The Curve Of A Creative Person's Life

Experience

Dear Friends,

“Learnings” week is continuing at The Republic of Letters, with MH Rowe writing on security guarding and Wim Hylen on butchering.

Best,

Sam

THE CURVE OF A CREATIVE PERSON’S LIFE

I’ve watched enough VH1 to know what the standard arc is of a creative person’s life. They’re some kind of a misfit kid, always unpopular in high school, ideally with some sort of a trauma. But they have a talent. Everybody who sees it kind of recognizes the talent, and ideally some gruff older person is the one who most effectively encourages it. Then they work really hard. Then they have a break — which often involves the magical alchemy of finding their collaborators. Then they are so overwhelmingly talented that the industry can’t help but let them in even though the industry is wary of the risk and rawness of what they are doing. Then the public, with its miraculous good taste, bends before them and they embark on a montage-like sequence of sold-out shows, late night talk show appearances, a gorgeously hedonistic lifestyle but all of it underpinned by a solid work ethic and unassailable internal camaraderie. Then they succumb to the fame, get addicted to drugs, have terrible falling outs with each other, and probably somebody in their orbit dies of an overdose. Then they either get it together, go to recovery, hug it out, have a comeback at which point they produce their best work, which has a maturity that their younger talented selves lacked, or they simply continue to spiral. Regardless of that fork in the road, though, they break apart again and then go through a gradual unraveling that even VH1 mercifully doesn’t cover, involving more drugs and alcohol, partners who are ever more inappropriate for them, work in which they become parodies of themselves unless they’re simply repeating the same five songs over and over again into senility. By this time they have also of course squandered all their money and are scrounging together a living either with reunion tours or by going on talk shows and writing memoirs in which through stray flickers of their coke-addled brains they are able to stitch together a vague palimpsest of their glory days.

Billie Joe Armstrong standing in for every other “Behind The Music” episode

That mostly describes musicians, but, as in some game of Sad Artist Mad Libs, you can fill in the blanks for actors or writers or any creative person at all really. Watch VH1 — or read most artist biographies — and this sort of arc is treated with the same sort of inexorability as if it were out of the Book of Proverbs: the early talent, the recognition, the peak, the fall.

It took me a long time — and consuming sources different from VH1 — to start to suspect that this might not actually be the natural arc of a creative person’s life but an industry’s method of disposability, the narrative by which new ‘talent’ is ushered in and then, more quietly, ushered out again. The actual arc of a creative person’s life tends to be very different — much steadier, much less dramatic, and, potentially, much longer-lasting. Here were a few of the touchstones that started to come into my mind.

Don DeLillo said, “I lived in one room for a long time and felt that there was something important about a man in a room and what it meant.” A critic discussing DeLillo wrote, “A prominent biographer once told me that there would never be a biography of Don DeLillo because all he ever did was sit at his desk and write his books.”

Paul Klee in one year produced 1,200 paintings. A visitor to Brancusi’s study was startled to seem him finish a sculpture only to laughingly throw it back into the box of clay.

Paul Cezanne worked so continuously that he skipped his mother’s funeral. Roger Fry describes him as “lacking the comparatively common gift for illustration” — and, in effect, spending his lifetime learning to paint. Rilke writes that “he lived like a Bohemian until his fortieth year. Only then did the taste for work open up for him. But then so much so that he did nothing but work for the last thirty years of his life.”

Paul Cezanne, “Self Portrait”

Much of this is usually framed as a debate between Romanticism and a more workmanlike approach to creativity. The ‘Romantics’ wear “forever 27” t-shirts and hold out hope that their icons will immolate in an absinthe-induced haze, or at least overdose on coke. The workmanticists tend to populate college writing departments or to write essays on ‘creativity’ in The New Yorker, and the argument there (made most famously by Malcolm Gladwell) is that the ‘talent’ has a way of being a front for the hard work underneath it — and it’s actually the hard work that is the talent.

But, for me, a different framing is coming into view. It’s the distinction between the idea of the artist’s career as the industry would like to present it, and the career as creativity actually plays out over the course of a person’s life. The industry wants ‘stories,’ so there tends to be the story of immense, overpowering talent to whet an audience’s appetite. Then there’s the story of ‘discovery’ — which is meant to be a point of origin, but in reality is very often the money just inadvertently showing up to take advantage of what the artist has already been doing for a long time. And then there’s the story of the ‘decline,’ which in reality very often tends to be the industry compelling the artist to do the same thing over and over again, because that contributes to the ‘brand,’ until eventually the public finally turns on the artist when they’ve reached the point of saturation and it’s time for new blood, and the artist may well combust from, if nothing else, having had to play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” 500,000 times.

Please God, not “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” again

The real arc of a creative person’s life is, I expect, something more like this. They discover what the Duplass Brothers call a “weird magic” inside themselves somewhere in adolescence and then either try to exploit it or try to bury it and get a real job. In their 20s, they may hit a break but, really, they’re flopping around, trying out different versions of themselves. In their 30s, they tend to find ‘it’ if they’re really disciplined — it being no more and no less than their truth, their distinctive voice. And then depending on the strength of their discipline — and whether they can catch a break from paying the mortgage and dealing with the kids — continue that into their 40s, 50s, 60s, and as in the occasional heartwarming NYT arts section stories, maybe into their 80s or 90s. The peak of it tends not to be when they gloriously flame out at 27 but when they hit a certain dull steadiness — the ability to know themselves and then to really explore the different aspects of themselves within the constraints of their art. This happens at a different time for everyone but would tend to fall, I suspect, when they’ve already been doing what they’re doing for ten or probably more like twenty years, are getting a little long in the tooth and no longer have the kind of freshness that the industry is so vampirishly eager for.

There are different gestures in the culture towards appreciating that this conception is closer to what the real arc of creativity is. Henry Oliver writes about it in his Second Act. Malcolm Gladwell did a great deal for this idea. People like Philip Glass, On Kawara, provide the temple-like atmosphere for this celebration of steady creativity. But I still find the framing of it to be not quite right — even the term ‘late bloomers’ plays into an industry-driven conception of how things are supposed to go. (The ‘late blooming’ very often means that that’s when somebody was ‘discovered’ as opposed to when they were actually doing the work.) But, basically, the further we get away from Romanticism and from VH1 the better. Our conceptions of creativity have, for a long time, been shaped by people who are interested, basically, in selling us coffee mugs. The effort of a more mature society is to try to really see things from the perspective of the creative.