Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Creativity (32 page)
I didn’t want one. I realized that everybody else was living better than I was. I had deliberately chosen not to go the university route, not to establish myself in a university, because I thought that I’d fall asleep. I needed a certain existential challenge to keep my mind alert and alive and responsive, at least enough so that I could write poems. But living in New York and scratching around for money, taking this job and that job and commuting, giving too many readings, that sort of thing, was destructive. It destroyed my concentration, so we had to get out.
This is when the Strands moved to Utah, where after another scary spell of poetic drought, his verse began to flow again. Patiently watching and listening to events unfolding around him, alternating between passionate involvement and sardonic detachment, he has found the pattern that best fits the predilections of his consciousness: to be an unassuming yet precise chronicler of life.
T
HE
H
AVEN OF
W
ORDS
Of all the writers we interviewed, Hilde Domin most clearly sees literature as an alternative reality, a refuge from the brutish aspects of life. In her seventies, she has achieved a leading position in German letters. Her poems are widely read and are included in official high school textbooks. She has had her share of prestigious prizes, and she is asked to be on numerous literary juries. But hardship and tragedy have marked her life, and it is doubtful she would have survived this long if she had been unable to impose the ordered meter of verse on the chaos of her experiences.
Domin started out studying law at the University of Heidelberg and took courses with the philosopher Karl Jaspers and the sociologist Karl Mannheim. At the university she fell in love with one of the professors, a well-known classical scholar, and, as Hitler was rapidly gaining power in Germany and Domin was Jewish, the two left on a voyage of exile that was to last almost three decades. At first they went to Rome, where Domin’s husband had many colleagues. But Jews were vulnerable in fascist Italy as well, so they left for Spain, then for the Dominican Republic, and for shor
t periods they visited the United States. Thanks to her husband’s connections and fame, the material hardships they encountered were not as great as they were for many other refugees. But the spiritual pain was hard enough to bear: Having to depend on the charity of hosts, being constantly on the outside of society, having to learn new languages and new skills—and always worrying about the fate of family and friends left behind—caused a chronic state of psychological dislocation.
After World War II, Domin and her husband returned to Germany, and eventually he regained his university chair, this time in Hispanic art, a field of study he had pioneered during his Caribbean exile. Domin, who up to then had been helping her husband as a sort of secretary, translator, and editor, started writing poems herself in 1951. This is how she describes the beginnings of her career: “One evening, I started writing a poem. I didn’t have the idea that I wrote, but I started. It happened to me. Like, you know, falling in love. Or like being run over by a car. It happened. I had the langu
age and I needed writing, so I wrote.” The precipitating factor was that she felt “annihilated” by her mother’s death. All through their life together, she had been protected by her husband; but in this crisis
she felt alone and helpless. “And that is why all of a sudden…
I flew into language
.”
This flight into a world of symbols saves the writer from the unbearable reality where experience is raw and unmediated. When painful experience is put into words, the poet is relieved of some of her burden:
[The emotion] gets fulfilled, I guess. You know what was in you, and you can look at it now. And it is kind of a catalyst. Wouldn’t you say? Yeah, I think so. You are freed for a time from the emotion. And the next reader will take the place of the author, isn’t it so? If he identifies with the writing he will become, in his turn, the author. And he then also gets freed. Like the author gets freed. The emotion may not be exactly the same, but it is somehow, how would you say, in harmonic resonance.
Domin’s skill with words was not something that manifested itself early or suddenly. She became interested in language after she learned first Greek and Latin, and later Italian, French, English, and Spanish. As she learned to speak these various languages, she became fascinated by the fact that the same word may have a certain set of connotations in one and a very different network of meanings in another. Or that one language could express some emotions or events more accurately than another. She read a great amount and came to cherish especially Shakespeare’s sonnets and the works of Goet
he. She apprenticed by helping her husband translate some of the classic Spanish poets. But above everything else she felt drawn to German, her native tongue; it was because she could not live where that language was not spoken that she returned to a land where her kin had been killed. “It’s normal to find refuge in language,” she says. “In music if you are a musician, or if you are a painter, in color.”
Struggles with the Field
It took six years before any of her verse was published. These were difficult years, not in the least because her husband, who had been her mentor and protector, bridled at the idea that Domin could have her own voice and independent literary career. At first he patronized her efforts, then he grew resentful, and it took many years for him finally to accept the fact that her fame might surpass
his own. But from the very first poem he grudgingly recognized that her verses were true poetry, and this reinforced Domin’s resolution. A more ominous obstacle was the politics of the field, which almost succeeded in discouraging her. What kept her going, she thinks, was the fact that she remained oblivious to much of the infighting that took place around her:
I was very naive. I don’t know how I could have been, but I was. I did not believe in literary intrigues or any such things, you know, a literary mafia. I mean, for me the work was work, and it has remained so. You know, it was difficult to be a woman, too, at the time. Being pretty. Being pretty is a disadvantage, of course. If you don’t want to be kind the way people want you to be kind. But poems make their own way, and also my poems made their way without the support of people who then were in the “mafia.”
Like many writers and painters, Domin is torn between endorsing two opposite images of the artist. One is the idealized version, in which genius triumphs no matter what obstacles stand in its way. The second is based on experience, and it recognizes the fact that jealous and antagonistic critics have ways to silence the artist’s voice:
Mallarmé says that a poem is like a rocket—it goes up by itself. And that may be true. But then of course it can be cut off. By jealousy. I guess that is the right word. Yeah, of course. But it cannot be ever spoken about and it’s long ago past, you know? It is an advantage not to be so young anymore. Nobody wants to sleep with you.
