Artists and Craziness

Steve Sailer has a review coming out of an Edith Piaf biopic. He notes that so many artists, in particular performers, tend to live rather disordered lives. This, of course, makes their lives more entertaining to read about, or to view onscreen. As Sailer points out, those artists, like J.S. Bach, whose life mostly consisted of their work, tend not to make very good subjects for movie biographies.

It is interesting to note that, a few small irregularities aside, it is often the very greatest artists who break this "inner demons" mold: Shakespeare, Raphael, Bach, Balanchine, and, I would say, Spielberg. All of them lived relatively normal, businesslike lives. Of course, on the other side there is Beethoven. Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Mozart come out somewhere in between. Their lives were not perfectly ordered, but they too were mostly interested in work. To make their stories sufficiently dramatic you need to drag in princes, popes and Salieris.

Mean Mr. Mustard comments:

Charles Murray, in Human Accomplishment, talked about the sine qua non of truly great achievement being monomaniacal devotion to one's pursuit (plus, of course, towering genius, but there are scores of such geniuses for every great achiever).

This requirement precludes much preoccupation with one's troubled inner dramas.

I'm not so sure he is right on that one. Truly great writers leading very disordered lives include Tasso, Camoes, Cervantes, Villon, Rousseau, Kleist, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Yeats, Faulkner, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And that's only the writers. Yet, somehow through it all these guys managed to keep producing.

Almost all artists seem to have at least some potential craziness in their makeup, but many of them manage to keep it under control for most of their lives. Sometimes, however, the nuttiness manages to slip out from under their control and produce some really ugly incidents, like with Dickens, who managed to live a pretty quiet adult life, until his divorce.

Interestingly, a lot of the best artists do seem to have some inkling that letting their mad impulses run wild in their lives will only impede their productivity. A surprising number of them look for a good, stable wife and then settle down to an quiet, productive life, without too many distractions to stir up the nuttiness. Wordsworth, Blake, and Joyce all did this. Tennyson did too (and they don't come more morbid and melancholic than Tennyson). Some, after long stuggles, realize this a bit later in life and settle down, often leading to their greatest work. Dostoevsky, Conrad, Lawrence, and Yeats all saw their productivity go up after marriage. Virginia Woolf was highly dependant on her husband to help her keep going through her madness. So, perhaps the lesson is that, while to get the work started it is best to be slightly mad, to finish the work off it is best to live as sane and normal a life as possible.