The Nature of the Artist

THE other day I had a letter from a woman in a little town in Michigan. Fremont, the town was, population thirty-six hundred. I had not met the lady, and this is what she wrote: “Dear Mrs. Bowen, Some time ago I read a quotation where you said that if you died and turned up somewhere, you would know it was heaven when Mozart came forward and told you, ‘Mrs. B., I am so glad you are here. I have just written 258 new string quartets, and we badly need a second fiddle.’ ”

The quotation was letter-perfect, and my correspondent went on to say she had given the matter much thought. “In case you get there first,” she added, “please mention me for the cello position, if it isn’t already filled. I promise to practice all I can in preparation.”

Music has been, and is, the happiest single factor of my life. More than once I have testified in print to the joys of sitting in the second fiddler’s chair and following, under the lamp, players more skillful than I by far, but equal in their love of chamber music and their willingness to keep on playing until two in the morning. Star events in my life were playing Mozart string quintets with Piatagorsky, quartets with Sidney Griller and with Boris Croyt of the Budapest. I know why these brilliant players let me sit in with them, and it has little to do with the fact that I spent, long ago, four years at music school, two at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore and two at the Juilliard in New York. The reason I am made part of these delightful sessions is that the musicians have read my books. And they have not hesitated to tell me so: “I read your John Adams book and I wanted to see what you were like.”

There is more than one road to Elysium, and, as Francis Bacon said, the fairer path is longer about. If musicians do me the honor to be curious about me, it is as nothing compared with my curiosity concerning musicians. Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive. With me the appetite has centered on the genus lawyer and the genus musician. While I was writing the biographies of Tchaikovsky and the brothers Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein, I became familiar with many great musicians of the past—not only famous virtuosos, celebrated performers, and conductors of orchestras, but men and women of the profession who truly loved to make music, and said so. (And to be a musical celebrity is, I may add, by no means synonymous with a true love of music.) 1 recall these men and women not only with respect and wonder but with affection; their zeal encourages the amateur. I think of Borodin, the composer who, when he was a medical student, played string quartets once a week, and used to walk seven Russian miles with his cello, not being able to afford cab fares. Then there was Paderewski’s teacher, Theodor Leschetizky. To Leschetizky it was incomprehensible that a musician could be without music even for a day. (Incidentally, his dog was named Solo.) Leschetizky could not keep away from music. On entering the room he sometimes played a chord on the piano, as if to say good morning, and on leaving, to say good-by. Once, when a talented pupil and her sister were going away, after a visit to his house, Leschetizky helped them pack, then exclaimed, “But you haven’t said good-by to the piano!” Seeing they were hurried, Leschetizky went to the piano himself and played a joyous little good-by, adding, “It will be several days before you can hear a piano again.”

MUSICIANS have a lighthearted way of identifying music with the events and associations of their daily lives. Take Karl Maria von Weber, who composed so many charming waltzes, and whose music seems to be coming back in fashion. Weber and his close friend, Gansbacher, when writing to each other, always referred to their several lady friends by musical keys: “I see or hear nothing of D minor; she is quite dead to me, which causes me heartfelt regret. F major has disappeared altogether.” I think of Henry Purcell in the seventeenth century, who wrote such truly enchanting music. When Purcell published his book of Sonatas a Tré — those beautiful sonatas for two violins and harpsichord — he wrote in the preface, “The Author heartily wishes that his Book may fall into no other hands but theirs who carry musical Souls about them.”

I have often wished the same about my own books after writing them — even those books which did not deal with music. People who carry musical souls about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasing propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong, they may be mistaken. It is hard for me to acknowledge that there actually exist people — breathing, sentient beings — who do not like music, persons who otherwise can be agreeable enough, even brilliant intellectually, and seemingly normal. When I was younger, I used to try to reform these unfortunates. I urged them to take ear-training lessons, or offered to lend them my third-best violin. “Just take it home and keep it around,” I said. It seemed to me impossible that a person who once had held a violin beneath his chin could resist .... Well, the Greeks used to say that any man who had looked on Helen of Troy was never the same again.

