The Anxiety of (No) Influence

Confession: I’ve never read Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. Well, that’s not quite true. I’ve just never finished it, despite stopping and starting several times over the years. I’ve decided to give it another try. For you McCarthy fans out there, I know this is slander of the highest order, but at least I’ve read The Road (before seeing the movie) and No Country for Old Men (after seeing the movie). If I sound a little salty on McCarthy it honestly has nothing to do with him; you can blame it all on his influence. I think his work has single-handedly ruined the aesthetics of an entire generation of predominately White, male writers between the ages 25 and 50. I cannot tell you how many workshops I’ve led and events I’ve sat through where I’ve had to read or listen to literary “bros” try their hardest to emulate their hero. Honestly, I think their work suffered as a result, but I do know of a few of these writers who were able to move through McCarthy’s influence and come out better and more original on the other side. What else can we ask of a literary influence but to inspire us to reach higher so that we can truly find our voice? McCarthy’s influence has done that for many writers, but it’s ruined many, many more. Don’t worry, this also happened to McCarthy early in his career. About his debut novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), a reviewer for the The New York Times wrote that McCarthy used “so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half-submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.”

It’s true. Aside from McCarthy’s debut, his early novels - Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree (1979) - were also deeply influenced by Faulkner. They sold poorly and garnered meager attention, especially in comparison to what was to come. In 1992 McCarthy published All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and was adapted into a movie starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz. In 2007 he published The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was also made into a film, as was No Country for Old Men, which he’d published two years earlier.

So what happened? Well, for one thing, McCarthy stopped trying to emulate William Faulkner in his early fiction set in Appalachia and worked to forge his own style while writing about the southwest. His first published novel set in the southwest was 1985’s Blood Meridian; most serious readers and critics believe it to be his masterpiece. But how can this be so? He was still relatively unknown when he won the National Book Award in 1992, so how could he have already published his masterpiece seven years earlier?

There’s no accounting for taste, especially literary taste, and there’s no accounting for influence, especially literary influence. Still, one must wonder if it was the notiriety that comes with awards that guaranteed McCarthy’s reach into the minds of every male writer in every creative writing classroom across the country, or was it the films? Blood Meridian, his supposed masterpiece, had not been enough to gain him the notice he would later receive, but now his fans site that novel and his earlier books, especially Suttree, as being deeply influential on their own writing and of much higher literary quality than the books he’s actually known for.

Before recently returning to Blood Meridian I read a recently published biography titled To Anyone Who Ever Asks by Howard Fishman about an obscure singer/songwriter named Connie Converse. A New Hampshire native born in 1924, Converse lived in New York City from 1945 to 1960, where she worked two longterm jobs, one for an international political journal and another for a printing company. In late 1950 she moved to the West Village, bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and began singing and recording songs she wrote with her guitar. She wasn’t writing protest songs like her contemporaries Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and like other musicians of the time she wasn’t performing folk songs someone else had written. She was writing poetic, introspective songs, songs of love and travel, abandonment and isolation. In short, she was writing the kinds of songs that Bob Dylan would eventually perform a decade later. Take the lyrics below as a stunning yet consistent example of the literary quality and resonance of her writing all the way back in 1952, when the biggest hit of the year was Leroy Anderson’s “Blue Tango.” Here’s a link to a rough cut of the song if you want to listen to Converse perform the song while you read the lyrics.

How sad, how lovely
How short, how sweet
To see that sunset at the end of the street
And the day gathered in to a single light
And the shadows rising
From the brim of the night

Too few, too few are the days that will hold your face
Your face in a blaze of gold
How sad, how lovely
How short, how sweet
To see that sunset at the end of the street
And the lights going on in the shops and the bars
And the lovers looking for the first little stars

Like life, like your smile, like the fall of a leaf
How sad, how lovely, how brief

These might be the most deeply affecting lyrics I’ve ever read for one of the most deeply affecting songs I’ve ever heard.

Converse mostly played small shows in people’s homes, which is where her songs were recorded. Despite her efforts and obvious talent, she was never offered a record deal. Eventually she took up the piano and wrote a now-lost opera and a song cycle about the mythological Cassandra. She was a prolific musician and songwriter while holding down full-time employment. She was an incredible artist and cartoonist as well, and she also tried her hand at writing novels, none of which survive.

As to her writing, consider this excerpt from a journal she kept while traveling west across the country with two friends in 1949.

