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The
Books that Made the Writers
A
reading list from the people who know reading
Summer
2003
Great writers
are great readers. Writers spend endless hours studying the books
of predecessors and contemporaries to learn what worked and what
didn't. In all this reading, some works stand out. We asked several
alumni authors to tell us about one book that has passed the night-table
test -- a book always by the bedside to be consulted over and over,
a book that has made a difference in their writing lives. Here,
then, is a summer reading list from the best -- with an introduction
from Tom Wolfe, cultural critic extraordinaire, on what happens
when writers read.
Tom
Wolfe '57PhD
Honey
Bear
by Dixie Willson
Tom
Wolfe has published more than a dozen books, including The Right
Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full.
To be
perfectly honest, I had never even thought about how reading might
affect a writer until our genial hosts and editors raised the question. The first
thing that crossed my mind was all the destined-to-be-famous writers
who were ignited -- lit! -- set off! -- lifted! -- launched! -- just like that! -- by reading already-famous
writers. Oddly enough, reading Dickens was what ignited Dostoyevsky.
Odder still, it was reading Sir Walter Scott that ignited Balzac.
He spent ten years imitating Scott's historical novels . ineptly.
before turning into an entirely different sort of writer, Balzac
the chronicler of the here and now, Balzac "the secretary of French
society," as he put it himself. Reading Balzac ignited Zola, who
imitated the great man brilliantly for the rest of his life, even
to the point of proclaiming his life's work a single vast epic, Les Rougon-Macquart, that had captured all of France in the
Second Empire within its 11,000 pages, a la Balzac's Comedie
Humaine. Zola, in turn, ignited two generations of American
"naturalistic" novelists, resulting in the great era of the American
novel, which ran from Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 1893 to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 .
before another French influence, ism-lit -- absurdism, fabulism,
concretism, minimalism, existentialism, symbolism -- ignited the
talent in the university MFA creative writing programs in the late
1950s, sending American fiction into a long, grim slide that has
not ended yet.
Turned on probably
says it better than ignited, but turned on today has
39 years' worth of drug paraphernalia dragging along behind it.
Speaking for myself, I was . galvanized . by a writer who never
rated so much as a footnote to American literary history: Dixie
Willson.
Dixie Willson wrote,
and Maginel Wright Barney illustrated, a book called Honey Bear in 1923. My mother used to read it to me at bedtime long before
I knew one letter of the alphabet from another. Over and over she
read it to me. I was small, but like many people my age I had already
mastered the art of having things my way. I had memorized the entire
poem in the passive sense that I could tell whenever Mother skipped
a passage in the vain hope of getting the 110th or 232nd reading
over with a little sooner. Oh, no-ho-ho . there was no fooling
His Majesty the Baby. He wanted it all. He couldn't get enough of
it.
Honey Bear is
a narrative poem about a baby kidnapped from a bassinet by a black
bear. Maginel Wright Barney drew and painted in the japanais Vienna
Secession style. To me, her pictures were pure magic. But Honey
Bear's main attraction was Dixie Willson's rollicking and rolling
rhythm: anapestic quadrameter with spondees at regular intervals.
One has to read it out loud in order to be there:
Once upon
a summer in the hills by the river
Was a deep green forest where the wild things grew.
There were caves as dark as midnight -- there were tangled trees
and thickets
And a thousand little places where the sky looked through.
The Willson
beat made me think writing must be not only magical but fun. It isn't, particularly, but Honey Bear was fun, and I resolved
then and there, lying illiterate on a little pillow in a tiny bed,
to be a writer. In homage to Dixie Willson, I've slipped a phrase
or two from Honey Bear into every book I've written. I tucked
the fourth line, above, into the opening chapter of The Right
Stuff (page 4) from memory as I described how not-yet-an-Astronaut
Pete Conrad's and his Jean Simmons-lookalike wife Jane's little
white brick cottage near Jacksonville Naval Air Base was set in
a thick green grove of pine trees with "a thousand little places
where the sun peeks through." Peeks . looked . Ah, well,
hey ho .
By and by my sister,
Helen, as fond of Honey Bear as I am, discovered that Dixie
Willson was the sister of Meredith Willson of The Music Man fame and that Maginel Wright Barney was the sister of Frank Lloyd
Wright. As luck and nonfiction would have it, they never laid eyes
on each other.
