The Artist as Family Man
Cormac McCarthy died, and the Internet commentariat cannot stop talking about beans.
Beans!
The focus was on one particular portion of the man’s Wikipedia1 entry:
This anecdote was considered either based or cringe depending on who was doing the commentating. I saw little talk about the literary merit of the man’s works; for that, I had to actually go to newspapers and other so-called respectable sources who might be horrid on average but at least remembered that there were actual words involved.2
Of all the myths about artists, the “starving artist” trope refuses to die, and stories like this don’t help.3 One does not have to bathe in a lake and subsist on beans in order to be a great writer. One does not have to abandon their family and live in an artists’ commune either. I’m sure that it helps—finding like-minded people is one of the best ways to gain inspiration, motivation, and support, but I don’t think it’s the only way.
One could always just, you know, do the work. One of the greatest insights I gained on this topic came from Frank Zappa’s autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, and it didn’t even come from Mr. Zappa himself. Instead, it was a quote at the beginning of a chapter4 from someone else:
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
― Gustav Flaubert
While funny, Mr. Zappa’s autobiography suffers from the fault of most self-penned memoirs, in that it is incredibly self-serving. Zappa was a serial philanderer and absentee father who, when you read about his personal and family life especially during the 1960s, it becomes clear that he was hardly the staid, boring family man he liked to portray himself as, long-term marriage and four children be damned.5 That said, this quote gives a good insight into the man’s work habits as the seventies turned into the eighties and he became a bitter crank/boringly conventional partisan Democrat who just sat in his basement watching CNN and bashing Christian conservatives when he wasn’t writing music.
Lots of people’s creative vigor can burst forth without having to live a radical lifestyle. Let’s not forget that dayjobs can not only provide the steady income necessary to practice one’s art, that they can provide inspiration and human connection to make the art richer, and that they can also provide meaning. So maybe you need to schedule your interpretive dancing in between softball practice and math tutoring. Big deal. Time management is what adults do, and that same rigor can be applied to everything.
I’m not recommending sacrificing time with your family to focus on your work—balance, my friends—but I am recommending that there is no substitute for discipline.
The Artist as Revolutionary
Art is created on the backs of the boring people artists hold in contempt.
For every artist who lives a life of quiet order allowing them to craft their passionate work, there are hundreds, thousands, operating on the margins of society, transgressing social and cultural norms and pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. One stands on the fringes in relation to the center of the rich tapestry of a civilization, but it is impossible to have a fringe if there is no carpet in the first place.
Do artists reflect, or create? The answer is “Yes.” They reflect what is, and create what they want to be. The edge gets pushed farther and farther, shifting the whole picture until what was once taboo is now mainstream. This is often called the Overton Window, and there is no need to list the examples of things once forbidden we have shoved down our children’s throats on a daily basis.
The artist, like all successful revolutionaries, transgresses to the point where the only way to transgress is to push the edge in the other direction. The revolution runs out of things to revolt against, and thus it turns against the people it is ostensibly revolting to protect. The order that gave birth to liberty is threatened, resulting in a world where neither is possible.
Suddenly, these forgotten, unremarkable people who make the world run take on a greater import. Plumbers. Engineers. Sanitation workers. Electricians. People who work with their hands. The guy at the powerplant. The lady cleaning your house. The tattooed former gangbanger at the auto factory who just needed a steady job to stay out of trouble. The downscale white chainsmoker who was probably a knockout in her twenties who puts the beer in the bottles you nonchalantly sip at those dives you frequent in Turtle Bay or Dimes Square.6 Teachers, auto mechanics, and accountants. The proletariat and petit bourgeois that the artistic class literally could not exist without. And yet the contempt for them grows.
America has always had a class system, but at least used to act like it pretended it didn’t exist. Not anymore. Now, half of the country could disappear and the other half would throw a block party on their mass graves. It would be nice if artist could take a different attitude towards the people who buy their product. It would be nice if they could celebrate these people in a way that is neither cloying nor insincere. It would be nice if the calls for a hoi polloi genocide could stop. It would be nice if the artistic class could stop mocking these people as a vestigial appendage that needs to be excised.
It would be nice.7
And so we return to the idea that the constraints of “straight”8 society will keep you from your full flourishing as an artist. Who wants to be a salaryman, man, when you can just hop on the dole and shack up with a few art-school dropouts who like to get down-and-dirty after hitting the clubs? Family men never do great things,9 after all, so it’s better to be free and be authentic than respectable and lame. Let’s check in with our friends who many moons ago lived in drug-soaked squalor abroad to avoid the taxes they owed due to getting super-rich off of their art:
Let's drink to the hard working people
Let's drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let's drink to the salt of the earthSay a prayer for the common foot soldier
Spare a thought for his back breaking work
Say a prayer for his wife and his children
Who burn the fires and who still till the earthAnd when I search a faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray and black and white
They don't look real to me
In fact, they look so strangeRaise your glass to the hard working people
Let's drink to the uncounted heads
Let's think of the wavering millions
Who needs leading, but get gamblers insteadSpare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polioWhen I look into the faceless crowd
A swirling mass of grays and black and white
They don't look real to me
Or don't they look so strangeLet's drink to the hard working people
Let's think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag taggy people
Let's drink to the salt of the earthLet's drink to the hard working people
Let's drink to the salt of the earth
Let's drink to the two thousand million
Let's think of the humble of birth― The Rolling Stones, “Salt of the Earth”
If this is you, great. But make sure to thank that same swirling mass of grays and black and white that make your exciting, adventurous life possible. Boring that mass may be, I’m pretty sure that, no matter how Bohemian you are, you you enjoy indoor plumbing, modern sanitation, and the electricity in your studio apartment.
-Alexander
My book Dreamers & Misfits: The Definitive Book About Rush Fans explores the relationship between the record-buying public and a band that truly loved them. Buy it here.
I know, I know. But I’m just reporting the facts.
I am not going to discuss which books of McCarthy’s I read, or what I think of his writing, because that does not matter.
It may be hard. There will be lean years. But who starves these days?
These are called epigraphs:
It is even more embarrassing that Current Year conservatives and libertarians try to use this to portray Zappa as one of “their guys,” but I digress.
Not a typo.
The only pop cultural product in recent memory I can think of that has a sympathetic portrayal of what can only be considered downscale rural whites looks like this:
Boy, what a loaded word that is these days.
There is some truth to this, but only in the sense that family men have more to lose and will therefore on average be less-willing to take crazy risks.
That's my favourite stonetoss comic.
This. This is why I'm really starting to believe that precious few modern artists, regardless of chosen field, subsist within the confines of reality rather than their medium. Whether you face reality and express that within your work, or you seek to escape the reality you have faced by way of your work, the state of the world in and of itself has some influence. However, there so many more people who are brought up within an insular environment where you draw on others' work rather than any interaction with the real world. Hence why so many works become alien and alienating, not out of structure nor aesthetic, but purely because they come from a place of detachment.