Writers read for style. That, more than anything else, is what separates the professionals from the civilians. When a reader fancies a particular author, it could be for any of a hundred reasons—the characters’ names, the product placement, the political slant, the exotic locales, the sex scenes, the happy endings, the typeface on the dust jacket. But when one writer falls under another’s spell, it is generally because of the way the progenitor uses language to forge or reflect an attitude toward the world—that is, it is because of style.
I asked about personal influences in every interview for this book. Every interviewee had at least one name to offer. For two reasons, I take it as significant that Manny Farber was mentioned as often as Ernest Hemingway. The first reason is that, as in so much having to do with style, the currents that flow beneath the surface are more powerful than the ones the eye can see. That is to say, Hemingway obviously had a greater impact on twentieth-century writing than did Farber (a film critic who published in various periodicals in the 1940s through the 1970s and now works exclusively as a painter). He permeates the literary ether, so that anyone coming after him needs to imitate, reject, or in some other way negotiate his presence. But his influence is so pervasive that it goes without saying—just as, if you were asked what you did when you woke up this morning, you might say that you tried a new radio station, but you probably wouldn’t mention that you got dressed. Particular genres have their own 800-pound gorillas whom all that follow have to contend with, whether they know it or not: Tom Wolfe in feature journalism, Raymond Chandler in detective novels, George Orwell in higher journalistic criticism, Joan Didion in personal essays, and so on.
Even so (and this is the second reason), Manny Farber really did influence James Wolcott and Greil Marcus—and, earlier, Pauline Kael, who in turn was a model for Wolcott and Marcus. With remarkable frequency, relatively obscure or otherwise unexpected voices will insinuate themselves into the souls of writers-in-development. Joseph Heller discovered the voice that allowed him to write his first novel, Catch 22, by reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and a novel by Vladimir Nabokov in the same week. (“What I got from Celine is the slangy use of prose and the continuity that is relaxed and vague rather than precise and motivated; from Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, the flippant approach to situations that were filled with anguish and grief and tragedy.”) Norman Mailer has said that an “immense influence” on The Naked and the Dead was the work of James T. Farrell, and John Updike that The Poorhouse Fair was inspired by Henry Green’s Concluding. Asked to name an influence in one interview, Pauline Kael cited the academic critic R. P. Blackmur, which is a bit like Charlie Parker giving props to Tommy Dorsey. Raymond Carver said his “greatest hero” was William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy named Albert Camus, and William Kennedy, in his early years, was under the spell of Damon Runyan. Never one to be topped, even in citing obscure stylistic forebears, Tom Wolfe has said on a number of occasions that the main influences for his use of multiple points of view were the “Serapion Brothers” group in the 1920s Soviet Union, which included Eugene Zamyatin, Andrei Sobel, Aleksie Remizov, and Boris Pilnyak.
Whitman wrote:
I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
A century later, in a book called The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom expounded on this idea and added a corollary: to “destroy the teacher”(i.e., to appropriate the style of an earlier writer) is painful and sometimes devastating for the student. My investigations support a different conclusion. For the writers I spoke to, acquiring an influence was exciting, and subsequently contending with it was kind of fun. To be sure, a necessary process of differentiation was involved. But this was generally seen as an intriguing and invigorating program—and one that, far from destroying the earlier writer, actually enhanced his or her stature (just as the second line in the Whitman quote has it).
In due time, after all, influence will be mitigated and eventually trumped by personality; therein lies the truth of “the style is the man himself.” If you end up mimicking someone else, you’re not a writer, you’re a copycat. As novelist Richard Ford said, “Anyone’s style is their intelligence. Their style is just a natural incarnation of their intelligence. You can’t imitate someone’s intelligence. You can’t be someone else’s mind. You might learn a trick. But finally it has to heat itself to your own intelligence and make something worthwhile, or it’s useless.”
Things are far more ticklish in forms like the visual arts or jazz performance, where style is all; once technical competence is achieved, originality and singularity are valued more than anything else. A saxophonist who sounds just like John Coltrane or a painter whose stuff can’t be distinguished from de Kooning’s will be seen as amusing but negligible novelty acts. Among the genres of writing, poetry fits this model the closest, and indeed, Bloom’s work on influence focuses on poets. But there is not as much pressure on prose writers. For them, style is always paired with content—narrative, information, character, idea—which can at any moment pick up the burden of engaging the reader’s attention. And so influence, along with all the other elements of style, can be viewed with a bit more equanimity.
