A while back, I did a post about the books I found most useful for writing the essays that have always been the main focus here on OIN. Well, considering that the essays have jumped ship, so to speak, it seems like an okay time to write the companion piece to Wide Spindrift Gaze Towards Paradise and talk about the writing and writers who have most influenced me.
I set myself a few groundrules, which is that I couldn't list any writer I didn't currently own a work by. This isn't really all that onerous a burden... I mean, if someone influences you, you probably own something she or he wrote. In addition, I'm going to try and pick out one work and discuss it, even though in many cases this is the height of absurdity. How am I going to pick just one of the many works a particular author may have written that influenced me? Through sheer arbitrary choice. This way, even if I'm not giving you the full picture of the artist in question, I'm at least pointing you in the right direction as best I can. And finally, no distinctions between fiction and poetry, because both have contributed to me.
So, here we go with my woefully incomplete listing of authors whose work is somehow incorporated into the mass of influences that make me up.
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.
The way this book moves from Casaubon and his friends inventing the Templar conspiracy and into a slowly dawing certainty that they didn't invent anything at all has always stayed with me. One of the masters, and Foucault's Pendulum is the book of his that I've always been sure to have a copy of at all times.
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.
I don't know why I choose this book over The Stress of Her Regard or Last Call, both of which are excellent books and both of which I devoured avidly, but ultimately this book is my favorite by Powers, with the nice temporal paradox working to fill out the story and be no paradox at all, just new information. And it has mad wizards with spring boots and body-snatchers who grow hair all over their stolen forms and a deranged clone of a famous literary figure bent on an assassination mission. What 's not to love?
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
These poems officially rocked my socks off when I was exposed to them in college, especially The Waking, My Papa's Waltz and In a Dark Time. Roethke's ability to come up with just the right words to convey whatever it is he's musing about is uncanny and as brilliant as a freshly cut gemstone.
Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock.
This is one of those authors who made me want to rip my hair out to pick just one work by him. Mother London and The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius - stories of the comic apocalypse and The Chronicles of Corum all own places of respect and admiration on my bookshelf. Hell, I like those books better than this one. But this one was my first exposure to Moorcock and his albino swordsman Elric, one facet of the Eternal Champion (and several other facets appear in this book as well) and so it will always be the one I remember most. Moorcock's Young Kingdoms tales carry the spirit of the fantastic into strange and often unsettling places, and I admire that most deeply about them.
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka
To quote an old review of this book I wrote: Franz held out no hopeful messages in his work, but was more concerned with simply writing as effectively as he could...one critic compared his writing to the act of prayer. Others argue that it is suffused with shame. I see it as neither, nor as a warning, exactly: Kafka saw the spectrum of humanity with a particular ability, and tuned his vision to those colors we are often ashamed of and refuse to admit. He, however, had no such compunctions. In being so willing to face all the bleak sections of our communal landscape, he helped contrast it. Light without contrasts is simply a white glare, after all. I, for one, am grateful that he took the time to shade it for me. I've never been able to look at the world the way I did before I read Kafka.
The Adversary by Julian May
A lot of people don't like Julian May, seeing her as a low-rent ripoff of Anne McCaffery. I won't pretend to think she's fine literature, but for her portrayal of time travel, psionic powers, aliens who are patterened after celtic myths, and Marc Remillard (the aforementioned Adversary of the title) I can honestly say I was inspired and impressed. Remillard's evil, yes, but human, and his redemption makes sense for the sort of character he has been and is.
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
Okay, let's not waste time or mince words. Yes, his prose style was at best adequate and at times as hideous and abhorrent as the indescribable monstrosities he described with it, and yes, he was a weird guy who married briefly and held strange self-loathing beliefs that he externalized at first as racism before getting over it. You've read the S.T. Joshi books, you know the score. But I met Lovecraft at the Providence Public Library, in a collection named after him, and it was this book and his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature that first showed me that yes, you could be a writer even if what you wanted to write wasn't the dull, plodding subject matter of my grandmother's classics library. (Some of those books I would later come back to embrace.) Howard Phillips Lovecraft made my world an unusual place, and this was the book I first met him in.
Kull by Robert E. Howard
Howard's work contains a lot of influential works as far as I'm concerned, his story Pigeons from Hell, the Conan and Solomon Kane stories... but it's Kull that has fascinated me since I discovered him on those same library trips all those years ago. An existentialist barbarian! Seriously, read the stories in this collection (which I hope gets the same spiffy treatment that the Conan tales did by Del Rey) and you'll see a King for whom rulership breeds apathy and distaste, and for whom the entire universe may well be a flicker of the eye. I love the discordant idea wherever I find it, and the idea of a huge, brutal axe-weilding barbarian who becomes King and then turns to brooding over the passage of time and whether there's any meaning to life just fascinated me as a kid.
