Note: This was originally posted on Slow Muse in March 2011. It came across my screen this morning quite unexpectedly and just seemed so timely. Again.
Grand master for a lifetime: Henri Matisse, photographed by Man Ray
The nature of art making over the lifetime has been a recurring theme for me these last few months. Spurred in many ways by the publication of Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, by Nicholas Delbanco (which wasn’t as satisfying as I had hoped), my curiosity about what makes an artist able to continue working has only deepened. Answers are few as to why some continue on and others do not, but the question is a potent one.
Here are a few highlights from Delbanco’s book:
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Why should it seem so difficult to substitute endurance for enthusiasm, to temper ambition with artistry;what are, in Cyril Connolly’s fine phrase, the “enemies of promise” that keep us from achieving the best work at the end?
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To know, I mean truly know—as might a basketball player or ballerina—that the best is behind you is to turn to drink or dithering or to an oven or gun. A few modest and decorous authors—think of E. M. Forster and Eudora Welty—withdraw into silence and declare at a certain point in their career, Enough’s enough. But most of us go on and on, unable or unwilling to break a lifetime’s habit of wrangling with language, and happy to be allowed, even encouraged, to do so. Most of us, when asked which book has been our favorite, will answer (hopefully, wishfully, truthfully), “The next.”
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For a group of ceaseless strivers (often miserable, always doubt-hounded as they search) the motto is Cezanne’s: “I seek in painting.” Whereas Picasso announced, “I don’t seek; I find.”
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Of the aging artists, Donald Hall has this to say: When I saw Moore the year he turned eighty, I asked him, in a jocular manner I hope, to tell me the secret of life. Without jocularity he answered that the secret was to devote yourself entirely to one end, to one goal, and to work every day toward this goal, to put all your energy and imagination into the one endeavor. The only necessity was that this goal by unattainable.”
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As Anthony Storr observes, in “Solitude: A Return to Self”:
One of the most interesting features of any creative person’s work is how it changes over time. No highly creative person is ever satisfied with what he has done. Often indeed, after completing a project, he experiences a period of depression from which he is only relieved by embarking on the next piece of work. It seems to me that the capacity to create provides an irreplaceable opportunity for personal development in isolation. Most of us develop and mature primarily through interaction with others. Our passage through life is defined by our roles relative to others; as child, adolescent, spouse, parent, and grandparent. The artist or philosopher is able to mature primarily on his own. His passage through life is defined by the changing nature and increasing maturity of his work, rather than his relationships with others.
The last quote, from Storr’s book, is a rich one. It is also right in keeping with my personal predilection for hermitizing, for being defined more by my work than anything else. And it was provocative enough to get me to read Storr’s book next.
I love that last quote, because I too am becoming more of a hermit, enjoying my quiet and my time with my work.
In many ways it is the best time. Those of us who’ve devoted a lot of our lives to making art are extremely fortunate in middle and old age, especially. At 63 I am so appreciating this vocation that was so difficult financially for so many years. Now so many earlier responsibilities are behind me, and I am freer than ever before to pursue the goal Moore speaks of. Yay.
That last quote certainly touched me. It feels like a continuation of yesterday’s conversation. Thank you.
I’m reading Donald Hall’s 2007 collected poems, White Apples & the Taste of Stone, which is huge and chronological and which demonstrates the way this poet’s work/art has changed over decades…and also in relation to his interaction with others, since so much of Hall’s poetry finds its initial narrative and imagery in home, place, and family.
I’m struck by how Hall’s very late work–the man is 85 and still writing–differs from the late poems of Kunitz, George Oppen, David Ignatow, and other (male) poets who lived into their 80s and whose later poems might be considered “more philosophical” than Hall’s (not that Hall ignores the philosophical entirely).
And yet there are significant similarities as well.
The quote by Storrs, above, is indeed rich; and now, I’m becoming curious to delve into my collection of female poets to see if their late poetry “is defined by the changing nature and increasing maturity of [their] work” or more “through interaction with others.” I’m thinking Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, May Sarton, Ruth Stone, Maxine Kumin.
I would love to retreat into a more “hermit-like” approach to my work as I age. Personal interactions, however, still define or take up a great deal of my time.