(I delivered these remarks in April 2008 at the National Arts Club, where Don DeLillo was awarded the organization’s Medal of Honor. I revere DeLillo’s work above that of all living writers, and most dead ones, and to have been asked by him to speak on that occasion is probably the greatest honor of my career.)
When I was about twenty-five I was working as a insurance claims adjustor in San Francisco, with very few ambitions beyond continuing to be an insurance claims adjustor. This was during that period when any sign of one’s absolute severance from childhood and its childish things is still intoxicating, right down to the junk mail imprinted with your name that miraculously arrives in your box each day. I got a lot of junk mail, most of it inviting me to join the fraternity of the indebted, and I studied it scrupulously.
That was about the extent of my reading. I didn’t read a lot then. I’d gone on hiatus from reading sometime shortly after dropping out of college. You may be surprised to learn that water cooler conversations in insurance claims departments don’t tend to center on literature, but they don’t. And of course I knew everything then, so what was the point? But one day I was very flattered to discover that the staff of the Book of the Month Club had found me and decided that I was a particularly discerning sort of person. Would I be interested in taking them up on their restricted offer to receive five books for five bucks? Of course I would.
I remember what I got. I got a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s collected stories. I got a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s collected stories. I got a copy of Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. I got a copy of the first edition of the New York Public Library Desk Reference. That’s four books. I had one more book. I looked through the offerings again. I don’t remember them. It wasn’t a bad year for books. Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Danielle Steele’s Zoya. But there was one, by a writer whose ambient presence in American letters had by then become difficult to ignore. It was called Libra and in the words of its author purported to “extend real people into imagined space and time.” I was game.
Shortly, I was also hooked. I brought news of Libra to my father and was somewhat surprised to find that he’d heard of its author, this Don DeLillo, and was happy to point me at other books the man had written. I became a fan.
I don’t want to gush and say that DeLillo’s work changed my life but it certainly changed my sense of the approach one could take to writing, and the knowledge of this approach -- mandarin sentences constructed entirely from the vernacular and drawing their strength and beauty from their very contravention of the “correct” -- invigorated and sustained my own early and not-so-early attempts at writing. The chutzpah and mayhem in those novels, from early masterpieces like Ratner’s Star through the quiet mysteries of works like The Body Artist, gave me a sense of the way that the works of Faulkner, of Pound, of Joyce, had earlier inspired great leaps, and greater acts of thievery.
In becoming a disciple of Don DeLillo’s I, along with countless others, have laid bare in the pages of my own work the presence of that influence, and have concomitantly been charged with the crime of that influence -- sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes in not so friendly a way. To such charges, I very happily, and gratefully, plead guilty. In writing, you try to see beyond your influences, but you also, in moments of candor, try to see where your work would be without them. My own work, and American fiction, would be incalculably poorer. Salut, Don, and thank you.
Return to The Bottom Drawer
When I was about twenty-five I was working as a insurance claims adjustor in San Francisco, with very few ambitions beyond continuing to be an insurance claims adjustor. This was during that period when any sign of one’s absolute severance from childhood and its childish things is still intoxicating, right down to the junk mail imprinted with your name that miraculously arrives in your box each day. I got a lot of junk mail, most of it inviting me to join the fraternity of the indebted, and I studied it scrupulously.
That was about the extent of my reading. I didn’t read a lot then. I’d gone on hiatus from reading sometime shortly after dropping out of college. You may be surprised to learn that water cooler conversations in insurance claims departments don’t tend to center on literature, but they don’t. And of course I knew everything then, so what was the point? But one day I was very flattered to discover that the staff of the Book of the Month Club had found me and decided that I was a particularly discerning sort of person. Would I be interested in taking them up on their restricted offer to receive five books for five bucks? Of course I would.
I remember what I got. I got a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s collected stories. I got a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s collected stories. I got a copy of Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. I got a copy of the first edition of the New York Public Library Desk Reference. That’s four books. I had one more book. I looked through the offerings again. I don’t remember them. It wasn’t a bad year for books. Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Danielle Steele’s Zoya. But there was one, by a writer whose ambient presence in American letters had by then become difficult to ignore. It was called Libra and in the words of its author purported to “extend real people into imagined space and time.” I was game.
Shortly, I was also hooked. I brought news of Libra to my father and was somewhat surprised to find that he’d heard of its author, this Don DeLillo, and was happy to point me at other books the man had written. I became a fan.
I don’t want to gush and say that DeLillo’s work changed my life but it certainly changed my sense of the approach one could take to writing, and the knowledge of this approach -- mandarin sentences constructed entirely from the vernacular and drawing their strength and beauty from their very contravention of the “correct” -- invigorated and sustained my own early and not-so-early attempts at writing. The chutzpah and mayhem in those novels, from early masterpieces like Ratner’s Star through the quiet mysteries of works like The Body Artist, gave me a sense of the way that the works of Faulkner, of Pound, of Joyce, had earlier inspired great leaps, and greater acts of thievery.
In becoming a disciple of Don DeLillo’s I, along with countless others, have laid bare in the pages of my own work the presence of that influence, and have concomitantly been charged with the crime of that influence -- sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes in not so friendly a way. To such charges, I very happily, and gratefully, plead guilty. In writing, you try to see beyond your influences, but you also, in moments of candor, try to see where your work would be without them. My own work, and American fiction, would be incalculably poorer. Salut, Don, and thank you.
Return to The Bottom Drawer
