Thereby hangs a tale, and it’s a very long tale. It includes Plato wishing to kick the poets out of the ideal state proposed in the Republic, because of the lies they told; it includes not a few book-burnings, and some people-burnings too, and such things as fatwahs and Papal Indexes, not to mention the fact that your Aunt Lila won’t speak to you because she thinks she is Madame X, the profligate floozy in your latest novel, and she never did any such thing, and how dare you. Serves you right for filching her finger-wave and her 1945 nip-waisted suit, and pasting them onto someone completely different.
But was it really your right as an artist to purloin Aunt Lila’s wardrobe? Are you entitled to make off with the conversations you overhear in bus stations and stick them into some recondite construction of your own? Can everything and everyone be used by you – viewed as material, as they are by Hugo, the writer whose wife calls him a “filthy moral idiot” in the Alice Munro short story called “Material”? Hugo is the epitome of the hateful writer, and at first his wife doesn’t believe he really is a writer:
He did not have the authority I thought a writer should have. He was too nervous, too touchy with everybody, too much of a showoff. I believed that writers were calm, sad people, knowing too much. I believed that there was a difference about them, some hard and shining, rare intimidating quality they had from the beginning, and Hugo didn’t have it.17
But as it turns out, Hugo does have it. After they’re divorced, the wife comes across a story by Hugo, which Hugo has created by stealing the wife’s descriptions of their former downstairs neighbor, Dotty, with whom he never had much to do in real life. It’s a very good story, says the wife:
I am not moved by tricks. Or if I am, they have to be good tricks. Lovely tricks, honest tricks. There is Dotty lifted out of life and held in light, suspended in the marvellous clear jelly Hugo has spent all his life learning how to make. It is an act of magic, there is no getting around it … [Dotty] has passed into Art. It doesn’t happen to everybody.18
The wife sits down to write a note of appreciation to Hugo, but finds herself writing in anger: “This is not enough, Hugo. You think it is, but it isn’t. You are mistaken.”19
What isn’t enough? The lovely tricks, the magic. The art. It doesn’t compensate – or not in the wife’s mind – for the filthy moral idiocy of Hugo.
Start asking what would be enough, and enough in what terms, and a whole pile of questions come pouring out of the box. Should the god of the artist be Apollo the Classicist, with his beautiful formality, or Mercury, the mischief-maker, trickster, and thief? Should you invoke as your inspiration the Holy Spirit, as Milton did in Paradise Lost, or a Muse of fire, as in the Prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V, or Harry Houdini, the hocus-pocus man?
In what ways, if any, does talent set you apart? Does it exempt you from the duties and responsibilities expected of others? Or does it load you up with even more duties and responsibilities, but of a different kind? Are you to be a detached observer, pursuing your art for its own sake, and having arcane kinds of fun – or rather, experiences that will enrich your understanding of Life and the Human Condition – and if you do this to the exclusion of other people and their needs, will you become your own sin-soaked gargoyle? Or ought you to be a dedicated spokesperson for the downtrodden of this earth, like Gogol or Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo or the Zola of Germinal or the Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London? Should you write your own J’accuse, like Zola, or are all such accusations vulgar? Ought you to support worthy causes, or avoid them like the plague? Are you, vis-à-vis the average taxpayer, a superfluous parasite, or the essential heart of the matter? Should you be tagged as some dreary “intellectual worker,” as in various Communist regimes of yesteryear – ever anxious about whether you’re getting the party line right? The party line may be of any kind at all: the knots of 1930s left-wing political correctness are, as knots, much like the right-wing religiously correct knots of not so very long before that time, and not so far also from the ideological neo-liberal knots of today. In every case of party lines, reality is seen through a lens, and the lens distorts.
For instance, there’s the F-word. If you’re a woman and a writer, does the combination of gender and vocation automatically make you a feminist, and what does that mean, exactly? That you shouldn’t put a good man into your books, even though you may in real life have managed to dig up a specimen or two? And if you do courageously admit to being one of those F-word females, how should this self-categorization influence your wardrobe choices? I know that’s a frivolous comment, but if the wardrobe matter is all that frivolous, then why have so many earnest commentators made such ideological heavy work of it? And even if you aren’t an F-word feminist in any strict ideological sense, will nervous critics wallop you over the head for being one, simply because you exemplify that suspicious character, A Woman Who Writes? If, that is, you put any female characters into your books who aren’t happy, and any men who aren’t good. Well, probably they will. It’s happened before.
In short: if you acknowledge any responsibility to society at all, even insofar as you claim to describe it, does your vocation make you the master of all you survey, or the slave of somebody else’s lamp?
There’s “good,” there’s “good at,” and there’s “good for,” in the sense of good for other people. In which of these ways should art and artists be “good”? Many more panel discussions than I care to dwell on have been devoted to such topics; they usually have titles like “The Writer and Society,” and assume the writer has, or ought to have, a function in relation to everybody else, and that it should be a useful rather than a merely decorative or entertaining function – decoration and entertainment being viewed by some, though not by all, as lightweight if not sinful – and that the usefulness of this function should be measurable by a yardstick other than that of artists themselves. There is never any shortage of people who can think up good things for you to do which are not the same as the things you are good at.
