Odd Jobs (25 page)

and adds this comment: “All the tragedy of the fastidious man who has to make his living in the theatre is in that last unforgettable line.”

Perhaps it needed the rise of a bourgeois audience to generate a fully conscious conflict between the artist’s needs and manners and his public’s. While we are aware that the genius of Leonardo da Vinci and, to a lesser extent, that of Michelangelo were led into many aborted and ephemeral projects by their aristocratic and papal patrons, it is not until Rembrandt that an artist pursues and improves his art at the distinct price of leaving his patronage behind. As Rembrandt’s painting became broader, rougher, more daring, and ever more deeply humane, his commissions from the solid Dutch burghers dried up. What did they want with these light-encrusted portraits of wrinkled Amsterdam Jews, these Biblical scenes featuring big-bellied, unmistakably middle-aged women? They wanted, very sensibly, idealized portraits of themselves, with no more psychological depth than was needed to make the likeness vivid.

Another writer with distinguished Albany connections, Henry James, enjoyed the most sustained and rounded career of any American novelist, yet he, too, could be said to have outdistanced his public. Though his fluent style and tireless intelligence won him in his early twenties the loyalty of editors, his audience was at best limited, and his efforts to widen it proved futile; his attempt, for five years, to write for the London theatre ended in disaster—he came onto the stage after the premier performance of
Guy Domville
in 1895 and was unmistakably booed—and as his style became more ornate and his plots more rarefied his novels passed in many quarters for curiosities, the butt of parodies and patronizing reviews. The New York edition of his fiction, whose prefaces and revisions formed a labor of literary love and self-summation without parallel in the annals of the novel, was described by James in the last year of his life as “really a monument (like Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done to it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid to it.” As to his material rewards, James added, “No more commercially thankless job of the literary order was (Prefaces and all—
they
of a thanklessness!) accordingly ever achieved.” Throughout his magnificently productive and thoughtful career, he needed for sustenance his share of the fortune amassed here in Albany by his Irish immigrant grandfather.

But at least James had no difficulty getting published; William Kennedy, who is among us tonight as this city’s foremost literary exponent and ornament, whose novel
Ironweed
won two of its year’s three main
prizes for fiction, has confided in accepting one of them that this novel was rejected by publishers thirteen times. The annals of modernism abound in such horror stories: no less a first reader than André Gide turned down, for Éditions Gallimard,
Swann’s Way
, the first volume of Proust’s sublime
Remembrance of Things Past
, whose publication Proust then undertook to finance himself; and not only did James Joyce’s
Ulysses
have to be privately printed in France, but his exemplary book of short stories,
Dubliners
, now standard fare for high-school students, went unpublished for ten years while Irish and English printers dithered over a few of its excessively accurate details.

Now, how does this make us feel, here in 1985? Superior, I think, and anxious. Superior because obviously
we
, had we been in the audience, would not have booed poor Henry James;
we
, had we been editorially empowered, would have accepted
Ironweed
, and
Swann’s Way; we
, had we been alive in 1851, would have recognized
Moby-Dick
to be the great American epic it is. And anxious because we naturally wish to shelter authors, in their selfless delicacy and rapture, from the crass vagaries of obtuse editors, obtuser reviewers, and still obtuser book-buyers. One approach is to fund governmental and academic sponsorship of the arts. In 1965 Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into being the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities; in 1984 the Senate-Assembly of your great state of New York, Governor Cuomo assenting, passed an act stating that “the general welfare of the people of the state will be enhanced by the establishment of a center devoted to writing and the allied arts,” some specified objectives of which center are to hire writers, offer scholarships, foster coöperation among writers’ programs and workshops, offer programs for the teaching of the craft of writing, and, even, to “offer at least one lecture annually by a distinguished writer on an aspect of the creative imagination which will further the objectives of the institute’s programs and which will enrich the community’s exposure to the arts.”

One wonders, really, whether such a proposed whirlwind of worthiness will ever do more than provide a few sinecures and some cheerful fellowship for writers who otherwise might have to develop a new profession. The more widespread solution, to bourgeois pro-art anxiety in the wake of modernism, has been academic patronage. On this recourse, as it pertains to the art of music, Mr. Richard Sennett was recently eloquent in last year’s December
Harper’s
magazine:

Mr. Sennett goes on to doubt that the results of such a tenured art have been, at least in music, very wonderful, or even, as one might expect, very adventurous: “Security brought about a new kind of provincialism, the provincialism of the college town.… And so avant-garde became predictable. It was a logical turn of events, once the campus salon replaced the music hall.”

