From art

Absent Fathers and Present Mothers: Reading Mary Gordon and Alison Bechdel

In Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechtel quotes from Virginia Woolf’s diaries in which she reports that her great novels about her parents, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse could not have been written while her parents were still alive.

That Woolf reports this as a matter of simple, unsentimental fact seems another thing that depends upon the absence of her parents. For Bechtel, the irony is clear: that her mother is still alive is what makes Are You My Mother? a looser and messier book than Fun Home, her elegy to her absent father and investigation into his absence. Her mother keeps popping up, challenging the story, shifting out of place.  

Woolf lost her mother at 13, an event which underscores the longing romanticism with which she paints the mothers in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.  To my mind, there’s still no more devastating passage of loss than the parenthetical by which we learn of Mrs. Ramsey’s death: “(Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.)”

More often, however, it is the case that women marry older men and outlive them, that fathers leave and mothers stay, and that fathers’ inner lives are a bewilderment to their children, and that writers write books about absent fathers and present mothers. Another contemporary writer, the criminally under-read Mary Gordon, has produced in The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother a pair of memoirs that explore the legacies of an absent father and a present mother. Like Bechtel’s father, Gordon’s used intellectual pretension and artistic ambition to crush the residue of their secrets: in the case of Bechtel’s father, his attraction to men; in Gordon’s, his Jewishness.

Bechtel and Gordon wonder what it might mean to use words differently than their fathers who used them to dissemble and conceal, and both struggle with mothers who might prove to have a more unshakable relationship to language and belief than their daughters. When Gordon helps her mother, a devout Catholic, endure the terror of undergoing invasive tests while suffering from dementia by reciting the rosary she wonders how it is that there are no words in which she might find similar comfort, despite her whole sense of self being that of a writer and reader.

Part of the poignance of Gordon’s books is that her mother’s dementia places her in a limbo where self-disclosure is neither forbidden nor permitted. At one point, she decides not to escort her mother on an excursion – in part because she’s not sure if she will enjoy it but in part because she is working on her book and would rather write about her mother than spend time with her.  Sometimes I wonder if those with abusive or absent parents become writers or artists not because there is more material there, but because they are “liberated” sooner from the desire to please, placate, from the requirements of decorum. In a piece I wrote a while ago on Alison Bechtel, I talked about the ways therapy promises to essentially, kill off our parents without killing them: to kill Woolf’s angel of the house, to kill the need to please, and allow for truth. And yet, it seems to me, this is often cold comfort indeed, not only for those who mourn but for all of those, who, like Gordon and Bechtel’s absent fathers and present mothers still seek the comforts beyond truth of art or faith or beauty: that is, for all of us.

 

10 Great Books for Small Children, and What Makes Them Great

Nearly four years into this whole parenting thing, I have no great unified theory of parenting. I do have a theory about kids books, though. To me, there is no failed literary experiment or abstruse academic text so baffling as the children’s book written by someone who has apparently never read a book to a child. What’s interesting about these books is that if you describe them they often don’t sound so terrible, but trying to read them you have no choice but to change the words. The words don’t track, don’t fit the story, don’t fit the pictures. They’re invariably overwritten. I’ve never gone along with the whole kill-all-the-adjectives and adverbs thing, but it’s really true for picture books.

With this lovely Ben Lerner LRB piece in mind, about (among other things) how the existence of Really Bad Poetry can help us think about what good poetry is, I’ve been thinking about what these baffling books can tell us about what makes a great book for little kids. Here’s what I’ve come up with: a good picture book aspires to the condition of poetry. That is, it has to use some combination of the things that make poetry poetry: condensed and/or heightened language, attention to rhythm, rhyme or sound, repetition and variation, attention to how words are presented on the page. With picture books of course that means not only arrangement and typeface but how the pictures interact with the words. A bad or mediocre picture book often reads like the author had an idea, often seemingly based on something they liked as a kid, wrote it up in excruciating detail, then had someone draw some related pictures.

So here are ten picture books that have given me a lot of pleasure, and that my son also loves. (There are lots of so-so books that kids love that can drive parents crazy with enough repetition; there are lots of crappy ones that can’t hold a kid’s attention; the really good ones appeal to both.)

Some of these are pretty well known but I tried to included some less known ones, or somewhat lesser known ones by well known authors.

