The Doctor Is ‘In’ : T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ph.D, Is a Former Juvenile Delinquent Turned USC Professor Whose Books Have Been Getting Rave Reviews. As He Will Be the First to Tell You.

At a first meeting, you wouldn’t think that someone who looks as unusual as Tom Boyle would have so much self-assurance. He’s an alarmingly skinny 6-foot-3 with feral hair and a gold clip in his left ear. His idea of dressing up is to add a black leather jacket and a plastic bone necklace around his Adam’s apple. It’s only when he begins to speak that you realize he is forceful, witty and erudite, which should be no surprise, since he has a doctorate in 19th-Century English literature from the University of Iowa. Twice a week he teaches writing at USC (he’s a tenured professor in the English department). He is also the author of two well-regarded novels (“Water Music” and “Budding Prospects”) and two short-story collections (“Descent of Man” and “Greasy Lake,” the title story of which, he says, is really about himself and his friends).

Digby wore a gold star in his right ear and allowed his father to pay his tuition at Cornell; Jeff was thinking of quitting school to become a painter/musician/ head-shop proprietor. They were both expert in th e social graces, quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over a rutted and gutted blacktop road at eighty-five while rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick. They could lounge against a bank of booming speakers and trade “man” ’s with the best of them or roll out across the dance floor as if their joints worked on bearings. They were slick and quick and they wore their mirror shades at breakfast and dinner, in the shower, in closets and caves. In short, they were bad.

--Excerpt from “Greasy Lake”

In an age arguably deficient in serious new American writers, Boyle is one who has a chance to make it big. Movie producers have optioned his two novels. Penguin has already published or shortly will publish paperback editions of all four of his books in its Contemporary American Fiction Series. And earlier this year, Viking agreed to give Boyle a “high-five-figure advance” on his current project (a book called “World’s End,” covering 400 years in the life of a Hudson River community. (“It’s about the sins of the father, correspondences, the synchronicity of history, betrayal, turncoat-ism and back-stabbing,” Boyle says.)

As he’s only halfway through the novel at this point--it won’t be published until 1987--there’s no way to know if this book will catapult Boyle into the big time. But in the past, Boyle points out, “all my books have gotten very fine, very rave reviews. And I’ve developed a cult following of fans at universities.”

And in fact, with the exception of the Nation’s dismissal of “Budding Prospects” as insufficiently feminist, it’s mostly true that he has had remarkably complimentary reviews. The Times’ arts editor, Charles Champlin, has praised Boyle for his “ferocious, delicious imagination.” William Cole of the Saturday Review, after first chiding him for writing under the vainglorious pen name “T. Coraghessan Boyle” (instead of plain but honest Tom Boyle), called him “a real writer.” New York Times reviewer Larry McCaffery went out of his way to laud his “manic wit, lush, baroque language and narrative invention.” Not only does Boyle push the “limits of good taste to comic extremes,” McCaffery said, “he is a master of rendering the grotesque details of the rot, decay and sleaze of a society up to its ears in K mart oil cans, Kitty Litter and the rusted skeletons of abandoned cars and refrigerators.” And although his writing has occasionally misfired, his failures were “the honest failures of an energetic writer who is willing to try anything.”

One thing about Boyle, his longtime friends say, is that he’s never suffered any lack of confidence in his abilities. “Once when Boyle got a good review in the New York Times,” says old friend and California magazine editor Robin Green, “I said, ‘Hey, good review.’ He said, ‘Yes, but it wasn’t on the front page.’ ”

“You don’t generally have conversations with Tom about life in general,” says Stephen Moore, a USC associate dean. “You talk about writing, and the writing always comes back to his own work.” Not that this is a handicap to a serious writer. In such a solitary and psychically debilitating occupation, you need a secure and powerful ego to merely survive. In Los Angeles, there are plenty of serious writers who couldn’t care less about the film industry until someone made them an offer; then they couldn’t roll over fast enough.

Although Boyle could write screenplays if he wanted to, he says, he’s not interested in playing a screenwriter’s distant third fiddle to directors and actors. “I don’t like the loss of control. I don’t like to collaborate. I’m very egotistical. I want to be the guy who’s profiled on the front cover.”

Boyle is 37 years old. He grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., a poor boy in a rich county. His father, he says, was a janitor, a school-bus driver and a drunk; his mother was an alcoholic who never knew her own father’s name. Skinny then as now, Boyle used to eat everything he could lay his hands on in the school cafeteria, even as his wealthier classmates derided the “garbage” they were served for lunch.