Night ride across Michigan, a deer dashing in front of the car … moon nearly full … pulling into Luddington at dawn and having breakfast at an all-night cafe with a jukebox going full blast, as if it were the shank of the evening … the car ferry: off in a blaze of sunlight across Lake Michigan; then fog closing in, thicker and thicker … the terrible fog horn, the gentle replies of others … white breakwater tower coming out of the fog like a ghost … we, having found our harbor blind-folded.

Can you even believe how beautiful this writing is, words that were tossed off in her journal and never intended to be seen? We’ve grown accustomed to this kind of propulsive, road-hot writing after Jack Kerouac published On the Road about his own cross-country adventures with friends. I would argue that book has had an even greater effect on predominately White, male writers than McCarthy’s work has. But here’s the thing: Converse isn’t using Kerouac as a model, not for her cross-country trek or in her style that recorded it. On the Road wouldn’t be published until eight years later in 1957, yet, here Converse was, leading the way with both her journey and her style. Given this journal entry, can you even imagine how beautiful her novels must have been? We’ll never know.

Perhaps the disappointments of never getting a record deal or a publishing contract are what drove Converse to leave New York City in January of 1961, which, ironically, was the same month Bob Dylan arrived in the city and changed American music forever. Converse ended up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her younger brother lived, and she worked as an editor for a journal at the University of Michigan. In 1974, a week after her 50th birthday and after struggles with alcohol and a series of what she described as nervous breakdowns, she wrote letters to friends and family thanking them for their support and informing them that she was returning to New York City to start anew. She disappeared and was never seen or heard from again.

How does this happen? How does any of this happen? How does Cormac McCarthy write his most influential novel before anyone knows who he is? How does Connie Converse go completely unknown while somehow clearly affecting the zeitgeist enough to influence writers and musicians like Kerouac and Dylan? How is she only just now getting the literary and cultural attention she’s long deserved? The mystery of her disappearance is rivaled only by the mystery of how her art isn’t better known. In terms of simply making art, does any of this matter?

These questions are impossible to answer, but I think they are worth asking whenever we take up our pens or keyboards to put down words of our own. Which influential writers have come before us, and which completely unknown writers have influenced us even more?

Exercise

This exercise is a two-parter. First, find a brief excerpt, perhaps a page of prose or a poem, from a writer whose work has great influenced you. Copy it out, either typing it or handwriting it. Donald Ray Pollock (mentioned below) did this with Hemingway and O’Connor while teaching himself to write short stories during his lunch breaks at a paper mill in Ohio. Now, after you’ve copied it, rewrite it using your own words and your own ideas, but try to remain as close to the rhythm and style of the original as possible. What have you learned? What came easily? What was hard?

Now, part two: Research the life of the writer whose work you just emulated and discover who their greatest influence was. Find an example of this writer’s work and hold it up alongside the work of the writer you admire. What similarities can you find? What differences? Now, compare your own original work to your favorite writer’s greatest influence. Have you been influenced by this person without realizing it? Can you trace the lines of descent even further back?

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THE AUGUST SELECTION OF THE OPEN CANON BOOK CLUB

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

A husband, a father, a son, a business owner...And the best getaway driver east of the Mississippi.

Beauregard “Bug” Montage is an honest mechanic, a loving husband, and a hard-working dad. Bug knows there’s no future in the man he used to be: known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best wheelman on the East Coast.

He thought he'd left all that behind him, but as his carefully built new life begins to crumble, he finds himself drawn inexorably back into a world of blood and bullets. When a smooth-talking former associate comes calling with a can't-miss jewelry store heist, Bug feels he has no choice but to get back in the driver's seat. And Bug is at his best where the scent of gasoline mixes with the smell of fear.

Haunted by the ghost of who he used to be and the father who disappeared when he needed him most, Bug must find a way to navigate this blacktop wasteland...or die trying.

Like Ocean’s Eleven meets Drive, with a Southern noir twist, S. A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland is a searing, operatic story of a man pushed to his limits by poverty, race, and his own former life of crime.

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IF YOU LIKED Blacktop Wasteland YOU MIGHT LIKE…

• The Gospel Singer by Harry Crews

  Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie Hall. But for all his fame, he is a man in mortal torment that drives him back to his obscure and wretched hometown of Enigma, Georgia. But by the time his Cadillac pulls into Enigma, he discovers an old friend is being held at tenuous bay from a lynch mob. As Harry Crews’s first novel unfolds, the Gospel Singer is forced to give way to his torment, and in doing so he reveals to the believers who have gathered at his feet just how little he is God’s man, and how much he has contributed to the corruption of each of them.

• A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines

  A powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man–set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s. The Village Voice called A Gathering of Old Men “the best-written novel on Southern race relations in over a decade.”

• The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock

  It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family’s entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it?

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