Kaffeeklatsch

Do we understand Grace Hartigan by browsing the catalogue of her life? Is to look at the facts of an artist’s existence enough to know her…. No! I stamp my foot, and throw the catalogue down. Journalism will never do. We need style - literature’s substance - if we are to see the living portrait.

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As we slowly drive past the roadblock, a police officer walks across and taps the window. I roll it down, sticking my head out. Yes, officer? Be careful now, very careful, as you drive down there. The accident is horrendous, and we haven’t yet cleared all the bodies and the blood. Don’t look. I advise you very strongly sir, do not look, keep straight ahead, your eyes on the road.

Too melodramatic for your taste? A little too Lars von Trier? Ok. Prepare yourself. Work yourself up. Become tense and excitable. And put that tea down! You can drink it afterwards. Can’t have you spilling it now, can we? It might seep into your laptop, and these words...what will they look like then?

Oh, I’m joking am I? No no no. Gird yourself! Be a warrior going into battle. Read with courage and strength. This writer has no mercy.

Although [Jeffrey] had been off heroin for a decade, he did not give up alcohol; on December 9 2006, he died of liver failure, at age sixty-four. His son, Jason, had died five years earlier, at age thirty, of a heroin overdose.

Grace had remained deaf to her granddaughters’ invitations to include her in their lives. After her 1992 visit to California, Vicky wrote, “It hurts my feelings that you never want to see me.” Two weeks after Jeffrey’s death—three days before Christmas—in what was probably the cruelest, most unforgivable act of her entire life, Grace sent a letter to Valerie, her other granddaughter. After writing the salutation in her usual script, Grace resorted to capital letters—as if concerned that the message might otherwise not be perfectly clear—for the body of the letter.

She began relating a story about her life as if it were a fairy tale or fable; “About 65 years ago,” a girl and boy married and “much to their horror she got pregnant and had a baby.” When Robert returned from his army service, “she was an artist and he was a lost man.” After Jeffrey went to live with Robert in California, Grace wrote, “I saw him once in 50 years.” Then came a stunning blow: “I met his daughters briefly, they are women with whom I have nothing in common.” Grace proclaimed that “family feelings do not come with the accident of birth but through constant living and nurturing.” But those fault was that? “I’m sorry you lost your father. I lost my son 50 years ago.”

Granted that Grace felt no closeness to her granddaughters, this abrupt dismissal was an act of appalling selfishness. Mourning her father, and in the process of separating from her alcoholic first husband, Valerie was deeply wounded by the letter. It is hard to find excuses for an eighty-four-year-old woman in full possession of her faculties, and no stranger to suffering, who could be so cruel to a grieving close relative. Perhaps Grace’s many years of alcohol addiction had impeded her ability to empathize. (A medical diagnosis is given in the footnotes.)

Cathy Curtis is appalled by her subject. She is right to be so, though we bridle at an interpolation like “whose fault was that?”, and we resist the moral abuse. Sermons are out of place in Grace Hartigan’s life. And as readers we demand freedom and respect: let us make our own judgements. We left primary school a long time ago, Ms Curtis, and, growing wise with experience, we see, as you apparently do not, that Grace has lost - and has wanted to lose - all contact with this family.

A life is not a classroom. The biographer’s subjects older and more complex than children. Few seem aware of this. Artists and writers, retaining something of their adolescence, attracting those who, having never left the playground, mistake eternal youth for their own immaturity. We accept these traits in the columns of a newspaper, but it is a catastrophe when journalists are put in charge of an adult’s life: schoolboys and girls should not write biographies, their experience too narrow and weak. Moral indignation, a product of naivety and the shallow egoism that it engenders, is disastrous when trying to understand complex and difficult characters. The biographical task requiring a mature intelligence and a suspension of judgement; only then can we absorb personalities very different from ourselves. Turn the moral filter off, Ms Curtis. But do they listen? The odd, the exceptional, the barely sane; The Other, to use that foolishly fashionable term, has to be approached with caution and respect, and a penetrating wisdom. Do they take heed of these words? Why should they? They have read all the letters, spoken to the survivors, and scanned the secondary literature. The facts are sufficient for their task. And the idea that they themselves may have to change…. But this is nonsense, they protest, look at our certificates, our publications in the quality press; then there is our liberal tolerance, our sympathy, our acumen. We change! what talk is this?! Now that I think of it - having thought of it much before - I see the reason for this current academic obsession with The Other: most academics lack the wit to grasp those alien to themselves.1 The Other: all those outside the university campus.2 Why expose yourself, Ms Curtis? To vent that feeble and mean moralism. It is you who appall us. A child squashing the world down to its puny size. This display of small-mindedness contaminates this reader. Lucky it comes at the end of the book…imagine: to have spent the entire journey with a prig!