In those days there was nothing about Boyle to make anyone think he would end up an artist. Certainly the local cops never noticed any potential. “They used to stop and frisk me every time I crossed the city line,” Boyle says, which in retrospect doesn’t seem so unreasonable. “I was a maniacal, crazy driver and a punk, pure and simple.” At night, he and his buddies would drive around in “our parents’ cars, committing acts of vandalism.” He bought heroin for $5 a bag on the sidewalks of Peekskill and listened to music with Linda Lovelace (she was 19 at the time).

Although Boyle later went to college, he was too far into the “ethics of drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” to learn anything useful. “Everyone I knew wanted to be an artist of some sort--a writer, musician or painter,” Boyle says. “No one cared about getting a job.”

After graduation in 1970, he taught high school English in a tough school in Peekskill, N.Y., as he says, “to avoid being executed in Vietnam.” It wasn’t necessarily the easier choice. “I had to get up at dawn and face down a bunch of renegades not much younger than I, and had to tear their shirts and throw them against brick walls while uttering the most savage threats known to mankind.” The satisfactions of beating up young punks notwithstanding, there were too many parties, too many drugs and too much standing around at 5 a.m. saying “Hey, man” to other deadheads. In reaction to this and the drug-overdose deaths of increasing numbers of friends, he applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At the same time, he decided to get a Ph.D. “I’d been a terrible undergraduate,” Boyle says. “I didn’t go to class. I hadn’t read the books. I didn’t know anything, and I felt it would be good for my work if I knew the history of my literature.”

On the strength of a published short story in the North America Review, “The OD Hepatitis Railroad or Bust,” he was accepted at Iowa, whereupon, he says, “everyone said to me: ‘Don’t be a fool. You’ll never make it as a writer, and you have even less chance of becoming a professor.’ And I felt, ‘Maybe that’s true, but somebody will be a writer, and somebody will be a professor, and it might as well be me.’ ”

Boyle made no concessions to middle-class respectability while finishing up his doctorate, which is to say, he still looked as wild as ever. “My hair,” Boyle has written of that time, was “kinky, buoyant, comb-devouring, a medium for the collection of lint and the propagation of lower forms of life, frozen to my head like some weird tundra growth.” (It wasn’t until 1979, says friend and film producer Philip Melman, that he was finally able to persuade Boyle to forget the ‘60s and get a haircut). “When I was looking for a job,” Boyle says, “I used to be at the top of the list until they interviewed me.” In fact, he maintains, the only reason he got the job at USC was that they conducted the interview at a Modern Language Assn. convention, rather than on campus. Usually, Boyle says, for this kind of interview there are eight guys with beards in a room. But for USC there was just one guy in his shirt sleeves. “He said, ‘Do you want the job?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ And he said, ‘OK, it’s yours.’ ”

When Boyle and his wife, Karen, first came to Los Angeles from Iowa eight years ago, they bought a little house in Tujunga. Although his neighbors tended to be hillbillies and bikers, Boyle got along just fine. (“He probably had more education than his entire block combined,” Melman says.) By disciplining himself to work daily, he published four books in the next seven years, and in the process won himself tenure at USC.

For someone with as much selfassurance as Boyle, in the classroom he is surprisingly low-key. He tries hard, he says, to avoid the megalomania of some writing teachers (Boyle cites the late John Gardner), who tend to make disciples out of students rather than help them develop their individual styles. As a result, he usually has twice as many applicants as available seats. (When any slots unexpectedly open up, he fills them by means of a lottery.)

Unlike many academicians, Boyle doesn’t much care about the normal trappings of the job. After he made tenure at USC (in four years instead of the usual six), he was entitled by university policy to a larger office, with windows, as opposed to the airless broom closet he had been working in. At first he declined to move (he didn’t want to move his books), but his wife ultimately prodded him into it.

At the same time, he can be surprisingly vain about seemingly inconsequential matters. He once quit a job as a club tennis pro because some members could beat him on the court. “I don’t have a good attitude for an athlete,” Boyle says. “I can’t accept defeat.”

Although Boyle loves publicity (he thinks it will be good for book sales, and he personally enjoys the fame), he shuns some of the more trendy aspects of a writer’s life. Once, a bookstore owner telephoned Boyle to invite him to a writers’ dinner in a Japanese restaurant. And he went on about all the famous and important people who might be able to help Boyle. It was the wrong thing to say. “God,” Boyle told the man, “that sounds like a great idea. I think I’ll have 13 of my friends over tonight.”

At USC, not only has Boyle not been an office politician, but there also are some colleagues he hasn’t seen in years and others he’s never even met. Once, at a dinner for John Gardner at USC, an elderly gentleman sitting next to him leaned forward to offer his congratulations to Boyle for having won the Paris Review’s prestigious Aga Khan award.

