imagined-community

Sometimes when you find something you like, you gotta share it…)

I have always been fascinated by the lives of artists. My father was a wildlife artist who made a bit of a living off his paintings. Then when I was seventeen something in his personality led him, over the course of about a year, to turn away from his talent. Days were barren in the studio over the garage, as he painted less and less and then eventually not at all. Maybe that turning away that I saw in my father — back to the numbing distraction of alcohol, off to an old house in the woods, a second round of kids, another divorce, and more lost time – fostered in me a keen admiration for artists that stay the course. The ones who stay despite the anxiety and the failure, the pressure to always be good or even better than last time, that frustrating mix of success and falling just short of a personal vision. Whether artists are of exceptional talent, those luminaries who amaze the multitudes with their skill and soul, or the middling sort that can turn a grubby coffeehouse in a small town on a Friday night into a wondrous place to be.

And so…when I found Kathryn Harrison’s review of Joan Acocella’s, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, I was pleasantly surprised. There was so much in the article that I liked that I am just going to blockquote a chunk of it:

Among the lucid and often delightful observations Joan Acocella makes in her new collection of critical essays, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” none is more important than this: “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite … ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.”

Which doesn’t make the creative process any less mysterious. What emerges from a reading of “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” is Acocella’s — and through hers our own — respect and in certain cases even reverence for the dogged faith on which an artistic career is built. We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos: these are the promises art makes. Fulfilling them requires something else entirely, an attribute closer to blindness than to inspiration — the refusal to give up when the odds predict defeat, again.

Harrison goes on to discuss Acocella’s essay on Mikhail Baryshnikov.

As Russian as he is, Baryshnikov has achieved the stature of an American icon by that most reliable means — his own bootstraps. We love stories of overcoming hardship; really, the only way to improve on them is to multiply the hero’s woes, and Baryshnikov endured decades of crises and abandonments that only his obdurate investment in ballet allowed him to transcend.

Twelve years old, Baryshnikov had been dancing for three years when his mother hanged herself and he became “a child workaholic.” Drudgery paid off: at 19 he was accepted into the Kirov Ballet as a soloist, and then, Acocella writes, “his troubles really began.” In the wake of Nureyev’s 1961 defection, the Kirov became, in effect, “a mini police state” that rewarded its dancers “less on the basis of merit than according to one’s history of cooperation” with Communist witch hunts. The pinnacle of success for Russian dancers, it left them vulnerable to a “mixture of impotence and cynicism” that destroyed one brilliant career after another.

In 1970, Alexander Pushkin, celebrated teacher and surrogate father to the young dancer (whose own father never understood or supported his ambitions), died suddenly and left Baryshnikov feeling bereft of protectors. That same year, Natalia Makarova defected and the Kirov descended into panic, with the result that the K.G.B. came calling whenever Baryshnikov had so much as a meal with a visiting Western dancer. It was clear that to remain in his homeland would amount to creative suicide and so in 1974, Baryshnikov, too, defected.

Summarizing his subsequent career with the American Ballet Theater, with Balanchine, with Twyla Tharp, Acocella says of Baryshnikov: “Homelessness turned him inward, gave him to himself. Then dance, the substitute home, turned him outward, gave him to us.” It’s an astute observation — the kind of simple and clearsighted remark that distinguishes Acocella’s criticism — and it applies to almost every artist, conscious or not of an alienation assuaged only by the consuming effort art demands.

Does this help me think about what happened with my father? Yes and no. The artists Acocella writes about seemed to have felt toward their art a kind of love that anchored them, not unlike the love that parents usually feel for their children. Different, yes, but with that same core of devotion & selflessness.

And all this thinking about what goes wrong when artists lose their way led me to think about something else I read — A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, by Rachel Cohen. In an essay on Hart Crane and Katherine Anne Porter, Cohen describes a brief period of time in 1931 when the lives of these two artists intersected. Both Crane & Porter were in Mexico City; they were drinking too much and not writing enough, but Crane was over the top, getting jailed for fights and propositioning men. After Crane received a telegram that his father had died, he decided to return to New York with his lover, Peggy Cowley (his only heterosexual affair) via ship. On board, Crane was beaten up and robbed. Later, he drunkenly told Cowley over breakfast, “I’m not going to make it, dear, I’m utterly disgraced.” Shortly thereafter he jumped overboard.

Cohen writes:

Katherine Anne Porter, having left Germany – where she was going to dinner parties with people like Hermann Goering, a social life she would later frame as information gathering – and gone to Switzerland, wrote, upon hearing the news, a long, unpleasant letter about the effect Crane’s death was having on her. She concluded that it might be just as well, since now people could focus on the writing of “that living corpse, who wrote his poetry almost in spite of himself, and who, if he had stayed in the world, would have come to worse ends.” Porter was never charitable, but she may rightly have expressed the possibility that Crane already had his death inside him by the time he arrived in Mexico.

Katherine Anne Porter went on and on. In 1939, she published Pale Horse, Pale Rider; she worked through World War II and spent thirty years on her novel, won the Pulitizer prize for her collected stories, and lived to be ninty years old. Never once in all her long life did she say, “ I’m not going to make it, dear, I’m utterly disgraced.”…

Mexico was a kind of catapult. It shot them both forward. She was a spectacular writer of prose, and he was a thwarted genius, and they both had a gift for the mythic that hardened in Mexico. He retreated, forever, into his legend and his death. She became a famous southern lady and refused to look back. Perhaps he had as much disdain for her choice as she did for his.

Don’t ask me what it all means, I’m just ruminating in print…