``I simply don't believe these lists of great or near-great books that supposedly had determining influnce on the poster....
These are the kind of books [Howard Fast, Bertrand Russell, Upton Sinclair, ...H.G Wells, Will Durant], I suspect, differing for each, that introduced people to reading and to worlds of reading, and that were far more influential on their lives than any of the heavyweight books that gradually get interspersed with such works...'' Carol Cox
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There is an implicit question hidden in there, that asks, why on earth would you claim Flaubert and Tolstoy influenced you?
I've thought about this question most of the day, and here is some background by way of an answer.
I was raised in my earliest life (up to twelve) in Los Angeles completely surrounded by classical music, big books, and the smell of turpentine from real paintings, painted in the living room or any other room available for an easel, palette, and the mess associated with painting. Names like Rico Lebrun and Orozco, Michaelangelo, Degas, always Picasso, and then later Pollack, de Kooning and others were in most adult conversations. We had a short list of people in the arts live with us in their transitions from one place to another. The most impressive of these figures was C.F. MacIntyre who was a translator for German, French, and Spanish poetry.
As I discovered later when I read MacIntyre's translation of Goethe's Faust in a comparative lit class, he was best known for his translations of the French Symbolist poets. When I met him at ten and eleven at our place he was a very heavy bourbon drinker, smoked Galois, actually wore a beret and black sweater, and had a strong Southern accent. I had seen him in Guadalajara when we went to the bull fights. In LA, one afternoon, when I came home from school, he was asleep in a chair propped up in the thresholds of a doorway between the kitchen and living room. Since I couldn't get passed him, I studied his face which was leathery, deeply wrinkled, and had strange skin formations on it. His nostrils were huge, dark, and filled with wiry grey hairs.
I am telling you this because much later when I read Joyce's The Sisters, I saw MacIntyre's nostrils, just as Joyce described them for a dead uncle:
``When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling. There he lay, solemn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was very truculent, grey, and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by scanty white fur. There was a heavy odour in the room--the flowers....''
These memories of Mac and others made the distance between some scenes in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and what had gone on in my family just about zero. Living in another country among the locals and the American ex-patriot art crowd, going on strange trips with weird people, meeting my stepfather on a cobblestone street in Guadalajara walking with another woman much better looking than my mother...
It was not your regular American kid's life. Much later at nineteen, partly in a deep nostalgia for a lost world of childhood and the arts, I went into a book store looking for a French novel in French, because I had completed a year of French. I was looking to re-live an art life that had been lost through divorce and many other transformations. I found a copy of Stendal's Rouge et Noir and was struggling to get through the first paragraphs. I realized I just didn't have the skill or background to read the damned thing. Since the foreign language books were almost never opened, the store owner, Mr. Lewis of Lewis Books came over and asked what I was looking for. I told him that I thought I could get through a French novel in French, but it wasn't working. So he suggested I try the translations and took me over to a rack of recent translations....
Months later, I was at the translations rack and Lewis who had gotten the idea that I wanted to learn about French literature, picked out Flaubert's Sentimental Education for me. It was in the New Directions section which also had Sartre's Nausea that I had read and thought was just weird. Arty weird, but weird.
There was simply nothing like reading the first few pages of Flaubert's novel. I realized immediately that he was painting a picture and was very very good at it. I could see everything as if it were a moving canvas. I thought about the color schemes and their combinations, and since I had already seen the early Impressionist Manet, Degas, and Pisarro, I could see Flaubert's world. He was just as good with words as they were with paint. It was a revelation. And the novel was big, even if the central characters were small, few and mostly immune to their world. I could never figure out why Federick didn't make a move on Madame Arnoux or why he seemed incapable of acting on anything at all. It was a horribly frustrating novel, but it was immensely beautiful in its fabulous scenery and in the great scope of time. It made mid-19thC France live in a completely real way that culminated in the disastrous turns of 1848 through 1860 something. The painters, the writers, the salons, the art, the absurd newspapers and popular culture all lived and were laid out before me as a living tableaux. Here are the first couple of paragraphs:
``In front of the Quai St. Bernard, the Ville de Montereau, which was just about to start, was puffing great whirlwinds of smoke. It was six o'clock on the morning of the 15th of September, 1840.
