Memoir of a Book Lover

DATE September 12, 2005 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Review: Maureen Corrigan's new book, "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading:
Finding and Losing Myself in Books"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Just about every week on FRESH AIR our book critic Maureen Corrigan leads us
to a novel or work of nonfiction that she thinks is worthy of our time. Her
reviews are so interesting in and of themselves and so well written, it's
always been clear she's an excellent writer herself. Now she's written her
first book and it's all about her life as an obsessive reader. She writes,
`My own book is my attempt to figure out some of the consequences of my
prolonged exposure to books and to explore how reading has transformed my life
mostly for the better, sometimes for the worse.'

The book is called "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in
Books." In addition to her work on our show, Maureen writes a mystery column
for The Washington Post and teaches literature at Georgetown University.
Let's start with a short reading.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN reporting:

(Reading) The roots of my own yearning to read are easy enough to trace. I
was a shy kid, an only child who grew up in a two-bedroom walk-up apartment in
Queens. Reading offered companionship as well as escape. It also gave me a
way to be more like my dad whom I adored. Every weeknight after he came home
from his job as a refrigeration mechanic and ate supper, my dad would go to
his bedroom and read. Mostly he read adventure novels about World War II. He
had served first in the Merchant Marine and then after Pearl Harbor in the
Navy on a destroyer escort. Those Navy years were the most intense of my
father's life although he never said so. My dad belonged to that generation
of men forged by the Great Depression and World War II whose unspoken motto
was, `The deeper the feeling, the fewer the words.' He didn't talk a lot about
the war but I knew it haunted his memory because every night he cracked open a
paperback, usually one with an embossed swastika on its cover, and sat smoking
and reading. Near his chair was a framed photograph of his ship, the USS
Schmidt. To read was to be like my dad and maybe to get a glimpse of his
experience, to me as wide and unfathomable as the sea.

My mom, on the other hand, would rather try to talk to just about
anybody--Minnie Mouse, Alan Greenspan--than read a book. She used to grow
restless on those long ago evenings when my dad and I would be lost in our
separate fictional worlds. Because she knew better than to bother him, she'd
invariably sidle up to me and complain that I was ruining my eyes by reading
in the perfectly adequate light of the living room lamp. Or she'd feel my
head and tell me that I was getting bumps from too much reading. Sometimes
I'd give in and watch TV with her for a while but at some point I'd always
pick up my book again, leaving her, as she'd complained, all alone. My poor
mother. How did she get stuck with the two us reader loners for company?

GROSS: That's Maureen Corrigan reading from her new memoir "Leave Me Alone,
I'm Reading." Maureen, congratulations on the book.

CORRIGAN: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: You know, reading that I was really wondering, did you get mixed
messages about reading when you were growing up? On the one hand, it's good
for you, you know, reading is good for you. You have to learn to be a smart
girl. But on the other hand, it's anti-social. Put down the book and talk to
your family. Put down the book when we're visiting relatives.

CORRIGAN: Yeah, I definitely got mixed messages. I think, you know, for a
lot of women we're supposed to be the connectors. We're supposed to be the
socializers. We're not supposed to be the people in the family who isolate
ourselves and sit alone in a room and read. My mother definitely saw too much
reading as a sign of trouble and almost like a personality disorder. What was
the matter with me? Why didn't I get out more and talk to people? And, you
know, for my mother reading is just a mystery. She is one of those
people--and there are a lot of people out there like this--who just can't
respond to books. She doesn't get their magic. She doesn't understand why
someone would want to spend hours lost in a book.

My dad, on the other hand, would have been quite happy, I think, to spend most
of his life sitting in his bedroom, as I say, smoking and reading and, you
know, coming up for air once in a while. He wasn't a misanthrope, but to him
there was no greater pleasure than to be a reader.

GROSS: Now you write in your book that you realize there's a certain risk of
reading, that it can make you estranged from real life. What do you mean by
that?

CORRIGAN: You know, we hear so much about reading as being beneficial, and,
of course, I'm not going to argue with that. Reading is one of the greatest
pleasures of my life and it's opened up worlds to me. But I do think there is
a risk to reading and that, especially for those of us who get carried away by
stories, and that possibly--and certainly for me this was the case--that it
intensifies our own passivity. I know that there have been periods in my life
where I've sort of sat back and waited to be rescued or, you know, waited for
some kind of author god to write a better script for whatever was going on in
my life at the moment. And I think that, you know, getting lost in books as a
refuge is sometimes a way not to deal with life. And, again, I think I've
experienced that, that books were a great place to hide out when things
weren't going so well for me in the real world.

