Life As An Artist

Adapted from the Introduction to Wallace Shawn's new book Essays.

The human community is carved up into "individuals." Why? Presumably because it's helped us to survive, because a sleeping dog can easily be kicked, but it's hard to damage a large group of flies. I honestly don't know. At any rate, I didn't ask to be an individual, but I find I am one, and by definition I occupy a space that no other individual occupies -- in other words, for what it's worth, I have my own point of view. I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals, I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am. I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write. My friends Anthony and Brenda found my signals interesting, so Anthony asked me to collect them into a book, which Haymarket Books has just published (Essays). I've always somewhat hated being "me" and only me. I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are. Unlike the fiction writer who says, as himself, "Fred woke up in his bed that cloudy Sunday," a playwright can spend a lifetime writing without ever speaking from his own location. I've passed my life largely in a fantasy world. My personal life is lived as "me," but my professional life is lived as other people. In other words, when I go to the office, I lie down, dream, and become "someone else." That's my job.

I've worked in the theatre since 1970. I've written plays and a few screenplays, in each one of which a person who isn't me speaks, and then another person who isn't me replies, and then a third one enters or the first one speaks again, and so it goes until the end of the piece. I've even worked as a professional actor, speaking out loud as if I were someone not myself. And perhaps it's disturbing or frightening how easy it is to become "someone else," to say the words of "someone else." It really doesn't feel odd at all, I have to tell you. Every once in a while, though, I like to take a break from fantasy land, and I go off to the place called Reality for a brief vacation. It's happened a dozen or so times in the course of my life. I've looked at the world from my own point of view, and I've written these essays. I've written essays about reality, the world, and I've even written a few essays about the dream-world of "art" in which I normally dwell. In a bold mood I've brooded once or twice on the question, Where do the dreams go, and what do they do, in the world of the real?

My congenital inability to take the concept of the inviolable "self " seriously -- my lack of certainty about who I am, where I am, and what my "characteristics" are -- has led me to a certain skepticism, a certain detachment, when people in my vicinity are reviling the evil and alien Other, because I feel that very easily I could become that Other, and so could the reviler. And this has had an effect on my view of the world.

I grew up listening to discussions about the world, and in school I studied history and politics and even a little elementary economics. My parents were completely (some might say excessively) assimilated American Jews whose own parents (said with only a moderate degree of certainty to have been born in Sweden, England, Germany, and possibly Canada) were probably all of Eastern European or Russian origin, or in other words, saved from a harsh destiny by the existence of the United States of America. My mother and father, fortunate members of the bourgeoisie, were American liberals of the old school. They never described the United States as "the greatest country in the world" as many politicians did. They were passionately close to their French friends and their English friends and presided over a living room in which people from India, Poland, Italy, and Czechoslovakia were constant visitors, and they adored and admired Adlai Stevenson. From an early age, I remember going with my mother to the gorgeous, modern United Nations buildings on our own island of Manhattan and buying holiday cards from UNICEF in the United Nations gift shop. (As a Jewish atheist, my mother was one of the world's most loyal devotees of Christmas, and she loved Advent calendars, Christmas trees, and Christmas cards.) Mother loved UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund, which helped poor children all over the world, and she loved the United Nations; and, to her, being an American meant being a person who loved the United Nations and was a friend to poor children all over the world, like Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson.

When not totally preoccupied with my own problems, I feel some of the emotions my mother felt toward those poor children all over the world. But my earliest essay, "Morality," from 1985 (I was just over 40 years old when I wrote it) shows me slowly seeing, as it appeared out of the mist, the outline of my own figure as a character in their story. It turned out that my role was sinister, dreadful, but for my first 40 years I hadn't realized that. My ignorance about my own involvement in the story of the children allowed me to think, Yes, the conditions in the world are terrible, certainly -- but I still could feel that the topic could be discussed in a leisurely manner. When one hasn't noticed that it's one's own boot that's standing on the suffering person's neck, one can be calmly sympathetic to the suffering person and hope that over time things will work out well for them.

I never became as nice as my mother. But by the time I was 45 I understood a few things that she'd overlooked. I suppose I'm something like what my mother would have been if she'd gone down into her basement and stumbled on Eleanor Roosevelt murdering babies there.

