In Praise of Bourgeois Art

I've had reason to think lately about how the making of art and the hum drum professional life intersect. This would normally be a busy time at work, but this year it is even more so, in part because I'm going through one of those gradual increases of responsibilities which may or may not eventually lead to a promotion and a new, busier status quo. This busyness at work intersects with my own self imposed busyness. This is also production weekend for our community theater production of Twelve Angry Men, so I've been down at the old courthouse for two-and-a-half hours a night for the last couple weeks, sitting at the jury table in dress rehearsals as self important adman Juror #12.

And on Monday night I finally finished the latest installment of the The Great War. This was a necessary first step to my commitment to get serious about the revise-and-submit part of being a novelist. Goal for the next month or two: revise and expand If You Can Get It so that Kristy and Katie can get a shot at having their day in print. (I'll probably de-publish all those posts when I send the novel out, so this represents a last call on the original version.)

At a certain point, thinking of all this writing, I was telling myself: What I need to do is get away from all this. Once the play is over, I should arrange to take a long weekend off, go away somewhere, and just write all day long. A writer's retreat. I could get so much writing and revising done. It would be like being a real writer for a couple days.

But of course, that's a false siren call. Not only would it be really jerky to stick MrsDarwin alone for a couple days due to a needless trip right after the time stresses of a show's production week, but the fact is that the life of a "real writer" is not some airy thing where one is free to spend all day at the keyboard in some picturesque locale far from the worries of cleaning the living room, reading bedtime stories, and justifying the sell in story for 2019 pricing. Being a real writer consists of writing while in the life one actually has. Sure, if I had a couple days and a good outline, I could probably write more than I do in my normal routine during a month or two of time stolen between ten at night and one in the morning. But fantasizing about writing in such unrealistic conditions is self defeating. The distraction free life is not mine, and I don't evenP really want it to be.

Perhaps due to its creative nature, the artistic life seems prey to more than the usual number of illusions, and some of these have to do with what it means to do art. There are images of what the artistic life should be like: The starving artist living on nothing in some exotic locale while devoting all time to art. The self destructive artist destroying relationships and splitting time between substance abuse and creating brilliant art.

Yes, some people have fit these molds, but many haven't, and none of them are necessary in order to produce good art. Indeed, when actually lived rather than watched in some costume drama, poverty or dysfunctional relationships or substance abuse are things which can eat up attention and keep someone from investing the time necessary to produce good art. Producing art requires just that, sitting down and producing it. Following some trope of 'the artistic life' is in no sense necessary to it.

I was struck by this recently when reading a piece which sought to contemplate to what extent it was possible to do art (in the case of the article, acting) in a "safe space" during the current moment of heightened awareness of harassment. The author argued that art couldn't really be safe, and that while it was important that those in the artistic world engage in abuses of power, that something as small scale as a community theater production must necessarily involve lots of drinking and despair and yelling and melodrama and hookups.

Nonsense. Not only does theater not require these things, but the more your theater group can focus on their job, putting on a play, and avoid bringing personal chaos into it, the better the art you will produce. Fighting and melodrama aren't essential to acting, they're detrimental to it. The audience doesn't come to see your artistic experience, they come to see a play that actually goes well, and for a play to go well requires organization and a cast and crew that are dedicated to working hard on the project at hand.

This is why I'm always inspired by hearing about artists, writers in my case, who produced good art while also holding down a solid job in an ordinary, middle class sort of way.

Anthony Trollope, in addition to being one of the great English novelists of the 19th century, put in a full career in the post office. Even his writing routine was orderly and professional: He'd sit down each day for a set amount of time and try hard to produce a set number of pages. If his time was up in the middle of a sentence, he'd leave off there and resume the next day. If he finished one novel during a day's writing time, he'd start the next one without skipping a beat.

Even the notably cutting edge poet T. S. Eliot simultaneously pursued a successful career as a banker at Loyd's Bank in London.

The novelist Aldous Huxley visited Eliot at Lloyd’s and wrote: “(Eliot) was not on the ground floor nor even on the floor under that, but in a sub-sub-basement sitting at a desk which was in a row of desks with other bank clerks.”

And while Eliot’s banking days are no secret, what is less appreciated is that he was really good at his day job. Huxley observed that Eliot was indeed “the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks.” And an officer of Lloyd’s, upon hearing of Eliot’s success with his “hobby,” remarked that Eliot had a bright future at Lloyd’s if he wanted it. “If he goes on as he has been doing, I don’t see why — in time, of course, in time — he mightn’t even become Branch Manager.”

I find it inspiring that our cast is made up, not of edgy personalities living 'artistic' lives, but of half a dozen lawyers and assorted other holders of mundane jobs (project manager, math teacher, pricing director, etc.) who show up every night to put the work to make a good show. And as a writer I try to remind myself often of the good writers, writers better than I will ever be, who held down solid jobs and were good at them. Being a writer, or any other kind of artist, does not require adherence to some edgy trope. It requires only one thing, that whoever we are, whatever our vocation and employment, we sit down and create works that help others see the world a little more truly through the lens of our creations.