role—for a writer—of that.
During a year when I commute once a week to Boston to teach, I have time to reflect on the difference between “being” a writer, and “doing” it. Here are five Monday nights from a journal:
Monday, the 1st
Never trust the private journal of a writer; give his confidence your sympathy and before you know it you may be standing in the middle of what is merely another work of art. No, these Monday nights here, after talking the stars into the skies with students, I want the fraternity of some dear colleague whose customary vehicle is not words—and as usual, I find myself with a painter, a habit since the age of thirteen, when, not daring to steal from the public library, I copied out great passages from the notebooks of Robert Henri. What a period piece we are back there, he and I—and perhaps now! For, remind myself as I will, I never buy that book, not fearing to find it less good, but mourning the decline of both situation and passion—in which a book is for stealing. Tonight, howsomever got, I have the journal of Delacroix, along with coffeepot, pound of coffee and immersion heater—all of which gear the university has so far overlooked my keeping on week-to-week in the room in the faculty lodge where they quarter me on these visits. Usually they give me the same room; at least the picture on the wall is the same—an original Eilshemius—and that’s certainly my gear in the bottom of the closet, tucked back of the beautiful sliding door that doesn’t slide. Elegant as the lodge is, it is motel-style, a long wing of rooms budded on one another—open the door of any, and pop, one is sucked into the beatific light of that roving public cell, the ultimate cellule of alone . Someday the room won’t be the same—I’ll know by the picture—but what if my gear is still there? For that terrible philosophic abyss, I hope to be ready. These solipsistic nights, another personality takes over, dropped on my head like a sack, the minute I enter. Suspended here, between the day’s process of being a writer to all those young faces, and the faraway humbler apparatus of doing it at home in New York, I examine these alternatives in the muttering underhand of conscience. And I don’t leave Delacroix here; I keep him in my bag.
Monday, the 2nd
Comments on the pitfalls and sublimes of art are not what I read him for these days, although his can shake one in those depths of gratitude always waiting for the kindred “ahoy” across the waters. “Style can result only from great research, and the fine brushing has got to stop when the touch is going well. I must try to see the big gouaches by Correggio at the Museum. I believe they were done with very small touches.” It’s the note of authority, underlaid with doubt, that one loves and shivers to. And these days I hunt it most where he scolds and scares himself for being in or out of his society. “I believe that seeing … people from time to time is not such a danger to work and the progress of the mind as it is claimed to be by many pretended artists; to consort with them is certainly more dangerous. … I must return to solitude. … How is one to retain one’s enthusiasm about anything when one is at all times at the mercy of other people, and when one has constant need of their society?”
“Society” may have enlarged since his day, but the ins and outs of it for the artist are always much the same, no matter how stated. For Mann—the artist yearned to be loved by the bourgeois for those very differences that must be flaunted but made it impossible; to this he added that guilt, now almost traditional, of those who neglect “life” in order to record it. Whereas it seems to me that an artist may be bourgeois or revolutionary—the in-ness or outness merely shifts ground—and recording may be his treasure, not his burden. And each man, from ditch-digger to clerk, stands aside for some part of his day, from what each has
During a year when I commute once a week to Boston to teach, I have time to reflect on the difference between “being” a writer, and “doing” it. Here are five Monday nights from a journal:
Monday, the 1st
Never trust the private journal of a writer; give his confidence your sympathy and before you know it you may be standing in the middle of what is merely another work of art. No, these Monday nights here, after talking the stars into the skies with students, I want the fraternity of some dear colleague whose customary vehicle is not words—and as usual, I find myself with a painter, a habit since the age of thirteen, when, not daring to steal from the public library, I copied out great passages from the notebooks of Robert Henri. What a period piece we are back there, he and I—and perhaps now! For, remind myself as I will, I never buy that book, not fearing to find it less good, but mourning the decline of both situation and passion—in which a book is for stealing. Tonight, howsomever got, I have the journal of Delacroix, along with coffeepot, pound of coffee and immersion heater—all of which gear the university has so far overlooked my keeping on week-to-week in the room in the faculty lodge where they quarter me on these visits. Usually they give me the same room; at least the picture on the wall is the same—an original Eilshemius—and that’s certainly my gear in the bottom of the closet, tucked back of the beautiful sliding door that doesn’t slide. Elegant as the lodge is, it is motel-style, a long wing of rooms budded on one another—open the door of any, and pop, one is sucked into the beatific light of that roving public cell, the ultimate cellule of alone . Someday the room won’t be the same—I’ll know by the picture—but what if my gear is still there? For that terrible philosophic abyss, I hope to be ready. These solipsistic nights, another personality takes over, dropped on my head like a sack, the minute I enter. Suspended here, between the day’s process of being a writer to all those young faces, and the faraway humbler apparatus of doing it at home in New York, I examine these alternatives in the muttering underhand of conscience. And I don’t leave Delacroix here; I keep him in my bag.
Monday, the 2nd
Comments on the pitfalls and sublimes of art are not what I read him for these days, although his can shake one in those depths of gratitude always waiting for the kindred “ahoy” across the waters. “Style can result only from great research, and the fine brushing has got to stop when the touch is going well. I must try to see the big gouaches by Correggio at the Museum. I believe they were done with very small touches.” It’s the note of authority, underlaid with doubt, that one loves and shivers to. And these days I hunt it most where he scolds and scares himself for being in or out of his society. “I believe that seeing … people from time to time is not such a danger to work and the progress of the mind as it is claimed to be by many pretended artists; to consort with them is certainly more dangerous. … I must return to solitude. … How is one to retain one’s enthusiasm about anything when one is at all times at the mercy of other people, and when one has constant need of their society?”
“Society” may have enlarged since his day, but the ins and outs of it for the artist are always much the same, no matter how stated. For Mann—the artist yearned to be loved by the bourgeois for those very differences that must be flaunted but made it impossible; to this he added that guilt, now almost traditional, of those who neglect “life” in order to record it. Whereas it seems to me that an artist may be bourgeois or revolutionary—the in-ness or outness merely shifts ground—and recording may be his treasure, not his burden. And each man, from ditch-digger to clerk, stands aside for some part of his day, from what each has
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