Some thoughts about art and life

Until very recently, a central claim for the novel was that it was a vehicle for moral and ethical enquiry. Cheeringly, Wood does not agree with the superior persons who assure us that such a view is hopelessly naïve, and explain that no novel is about anything except the act of its own composition. (That, of course, is all that many of those who have learned to write novels in creative writing courses can write about.) Wood sees in the novel the virtue that Bernard Williams found absent from much moral philosophy, that of reflecting the choice between conflicting goods rather than between a polarized good and bad. Novels should not be propaganda on behalf of a particular moral code—Wood justly deplores the "contagion of moralizing niceness" endemic in online reader reviews —but they have characteristically enquired into the sustainability of such codes (and this is true even of novelists, such as Robbe- Grillet, who disown such an agenda). A long list of examples could be given; in fact the difficulty would be who to omit.

PAUL DEAN, "The Art of Reality."

When I was about eleven years old, I moved with my family to Geneva one summer. My brothers and I knew no children of our own age, and in fact there appeared to be none in our neighbourhood. The Swiss, and particularly the people of Geneva, are notorious for the way they effectively hide themselves and their lives from foreigners. Having arrived in early July, we had not started school, so we had no school friends to talk to or play with. My brothers, who formed a sort of tribe on their own, built forts in the garden and played rough games which I was not welcome to join, and anyway, I was growing too old for games of that kind. So what could I do? I read. There was a room at the top of the house, three stories up, where our books lay in boxes, waiting to be unpacked. I sat there, day after day, taking books out of boxes and starting them, sometimes putting them back if they appeared to be too difficult, often ploughing ahead as well as I could.

One of the books I discovered at that time was a short collection of essays by Somerset Maugham, called The Ten Best Novels in the World, or something like that. Among Maugham's selections were Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black, and David Copperfield. Many of the books were far too old for me, and perhaps Maugham's book of essays was too, for in addition to describing the books he had selected, he provided a biographical essay on their authors. So appalling did I find the lives he described, and especially the marriages (remember, I was only eleven at the time), that I remember promising myself then and there that I would never marry a writer. Not only do they invade the privacy of one's family life with their detached and critical eyes, but they get to have the last word on it.

My resolution has so far proven to be quite unnecessary, since no writer has ever proposed to me. But I was recently reminded of it by a series of news items I read about writers and their lives which I had coincidentally encountered at the same time. One of the writers was Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the Anne stories and many other books about spunky young women. Her grand-daughter recently confessed in the Globe and Mail that Montgomery had committed suicide. Another of the writers was, not surprisingly, David Foster Wallace, who recently committed suicide. I didn't know his work, though I'd certainly heard his name before, but it was difficult not to be aware of his death because it was so widely reported and occasioned so many arguments and so much distress among his admirers. Finally, I happened by chance to stumble on a New Yorker piece about the children's writer Madeleine L'Engle, whose early work I knew and liked well enough, but whose later novels repelled me. She died of old age rather than suicide, but the New Yorker article revealed that her life and her marriage were far more painful and complex than she had allowed them to appear in her more autobiographical writings.

There are two equal and opposite truths about writers. One is that their families almost invariably find it difficult to live with them, even if they are not suicidal or mentally ill. The other is that their admirers, with equal inevitability, look to them as models of how to live, that is, they look not merely to their literary work for insights into life and human nature, but to their lives as they were actually lived. And, also inevitably, they are usually profoundly disappointed, perhaps so much so that they lose all interest in the writer in question, feeling themselves to have been betrayed.

Of the three writers named here, Lucy Maud Montgomery was perhaps the least likely to have inspired such feelings in her readers. She has been dead for too long now, and it is for some reason easier to feel this way about writers who are, if not our contemporaries, at least alive at the same time as ourselves. On the other hand, it is clear that many of David Foster Wallace's admirers were not only distressed by his suicide, but took it personally, as if he had let them down. Perhaps this is because he was known to have triumphed over addiction and depression, and gone on to live a productive and apparently happy life. Comments on his death on various blogs echoed with anger, disappointment, and grief, a sign of how strongly many of his readers seem to have identified with him. I must admit that when I read such pieces of his as were available on line, I found it difficult to understand why or how they could have done so. Like so many writers of the last fifteen years, Wallace to me seemed to have great difficulty breaking out of his own head, his own perceptions. It's obvious that he wanted to do so, but it's hard to imagine that he ever did. I could be wrong here of course, as my knowledge of his work is quite limited, but he struck me as ill-equipped for either story-telling or the creation of characters.

As for Madeleine L'Engle, it may be that revelations of her life hit her readers hardest of all. Authors of children's books are even more burdened than other writers by the expectations of their fans, who are too young to understand that there is no necessary connection between a writer's outlook on life as it is expressed in books, and the writer's real life. The New Yorker article revealed not only that her son had died young of alcoholism, but that his mother had refused to acknowledge this fact even in private. Worse, he had apparently hated her fiction, or at least those works in which he had appeared in fictional guise. The writer of the article went so far as to hint that his death was somehow his mother's fault, for making him appear so saintly in her fiction that he was never able to grow out of childhood. Or something of the sort; the writer's exact accusation remains vague. The article brought an outpouring of anger from L'Engle's fans, not because the article itself was too revealing, or unfair, though it almost certainly was, but because they found it impossible to cope with the revelation that L'Engle's children had found her a difficult and a distant mother.

It seems that Oscar Wilde was wrong. Not only are certain kinds of art expected by their audience to be morally edifying, but the audience insists that the lives of their creators must be too. Painters and poets, with rare exceptions, seldom awaken similar demands for their moral perfection among their fans. Nor do classical musicians (although perhaps popular singer/songwriters do, and some actresses, and quite a few philosophers). Why should we expect so much from novelists? Perhaps novels bear a greater burden of expectation in this respect than any other art form because a novel that does not deal with the moral dilemmas of human beings must be a tedious and empty exercise. It is possible to read a poem, or look at a painting, or hear a piece of music, without any attention to their moral content, valuing them only for their beauty. Writers, in contrast, create characters, set them loose in the world, and sit in judgment on them and on their actions. How can we trust them if they turn out to be only too human themselves? Our indignant response upon discovering their feet of clay may be naive, but it is entirely natural.