Biographers should understand their subjects. They prefer attacking them.

The biographer should be an artist; think of Julia Blackburn and Michael Holroyd. But these talents are rare. Too often the “life writer” is no more than a filing clerk, who collects the data and positions it on the page; the structure of the book the chronology of a person’s life. No plot. Little dramatic tension. The scene-painting perfunctory. And the psychology: pure pop. To read such books is to read the newspapers, those printing plants of disposal fact and forgettable comment. Junkies for the lives of artists accept these dull products; we are prepared to pay the dealer’s price for our addiction. But no sermons! Ms Curtis. Leave that to the preachers and the columnists; those channels of small-town resentment, who like to target the odd, the perverse and the brilliant. This reader, at least, doesn't belong to that crowd. I want no Mrs Grundy in my living room. 

Do they listen? Heck they do! They barge in. And talk! Talking, talking, talking; telling us how to behave and what to think, and really Mrs Hartigan, you shouldn’t say those things…. Do I care? I never listen to that crap. What do they know about me or Frank or Joe or Helen? Eh Schloss? I ask them to leave. It’s no good. On and on they go. I’ve got work to do, Ms Curtis. Is she hearing me? No, she wants to tell me about the granddaughters, and the hurt I’ve done them. You have a wicked mouth Mrs Hartigan. Even Grace’s laugh does not put this woman off. And then when Grace pushes Ms Curtis out of her studio she grabs at the door jamb, where she insists and pleads and tells Grace straight: you have badness in you Grace Hartigan. Why so surprised Cathy my dear? Why the outburst now? This letter is no shock. It’s been obvious for a long time that by your standards, a standard, by the way I do not accept, I am a horrible person. Isn’t this really ugly…

LeSueur, who was not a member of Grace’s fan club, also witnessed her callous side. Once, when he and Frank and Grace left a party, she became annoyed at a drunk painter who was following them down the street. She turned and hit the man on the head, propelling him into the gutter. While Frank helped the man stand up, Grace keep walking. Why, LeSuer asked, would she do a thing like that? “I can’t stand a man who doesn't act like a man,” she replied. Frank loyally stood up for her when the two men were alone claiming that “the guy was asking for it.”

This biographer is hiding from the truth. Frank ‘claimed’. LeSueur no “member of Grace’s fan club”.3 Tell it straight Ms Curtis! Sharpen your prose style. Stick the needle in; so we get the hit, that hypodermic shot of Grace’s personality; her hate and rage, the violence, that imperiousness as it slides into the arm…ah…ah…ah…we sink down in a swoon. But not this mealy-mouthed stuff: he claimed; he’s no member of the club…blah! So what if LeSueur is not a friend and Frank disses the other guy. Are you saying it’s alright for Grace to punch a man? Any old painter allowed to throw a drunken Grace Hartigan to the ground. Is that what you are saying Ms Curtis?

Oh, oh, what is going on…. A group of young women in skirts, blouses and cardigans are pushing me out of the book: a scrum pack against a scrum machine, slowly rolling me off the page. You’ll spoiling the party, Mr Schloss. Haven’t you learned anything? In a party everybody wants to get along, we are all friends here, at least to each other’s faces. The bitching goes on in private, out in the kitchen or in the back garden between a shot of fag. Here everyone is nice, we like each other, and - you always forget this, don’t you? - we want to get on. I know, I know: remove the bores and brutes! And they do. Pushed out of the door, I tumble onto the garden path, where I contemplate my bruises and my own unpleasantness. Why am I so obtuse? Biographers have to like their subjects. It is not possible to spend years in the company of an obnoxious harridan. Cathy Curtis, for her own sanity, has to pretend that underneath that moral ugliness there lives a decent human being. Here is the biggest danger, it is the largest failure of the biographical enterprise: the biographer writes a vision of themselves into the subject, which they soften and sentimentalise. Yet Grace Hartigan was not an ordinary person. She wasn’t made for day-time TV. No, I wasn’t Schloss. I ask her if she has read this book. I skimmed it Schloss, I skimmed it. For a while I couldn't recognise the main character. Had my name on the title, but hell, I sure wasn’t in there. Her cackle disturbs even me.

