Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

  Our mental life, like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flight and perchings. The rhythms of languages expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest. Let us call the resting-places the “substantive points,” and the places of flight the “transitive parts,” of the stream of thought.5

  A modern research team took the trouble to examine the use of metaphor in psychological writing. Examining research papers from 1894 to 1975, they found that among psychologists of routine skills and limited creative imagination, the “metaphor score” was only three per article, whereas in William James’s famous “President’s Address: The Experience of Activity” (1905), there were twenty-nine metaphors.

  That metaphors are useful to creative thinking becomes more certain and obvious the more you study specific instances. What is more difficult to ascertain is the part activities play. Einstein’s card houses were an example more of character training than an actual aid to creative thought. But most scientists and many writers have on their desks implements, gewgaws, games, and puzzles, presumably because they find such things useful to thought. I have no difficulty in concentrating, and I get down to actual writing as soon as I sit at my desk (or at my easel or drawing table), so I cannot easily follow the reasoning behind such gimmicks. But in cases without number, it is clear that spasmodic or periodic activity helps imaginative thought. Thus Dickens, who would spring up from his writing table to make dreadful faces in the big mirrors in his study, is by no means unusual among writers. Some writers build up such resistance against writing, or against continuing to write, that physical means have to be applied to force them to concentrate. When I was an editor, I had, on occasion, particularly with one or two contributors, to lock them in a bare room with a typewriter, in order to get them to write or complete an article, not allowing them to emerge until it was done. But many writers cannot work out their creative thoughts in a writing room. It is well known that Wordsworth usually composed his verses while walking in the open air, either around the lake at Grasmere or Rydal Water, or ascending and descending the fells. He memorized the lines thus imagined, and only wrote them down when he returned to the house. Sometimes a gap of days, even weeks, intervened between writing the lines in his head and getting them on paper. It is not clear whether Wordsworth needed walking for his poetry because he saw things outside that he could then transform into verse, or because the sheer movement of walking jogged his thoughts. The latter, I surmise, for Wordsworth was in some ways an unobservant man. It was his sister, Dorothy, who saw the works of nature, in astonishing detail, and noted them down. When both were at Gowbarrow Bay, on Ullswater, when the daffodils were dancing in the wind, it was Dorothy who observed them and noted them in her journal, passing on her visual experience to her brother, who some weeks later wrote the famous poem. Without Dorothy it would not have come into existence.

  Yet experience is the mother, or rather a mother, of creativity, and by experience I mean the combination of observation and feeling that leads to a creative moment. Emily Dickinson did not just notice things in nature (as Dorothy Wordsworth did); she also felt strongly, or deeply, or perceptively, about them—and this is what makes her little poems so powerful and moving. Charlotte Brontë’s strong feelings about her life, combined with an acute eye and ear, enabled her to transform experience, in the first half of Jane Eyre, so strikingly into art—an act of creation rare, for its passionate beauty, in the annals of literature. Writers, particularly of novels, are never so powerfully creative than when recording, albeit transformed into fiction, their own deeply felt experience. Dickens always felt David Copperfield was his best book, for this reason. The same could be said of The Mill on the Floss, for Maggie Tulliver is the young Mary Ann Evans, and all she lived and felt. In that wonderful novel, in the stories of Scenes from Clerical Life, in Adam Bede, and to some extent in Middlemarch, George Eliot is writing of things and people she knew from her own direct observation and feelings. Later, though more experienced as a writer, she was less convincing. For Daniel Deronda, her novel about the Jewish problem; and for Romola, set in Renaissance Florence, she did much careful reading, intelligently digested. But these stories do not come to life in the same way. For the novelist, books cannot make up for the absence of direct knowledge and feeling. Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary from the heart, his later stories from books, and the difference shows. Bouvard et Pécuchet sprang from an entire library—stillborn. When I see a certain woman novelist I know, sitting behind an entrenchment of books in the reading room of the London Library, and scribbling industriously away at her next piece of fiction, I say to myself: “Oh, dear!”