In this connection it is odd that I elected to spend eight or nine years writing the biographies of two men who were totally indifferent to music: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of our United States Supreme Court and Sir Edward Coke of England, who was Queen Elizabeth’s Attorney General and Chief Justice under James I. If Coke loved music, he never said so, to my knowledge at least. As for Mr. Justice Holmes — let me quote to you his definition of music. It is true the definition was made for legal purposes, pronounced from the Supreme Court during a plagiarism suit that had to do with a mechanical player piano. Even so, no musician could have written it. Here it is: “A musical composition is a rational collocation of sounds apart from concepts, reduced to a tangible expression from which the collocation can be reproduced either with or without continuous human intervention.”

For me to write a whole book about such a man must have been sheer perversity. Mrs. Holmes, otherwise an enchanting woman, said straight out, “Music is a noise.” During the years when I was writing Yankee from Olympus, it was always a relief to turn to the Justice’s father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes of Boston, who played the violin — very badly. He took it up in his fifties and alarmed his family by practicing in a downstairs parlor with the door open. He was quite airy and confident. Learning to play the violin, the doctor assured the household, was a mere matter of application and patience.

John Adams, our second President, liked music, I believe. In writing his biography I decided that if Adams had not had such a bleak Puritan bringing-up, he might have derived much joy from music. He played no instrument, but he liked to sing and to hear other people sing. He was sorely tried by the nasal whine which passed for Psalm singing in his New England Congregational Church; he did not find it conducive to gratitude toward one’s Maker. The Episcopalians, unfortunately, sang much better. “More genteelly,” was the way Adams put it. When John Adams went down to Philadelphia for the Continental Congress in 1774, he became greatly daring, and strayed around the block to attend Mass at the Romish Chapel. He confessed himself half tranced by the organ and the choir that sang so sweetly. “I wonder,” he wrote to his wife, “how Luther ever broke the spell.”

It’s hard to remember the naïveté of our nation concerning music, even much later in history than John Adams’ time. American audiences of the 1840s were offered tricks and stunts in lieu of music. Volovsky the Pole came on tour and advertised that he could play four hundred notes in one musical measure. Leopold Meyer, known as the “sledge hammer artist,” played roulades on the keyboard with his left hand, while with his right he waved gaily to the ladies in the audience. Then there was Henri Herz, the Parisian piano manufacturer. At one of his American concerts, Herz’s manager advertised that the hall would be lighted by a thousand wax candles. A man in the audience complained that he had counted and there were only 999. So Herz sent the man a candle. Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, was advertised by that astute manager, P. T. Barnum, not as a singer and musician but as an angel from heaven, an example of sweet unsullied womanhood. When she landed in New York, Jenny Lind was escorted from her ship by five hundred red-shirted, trumpet-blowing firemen.

The Barnum attitude was not confined entirely to America. Debussy noted it in the Paris of the 1890s. Knowledgeable, urbane Debussy remarked one day, “The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always a hope that something dangerous may happen. Monsieur X may play the violin with Monsieur Y on his shoulders, or Monsieur B may conclude his piece by playing the piano with his teeth.”

I am not sure the attitude has disappeared, nor do I think we need to be too severe about it. Virtuoso playing, virtuoso conducting of orchestras has perforce the quality of theater in it, even of theatricality. Tickets must be sold, concerts are apt to be long, and a little diversion can be helpful. Do you recall the musical ladies in E. M. Forster’s delicious novel, Howard’s End? The ladies were discussing the symphonies at the Queen’s Hall in London, in particular the merits of a certain performance of Beethoven’s Fifth. “Oh, surely you remember!” says one of the ladies. “That was the time the sandy cat ran round the balustrade.”

WHAT is the motivation that lies behind great art? What propels the artist to his work? What keeps him on the track, that extraordinary track from which nothing can divert him? Is it circumstance: is it something in the original gene? While I was studying for the biographies of Tchaikovsky and the Rubinsteins, I read what material I could find about genius, from graphs drawn up in university laboratories to Santayana on aesthetics and to Freud and others in psychiatry. I found no satisfactory answer. So I turned to a study of the lives of artists, of the conditions under which men produce their best work and function at their highest and happiest. I noted especially the artist’s concept of himself, his confessed estimate of his powers, his personal morality and outlook on his world.

Critics are prodigal with notions as to what motivated certain compositions of the masters. Brahms’s biographers have said that he wrote such and such music because he was “grieving over Clara Schumann,” Robert Schumann’s wife, with whom Brahms was in love for years. Maybe the critics were right. But what Brahms himself said at the time was, “Some of my best ideas come to me while I am brushing my shoes before dawn.”

