Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

  In fact, Wagner never lived in poverty. He needed and begged for cash, and used it (plus credit) in vast quantities, because of his methods of composition. To understand creation, and creators, better, it would be useful to have a list of what creators need to inspire their faculties. Carlyle, for instance, required absolute silence, and his letters resound with his angry and usually unsuccessful attempts to obtain it. Proust, too, sought the total elimination of noise and had the walls of his apartment lined with cork. Dickens needed mirrors in which to pull faces imitative of his characters. Byron required night. Walt Disney needed to wash his hands, sometimes thirty times in an hour. Other creators are less specific. But Wagner was adamant. What he needed to write the verse of The Ring, and then to compose it, was quite simple: overwhelming luxury. He needed luxury in his surroundings, his rooms, the air he breathed, the food he ate, the clothes he wore. In order to live in a world of imagination, he wrote, he “needed a good deal of support and my fancy needs sustenance.” He insisted: “I cannot live like a dog when I am working, nor can I sleep on straw or swig cheap liquor.” Wagner required a beautiful landscape outside his windows, but when he wrote music, the silence had to be absolute and all outside sounds, and sunlight, had to be excluded by heavy curtains of the finest and costliest materials. They had to draw with “a satisfying swish.” The carpets had to be ankle-deep; the sofas enormous; the curtains vast, of silk and satin. The air had to be perfumed with a special scent. The polish must be “radiant.” The heat must have been oppressive, but Wagner required it. Berta Goldwag wrote: “He wore satin trousers…. He needed an unusual degree of warmth if he was to feel well enough to compose. His clothes (which I made for him) had to be heavily padded, for he was always complaining of the cold.”6 Frau Goldwag was not an ordinary supplier of clothes. She was the leading Viennese couturier and milliner, who normally dressed society ladies. At a time when he was bringing forth begging letters, Wagner sent her a list of his sartorial requirements. They included four jackets, “one pink, one very pale yellow, one light grey, one dark green.” His dressing gowns had to be of “pink with starched inlets, one ditto blue, one green, one quilted dark green.” He required pink, pale yellow, and light gray trousers, plus “one dark green like the quilted dressing gown.” He also commanded six pairs of boots, in pink, blue, gray, green, yellow, and white. Wagner sent Frau Goldwag orders for coverings for all his rooms, ranging from blue bedcovers with white linings through ribbons, “as many and as beautiful as possible,” to “a large quantity, 20–30 yards, of the lovely heavy pink satin material.” He left detailed instructions on how his rooms were to be painted and adorned. Thus the dining room must be “dark brown with small rosebuds,” the music room “brown woollen curtains with Persian pattern,” the tea room “plain green with violet velvet borders and gold trim in the corners” and the study “plain brown-gray with purple flowers”—and so on through the whole house. Through these rooms strode the composer, according to one woman witness: “Snow-white pantaloons, sky-blue tail coat with huge gold buttons, cuffs, an immensely tall top hat with a narrow brim, a walking-stick as high as himself, with a huge gold knob, and very bright, sulphur-yellow kid gloves.” So far as I know, other musicians did not object to Wagner’s sartorial tastes. Fellow creators sympathized. Indeed Dumas père, when Wagner called, felt he had to receive him wearing a plumed helmet, a military belt, and a Japanese silk gown. Dressing the part appeals to creators. Handel always composed in court dress. When Emerson wrote his essay on Michelangelo, he insisted on wearing a special dress coat he had bought (“acquired” was his word) in Florence.

  Whether or not Wagner was the son of the actor, poet, and painter Ludwig Geyer, or of his legal father, Friedrich Wagner, a police actuary, there was plenty of theater in his genes, and the theatrical manner in which he liked to dress and live was natural. It was, too, suited to his music, whose rich and luxurious themes, harmonies, and orchestration seem entirely in keeping with his personal tastes. Luxe, calme et volupté: Baudelaire’s famous line has a resonance in Wagner’s work that is not wholly coincidental. Both men created according to new principles and impulses that were pushing to the fore in the late 1850s. Wagner began the first act of Tristan und Isolde, which many historians judge the beginning of modern music, shortly after Baudelaire published Les Fleurs de Mal, often described as the beginning of modern literature. Each man recognized the importance of the other. And Baudelaire was also a persistent, shameless, and utterly self-centered writer of begging letters.

