Perhaps one of the luckiest things to occur in literature happened when Gabriel García Márquez was attending law school and working as an apprentice journalist in Cartagena. Colombia was in the midst of violent political upheaval, which García Márquez had escaped from when he fled Quito. Bragging one night at a restaurant about his happy-go-lucky life, he was brought to a realization when, as he writes, his editor “stopped me cold: ‘ Just tell me one thing, Gabriel: in the midst of all the damn fool things you do, have you been able to realize that this country is coming to an end?’”
Inspired to get “dead drunk,” García Márquez fell asleep on a park bench and “a biblical downpour left me soaked to the skin.” An antibiotic-resistant pneumonia was the result, and he had to go to his parents’ home in Sucre to recuperate. Three of his friends sent him a crate of books to keep occupied him during his convalescence:
There were were twenty-three distinguished works by contemporary authors, all of them in Spanish and selected with the evident intention that they be read for the sole purpose of learning to write…. Fifty years later it is impossible for me to recall the entire list, and the three eternal friends who knew it are no longer here to remember. I had read only two of them: Mrs. Dalloway by Mrs. Woolf, and Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley. The ones I remember best were those by William Faulkner: The Hamlet, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and The Wild Palms. Also Manhatten Transfer and perhaps another by John Dos Passos; Orlando by Virginia Woolf; John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath; Portrait of Jenny, by Robert Nathan, and Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell. Among the titles I do not remember at a distance of half a century, there was at least one by Hemingway, perhaps a book of short stories…; another by Jorge Luis Borges, no doubt stories as well, and perhaps another by Felisberto Hernádez, the extraordinary Uruguayan storyteller my friends had just discovered with shouts of joy. I read them all in the months that followed, some of them well and others less so, and thanks to them I managed to get out of the creative limbo where I was foundering.
If I were to quiz a dozen male MFA students, I’d bet that more than a few of them would cite Faulkner as a significant influence on them, too. Fifty years ago, García Márquez was influenced by the newest American literature available to him. Now, writers are influenced by eighty-year-old American literature (The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929!). Here I am among them, with Steinbeck as my man on that list, but I have been making an effort to read more contemporary works. Right now, with YA literature in my sights, I’ve been turning to my favorite of that category — Francisca Lia Block.
Perhaps it would be a good idea if MFA programs included contemporary literature seminars. There wasn’t anything along that line in the SJSU program, so I’m undertaking an independent studies initiative!
All of these quotes are from, of course, García Márquez’s wonderful memoir Living to Tell the Tale
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