Just listen:
TOURÉ: When you read certain styles, you can’t help but be changed by them. It’s like drinking a grape juice that gets all over your teeth and tongue. Nabokov was like that for me—he was a freight train that went straight into my head. Joan Didion and Ralph Ellison had strong, identifiable styles, but it wasn’t the same. They were more textured, less overwhelming. Like apple juice.
JONATHAN RABAN: My one major, obsessive, dominating literary influence was Robert Lowell, and Lowell’s poems sometimes had these marvelous, rich adjectival and adverbial piles. Like in “Man and Wife”: “your old-fashioned tirade—/loving, rapid, merciless—/breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.” If I learned anything really practical from Lowell, it was not to be afraid if the textbooks said you should be afraid of reducing loving, rapid, merciless down to one adjective. Sometimes you can get away with three. The amazing thing is, you have loving, rapid, merciless, which you would think was linguistic explosion enough, and then you have this towering simile: “breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.” It adds excess to excess but with total, total conviction and power.
JUDITH THURMAN: When I’m stuck I’ll read Didion—she calms me down.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE: Orwell was a tremendous influence—the sparseness and lack of emotion as he describes something, and yet that thing, the object, carries all the weight of the emotion.
JAMES WOLCOTT: Early on, I was a huge Norman Mailer fan. As a teenager I wrote an imitative Mailer style, from his Advertisements for Myself period, that tough, fighting, rhetorical overkill, the way he seemed to electrically take in everything. Then when I got to New York, I realized there were all these Mailer wannabes. The Village Voice alone had a lot of macho guys with five-year head starts.
Later, I read a lot of the Brits. Clive James’s television column in the Observer was the must-read thing in England, the way [Kenneth] Tynan’s theater column was earlier. People like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, when they were talking about someone like Milton, had a certain offhand quality, like they weren’t going to put on false airs. Anthony Powell’s deadpan humor, particularly in his diaries. It’s a good way to get across comedy, so that it’s unforced; it’s the opposite of wisecracking. Geoffrey Barnard had a column in the Spectator that was about his gambling, his alcoholism, his bitter ex-wives. It had a real casual, shambling quality that I liked.
In New York, I was affected a lot by the Jewish hipsters—Seymour Krim, Manny Farber, Albert Goldman, Marvin Mudrick—a whole species of writer that is gone and never will return. These guys wrote a really fast conversational style. It was deceptive because I know they worked really hard on it, particularly Farber. He totally layered his stuff. He worked months and sometimes years on a piece. Goldman was the most brilliant talker I ever heard, but his brain worked so fast that when he sat down to write he got stymied. For his Lenny Bruce book, he got someone to sit in a room with him. He would talk it and the guy took it all down.
I learned about using quotation as evidence from Mudrick. He was brilliant at using the writer’s own words to hang him. I remember once reading one of his collections where he had a review of an academic novel. He quoted a long description of oral sex, and at the end, he writes, “This is truly one of the most moving blow jobs in recent literature.” At that point the book practically flew out of my hands, I was laughing so hard. I had no idea that was what he was going to do.
Pauline Kael came out of that tradition. Her writing was deceptively casual. No one pencilled over galleys the way she did. You would see blocks and blocks of very fine handwriting in the margins.
TOBIAS WOLFF: Hemingway was my dominant influence. I didn’t like it pointed out to me, but I knew in my heart it was true.
NICHOLSON BAKER: As I’ve described in U and I, Updike was the big influence on me. He’s the one. When I was starting out I took out a bunch of his books out of the library: The Centaur, Of the Farm, Rabbit, Run. I read more Updike than anybody else beginning. He’s so hugely influential because he obviously has an ear. There was a feeling of just watching somebody ride a bicycle better than anybody else, up and down hills and doing things on that bicycle that nobody else could do. It was just immediately clear that it had to do with style, not just style but intelligence behind style, or a seeing eye behind style.
BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL: I like books where I can sense it, feel it, get in the middle of it. I like the turn-of-the-century writers, like Edith Wharton and Dreiser. Dreiser puts you right there.
JOHN LUKACS: My ideal as an English writer was Harold Nicolson. When I read him, I said, “Well, now, this is the way to write.” There are still some sentences of his that ring in my ear.
