Struggling Scholar Sleeps on Streets to Finish Book : Cash-Strapped Author Did Research on Buildings, Ruins Still Remaining From Shakespeare’s Time

After the nights he spent on the street, Irvin Matus rolled up his blanket, packed his belongings and hunted for a discarded copy of the morning paper. He digested the news along with a cup of coffee, strolled past the Capitol and arrived at the Library of Congress just as it opened. Slipping into an out-of-the-way bathroom, he washed, shaved and changed into clean clothes.

Minutes later, he walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library, turned on his word processor and sat down behind a stout tower of reference books. The world of his nights receded. The world of his days was about to begin.

Three years ago, Matus came to Washington determined to finish his book on Shakespeare’s England no matter what it cost him. He has been broke much of that time, fixing himself cheap meals and sleeping in the homes of absent acquaintances.

Tried to Find Privacy

In late May, when his house-sitting network broke down, the 47-year-old Brooklyn native found himself on the street. For the next three months, his life depended on an old Army blanket and an ability to find privacy.

“A friend of mine said to me, ‘You never really considered giving up the book, did you?’ ” he recalls. “And I said, ‘No.’ At one time I decided that either I was going to finish this book or it was going to finish me.”

In late September, 4 1/2 years after he began the research, Matus completed his manuscript. “Shakespeare: The Living Record” is a 68,000-word study of the ruins and remaining buildings that figured in the bard’s life and work.

So little is known about Shakespeare that some scholars have even questioned whether he wrote all the plays attributed to him. Matus attempts to illuminate the playwright’s life by studying his surroundings: the market town where he was born, the halls where his plays were performed, the estates of his patrons.

Shakespeare expert Richard Dutton was so impressed with Matus’ work that he submitted it to Macmillan, the British publishing house.

“My personal opinion is favorable,” says Sarah Roberts West, a Macmillan editor. She says other experts are reviewing the manuscript, whose publication “depends on favorable readings and our ability to secure a U.S. co-publisher.”

Matus is hopeful, confident even, that the book will find a home somewhere.

Story Not Over

“Now that it is over, it really is an exhilarating feeling,” he says. “To have demanded so much of yourself and to have done it is a wonderful feeling.”

But Matus’ story is not over. He is still broke, still one house-sit away from the street. He can’t find a job that suits him--though he gives a great historical tour of Capitol Hill--and won’t take one that doesn’t.

“I don’t want to live like this,” he says. “But if the alternative is that I have to give up my curiosity, my love of knowledge, my love of research--there’s the wonderful line from Hamlet: ‘What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.’ ”

Even if he had had someplace to live, Matus would have stuck out in the rarefied atmosphere of the Folger library where some of the world’s eminent Elizabethan scholars conduct their research.

His schooling ended the day he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1958. His wardrobe has had few additions since the mid-’70s. In his youth he was a friend of the pioneering rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey Alan Freed.

“He’s the last person you’d expect to be a Shakespeare scholar,” says Roy Kendall, a senior lecturer in play writing at Antioch University in London, who worked at the Folger while researching a play on Christopher Marlowe. “It’s this Brooklyn accent. To myself I always call him ‘The Fonz.’ ”

There is something of the old “Happy Days” cool guy in Matus’ voice and hair style. But his dark, deep-set eyes and quirky hyper-intensity suggest that he travels in a more troubled world.

Matus is a man of fierce loves--baseball, rhythm and blues, American history--fixed principles and a wearying array of opinions. Naturally exuberant, yet continually aggrieved by the meagerness of his lot, he is driven by a happy rage.

Friends describe Matus as a loner and say he doesn’t like to take direction from others. Yet he can be extremely solicitous, as he was one recent morning when he offered to prepare his “Omelet Cordon Bleu.” He was living at the time in an extra room in a friend’s house.

“Would you like a coffee?” he asked immediately, shaping a filter into a funnel and filling it with freshly ground beans. “I’m making it fresh.”

Before spending December in that house, Matus slept on the couch in the Capitol Hill home of Virginia Durr, a clinical social worker, who met him in early September when he was sleeping at a construction site behind the Library of Congress.

Matus’ highly developed sense of orderliness paid off as his Shakespeare project wore on. On a typical day, he labored over his research until the Folger closed at 4:45. Then, if he was house-sitting in the area, he would hurry home to “make a nice chili and win my usual $30,000 or $40,000 on ‘Jeopardy.’ ” Since he couldn’t be sure where he would be cooking from one week to the next, he kept a bottle of Tabasco sauce in his desk at the Library of Congress.

By 7:30 p.m., he would be back at the library, where he continued his research until closing. On the nights he slept on the street, Matus often wandered past the Capitol or took in a concert when one of the military bands played on the Mall.

Sometimes, speaking of those nights, Matus endows them with a sweet sorrowfulness, as though being homeless had been an enriching experience. It hadn’t.

“A sheer cold anger,” he says. “That’s what got me through it. People will take a dog in from the street, but they won’t help another human being.

“I saw the people who gave up, the people who cried, the people who got into therapy, and it seemed to me that being angry and staying angry was probably the best alternative I had.”

Friends have suggested that he write about his ordeal, but Matus would rather put it behind him. “It’s not a question of not remembering,” he says. “It’s a question of giving it a position it didn’t hold in my life. I don’t wake up in cold sweats. I don’t have nightmares. I don’t live running from a memory. That was just how I slept.”