In no particular order:

1) Harold’s Fairy Tale, by Crockett Johnson (1956).

One of many follow-ups to the also wonderful Harold and the Purple Crayon.  An epitome of words and pictures synthesis, as Harold draws the world as the words create it. Lore Segal, best writing teacher I ever had once told a story about sharing a hallway with Malamud who told her he was writing a story about a runner, which was very hard, because he had to make the world he ran through. That’s what these books are about. For me, Fairy Tale is even better than the original because its story, about how creating an imaginary king and imaginary gardens, is so wittingly subversive. So imagine my delight to find out Crockett Johnson (born David Johnson Leisk) was a big old commie who wrote cartoons for the New Masses. The books are funny too. (An interesting thing I’ve learned is that a lot of children’s book authors and illustrators had really fascinating lives.)

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Today in Feminist History: On Lee Miller

Word came this week that Kate Winslet will star in a movie about Lee Miller. It’s certainly a life that begs for cinematic treatment: Miller was a young model, a muse and collaborator to Picasso, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau who became one of the most important photographers and war photographers of the century.  Her work ranged from abstract treatments of the Egyptian landscape to the war photographs she is most known for. A while ago, I published a poem inspired by a photograph of her in Hitler’s bathtub at his house in Munich, where Miller and collaborator David Scherman arrived a few days ahead of the American troops. She and Sherman came to the home from Dachau, where they were among the first photographers to arrive. There’s so much about that picture I love: the boots and dirty bathmat seem more beautifully irreverent and darkly hopeful than Mel Brooks’ dancing Nazis could ever hope to be. Given Winslet’s somewhat well-known penchant for movies that ask for tasteful or meaningful artistic dis-robing, I can’t help but wonder if this photograph will play a role in the movie.

I got interested in Miller after reading a chapter about her in Francine Prose’s The Lives of the Muses. It’s a collection of short biographical essays, probably my favorite genre, and not only because I usually get overwhelmed by shopping-list level of detail in full-length biographies. It’s also the perfect genre for the women Prose writes about, all of whom struggled in one way or another with their own creative ambitions, the politics of the artistic circles in which they travelled, and the not insignificant calculations behind whether, how, and for how long, to sleep with the artist in question.  (Prose goes on a bit defensively in her introduction about defending her subject from the charge that the muse is anti- or at least non-feminist, but the stories themselves are universally fascinating looks at sexual politics, although I did wish she’d mixed it up a bit with chapters on Neal Cassidy, Alice Toklas or Natalie Barney, to name a few.)

In the bathtub picture, Miller plays both roles: she didn’t take the picture, obviously, but she had the idea for it, and you don’t have to have read Laura Mulvey to realize there are worlds going on in her look.

The war divided Miller’s life. Her life after the war was marked by heavy drinking and depression, likely related to her war experiences. She was also a legendary hostess whose farm was a legendary salon for artists and others. Her only child was born in 1947, when she was 40. Throughout the 40s and 50s, MI-5 spied on  her for communist tendencies.  There being no evidence of espinoge, her communism is described as “more of a mental outlook.” Her boss at Vogue told the spooks: “She is eccentric and indulges in queer food and queer clothes.”

The film is based on a book by Miller’s son, who was born after her artistic working life had ended and knew little of it until after she passed away. Given the well-known dangers of the bio-pic, I dread watching Winslet play drunk in bad aging makeup, or some movie of the week tripe about the conflict between work and family. If I were making it, (call me!) I would be tempted to have two unconnected scenes: one around the making of the one film she was in: Jean Cocteau’s “The Blood of Poet,” in which she played a statue, and one on the day in that apartment: show them coming to the idea, show her and Sherman talking: what more “tensions” do we need than that distance?

