ARTISTS MUST ABANDON CONTROL
Artists have always been drawn to the wild, wide elements they cannot control or understand—the sea, mountains, fire. To be an artist means to approach the light, and that means to let go our control, to allow our whole selves to be placed with absolute faith in that which is greater than we are. The novel we sit down to write and the one we end up writing may be very different, just as the Jesus we grasp and the Jesus who grasps us may also differ.
We live under the illusion that if we can acquire complete control, we can understand God, or we can write the great American novel. But the only way we can brush against the hem of the Lord, or hope to be part of the creative process, is to have the courage, the faith, to abandon control.
THE DANGER OF ARTISTS
The first people that a dictator puts in jail are the writers and the teachers because these are the people who have vocabulary, who can see injustice and can express what they feel about it. Artists are dangerous people because they are called to work with human clay, with the heart and the soul. So to protect itself, society has had to pretend that either art is unimportant or that it is simple.
The other way of disposing of the artist is to assume that art is wicked and all artists are notorious sinners. We are told that story is a lie, that theater and acting are pretending, so they are not real and therefore sinful. But it is in art that we look for a reality. It is the artist who dared to help us try to be human—to be, though many artists might not put it so, to be saints. We have been given a model in Jesus and we must be brave enough not to kill the Christ in ourselves or to let it be killed as people tried to kill Christ 2000 years ago. It is not the secular humanists who are doing the killing of Christ, but we who call ourselves Christians.
THE ARTS ENDURE
The arts outlive governments and creeds and societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed all together because they represent the substance of faith and their only reality. They are what we find when the ruins are cleared away.
NO WORK IS TOO SMALL
If the work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, “Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”
To feed the lake is to serve, to be a servant. Servant is another unpopular word, a word we have derided by denigrating servants and service. To serve should be a privilege, and it is to our shame that we tend to think of it as a burden, something to do if you’re not fit for anything better or higher.
I have never served a work as it ought to be served; my little trickle adds hardly a drop of water to the lake, and yet it doesn’t matter; there is no trickle too small. Over the years I have come to recognize that the work often knows more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully.
PREPARE FOR SACRIFICE
A book may come to me and ask to be written, but it takes time and energy and considerable pain to give birth to even the most minor of stories. The life of the artist is as much a life of discipline as that of the physician or the missionary. It makes incredibly austere and difficult demands. Are you willing to make the sacrifice? Don’t worry if you’re not. There’s nothing wrong in being a Sunday painter. Not everyone who writes is called on to make this work a vocation; but if you feel that you are called, then I can promise you great joy as well as conflict and pain.
AGAIN AND AGAIN
With free will, we are able to try something new. Maybe it doesn’t work, or we make mistakes and learn from them. We try something else. That doesn’t work, either. So we try yet something else again. When I study the working processes of the great artists I am awed at the hundreds and hundreds of sketches made before the painter begins to be ready to put anything on the canvas. It gives me fresh courage to know of the massive revision Dostoyevsky made of all his books—the hundreds of pages that got written and thrown out before one was kept. A performer must rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, making mistakes, discarding, trying again and again.
ART IS A GIFT OF THE SPIRIT
We’re never sure that what we write is true and honest. We try to make it true and honest. How much I succeed is really beyond my control. It happens if I am given the Spirit to write the work.
It is through the gifts of the Spirit that art comes, that love comes. But because we’re human, we’re never entirely sure. We know we haven’t served the work as well as we would want to. But if I had to serve the work to my satisfaction, I would still be on my first novel. And that would be pride.
THE GIFT OF WHOLENESS
The important thing is to recognize that our gift, no matter what the size, is indeed something given us, for which we can take no credit, but which we may humbly serve, and, in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous newness.
Picasso says that an artist paints not to ask a question, but because he has found something, and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.
STRUGGLING TOWARD MEANING
To be alive is to be vulnerable. To be born is to start the journey towards death. If taxes have not always been inevitable, death has. What, then, does life mean? No more than “Out, brief candle”?