“Thank you,” Boyle said politely. “Are you connected with USC?”

“Yes,” said the man. “I’m dean of humanities.”

I’ve always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth - century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. --Opening paragraph of

“Budding Prospects”

Boyle currently works at his writing every day from 8 or 9 a.m. till 1 or 2 in the afternoon. After that he either teaches at USC (twice a week), goes hiking, chops wood, does the laundry, and, whenever possible, goes drinking with his friends. “Tom’s a man’s man,” says Robin Green. “He likes to drink with the boys, howl at the moon and throw up on the wheels of parked cars.”

“Tom likes to be on the cutting edge of things and places,” Melman agrees. “He definitely enjoys a good drink in a lively bar.” In contrast to all the people who now claim to have been there, he actually was at Woodstock. He still remains close friends with the half-dozen guys with whom he went to grammar school. Sometimes, when friends show up at his home (a large, comfortable ranch house in Woodland Hills), he’s playing music so loud they have to wait for the record to end before he can hear their knocking.

In conversation, Boyle is intense, witty and self-assured. “There is no one who will meet him, walk away and not remember him,” says Melman. And indeed, more conventional people sometimes find his unpredictability so alarming that he still finds it hard to make a credit-card purchase without first being asked for a driver’s license.

Perhaps because of his temperament, his relationship with his wife, Karen, has sometimes been a stormy one. On one occasion, when he and Karen were having a loud fight in their car, a cop pulled them over, fearing that it was an abduction. In another incident, a cop stopped him to ask where he got the car, figuring that no one who looked like Boyle would own a red BMW with a baby carrier in the back seat.

To Boyle’s old friends, it’s a subject of mild amusement that someone with his background and sensibilities now lives in an upper-middle-class house in Woodland Hills with polished-hardwood floors; soft, tufted red-leather couches and a silver service on the dining room table. But you’ve got to remember, Melman says, that despite Boyle’s avant-garde rebel artist persona, he did, after all, grow up in Westchester County--even if it was on the wrong side of the tracks--and on the inside, he’s basically middle-class. According to Green, the explanation for Boyle’s current middle-class respectability is even simpler than that. “Karen told him, ‘I don’t want our kids growing up with bricks and boards for bookcases.’ ”

Recently Boyle sat in the backyard of his home, under the oaks, chatting about children, squirrels, the weather and the life of a writer in Los Angeles. “I actually like the culture here a good deal,” he said. It’s the weather he can’t stand. As an Easterner, he grew up with “rain and gloom, and the water dripping down the windows.” In the summer, he liked to go hiking in the woods and follow stream beds to their source. “But here, when I get to the top of the mountain, there’s a yucca plant, and I can’t get used to it.”

Unlike doctors and lawyers, who tend to associate mainly with their peers, Boyle says, he doesn’t really hang out with other writers. For one thing, “there aren’t that many of them in Los Angeles.” For another, he says, most writers tend to feel edgy around other writers with big reputations. “What are you going to say to them? ‘Hey, I really dug your book, and I think the theme’s terrific.’ When people come up to me and go through all the genuflections, I’m very flattered, but on the other hand I also feel embarrassed for them. They don’t have to tell me in such detail how wonderful I am.”

As a USC professor, Boyle is in an enviable position for a writer. Not only does the job subsidize his writing, it also gets him out of the house two afternoons a week and gets him “doing something other than sitting here staring at a blank page.” Besides, he likes his students. Although USC is a conservative institution, in creative writing one generally tends to get “the lame, the halt and the crazy,” which is to say, the students “who feel the same way I do.”

As for the future of writing, Boyle believes that nowadays people satisfy their need for myth and storytelling with television rather than books. And despite all the favorable reviews he gets, he still has never had a book sell more than 7,500 copies in hard-cover. “It’s very bloody depressing,” Boyle says. “I mean, I’ve devoted my whole life to it, and it seems obsolete already.”

On the other hand, Boyle can’t think of anything else he’d rather be, except perhaps an ichthyologist (“but that would be in another lifetime”).

The day Boyle finally found his true vocation was a warm September afternoon in graduate school at Iowa: “I found myself lying in a field that was abuzz with grasshoppers on the wing. Moths and butterflies drifted overhead like confetti, and the sky was cloudless and grand. In my hand was a novel by Trollope, which I was reading for a course in British literature. From time to time I paused to take in the sun, the grasshoppers, the butterflies and the seamless cobalt sky that opened up so far I could see traces of the dark infinitude beyond it. And then it hit me. This is my job. This is my work. I’ve been at it ever since.”