and moralist—George Eliot, readers can enjoy the irony of her fearing the immoral influence of fiction. Few novelists have done more than she to shape readers’ explicitly moral sensibilities. Her great humanist moral vision became my own equivalent of a religion: the concern with how we might still aspire as secular people to rise to being our best selves and to touch and inspire one another. I try not to lose sight of this ideal. Yet I, too, shall carry to my grave the contamination, if you will, of reading fiction—serious fiction but fiction nonetheless, my stimulant and analgesic of choice. I have lived my life refracted through novels; they have shaped the terms of my existence. I think of their influence as positive, their place in my life a means of deepening understanding and compassion. But fiction is a realm into which I have escaped as well as one in which I have found myself.
When people ask me what it was like growing up in Beverly Hills, California, in the forties and fifties as the daughter of a nationally syndicated Hollywood columnist, I always feel my answer will disappoint them. Yes, Marilyn Monroe came to parties at our house, and Hopalong Cassidy posed with my younger brother and me, all of us in black Hoppy outfits, six shooters drawn, under our Christmas tree. Our mother took us with her to movie premieres and famous restaurants and on trips abroad. Without doubt mine was an unusual and privileged childhood. But I have difficulty making vivid a world that always seemed to me at a remove. As soon as I could read to myself, I withdrew from it for long stretches every day. The adventures of the Five Little Peppers were far more engaging than the experience of attending Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Nicky Hilton. With the little Peppers—Ben, Polly, Joel, Davie, and Phronsie—and their neighbor, the wonderfully named Jasper, I felt I belonged. There was a comfort in entering their lives that I was far from feeling, say, as a child sitting in Liz’s dressing room before the ceremony while my mother interviewed the bride-to-be. At thirteen I passed up the chance to meet Elvis Presley to stay home and listen to my recording of Madama Butterfly. My heart could flow out to poor abandoned Cio-Cio San singing un bel dei vedremo, but it was never even faintly touched by the teen idol of my time. If I seem to be boasting, I’m not. It surely was a missed opportunity that I couldn’t let myself be more present in my actual surroundings. But I couldn’t. In many ways I still can’t. Or don’t as completely as I might. Living through all the interesting decades of my life from the forties to the turn of the twenty-first century, I have been, in an important sense, elsewhere. I wonder if because of my reading I have lived more fully or in some ways failed to live, at least in my own time and place.
I am helped in exploring this conundrum by the experience of other readers who have loved and lived in books—and not just any books but the same classic texts of English literature. On my desk lies a pile of literary studies and memoirs, testaments to others’ “contamination.” I quote from a few of them.
Rachel Brownstein in Becoming a Heroine, one of the first critical studies of texts to acknowledge the personal, writes of growing up in Queens:
Reading the novels of Henry James at fifteen, I experienced a miracle. Behind the locked bathroom door, sitting on the terry-cloth-covered toilet seat, I was transformed into someone older, more beautiful