GROSS: One of the things you've done is gone back to some of the books that
you read as a girl when you were in Catholic school. And one of those books
was called The Brooklyn Catholic Reader(ph). Would you describe this book.

CORRIGAN: The Brooklyn Catholic Reader is--wow, it's a great time capsule of
pre-Vatican II Catholicism. First of all, the pub date on The Brooklyn
Catholic Reader is 1939, and I was in Catholic grammar school in the 60s, pre-
and post-Vatican II. So it's a little scary to think of, you know, what the
resources of my little Catholic school were in Queens that we were still
reading something published in 1939. It's filled with poems, short stories
all with a message of `Suck it up,' you know, `stiff upper lip, don't
complain.' To be a whiner was to endanger your soul and to not be a complainer
was to be considered, you know, closer to God, closer to heaven. And so all
of these stories and poems preach against pridefulness and having too much
ego, thinking too much of yourself. And that was definitely the message that
I got growing up--not only from Catholic school but coming from a working
class background. You know, who do you think you are? Don't walk around
thinking that you're somebody with a capital S.

You know, Terry Eagleton wrote, I think, a great little autobiography a couple
of years ago called "The Gatekeeper" and for those of you who don't know who
he is, he's a very prominent British literary critic and scholar. And
Eagleton also comes from a working class background in England, an Irish
Catholic one. And he, for me, crystallized that attitude when he described
the tombstone that he could imagine his family adopting when they all passed
away. And on the tombstone he said the slogan would be written `We didn't
cause too much trouble.' I mean, that's sort of, you know, the attitude of not
causing too much trouble, not asking for too much. And I have mixed feelings
about that attitude because these days I feel like I spend way too much time
with people who think way too much of themselves, you know. And so there's
something to me endearing and admirable about self-deprecation and not putting
yourself forward but it also can be damaging.

GROSS: Well, how do you think it affected you as a girl who was already shy,
and was probably already a bit unsure of yourself, a little insecure...

CORRIGAN: Mm-hm.

GROSS: ...so--to constantly get this message in literature that, you know,
who do you think you are?

CORRIGAN: Yeah, yeah, who do you think...

GROSS: Don't inconvenience anybody with your presence. How do you think that
helped shape you?

CORRIGAN: Oh, gosh. I think, first of all, it gave me the comforting sense,
in a way, that somebody was always watching, somebody with a capital S, you
know, a divine somebody. So that no matter how alone I felt or how much of
a--in a jam I might be I did have that sense that a religious background you
that, you know, I was not alone. I think being shy and getting that message
of not putting yourself forward probably set my career back as a writer and as
a scholar, I don't know, by years and years. You know, there's a way in which
I edit myself, especially if I'm talking to people from the old neighborhood
where, you know, I certainly don't reel off all the reviews I've published or
what I'm doing lately. You know, you learn to kind of keep yourself in the
background, and, you know, I think, too, as a teacher, as a reviewer, that's
what I'm used to. I'm used to being a handmaiden of literature. I'm used to
especially cheering other people's books and so this situation of having--you
know, finally written a book of my own and talking about my own book is weird
and uncomfortable for me because I'm really used to promoting other people's
works and I'm more comfortable doing that.

GROSS: A lot of the early reading you did, back when you were in Catholic
school, was about the lives of the saints and martyrs...

CORRIGAN: Mm.

GROSS: ...and these are stories that often involve violent, bloody death and,
as you put it, for the women these are often about trying to defend virginity
at all costs. Were these stories appealing to you? Did you--and were they
frightening to you?

