'A Reader Who Is Moved to Emulation'

“My first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired. In a symposium at Smith College, Saul Bellow said something that describes it to perfection. He said, ‘A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.’” 

I’ve learned that not every writer is a reader. That seems remarkable, though nothing in the human realm should still surprise me. Writing starts as blunt self-expression. As a little kid I wrote about things I liked -- the animals and plants in the fields and woods behind our house. I never had a strong impulse to be a complainer or junior-grade satirist. A fellow reporter once hacked the computer of an editor, now dead, a crude bully and deeply unpleasant man, and found a document titled something like “Things I Hate.” What followed was a list of grievances, mundane things like traffic and yogurt, that he might address in a column.

 

That leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: why write? At its most primal, the urge recalls the kid who carves his name into his desktop or spray paints it on the wall. It’s a declaration of existence. No one is born with the wish to write novels or poems (or blogs). That comes later, when we learn our impulse to write can be channeled into existing forms. At the top, William Maxwell is speaking in his 1982 interview with the Paris Review. For my money, Maxwell is on the short list of the finest American novelists.

 

“What I wrote when I was very young had some of the characteristic qualities of every writer I had any feeling for. It takes a while before that admiration sinks back and becomes unconscious. The writers stay with you for the rest of your life. But at least they don’t intrude and become visible to the reader.”

 

By the time I was writing as a teenager, I was reading and emulating (sometimes almost plagiarizing) Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Eric Hoffer, Vladimir Nabokov. I was copying but at least I was copying the best, except for a brief sojourn with Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel. In the interview, Maxwell goes on to recall a man he spoke with who knew Willa Cather:

 

“’I said, ‘Whatever made her a writer, do you suppose?’ and he said, ‘Why, what makes anyone a writer—deprivation, of course.’ And then he begged my pardon. But I do think its deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.”

 

Maxwell lost his mother in the 1918 influenza epidemic when he was ten years old. Shadows of this event cast shadows on many of his books. I experienced no comparable trauma as a child but perhaps deprivation is a subtler thing than we imagine.

'A Dark Vanessa With Crimson Band'

The first stanza of C.H. Sisson’s “The Red Admiral” (Exactions, 1980): 

“The wings tremble, it is the red admiral

Ecstatically against the garden wall;

September is his enjoyment, but he does not know it,

Name it, or refer to it at all.”

 

When I was collecting butterflies as a boy, the Red Admiral was my favorite after the mourning cloak. The beauty of each is less gaudy, more complex than many other species. I always thought the orangish-red pattern on the wings resembled the outline of a gaping human mouth or a partially erased circle. The species was described by Linnaeus in 1758 and is known to lepidopterists as Vanessa atalanta. It is widely distributed among the world’s temperate zones. Sisson, no scientist, is right. Butterflies are often most active in late summer – a sort of lepidopteran last hurrah -- but I have seen no red admirals in our garden this year, only monarchs and various fritillaries and swallowtails.

 

In his marvelous The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband, 2025), Nigel Andrew describes the surprising origin of the butterfly’s Latin name:

 

“Vanessa is a name that sounds as if it has been around for ever – the kind of name that might be found in Latin love poetry – but it was in fact invented by the poet and satirist Jonathan Swift as a pet name for Esther Vanhomrigh, the unfortunate young woman, twenty-two years his junior, who was the object of his obsessive love for seventeen years, until he moved on to another Esther (Esther Johnson, nicknamed Stella).”

 

Swift arrived at “Vanessa” by conflating the “Van” of “Vanhomrigh” with “Esse,” a pet form of Esther. Soon after Swift published his poem "Cadenus and Vanesa" (written 1713; published 1726), the Danish naturalist Fabricius named the butterfly’s genus Vanessa. Nige tells us “Atalanta” was a figure in Greek mythology, “a formidable virgin huntress and athlete who was notably reluctant to marry." Handel titled his 1736 pastoral opera Atalanta.

 

Nabokov took to calling the butterfly Red Admirable “(Admiral, in vulgar parlance).” No other species shows up so often in the lepidopterist/novelist’s work. In his novel Pale Fire, in the poem that gives the novel its name, the poet John Shade, likens his wife, Sybil, to the butterfly:

 

“Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,

My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest

My Admirable butterfly!”

