18
MARRIAGE AND MONEY
No, I didn’t go
fortune-hunting; Mary was the only heiress I knew, and she certainly had no
intention of marrying me (or, as it turned out, anyone else). That is a
traditional way for a man to surmount one of life’s hurdles, but in my case, it
was only the way I overcame the last obstacle to earning a Ph.D. Marriage
and Money in English City Comedy, 1597-1625 is the title of my doctoral
dissertation. After Jane and I broke up, I became semi-celibate, turning off my
phone and not leaving the apartment for days at a time. I devoted the next year
almost entirely to finding and reading source materials for my study, some of
them arcane enough that they weren’t in Columbia’s Butler Library (which is big,
even for a well-endowed university), so that I often had to make use of the
main branch of the New York Public -- not my favorite place. At least at
Butler, I had access to the stacks; I could poke around and come across all
sorts of interesting related things. At NYPL, I, like everyone else, had to
fill out call slips (in pencil) and give them to a clerk, who would disappear
for minutes or hours, and return either with what I had asked for, or something
else that he’d mistaken for what I had asked for, or empty-handed. Books get
lost and misplaced, in every library.
Someone puts a book back a shelf lower than where it’s call number says
it belongs, and it has effectively disappeared forever. I don’t know what
percentage of books in the library’s card catalogue have effectively ceased to
admit, but one-tenth wouldn’t sound high to me.
For starters,
I had to read every comedy written in England in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries, along with many that came before them – not a huge task, given what
had survived in print. And I had to read all of the secondary sources I could
find -- what those playwrights’ contemporaries, and my own contemporaries, had
written about them – but, here, Professor J had actually done me a favor by
compelling me to write on obscure plays that hadn’t been of much interest to
scholars – unlike Shakespeare. And I read economic historians like R.H. Tawney
and Max Weber, who wrote about the Protestant Reformation and the rise of
capitalism, both of which contributed to new attitudes toward marriage and
money that were reflected in the 21 plays I was writing about. But I was also
using primary sources -- pamphlets and handbooks and sermons from the 16th
and early 17th centuries, which told the people of their time what
to do and how to think about sex, courtship and marriage – and these opinions
and attitudes were reflected, often with interesting distortions, in the
theater. There was a kind of feminist debate going on at the time. I was
reading things like a misogynistic pamphlet written by a man named Joseph
Swetnam titled The Arraignement of Lewd,
Idle, Froward and Inconstant Women in 1615, which almost immediately provoked
a reply by someone calling herself Esther Sowernam (get it? sweet/sour?) which
she called Esther hath hang’d Haman: or
an Answer to a Lewd Pamphlet, entitled “The Arraignement of Women.” Feminist
literary critics discovered and these materials ten years later, so I was
actually ahead of my time – as I might have discovered if I’d ever received any
encouragement to publish my thesis from my advisor.
No one has ever
read my dissertation, as far as I
know, with the exception of my advisor and the four members of my defense
committee, who probably skimmed its 339 pages in an hour or two before doing
what I needed them to do, which was to affix their seal of approval, which
appears on the title page:
It was then
put on microfilm and buried in a depository in Ann Arbor – I picture it as a
pit for radioactive waste, brimming with manuscripts that emit deadly sleep
rays. And there it sits, undisturbed, an artifact similar to Keats’s Grecian
urn, except that it will never be unearthed and displayed in the British Museum
like the Elgin Marbles, and no one will ever write an ode to it.
Some
dissertations do get published, by university presses, usually after
considerable revision and polishing overseen by one’s advisor, who, if one is
lucky, will also have connections among the editors at those presses to whom he
can recommend you. But Professor J had no such connections, never having
published a book – or anything else, as far as I can tell. He was presented
with a festschrift when he retired,
which is a collection of essays by various scholars in his honor, and the
scholars in this case were a veritable Who’s
Who of professors of Renaissance English lit. But how he joined their
august company – indeed, how he got tenure at Columbia – without publishing remains
a mystery. So he wouldn’t have been much help to me in getting Marriage and Money published even if
he’d wanted to. And he didn’t want to. After
I had “defended” it before that committee of department members (the last
hurdle of doctoral studies was the Defense of Dissertation), during which
Professor J said not a word in my defense when some feature that he had
insisted on was questioned, he took me aside. I thought he was at last going to
congratulate me, but what he said was, “Well, it’s all right as a dissertation,
but of course there’s no book there.” And, still as gullible as Malvolio, I
believed him.
