Under the Influence

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

In Minnesota and in rural northern California where I live in the winter, people sometimes approach me with a certain look in their eyes and tell me how much they love my accent. It feels strangely personal and I’m never quite sure if they’re comfortable with what they hear or if they think I sound like Buddy Hackett. But my speaking style is the most obvious way that my origins can be identified. Place is deeply ingrained. New York does not wash off.

I begin with Place because nothing happens unless it happens somewhere, in my case in a sixteen story apartment house on the southeast corner of 83rd street and Broadway in Manhattan. Some three hundred people lived in that building if you can believe it. The weight of the marital discord, the financial insecurity, the health crises pressed down on the people on the lower floors from the struggles of those above, flattening them like old Chevys in a compactor. A vertical childhood is dense with the stuff of life, dank and airless in comparison to a childhood like the one my great-grandchildren are enjoying where running out into the yard to dig for worms remains a possibility. We didn’t have yards or worms. We had asphalt and pigeons. There were, I suppose, families changing the water in the philodendron, keeping parakeets in cages, walking their poodles and cocker spaniels, but many of these people were refugees from the shtetl, from the camps. I grew up with melancholy and displacement, but also with pyrotechnics in many languages and feats of daring imagination. You could not see a distant horizon with sheep grazing in the meadow from my bedroom window, but you could fold in on yourself and make literary discoveries that waited inside you for the right time, their moment of liberation. The sheer compression of all those people crammed into one space had a profound influence on who I am. The crush of the crowds in the stores, on the street and in the subway, formed me. The Place I grew up in, New York in the ‘50s, was an Influencer.

Photo by Leo Bayard on Unsplash

There seem to be a great many individuals now who call themselves Influencers. I don’t know who these people are or what they do, how they expect to plant their taste in clothing, music, food, politics and so on in my head so that I will spend my money for example on certain wellness supplements, but I can tell you that growing up in the pressure cooker of upper Broadway I had to fight to fend off the onslaught of other people’s opinions. I had to kick and scream to become my own person, to become a writer in my own right. It took years and years to cleanse myself of the anxiety of influence as the critic Harold Bloom wrote in his 1973 book of that name. Bloom was writing about poets needing to alleviate the pressure of the past in order to create space for their own work. I had Isaac Bashevis Singer up the block. I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t recognize the debts I carry, intellectually, artistically, spiritually. But I have to chew for a while and digest other people’s experience, allowing it to take its sweet time settling into my organism so that I can add it to the existing chemistry. I can’t just slap it on like pancake make-up because some tik-tokker thinks its hot.

There are many people to whom I’m indebted, but I can only invite them in a few at a time. Today, I want to acknowledge George Orwell whose fierce devotion to telling the truth as he saw it remains a model. His defense of the posture of democracy and free speech has sustained me since I first read Homage to Catalonia in college. I’d love to be able to introduce him to Grace Paley, the feminist and anti-war activist, who produced a small output of flawless stories while marching tirelessly in support of civil rights and against nuclear weapons. I am usually averse to cozying up to celebrity, but her older sister, Jean, who called her Gracie, lived in my building on 83rd street and befriended my mother so I take certain liberties. I want to tell George and Gracie that I can’t do without them. In a world where everything seems provisional, where four different people who are actually bots have recently sent me marketing pitches, I need to remember where I come from and I need to acknowledge the influence of real people, writing real books and doing real work on behalf of the common good.

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