Influence: A Love Note to Julian Barnes

I first encountered Julian Barnes the summer before I started college. High school hadn’t suited me very well, and I left after my sophomore year, figuring out a way to graduate a year early while completing my coursework at home. The prospect of college was exciting—new and different, independent and far-away. I was ready to be somewhere else, doing something else, as someone else. I now know that many (most?) seventeen-year-olds feel this way, but at the time, I was sure of the uniqueness of my crisis, and I knew college would solve it.

One day, a book-shaped package arrived in my parents’ rural mailbox. It was from the college where I’d soon be going. Inside was a letter that said we’d be discussing the enclosed book in the first couple weeks of freshmen seminar—a course equal parts philosophy, theology, literature, history, and sociology. I was encouraged to read it over the summer with a pen in hand. The book was Barnes’ The History of the World in Ten ½ Chapters.

My parents moved a lot when I was young, and I lived in many different places during my childhood, but my parents are still in the house where I spent my high school years. The house sits on six acres along Trout Creek in the Big Belt Mountains, about twenty miles outside Helena, Montana. I have a clear memory of reading Barnes’ book in the grass by the creek, sun overhead, the state’s famous sky shrunk by the mountains that rose up on either side of our small valley. Everything is conflated: the beauty of summer in Montana, the newness of what I was reading, the wide-open future in front of me.  

I was already an aspiring writer then. I knew I wanted to write from the moment I learned how. For as long as I can remember, I have translated what I see into specific words and what I experience into specific stories. But The History of the World in Ten ½ Chapters was like nothing I’d read before, and it changed my perspective on writing. I didn’t know I could write like that. I didn’t know I could weave together fiction and history and make a novel out of linked narratives. It would take many more years for me to write anything more than angsty, naval-gazing, self-absorbed semi-fictional prose, but the seed was planted with Barnes’ novel that summer in the mountains, and when I started writing what would become my first published novel, I returned to the structure and technique I’d read all those years before. 

I pulled heavily from the historic record: I quoted from a prison warden who was just too big a character not to include. I gave Ed Mason—the man who built Alabama’s first electric chair—a place in the novel because I could never imagine a better story than the real one (Mason was a cabinet maker from London who somehow found himself in Mobile, Alabama, where he was arrested for larceny; he was granted a month-long furlough from prison in exchange for building the chair, and then he disappeared). I referenced blueprints of Kilby Prison, institutional reports, prison records. I brought Michael Faraday in, that pioneer of electro-magnetism, to serve as something like God to my wayward main character. I shifted narratives; I explored multiple stories.

Make no mistake: my first novel feels nothing like Barnes’ History, and no one (other than me) could ever trace the inspiration. It sat dormant in my mind for nearly fifteen years, hanging back silently while I sharpened my pencil and explored innumerable dead ends. From what I’ve read of Barnes’ writing-about-writing, he’d likely reject the connection completely. In his short essay, “Single-handed” (published in the New Yorker in 2000), he warns writers away from too much influence by others. “Such authors are both your masters and your fellow-students,” he writes. “Sometimes they daunt, sometimes they encourage. But their true influence is to say, simply and repeatedly, across the years: Go thou and do otherwise.” Maybe I’ve done that. I hope I have.

But I also think there are pieces of everything we’ve ever read scattered through everything we ever write. We do otherwise, but it’s in terms of architecture. The house will always have a kitchen, a living space, a bedroom, a bathroom, but the design of those rooms, the feeling of those rooms will change. In a short craft essay of my own, from 2001, I wrote:

It was June when the fur first appeared on the trail.

            “Would you like to know what happened?” my daughter asked.

            “Sure.”

            “A coyote was swimming in these ocean woods, and a shark came and pulled off his fur.”

            She’s five.

            “Why’d the shark do that?” I asked.

            “As a warning to other coyotes.”

            “Wow.”

            “I know,” she replied.

            I was only a few weeks out of school—a year spent assisting in creative writing courses at Carroll College under the poet Loren Graham—and stories were on my mind, undergraduate stories, raw ones. During my junior year, I’d written my own coyote situation, prompted by an equally inexplicable patch of fur. My coyote was a Chow and my shark a shotgun, but really its message was the same: Don’t swim in these ocean woods. And yet, the two stories weren’t redundant. Writing, I figure, isn’t about subject, but technique. 

And I believe that still. I don’t know that we’ll ever write about something new, but we’ll write about those same old things in new ways, and that’s the lasting gift of Barnes’ influence. The other novels of his I’ve read—The Sense of an Ending, Flaubert’s Parrot, Talking it Over, Love, etc—continue to reshape my perspective, shifting it like History did back in that beautiful summer in the mountains, reading alongside Trout Creek. Even the story of that restless girl-turned-somewhat-less-restless adult embodies this same idea. Feeling lost in the body of a teenager isn’t new, but my route through it differed from the routes of my peers. History does repeat itself it—in fiction and reality. Our job is to see it with new eyes.