Lucky Cloud, Your Sky

Reading the first essay — the customary “note from the editor”, done in a slightly more editorial manner by Sven — in the recent issue of AGNI, (full disclosure: I am an editorial assistant at this particular magazine) I noticed that Sven had seen something in Cormac McCarthy that I had seen in my favorite author, Vladimir Nabokov. In relating his experience watching a youtube video of McCarthy speaking to Oprah, he explains that he wonders why McCarthy seems to lack something of the sturm and drang he expected in the interview. I once noticed this in Nabokov in the one taped interview I am aware of him allowing.

As a side note, I would suggest that you just take a moment to imagine a famously technophobic literary critic watching Oprah interview a reclusive genius on television for her polarizing book club.

McCarthy, he explains, is surprisingly gentle and calm with Oprah, who pesters him with questions one might assume a small child would ask the first author they ever meet. Birkerts writes that he was a “soft-spoken old gentleman with silvery hair — Walker Percy! That’s who he looked like! — speaking softly. No sturm, no drang. He fielded each of Oprah’s questions without protest or sarcasm, and in the process seemed to accede to everything.” And we understand his confusion. If we have come to expect that our rock stars and musicians will act like petulant children, what should we expect from our apocalyptic, clever, cynical, and most confrontational novelists and artists? Mostly, we would expect the same ego, the same arrogance, and even more of an aggressive spark than we would expect from our popsters and hipsters.

McCarthy, though, does not present himself this way — instead, a calm gentle old man. Nabokov, in that one filmed interview, seemed to act like a kind grandfather as well. Although I can’t watch the interview again to verify this, he seemed to be nothing more than a sweet old man amazed by some of the different editions of his Lolita. In one scene, he even begins to resemble one of his own charming and bumbling old characters, the professor Pnin, who is characterized by the fact that “Electric devices enchanted him. Plastics swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the zipper.” Nabokov (if memory serves me correctly) even laughs at one point in an expression of not cynicism or cruelty, but simple joy.

These two men, both looking kindly and patient, have released some of the most incendiary art of the past century. Nabokov most obviously with Lolita, and perhaps a little less obviously over and over again with most of his oeuvre, and McCarthy with, well, everything. Even David Lynch, famous for his ability to creep out his viewers (more famous for that than for making Dune, anyway), comes across as something of a kindly old Canadian man at first, known for his speeches about transcendental meditation, his refusal to discuss Dune, and sweaters. This is, of course, only until he lets the spit fly while hating on the iphone.

Is the art the outlet for all this vitriol, leaving the person unburdened by all the cynicism, criticism, and apocalypse that find their way into the novels? It must be at least slightly more complex than that. Maybe looking back at McCarthy’s own work will help us best with this — though often an author is not the best witness to their own work — as No Country for Old Men shows us that the kind old man has seen a few things in his day, as I know at least Nabokov has, and finds an apocalyptic view every now and again to be more than just a little justified.

What this says more about, though, is that we still conflate the artist with the art. The art is bleak, the artist must be bleak. We take the artist as the star witness to the meaning of their own art, we assume that the art must reflect the personality of the artist. This is especially naive when we begin to consider the exploratory nature of much of the most challenging art — art is about discovery as much for the artist as it should be for the audience. The artist, in other words, could very well be exploring a portion of themselves that is repressed, hidden, or just incompletely explored. To write cynically does not make a person cynical, the author does not always live his art.

Who cares if Bukowski really was a misogynist drunk? He could have been a fourteen-year-old feminist and it would not have made a single difference to his work. In other words, insistence on authenticity is naive. The importance has never and will never rest with the author, but with the audience. Once the book is written, the author is dead.