CORRIGAN: I remember loving the lives of the saints stories whenever we got
to them in religion class. You know, the life of Christ we all knew it, and,
you know, we went to mass every Sunday. We were familiar with the gospel
stories. The lives of the saints, right, were gory. They were bloody. And
this business about virginity, I know this is going to sound just impossible
probably, especially to any listener under 30 out there, but I think it took
me probably an extraordinarily long time to figure out what virginity was. I
remember huddling with my best friend Mary Ellen Moore(ph) from St.
Rayfields(ph), which is the Catholic school we both went to, and we had
gotten, you know, a book out of the library, the local library, when we were
both in about 7th grade and it was a medical textbook. And we were looking at
the male and female anatomy and, you know, the chapters on procreation and
making faces and being appalled. I mean, we really didn't have a clue. My
mother explained menstruation to me by saying that this was the way your body
got rid of bad blood. So I thought everybody menstruated, you know. And this
was at age 13. So, you know, it's uncomfortable to admit that but I think
coming from that Catholic background where we were still growing out of the
changes in Vatican--that Vatican II wrought and the sexual revolution
certainly didn't hit my corner of Queens until probably the mid-'70's. I
think we were still growing up more like probably kids grew up in the '40s and
'50s than in the swinging '60s.

GROSS: My guest is our book critic Maureen Corrigan. Her new memoir is
called "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading." We'll talk more after a break. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is FRESH AIR's book critic Maureen Corrigan. She's written a
new book. It's called "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing
Myself in Books."

You've talked about how, in some ways, you think reading encourages passivity
and how some of the early Catholic literature you were exposed to kind of
reinforced your shyness. At the same time you loved Nancy Drew books and, you
know, here's like a heroine who is assertive. I mean, she's solving
mysteries. She's putting her life in danger to solve those mysteries. What
appealed to you about Nancy Drew books?

CORRIGAN: Well, first of all, I loved the trappings of the Nancy Drew books.
When I opened up Nancy Drew--and I vividly remember getting my first Nancy
Drew. I was eight years old. It was Christmas, "The Secret of the Old Clock"
was in my Christmas stocking. When I opened up those books I became Nancy
Drew of River Heights with the patrician lawyer father and with Hannah Gruen
the loyal what--what do you want to call--a housekeeper who kept everything in
order and with the two adoring sidekick friends. So, you know, part of the
great appeal of those books for me was that Nancy was always dressed
appropriately. She always knew what to say. Absolutely she could hold her
own against thugs and jewel thieves, but it was--for me I think it was more
the social ease that those books conveyed, that it was just a great fantasy
for me to be so on top of your own world.

GROSS: You loved the Nancy Drew books as a girl and then as a woman you fell
in love with hard-boiled fiction and you fell in love with that while you were
in graduate school studying literature.

CORRIGAN: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Why is it that when you were studying literature and going for a
graduate degree did you fall in love with just the kind of book that probably
wouldn't be studied at that point in time in graduate school?

CORRIGAN: Yes.

GROSS: I mean, you'd teach courses on detective fiction now, but I don't
think that there were such courses when you were studying.

CORRIGAN: No, when I was--when I began graduate school in the mid-'70s the
kind of--the cultural studies tsunami was just starting to hit grad school
programs. So, no, definitely you wouldn't talk about detective fiction. I
was doing a dissertation on 19th century nonfictional prose writers, social
critics like John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle and William Morris. And really
for diversion one night I opened up a paperback of Dashiell Hammett's "Red
Harvest." And somebody had recommended it to me. They said I might like it
and I saw that the plot had to do with something about union busting. And
since my dad had been a shop steward almost all his working life, I kind of
thought `Well, maybe I'll be interested in this.' And I started to read "The
Red Harvest." It's narrated by one of Hammett's detectives called the
Continental Op and I fell in love with the voice, the voice is a tough,
working class voice that was the kind of voice I wasn't hearing in graduate
school. And it's not as though I'm--you know, I'm not a big fan of identity
politics in literature. I don't think that we're just attracted to stories
that are about us or sound like people we know. I think that's a really
limiting way to regard literature. But I was so starved for the kind of voice
I would have heard around my old neighborhood in Queens--you know, trapped as
I was in this elite graduate school program--that I really began to fall in
love with hard-boiled American detective fiction. And then I began to see
some connections between the British--19th century British writers I was
studying and people like Hammett and Chandler who, you know, in Chandler's
immortal phrase, `We're investigating a world gone wrong.' That's what these
social critics in the 19th century were doing. So I really began to feel like
there was more to detective fiction than, you know, than meets the eye, than
people had usually credited the form with.

GROSS: Now one might think that you were in heaven going to graduate school
to study literature, but it sounds from your memoir that you were not in
heaven at all. You felt terribly comfortable. You say at your first academic
dinner party you were drenched in self-loathing. What was so off-putting
about graduate school for you?

