steepholm

Ah, thank you! That has rather more of 3 and less of 1 than I expected, but perhaps a smidgeon of 2, as well.

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sovay

That has rather more of 3 and less of 1 than I expected, but perhaps a smidgeon of 2, as well.

I don't know that Greene is saying that you can't expect writers to behave decently to other people. They may treat you quite decently: you should just be aware while you're being supported through your traumatic break-up that you're generating useful human data as well.

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Yes, that's fairer. In fact, I remember writing elsewhere (but I am unable now to track down the post) about how nice it would be to be able to give that compulsive secretary time off. I found it most oppressive when looking at the dead body of my father, and feeling very sad, but also taking notes.

And then taking notes on my self-disgust.

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sovay

And then taking notes on my self-disgust.

Then Greene might be in sympathy with you; he is describing himself with the splinter. He may have felt it as a failing. I think I disagree with his metaphor anyway, because I do not see observation and memory as incompatible with compassion or other real feeling, but I have always studied my own behavior and other people's; I knew from very early on that they were often not naturally the same.

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Observation and memory are fine - but it's the mixture of motives that gives unease. Did I want to remember (in this case) what my father looked like as an act of filial love, or as raw material for some future book? Such questions are idle, of course, no human motive being unmixed, but even if the more "acceptable" reasons predominated I experienced the consciousness of the other ones as a kind of adulteration. I don't pretend that's a reasonable point of view, though.

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nightspore.livejournal.com

I don't know that the motives are necessarily mixed. I mean if it were me (when it is me) the near-clinical aspect of observation is self-protective (an escape from emotion as Eliot said). As in Dickinson's formal feeling, where she too notices the way she's noticing how she retreats from pain into noticing.

Wonderful post and comments.

(I love the loose mantel of self-criticism. I do that too much. (J/k))

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Yes, that's a very good point - there's certainly an element of defensiveness there in some cases, and at some times. Genius as coping mechanism!

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karinmollberg.livejournal.com

Seconded but it doesn't seem to cure guilt (feelings of, in case existent, ihowever processed&depicted for the sake of art). The amount of egotism can possibly be negotiated ID-Wise which is only one reason I love a certain film where Freud meets God (who is posing as a burglar, entering through the window dressed in a white zoot-suit but probably not to make a point about architecture without architects Tom Wolfe-Wise) in Vienna but Freud won't believe it is God because how could he until he critizes what Freud intends to write but hasn't yet. It's hilarious yet I forget the title, saw it on arte ages ago.

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That's what I immediately thought it meant -- that feeling.

I once got kicked by a horse, and as I flew through the air and landed in a hedge, I thought "And I can't even use this, my character would never have been so stupid!" If there had happened to be a stone wall there and not a hedge, and if I'd hit my head on it, that would have been my last thought. This is not necessarily a nice thing to know about oneself, but it is a thing, and if it is a thing I can use it...

I don't think it justifies bad behaviour at all ever, being an artist is not an excuse for not being a good human being, nor does noting things prevent compassion.

Have you read A.S. Byatt's The Game?

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I haven't - you'd recommend it?

I know the feeling you refer to well, though (as you'll have gathered) I've come to have mixed feelings about the involuntariness of it, sometimes even seeing it as a kind of fifth columnist who adds insult to injury by publishing the column! But what indirectly triggered this post was hearing Hanif Kureishi on the radio the other day, mentioning the "chip [sic] of ice" and then having this exchange with John Wilson:

JW: You’ve always mined your own biography and talked about family… How do your sons feel about it? There are sketches here, we get a sense of who they are in a couple of these stories. Do they mind being written about?

HK: I would advise them to keep out of a writer’s way if you don’t want to be in a book.

JW: That’s pretty hard when the writer is their own dad!

HK: That’s tough. I mean, that’s something that they have to live with. You’d have to ask them about it. Writers are rather merciless. You see it with painters too. There’s something really ruthless about a real artist. Virtue is the worst quality in any artist.

