This Noble Land (22 page)

For me, the arts have been a wonderland that I explored as if I were a perpetual ten-year-old always discovering fresh excitements. The arts have helped create a civilization of which I have been proud to be a part, and they have vastly enriched my life. I feel almost a blood relationship with all the artists in all the mediums, for I find that we face the same problems but solve them in our own ways. When young people in my writing classes, for example, ask what subjects they should study if they wish to become writers, I surprise them by replying: ‘Ceramics and eurythmic dancing.’ When they look surprised I explain: ‘Ceramics so you can feel form evolving through your fingertips molding the moist clay, and eurythmic dancing so you can experience
the flow of motion through your body. You might develop a sense of freedom that way.’

If an aspiring writer assures me that she or he received A’s in English I am not impressed, because anyone ought to be able to get an A in English. But if she or he also says: ‘I received an A in architecture,’ I feel there might be potential in that person because I can assume the speaker has a feeling for form, which is the sense of balance that is essential for both a building and a novel to create a vibrant impression.

When I was striving to develop my own method of storytelling, I was helped enormously by an orchestra concert I heard. The featured work was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, which opens with crashing chords from the piano, as if to alert the audience that the piano is going to be very important. It then falls silent while the other instruments of the orchestra lay a solid groundwork, then it magnificently rejoins and blends with the orchestra. I told myself that evening: If Beethoven can keep the primary instrument silent for so long, I can do the same with my novels: Establish a theme but don’t bring any human characters into play until many pages later. That device, which I learned through music, has served me well.

Later in life I put together a master collection of Japanese prints, especially the landscapes of Hokusai and Hiroshige, and through studying them I learned how to view outdoor nature. In time I would become well known for my faithful description and wide use of landscape in my novels. And from the brilliant canvases of the early Italian Renaissance I learned what color was and how to achieve its effects in words.

I have been well served by the arts, and have lived in close contact with orchestras and opera companies and art museums, always with rewarding results. I cannot conceive how any city can describe itself as major if it does not provide its citizens with
experiences in the arts. And I believe that performing groups like dance companies and repertoire theater companies, and large establishments with fixed costs like orchestra halls and opera houses, should be supported by tax funds. I realize that in admitting this I am flying in the face of the current wisdom. Under the new government today, a powerful assault is being made on all the arts, and the targets include the individual such as a painter, the group like a dance company, the institution like an opera house, or a television station that presumes to offer cultural programming.

I find it perplexing that our new Congress seems determined to strangle the arts. The Contract with the American Family blatantly calls for the cessation of all public funds for the arts, and while Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America refrains from a frontal assault, the actions of his Congress speak for him: subsidies for the arts will have to go.

I cannot understand why the proponents of the contracts seem to believe that killing off funds for the arts will strengthen family life or help to create a stronger nation. Does the cultivation of beauty—great theater, superb orchestral performances—add nothing to American life?

In 1996 the members of Congress have delighted in castigating the arts as if they and their creators exert an influence that is somehow poisonous. And some of the public is applauding. But ten years from now, when these same legislators are older and perhaps wealthier and they decide to take a vacation in Europe, what do they and their families want to see? Not the Rolls-Royce plant and not the headquarters of a great international bank in London, nor the operations of the French railway system, which is so much more effectively run than ours. No, our visitors know what makes a trip to Europe meaningful. They want to see where Charles Dickens lived, or the moors about which Thomas Hardy
wrote, or Stratford-on-Avon, where William Shakespeare honed his mastery of words. They want to see where Cézanne painted or view the art treasures of the Vatican, including that immortal chapel decorated primarily by Michelangelo. They want to hear a Verdi opera at La Scala or a Wagner opus in Bayreuth or experience the majesty of Florence and the joie de vivre of Venice. They want to tour the Louvre and the Prado and the National Gallery in London.

Our American visitors to Europe are not stupid. They know what greatness is, and if they can spot it only in Europe and rarely in their own backyard, when they are abroad they are eager to pay their respects to it.

Therefore I cannot understand why our new leaders attack the arts with such venom. I sometimes feel they hate the arts more than they do child pornography, and this bespeaks an ignorance about what makes the civilization of any nation memorable. If our new masters have their way, tax support for the arts would decline to near zero, an act of folly that will elicit censorious comments from the nations with which we compete.

In most of the major nations, even including some in South and Central America, public funds are allotted to the arts. Great museums are built and publicly funded. Performing companies enjoy public support; individual artists receive help from state-administered funds. The governments understand and fulfill their obligations to take what steps they can afford to spur the arts generally. If such a symbiotic relationship exists in large parts of the world, it must be because the nations appreciate the great good that art contributes to their societies.

And one of the major contributions that art brings to a community is money. When theaters are crowded, hotels, restaurants and taxicabs prosper. When an arts festival is held, the public pours money into the area in which it is offered. When a group
of fine paintings come up for auction, the evening’s take might reach $60 million, much of it taxable. And a city or a district that becomes famous for the excellence of its art—like Boston for its symphony, Santa Fe for its opera, Tanglewood for its summer concerts, Assisi for the frescoes depicting the life of Saint Francis, or Florence for the richness of the art displayed at the Uffizi—collects not only substantial income from ticket sales but also tax funds from the general economy of the region. Crassly put: art means money.

