VI.
Junior year of college James lived in the crappy little carpeted apartment next to mine, in a complex that went by the manifoldly deceptive name of Governor’s Square. This was Williamsburg, Virginia, so Governor’s Square was just off Ironbound Road, right behind the Bucktrout Funeral Home. Given how much space James takes up in my memory of that time, it’s surprising that I can’t remember any particulars about meeting him—it’s almost like he was already there. And in a way he was, in the form of cultural archetypes I’d long since internalized and was still incredibly in thrall to: James was part Cool Older Brother and part Reclusive Genius. I first learned of his existence from my roommate. Had I met the guy next door who was taking time off school to write? Who sold his plasma to help make rent? Whose Russian girlfriend with an achingly exotic accent would drop by every so often to smoke pot and erotify and listen to records? I had not, but I’d glimpsed him, had seen him down in the parking lot getting in and out of his black early-nineties Isuzu Rodeo. It ranks among the failures of our latently homophobic culture that we’re discouraged from honoring the flint-spark of attraction that ignites even the most platonic relationships, but fuck it, James was beautiful. He was tall and rocker-lean and his chestnut hair hung in waves and practical goddamn ringlets down past his shoulders. He wore dandyish monk-strap boots that clip-clopped on the concrete steps as he came and went, taking them, both up and down from the sound of it, two at a time. I knew that he was older than me, but didn’t know by how much, and still don’t—that James can be cagey about the strangest shit was one of the many things about our friendship I had to learn to live with. He was cloaked in dusky obscurity, seemed always to have a smoke going. And by the time we finally met, sometime later that fall, he’d attained in my mind the mythic status of Writer.
Now, there is a form of envy that afflicts a certain kind of young person, the kind of young person studying Literature in college, whose writerly aspirations are amorphous, wispy intuitions that haunt the mind, who sorta thinks, I don’t know, that maybe one day, after I’ve studied enough, read enough, maybe then I’d like to write something myself. For such a young person, Literature is always capital L. It is a giant temple inside of which sit a whole bunch of smaller temples, and by the entrance to each, a great marble bust looms: Tolstoy, Woolf, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Faulkner, the Eliots, etc. One is led through these temples by docents, by professors, professors who may on occasion be heard to proudly declare, “I don’t read living authors.” The dream of writing for such a young person culminates in an imagined quid pro quo, in having one’s name burnished on a syllabus, to finally and at long last be studied oneself. And the envy this young person can fall prey to is that of another writer’s calling, of the relative certainty with which that person inhabits his or her artistic identity. How unproblematic is that person’s relationship to their promise and ambition! And how uncertain my own!
The fall I met James I was still at least partially bent on achieving yet higher levels of bro: I was still semiactive in my fraternity, still playing lacrosse, still wearing plaid on plaid and saddle shoes and pants embroidered with sundry fauna. But I’d also fallen hard for the poetry of T. S. Eliot and had buckled down sophomore year and decided to count schooling among the priorities of my time at school. The first of many Grand Academic Endeavors I’d embark on, all of which time would swiftly abort, was a thesis exploring the philosopher F. H. Bradley’s influence on Eliot—the latter wrote a dissertation on the former while at Harvard, before WWI broke out and prevented him from defending it. (And how very proud I was to have grasped that grammatical construction. Former, latter; latter, former: no longer would I wander blindly the path of misidentified antecedents!) Plan was I’d then use my credentials to score a position on the English faculty of a hoity-toity boarding school in the Northeast, where I’d stroll the manicured grounds contemplating the Verities, writing poems, nay, writing verse in the rusticozy lodgings the institution provided me, all the while inspiring a generation of wealthy children who would remember me throughout their lives, perhaps most fondly whenever they confused Emerson and Thoreau at art auctions or on their yachts. In the privacy of my Governor’s Square apartment, which had come furnished, I wore a crimson old-man cardigan and sheepskin slippers while attempting to memorize long passages from The Four Quartets—a practice I thought might help me understand them. Also sometimes, sincerely, I smoked a pipe.
My apartment had the anodyne vibe of a low-rent beach house. I wasn’t home very often then but even when I was it still seemed empty, maybe more so with me in it. But James’s? His place was for me the prototypical locus of writerly divination. State of his floor, it was like someone had busted a piñata packed with holey jeans and threadbare T-shirts. Dirty plates and empty cereal bowls were always Jengaed in his kitchen sink. And in his living room you were likely to find a number of his floral-patterned antique china cups, in which soggy cigarette butts floated, extinguished in the cold remains of the milky tea he favored then. On his walls, though, actual art: a painting of a man sitting in a chair wearing only a flocculent beard, his not inconsiderable dong somehow more intimidating for being limp, hung next to another of an erect naked woman whose feral black pubic thatch stirred in one equal parts desire and fear. In addition to a simple tribal mask on the wall near the front door, James owned a five-foot bamboo blowgun. I gathered that he’d picked them up while in South America, but because he never told me why he’d been there or how he’d acquired them, my imagination was allowed (encouraged?) to run wild. I pictured him in a remote Amazonian village, participating in an obscure initiation rite, one that entailed visionary drugs administered via the tip of a blow dart achooed into his ass, followed by some inconspicuous bit of body modification. Most important, though, were the books. They were always strewn about in a way that suggested they’d been seized in a moment of inspiration and then summarily discarded. Pick one up and open to a random page and you might find a caterpillar of cigarette ash gathered in the spine, a physical trace of the ghostly and immaterial act of reading, evidence he’d been there. The names on the spines were foreign to me then and, by virtue of the transitive property, were an extension of James’s mystery and further evidence of his considerable power over me. I arranged them all alphabetically in my mind, where they sat in a row like the world’s most intimidating admissions board: Acker, Auster, Baldwin, Barthelme, Carver, DeLillo, Didion, down on through Gaddis, Munro, Murdoch, O’Connor, and Pynchon. And of course, finally, there was Wallace.
