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Meat Loaf and Me: a Journey to Hell and Back

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By Jeff Abernathy

Although we spend a lot of time assessing the scholarly work of our colleagues, administrators aren't often judged on our own research and writing. I'm sad to report a recent discovery that may have sullied my scholarly reputation and confirmed the wisdom of my decision to leave my faculty role and become a dean in the first place.

I published a book a couple of years ago with a fine university press that did terrific work in creating a beautiful volume and supporting its sales. My book attracted a run of mostly positive reviews, and has been cited in other books that I respect. However, with the uncertain ego typical of an academic, I never quite believed the affirmation and only trusted the criticism.

Perhaps that is why I was distraught to learn recently that my study of race in the Southern novel shares its title, To Hell and Back, with an autobiography written by the aging rock star Meat Loaf.

That came to light only this year, when a faculty colleague sent a snide note along with a link to Meat Loaf's book. Was I holding my own, he wondered, in sales? My book had, by then, been out for a couple of years and was closing in on the top two million in Amazon sales, a feat that I figured would be the academic-publishing equivalent of breaking into single-A baseball (I admit my expectations are low).

After hearing from my colleague, I searched for the title online, and turned up the inaugural publishing effort of the singer of the 1977 over-the-top hit "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights."

It turns out that Meat Loaf and I have plenty of company in choosing our title; hell-bent writers have taken on a range of topics from self-help to near-death experiences. Hell, it seems, is a fungible metaphor: I chose it because I study the way that Huck Finn and a raft of other Southern characters make a resolution to go to a multicultural "hell" condemned by their societies, and their inevitable failure to stay there. Meat Loaf, I suspect, chose the title as an appealing metaphor for ruin and redemption.

But the association with Meat Loaf troubled me, if mainly from a publicity perspective. After all, what serious academic wants to share a title with a baked loaf of ground meat?

I might take solace if I were holding off Meat Loaf in sales. But he's killing me. As I write, he is 714,334th on the Amazon.com sales list -- six years after his book came out -- while I suffer in ignominy at 2,012,395th. His book has sold in the tens of thousands; were I to sell 5,000 copies, my publisher would put my picture in its lobby.

Sure, Meat Loaf does have the experience of "Bat Out of Hell," his top-five, all-time rock-album bestseller, to draw from. And then there's his work as Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

But my book quotes Leslie Fiedler and Shelley Fisher Fishkin!

Meat Loaf's book led to radio interviews, new record deals, and a VH1 special on his life. He bought a mansion in L.A. By contrast, you would find more copies of my book in my basement than in all the cavernous Amazon warehouses put together. I've yet to see it in an actual nonvirtual bookstore.

It all might have turned out so differently. Back when I was imagining the witty and sage chestnuts I would toss off during my interview with Scott Simon on National Public Radio, I had no doubt that authorship would bring with it a certain élan.

Instead, it brought 10 free copies of my book and a talk in my hometown of Richmond, Va., where I have to say that I rocked the house, which consisted of nearly a dozen souls, only half of whom were my blood relatives.

Naturally, I couldn't help but contemplate the comparative literary merits of the two projects. As it turns out, Meat Loaf did not actually write "his" book. Rock stars, like politicians, be they luminous or faded, are entitled to their ghost writers. And so we can read the lie implied by the title -- To Hell and Back: An Autobiography -- as subtle acknowledgment of a Bakhtin polyphonic discourse between a society and its popular culture. Meaty stuff indeed.

Yet while I would no more expect that Meat Loaf could write a book than that George Bush could write a speech, my own professional standards, by necessity, differ. Academics have no ghost writers, unless they are the sort utilized by Joseph Ellis, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and a depressingly large number of Web-surfing students assigned to write term papers. I had to settle for good old monophonic discourse.

It's true that Meat Loaf and I have contrasting prose styles, which I might have expected to work to my advantage in the marketplace. While I acknowledge a certain intrigue in his first line -- "I wake up in a room I've never seen before" -- isn't it a bit shopworn? True, there's a Keseyesque directness there, the thrill of the Beat still pumping in popular American literature. But come now: Another dizzy rocker?

In retrospect, my own first line is admittedly a bit dense, but nevertheless, I had thought, rewarding to the alert reader: "Americans speak of race as static and knowable, but we experience it as dynamic and inscrutable, ever shifting and ever elusive." Despite my failure to rocket to the top of the bestseller lists, I can still vaguely imagine smallish crowds at bookstores reading a line like that and slapping down hard-earned cash.

In fact, I had hoped by now to be explaining to the breathless masses the essential link between Huck Finn and Elvis Presley, as well as the contributions of each to the American understanding of race. Where, I wonder, is my VH1 special?

I'll bet Meat Loaf isn't finding unread review copies of his book on the discount Web sites, as I have been since before even new copies of my book were available.

There is no accounting for taste.

Still, hope remains. I mean, what were the odds that a 300-pound white Texan would get signed by Motown and go on to sell 50 million records?

My aspirations are lower. The New York Times nonfiction list seems unlikely. But maybe I'll crack the top million on Amazon's lists with the renewed publicity effort to which you are currently being subjected. Maybe if I adopt a pseudonym, Scott Simon will call after all.

I found that I am leading in one category: WorldCat tells me that 579 libraries worldwide own a copy of my book. Only 306 own Meat Loaf's.

Long live rock. But score one for the pointy heads.