Midway through Edward Albee’s 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” the aggrieved housewife Martha delivers one of several withering denunciations of her husband George, a college professor who has the countenance of a milksop. “So, here I am,” Martha begins, “stuck with this flop, this bog in the history department, who’s married to the president’s daughter, who’s expected to be somebody, not just a nobody, a bookworm.”
As an adolescent in the 1990s, when I first watched the classic film version of the play starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, I was always struck by Martha’s use of the word “bookworm.” As enunciated with a tone of high dudgeon by Taylor, the seemingly innocuous word became sinister. One pictured an insidious insect that had taken up residence in the library stacks, slithering through the collected works of Henry Adams.
No matter how many times I saw the film, I could never help but wonder: What was so bad about being a bookworm? In truth, while a viewer my age could identify not at all with the middle-aged miseries of George and Martha, I found myself taking the side of George. Where Martha was unapologetically coarse, George was merely sarcastic; where Martha was spoiling for a fresh fight, George was inclined to look backward with regret.
In fact, George was a member of an honorable, underappreciated brotherhood of fictional nerds who, despite being castigated or cast aside, are capable of eliciting more sympathy than the ostensible hero. Of course, there are no heroes or heroines in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” but that never stopped me from freeing George from the chains of the play and making him a hero in my mind. Call it fan fiction of a kind.
In “Gone with the Wind,” the filmmakers encourage us to look up to and identify with the dashing derring-do of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) or the volatile magnetism of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh). But what if some of us saw more merit in the gallant fatalism of Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and the unadorned decency of Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland)? Besides, I always thought there was something vaguely presumptuous in the way Hollywood encourages audiences to identify with the most glamorous of its stars.
For me, the word “nerd,” like “bookworm,” was hardly a pejorative. Nor did it automatically suggest excessive learning or the presence of pocket protectors. To the contrary, the nerds I admired in books and movies were calm, rational, self-possessed figures who sometimes needed corrective lenses, and sometimes not. My definition was inclusive. By my reckoning, Clark Kent and Peter Parker were nerds; so were many characters played by my favorite contemporary actor, Sam Waterston, whose inherent decency and studiousness were well articulated by Woody Allen in films such as “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “September.”
“He’s a regular man,” Allen said of Waterston in an interview. “He’s not a gunfighter or a machismo figure. He’s a man.”
When I first read E.M. Forster’s 1908 masterpiece A Room with a View, I was surprised to find myself rooting against George Emerson, the raffish, moody young man who seeks and wins the hand of Lucy Honeychurch. Instead, I kept hoping Lucy would see the wisdom in remaining with Cecil Vyse, her upright if uptight fiancé who, at one point, proudly boasts to her brother: “My dear Freddy, I am no athlete. As you well remarked this very morning, ‘There are some chaps who are no good for anything but books’; I plead guilty to being such a chap, and will not inflict myself on you.” I came to see the book as a conspiracy against Cecil, whose virtues were well articulated by Lucy’s mother — “he’s good, he’s clever, he’s rich, he’s well connected” — but who was continually parodied by the other characters and by Forster.
Naturally, writers and filmmakers get a lot of mileage out of running down characters like Cecil Vyse. In Leo McCarey’s screwball comedy “The Awful Truth,” for example, Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) is portrayed as having taken leave of her senses temporarily, preferring the company of Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), a bumpkinish but exceedingly courtly and wealthy oilman, over that of her debonair but womanizing ex-husband Jerry (Cary Grant). In his most unpardonable offense, Dan, while clearly level-headed and fun-loving, spends too much time with his aged mother. The message was simply that to win the hand of a gal like Irene Dunne, it is better to be a ladies’ man than a mama’s boy.
In time, however, I found a subgenre of films in which the merits of nerds were celebrated. In the great Western, “Fort Apache,” John Ford declined to mock the unalterably old-fashioned ways of Henry Fonda’s West Point-educated Lt. Col. Owen Thursday; in a famous scene when Fonda awkwardly waltzes at an army dance, the last place this man of duty and service would want to be, Ford captures the moment with amused affection. Then there were the comedies in which the nerd got the girl. In Howard Hawks’ “Bringing Up Baby,” Katharine Hepburn seeks to instigate a romance with Cary Grant’s cloddish paleontologist; in Peter Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” the pattern gets repeated, with Barbra Streisand pursuing a relationship with Ryan O’Neal’s four-eyed musicologist. And in Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan,” one of the debutantes made an assertion that those of us who identified as bookworms long hoped to hear from the opposite sex: “I think serious guys tend to be better-looking.”
Well, there was hope. Like George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” I was a reader of books; like Cecil in A Room with a View, I was a reluctant participant in sports; and like Henry Fonda in “Fort Apache,” I tended to live my life on the straight and narrow. To look up to such characters seemed natural. In admitting such allegiances, we are leveling with ourselves. Isn’t the world made up of more Leslie Howards than Clark Gables?
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
