The Writers One Loves
citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Fri, 23 Jul 1999 09:26:15 -0700
Recently I had occasion to look at that oft-quoted list of writers JDS
professed he loved in The Book of the Month Club News in July 1951. (Pardon
this pickyness, but he said he wouldn't name any living authors, and then he
goes on to include O'Casey--surely, Sean, died 1964.) I was struck, in
looking at it this time, by certain absences: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring
Lardner, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, and no Chinese or Japanese poets. (And I
have always wondered what JDS thinks about that other 20th century
wordsmith, perhaps the greatest in English: James Joyce.)
But, anyhow, the important point of the list was JDS's insistence on the
word *loves.* Not admires, not wishes to emulate, not envies, not greatly
respects. This led to a little test. I sat before my wall of books (I
should say my and my wife's wall of books) and began to causally run my eye
along the spines, starting at the upper left, near the nine-foot ceiling,
and proceeding downwards till I hit the art section. Then to the next case,
at the top, and downwards till again running into that sprawling art
section. And then to the third and fourth cases (only in these I stopped at
the reference sections.) As I did this, I kept trying to adhere strictly to
the injunction of *love*. It even caused me to seek out that hidden,
all-too-forgotten, misunderstood, magnificent muscle, the heart. Each of
the names I lifted from the spines accompanied me to that chamber, so I
could speak them into its silence. Alas, Ezra Pound's died away. ( And a
few others.) But I was left with five, easy to recall on one hand. They
are, in chronological order, that is, in the order they entered my reading
life---no, my *life*--J.D.Salinger (I will include the living), John Keats,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka.
And *yours*?
--Bruce