Last week we told the stories of how we got into writing. They were great fun—all those busy four-year-olds cooking up stories, all those mad teens clacking away on typewriters under the raised eyebrows of the taken-aback, even some of us who came to this craft recently and are only now discovering the fascination of it. What maniacs we all are, utterly devoted to this simple world of words!
So this week let’s tell more stories, this time about those marvelous, convoluted degrees of separation that separate us all from each other—and from the authors we love.
How many degrees of separation are you from your literary idols?
One of the writers I love best is the extraordinary early-twentieth-century Danish story writer, Isak Dinesen. Famous in our time as the author of Out of Africa—starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford—which is the memoir of her life on her coffee plantation in Kenya, Dinesen was known throughout Europe for decades before that 1985 movie as the author of some of the most wonderful gothic, mystical literature ever, through her collections of short stories, Seven Gothic Tales, Winter’s Tales, and Last Tales. She also wrote a companion book to Out of Africa, even more beautifully-rendered stories of Africa, Shadows on the Grass, as well as many wonderful essays and a ‘potboiler’ mystery, The Angelic Avengers, under the pseudonym Pierre Andrezel. She was interviewed as Baroness Karen Blixen, her real name, by The Paris Review in 1956, only a few years before she died.
Now, one of the people Dinesen knew in Kenya was a young American woman, Beryl Markham, who’d been raised there by her father. Markham was a teen when Dinesen was an adult (she makes a brief appearance in Out of Africa under the name Felicity), and she was always deadly jealous of Dinesen, particularly of her love affair with the coveted Denys Finch-Hatton. Markham has claimed Finch-Hatton was in the process of leaving Dinesen for her when he died and, in fact, that Finch-Hatton invited her to join him on his fateful plane ride. Markham was studying at the time to become a bush pilot, delivering mail and supplies around rural Kenya in the early days of the airplane, and eventually became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane from east to west. Markham wrote a gorgeous memoir chronicling that trip, West with the Night, in the style of one of her lovers, the quintessential Antoine de Saint Exupéry.
However, when Markham was old, her third husband, LA scriptwriter Raoul Schumacher, came out with the claim that, in fact, he had written West with the Night. This claim got quite a bit of coverage in works written about Markham in the 1980s (when West with the Night was rediscovered and republished), especially by the biographer Errol Trzebinski.
In fact, the LA writer Scott O’Dell, author of the Newbery award-winning Island of the Blue Dolphins and friend to both Markham and Schumacher, made quite an issue out of Schumacher’s assertion, trying very hard to have it verified in order to force Markham to give up her claim to authorship. He failed—to this day, nobody knows for certain who wrote West with the Night, although most agree somebody edited it into its final polished form.
As it happens, O’Dell and his wife, the author Elizabeth Hall, were close friends of my aunt and uncle, who helped raise me. From the time I was quite young, I had autographed copies of Hall’s children’s books on my shelf, along with Island of the Blue Dolphins (which I’m afraid I found intensely dry and unreadable until I was an adult). My aunt and uncle even took in Hall’s daughter when her marriage ended in the 1970s and helped raise her baby daughter in their home for her first year of life. Hall’s granddaughter is still a close member of our family—she and I spoke together at my uncle’s funeral several years ago.
And all that makes me four degrees of separation from one of my greatest literary idols of all time, the brilliant Isak Dinesen.
So who are your literary idols? What stories can you tell? And how many degrees of separate stand between the two of you?
NEXT WEEK: What Does Writing Mean to You?
My literary idol is Ernest Hemingway. I have scoured the internet. I have interrogated all my friends with any celebrity connection. One of my friends is a friend of Bob Gale, Lee Childs and Willy Russell but I can’t find any connection between them and Ernest. I have searched through family and work colleagues.
I have no connection to Ernest Hemingway whatsoever 🙁 but it was fun looking.
Okay, you made me laugh! And right out of the gate.
If your literary idols are contemporaries, then it’s very likely your degree of separation is one or pretty close to it. I follow most of my favorite writers on Twitter; some of them follow me back. Since I read genre fiction, I’ve hung out with quite a few of my favorites at cons like Readercon and Worldcon or at signings. Heck, nowadays I’m agent cousins with several of them.
When it comes to cool stories, it’s almost better if you’re not too close, neh? Then you can talk about this person’s cousin’s wife and so forth. Saying, “Well I play Scrabble with so-and-so on facebook all the time” is positively unromantic by comparison.
Okay, I guess I’ve got one. Growing up, Robert Heinlein was my favorite writer. One day within the first month after I moved to my current home, I saw somebody at the bank depositing a check, and I couldn’t help but notice the last name on the deposit slip: Heinlein. So I asked, and it turned that this person’s spouse was like a second cousin once removed of the man himself.
Or there was the time I was on the phone–I want to say I was making cruise reservations, but I’m not positive–and noticed that the phone agent’s last name was Stookey. I mentioned to her that I loved the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary and asked if she were related to Paul Stookey. Turned out her husband was Stookey’s nephew. Is that a literary idol? I’m going to say that songwriting is poetry, and I’m sticking to that. 🙂
Puff the Magic Dragon always counts. (Of course, we were just talking the other day about the mega-popularity of that song among a generation of young adults who perhaps wanted quite badly to believe childhood simply couldn’t live without them. . .)
