No matter your job, it's still who you know

Jane Austen is my sixth cousin eight times removed. I’m also related to John Steinbeck, Hans Christian Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Agatha Christie, George Orwell, Robert Graves and Elizabeth Browning. My mother is into genealogy, you see. And one of the features of Ancestry.com is that if you enter in your family tree, they can tell you which famous people you’re related to. Our list has an impressive number of writers; Mom wondered if talent can be inherited. I’ll admit, I feeling almost like coming from this long line of writers must legitimate me somehow. Almost.

Last summer I read Old School by Tobias Wolff. The first chapter talks about his anticipation as a schoolboy of a visit by Robert Frost to his school. He said that, as an aspiring writer, he wanted to have a "great" take him under their wing. Lay their hands on him. Give them their blessing.

It’s who you know, right? A lot of times now it’s not where you studied, it’s who you studied with. As an undergraduate, I wrote a thesis and asked Lee K. Abbott to direct it. When asked by a fellow student who was directing my thesis, I sometimes got this response: “Oooh, Lee K. Impressive.”

That undergraduate thesis was a collection of short stories that attempted to mimic Shakespeare’s writing process by using the sources he used for his plays to create my own work. I explained: if trying to learn how to write by studying a specific writer, why not go to the best? But maybe, just maybe, I was also hoping that some of his—what shall I call it? mastery? magic? mojo?—would rub off on me.

Harold Bloom calls this the “anxiety of influence.” Strong poets, he says (although this applies to other writers), will creatively (and/or purposefully) misread a previous author. That’s exactly what I was doing, and I’ll be the first to admit that I did not get anywhere close to Shakespeare’s level of genius. But I did pick up a few tricks.

I don’t know if I have it in me to be a “strong” writer. And even though I’ve been reading a lot lately about the theory of writing and about canonical works and what the next major novel is going to look like, I still have no idea. What precisely, for example, does Bloom mean when he says that we’re about to usher in a new theological age of literature?

I am reminded of reading recently on the back cover of A Dash of Style by Noah Lukeman one of the marketing quotes, calling the book a “pageturner.” It’s a grammar manual. Normally, seeing a quote like this, I'd assume that at least one person was really enthralled, no matter how bad I thought the book was, this was not the kind of book you would read straight through, much less not be able to put down. I would hope that this is an extreme example, but my gut is telling me that it's not.

These quotes on book jackets seem to have dropped a long way from their original purpose: they’ve always been used as tools to help sell the book, but now no care is taken by those who are expected to give them. (I wish I could ask that these readers would take the time to think intelligently about the books they’re commenting on instead of churning out the clichés of the book reviewing industry, but this might be too much to ask.)

Isn’t this just an exercise in proving who you know? An extension of Bloom’s theory even into the vast body of writers whom he would not class as “strong.” But it seems to me that they also want this laying-hands-on.

And really, if I were the focal character in Old School, I’d want Robert Frost’s blessing too.