I think he was serious when he said it. I heard a magnificent painter say that she got her best ideas while she was taking her bath before breakfast. Many years ago, Theodore Roethke, the distinguished poet, told me that in order to write poetry he had to have, when he got up in the morning, “a sense of well-being.”

I think I know what he meant — a sense of his powers serving him, pulling together with all their native force. Whether a person is endowed with big powers or little powers, he has to feel confidence, complete and functioning. This sense of well-being has little to do with happiness, as the world counts happiness. Poets, novelists, even historians, sometimes write from a sense of desperation, pour it out, and thus get rid of it. Observe for a moment that gloomy Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle (I happen to be his fervent admirer). In 1835, Carlyle was in London working on his history of the French Revolution — two volumes filled with life, color, movement. “The great difficulty,” Carlyle wrote in his diary, “is to keep oneself in right balance, not despondent, not exasperated, defiant, free and clear.”

While I was writing Yankee from Olympus, I typed that out and tacked it over my desk. Now let me give you the rest of Carlyle’s paragraph: “defiant, free and clear. . . . Nevertheless,” he says, “it is now some three-and-twenty months since I have earned one penny by the craft of literature. I have been ready to work. I know no fault I have committed. To ask able editors to employ me will not improve but worsen matters. I am like a spinster, waiting to be married. . . . Write then and complain of nothing — defy all things. In this humour I write my book, without hope of it, except of being done with it.”

Now, I suspect that Carlyle was not quite as depressed after he wrote those lines as before. Artists have a way of making gloomy, desperate confessions in diaries, and writing gloomy, desperate letters to their friends, about how they will never be able to finish this book or this symphony. Then they go back to work with the greatest zest. There is excitement in the very act of composition. Some of you know this at first hand — a deep satisfaction when the thing begins to take shape. Actually, I wonder if life holds a deeper satisfaction. If Carlyle wrote his book “without hope of it, except of being done with it,” that still gave room for quite a lot of hope. The time when an artist truly despairs is not when his wife leaves him or he cannot pay the bills, but when in his work he falls short, knows himself blocked, stopped, helpless, and has no hope of “being done with it,” almost as if breath itself had been cut off. One feels sorry for Rameau, the composer, as he grew old. “From day to day my taste improves,” he said. “But I have lost all my genius.”

I HAVE noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. I am impressed by the really formidable discipline under which great artists operate. I do not refer here to moral discipline, or the pleasing virtues which lead to good citizenship. I mean artistic discipline — discipline with regard to working hours, a hoarding of themselves so they can pour it out where it really counts. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness. Tchaikovsky, for example, was a man of much charm and friendliness. People used to follow him around town. Everybody wanted him at parties, and Tchaikovsky liked parties. In 1937 I was in Russia and visited Klin, outside Moscow, where Tchaikovsky had a country villa, I saw a sign which used to hang outside the gate. It read: “P. I. Tchaikovsky. Receives Mondays and Thursdays, 3 to 5. Not at home. Please do not ring.”

I think the world at large has little conception of how hard great artists work. You can say they are driven, you can say they are inspired. One thing is sure: from an early age they are aware of their natural endowments. I know of not one first-rate talent who was not — or is not — entirely conscious of his gifts. If anyone called him genius to his face, he would look uncomfortable and probably be rude. Stanislavsky, the great theatrical producer, said, “Only home-made geniuses boast of their nearness to Apollo, of their all-embracing inner fire.” When Johann Sebastian Bach was asked the secret of his mastery, he replied, “I worked hard.” Charles Darwin and Sir Isaac Newton had similar answers to that question. Some of the classic composers acknowledged their talent with a splendid simplicity. “I know,” said Haydn, “that God has bestowed a talent upon me, and I thank Him for it.” Someone protested the gaiety of Haydn’s church music. “I cannot help it,” Haydn replied. “I give forth what is in me. When I think of the Divine Being, my heart is so full of joy that the notes fly off as from a spindle. And as I have a cheerful heart, He will pardon me if I serve Him cheerfully.”