VII.
It’s a phrase that zaps the mind, like biting into tinfoil—“the anxiety of influence.” Like other Big Ideas that devolve into idioms (Relativity, String Theory, Communism, etc.), it gets mentioned more often than it gets discussed. Do we skip over it so quickly because we’ve all accepted it as fact? Or do we quietly distrust or resent it? In a way it’s easy to dismiss or ignore. It’s almost willfully oblivious of writers who aren’t white or male, for example—a big-time no-no nowadays. But there’s also the simple fact that Harold Bloom’s theory comes to us via Harold Bloom’s prose, which smells of oniony-ripe academic BO. His syntax gets so gnarled in places and he repurposes so many words from Latin and Greek that at times The Anxiety of Influence reads like a parody of bad scholarly writing. What it’s like? It’s like watching Baryshnikov dance in combat boots. Because the core idea is striking, elegant even: young poets (“ephebes” (of course)) begin their artistic journeys nervy and afraid that the achievements of previous poets will always overshadow their own. In order to protect and nurture their gifts, their originality, to ensure they aren’t swallowed up and subsumed by the splendor of their “Great Originals,” they must creatively “misread” them. And their work, their poems—this is key—they are those misreadings. They’re artifacts and instances of living anxiety, not proof that that anxiety has been overcome. And so literary history, at least from Shakespeare to the present, isn’t simply a Connect the Dots of anchoritic geniuses but a com
plex and tessellated game of Telephone. The bulk of Bloom’s little book is taken up with outlining six “revisionary ratios,” i.e., the ways a poet misreads his Great Original, and exploring the psychological ramifications of each. But the phrase itself, “the anxiety of influence,” has since outpaced all these particulars. It now lives a life abroad in the culture, a much diminished and maybe even bankrupt life, one in which it means something like: a fruitful creative life is begun only after an ephebe kills his artistic father.
You don’t hear the question of influence put directly all that often—we seem to skirt it, almost as if it were a taboo. But every now and again an interviewer will trot it out like a Trojan horse. Much of the time it’s harmless, driven by innocent curiosity, but still there are instances in which you hear it loud and clear, the accusation in the question. “Is there not the shibboleth bequeathed to us by Eliot,” Bloom puts it, “that the good poet steals, while the poor poet betrays an influence, borrows a voice?” If the writer doesn’t simply slough the question off, he (because in my experience it’s largely pygmy-weinered, mommy-issued men we’re talking here) will likely qualify and evade. Act cagey. He might offer some bit of braggadocio, a helping of humbug or humblebrag on the order of “I thought about Nabokov a lot in my latish teens.” Or he might reach for the heavens and claim an influence so grand as to border on the delusional, like when I heard a novelist, unfamous for his experiments with genre, assert, “Proust? I count him among my influences.” These answers are never satisfying, most likely because they amount to little more than the writer’s bid for influential power of his own.
But the question’s always confused me. Because when we ask a writer about his or her influences, what are we really angling after? What would a good answer look like?
Do we want to hear about their initial thrill of discovery? About how the Ephebe, at the riperound age of a score, borrowed a hip and smart friend’s copy of, say, Girl with Curious Hair, prepared to like what he found there because it came stamped with that friend’s seal of approval, and spent a weekend feverishly reading and rereading it? Do we want to know that he may have experienced a mild form of the vaunted Stendhal syndrome? That he literally swooned, the words blurring and pulling apart on the page in a way that forced him to put the book down? Do we really want to hear that he’d been unaware that language could feel as alive, as playful and inventive and fresh and funny, as welcoming of all modes of contemporary experience, as what he encountered in those pages?
Not really, I don’t think. It’s the same first lesson every writer must learn, one way or another: literature is alive, ongoing. Language, like history, is always making room. Always ending in this moment and this one and this.
But if it’s not this itty-bitty epiphany we’re hankering for, then what? Maybe we’re hungry for what the Ephebe did after that experience. The obsessive bits, then, the embarrassing shit. How he wrote down every word he didn’t know on a note card and kept the growing stack in a case on his desk, a case he came to think of as a treasure chest. How before writing essays for his classes he’d choose half a dozen of these cards at random and force himself to use them, often to preposterous and cringe-worthy ends. How he happened upon Wallace’s writing process, one that involved doing five drafts of whatever he was working on, and forthwith began doing that, believing it would solve the Rubik’s Cube of genius inside him. Maybe we want to hear how wildly stilted his fiction was then, how it was so full of footnotes that the text proper was practically on stilts. Or how on a cross-country trip with the hip and smart friend he found a copy of Wallace’s then hard-to-find first novel, The Broom of the System, in a Haight-Ashbury bookstore and felt a soaring sense of power over the friend, who’d never read it. Or about how the Ephebe audited a Wittgenstein seminar and a Calculus class because he thought one needed more than a passing familiarity with Analytic Philosophy and capital-M Mathematics in order to produce Serious Writing. And so on (and on and on. . .).