  Does any of this matter? Wagner felt, passionately, that he was pursuing a lonely and overwhelmingly difficult task in creating a new kind of music, against all the forces of inertia, conservatism, and mediocrity in the world of opera, and that he not only needed but thoroughly deserved all the material help he could get. In the end he received such help in abundance, and he often failed to acknowledge it. He was indeed selfish, egotistical, ungrateful, and unkind to an unusual degree, and there is nothing edifying about his life and career, except his creative work. But that is an exception which makes all the difference. Wagner not only transformed the way in which opera is written and performed but created an oeuvre of extraordinary beauty and large dimensions, which delights, awes, and terrifies ever larger audiences a century and a half after the works were composed. Beneficiary of generous friends and colleagues in life, who were ill-rewarded for their help, he has been, in death, the benefactor of humanity. That is a typical creator’s story.

  But is there a typical creator? I do not think there is, and the essays that follow, dealing with a wide selection of creative figures in the arts, seem to confirm this view. What can be said is that creation is always difficult. If it is worth doing at all, we can be sure it is hard to do. I cannot think of any instance in which it is accurate, let alone fair, to use the word “facile.” Mozart composed with, at times, astonishing speed. When he was nineteen, for instance, he wrote all five of his violin concertos in a single summer. They are of extraordinary quality, and the way in which he learned from one and applied the lessons to the next is almost as impressive as the relentless vivacity with which he wrote each in turn. But there was nothing easy about them, and it is overwhelmingly obvious, reading the scores and his autographs and letters, that he worked extremely hard. When, indeed, did he not? It was the same with, say, Charles Dickens. Prolific he might be, and mesmerizingly quick in developing great themes and scenes. But it was all hard, dedicated work, in which he poured out everything that was in him, unsparingly, recklessly. “I am in a perfect frenzy of Copperfield,” he wrote, in the middle of creating one of his greatest novels. The word “frenzy” is well chosen. It applies, also, perhaps, to others: to Balzac, in “the fit of writing” (as he called it), and at times to Dostoyevsky.

  Much of composition and creative activity is pursued under daunting difficulties. Wagner might demand (and normally get) luxurious comfort in order to write his scores. But it must be remarked that for much of his career he was a political outcast, in trouble over his involvement in the events of 1848–1849 and sought by the police, forbidden to enter many parts of Germany, and banned from seeing performances of his works wherever the writ of the imperial police ran. An even more distressing case was that of Caravaggio, and the fact that he had only himself to blame did not make things easier for him. In 2005 exhibitions of his late works were held in Naples and London, and very poignant occasions they were. All these works had been painted while Caravaggio was on the run, doubly so for he was wanted by the Roman police for murder, and by the Knights of Malta, a peculiarly relentless organization, for a variety of misdeeds. He could not maintain a regular studio or rely on permanent assistants. Often he had to paint in improvised surroundings that his younger contemporary Rubens, for instance, would have regarded as insupportable. Yet during this period of distress, worry, and fear, constantly on the move, he produced twenty-two major works of art, of astounding originality and often of vast size. It is a fact we must bear in mind, in
considering the failings of creative people, that to produce their work often involves prodigies of courage, as well as talent.

