On Not Being Found

Franklin G. Weller, 'Hide and Go Seek,' albumin silver stereoview (1873), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef, 84.XC.979.8987

In a new book, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry, Stacey D’Erasmo asks half a dozen artists, “How do we keep doing this—making art?” I read it avidly, devouring D’Erasmo’s profiles of a painter, a composer, a garden designer, and others, especially enjoying the “fugitive, occasional memoir” (her words) that her disclosures about herself add up to. I did have a hiccup, however: I had to set the book down for a few hours in order to talk myself out of the expectation that either D’Erasmo or one of her interview subjects would answer the question as it applied to my own case. Selfishly and rather naively, I realized, I had been hoping that she or they would.

Alas, no one but me can—which doesn’t stop me from continuing to try to get other people to. In the gift shop of the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod, last month, I bought Mark Dery’s biography of Gorey and read it straight through, in that untroubled way that one reads when one finds a book that happens to be running parallel with one’s preoccupations at the moment. How did Gorey keep going? His special power seems to have been an ability to distill everything he loved into a distinctive sensibility—and then persevere in that sensibility all his life. In retrospect, the Gorey formula seems clear—William Roughhead + Edward Lear + Ronald Firbank, rendered graphically—and seems super gay, but it wasn’t clear that the elements belonged together before he put them together, and the homosexuality of it all (which comes with this asterisk: though Gorey’s crushes were all on men, as a practical matter he seems to have been ace) didn’t become transparent until later. The stubbornness is what I came away from his biography most admiring—the reserves of patience that enabled him to draw the many delicate, etching-like hash marks that texture the wallpapers of his dark rooms, and to keep drawing these hash marks in small-press book after small-press book, for decades, until at last America decided they were awesome.

That “at last” doesn’t arrive in time for everyone. In most of D’Erasmo’s case studies, however—since she has chosen artists who made it into old age, some selection bias may be at work here—there’s a windfall at some point, an unexpected, not-to-be-relied-upon intersection of popular taste with the genius of the artist in question. In Gorey’s case, he got lucky with his set design for a 1970s production of a play about Dracula, which brought him money, and then with his animated title-credit sequence for the PBS show Mystery, which brought him fame. I want to say that money and fame, when they came, altered him not at all, that he kept on going exactly as he had before, and in many ways this is true, but Dery reveals that Gorey’s focus did change, after Dracula. The experience revived his love of creating and staging plays, and in later life, he devoted more and more of himself to them, the more absurdist the better. The plays weren’t what America wanted from him at that point—having discovered the droll little illustrated books, America wanted more of those—which dissuaded him not at all. Were the plays the best use of his genius? Maybe not, but it was his life. What stayed consistent, in other words, was not his art, but the stubbornness with which he kept executing it.

I can do stubbornness, too, I’m pretty sure. And I can definitely do drift in kind of art. I’m supposed to be writing a third novel, and maybe someday I will, but lately I only seem able to finish poems and short stories.

In a chapter that profiles country musician Steve Earle, D’Erasmo quotes the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott:

In the artist of all kinds, I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. This might account for the fact that we cannot conceive of an artist’s coming to the end of the task that occupies his whole nature.

In the same essay, Winnicott tells the story of a patient whose private journal was read by her mother when she was nine. On the first page of the journal, the girl had written, “What a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Her mother asked her where she got the quote, revealing she had read the journal, which upset the patient. But the patient believed she wouldn’t have been upset if her mother had read her journal without revealing she had read it. This, Winnicott comments, “is a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek in which it is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.”

The two moments in Winnicott’s essay seem to get at something profound about the creative impulse. And the two moments, it should be noted, contradict each other. Does the artist urgently need not to be found, or would it be a disaster not to be found? Yes, seems to be the answer. D’Erasmo brings in Winnicott in order to throw light on the anxiety that she feels has driven her own writing, an anxiety to report on “an interior world that has often felt as if it was burning down.” Anxiety in the sense of both wanting to share and feeling no one should see.

The girl’s quote comes from the Book of Proverbs, by the way—from a chapter in the most public and available book in the Western world. On the other hand, the import of the quote seems to be that the higher truth about a person is in her secrets. At the start of his essay, Winnicott writes that he surprised himself, in the writing of it, by “staking a claim . . . to the right not to communicate.” He concludes that “the individual person knows that [her core self] must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality.”

What does this have to do with going on as an artist? One of the things artists must do is let themselves be made use of, which is somewhat endangering. To let oneself be published is to let oneself be made use of. The other day, a newcomer to my gym asked what I did for a living, and when I said I was a writer, he said, “So I can google you and find out all about you?” and it brought home to me how strange it is that for the sake of my career I’ve agreed to be exposed.

There are other, more-mixed forms of use. Gorey let his illustrations appear on the front of other people’s books, while he was a designer of paperbacks at Anchor, and onstage in other people’s plays. He didn’t have much to do with the creation of the Mystery animations, Dery reveals, apart from granting the producer of the sequences the right to combine and put into motion his illustrations. How can you let yourself be made use of while continuing to protect the core of you that must never be communicated? That, I think, is the hard part. Making money is hard, too, and maybe for the same reason? The paradox of needing to be found and not found may explain the stubbornness and drift in someone like Gorey (or me)—the insistence on not changing and on changing. In order to continue, you have to be able to not continue. Not being found is a tricky game to keep playing.