'I Don’t Know Where I’d Be Without Them'

“What does a writer need to know? In one word, predecessors.”

I don’t know how people who don’t read can write. There’s no such thing as spontaneous generation. Words spawn words. Literature spawns literature, and it’s not just a matter of having models. Writing is a private itch having less to do with self-expression than with the human compulsion to absorb, imitate and best other humans. In a 1953 interview with the BBC, when asked if he was conveying a “message” in his work, Evelyn Waugh replied: “No, I wish to make a pleasant object, I think any work of art is something exterior to oneself, it is the making of something, whether it’s a bed table or a book.”

   

“I don’t know why it is that things become more precious with the awareness that someone else has looked at them, thought about them, written about them. But so I find it to be. There is less originality than we think.”

Originality is a seductively destructive myth. Setting out to be original seems like a prescription for unreadability. Charles Olson and William Burroughs wished to be original and ended up merely incoherent, shallow and tedious.

“It’s not the command of knowledge that matters finally, but the company. It’s the predecessors. As a writer I don’t know where I’d be without them.”

[The quoted passages are taken from the title essay in Amy Clampitt’s Predecessors, Et Cetera (University of Michigan Press, 1991).]