These reflections on “Why Music & Culture” began with the movie, Whiplash, as a severe take on the demands of a calling to the arts. The mentor figure, Terence Fletcher (played superbly by J.K. Simmons) pushes his student, Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) to the breaking point and beyond in the young man’s quest to become a great jazz drummer. What justifies this?
One might conclude—too easily, I think—that Fletcher is a sadist, a type found everywhere, from high school football coaches to drill sergeants to CEOs. There’s a frontier between “tough love” and just kicking the everlasting crap out of somebody for one’s own pleasure, and many find themselves traversing it, I imagine, while thinking well of themselves.
But then, why are the arts so often associated with outrageous behavior on many fronts? This is so common that I’ve had many people explain to me—or use an excuse—that one can’t expect “creatives” to observe common courtesy or decency or keep their promises.
I promised a couple of stories about my own challenging mentors, and these bits may be useful as we angle in on the ethical milieu many artists embrace as belonging to their vocation.
One of my difficult mentors enjoyed being mean, I’m sure, although he always had a purpose in mind as he dished out the discipline. The other’s on-again and off-again cruelty might have been the result of a psychological disorder—he was, I believe, bipolar.
I’m not writing this as a latter-day act of revenge or even to decry these men’s methods. In fact, they did me a lot of good. There’s a tertiary point being made, but you’ll have to wait for it.
I remember the day I attended, along with about fifty other aspiring writers, the first meeting of a workshop in the writing of fiction at UCLA. Only fifteen of us would be admitted to the class. The professor could have posted a list of those being admitted ahead of time, but he had left it to the first in-person meeting. Did he just relish the drama?
He sat down at the head of the seminar table, with fifteen admittance slips in his hands. He began to read out the names, to a very quiet room. At about the seventh or eighth name, mine was called. I thought all my hopes and dreams had just been verified, and in my heart, I danced my way out of that first session.
The day came when I would present my first short story. I had written a long piece of some 27 pages. Going in I was convinced that I might just have made a first enduring contribution to American literature.
“This is long, Harold,” the professor said. “Why don’t you read just one page—any page you like.”
This was unexpected and disconcerting, but I picked a page near the end where the character experiences a spiritual epiphany—one I considered especially well written.
For the next two hours, my professor critiqued each and every sentence on the page I had read, noting what was wrong with each, my lack of understanding of how the English language worked, and the fiction-killing self-consciousness that reigned supreme everywhere.
During the last hour of the three-hour seminar, my professor read a long short story whose sole purpose was to ridicule exactly the type of bad writing that characterized my short story and get the whole class laughing. At me—or so it felt.
I remember walking home that evening, shattered. My life seemed to be over before having started.
I had to write two more short stories and a re-write as well that quarter. That helped me find my feet—or better, stop the wild orbiting in my mind. I began working at my writing as never before. I learned what the professor meant by the English language’s logic—the attention that must be paid to the denotative and etymological roots of words and how these enable some constructions and disallow others. I gave up at least some of my pretensions, and began writing much closer to the bone.
Eventually, this professor, who had been so helpful by being so brutal, actually wrote a blurb for my first book of short stories. I still have no doubt that he enjoyed ridiculing what was, indeed, ridiculous.
In graduate school, my major professor was one of the few, true adherents of de Sade’s philosophy. He believed that truth and beauty can emerge out of cruelty and wrote long and stunning passages, in terms of prose style, to prove it, including one in which a horse is tortured at prodigious length and in excruciating details.
He was among the most gifted writers from one sentence to another I have ever read and was said to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize. In retrospect, I believe he was also among the most philosophically muddled thinkers I’ve ever encountered, at least in the elite intellectual circles he inhabited. He both embraced de Sade and thought of himself as a humanist.
Personally, he could be an angel one day and a flesh-devouring demon the next. I think most often of his gentle and charming side, but he was also someone who could freeze out graduate students by refusing to acknowledge their existence during seminars. They would try to speak. They would ask to present some of their work. He treated them as if they were invisible. They became non-persons.
With me, he was only as cutting as possible on certain occasions.
What I never doubted about him—nor could anyone—was his hatred of Christianity. One time he walked into a seminar, having just come back from a friend’s funeral. Although the man had been a close friend, the writer had walked out of the funeral before the service finished, as he found the expressions of faith insufferable. “I hate everything about Christianity!” he declared.