 

Misty Copeland

In another life, like countless girls, I spent countless hours dreaming about ballet. I subscribed to Dance Magazine, I sewed ribbons into shoes, and I watched a VHS tape we had of the Kirov’s production of Swan Lake dozens of times. I read Gelsey Kirkland’s memoir on the beach and cried.I wasn’t very good. But I kept practicing, and I cared about it deeply. I think it was invaluable for my young physical self growing up in a very anti-sports family, and to my love of the arts.  One summer I went to a ballet camp and there was this imposing teacher everyone was scared of. But one day he broke character and had us huddle around and talked about the worthiness of our calling. He did a probably offensive but very funny imitation of a ditzy high school girl and asked if those girls made fun of us for dancing. He told us, just remember, what do they do? Nothing. What do you do? You dance. He made it sound sacred.
When I got to college (a woman’s college I’d picked in part because they had a dance program), I realized quickly a lot of budding feminists saw ballet as a very bad thing.  It fetishized little girls, it gave them eating disorders, it was aristocratic, elitist, etc. etc. I could see where they were coming from, but my heart wasn’t in it. Later in graduate school when I met the Marxist who would become my advisor, I sheepishly mentioned I had been a dancer once, in another life. “Ah, she said. That’s so wonderful! The physical discipline!” That’s probably the moment I knew she would be an important figure to me. 

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The Dancer and the Dance

This summer I published a poem about Lee Miller in Narrative.  Miller isn’t exactly obscure – people interesting in photography, war journalism, or surrealism are probably at least somewhat familiar with her life and work. But she isn’t a household name either – I didn’t know anything about her until I read Francine Prose’s collection of biographic essays about women – many artists in their own right – who have served as “muses.” I’ve been working on a group of poems, short fiction and short essays on other artists I’m interested in for a variety of reasons – people like Jay DeFeo and Isa Genzken and Maria Lassnig and Paula Modersohn-Becker. Again, none of these people are unknown, but they all have fascinating, not-common knowledge stories that having fascinating things to say about obsession, passion, bodies, sex, death, and all the other good stuff. I’ve worried, though, about how to talk about wanting to do this – it sounds a little old-fashioned: ah, those second wavers with their projects of “rediscovery”! Haven’t we found them all by now? Not by a longshot, as it turns out.  

This was on my mind recently when I read this great piece by my friend Joanna Scutts about the usually disappointning results and diminishing returns of the seemingly inexhastable genre of novels about writer’s wives, and how they tend to smooth over the uncomfortable details literary biographers deal with. Being in love with a difficult man – who can’t relate, these books seem to tell us. In wanting to bring women’s stories “from the shadows,” are we most interested if the shadow takes the form of a great man? Are we more comfortable with stores of talent squelched and repressed than those who worked through these paradoxes?

“That city which the people from heaven had made their home”: Thoughts on Baldwin’s “Another Country”

When I was volunteering at Housing Works Bookstore, one of the musicians who came to perform was a woman named Tift Merritt. I knew of her a little from my ex-boyfriend, and listened to a bunch of her music right around the time she played the show at Housing Works. Her most recent album at the time was “Another Country” and for a few weeks I kept listening to its title song, with its simple, sweet plaintive refrain:

I thought these things would come to me
Love is another country, and I want to go –

I want to go too. I want to go with you.I want to go too. I want to go with you.

 
 
She was incredibly gracious with the volunteers, and asked one of us if we had a copy of Baldwin’s novel hand. (But only if it wouldn’t be too much trouble). As I remember it, we managed to find one and she put it on her stand during her performance.

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On Men Writing On Women

“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct of morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathetic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the ‘other’ as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommy Dearest memoir – where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster – the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.” 

                                          Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

When I read something and am trying to figure out why and how it works, or does not work, Gornick is the writer I go back to more than anyone else, and to this passage above all.  Gornick talks about this need for imaginative sympathy when discussing a passage from D.H. Lawrence that troubles her – it is not that his view of women is “incorrect” but that there is no attempt to imagine a woman as she might imagine herself – no exploration, only reaction. In a sense I go this passage when I am looking for “permission” to be troubled by an author, especially a renowned one, especially a man when it comes to women.

The passage came to mind for a different reason while reading Hilton Als’ The Women. I’ve loved Als’ writing for the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books for a long time, and I’ve always been struck at what I can only inadequately term empathy – his deep love for artists and their work, for the imaginative intricacies of the craft and those attempt it, even when they fall short.

