Literature and Me

My parents always had books around. Tons of them. Even before they became booksellers there was always ample reading material around for me. My initial memories are of comic books.

 Here, then, are the literary influences that stuck in my brain throughout my life. Not necessarily the most important influences for me, but the ones that made initial impressions. Starting from as far back as I can remember.

The first comic that I can recall reading was the Jesse Marsh version of JOHN CARTER OF MARS from Dell Comics. I couldn't have been older than four or so when it was given to me. The next comic that I read was FANTASTIC FOUR #4. Again, I must have been five...it was before I entered first grade.

By the time I was eight I had discovered Hugh Lofting's DR. DOOLITTLE books. My mom watched me consume those and she gave me a copy of Bradbury's THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. Scared the shit out of me, and cemented a life-long love of horror. Then I discovered Ernest Thompson Seton and learned a respect for wild animals and later, I developed a love for our fellow creatures.

My dad gave me a copy of Darwin's VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE when I was nine. That began a love of science and learning and initiated a constant thirst for knowledge and kindled what I can only call a hatred for religion.

After that, of course, it was one discovery after another without any direction from my parents. I was too busy finding my own works to read. And of course it never stops. I'm always searching for the next writer to engage my imagination and to inspire my sense of wonder.

 

OCCUPATION: WRITER

Yesterday while going through my shelves of books, I stumbled upon a volume that I had thought was lost to me. Years ago, when I used to give some of my books away to friends I thought would be educated by them, I had recalled passing this one on as a gift. But I must have only considered doing this and thought better of it. I'm so happy that I didn't act on the impulse, but kept it.

One of the most influential points in my world as a writer came when I read OCCUPATION: WRITER by the great author, Robert Graves. Graves is best known today for his novels, I, CLAUDIUS and CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE, MESSILINA, and his memoir GOODBYE TO ALL THAT. I had read a number of his novels and was casting around for more of his work. In a used bookshop in Roanoke VA I stumbled upon an old paperback copy of OCCUPATION: WRITER.

My copy of OCCUPATION: WRITER. Pure literary gold.

This book is a collection of various pieces of his shorter works. Short stories, essays, articles, and plays. It was Graves' intention to showcase the fact that he was a professional writer and to indicate the breadth and reach of his abilities in various forms. I was attracted, of course, to the short stories. Two of the stories within this book hooked me like nothing I had ever read. From that moment on I looked at the creation of a short story in a different light and I don't recall ever allowing the influence of those two tales to fade away.

The stories were probably published as mainstream fiction in the 1920s when they first found the light of print, but they are both very definitely horror yarns of the first order. When I read "The Shout" I was impressed at the power of the work, and if there's a better lesson in how to slowly build tension and terror, I've yet to encounter it. In "Old Papa Johnson" he introduces the reader to a pair of soldiers recovering from severe wounds in a hospital. One--the Old Papa Johnson of the tale recounts an Antarctic adventure to the much younger soldier, referred to as Graveyspoons by the older man and who is obviously supposed to be Graves himself. I assume the yarn was inspired by something similar that happened when he really was in hospital during the First World War. As the story progresses as one of mainly historical interest and character humor, it slowly degrades into a very dark incident ending, at last, in an act of pure, cold-blooded monstrosity. I've yet to see any author equal it for power.

It's sad to think that in today's world of self-published garbage, sub-normal TV scripts, and the degradation we experience as the ebook fad, that we may now be looking upon the end of the days of the true professional writers. Gone are the skills and the powers of writers such as Robert Graves. Now we have a new normal of bad writing, self-publishing, and circle-jerks parading as literature. Alas.

War

This is a fragment from Robert Graves' GOODBYE TO ALL THAT. His matter-of-fact descriptions of life in the trenches during WWI are harrowing. People have forgotten what a hideous and wasteful undertaking World War One was.

Graves had what was, to me, a very strange outlook on war and his part in it. On the one hand he realized (having lived it) the hideous brutality of war, but never thought once about abandoning his part in it. After the war, when he was asked by Lord Bertrand Russell if he'd have fired on striking munitions factory workers in the UK (who were threatening to suspend production of armaments during the fighting), he assured a very shocked Russell that he would have done exactly that. His reasoning was that every good soldier on the front would dearly have loved to kill the workers who made the whole sorry mess so possible. As a member of the privileged class, I reckon it never dawned on him that it wasn't common workers who'd put him in such a position, but that of the upper classes who'd instigated the struggle and profited from it.

Once again I find myself quite admiring the work of a man, while being utterly horrified by the political and philosophical views of that same individual.

Influences

A lot of fiction heavily influenced my life in general, my life as a reader, and my life as a writer. Since I now make a decent paycheck now and again with my own fiction, that third influence on me is often foremost in my mind.

What books pushed me to write later in life more than others?

