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Monday 1 December 2008

The Writer’s Brush

More marks on paper

Victoria Glendinning

A few of the writer-artists featured in this hefty book are first-class at neither authorship nor art, and most are much better writers than they are artists, or vice versa. Proust was rubbish at drawing. Oskar Kokoschka has ‘dozens of published works’ to his name, but that’s not why he is famous. Victor Hugo left 3,000 drawings, but they are not what make him immortal. With some — William Blake, William Morris — there is a complete symbiosis, and with many, drawing seems to spring from the same source as the writing. James Thurber and Tom Wolfe (with a lethal caricature of Ted Kennedy) are cases in point. With others, such as Joseph Conrad with his saucy drawing of can-can girls, the subject-matter comes as a nice surprise. We are reminded that William Trevor, before he ever became a writer, was a professional and highly gifted wood-carver and sculptor. Sylvia Plath’s painting ‘Two Women Reading’, which is reproduced on the cover, is wonderful. The whole point, for the compiler Donald Friedman, is that so many practitioners have had this urge to express themselves both ways. They are ‘category resistant’.

The 20th century loved categories and specialisms and ring-fenced expertise, and distrusted the generalist. This was not always so. As William H. Gass says in an essay reprinted at the end of the book, ‘once upon a time’ any educated person might be expected to write and also to sketch and paint, and probably play a musical instrument as well. Writing was not divorced from art, when manuscripts were illuminated and calligraphy was the normal means of communication; and all children draw before they write. Both Gass and John Updike, in another piece reprinted here, make the point that the impulse to make marks on a surface was the same for writing, drawing, painting, sketching — until the tools became different, and the camera and the typewriter and the word-processor separated off the physical acts.

Two hundred writer-artists are arranged alphabetically in this book, making for some surreal juxtapositions, as one turns the page on Antonin Artaud’s scary stuff to encounter cosy Enid Bagnold. All are awarded a page of Donald Friedman’s text facing a page of art work, and range chronologically from Goethe and Blake to Daniel Clowes and Douglas Coupland. There are yet another 71, listed briefly without illustration. One of these, Stephen Spender, reflected sadly that ‘it’s possible entirely to lack talent in an art where one believes oneself to have creative feeling’.

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