Klarinet Archive - Posting 000083.txt from 2007/05

From: Simon Aldrich <simonaldrich@-----.ca>
Subj: [kl] Touching the Soul, Turning the Stomach
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 11:18:48 -0400

Diana Jean Schemo wrote an essay, published in the New York Times on
January 1st, 1995, titled "Between the Art and the Artist Lies the
Shadow",
subtitled " Touching the Soul, Turning the Stomach".
The article, included below, examines the question of whether art
should be considered independent of the person who created it.
(NB I don't necessarily agree or disagree with the points raised in
the article. I send the article along simply because I think it
touches on some of the issues recently discussed on this list).
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---
Simon Aldrich

Clarinet Faculty - McGill University
Principal Clarinet - Orchestre Metropolitain de Montreal
Principal Clarinet - Orchestre de l'Opera de Montreal
Clarinet - Nouvel Ensemble Moderne
Buffet-Crampon Artist/Clinician

Touching the Soul, Turning the Stomach
Between the Art and the Artist Lies the Shadow

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

Reports of the death of the playwright John Osborne last week, which
chronicled a life of unrelenting venom, probably did not stir a great
amount of soul-searching among those who loved his work. The author
of the 1956 play "Look Back in Anger" seemed to have looked forward,
sideways, up and down in anger through his life, and gave rise to a
school of British playwrights of such familiar bitterness they had
their own acronym, the A.Y.M. - Angry Young Men.
But why do suggestions that other artists whose work we admire -
writers, composers, painters, actors and singers - had politics or
personal habits we find despicable stir uneasiness within? Why can
the knowledge of the anti-Semitism of Edgar Degas or T. S. Eliot, or
allegations of the near-criminal opportunism of Bertolt Brecht or of
Picasso's misogyny cause such profound turmoil in many people?
For some, the disparity between the beauty of art and the human
foibles of an artist undoubtedly causes no alarm. The poet Kenneth
Koch, among many others, argues that art exists on its own plane, and
should be considered independent of the person who created it. Art
may well be like nature, wrapped in its own splendor and mystery, no
more beholden to moral tribulations than the crocuses that herald
spring. Perhaps, unlike Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," one should
never trouble over the befuddled shaman behind the curtains who
fashions our illusions, but thank genius for its gifts and ignore the
rest.
After all, discarding art on a political basis lands us in dubious
company of both left and right, from Josef Stalin to Joseph McCarthy.
And while
mores shift through age and place, true art defies time; centuries
after the scandal wore off Michelangelo's homosexuality, the Sistine
Chapel still takes the breath away.
Logically, we can recount the intellectual arguments with ease: that
the composer's gifts have more to do with an intuitive ability to
imagine complex patterns of sound than to form sound political
judgments; that an ear for language and rhythm, which can make a fine
writer, has nothing to do with an eye for morality, let alone humanity.
But while good art requires skills such as these, art at its best
connects words, sounds, movement or color to emotions crystalized
within us. It allows us to glimpse something sublime within human
reach, to fulfill the unuttered promise of experience, to find the
poetry in our loneliness. We come to believe the person capable of
elevating the mundane acts of our lives, fitting them into the
grander record of human existence, must also possess a greater
measure of wisdom.
We discover a writer and feel as if we've made a new friend,
welcoming his witticisms, stacking them on our night tables. We
follow the progression of his thinking, wonder about his observations
on the way to work and feel a twinge of pride for having recognized
talent. We want to know more. We want to know everything about the
person behind the curtains, as if putting together the pieces of
their lives will unravel the mystery of their creations.
And the art we love becomes intensely intimate. Like the gloriously
extravagant writer of radio scripts in Mario Vargas L1osa's "Aunt
Julia and the Script Writer," when we are about to be swallowed by
the muck of life, we turn to art. We fall in love and hear Puccini in
our heads. We grow old and find "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
ineffably moving:
"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works
and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate."

William Styron's severe depression, recounted in his slender volume,
"Darkness Visible" (Random House, 1990), culminated in his
contemplating suicide through a wrenching, sleepless night. He found
the strength to prevail upon hearing Brahms' "Alto Rhapsody," which
seemed to draw him back into the-human family. (Styron left it at
that, never addressing the question of politics. But what if his
savior had been Richard Strauss, who had headed the Reich Music
Chamber under Hitler, in charge of making
sure that no "subversive" music or Jewish musicians were heard in the
concert halls and opera houses of Nazi Germany?)
And so to learn that Eliot was an antiSemite becomes a kind of
betrayal, as if we were taken in by fine phrases alone. The
exhilaration of personal discovery one might have felt gives way to
shame at having not picked up on some fundamental flaw that, on some
level, we reason, must have been transmitted in the work.
"If you're dealing with a writer, more so than an artist or a
musician, you can find symptoms of the despicable private trait,
which is often a blemish on the work," said George Stade, a professor
of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and
author of "Confessions of a LadyKiller" (Norton, 1979). He noted that
Eliot's "Gerontion," for example, contains an antiSemitic caricature
of the rootless Jew as landlord of Europe; his "Sweeney Among the
Nightingales" speaks of "Rachel, nee Rabinovitch," who "tears at the
grapes with murderous paws."
Professor Stade said the relation between talent and integrity
bothered him more when he was 15 than it does now, though he
confessed that recent allegations that Brecht signed his name to
other people's work has lowered his esteem for the playwright. "It's
like a person you fall in love with for his or her physical beauty,
who you're then disappointed to find isn't a good person," Professor
Stade said.
More disturbing than the prospect that one fell for a pretty face are
the doubts about one's own character that may arise. Does finding
that literature that resonates to our very core was written by a
philanderer suggest there is a liar or a cheat crouching silently
within us?
Philip Larkin, the English poet laureate, maintained that most
people, faced with contradictory judgments about an artist and his
work, will adjust their views until the two elements fall in line
rather than accept the ambiguity. Thus a fine poet who was a
misanthrope and racist - as the posthumous publication of Larkin's
own correspondence suggests he was - will come to be seen as either a
bitter poet or a good person, Larkin contends.
It is usually not that simple. We almost don't want to know, we long
for the state of unknowing appreciation. We want to say, "Come back.
All is forgiven," but we can't.
And so at times we flatter ourselves with the notion that we are
rising above petty strictures to value art in all its breadth and
mystery, and we listen to Strauss with pleasure. Or it's possible to
admit this is a shameful indulgence, and listen guiltily, as if we
are holed up in the pantry with chocolate ice cream. The only other
choice is to avoid the work as sham altogether.
Top of Form
Still, the private questions persist - testimony to the power of art,
and its limits.

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