It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much… read article

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over the historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.”  Of the three points made by English novelist Julian Barnes, the first is dubious, the second and third inarguably true. To say someone is not in control of his temperament is usually an after-the-fact excuse for lousy behavior. Only the mentally ill and very young children may have persuasive explanations. The “historical moment” is beyond every individual's control and an aesthetic is a wrestling match between a writer’s gift and his ability to persevere. Even the best writers sometimes disappoint. Titus Andronicus, anyone?   Barnes has published fourteen novels. I’ve read his third, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which carries the only blurb ever written by Steven Millhauser. The sentence quoted above is from the pages devoted by Barnes to Jules Renard in his 2008 memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He also selected and introduced Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, riverrun, 2020). Barnes describes Renard as “one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives.” He recounts the Frenchman’s difficult childhood. His father didn’t talk to his mother for the last thirty years of his life. Jules, one of three children, “was used as a go-between and porte parole [spokesman]: an unenviable role for a child, if an instructive one for a future writer.”   Renard’s Journal is laced with familiarities. Reading it seems like reading a diary I kept long ago and forgot. He knew Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, Rostand and Gide. “Yet he could be a sombre presence in such company,” Barnes writes, “unforgiving and bearish.” Barnes quotes a “sophisticate” who describes Renard as a “rustic cryptogram.” Renard’s father takes his own life with a shotgun – both barrels – in 1897. His brother suffers a fatal heart attack four years later. ("The writer cannot help noting the improvised cushion on which his dead brother’s head is resting: a Paris telephone directory.”) In 1909, Renard’s mother is seated on the brickwork of the village well. She falls in backward and is killed. Barnes writes:   “Renard cannot determine whether it was an accident or another suicide; he calls his mother’s death ‘impenetrable.’ He argues: ‘Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible, is the strongest argument for His existence.’ He concludes: ‘Death is not an artist.’”   Renard would die on May 22, 1910 at the age of forty-six.

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In the “Prologue” to his 1962 prose collection The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden borrows a conceit from Lewis Carroll and divides all writers – “except the supreme masters who transcend all systems of classification” – into Alices and Mabels. In Alice in Wonderland, the title character, pondering her identity, says “. . . I’m sure I can’t be Mabel for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little. Beside she’s she and I’m I.” The categorization recalls Sir Isaiah Berlin’s Foxes and Hedgehogs. Of course, all of humanity can also be divided into those who divide all of humanity into two categories and those who don’t.  Leading the list of Auden’s Alices is Montaigne, followed by the names of eight other writers, including Andrew Marvell, Jane Austen and Paul Valéry. Like Alice, Montaigne knew “all sorts of things” – he is among the most learned of writers -- even while asking “Que sais-je?”: “What do I know?” Montaigne begins his longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” (1576) with these words:   “In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and that all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.”   Montaigne distills skepticism, which isn’t the same as nihilism or know-it-all-ism. It’s closer to the absence of naiveté, credulity and mental laziness, coupled with an open mind and curiosity. Montaigne was a benign skeptic and a Roman Catholic who lived through the French Wars of Religion. Auden wrote “Montaigne” in 1940, the year France fell to the Germans.   “Outside his library window he could see A gentle landscape terrified of grammar, Cities where lisping was compulsory, And provinces where it was death to stammer.   “The hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took This donnish undersexed conservative To start a revolution and to give The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book.   “When devils drive the reasonable wild, They strip their adult century so bare, Love must be re-grown from the sensual child,   ‘To doubt becomes a way of definition, Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer, And laziness a movement of contrition.”   “Death to stammer” is no exaggeration. In the sixteenth century, speech defects were often equated with possession by the devil. The final stanza is a writer’s credo. Auden was born on this day in 1907. He shares a birthday with my youngest son, David, who turns twenty-two today.     [The Montaigne passage is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

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