 

In the poem’s final lines, Shade is looking for his wife moments before his death:

 

“A dark Vanessa with crimson band

Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand

And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.

And through the flowing shade and ebbing light

A man, unheedful of the butterfly -

Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by

Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.” 

 

Nige notes that Nabokov believed “Admiral” was a corruption of “Admirable,” but the opposite is likely true: “‘Admiral’ was the earliest recorded name,” he writes, “‘Admirable’ a later version that gained little currency except with those who, reasonably enough, liked the sound of it.” I never encountered “Admirable” until reading Nabokov.

 

Here is the final stanza of Sisson’s poem:

 

“Its fingers lighter than spiders, the red admiral

Considers, as I do, with little movement;

With little of anything that is meant:

But let the meaning go, movement is all.”

'What I Wanted to Get Into My Writing'

Clive James in his essay on Louis Armstrong in Cultural Amnesia (2007): 

“[F]or the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured, disconsolate tread of the blue reverie.”

 

Genuine influence is difficult to gauge in any writer, and probably in the other arts. Copying, a watered-down form of plagiarism, is easy to see. If you read Cormac McCarthy, you’re reading refried Faulkner. That’s not a crime but it’s also not interesting. So, what can any writer learn from music and musicians? James is right to concentrate on rhythm, the way a sentence moves without being too obvious about it. You take the material at hand (your subject, what you want to say) and align it with the rhythm in your head. This is subtle and covert and most readers will never notice – precisely the reaction you want. If I were to say that Lester Young influenced the way I write – his soulful evanescence coupled with unwavering forward motion -- you would rightly have no idea what I was talking about.

 

The Beats sometimes claimed to adopt jazz rhythms in their poems and prose. I’ve read anthologies of “jazz poetry” which include not a single readable poem. Jazz became another hipster excuse for laziness and self-indulgence.

 

Today is the centenary of the birth of John Coltrane – hard to believe, considering he died at age thirty-nine (as did Flannery O’Connor and Martin Luther King Jr.). Coltrane was a brilliant player who attracts acolytes (often for extra-musical reasons) and vehement detractors. There’s a Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco, and I once discovered a similar place of worship in Portland, Oregon. Thirty years ago, in a break between sets, I listened to a trumpet player ranting about Coltrane, accusing him of single-handedly ruining jazz, whatever that means.

 

In a literary context, the most prominent Coltrane critic is Phillip Larkin. In the first column he wrote as the jazz writer for the Daily Telegraph, in 1961, the poet describes Coltrane’s sound on tenor or soprano saxophone as “a thin, keening noise, sometimes sour as an oboe, at times expiring in an upper-register squeak, possessed continually by an almost Scandinavian unloveliness.” Admit it, Coltrane lovers (among whom I sometimes number myself): that’s funny and at least occasionally true. The vast body of Coltrane’s recordings must be listened to with an honest, discerning, commonsensical ear.

 

Clive James devoted an essay, “On Larkin’s Wit,” to the poet’s jazz writing, much of it regarding his evolving critical measure of Coltrane’s music. After quoting a passage written following Coltrane’s death in 1967, James writes: “It should be remembered, if this sounds like a grave being danced on, that Larkin’s was virtually the sole dissenting critical voice. Coltrane died in triumph and Larkin had every right to think at the time that to express any doubts about the stature of the deceased genius was to whistle against the wind.” 

 

The recording I listen to most often is the collection of ballads, Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane, recorded in 1963. On it, Hartman sings my favorite version of Billy Strayhorn’s notoriously difficult “Lush Life.” The album is the only recording we have of Coltrane accompanying a singer, and it remains endlessly listenable.

 

[Larkin’s jazz columns, which often address Coltrane, are collected in All What Jazz (1970; rev. 1985). James' “On Larkin’s Wit” is collected in Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin (Picador, 2019).]

'The Sign of Memory and the Sign of Ecstasy'

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023): 

“[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experience that might be called ‘pre-reading,’ when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us receptive in advance to an author we have not yet encountered.”

