I began dipping into Mentors, Muses & Monsters the other day, and oh is it off to a good start! The editor, Elizabeth Benedict, has a lovely essay about Elizabeth Hardwick who she had as a teacher at Barnard in the 1970s. Hardwick has a reputation for being sort of a bitch (my choice of descriptor not Benedict’s), but Benedict’s experience of her was as a tactfully honest teacher who was also “very jolly.”

Of the few essays I have read thus far, the one sticking in my mind at the moment is by Robert Boyers called “Imagining Influence.” As a young man trying to make his way in the world as a writer he found that he was paralyzed at the thought of writing fiction. He knew he could not compare to one of the greats and he could not bring himself to produce something he knew was subpar in comparison. So he wrote nonfiction and made his success that way.

But his wife had an obsession with Natalia Ginzburg and worked on a project that took her to Italy several times to interview her. Boyers wasn’t interested in meeting Ginzburg at the time but eventually, because of his wife’s interest, read all of Ginzburg’s work. In Ginzburg he found a writer who was not great but who had a certain force and appeal nonetheless. Ginzburg’s secret was her honesty, she wrote with a fear of “cheating and being dishonest.”

Boyers claims he was not inspired by her work. But Ginzburg had a certain disdain for the notion of “LITERATURE,” and this allowed Boyers to finally begin to write fiction:

I knew that if I was to write fiction, I would have to proceed without worrying about this sort of stuff. Ginzburg herself had derided the notion that to be taken seriously, she would have to ask how she stacked up against Proust or Joyce or Kafka, and in some way her inveterate unconcern fueled my own and allowed me simply to write without noticing the shadows on the wall. When I was young and fresh out of college I wished to write sentences as intricate and original as Stendhal’s. But as I wrote in my fifties I felt free at last to proceed as if the word “masterpiece” had nothing whatever to do with the real, immediate, heart-stopping business of fiction.

Boyers never did meet Ginzburg but her influence is very real.

Nanowrimo is going on this month and all the people participating are attempting to write a novel in one month. It occurs to me that it is very much a device, a means as Ginzburg was to Boyers, to get past the notion of masterpiece and the comparing of oneself with the “biggies.” And isn’t the idea of what literature should be what gets in the way of many fledgling writers? So they write how they think they should write or they try to write like Virginia Woolf or Charles Dickens, or John Updike and end by making a real mess of things.

I’ve never read Ginzburg before, but it seems to me she is onto something. Honesty is a good thing to strive for in fiction. A reader knows when a writer is being dishonest. We will forgive small lies, but if the dishonesty persists, then we put the book down and do not return to it.

I hope the rest of the essays in the book are as good as the first. I’ll let you know!