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Monday 1 December 2008

The Writer’s Brush

More marks on paper

Victoria Glendinning

But The Writer’s Brush is the work of an enthusiast, what you see is what you get, and with 400 well-reproduced illustrations (printed in China, by the way), it is astounding value for money. The quotations Friedman has unearthed about how the writer-artists themselves see their dual activities are of the greatest interest. Max Beerbohm thought of himself as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. George Sand did the ‘interior work’ of her writing while painting water-colours. Hermann Hesse thought painting made him ‘happier and more patient’. Friedman, in his introduction, says that words are ‘imprecise and abstract’, while images are ‘specific and concrete’, using Picasso’s line-drawing of female buttocks as an example. This judgment may seem counterintuitive, but Updike, whose youthful passion was for drawing, would agree. A drawing, he writes, can be perfect, while language is ‘intrinsically approximate’. Günter Grass’s art, as illustrated here, is pretty macabre, but what he wrote about the relation between words and images is beautiful, and says it all: ‘Look, says the image, at how few words I need. Listen, says the poem, to what you can read between the lines.’

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