FRANK KERMODE: Some of my tone derives from William Empson. I took a way of doing things that was not at all grandiose. Others took something else from Empson—an epigrammatic smartness, a woundingness.
PETER CAREY: I failed science at university and fell into advertising. It was then that I began to read literature for the first time in my life. I fell into modernism—Joyce, Kafka, Ezra Pound was where I went in, with nothing underneath it. I remember opening up As I Lay Dying—I didn’t know combinations of words like that existed in the universe. I read Fitzgerald, John Irving, Márquez, who was the writer that must have had the greatest influence on me. I was living in Queensland [Australia] in the country. I would sit there every night in the gaslight, drinking and reading. I’d read until I couldn’t see anymore, because of the alcohol. It must have been like blotting paper, sitting there reading every night.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: My parents read Alice in Wonderland to me when I was tiny. I loved the sound of Carroll’s one-liners, the exclamatory, aggressive, abrupt sound of speech in that book. The flowers were so mean to her.
I loved the tone of the ’20s and ’30s, the Algonquin sound. I saw a drawing of Dorothy Parker hurling a giant pen like a spear, dripping ink like blood. I loved the idea of using speech as a weapon, of projecting your voice so the words struck home.
As a girl I got a secondhand book called The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde, and I just pored over his one-liners. Later I stumbled over Walter Pater, having no idea there was any connection between him and Wilde. I loved his most purple prose.
In graduate school, I loved Frazer’s The Golden Bough—the dreamy quality and the juxtaposition of material, the way he would go from Greece to Rome to Polynesia to something he observed in Edinburgh. I adored Kenneth Clarke’s The Nude—the simple sentences, the luminous way he introduces the reader to body types.
There was a style in British academic writing, in roughly the period 1890 to 1960, that I thought was fabulous. You saw it in people like Jane Harrison and C. M. Bowra. I thought, This is the way a critic should write. They wrote in a very relaxed manner. You had the impression that they had absorbed all learning but knew how to present it to the general reader without being showy or ponderous, like the German academics. You heard the spoken voice, as if you were in a one-on-one tutorial.
MARGARET DRABBLE: Virginia Woolf, of course, in her novels. I think To the Lighthouse is one of the truly great novels. There’s not a word over, or missing. It’s just a heartbreakingly good novel. It’s very curious, but one of the writers I most revere is Doris Lessing, whose style is terrible. She’s a great writer without any question, an important writer, but her style is not her great quality. She’s direct, she’s abrupt, she hasn’t got a very good ear. But she’s got the matter.
MICHAEL KINSLEY: When I was at Oxford after college, I discovered the Spectator and the New Statesman, which were going through a glory period in the ’70s and ’80s. That whole British witty, ironic style opened my eyes. I hope I’m not just unconsciously ripping it off.
ANDREI CODRESCU: The people who were my contemporaries and influences were the New York poets, who were more sophisticated in some ways than the Beats. They had read and played with French surrealism and Dada and the avant-garde and they also had a really combative attitude toward mainstream American writing, which at the time was very provincial. It was the right crowd because what I knew and what I was doing made perfect sense to them. Certainly, there wasn’t a demand to write in a very polished way. They welcomed experimenting, they loved it when things sounded awkward. Ted Berrigan said, “A great poem is a great mistake.” He loved the idea of mishearing, reading the wrong words, hearing what happens if you keep up with the mistake.
Something I learned from Ted is that the American language insists on the present. It just simply insists on the spoken as a dimension that’s as good as any transcendental or physical dimension. He was very insistent on the fact that you must use words in poems that haven’t been used before. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but he always said he was the first American poet to use the word Pepsi in a poem. To this day there are teachers of creative writing who will try to forbid their students to use brand names in their poems. I don’t know why—maybe because they’re not elegant enough or they will be forgotten or whatever reason. It was quite the opposite of the New York school, because we were at the height of the Pop Art thing. It was actually tremendous fun to bring into artistic production things like soup cans and words like Pepsi. Suddenly the range got much bigger.
CRISTINA GARCIA: My main man is Chekhov, for pleasure and desperation. Especially at crucial junctures—he’s saved me again and again. I’ve gained a lot of sustenance from his humanity and characterizations.