I want to run a mile – although I don’t always manage it – when asked to participate in such discussions. No doubt this is because I was told, in 1960, as a twenty-year-old poet, by an older poet who was a man, that I would never come to anything as a poet until I had been a truck-driver, thus learning at first hand what real people actually did all day. I don’t think there are any tried and true correlations of that reliable cause-and-effect sausage-machine kind between life and art, or none that have to do with quality – that is, raw material into the truck-driver’s seat, and after a while, accomplished top-grade artist out the other door. But perhaps if it had been possible for me to hire myself out as a female truck-driver – which it was not, yet, there and then – I would have done it, and it would have become one of those formative experiences biographers are so fond of talking about, and then I might have thought otherwise.
“Is it necessary to suffer in order to be a writer?” aspiring writers are in the habit of asking. “Don’t worry about the suffering,” I have tended to say. “The suffering will occur whether you like it or not.” What I ought to add is that, many times, the suffering is a result of the writing, rather than its cause. Why? Because there are a lot of people out there who’ll be damned if they let you get away with it, you jumped-up smarty-pants. Publishing a book is often very much like being put on trial, for some offense which is quite other than the one you know in your heart you’ve committed. “ ‘It’s the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You’re half murderers, most of you,’ ” says a character in Mao II;20 and many critics, and many outraged members of vigilante committees dedicated to cleaning up the reading material of the youth of today, and many governments of totalitarian regimes, share this view. They know there’s a body buried somewhere, and they’re keen to dig it up, and then to hunt you down. Trouble is, it’s not usually the right body.
How does writing differ in this respect from the other arts – or, these days,
media – if indeed it does? All come in for their share of vilification: artists of every kind have been lined up in front of the firing squads. But I’d say writers are especially prone to retaliation by those who have the power to denounce them, and to assassinate them on the street, and to drop them out of helicopters, not only because they’re so mouthy, but also because – like it or not – language has a moral dimension built into it: you can’t say weed without making a negative judgment about the botanical specimens you’ve just assigned to the weed category.
When I was a university student, we were all expected to be familiar with an Archibald MacLeish poem called “Ars Poetica” that contained the lines, “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a ripe fruit,” and ended, “A poem should not mean, but be.”21 Of course this poem contradicted its own strictures: it was a poem, but it was hardly mute and devoid of meaning; indeed, it was situated firmly in the didactic tradition. Critics held for a long time that it ought to be the aim of art both to delight and to instruct, and I’d say this poem falls pretty heavily on the instruction side of the fence. You might even call it prescriptive. Much more so than, say, Gertrude Steins famous little rhyme, “Pigeons on the grass alas.”22 Nor does the MacLeish poem resemble the Cézanne-like meditation on the essence of appleness that it holds out as the ideal for poetry – lyric poetry, presumably, as you can hardly expect the Iliad or the Inferno to possess nothing but these fruit-like qualities.
I asked a recent house-guest – a novelist23 – for her opinion. Was it possible, I said, to write a story with no moral implications at all? “No,” she said. “You can’t help the moral implication, because a story has to come out one way or the other, and the reader will have opinions about the rightness or wrongness of the outcome, whether you like it or not.” She recalled various authors who had tried to do away with this element: Gide in Lafcadio, Robbe-Grillet, who declared that he was out to dispose of two obsolete concepts, character and plot. I do remember reading the latter in the late fifties – it was sort of like reading a cafeteria tray before you’ve put anything on it. That having been said, I’d also say that Robbe-Grillet came pretty close to writing morally neutral prose. But this prose was also neutral in most other ways – ways that make much writing of interest. “His essays are a scream,” said my friend. “Yes, but do you still read his novels?” I said. “No,” she said. “Nothing happens, and there aren’t any jokes.”
Value judgments on the characters or the outcome need not be made by the writer, at least not in any overt fashion. It was Chekhov who said famously, and not quite truthfully, that he never judged his characters, and you will find many a critical review that tacitly endorses this sort of restraint. But the reader will judge the characters, because the reader will interpret. We all interpret, every day – we must interpret, not only language, but a whole environment in which this means that – “little green man” means cross the street, “little red man” means don’t and if we didn’t interpret, we’d be dead. Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism.
Where does that leave art for art’s sake? Between a swinging door and a brick wall, you’d think. And that’s where it is, out there in the free-for-all, never-never land of newspapers and political reactions and market forces, where art and society clash over such things as elephant-dung-ornamented Madonnas, with both sides taking the tickets and counting the cash.
“Poets are magicians without quick wrists,”24 said Gwendolyn MacEwen. I’d like to come at this subject from a different angle now by talking about three fictional characters, all of them quasi-magicians. These are: the Wizard of Oz in the L. Frank Baum children’s story of the same name, Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and the power-mad actor Henrik Höfgen in Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto. What do all three have in common? All exist at the intersection of art with power, and therefore with moral and social responsibility. And all three are illusionists, of one kind or another, like Hugo the filthy moral idiot and his wonderful magic jelly.
