LITERARY INFLUENCES

I have read a great many books since 1972, the year I first began to systematically collect them, but the authors who have had the most influence on my literary and spiritual development are comparatively few in number and mainly of philosophical tendency. I list below those whom, for one reason or another, I consider to have had the most influence on me, namely: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Emerson, Aldous Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse, Arthur Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge, Bertrand Russell, Henry Miller, Oswald Spengler, Carl Jung, and Lewis Mumford.

There are authors whom I have read more for enjoyment than instruction, and these include: Lawrence Durrell, Thomas Mann, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, de Nerval, Montaigne, Poe, Wilde, Maupassant, Hamsun, and Flaubert. There are yet others whom I have largely read for instruction but subsequently turned against and condemned in my thoughts or writings. To some extent this applies to most of those in the first category, but it applies, in particular, to authors like D.H. Lawrence, André Gide, Tolstoy, John Cowper Powys, Wilhelm Reich, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and Thomas Hardy, largely because I disapprove of their neo-paganism in opposition to transcendental progress. Lawrence is, it seems to me, especially culpable in this regard, and so, to a significant extent, is Powys, whose philosophy of nature worship (he called it 'Elementalism') embraces a two-faced allegiance to the First Cause!

I seem to recall that my first adult reading took the form of poetry, and that, from there, I slowly gravitated towards novels. Since 1980, however, I have read mostly philosophies, art books, histories, political and literary biographies, autobiographies, and travelogues. My taste for literature, in the strictly narrative sense, appears to have declined during my late twenties. For these days I rarely have a novel in my hands. Yet I keep a list of all the books borrowed from the local library, together with the date of borrowing, so that I am able to verify the exact nature and tendency of my tastes (see appendix). When I have read a book I particularly enjoyed or admired, I put an asterisk (*) against the title on my list, the better to recall my impression of the book at a later date. There are now, in my notebook, some thirty pages of books listed in this way, with about twenty titles to a page. If I get to put 6-10 asterisks on a page, I consider myself relatively fortunate. It means that I have borrowed fairly discerningly and tastefully from a library in which, like all libraries, there are thousands of books one wouldn't wish to read.

I gave up buying books some time in 1976. I had about 350 paperbacks in my private collection and little room on the shelves of my modest bedsitter bookcase for any more. But the following year, due in large part to a desire to enliven my life following a lengthy illness which had kept me from writing, I decided to dispose of all but my very favourite, so whittled my collection of paperbacks down to about thirty, which are still with me at the time of writing. They include: Baudelaire's Intimate Journals, Hesse's Steppenwolf, Joyce's Ulysses, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Sartre's Nausea, Camus' A Happy Death, Huxley's The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Hamsun's Mysteries. I hang-on to these books but I don't re-read them. They bear little resemblance to my current tastes and have long ceased to exert any real influence over my writings.

Indeed, although I speak of influences, I should stress that most of my work is original, having developed from my own inner world, not been imposed upon it from without. Of course, no-one is completely free of influences, but rarely will it be the case that a genuine writer is dominated by them. I know myself to be a genuine writer, for I am of sufficient independence of mind and intellectual integrity, and have been practising in my chosen field for a sufficiently long period of time to become both increasingly original and technically proficient. Naturally, this doesn't guarantee popularity or acclaim, since one's independent-mindedness may well make one too frank, progressive, sophisticated, or whatever, to be acceptable to the generality, whether bourgeois, proletarian, or anything else. I know this fact only too well, bearing in mind that England is ever the home, despite monumental exceptions to the rule, of literary mediocrity, and creative outsiders, such as myself, who pride themselves on being professional rather than amateur, or fastidious rather than slapdash, or 'artists' rather than 'jobbers', could only be relatively taboo. One feels that no matter what one writes, sooner or later one will be writing something which the publishing insiders won't be able to countenance, and that one will therefore have one's work rejected or, at best, bowdlerized. One is conscious of being a kind of spiritual giant among spiritual pigmies, outlawed for belonging to that exceptional category of men whose intelligence and temperament could never permit them to become stooges of bourgeois commercialism. At times it is tempting to wish one were a painter or a composer rather than a writer, because they at least work in comparatively impersonal terms and can get away with almost anything, whereas the medium of language exposes the nature of one's thought to all kinds and degrees of bourgeois repression, especially when that nature is both political and religious, and hails from an ethnic basis which, being Irish, is virtually anathema to the country of one's residence!

But I have not succumbed to bourgeois pressures, and neither, I dare say, will I ever do so. There is, at any rate, a degree of consolation to be gleaned from the fact that, from time to time, outsiders have broken through the Establishment's opposition to their work or existence and created their own, higher order beyond the bounds of convention. What they have done before us, we, too, can do in the future!