HAROLD BLOOM: Johnson, always, with his antithetical style. Walter Pater and Hazlitt, who endlessly fascinate me, although obviously one cannot write with the baroque splendor of Pater, and one cannot write with that marvelous plain style of Hazlitt. Thomas De Quincey. Kenneth Burke, especially in The Rhetoric of Religion. And of course Emerson. When I was in a deep depression in the middle of the journey, in 1965, when I was 35, I came out of it essentially by reading two essayists, Emerson and Freud. But, today, who can be Johnson or Emerson or Hazlitt or De Quincey? It’s too late in the day.
DAVID THOMSON: When I was in my twenties, I discovered a yellow French magazine called Cahier du Cinéma. My French was O-level French, and I had to look up every word in a sentence, but I was still affected by that flowery style. A little after that, I discovered Andrew Sarris. Tynan was a big influence—his ability to “get” an actor in a sentence. John Berger wrote art criticism the way I thought movie criticism should be written.
MEGHAN DAUM: Certainly there’s no young writer in the country who hasn’t been influenced by Didion. It’s like singer-songwriters and Joni Mitchell. When I was in graduate school, I would read “Goodbye to All That” again and again and try to redo it. But then the memoir culture came about, and the bar was moved in terms of how people respond to first-person writing. If Joan Didion were my age now, I’m not sure she could get away with writing the way she did.
STANLEY CROUCH: You begin as an imitator. Through imitations, one finds one’s own way. I taught a theater class at Claremont [College] from ’68 to ’75. I was influenced by Beckett, Genet, Pinter. A lot of freedoms were available. I studied Yeats, Eliot, and Pound for their rhythmic effects.
For a time I was heavily into Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, then Baldwin’s Another Country. LeRoi Jones was doing something with Joyce that Baldwin had done with Henry James—they added African-American rhythms. After Baldwin, the level Ralph Ellison was on was a whole other thing. He was an Olympian with coal dust on his shoes. There was no sense of limitation. He was a black person not as an outsider but as an unacknowledged insider.
JAMAICA KINCAID: The biggest influences on me are the things I read when I was learning to read: the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare. They had an obsession with the beginning and end of a person, which are always the same—you are born and then you die. This literature all has the sense of death as an inexplicable inevitability and takes on the challenge of thinking that there’s something beyond it, even though you know there isn’t anything.
CYNTHIA OZICK: My first novel, which nobody has ever read, had clear Jamesian footprints, even in the use of adverbs. I can see Jamesian tics all over. But when I look at it now, I don’t think I’ve ever written better, or been more ambitious.
Later, I came under the influence of E. M. Forster. I keep on my desk as a kind of talisman a copy of A Passage to India. I make myself take it away every once in a while, then I take it back. I open it, I look at a sentence or two, and then I put it down again. It’s like a drink from some holy fountain. Lately I’ve put on top of that one Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which is a first-person narrator and so stunning, so intimate. To get that voice, which is both intimate and Mandarin, is astonishing—talk about tone in the first person. That is marvelous. Forster is just the opposite, because he’s sort of a wise man, from the outside. He has these little essayistic moments which are brilliant. He does it all. He makes it come out in the dialogue, and he stops to comment. It’s just extraordinary. He wants to include everything one can think of—plus, plus, plus.
As a critic, I was shaped by the prevalent view when I went to school: close reading, analytic reading—that reverence for literature. That’s what shaped me. The sentence in a piece of prose has to be as perfectly constructed as a poem. [Lionel] Trilling’s sentences are these little spirals—not admirable sentences. But [Alfred] Kazin’s are. And [Allen] Tate, and [R. P.] Blackmur, and [F. W.] Dupee—the whole gang—they practiced what they preached.
GREIL MARCUS: Pauline Kael, Leslie Fiedler, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature. They dove into their subjects, wrestled with them, brought them to life. I had never come across anything like it. The writer became an actor in his own work—whether humble, arrogant, angry, or defeated. I got a sense of life from reading this stuff. I thought, What would it be like to feel alive the way these people do? (Mailer is different. It’s always about him, and if you don’t care about him, you’re left out.) It told me I could address the object of my fascination as an equal, as a citizen. If something pissed me off, I could figure out why I felt that way. Why not? That’s the way people respond in baseball or politics. They hate, they love, they scream.