First, The Wizard of Oz – a book I read early in life. As you know, it concerns Dorothy, a Kansas girl who is carried away by a tornado to the Land of Oz, where witches, good and evil, still exist. Dorothy sets out for the Emerald City, where everything is green and there is said to be a wizard who can facilitate her journey back to Kansas. After many adventures she gets there, along with a Cowardly Lion who believes he lacks bravery, a Scarecrow who thinks he has no brain, and a Tin Woodman who claims to be missing a heart. All are in search of personal life-enhancement and increased self-esteem, and they seek these from the Wizard, who appears to each one differently: Oz the Great and Terrible is a giant head, a raging fire, a beast, and a lovely woman.
But during Dorothy’s audience, her dog Toto knocks over a screen in the corner, and the real Wizard is revealed – a little old man, who was been working the whole show with the aid of props, tricks, and ventriloquism. It is he too who has arranged, by means of colored spectacles, for the Emerald City to look so green; but he has practiced all these deceptions, he explains, for the good of his people. He’s had to pretend to be magical and fearsome, so that the evil witches – who really do have supernatural powers – would not destroy them all. Thus he has created either a utopia or a benevolent despotism, however you choose to look at it. Also he has fooled Dorothy into doing battle with the remaining evil witch by holding out false promises: he doesn’t really know how to get her back to Kansas.
Dorothy is not impressed. “I think you are a very bad man,” she says.
“Oh, no, my dear,” says the Wizard. “I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard …”25
If you’re an artist, being a good man – or a good woman – is pretty much beside the point when it comes to your actual accomplishments. Moral perfection won’t compensate for your badness as an artist: not being able to hit high C is not redeemed by being kind to dogs. However, whether you are a good man or a bad man is not beside the point if you happen to be a good wizard – good at doing your magic, making your “marvellous clear jelly,” creating illusions that can convince people of their truth – because if you are good at being a wizard in this sense, then power of various sorts may well come your way – power in relation to society – and then your goodness or badness as a human being will have a part in determining what you do with this power.
The Wizard of Oz – soi-disant magician, wielder of power, manipulator, illusionist, and fraud – has a long genealogy. His remote ancestor was probably a shaman or high priest or conjuror, or one who combined these functions. Other ancestors can be found in folklore. More recently, and in literature, he can be traced from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus through Prospero of The Tempest. Prospero begot Jonson’s Alchemist, and The Alchemist begot Thackeray’s Prologue to Vanity Fair with its puppet-show world controlled by the puppeteer as author. He also begot a lot of tyrannical magicians and artist figures, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sinister or deluded alchemists of “The Birthmark” and “Rappacinni’s Daughter.” Sometimes things turned nasty, and we got the bad magicians of E. T. A. Hoffmann – see also the Offenbach opera, Tales of Hoffmann, – and George du Maurier’s exploitative hypnotist Svengali in Trilby, and then there was some fooling around under the table, and who knows who begot whom, and further along there were the creepy shoemaker in the film The Red Shoes, and the master of the wax museum in Joseph Roth’s novel The Tale of the Thousand and Second Night, who creates illusionary monsters because that’s what people want. Then there are Thomas Mann’s hypnotist in “Mario and the Magician,” and Robertson Davies’s master-magician Eisengrim the Great, alias Paul Dempster, in the Deptford trilogy, and Bergman’s tormented hero in his film The Magician. They range from showmen out to make a buck to those who wish to manipulate the lives of othe
rs for fun and profit, to those who suspect their magic may in fact be real, and that the world of wonders they concoct really is a wonder, and a creator of wonder in others.
Let us then consider Shakespeare’s Prospero, for he is in a way the grand-daddy of all the rest. We know his story. Betrayed by his usurping brother, cast away with his daughter and his books – including, not incidentally, his books of magic – he fetches up on a tropical island, where he attempts to civilize the one native available to him, the witch-born Caliban, and when this fails keeps him under control by aid of enchantment. Along come the bad brother and the King of Naples and his court, shipwrecked on the island. Prospero calls up his familiar, the airborne elemental, Ariel, and proceeds to entice, confuse, and scare the pants off those erstwhile enemies whom Fate has now put into his power. His aim is not revenge, according to him – he wants to bring about their repentance: “They being penitent, / The sole drift of my purpose doth extend / Not a frown farther,” as he says. Once they are penitent, his own restoration as the Duke of Milan will follow, and also the marriage of his worthy daughter with the worthy son of the King, thus forestalling the proposed assassination of the latter. In short, Prospero uses his arts – magic arts, arts of illusion – not just for entertainment, though he does some of that as well, but for the purposes of moral and social improvement.
That being said, it must also be said that Prospero plays God. If you don’t happen to agree with him – as Caliban doesn’t – you’d call him a tyrant, as Caliban does. With just a slight twist, Prospero might be the Grand Inquisitor, torturing people for their own good. You might also call him a usurper – he’s stolen the island from Caliban, just as his own brother has stolen the dukedom from him; and you might call him a sorcerer, as Caliban also terms him. We – the audience – are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to see him as a benevolent despot. Or we are inclined most of the time. But Caliban is not without insight.
On Writers and Writing Page 11
