B.H. Fairchild

B.H. Fairchild was a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry for The Art of the Lathe.

Thank you for your letter in which you asked me about books that have changed my life or have influenced my writing life. Those really are two rather different categories, although yes, they overlap at most points. And I think that often a certain amount of self-deception enters into the listing of such books; that is, sometimes one doesn't know or admit to oneself the books that have had the most influence, maybe for Bloomian reasons of oedipal rivalry, maybe because the titles just aren't grand enough. I think, for instance, of a particular comic book--an early issue of Captain Marvel--which establishes the origins of Marvel mythology when Billy Batson wanders into the urban underground temple and encounters a wise old man, a kind of subway magus, who teaches him the inner wisdom of SHAZAM (acronym for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, Mercury) that gives him the intellectual and physical powers of Captain Marvel. Looking back, I know that this little story for mythic but also perhaps socioeconomic reasons must have entered deeply into my child's psyche. And I was astonished to realize recently, as if for the first time, how much I must have been affected and influenced--even as a poet--by James Agee's novel, A Death in the Family, especially the opening Knoxville section, which I read when I was a young man. Among other books or parts of books of whose influence I am conscious, I would mention, in chronological order, Treasure Island (and later in college, Stevenson's Essays), odd portions of the King James Bible, Classics Illustrated comic books, Poe's stories, Somebody Up There Likes Me (Rocky Graziano's autobiography), Hemingway's stories (especially "Big Two-Hearted River" and "A Way You'll Never Be"), poems by Whitmen, E.A. Robinson, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Frost, Look Homeward Angel, Catcher in the Rye, Norman Mailer's Barbery Shore, Fahrenheit 451, then later in college, All the King's Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Madame Bovary, On the Road, Great Expectations, The Brothers Karamazov, Brave New World, The Adventures of Augie March, Malamud's The Assistant, Death of a Salesman, Shakespeare's tragedies, Keats, Emily Dickinson, a single poem by Robinson Jeffers ("Shine, Perishing Republic"), T.S. Eliot, Yeats and indeed all the poets in a book I still possess, quaintly entitled A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry. But by far the most important book of my college years, which I read when I was a freshman, was Moby Dick--it might as well have been written by God. In graduate school, Anthony Hecht's The Hard Hours, Sylvia Plath's poems, and Flannery O'Connor's stories were major discoveries, and the poems of James Wright, William Stafford, and Richard Hugo made it possible for me to see how the sort of small-town blue-collar life that had formed me could be turned into poetry. This is the problem with such lists: one's own writing comes in part from other writing, and one doesn't know where to begin and then where to end. But let me end with William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, which I read only a year ago and which will be with me forever, and let me begin again with the book which, of all books, hit me the hardest: Ernest Thompson Seton's Biography of Grizzly, most of which I read in the fever of a choldhood illness. I cannot separate this book's effect on my life from its influence on my writing. I think it made me want to write because it made me see life in a certain way, made me see that life bore significance, although I hardly knew how to think about life at that age. But in the bear's struggles and defeats and triumphs, in its effort to be truly and completely its own best self, I think I gained some intuition, some preverbal half-comprehension, of what I would only much later have works for: nobility, dignity, character--even, I think, grace. I think it also gave me my first slight, unformed, and rather troubled notion of the tragic sense of life. I will never forget the last page and the last surrendering at last to the knowledge that death is upon him as the hunters stand in silhouette on the canyon's rim. It left a heaviness inside me that twenty years later I would try to carry into a poem:

Ernest Thomson Seton's Biography of a Grizzly

Even then, reading Seton's book, I could,
in my eighth long year, in bed
with chicken pox and Marvel comic books,
even then, I could sense something
deeply human about being hunted,
even then, seeing my father come home
from days and nights in West Texas
machine shops, with blue fingernails
and eyes that vibrated like hummingbirds,
event then, before Jessie the drunk foreman
came raging with his shotgun cocked
and shaking in his hands, before Red
the welder lay curled and crying on the bed
when his woman ran off and then,
even then, before the dust would thin
from Kansas skies and we would take the rags
from the windows and breathe again,
even then, I could turn with Seton's bear
at the gateway to the last canyon
as the Angel of the Wild Things waited,
as the fumes rose like night's warm quilt,
as the hunters crept closer slowly, slowly.

Sincerely,

B.H. Fairchild