Prologue

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

Oh, God! Do I really want to invoke David Copperfield? Well, yes.

Back in my undergraduate years, still wet behind the years, I unwittingly spoiled the remainder of my matriculation by establishing a Reputation. “Oh, so you’re Greg Wright!” was a reception I would have far too often in my remaining two-plus years as an Honors English Lit nerd.

I made that reputation with a midterm paper that Richard Dunn called “frankly the best undergraduate essay on David Copperfield that I have ever read.” And he was counting essays from around the world.

Only now has it dawned on me why he thought so highly of that essay. It’s because my paper intuited what is probably the “correct” answer to the opening poser of the novel.

David Copperfield is not the hero of his own fictional life. The hero of his story is, in fact, its author.

The story goes like this.

I was in a bind. As a change of pace (and in a gambit to allow me to sleep in later), I had signed up for an evening Victorian lit class taught by the dean of the English Department at the University of Washington, Dr. Dick Dunn—a world-renowned authority on Charles Dickens who had just completed editing David Copperfield: An Annotated Bibliography. He was also a founding member of the Dickens Society. (Just after I graduated, he edited Approaches to Teaching Dickens’s David Copperfield, and later edited A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.) So when it came to Dickens, Dunn knew whereof he spoke.

I, of course, realized none of this. I was just taking English classes because they helped my GPA. I was a CSci nerd, not an ELit nerd.

So there I was coming up on my first essay deadline of the quarter. We were reading 1000+ pages a week, and after plowing through Emma, Jane Eyre, and Pride and Prejudice I was drawing a blank on themes that interested me. I only had one novel left from which I could choose: David Copperfield. The problem: I had not even started reading it yet.

By this point in my college career, however, I was a seasoned essay factory. I knew precisely how long it would take me to read x number of pages, how long it would take to write a draft of y pages, and how long it would take to type that hand-written draft into something that looked presentable.

So I quickly did the math that Friday evening. (Yes, I approached literature with math.) I could try to dredge up something intelligent about Jane Austen over the next couple of days, or I could take a chance on Dickens. The latter seemed more likely… but it would mean I would have to start reading Copperfield that very night—and read for 24 straight hours (excepting meals and potty breaks), going through a page every 90 seconds.

Talk about pressure! Have you ever tried reading a novel on the clock?

And for five days after, I would pretty much have to ignore every other class in order to make the deadline: two days for additional research and organization of my notes, one day for outlining, two days for drafting, the final day for typing.

What the heck. You’re only young once, right? It wouldn’t be my first all-nighter, nor my last.

The plan went like clockwork—and before I was six hours into my read, themes were popping out at me everywhere. I had definitely made the right choice. Either that or I was sleep-deprived, and The Cat in the Hat would have been equally inspiring.

Six and half days later, I turned in my paper and didn’t give it a second thought. The central thesis was that Charles Dickens was righting the wrongs of his own life through literary wish-fulfillment in the person of David Copperfield. I supported my assertion with biographical details and a thorough analysis of symbols Dickens planted throughout the text of his novel.

The following week, Professor Dunn passed back the graded papers. He looked at me pointedly as he placed my essay on the desk. I leafed through it quickly. There were the usual marginal notations, and then on the final page, next to the scarlet A writ large, were the words, “Please make an appointment to see me in my office about your paper.”

Oh, crap.

Though I had been sent to the principal’s office but once in my schooling, I generally knew what such things meant.

But being called to the Dean’s office for an A paper? What’s up with that?

When I arrived for my appointment, Dunn uttered the fatal words: “Greg, this is, frankly, the best undergraduate essay on David Copperfield that I have ever read. As far as I am concerned you are done with this class. You don’t have to submit any more papers or take any tests. In fact, you don’t even have to come to lectures.”

I had already been sweating bullets, and now I truly panicked.

“With all due respect, sir,” I managed to gasp, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Naturally, Dunn looked at me like a jailor would look at a convict who refused the key to his cell.

“I have friends in that class, sir,” I explained. “They’ll wonder why I’m not attending lectures, and I’ll have to explain.”

I spent the entirety of my grade school and junior high years mercilessly bullied as the runty smart kid, and had just spent five years perfecting the art of masquerading as a normal person. I wasn’t about to voluntarily don a target on my back once more.

Moreover, I instinctively knew that whatever brilliance lay in my paper was the byproduct of circumstance. One just doesn’t read a 1200-page novel in one sitting, hyped up on Mountain Dew, in the same way one would read it over, say, a week or two. You notice different things. My term-paper disaster plan had simply yielded unexpected insights of a kind that I would never be able to replicate. Lightning would not be striking twice.

So I was in a real bind. If I took up Dunn on his offer, I would be hectored as The Literary Genius of McCarty Hall. If I declined, I would still, at the very least, have to sit in class and take essay tests… which would clearly demonstrate that the emperor had no clothes, as it were. I would be exposed to Dunn as, well, not a fraud, but certainly not a genius, either.

We reached a compromise. I would remain in class and take the exams, but would be exempt from further papers. And, Dunn assured me, whatever transpired I was assured an A in the class.

I did not, it turned out, particularly embarrass myself with my tests over the following six weeks. But none of my classmates or peers ever found out about “that paper.” Huh-uh. Nope.

Oh, that the same would have been true for Dunn’s colleagues. For the remainder of my college career, I was one of the department’s golden children, quite reluctantly, and never quite living up to the promise of that David Copperfield essay. And in spite of the scholarship that the English Department gave me for my final year at the school—and the cushy part-time job Leroy Searle lined up for me, including a private office in Padelford—Dunn et al were quite disappointed that I opted to forego graduate school in favor of a real job, Seahawk season tickets, and margaritas on the beach in Mazatlan. Go figure. Only Miceal Vaughan seemed to get that I was just a regular student who paid attention and happened to write pretty well… and found a way to make procrastination usually pay off.

But like Copperfield himself, I was not the hero of that story. Someone else was pulling the strings, and I just happened to be at the right place of the plot at just the right time. If Alex Riggle had come up with free tickets to a Queen concert that fateful Friday night, I would have been more than happy to punt on Dickens and instead kluge together some bromides about Austen. And probably still pulled an A.

In many ways, the stories of my own life have often played out like someone else’s fantastic creation, a cosmic orchestration in which the sheet music calls for a brief solo by yours truly. I just follow along, sight-read well, and hope that the applause is for the composer or conductor—certainly not for me, no matter how well I do happen to perform my part.

I am not the hero of my own life.