Who Inspired You As A Writer?
A New Book Asks Several Acclaimed Writers to Name Theirs
When I think about a college professor who really cracked open the literary world for me, I realize it sometimes had less to do with what he said and more with how he said it.
His name was Ricardo Quinones. He was in his late 50s, carried around a cracked leather satchel stuffed with papers, and had an office organized by a tornado. His Van Dyke beard and hair were both gray, curly, and messy … and he wore scuffed boots and the tweed jacket with worn elbow patches that seems a minimum fashion requirement for many in the literary world.
And yet.
From all that disorder came his elegant, eloquent lectures on Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dante that first turned my head and made me see literature in an exciting new way.
The disorder of his office and person was probably just a gesture of defiance against the norms of the uptight, small, politically conservative college in Southern California where he made his living. While other professors equipped us with the tools to take into the worlds of government and finance, my late professor (and his colleagues in the small English department) tended to our hearts and souls.
I hadn’t thought about him in a long time — not until I opened Dale Salwak’s inspiring Writers and Their Teachers, a collection of essays from Bloomsbury about mentorship and the impact that people have on young literary lives.
It’s a very special book. The people in it are very special.
I’m not just referring to the superstars Salwak has managed to corral here — including J.M. Coetzee, Jay Parini, Paul Theroux, Margaret Drabble, Stephen Greenblatt, and Dana Gioia. I mean the people they honor: the teachers who inspired them and who might otherwise remain unknown if it weren’t for this book.
For some, their memories of their mentors are like mine — they mingle the romantic with the more practical side of writing.
“He was a natty dresser, in the European fashion, and always seemed to don a beret and smoking, a long cigarette holder in his right hand,” writes Paul Mariani about famed poet and translator Allen Mandelbaum. He first encountered him as an undergraduate at New York University. “He was tall, thin, lightly bearded, full of nervous energy, and always — always — thinking.”
Mariani’s glowing tribute — and quite a few in this collection — are less about learning any specific literary practice and instead describe how they felt when these teachers first appeared in their lives.
Feelings shouldn’t be dismissed, though. They’re important; I don’t mean to suggest that any essay is less valuable because it doesn’t say much about the nuts and bolts of writing. Our lives change because of feelings; new vistas open because of them. They can have just as much impact — arguably even more — than any technical advice or tips.
That’s what novelist Margaret Drabble suggests. Her tribute to college administrator Barry Till is a good example of that.
In “A Far Cry from Oxbridge,” Drabble writes that he “never taught me, and he was an administrator rather than a teacher, so he doesn’t strictly qualify as a subject for this book. But the more I thought about him and the historic institution that he ran with such panache, the more the thought of writing about him and Morley College appealed to me.”
Till was a dynamic person with many sides to his experience: he was an author, a former clergyman (with very ecumenical views), and an advocate for women (especially young mothers), among other roles. At Morley College, he created an atmosphere of openness and inclusivity that was just what Drabble needed when she arrived to teach there.
“Morley had a considerable influence on me, and it was through Barry’s invitation that I came to teach there,” she explains. “Those years taught me a lot. I knew nothing about teaching at the outset.”
Lessons in living
It’s often the case that our mentors teach us more about living than about the craft.
Some may disagree with that, but one who won’t is acclaimed literary critic Stephen Greenblatt.
As he worked on his dissertation about poet-soldier Sir Walter Raleigh, he found that same blend of art and experience in Alvin Kernan, a literary critic who was his dissertation advisor and who had been a sailor caught in the Battle of Midway.
“Kernan had lived a life elsewhere, far from the secure boundaries of the elite university,” Greenblatt writes of his teacher, whom he honors with the title of doktorvater. Like Raleigh, Kernan was something of a poet-soldier himself.
“He grasped in a deep existential way, as well as intellectually, what I was struggling to understand,” Greenblatt explains. “And I in turn sensed that he enabled my project because it spoke to something important in him.”
Is friendship possible with a mentor?
This book makes clear that friendship is possible. I never felt that way with Quinones — I kept him up on a pedestal for the time I knew him. But others in this collection describe the evolution of their mentor-disciple relationships into something else as they came into their own as writers.
“Mentorship is really a kind of friendship taken to a refined level,” explains critic, novelist, and poet Jay Parini. “The friendship is one-sided at first, although in time there’s a kind of seesaw that finds a balancing point.”
