Subtract ... 'outwardness'
Embrace inwardness and creative privacy
I’ve often said that the major tension in my life is that between retreat from ‘the outside world’ and engagement with it. While (tellingly) it remains unresolved, it is indeed the central preoccupation of my latest novel. And I believe all true artists live permanently, and uncomfortably, in this uncertain state.
I’ve grown accustomed to trotting up and down the line between the end points of total privacy and complete exposure, and at times have even found a kind of peace in that routine movement. But last year I read my friend Lucinda Holdforth’s short, excoriating treatise on the bullshit of contemporary life, 21stCentury Virtues: How they are failing our democracy. It’s an analysis of how our culture is embracing self-absorption as an aspirational virtue, and the danger this poses to leadership and democracy. I loved all this book’s provocations, but one in particular set a personal warning bell ringing in the back of my mind – and its toll has only grown louder with the passing of the months.
Among Lucinda’s surprising targets – ‘authenticity’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘empathy’, ‘humility’ and others – was ‘transparency’. I was confronted and confused by this: how could transparency possibly be a bad thing? Well, you need to read the book to see how very convincingly Lucinda argues that ‘transparency’ is a pernicious threat to democracy (hint: fascists love surveillance, and self-surveillance most of all).
But alongside that societal threat, I’ve come to see, is a deeply personal one for me – the danger that our contemporary worship of ‘openness’ will totally destroy the deep privacy of the inner life, a privacy that is essential if art is to flourish.
In this digital and therapeutic era, we should not be astonished at just how much of their private lives modern people are willing to disclose. To anyone. To everyone. Especially for money, but often for free. The veil between the home and the world has now been lifted … The mania for self-explanation and self-exposure means that the concept of a valuable private life is almost meaningless today. At no small cost. ‘A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes … shallow,’ wrote political theorist Hannah Arendt.
These observations hit me hard. And the more I think about it, the more I see that too much voluntary ceding of privacy may threaten to completely extinguish what I call ‘the art spirit’ within myself.
I’m aware, of course, of the irony that I’m attempting to figure out this personal problem here, in such a public way. But like others before me, I also find that writing for an audience is sometimes the only way I can articulate and process my thoughts. As EM Forster and others have said, ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ And I’m hoping my attempt to think seriously about this here might circumvent some of the shallowness Hannah Arendt warns us about.
Because I know this shallowness, and increasingly I feel its corrosive force.
I feel this shallowness in the Instagram posts I make several times a week. I feel it when I answer inane questions to help fill magazine columns or social media feeds (If you could have three famous people to dinner who would they be? If you were a character in a book who would it be? What’s a book you hate? Who would play you in the movie of your life? What’s your favourite swearword?) I feel this shallowness, too, in interview questions designed to elicit banal expressions of emotion, and I feel it in the rote, faux-profound remarks we writers routinely dole out about the value of reading, the importance of empathy, blah blah blah.
THE MEMBRANE BETWEEN the private and public self has always been a difficult one for artists to keep intact. My mortgage broker’s private self is of no interest to me, for it has no bearing on her work at hand. But do I love to see inside the artist’s studio, to hear about her childhood, her dreams? Of course I do - for is this deeply personal experience not the wellspring of their work? Is not their art itself, in fact, the deepest expression of that private self? I think it is. But that doesn’t mean I’m owed access to any of it outside my experience of their work. And I’m growing more convinced that the artist’s inner world must be held close if good work is to continue to be made.
Too many of us have allowed the membrane to rupture in both directions. That we put too much of our private selves into the public world is bad enough, but I think the second type of privacy breach is worse: we’ve allowed too much of the public world into our inner lives.
But how does this happen? And how should we address it?
Too much ‘inside’ getting out
The first type of rupture to the membrane should be easiest to address, with a little forethought and discipline. And conscious resistance.
For a long time now, there has grown up a public clamour for ‘the story behind the story’, and as media consumers we all bear responsibility for the fact that any competent publicist or journalist will be hoping an artist a) has a personal ‘story’ to attach to their work, and b) is willing to share it.
I’ve had a crash course in this lately, having made a conscious decision to speak publicly about the three-way cancer shitshow that befell my family while I was in the middle of writing my novel Stone Yard Devotional. Maybe paradoxically, I have no regret about this. The illness most definitely shaped the writing, themes and tone of the book; I was not ashamed of my experience, and in many ways – given that one in seven women will experience breast cancer – it didn’t even feel especially personal. In some ways, I think talking about it publicly in a limited way helped me usefully process it. And I was lucky – every interviewer agreed in advance to respect my decision to introduce the subject or not, every time I spoke about it I made a clear decision to do so, and every reference felt contextually relevant to my work. At least, that’s how it feels to me right now. Who knows how that feeling might change with hindsight.