Dixie Willson! Sui
generis! -- although in my school days, I imitated all sorts
of writers. The ones I remember best are John Steinbeck and an Associated
Press sports writer named Sid Feder. Steinbeck wrote with an almost
archly simple biblical rhetoric, especially figures of speech involving
repetition, such as (from chapter 5 of The Grapes of Wrath): "Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they
had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be
cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found
that one could not be an owner unless one were cold" -- a single
48-word sentence packing four King James Version favorites: anaphora,
epistrophe, symploce, and conjunctio (the dreamy repetition
of the word and). I used to turn in English papers written
that way and history papers written that way and sociology papers
written that way and even economics papers written that way as if
that way were the only way. And no isolated case was the teacher
man who said that way was out to lunch. All the while, as a sportswriter
for my high school (St. Christopher's) and college (Washington and
Lee) newspapers, I tried to out-Feder the great Feder, whose typical
lead (the subject is the traditional Thanksgiving Day football game
between the Virginia Military Institute and Virginia Tech) would
read: "The VMI Keydets had the Virginia Tech Gobblers for dinner
yesterday and came away smacking their lips and picking their teeth
after a 37-7 repast."
As
a graduate student at Yale, I found other paragons. One day
I was roaming the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library -- at the
time only graduate students and faculty had free run of the stacks
-- when I came across, in English translation, a group of early
Soviet writers who called themselves the Brothers Serapion. Their
mentor, Evgeny Zamyatin, author of the novel We, which Orwell
cannibalized shamelessly to write 1984, is the only one whose
name is apt to ring a bell today. The Brothers Serapion were devotees
of a rather precious, sensibility-wafting French movement, Symbolism,
created for "a charming aristocracy" of aesthetes, as Catulle Mendes
once put it. But in the early 1920s the Brothers found their refined
sensibilities wafting over the brute material of the Soviet Revolution.
The upshot was a self-consciously avant-garde, exotically reckless
style that made wanton use of interjections and italics and pieces
of punctuation that had been lying around narcoleptically for a
hundred years: dots, dashes, exclamation points, anything to simulate
the rushes and abrupt swings of actual thought. Santa Barranza!
Would the day come when I'd have. fun. with that! --
or wouldn't it --
I pause to bow also
to John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Evelyn Waugh, Mencken, my namesake
Thomas Wolfe, Carl Van Vechten, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Celine
and his American epopt, Henry Miller -- but what in all the tangled
trees and thickets of literature could ever ignite a writer faster
than (up audio, please):
Now 'way inside
the forest where the path was lost in nothing,
And the moss was soft as velvet -- dusky, rusky as could be,
Where the day was full of shadows, and the night was full of darkness,
And nobody ever found it -- was a big old hollow tree!
There were wild-cats in the forest, there were silky little foxes,
There were owls and there were 'possums peeking out from everywhere,
But the wildest thing of any, in the dusky, rusky forest,
With the hollow tree to live in, was a big black bear!
By the way, Mommy and
Daddy, a woodsman, find Baby sitting on a carpet of moss next to
the hollow tree having a party with the bear. He's feeding her half
a huge honeycomb he's just purloined from a beehive expressly for
the occasion and eating the rest himself, and everybody, Baby, Mommy,
Daddy, and the bear, gets a hug. One has to remember that when Honey
Bear was published, the age of Morbid Art was still a good 50
years off into the future.
Alexandra Robbins
'98
When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi
by David Maraniss
Alexandra
Robbins is author of Secrets
of The Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden
Paths of Power.
The Yale Daily News taught me about the "nutgraf" -- the pre-programmed post-lead paragraph
containing the what-where-when of a story. But real life taught
me that too many reporters concentrate on formulaic structure at
the expense of good storytelling. Maraniss is the rare serious journalist
who can tell a thoughtful story, this one about the man who found
both formula and philosophy in football. The combination of the
man, the sport, and the writing kept this book by my bedside far
longer than others -- a subtle but telling gauge. And because of
it, I haven't written a nutgraf since.
Julia Glass '78
Daniel
Deronda
by George Eliot
Novelist Julia Glass won the National
Book Award in fiction last year for Three
Junes.
George Eliot's Daniel
Deronda is the book that made me need to be a writer.
I was in my late twenties, working diligently as the painter I'd
studied to be while at Yale, but I was also reading voraciously,
catching up on the "classics" I'd missed by deciding not to major
in English. Deronda is flawed, but its ambitions are magnificent.
Eliot's assertively beautiful language, her contemptible yet ultimately
heart-rending heroine (Gwendolen Harleth, one of my all-time favorite
characters), and the novel's daring structure (sprawling, like life
itself, yet cunningly aimed at the climax) all stopped me in my
creative tracks. This, I realized -- a great book -- is pure,
unsurpassable sorcery, and suddenly I wanted, fiercely, to be conjuring
stories of my own.
Alan M. Dershowitz
'62LLB
The
Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Alan
M. Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard,
returned to the arguments between Ivan and Alyosha in his 2002 account
of his legal philosophy, Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a
Turbulent Age.
Even as a kid I never
trusted biographies, which tended to be hagiographies. I was inherently
skeptical of authority figures, scriptural accounts, and perfect
people.