Parini found that balancing point with W. Edward Brown, his undergraduate advisor at Lafayette College. Brown was a genuine polymath who showed Parini how to read ancient Greek as a way to enhance his writing and whom the young Parini sought to mimic in his style and attitude. Beyond writing lessons, Brown also counseled him through times of political upheaval and fear, and Parini found in him someone interested in his works in progress.
Poet and critic William Logan found a similar balancing point with David Milch (creator of NYPD Blue, Deadwood), a figure whose literary roots have nourished a successful TV career. Logan was able to learn from him thanks to a Yale program that offered courses that were less conventional, more experimental, and outside the academic mainstream. These courses were taught by “hired gunslingers rather than regular faculty”—people, in other words, like Milch.
Other writers featured in this book include British poet laureate Andrew Motion (whose housemaster, Peter Way, showed him that his desire to become a poet wasn’t impossible), George Howe Colt (who found inspiration and support in one of his prep school classmates), and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who celebrates not one, but many of his teachers, starting with his grandfather, who ingrained in him a deep awareness of words and their tonal qualities that has stayed with him throughout his career.
Salwak has done an excellent job of coaxing fresh pieces — all of them, he tells us in his introduction, are original and only for this volume — and assembling a good variety of voices, which is hard to do in collections like these for a simple reason: you never know who will finally be willing to put in the time to deliver a piece.
The author of many books and collections, Salwak himself muses on mentors in his introduction.
“I often wonder what would have come about if I had not heard Mrs. Joanna Hayes, my high school literature teacher, speak six memorable words that would change my life,” he explains. “Each of the essays portrays influential teachers at the height of their powers. Each explores the awakening that can occur in the minds of those fortunate enough to have had such an educational experience.”
Who inspired you?
The pieces that open and close this book serve as strange bookends because they are so different.
These drastic differences, in fact, make them an ideal focus for closing this piece. The opening essay is by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee on a teacher he had as a child, and the closing essay is about Paul Theroux’s relationship with V.S. Naipaul, which was, to put it diplomatically, challenging.
Coetzee’s touching portrait of Gerrit Gouws not only thanks him for his kindness to the young writer, who felt alienated and alone, it also recognizes Gouws’ quiet heroism and endurance in a world divided by language and politics.
Coetzee gives us a quick overview of how people like him, who spent much of their lives in an Afrikaans-speaking environment (a form of Dutch brought to South Africa by early Protestant settlers), struggled to learn English because “sending a child to an English-language school was a common way of smoothing the child’s way in the world.” It wasn’t easy for Coetzee and his classmates — and it wasn’t easy for Gouws, either.
“I find my heart going out to poor Gerrit Gouws, required to master the intricacies of the grammar of a language not his own, and to maintain an air of unshakeable authority while delivering lessons in that grammar to children,” writes Coetzee, who paints a moving portrait of someone who quietly bore the challenges wrought by politics in South African classrooms with a simple stoicism.
By contrast, Naipaul, in Theroux’s musings on their up-and-down relationship, never bore anything quietly.
Anyone in Naipaul’s presence was constantly subjected to his impatience, arrogance, and incredibly — one could substitute impossibly — high standards.
And yet, even though Naipaul sounds like a complete horror show to me, he provided something affirming to Theroux. Theroux was drawn to him. Naipaul encouraged and supported him, even though Theroux wasn’t spared his mentor’s cruelty and harsh judgments.
Near the end of his piece, Theroux writes how, once he moved “out of his shadow, I saw his contradictions clearly, and I am still seeing them — his divided self, his many moods. In good health he was superb; after a bad night, or in a depressive frame of mind, he was a doomsayer.” And yet, despite all of Naipaul’s negative qualities, Theroux’s admiration and love for him are evident throughout the piece.
I think Theroux’s reaction is true for any writer and his/her teacher. Someone else may not see the same things that we do, but that’s because those teachers weren’t meant for them. Look back on your own life, and I’m sure you’ll find at least a couple of people who have exerted an important influence on your formation, and their influence belongs only to you and no one else.
That’s just one of the musings that occurred to me as I finished Salwak’s thoughtfully arranged book. The world is full of teachers. They’re all around us. We just need to be ready for the lessons that they’re waiting to teach us.
Learn more about Dale Salwak’s Writers and Their Teachers