Armor by John Steakley
See, I like battlesuits and big alien bugs and all that, so why don't I love Starship Troopers? It was one of the foundations of the genre, and no mistake. However, I managed to read Steakley's Armor first, and while the battlesuits and alien insects aren't anything new, the emotional core of the story, about a man who wants to die and yet can't turn off his survival instinct, and the hideous catch-22 he finds himself in simply kicked me in the head and demanded I pay attention. It's a quirk of time that I read it first, and it's the one that influenced me.
Collected Poems 1909-1962 of W.B. Yeats
I don't really know what's to say about Yeats... poet, playwright, mythologizer, member of the Order of the Golden Dawn... or about his poems, works like Leda and the Swan or The Second Coming. Either you've read Yeats and felt humbled or you haven't and that opportunity still lies open before you, but either way, I named this entry what I did for a reason. No other writer seemed to understand all the variations on being human that Yeats did.
Pavane by Keith Roberts
Man, did I have a hard time finding a copy of this book again! I'd read it in the library years ago, remembered it as being intense and impressive and broken up into smaller almost-novellas and then I could not find a copy again to save my life! Luckily a book exchange (well, a kind soul giving me the book, really) led me back to owning a copy, and I'm glad it did. Pavane's alternative to history is unique in that it feels fully realized... if you didn't know that this isn't what happened, you might well mistake it for a exquisitely well done historical novel.
Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany
Okay, I'd try and tell you about Bellona, and the Kid, and the moon, and... but really, Dhalgren is almost inexplicably good and anything I said about it would be unfair to it. So let me tell you a story. I was living in Washington DC, following a rather shattering emotional experience, drinking and failing out of grad school, adrift, my whole world unrecognizable to me and hard, angular, full of shapes I didn't understand any longer. While drifting, reeking of hard liquor and that peculiar smell we get when we cease to care about ourselves, I saw a copy of Dhalgren in a bookstore off of Dupont Circle, and I picked it up on a whim. I've read the book several times since then, and I'll read it several more, and I'll never claim I understand it: it was mystery and wonder and it made me realize that writing wasn't just something I liked to do, it was my calling. So that's why I'll always fondly remember Dhalgren.
All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life by Loren Eisley
Loren Eisley was a visionary scientist. In the vast sweeps of deep time that have shaped the process of life on earth he found a quiet magic and used that magic to make words that conveyed something of the majesty, the power, the dignity and the tumult of what Dylan Thomas called the force that through the green fuse drives the flower without sacrificing informative, careful and meticulous understanding of the physical world. There's a scene in this book where Eisley has fallen down and is bleeding, and his first lament is for his poor corpuscles, which are bursting and dying on the ground as his blood pools. An elegiac whisper of a book that I'm never going to be able to forget.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
So many modern writers of 'literary' or 'realistic' fiction have failed to learn the lessons of Richard Yates, especially this book. I remember on first reading it being shocked and amazed by the lacerating insights into the way people behave around one another, the reflexive deceit and even self-deception revealed in the discussion of Frank's changing self, his 'masks' for different people, different occassions. Yates knew that realism is a false idol, and the real goal is to tell an effective, powerful story which found truth in what it said, not merely the veracity of details.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
We don't know who wrote the Travels, except that it was probably not Sir John Mandeville. It's a pretty good bet that whoever it was either never traveled to the lands of the Middle East or Asia that the book describes with their cyclopses, lambs that grow in plants, and other wonders. But that doesn't really matter all that much to me: the Travels serves me well as the book it is, the book that Columbus apparently read and believed, a book of implausible wonders that almost convince on sheer brass.
The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones
Not every book is on here because it showed me what I wanted to do: some are because I just plain like them, and this one (which I did and do til this day like a great deal for its muscular, aggressive prose, even in quiet, weary stories like the one that named the collection) showed me that I could never write what we laughingly call realistic fiction. Jones is a master, make no mistake, and these stories are the stories of a master with a unique voice that stands out from the Carvers and the Hemingways of his tradition. A brilliant and at times haunting book, I know reading it had an impact on my brain like a hammer. I knew this wasn't me.
