Good  Writers Read

“When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”

–Desiderius Erasmus

“By the time I was thirteen,” the late African-American novelist James Baldwin once told the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, “I had read myself out of Harlem.” Baldwin was one of America’s greatest writers, but notice that he did not say that he had written himself out. He had read. And certainly it would have been ludicrous for Baldwin, as gifted as he was, to have written himself out of Harlem at thirteen. Yet many thirteen-year-olds, fifteen-year olds and nineteen-year olds we have come across believe that they, unlike Baldwin (who was first published at twenty-four), can write brilliantly at an early age, too often without the benefit of first hearing what other writers have to say.

There is an old axiom quoted by the 16th-century poet Phillip Sidney in his “Apology for Poetry”: “Orator fit, Poeta nascitur.” The Latin may be translated as, “An orator (speaker or lecturer) is made, but a poet must be born one.” The saying suggests that great writers are born great writers, that there is something inside of them at birth that the rest of us simply don’t have. But Sidney is driven to refute the concept:  “…as the fertilist ground must be manured, so must the highest flying wit have a Daedalus to guide him.”

Get that? Catch the allusion? If your answer is “yes,” perhaps you have taken a course in mythology. If “no,” you can go to wikipedia. Just in case your wi-fi is spotty, we’ll help you out in this instance:  Daedalus, whose name literally means “maker,” was the genius behind the great labyrinth of Crete, which he designed for King Minos. You may recall that Minos used to like to throw enemies of the state into that virtually inescapable maze, which was inhabited by a man-bull monster called the Minotaur. But Daedalus’ brilliance also worked against him, for he was so valuable to Minos that the king would not permit him to leave Crete. So Daedalus fashioned two sets of wings made from  feathers and wax, and gave one pair to his son, Icarus, and kept the other for himself. The two flew into the air, but only Daedalus escaped, for Icarus, though warned by his pop not to fly too close to the sun for fear that the heat would melt the wax holding together his wings, did not listen.

Now, back to Phillip Sidney, who, through allusion, compares the would-be writer or “high-flying wit,” to Icarus. In this manner Sidney suggests that even the most innately talented writers will come crashing down if not given proper guidance.

Nowadays, in our so-called postmodern era, the term “intertextuality” has been applied to the old term “allusion,” to suggest that writing is almost always a complex interrelationship between one author’s work and all of their predecessors. After all, given thousands of years of prose and poetry, is anything really completely new? And beyond this, the suggestion behind intertextuality is that good writers are so steeped in the work of both their contemporaries as well as their literary ancestors, that intertextuality, the play of one text off another, is inevitable.

It is a staple of the 18th- and 19th-century novel that the reader gets a “reading list,” of sorts, of the protagonist’s early literary interests. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews knows The Bible, The Whole Duty of Man, Thomas a Kempis, and Baker’s Chronicle at an early age. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre read Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Pamela, John Wesley’s History of Henry, Earl of Moreland,  Oliver Goldsmith’s Roman History and Gulliver’s Travels. The list of Samuel Butler’s Earnest Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh is particularly impressive. By the age of twelve Earnest has read “the greater part of Virgil, Horace and Livy, and I do not know how many Greek plays.” In the world of classic literature, even Frankenstein’s monster reads, in Mary Shelley’s great novel, Frankenstein. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Sorrows of Werter and Plutarch’s Lives are his chief literary interests. “I can hardly describe . . . the effect of these books,” says the monster. “They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy [or] sunk me into the lowest dejection.”

The great writers themselves read and read and read. In her memoir of D.H. Lawrence, Jessie Chambers, an early girlfriend of the great British modernist, and the model for Miriam in his classic novel Sons and Lovers, spends thirty pages detailing the books the author read in his teens that were responsible for his literary education. A sample:  “Lawrence gave me once a selection of Shelley and at other times The Blessed Damozel and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and I gave him Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.”

Ask writers what other writers they admire, or what books influenced their own writing, and you will quite often find that you have opened floodgates. In a short interview about her novel Claire of the Sea Light, the Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat mentions the following influences and inspirations: Jean Toomer’s Cane, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, James Joyce’s The Dubliners, Lydia Davis, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Junot Diaz, Jhumpha Lahiri, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Cambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Jacques Roumain.

Now, British novelist Neil Gaiman:

“I think the people who influence you probably did it before you were twenty – in my case the list would have to include C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Harlan Ellison, Lou Reed, R. A. Lafferty, E. Nesbit, David Bowie, Jim Henson, Roger Zelazny, Will Eisner, Dr Who (the Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee incarnations), Jules Feiffer, Noel Langley, Ursula K. LeGuin, Michael Moorcock, Hope Mirrlees, Margaret Storey, Robert Heinlein, Al Stewart, Charles Addams and the people who did the black and white episodes of The Avengers… and that’s just for starters…”

You may notice that Gaiman’s list includes everything from television shows to comic books to science fiction and fantasy novels. Not unusual. Writers can learn from any genre, just as rock musicians, for example, can and have learned and been influenced by jazz, blues, hip-hop, etc. Good writers read from all genres, from people of all countries, from almost everywhere. In the words of 18th-century man of letters Richard Steele, “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

There are always exceptions, of course. Here’s Kurt Vonnegut:

“I grew up in a house crammed with books. But I never had to read a book for academic credit, never had to write a paper about it, never had to prove I’d understood it in a seminar. I am a hopeless clumsy discusser of books. My experience is nil.”

