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The Alienated Artist as Connecticut Confederate
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11536 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
5,007 Words |
| Author
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
James J. Thompson, Jr., is the book review editor for The New
Oxford Review. He has written three books: Tried as by Fire:
Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Mercer University Press, 1982); Christian Classics Revisited
(Ignatius Press, 1983); and Fleeing the Whore of Babylon: A
Modern Conversion Story (Christian Classics, Inc., 1986). He
has coedited (with George M. Curtis III) The Southern Essays
of Richard M. Weaver (Liberty Press, 1987). |
The alienated artist has become a stock item on the cultural scene. Diagnosticians disagree on when he first appeared, but even a casual observer acknowledges his ubiquity. Writers with incomes that neurosurgeons would envy parade their disaffection; wading in royalties up to their knees, they thumb their noses at the philistines. Painters splash the nasty message of estrangement onto canvases, and sculptors deface parks and plazas with creations so ugly that one adjudges them a form of revenge. Composers stew and fuss over loutish audiences that prefer Beethoven to Bartok, Schubert to Schonberg, Weber to Webern. For spite, John Cage "composes" four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.
Alienation has become a business or, more properly, a racket with benefits to all involved. The advantages to the artist are patent: money, fame (or what our society truly cherishes celebrity), and confirmation that one is a superior should, too sensitive to be easeful among churls and Babbitts. Simpering like pubescent cheerleaders, the critics coo over the artist in this lonely ascendancy. In celebrating alienation the critic demonstrates that he, too, floats majestically above the multitudes. And what of George Babbitt? He is crucial to the scam. His money keeps the enterprise rolling. He derives immense satisfaction from being a cognoscente; his appreciation of the suffering artist distinguishes him from the real Babbitts everyone else. He shivers with delight when one of these godlike figures descends from the empyrean to grace his dinner table. The artiste stumbles in two hours late, drunk and attired in tattered corduroy jacket, frazzled Levis, and down-at-the-heel Hush Puppies. He swills Glenlivet and V.S.O.P.Courvoisier, gooses Mrs. Babbitt, molests Ming Lao, the family's Lhasa apso, and collapses face down in a plate of duck a l'orange. But George is ecstatic: he has touched the quick of genius.
In recent decades the southern writer the South's main contribution to the artistic community has shared in the fun. One thinks of Truman Capote mincing and smirking his way through a continual round of beautiful people parties and television talk shoes, al the while wearing his exquisitely tormented soul on his sleeve. Or of Lillian Hellman, the self-acclaimed moral conscience of the McCarthy era, frequent in the pages of The New Yorker in her Blackgama mink. After Tennessee Williams frittered away his creative powers in booze and pills, he pursued a much-chronicled career fabricated out of drunkenness, sodomy, and angst. These three are mercifully dead, but William Styron lives, always eager to reassert his celebrity status by signing yet another denunciatory petition or jetting to Paris to welcome the
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