Grace is too big, too difficult, has too many edges, for the homely wisdom of this biographer. But Ms Curtis isn’t going to worry about that. Out comes her scissors and she cuts Grace down to a good suburban size. Snip snip; snip snip. Ow! Ow!…snip snip.

What to do with one’s disgust, which can put an enormous strain on the author, who may have to live with his subject for years. This was Emmanuel Carrère’s dilemma when he discovered that Limonov had fired a gun at Sarajevo. So appalling did he find his hero’s actions that he put the book aside for a year. Grace doesn’t disturb Ms Curtis nearly so much - there is no indication that she ever thought of giving up this project.4 Instead, the nastiness is downplayed, overlooked, medically treated: Grace, she convinces herself, wasn’t so bad after all.5

We sympathise. All those years wasted when you discover you are writing about a minor artist who is nasty with it. The vertigo when you peer over the mountain top of research…. A serious writer - young Robert Graves hanging to the cliff’s edge - embraces the experience, hoping to master it. Or they walk away, knowing such heights are not for them. These two choices are too extreme for Cathy Curtis, who is a mere clerk. This book just a job. Then there’s the advance. And all the people she’s told: the word in the quarter is that she’s working on a major female artist. While she imagines herself reshaping the art landscape, Grace no longer some insignificant mound, but a hill hustling for space with Motherwell and Kline. This book was always going to be written, once first conceived.

She reads that letter. Poor Cathy. The journey difficult, she’s looking forward to its end; having eaten cheap food, slept in bug-ridden hotels, and dealt with crooks, barely surviving the charlatans. It will make a picaresque tale, she thinks, congratulating herself on her stamina. But this. No, this she had not expected; despite all that she has seen and heard. Grace Hartigan is a termagant! Cathy feels soiled. It hurts like a wound. Treat it with antiseptic, a friend suggests, bandage it up, let it rest; in a few hours Cathy you will be alright again. Sure enough, the next day she is back at her desk. Yes, I know I can do this, she says to a colleague; I know I can make Grace work for me: she was hurt; then there’s the environment, she can’t help herself; and that alcohol…. Grace is turned into a victim, Ms Curtis the doctor with the diagnosis. 

We don’t believe it.

Grace Hartigan was one of the strongest characters of the 1950s. Heck, she’s as tough as any New York cop. Traveling with Grace, through the chapters of this book, we find an aggressive and self-willed woman, who is also attractive, vivacious, sexually promiscuous…the list runs on…witty, intelligent and aesthetically sensitive. There is charisma too. We like her. No no no. We love her! Even though she abuses the bores and philistines who share the bus with us. That’s a tautology, Schloss. There’s an equals sign between philistine and bore; she draws the equation on the dusty window. Do I need to add that she irritates with her insensitivity, makes us angry at her hardness and shocks with her bad behaviour? There she goes, slamming into the man behind…. You know f*** about art. Art! It’s porn you’re after. Excited, she swivels around in her seat to shout into the man’s face. You want a harem on your walls. Every girl stripped for inspection. And you on that couch unzipping your trousers…. Grace! I nudge her in the ribs. She twists her neck round and sneers at me. Art! No good gallery should let him in, extending her arm and pointing a finger at his chest. For a moment I worry he might grab and bite it. She turns back to the man, and draws quick squiggly lines in front of his eyes. Then puts that finger in her mouth. She pulls it out and sticks it up. Giving The Finger, opus 32; she says, laughing hysterically. I recall an earlier scene, where Grace, shouting like a lunatic, pushed an expensively dressed man against the gallery wall, then squeezed his testicles. Art! The only brush you can use, fella, is your penis, and, I’ve gotta to tell you, there ain’t many canvases left in there. The curator flapping her arms, and appealing to Franz and Robert, who are giggling by the drinks table. Selfish. Loud. A terror to those who are not simpatico, which is most of New York, and nearly all of America, Grace Hartigan terrorises the average and the ordinary. She doesn’t care if she hurts our feelings. We mean nothing to her. Behind that vivacious surface there is an empathetic void. Cut off from the majority of human kind she can only resonate with similar characters or believe them extensions of herself. Aloof, she is alienated by people outside her sensibility, whom she finds a drain on her vitality. Grace lacks the everyday sentimentalities. She is…. Quieter please, cautions a friend; you know that the philistines are in command, and that they demand everyone be nice; we must all pretend to be sympathetic. She takes me to a footnote.6 I read it with interest, and some wonder. Wow. Yes. Ok, ok, I whisper. Psst. Psst. I lean into my friend’s ear: Grace, you know, is a typical artist.7 Her emotional ties are intense but short-lived, and are prone to a cruel utilitarianism: lovers, husbands, even her own children are sacrificed to aesthetic obsession and her freewheeling desires. Art. It is an egoists’ ball. Keep the noise down Schloss. Ok ok. Art. It incubates monsters, I say in my softest voice. Though should we care? Grace is marvellous company, if she likes us, and is in good form. She belongs to an elite and expects us to live up to its standards. And if we don’t - we’re trash; and perhaps that is true.… Too loud, says my friend, shaking my arm; you know how they hate that word elite. Alright alright, I reply. I do know; I know I know. Today we must believe art and those who create it are cuddly teddy bears, safe in the hands of our kids. It is why Cathy Curtis works so hard with those scissors. Snip snip snip. Vixen. Virago. Shrew. All fall to the floor. But she slips on hellcat, catching her fingertip. But with the Germolene and a plaster soon all is well. Snip snip; snip snip….

