And What Authors Would You Choose?

I recently answered a Quora question, "Which writers have influenced or inspired you to write?" and three names popped up immediately. 

Three writers influenced my desire to write: Charles Brackett, John Steinbeck, and Antoine de St. Exupery.

Charles Brackett was my grandfather (mother’s father), and he was a novelist, a short-story author, a critic at the New Yorker, and a successful (4 Oscars) screenwriter and movie producer. Growing up around him, watching him write, reading his work, and seeing the final products in print or on the movie screen taught me a lot about the organization a writer has to have in order to move a plot forward and create believable characters and scenes.

My grandfather’s writing routine was consistent and pretty much non-negotiable when it came to distractions; you didn’t bother him when he was writing, and he stuck with a specific routine for years. He was very inquisitive, analytical, and self-critiquing to the point of knowing when it was time to start over again. He wrote diary entries every day from the late 1920s until ill-health forced him to stop in the mid-1960s. I published a book about his diaries, It's the Pictures That Got Small": Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age.

He was good friends with many of the writers and humorists of the early- to mid-20th century, including Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Huxley, Dorothy Parker, and others, many of whom I met as a boy, and whose many kindnesses and support remain with me.

The next influential writer on my short list is John Steinbeck. It would be impossible here to detail all Steinbeck meant, and means, to me as a powerful motivating factor in my own career as a writer, reporter, speechwriter, and ghost writer. I had the pleasure of meeting Steinbeck in the early 1960s when I was old enough to know who he was and had read a few of his books (or, when I was younger, had them read to me). He was working on Travels with Charley: In Search of America, and he stopped by my grandfather’s house in Hollywood to say hello to his old friend. I was visiting my grandfather at the time, and Mr. Steinbeck was incredibly polite and treated me not like a 12-year-old boy, but as a reader of books.

Steinbeck has a way of telling stories that resonate deep in my heart and brain. His pacing, phrasing, sparse use of adjectives and adverbs, his powerful use of verbs and interesting nouns, and his ability to set a scene and tell a short story within a long story just knock me out every time. Go find Cannery Row, then turn to Chapter VI, TheTide Pool, and read this passage:

“Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a grey mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat, while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing colour of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tip of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. 

On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.”

I mean, really? Can you do that? I sure as hell can’t, and I’ve been writing for 50 years! 

Someone on Quora also asked the question, “What is the greatest monologue from any book or movie?” I replied:

"My favorite monologue is drawn from the dialogue between Tom Joad and his mother (Ma) in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath:

Tom: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled. 

Ma: Oh, Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casey.

 Tom: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’d get me for one thing if not for another. Until then…

Ma: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.
Tom: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.

Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…

Ma: Then what, Tom?

Tom: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. 

Ma: I don’t understand it, Tom.

Tom: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.

Again, this is writing at its finest, writing that makes a statement, writing that influences and serves as a beacon for social change. This is Steinbeck.

Finally, I name Antoine de St. Exupery as the third writer in my trio of favorite authors, and it’s not because of The Little Prince, though it’s impossible to speak of St. Exupery without a reverent bow to this line from that little book:

“Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

What is important to know about St. Ex, is that he saw the world from above, as an aviator in the early days of aviation—from World War I to World War II—when he was a military pilot and a mail pilot, flying across hostile and inhospitable terrain from South America to the Sahara Desert to the battlefields of France and Germany. But he didn’t just “see” from above, he described in exquisite detail every sensation of flight (and I know, because, like my father and mother were, I am a pilot, and I grew up in that world).

St. Exupery’s writing is lofty, lyrical, heartbreakingly beautiful, sometimes ruthless, oftentimes deeply introspective, always passionate. Whether you read Wind, Sand, And Stars, or Night Flight, or Flight to Arras, you will be caught up in the world of open-cockpit aeroplanes over frigid mountains or scalding deserts or war-ripped countryside. You will see through St. Ex’s eyes and his pen, the nature of human suffering and human exuberance. And, as with The Little Prince, you will come to look inside yourself for the answers to so many questions about the meaning of life and the purpose of sacrifice.

I began reading St. Exupery before I was ten—and my parents often read him to me before I’d learned to read, and now I own several first editions of his work, and treasure them; they are old, old friends when I need them. And, after all, isn’t that what a good book is there for?