The Women is a beautiful example of one of my favorite genres – a collection of biographical essays, reflections on the meanings of lives, extensively knowledgable but unabashedly subjective in its interest and these lives and their meanings. The subjects of the essays are first, Als’ own mother, second, Dorothy Dean, the third Owen Dodson.  Because Dean and Dodson are not household names, the convention would be to briefly attach a label to each by means of introduction. The difficulty of accurately doing so is, in some sense, the subject of these essays. Dean’s wikipedia entry leads with “an African American socialite connected to Andy Warhol’s the factory . . . and Max’s Kansas City, where she worked as a door person.” The back of Als’ book describes her as “brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men.” And so Als’ empathy and identification with her reflects and refracts her own. Dodson can perhaps be more easily classified as a poet, novelist, and playwright. Yet Als’ focus is more on the disappointments of his later years, when Als knew him as a mentor and lover, and on his identification with women, as suggested in his inclusion in a book by this name.

What unites these figures is the ways they responded to and crafted themselves out of their disappointments. We tend to think of those who don’t find suitable outlets for their talents burning out in a blaze, as Virginia Woolf imagined the fate of Shakespeare’s sister, or retreating into silence. But we all know from our experience what is more often the case: frustrated talents (frustrated by a tangle of external and internal circumstances which, Als demonstrates, are impossible to pull apart) drink too much, pester their more successful friends, host parties, read and edit manuscripts, take refuge in snobbism, sleep with people whose work they admire, and so forth. In the case of his mother, who lacked Dean and Dodson’s the artistic and social outlets, love and disease become the vehicles. When tragedy comes, it comes slowly and excruciatingly: “In the end I think my mother’s long and public illness was the only thing she ever felt experienced as an accomplishment separate from other people.” And a doctor who examined Dean after she had lost her home declared that she “must be delusional: ‘She keeps saying she went to Radcliffe.'” Which, of course, she had.

And yet very often, Als suggests, they are more effective mentors than those with smoother paths could ever be – and richer subjects.

The feminist complaint against stereotypical female characters is by now well known. But less recognized, as Als’ own criticism has shown, is how male writers, especially queer ones, have been actively attacked for imagining women more fully. In this fascinating piece about A Streetcar Named Desire, Als recalls Mary McCarthy’s attack on the play: noticing Williams’ identification with Blanche DuBois, she accuses him of deceit, just as Blanche is accused of in the play. Seeing only the grating aspects of Blanche’s femininity, she misses Blanche’s discomfort with convention, her inability to play the role:

Perhaps McCarthy, like Stanley and Mitch, was ultimately too uncomfortable with Blanche’s queerness. She is unmarried, but she has loved. She has no money, no property, and no social equity, and yet her memories of the boys she took to her breast are a kind of sustenance, too. Williams lets us in on Blanche’s difference by degrees, and by having her speak a recognizably gay language. Queer talk from a queer artist about a queer woman. Blanche to Stella: “I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick. It isn’t enough to be soft.” Blanche to the Young Man she’d like to trick with: “I’m not a conventional person, and I’m so—restless today….”

The other other artist I immediately associate with these two traits – empathy for, and identification with, the feminine and female characters, Pedro Almodovar, famously dedicated my favorite of his films, All About My Mother, “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider. . . To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother.” Gender and its associated identities are here both performative and not: a woman or a mother is something a man might become, but it is not an empty category.

Another wonderful Almodovar film, Talk to Her, tells the story of a male nurse who talks to a woman in a coma, a dancer who has been struck by a car. He says he has learned his care taking skills from caring for his mother. In one sequence, we are presented an invented old surrealist film the nurse remembers: a man drinks a potion that renders him tiny. In his new state, he crawls across his lover’s body and blissfully disappears into her vagina.  In his New Yorker review, David Denby says that one way of looking at the film, “I suppose, is as a story shaped by a homosexual’s longing for women, a longing that can only be expressed as irony or as a nightmare.” I suppose. But only if one supposes that longing for women is the only stance a male director can take towards women – as opposed to curiosity, empathy or identification. (The extent to which heterosexual longing for women is so often expressed as irony or nightmare comes through in Denby’s swift takedown of Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale, with which his review of Talk to Her is paired.)