As it happens, Ronnie Gilbert of The Weavers lives in my small town. She’s quite elderly now and a familiar sight at the local grocery store. She was deeply touched when I took my four-year-old to meet her at a writers’ dinner once, telling her he’d been playing Tzena Tzena Tzena non-stop for months on end.
My childhood favorite Trailblazer series authors, Dave and Neta Jackson, joined my former church. I remember asking them are you “THE Dave and Neta Jackson”? I admit to being a bit starstruck. 🙂
I do that, too. If I ever met Isak Dinesen on the street, I’d probably drop dead from awe. And not just because she’s been dead herself for forty years, either.
Um. Flannery O’Connor is my literary idol, and our closest connection is (a) my Dad is Catholic, and (b) I feel about cows somewhat the way she did about peafowl 🙂 bemused fascination. Except that I eat cows. I kind of think she didn’t eat her peacocks. Can’t recall.
But any personal connection? Nope.
I must not get out enough.
I’ll give you one:
Flannery O’Connor met Patricia Highsmith at Yaddo, where Highsmith was appalled when O’Connor claimed to see the face of Jesus in the porch floorboards.
Years later, Highsmith had an affair with a woman named Maryjane Meaker.
Maryjane Meaker researched and wrote a book based on the story behind the movie Heavenly Creatures about two New Zealand teens who murdered one of their mothers.
One of those teens grew up to become the mystery author Anne Perry.
I have interviewed Anne Perry’s literary agent, Donald Maass.
And you have hired me.
That makes you six degrees of separation from Flannery O’Connor.
I’ve always loved Walt Whitman, and I once saw a documentary on him in which Allen Ginsberg related how he’d once kissed Gregory Corso, who’d once kissed someone else, on back through to Whitman himself.
Well, a year later a friend of mine was at a reading of Ginsberg’s, sitting right up front, and Ginsberg kept looking at him the whole time, and at the end of the reading he walked up to my friend and kissed him on the lips.
Well, with just my friend now standing between me and Whitman in this long line of literary necking, I had to seal the deal with a smooch.
I’m guessing Allen Ginsberg kissed Gregory Corso more than once.
For some years in the 70’s and 80’s I was close with a man named George Gipe and his family. He was a local reporter, and a long time news writer for a TV station. He wrote a terrific book tracing the entire history of sports in America, starting from the 1700’s. He went on to write two screenplays with Carl Reiner and Steve Martin (“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “The Man With Two Brains”). Carl Reiner worked as a writer in 1950 on Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows” with Neil Simon who, after a Tony win, numerous Emmy wins, and several Oscar nominations, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in drama for the play “Lost in Yonkers.”
So, that’s only a few degrees of separation for me. If playwrights count, that is.
Or, how about this? I was at a party in the 70’s once with a bunch of yuppie intellectual types. One of them was convinced I was the guitar player in a band called Fat City who backed up the singer John Denver. Before his arrival on the scene as a singer John Denver wrote the song “Leaving on a Jet Plane” which became a #1 hit for the folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary. They share the same manager as Bob Dylan. So, at least in the eyes of an inebriated yuppie there’s only a few degrees between me and Dylan.
If neither one of those count then I’ll visit my local museum’s Matisse exhibit tomorrow. The paintings were donated by two wealthy, matronly socialites in town (both deceased now) who were close with Gertrude Stein, starting in the 1920’s. Stein was an American who lived most of her life in Paris, and was a supporter of Matisse. She was also close with other American expatriates in Paris, including Hemingway…
Quick, Jeffrey! Run out and make friends with one of the children or friends of those matronly socialites! That would put you at four degrees of separation from Hemingway, whom I know you quote.
Oh! And I just realized—then, you knowing me and and Christopher Wills commenting on my blog, that would make Christopher six degrees of separation from Hemingway himself!
Isak Dinesen was remarkable not only for her literature but also for her life: a woman of great strength and courage,yet vulnerable and not afraid to show it. I know you know this. I only mention it because she occupies such a special place in my heart.
Do you know the story behind The Angelic Avengers? How it was smuggled out of German-occupied Denmark through Sweden during WWII to be published in America, Dinesen’s gesture of defiance against the oppressors of her beloved country?
I least I think that’s how it went.
I do know a little of the story behind it, yes. And what you say is true — or, at any rate, she hinted on more than one occasion that The Angelic Avengers was intended as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of Denmark.
“Her beloved country.”
I like that.
My literary hero is JRR Tolkien, and I have no connection to him that I know of. Except that I visited Oxford once and saw the Eagle and Child pub from across the street. I didn’t get to go inside, though.
My literary idol is James Joyce. A bunch of years ago, I was in Dublin and had the great good fortune of meeting his nephew, Ken Monaghan. He was a gentleman, making this little undergrad feel like the most important Joycean scholar he’s ever met. I was sorry to learn he’d passed away.
My oldest son’s teacher last sememster at UNC was Daniel Wallace who wrote, “Big Fish”. I paid the tuition!
My literary idol has been Australian author John Marsden since I was a young teen. I was lucky enough to meet him once when I was a teenager at our local small town library and even got his autograph.