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
In his long career, Burroughs was almost fiendishly inventive, with alien worlds, hollow earths and lost cities populating his created universe just waiting for stalwart heroes to come and adventure in them. I like just about everything he ever wrote (even books like The Outlaw of Torn which probably deserves more attention than it gets) but before I'd ever heard of Tarzan or Pellucidar I'd read this, a copy of it being among the few things my grandfather Morgan left behind in the attic of the house my mom grew up in. John Carter has thus become the singular Burroughs hero in my mind, and this the first and best of the Barsoom novels.
Dubliners by James Joyce
When I first read The Dead I didn't like it or understand it, an experience I would have again and again while reading Joyce. I keep coming back to him, because I'm stubborn, and because every time I do I learn something... the man's gift was amazing, and the realization in The Dead that someone we thought we knew can have a whole past life we know nothing about, can have loved more than we understood, still blows me away.
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
Holy hell, there are animals that have been surgically altered to be like men in this book. I mean, shit. Animals surgically altered to be like men. If that idea doesn't blow your mind, it's because the book itself has had such an effect on what came after it that it has rendered itself less impressive: we come to it having seen its wake a long way off. My absolute favorite Wells.
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which I own in Borges - A Reader, obviously both by Jose Luis Borges
The idea of a fictional reality overtaking and replacing the one we've come to believe in, with elements of Russell's idea that the past is just memory and we only exist in now, just reaches into my head and crushes my self-importance every time I read it. Borges terrifies me, and sometimes being terrified by a writer is a good thing.
Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman and George Perez
One of two comic books on this list, almost diametrical opposites, Crisis is a big ugly mess of an ungainly, rocket-fuel drinking wendigo, a story where whole universes get chewed up and shit out while the superpeople convulse in four-color mayhem. I love it.
Theogony by Hesiod
Now, I personally like Homer and the Iliad and Odyssey and one of those two will doubtless make it on this list, but Hesiod's work is more interesting to me because it's cosmological: it's about the formation of the world, the rise and fall of the Titans and the coming of the Olympians. Why I find this kind of stuff fascinating I really couldn't tell you, but even as a kid I rooted for Typhon and the giants over the gods and was disappointed for them. This probably says a lot about me that I don't want to think too much about.
The Collected Poems of John Keats
Another writer who so strongly affected me that I wrote an essay about him, this time musing about his possible status as a descendent of elementals fallen from heaven. Keats' work is divided between reality and an ideal world, and the tension of the division has always stayed with me, even years after first reading him. Quite possibly my favorite poet who wrote in english.
Swords against Deviltry by Fritz Leiber
My personal taste is slightly more towards Robert E. Howard, but even so, I sometimes think tht Fritz Leiber may have written the ultimate swords and sorcery tales in the adventures of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Leiber was a genius, of course: everything he wrote is at least good, if not fully great (The Night of the Wolf and Our Lady of Darkness coming to mind as works fully in the great camp) but for me, I keep coming back to these two thieves and the city of Lankhmar. If I ever was to turn my attention towards a swords and sorcery milieu it would be impossible for me to not draw heavily on Leiber's take.
The White People and Other Stories by Arthur Machen
Let it be said now, and no mistaking it: Machen was better than Lovecraft. His writing was more mature, more adept, and clearly provided inspiration for both Lovecraft and Howard. Machen was also an influence on me for references to his real life activities I found in Colin Wilson's The Occult, and so I tracked down and grabbed hold of his work as soon as I could. This collection contains The Angel of Mons, a story that upon publication actually managed to convince people that it had actually happened, as if Machen were a character in a Borges story. I recommend Machen unreservedly and he's definitely had a big affect on my worldview.
The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson
Hey, I have it in one volume. RAW is one of three influential Wilsons who will probably make this list (if Colin and F. Paul don't, it will be because I cant pick a work out of the body of their writings) and this is the first sustained work of his I encountered. If for no other reason than the priaptic section and the way reality keeps changing it's worth your time. I don't know who I would be if I hadn't read it.
Triplanetary by E.E. Smith
"Doc" Smith is the granddaddy of fantastic space epics. Pretty much every cliche in the genre can be traced back here, there's some fairly sexist arguments going on, the science is peculiar to say the least (between the lens itself and inertialess drives) but if you want space battles involving thousands of ships, planets used as weapons, and two-fisted adventure then Smith's work is necessary reading and it all began with Triplanetary, at least for me. And I got a pretty cool essay arguing that Smith himself was actually an Arisian agent on Earth, so I'd be churlish in the extreme to forget him.