Then in college I began
to read fiction. Now here was something I could believe in, because
it didn't claim to be the truth or the word of God. Instead, the
great novelist discovered truth without claiming to be faithful
to the facts. My favorites were Kafka and Dostoyevsky. I wanted
to be a lawyer even before I read The Trial, but it was reading The Brothers Karamazov that made me decide to become a law teacher.
Dostoyevsky's major
characters -- especially Ivan, Dmitri, and Alyosha -- represented
different aspects of my own personality. I have reread the Brothers
K at every important stage of my life, and while the book has never
disappointed, it was ironic, and somewhat troubling, to learn that
Dostoyevsky was a virulent anti-Semite. But partial truths can come
from people whose lives were based on lies -- witness Renoir, Wagner
and Rodin -- and as a disbeliever in hagiography, that should not
surprise.
Carl Zimmer '87
Charles
Darwin: Voyaging and The Power of Place
by Janet Browne
Earlier this year Janet
Browne published the second part of her two-volume biography of
Charles Darwin. I can already tell that I will be rereading it many
times in years to come. It's like a dancing elephant: Although it
runs 1,200 pages, it is always quick on its feet. That's because
Darwin's life is so full of travels, ideas, friends, enemies, orchids,
barnacles, and children. As you read Browne's biography, you feel
the shudders of the world as it enters the modern age, and you realize
that this odd, obsessive, reclusive, selfish, big-hearted genius
was hugely responsible for the change.
Darwin
figures heavily in the work of science writer Carl Zimmer, whose
most recent book is Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea.
Glenn Fleishman '90
Moby-Dick;
or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
Technology
journalist and "unsolicited pundit" Glenn Fleishman most recently
co-wrote The Wireless Networking Startup Kit.
Moby-Dick is
the fallback of anyone moderately literate in the Western canon,
but it's an old friend of mine. Moby-Dick is the only member
of the canon I'm compelled to read again and again. In high school,
I didn't understand that it's largely a comedy: it seemed deadly
dull and serious. I picked it up by accident during college, and
discovered the buffoon inside the stuffed shirt. Few novels echo
back and forth down the long halls of allegory, analogy, and allusion,
and every time I reread it, the echoes get louder.
Naomi Wolf '84
The Koran
Naomi
Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, is the co-founder of the
Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership.
I'd lived in Israel.
I'd studied Christianity as an undergraduate. But my epiphany as
a reader and a thinker came when I took a course in the Koran. While
there were passages that were hard to wrap my brain around, I realized
that the Koran was not so "other." The core of Mohammed's message
of tolerance and generosity was similar to what I'd read in the
Bible, and though the Koran has been misinterpreted by extremists
and redactors -- isn't this a problem in every religion? -- I became
convinced that the schism I saw then and now was and is unnecessary.
I also was surprised to learn that Mohammed was very pro-woman,
so when I see what's being done in his name, I want to tear my hair
out.
David Quammen '70
The
Growth of Biological Thought
by Ernst Mayr
David
Quammen is a winner of the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing.
His forthcoming book is Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator
in the Jungles of History and the Mind.
In the summer of 1988,
I indulged myself with Ernst Mayr's The Growth of Biological
Thought. It's a vast, ambitious intellectual chronicle that
reads crisply and well. I nibbled away at it for 20 minutes every
morning, while seated in a lawn chair under a mountain ash tree,
at my home in Bozeman, Montana, before going inside to begin work.
There was no hurry, and I enjoyed every bit. Like Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy -- another long book that
I'd read and savored very slowly -- Mayr's Growth was a fine
way of opening my brain out, each day, to the larger world. As for
its lingering influence? I suppose it inoculated me with a strong
sense that evolutionary biology is a fundamentally historical science
(as opposed to an experimental one) and that, in order to understand
properly its most forceful and crucial ideas, one must also understand
a bit of its history.
Sherwin B. Nuland
'55MD
The King James Bible
Retired
surgeon Sherwin B. Nuland won
the 1994 National Book Award in nonfiction for How We Die: Reflections
on Life's Final Chapter.
The Hebrew Bible had
begun affecting my thoughts long before I knew that it was the source
of so many of the fascinating tales and allusions I absorbed at
my grandmother's knee. Without yet realizing it, I was learning
the value of a good story as a means of conveying some greater truth.
But it wasn't until college, when I studied the King James Version
of what are called the Old and the New Testament, that I began to
understand the significance of cadence and sound, to express the
simplest or most complex idea in rhythms so magnificent that they
enthrall the spirit and the mind.
Tom Perrotta '83
Winesburg,
Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
Novelist
Tom Perrotta, whose most recent book is Joe College, finds
his characters in New Jersey and at Yale.