Manny Farber was a complete thrill to read. He’d write a two-to-three-page piece on a director that captured everything that needed to be said. He wrote a bit like Chandler with hard-boiled puns—I remember him referring to “Jeanne Morose.” I knew I could never write that way, but it still inspired me.
JON PARELES: The writers I love are the dense ones. People like DeLillo and Pynchon, who you feel have simultaneously applied a microscope to everything they see and are also looking at the giant world conspiracy. I try to take away a combination of closeup and grand insight.
Among rock writers, I like Robert Christgau. His style is the opposite of mine—it’s dense and clotted—but he’s really smart. Greil Marcus is a genius in extrapolating the entire seashore from a grain of sand. He hears a catch in somebody’s voice, and that is the history of slavery, plus he was drunk the night of the session. Greil’s amazing at that. He’s like a seismograph. A tiny flicker and the world shakes.
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN: Grace Paley. I have no idea what makes her short story “Gloomy Tomb” a short story, but it influenced me in a very strange, very mysterious way. There was a combination of a particular warm voice, a certain directness, and a certain prickliness. It was a little like Thelonius Monk’s music.
JUNOT DÍAZ: Cormac McCarthy was an important model. When I found him, I was blown away. The whole time I was working on the stories in Drown, I was obsessed with Toni Morrison. She had it all. I was writing about Dominican masculinity, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that no one knows more about masculinity than a woman. They have a handle on how utterly fucking nuts boys are.
I can’t leave this topic without a word on negative influence—the writers you dislike so much that you resolve to do anything in your power not to be like them. V. S. Naipaul provided an interviewer a list: “Santayana: almost unreadable. Gibbon lulls one to sleep. The King James Bible: unbearable, unbearable. The rhythm, and the killing of sense, the killing of sense…. And I don’t like smooth things—I can’t bear smoothness. Dryden is smooth.”
Cynthia Ozick minces no words in describing her pet peeve:
I hate Hemingway. I absolutely despise Hemingway. I can’t tell you passionately enough how much I hate Hemingway. Those stories in In Our Time, cooking at the side of the river—those are housewife stories. They are so domesticated in an outdoor way. I can’t stand the bareness of it. This naked prose…it seems to me so brutal. Grunt-grunt. There’s no richness—no mind—to it. I mean, I think I understand why this was really refreshing when it first appeared, after all that fustian. It was probably such a breath of fresh air. But we’re here now, at the start of the twenty-first century, and so many writers have bought into it. It’s become so pedestrian. When I say I hate Hemingway, I hate him for his influence. What has he done to American writing? He’s simply despoiled it. As opposed to Faulkner.
Writers often talk about finding their voice. It’s an odd use of the common metaphor—a speaking voice is there for us all along and doesn’t require a search party—but it’s undoubtedly accurate. And so while it’s true that some writers seem to be blessed with a style-by-birthright, needing only to refine or develop it, many others have a moment on their road to Damascus when, all of a sudden, the words tumbling out sound right for the first time.
Given youth’s reputation for excess and revolt, one would think that the eureka moment would involve a taming of one’s wilder impulses, an acceptance of convention. But in writing as in painting and music, it’s more often the other way around—a movement from stiff correctness to the taking of liberties.
The shift from early conformity to mature liberation is especially common in people who come of age feeling that they are on the margins. African-American writer John Edgar Wideman said that in his early novels, he tried to “legitimize” the black characters and settings by “infusing echoes of T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Faulkner, English and Continental masters.”
As I grew and learned more about writing, I found, or rediscovered I guess, that what Bessie Smith did when she sang, what Clyde McPhatter did, what John Coltrane did, what Ralph Ellison did, what Richard Wright did, what the anonymous slave composers and the people who spoke in the slave narratives did, what they were doing was drawing from a realm of experience, a common human inheritance…. As a writer I didn’t need to go by way of the European tradition to get to what really counted, the common, shared, universal core. I could take a direct route and get back to that essential mother lode of pain, love, grief, wonder, the basic human emotions that are the stuff of literature. I could get back to that mother lode through my very own mother’s voice.
In a similar way, Saul Bellow had published two “well-made novels” in the 1940s when he sensed something was not right. He later said:
I could not, with such an instrument as I had developed in the first two books, express a variety of things I knew intimately. Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable. A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously, in a form in which frees his mind, his sensibilities. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? With a borrowed sensibility? With the desire to be “correct”? Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman of a contributor to the New Yorker? I soon saw that it was simply not in me to be a mandarin.
