Bookmarker tag: advice/not-selling-out (6 notes)

I made a point of catching the commercial. Orson offered the nation his assurance of the product’s worth with a voice as resonant as ever—a beautiful instrument indeed—and his presence was, in some grotesque way, still imposing. I couldn’t help wondering—as I do with any sponsoring of a product where an artist is paid to say what he’s paid to say—did Orson, himself, believe what he professed? Of course, he must be broke, so he has to earn his living this way. What a tragedy, to put such a talent to this use.

I contrasted this puffy huckster with the dauntless, spirited fellow I’d worked with in the thirties. I remarked how he dressed now, entirely in black, a formless, unbound costume, the kind of garment old women choose to conceal the infirmities of an aging body. I thought of what he was wearing as a great tent inside which he was hiding. I also thought of him—remembering his glory years—as a great beached whale, driven onshore by a storm or, more likely, by some mysterious turbulence in its essence. Why this slow suicide among whales? No one has ever found out. Was there some compulsion of shame or spiritual defect here that made Orson “let himself go,” then degrade his huge gifts by making commercials? Did he have an impulse, like the one that beached the whales, to rush to the end?

There are others whom the waves of thought and art in the forties, when they retreated, left stranded. Brando, like Welles neurotically overweight, and by some mysterious choice out of things, respecting no one and least of all his own profession and his incomparable gifts, hides on a dirt hill over the film colony or in Tahiti. There are others too, many of whom make fat livings by boosting commercial enterprises—you’ve seen them on TV. These men in their private moments still present themselves as rebels—like old actors coming back again and again to play a favorite role, the one in which they scored their great successes. But in their hearts, I believe, they know the unhappy truth, that they are now deep in the system they once loathed and attacked. Many of them are affluent, with a Mercedes or the assurance of a stretch limo and an obedient chauffeur at their command. They are all good men, men of the “movement,” as it was called, not the Communist movement but the surge of hope and confidence and determination that took over from the Great Depression, the anti-monopoly-capital movement, the common-man movement, the anti-colonialist movement of the thirties and forties. These were and are worthy causes, causes with which I am in sympathy, and, as much as the others, I hold on to the postures of those days and the dreams we once all had. But now, in the cold light of a cold morning, those dreams are troubled when they exist at all, and on the beach lie the remains of that other time.

Forty years is a long perspective, but perhaps it can afford a clear view. I look back at Clifford Odets—no one I’ve known was more talented. He couldn’t resist the money, the flattery, the apparent safety and security in the movie community. And he lost himself. Harold Clurman, one of the men I’ve most admired, was lucky: The people who ran the big studios did not want him, and he had to come east again; that saved him, for he seemed lost in southern California. But I’m not praising the East over the West. New York was simply my habitat, where my sources were. In Hollywood I’d have had to rely on my cleverness and my facility, which are technical, not artistic, qualities. The one time I met William Faulkner, I remember he wore rubber boots and they were covered with the mud of his Mississippi winter. He never left his home in Oxford for very long. John Steinbeck left northern California and looked a fool in New York theatre society and on the right bank of Paris. Saul Bellow is wise; he stays in Chicago. As for Nick Ray, who knew more about the back roads and so on, I saw him give himself over and be lost among the moguls of the film world. And Orson Welles, the most talented and inventive theatre man of my day: What an ass he seemed in the posh restaurants and hotels of Europe’s capitals, and how sad later, in financial desperation, making TV commercials. I was to watch with an awful pain how lost Tennessee Williams was as he shuttled around the bright spots of the world. The money his great success brought him allowed him to live in a way that squashed his talent. He would have been better off living in his native South, that part of the world where he was uncomfortable, even outraged, because he felt he was an outsider. Notice Picasso, how he stayed where his clay was, and Matisse and Renoir and Cézanne. It’s difficult to get Fellini out of Italy for any reason, or Bergman out of Sweden or Satyajit Ray out of Bengal. They know where their artistic roots are. I was with Kurosawa in New York City and he seemed like a child eager to return home—which he soon did. Read the letters of Gustave Flaubert and notice how rarely he made the trip—an hour? two?—to Paris, where his mistress was eagerly waiting to see him. He knew his material was in the province of Normandy. And Proust: He lived in what he wrote about—a life no one else could tolerate.