The schizophrenic nature of my book (essays on war and death and essays on the windowless miniature world of theatre) gives a pretty good picture of my own mind. Born by most definitions into the ruling class, I was destined to live a comfortable life. And to spend one's life as a so-called "creative artist" is probably the most comfortable, cozy, and privileged life that a human being can live on this earth -- the most "bourgeois" life, if one uses that phrase to describe a life that is so comfortable that no one living it would want to give it up. To lie in bed and watch words bump together until they become sentences is a form of hedonism, whether the words and sentences glorify society and the status quo or denounce them. It's very agreeable to live like that, even if people don't like your work, criticize you, whatever. So I've always been tempted to turn off the radio and forget the world, but I'm not quite enough of a hedonist to forget it entirely and forever. I'm unable to totally forget the world -- but I still haven't (yet) become a compassionate enough person to leave my bed for more than a moment in order to devote myself to changing the world or alleviating the suffering of my fellow human beings.

In other words, I've been divided. When I was 15, my brain was feverish with the work of Dostoevsky and James Joyce. But by the time I was 20 I'd turned against art, I planned to spend my life as a civil servant, helping humanity, and I would no more have dreamed that I'd one day work in the theatre than that I'd one day become a champion racing car driver. Five years later I'd fallen hard for art again, and I was loyal to art for twenty years. Then its immorality became intolerable to me, and I turned against it again, though I failed to find, as I looked around me, anything else that I wanted to do. At any rate, the oscillations continued, their pattern unpredictable and indecipherable to me. Not surprisingly, my own ambivalence leaves me totally in awe of those amazing people whose concerns and passions have stayed constant and undimmed throughout their lives. I find I do need models or heroes to guide me on my journey through the world, and this need, combined with my shaky grasp on who I find "myself" to be, led me not merely to seek out and interview the poet Mark Strand and the political philosopher Noam Chomsky, but to believe, against the evidence, that they were me. Of course one could say that no one person could be both Noam Chomsky and Mark Strand, not merely because it's miraculous that anyone ever was remarkable enough to be either of them, but because their lives seem to point in opposite directions. That doesn't seem to stop me from wanting to be both of them at the same time, and it doesn't seem to stop me from refusing to accept that their lives are contradictory. Somehow poetry and the search for a more just order on earth are not contradictory, and rational thought and dreams are not contradictory, and there may be something necessary, as well as ridiculous, in the odd activity of racing back and forth on the bridge between reality and the world of dreams.

Comments

[TwistedNibbler]

Thank you for your description of your mother.

The entire article was excellent, but as someone who as self-analyzed the manner in which I am a product of my parents, thank you for your description of your mother.

I must read more of your work; I have always seen a great deal in you as a character actor and had not hitherto *truly* discovered the depth of your intellect.

Thank you, again; I am sure I will wish I had a better comment to make (given this opportunity) in the future!

[Vickie Karp]

Dear Wallace Shawn, Do you know that Mark Strand poem in which he thinks everything is speaking to him? The pigeons... The cows... The billboards? Art just keeps speaking to him in its nonchalant uncollected way and will not let him go. Your writing is like that for me. You make wonderful company.

[WonderingRadical]

Not being an artist, in a professional sense, I'm left to only enjoy the fruits of creativity, but never the joys of the creative act. At the best of times, I'm left asking where, within him, did the artist go to discover this?? ...why have I not seen this until now? ...and what has yet to be discovered? I simply repay the moment with thoughtfulness and gratitude. Content with my ever growing appreciation for the bit time on this blue dot filled with such wonder and variety.

I believe that if there is any gift the artist offers beyond the creative discovery... it is the lesson that perhaps a healthy detachment and lack of self-importance may be essential to good creative work -- that creativity, and ‘good’ art should in fact be the humblest of all activities -- taken on by humble heroes who break free from the moorings with courage and curiosity, and set out on the lonely crossing. …later returning to point to a new understanding. …or a good laugh! Be they witting or unwitting lesson masters in the beauty, ugliness, and ridiculousness of life.

As to those "amazing people whose concerns and passions have stayed constant and undimmed throughout their lives" (be it to a commitment of compassion or ambivalence) … it’s probably as it should be.

The rest of us, however, still need pointers to point the way. For that, my thanks to you and your band of dream chasers, Mr. Shawn.

Great article!

[MJinCanada]

I sympathize, Wally. It is always a blow to the gut to find out that you're well off because your government, countrymen or national corporations screwed someone else. And realizing your UNICEF cards or World Vision gifts are a drop in the bucket.