The result was The Adventures of Augie March, with its famous first sentence: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” In a later interview, in 1991, Bellow described the novel’s style as “putting my own accents into the language…. I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance. What you find in the best English writing of the twentieth century—in Joyce or e.e. cummings. Street language combined with a high style. I don’t today take rhetorical effects so seriously, but at the time I was driven by a passion to invent.”
Grace Paley—like Bellow, the child of Russian immigrants—took a class with W.H. Auden at the New School in New York when she was still in her teens. Auden was impressed with her and asked to see some of her poems. A couple of weeks later Paley went to see him, and he began by asking about what struck him as some odd terms in her poetry. “He said to me, ‘Do you usually use words like trousers?’ I had never said anything but pants my whole life. ‘And what about this word? Subaltern.’ You know, like a sublieutenant. That was the beginning of the war. ‘Well, once in a while.’” Paley said she didn’t drop her “English-English” mannerisms until she began writing short stories: “Poetry is addressing the world, and fiction is getting the world to talk to you. When I was able to get into somebody else’s voice, when I was able to speak in other people’s voice, I found my own. Until then I did not have a voice that could tell a story.”
Pauline Kael studied philosophy at graduate school, and when she began writing about movies, “I worked to loosen my style—to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college. I wanted the sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice. I began, for example, to interject remarks—interrupting a train of thought, just as we do when we talk, and then picking it up again.” In a later interview, she said that when she started, “I was conscious of the fact that I was writing about a popular art form. I don’t think I would have written in the same way if I were writing about classical music. How can you deal with movies truthfully, in terms of your responses, if you don’t use you instead of one? I mean, I’m not a goddamned Englishman. I don’t say, ‘One likes this movie very much.’”
Margaret Drabble is an Englishwoman, but she underwent a similar process of loosening up in the course of writing her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, which was published in 1964. She says:
I just sat down one day and started off, in a very informal, chatty, first-person voice I really enjoyed. I know why I chose this voice. It was because I’d been at Cambridge studying English literature and I’d been writing essays and studying the grand designs of George Eliot, the Great Tradition, and I thought, I can’t write like that and I don’t want to write like that. I’ll write something very, very small and informal and try and get rid of this judicial tone we were all supposed to adopt. You know, we were never allowed to use the word I or say I think or it seems to me. So I suppose when I started writing in the first person, which I also used for my next two novels, it was a total throwing away of everything I’d been doing for three years at university. And it was a great liberation. I thought, This is fine, this narrator can be as silly as she likes. She can just say whatever she feels.
At the time that I wrote my first novel I had just married my first husband. I was living in Stratford-on-Avon; I didn’t really know anyone there. I was sort of bored. Writing a novel was very much like talking to myself and trying to work things out.
What all these stories have in common is the idea of a true style being born of a certain comfort and ease. That feeling is not available if one is trying too hard. Frank Kermode’s career as a scholar and teacher was delayed six years by his service in World War II. “I became a critic late in life, at twenty-eight,” he says. “I was anxious to make my way. I needed to write a book, and that led to a certain amount of strain in the writing—I pushed too hard at the ideas. When you’re young, you’re writing for your life. You tend to be rather grandiose. Eventually, I learned to relax.”
Early in a career, in order to get published, or hired, it is often important for a writer to master a middle style—to learn to do things the way everyone else is doing them. At that point, he or she can start becoming different. At some institutions and historical moments (say, Time magazine in 1953 or MSNBC.com right now), that is discouraged; in other circumstances, it is embraced. Anna Quindlen went to work as a feature writer for the New York Times in the late 1970s, “a moment,” she says, “when newspapers suddenly permitted some sense of stylistic individuality. And overnight there was a group of us whose unspoken goal was to have the readers recognize us even if the composing room dropped the byline. I think you see that with [Gay] Talese and [Tom] Wolfe, of course, and Francis X. Clines and Maureen Dowd, whose voice is absolutely indelible. Certainly it was something I always tried for.”