Domin is sensitive to the particular vulnerability of women in the arts. None of the women scientists in our sample hinted at sexual favors being part of the price they had to pay for advancement, but a suspicion of this being the case was not entirely absent from the artists’ accounts. It is in part for this reason that naïveté is such a great help for long-term success in the arts. Instead of wasting time hatching plots and counterplots, it allows the focusing of every ounce of energy on painting or writing. Of course, this works only as long as the innocent is also lucky—because
it is just as possible to be wiped out by the field, never knowing what happened or why.
Even now, despite her fame, Domin feels like an outsider in the field of literature. When she has to evaluate manuscripts for literary prizes, she concentrates on the merits of the writing instead of the personality and politics of the writer. This is how things should be, of course, but Domin claims they are rarely so. “You know, I am a terrible person when I am on a jury because I have the idea that I am not looking at the person but at the poem. And some people don’t. And therefore very soon I am out of the jury.” But while she keeps on the periphery of power struggles, she is deeply
involved in helping young writers improve their craft. Every week she gets scores of manuscripts from aspiring poets, asking for advice. The poems she thinks are beyond redemption she sends back with a note thanking the writer for his or her confidence. If she sees some promise in the verse, she will spend hours suggesting improvements to the writer—mainly to simplify, to cut out whatever is redundant, flabby, unnecessary. Her own poems read like Japanese haiku, clean to the bone.
Telling It As It Is
Domin is aware that her poetry acts as a catalyst for deep emotions, and usually painful ones—like the depression caused by the death of her mother. Finding words for what is painful begins the healing—through form and style the poet recovers control over tragic events. But for this to work, it is necessary to be absolutely truthful, never pulling punches, always looking at reality without flinching. The ability to do this, Domin thinks, is her strongest claim to being a poet. “I think I am honest, that is why my poems get straight to people regardless of their age or their social situati
on. Honesty is always touching because so few people are honest, no? I don’t make words around it.”
Like many other respondents, Domin credits her parents—in this case, her mother—with forming her character.
It’s my nature. I think it depends on my parents. I had such a wonderful childhood because I didn’t need to lie. And so I was educated to have confidence in people. If you learn it when you are very young it convinces you, even if later you have bad experiences. On the whole, confidence kind of creates confidence, doesn’t it?
I did not have to lie, no. And therefore, I guess possibly, I did
not learn to. I have learned to keep silent, but I did not learn to lie. It was my mother. I could speak lots of intimate things with her, and if other children wanted to not tell where we went to, I told my mother, “We are there and there, but don’t tell the other mothers if they call,” and my mother always kept face. I think for children the most important thing is whether they can be open at home and have nothing to fear, but can be just straightforward.
Honesty is important to the poet for at least two reasons. The first is that if she lets ideology or undue optimism color the way she reports her experiences, the truth content of the poem will be corrupted. The second is that the poet must be honest with herself, always evaluating what she writes and not letting wishful thinking stop her from improving the evolving work. “In every art, you have to be your own critic,” Domin says. “If you get up to a real good standard, you have to be both the one who writes and the one who corrects at the same time. It is paradoxical, but you have to be
paradoxical, otherwise you cannot live in this world.” The creative individual must reject the wisdom of the field, yet she must also incorporate its standards into a strict self-criticism. And for this one must learn to achieve the dialectical tension between involvement and detachment that is so characteristic of every creative process:
You must always keep distance from yourself. Don’t you think? It is the change between being quite close and being quite distant. You must always be in it and always see it from the outside. While you are doing it, you are in it. But you must always keep also a distance. And evidently the more you have the skill, the craft, the more you are able to at the same time be in it and also keep the distance and know what you are doing. Like, for example, when you eliminate a word. In the beginning you eliminate it
after
you have written it. And when you are more skilled you eliminate while you are writ
ing. A schizoid process, is writing. You are the emotional person that kind of furnishes the words, and at the same time you are the rational person that kind of knows which words you want.
But being unflinchingly honest can be dangerous when reality becomes too chaotic, and art can no longer bring order to it. Several
of Domin’s close friends, Jewish writers who survived the Holocaust, have recently taken their lives, or have lost their minds, in desperation at the renewal of racism and fascism in Europe. She shares their suffering but is not ready to throw in the towel. She still hopes that poetry will help young people to find their way to a better world.
When you write poetry honestly, and when you read it honestly, then you become an individual and build up a defense against becoming programmed. And if you read poetry to young people, which I very often do—I go to schools, I have even gone to prisons—I feel you can raise in people’s minds the wish never to be an opportunist, never to be a mindless follower. To look always at what’s happening and not to look away from it. That’s the most you can do. You cannot change the world, but you can change the single person, I guess. And a single person who decides not to join the crowd….
You should not look whether you are in or out. You should look into your own heart. Confucius says that you should listen to the silent voice of your own heart. This is what poetry can do.
R
ELEASED BY
S
TYLE
Anthony Hecht is a lyric poet whose verse has been published in numerous collections and in
The New Yorker
and other leading magazines. He has been awarded fellowships by all the major foundations and has won a great number of prizes for his work, including the Pulitzer in 1968. Hecht’s poems are crystalline, elegant to the point of refinement, constructed with a rigorous attention to form. A Vivaldi concerto could provide a passable musical analogy to his writing. He often uses the sonnet, or even earlier
canzoni
of the kind used in the Middle Ages, more than six hundred yea
rs ago. The rules of these forms are so rigid that even Dante complained that to write according to them was like hanging chains upon himself and that he never would write in that style again. Yet, paradoxically, it is by following such demanding discipline that poetry can liberate the writer—and the reader—from the jumbled onslaught of raw experience.