Carol Hogan should have been on the list.
I compiled the list that should have included Hogan, author of the children’s book “18 Cousins,” after a friend challenged me via Facebook to name 15 writers who have influenced me, and to spend no more than 15 minutes thinking about it. Here’s my 15:
Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Bishop, Salman Rushdie, Jane Austen, Thomas Mann, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anjana Appachana, John Ashberry, Alma Guillermoprieto, Langston Hughes, Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison -- those last two will tell you I had a sci-fi phase and probably allow you to date it.
Jo in Alcott’s ``Little Women’’ taught me the rewards of the mindful practice of writing, the honing of your own taste and confidence through reading and writing regularly. Hurston, who was a novelist and an anthropologist who set her work among Black Floridians who might have known my relatives, added lessons about the power of humor. Guillermoprieto, a nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, made me want to travel, which can take writers out of their comfort zones so that they become better observers.
The poets Ashberry and Bishop and the novelist Austen taught me to listen for the music in everyday life. They are understated. Poet Hughes taught me that it can be OK to overstate. Speaking of overstatement: For novelists Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, Baldwin and Garcia Marquez, writing is jazz: audacious, ornate, yet controlled. It doesn’t work if you don’t have control.
In the first moments of my 15 minutes, I thought of writers who have influenced my writing. But writers also have influenced how I live. Appachana is on my list because of her “Listening Now” (isn’t that a beautiful title?). Once in this Rashomon-like novel, the main character Padma retreats to her bathroom to read, snatching a moment from a demanding child. I read “Listening Now” years before I had my own child. Its plot -- woven from the lives of Padma, who is a brilliant South Indian literature professor, and her family -- was far removed from my own life. But I recognized how we all sometimes need the escape a book can offer. And I felt a validation of my habit of taking books into the bathroom – so private, and the light so bright in there.
Mann is on my list because I love ``Joseph and his Brothers’’ and ``Buddenbrooks,’’ but also because of the Mann scholar Erich Heller. Heller was a literary super star who, though officially retired, was still teaching one course a year when I was an undergrad at Northwestern. When I arrived for the first day of his class, I discovered the auditorium was so packed, desks were jammed together in a manner that surely violated the fire code. Heller was hugely intelligent, but that didn’t make him aloof. He was warm and open and slyly humorous. In my mind’s eye, Mann looked, behaved and spoke just like Erich Heller. I aspire to such graciousness.
I passed the list challenge on to 15 friends and pored over their responses on Facebook. Why didn’t I think of Shel Silverstein or Bob Dylan?
One response was particularly humbling. It was from a fellow journalist who had had a stroke when she was just 40 years old. The stroke left her struggling to process language, cruel for a writer. But she is stubborn and strong. She typed out a few names. Not 15, but enough: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Emily Bronte, Philip Pullman, William Gibson, Yeats.
Just as my 15 writers are from all over the world, responses to the challenge were global. The Yeats fan wrote from South Africa. Just glancing at the lists compiled by friends and friends of friends transported me to places I have visited such as the now defunct Boekehuis book store in Johannesburg, the Strand in New York with its "18 miles of books," the overflowing tables of a Khan Market book store in New Delhi that I could imagine Appachana’s Padma visiting. The Khan Market proprietor once called up another customer and convinced her to loan me a book he didn’t happen to have in stock the day I stopped by.
Yes, I spent more than the prescribed 15 minutes on this Internet exercises. It was a glorious way to pass the time in an age of isolation and travel bans imposed because of COVID. Technology can be put to use to remind us of what we share and to help us share it. Not just the new technology of social media platforms that bring us together virtually across time and space, but the old tech that is a book – an ink-and-paper TARDIS that broadens your mind in unexpected ways as soon as you open the cover.
I just wish I had remembered Hogan. Her `18 Cousins’ was the first book I read on my own. In it, an only child city kid is at first intimidated, then charmed to find he has 18 country cousins eager to show him farm life. What influence could be more profound or lasting than the first time you crack the code of reading? I passed my copy of ’18 Cousins’ on to my daughter. She’s long outgrown it. It’s still on her shelf, waiting to be passed on one day to some other kid.