The absurdity of his opening remark was almost disarming, but the last sentence, along with the snobbery of "real" in the penultimate one, made me want to puke.

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Yeah, and that's a real concern, but that's... wow. What a jerk.

Years ago, I used to write a column for Arcane magazine, a UK RPG magazine. And when people were in our RPGs, I used to say to them that anything they said or did in the session could end up in my column, that by coming to the game they were agreeing to this. (Often we were playtesting things for me to review, but even if we weren't I'd use funny things and clever things they came up with in the game sometimes.)

Even if that's an ethical thing to say in a non-game context, to your friends, about real things -- and I have done this, asking if they'd be OK if I fictionalised something they were telling me -- you can't say this to your children! They can't give that consent! I am horrified. I'll never be able to read Kureishi again. There's an obligation to be ethical about using things from anyone, let along your children, my goodness, what entitlement.

Being a real artist does not give you a pass on being a real human being, not not not, and furthermore, look at Bach. Lived to be old, married to one woman, raised eight gifted children, mild, happy, peaceful, and producing the greatest music ever, year after year after year. That's a much better model of a real artist.

(I am so used to reading "virtue" as a mistranslation of "arete" that I almost forgot what it really means in normal English. I am getting to be like those people who cackle at the use of "quaint".)

The Game is directly about this, and while it's an early work and she wasn't writing as well as she is now, it's very interesting, and interested in these questions.

I also recommend, if you haven't read it, William Goldman's The Color of Light, a horror novel for writers. Don't read it if stuck.

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Absolutely agreed. If you want to hear that exchange in context, by the way, it's here. I don't think it's unrepresentative of the way he came across generally.

I shall seek out the Byatt and Goldman - thanks!

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look at Bach

Madeleine L'Engle once wrote: "That night during a wakeful period I thought about all the people in history, literature, art, whom I most admire: Mozart, Shakespeare, Homer, El Greco, St. John, Chekhov, Gregory of Nyssa, Dostoevsky, Emily Bronte: not one of them would qualify for a mental-health certificate. It’s been a small game with me this summer to ask, “Do you know anybody you really admire, who has really been important to the world in a creative way, who would qualify for a mental-health certificate?” So far nobody has come up with one."

Bach was one of the people I thought of, but even for several of the people on that list -- Homer? She thinks she knows enough about Homer to say whether he was mentally healthy?

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There are quite a few scholars who don't believe Homer was one individual, so that might disqualify him on the grounds of multiple personality disorder, I suppose?

But really - how much do we know about Shakespeare, even, to say that he wouldn't qualify? (Not that I really know what a mental health certificate is, nor how one would qualify.)

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I was thinking Homer was more or less the opposite -- multiple people who all had the delusion they were the same person :-) And yeah, I can't even figure out what she was thinking of when she mentioned Homer, Shakespeare, St. John, El Greco, and Gregory of Nyssa, and I'm inclined to disagree about Emily Bronte.

I also wondered what L'Engle meant by a mental-health certificate. Not sure I've ever heard of one anywhere else.

There's at least one psych textbook that quotes L'Engle as above, quite uncritically.

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Using one's children in fiction is really awfully common, though, from what I've seen. My mother did it quite openly, though she wasn't always sure she should have done it. I told her once, baiting her rather, "You know, when I'm grown up I could always write a novel about you and Dad," and she winced and said "Please don't!" So I haven't. (I mean, there are other reasons for that, like my never having written any novels at all, but still.)

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It is indeed common - and for what it's worth, I'll be blogging on this over at the Awfully Big Blog Adventure on the 11th, under the lurid title "The Muse as Moloch". (That is to say, I've already blogged but it'll only be up then.) I think what makes Kureishi's words so annoying isn't that there's no truth in them, but that he appears not to find the situation problematic or to feel any need take other people's feelings into account - which clearly wasn't the case with your mother.

"Ours is a high and lonely destiny," says Uncle Andrew in an attempt to give his selfishness a cover of grandeur, and later the same words are echoed by Jadis, that future Snow Queen. That's what a splinter of ice in the heart will do.

