Hello, My Name Is…
Appearances (see in Gallery / Store) | Image by Bruce Harris
A painting colors your mood, your mood colors the art. The strokes and dabs pull you into their swirls. As do the last lines that lay a story bare. Or a chord is struck and reverbs around the lyrics, a sonic glimpse into the singer's life binding it to your own. Does it matter who the artist is and the life they've led to be moved by their work?
No, I want to say. I say it. No. But then, I don't quite believe myself.
I am asking this question while contemplating a pen name for the writing I’m going to share. For the business of book publishing. For the gulping unveil of public persona. Because, if I'm honest about the no, it reflects my very strong instinct to hide behind the words I make and the pictures I take. Why?
My age, possibly. I was a youngish adult at the advent of social media, but I was not a partaker. While I admired the sentiment of sharing, I was turned off by incessant over-sharing, and by the stunning speed at which hate could be spread. But our better angels also have a place, and the ability to connect, which is the point of making art, supersedes my discomforts. But that conclusion leaves me no closer to the desire to let anyone know who I am.
Humility would be a natural answer. Natural, but wrong. Making art is the opposite of modest. Art is an audacious act. To take the necessary time to craft and craft and edit and edit and practice and practice is a gigantic leap of faith that assumes the time spent creating is worth spending. Especially if you haven't published or shown or performed. If you haven't had an audience's adulation or a critic's raised brow canted your way. You have no history, no evidence that anything that you create is worth your audience's time. You are, in a sense, insisting they invest their time, small as this audience likely will be, strangers they better be, friends and family are but a very small part of an artist’s business model. You are asking for a slice of this stranger's life; the time they take to consider your creation. Humble? I don't think so.
I find myself wanting to wriggle free from the necessary but self-sustaining grip of self-promotion. Wouldn't it be nice if an agent somehow found and loved my work, and then in this fantasy world, they found a publisher who loved it more, and further still, cultivated a global audience that cared only for the work, uninterested in how it came to be. I could just type away unbeknownst to the world, for I am well above the craving of mere celebrity. I tell myself that I've already been through high school; the cool kids have never been cool to me.
But am I ready for a harsh review? Worse yet, communal repudiation for some incorrectness depicted, some words misconstrued or poorly played. I easily convince myself that I would be thoroughly satisfied to have the security of anonymity rather than the responsibility of self-promotion. Because once the art is made, once it is deemed polished enough, a voice says that I am responsible for its birth into the world and that I should do right by its existence.
Perhaps the self in self-promotion is the self-determined dilemma. Pull the shower curtain back and, brace yourself, there's a naked, fifty-plus-year-old man, suds bubbling around what's left of his hair, covering up, and yelling at you to get the f*** out!
Perhaps anonymity is nothing but cover.
I believe in the idea that art isn't complete until it's shared. I'm even comfortable with the other idea that once the work is shared, copyright infringements aside, it belongs to the public realm and not the artist. Otherwise, the artists are nothing more than aging humans letting their voices echo against the shower tiles.
Unless said artist, who we will say is a writer, edits and edits and edits only for posterity's sake, for the ideal of an eternal offering, the release of the art and the artist being simultaneous. Not my choice, although I can see how the artist might be fed up with the agent query process, the book industry interruption, the big five publisher consolidations consolidating to four, three, two, Amazon. The chaotic market dynamics. Book buybacks. Discount bins. Success odds equaling lottery probabilities. Social media promotion devolving into de-humanizing widget making. And other endless distractions, discouragements, and frustrations. That longer-view approach has its appeal. But it won't help pay the bills. Nor does it feel responsible to the little voice, the seed, the calling that forced the artwork out from within.
There's also the faith-based approach to art; if it's good, it will find an audience. It just will, no matter what name is below the title. Trust me.
So how would the ideal of anonymity work? Let's take Elena Ferrante as an example. Nobody knows who she is, yet she has written several staggeringly good novels (plus My Brilliant Friend dramatized on HBO is utterly fantastic). To pull off anonymity in today's age makes her a master of invisibility. She has remained anonymous despite a variety of journalistic voyeurs trying to expose her identity. I admire her adamance and requisite skill in maintaining her mask, which she must feel is integral to her art. In her written interviews, if I understood her correctly, her belief is that a story should be judged on its own merit; that biographical knowledge can and does but shouldn’t influence the interpretation of the work. Of course, she is much more eloquent in communicating her position than I am, but that seems to be her primary justification for keeping the NO TRESPASSING sign hung prominently on her literary plot of ground.
Ironically, or cleverly, she has turned her nom-de-plume into an intriguing meta-fiction, with the protagonist of the Neapolitan novels conspicuously named Elena. Not quite as blatant as Philip Roth naming a character, Philip Roth, but not a bad effort. When asked which of her two primary characters from the Neapolitan novels, Elena or Lila, is most like herself, Ferrante said in a written interview that she thinks each character mirrors aspects of her personality. It does make me wonder, whether purposeful or not, doesn't the use of a meta-fictional schema precisely create a sense of biographical yearning in the mind of the reader? Like a self-portrait, the artist self-examines while inviting the audience to do the same.