  An unusual degree of courage is demanded of those whose desire and ability to create are limited by physical debility. But courage and creativity are linked, for all serious creation requires intellectual courage. It is frightening to enter your workroom early in the morning and face an empty canvas, a blank sheet of paper, or a score sheet, knowing that you must inscribe the marks of a completely original work. The fact that you have done it before helps, if only in the sense that you know you can do it. But this never quite removes the fear. Indeed, creative courage, like physical courage in battle, comes in a limited quantity—a form of personal capital, which diminishes with repeated demands on it, and may even disappear completely. Thus, toward the end of World War I, the conflict that imposed more repeated demands on men’s courage than any other in history, veterans of conspicuous courage, holders of many awards for gallantry, suddenly refused to face the enemy again, and were arrested for cowardice, or sent to hospitals: Freud treated some of them in Vienna and wrote about them. Equally, creative people who have repeatedly overcome daunting challenges may suddenly, as they age, lay down their tools and refuse to go “over the top” again. This happened to Carlyle, after he finished Frederick the Great. I suspect that it was happening to Dickens in his mid-fifties, and that this is why he turned to reading his existing works instead of writing new ones—reading was an activity requiring physical daring rather than intellectual courage. His attempt to write The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a last defiant effort to regain his pristine valor; he died before completing it.

  Creative originality of outstanding quality often reflects huge resources of courage, especially when the artist will not bow to the final enemy: age or increasing debility. Thus Beethoven struggled against his deafness, amid a chaos of broken piano wire, wrecked keyboards, dirt, dust, and poverty, to achieve the extraordinary drama and serenity of his string quartets, Op. 130, 131, 133, and 135, surely the most remarkable display of courage in musical history. Painters have had to deal with deteriorating eyesight: this happened to Mary Cassatt, who, being a woman, was unusually aware of the physical demands painting imposed on the artist. In 1913, having resumed work after two years of inactivity imposed by eye trouble, she wrote: “Nothing takes it out of you like painting. I have only to look around me to see that, to see Degas a mere wreck, and Renoir and Monet too.”7 She ceased to paint completely after two operations for cataracts failed. Her dealer, René Gimpel, visiting her at her villa in Grasse in March 1918, wrote of his distress to find that “the great devotee of light” was “almost blind.” “She who loved the sun and drew from it so much beauty is scarcely touched by its rays…. She lives in this enchanting villa perched on the mountains like a nest among branches…. She takes my children’s heads between her hands and, her face close to theirs, looks at them intently, saying ‘How I should have loved to paint them.’”8

  An even more distressing case was that of Toulouse-Lautrec, but it was also an inspiring one, in some ways, for his inherited disabilities, of a most painful and shaming kind, brought out prodigies of courage and willpower. A life of horror and self-degradation was redeemed by a mass of creative work of superlative quality. Though he did not reach his thirty-seventh birthday, and was often too ill to paint, the quantity of his oeuvre is impressive and the quality high. He was born to wealth and came from one of France’s grandest families, which had once possessed the rich city of Toulouse and still owned thousands of acres of fertile land. But the family had a fatal propensity to inbreed. Henri and four of his cousins were victims of the doubling of a recessive gene carried by both his parents and his uncle and aunt. One female cousin merely suffered from pain and weakness in her legs. But three others were genuine dwarfs and badly deformed as well, one of them spending her entire life in a large wicker baby carriage.

  Henri was a little more fortunate. Fragility at the growth end of his bones hindered normal development and caused pain, deformation, and weakness in his skeletal structure. This condition became obvious in adolescence. It baffled the doctors and proved impossible to treat. As an adult, he had a normal torso but “his knock-kneed legs were comically short and his stocky arms had massive hands with club-like fingers.” His bones were fragile and would break without apparent cause. He limped, and he had very large nostrils, bulbous lips, a thickened tongue, and a speech impediment. He sniffed continuously and drooled at the mouth.9 Most men with his afflictions would have done nothing with their lives but hide and brood. In fact Lautrec compounded his troubles by becoming an alcoholic and contracting syphilis, though he had been warned against the woman who infected him.

