The rather more personal problem I have with the myth of the suffering artist arises when I meet young and new writers and find they are intent upon suffering, rather than writing. It can seem that wearing black, moping, engineering car-crash relationships and generally being someone nobody wants to sit beside on the bus could be a shortcut to writing success. Surely, when so many writers seem bathed in fascinating disasters and have such wonderful scars, then scars and disasters would save us effort, focus and the development of our craft? Well, no. In fact, without effort, focus and development, we won't have the skills to present even rosy sunsets and charmingly eccentric families with saleable adventures to the waiting reader, never mind the kind of stuff that wracks the soul and is personal and precious and must be handled with care and precision and respect.
This sort of thing always reminds me of this.
Hi Frank, Kennedy makes several points there, some valid, others not so. To actually seek suffering so as to be a writer is of course insane as is the belief, among whoever shares it, that only artists are sensitive. Also, I have started to come around to the view that all art stems from a part in the human being that cannot be designed. It is there, or not. However, grief, sadness and suffering do transform us in profound ways. And while that may not be a condition of art, art has often been a source of succor to the grief-stricken. Kennedy seems to completely miss this point.
ReplyDeleteI think, as Somerset Maugham noted somewhere, that while suffering can ennoble, as often as not it does not. It is the attitude toward suffering and the character of the individual that count most, it seems. And most of us, I fear, are not heroic.
ReplyDeleteI titled the post as I did, of course, because of the romantic notion of suffering we get from something like La Boheme. Aldous Huxley, who was with D. H. Lawrence when Lawrence died, noted that there is nothing romantic about the final stages of tuberculosis.
Of course, this may all just be me. I have a distinct aversion to suffering.
I don't think suffering is NECESSARY for making great art, I think a lot of great art has been made by people who didn't suffer huge torments, and didn't die in poverty, or from drinking themselves to death. Of course, suffering can be emotional and mental, not just physical.
ReplyDeleteAnd frankly a lot of the suffering that artists go through is because they're misunderstood and unsupported by family, friends, and culture. Artists can put up with a lot of crap from people from the very fact that people buy into these stupid myths about starving, suffering artists.
Was Andrew Wyeth a lesser artist than van Gogh because he wasn't crazy, and had a good home? No, I don't think so. Wyeth was just as misunderstood in some ways as van Gogh, however he did seem to have a thicker skin about it.
But I basically agree with Kennedy. I'm tired of the stereotypes, and the myths, and the attitudes people HAVE towards artists. When I lived in Taos, NM, there was an artist's coop for beginning artists that the owner called The Starving Artist Gallery, which to me just seemed to perpetuate the stereotypes; so I showed my art elsewhere. These myths are so engrained that people don't even think about them, they just assume.
So even if Kennedy misses a few points, overall I appreciate this because debunking the myths does need to be talked about from time to time—talked over by artists as well as by people who appreciate art.
It isn't NECESSARY to suffer for art. It's a good thing that one can take existing suffering and use it to fuel one's art-making. I do that myself. But anyone who actively goes looking for suffering in the belief that it will improve their art is frankly just being masochistic.