The situation as described is perhaps an extreme one. The homely art of fiction, with its roots in penny journalism and the common coin of spoken language, could never become so sequestered; nor, in my opinion, should it. The creative imagination is not born in a vacuum. Its first impulses bloom under the stimulus of parental and institutional praise, and even the most precocious musical genius needs a piano in the house and, now, records and tapes. Creativity, as I construe it, is a tripartite phenomenon. There is the artist, keen to express himself and make an impression. But there also has to be a genre, a pre-existent form or type of object to which the prospective artist’s first relation was that of consumer, the pleasure of his consumption extending itself into the ambition to be a producer. And attached to that genre and inextricable from its growth is the audience that finds in the contents of this form some cause for consolation, amusement, or enlightenment. In Pompeii, racy frescoes served a purpose; in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, wall paintings became necessary furniture. In the nineteenth century, novels developed
a wide public, and Mr. Sennett’s description of the plight and progress of classical music affords an interesting parallel: he says, “In the nineteenth century, problems in communication arose because of the moral expectations the bourgeoisie had of art. Art, it was held, could refine taste, could remove one from the sordid world of small-mindedness and material striving. The Romantic musicians struggled constantly against these restraints of ‘good taste.’ ”

Art, then, became, for the hard-working bourgeoisie, a relief from life rather than, as for pre-capitalist tribesmen, an explanation and intensification of it. To an extent, the arts survive as an instrument and emblem of social improvement: one goes to the museum, and concerts, and reads books, because other nice people do. One attends college partly to get the knack of the arts, so one will move at ease among other people who have mastered the same knack. Art functions as grease in the social wheels. Banks and corporations are now among the chief purchasers of contemporary paintings, which hang in their offices not only as a possibly sound investment for themselves but as a kind of soothing visual Muzak to lull the customers, to create an atmosphere of play that alleviates the terrible seriousness with which money offers itself to our management. The theatrical arts serve now as they have done for centuries as backdrop to courtships and seductions on the private as well as the business level. Art is associated with refinement, and refinement with wealth, and wealth with power.

People once read Fanny Burney and Thackeray to learn about manners and decorum in the social class a notch or two above their own; one of the charms, certainly, of going to the movies in the Thirties and Forties was seeing how the rich lived, in their penthouses, with their tuxedos and butlers and silver cigarette cases. The recent success on television of
Dynasty
again demonstrates that the rich, who always look well in their clothes and always find parking places in front of hotels, remain fascinating—supermen and wonder women of the consumer society. But people who read novels now do so, I suspect, more to learn how other people act in bed than at the table; our fantasies run less toward palaces and penthouses than toward the violence and paranoia of the international thriller.

People look to the arts, in any case, to supplement their lives, and when a genre ceases to provide supplements self-evidently desirable, then uneasy philanthropic and legislative effort to encourage the art, to foster its perpetuation and ensure its survival, enter in. Why does one
never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines, and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct; they exist in our culture unaccredited, unrespectable, and un-sponsored, except by popular demand, like the novel in the nineteenth century, like the drama in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. An art form does not determine itself from abstract or intrinsic causes; it is shaped by the technology and appetite of the time. Very quickly, a dust of nostalgia and scholarship can deceptively accumulate upon a form, so that it seems to have been always dusty. Already, learned societies devote themselves to the early history of the comic strip, and the Hollywood movies of the studio era, turned out as giant artifacts by so-called film factories, can now be seen to have artistic qualities and, more surprisingly, an artistic integrity lacking in the much more artistically self-conscious movies of today. There comes a moment in the evolution of art when a certain thing cannot any more be done; Busby Berkeley musicals could not be produced at contemporary wage-rates, and we cannot now, except with a great effort of mimicry, produce images with the texture of those Victorian block-prints that, until the invention of photogravure, were turned out by the tens of thousands. So, in the collage-narratives of Max Ernst and Donald Barthelme, these prints become art. Qualities that once seemed neutral and inevitable are the second time around revealed as full of the passion of the time, as declared by a style that in retrospect brims with strangeness.

Now, where does this rather fatalistic and determinist overview of art leave the individual creative imagination? The creative imagination, I would say, functions with a certain indispensable innocence within its implacable context. Ever renewed as each generation emerges from childhood, it wants to please. It wants to please more or less as it has been pleased, by the art that touched it in its formative years. Already, a generation of novelists flourishes, Stephen King foremost, that has been deeply penetrated by the narrative vocabulary of television; I cannot feel more than mildly alarmed, since my own generation was enslaved to the movies. The creative imagination wants to please its problematical audience, and it does so by sharing what is most precious to it. A small child’s first instinct vis-à-vis possessions is to hug what it has tight to itself; its socialization and its creativity begin when it pushes a lima bean or a slobbered toy truck toward a sibling or playmate. Perhaps we can take
this development a step further back: Freud somewhere claims that a child’s first gifts, to its parents, are its feces, whose presentation (in the appropriate receptacle) is roundly praised. And, as in this primal benefaction, the writer extrudes his daily product while sitting down, on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain. The artist who works in words and anecdotes, images and facts wants to share with us nothing less than his digested life, his life as he conceives it, in the memories and fantasies most precious, however obscurely, to him. Let me illustrate all this with a brief example from the creative process I know best, my own.

In 1958 I was a young man of twenty-six who had recently presumed to set himself up in a small New England town as a free-lance writer. My obligations to my career and my family, as I had framed them, were to sell six short stories a year to
The New Yorker
magazine. I had already written and sold a number based upon my Pennsylvania boyhood and my young married life in New York City; one winter day I happened to remember, with a sudden simultaneous sense of loss and recapture, the New Year’s Eve parties my old high-school crowd used to have at a certain home, and how even after most of us had gone off to college we for several years continued the custom, which now served as a kind of reunion. The hero of my story is a college sophomore, already committed to a college girlfriend and to aspirations that will take him forever away from his home town. He tells us of a moment in this hectic gathering of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds: