“Bergman, Books, & Boredom” was originally published as part of our Foundations column. That column aimed to have some nationally-recognized artist briefly discuss some thing (a single book, story, movie, painting, toy, artist, iconic figure, what have you) that/who moved, inspired, helped, or was otherwise influential early on in his or her artistic life and that/who we all might find equally helpful at whatever stage of our creative life we’re at currently. We have since rolled the Foundation pieces into the larger nonfiction category.
When I was thirteen, my father took me to see a double bill of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Definitely heady stuff for a kid, but what deeply imprinted itself on me was the use of visual images in lieu of words for telling narratives and rendering characters’ interiority. Already a voracious reader, thanks to my mother, and a lover of words and story, I was overpowered by the visual impact of both films and the simultaneously subtle and complex worlds they opened up. Avid scribbler that I had become, “script writing” seemed a natural extension of the unrevised stacks of “chapter ones” and poems and stories that lay scattered around the house. Then and there I wrote my first “screenplay,” full of “very symbolic images.”
And then there were all the books. In some ways I was a better reader as a kid than I am now. Back then, free to approach books without aforethought, I was less critical and more omnivorous. I’d devour Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys alongside Edgar Allan Poe, Yeats, James Baldwin, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Daphne DuMaurier. The same summer I got “onto the Russians” and read Crime and Punishment, I was equally enamored of Victoria Holt and Frank Yerby novels. I read straight through the Harlem Renaissance poets, only to return to Tennyson and Keats.
The point is, one book leads to another. This is the way I entered the world, often choosing books by their shapes, the smell of their pages, and the lure of opening paragraphs. At the library where the well-meaning librarian tried to steer me to “young adult fiction,” I couldn’t be kept away from the adult books, even ones that were well beyond me. Because my mother had read aloud to us so much and from such a broad spectrum when we were very young children, I’d come to believe I could read anything. Complex sentences and “hard words” didn’t daunt me. It was rare for me not to finish a book.
Influences? I can offer a list of what we now call “the classics,” and it’s true, they’re sine qua non stuff, not only for their own intrinsic value but also for the story they tell about other writers. I doubt I would have as fully appreciated Toni Morrison’s art if I hadn’t read Melville and Faulkner first. Without Chekhov I wouldn’t have fallen in love with the short story.
But there were other influences as well: boredom which compels one to develop a life of the imagination, traveling (whether one town over or to another country), taking odd jobs, meeting people, and most important, perhaps, learning to watch and listen, even at those moments when nothing seems to be going on.