Ms Curtis writes that we must blame the alcohol for corroding Grace’s personality. Like all right thinking people of today she replaces moral condemnation with medical diagnosis, thus diminishing her subject. Grace no longer a heroine, with free will and choice, but a patient who needs help and a certificate of mental insanity.

I was in the room when Grace wrote that letter. Her mind was cold, alone, hard and sharp. A few days before it had been a rampaging crowd. Don’t I know the family history is terrible? she’d shouted. That those addictions and early deaths suggest a lack of parental care. I don’t know this? Do I have to be told! They are so dull. Me! They want to tell me! As if I haven’t lived with this for decades. You know what Schloss, they strangle me with their closeness. They suffocate me with their Biedermeier psychology. Hey Grace, you’ve been a bad mother. Can’t you just see them, stuffing their faces with self-righteousness. It’s there in every line. She’s an evil bitch, thinks more of those silly pictures than she does of us. Moan moan moan moan! I know, I know, I say quietly…. Keep away Schloss! she shouts, as I go to touch her. I care? My pictures are alive, while they’re hardly living, their entire lives a preparation for the mortuary. Always so smart, Grace, but aren’t you…I wave my hand in the air…going too far. Who are they! Her words or her eyes on fire? I’ll tell you Schloss. They’re Lilliputians trying to pull down the Statue of Liberty. It will never fall. She goes to the window and looks down at the street. Grace, you know, you’re becoming a bore…. Yes, I am, she smiles at her reflection. Stupid people make you stupid, isn’t that what you always say my dear Schloss? I concede this truth. And as I go to the kitchen to make tea Grace shouts out: the solution is simple, we get away from these brutes. By keeping our distance, Schloss, that is how we save our sanity. She follows me into the kitchen and wraps her arms around my waist. It will be alright, she purrs into my ear, I know what to do.

Intelligent and sensitive - especially about herself and art - Grace reacts badly to any pressure. She will not be canned into another’s morality.8 Of course she is the source for those self-destructive behaviours that have killed off son and grandson. Her distance, that aloofness, her complete lack of the maternal feelings - there can be no question that she has caused two generations to suffer. Grace rages at those who rub her nose in the obvious; I am not a cat, Schloss, that has pissed on the carpet; come here kitty kitty, smell that kitty kitty; don’t do it again! whap to the floor! you bad cat, bad bad cat. Can you see them Schloss, trying to hold me down. And who's the sad fart, do you think, who'll be holding my arse!….That cackle again, as she strokes the breakfast bar. We understand the granddaughter’s upset; we accept it and sympathise. But we also know she doesn’t understand Grace, and has made a mistake in trying to get close to someone outside her psychological range. Distance protects everyone.

Grace has her own way of dealing with her remoteness, her lack of the conventional emotions, and the damage this causes to family, lovers and friends. She accepts these facts and faces them like an artist: she runs away. The danger is to lose control and succumb to guilt and remorse, trapped inside the anguish and regret. You’re right, Schloss, I’ll give you credit for that. Now it is Grace who is looking over my shoulder, as I write this. I attacked, and hard. How they hated me! That mean bitch! Don’t you just hear them? Marionettes on the end of my string. Never heard from again. Ha! Ha! Ha! To protect herself Grace increases the distance between herself and the family. To feel less - so securing her equanimity - she has to hurt them more. Only by alienating the granddaughters completely - that letter is meant to be abhorrent - does she retain the emotional balance essential for her work. Not to feel the pain of a bad conscience, which would undermine the meaning of her life, those artistic sacrifices, she has to kill all their sympathy; cutting the umbilical cord of familial connection. She needs their hate, it keeps them on the other side of America.

