'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.