He was wrong;
there was a book there. Not having included Shakespeare in the dissertation would
have made it publishable, simply because there was so little in print about the
other minor playwrights of the time. I had touched a lot of important social
and cultural bases: the practice of paying dowries to the families of brides
and jointures to the families of grooms; the arranging of marriages for
financial gain by parents without consulting their children’s wishes (a
practice that prompted a playwright named George Wilkins to write a play in
1607 titled The Miseries of Enforced
Marriage); the role (and it was a large one) played by courtesans, those
alternatives to wives who also had to be financially compensated. When I turned
each of my five chapters into a scholarly article and sent them off to
prestigious journals, all of them were accepted and published. And still I didn’t have the sense to
repackage them as a book and send them off to a university press for
consideration.
After the
research was complete came the actual writing. The corner of my living room looked
like those offices you see on police and spy dramas in which mug shots and pieces
of paper full of marginal exclamation points and highlighted phrases, connected
by pieces of yarn attached to push pins, cover every inch of wall space. The
manuscript itself was a mess as well. Keep in mind that the PC hadn’t yet made
its debut; I couldn’t arrange my materials neatly on a screen. If a sentence needed to be changed, or moved,
or removed, the whole page would have to be retyped, eventually, so I was
writing notes to myself and sticking them onto pages with Scotch tape, Post-Its
not having yet been invented.
And of
course, I was doing the actual writing on my father’s old Smith-Corona
portable, which was falling apart. The keys started sticking -- first the ones
that had frozen from disuse, like “+” and “{", but eventually I had to
train myself to leave a space every time I needed a “w,” so that I could go
back later and put it in by hand. As you can see by the title page, it has an
old-timey look to it: if I’d had access to an IBM Selectric – the state of the
art in writing machines at the time – it would have given it a cleaner, more
readable appearance, or at least a more standardized one. I confess, though,
that when I looked at my dissertation the other day (it’s on my computer, in
PDF format), it made me nostalgic for that typewriter. My Luddite daughter, who
has the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen, likes the Smith-Corona and
occasionally types things on it just for fun.
My work
habits were exactly what they are now. I’m a late sleeper, and I need to soak
my brain in at least two cups of coffee before it functions. Then I
procrastinate for a couple of hours, which is much easier now than it was then,
what with my iPad at my elbow and the Times
on my doorstep. But when I lived on 77th, Facebook was decades
away, the nearest newsstand was four blocks away, and so to waste time, I made
do with whatever was at hand -- a Hammacher-Schlemmer catalogue, a World Atlas,
a crossword puzzle, the Post from
four days ago. Once I even found myself reading the labels of the bottles in
the medicine cabinet. Finally, at about eleven, I’d sit down at my desk and
start pecking away, without breaks for food or even for peeing. I’d start by
rewriting the thousand words I’d written the day before, and then I’d write
another thousand words, to be rewritten tomorrow. All writing is rewriting, as
I told my students; you don’t know what you want to say until you’ve said it. And
I discovered something about myself as a writer: I’m by nature a minimalist. I
like short forms – reviews, articles – whose entirety I can keep in mind the
whole time I’m composing them. But even a chapter of 60 pages presented
problems of organization that I found difficult to solve. When I had written a
section on Franceschina, the murderous prostitute of John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, should I follow
that with my discussion of Vittoria, the title character of Webster’s The White Devil, the mistress of a
corrupt Duke but the most sympathetic person in the play, or should I discuss
Middleton’s eponymous Courtesan in The
Honest Whore, Part One, who is a pro like Franceschina but a sympathetic
character like Vittoria?
When I was
finished with my day’s labors, I put the manuscript away in its resting-place –
the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. I did this because, when I was
still an undergraduate at Cornell, a terrible thing happened: a graduate
student in English, who had finished her dissertation and was only weeks away
from her degree, went out to dinner and returned to find her apartment in
ashes. The fire had destroyed everything – both copies of her thesis and all
her notes. But a package of Velveeta cheese that she had left in the freezer
was intact.