CORRIGAN: I think I came to grad school with a lot of expectations that were
probably impossible to meet. I think I imagined graduate school the way
people talk about their reading groups, you know, as this great community of
like-minded readers who I would spend years with and we would talk about books
and it would just be heaven. And it wasn't. I was accepted into the grad
program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. And when I arrived at Penn
I went to my first sherry hour that the English department hosted and there
were a lot of these kind of Oxbridge customs around the place, one of them
being a sherry hour. And I was--at the sherry hour one of the professors I
was working with got up and announced to all of us first-year students that
none of us would ever be as brilliant as Ira Einhorn.

And, again, for the non-Philadelphia listeners out there, Ira Einhorn was
probably one of the most famous characters to emerge out of Philadelphia in
the '70s. He was a kind of a New Age celebrity. He had been earlier a
fixture in the new left in Philadelphia. In 1977 his girlfriend, Holly
Maddux, had disappeared and Einhorn was fingered as the number one suspect in
her disappearance. Two years later her body, her decomposed body was found in
a trunk in Einhorn's West Philadelphia apartment. And he eventually skipped
bail and went on the run for 20 years all over Europe.

So when I got to Penn to hear that none of us would ever be as brilliant as
Ira Einhorn who was, as I said, just the number suspect in this poor girl's
disappearance, it should have told me a few things. I mean, it should
have--that announcement should have told me that, first of all, men really
mattered more than women, you know, here was this brilliant man and, well, his
girlfriend had disappeared but who cared about her. He was the one who
mattered. And then secondly, that really brilliance was really the only value
in this kind of amoral universe I had entered--brilliance or the appearance of
brilliance. And that's why Einhorn was still celebrated at Penn when I got
there.

GROSS: So did things ever get better for you in graduate school?

CORRIGAN: Things got better when I left. You know, graduate school is
miserable for a lot of people. It's a lonely experience. You're mostly on
your own reading and writing and you're constantly trying to prove yourself,
and you're a student way beyond probably the age when you should still be a
student. And in my case I was competing for jobs as an English--a literature
scholar in an ever-shrinking job market. So it was an atmosphere filled with
anxiety.

Eventually deliverance came in the form of a friend who had landed a job at
The Village Voice literary supplement and she said to me, `Would you like to
try to write a review?' And I said, `Yes.' And wow, the idea of writing about
literature in a way that was accessible to an informed, but not a scholarly
audience, that just--that idea just energized me. So I eventually finished my
dissertation and got out of Penn but I also found this other way of talking
about books that was much more congenial.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan is FRESH AIR's book critic. Her new memoir is called
"Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading." She'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

Coming up, more with our book critic Maureen Corrigan. And we talk with Sonny
Rollins about performing just a few days after the September 11thg attacks and
evacuating his apartment near ground zero. That concert has just been
released on CD.

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with our book critic Maureen
Corrigan. She's written a new memoir about her life as an obsessive reader
and how books have affected her life. It's called "Leave Me Alone, I'm
Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books."

In your memoir, you write a little bit about a type of book that you describe
as the extreme adventure story. And you write about the male and the female
versions of it. The male version would be like John Krakauer writing, you
know, a book about climbing Mt. Everest. What's the female version?

CORRIGAN: I love the male version of the extreme adventure tale. I love
getting lost in these tales of men battling the ocean or climbing the
mountain, but, you know, it occurred to me about 10 years ago, as I was
reading a lot of these male extreme adventure stories 'cause I think they
began to come out about a decade ago, that there was a female version of this
kind of story. And the female version isn't really heavy on physical
exertion. It's heavy on endurance, it's heavy on emotional stamina. And I
began to think about the great 19th century novels written by women that I
love: Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" and "Villette," the novels of Jane
Austen, these stories about women who have to endure. I mean, if you think
about Jane Eyre, here's a character who's presented to us on page one of that
novel as being solitary. You know, to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison's
"Beloved," Jane Eyre's loneliness is wrapped tight around her like skin. And
that novel is unrelenting in its picture of Jane Eyre trying to break out of
her emotional solitude.