I speak with a certain familiarity with this important aspect of creative activity. Some years ago, before I had even written most of my big books, an accountant calculated that the government had collected some $60 million in taxes on my works and from their subsequent lives as plays, musicals, movies and television programs. The figure did not come solely from my taxes, although I certainly contributed generously; it also included taxes on the salaries and the production costs and the price of admission tickets to works that other artists had based upon my novels. And my contributions are modest compared with the national income derived from blockbuster motion pictures today.

So when I listen to our national leaders blasting the arts, and when I hear that in their plans for the future they propose to stifle the arts and deny them sustenance, I think: How shortsighted! They are killing a goose that lays golden eggs.

The presence of art more than pays its way, and the world’s hunger for the best keeps the art world functioning. Why did thousands of people from all over the world crowd into a little town in southern France to visit a cave at Lascaux? They had come to view art—in my case, to pay profound, almost religious respect. On the walls of the dark cave prehistoric artists of 14,000
B.C.
engraved or sketched or painted the world’s oldest surviving art, probably created for public ritual or worship. So many
tourists and art lovers elbowed their way into the cave that the French government had to ration admittance lest perspiration and moisture-laden breath destroy the art.

But I have been speaking only of the utilitarian value of the arts. More vital, I think, are the spiritual values that art brings to a nation. How inestimable in value to the French people has been their magnificent “La Marseillaise”! What tremendous power it has to inspirit an entire nation! How the world responds to the seraphic beauty of the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony! How gently Fra Angelico’s fresco of
The Annunciation
can affect the mind and one’s spiritual impulses! With what awe we stare at Michelangelo’s Sistine paintings! And how like the voice of heaven do the chords of Palestrina’s
Missa Papae Marcelli
echo in our minds!

I have used exclamation marks in the above paragraph because such experiences reach one’s very soul. I hope that there are many among my readers who can recall those moments of revelation when their levels of understanding were altered. Perhaps it was a performance of
Death of a Salesman
or
A Streetcar Named Desire
or even the movie
E.T.
The arts can truly lift us out of ourselves in a way that nothing else can.

I hope I have made it clear that I enthusiastically support projects that pump tax dollars into the art institutions like orchestras, ballet companies, grand operas and museums. To invest in such activity is to gamble intelligently on the future of the community. But now we come to a more debatable aspect of the problem: Should tax dollars be allocated to individual artists so that they can pursue their vocation? Should committees be given the responsibility for identifying which individual artists are to receive a governmental stipend?

A large portion of the harsh anti-art agitation of recent years in America has stemmed from grants to individuals whose work or
behavior has turned sour, and from the blatant exhibitionism of publicity-seeking undisciplined artists whose extravagant public performances have insulted and outraged the general public, bringing opprobrium not only on themselves but also on the arts and artists generally.

An exhibition of the work of one artist, the gifted photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, was mounted with primarily fine photographs of standard subject matter. But mixed in with such shots was a series of what the public considered offensively explicit erotic scenes, particularly those depicting naked males in various suggestive poses.

Since government funds had helped support the exhibition, there was a public outcry. Two different major museums handled the exhibit in similar ways, but with vastly different results. At the distinguished Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art the show was arranged for the public with full fanfare, but in the spaces open to the general public only the noncontroversial photographs were shown. Far off to one side in a corner not easily approached by the public but available to it if visitors asked to see them, were the sexually explicit photos.

There was not a word of protest. The artistic integrity of the museum was protected, censorship was not practiced and the public could see some fine photographic work. I thought at the time: Precisely the strategy followed for the last two hundred years with the erotic murals at Pompeii—they’ve been preserved, but they’re not thrown in the public’s face.

How different from what happened in Cincinnati. Despite the care taken by that city’s Contemporary Arts Center to isolate five images of homosexual acts, to put up warnings about the subject matter of the photos and to prohibit children from viewing any of the works, the result was a loud outcry, strong protests, an indictment of the museum and its director on obscenity charges, and a
scandalous court case. A hasty marshaling of experts from the artistic and cultural community—not only in Cincinnati—rushed to defend the director, but the city was seen nationwide as a censorious philistine town and received a black eye it did not merit. I am at a complete loss as to why the public reception in Cincinnati was so different from that in Philadelphia, since both museums handled the delicate situation in equally sensitive and intelligent ways.

I personally spoke out in defense of Mapplethorpe and decried the censorship that had motivated the trial surrounding his work, for I had taken an oath that all my public life I would defend the free-speech article of the Bill of Rights. I have done so whenever books like Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn
have been attacked by self-appointed censors. I take my direction from Justice Hugo Black of our Supreme Court, who preached repeatedly in his decisions that the First Amendment meant what it said: ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’

So I would defend Mapplethorpe’s photographs, all of them, and the work of the young iconoclast Andres Serrano, who placed a crucifix in a jar of urine and called it a work of art. As a former navy officer, I salute the flag and, after a long absence from home, choke up when I see it flying in the breeze, but I would also defend the flag burner on the grounds that even his reprehensible action is an expression of free speech.

I have abided by that promise to myself to combat censorship, but when faced by horrendous wrongs in our society I have found that I simply cannot defend child pornographers or lyricists who compose vile songs in which they advocate the killing or debasement of women or of policemen. Those malefactors have surrendered any claim to my support. And, to return to Mapplethorpe, while I would place his art under the protection of the
Bill of Rights, I could not defend the financing and display of his art with public funds. Some of his art, and I recognize that it
is
art, is seemingly intended to infuriate the sensibilities of commonly accepted morality. And it should also be recognized that it will not accomplish the purpose of the expenditure of tax dollars on art as a spiritual, financial and social asset of the community.