Sunday, September 17, 2006

On the Life of an Artist

Since 2004, I have been working hard with no remuneration. In that time I have produced four manuscripts of 50,000 words or more that need to be revised and edited. How often do I browbeat myself for not making more of myself? Why does all this labour seem pointless, unworthy, senseless? Browsing The Atlantic Monthly I came across something which helped both to define myself, and to give voice to people who live quiet, hermetic, and let's say it, poor, lives for their art. I quote this section from So You Want to Be a Writer in the hopes that it may help others who are dedicated to their art despite its lowly value in a society that measures success by financial standards:

"Wallace Stegner, an author who served as director of the Creative Writing Center at Stanford ... [wrote an] essay "To a Young Writer" (November 1959) [that] took the form of a letter addressed to a former student—a twenty-something young woman with literary aspirations, a graduate degree, and an unpublished novel. Stegner sought at once encourage her and to give her an honest picture of how difficult her career path would be.

He began by expressing empathy for the uncertainty she must now be feeling:

To date, from all your writing, you have made perhaps five hundred dollars for two short stories and a travel article. To finance school and to write your novel you have lived meagerly with little encouragement and have risked the disapproval of your family, who have understandably said, "Here is this girl nearly thirty years old now, unmarried, without a job or a profession, still mooning away at her writing as if life were forever. Here goes her life through her fingers while she sits in cold rooms and grows stoop-shouldered over a typewriter." So now, with your book finally in hand, you want desperately to have some harvest: a few good reviews, some critical attention, encouragement, royalties enough to let you live and go on writing...

You would like to be told that you are good and that all this difficulty and struggle and frustration will give way gradually or suddenly, preferably suddenly, to security, fame, confidence, the conviction of having worked well and faithfully to a good end and become someone important to the world.

Stegner warned, however, that fame, fortune, and accolades would most likely not be forthcoming. Not because her work was not good: "You write better than hundreds of people with established literary reputations.” The problem, he explained, was that her writing was aimed over the heads of the mass of readers, and would therefore only ever be appreciated by a small audience of "thoughtful readers." She would thus always find herself struggling—"pinched for money, for time, for a place to work."

So was all this worth it? "I would not blame you,” he wrote, “if you ... asked, Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?"

But in the end, he argued, living to practice an art that one does well is its own reward:

For you ... it will have to be art. You have nothing to gain and nothing to give except as you distill and purify ephemeral experience into quiet, searching, touching little stories ... and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility.

But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve?"


I think you have to just not care about what people think of you while you scribble away. Future fame or fortune are irrelevant. You do it while your family and friends shake their heads and wonder why with all that education and ability you seem to be doing nothing, and they pity you and shake their heads and you have to just let them. There is no teleology to it; simply, you have to release yourself of the books that want to be born. You labour alone, that's just the way it is. No point fighting it. Without "a product," a society based on capitalism, commercialism has no way to gage value. Until the book is written and published, there is no "product," and, therefore, no "value."

Though I don't know about you, personally I haven't found that giving up and walking away from one's muse is an option. Exigencies of the muse, though, is another topic.

11 comments:

  1. If the world were deprived of all the artworks, music, and writing of all those that capitalism found irrelevant during their lifetimes, we would surely be a much poorer planet. Thankfully the human spirit is so much greater than the economic system America invented. Thankfully the human creative urge is an incredibly powerful one that can hardly be stopped. And thankfully we live in an age whee instead of sitting alone with our quill in front of a meager fire we can reach out via our technology and meet and share.

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  2. Narrator, I agree fully with you. When a recent Van Gogh Sunflowers went for many millions at an auction, I was struck by the irony - especially since I believe Vincent commited suicide because his brother, Theo, who had been supporting him, was marrying and Vincent didn't want to continue to be a financial burden. We lost Vincent Van Gogh because we didn't value his work enough to pay him a living wage for it. It was not a "product" of value at the time. Yet, yet...

    Without those bursting sunflowers, how much poorer our art, our perception of the world of nature. My Dad had a business associate in London who owned one of the Sunflowers and my Dad said he had never seen anything so vibrant on canvas, that it was amazing to stand before the painting, that the vibrancy swept into the viewer, "It was ALIVE, the sunflowers bursting with LIFE!"

    I'm moving into teaching now, tutoring/esl/tiny classes 3 days a week at a local Korean Centre, so there'll be more stability than there has been for many years. Years which I don't regret. If I hadn't lived in such stark and unrelenting uncertainty I don't think I'd ever have found out anything about real life. Surely artists need to go through something that turns their life upside down, that shows how arbitrary it all really is, or at least, I'm considering this perception of the artist (& yes, you did, in childhood). Security and comfort are to a certain extent an illusion and contingent; we only discover this when faced with the inexplicable, with what borders on catastrophe. If the most powerful art is deeply risk-taking, how can that happen unless the artist has had to encounter the raw risk of living without any scaffolding? Faced the violence of life?

