The effects of writers on writers

Writers are influenced by everything, and particularly by other writers; but others are often better at perceiving the influence

Since my last essay, which stepped away from Parliament and politics for a little and looked at one of the works of the great British novelist John le Carré, seems to have been popular and has attracted some new fans, I thought I’d stay clear of current affairs for another day and say a few words about something different. I’ve been listening to and watching a lot of talks by authors recently—YouTube is my oyster, a remarkable resource, and I dive deep and roam wide—and while I enjoy hearing about their individual works and characters, I’m also curious to know about the way in which they write: that is, how they conceive their ideas and plots, and how they transmit them from the imagination to the page. I’m deeply interested in writing as a craft, the individual selection of words and phrases, the choice of simile or metaphor, the building of a sentence or paragraph. Why do they do what they do the way they do? What has influenced them, and which writers do they admire, enjoy or seek to emulate?

It has always seemed to me a slightly unfair question to put to a writer. After all, we are in some ways the worst, most purblind judges of our own work, because we are too close and therefore either too sympathetic or too critical—or both. It’s a little like saying to a musician, “Why do people like your work?”, or to a poet “How good is your verse?” One can answer, if a pistol is applied to the temple, but it is a matter of doubt whether the response will be meaningful or useful.

Of course a writer is not totally ignorant. I can tell you, for example, that my sentences tend towards the long: Allie Dickinson, who edited my professional work for years and is a brilliant polisher of prose, making the bad acceptable and the good sparkling, used to amuse herself by counting the words of my opening sentences. I think the record she recorded was somewhere in the high 50s—too long, of course—and she gently and deftly wielded her editorial scalpel and made the resulting two or three sentences much better and more digestible. I’m afraid this is an instinct: I always think there’s room for just one more clause or one more adjective, making the whole sentence almost biliously dense and rich. I have a habit of inserting parenthetical thoughts, observations or additions, too—anyone who has read very much of my work will know this—and, worse, it extends to the spoken word too. I churn out ideas and words that are relevant but separate, and it’s not easy in conversation, unlike writing, for people to return to these for their full meaning.

It reminds me—he said, parenthetically—of a sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? The comedic pair, Fry in particular, were a vital foundation of my development and especially my modes of expression. I have written a tribute to Stephen Fry and his influence on me, but the headline here is that I was, and am, enchanted by his playfulness and delight in juggling words, using them as toys and instruments of display. The sketch in question, “Beauty and Ideas”, is a perfect example: Stephen plays a verbally freewheeling critic and thinker, while Hugh is his Everyman interlocutor. It is played for laughs, of course, but if you watch or read it again, and pay attention, you will also find that the wild phrases and thoughts Stephen produces are beautifully, if eccentrically expressed, and, above all, true and full of insight. (The same is true of the sketch’s prequel, “Language Conversation”. Each is a real joy.)

The reason I bring the sketch up at all (I know you are wondering) is there is a playful exchange between Stephen and Hugh early on, in which the former says a few words, and then seeks to preserve them for later reference. Stephen speaks first:

“Hold a thought for me, Geoffrey, I’ll give you the thought, hold it for me. Would you please?”
“I’m going to hold a thought now.”

The conversation continues, beautifully, floridly, madly. But Stephen has not forgotten his parked idea.

“Now. Tommy, time to ask you to give back the thought I bade you hold for me.”
“I was holding the thought ‘We’ve made a return to language’.”
“Correct correctington. Language pursues beauty, harries it, hounds it, courses it across the roughlands of truth and enquiry AND IN SO DOING CAN BE BEAUTIFUL ITSELF.”

It is sense veiled in nonsense, it is a fizzing display of mental pyrotechnics and it is very silly. But it also makes me roar with laughter, and a tiny bit of self-recognition and self-awareness.

All of which is an enormously circuitous and periphrastic way of saying I speak too elaborately. (I learned the word “periphrastic” from Fry’s brilliant novel The Liar. Read it.) My late mother, of whom I wrote a few months ago, once looked at me when I was an early teenager and said, not with despair but with a sense, perhaps, of resignation “You’re the only person I know who speaks in paragraphs.”