  But he had courage, and his courage not only enabled him to fight against his ill health and debilities by hard work but also to do amazingly daring things with his pencil, pen, and brush. Along with his bravery, his dwarfism may actually have helped his art. He had to stand right up to the canvas and thus avoided impressionist fuzz. Though he is normally grouped with Monet and the rest, he was no more an impressionist than Degas and Cassatt. He became a linear artist of great skill, the best draftsman of his time in Paris, Degas alone excepted, and he developed a strikingly original sense of color. The kind of courage that allowed him to show himself at all, and to work, made it possible for him to penetrate the behind-the-scenes worlds of the circus, the music hall, the theater, and the brothel. Isolated himself, and weird, he nurtured a strange gift for capturing the bizarre character and vigor of a star performer. His subjects leap out at us from the canvas or print, grotesquely vibrant like himself, as vivid as their greasepaint—once seen, never forgotten. His images had a perceptible influence on the whole course of twentieth-century art, and it is impossible to imagine modern design without his colors, shapes, ideas, and frissons. A creative martyr in his way, a hero of creativity.

  Equally striking, in this category of courage, are the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson, which can now be studied day by day in the eight rich volumes of his collected correspondence.10 Like Toulouse-Lautrec, Stevenson was a sick man from childhood—not a dwarf or a cripple, but a man with weak and unreliable lungs, which finally killed him when he was in his early forties. As his letters show, there were few days, and fewer still weeks or months, when he could work normal hours without a conscious effort of will. He found writing (as he admitted) hard, especially to begin with. The kind of originality he demanded of himself added a huge extra dimension of difficulty, and his health added yet another. Few writers have shown such constant courage over the whole course of a career. Few have hit the original note so often as he did, with Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae, the marvelous verses for children, and strange tales like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Given the effort everything took and the brevity of his career—less than two decades—his output was impressive. I can never pass a set of his Collected Works in a library or a bookshop without, as it were, taking off my hat to this brave man.

  This creative courage is of many different kinds. What are we to think of the quiet, withdrawn, silent, uncomplaining courage of Emily Dickinson? She continued to write her poetry, and eventually amassed a significant oeuvre, with little or no encouragement, no guidance, and no public response, for only six short poems were published in her lifetime and these against her will. She worked essentially in isolation and solitude, a brave woman confronting the fears and agonies of creation without help (or hindrance either, as perhaps she would have said). Then there is the courage of persistence, in the face of failure or total lack of recognition, as shown by David Hume, whose brilliant Essay on Human Understanding “fell dead-born from the press,” as he put it; or Anthony Trollope, whose first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, was (so far as he knew) never reviewed at all, and sold not a single copy. There is the courage of age, too. My old friend V. S. Pritchett, the best critic of his day and a short-story writer of genius, told me in his eighties how he had to
drag himself “moaning and protesting” up long flights of stairs to his study at the top of his house in Primrose Hill, without fail every morning after breakfast, to begin his invariable stint of work—and this continued into his nineties. Another old friend, the novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley, described to me how (in his late eighties) he sat at his desk at nine each morning and practiced little strategies—cleaning his pipe, sharpening pencils, rearranging papers and implements—to delay the dreaded but inevitable moment when he had to begin putting words on paper again. All the same, creation is a marvelous business, and people who create at the highest level lead a privileged life, however arduous and difficult it may be. An interesting life, too, full of peculiar aspects and strange satisfactions. That is the message of this book.

  2

  Chaucer: The Man in the Fourteenth-Century Street

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER (C.1342–1400) was perhaps the most creative spirit ever to write in English. Indeed it could be argued that he created English as a medium of art. Before him, we had a tongue, spoken and to some degree written. After him, we had a literature. He came, to be sure, at a good time. In his grandfather’s day, England still had a hieratic-demotic language structure. Only the plebeians habitually spoke English, in a variety of bewildering regional forms. The ruling class spoke French and wrote in Latin. Edward I and his son Edward II spoke French. They understood some English, though they certainly did not, and probably could not, write it. Edward III, born in 1312—he was a generation older than Chaucer—spoke English fluently. The Hundred Years’ War, which he launched five years before Chaucer was born, opened a deep chasm between England and France that made the close interaction and simultaneous development of their culture no longer possible. The use of French in official transactions went into precipitous decline. The rise of English as the language of law and government was formally recognized by the Statute of Pleading (1362), when Chaucer was a young man. It ordered that in all the courts, all cases “shall be pleaded, showed, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue.”1 The following year the lord chancellor, for the first time, opened Parliament with a speech in English.