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sovay

"Ours is a high and lonely destiny," says Uncle Andrew in an attempt to give his selfishness a cover of grandeur, and later the same words are echoed by Jadis, that future Snow Queen. That's what a splinter of ice in the heart will do.

I hope you have a book in the works where you are going to put these two sentences, because they're very good.

That is such a useful line. There are several reasons that The Magician's Nephew remains my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia, but the fact that it gave me a highly quotable single-sentence shorthand for a whole host of selfish behaviors is among them.

Belatedly, it occurs to me to ask if you've read A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009)? I did not like it as much after the fact as I had thought while reading it (partly for, ironically, reasons of blurring real and fictitious persons), but it is constructed very deeply as a rebuke to the idea that writers have a right to their children's lives as fictional material.

Edited Date: 2015-06-24 04:43 pm (UTC)

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I've been meaning to read The Children's Book for years now, but it never quite manages to work its way to the top of my pile!

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sovay

I've been meaning to read The Children's Book for years now, but it never quite manages to work its way to the top of my pile!

It's beautifully written, prose-wise! These were my reactions immediately upon finishing it. After I had learned more about E. Nesbit, I felt more ambivalently. I stand by my opinion of (hardcover) pp. 391–396.

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It might be common, but it's unethical until the child is grown up and can give or refuse permission. Did you feel it as a violation of your privacy? Have you read C.R. Milne's autobiography?

I do think there are degrees. If a writer puts in the time their kid dropped a lollypop that's not as reprehensible as something that reveals the child's inner life and anguish.

(Stupid things that go through one's mind: "I'd have thought better of Yonge than that she'd have used her children...")

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I didn't mind especially, and I don't think most of my siblings did. One of my sisters did mind a rather didactic chapter (in my mother's first book, which is extremely first-book-ish though rather charming) in which she was portrayed as a crybaby who gained confidence after a certain magical adventure. My oldest brother minded that our other brother got given all his best lines (as his character was the right age to deliver them).

I have read Milne's memoirs, but I think a lot of the trouble was his father's fame. I do think AAM shouldn't have used his son's actual name -- he could just as well have said "Gregory Michael" or "Timothy Thomas" or something.

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Can't resist observing that he did ... some of the time.

Timothy Tim has ten pink toes
And ten pink toes has Timothy Tim
They go with him wherever he goes
Wherever he goes they go with him.

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I should perhaps mention that my mother also used herself, her parents, and her childhood friends in other stories. I think that probably helped us keep perspective.

Yeah, I was probably thinking of Timothy Tim, as well as my cousins Tim and Tom (who are not twins).

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Yonge probably did use her brother's children once he had any, not to mention her zillions of cousins and their children, and the village children she taught. But I think she was more of the "I always pulp my acquaintances before serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage" type. (Frances Trollope)

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sovay

There’s something really ruthless about a real artist. Virtue is the worst quality in any artist.

It is amazing how rapidly that diminished my desire to read Hanif Kureishi.

There are so many myths about artists I hate. Tortured genius is probably at the top of the list, but the idea that great art is fueled by poor treatment of other people (and the best that people who aren't artists can hope for is to enable or stay the hell out of the way) comes in a very close second. I associate it especially with the twentieth century, actually. I wonder how to trace that.

(It may start in the late ninetenth century. Gauguin was an ass.)

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It's not enough to be an ass. You've got to make a virtue of it somehow, and imply that your very asshood is (by a thrilling vault of logic) proof of your genius, and conversely that anyone who's considerate of others, especially if they give up a day's writing to attend their mother's funeral, is ipso facto not a "real" artist.

In my head, this feels a rather macho and early-20thC, perhaps initially American line; but I may be confusing it with the related idea that you're also not a real writer unless you've got a destructive addiction.

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sovay

In my head, this feels a rather macho and early-20thC, perhaps initially American line; but I may be confusing it with the related idea that you're also not a real writer unless you've got a destructive addiction.

