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A. ALVAREZ
Mayakovsky, Yesenin and Tsvetayeva killed themselves. Among the
painters, the suicides include Modigliani, Arshile Gorki, Mark Gertler,
Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko. Spanning the generations was
Hemingway, whose prose was modeled on a kind of physical ethic
of courage and the control necessary at the limits of endurance. He
stripped his style to the bone in order to achieve the aesthetic corol–
lary of physical grace - a matter of great economy, great precision,
great tension under the appearance of ease.
In
such a perspective,
the natural erosions of age - weakness, uncertainty, clumsiness, im–
precision, an overall slackening of what had once been a highly
tuned machine - would have seemed as unbearable as losing the
ability to write.
In
the end, he followed the example of
his
father
and shot himself.
Each of these deaths has its own inner logic and unrepeatable
despair, and to do them justice would require a degree of detail
beyond my purposes here. But a simple point emerges: before the
twentieth century it is possible to discuss cases individually, since the
artists who killed themselves or were even seriously suicidal were rare
exceptions.
In
the twentieth century the balance suddenly shifts: the
better the artist the more vulnerable he seems to be. Obviously, this
is in no way a firm rule. The Grand
Old
Men of literature have
been both numerous and very grand: Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Mann,
Forster, Frost, Stevens, Marianne Moore. Even so, the casualty rate
among the gifted seems out of all proportion, as though the nature
of the artistic undertaking itself and the demands it makes had
altered radically.
There are, I think, a number of reasons. The first is the con–
tinuous, restless urge to experiment, the constant need to change, to
innovate, to destroy the accepted styles.
"If
it works," says Marshall
McLuhan, "it's obsolete." But experiment has a logic of its own
which leads it unceasingly away from questions of formal technique
into a realm where the role of the artist himself alters. Since
art
changes when the forms available are no longer adequate to what
has to be expressed, it follows that every genuine technical revolu–
tion is parallel to a profound internal shift. (The superficial changes
need not concern us since they are a matter merely of fashion, and,
as such, are dictated not by any inner necessities but by the economics
of the art industry and the demands of art consumers.) Thus for the