So I’m aware I do all that when I write. I can tell you that and I can do it with a degree of dispassion. I can also tell you about authors I enjoy and admire. They fall into a few categories. I have long been fascinated by spies, secret agents, espionage and counter-espionage. (By “long”, I mean pre-teen, probably since the age of six or seven, probably inspired by starting to watch Bond films.) I’ve read most of Ian Fleming’s novels, and like them a great deal. They are axiomatically different from the films, just as glamorous and polished but darker, sadder and more introspective. They also span a period of just 13 years, the first published in 1953 and the last, a collection of short stories, released in 1966 after Fleming’s death (he died in August 1964). They are a mixed bag, occasionally formulaic, often implausible, rooted in their period of the 1950s and early 1960s, but sometimes breathtakingly good. The opening of the first book, Casino Royale, is now quite well-known but it is a classic, reaching out of the page and seizing the reader by the throat.

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling—a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension—becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

Isn’t that brilliant? Imagine opening the first novel by a new author, who has a track record in journalism but has never tackled a full-length work, and that is what greets you! It is rightly quoted among the most memorable openings of any novel.

Fleming, as much by success and fame as by artistry and skill, set the standard for modern espionage fiction. But he was sui generis, producing taut, sometimes violent prose with attitudes towards food, drink, women, foreigners, homosexuals and God knows what else which are now lip-chewingly dated. (He believed that homosexuals could not whistle: I’ve never worked out if he thought it was a trait simply common in gay men or if he thought gay men did something which made them no longer able to whistle. I have quizzed several gay friends, and it is not true.) As stories, however, they remain very fine works, and Bond is a strong, sharply defined and attractive character though not without a dark and almost repellent side.

Following Fleming but both, in their individual ways, rebelling against the model he had created, are two of my great favourites as authors of any kind, not just of spy novels: John le Carré and Len Deighton. I think both are brilliant wordsmiths and storytellers, and their novels deserve to be considered as great works in the mainstream English-language post-war canon, not simply in the narrower confines of genre fiction. Le Carré is much the better known, especially these days, and his best books are stunning: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Night Manager, A Legacy of Spies, to name a few. Many have been transformed into fine film and television adaptations (I explored Tinker, Tailor in my last essay).

Le Carré wrote from experience. He had worked for both MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6), and he was an elegant and entrancing writer, Establishment-educated at Sherborne School, the University of Bern and Lincoln College, Oxford. Audiences love his works because they are exciting and skilfully plotted, and because his characters are subtle and delicately drawn, but they also have the tag of authenticity. His stately pace and sometimes downbeat atmosphere feel like British spying probably was and is, and he tackles the moral compromises and quandaries which we imagine spies must face with nuance and humanity. For me, some of his later books, while never less than strong, became a little preachy, as he adopted a generally progressive, anti-American world view, and the political framework can be a little predictable, but at his best he is one of the finest writers of the last 100 years.

Len Deighton, who is still alive at 93 although firmly in retirement, is today a little less remembered and more of a connoisseur’s choice. He really became the anti-Fleming in the early 1960s: in The IPCRESS File of 1962, he created a sardonic, rebellious and anarchistic unnamed hero (dubbed “Harry Palmer” for the cinematic version in 1965, iconically portrayed by Michael Caine). He is the antithesis of James Bond, and the book occupies a shabby, down-at-heel, tired and bureaucratic milieu, which contrasted sharply with Bond’s glamour and international travel. It also felt infinitely more real. The “Harry Palmer” novels—The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin and Billion-Dollar Brain—are brilliant, dazzling evocations of the Swinging Sixties, but he ranged much more widely.

There are the novels of historical fiction: Bomber, SS-GB, Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, Winter. All are good, and Bomber, the story of a single night’s RAF raid on a fictional German city, will teach you as much about strategic bombing in the Second World War as any textbook. It is crying out for a lavish, star-studded Netflix adaptation. Deighton also wrote the script for the 1969 musical comedy Oh! What A Lovely War, which portrayed the hope, the tragedy and, characteristically, the class divisions of the First World War.

