Influences

I had a copy of a wonderful cartoon by Sidney Harris, of Scientific American fame, titled "Influences." It followed me from office wall to office wall for 20 years, and showed it: The corners had layers of discolored tape and several push pin holes. Reconstructing it from memory, it's laid out in classic "Comedy Rule of Three" structure and runs roughly like this:

Panel 1: A tweedy writer sitting at his typewriter: "Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and of course Eudora Welty."

Panel 2: A woman standing in a classroom: "Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and of course Eudora Welty."

Panel 3: A baseball player leaning on his bat in the on-deck circle: "My first batting coach, Casey Stengel, and of course Eudora Welty."

[Updated 1/14/14: Here's the cartoon by Sid Harris.

Shows how trustworthy my memory is.]

All of which I mention as a tee-up to an article in today's NY Times Book Review, asking several novelists under 40 to identify their influences.

Before reading the article, I made some predictions: First, that I would know none of the writers they interviewed. Second, that I would only dimly recognize the names of about 15-20% of the influences they named. Third, that I would only have actually read (whether I liked or disliked) about 5% of the influences they named.

To be fair, I didn't use my education to become better acquainted with the novel (at least not the novels these people mean), and did so at all only under duress. I didn't read Jane Austen until I was 30, and then--if I'm being honest--probably only because the number of Jane Austen jokes that National Lampoon was making during its salad days left me with the vague feeling I was missing something. Turns out I love Austen, and will today risk a bar fight by insisting that Pride and Prejudice has the best opening sentence in all of English literature. (You can look it up.) But I digress.

Having read the article with a pencil and paper at hand to keep a running tally, I can present the box scores:

Total writers interviewed: 9
Total I'd never heard of: 9
Total influences mentioned: 56
Total I'd never heard of: 32
Total I'd at least heard of: 24 (In hindsight, I set this up wrong, because they mostly mentioned authors, and I was expecting titles. Still, I did better than I'd predicted.)
Of those I recognized, total I'd ever actually read: 11 (Again, faulty construction probably inflated this number: If I'd have had to read the same influential novel the novelist was thinking about, I'd probably have scored much lower, since my fiction reading is known to be eccentric and indiscriminate. But if they mentioned Chekhov and I'd read anything by Chekhov, then that got a mark on my tally. No one mentioned Eudora Welty.)

The influences named tended to fit into one of two groups: There were the Major Influences, who received extended discussion in the article. Of these, I only knew Mark Twain, and the story of the young Russian writer-to-be falling in love with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn--in Soviet-era translation--is wonderful, worth the price of the article on its own. Then there were the Obligatory Other Influences, a string of also-rans mentioned like a dissertation dump-footnote: "Oh, yeah, and of course Greene and Roth and Ovid, yada, yada, yada." I tended to do much better among the OOIs than among the MIs.

What this says to me, alas, is that fiction writing today is people I've never heard of, influenced by people I don't know, writing books I've never read. That doesn't sound good (assuming, of course, that I'm even remotely like the sort of person these authors want reading their writing).

In this age of hyperspecialization and professional self-referentiality, is anybody being influenced by Eudora Welty anymore?