Influences 2-- Reply to Matt

Matt said:

"You were a writer already into his own by the time I found that excerpt from "Rage" in the Smithsonian(?). But maybe you'd like to share some of your early unpublished work with us :-) and let us try to find the ghosts of Kipling and Hemingway in it? Maybe it's not there either".

By the time Rage was published (1984) I was already the veteran of quite a bit of the "New Sporting Writing"-- a term I just made up, and what probably got the book published-- and also of the various weeklies that had morphed from the anti- establishment papers of the Seventies. But let me back up.

You won't see any of my writing that is not in "my" style-- if there actually was any it has long since been thrown away. Some of my Seventies journalism does exist in dusty boxes here-- I even like some of it-- but it would require retyping off old newsprint and it's not all THAT good.

But the main reason you won't is that, while I vaguely felt I would "be a writer" I also thought I might equally "be a biologist" who wrote, and delayed my actual debut as I studied. I was interminably in school in the late Sixties- Seventies, studying both evo and populations biology and literature and writing, reading every Russian novelist ever translated, editing a scholarly journal of English Renaissance studies for credit because they didn't know what else to do with me, taking a one- on- one Shakespeare seminar, meanwhile staying alive by cutting wood and hunting, sometimes even poaching. Odd life.

During this time I discovered a bunch of young writers-- actually averaging about ten years older than I am-- who became an inspiration. Starting in the late Sixties, Sports Illustrated, under the remarkable editorship of a woman named Pat Ryan, a bunch of talented Bohemians and outdoorsmen began to merge the personal "New Journalism" of the time with their love of hunting and fishing, and nature. Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, William "Gatz" Hjortsberg, artist- writer Russell Chatham, Time- Life staffer Robert F. Jones, and others (including in other magazines, like Harper's and the Atlantic) suggested that you could be adventurous, intellectual, and have esthetic standards-- that you didn't have to be either a redneck (or as we said in the New England hills, "wood tick") or Henry James. Not that anyone had said that you did-- but for a young New England intellectual in the early Seventies it sometimes seemed so.

I began sending out stories to SI, to the new Gray's Sporting Journal-- a magazine that probably would not have existed without Pat Ryan's SI, and that featured many of the same writers-- and to various other mostly outdoor mags, which in the face of this competition at least temporarily raised their own standards. I also began to contribute pieces to the Cambridge Real Paper, including book reviews, a genre that I have practiced until recently for money. When an intelligent prof of mine-- who now lives in Santa Fe and also writes books-- questioned the sense of my putting myself through writing classes by writing for money, I realized he was right and quit on the spot.

My style was probably influenced by these people-- perhaps a bit too much by some for a short while-- but then it probably didn't show much, because after all they they had read the same people I had. And I like to think my subject matter was often broader, and still is. I got to know most of them, and all have been kind. Some became dear friends, like the late Robert F. "Bad Bob" Jones. Russell Chatham introduced me to Libby.

But in the innocence of autodidact youth I picked up a few bad habits then. Oddly, what some would say was the least sensible has always been of least import to me-- acting like money didn't matter. Betsy Huntington (who was born to privilege but blew through her inheritance long before she ever met me) used to say to me in exasperation about my literary idols, especially when I was contemplating a journey to some impossible place "My God, Stephen, don't you realize those people were richer than God?" (Not all were-- not Jim Harrison, at least by birth; not Bad Bob; not She Who Must Not Be Named. But most, including my predecessors as well as my contemporaries, were not people who would have to work hard, or at all, for a living.) I would as blithely reply in the same vein "God will provide", and God, magazines, or generous souls often have. In my fifties, with no regular income, my insouciance no longer seems quite as funny. But I still believe I have achieved much by jumping off cliffs while hoping that my wings worked.

But the other mistake I made was thinking that because my friends published in sporting mags that I could as easily get into literary ones, even if they were willing to blurb me or introduce me to agents. Literary ghettos are everywhere, and belonging to one is like being blackballed at a country club.

If you are ambitious you should know this: there are "proper" ways to become a literary/ midlist writer, and improper ones-- though I hope the Internet is subtly changing the paradigm.

Update: Chas Clifton writes in Hardscabble Creek on the subject of "ghettoization":

".... In a different sort of bitchfest, blogger Majikthise has all the links on Terry Prachett's denunciation of Rowling for not being a proper fantasy-genre writer. It really pisses [Pratchett and Neil Gaiman] off that such a huge commercial success isn't counted squarely as a coup for the fantasy genre.

"On the other hand, they really don't like the fact that a card carrying non-fanboy is kicking asses all over the best seller lists".

"There is a sign on the border of every ghetto: "Sal si puedes. Get out if you can." "

To be continued.