They're often found together; they're both glorifications of the Writer as Terrible Human Being, which I definitely agree is expressed in a certain strain of American writing with an admiring sonofabitch. I feel like it mutated slightly in the second half of the century from glamorous self-destructive machismo to an equivalent kind of academic self-centeredness, but I may just think that because my experiences with Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and John Updike were so uncongenial. (I can't quite include Philip Roth in that sentence because every time I decide that I just don't like him, I remember that Portnoy's Complaint is the textbook definition of oversharing, but it has such a good punchline. So ninety percent of my experiences with Philip Roth were uncongenial, but the last page of Portnoy's Complaint is hilarious.)

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The person I associate this with most, pre reading that bit of Kureishi anyway, is Dylan Thomas.

Dylan Thomas singlehandedly reinvented poetry readings, and he was a terrific poet when he was on, and he's the only person of any merit to write in my native dialect. But he was a huge entitled jerk who believed his talent excused any behaviour, and because he really was talented and got famous and visible, I think he influenced a lot of people in a terrible way.

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(It may start in the late nineteenth century. Gauguin was an ass.

One word: GeorgegordonlordfuckingBYRON.

Edited Date: 2015-06-07 05:30 pm (UTC)

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A word as dangerous to know as Demogorgon! But you will remember that I have a family conflict of interest when it comes to Byron's asshattery, so perhaps should comment no further.

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In one sense, that reminds me of the claim of China Mieville, among others, that writers have to discomfit. I would say that writers have to tell the truth: some truths are discomfiting, and some are not. To be thus purposely selective is to slant the truth.

In another, I've been reading Leader's biography of Kingsley Amis, and the relationship of his life to his novels is outstandingly murky. Amis would claim both that they were drawn from life and that they were completely fictional, whichever claim was more convenient at the moment. The net result is that he libeled people from behind their fictional avatars' names.

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In one sense, that reminds me of the claim of China Mieville, among others, that writers have to discomfit. I would say that writers have to tell the truth: some truths are discomfiting, and some are not. To be thus purposely selective is to slant the truth.

I didn't reply to this at first because I wasn't sure what you (or Mieville) meant by it, and wanted to ponder. But I'm still not sure. I can see what "writers have to discomfit" might mean - in the sense that writers have to do more than reinforce people in their accustomed ways of seeing the world; and I can see what "writers have to tell the truth" might mean - in the sense that writers need to have integrity in the broadest sense, and not distort their vision because it might cause upset. How either of those articulates with using one's children as fodder for fiction I'm less certain. I'm not saying that it's unconnected, mind, but the way those ideas might be joined up in practice needs to be fleshed out.

Selectivity slants the truth, of course - but how could one not be selective and call oneself an artist?

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Mieville's remark is only relevant in one sense, that using your children as fodder is discomfiting to them. And I thought of that when you quoted Hanif Kureishi saying to/about his children, "That's tough."

"Writers have to tell the truth" doesn't mean just that they mustn't distort because it might upset. It also means they mustn't distort because it might not upset. Mieville was criticizing Tolkien, whom he considers a reassuring, comforting author. He hasn't read much Tolkien nor paid attention to what he did read, but Tolkien was an author of profound truth and even his comforting aspects are real and true. He shouldn't be dissuaded from them just because China Mieville thinks they're not upsetting enough.

Re the inevitability of selectivity: I wrote of purposeful selectivity.

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Thank you for expanding on those thoughts. Naruhodo, as they say in Japan - and I agree with those points. I think Tolkien is ultimately a comforting writer, but with the stress very much on "ultimately".

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The phrase I always feel sums up the best of Tolkien is "Great deeds that were not wholly vain."

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I think in these days where there's not much war in the West and we have good medicine, many people are growing up without experiencing real loss or grief, beyond perhaps a pet. Siblings mostly survive, many people aren't close to their grandparents, and their parents in the natural course of things live on until the grown child might be in their fifties or older before dealing with their loss.

I think this makes it harder for these fortunate people to appreciate the brilliance of the way Tolkien deals with writing about grief and loss, because it's something that they have no experience of and so they don't see how it's true and painful and healing.

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