read part of
Hamlet
and short stories by Saki and O. Henry. At the University of Michigan the faculty apparently assumed students had read all the famous works, so we were assigned the second and the third famous. I was, I figured, at least two years behind; it would take me most of my life to catch up on my reading, a most felicitous way to spend oneâs life.
The books I read while I was in high school came from the town library, where Sarah Levi steered me away from the adult shelves as long as she could. Eventually, at the library and in my grandmotherâs house, I came upon, I fell upon, what we now call bodice rippers. Frank G. Slaughter was my favorite,
Battle
Surgeon
his best. The hero was a surgeon in battle in World War II. My dad was a surgeon, and during World War II he traveled to the county seat once a month to see if the draft board would call him up for duty. Every month he returned downhearted: the father of four and the only surgeon in three counties, he was essential to the homefront, which in fact wasnât all that beleaguered, most of its residents being Mennonites and so conscientious objectors. In
Battle Surgeon
the main character is terribly handsome, as was my father, and he wants this particular nurse. She is a good girl and resists; she is noble in wartime and gifted in her nursing, but one night, fresh from battlefield surgery, where the doctor and the nurse looked meaningfully at each other over their operating masks, the battle surgeon seizes her âround the waist right when all the bombs are bursting and she feels the roughness of him pressing against her. He feels the mounds of her breasts (!) beneath her scrubs. Their hearts beat wildly and they kiss. Holy Toledo!
Then there was Frank Yerby.
Foxes of Harrow,
another winner (think Rex Harrison as the lead, which he was). The hero of this one is so enormously masculine, yet underneath his cavalier behavior so gentle, that no woman (Maureen OâHara) could resist him. And she doesnât. She, like the battle nurse, is swept up, overpowered, overwhelmed by Manhood, and canât be held responsible for her passionate behavior.
One Christmas my grandmother, who lived across the street and belonged to the Literary Guild and read all of Taylor Caldwellâs novels as fast as Ms. Caldwell could write them, gave my mother her very own copy of
Gone with the Wind
(so she would quit borrowing hers). At the tender age of sixteen, I read it. Sakes alive! Ashley, oh Ashley! Rhett, how could you? Scarlett, despite your first sentence, you were beautiful! You drove men wild with desire! And then, when he carried you up those stairs, and you did it, you did it against your will and only after you were married and you loved it. Thatâs how sex ought to be!
There was no stopping me now.
Janice Meredith
was a Revolutionary War romance, not nearly as torrid as
Gone with the Wind,
whose background of the Civil War far outshone
Janice
âs Revolutionary setting. Janice, too, saved an injured soldier, so she had to marry him, and she was happy except that he was British, but what else could she do after she let him kiss her under the bridge? The very best of all, though, was
The Sheik.
Ahhhh,
The Sheik
! I read
The Sheik
almost as many times as my mother, though she never knew it. She would send me to the library to get it and
Janice,
and I would sneak it when she was paying attention to the younger kids in my family or to my dad, who didnât read anything but medical books in which my brother discovered photographs and drawings of naked parts and showed them to me.
The Sheik,
a major motion picture in 1921 starring Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres, beat
Gone with the Wind
all to heck when it came to sex. Agnes played a smart-alecky, independent, rich English beauty named Lady Diana Mayo, who travels to the desert to relieve the boredom of her wealth-ridden life in rural England. She gets kidnapped. She gets swooped upâby the
Hamlet
and short stories by Saki and O. Henry. At the University of Michigan the faculty apparently assumed students had read all the famous works, so we were assigned the second and the third famous. I was, I figured, at least two years behind; it would take me most of my life to catch up on my reading, a most felicitous way to spend oneâs life.
The books I read while I was in high school came from the town library, where Sarah Levi steered me away from the adult shelves as long as she could. Eventually, at the library and in my grandmotherâs house, I came upon, I fell upon, what we now call bodice rippers. Frank G. Slaughter was my favorite,
Battle
Surgeon
his best. The hero was a surgeon in battle in World War II. My dad was a surgeon, and during World War II he traveled to the county seat once a month to see if the draft board would call him up for duty. Every month he returned downhearted: the father of four and the only surgeon in three counties, he was essential to the homefront, which in fact wasnât all that beleaguered, most of its residents being Mennonites and so conscientious objectors. In
Battle Surgeon
the main character is terribly handsome, as was my father, and he wants this particular nurse. She is a good girl and resists; she is noble in wartime and gifted in her nursing, but one night, fresh from battlefield surgery, where the doctor and the nurse looked meaningfully at each other over their operating masks, the battle surgeon seizes her âround the waist right when all the bombs are bursting and she feels the roughness of him pressing against her. He feels the mounds of her breasts (!) beneath her scrubs. Their hearts beat wildly and they kiss. Holy Toledo!
Then there was Frank Yerby.
Foxes of Harrow,
another winner (think Rex Harrison as the lead, which he was). The hero of this one is so enormously masculine, yet underneath his cavalier behavior so gentle, that no woman (Maureen OâHara) could resist him. And she doesnât. She, like the battle nurse, is swept up, overpowered, overwhelmed by Manhood, and canât be held responsible for her passionate behavior.
One Christmas my grandmother, who lived across the street and belonged to the Literary Guild and read all of Taylor Caldwellâs novels as fast as Ms. Caldwell could write them, gave my mother her very own copy of
Gone with the Wind
(so she would quit borrowing hers). At the tender age of sixteen, I read it. Sakes alive! Ashley, oh Ashley! Rhett, how could you? Scarlett, despite your first sentence, you were beautiful! You drove men wild with desire! And then, when he carried you up those stairs, and you did it, you did it against your will and only after you were married and you loved it. Thatâs how sex ought to be!
There was no stopping me now.
Janice Meredith
was a Revolutionary War romance, not nearly as torrid as
Gone with the Wind,
whose background of the Civil War far outshone
Janice
âs Revolutionary setting. Janice, too, saved an injured soldier, so she had to marry him, and she was happy except that he was British, but what else could she do after she let him kiss her under the bridge? The very best of all, though, was
The Sheik.
Ahhhh,
The Sheik
! I read
The Sheik
almost as many times as my mother, though she never knew it. She would send me to the library to get it and
Janice,
and I would sneak it when she was paying attention to the younger kids in my family or to my dad, who didnât read anything but medical books in which my brother discovered photographs and drawings of naked parts and showed them to me.
The Sheik,
a major motion picture in 1921 starring Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres, beat
Gone with the Wind
all to heck when it came to sex. Agnes played a smart-alecky, independent, rich English beauty named Lady Diana Mayo, who travels to the desert to relieve the boredom of her wealth-ridden life in rural England. She gets kidnapped. She gets swooped upâby the
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