This posed a particular problem for me as I found myself exploring the interior life—and the possibility of Christian faith—in my fiction. This was regarded by my writing professor—and everyone around me, really—as an unfortunate by-product of my upbringing; something I would have to get over if I wanted to become a serious writer.
I did enjoy, however, the Flannery O’Connor dispensation. My major professor had been friends with O’Connor, which frequently shows up in her collected letters. “When I read O’Connor,” he said, “I know what it feels like to be a Christian—only until I put the book down, you understand.” He knew the territory I was trying to explore, however much he disliked it, and couldn’t rule it out as a literary possibility.
Both of my harsh mentors shared a common attitude—one that predominated in the arts at the time and still does, even if most would be reluctant to admit as much. This can be summarized:
Nothing counts but the work.
Being an accomplished person in the arts meant they were free from anything like “bourgeois morality,” as they were dedicated to a higher purpose, the creation of great art. Their life’s mission, as they saw it, demanded self-sacrifice —a type of asceticism—and so their peccadilloes, kinks, off-handed cruelty, and other merely personal failings meant nothing in comparison to this great quest. Others should understand this or suffer the consequences.
This comes through in innumerable anecdotes about the lifestyles of the gifted and gruesome. One of my favorites, because it’s so on point, comes from William Faulkner. The great southern gentleman of 20th century American letters was still writing one day after the time when he had promised to take his daughter on an outing. She kept appearing at his study door, asking if he was ready to leave yet. He kept putting her off.
His daughter wouldn’t be put off, though. Finally, in desperation, she screamed, “Daddy!”
Faulkner looked up from his desk and said, “No one remembers Shakespeare’s daughter. Close the door and go away.”
In the famous “The Art of Fiction” interviews from The Paris Review, another writer—whose name I can’t remember—commented that if and when the arguments with one’s wife at night get so ugly that it’s impossible to write the next day, it’s time to get a new wife.
While giving readings at American universities the poet Dylan Thomas used to approach young women at the after-parties with this charming line: “May I jump you?”
There’s a wonderful monologue that opens up Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties. The play conjures up what might have happened if James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin—all of whom were living in Zurich in 1917—had formed their own social circle. The plays unifying character, British consul Henry Carr, takes us back to that time and his memories of the three upon which, as we learn in the opening monologue, the tableau we are about to witness is based.
While describing the behavior and manners of the two artists, Joyce and Tzara, Carr recalls his school days. To do anything unusual like miss a class for a relative’s visit or be exempt from participating in athletics due to illness a student needed a “chit.” What we might call a permission slip. Chits always endowed unusual privileges. As to artists, Carr remarks, he’s always thought of them as people who believed they had “a chit for life.”
This attitude of being a privileged character who can do just as she pleases shows up in this recent tweet from Halle Berry.
i do what i wanna do.
“I do what I wanna do.” I suppose I’m supposed to say, “You go, girl!” But, really?
I posted a clip at the top from La Vie En Rose, the biopic of the French singer, Edith Piaf (starring Marion Cotillard). The singer’s career progresses from clubs to concert halls once she is taken under the wing of Raymond Asso (played by Marc Barbe), a composer and accompanist. Piaf’s Pygmalion imposes his own severe discipline, providing elocution lessons, drumming into her the art of phrasing, and teaching her to the art of performance. Asso tells her, “You must do exactly as I say, or you can go back to the gutter.” He’s not a Terence Fletcher, but he is something of a terror to the “little sparrow,” if a transformative one.
Once Piaf attains stardom, she becomes a terror—an outright shrew—to those around her, castigating her maid, her manager, and anyone else who fails her expectations. When told she can’t treat people that way, she replies, “What’s the point of being Edith Piaf then?”
What is the point of being Edith Piaf?
If you’ll click on the clip above, you’ll be reminded of the stunningly beautiful voice Piaf gave to the world and left as a legacy. You’ll also likely think, as I do, that, well, for that gift we can forgive you just about anything.
Do artists really have a “chit for life” then? In Part 3 we will go deeper into the rationale for artists or “creatives” as “privileged characters” and ask whether this actually serves their art or the artists themselves.
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