My day’s work
done, I was at leisure, since I wasn’t making any social plans for the
duration. If the weather was warm, I might wander down to the tennis courts in
Riverside Park to see if I could pick up a tennis game, or I might fall by
Marty Reisman’s table-tennis academy on Broadway and 96th, though the people
who hung out there were the most serious players in the city, much too good for
me. And there were always movies. I wasn’t dating, but I wasn’t living the
monkish existence that Jacques Barzun had prescribed, and when the occasional
hookup presented itself, I had to take advantage of it, didn’t I, if only for
hygienic reasons? I believed in my friend George Robinson’s maxim, “Getting it
regular is the basis of mental health.” Most of my fellow graduate students
lived pretty much the same life I did. One of them – I forget his name – had
worked out a way to quantify the value of each week through a mathematical
formula: he took the number of pages of his dissertation he’d written, the
number of hours he’d slept, the number of times he’d played squash and the
number of times he’d had sex, and, assigning to each a numerical value according
to its importance, added them up. Let’s see – 12 pages, 79 hours, two games and
one blow job, typical for him, he said, somehow produced the number 27, which
was okay but not great.
Most of my
weeks were okay but not great, too. But by the spring of 1967, I had a draft to
show Professor J. It took him a couple of weeks to read it, but in the end,
aside from requiring a few minor revisions, he signed off on it. He’d never
demonstrated the least enthusiasm for my project and clearly wanted to be rid
of it and me. But my job wasn’t finished. The English Department required five
copies of the dissertation. What that had meant from time immemorial was an
original and four carbons. (Google it if you don’t know what a carbon is.) Carbon
paper was terrible stuff, flimsy and coated with ink that smudged your fingers
when you touched it. Typing each page would have required me to sandwich
together five sheets of paper and four carbons, and hit the keys hard enough to
carry the impression through all those layers, which would have destroyed the
Smith-Corona before I’d finished the first chapter. If I made a typo, I’d have
to correct it with white-out on all those increasingly faint and barely legible
carbon copies. I was resigned to hiring a professional typist for the job,
which would have cost quite a large sum.
But
technology, in the form of George Robinson – it was George who had sprung
Philip Roth on me and Jane – rescued me. George had recently opened a brokerage
house; he was the youngest CEO on Wall Street. And he had purchased a new piece
of equipment that had just come on the market, called a “Xerox” machine. All I
had to do was produce one pristine manuscript and the Xerox would do the rest. Even that was almost beyond my powers. The
typing, proofreading and correcting took over a month, but at last it was
ready. I took it down to George’s office and fed it, page by page, into the
gigantic contraption, and it slowly churned out the copies. It took the better
part of two days to finish a job that now, with copiers that spit out multiple
pages as fast as the automatic feeder can push them in, would have been done in
a few hours.
But George’s
machine produced four clean sets of each page. They weren’t collated; each pile
of five identical pages had to be sorted into five piles of 339 pages in proper
sequence. Nonetheless, it was a huge improvement over the old system; each of
the copies was as legible as the original, which must have gladdened the hearts
of the defense committee who had to read it. Mine, one of them told me, was the
first dissertation they’d ever seen that had been Xeroxed. I know that counted
in my favor when it came to being grilled at my defense.
The defense
was nothing like the third-degree that my orals had been. It was simply an
academic chore for the members of the committee, and they got through it as
quickly as they could. A couple of them asked me questions about some
peculiarities of style and structure – most of them the brainchildren of
Professor J, who sat mute while I tried to account for them – but after an hour
or so, the committee’s chairman, Professor S, whose hostile manner had worried
me throughout, complimented me on the final chapter – the one on Franceschina
and Vittoria, which I had titled “Honest and Dishonest Whores” – and suggested
the possibility of expanding it into a book, a recommendation I didn’t follow
for reasons that I still can’t explain. Everyone shook my hand and
congratulated me, addressing me as “Doctor.” One of them asked me if I felt any
different, and really, I didn’t. The all-purpose title “Doctor of Philosophy”
seemed archaic, like that old TV show, “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” I was Dr.
Horwich, Philosophy Man.” A few years later my friend David Gordon, also a Ph.D
in English, was eating in a restaurant where he had booked under the name “Dr.
Gordon,” thinking that would get him a better table, when another diner
aspirated a piece of steak and started choking. The manager came rushing up to
his table – “Please, Doctor, we have an emergency!” And my friend shrugged ruefully
and said, “I’m sorry, I’m not the kind of doctor who does anybody any
good.”
No comments:
Post a Comment