  Evelyn Waugh was very conscious of the creative capital based on the direct experience of deeply felt things in the childhood, youth, and early manhood with which a novelist begins his career, and the ease with which this precious capital can be spent—thrown away, as it were—in one profligate work. He said that it should be carefully conserved, doled out frugally. Alas, he added, by the time a novelist was old, and wise enough to realize this, his capital was gone. “Spent,” as he put it, with a rueful expression on his fierce face. The only way it could be replenished was by undergoing fresh experience of a peculiarly taxing and intense kind. That is why he welcomed World War II, which came in his mid-thirties when his initial capital was well-nigh exhausted. He made good use of it, too: first as the framework for his rococo display of virtuoso romanticism, Brideshead Revisited; then as the substance of his three-volume masterpiece, Sword of Honour. It was the same for Waugh’s contemporary Anthony Powell, in writing the twelve-volume roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time. It is true that this long work covered his entire life, from schooldays to middle age. But the war, when his life was richest and most exciting, and when he met people and experienced events quite out of his normal milieu and its habitual activities, provided the three best books of the dozen, and without them the entire work would have failed. Students of the creative process, especially in fiction, can learn a lot by comparing Waugh’s and Powell’s absorption and regurgitation of their respective military careers—the first intense, vivid, tragic, and noble; the second discursive, contemplative, and philosophical; both rich in the ironies that warfare inspires in artists. Without the war, both would have been far less creative or, to put it more accurately, would have created far less. The same is true of a significant number of male novelists. Stendhal had published a good deal by the end of the 1820s, by which time he was in his mid-forties. Had his work ceased at that point there would be no reason whatever to read it or remember him. But in 1830 he published Le Rouge et le Noir, and nine years later La Chartreuse de Parme, both arising naturally out of his experiences as a soldier and a military administrator under Napoleon. It was these events, and no others, essentially, which made him a major creative artist. The same could be said of Ernest Hemingway. His experiences in Italy in World War I made it possible for him to write A Farewell to Arms, which established him as a novelist in the eyes of both himself and the public; and further wars, in Spain and northwestern Europe, replenished his fictional capital and kept him going as a creator. For women writers of fiction, the essential capital is supplied by emotion and love affairs, and children and divorces, and is not so easily replenished, as time goes by. Jane Austen’s novels were all rooted in her emotions, felt while she was young or comparatively so. Had she lived into her sixties, say, instead of dying at forty-one, how and where would she have found the replenishment for her depleted creative capital?

  It is true that creative art or science does not necessarily spring from, or even have any relation to, t
he work a creator performs for a living. It is curious and interesting that both Einstein and the poet A. E. Housman spent many years in national patent offices, one in Bern, the other in London, before moving openly into creative work. And then there was T. S. Eliot’s dignified and successful career as an exchange-rate banker, before he moved into the more appropriate world of publishing. Much of Stendhal’s life was spent as a consul; so was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s; and Evelyn Waugh seriously thought of doing the same in mid-career, and even took tentative steps to securing a position. I have heard writers argue fiercely that the best background to a productive life of poetry and fiction is a humdrum, undemanding, regularly paid job which has absolutely nothing to do with creation.

  But other writers would hotly disagree; and, in any case, such a job is not in practice an option open to many kinds of creators at the highest level: composers, painters, and scientists, for instance. They can all teach, to be sure, to make a living; and many do. But teaching an art is too intimately related to its practice to constitute the contrasting world of the everyday which, the theory runs, stimulates production in the creative world. The truth is, all creators are highly individual and have different views about what helps or hinders their work. Often their views are confused, or are formed so slowly and tentatively—after setbacks and failures—as to come too late materially to influence their careers, when options have closed and energy flags. It is not easy to be a creator at the higher levels, and at the highest it is often agony. All creators agree that it is a painful and often a terrifying experience, to be endured rather than relished, and preferable only to not being a creator at all.