At some point I discovered the works of Charles Bukowski. At first it was his short stories that grabbed me, and then I moved to his novels, and then his poetry. Bukowski was an original. He made everything he did seem easy and casual, but that's not the way it was, at all. Underlying everything that he wrote was a humor and a wit that were both as sharp an insightful as any I've encountered. A lot of other writers try to imitate him, but no one succeeds at that. Don't try.

I also found Cormac McCarthy at some point. The first thing of his that I read was BLOOD MERIDIAN. It made quite an impact on me, and I've continued to read just about every novel that he produces. Some others are almost as powerful as that first one, but none of those have influenced me quite so much as that one. His style is another that one should not try to imitate. It's not that it can't be done--Charles Frazier did a passable patch on McCarthy with his COLD MOUNTAIN--but no one else can quite capture the world that McCarthy can conjure. Again, my advice would be to not even try to copy that style...and certainly don't compare yourself to Cormac McCarthy--this is a bit of hubris I've seen out of a few authors. Silly chaps.

I came upon The Beats rather late in life. I was well into my forties before I "discovered" them. It wasn't that I hadn't tried reading the work of that group of creators before I was older--but the fiction never held me for more than a few lines or pages, and so I'd cast that stuff off. Finally, though, I picked up ON THE ROAD for maybe the twelfth time in my life and, for some reason, that time everything fell into place. All the tumblers clicked. I was hooked for over a year on the fiction of Jack Kerouac, and then William S. Burroughs, and the rest of the bunch. I learned quite a lot from reading The Beats, and I almost abandoned genre fiction entirely after feeling that horrors and fantasies could never match the kind of power I was reading within the paragraphs of DESOLATION ANGELS or JUNKY. But eventually I came around and returned to what I knew best.

Somewhere in those past-40 years I found Robert Graves. First it was I, CLAUDIUS and then CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSILINA. Later I sought out his short fiction and after reading a bit of that I discovered some things about how to write that left me very well educated, indeed. Graves was a bit of a nut in many ways, but he was about as skilled a writer as I have ever encountered and I learned about as much from reading his fiction as from the works of anyone else I could name.

And even later than Graves and Kerouac and Bukowski I finally buckled down to read as much as I could of Hemingway. As with Kerouac, most of my friends had read Ernest Hemingway's work in their youth and been influenced by it as very young men. For whatever reason I found more to admire in the fantasies of Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and so would give up on the tempered realities of Hemingway. My loss as a young man, but there's nothing to be done for it now. Better that I finally appreciated him late than not at all. As with the others, reading his stories and novels showed me how to write more effectively than just about any of the fantasists with whom I'd been so engrossed from the age of eight through forty-two or so.

Did I waste a lot of my youth chasing dragons and demons and aliens creatures? Not really.

For the writer who influenced me more than any other was the crazed visionary Philip K. Dick. Most people today who know his name at all hear it because of his connection to so many film adaptations of his novels and short stories. He was, for many years, quite prolific and his mind was a vast factory of ideas. Today, he's considered the father of cyberpunk (go look it up). Some of his fiction seems dated--a product of the 1950s and 1960s and showing this in his language and condescending attitudes toward race and sex. But much of his work has stood the test of the decades since his death, and that material is as powerful now as when he first produced it.

My favorite Philip K. Dick novel is THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. It is set in a world in which it was not the Allies who won World War II, but the Axis. Furthermore, he cast his characters in a North America that has been divided down the Mississippi River basin--the Germans in the East and the Japanese in the West. If he wasn't the first to exploit this concept, he was likely in the first tier of those using that idea effectively.

But Dick goes further. Within the novel is another novel. This novel is called THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. The characters hear about it--written by an author who has used the theme that it wasn't the Axis who won WWII, but the Allies. And in MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, walls sometimes break down and the boundaries of reality are changed and altered. The characters within Dick's book are left with the idea that there is another world--one in which they were the victors and not among the oppressed.

This novel affected me on many levels. The night that I finished reading it, I placed it on my bedside table and turned out the light and went to sleep. Some time later--well before dawn--I came awake. Or at least I thought that I was awake. Then I realized that I was dreaming very vividly that I was lying in my bed in my own house. And I dreamed that I had just finished reading a book that I had placed on the bedside table before turning out the light. That book was, I realized, THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY.

This realization so startled me that I had to get up to turn on the light to look at the book. So I sat up and reached for the light.

And then I woke up. Really woke up. I was already up on one elbow reaching for the lamp, pretty much in my sleep. I knew what I was doing. For a moment, in the dark, I froze. I couldn't recall if the book by my bed was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE or THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. Which one was it?

After a few moments I couldn't take the suspense so I turned on the light and reached for the book. Picking it up, I realized that it was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. The bad guys had not won WWII. I was not living in a world dominated by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich.