But I’m done talking about it now, and I’m finding ways to slip quickly away from it if the subject is raised by others in public. I’ve even discovered methods of managing the attendant emotional responses - when I recently felt an interviewer’s probing for tears or a wobble in my voice, for example, I found that pushing my sternum into the table in front of me eliminated my urge to cry. Helpful tip! You’re welcome!
There is a newish and more subtle form of exposure I find difficult to navigate, however, because its rules and requirements are vague and unspoken. This is the growing sense from festival and event organisers that your work - even speaking very openly about the ‘story’ behind your work - is not enough. It’s the feeling that what’s really required is not your work but you: the whole, sociable you – to be photographed, chatted with, dined with, hugged, asked for advice or blessings, bestowed with (often deep and difficult) personal stories, given manuscripts, books, other gifts. This phenomenon is almost impossible to resist. Who wants to be the cold, stuck-up bitch who refuses the thoughtful gift, the photo, the generously offered dinner or the deeply felt personal disclosure? Mostly, except for avoidable unwanted dinners, I submit to these highly personal yet uninvited interactions without even thinking about it.
And after a while, a very slight film of ick forms over my sense of who I am as a result.
HAVING A SOCIAL MEDIA account, or two, or six, is one of the more easily controlled forms of this too-much-exposure problem. I have a public Instagram account which benefits and irritates me in equal measure. I rarely post anything actually personal, and to be honest I don’t know why anyone follows me there. My posts are the usual anodyne stuff: event links, book or art recommendations, photos of writer colleagues, bookshop visits, the occasional view from a plane or a hotel room. I am careful to keep my private self away from this account, and have found doing so a simple exercise for some years now.
But there is a more insidious problem with social media, it seems to me, and it’s related to the second form of rupture.
Too much ‘outside’ getting in
Social media does bear some blame for the shallowness Arendt warned about – not just because of our individual exhibitionism, but because it has led to a profound values shift, moving the baseline on what constitutes a generally acceptable level of privacy.
As Lucinda writes in her book, it has made us begin to unconsciously question the validity of not ‘sharing’. This shift means that if we artists on social media are endlessly communicating, videoing ourselves, sharing our work spaces, our wardrobe choices, filming ourselves at protests or parties, expressing an opinion on every global atrocity or political event, even sharing images of our draft manuscripts or paintings in progress – all of which I have cheerfully, unthinkingly done – then a subtle suggestion begins to form: if we don’t do this, there is something uptight, ungenerous or evasive about us.
Honourable privacy has slowly morphed into suspect secrecy.
BUT WHY DOES this matter? Why is it important that an artist has a private, inner world that is unavailable to outside influence?
Well for one, because that inner world is the seedbed of art. This private world is the only place an artist’s relationship to the world can be thoughtfully, uniquely explored, imagined, played with, debated, understood – or misunderstood – and only then expressed as art.
As Indian writer TM Krishna articulates,
Privacy is often thought to be the same as secrecy. But privacy is about keeping something sacred, not secret. Privacy is not a palace, nor is it a prison. It is home and that home could be anywhere – and only when artists are in their own home does imagination actually occur … Privacy is a space for art, for creativity in dignity; a space where every aspect of being – physical, intellectual, emotional and sexual – is liberated. Privacy for an artist … is solitude, not in the sense of shutting off from contact but closing into a relationship of the profoundest creative intimacy with the soul of art.
This intimacy is especially important in the developing artist. It’s the reason I’ve always been leery of ‘workshopping’ unfinished writing among fellow students in classes and seminars – where it is ‘evaluated’, sometimes brutally and mostly by peers with zero expertise themselves.
Apart from the damage caused to confidence by clumsy or competitive classmates, as I wrote in The Luminous Solution:
the premature and frequent sharing of work in progress can hinder development of the self-reliance every artist needs. The seeking of approval by sharing work at every stage of its development … can fuel a neurotic addiction to external validation or reassurance or correction. It can create a kind of blank space in the self, an inability to discern the worth of one’s own work even at a sentence level without outside help. And it means we can fail to develop and exercise the artist’s most important muscles: fortitude and perseverance—even bloody-mindedness when necessary—in our commitment to our art.
But the main issue here is that works in progress are incredibly delicate and need privacy in which to strengthen. American academic David Bromwich examines this eloquently (and soberingly), in his essay Private Thought and Public Speech.
