Professor Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of Queen Mary College interviewed 500 men, many of whom had some professional connection with literature, about the novels that had changed their lives. The most frequently named book was Albert Camus's The Outsider, followed by JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.... Carl Remick
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Professor Lisa of Queen Mary was talking to the wrong men. For one thing the novel is called The Stranger, L'Estranger, which I have in a first edition, thanks for asking. It cost one hundred and twenty bucks.. My first copy I had died from reading to much...
The three novels and journal that most changed my life were Flaubert's Sentimental Education (1st place), Tolstory's War and Peace (also 1st place), Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (2rd place) and the Journals of Andre Gide (also 2rd place). I read them all during the summer I was nineteen and dodged getting a job through the transparent rouse of going to summer school---one sculpture class that ended after ten weeks and was over by noon. I would go to a local Italian deli, get a great sandwich and soda, and flop under a lemon or orange tree and read the rest of the afternoon in the oppressive heat of the San Fernando Valley---or go out at one of the beaches on Hwy 1 off Topanga Canyon Rd. It was like living in paradise. I could always open a Picasso book and just gaze at it for hours. In the cool evenings after midnight I would play either John Coltrain's My Favorite Things or Miles Davis, Kind of Blue.
I had already read Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, but I was annoyed and envious of the wealth and privilege of going to a fancy east coast prep school---with its high tone adventures in NYC. I preferred the grit in Hemingway's fishing vacation to Spain which reminded me of Mexico where I saw my first bullfight at nine, saw my first you know what, and gazed at the delicious mocha skin and lips of Dolores Rodriguez (ten) who lived downstairs---well, and by the time I got to Hemingway I had been fishing and hiking over several summers in the California Sierras and in Idaho where the fish were bigger.
I still remember my impressions and their mixtures with images of my life, especially the great affinity between California and Spain---and then some sections of Russia from Tolstoy---the supreme dominance of the landscape which became a great love.
My best friend at the time was learning flamenco guitar and we were avid fans of Segovia, Montoya, and Sabicas. We drank red wine and read Tortilla Flat and laughed as we recited drunken passages to each other. Red Mountain in fruit jars! Malaguena sal de rosa. Gallo like Coors was forbidden by his commie parents. Spain, Russia, France, wine, guitars, oil paint, writing, and communism. What could be better? For alienation there were the great Italian and French movies of the period... La Dolce Vita, L'Aventura, La Notte or 400 Blows, Sundays and Cybelle, Jules and Jim.
It's very hard to imagine many kids today have ever tasted any of these riches, their extraordinary visions and textures, the intensity of the feelings and associations, the depths of culture and history given implicitly in these arts---especially in contrast to the vacuum of Amerika and its counterpoint as modernity.
The next fall I took a printmaking class and spent hours and hours going over Goya's Disasters of War and the Capriccios, and of course Rembrandt, particularly his self portraits. It was not encouraged at the time, but I copied several of Goya and Rembrandt's prints, first in pen and ink and then with a needle cutting through hard ground asphaltum on copper keeping the prints for myself. While the outside art world was cooling off with Warhol, I was still stuck on the powerful expressionism of Jose Clemente Orozco and Rico Lebrun. About the only communion with the `present' I could find was in Franz Klein, the landscape images of de Kooning, and the figurative paintings and miniatures of Diebenkorn.
What interests me now is that I was no longer an American in quite the way one is supposed to be in order to paint like an American. You simply can not look at Spanish and Mexican painters, read French and Russian novels, and look at California through those eyes and still be an American. Maybe the rightwing is right, California isn't really part of America.
C