The Artist’s Unfinished Business

James Anderson makes a compelling argument that an artist’s finest work typically draws on “something within him that is

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raw, unfinished, conflictual, troubling, and unsettling.” More, Anderson’s analysis of The Crucible suggests by example that an awareness of inner conflicts the author faced during composition can deepen our understanding of a work of art. As a teacher of literature, I can add that college students are keen to know how a poem or novel recasts material from the author’s inner life. If I were to teach The Crucible, I would certainly draw on Anderson’s account of the lines of force connecting this text to Miller’s fraught preoccupation with Marilyn Monroe.

I believe—and perhaps Anderson would agree—that it is theoretically possible for an artist to produce outstanding work without infusing it with his or her psychological conflicts. This would especially be the case when the medium is an abstract one. A Bach fugue, for example, is a mass of aesthetic tensions, controlled by the requirements of harmony and thematic closure. But are these tensions, or any other part of the fugue, necessarily driven by a conscious or unconscious tension within Bach’s own psyche? Perhaps some psychological conflict did underlie Bach’s compositions, though there is no way to know. But the fugue, as a genre, centers on problems that are so analytical in nature that it seems just as likely to me that a sheer passion for working out melodic and harmonic puzzles could inspire a great fugue. The fugue, in taking its course, might also give voice to strong emotions—such as joy, sadness, suspense, and the thrill of flirting with chaos—without necessarily expressing the composer’s unique psychological conflicts.

On the other hand, when we turn to a more representational medium such as the performed or written word—where Anderson’s paper itself is focused—the situation is different. I do think that a literary work will be the richer when it touches upon the author’s “unfinished” psychological business, so long as the emotional rough edges are balanced by formal coherence and some artistic objectivity. For example, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) was the work in which Virginia Woolf first took the risk of publishing what was “on the verge of embarrassing her,” to use the phrase Anderson quotes from Miller. In the novel’s two central characters, Woolf recalled at intimate range her own oscillations between suicidal depression and an attachment to the sweetness of life. At the same time, Mrs.

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Dalloway was Woolf’s first great literary work, and the one that in her own time raised her to a sudden eminence and popularity. With Anderson, I think that such a correspondence is more than coincidence.

When I first read Anderson’s paper, though, I wondered if there might exist a good literary counterexample to his argument. This would be some work, from within the literary domain, that approached the impersonality of a Bach fugue but that still had recognizable excellence. A text that came to mind was William Carlos Williams’ short lyric “As the Cat,” which traces a cat’s movement across the top of a jam closet (a basement cupboard for storing jams in the wintertime):

As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind
stepped down into the pit of the empty flower pot

(The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1951, p. 340)

The poem has a minimalism and a studied objectivity characteristic of much of Williams’ work. I would be surprised to learn that this spare poem was grounded in some serious psychological conflict within the poet. Yet the poem is still a delightful one. Literary critics have explored the formal tensions that contribute to its vitality. For example, there is a tension between the forward momentum of the sentence as a grammatical whole and the line divisions that break up the syntactical flow, often in odd places. The line divisions isolate individual words for our contemplation and thus create a kind of stasis amid the movement. This general tension between forward propulsion and stasis echoes, at the stylistic

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level, the contrast between the cat’s horizontal forward motion and the near hiatus of its cautious vertical steps into the flowerpot. Such complexities make the poem a striking and interesting work, even in the (probable) absence of any basis in the author’s psychological struggles. A blogger spontaneously attests to its effectiveness: “The first time I read this poem, I BRISTLED with excitement, literally. The words themselves so sleekly feline, and the last paragraph leaping down on to the page so nimbly, that just reading the words, just hearing the sound of them, you can see the cat moving” (http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/2001/01/poem-william-carlos-williams.html).

Yet—as a final consideration—let us place that poem, fine as it is, alongside another of Williams’ lyrics, which shares the prior poem’s minimalism and precision of detail but surely carried more personal meaning for the poet:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably saving
for breakfast Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

(The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1951, p. 354)

This poem, amid many other themes, pits the pleasures of domesticity—the note left in the kitchen, the routine of reserving fruit for the morning—against the lure of sensual license. I cannot think about this aspect of the poem without being reminded of the ways in which Williams’ own romantic life, which punctuated long-term marriage with serial infidelities, (mis)handled the same tension. Anyone who knows Williams’ biography knows of the less

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jocular “Forgive me” that would express itself in the course of his marriage, and in his later poetry.

I believe that most of the people in my profession would say that “As the Cat” is a good poem, but that “This Is Just to Say” is a richer and better one. Pressed to explain why, we would perform some close analysis that would touch on the human complexities that are expressed in the latter poem and that doubtless derive some of their force from Williams’ own experience. My point is that, other things being equal, authors will achieve some of their best effects when, forgetting the fear of embarrassment, they allow themselves to be played upon by the inner turbulence that Anderson explores in his paper. As the poet Sharon Olds has remarked in an interview,

You’re alone when you’re writing, and at that point, hopefully, you’re not thinking, What would someone think of me for doing this? Strong forces are at work, like if you’re on a raft, and you’re rowing, and the river is rushing, and you need to get to the other side, and you’re being pulled under a bridge; you’re feeling a shadow crossing, you’re not really thinking, What is playing on the radio on shore? (Interview with Amy Hempel, BOMB 54 [Winter 1996], p. 26)

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