Authors were the people who had the greatest influence on me. They weren’t the people I loved the most. That group includes my wife, children, grandchildren, and extended family.
The authors weren’t even the people I necessarily admired the most. Many of them made morally repugnant political judgments. The America First Committee was a pressure group founded before World War II that urged Americans not to intervene as much of Europe was conquered, British bombed, and Jews, among others, rounded up for what would become systematic murder. Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, was a member. So was the poet E.E. Cummings (or, if you prefer following his own example e.e. cummings). A young Gore Vidal, then a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, was a member of the student chapter there.
In 1937, the philosopher John Dewey headed a commission. It included the novelist James T. Farrell. The Commission was inquiring into charges against Leon Trotsky at the show trials Joseph Stalin had set up. A year earlier sixteen well-known Bolsheviks “confessed” to having plotted with Trotsky to kill Stalin. The defendants were sentenced to death as was Trotsky in absentia. There were four show trials; they ended in the death of every member of the Politburo Lenin had set up except for Stalin. Of course, Stalin ended up purging millions of people, including many writers and intellectuals.
A month before Dewey left on his inquiry, a group of Americans wrote an “Open Letter to American Liberals.” In the letter, this group attacked Dewey and his Commission for questioning the assertions of the Soviet Communist Party that the Bolsheviks convicted at the trials were traitors. Signers of that Letter included Nathaniel West, Dorothy Parker, Henry Roth, Lillian Hellman, Malcolm Cowley, and Theodore Dreiser.
Of course, Celine, Ezra Pound, and Knut Hamsun (who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920) were notorious racists and anti-Semites. There are, sadly, many other examples of authors with repugnant political views. But it is not for political guidance that I admire authors.
What authors have done is not provide social or political guidance, but a guidance that is much more personal. Many people like to point to a parent, a friend, or a teacher who changed their life, and pointed them in a direction that proved decisive in the definition of their lives. Such writers provided those directions either through an epiphanic insight, what Edmund Wilson termed a “shock of recognition,” or a reasoned argument or the emotional sway and linguistic dazzle of a well wrought novel.
What is interesting in the author-reader relationship is that the two participants rarely meet, and when they do the meeting doesn’t go so well. Their intimate relationship involves authors providing a road map to the bottom of our souls and readers taking the tour of that soul and learning from it as they continue their own journeys.
The last line of the Leonard Cohen song “Stories of the Street” is “and lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye.” This is a striking image that perfectly describes the author in the modern world, a thinker surrounded by noise, by people rushing to their next stop, by being part of what David Riesman called “the lonely crowd.” The author, in the middle of all that, tries to find a human contact, tries to look at us, and get us to look back.
As for me, I like to go where readers congregate, to bookstores and libraries and classrooms, to literary blogs and websites, to lectures, and I also like to sit in the corner, quietly, and hold up a book or my iPad and make my way to another person’s imagination.
And so, thank you Sinclair Lewis, for writing Babbitt, the book that introduced me to adult literature, made me realize that it was possible to get at truth, and allowed me to escape the mundane world I lived in as a thirteen year old. And thank you to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for writing God in Search of Man and for rendering the search for wonder and awe in such poetic prose. And thank you to the untold hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of writers I’ve read since I began. And thank you to the teachers to showed me how to read more intelligently than I could have on my own.
And thank you, the readers, for allowing my words into your minds.
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