Just A Fan

I jotted down a few names in one of my journals for rough notes & stuff some months back, these being those writers & musicians regarding whom I considered myself an irredeemable fanboy of. I deliberately left the page open to amendment wondering if I might have left someone out, and it occurred to me yesterday that this had been the case with the list of writers. 

I'd felt a touch of concern regarding the list from its inception due to the lack of female names on it. Now this certainly wasn't because there aren't plenty of such I greatly admire, but I just couldn't think of any of the ladies who fulfilled the essential criteria: Love at first sight which carried over into everything read since plus a kind of unpleasantly personal curiosity into biographical background (close to a kind of conceptual stalking.)

And then it came to me that I'd missed out Jane Austen. I'm quite baffled as to why this was. From Jack Connelly's first lesson on Emma as an 'A' level text I just knew that I was hopelessly smitten and, if anything, Pride and Prejudice, read very soon after was even more appealing in its sheer exuberance. I suppose I left her out having mildly struggled with the later pages of Sense and Sensibility (just loved the Emma Thompson movie though) but that's weak quibbling. So now she's on the list and I'm yearning for a reread of Persuasion, for no good reason i can think of, but that's what being a fanboy does to you.

Anyway, in the interests of full disclosure here's the list as it stands today, in no order of merit, except for number one: Will Shakespeare, James Joyce, William Blake, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Ted Hughes, Stephen King, P.G. Wodehouse, Leon Garfield, Peter Ackroyd, Philip Pullman, David Lodge, Kurt Vonnegut, Ian McMillan, Anthony Powell and, now, Jane Austen.

And here's another odd thing. I added a space for writers I fell completely in love with, but not actually at first sight, and two names appear there. One is Marcel Proust, which makes sense since I knew eventually I would fall for him but made more than one false start on Swann's Way. The other is Charles Dickens. But, as far as I can remember, I fell hook, line & sinker for him on reading Bleak House straight after graduating from university. So I don't know why I hesitated over his unmitigated fanboy status a few months back. Was it because I was of that generation that 'met' Dickens through adaptations on the telly as a little kid and didn't quite realise then I was a fan? Not sure, but this isn't a question that will keep me up at night.