 

Brombert’s example in his own reading life is Baudelaire. As a boy growing up in Paris, attending the lycée, he walked the city streets as an unknowing flâneur, predisposing himself to loving the great poet long before embracing the author of Les Fleur du Mal. I understand the process but in my case it was less linear and immediate, more halting and delayed. I shed various bookish enthusiasms along the way before settling on the “receptivity” to the writers who possesses me today.

 

With the passing of adolescence I adopted some of the American realists, of varying talents and readability – Dreiser, Sinclair, Dos Passos, Farrell, Anderson, even Steinbeck. That didn’t last long. Next came Modernism – Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, Proust – some of whom I still admire and read. After that, the evolution of taste became more diffuse. Post-modernists and various non-aligned figures made their appearances, but my loves and distastes became, after many decades, more settled and defensible – and eclectic, the product of a life spent reading widely.

 

I’m not a literary determinist but I know my mind by this time in my life. My current inner library is not made of bronze and discards are still possible, as are new books and writers, but I’m pleased by what is important to me.

 

So, why do I read what I read? I have no ironclad theories. The unflattering answer is habit. Pure momentum. Without the books I love I don’t know what I would do with my time not devoted to family, work and their corollaries like grocery shopping and laundry. I love movies but for me they amount to a poor substitute for books. They don’t deliver what I demand of serious reading. I’m willing to settle for less with movies.  A good action flick easily keeps me occupied for ninety minutes. I expect more of books. In his essay “Young Poets, Please Read Everything” (A Defense of Ardor, trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2004), the late Adam Zagajewski, a formidably well-read poet, writes:

 

“[O]ur reading takes place chiefly beneath two signs: the sign of memory and the sign of ecstasy. We read for memory (for knowledge, education) because we are curious about what our many precursors produced before our own minds were opened. This is what we call tradition--or history.

 

“We also read for ecstasy. Why? Just because. Because books contain not only wisdom and well-ordered information but also a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanist drunkenness. This is especially true of (some) poetry.”

'The Greatest Remedy'

Kafka somewhere says that impatience is a form of laziness. I would add that it’s also a form of egotism, a presumption that our clocks ought to govern the world. We’re likely born impatient, ever awaiting the next feeding. When young, we mistake patience for acquiescence, a shameful surrender. Only later do we reluctantly accept, for instance, pain as an occasional inevitability. In short, that’s life. Dr. Johnson, who suffered a Merck Manual of physical and emotional disorders, understood. In The Rambler of July 7, 1750 he writes: “The great remedy which heaven has put in our hands is patience, by which, though we cannot lessen the torments of the body, we can in a great measure preserve the peace of the mind, and shall suffer only the natural and genuine force of an evil, without heightening its acrimony, or prolonging its effects.” 

Much consolation in those words. Kay Ryan at the conclusion of her poem “Patience” (Say Uncle, 2000), makes a similar point:

 

“Patience is

wider than one

once envisioned,

with ribbons

of rivers

and distant

ranges and

tasks undertaken

and finished

with modest

relish by

natives in their

native dress.

Who would

have guessed

it possible

that waiting

is sustainable—

a place with

its own harvests.

Or that in

time's fullness

the diamonds

of patience

couldn't be

distinguished

from the genuine

in brilliance

or hardness.”

 

Patience doesn’t make the pain go away, but with time and practice it can’t “be / distinguished/ from the genuine.” It’s also cheaper and less likely to result in addiction. Another man who knew sickness and pain throughout his life was Montaigne who, in his essay “Children and Fathers,” recalled that Pericles wore amulets to assuage his illness. Montaigne calls them “vain things” and continues:

 

“I do not say that I may not be carried away someday by that ridiculous notion of committing my life and my health to the mercy and government of the doctors. I may fall into such a madness; I cannot answer for my future firmness. But then, too, if someone inquires of me how I am, I can say to him, like Pericles, ‘You may judge by this,’ showing my hand filled with six drams of opiate. It will be a very evident sign of a violent sickness. My judgment will be extraordinarily unhinged. If impatience and fear win this victory over me, people may infer from it a very fierce fever in my soul.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'Do These Things Go Out With Life?'