Listeners will probably remember that scene in "Jane Eyre" when she is at
Lowood, the academy she attends as an orphan child, and she finds a best
friend named Helen Burns. And one day, she and Helen--or one night, rather,
they share a cot together and they fall asleep. And that next morning, Jane
Eyre wakes up and Helen's cold corpse is next to her. I mean, I don't think
there's a picture in all of literature of, you know, this thirst for human
companionship that's so cosmically denied as we get in "Jane Eyre." She
endures this romance with Mr. Rochester and then finding out that he's got
this crazed wife, and she runs away from him. And, you know, finally, because
Charlotte Bronte relents, you get a happy ending at the very end of that
novel.

But women's extreme adventure stories usually have to do with loneliness, with
caretaking, whether the caretaking is of a child or of an elderly parent or of
an invalid. They have to do with women kind of bucking up in circumstances
that probably try the soul rather than test the muscle.

GROSS: In thinking about that kind of women's extreme adventure story, you
think about your own family, and you write a little bit about your grandmother
on your mother's side, you know, your mother's mother, and about how she left
Poland in 1905 alone at the age of, I think, 17 to start a new life in New
York. And it's an extreme adventure that so many immigrants have had over the
generations, still having. And I bet she never talked about it as an
adventure.

CORRIGAN: I don't think she ever did talk about it as an adventure. My
grandmother died when I was seven, but the way the story was handed down to me
was as a cautionary tale almost like it's better not to leave home. Grandma
got on that ship by herself, and as we've heard in countless immigrant
narratives, everybody was sick on the ship for the entire journey. And when
she finally got off after going through Ellis Island, when she finally stepped
on to the shores of America, the cousins who were supposed to meet her didn't
show up. And so there's my grandmother standing in New York, surrounded by
people speaking a language she didn't understand. And luckily, she had met a
Jewish doctor and his wife on board the ship, and they asked her to be their
housekeeper and so she went off with them.

The way the story was always told to me was, `Oh, my God, imagine if those
people hadn't taken her in. What would have happened to her?' all with
exclamation points. And, you know, I think about stories like that and how
you can turn those stories around, you know, into something that's more
celebratory of, you know, female strength and just a sense of adventure, that
there was a whole different way you could tell that story. But because my
grandmother was my grandmother and not my grandfather, the story was always
told with a lot of--rimmed round with anxiety and fear.

GROSS: As a lifelong obsessive reader, how does it feel to actually have a
book of your own now?

CORRIGAN: It feels unreal. You know, I've had this book in my hand for a
few weeks, the finished book. It feels a little unreal. And, you know, I
like reading my book. I go back and read it sometimes, and I think, `Well,
that's good. I don't have to be embarrassed about this, whatever.' I did
write by--in my discussion of Catholic martyr narratives, by Dashiell Hammett,
I explain my love for him pretty well. So I feel always like I hit the nail
on the head better in writing than I do in speaking, so I'm relieved when I
can open my book and feel like I captured something. But it does feel a
little strange to have a book of my own.

GROSS: You know, we were talking earlier about how when you were a girl and
you were going to Catholic school and, you know, reading this Catholic
juvenile literature that the literature's message seemed to be, you know, `Be
a good girl. Be humble. Don't let yourself get too full of yourself. Don't
get in other people's way.' When you're a book critic, you have to be pretty
tough-minded and you have to be willing to be critical. You have to be
willing to say, `This isn't a good book, and here's why,' `This person isn't
really a good writer, and here's why.'

CORRIGAN: Yeah.

GROSS: Was it hard for you to develop that side of your personality, the side
that was critical and willing to say something that wasn't flattering about a
person who is still alive?

CORRIGAN: For some reason, it was not hard for me to find my critical voice.
I always feel like my first duty is to the book, to try to understand it on
its own terms and to either sing its praises or to talk about its weaknesses
and not to really worry about the author or even, you know, readers I might be
disappointing. But when I write a review, it's really me and the book. And
when I've tried to be nicer, because I've, whatever, felt bad that I can't say
more positive things about a book, my reviews come off as very wooden. So
I've really also learned that my own writing gets affected when I try to be a
good girl and not to offend.

GROSS: Have you learned about how to behave as somebody whose book is going
to be reviewed by watching how other people behave who are reviewed by you?

CORRIGAN: I've learned not to complain about reviews. You know, that stiff
upper-lip motto that I grew up with as a Catholic schoolgirl comes in handy as
I'm preparing myself to read reviews of my own book. You know, if you can't
take the heat, don't write a book. So I'm just going to have to suffer and be
silent if I get negative reviews.