Paradoxically, the stronger the conventions and expectations, the more opportunity there is for a personal voice to emerge, and the more distinctly it can be discerned by sharp-eared readers. Not long after its founding in 1925, New Yorker magazine had established a formula for its biographical articles, called Profiles. The building blocks were long paragraphs, each one filled with a series of straightforward, mostly factual declarative sentences that could be deployed for the purposes of humor, irony, drama, poignancy, or merely information. In the 1930s, two young newspapermen, Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, joined the magazine’s staff. The first articles of each were conventional and competent. But within a couple of years, both men began to stretch the boundaries of the New Yorker profile while still honoring the essential values of the form. Mitchell used the lives of the marginal characters and “lowlife” of New York to pose the immortal questions of faith, death and meaning. Liebling insinuated his own hectoring, philosophizing cadences into his articles, so that what started as a profile of Governor Earl Long could detour into a discussion of Liebling’s tastes in and theories about Louisiana cuisine. For 50 years hence, the same process, of initial conformity and eventual innovation in profiles, occurred over and over at the magazine—with Lillian Ross, Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, George Trow, Ian Frazier, Mark Singer, and Susan Orlean.
Helping George Kennan find his formal, almost mannered style were the conventions of the U.S. foreign service, where he worked in his younger days. Kennan told an interviewer:
We were required to give a certain stately and dignified form to many of the things we wrote. Although this was never said by the ambassador overseeing the officer, the dispatches all had to begin with the salutation “The Honorable the Secretary of State.” Then “Sir.” And then the first sentence had to embody the phrase “I have the honor.” So you had to say, “In my dispatch of such and such I had the honor to mention to you So-and-So.” But you always had to put that into the first sentence. It was the way that George Washington and the other Founding Fathers wrote. And when you got to the end of one of these diplomatic dispatches you had to end, “I have the honor to be, sir, your humble and obedient servant.” Well, there was something about the restrictions on the diplomatic writing which I think was good for me. It was a really good restraint, I thought, for young writers. Goethe said that literary mastery expresses itself only in the restrictions it accepts.
In the stories writers tell themselves about their own developments, there are all kinds of tipping points. John Lukacs found a key element of his style through being a teacher. He came to the United States from Hungary in 1947 and found work teaching history in a small Catholic women’s college in Philadelphia. He remained there until his retirement nearly half a century later. He says:
The very fact that I taught undergraduates was an indirect but immense help to my writing. You’re very young, and you think, “How can I fill a fifty-minute class? I have to tell them everything.” Then you realize that is impossible, and you come to the conclusion that you have to describe things simply, economically but not superficially. Suppose I am teaching a course on twentieth-century European history. I have only four lectures on the First World War. I have to choose what’s important. And I learned to approach writing the same way. If I had ended up a graduate professor at a big university, giving seminars on the things that interested me, I would not have ended up the writer that I am today.
Abraham Verghese found his personal style through being, of all things, a student. Born in Ethiopia, Verghese received his medical training in his parents’ native India and took his residency in the United States, all the while writing stories and essays in his spare time. In 1991, at the age of 36, he decided to give writing his best shot and studied for a year at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He says:
To me, finding voice is about confidence. It was great to have these fourteen people [his fellow students] respond to my work. It immediately became clear that what I had been doing—self-referential, clever stuff that impressed my family and impressed me—was not going to work. Typically, when your mother starts to dislike your writing, that’s when you’ve really found your voice. You’ve come to an honesty that’s maybe causing some discomfort to the people around you, as opposed to writing pretty in an entertaining libretto way.
Initially, Verghese concentrated on fiction. But his first book, begun after his year in Iowa, turned out to be My Own Country, an autobiographical account of the patients with AIDS he treated as a doctor in rural Tennessee, and his second, The Tennis Partner, a memoir of his relationship with a troubled colleague. Switching genres proved a challenge:
My fiction is much more wild and exuberant, and I struggled when I first started writing nonfiction. I had to speak as myself. There had to be a sameness and a tameness to my voice. And I had to learn that this is one of the great advantages of nonfiction: when something is true, you automatically have the reader’s interest, because we’re all inherently curious about things that really happened. In fiction you have to work ten times harder to hold the reader’s interest; there’s an exuberance or excess that fiction has to have. If I were to make up a story based on the O.J. Simpson case, think how much effort I would have to expend to make it credible. As fiction, it’s paltry, it’s not even halfway interesting. And yet, because it really happened, look how much time you and I wasted on that miserable story.