  Notes

  Chapter 1: The Anatomy of Creative Courage

  1. There is surprisingly little about Imhotep in the historical literature. See, for instance, The Cambridge Ancient History (new series), i, part 2: The Early History of the Middle East, chapter XIV, i. See also my The Civilisation of Ancient Egypt (2nd edition, London, 1998), pp. 36–37, 53–54, 120, 133–138; and Grove’s Dictionary of Art, XV, p. 146, with bibliography.

  2. Emily Anderson (ed.), The Letters of Beethoven, 3 vols (London, 1961), passim.

  3. Paul Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (London, 1985), passim.

  4. Ibid, p. 79.

  5. Rudolph Sabor, The Real Wagner (London, 1987), chapter IV.

  6. Some of Frau Goldweg’s sketches survive, including one of the frilly lace underpants she designed for Wagner.

  7. Letter to Louisine Havemeyer, 4 December 1913, quoted in Judith A. Barter (ed.), Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman (Chicago, 1998), p. 350.

  8. Rene Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer (trans., New York, 1966), p. 9.

  9. Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life (London, 1994), based on family papers and over 1,000 unpublished letters, gives the first full account of Lautrec’s medical background, especially pp. 58–9, 70–79, 87–95, 103–8, 202–3.

  10. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds.), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols. (Yale, 1994).

  Chapter 2: Chaucer: The Man in the Fourteenth-Century Street

  1. Statutes of the Realm, ii, p. 375; key extract in A. R. Myers (ed.), English Historical Documents iv, 1327–1495 (London, 1969), pp. 483–484.

  2. Claire Jones, “The Use of English in Medieval East Anglian Medicine,” in Jacek Fisiak and Peter Trudgill, East Anglian English (Cambridge, 2001).

  3. C. Paul Christianson, “Chancery Standard and the Records of Old London Bridge,” in J. B. Trahern (ed.), Standardizing English (Knoxville, 1989).

  4. T. K. Derry and Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Technology (Oxford, 1979), p. 234.

  5. L. D. Benson, “Chaucer: A Select Bibliography,” in D. S. Brewer (ed.), Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1974), pp. 352–372; C. F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1925).

  6. Portraits of Chaucer are found in the Ellesmere mss of his Works, the basis of most modern editions, now in the Huntington Library; in the mss of Troilus and Criseyde in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and in the British Library Harley mss 4866.

  7. For Clarence, see Dugdale, Baronage, i, p. 396, and T. F. Tout’s entry in Dictionary of National Biography, standard series, XI, pp. 1214–1217.

  8. M. M. Crow and C. C. Olson (eds.), Chaucer Life Records (Oxford, 1966).

  9. See E. B. Graves (ed.), Bibliography of English History to 1485 (Oxford, 1975), under “Chaucer,” items 6999–7014, especially 7007.

  10. D. R. Howard, Chaucer and the Medieval World (London, 1987), pp. 388–371; see also Gervase Matthew, The Court of Richard II (London, 1968), passim.

  11. J. M. Marly, Some New Light on Chaucer (New York, 1926); see also Marly’s edition of The Canterbury Tales (New York, 1928).

  12. For Chaucer and Italian authors, see H. M. Cummings, The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Works to the Italian Works of Boccaccio, U. [University] of Cincinnati Studies, X, p. 1916; M. Praz, “Chaucer and the Great Italian Writers of the Trecento,” in Monthly Criterion, VI, p. 1927; J. L. Lowes, “Chaucer and Dante,” in Modern Philology, XIV, p. 1917.

  13. See N. R. Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio (London, 1980); A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream Poetry (London, 1976).

  14. H. S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1948), p. 95; G. F. Cunningham, The Divine Comedy in English, 2 vols. (London, 1965–1966), introduction. Dante’s name first occurs in English in Chaucer.

  15. J. A. W. Bennett, The Parliament of Fowls (London, 1957); R. O. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer’s Poetics (London, 1963).