The artist struggles towards meaning. Mahler was terrified of death, and worked out his fear in music. I had a letter from a college student at Harvard saying, “I am afraid of non-being.” That same day, a friend with whom I was having lunch, said, “I cannot bear the thought of annihilation.”
Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death.
And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die.
WE ARE REQUIRED TO SERVE THE GIFT
I listen to my stories; they are given to me, but they don’t come without a price. We do have to pay, with hours of work that ends up in the wastepaper basket, with intense loneliness, with a vulnerability that often causes us to be hurt. And I’m not sure that it’s a choice. If we’re given a gift—and the size of the gift, small or great, does not matter—then we are required to serve it, like it or not, ready or not. Most of us, that is, because I have seen people of great talent who have done nothing with their talent who mutter about “When there’s time…,” or who bury their talent because it’s too risky to use.
Yes, it is risky. We may not hear the story well. We may be like faulty radios, transmitting only static and words out of context. But I believe that it is a risk we have to take. And it is worth it, because the story knows more than the artist knows.
GET OUT OF THE WAY
When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew; Rembrandt’s brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.
When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work. Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer.
THE HEALING POWER OF SUFFERING
It is interesting to note how many artists have had physical problems to overcome, deformities, lameness, terrible loneliness. Could Beethoven have written that glorious paean of praise in the Ninth Symphony if he had not had to endure the dark closing in of deafness? As I look through his work chronologically, there’s no denying
that it deepens and strengthens along with the deafness. Could Milton have seen all that he sees in Paradise Lost if he had not been blind? It is chastening to realize that those who have no physical flaw, who move through life in step with their peers, who are bright and beautiful, seldom become artists. The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.
WHOLENESS THROUGH WOUNDS
Wounds. By his wounds we are healed. But they are our wounds, too; and until we have been healed we do not know what wholeness is. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort toward wholeness.
The great male artists have somehow or other retained this wholeness, this being in touch with both intellect and intuition, a wholeness which always has to be bought at a price in this world. How many artists, in the eyes of the world, have been less than whole? Toulouse-Lautrec had the body of a man and the legs of a child. Byron had a club foot. Demosthenes was a terrible stutterer. Traditionally, Homer was blind. The great artists have gained their wholeness through their wounds, their epilepsies, tuberculoses, periods of madness.
FREE TO FAIL
There are in the life works of all artists things which don’t work. But sometimes that painting which did not work, that piece of music which did not work, was a necessary preliminary for the next thing which did. And if the artist had never been free to fail, he never would have gone on to that next work.
MARY’S “YES!”
What would have happened to Mary (and to all the rest of us) if she had said No to the angel? She was free to do so. But she said, Yes. She was obedient, and the artist, too, must be obedient to the command of the work, knowing that this involves long hours of research, of throwing out a month’s work, of going back to the beginning, or, sometimes, scrapping the whole thing. The artist, like Mary, is free to say No. When a shoddy novel is published the writer is rejecting the obedient response, taking the easy way out. But when the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.
OUR CHOICES HELP TO SHAPE OUR STORIES
I do believe that we all have a share in the writing of our own story. We do make a decision at the crossroads. Milton could have retreated into passive blindness and self-pity instead of trying the patience of his three dutiful daughters and any visiting friend by insisting that they write down what he dictated. Beethoven could have remained in the gloom of silence instead of forging the glorious sounds which he could never hear except in his artist’s imagination. Sometimes the very impetus of overcoming obstacles results in a surge of creativity. It is in our responses that we are given the gift of helping God write our story.
THE DANGER OF COMPARISON
At its highest, the relationship between the artist and the work shifts, and artist and work collaborate. In my own way I have known such moments—I think all artists know them, because it has nothing to do with the degree of talent….I must not worry about comparisons between great and small. I used to irritate my children by frequently quoting Marlowe: “Comparisons are odious.”
THE VULNERABILITY OF THE ARTIST
The faith of the artist is the faith of vulnerability. The artist is a listener as we are all supposed to listen in prayer and are seldom able to do. The artist must listen and go wherever the work takes the story of the painting or the song, and it well may be not where the artist expected. The artist understands, sometimes intuitively rather than intellectually, that God speaks to us in the cloud.
