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Good Writers Read
“When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”
–Desiderius Erasmus
“By the time I was thirteen,” the late African-American novelist James Baldwin once told the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, “I had read myself out of Harlem.” Baldwin was one of America’s greatest writers, but notice that he did not say that he had written himself out. He had read. And certainly it would have been ludicrous for Baldwin, as gifted as he was, to have written himself out of Harlem at thirteen. Yet many thirteen-year-olds, fifteen-year olds and nineteen-year olds we have come across believe that they, unlike Baldwin (who was first published at twenty-four), can write brilliantly at an early age, too often without the benefit of first hearing what other writers have to say.
There is an old axiom quoted by the 16th-century poet Phillip Sidney in his “Apology for Poetry”: “Orator fit, Poeta nascitur.” The Latin may be translated as, “An orator (speaker or lecturer) is made, but a poet must be born one.” The saying suggests that great writers are born great writers, that there is something inside of them at birth that the rest of us simply don’t have. But Sidney is driven to refute the concept: “…as the fertilist ground must be manured, so must the highest flying wit have a Daedalus to guide him.”
Get that? Catch the allusion? If your answer is “yes,” perhaps you have taken a course in mythology. If “no,” you can go to wikipedia. Just in case your wi-fi is spotty, we’ll help you out in this instance: Daedalus, whose name literally means “maker,” was the genius behind the great labyrinth of Crete, which he designed for King Minos. You may recall that Minos used to like to throw enemies of the state into that virtually inescapable maze, which was inhabited by a man-bull monster called the Minotaur. But Daedalus’ brilliance also worked against him, for he was so valuable to Minos that the king would not permit him to leave Crete. So Daedalus fashioned two sets of wings made from feathers and wax, and gave one pair to his son, Icarus, and kept the other for himself. The two flew into the air, but only Daedalus escaped, for Icarus, though warned by his pop not to fly too close to the sun for fear that the heat would melt the wax holding together his wings, did not listen.
Now, back to Phillip Sidney, who, through allusion, compares the would-be writer or “high-flying wit,” to Icarus. In this manner Sidney suggests that even the most innately talented writers will come crashing down if not given proper guidance.
Nowadays, in our so-called postmodern era, the term “intertextuality” has been applied to the old term “allusion,” to suggest that writing is almost always a complex interrelationship between one author’s work and all of their predecessors. After all, given thousands of years of prose and poetry, is anything really completely new? And beyond this, the suggestion behind intertextuality is that good writers are so