Thoughts about influences

This site was established in May 2025, using a well-known platform that became unstable and had to be abandoned. What follows is an edited version of one of the first posts, originally published 24 May 2025.

Occasionally a publisher asks submitters to list their influences. This could expose one to prejudices or ignorance, and hence over-hasty rejection. But I daresay we all comply, probably with a simple shortlist. Nonetheless, it’s really a rather complex topic that I have found revealing to think through.

Any artist whose work you spend time with—whose craft and intent you absorb, you allow to be absorbed, or have done in the past—is an influence, surely. In that sense, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Joyce—they all count, all unavoidable. Here we’re talking about inimitable greatness of artistic achievement, that influences one to try harder, explore and reflect more, to aspire to be as good as you can be. But I would not cite them in a shortlist of influences.

So perhaps it’s more about overt influences that can be readily recognised. The most obvious one in my case being Samuel Beckett, whose diction and phrasing I seem to echo instinctively, from long absorption since the 1970s, and without shame. But there are examples of artists whose influence might not be quite so obvious. I’d shortlist e.g. Borges, Chopin, Webern and Kurtág, for their exemplary focus on encapsulating more using less.

And then there’s Degas—not just for breathtaking technical accomplishment but also the unpretentiousness of his composition, and acceptance of the ‘partiality’ (or incompleteness) of our experience of the world. And Francis Bacon, for his ability to combine the artistic impulse (‘direct from the nervous system’—not always successful, of course) with intensive crafting. My list would probably have to include, say, Van Gogh (for defiant daring), Calvino, and Heaney.

There are other angles to mention, such as ‘unappreciated’ influences, those that are perhaps too subtle to pinpoint. I try to tease them out of the shadows. I think Gerard Manley Hopkins is lurking there somewhere; Paul Klee too perhaps—I’m still puzzling; and probably Dylan Thomas, because he represents an experiment with de-emphasising ‘meaning’ while over-emphasising material. Peripherally I'm aware increasingly of Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector, who were grasping at something that cannot quite be seen.

Counterpointing that category, there are discarded and oblique influences. A clear example for me is Kafka, who I find excruciatingly long-winded and mysteriously over-rated—but whose indirect influence, in terms of how he changed notions of what can constitute literary fiction, is undeniable. And perhaps there are genre biases to confess to: I seldom read novels now, I can’t get interested in opera, I don’t get to enough exhibitions of contemporary painting or concerts of contemporary music, so I’m thereby, inevitably, excluding potential influences.

One curious example of indirect influence that I would not have anticipated is surrealism. It’s only recently that I’ve come to appreciate how the radicalism of this energetic movement, with so much mediocre art associated with it, has allowed or encouraged generations of artists (Giacometti for starters) to take risks, to dare, and to engage with the possibility of failure. Which reminds me of one other influence: songwriter Tom Waits, because his often far-fetched language gave me courage, to experiment, to break away from whatever I had been taught or read or had assumed—to let go, with language. Of course, that argues for subsequent crafting (‘polishing’) and self-critical revision, the hardest part, which brings me back to understanding Bacon's artistic process and that of others.