"Anxiety of Influence" can be powerful and harmful - Alan Garner and JRR Tolkien

It is some decades since I read Harold Bloom's 1973 book "The Anxiety of Influence". The idea I retain from it is that a "strong" (and would-be "major") writer will sometimes (I recall that Bloom says always, which isn't true - but let's say "sometimes") have his work shaped by the "anxiety" of his major precursor. 

So that the Roman poet Virgil's work was shaped by his own sense of debt to the Greek poet Homer. 

Bloom's idea is that the earlier major poet casts a shadow and exerts such an influence that the later poet must either engage-with and transcend the earlier poet - or else be resigned to being a derivative and second-rate version of the earlier poet. 

If this goes well; the later writer will be the equal of, but qualitatively different from, the earlier poet. 

But if this fails - if the later author fails positively to transcend the earlier writer, yet is compelled by "anxiety" to make his own work as different as possible; then the result will merely be that the later author negatively reacts-against the earlier. 

I see this latter negative, reacting-against, version of the anxiety of influence; in the relationship between Alan Garner and JRR Tolkien.

Garner's earliest works were The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. I like these both very much, especially Gomrath; and have re-read them multiple times. 

But they were clearly deeply indebted to Tolkien, and in his shadow. 

These books were indeed significantly different in form; being set in modern times, with a parallel occult magical world breaking-into the protagonist's lives. The magical world is also of a much more folkloric nature than Tolkien's autonomous world-building.

Nonetheless, the Tolkien influence is undeniable. 

 

Garner continued on this line with his next two books, Elidor and The Owl Service. 

Elidor does not work for me; but The Owl Service (1967) is both powerful and original in its use of a Mabinogion atmosphere and theme - probably Garner's "best book", qua book. 

These two later books introduce themes very different from Tolkien - an increasingly psychologically-tormented male protagonist, and socialist-type elements of class-conflict and -resentment. These are both autobiographical themes for Alan Garner*; as evident in his book of essays The Voice that Thunders.

Elidor and Owl Service also eschew the "eucatastrophic" (Tolkien's word) happy endings of classic fairytale; although OS has a satisfying sense of closure.

But Elidor, in particular, ends very abruptly with an atmosphere of pessimism and disgust, almost despair. 

 

Garner has often spoken either slightingly, or in a definitely hostile way, about JRR Tolkien and his work; and about both of the first two - and most obviously Tolkien-esque - books. 

Tolkien and garner indeed shared several strikingly similar characteristics, personal experiences, and professional interests.  

Tolkien's background was lower middle class. His childhood and young adult sufferings were (I think) much greater than Garner's, since Tolkien's childhood was distinctly impoverished. He was orphaned age twelve, and served in the First World War on the frontlines. Many close friends were killed. 

By contrast, Garner had a loving family background among the upper working classes of rural Cheshire. He did a short period of compulsory Army National Service during peacetime. His main unusual sufferings were three prolonged and severe, life-threatening, childhood illnesses. 

Both Tolkien and Garner were scholarship boys at famous and academically-rigorous old Grammar Schools in their nearby cities. Both joined the Army after school; and both went on to Oxford University to study Classics (Literae Humaniores) - with ambitions to become an academic; and both had an academically-undistinguished first couple of years. 

However, here their biographies diverge. 

Tolkien changed to an English degree, discovered his true academic interest, became a philologist, a full-time academic, and eventually a Professor. His major writings were done part-time, in his meagre spare time; for his own personal motivations, and without regard to making-a-living. 

Garner dropped-out of Oxford without taking a degree in 1956, shortly after Tolkien had published The Lord of the Rings. From then onwards, Garner was a full-time professional author; and either needed to accept state or personal subsidies, or make a living from his writing to support his family.

Garner was an excellent writer; but from age 22 his whole life became focused on writing, publishing, selling books etc. 

And in terms of making a living from writing, it became evident that the more Tolkienian were Garner's books, the more popular they were and the money they made. 

Weirdstone is still, by some distance, Garner's best-selling book on Amazon. 

It is my inference, but it seems evident that Garner's anxiety of influence therefore got worse with time. The less Tolkien-esque he was, the less successful were his books...

He desired to be a major writer, and had great talent in that direction - but, as with many other full-time professional writers - I get a sense of running-out of things to say; and a change to focusing on form rather than content.

A sense of focusing on how the book is written, more than what the book is "about".  

This is, I believe, one of the reasons for literary "modernism" and the stylistically and structurally "experimental writings" of the 1920s and 30s; such as Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, and the like. 

So, rather belatedly, Garner made a decisive break with the earlier Tolkien-esque stories; and wrote Red Shift (1973) - which is extremely difficult to follow, and very experimental and stylized in its structure and prose. 

Yet which is underneath (as with Ulysses) somewhat banal and stereotyped, melodramatic, in its action and emotions. 

RS also ends extremely negatively; in disgust, extreme pessimism, and despair; with the tormented male protagonist descending into psychosis - and a coded intention of suicide. 

Since Red Shift; Garner has continued to write in a broadly similar deliberately obscure and experimental style - and typically aimed at adults, rather than children or adolescents. 

His books are critically acclaimed in the high-brow media, and have "garnered" and sustained a dedicated - almost fanatical - cult following. 

Yet they are not popular because they are not enjoyable, and don't sell well. 

This outcome seems, from what he says, to have hardened and intensified Garner's negative reaction-against Tolkien and his earlier Tolkien-indebted fictions. 

He has doubled-down on his modernistic experimentations; obscurity, the puzzle-like decoding required of the reader.  

But, in terms of quality, there has been a price to pay - and this includes a pervasive atmosphere of horror, misery, resentment, bitterness - and hopelessness.  

The recurrence of suicide as a theme, or resolution, is especially telling - and dismaying. 

Such have been, by my judgment, the extremities of the phenomenon of anxiety of influence for a very talented writer. 

I am sympathetic about Garner's dilemma, and the problem is genuine. 

But I believe he made wrong choices, fell into endorsing wrong attitudes; and has chronically refused to repent his errors. 

*This relatively late arrival of autobiographical themes, strikes me as retrogressive. Autobiographical concerns ought, I feel, to be worked-through at an early stage (a classic "first novel" concern!) - and something a writer transcends as his work proceeds. But in the case of professional authors, with their writing-focused lives; it seems they feel compelled to dredge their own lives - often of their pre-writing lives - over and again; for lack of any other personally-motivating theme. Either that or they start writing-about-writing!