Back when New York magazine asked a number of writers about Philip Roth’s legacy, Keith Gessen took a lot of flack for saying “Did Roth hate women? What does that mean? If you hated women, why would you spend all your time thinking about fucking them?” As I wrote then, critics were right to note that taking male heterosexual desire as a central theme doesn’t mean one isn’t a misogynist – but it doesn’t mean one is, either. Or, to reframe the question aesthetically, away from the moralism that gets people so upset, it doesn’t mean one can credibly create real female characters – and it doesn’t mean one can’t. It is of course too simple to say that Als, or Almodovar, or Williams, or Allen Ginsberg, who beautifully gave his mother the last lines of his elegy to her – are successful in imagining women characters with empathy and nuance because they don’t, by and large, want to fuck women. It is probably far too simple as well to say that their experience of sexual other-ness or outsider-ness, allows them this success. All I can say for sure is that their work confirms for me how essential and undervalued these qualities are in writers and artists and how much our categories of gender, sexuality and desire – completely real and completely imagined at the same time – can both get in our way and get us there.




On Movie Stars and Being Moved

In 1997, I was just out of college, having gone straight to graduate school and moved to New York where I knew almost no one. I had one friend from college who’d come here to try to be an actress who was living in this dorm-style residence for women where I’d also lived briefly in college and I remember going to the lobby to meet her and feeling like I was some girl from the fifties destined to be a shopgirl while pining for life on Broadway.

One weekend that summer, I went to see two movies that stuck with me for very different reasons. The first was Neil LaBute’s first movie, In the Company of Men, which was then making something of a stir for the way it shows bad man doing bad bad things – basically, a bunch of corporate assholes doing asshole stuff, one of whom fake seduces a deaf woman in order to dump and humiliate her. I haven’t seen it since then – I imagine I would find it fake-daring, as I do so many of these films that “dare” to show people as completely and flatly evil – as if that were any more psychologically insightful than a Disney cartoon. Inevitably these characters are still charismatic because they are being played by attractive movie stars good at making themselves liked, so these performances are seen as “brave” and “complicated,” making them “more than monsters,” etc. Probably if I saw it now I would note the ridiculousness and offensiveness of the premise that a woman who happened to be deaf (and who of course also happened to be beautiful) would be so desperate as to fall for this ploy, inexplicably having no friends or romantic prospects of her own. In any case, I don’t remember who I saw the movie with, but I remember afterwards we both looked at each other and said something like, ok, we each have to go home now and take twenty showers with bleach.

The second movie was Mike Leigh’s Career Girls. Its world was as grounded and measured as LaBute’s was absurd. I don’t remember a lot of the plot but I remember the dynamics between the two main characters, college friends whose bond and struggles the movie charts moving back and forth over six years in their twenties filled with crappy jobs and desperate doomed romantic obsessions. I especially remember the game they would play of “Miss Bronte, Miss Bronte,” turning to a random page of Wuthering Heights for the “answer” to a pressing question. (Roger Ebert beautifully ends his largely positive and somewhat perplexed review by apply this trick to understanding the movie. It works.)  And I remember the amazing face and performance of Katrin Cartlidge, who died way too young and was also breathtaking in Breaking the Waves.  I do remember that I saw this one with a female friend who I could tell was also very affected by it, in probably painful ways, and saying, ok, time to go home and read the Brontes. I got home that night and turned on my little clock radio to set the alarm and heard someone weeping because Princess Diana had died. I turned it off and thought, but the Brontes! Later that week I had an argument with a friend about why people were sad about the deaths of famous people they had never met, which in my young self-righteousness I saw as grandstanding and parasitic. It didn’t occur to me that I hadn’t been moved by the news because I’d been too busy being moved by fictional people.

Three times in my life I have been moved by the death of someone famous. Of course there are many many people I admire whose loss saddened me, but most often it’s an abstract rather than visceral reaction. It’s not the thing I couldn’t understand when people felt it about Diana,  thinking about them something in the way I would about someone I had known. Two of these were recent: James Gandolfini last year and Philip Seymour Hoffman this week. Partly this is for obvious reasons: they were such commanding presences, and ones whose performances I’d spent so much time with, that it was hard to imagine that force just disappearing. Interestingly, both were most famous for the dark characters who are often delicately referred to as “complicated” – meaning they do really terrible shit and meaning I might likely have reacted to them with the impatience I had with LaBute’s movie, but I didn’t. I do wonder what they might have done if we didn’t have this way of associating the powerful physicality they both had with violence or deviance. By far my favorite role of Hoffman’s was Phil Parma, the kind nurse who engineers a reunion between Jason Robards’ dying patriarch and Tom Cruise’s misogynist “motivational speaker.”  What if, I wonder, more of our best writers and artists thought that damaged people who do what most damaged people do – struggle, drink too much, take it out on themselves – were as interesting as revealing, time and again, that people who do terrible things are also damaged?

