|
On a Wednesday night midway through the spring semester of 1969, Professor John J. McAleer sat at the typewriter in his study. Behind him was a six-foot bookshelf, the shelves on which he kept his entertainment reading: detective fiction. McAleer loaded a sheet of Boston College English Department letterhead in the typewriter, typed his address in the upper right (“121 Follen Road, Lexington, Mass, 02173”), hit the carriage return. On the next line, he addressed the letter: “Dear Mr. Stout.” He hit return again. Then he wrote:
The person McAleer was thanking for three decades of enjoyment was Rex Stout, the creator of a series of novels and short stories about private detective Nero Wolfe and assistant Archie Goodwin, which featured prominently on the bookshelf in the study, not only because Stout was one of McAleer’s favorites, but also, quite simply, because there were so many books: there were sixty-nine Nero Wolfe works to date. When McAleer finished typing, there were two full pages, single-spaced. In those pages, he confided to the writer that he always included a Nero Wolfe novel in his “Realism and Naturalism in American Literature” course. Almost as if defending the choice, McAleer vociferously contended that Stout’s writing possessed great literary merit: he praised the “leanless and lucidity” and “direct and forceful imagery” of Stout’s prose. He wrote of Stout’s “intuitive grasp of seminal ideas in the American tradition.” Those books—as Stout undoubtedly already knew—should neighbor Steinbeck and Styron, not the “off-hours recreation” books with which they currently shared shelfspace at bookstores. McAleer said the relationship between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin would have fascinated Henry James. Stout’s private detective, who made a point of daily visits to his plant rooms, echoed a trope of periodic retreat to nature in Huck Finn. The detective’s assistant was a “Byronic hero, the would-be adherent to the boot-strap myth, endowed with a subtlety in aims which he himself is not capable of on his own—there is that, and much more in Archie Goodwin.” It was nothing short of the most dignifying praise a literary scholar could bestow. But McAleer, even though he was an academic—he’d received his doctorate from Harvard, had published a critical biography on Dreiser (which, he informed Stout, “Maxwell Geismar has called the best book ever done on the subject”) was in his fourteenth year of teaching American literature of the 19th and 20th century, wrote regularly for periodicals and occasionally for the Boston Globe—he apparently had a more personal reason for writing. Although it embarrassed him to do so, McAleer wrote, he was enclosing a photograph. He hoped for the writer’s autograph. He wanted it for his study, for the “shrine” of Rex Stout books on the shelf behind him. McAleer signed the letter:
McAleer would get his wish—in the mail nine days later, and McAleer wrote back the same day with another two pages, thanking Stout for the autograph, this time sending a first edition novel with the same request. But the letter was more than a successful plea for an autograph. It was the beginning of a correspondence that would span the next six years, up to two days before Stout died. It was also the beginning of a research project that would conclude, eight years later, with McAleer publishing a 621-page authorized biography of his adored detective fiction writer.
|