There’s something delightfully deranged about behavior like this and such details come close to what we’re after, I think, when we ask about “influence.” We like to hear that the writer—tickler of our risibilities, puppeteer of our heartstrings—wasn’t always in full possession of his or her powers. Which is to say that we like to hear that there was a time when he or she wasn’t quite fully him- or herself. To ask about “influence,” then, is to ask for an explanation, an origin story. For as much as we talk about genius, for as thoroughly as we’ve invested our artists with qualities once culturally reserved for prophets and hierophants, we still seem to favor the view that great art is the result, at bottom, of hard work. Questions of talent and spiritual awareness and vision (in the deepest sense of that word) make us squirrelly, so we place our faith in the process, in the discipline that self-knowledge and -transformation demand—and in, finally, the very idea of selfhood and its expression. There’s even a whole genre devoted to the development of an artist: the Künstlerroman. And in her fantastic one, The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather sums this idea up nicely: “Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.”
We’re happy to treat our athletes, on the other hand, as outliers, as physical mutants or avatars. The freakishly graceful ways they move, in real time, right before our eyes, necessarily blind us to the tremendous amount of work they’ve invested into moving that way. And so we chalk their achievements up to something that lives in the genes, that’s gifted to them more than earned. This would help explain the hiccup of dissonance we experience when we hear elite athletes talk about how hard they work at their “craft.”
And while of course hard work and natural aptitude are integral to both, the difference in how we emphasize them fascinates me. By stressing that great art is the result of hard work, we shore up the notion that it’s attainable. We’ve come to put such a high premium on individuality and self-expression, and have brought those into an asymptotic relationship with art, that we have to ensure art remains democratic, accessible—hence the popularity of books that claim to explain “creativity,” that promise mastery to those willing to put in ten thousand hours of practice. Hence MFAs. Said differently: more people believe they have a great book in them than believe they could win, say, Wimbledon. No amount of later-in-life work could prepare Joe Sixpack or Plain Jane for the latter, but the former? If they had enough free time, on the weekends maybe, if they didn’t have to make money, if they weren’t burdened by the kids, if they could read everything they needed to read to prepare themselves, then they could articulate what makes them special, authentic. Then, at long last, they could tell their story.
This is a long way of saying that, early on, I thought a writer’s influences were a blueprint of sorts, a record of the work they did to become themselves and therefore a road map of the work I’d need to do to become myself. So after I got through all Wallace’s books and all the uncollected work I could run down online in the dread latter days of Web 1.0, including short stories he’d published in his college’s literary magazine, humor articles he’d written for its paper, I went off in search of something like a developmental record. I was looking for anything that bore a trace of where Wallace had come from. I scoured interviews for mentions of other writers he admired, folks he may have read as closely as I was reading him. All at once I became a truffle pig, snuffling for sources, clues. And I was thrilled when I thought I stumbled upon them, when I caught stylistic or spiritual echoes in work that he’d either mentioned or that I was sure he’d read. There’s a scene in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, for example, where Binx returns to a theater to look for a seat he’d long ago carved his initials into, and there’s an almost identical scene in The Broom of the System, only if I remember right it’s a bathroom stall. Vonnegut’s story “The Euphio Question” features a radio signal that produces in those who hear it a euphoria so intense it stupefies them, leaves them as but blissed-out husks of their former selves, which is precisely the conceit
of the eponymous movie at the heart of Infinite Jest. And Madame Psychosis’s suicide attempt in that book might as well have been written on onionskin laid atop an indelible party scene in Gaddis’s The Recognitions. Don DeLillo’s work makes many cameos, especially nuggets from his lesser-known novels like End Zone and Ratner’s Star. Nicholson Baker’s use of footnotes in The Mezzanine set bells off, as did Lee K. Abbott’s knowing way of spelling out “quote unquote” in dialogue. I could go on and on. Point is I found what I’d been looking for, which is to say, I found other writers, a whole lot of them. “For a time, our teachers serve us personally, as meters or milestones of progress,” Emerson wrote. “Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and they yielded their place to other geniuses.” But what I thought would empower disturbed me in the end. I wallowed for a while. By this point I’d dropped out of the frat and grown my hair long and cultivated what I could of a beard and bought a corduroy bomber jacket that seemed like something James might wear, or at least approve of in his tight-lipped way, and I’d swapped my pipe for cigs and my contact lenses for big, doofy glasses, and I’d sometimes sit around my bland apartment ruefully excogitating: all this evidence, did it mean that Wallace was unoriginal and, therefore, inauthentic? And if so, I fretted, what hope could there ever be for me?
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