“Some people think I’m a reproach to them, to their life style,” he says. “I’m not. I have a sneaking admiration for those who can go through life like that. They make it look so much nicer than mine.”

Matus knows people find him unusual, that some of his relatives feel his own willfulness has ruined his life.

“I feel that too,” he says. “What people don’t understand is that somebody who lives like this does it because they just can’t imagine being another way. If a dog has fleas, it scratches them. I have this flea up here,” he says, tapping index finger to forehead. “And I scratch.”

He developed the Shakespearean itch in high school, but at first he turned his back on it.

‘Torture for Me’

“Up to that time, my idea of good reading was a Brooklyn Dodger box score,” he says. “Teaching stank. Shakespeare classes were torture for me.”

But one day, walking down Flatbush Avenue in an uncharitable mood, Matus looked into the faces of the people filing past and thought to himself: “You blocks, you stones, you less-than-worthless things.”

“And then I said, ‘My goodness, I didn’t say those things. Who did?’ And sure enough, it was Willie Shakes (in ‘Julius Caesar’). That’s when I realized that I was remembering large blocks of the plays.”

But Shakespeare had no place in the life of a kid who was obsessed with popular culture. Matus’ father, Matthew, was the manager of the Western Union office in Times Square and handled telegrams for the theater district. His Broadway clients often favored him with free tickets. “I got to see an awful lot of good stuff,” Irvin says.

In his early teens, Matus wrote a fan letter to the Cadillacs that so impressed members of that ‘50s doo-wop group that they gave him backstage passes and invited him to tour. He also struck up a correspondence with Alan Freed that resulted in his becoming a backstage regular at the concerts and live broadcasts the disc jockey organized.

He thinks people liked him for his intensity. “An undersized skinny kid with hair that falls in front of his face and who was always dirty from playing baseball was not lovable,” he says. “But when you put as much effort as I did into something, people seemed to respond. At least when you are a child they do.”

One of his close friends was his cousin Stephen Solarz, who now is the congressman for the Brooklyn district where they grew up.

After high school, Matus and his brother Paul opened a small vanity press in the apartment they shared with their mother, Betty, after their father left the family. But the business failed as first one brother and then the other was drafted into the Army. Matus was stationed on Staten Island where he won the Army Commendation Medal for meritorious service, but after his discharge, his life never really regained its momentum.

Book on Architecture

Matus seemed to be laboring listlessly until 1983, when a friend gave him a book on British architecture that “sucked me in right away.” He was particularly taken by the buildings that dated from Shakespeare’s time and decided to read everything he could about them.

But, scouring the libraries, he found that no book existed on the connections between the bard’s work and the architecture of the Elizabethan Era. “So I decided to write it,” Matus says. “It had art. It had architecture. The only thing Shakespeare didn’t include for me was that his characters were not baseball fans.”

Matus learned quickly enough that Long Island was not the place to conduct his research. So in 1985 he and his brother sold their home and Irvin lit out for England. “It was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life,” he says.

His first trip lasted just five weeks, but when he returned, he stayed for six months.

Renting a small camper, he drove a 2,300-mile figure-eight through the English countryside, meeting archivists, preservationists, historians, anyone who could tell him the stories of the region.

When Matus returned to the United States in November, 1985, he decided to move to Washington where Sam Schoenbaum, perhaps the most respected Shakespearean in the country, helped him get access to the Folger’s restricted collections.

Schoenbaum, who has seen “bits and pieces” of Matus’ work, says he thinks it is “not only in the scholarly mainstream, but in the mainstream of Western thought. I think it will be of general value.”

At first it seemed as though Matus’ new life might take hold. His first two house-sitting arrangements lasted seven months each. In January, 1986, he landed a four-month job as a phone solicitor for Arena Stage that kept him in pocket money for much of the year. And, in early September, a long account of his travels appeared in the travel section of The Washington Post.

Jobs Harder to Find

But by fall, house-sitting jobs were getting harder to find. Matus moved 25 times between October, 1986, and November, 1987, and was more at home in the libraries than the places where he slept.

A modicum of assistance came his way in June, 1987, when Matus received a $2,500 grant that allowed him to buy a $650 word processor and begin his writing. The money ran out after seven months.

By last summer his slide into homelessness was complete. Still, he managed to keep up appearances. “Even when I was sleeping on the street, when people saw me the next day, every hair was in place,” he says. “It was too long, but it was in place.”

On the edge of destitution, he cultivated a network of influential friends, including Schoenbaum, Kendall and community leaders like Bob Boyd and Jim Hodgson, former president of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society.

The perseverance finally paid off last July. Matus was visiting a fellow researcher at the Folger guest house when he was introduced to Richard Dutton, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Lancaster.

“He’s a type that academics encounter from time to time, and you treat them somewhat charily,” says Dutton, who is also a reviewer for the prestigious Shakespeare Survey. “They have bees in their bonnets, and they don’t know what they are talking about. But the one thing with Irvin--within his own range--is that he really does know what he’s talking about.”

After Dutton read the manuscript, he volunteered to be Matus’ advocate with British publishers. “It’s very thorough, archival, back-to-the-grass-roots, trust-nothing, find-the-first-sources scholarship,” he says. “And so little scholarship is like that. He’s done an amazing job of collecting that sort of information.”