Poor Grace. Living the life of an artist amongst people who resent the artist’s mentality. No society wants to be shunned or neglected, treated with contempt. When alive she could impress her personality on those around her. No more. Society, outliving the rebels, always has its revenge. Poor Grace! Now, when she should be able to luxuriate in the mausoleum of her reputation, it is rifled by grave robbers. The family visits the studio, which they turn into a suburban living room; the walls painted in pastel colours, the TV a background commentary on the day. Schloss, how can they listen to that crap - even as a ghost Grace will not let up. Do you hear that? she snarls, as some preppy kid talks about Grace Hartigan, one of the most important artists in postwar America. Grace was a strong independent woman. A feminist, at a time when women were supposed to be wives and mothers, she had to make terrible sacrifices in pursuit of her art. To be an artist was a horrendous cost both to her and her family. Are you hearing that, Schloss? Are you reading the code: I had to pay a cost? Or was it they who suffered? We’re all just a bunch of hopeless victims, right? Bah! Should have conformed Mrs Hartigan, you should have conformed. How dare she use my first name. Grace this, Grace that; Grace makes cookie crumble. Cost! What does this high school kid know about the price of art? Do you hear her Schloss? counting out the psychological pennies. If the cost had been a hundred times more, I would have paid it. Oh, listen to this…. She had many lovers, some were the most famous artists in New York. No, my dear, I fucked my way through the entire West Side. I know I know, too coarse for the TV. Get the old, the ugly and the too damned ornery out of here! Oh, Schloss, come here; come on, come here, this is marvellous. Grace stares at the screen entranced. Most of her associates were men; they were artists, writers, poets and bohemians, who helped her find her artistic vocation. It was a tough time, especially for a woman, but through it she discovered herself both as an independent and creative person. No my dear. Grace paints a thick black acute angle across the table top; it points at herself. This Grace fucked those guys because she liked fucking. The brush goes in, ecstatic expressionism comes out. Ha! Ha! Ha! Stop being so crude, Mrs Hartigan, Grace cries out in a whiney voice. Oh, isn’t this marvellous Schloss; she squeezes my arm and pulls me to the television…. Crouching down Grace cups her hand around an ear and presses it against the screen, whose sound she has muted. Putting on a thick Mid-Western accent she says, he said that the place was a mess; and that the area wasn’t very salubrious. He couldn't find a good hamburger anywhere; the one stall sold shoe leather not meat, is what my husband said. But I said what about that bakery, and that lovely display in the window. It had a wonderful wedding cake made of white roses. Just like those roses in The English Belle, you know, the shop where Mabel works. She is so talented. Mabel does all the flower arranging now; she is so clever with her fingers; just like Grace; you can see it’s in the blood. If only she’d had a chance she could have been an artist too. I’m sure all she needed was someone to support her; you know, with the encouragement, and the contacts, and showing her, you know how it is, it is a different way of life and you need the confidence, don’t you? Hear that Schloss! I’m to blame because Mabel works in a shop. And they wanted me to listen to this, weekend upon week. Grace stands up. Better dead than this rot. A flower arranger! If Mabel had come here she could have arranged my brushes: there’s the red one, the blue one and the white one; shall I put them in the jam jar or the coffee mug? Grace stands lamp-post straight, with her head on her side, and a finger crooked against her nose. Lock me up in yokel-town. That’s what those bastards wanted. They’re monsters, Schloss. Monsters!  Come now Grace, aren’t you going too far?

This character is beyond the granddaughters. The Famous Artist is an exotic creature whom they only ever see in the zoo; inside the cage it looks colourful and cute. But let a colony of monkeys loose in the living room….9 The simple mistake of simple people is to think that everyone - underneath that surface decoration - is just like themselves. It is why the family want to involve Grace in their lives. Do visit; can we come over; please please, how about next month; and here’s baby, look; and Jonathan, do you know he starts school next week. Poor dear Jeffrey, he died today. What appalling manners! Grace rages, as I put the kettle on. Is it Earl Grey or Lapsang souchong? I call out. Rhinos show more sensitivity, she shouts. She moves into the frame of the kitchen door. They are a bunch of…the kettle boils her words away.