That's what writing is all about. That's power. That's talent. It's not something I'm ever likely to equal, but it's something to reach for.

Philip K. Dick may very well have influenced me more than any other author.

At least I think so.

Goodbye to All That

One of my favorite book titles is Robert Graves' GOODBYE TO ALL THAT. It's his autobiography dealing mainly with his days as a British soldier during WWI. It's a pretty horrifying account of that struggle, but is a book of many facets. He caught a lot of flack from his fellow countrymen over his blunt admissions about the conduct of his fellow Allied soldiers and of the insanity of the war itself. It was, in many ways, taking leave not only of the grief of those memories, but also of the grief of having to bear up under the weight of his British identity. With that book, he seemed to cut a lot of baggage loose.

I've always been able to identify with people going through such turmoil. In a nutshell, I don't know the advantages of weird concepts like tribal loyalty. They had their day, I reckon, but it seems so strange and counter-productive in these modern times to hold fast to such primitive ideas. I cast my contempt on pretty much every kind of so-called patriotism.

For a long time I had not much but admiration for Graves. For his courage and his clarity of thought to be able to throw off the chains and move on, improved by freedom. Alas, though, I continued to read his work and soon found that he was, like all of my other idols, cursed with feet of clay.

Before WWII he was living in a kind of happiness on the island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain. Both the Spanish Civil War which pitted the filthy murdering bastard Francisco Franco against the Socialist Republican Loyalists in a bloodbath of almost unimaginable savagery, and the threat of Nazi capture caused Graves to leave his idyllic home on the island and go into temporary exile. So he boarded a British rescue ship and ended up in, among other places, the USA for the duration of the hostilities.

Eventually, though, he did return to his home in Mallorca. It was, though, the Spain of that Fascist sack of shit, Francisco Franco. He could have gone somewhere else. But he didn't. He went back to his island farm, ruled now by one of the most murderous tyrants of modern European history. I could have forgiven him that--going back to the embrace of a land ruled by a vicious monster. But he did something that forever colored my impression of Mr. Graves.

He wrote a story to excuse himself of this act. Now, he didn't have to do that. He could have just returned to his old Mallorcan haunt and held his mouth shut, or uttered an occasional "no comment" about going back to a place now administered by one of the most evil regimes to ever hold sway in the western world. They weren't going to molest a man of such reputation. Not at that point. All he had to do was go about his business, write his fiction and his poetry and tend to his orchards and his wife and children.

But there was that excuse he felt he had to pen.

It was in the form of a short story in which the reader is left to conclude that the Loyalist Republicans were no better than Franco's Falangists. Anyone who understands what went on during the Spanish Civil War is left to be astounded by the scandal of such an argument. It was then that my respect for Graves as a person drained forever away.

I still hold him in high regard as a writer. I admire some of his ideas about the nature of the social standing between men and women. He was brilliant.

But I had to say goodbye to my respect for him as a person.

Two More Great Websites

I'm not what you'd call a history buff, but I do enjoy reading my fair share of that subject. Recent history, world history, ancient history, etc. To get my fix of information I generally begin my trek at a specific online location. It's a website that always ultimately leads me to other sources that enhance my knowledge of certain places, their peoples, their histories, and on.

That website is The CIA World Factbook. Now, as the CIA is often politically motivated, you'd assume that such a site would be packed to capacity with dogma. But that's not the case. Not at all. As the title suggests, they're concerned pretty much with stating the facts. Just hard, cold facts. Yeah, you could argue that there's something of the political and philosophical in the organization having come to that conclusion, but there you are. For me, the CIA Factbook is a wonderful resource when I'm just beginning to do research on the history of just about any place on Earth.

Some decades back I stumbled upon the works of Robert Graves. Like most people, my first exposure to his fiction were his volumes concerning his fictionalised versions of the life of the Juli0-Claudian Roman Emperors, I, CLAUDIUS and CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSLINA. In his day, Graves was known to turn the literary world on its ear. He had no problems in shocking readers and critics and the general public. And his work has only grown in stature since it was first published.

Because of those novels on the machinations of those ancient royals, I became fascinated with the lives of many of the Roman emperors and began to read widely of them. One of the most convenient online sources for basic information about these crazy bastards is The Throne of the Caesars. Here, you can glean the basics on the royals and the guys who tried and fell short of Imperial majesty. There's lots of politics here; much murder; high comedy; tragedy...you name it. Humans being...well...human. The purest form of the march of insanity and greed that mark us as one of the most fascinating species to travel down the biological rails toward extinction.

Julian. My favorite Roman emperor. Short-lived, tragic, but one of the best of the lot.

A few more links:

The only religious leader whose opinions and judgments I respect: Rabbi Michael Lerner.

And his organization, Tikkun.