But don't feel guilty about art. Art makes us see things from different points of view. Art makes us think. Art is a vehicle for making us aware of what's wrong and what we need to do. Art is freedom in ways that the most ardent libertarian just doesn't get. (Why do you think right-wing governments always cut funding to the arts first?)

[PierceAero]

OMG, I get to post a comment that Wally may read. We share the same nick name for a different legal name. I don't even like to type it. I grew up, with a brother named Teddy, in the same town where Tony Dow, Jerry Mathers, and the other Big Kids from a show that was on before I was born used to hang out, at the local Bob's Big Boy. It all seemed normal to those of us that grew up in Hollywood. More than a few coincidences though. And the Jokes...Sheesh!
Anyway, I saw My Dinner With Andre, when it came out. and remember there being discussion about coincidences. Every time Andre would say your name, and speak to you I would get an uneasy feeling. I've known a few writers, having grown up in a neighborhood full of them, and have seen the childhood antics of kids I knew, as well as myself in the arts. any comments?

[Allen J]

Very nice; I see no contradiction. I've modeled my life similarly, using such people as these for inspiration: Noam Chomsky and Nikola Tesla on the science side, Aldous Huxley, Richard Feynman, Philip K. Dick and Oliver Sacks to bridge the divide between science and art, and Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick and Matt Groening on the art side.

[totspotcafe]

Great article...and I want to read more! Although, to my 3 year old, you will always be a dinosaur. He loves to shake hands and say, "I'm so glad you're not a dinosaur!"

[Gregg Jones]

"I've worked in the theatre since 1970. I've written plays and a few screenplays, in each one of which a person who isn't me speaks, and then another person who isn't me replies, and then a third one enters or the first one speaks again, and so it goes until the end of the piece. I've even worked as a professional actor, speaking out loud as if I were someone not myself."

I've heard you say this, that you've never written a character, or performed a part, that was you, or like you. And it confuses me. Is there really nothing of you in My Dinner With Andre?

[Tulka2]

Thank you. Read one of these essays in The New Yorker two issues ago. Great and witty fun.

[afrographia]

if meaning includes bringing happiness to others, you have done that for me. I saw you a few years ago in a Greenwich Village post office minding your own business. I did not say anything but thought fondly of the times I've seen you on screen.

[Arion]

Among Shawn's endearing traits is the restraint to hit solid doubles and not swing for the bleachers. I should like to see him write and perform a new Godot, with an act added where Godot finally shows up.

[Ronnie Bray]

Ah, you outsiders! Haven't you realised that Shawn IS Godot? He is there all the time through the agency of dialogue, but only the Erewhonists can see him.

[Schuyler Brown - Huffpost Blogger]

My Dinner with Andre haunts me. I just received your book for my birthday. Have yet to read it, but as always - this post included - your voice is strong and speaks a kind of humorous truth we need more of. Thank you for being you...whoever you are.

[MikeDu]

I'll buy anyhing by the guy who penned "The Designated Mourner". The word schizophrenic was mentioned up above. And apt description for a famously incendiary playright who is best know for that impossibly awful film 'The Princess Bride". As though Sam Sheppard and Peewee Herman had been the same person.

[JacqueItch]

Shepard and Herman are two different people???
Damn. . . . .

[Mort]

Inconceivable!!!

[crissyo]

Mr. Shawn,

Since you seem to be at a loss to define yourself, let me do it for you. You, sir, are a first-class American, and lovely artist posessed of a "today-muc­h-missing" capacity for introspection. It is good you remained, somewhat, in art, as the art world needs more people actively engaging in envisioning their mothers stumbling upon a murderous murderess like Eleanor Roosevelt, especially in one's own basement. I look forward to your book, as I too fall in and out of art, convinced, perplexed then disabused of the notion it is good for much more than the facilitating of someone's bourgois comfortableness. Perhaps it is, more likely, or less, it is not, and your recognition of this conflict is what makes you a treasure.

"My Dinner With Andre" is one of the most fascinating pieces of art I have ever seen, and it is good to see these questions continuing to plague you, maybe not for you, but for me and hopefully your bank account. I look forward to your essays, and think you should go to a park with Dick Cavett, and film your conversings.

Thanks!

[kilgore trout]

Even if Wallace Shawn had done nothing else, "My Dinner With Andre" would stand as some kind of landmark, which I believe he co-wrote with Andre Gregory. Definitely one of my favorite films.

One line in particular still resonates with me -
"I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just bl.ow your bra.ins out!"