Creative Hate

“If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate!”
       The speaker is Thea Kronborg, the protagonist of Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark, a prairie-town girl who’s carving out a career as an opera singer. She’s partly based on a real singer Cather knew and admired, but a lot of what she says comes straight out of Cather’s own experience as a prairie-town girl then carving out her own impressive career as a novelist.

       “How can I get much satisfaction out of the enthusiasm of a house,” Thea asks, “that likes her atrociously bad performance at the same time that it pretends to like mine?” She’s talking about a rival singer, one who doesn’t live up to Thea’s idea of what vocal art ought to be. “If they like her, then they ought to hiss me off the stage. We stand for things that are irreconcilable, absolutely.”

      A couple of things have kept this on my mind lately: visiting Cather’s home town in Nebraska a few weeks ago and going to the San Diego Comic Con just last weekend.
       The Cather pilgrimage happened on my 57th birthday. It was fortuitous more than planned—my son had been intending to fly to Chicago for his annual G (as in Godzilla) Fest until he suddenly suggested we make it into a father-son road trip—but it turned out to be a powerful thing. Once I realized we’d be driving within fifty miles of Red Cloud, Nebraska, I decided to Cather it up good: listening to an audiobook of My Antonia (sending Nicky back to his earbuds), reading Five Stories when I wasn’t driving, making reservations at the Cather family home, now a guest house run the Willa Cather Foundation, doing the Cather tour run by selfsame Foundation, even having breakfast at the cafe with the hand-lettered sign in the window reading WE SELL CATHER. It was only two days that I spent immersed in her flat, hard country, her bright-burning ambition, and her spare, perfect art—but those two days have stayed with me.
       Comic Con was a different sort of pilgrimage. It was my 31st year in a row going to that thing. I was going there when I was “just a fan,” and I was going there when I was writing seven scripts a month for DC and Marvel; I was going there when I gave up writing the comics themselves to write about their history, and I kept going there when comics were just about the furthest things from my mind. (Lest this sound like some sort of morbid compulsion, I should tell you that the main point of the trip now is to hang out with my friend Joe Filice and his family, with the Con as a pretext and an organizing principle.) Every trip there, whether I like it or not, becomes a journey through my own creative and professional past. 
       And God, did I ever use that “creative hate” in my past! There were writers I loved, admired, emulated, tried to learn from. But there were other writers I couldn’t stand, writers I loved to bitch about and rage at, to satirize and mock (never to their faces, of course). And they were on my mind every bit as much as the writers I loved. Maybe more.
       These weren’t inept or egregiously bad writers. They were mostly popular or well respected, usually with good reason, but with aesthetics or goals or intended audiences drastically different from mine. They weren’t doing me any harm. Sometimes I tried to convince myself that they were taking away my audience, or degrading the form to the point that no one would be able to recognize good work, but that was only to justify my hostility. Nor was this about simple jealousy, although that would be easy to assume. It wasn’t really even about competitiveness. I could be very happy for another writer’s success, even when it was much greater than mine...if it was a writer I liked. 
       I needed those writers to define myself. I wasn’t one of those people who seems to have been born with a vision of what he must write. I wasn’t even very good at knowing who I was as a person, let alone as a writer. I spent a long time working at self-definition. For that I needed mentors, collaborators, and role models, but I also needed people to contrast myself against, people about whom I could say, “I’m definitely not that—so that must mean I’m this.” If I was clear on what I didn’t want to write, if I made that an anathema that would repel me every time I found myself drifting toward it, then I could stay on my own slowly emerging path.
       I found a lot of people to play that role: novelists, screenwriters, comics writers, and essayists, young writers emerging alongside me, aging veterans, and some who weren’t around anymore. I even had Thomas Wolfe on the list for a while (So damned self-preoccupied! Too many words! No discipline!), even though though the poor mug had been dead and losing critical favor for decades before I was born.
       And the more rage I could stir up against them, the more focus and energy I could bring to my own work. I nursed what Thea Kronborg calls the “contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.”

      Not that I was doing any of this consciously. Like an adolescent who suddenly finds his parents stupid and infuriating, I made up a world view that served my larger purposes—and then threw myself into it with a blind passion. (The whole process of finding myself as a writer was basically an adolescent journey, in fact. I just dragged it on for a decade or so beyond the age of acne.) Of course, if it hadn’t been unconscious, it wouldn’t have worked. Self awareness is not always our friend.
       Somewhere along the way, that all changed. As I became more comfortable in who I was and what I was doing as a writer, I lost my energy for mocking and complaining about others. Then, at some point (around the time I became a dad, I think) I began to develop a compassion and a feeling of solidarity with everyone else who was pursuing this nerve-wracking career, whether the results were anything I liked or not. And, having lost the need to define myself as Not That Guy, because I finally had a sense of myself as This Guy, I began to appreciate writers I had been unable to like before, even to appreciate them precisely because they broke my personal rules. Thomas Wolfe could churn out some pretty powerful descriptions with all those words.