    But I digress...

    Thank you so much for dropping by, your comments are always perceptive and caring and mean much to this madwoman in the attic or subaltern abode, as it may be. :-)

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  3. Thanks for sharing these wise words from Mr. Stegner. I concluded several years ago that the process of creation itself would have to be the only reward for me, since I suffer from a crippling lack of energy for pursuing publication, awards, etc. But "four manuscripts of 50,000 words or more"?! Damn, you're even crazier than I am!

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  4. "We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." -- Henry James

    ";;;quiet, searching, touching little stories" : the kiss of death! Don't I know it!

    "But isn't it enough?....won't it serve?" Easy enough to answer if you're a popular novelist who's the director of creative writing at Stanford.

    Much food for thought here, Brenda -- thanks.

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  5. Dave, as ever, you make me laugh - actually snort my afternoon coffee! You've probably got more books than I have in all those carefully categorized posts. A nature journal... a couple of books of poetry... the surrealist/dream-like (& often strange) prose poetry you do so well... an anthropological type book, both on modern culture and other cultures... as well as all the photographs... and that's just for starters. Now I wouldn't want the job of editing it all, but someday you'll probably do it. Then we'll talk about who's crazier, 'K!

    Richard, oh, you must be in some deep soul searching place with your break from blogging... I love your book, Only What Is, and think a book of posts can certainly stand on its own. On the other hand, I always expected you to re-weave them (or others like them) into another story, or a group of interconnecting stories in one book. I've never for one moment doubted the quality or importance of your writing. From my vantage, you seem 'successful,' but I agree that the next step is a best seller...

    But that's not what Stegner's talking about, and nor is the future predictable. We are, indeed, as you quote James, left in the dark to do our work. The "madness of art"! Ha!

    Thanks for dropping by, Dave, and Richard, good to hear from both of you.

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  6. I write because when I write I sometimes feel whole. "Art is nutrition for the Soul." — Alex Grey

    In my better moments I realize I am holding two contradictions in the palm of one hand and that's the way life often, if not usually, seems to run. In my mind, that means that one just has to do what one has to do the best one can without expectation of a smooth outcome, but with expectation that there will eventually be both joy and sorrow, both rough and smooth.

    Sorry, somehow that is related to what you are saying but I can't find the way to make the connection clear. Still drifting on the river, I guess.

    (I also appreciate Richard's "quiet, searching, touching little stories" though I never envisioned them woven together. They stand individually in my mind, like poems do.)

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  7. Anonymous6:11 PM

    I needed to read this today~and probably tomorrow too

    Blessings~

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  8. Actually, Brenda, this is the way I always am.

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  9. MB, how beautifully you express contradiction and the paradox of your own art. Reading your comment is reading a poem of yours... a lovely bathing of images, ungraspable, mysterious, on the fine and golden edge of the numinous even knowing the abyss is there too. Thank you.

    I agree with you on Richard, of course I do. Each piece stands entirely on its own. But somehow I always thought that he'd weave some of his posts into perhaps a novel about a man who blogs, place them in a story about a life that's going on, and I'm really not sure why I thought that. And apologize if my sometimes too active imagination got carried away!

    Laurieglynn, your novel interweaves spirit and reality, traditional herbal medicine with healing the soul, Western science/culture meeting the muse, the sun meeting the moon, glaring light with illumination, and you shouldn't doubt finishing it. While I've read the first chapters of your novel, as you know, and sent some copyediting responses, I haven't begun on the newer material you sent... soon. Keep writing/editing! You know I love your work!

    Richard, that's good to hear, somehow comforting at this hour of the morning. I suppose there are authors who discover a 'way' to write and then write by rote. It might be more financially successful to go with a saleable formula, but art challenges us, uncovers us, opens us, and is never a sure thing, surely. No guarantees... what better way to live in the moment?

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  10. Very similar philosophy in Marge Piercy's poem "For The Young Who Want To", which I originally read in her book The Moon Is Always Female. On my wall in front of where I'm typing this I have a quote from Marilyn vos Savant's column, which appears in Parade. In it, Nick Hanson of Woodbury, MN, asks, "Do you think we would be as advanced today if the famous philosophers, mathematicians, etc., had never lived?" Marilyn answers, "Probably. The ones who become famous aren't the ones who are doing the day-to-day work that makes a civilization advance. Besides, if those particular people hadn't lived, others would have made the same discoveries anyway. Creative people such as artists are a major exception. They are irreplaceable." (emphasis mine)

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  11. What a marvelous post, and a thoughtful ensuing discussion. Like Laurie Glynne, I feel I will have to come back and read it again. And again.

    Thank you, Brenda.

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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___