Watch enough TV, and
you might almost start to believe that small-town America is full
of good-looking, good-hearted, optimistic people who always have
a clever quip at the ready and a solution for every problem. Sherwood
Anderson knew differently. His fictional town, Winesburg, Ohio,
is populated by an assortment of thwarted souls and lonely dreamers
who would dearly love to explain themselves to their neighbors,
if they could only find the words, if their neighbors could only
learn to listen. Awkwardly written, almost saintly in its compassion,
Anderson's subversive vision of middle America has continued to
echo through American literature all the way to Raymond Carver and
beyond.
Stephen Sandy '55
The
Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Poet
and teacher Stephen Sandy's latest book is Surface Impressions:
A Poem.
When Donald Rumsfeld,
embroiled over Iraq, called France and Germany "old Europe," we
flew to our Henry James, particularly to The Portrait of a Lady. Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times, cast Colin Powell "as
Isabel Archer, seduced and betrayed by the bloodless machinations
of Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond." Frailty of innocence, persistence
of evil; the unripe culture of America encountering a refined, arrogant
old world: These contrasts are unforgettably dramatized. It's one
of the great novels in the language; if you've not read it, or haven't
read it in years, get started. Forget the film; read the 1908 not
the 1881 text; and no matter if Osmond and Merle are American, after
all.
Anthony Kronman '72PhD,
'75JD
The Republic
by Plato
Anthony
Kronman, dean of the Yale Law School, wrote The Lost Lawyer:
Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession.
Years ago, during my
freshman year at Williams, I read Plato's Republic for the
first time. I've reread it almost every year since. It is a work
of endless fascination -- a deep work of philosophy and a brilliant
literary achievement at the same time. It's the one perfect book
I know, and the fact that it has come down to us intact is a miracle.
From its very first sentence, "I went down to the Piraeus yesterday
.," to its transporting conclusion, Plato's Republic carries
the reader along in a flow of argument that explores life's most
urgent questions and brings light and hope to the human struggle
for understanding and justice.
Garry Wills '61PhD
Confessiones
by Augustine
Northwestern
University historian Garry Wills wrote a biography of Saint Augustine
in 1999 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for Lincoln at Gettysburg:
The Words that Remade America.
When I first read Augustine's Confessiones (The Testimony) in college, I did not know there
was any such thing as an interior life -- much less that it was
the place to find God: "I sought you outside me, while you were
inside . deeper in me than I am in me" (intimior intimo meo). Ever since I have tried to be a spelunker there.
Ann Packer '81
Psychoanalysis:
The Impossible Profession
by Janet Malcolm
Ann
Packer is the author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier and Mendocino and Other Stories.
Impossible to choose
a single work of fiction, and fiction is what works for me, what
works on me: Mrs. Dalloway, Howards End, Pride and Prejudice,
Tender is the Night, a hundred incredible short stories. So,
instead: Janet Malcolm's brief, provocative, and mesmerizing Psychoanalysis:
The Impossible Profession. I first read it as a series of New
Yorker articles, again in book form when I was beginning my
own psychological work, again (knowing the book itself had helped
propel me) when I started psychoanalysis myself. A compulsively
readable history of psychoanalysis, a fascinating portrait of a
Manhattan psychoanalyst, a book that yields new treasures with each
rereading, this is a work about the 20th century's great project,
our approach on consciousness, the illustration of which is, after
all, one of the great projects of literature as well.
Steve Olson '78
Gravity's
Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Science
writer Steve Olson was a National Book Award finalist in nonfiction
in 2002 for Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common
Origins.
At Yale, after taking
English 29, I read Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and
that book, more than anything else, made me decide to become a writer.
Leafing through its pages now I can easily summon up that delightful
adolescent frisson of naivete, discovery, and incredulity that the
world could be so large. The book still astonishes me.
But I can no longer
recommend it. To me now the book also seems distant and cold --
a bit unlikable really (though very funny). It was the right book
at the right time for me, but that was almost three decades ago,
and I'm a different person now.
Jennifer Ackerman
'80
The
Complete Essays of Montaigne
translated by Donald M. Frame
Nature
writer Jennifer Ackerman, a regular contributor to National Geographic, wrote Chance in the House of Fate: A Natural History of Heredity.
When I am out of humor,
from a bleak day or a poor train of thought, I read Montaigne's
essays. Pick them up, and it's like talking to an old friend --
about sadness, liars, the power of the imagination, sleep, prayer,
aging, the affection of fathers for their children, cannibals, thumbs,
anger, what it means to be a human being. Though Montaigne was writing
more than 400 years ago, his concerns are modern and his voice,
vascular, funny, uplifting: "Of our maladies, the most wild and
barbarous is to despise our being . . . For my part, I love life and
cultivate it."  |
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