As Verghese’s experience suggests, finding a voice can be a matter of finding a genre. Jonathan Raban says:
I spent five years doing nothing except write plays, plays for radio, plays for television, one play for the stage. I greatly liked writing for voices, but then I became more and more interested in my stage directions. I would set the scenery, the description of the room, pages and pages of description all underlined with my old-fashioned manual typewriter, before anyone began to talk. And I thought, It is now time to stop being a playwright.
For Andrei Codrescu, whose voice is absolutely distinctive in print or on the radio, a crucial change was a very simple one: writing in units just a few hundred words shorter. He had been writing a column for the Baltimore Sun for several years when he got a call from Art Silverman, a producer at National Public Radio, asking him to record one of his pieces for broadcast. Codrescu says, “Art said that for the radio, it needed to be a little bit shorter—four hundred words as opposed to seven hundred fifty. That was great, because as a poet I was used to concentrated language. The four hundred words felt more friendly to me—for seven hundred fifty words, I had to put in filler.”
Novelist Richard Ford, who grew up in Mississippi and Arkansas, found that the key was where he hung his hat:
One of the reasons I didn’t want to stay in the South was that I didn’t have much to offer from the standpoint of language. My language, I thought, was just like everybody else’s language in the South…. I wanted to go off someplace where I had to make up my own language…. But now I have a different language that’s almost my own, which is the kind of flat, uninflected language of the Great Plains, which I love.
Sometimes style lies in wait for theme, and vice versa. Here are three accounts of their coming together, the first laborious, the second instantaneous, and the third a kind of logical ineviability. Working on his first book, a collection of interconnected short stories about the difficult boyhood of a young man named Yunior, Junot Díaz struggled to find the right style for Yunior’s narration:
Boys don’t talk about themselves. I wanted a voice that was in your face, blunt, honest—but at the same time hiding a huge silence about himself and all the conflicts. That was the idiom that all the boys I know used.
When I tried to mimic the language he would really use, it didn’t work. You can’t mimic silence. I had to give the impression of that silence underneath. I needed to get the final result, the effect, without necessarily using the exact language. Something can be false but still have “truth effects.” I couldn’t be very pyrotechnic in the language; that would betray my hand too much. This guy would never look into his heart. Sometimes I would generate language that was five hundred times too lush. Yunior would veto it. I wanted to be the storyteller, but Yunior also wanted to be the storyteller. If I just asked him to show up and read his lines, he’d say, “I can’t do this.”*
In 1968, Greil Marcus left graduate school for the life of a freelance rock and roll writer. He says:
I’d been writing for about a year, but I never wrote anything really good till the fall of 1969, when I wrote a piece about Let It Bleed, which I still feel is the best record the Stones ever made. Goodbye, Baby, and Amen, David Bailey’s book about swinging London, had just come out. I was so struck that the entire moment in the culture looked so phony, so old and contrived. I said to myself, Something’s over. Things are going to get rough. I had the sense that we’d just been through something that we’d spend the rest of our lives trying to understand. I wrote a piece for Rolling Stone that had many subjects. There seemed to be a lot at stake. My writing was more clear, more blunt, than ever before. It was the first time I escaped from self-censorship. I had no thought of what people would think. That’s a premise of writing, as far as I’m concerned—you have to cease to exist. It’s irrelevant who you are. The best work I’ve done is when I care what I’m writing about, not about me.
In addition to the usual burdens of a young poet, Billy Collins says, he started out with the wrong influence:
You come to your style by learning what to leave out. At first, you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
When I started, I was under the spell of Wallace Stevens. I was writing intentionally difficult poems. It wasn’t bad for obtuse poetry, but it was totally humorless. I thought that was me the poet. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but that was suited to me, because I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Richard Brautigan and Thom Gunn were important models for me in getting away from the knottier stuff. When I read Gunn’s poem about Elvis Presley, I was shocked—I did not know you could write a poem about Elvis Presley. And Tom Clark’s poems about the Beach Boys and Don Ho. They were hooded, and full of linguistic play and irony. They got me out from Stevens’s influence.
All young poets put on poetry sunglasses. I took off the goggles, and then I could let in humor, personality, all the things I was excluding. The main thing was simplifying my vocabulary. Eventually, I was confident enough to write a simple sentence, and then I began to recognize the sound of my own writing.