Haydn had a personal habit, as a composer, which, when I read about it years ago, clarified a number of things for me. As a beginner, I was fearful of the act of writing. To sit down at the typewriter, alone in the room, and start a book or a chapter or a short story seemed to me a terrifying act of presumption, though a thrilling one. I used to get all dressed up, at eight o’clock in the morning or earlier, put on my good suit, good shoes, lipstick, everything, and sit solemnly down at my desk on the third floor. I remember one Saturday my daughter of eight dashed in and found me at the typewriter, thus accoutered. She said, “Ma, you going someplace this morning?” I told her I hoped so, I hoped so indeed. She understood, and laughed, and left the room.

It was during those early, tentative days that I read how Joseph Haydn, when he sat down to compose, used to put on full court regalia, gold-braided coat, buckled shoes, and a diamond ring which the Emperor had given him. It was certainly arguing from the sublime to the ridiculous. Yet if Joseph Haydn was awe-struck before the act of composition, then C. D. Bowen surely had a right to shake in her shoes. Haydn’s character was like his music, the more intimately you know it, the more you love and admire. Before he was sixty, Haydn never traveled, but lived quietly on the estate of his patron, Prince Esterházy, and wrote innumerable pieces for water parties, balls, and family birthdays. But when Prince Esterházy died, Salomon, the violin virtuoso, hurried to Vienna and urged Haydn to tour Europe with him. They would play in every important city of the Continent — a dazzling prospect. Haydn’s friends worried, because Haydn was an unworldly soul, and they wondered how he would handle himself. Mozart especially was uneasy. “Papa,” Mozart said, “Papa Haydn, you have no training for the great world, and you speak few languages.” “Ach!” Haydn said. “My language is understood all over the world.”

When Haydn was an old man, he made his last public appearance. It was in Vienna, in 1808, and his choral work, The Creation, was given before a brilliant audience. When the singers reached the passage, “And there was light,” the audience burst into applause. Haydn, overcome with excitement, exclaimed aloud, “Not I, but a power from above created that.”

Artists, writers, even great philosophers, are sometimes quite ingenuous about their powers, indignantly surprised when someone does not recognize them for what they are. One of the stories I like best is about Schopenhauer. Not an endearing character, certainly, but hardly one to ignore. Apparently Schopenhauer ate, quantitatively, like an elephant. One day a young man, an admirer, came to lunch, and sat marveling at the philosopher’s capacity. The young man stayed for supper, and the sage went at it as if he had not been fed in a week. Finally the young man said, “Sir, why do you eat so much?”

“I eat a great deal,” Schopenhauer replied, “because I am a great man.”

Your great artist looks on his talent as a responsibility laid on him by God, or perhaps a curse set on him by the devil. Whichever way he looks at it, while he is writing that book or composing that symphony, Doom hangs over him. He is afraid something will interfere to stop him. Tchaikovsky was forever writing to his friends, “I fear that I shall die with my music in me.” Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours. In psychiatric terms I have heard this described as guilt, under the theory that artistic creation is a lifelong, recurring act of expiation. This is hard for me to accept. I think rather that artists dread death because they love life. Artists, even at their gloomiest, seem to maintain a constant love affair with life, marked by all the ups and downs, the depressions and ecstasies of infatuation. Artists have so much to do and so little time to do it! Joseph Conrad was convinced that he would die early, although there was nothing wrong with his health. He bemoaned this sad, oncoming fate — and lived to a ripe enough age. Do you remember the New Yorker profile of William Faulkner some years ago? Walking along New York city streets, Faulkner would look over his shoulder. “I got a Doom follerin’ me,” he said.

It is amusing to observe the ways and means used to ward off the evil eye. Tchaikovsky was convinced that he dare not let himself look for success at the next concert. He was aware that his new symphony was good; he did not doubt it. But at the first performance, something would surely go wrong. The audience would be filled with his sworn enemies, or the timpani player would be late with his roll, the cymbalist would let go two bars early. When Tchaikovsky conducted the orchestra himself, he suffered from a neurotic fear that his head would fall off. He had an awkward time, holding it down with one hand while he conducted with the other. I used to try it, while I was writing his biography.

Nineteenth-century romanticists indulged, I believe, in the loudest moans on record. Among these romantics, Wagner yelled more agonizingly than any. Have you read his letters to Liszt, written when Wagner was young, living in exile? Here is a sample: “Everything seems so waste, so waste, so waste! Dearest friend, art, with me, after all, is a pure stopgap, nothing else. A stopgap in order to live at all. It is therefore with genuine despair that I always resume art. The only thing I want is money; that, at least, one ought to be able to get. Love I abandon, and art!”

