Intellectual Family Tree (of sorts)
Recently I was playing around with a trial version of Mindjet's MindManager, which is billed as a help for "nonlinear thinking." Supposedly the novelist Richard Powers uses it to write his fiction. Several years ago I created a kind of flow chart or family tree of literary/intellectual connections in my personal history, so I decided as an easy project to replicate that. The result is here for those so interested. Larger text or a box around a name indicates a stronger presence in my intellectual life. A dotted orange line means a somewhat indirect connection, while a solid line means that one led straight to the other (when the authors aren't already adjacent in the chart, that is). For instance, an essay by Edmund Wilson on Henry James (in The Triple Thinkers) intrigued me about the latter. I don't claim that the chart is absolutely complete in either the names listed or certainly in all the possible connections between them. I stick pretty much to people I consider influential on my own thinking. For instance there were plenty of science fiction writers whose work I enjoyed as a teenager, but I don't think they deserve to clutter the chart. Also the connections are not absolute, outside of the randomness of my own discovery of authors. For instance, what do John Cowper Powys and John Fowles have to do with one another? Well, while researching Powys in college, I read H.W. Fawkner's book The Ecstatic World of John Cowper Powys. While doing some follow-up work, I did a name search for the author to see if he had written anything else on Powys, and noticed that he'd written a book on Fowles. Just for the heck of it, I took that book down to read and was so intrigued that I sought out Fowles' novels as a result and have been a fan ever since.
Another example: My interest in science fiction led me to consult a reference book on the genre which recommended some of Italo Calvino's books. I'd never heard of him before, but I found a few of his books at a little place called Dushoff Books in Phoenix (now defunct, a victim of the spread of Borders/Barnes and Noble). On the back of most of Calvino's books were (are?) blurbs by Gore Vidal. This made me curious about Vidal's own work, and in a collection of essays (Rocking the Boat, if I remember right) there is an essay on "Two Immoralists" Ayn Rand and (the now forgotten) Orville Prescott. At the end of that essay, Vidal mentions briefly Lewis Mumford, saying "let him flourish" in contrast to the two writers he has just considered. This obviously piqued my interest and led me to take down a nice little stack of Mumford's books the next time I was the Hayden Library. It was considering these odd little daisy-chained links from author to author that led me to my earlier flow-chart of curiosities and discoveries.
I realize a couple things looking at this chart. First, it is top-heavy with dead white European (or Euro-American) males. The only women are Mary Midgley and Dorothy Sayers. I go back to my earlier statement about the difference between enjoyment and influence. While I could add Iris Murdoch (a friend of Midgley's in fact) or Angela Carter, for instance, I would only be doing so to try to balance the ledgers. The other thing isn't a surprise to me, but might be to onlookers expecting a too-typical pattern of bookish interests: namely the absence of Salinger, the Beats or other counter-cultural writers (Burroughs, Kesey, Tom Robbins, et al.) Their absence on the chart is not an oversight on my part, but an accurate reflection of my lack of interest in their work. This lack on my part no doubt explains my aloofness from the "bohemian" subculture of the college campus and of hipster cities like the one in which I live. In such milieus those writers are saints.
Finally, yes everything does flow from Edgar Allan Poe, my first (age 15 or so) literary love as a nascent adult. This fudges things a bit, since I was actually reading science fiction and enjoying Serling's Twilight Zone before discovering Poe, but Poe was my first consciously literary taste. Once I discovered that GB Shaw had expressed admiration for Poe, I looked into Shaw. Wanting to learn more about Shaw I found a book called Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment by Colin Wilson, and so another hero of my late teens was discovered. And so on...
Another example: My interest in science fiction led me to consult a reference book on the genre which recommended some of Italo Calvino's books. I'd never heard of him before, but I found a few of his books at a little place called Dushoff Books in Phoenix (now defunct, a victim of the spread of Borders/Barnes and Noble). On the back of most of Calvino's books were (are?) blurbs by Gore Vidal. This made me curious about Vidal's own work, and in a collection of essays (Rocking the Boat, if I remember right) there is an essay on "Two Immoralists" Ayn Rand and (the now forgotten) Orville Prescott. At the end of that essay, Vidal mentions briefly Lewis Mumford, saying "let him flourish" in contrast to the two writers he has just considered. This obviously piqued my interest and led me to take down a nice little stack of Mumford's books the next time I was the Hayden Library. It was considering these odd little daisy-chained links from author to author that led me to my earlier flow-chart of curiosities and discoveries.
I realize a couple things looking at this chart. First, it is top-heavy with dead white European (or Euro-American) males. The only women are Mary Midgley and Dorothy Sayers. I go back to my earlier statement about the difference between enjoyment and influence. While I could add Iris Murdoch (a friend of Midgley's in fact) or Angela Carter, for instance, I would only be doing so to try to balance the ledgers. The other thing isn't a surprise to me, but might be to onlookers expecting a too-typical pattern of bookish interests: namely the absence of Salinger, the Beats or other counter-cultural writers (Burroughs, Kesey, Tom Robbins, et al.) Their absence on the chart is not an oversight on my part, but an accurate reflection of my lack of interest in their work. This lack on my part no doubt explains my aloofness from the "bohemian" subculture of the college campus and of hipster cities like the one in which I live. In such milieus those writers are saints.
Finally, yes everything does flow from Edgar Allan Poe, my first (age 15 or so) literary love as a nascent adult. This fudges things a bit, since I was actually reading science fiction and enjoying Serling's Twilight Zone before discovering Poe, but Poe was my first consciously literary taste. Once I discovered that GB Shaw had expressed admiration for Poe, I looked into Shaw. Wanting to learn more about Shaw I found a book called Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment by Colin Wilson, and so another hero of my late teens was discovered. And so on...