Masterpieces

Back in the 1970s, I knew a Proust aficionado. Snuggling in bed with a lover, he’d read to her from In Search of Lost Time. “A masterpiece,” was how he described it, explaining, ruefully, that it was far richer in the French. Such funereal regret suggested literary time apogee’d with Proust. Had—lamentably—ground to a halt. Unspoken: the flame had a keeper. I sometimes wondered how he imagined Proust would have described him.

I was then in my late twenties. First book out, second in the works. The Proustian might have argued resistance to the word masterpiece suggested I suffered Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” As novelist Cynthia Ozick wrote, to critic Bloom “all of us are disconsolate latecomers... envious and frustrated inheritors.” For Bloom-the-Freudian, writing was about oedipal winners and losers, a zero-sum game.

Some readers, however, found know-it-all Bloom “hoist with his own petard,” as Hamlet, Bloom’s favorite, put it. Struggles with tradition? Risks of being derivative? William Deresiewicz suggests Bloom’s theory “seems all too transparent a projection of the academic’s own predicament... It is the professor, above all, who labors under the existential need to be ‘original.’ ”

Though Bloom was perhaps projecting, writers can of course be competitive. Of the commitment to art, poet Donald Justice deemed it “rather like the self-satisfaction of the elect in certain Protestant sects.” And, “Experience teaches one to believe that there is a dimension to the self that all those who are not artists lack.” Not an attractive sentiment, I’d say, but Justice doubled down: “Some dim notion of all this must underlie the critic’s familiar envy.”

In this same vein, poet Derek Walcott was “taking on Shakespeare, he was taking on Chaucer,” according to Kei Miller. “He was taking on Dante... This is what great writing was and this is what he wanted to produce... he wanted to stand alongside them.”

Sheesh, as they put it in Hawaiian pidgin. Think of the wolf in “Three Little Pigs,” huffing and puffing. Or remember Norman Mailer’s boxing. Playing the writer—self-promoting, writers so terribly self-made. Self-employed: gig economy workers. Having to, as the idiom went, pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

The literary past: like stenography and filing, part of a writer’s skill set is how best to make use of it. That, and—apologies to Professor Bloom—deciding what voices in the present not to listen to.

Coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, an avid reader, I knew our particular stories had not been told. Stumbled, exuberantly, into trying for myself. Obviously I was instructed by countless works of fiction and nonfiction. Each precursor, without my knowing it, opening another door. I’d read, say, Homer / Sophocles / Ovid / Chaucer / Shakespeare / George Eliot / the Brontes / Dickens / Woolf / Conrad / Flaubert.

The writers I wanted to be in the company of, however, were not-much-older elders. Authors a generation or two senior, all kinds: Camus / Roth / Hunter Thompson / Janet Malcom / George V. Higgins / John Hersey / Marguerite Duras / Italo Calvino / Mary McCarthy / Elizabeth Hardwick / Robert Caro / Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few.

Meanwhile, though books were at the heart of my life, they were only among arts formal and informal shaping me. Films, from Children of Paradise to Little Big Man; music—classical, folk, rock, soul, rhythm and blues; stoned rapping of friends, their interminable oral sagas; and idiomatic English in its many varieties.

About Narrow Road to the Interior, Haruo Shirane writes that for Bashō “the ancients were, paradoxically, to be a source of inspiration but not of models to be emulated.” The search for the new would exist “in relationship to established associations and worlds, which were reconstructed and transmitted by Bashō and other haikai masters.”

When I was in my twenties, spending time in ranch country or in or on the ocean, my poet-mother recommended Narrow Road. Bashō one of the “ancients” she read as part of her process of—as for Bashō himself—revisioning tradition. And though my mother’s great gifts for words—spoken, written—were my mother tongue, I felt...