Looking to figure out literary influences.

July 26, 2012 7:46 PM

I just read the letter Ted Turner received after his father found out that Ted was now studying Classics at university. Passionately written. My question, what was Ted Turner's father reading that would make him write like that? What authors influenced this urgent writing style? I want to read more like it.
posted by leftoverboy to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

Best answer: I don't know anything about the elder Mr. Turner, but that letter strongly reminded me of L. Rust Hills's writing. Hills said his greatest influences were H. L. Mencken and Montaigne.
posted by Sidhedevil at 8:03 PM on July 26, 2012

It reminds me of the letters James Joyce received in response to drafts of Finnegans Wake. For instance:

"I will have another go at it, but up to present I can make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as I can make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization."

—Ezra Pound
posted by morninj at 8:04 PM on July 26, 2012 [1 favorite]

Well it wasn't Classics, or he would have realized how wrong he was, say I a Classics major. It reminds me of some of the movies that were popular in the 1950s. It seems like that style, kind of overbearing and urgent; post-war bluster.
posted by fifilaru at 8:48 PM on July 26, 2012 [4 favorites]

Maybe he was going to puke because he heard his son had rolled a bowling ball down the East Side Trolley Tunnel at Brown? It sounds like he was reading some Dale Carnegie -- I believe this is from that book (if the old PDF I have is accurate):

"For hundreds of years, learned volumes had been written on Greek and Latin and higher mathematics - topics about which the average adult doesn't give two hoots."

- How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
posted by This_Will_Be_Good at 8:50 PM on July 26, 2012

Reagan: A life in Letters is some of Ronald Reagan's letters such as the following one to his son a few days before the son's wedding. This letter was from a time before he became U.S. President. There are many more gems like this one.



Michael Reagan
Manhattan Beach, California
June 1971

Dear Mike:

Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won't.

You've heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the "unhappy marrieds" and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.

Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn't know won't hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it. The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn't take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn't ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.

Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.

Love,

Dad

P.S. You'll never get in trouble if you say "I love you" at least once a day.
posted by JujuB at 9:32 PM on July 26, 2012 [24 favorites]

You say "passionately written" as if passion were what sets his writing apart. Two responses to that, take them as you will: One, passion is cheap and plentiful. Every sports bar is full of passion on game nights. Two, what appeals to you is not the passion so much as the fact that he's making a point with grammatically correct sentences. (Simple sentences, but strung together with some art.) Yes, that is a useful skill. Look up the definition of "rhetoric."

To actually answer your question, try some G. K. Chesterton. And as Sidhedevil already mentioned, Mencken.

Yeah, those damned theoretical mathematicians. They're so smart, no one understands them. Don't be like that, son.
posted by bricoleur at 9:49 PM on July 26, 2012 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Sounds like 40s crispness (try George Orwell's essays! Actually, just read them anyway, they're great fun) mixing with 50s adventurous certainty. Maybe try Max Lerner's columns? They're like distilled essence of the 50s liberal. Really, a lot of good 40s and 50s newspaper columnist will have this sharp, forward-charging style.

Also, if you have a grandfather still around, try talking to him. Maybe about politics. My grandfather (80-something) sounds quite a bit like this when irritated.
posted by ostro at 11:37 PM on July 26, 2012

He's got to be kidding about that "speaks Greek" shit, right? Maybe not. I just get the feeling he is joking a certain amount and knows more than he lets on. I was a classics major and it strikes me as a weird kind of endorsement.

But yeah, it's a certain type of old-fashioned male bluster. You can find some of the same touches in letters from Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald.
posted by BibiRose at 7:12 AM on July 27, 2012

Yeah, I've read a lot of correspondence by people of that era. Pretty much all artists and people in the art world. Duchamp, Picabia, Manet, Apollinaire, etc. That's just how people wrote.
posted by cmoj at 9:56 AM on July 27, 2012