Biography, while perhaps less important in fiction, is a big part of my connection with songwriters. Knowledge of my favorite songwriters' personal stories adds credibility and weight to my listening experience. Joni Mitchell, self-taught from rural Canada, somehow found her North Star and followed its light in an original and brilliant fashion, her life lacing in and out of her songs. Her voice, her poetry, her strange chords, and ethereal picking and strumming are, for me, endlessly moving. Bob Dylan witnesses and documents the world through a soul seeker's lens, despite the stage name; Zimmerman is his not-so-secret last name. I won't say his work is blatantly biographical but listen to enough of his work and a clear sense of the man appears from the twisting metaphors, the ironic sneer, and the apocalyptic appall. Bob Seger, when he sings about leaving every ounce of energy on a stage or that nobody loves me here anyway, I hear it through the knowledge of him and his band touring half of America in a station wagon for more than a decade playing nearly three hundred shows a year. Bruce Springsteen, the man's catalog is musical self-mythmaking; his own myth confronting and de-mythologizing the American myth. John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Shawn Colvin, Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Jason Isbell (I guess I'm giving away my musical tastes), and so many more, their life stories are layered in their songs like strata down a canyon wall.
Poetry is another example of autobiographic rooting’s, although it isn't in the public eye like popular music. Poetry isn't past the cultural tipping point (thank you Malcolm Gladwell) where consumers are barraged in a pinging downpour of synchronized hype. Think of poetry as an untapped global market for publicists everywhere that want new clients and bad invoices. I subscribe to Poem-A-Day through the Academy of American Poets; Rattle, an online journal that has a daily feed; and the Paris Review, which sends a daily poem. Mary Oliver, Jim Harrison, Gerald Stern, Lee Young Lee, Lisel Mueller, Billy Collins, Charles Simic, and many others fill my shelves. Their poems are a mosaic of their lives. Not always, but mostly. Yet, I still take time to search out interviews and read articles about the poets I love.
On the other hand, I also admire that Richard Ford doesn't have a website. Neither does Philip Roth. Or Jim Harrison. Or Annie Proulx. Or N. Scott Momaday. I doubt they ever concerned themselves with the conversion rates of Facebook ads. Author pages included on their publisher's websites don't count. Many of the luminaries, I suppose, don't need such a thing as a website. Their publishers and publicists and estates handle all things online. The steady stream of bookstore and library re-stockings. School syllabus requirements. Literary award nominations and wins. Readings or recordings of readings. The grinding gears of constant to-do’s keeping the literary gods flush and in the public eye. I'm referring to several of my literary gods. Lit gods are different for everyone and, unfortunately for many, do not exist at all.
Yes, my lit gods had book tours and radio interviews, feature articles, and some even ended up on major network talk shows. Their work seems closer to that idyllic approach; quality will always find its audience. That the life and the afterlife of their art was as inevitable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. That their voice was big enough and eloquent enough and talented enough that it must be heard. That they, by the power of their words, were sought by an audience rather than seekers of the same. That they are the ones who are actually above the attention-grubbing, hand-wringing need for self-promotion.
I know that is not true. I know that without the back-office staff and sizable budgets of major publishers and all their synergistic, conglomerative string pulling, I wouldn't be able to find much information about my favorite writers. Perhaps they wouldn't be my favorite writers. Perhaps I wouldn't know they exist at all.
But industry workings aside, I can and have devoured countless interviews and articles to learn about my website-less gods. Why? Because I'm curious. Possibly to gain insight into their process, the influences that spurred their keen imaginations, and the free-climb and associated terrors they overcame to be resting on Mount Olympus. Some of this sleuth work has led to my discovery of other writers and philosophers and musicians, none of whom I would have otherwise known.
I can't say I spend any time connecting the dots between the fiction of my favorite novelists and their biographies. I want to know who wrote the book in my hands, but I'm too immersed in the music of their prose and the worlds they create to bother matching fact to fiction. Perhaps songwriters and poets occupy a slightly different space in my imagination than novelists. Or it's possible that the songs and poetry I love can be replayed or re-read multiple times, whereas several hundred-page novels are a much longer undertaking. Lyrics and melody are imprinted in different ways than fictional characters and their sagas, but both are put to memory and to the heart.
Toni Morrison stated in an interview with Charlie Rose (pre-cancelation) that all fiction is shaded with the life and times of the author. When I heard that, I said to myself, of course it is. How could it possibly be any other way? And she referenced James Joyce, who rightly stated that all fiction is inherently political. I imagined an actor in a house of mirrors, their own house, with all the costumes of the day.
If the art of fiction is unavoidably biographical and implicitly political, then it is, therefore, very personal. And what could be more personal than a name?