The other death that moved me was Heath Ledger’s. In this case it wasn’t because of any of his performances, but because of something that had happened a few months before. It started as a funny story – my first good New York celebrity story despite being a decade since that night when Diana died and I just wanted to read the Brontes. At the time I was volunteering at Housing Works bookstore in Soho. One day Heath came into the store. People started to whisper – was it really him? His companion, a woman with an Australian accent, asked if we had a copy of a certain book.  I explained that since the books were all used and donated, we didn’t have database, but mentioned the section where she might find it. When I pointed to it, she asked if I could walk with her. I explained that I was working the register. And then – at least the way I remember it  – Heath said – why don’t you look yourself – and gave me a look of sympathy. That’s right I thought. Heath and I are having a moment. It’s me and him against her.  It reminded me of what people always said about Bill Clinton – the making you think you are the only one in the room thing. Eventually he bought a couple hundred dollars worth of mostly elegant hardbacks. I remember one of them was Chomsky – one of the linguistics ones. He said “you have a beautiful store.” He joked about whether his credit card would work. I think I have enough on that one. There it was on his American Express – H Ledger. It didn’t work at first, so I rubbed it on my shirt. A week later he came in again, this time with his daughter. A couple months later, he was gone.

Sometime after that, I read what is probably my favorite short story, Miranda July’s “Roy Spivey.” It begins like this: “Twice I have sat beside a famous person on an airplane.” The first part of the story is the narrator’s account of the odd conversation with she has with the second of these, a movie star.  At the end of the flight he explains that they won’t be able to talk when they get off.  They come up with a code: he will say “Do you work here?” and she will say, “no.” But when the time comes a flight attendant interrupts. I work here, she says. I will help you. Then she rolls her eyes at the famous man, as if she was commiserating with him about people like her.  This is the kind of imperceptible but all-important shift short story writers often try and fail to give weight too:  the little shifts in our alliances, the circles we draw of who is inside and who is outside. The narrator wants to mark that her connection was real, but it was too late. “His eyes were mute. He was acting.”

In a brilliant n+1 essay, Christopher Glazek talks about the psychic space taken up by those who die while young and beautiful, thinking about how Joaquin Phoenix’s response to his brother River’s death has resonated with his own experience of his brother’s mental illness. I realized while reading that if I had seen My Own Private Idaho and Running on Empty before rather than after River’s death, his would have been the first to have shaken me, the way it did so many about my age.

The idea of separating an artist from his or her art can mean a lot of things in a lot of different contexts, most of which I think are largely impossible, even if desirable. This is especially so in the case of movie stars, who live inside the instruments of their art.  At the end of July’s story, the narrator finds the movie star’s number after many years and thinks about how the idea of their connection has promised to save her. At the end of Glazek’s essay, he describes why we cannot help but read our lives through those of the stars, especially the damned stars, no matter how complicit or parasitic that may make us:

When art fails to provide catharsis — when the movies won’t resemble reality, or admit their own unreality — the tabloids take over. Here, at least, the world is half-acknowledged, if not transcended. Recognition, of course, is not the same as resolution: the only thing like life is life, which is so much longer than a movie. The story seems never to end; the suffering does not stop.

 

Lessing

 

 

 

Last week I went to buy a new blank notebook. The situation had gotten pretty desperate:  the scraps of paper I was using were taped to other scraps.  Somehow I went to my campus bookstore three times before I could find where they were keeping them. But how many to get? I needed one for my teaching notes, one for notes on various writing projects, one for a personal journal. Should there be one to take notes on things I was reading? Some of those were related to the writing projects, but some might be extensions of the journal. And sometimes the journal would turn into a story if I got bored with telling it straight.  Someone suggested another one for to-do lists and life management. In the end I bought four, but already they’re all mixed up, what is in one should be in the other . . . 

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On Obsession

I’ve mentioned before my compulsive need to read The New Yorker in order, no matter how far behind I get, and no matter how absurd it feels to see people’s posts or hear things in conversation and file them away for three months later.  So there I am, going through the March 18th issue of The New Yorker, ready to throw it across the room because all the thoughts in the world about my own relative privilege in life still can’t make me cope with a book review that’s half about the author’s two kitchens, one on the Upper West Side, (sadly small because it was made for servants), and one in Umbria. But then, in the back pages, in the stuff there really should be no reason but compulsion not to skip (a review of an exhibition now closed), I came across one of the most stunning photographs I’ve seen in a long time.