       I figure we’re all out there doing our best, trying to do what we think is good or hope other people will like, and there’s room in the world for all our different aesthetics and philosophies and abilities. These days I can’t even work up the energy to mock the woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey. (In fact, I can never remember her name, which itself is different from the old days. Back then I would have had her name seared into my frontal lobe.) I assume she’s doing what she loves to do, and lots of people like it because it speaks to something in them, and that’s really fine with me. I do what I believe in doing, and people can stop to look at it if they want to. 
      Not that I don’t still have strong opinions. Not that I don’t get annoyed when a writer I like lets me down, especially if I think it’s from laziness or self-indulgence (you should’ve heard me when I finished The Goldfinch). I’ve just found that anger and judgment take more out of me now than they give back. Our emotional energy is finite, and I need to direct mine where it will do some good. 
       But I do try to catch myself when I’m tempted to tell some younger writer to lighten up or to lecture him on having compassion for our ink-stained comrades. I’m where I am because I went through the process, and the process, at least for me, required a fair amount of what Willa Cather had the guts to call “creative hate.”
       There’s something attractive about those feelings, too. There’s a vitality and a potency in that kind of negative intensity that my grown-up acceptance and compassion can never completely replace. I suspect Cather felt the same. Her judgments of younger writers became more measured and philosophical even as the youngsters started making fun of her, but she still let Thea Kronborg have her rage. Even when I feel stupid for some of the arrogant judgments I laid on good writers when I was young and self-obsessed, I can still hear the nobility in Thea’s call to arms: 
       “You can’t try to do things right and not despise the people who do them wrong. How can I be indifferent? If that doesn’t matter, then nothing matters.”

A Boring New Year, Please

I never wanted to be dull. Not that writing for a living ever promised big thrills, not like testing military jets or fighting fires on oil rigs or anything, but it did seem like a route to a challenging life full of unexpected turns; if nothing else, it would make me look more interesting than most of the other people who made their livings sitting at desks. That's why I dropped out of college: too predictable. I wanted a career of gambles and improvisations and surprises, both good and bad. 
       In my private life I was much less daring, at least for the first few decades. But in my thirties that changed too, as I discovered a predilection for flinging myself into emotional tornadoes. Even in my quest for stability I was unstable, as my wife and I broke up, came back together, broke up again, came together again, and...you get the picture.
       In my early fifties, by which time most people have burned out and settled down, I was just reaching my peak: 2010 and 2011 were the most dramatically bizarre, wonderful, terrible years of my life (personally, especially, but in some ways professionally too). This year that just ended was a lot calmer, but still...I had a lot going on, and where I was at the end I couldn't have predicted at the start.
       Yet now I find myself wanting nothing more than a predictable year for 2013. I want to work calmly on the edits for this book until it's done and then move smoothly to writing the next one. No agonies of avoidance, please, and no drastic rethinkings of my entire purpose as a writer. I want to develop my story classes and the book I plan to base on those classes at a steady pace. From my personal life I ask only one thing: no drama. (Although I suppose no one's life is entirely free of drama, so let's make that: no life-changing turmoil and roof-blowing emotionality. Not if I can possibly head them off.) I want to show up consistently for my family and close friends. I want to know for sure where I'm going to be living, and I'll be more than happy to spend the whole year on one continent.     

      I'm thinking about all this in the context of the book I just read, Willa Cather's The Professor's House. This was the first book Cather wrote in her fifties, and it was unmistakably transitional for her. She'd made her reputation with a series of novels about struggle and hardship—although that's probably too simplistic. Let's say they were novels of depth and subtlety about pioneers and hard-scrabble farmers and soldiers whose lives were shaped by struggle and hardship. She didn't tend toward fireworks and cataclysm, but she didn't shy away from hard choices and brutal conflicts, either.  
       Then, in 1925, she wrote this slow, gentle, beautiful story about a middle-aged professor in a quiet Midwestern town, writing his history of the Spanish exploration of the Southwest, dealing with the small vanities of his family and neighbors, trying to put off moving from his comfortable old house into the fancy new one that his wife and daughters are convinced he deserves.  
       There's drama in the background of this quietude: it all revolves around the legacy of a mysterious young man who shook things up and died in the war, and the small events hint at the outlines of the great economic and cultural shifts of the century. But it's a deep background. Tom Outland lives on mainly through bittersweet memories and petty jealousies, barely enough to disrupt a family dinner, while Professor St. Peter confronts the future with exasperated sighs, poignant recollections, middle-aged whimsy, and the occasional pedantic crack. The ending's a bit rougher. But it's quiet, too.
      I don't know how to begin describing the understated glory of Cather's art. I'll just say that I didn't want to leave the book any more than I wanted the professor to leave his old house. I stretched my reading out over weeks and reread chapters along the way so I could stay there.
       It was with The Professor's House, though, that Cather's reputation with the critics began to change. Her previous novel was pretty widely taken as a major work, and the one before that had won the Pulitzer Prize. This one drew far less notice, and over the next few years she found herself ever more frequently the target of critical dismissals.
       It was the new critics of the 1930s who went after her most fiercely, the politically heated young studs like Granville Hicks and Lionel Trilling, who demanded that every writer tackle the class conflicts and institutional upheavals that preoccupied their generation. Hicks especially went after Cather for her "refusal to examine life as it is," meaning her refusal to see life as he and his Ivy League Stalinist friends defined it.
       Well, fooey. That's what I say.
       At least, that's what I say now. But there was a time, I have to admit, when I might have sympathized with Hicks and his friends. I would never have agreed, entirely—I was never politically doctrinaire—but in my twenties I may well have compared Cather unfavorably with the two-fisted class warriors, Dos Passos and Steinbeck, who stirred my blood, and the probers of the grotesque, Faulkner and Anderson, who flattered my belief in the clarity of my own unblinking gaze. 
       Ah, youth.
       Well, not now I won't. Not this particular year, at least, and maybe never again. This year I want the quiet depth of the fifty-something Willa Cather. Not only in what I read but in how I live. I want solid and steady. Amusing and fulfilling and slightly melancholy. But no big drama, thanks very much. I had all that. It was exciting, and I'm glad it's in my backstory. But it's time for a more grown-up story.