This post would worth making just for the lead quote's connection to the classic hip hop album by the Brand New Heavies: Heavy Rhyme Experience Vol 1 (1992).
The whole album is available at this YouTube page.
But this post is not about the radical melding of the Heavies' live Jazz/Funk grooves with the sometimes smooth, sometimes savage rap attack of early greats such as Gang Starr, Main Source and others.
This post is about literary apprenticeship, and how that inevitably requires immersion in the words and styles of the greats.
These indentures can be undertaken in a number of ways, including pupils standing inside of the literary skin of their masters, sitting down to write out their very words: in their exact same order, their absolute style.
Hunter S. Thompson is one great original who indentured himself in this way, to the great (drunken) master F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The story of this apprenticeship has been told a number of times, including by Johnny Depp in his November 2011 interview with the Guardian:
"You know Hunter typed The Great Gatsby? He'd look at each page Fitzgerald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once. Because he wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece."
Writing out the words of others was something I did in my youth without any clear understanding of what I was doing, and certainly no idea that I was undertaking a literary apprenticeship.
Just as an example, I have included a piece that I transcribed using one of my father's rusty old dip pens, perhaps 25 years ago.
Those familiar with Seferis will notice that even at this early stage my instinct was to riff off him, the last line being a variation on his own last line which reads: "where the waves are drowned in the noise from the radio".
One benefit of such an apprenticeship is that you can indenture yourself to a truly great writer, rather than the hopeful and/or indifferent teachers that you might be able to find at your local writers' centre or community college.
This is important. This technique allows you to quite literally apprentice yourself to any master living or dead.
You're also empowered to seek out masters whose work really resonates with you, those styles best suited to be the foundation of your own unique style. Hunter Thompson chose F. Scott Fitzgerald; my tastes led me towards the modern Greeks, towards Kerouac and T. S. Eliot and Robinson Jeffers.
And then there is scripture. Many people have the benefit of being steeped from an early age in the "stark metre and strange run-on rhythms of scriptural and poetic speech". [see #1 of my Style Notes - Hyp Prose].
The beauty of incorporating these cadences in your style is not only that they are beautiful, but that so many people are already attuned to this kind of speech, so that they will respond out of instant recognition when you adorn your prose with such style.
You might think that steeping yourself in the work of another writer so intensely would hamper the development of your own style.
I think it might delay this development to some extent, but if you look at the juvenilia of all but a handful of writers you'll that this is no bad thing.
This concern also misunderstands the nature of apprenticeship.
Inherent in every apprenticeship is the understanding that that the pupil will increasingly see the limitations of the master, bound up as they are with the strictures of time and the dicrete epochs of history.
The whole point of apprenticeship is that the pupil will eventually break free to develop their own style that may - if they have the talent and the courage, and a very large slice of luck - exceed the achievements of the master.
Back to my dodgy calligraphy. My thought that I could improve on Seferis at that stage was wrong-headed, but it came out of an understanding that I must depart from him at some point, that point being (ironically enough) the stanza which begins: "at this point they separated..."
Perhaps the best news is that this kind of literary apprenticeship is free, and free of any obligation. Dead writers cannot feel envy, and will not try to hold you back when you begin to surpass them.
It is even possible to imagine them being honoured by your resect for them, that they may yet be out there somewhere, watching and willing you on.
P. Julian
9 August 2018
For a limited time all of my books are available (Free!) to read on my website. Click this link https://www.pjulian.net/books to go to my website and then follow the links to each book.
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