The Writer’s Voice by Al Alvarez

Author:Al Alvarez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2005-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

The Cult of Personality and the Myth of the Artist

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

—FLAUBERT

All the grief of this century has come from trying to turn life into art. Think about it.

—ROBERT STONE

i

I have been talking so far about two of the three R’s: the writer’s patient, exacting quest for a distinctive voice of his own, and the reader’s equally exacting obligation to listen while he reads. Both writing and reading, in the intensive way I’ve described, are private, inward experiences that take place, like thinking, in silence. In order to write a poem or even an authentic sentence, and to hear it properly, you have to read it out loud silently in your head. But once the poem or the piece of prose is finished, it is sent out into the world to find an audience. This is where the third R comes in—the arithmetic of sales and the razzmatazz it generates in order to turn a writer into a marketable personality—and its effects, in the last few decades, have become increasingly confusing.

There is also a fourth R in the equation, Romanticism and its legacy, and to describe its effect, I want to start with a fragment of partial and potted literary history. Romanticism was a sudden, violent explosion of emotion, enthusiasm, and introspection that erupted in the second half of the eighteenth century, destroying the classical belief in order, reason, symmetry, and calm and clearing the ground for the cult of personality by redefining the concept of genius. Genius in the modern sense, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary—“instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imaginative creation, original thought, invention, or discovery”—is an innovation of the late eighteenth century and it is not in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. Alexander Pope may have been acknowledged as Augustan England’s most gifted poet, but he was admired, above all, for the brilliance with which he refined and perfected classical forms, and his patrons regarded him, as the Esterházys regarded Haydn, as little more than an exalted servant. Although Pope was touchy, vengeful, and not famous for his modesty, he believed, like all the Augustans, that “whatever is, is right,” including the way society was ordered; when he talked about the World (usually with a capital “W”), he meant the bewigged and corseted beau monde, and he accepted his place in it. For Romantics like Shelley, the world meant untamed nature with a quivering sensibility at its center, and poets were “unacknowledged legislators” whose artistic freedom was part of the larger political movement toward liberty, equality, and fraternity that was shaking society. Like the French Revolution, Romanticism was founded on an idea of freedom—the freedom to feel, react, and create in a personal and unpredictable way—and it involved a profound shift of focus—away from established Augustan certainties and toward subjective experience. Genius as we now understand it is a wholly Romantic concept: not just a great artist, but a great artist

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