Actually Kurt’s being a bit self-effacing here, a bit modest. He describes elsewhere how he grew to love literature in his later years, and how he read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel at eighteen. Hey, we still haven’t read that one!

But these days, with the distractions of streaming services, social media, and video games, a lot of us tend to share Vonnegut’s lack of experience with more traditional texts. Many would-be writers spend more time scrolling through subreddits or bouncing through online links that digging into a novel or a collection of poems. And while we think that all reading is reading and useful in building your reading and writing skills, engaging with poems and novels and short stories is a clear path to becoming a better writer. It is probably no surprise based on the above quote from Neil Gaiman that he also advises people to “Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read.”

Even established writers are subject to this criticism. It’s like saying of a professional baseball player, “He doesn’t take enough batting practice.” Matthew Arnold, a famous English Victorian poet, once disparaged another equally famous predecessor, the great Romantic, William Wordsworth, by saying,

“…surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is,–his thought richer, and his influence of wider application,–was that he should have read more books….”

Let us assure you of something. William Wordsworth read a heck of a lot more than most of us do today. Nevertheless, there is the criticism, in black and white. Shakespeare was subject to the same disparagement. The famous line is that he “had little Latin and less Greek,” which is often raised by those who don’t believe that Shakespeare is the true author of the plays because he, among other things, “was no deep reader” as Arnold goes on to say of The Bard (that is, Shakespeare) later in the same essay. And yet the standard version that most of us have come to believe is that Shakespeare made up almost none of his stories, but that all have their genesis in literature and history he gleaned from myriad sources.

An interesting but sometimes overlooked reality is that all writers are, by the very nature of what they do, readers. When you write, your are simultaneously reading yourself! Donald Murray, an acknowledged guru of process writing, makes the point in his text, aptly named Read to Write.  “As we write we are readers. The words and sentences and paragraphs that appear under our hand are read. We see our own attempts to capture meaning.”

If, as most writers do, we have learned the lessons of the craft from reading others, then, as Murray goes on to say,

“…we remember as we make these attempts how other writers have faced these problems and solved them, how they have tuned their voice, how they have reached their readers, established their authority, developed and ordered their meaning.”

And as we read we remember ourselves writing, and we see the writer behind the text, an individual who does not yet know completely what is being written and how it is being written.

We need, as Murray says, to learn to “…read as a writer and write as a reader.”  The interrelationship is unavoidable, and more than this, all important.

Mike Bunn, a composition scholar, extends this thinking and asks us to read aware of the writerly choices the author has made as well as “imagin[ing] what different choices the author might have made instead, and what effect those different choices would have on readers.” This kind of reading is much more active and interesting–and helpful to you as a writer.

Here’s a little exercise involving reading that may get you in the mood for exploring more poetry.  You are going to be presented with eight poems, all of them both fairly short and reasonably readable. The idea here is not to analyze them, as we did with “Blackbirds,” but to let them make an impression upon you and to respond with your gut feelings, not so much as with your analytical mind. The idea grows out of numerous theories of poetry, but also out of the “reader response” movement that began in the 1960s and 70s and has been an important influence in schools ever since.

Reader response is a theory of literary analysis that suggests, quite logically, that no two readers approach a text with the exact same life experiences. And because what any reader interprets from a book, poem, oil painting, comic book must invariably be influenced by a reader’s personal history, readers are forever recreating texts through the palimpsest, so to speak, of their own lives. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been modified or changes but the the original text is still visible. It’s like when the notes on the whiteboard from a previous class linger beneath the new words and diagrams of the current class. The metaphor suggests that each reader creates his own layer of personal meanings that he or she overlays on the original text.

Now, you may wonder, since we said right from the beginning of this book that a text can’t mean everything, is reader response theory contradicting us? No, not at all. Remember, the palimpsest is only laid on top of the original text. Attempting to blot out the text by creating some wild meaning is not valid, at least to our mind. Reader response theorists can get pretty crazy, however; some have wondered aloud if the text is important at all, given the prominence of our individual readings. The answer, to our mind, is yes.  As Hamlet says, “The play’s the thing.”

What’s this got to do with us, here, now? Well, simply stated, we want you to respond to the following poems with your guts more than your brains, to feel rather than to analyze. The questions that follow are designed to evoke a personal response.

And now, the poems. These are mostly living poets, but we couldn’t help sticking in a couple of our favorites from the past as well.

There they are: two selections of eight poems each. Choose one group and write the answers in your notebook. Do both if you’re really into it. Compare answers with your friends or classmates. Discuss.

Now it’s on to another major assignment, a reading/writing assignment. The idea is to get to know the life and works of one major American contemporary poet intimately. When asked to name a living poet, many people can’t do. This exercise insures that even those of you who hate poetry will be able to do so!