Now, guess how the next sentence reads; “Well, the Rheingold is ready, readier than I ever thought it would be. I went to this music with so much faith, so much joy. And with a true fury of despair I continued, and have at last finished it.”

Your true artist, let us note, always does finish. Sometimes he rages, like Wagner. Sometimes he finishes in serenity, and writes at the bottom of his music paper, like Palestrina and Bach, the words Soli Dei Gloria. But he finishes. This is not to say that great artists are never blocked in their inspiration. On the contrary, they can be temporarily put off by failure, by success, by illness, by disappointment, or perhaps by some difficulty intrinsic to the composition itself, one of those snags, those compositional pitfalls that lie in wait on every page. Robert Frost once told me he could not write if he heard that somebody had said something mean about him.

ALL artists quiver under the lash of adverse criticism. Rachmaninoff’s first symphony was a failure. So Rachmaninoff took sick (and I mean, took sick) and lay around on sofas for a year, without writing one measure of music. He was twenty-two at the time. But he recovered, and wrote much music. When Beethoven heard that a certain conductor refused to perform one of his symphonies, he went to bed and stayed there until the symphony was performed. Charles Dickens was forever defending himself against criticism, writing letters to the press and protesting that he was misunderstood. Yet neither criticism nor misunderstanding stopped his output. “Dickens,” said G. K. Chesterton, “was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody can kill.”

The recovery is what counts, not the illness. Certain artists work better when they are in rebellion against something or other — against the society in which they live, against their immediate boss if they have one, or their wife or their husband or their best friend. Such a person enjoys all the arrogance of opposition, with little to lose. That of course is one reason why success is a danger — it doubles the risk.

To do their best work, different personalities require differing degrees of hardship or ease. William James has pointed this out eloquently in his Varieties of Religious Experience. “Some men and women there are who can live on smiles and the word ‘yes’ forever,” James says. “For others, this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency and effort, some no! no! must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual difference,” he says, “in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yesses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in the right proportion for him. ‘This,’ he feels, ‘is my proper vocation, this is the optimum, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight and hardship without which my soul’s energy expires.’ ”

As a biographer, I am always curious to see how a talented man reacts to his first great success. I once heard a psychiatrist say that he had seen more people break down after success than after failure. Woodrow Wilson remarked that many a man has been ruined by his secondary successes. Young artists in particular, I think, can be thus diverted, pushed off their true road by the praise of friends and neighbors. Brahms wrote to his publisher, concerning Max Bruch, the composer. “Bruch is shortsighted. He sees only to the next laurel wreath.”

Johannes Brahms wrote enough string quartets, he said, to paper his room. Of these he submitted only three for publication, the three that we know. One night in a Vienna café, a young composer was complaining of the poor reception his first opera had had from the critics. “Ach!” Brahms said, “It is customary to drown the first litter.”

Brahms had a right to say it; he had destroyed his own offspring when he considered them unworthy. The point to bear in mind, I think, is that, to hit the target, a man has to shoot off much ammunition. One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity — of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?

The stories I have told here are an illustration of the artist and his nature —of the artist’s faith in himself, of his defiance of society when it does not serve his art, of his self-discipline, his selfindulgence, his golden humor, or his nervous lack of humor on occasion. Most of the men whom I mentioned lived in times past. Yet I cannot think the artist’s nature has changed in a mere century or two, or that it will change. It is the environment that changes. If Picasso paints a Guernica, it is because Picasso lives in times of horror and despair. If sculptured man is distorted in iron and stone, it is because the artist has reason to see him as distorted. In the discord and formlessness of modern music we hear and feel the harshness of man’s present fate.

These pictures and this music are not pretty. Let us take pride, however, that in America the artist is free to express reality as he sees it. But freedom for the artist, as for anyone else, is an evanescent thing. Overnight it can vanish. A sense of freedom, the sense of well-being that Theodore Roethke spoke of, is partly contingent on the poet’s assurance that his environment respects his art, holds it high in estimation — as high, for instance, as it holds science, the launching of satellites, or important journeys to the moon.