People rushed on board the vessel in frantic haste. The traffic was obstructed by casks, cables, and baskets of linen. The sailors answered no questions. People jostled one another. Between the two paddle-boxes was a heap of parcels; the clamour was drowned in the loud hissing of the steam, which, making its way through the plates of sheet-iron, encompassed everything in a white mist, while the bell at the prow kept continuously ringing.
At last, the vessel drew away; and the banks of the river, crowded with warehouses, timber-yards, and manufacturies, opened out like two huge ribbons being unrolled...''
In the end, as the famous coda, the entire weight of the novel, some five hundred plus pages, was balanced on the fleeting fulcrum of one late afternoon and early evening walk in Paris with Madame Arnoux fifteen years later.
I am telling you Carrol, this book changed me. I was ready for it and I read it at a perfect time. In remembrance of it, I re-read it in my forties exactly because I knew it ended with Federick in his forties. And by god, it was even better. I cried at nineteen and at forty something for the long ago nineteen year old who read the same book and who had disappeared. I discovered you can actually measure your sensibility by re-reading books you most loved when you were young.
I have occasionally wondered if old man Lewis, who was every inch of an old Jewish bookseller, knew what a gift he had given me. He must have known at least something in some silent communion. He frowned once when I brought several trashy pop science fiction books to the cash register. He had the look of a rejected lover. I felt terrible, but I made up for it later by buying Dostoyevsky's Notes from an Underground Man. I was expecting more tales of a bohemian and was shocked to discover a crank and shock of all shocks, a very funny crank---well in the cruel kind of irony that Dos likes.
Any way, remember I didn't asked about a great books list. I asked about what most influenced listmembers, mostly looking to see if people had great experiences in reading. If I go back further, the single greatest science fiction read for me at thirteen was H.G.Wells, The Time Machine---absolutely without doubt. Also Poe which I read in high school. But there was also John Steinbeck and Jack London.
In any event, Lewis was the best mentor I ever had. He gave me War and Peace and the Journals of Andre Gide. He also gave me Celine's Journey to the End of Night and Malraux's Man's Fate. For all intent and purpose he was the curator of my soul. How lucky was that?
But I want to say a few things about Tolstoy because the contrast with Flaubert was striking. I read Flaubert first and then Tolstoy. If Flaubert imagined he was a painter, Tolstoy believed he could evoke the physical movement of time and history. They were both right. If I imagined that I had seen mid-19thC Paris through Flaubert, I felt like I had lived in 19thC Russia through Tolstoy.
One deep concordance in W&P was the rabbit hunt on the Rostov estate. I had a horse as a teenager and had ridden my horse in the cold and rain and smelled his salty lather, the squeaking sound of wet leather and numerous other impressions, like the difficulty that horses have in deep wet plowed earth in the rain. All these are evoked in the rabbit hunting scene. And when the hunting party returns to the caretaker's cabin, there in the steaming close quarters of a peasant's house, fogged up windows, the smells of heavy cooking, the rosy cheeked women... I mean, my god man, how much of the earth and the human condition do you want to read and remain unimpressed...?
Well, much later still in the Magic Mountain, which also changed me, but in much more limited ways, there is the chapter titled Snow. I had been lost in the California wilderness around Lake Tahoe, cross country skying once upon a time, and Snow evoked it, except of course there was no hut for a refuge. I just managed to get to a road in the frozen twilight and had a long miserable hike back to the car. It was enough to make Snow real.
Well, life has its moments and literature is supposed to bring them out in their crystalline purity. If you are very lucky, and I was, those moments live forever in your imagination and compose part of the great positive and dominant chords of a life.
C