  16. David Crystal, The Stories of English (London, 2004), pp. 182–183.

  17. Quoted ibid., pp. 176–177.

  18. Ibid., p. 177.

  19. For a good edition see James Winny (ed.), The Miller’s Prologue and Tale (Cambridge, 1994).

  20. Crystal, 2004, pp. 163–168.

  21. For an instructive comment, see John Speirs, “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” in B. Ford (ed.), The Age of Chaucer (London, 1963), pp. 109ff.

  22. For Chaucer’s use of words, see the excellent treatment in Bennett, 1957, pp. 81ff.

  Chapter 3: Dürer: A Strong Smell of Printer’s Ink

  1. C. White, Dürer: The Artist and His Drawings (London, 1971).

  2. F. Piel, Albrecht Dürer: Aquarelle und Zeichnungen (Cologne, 1983).

  3. W. L. Strass, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, 6 vols. (New York, 1974; with supplements 1977, 1982).

  4. W. M. Conway (trans. and ed.), The Writings of Albrecht Dürer (New York, 1958).

  5. G. Bott et al. (eds.), Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 1300–1550 (New York, 1986).

  6. D. C. McMurtrie, The Gutenberg Documents (New York, 1941); E. P. Gold-schmidt, The Printed Books of the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1950); C. H. Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book (Philadelphia, 1960).

  7. R. Hirsch, Printing, Selling, and Reading 1450–1550 (Wiesbaden, 1967).

  8. R. Lightbown, Medieval Jewellery in Western Europe (London, 1991).

  9. A. Shestack, The Complete Engravings of Martin Schongauer (New York, 1969); Le Beau Martin: Gravures et Dessins de Martin Schongauer (Colmar, 1991).

  10. From a Mighty Forest: Prints, Drawings, and Books in the Age of Luther (Detroit, 1983).

  11. A. M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, with a Detailed Survey of Work Done in the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1935).

  12. W. L. Strauss (ed.), Albrecht Dürer: Woodcuts and Woodblocks (New York, 1980).

  13. M. Geisberg, The German Single Leaf Woodcut 1500–1550 (Washington, 1974); C. Dodgson, Catalogue of Early German and Flemish Woodcuts…in the British Museum (London, 1903), especially pp. 259–347.

  14. C. Dodgson, Albrecht Dürer: Engravings and Etchings (New York, 1967) and Albrecht Dürer: Master Printmaker (Boston, 1971); W. L. Strauss, Albrecht Dürer: Intaglio Prints, Engravings, Etchings, and Drypoints (New York, 1975).

  15. For Dürer’s painti
ngs see F. Anzelevosky, Albrecht Dürer: Das Malerische Werk, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1991).

  16. See W. L. Strauss (ed.), The Human Figure by Albrecht Dürer: The Complete Dresden Sketchbook (New York, 1972).

  17. Dürer’s work is called Etliche Underricht, zu Befestigung der Stett, Schosz und Flecken (Nuremberg, 1527); see J. R. Hale, Renaissance Fortifications: Art or Engineering (London, 1977).

  Chapter 4: Shakespeare: Glimpses of an Unknown Colossus

  1. I am following the attribution in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds.), The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (compact paperback edition, Oxford, 1994).

  2. F. W. Sternfield, “Shakespeare and Music,” in K. Muir and S. Schoenbaum, New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 157ff; Grove’s New Dictionary of Music (London, 1980), XVII, pp. 214–218.

  3. S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (London, 1975), which prints most of the texts.

  4. Printed in Wells and Taylor, 1994, pp. xliii–xlix.

  5. W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (London, 1955); C. Hinman, The Printing and Proofreading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (London, 1963). The First Folio was printed in facsimile in 1968.

  6. See Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford, 1998), chapters 5 and 6, pp. 60–94.

  7. Meredith Anne Skura, Shakespeare the Actor (Chicago, 1993); for a list of Shakespeare’s parts see Honan, 1998, pp. 204–205.

  8. Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge, 1992).

  9. For Shakespeare’s theater world, see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923), especially II, pp. 1–246, for the companies; IV, and pp. 353–578, for the theaters.

  10. On staging, see ibid., III, pp. 47–102.

  11. See A. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge, 1985); D. Bruster, Drama and Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1992).