GROSS: Maureen, thanks so much for talking with us, and congratulations on
the book.

CORRIGAN: Thank you very much, Terry.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan is FRESH AIR's book critic, and she teaches
literature at Georgetown University. Her new memoir is called "Leave Me
Alone, I'm Reading." You can read an excerpt on our Web site,
freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, Sonny Rollins talk about his September 11th concert which has just
been released on CD.

This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Sonny Rollins discusses his CD "Without a Song: The
9/11 Concert"
(Soundbite of music)

TERRY GROSS, host:

Four years ago this week on September 15, 2001, Sonny Rollins, one of the
greatest living jazz musicians, gave a concert in Boston that he wasn't sure
he should give. It was only four days after the September 11th attacks. He
was uncertain whether he or his audience was ready for a performance, and he
had been uprooted, forced to evacuate his Manhattan apartment which was near
ground zero. Now that concert has been released on a CD called "Without a
Song: The 9/11 Concert." Jazz critic Francis Davis wrote, `Why am I so wild
about "Without a Song"? First, no recording since his RCAs in the '60s has
more faithfully captured Rollins' sound. Then, two, maybe I'm responding to
the emotionalism of the occasion, just as Rollins and the Boston audience
did.'

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: I spoke to Sonny Rollins about his 9/11 concert and about his own
experiences on September 11th. When the first tower was hit, he left his
apartment, which was six blocks north of the World Trade Center, to see what
had happened. He stood there watching until the second tower fell, and then
he returned to his apartment.

Mr. SONNY ROLLINS (Jazz Musician): (Technical difficulties) ...leave the
area. No one could really leave the area. And there were a lot of emergency
vehicles, of course, there, so I went back up to my apartment and called up my
wife. And at that point, the phones were still working, lights were still on
and everything. And I was even stupid enough to take out my horn and start
playing, you know, practicing sort of, you know?

GROSS: What was stupid about that?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, it was stupid because there was so much toxic fumes and
everything, and I did feel a certain stomachache, so--and that actually was
why I stopped, but I still hadn't brought the two things together, you know?

GROSS: And I imagine when you're playing, you take really big breaths.

Mr. ROLLINS: Sure. Sure.

GROSS: Now I know your...

Mr. ROLLINS: Yeah.

GROSS: ...building was evacuated by the National Guard. At what point did
the National Guard come by and tell you you had to get out?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, the next day. Now later that day, the lights went. The
phone went. All of the things like that went. And so the National Guard at
that time came by to the people that were still left in my building and came
by to our apartments and said, `OK. Everybody's got to go.' So I picked up
my horn, and I got my briefcase, and we made our way down the stairwell in the
dark to the street, you know?

GROSS: So you're on the 39th floor?

Mr. ROLLINS: Right. And that was sort of rough. Now I think there was three
other people. There was another kid who was the son of a woman on the floor
and another woman. So we were the only people, I think, left in the building.

GROSS: Did you ever return to your apartment?

Mr. ROLLINS: I did return to my apartment on a regular basis, but I never
slept in my apartment again.

GROSS: Why not?

Mr. ROLLINS: But I would go down there to get things out, you know, and I had
certain things there that I felt I would like to try to salvage. But most of
the things in there I had to eventually throw away, get taken away. You know,
I had left my piano there, which was very sentimental to me. A lot of the
guys played on that. Monk used to play on it, all the people that came by to
my house. And I had lost a lot of clothes that I had there. I lost a lot of
books.

GROSS: Why did you leave your piano behind?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, because I was so afraid of the fact that toxic material
might have gotten into the mechanism of the piano, and I know that some people
in the TriBeCa area had found these problems. When they examined the air
ducts and everything in their buildings, they found a lot of material which
had to be cleaned. So I was afraid that I would be handling something of that
sort.

GROSS: Do you know what happened to your piano?

Mr. ROLLINS: No, I don't. I don't.

GROSS: Did you give that to the trash room, or what did you do with it?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, the piano, I tried to give it to the Salvation Army, but
then I also thought that they would have to have a long explanation about what
had happened. In fact, I did talk to them. So I ended up leaving it in the
apartment and explaining to the people in the apartment. Of course, they knew
what had happened, so it was something that they would be able to handle it
and take care of it in the proper way, you know? I just--I hope so, you know?