Private thoughts begin as something pre-verbal; they arrive as intimations, associations, radical perceptions we don’t yet know the meaning of. Thoughts, at this formative stage, can never be supposed identical with whatever finds its way to expression. This fact brings us up against a peculiar element of human nature that our researches have evaded, namely the self-censorship of thought.
If exposed too early to the external inspectors, this radicalness is easily flattened into banal, generic acceptability. Precisely not what art requires.
ALL HAIL THOSE artists, then, who loudly proclaim the developmental benefit of being ignored.
One is the American writer Philipp Meyer, who is refreshingly frank about failure and its advantages. At university he wrote his first ‘very bad, very long novel’, then a second one. ‘The first book was terrible, the second book was only mediocre. So in other words, it was a big improvement,’ he says. He wrote in privacy, failing, learning and improving, for almost 15 years before his first published novel, American Rust, appeared.
Meyer now sees this long, private apprenticeship as an advantage.
By the time my first book was published I was pretty fully formed as an artist … I knew who I was artistically, and my biggest worry at that point was not whether or not I was good, it was it was making sure that no one else affected my voice. It was keeping the voice of critics out, the voices of teachers out, the voices of other writers out. So what I was most interested in was protecting myself.
… by the time I had any public exposure, I was already done. I was made. I was, you know, this is my voice, this is who I am –  and I don't care what anyone else says. I mean really I didn't care … I think you're very lucky if you discover your voice in private, basically, because discovery in public is a bit of a curse.
British painter Jenny Saville echoes this, in advice given her by the great Cy Twombly. Â
‘Try and stay ignored for as long as possible.’ These were the words that Cy Twombly said to me when I was 29 years old, just after I first met him. He was a hero of mine, and of course I thought, ‘This guy doesn’t like my work very much!’ But what he was saying was to try to have this time of learning … it was really the best piece of artistic advice I've been given and I think about it often. You need the time to develop.
This point about time is important, it seems to me, not only in an artist’s early years. The outer contemporary world is obsessed with production and turnover and change. The internet lives on churn, and social media in particular privileges volume and speed of churn. But this is not how good art is made, or not often. Keeping the strong, flexible membrane between your inner and the outside world intact helps us to take time – to allow the slow germination of seeds of ideas, to wait and see which ones will thrive and which will mercifully fail.
MY CALL FOR protecting the inner life has been, so far, rather utilitarian. But the most precious thing about the private inner world is not that if we tend it well, we can use it well. What I am clumsily reaching toward here is the value of ‘inwardness’, as Susan Sontag called it, for its own sake.
The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman alludes to this, in his essay on Virginia Woolf’s idea of privacy:
Woolf often conceives of life ... as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation … It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own.
… By learning to leave your inner life alone, you learn to cultivate and appreciate it. And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much.Â
DOUBTLESS IT’S BECAUSE I’ve been so much in public lately that I’m suddenly so preoccupied with privacy. I’m soon to appear at my ninth writers’ festival since January, with another five or so to go before year’s end, each involving at least two or three public conversations.
Because of this perhaps foolhardy level of public-facing commitment, I’ve been forced to learn new ways to slide more easily and quickly between the public performer and the private writing self, in order that I can keep working on my new novel. I find these selves so diametrically opposed that in other years, I have waited until the public stuff is done before getting down to work on a book. But I can’t wait anymore. Life is short. Like many artists, if I don’t work I will go mad – and inside the work is where I find my home.
My experiment with a smoother glide and slide is going better than expected – I’m ‘keeping the document open’ as one writer friend advises, and simply visiting the patient, as Annie Dillard suggests1. But I’ve also made a new discovery, of the bleeding obvious: that careful, active, deliberate avoidance of the noisiest practitioners of shallowness is the best way to keep the membrane flexible yet strong, and the fastest way into my inner world.
If I stop scrolling, stop chattering in person or online; if I swap the hot takes and soundbites for long-form articles by writers I admire; if I read older books in print, away from screens of any kind; if I turn away from fizz, toward silence and slowness as soon as possible after a public appearance, all of this helps.
And keeping the membrane strong means that when at last I nudge my way through it I find my work waiting for me, quiet but pulsing, magically still breathing, on the other side.
‘I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.’ Annie Dillard, The Writing Life Â
This month I’ve been …
Reading
Watching
Seeing
mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri, Judy Watson - Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
PS... I will confess I posted my earlier comment after pausing in a panic to try to remember whether I had shared a meandering personal story at Brisbane Writers Festival!!
This hit home! Great essay Charlotte, inspiring as ever, thank you.