God and the Ambitious Artist

The Tension Between Faith and Ego

As I read over this post, I’m realizing it isn’t so much an argument because I’m not confident I have one. So consider this a thoughtful mulling-over.

As I discussed in my very first post, Flannery O’Connor kept a prayer journal during her student days at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In it, she describes a number of spiritual struggles, the most compelling of which I found to be the struggle between “her artistic ego and God, between her burning desire to be a great writer and her equally burning conviction that her talent and ability flow solely from God.” If you’ll allow me to borrow from my previous post:

On the one hand, O’Connor sees God as the true source of her fiction, positing herself as a mere vehicle for transmission:

Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story — just like the typewriter was mine . . . Dear God, I wish you would take care of making it a sound story because I don’t know how, just like I didn’t know how to write it but it came.

On the other hand, and simultaneously, O’Connor isn’t satisfied with being an average writer. She longs to be a superior writer, one of distinction — then chastises herself for the longing:

Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel. I want to do this for a good feeling & for a bad one. The bad one is uppermost. The psychologists say it is the natural one. Let me get away dear God from all things thus “natural”.

The “bad feeling” — the “natural” one, at least according to the Freudian shrinks of the time — is the ego and its hunger for praise and recognition.

I really felt for O’Connor here. She wants to create “good,” exceptional art to serve God, which sounds straightforward enough, but is actually a fraught proposition. Art involves self expression, after all, the externalization of memories, imaginings, emotions — the inner workings of the self. And “good” art usually earns the approbation of the world, through critics and audiences; at the very least, whether art is “good” or not is adjudged by worldly standards. Given all this, how is any artist, let alone a devout Catholic like O’Connor, supposed to extricate their ego from their ambition? Whatever acclaim they achieve can’t help but, on some level, feel like the validation of their very selves. (And if you don’t believe me, then you’ve never participated in a writing worksop. The entanglement between art and artist is never more obvious than when a story a writer has toiled over for months becomes the subject of “constructive criticism.”)

Besides, is it really possible to create great art that serves God without serving the self? I understand the concept of godly ambition, of putting your God-given talents to sacred use. And like O’Connor, I recognize the difference between vying to please God in your work as opposed to your own vanity. Yet it seems to me, at bottom, that if you’re going to pursue artistic greatness, it will unavoidably entail some degree of selfishness.

Writers and actors, for instance, are famous for cannibalizing the lives of others for their own ends. In a recent interview, Augusta Britt, Cormac McCarthy’s former lover, revealed how strange it was to find bits and pieces of herself re-appearing in McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses:

I started reading it, and it’s just so full of me, and yet isn’t me. It was so confusing . . . And I remember thinking to myself that being such a lover of books, I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about? . . .

Cormac called me and said, ‘What did you think about it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I really liked the book. It’s beautiful. But my kitten, John Grady and everything. It feels weird.’ And he just laughed and said, ‘Well, baby, that’s what I do. I’m a writer.’

Artists describe the people who inspire them as “muses.” Muses, however, tend to describe themselves as “fodder.” How could they do otherwise? Artists harvest all their shared intimacies — the pet names, the anecdotes, the words said in love and anger — and reconfigure them into a narrative that’s at once familiar and alien. And how could artists do otherwise? Even the most inventive imaginations must borrow from experience.

Then there’s the annoying fact that art demands selfishness on the practical, mundane level. Creating something great demands enormous amounts of time and attention — all diverted from family, friends, community. In her book Monsters, Claire Dederer bravely describes what it really takes to be a working writer or artist, particularly when you’re female:

[It takes] talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.

In other words, while Bach composed the most exalted music to glorify God, he also had two wives and a sister-in-law looking after those pesky twenty kids of his.

The Salieri Test

For the truly ambitious artist of faith, how do you detect the difference between desiring to glorify God and desiring to satisfy your ego? If O’Connor was nothing but God’s typewriter, then why did she fret over whether she could write something “good”? Implicit in O’Connor’s prayers is the knowledge that God doesn’t favor all artists equally with ability — certainly not genius. I imagine her sitting at the conference table at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, critiquing her fellow students’ work and receiving criticism for her own. She must have realized that some of her peers were just as keen on writing a “good” novel as she was, yet lacked the talent.

I wonder if that scared her a bit: That God could instill the urge, but withhold the gift. How do you, as an ambitious artist of faith, cope with the discovery that you’re average? Worse yet, what if you dedicate your art to God, aspiring to serve as His instrument, only to find that God has instead chosen to work through a complete ass?

This, of course, is the plot of Amadeus, one of my all-time favorite films. Salieri believes himself to be God’s humble scribe, even thanking Christ for the inspiration for a tune he composes for the emperor. But then impious, irreverent (although not historically accurate) Mozart reveals himself to be not only a much greater talent than Salieri, but a divine, transcendent talent. And just like that, Salieri turns from being God’s vessel to God’s enemy:

I adore the foregoing scene. It illustrates a principle I’ve long observed to be true: When people reject God, it’s often not so much a matter of Why me? as Why not ME?

Salieri then hatches a plot to destroy Mozart (who by now is distraught over the death of his father) and steal Mozart’s Requiem to pass off as Salieri’s own work of genius. I won’t go into the details of Salieri’s plot. Suffice it to say that, by the end of Amadeus, Salieri experiences a moment of grace. He finds himself helping Mozart, frantically transcribing the last of his Requiem for him before Mozart dies. And in those final moments, Salieri abandons himself to the wonder of Mozart’s talent. In an ironic turn, he at last becomes the humble scribe for God he previously and erroneously supposed himself to be.

Amadeus reminds us that great art is not only divine, but a divine mystery. The most heavenly work can and does flow from the deeply flawed. If you’ve ever been awed by the music of Wagner, or a Gaugin painting, or a Salinger story, you know what I mean.

So where does all this jumbling between art and ego leave the ambitious artist who’s also a believer?

I think, at bottom, it leaves them in the same place as any ambitious artist: looking at their true source of motivation. Long before winning the Fields Medal for mathematics, Princeton Professor June Huh dropped out of high school to be a poet. Yet as burning as his ambition was at the time, it soon dissipated. As Huh relates: “I didn’t want to write great poetry. I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry.” (emphasis mine).

That’s a critical distinction. It’s the difference between a person who values art as a means to achieve and one who values art for its own sake. It’s this latter type of person who endures, suffers, and surmounts the inevitable setbacks of an artistic career — even when that career fails to reach desired heights. Quite simply, they can’t imagine doing anything else.

Likewise, any ambitious artist must, like Salieri, acknowledge the mystery of talent and creation, even when doing so is humbling.

And with that, I’ll conclude with this song by Judee Sill, a singer-songwriter described by drummer John Cody as a “prostitute, armed robber, junkie, jail bird.” Not your typical vehicle for delivering a message about redemption and salvation, but there it is.