For me, Deighton’s masterpiece by a long way, some of the best, most emotional and affecting fiction I have ever read, is the nine-novel cycle centred on British spy Bernard Samson, which begins with the trilogy of Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match. He followed that with two more trilogies, Spy Hook, Spy Line and Spy Sinker, and Faith, Hope and Charity. It is difficult for me to know where to start in describing this collection. They ostensibly tell the story of a traitor in British intelligence, as le Carré does in the Karla trilogy, but so much more is taken in: loyalty, love, duty, honour, politics, class, wealth and the ideological conflict of the Cold War. I began reading without much expectation except that Berlin Game would be enjoyable, and fell far into the world of the characters. I re-read them all a few years ago, when I was far from well, and they were as dazzling as ever, both comforting from familiarity and a shouted reminder of perfect, sharp, sometimes caustic prose. Again, the opening scene of Berlin Game is up there with the best.

“How long have we been sitting here?” I said. I picked up the field glasses and studied the bored young American soldier in his glass-sided box.

“Nearly a quarter of a century,” said Werner Volkmann. His arms were resting on the steering wheel and his head was slumped on them. “That G.I. wasn’t even born when we first sat here waiting for the dogs to bark.”

Just re-read that, see how much it tells you, and feel the atmosphere it creates: jeopardy, of course, but boredom and cynicism and weariness too. That is Deighton’s metier. That is brilliance. There are dozens of other snippets I could wheel out, but one more is worth quoting, because it grabs your heart and squeezes it tight.

Did you ever say hello to a girl you almost married long ago? Did she smile the same, captivating smile, and give your arm a hug in a gesture you’d almost forgotten? That’s how I felt about Berlin every time I came back here.

Ahhhh. Too good. You know what he means, you feel exactly the feelings he wants to evoke. Perhaps not “almost married” (though it applies fully to my ex-wife, who is still a good, close, firm friend), but yes, I can see the smile of another, captivating and impossibly lovely, and feel the casual but intimate squeeze of the arm, those little signs that bring everything back in an instant. Deighton is so good. If you’ve never read him please put him to the top of your list. Whether or not you like spy novels, you need to read these books, feel the soar and swoop of emotion, have your heart broken as mine was. Come back and tell me whether you fell in love with Fiona or Gloria. I have views.

I’m now going to do something I hate and will argue passionately against, which is to put Fleming, le Carré and Deighton (temporarily) in the box marked “genre fiction”. It’s a concept I hate, because it’s always, but always, overtly or covertly disparaging, and is the reason why, for example, no writer of espionage fiction has ever won the Booker Prize, nor any crime writer. Historical fiction, oddly, seems to be regarded as above the salt, especially in our post-Mantel world, and comic novels occasionally pass muster. But it’s very arbitrary, and prejudges the quality of actual writing and storytelling. I would happily put John le Carré or Len Deighton up against the best literary fiction writers of the last 50 years or so.

But that is another day’s fight. What else do I read? I love Evelyn Waugh, for his comedy and his drama. Brideshead Revisited (1945) is a fine novel but a rare example of a better screen adaptation (the television series, which is transcendent, not the film, which is pretty dreary), but Scoop (1938) is one of the best comic novels of the 20th century, still funny 80 years after it was written. Vile Bodies (1930) is a perfect and perfectly witty evocation of its era, and Stephen Fry’s 2003 screen adaptation, Bright Young Things, is a strong film, with excellent performances from Emily Mortimer, Michael Sheen (of course), Stephen Campbell Moore, Fenella Woolgar and a supporting cast which groans with thespian laurels. The Sword of Honour trilogy (1952, 1955, 1961) is an epic portrayal of the tragedy, weirdness and excitement of the Second World War (in which Waugh served with distinction, with the Commandos and then as part of Fitzroy Maclean’s mission to Tito in Yugoslavia).

(While they were in Yugoslavia, Waugh grew irritated by Churchill’s incessant chatter. In November 1944, he wrote to Nancy Mitford explaining his attempt to silence his companion.

In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy and I have bet Randolph £20 that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. It would have been worth it at the price. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud. ‘I say I bet you didn’t know this came in the Bible…’ or merely slapping his side and chortling ‘God, isn’t God a shit!’