I’m reading another book by C.E. Montague, a collection of travel essays, The Right Place: A Book of Pleasures (Chatto & Windus, 1924). Montague gets a little rhapsodic on occasion and requires a periodic calming down, but the man survived the Great War and would die in 1928 at age sixty-one so I’m happy to make allowances. Montague begins his “Overture” by entering through the back door: 

“You may wonder how it will feel, to find you are old, and able to travel no more. Perhaps to sit out, with your legs up, in an invalid chair on a lawn when the warm weather comes, and to finger a book of time-tables for trains, and to think how at this hour the day express from Paris is probably nearing Mulhouse and the evening freshness of air that has blown across snow is coming in at the windows; soon the train will be slowing to clank into the station at Bale just when the first lamps are lit in the town and look gay in the twilight.”

 

Yes, I know the feeling, with a different emphasis and different geography. The essay that especially interests me, for personal reasons, is “‘Up to the Alps.” Reading it took me back to my sole encounter with the Alps, in the summer of 1973, when I spent time living in Chambéry (birthplace of Joseph de Maistre), in Savoy in the French Alps. There I bought a Penguin paperback of Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories and dated it “7-24-73.” From the same bookstore I bought the Signet edition of King Lear, which I’ve lost.

 

Both I carried in a manila-colored filet with a ham sandwich and a bottle of vin ordinaire while walking up le Nivolet, topped with the famous Croix du Nivolet. I was self-consciously imitating Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux more than six hundred years earlier and one hundred fifty miles to the southwest. The wine and sun got the better of me and I wanted to sit in the shade. On the side of the road was a small structure that resembled a bus stop made of stone. I sat, cooled off and enjoyed the view. Only later did I learn my bus stop was part of a Carolingian crypt, built, as I recall, in the ninth century. Soon I made it to the summit.

 

One of the pleasures of age is enjoying the memories we have accumulated over a lifetime. I returned to France in 1999 but not to the Alps, and don’t expect to see them again. Montague stokes my pleasure with his epigraph, taken from Charles Lamb’s essay “New Year’s Eve”:

“Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”

'Do Read a Lot of Novels'

For the first time, my youngest son, working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, recommended a book for me to read. It was a novel written by an American and published about a decade ago. I read little contemporary fiction but the book’s setting interested me and I felt that I owed my son an honest effort. 

I petered out after seventy pages. I felt guilty about it but the novel was long and my tolerance was short. It’s not a bad book. In fact the novelist is gifted. He writes well and obviously has done his homework. But I stopped caring about his people and their fate. The failure, I suspect, is mine, which is why I’m not identifying the novel or its author. I apologized to my son and asked him not to stop recommending the books he liked.

 

I turned nostalgic and remembered how, when young, I was a fiction-reading machine. When I discovered a writer I liked, I tended to exhaust his back catalogue. Melville comes to mind, and Nabokov. From that experience I learned that certain novels stuck with me and some were forgotten. This is not a universal critical statement but a personal expression of what is lastingly important to one reader. I might mention Death Comes for the Archbishop,  Nostromo, Zeno’s Conscience, Daniel Deronda, The Golden Bowl, Lolita, Parade’s End, The Assistant, Time Will Darken It, War and Peace, The Leopard, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Proust’s masterwork, among many others – all novels I have read at least twice and often many times. 

 

In his essay “Quixotism” (The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, 2013), Simon Leys recalls a philosopher he knew when young. Leys asked him to assemble “a list of basic readings.” Leys says he treasured this document and then lost it after many years. He has forgotten most of the books on the list but adds:

 

“What I still remember is the postscript the great philosopher had inscribed at the bottom of the page—I remember it vividly because, at the time, I did not understand it and it puzzled me. The postscript said (underlined), ‘Most important of all, don’t forget: do read a lot of novels.”

 

Leys says that as an “immature student,” this shocked him. “Somehow it did not sound serious enough,” he writes. “For, naively, we tend to confuse what is serious with what is deep.” He continues: “It took me a long time to appreciate the full wisdom of my philosopher’s advice. Now I frequently encounter echoes of it.”

 

Among those echoes for me is something Joseph Epstein writes in The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books, 2023):

 

“The knowledge provided by the best novels is knowledge that cannot be enumerated nor subjected to strict testing. Wider, less confined, deeper, its subject is human existence itself, in all its dense variousness and often humbling confusion.”