Miranda Rights for Artists

Artists get their material from life experience. Fact is strange and interesting enough. Not surprising if a reader isn't taken in by a story of contrived events. Most of us know life as something lived daily and by routine and by long expanses of days involved with a job. We can understand a story even if nothing too drastic happens. We recognize life, as babies recognize faces.

Chekhov is certainly imaginative. Things do happen in his stories. But they seem as if they are things that, basically, happen to him. Credit him with a broad sensitivity, an ability to inhabit many skins, to be able to morph just a tick away from his own direct experience into a very plausible alternate. He gets things, like the suspicious doctor in Ward No. 6, or the various footman lackies who are spies on life and have sympathy for their mistresses, or the grown up loser who doesn't know what to do with himself in My Life, or the schoolboy in The Steppe, because they are available to him, parts of his own self. And so a great story, Lady with the Pet Dog, is a portrait very close to a self-portrait, one that simply occurs when different circumstances might befall the original self.

Oh, there's a long list. Caravaggio stuck his own face in paintings. Giotto took folks he knew, like the famous maker of an altarpiece that initially shocked the town when they looked up and saw themselves along with Jesus (I can't remember--Ghent? Krakow?)

Writers, artists, deserve to be extended a special kind of Miranda Rights. They need to be given the right to use real life, people and situations as raw material. Without a certain respect to look the other way when they make the sin of appropriating stuff from life we'd have far less good art to enjoy, even if it would deprive lawyers and moralizing gossipers from exercising their own art, even if it would seem to allow the door to open to 'lesser art,' that which is not created completely out of the blue as if by magical powers of imagination and observation.

So a writer runs the risk of being himself taken as a strange one, intruding, revealing too much that stiff collared folks would prefer to keep at bay out of propriety. Ted Hughes only allowed Birthday Letters to be published toward the end of his life when he could less be touched upon by the firestorm of commentary on personal matters between himself and another person who was his wife, Sylvia Plath. The poems are his art; what can you do, but accept them.

Updike, you have to give him credit for revealing his own self, those parts which are 'a bit dirty,' a story built around the tensions, the awkwardness of wanting things in the odd bargains and negotiations of living in society and with one's self.

It is, perhaps, an unenviable task, the artist's, to reveal the creature as he really is, those parts normally edited out of daily manners, as one does not talk about masturbation in public. It is the very nature of his work to reveal that which is real and sometimes uncomfortable to admit, just as Jesus--or for that matter, the Marquis de Sade--before him reveals that which is scorned as much as gloried. Through his work, though, the artist finds a certain vigor, a healthiness in the animal, the creature that is humanity/mankind.

Yes, my friends, reveal yourself, in a clever enough way, change the names and never admit to anything as far as what you've written.