Sentimentality, as coarse in its way as vulgarity and clumsiness, is a perennial threat to the artist’s delicate antennae. Grace lives inside herself. Her world a self-created one, which because it is created - living in the mind and across the sensibility - is fragile, and easily damaged by careless outsiders. It must be protected, often by quite brutal means. The presence of others is also a nuisance; their trivia - another’s life is always trivial to the artist - liable to overwhelm that inner world which requires tranquility and large spans of quiet space. We mustn't forget time. An artist never has enough time, a precious object that others insouciantly steal. These strong characters, so forbidding from the outside, are weak on the in; their equanimity apt to collapse in a whirlpool of emotion and excitement, other people a storm of sensory and mental stimuli overwhelming their tenuous control. Indifference is the artist’s electric fence, keeping intruders out. But this family will not listen; they throw rugs over the wires, bash down the wooden poles. Thus Grace’s reaction. It’s extreme, for sure; but necessary, and predictable to those who know her well. The closer the granddaughters try to get the more aggressive she becomes. And they will not listen! Before that final climatic letter we suspect Grace sent out many signs: the civilised silence, the genteel snub, the laconic distance; that “you never want to see me” seems obvious to us. They are obtuse. They refuse to take the hint; on and on they go until…Jeffrey died today. Is it familial sympathy? Compassionate care? Straight information? No, Schloss, as she picks up the wine bottle, just one more attempt to touch this old cow. His dead body the bait on which to reel me in. But this shark won’t be caught, not on that measly portion. I’ll not bite! Laughing, she glugs down the wine straight from the bottle. We feel Grace’s claustrophobia. Of course she turned nasty. She has to live. Her life is to paint, and to teach and to talk about what she teaches. Grace stares at me, like a cat staring at a stranger. No, Schloss. This is the end. They won’t be seeing me again. Oh, they had their uses. You look surprised, Schloss. She smiles, as if replaying a private joke. Yes, they did. My paints were so bored they ran to the canvases to escape them. I was piling them into the galleries. Remember Elspeth: but why Grace, you’ve never painted so quickly…ha! ha! ha! God save us from the provinces, hey? You know the sort, the connubial bed covered with little pillows and fluffy toys. I’ll just put a nice print up on the walls.

______________

1. Contrast with Marlowe in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Novels, despite current academic dogma - see my Pass the Glue Please - remain the best biographies.

2. Reading Jon Elster’s Explaining Social Behaviour I am beginning to see a very strange community of souls, whose grasp of people is extremely slight: too many academics looking at society as if it is either a laboratory experiment or an examination question. These faults, because flagrant and egregious, are especially prevalent in the social sciences, with its pretensions to scientific precision; this ‘precision’ taking the humanity out of humans. One suspects the emphasis on change - it is on every university website - arises out of this lack of understanding: they must make everybody think and act like themselves!

Lorrie Moore’s short stories explore the personalities of these bizarre characters; the classic Terrific Mother (in The Collected Stories) revealing the true horror of their anti-social natures.

3. This book a difficult trip for the aesthete. On every page we tumble over a cliché. Ouch! Here’s one: “Grace’s deep personal connection to modern and contemporary literature was a hallmark of her early career.” (My italics). I fall over so many that my bruised body comes to look like a painting from the New York School.

4.  It is probable that Limonov hurt nobody. This cannot be said for Grace. Measured by pain delivered and succour provided we judge Limonov the far better person; yet Carrère is the biographer who exhibits moral scruple. Here is the vast ravine that separates the serious writer from the career journalist.

5.  We see something similar in the new Miles Davis documentary, especially in relation to his drug use and relations to women. It sentimentalises the subject, yet in this film to good effect: Miles’ genius survives his often unpleasant character. Frances Taylor Davis sums up her relationship to Miles perfectly: no regrets; I do not forget; I love him still. Only someone so intimate can be so psychologically capacious.

6. Train Them Good.

7.  The great character study is Lermontov’s Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time. Pechorin, to be accurate, is an artist without the gift of art. And so he turns life into a game, one kind of aesthetics.

8.  For a powerful evocation of such a personalty, and their resistance to the simplicities of others, there is Lorrie Moore’s People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk (in The Collected Stories).

9.  There is Bestiary, in Julio Cortazar’s Blow Up and Other Stories. A variation on the What Maisie Knew theme, it can also be read as an allegory of what happens when you let an artist into the house. Tellingly, the central character is called the Kid.