Interesting Take...

in an old interview with Andre Aciman:

As an adolescent I read voraciously, but I read the classics only. I refused to read Salinger, Orwell, Huxley, Sartre, and Hemingway, lesser writers in my book, partly because they were contemporaries and contemporary anything never appealed to me. In fact, the first time I read contemporary fiction was when I was in graduate school and picked up a book while riding to New York in a friend's crowded car; it was a spy novel by Robert Ludlum called The Scarlatti Inheritance. This is when it finally dawned on me that one couldn't write like Gogol or Stendhal or Proust in today's world, that the spirit of Classicism, which had shaped my sensibilities and which had been my escape, was simply gone. It's not that "one couldn't" write like them; it's just that there was no place, no purpose, and no tolerance for complex, rarefied voices. So you could say that my literary apprenticeship began in a friend's Camaro. I had to learn, not how to write, but how to unwrite -- or, to put it more bluntly, how to write down. It took me forever -- 15 years at least.

By then I was in my very late thirties. (Again, a late bloomer.) My first published piece was a book review which I submitted to Commentary. (By the way, the best way to start is to write book reviews -- not feature pieces or short stories.) Commentary asked me to propose another review after that, and another, and before long I asked whether they might be interested in my writing a little thing about growing up as a Jewish boy in Egypt who eventually moved to Italy and France. The editor said, "Yes, why not." He sounded too noncommittal, I thought. Perhaps he didn't mean it and was just being polite. But I decided to pretend he meant what he had said to me. To my complete surprise he loved what I showed him. Thus Out of Egypt was born.

But the story of my apprenticeship is a bit more complicated. My "induction" to the written page was via poetry, not prose -- and it was old poetry I liked, not new poetry, certainly not Beat poetry. I always felt that prose was a "concession" to our times, to modernity, to America, a way of "compromising" with the hard-and-fast, nuts-and-bolt, here-today-gone-tomorrow, fast-track, come-as-you-are, say-what-you-please world everyone took to be the real world. Prose was a demotion. I wanted poetry. Because in my pre-Camaro view of things, poetry was not entirely wedded to the real world, could turn its back to the real world, knew of a better deal. The Camaro, on the other hand, and the book I found in it, told me that if I wanted to be a writer I had to write with the cards life had given to me, not with those I'd designed myself, and that I had to play at the table history had placed me in, not in a Neverland of my own invention. I had to write for America, in America, because whether I liked it or not, America was going to be my home and I needed to learn to wet my throat with water from the Hudson, not from the Seine, the Tiber, or the Nile.

It's a lesson I never quite learned and may never learn. The classics had been my ticket out of a world I couldn't begin to fit in -- and here I was being told that I had no choice but to fit in. The task was made more difficult when it occurred to me that what I wanted more than acquiring this new citizenship was to acquire it without giving up the old.