Perhaps there once was. The painter and the composer learnt their craft from a master, as an apprentice, and had to fit their skills to the demands of patrons such as the Church or the nobility. All that has gone. Partly because the system of apprenticeship and patronage has gone, but that is only the symptom of a deeper change. It is no longer a question of fleshing out a given form. The form itself needs to be discovered or invented. And, once invented, needs to be reinvented with each new work.
The sense one gets, reading the letters of the great Romantic and post-Romantic artists — Keats, van Gogh, Kafka — is of enormous energy and desire finding it almost impossible to channel themselves adequately. The swimmer or runner can burn up energy in the pool or on the track and know that each day's work prepares him a little more for the race ahead; but, however much the artist would emulate him, he can't. For what would training mean in his case?
What is he to train for?
In retrospect of course one can often see a pattern in the career of a great artist. One can see that Proust's flurry of unfinished works between 1897 and 1907 was nothing but a groping towards A la recherche; that Picasso's whirlwind activity in those same years was leading him inexorably towards Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But for Proust in those years it was a case of nothing but one failure after another, one confirmation after another that he was not a writer at all; and if Picasso's enormous talent and energy kept him from despair it could not hide from him the fact that he had still not found his real voice.
But how to find that voice, do what one feels one was set on earth to do? Does one, like Rilke, contain oneself in patience, waiting for the day when the spirit will condescend to visit? Or, like Kafka, go on pouring out sketches and fragments, work that refuses to add up, that does not and cannot satisfy, in the vain hope that suddenly one will see what has to be done and how? Or does one, like Coleridge, take the failure to fulfil oneself as the subject-matter of one's poem?
And what is satisfaction? Will it even be recognised when it comes? I know I have reached my goal if I win the race I have been training for, climb the peak I have set myself to climb. But goals in art are less tangible; often it seems unclear if they have been reached at all. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their moments of dejection, remembered with nostalgia their childhoods and how different it had been then; Eliot, as he saw his work fragment under his hand, despite his best intentions, recalled, equally nostalgically, a culture that had once been unified and was now gone for ever; Kafka, in his later years, remembered with pleasure and despair the night of 22 September 1912, when, in one ten-hour stretch, he had written ‘The Judgement’ and felt it emerging from him as an organic whole, and felt ‘how everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again’.
To be filled with the desire to make something, with the energy to work harder than ever before, but to be unable to discover what it is one wants to make, what kind of work one should be engaged in — that is the terrible frustration all artists are at one time or another a prey to — and have been since 1800. But it is of course not a frustration specific to the artist. It is a blight which fell on all emancipated westerners in the wake of the French Revolution and the demise of the Ancien Régime.”* European literature in the nineteenth century reflects this malaise, littered as it is with works whose heroes dream of being Napoleon only to discover that they are petty murderers or frustrated clerks. For if anyone can become Napoleon the question then becomes: Why am I still only a clerk? With all that energy boiling up within me, with all that ambition to do something that will make the world sit up and pay attention, why can I not find the thing I need to do? The temptation dangled before so many heroes and heroines in nineteenth-century novels is the temptation of passion: a great all-consuming passion will finally release me from the pettiness of my surroundings, give meaning to my life. But, as Dante saw long ago, though passion may be better than indifference, it may in the end only be a mirage.
Describing in fiction the criminality or folly of a Raskolnikov, an Anna Karenina, an Emma Bovary, did of course bring some appeasement to their creators, just as describing his dejection brought appeasement to Coleridge. But these are local and temporary palliatives, and we should not be surprised at the number of artists who have sought refuge in drink or drugs and, in the wake of addiction, often, in suicide. John Berryman summed it up in one of the finest of his Dream Songs, the 153 rd, his response to the death of his friend, the writer Delmore Schwartz:
I'm cross with god who has wrecked this generation.
First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore.
In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath.
That was a first rate haul. He left alive
fools I could number like a kitchen knife
but Lowell he did not touch.
Somewhere the enterprise continues, not –
yellow the sun lies on the baby's blouse –
in Henry's staggered thought.
I suppose the word would be, we must submit.
Later.
I hang, and I will not be part of it.
A friend of Henry's contrasted God's career
with Mozart's, leaving Henry with nothing to say
but praise for a word so apt.
We suffer on, a day, a day, a day.
And never again can come, like a man slapped,
news like this.
But of course it did, with the announcement of Berryman's own suicide a few years later. Which left no poet to mourn him with the plangency with which he had said farewell to his poet friends.
And yet, in spite of everything, that silent hunger is sometimes appeased. I no longer feel absent from the world or from myself. I no longer see myself sitting over my notebook or my typewriter. The pent-up energy finds an outlet.
How does this come about?
It comes, I think, from the discovery of boundaries. When I can reach out and touch an edge and it does not give, then I know that it is only a matter of time and patience before the entire boundary has been touched. And when there is a boundary there is a work.
Clearly I do not literally reach out my hand and touch something. But equally clearly this is not simply a metaphor. I do not imagine the boundary, I feel it. How?
Because I discover what happens when I cross it.
I do not know what the boundary is and I do not know where it is, but I know when I have crossed it. For on the other side there is nothing. No meaning and no foothold. Outside the boundary I am once more in the empty and arbitrary world from which I had thought to escape by starting to write.
The making of the work will then consist in my feeling my way forward innumerable times until this boundary, which I can only feel when I cross it, has been entirely mapped.
To discover the existence of a boundary is to discover the possibility of work, and of a work.
The work is that which lies inside the boundary. The work is the mapping of the boundary.
The temptation of addiction: to appease the frustration that comes from not being able to discover what work it is one should be engaged in.
The logic of addiction: to dissolve the boundaries between myself and the world so as to get rid of my useless isolation. But the boundaries do not disappear; they only recede as I advance.
The melancholy of addiction: if it is a kind of solution it is only a temporary and inadequate one, which takes us further and further from the world instead of returning us to it.