The two had a strained relationship. In 1964, when Randolph underwent an operation to take a benign lump out of his lung, Waugh wrote in his diary “A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it”.)

I am also a devotee of the other great Catholic author of 20th century England, Graham Greene. It’s difficult to know where to start with Greene: Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Third Man (1949), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955) and The Comedians (1966) are works of literature as good as you will find anywhere, each immaculately crafted, poised and poignant: The Heart of the Matter is my favourite, with Major Scobie’s slow descent into hopeless and ultimately suicidal despair. George Orwell disliked it, saying “If [Scobie] believed in Hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women”, which proves how much Orwell knew about men, and women. But I find it a bleak, blasted, doomed masterpiece, heavy with the inevitability of fate and so savagely tragic that it slashes to the quick and beyond.

The novel overflows with sharp observations and jewel-like phrases. “He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness—the sense that is where we really belong”, says Greene, who knew all about unhappiness. Then, “In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.” How eternal a verity that is. But perhaps the most affecting is this summation of the novel and its protagonist:

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

You know you’re not getting a happy ending, but you will explore every last corner of the human psyche, flayed and cruelly exposed by Greene’s pen.

A close contender for his greatest work is the novella The Third Man, written as a preparatory draft of the screenplay of the film (which is, I should say, my favourite film). Carol Reed’s gloomy, eerie, desperate tale of post-war Vienna is cinematic gold, with a titanic performance from Orson Welles as the antihero Harry Lime and a marvellous turn by Joseph Cotten as the innocent abroad Holly Martins. Alida Valli is flawless and jaw-droppingly beautiful as Lime’s girlfriend Anna Schmidt, and Trevor Howard holds the film together as Major Calloway, the cynical military policeman who wearily sees the tale to its end. The most famous part of the script is Lime’s monologue to Martins as they ride the Wiener Riesenrad, the famous Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park, with the remark which Welles added spontaneously:

You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and blood-shed; but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!

Many suppose that Welles invented this witty little homily; in fact the most likely source is a lecture given by James McNeill Whistler in 1895, in which he noted:

The Swiss in their mountains... What more worthy people!... yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!

But Greene’s screenplay, and the novella from which it sprang, are extraordinary. The book is suffused with the same dark, mysterious gloom of Vienna, with figures flitting through the shadows and identities folded up inside each other and hidden from view. And it is vintage Greene in its intensely human, heavy, elegiac mood. I used to lean heavily on a helpless line from the novelist Martins: “I’m just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls.”

Anna gets some of the best lines when she considers her and Holly’s relationship with Lime, after his misdeeds are exposed. “‘I loved a man,’ she said. ‘I told you—a man doesn’t alter because you find out more about him. He’s still the same man.’” And her grief, first for the man she supposes is dead, then after his real demise, makes her impatient with the romantic Martins.

For God’s sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn’t just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.

But the line which has clung to my heart ever since I first read it is a light enough phrase, not featured in the screenplay but the burr of the novella which won’t let me go. “We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.” Oof. That’s a punch to the solar plexus, such a great, towering truth in so few words. That sentence alone gives Greene his place in the pantheon.

Already I’ve written much more than I intended, and I haven’t even mentioned F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark, P.G. Wodehouse, Ian McEwan, Patrick Hamilton, Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd, Jean Rhys, Truman Capote, Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Chandler, Françoise Sagan, Miklós Bánffy, Leïla Slimani… let alone Donna Tartt and Sally Rooney, whom I adore. Or the one-off novels that have moved me. Another time, perhaps.

How have these writers influenced me? That I cannot say with certainty. I do know that after reading Hemingway or Deighton, my prose becomes almost parodically clipped, terse, downbeat. Having read Fr Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh (1904) as a teenager, I then started producing wildly elaborate, curlicued, rococo text. But it is, ultimately, in the eye of the beholder.

I hope this has explained a little, and perhaps given some suggestions which readers might want to pursue. I have missed out far more than I have included, of course, and I will remember other treasured works and venerated authors as soon as I press “publish”. That is the way of things. There will be other times, other essays, other themes. I leave the last words to Graham Greene, again, this time from The Comedians, his dark but witty story of Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier.

“We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians—it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.”