I just like to be part of the conversation

books and books and more books.

So the other day I read this novella called The Day of the Locust. It’s an old Hollywood noir by a guy named Nathaniel West, the internet says it was published in 1939. And it’s famous in a cultish sense for containing a character named Homer Simpson.

I’m not a regular fan of The Simpsons, I was only reading the book because somebody told me it’s a funny read and I’ve been on this non-continuous kick to read every half-decent comic novel ever written.

But the point is that I was struck by this scene in the first twenty pages. The narrator walks into the room and discovers two women: one of whom he knows, and one of whom he doesn’t. The one he knows is the wife of a friend, the one he doesn’t is the friend’s wife’s friend — introduced as “a female tennis champ.” He describes the tennis champ by saying:

Joan Schwartzen was a big girl with large hands and feet and square, bony shoulders. She had a pretty, eighteen-year-old face and a thirty-five-year-old neck that was veined and sinewy. Her deep sunburn, ruby colored with a slight blue tint, kept the contrast between her face and neck from being too startling.

And obviously, most of this is the general vibe of the characters, their three-dimensional walking-across-the-page as it were but it was immediately obvious that Nathaniel West lifted Joan Schwartzen from The Great Gatsby.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic from 1925, Schwartzen is named Jordan Baker, and she’s a golf champ rather than a tennis champ. But nonetheless, a friend’s wife’s friend, described thusly:

She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.

And I read that and was captured in that wonderful moment, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, but if you read a lot of fiction, it’s one of the best feelings there is. You recognize what’s going on here, you see the thing behind the thing. I read Day of the Locust and I could feel Fitzgerald breathing behind it.

It turns out that Nathaniel West and Fitzgerald actually were friends in Hollywood. There for a brief moment, I felt like I was in on their hundred-year-old conversation.

It’s really a wonderful feeling, I cannot overstate that. You catch it sometimes out here in Los Angeles when you sit down at Musso & Frank’s and you look around that room and you know that great, and fuck-it, let’s say it — immortal — writers were here. That they stole scenes from here. You feel like you’re in on a secret, even if you’re only in on it peripherally.

This doesn’t happen all the time, I don’t want to put you under that impression. And most of the time, when it happens, it’s not as specific as it is in Catch-22, where Heller steals from Shakespeare to internally narrate Chaplain Tappman:

If they pricked him, didn't he bleed? And if he was tickled, didn't he laugh? It seemed never to have occurred to them that he, just as they, had eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses and affections, that he was wounded by the same kind of weapons they were, warmed and cooled by the same breezes and fed by the same kind of food.

That bit, of course, was stolen from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?

Again, most of the time, it’s not that obvious. And I like it a better when it’s not verbatim. I like it better when you faintly recognize the way a character moves across a page because you’ve seen that character somewhere before. You recognize how Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s because you’ve read Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin with a character named Sally Bowles, the obvious inspiration for Holly. Or the character of Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls — you know him, you’ve seen him before in Henry James’ The American, where his name is Christopher Newman.

There’s a daunting quality to a lot of literature, I know that. You know it too. Some of these big old dusty tomes keep you at arms length. But you read and you read and over time, you begin to feel like it’s one big conversation. And when you encounter these familiarisms, you feel a little bit special. You feel, even more, like you know these authors, like you know these characters a little more deeply. And I don’t know, I like this feeling, it’s one of my favorites, to feel like I’m part of the conversation, even if I’m not saying anything in it.