FACE THE DIRECTION OF THE GREAT ONES
I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their validity, no matter what. When I look back on [my] decade of total failure—it’s been a mixture, both before, and since—there was, even on the days of rejection slips, a tiny, stubborn refusal to be completely put down. And I think, too, and possibly most important, that there is a faith simply in the validity of art; when we talk about ourselves as being part of the company of such people as Mozart or van Gogh or Dostoyevsky, it has nothing to do with comparisons, or pitting talent against talent; it has everything to do with a way of looking at the universe. My husband said, “But people might think you’re putting yourself alongside Dostoyevsky.” The idea is so impossible that I can only laugh in incredulity. Dostoyevsky is a giant; I look up to him; I sit at his feet; perhaps I will be able to learn something from him. But we do face the same direction, no matter how giant his stride, how small mine.
FASCINATING QUESTIONS
And what is real? Does the work of art have a reality beyond that of the artist’s vision, beyond whatever has been set down on canvas, paper, musical notations? If the artist is the servant of the work, if each work of art, great or small, is the result of an annunciation, then it does.
Hamlet is. When the play has been read, when the curtain goes down on the performance, Hamlet still is. He is, in all his ambivalence, as real as Byron; or as the man who cried out, Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief! or as Ivan Karamazov. The flight of stairs up which George Macdonald’s princess had to climb would be there whether or not Macdonald had ever written The Princess and the Goblin. The storm still rages around King Lear. The joy of Bach’s gigue at the end of the Fifth French Suite does not depend on a piano for its being.
BEING A WRITER MEANS WRITING
Being a writer does not necessarily mean being published. It’s very nice to be published. It’s what you want. When you have a vision, you want to share it. But being a writer means writing. It means building up a body of work. It means writing every day. You can hardly say that van Gogh was not a painter because he sold one painting during his lifetime, and that to his brother. But do you say that van Gogh wasn’t a painter because he wasn’t “published”? He was a painter because he painted, because he held true to his vision as he saw it. And I think that’s the best example I can give you.
ARTISTS MUST LIVE BY TRUST
There is much that the artist must trust. He must trust himself. He must trust his work. He must open himself to revelation, and that is an act of trust. The artist must never lose the trust of the child for the parent, not that of the father who knew only the “heights of disillusionment,” but the trustworthiness of most of us flawed and fallen parents who nevertheless try to do the best we can for our children.
GREAT LITERATURE
Juvenile or adult, War and Peace or Treasure Island, Pride and Prejudice or Beauty and the Beast, a great work of the imagination is one of the highest forms of communication of truth that mankind has reached. But a great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or to agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.
BELIEVING WITH CHILDLIKE WONDER
The artist who is a Christian, like any other Christian, is required to be in this world, but not of it. We are to be in this world as healers, as listeners, and as servants.
In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.
We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening for meaning, feeling for healing. And during the writing of the story, or the painting, or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children. We cannot be mature artists if we have lost the ability to believe which we had as children. An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.
VOCATION MISUNDERSTOOD
One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is of a woman opening the door of her suburban house to a friend, and you see through to the back of the house, and there’s a man sitting at a table with a typewriter with a big pile of manuscripts. And the friend says, “Has you
r husband got a job yet or is he still writing?” That’s one way of disposing of the artist: to say it isn’t work.
A WORK OF ART IS WORK
A young writer told me once that she was asked by a neighbor what she did; and when she replied that she writes poetry, the neighbor said, “Oh, I didn’t mean your hobby.” A woman probing about how much a year I make in royalties remarked, “And to think most people would have had to work so hard for that.”
Well, make no mistake about it, a work of art—great or small, major or minor—is work. It’s hard work. El Greco’s paintings didn’t spring to the canvas in an hour. And it encourages me to think of the enormous amount of rewriting Dostoyevsky did—thousands of pages just thrown out.
WRITING IS COLLABORATIVE
I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, “Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me”; and the job of the artist is to serve the work. I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know.
Madeleine L'Engle Herself Page 3