The photograph shows a woman is standing on a ladder, slightly hunched. She’s wearing a brown coat, dark slacks, and high top sneakers. Her hair is thick, dark, and curled, cropped just below her ears. She’s looking down at the tools in her right hand and dangling a cigarette from her left. Something about her clothes and style say “sixties,” though the overall feel is so ethereal that I’m tempted to repress  all my historicist training and call the image “timeless.” Behind her is a giant canvass that fills the frame, a painting-as-sculpture with a center point from which spring thick gray ridges, carved with a palette knife. The center hits just above her head, a giant crushing halo. Apparently, when viewed properly, it generates its own light, a result of the mica spread across it.

The photograph is of Jay DeFeo in 1960, working on “The Rose;” the occasion for its appearance in The New Yorker is the (now closed) show at the Whitney.   DeFeo was part of the San Francisco Beat scene and worked on “The Rose” from ’58-’66, stopping only when she was evicted from her Filmore Street apartment. The work weighs more than a ton, so they had to knock out a wall and remove it by crane. When she died in 1989 it was in a conference room behind a protective wall.

I don’t want to say the obvious things: about people who say women aren’t as good at [fill it in] because they’re not capable of single-minded obsessions, about Big Drips and flowers and the problem with flowers, and whether a 2,300 pound gray rose might solve them. I know that power is supposed to come from the work, not the struggle it took to make it. (“DeFeo was not a great artist,” Peter Schjeldahl writes, “But the ferocity of her commitment and the anguish of her frustration make her a totemic figure for people who can understand those sentiments from experience.”)

I’m not sure I believe this anymore, though: that thinking about the struggle or the life is a distraction, a concession to our craven celebrity culture or what have you. I’ve started to think that all real art is in some sense about how it has come into being, how and why it exists, why it needed to.  Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebooks, from whence this blog, is all about this. There are four notebooks. The one that contains the novel the protagonist is writing is the thinnest, but it’s compelling because you see how the elements from the others are reworked and, inevitably, reduced when rendered this way. Of the novel within the novel, you think: look at all that went into making this smaller thing. Then, inevitably, of how much more of Lessing must have gone in to the making of Notebooks.  

What does it mean to work on a single painting everyday for seven years? Is it a beautiful story, an unfortunate sideline in an otherwise more productive career, or a full-blown cautionary tale?

People talk a lot about how we romanticize destructive obsessions, and there’s something to that. But what about someone like DeFeo? She’s not neglecting her children (she had none) or stabbing her partner or doing any of the things that, when done by artists, lead to tired arguments about whether we can “enjoy” their work. What does it mean to call this kind of obsession destructive?  We tell people to find their passion – but what that often means in practice is this.  Or else it means, find a way to feel good about your job, despite the fact that even the best ones are “too small for people” as one of Studs Terkel’s interviewees put it. In one of Miranda July’s stories, a character talks about her friends, the ones who work in the arts, who have decently creative jobs with nice sounding names. But none of them, she says, are as good as just singing La.

When I look at that photograph, I don’t think about the things people usually talk about when they talk about a the creation of a Big Important Work of Art: about sacrifice, or selfishness, or even obsession. DeFeo was apparently a beloved member of the artistic circle in San Francisco at the time. But even if she had been a loner, I don’t think I’d see that. The photograph has an obviously religious cast, with the giant “halo” and her body positioned something like Christ carrying the cross, ascending the ladder in front of her artwork as if towards the ceiling of her own chapel.  I’m sympathetic to the view that art or writing or any creative endeavor is just work like any other, and we shouldn’t talk about it in such metaphysical terms. But the perhaps manipulative framing of this photograph aside, it’s hard not to see a project like DeFeo’s as a sacred calling.

What is an artist like DeFeo doing, if not constructing a life, the kind of life she finds bearable? The aim is not to create a beautiful object, it’s to live a life in pursuit of beauty.  All meaning is constructed: here is where she finds hers. Perhaps this is not unique to the arts; perhaps this is what all unalienated work would look like. But it’s something.