Everyone in the scribbling game has heroes and, more importantly, models. Nobody does it from scratch. That’s just not how it works. Even if the trick is just stealing the curtains from a genre and putting them on your own windows—Hemingway took from the newspapers, Tom Wolfe took from comic books and tabloids—everyone figures out how to do what they’re doing by looking somewhere else. There’s no infused knowledge in the scribbling game.
Some are bigger magpies than others. David Foster Wallace is the classic case—Gaddis, Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, Updike, Nabokov, Melville, Robert Burton, Billy Shakes himself, plus advertising and broadcast television. Wallace gathered a nice little apostolate of imitators himself—early Franzen, early George Saunders, Zadie Smith. He’s out of favor now, though, or was when I was in school. I was one, too—a Wallacehead, that is—and it became clear that I was ten to fifteen years out of step with my fellow shiny young M.F.A. candidates. You grow out of these things, though you can still feel it there under the skin when you scratch sometimes.
Wallace makes only a little splash in the pool of Anglophone literature, though, influence-wise; the place is still swamped from the cannonball jump of the obesity-clinic waitlistee and bariatric surgery candidate (influence-wise, I mean, of course) Virginia Woolf, who figured she could put thoughts, beautiful thoughts into words, along with the little moments that make up your life—noticing a crab lying expectant in a tidepool, making the babysitter cry, snagging a sweater—just trying to jam all this pure perception and consciousness in there which, as you know, you can’t. Sometimes it’s pretty, sometimes it’s annoying, but it’s not consciousness. In any case, there are all these clever young people living in New York and writing short stories and little novels all dedicated to exquisite feelings and particular but universalizable hurts and beautiful thoughts, and not a one of them can tell a joke worth a damn. To them I say, Call me Ishmael.
All that consciousness stuff is silly. Language is the medium for argument, persuasion, or at least telling jokes—it holds the shape of time. Imitating the Brits is a mug’s game; it’s like trying to grow a lawn in Arizona. (Which many people do, with unintended results too grotesque to recount here.) As an editor, particularly in certain corners of the press, you find all these agonized young men who have ’lighted on Chesterton or (if they’re a little more sophisticated) Waugh as a model. What these boys want is a mouth full of long-cut American. Mencken muses that Henry James would have become a really first-rate writer if he had moved to Chicago rather than Old Blighty. I think that’s probably true (although the really amusing part of the hypothetical here, to my mind, is to consider how it would have ratcheted poor old Saul Bellow’s neurotic writerly anxieties up to eleven). The kids should hang up their paradoxic antitheses and precious periodic sentences and listen to some Kinky Friedman or John Prine or something.
There’s a lot of game on the American reserve for the youthful literary hunter. Making Mark Twain or Faulkner your main model is a big bite to chew, probably a choking hazard; aping Edith Wharton or F. Scott Fitz is almost as bad as pretending to be British. A lot of writing happened in the years between 1880 and 1930 that has been all but forgotten; plenty of it was dross, but you find by chance some frank diamonds in there. Occasionally young people ask me for advice (which is hugely depressing—set your horizons of success a little higher, kids), and I’ve taken to telling them to read a lot of Theodore Dreiser. Not because Dreiser is a flawless prose writer; far from it. You don’t want to give your rising generational rivals too much help. It’s just something different; it makes the game a little more interesting.
But if the young person is someone I particularly like, I might point them at Ambrose Bierce or Ring Lardner pere. There’s an archaism there, but a familiar one, the warm sepia world of old photographs, of brown suits and straw hats and highballs and race tracks; they put the rangy American language through its paces. They aren’t hung up on the whole European thing. Perhaps most importantly, they are very funny, Bierce in a nasty way, Lardner in (mostly) a nice way, at least until his late career. Bierce, before wandering into the Mexican desert—where, I believe, he still lives and waits like an American Barbarossa—published his collected works in ten volumes. Surely there’s something in there nobody has used before.
We live on the edge of the world; there has never been anything like this place before, and it’s doubtful there will ever be anything like it again once our civilization has run its course. Write with a cigar in your mouth and a squint set on the horizon. If you’re lucky, you might see America out there.