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
"Oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again." I didn't want to read this book: it was assigned to me for a Modern American Fiction class in college and I didn't crack the spine until 2 am on the Friday that the final paper was due. Man, was I stupid. I flew through this book. Wolfe's alter-ego and stand in, Eugene Gant, lives a life that exists to be put down on paper, it's an orgy of powerful, evocative descriptions. It's also relentless in its depiction of Gant's life to the degree that you might wonder if he's going to detail his bathroom stops. But I loved it, and I still do.
Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff
Unlike other authors on this list, this is the only book by Matt Ruff I like. The rest are okay, but this one reaches into my chest and squeezes on my heart, and I think it's because of the secondary character named Ragnarok, the son of a racist family who is haunted by what he saw as a child and who has grown up to be a walking, talking mass of barely constrained violence. The main plot is fine, and the language is engaging enough, but it's the tight, slowly uncoiling Ragnarok who really interested and compelled me when I read this.
A Wedding In October by Geoffrey Clark
Okay, I'm biased: Geoff Clark was my writing professor in my undergraduate days. He helped pull me out of my drunken self-loathing and make me interested in writing mostly due to his effortless ability to know seemingly a little bit about everything. Geoff's writing is the best kind of naturalism, it's tough, woody, dense and seems to pulse from time to time with the dangerous energy of life being really lived. I'm inordinately fond of all of his work (especially his collection Schooling the Spirit) and there's no denying that reading it helped convince me of where my own talents were.
The Keep by F. Paul Wilson
Now, I like the Repairman Jack books quite a bit, but I first discovered Wilson in this book, which I was given as a gift by a friend who'd seen the movie and who knew I didn't like movies. I'm glad for it: I'm much happier to have read it than I would have been to see it (I've seen it since and liked it, however): the book is at once deeper and more rich an experience, which of course is apples and oranges, but hell, I like oranges more than apples. Personal preference is all part of making a list of influences. I like this book because it never forgets that Nazis are human beings, that human evil is more varied than we'd like to believe and that even good people can do evil in the name of good. It's really an awfully good adventure story with some interesting thought behind it.
Why not you and I? by Karl Edward Wagner
This collection stunned me when I found it hiding in a bookstall in the back of a farmer's market in Tacoma Park, Maryland. It still does. Neither Brute Nor Human is a dark fable of writers and success that I reread from time to time, Sign of the Salamander is simply the best pulp pastiche I've ever read, and there's a story in here about the hells we make for ourselves that you need to read to understand. Just a simply marvelous book; Wagner died far too soon.
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
I grew up Catholic. I wrestled with the idea of God, with faith and the lack thereof, with miracles and holy books composed and redacted... and then I read Wise Blood. I don't know if, as so many say, the real message of the book is that one can't escape faith, but I know that it was a real and compelling argument that I've had with this book. Somewhere between Hazel Motes, Enoch Emery and Asa Hawks (also, Sabbath) is wisdom, even if I don't know where I stand in all of it yet, and may never.
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
I was stunned when I first read it: I re-read it whenever possible. It is a perfect moment in comic books, one of the best ever, and unlike classic works by Eisner, Kirby, Wood or Barks this one came in and hit me in the brain at the exact right moment to help crystallize everything I thought and felt about the medium in a whole new pattern. This isn't to take away from the other greats of the medium, but for me, there will always be one comic book that made me believe in the inherent potential greatness of the form, and that comic book was Watchmen. "Do it? Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you think I'd explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago."
The Blue Estuaries by Louise Bogan
I admit that I originally discovered Bogan because of her relationship with Roethke, but she's definitely worth reading on her own, with a poetry of elegant loss over a skeletal framework of poignant and beautiful images. "Now that I have your heart by heart, I see"
Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
"Lie close," Laura said,/ Pricking up her golden head:/ We must not look at goblin men,/ We must not buy their fruits:/ Who knows upon what soil they fed/ Their hungry thirsty roots?" Indeed, who does? Christina Rossetti, God, I was in love with you once. Too bad you were dead and maybe a lesbian depending upon who you talk to. Still, you wrote some really great work, and so I thank you for it, even if you did let the passage of time end our relationship before it could begin.
Walking on Glass by Iain Banks
The triple narrative here is almost as difficult to understand as Dhalgren and possibly a little less rewarding, but Banks is already starting to display the freakish talent that would take him far, and the idea of the doomed romance, the exile and the castle coming together has brought me back to the book on a few occassions. I won't say it is one of my favorite books, but sometimes the frustration a book causes you can influence you as well.
This is as good a place to stop as any... several authors, like T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Colin Wilson, Shelly, Algernon Blackwood... aren't here either because I couldn't narrow it down or because I'm damn tired. I may come back and expand on this list later, but for now it sufficies.