But from that time a happy change took place in his life. He expected his name to be covered in infamy, but it turned out quite the contrary. The lady who had commissioned the portrait went into raptures about this extraordinary artist, and our Chertkov’s studio filled with visitors wishing to double, and if possible increase tenfold, their own images. But the fresh, still innocent Chertkov, who felt in his soul that he was unworthy of taking on such an extraordinary task, in order to somewhat make amends and atone for his crime, decided to take up his work with all possible diligence, to double the exertion of his powers, which was the only thing that would produce miracles. But his intentions met with unforeseen obstacles. The visitors whose portraits he was painting were for the most part impatient, busy people in a hurry, and therefore, as soon as his brush began to create something a bit out of the ordinary, a new visitor would burst in and display his head in a most pompous way, burning with the desire to see it on canvas as soon as possible, and the artist would hurry to finish his work quickly.

His time was finally so filled up that he could not spend a single minute in reflection; and inspiration, continually destroyed at its very birth, finally got out of the habit of visiting him. Finally, in order to make his work go faster, he began to confine himself to well-known, defined, monotonous, long worn-out forms. Soon his portraits resembled those family depictions by the old artists, which are so often encountered in all the lands of Europe and in all corners of the world, where the ladies are depicted with their arms folded on their breasts and holding flowers in their hands, and the cavaliers in uniform with one hand tucked inside their jackets. Sometimes he wished to offer a new, not yet hackneyed posture that would be distinguished by originality and lack of constraint, but, alas! All that is unconstrained and easy is obtained by the poet and artist only in a most constrained way, and is the fruit of great exertions. In order to offer a new, bold expression, to grasp a new secret in painting, he would have to think for a long time, turning his eyes away from everything that surrounded him, flying away from everything worldly and from life. But he didn’t have time for this, and besides he was too exhausted by his daily work to be ready to receive inspiration; and the world he was using as a model to paint his works was too ordinary and monotonous to stimulate and stir his imagination. The deeply pondering and at the same time motionless face of the director of a department; the face of an Uhlan cavalry captain, handsome but always of the same type; the pale face of a St. Petersburg beauty with its forced smile; and many others that were just too ordinary—that is what appeared in turn every day before our painter. It seemed that his very brush had finally taken on the insipidity and lack of energy that marked his originals.

But the self-satisfied artist did not hear this talk and gloried in his universal fame, throwing his gold coins around and beginning to believe that everything on earth is ordinary and simple, that there is no such thing as a revelation from on high, and that everything must of necessity be subsumed under a strict order of tidiness and monotony. His life was reaching the years when everything that breathes of impulse begins to shrink within a person, when the powerful violin bow reaches the soul more faintly and does not twine about the heart with piercing sounds, when contact with beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burned-out feelings become more open to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little, imperceptibly, allow it to put them completely to sleep. Fame cannot satiate and give enjoyment to one who has stolen it and not earned it; it produces a constant excitement only in one who is worthy of it. And so all his feelings and impulses turned toward gold. Gold became his passion, his ideal, his terror, his enjoyment, and his goal. Bundles of banknotes grew in his chests. And like everyone who is given this terrible gift, he became boring, closed to everything and indifferent to everything. It seemed that he was ready to turn into one of those strange creatures who are sometimes encountered in the world, at whom a person full of energy and passion looks with horror, and who seem to him like living bodies that contain corpses within themselves. But a certain event powerfully shook him and gave his life a completely different turn.

Pure, unsullied, beautiful as a bride, the artist’s work stood before him. And if only the slightest desire to shine, if only a perhaps excusable vanity, if only a thought of showing itself off to the mob had been evident there—no, not a one! It rose up humbly. It was simple, innocent, and divine, like talent, like genius. The amazingly beautiful figures grouped themselves without constraint, freely, without touching the canvas, and, amazed by so many gazes directed at them, seemed to bashfully lower their beautiful eyelashes. In the divine features of the faces breathed those secret phenomena that the soul cannot, does not, know how to recount to another person; that which was expressed lay inexpressibly on them; and all this was tossed onto the canvas so easily, so humbly and freely, that it seemed to be the fruit of the artist’s momentary inspiration, a thought that had suddenly dawned upon him. The whole painting was—an instant, but an instant for which a whole human life is nothing but preparation. Involuntary tears were ready to roll down the faces of the visitors surrounding the painting. It seemed that all tastes, all bold, irregular deviations of taste, were merged into a silent hymn to the divine work. Motionless, with mouth open, Chertkov stood in front of the painting, and finally, when the visitors and experts began little by little to stir and to discuss the merits of the work, and when they finally turned to him and asked him to make his thoughts known, he regained consciousness. He wanted to assume an ordinary, indifferent air, wanted to offer the usual sort of banal opinion that stale, hard-hearted artists express: that the work was good and the artist’s talent was evident, but that one would wish for the idea and the finishing to be better executed in many places—but the words died on his lips, tears and sobs broke out discordantly in answer, and like a madman he ran out of the hall.