'What I Have Not Read and Been Influenced By'

Readers and critics are much taken with questions of “influence.” What they seem to mean is, “Who copies whom?” or, less politely, “Who read whom in graduate school and took it seriously?” These are lazy questions, often a reviewer’s or critic’s way of showing off his ingenuity and the vastness of his reading. The answers don’t tell us much. Writers certainly work within identifiable traditions, whether they know it or not. Originality, after all, is a myth. But knowing that Faulkner read Joyce reveals nothing of interest about Faulkner. As Guy Davenport writes: 

“A writer’s own sense of influences is spurious and frequently preposterous. When an influence dyes the mainstream it is all too obvious, disastrous, and tyrannical. As a true tributary it adds its lot and disappears into the flow.”

  

Flannery O’Connor took up the question of influence with typical irreverence and counter-snobbery. In an August 28, 1955 letter to a correspondent known as “A.” in The Habit of Being (ed. Sally Fitzgerald, 1979) and later identified as Hazel Elizabeth Hester of Atlanta, O’Connor writes:

 

“Which brings me to the embarrassing subject of what I have not read and been influenced by. I hope nobody ever asks me in public. If so I intend to look dark and mutter, ‘Henry James Henry James’ -- which will be the veriest lie, but no matter. I have not been influenced by the best people.”

 

After reading Greek and Roman myths as a child, O’Connor tells us, “The rest of what I read was Slop with a capital S. The Slop period was followed by the Edgar Allan Poe period which lasted for years and consisted chiefly in a volume called The Humerous [sic] Tales of E. A. Poe. These were mighty humerous -- one about a young man who was too vain to wear his glasses and consequently married his grandmother by accident . . .”

 

I’m always surprised when anyone, even Richard Wilbur or Daniel Hoffman, takes Poe seriously. I think of him as a writer we outgrow by age fourteen. O’Connor continues:

 

“I didn't really start to read until I went to Graduate School and then I began to read and write at the same time. When I went to Iowa I had never heard of Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, much less read them. Then I began to read everything at once, so much so that I didn't have time I suppose to be influenced by any one writer.”

 

Reading a writer closely is not the same as being influenced by him. Does anyone see Balzac or Conrad in O’Connor? She concludes:

 

“I've read almost all of Henry James -- from a sense of High Duty and because when I read James I feel something is happening to me, in slow motion but happening nevertheless. I admire Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. But always the largest thing that looms up is The Humerous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. I am sure he wrote them all while drunk too.”

 

[The Davenport passage can be found in his essay “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981).]