Sunday, March 25, 2007

I have not been influenced by the best people

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. The only good things I read when I was a child were the Greek and Roman myths which I got out of a set of child's encyclopedia called The Book of Knowledge. 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 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; another about a fine figure of a man who in his room removed wooden arms, wooden legs, hair piece, artificial teeth, voice box, etc. etc.; another about the inmates of a lunatic aslylum who take over the establishment and run it to suit themselves. This is an influence I would rather not think about. I went to a progressive high school where one did not read if one did not wish to; I did not wish to (except the Humerous Tales etc.) In college I read works of social-science, so-called. The only thing that kept me from being a social-scientist was the grace of God and the fact that I couldn't remember the stuff but a few days after reading it.

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. I read all the Catholic novelists, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, Greene, Waugh; I read all the nuts like Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson and Va. Woolf (unfair to the dear lady of course); I read the best Southern writers like Faulkner and the Tates, K.A. Porter, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor; read the Russians, not Tolstoy so much but Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. I became a great admirer of Conrad and have read almost all his fiction. I have totally skipped such people as Dreiser, Anderson (except for a few stories) and Thomas Wolfe. I have learned something from Hawthorne, Flaubert, Balzac and something from Kafka, thought I have never been able to finish one of his novels. 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.

--Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being

She would've been 82 today.

5 comments:

  1. Such an interesting blogpiece, Susan.
    I have always been a reader, always, but not a true literature addict. My addiction to literature I can trace to a single event, and your blog makes me recall it.
    I was in college... and finsished my final exams quite a bit prior to my flight back home.
    Mmmmm.... some unaccounted for time!
    Is there anything better?
    Well, I walked past a Coles bookstore in Peterborough, and there was a copy of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles on sale!
    I have never been the same since.
    I remember reading that book, in my dorm-room bed with more interest than ANYTHING I had studied for, in the weeks previous!
    I've never been the same since, and Hardy remains one of my favorite authors.

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  2. I was so excited about the section on her reading influences. Started to include it in my post, then decided to save it 'til tomorrow. Well, now I can just link it 'cause this is exactly what I was going to post!

    I'd never heard of The Humorous Tales of E.A. Poe! But when she described them, I thought: hmmm, I can surely see the influence of odd!

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  3. How far are you, JenClair? I didn't start reading it until Sunday afternoon, and then I couldn't stop. I have you to thank for getting me interested in this one. I need to slow down and pace myself.

    (And don't you love her misspellings? Humerous, Tennysee, etc.)

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  4. And Cip, how cool that you know exactly when and what turned you onto literature. I've always loved to read, I started to read better stuff in ninth grade as well as to search for it on my own (I'd never been required to read a book for school until ninth grade).

    And per the O'Connor quote, I love that she grew up with The Book of Knowledge because I did, too. It was my first exposure to Alice in Wonderland.

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  5. That was a great quote -- she's really an amazing person.

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