GROSS: Well, after you were evacuated from your building on September 12th,
you drove to Boston, where you're scheduled to play on September 15th. So
many events were canceled in the days after September 11th. Did you speak to
the producers of that event and have a long talk about whether you should go
on with the show or not?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, I spoke to my wife Lucille, and I was all for not doing
the show, because I was really very unsteady on my feet and...

GROSS: Did that have to do, in part, with having to walk down...

Mr. ROLLINS: Right.

GROSS: ...39 flights of stairs?

Mr. ROLLINS: Ex--right. Right. It did. And also, you know, I was just
really shook up. So I wanted to cancel it, but you know my wife Lucille, and
Lucille is a person that never wanted to violate a contract in any way. And
she also may have had a feeling that it would be important to do a concert at
that particular time, you know? So anyway, she convinced me to play the
concert.

GROSS: Well, we've heard "Summer Without a Song," so I thought I'd play
another track from your new CD "Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert." And this
is "A Nightingale Sang in Barkley Square." It's a beautiful version of it.
How did you first hear this song?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, you know, "A Nightingale Sang in Barkley Square," I guess
I heard it during the '40s when I used to see all the movies that came in town
every week. And it's funny that "A Nightingale Sang in Barkley Square" may
have had some connection to World War II. And the scene when I was evacuated
and I walked down those steps that day, when I came down stairs, it was very
reminiscent of those World War II pictures, when there was the Blitz of
London, with all of the emergency vehicles. And, you know, it was a threat
and the smoke and the fumes. I mean, it was really a--it was really something
that--of course, I don't want to go through it again, but it was something
that I guess I'm fortunate that I got out. But I guess it's something--I'm
trying to say that it's stored someplace in my mind, so I guess since I'm
still alive, I might have a way to turn it into some kind of a positive
experience.

GROSS: Well, here's Sonny Rollins from his new CD "Without a Song: The 9/11
Concert."

(Soundbite of applause; music)

GROSS: That's "A Nightingale Sang in Barkley Square" from Sonny Rollins' new
CD "Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert." We'll talk more with Rollins after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins. His new CD is called
"Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert." It was recorded in Boston four days
after the attacks.

Your wife Lucille died late last year in 2004 after a stroke. You were
married how many years?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, I get confused myself, but we started living together back
in 19--probably around 1958, something like that, and we were married a few
years later. So you can do the math.

GROSS: Your wife was your manager as well as your wife. She looked after
your career. How did she end up doing that?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, you know, my wife was a very brilliant, a very
intelligent, a very smart woman. She was actually working in the physics
department at the University of Chicago and also in--at NYU in New York. And
she was, in effect, running a lot of those physics departments. But at any
rate, she was a person that was very much interested in the music and in
seeing me being presented right and being happy and so on and so forth.

GROSS: What are some of the things she would insist on? What was presenting
you right? And what were some of the things she wouldn't stand for?

Mr. ROLLINS: Things such as--well, I would say proper dressing rooms, proper
billing so that I would be billed in the proper way. And we tried to--we
stopped working nightclubs, because we wanted to try to do more prestigious
type engagements, and we started doing concerts only. And as a matter of
fact, my wife got the nickname of Mrs. No because--and the promoters and the
booking people, they always knew that they couldn't just come to Sonny Rollins
and offer something that they might feel they could--they would like me to do,
but I just wouldn't do everything.

GROSS: How did you meet your wife?

Mr. ROLLINS: Well, actually, I was playing in Chicago in the '50s, and my
wife was a jazz fan, and she was a friend of a bass player, actually, that was
in my band for a while. And they used to come, her and this lady, the wife of
this bass player. They used to come frequent clubs from time to time. And
she saw me, and she said--I'm taking this from her words, that, you know,
well, then she saw me, and she said, `Well, that's the guy,' you know? So
then you know how it goes. When a woman says, `That's the guy,' they usually
make sure that they get that guy. So, you know...

GROSS: She pursue you?

Mr. ROLLINS: In a sense, yeah. Yeah, you know, in a very...

GROSS: Modest and subtle way?

Mr. ROLLINS: ...dignified way. Yeah, you know, very dignified. And
eventually I succumbed, you know?

GROSS: Sonny Rollins. His new CD is called "Without a Song: The 9/11
Concert." You can hear music from it on our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

(Soundbite of music)

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of music)
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