Originally posted by writer and comedian James Harris on his Substack, Stiff Upper Quip.
P.S. James has an upcoming salon, “How to Fail: Coping With Professional Rejection,” on Friday, March 10th.
John Cleese ends Chapter 10 of his autobiography ‘So, Anyway…’ with:
But I had scarcely settled back into our little apartment to enjoy the autumn when I got the most important phone call of my professional life.
It’s David Frost – with an invitation for Cleese to work for him!
YES!
We all dream about it: The moment when everything changes.
The email from a producer – ‘Come in and tell us about it.’ The voicemail from an agent. The big one – after which the path ahead becomes a little easier and can be seen to wind a little higher.
What if it never comes?
Or rather what if you receive – as in my own case – repeated small breaks which never achieve traction?
Such an experience calls into the question the very idea of the break, a single moment where your career ignites and the world recognizes you for your ability at something. Reaching such a moment may be predicated on surviving for a while; Van Gogh experienced unremitting failure but was also dead by 37. To catch any kind of upturn in fortunes often means sticking around for some time and often, quite possibly, beyond your artistic peak.
But perhaps what we mean here is the big break, when serious people and serious money get interested. If you’ve been creating for a while but it hasn’t happened, what then?
After all, you’re to an extent persisting with your work in the face of evidence to the contrary.
There are a good many now famous artists who never broke through. This is ‘break through’ in the sense of a ‘experienced single a significant success in their lifetime which sees them become known for their art’; an example from the city where I write this, London, would be William Blake.
Blake was really a paradigm of being born before his audience was there. He was the wrong class, the wrong self-presentation, the wrong interdisciplinary focus. The wrong sexual frankness and crucially, the wrong self-made religion. And yet, despite the poverty and thanks to the support of his spouse, he kept going and lived until 69 while assembling a huge body of work. He must, as his paintings did not sell or sold as curios and the only reviewer of his only exhibition described him as a ‘lunatic’, have felt bitterness; yet towards the end of his life he was still able to wish a young girl who he met “May God make this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me.”
Religious faith, of the type enjoyed by Blake and his fellow unheralded composer - though celebrated organist - JS Bach, seems to be an aid to enduring artistic obscurity. At least you can tell yourself that your struggles are irrelevant against the divine anyway. Yet some reactions to obscurity are less accepting. Take Jean Rhys’ comment, upon achieving fame for her book ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ at the age of 76, that success had come ‘too late’. This quote seems to indicate that even achieving a breakthrough – and don’t forget an artist only has to achieve one success to have their whole oeuvre to be seriously considered – is no guarantee of an artist being happier. We don’t just want success but usually success in some version of our prime.
What strikes me about Blake is how he seemed to be able to self-sustain indefatigability in obscurity, serving perhaps as an inspiration to other artists ploughing their own furrow since. His young artist admirers of the Shoreham Ancients, one of whom, I read once, would demonstratively kiss Blake’s door knocker upon each visit, surely created in him a sense that his work would have a legacy.
And what a legacy he has had - more, of course, than thousands of poets heralded in his age! Have you read, for example, any Henry James Pye recently? He was Poet Laureate for 23 years.
It seems fair to maintain that all artists want on some level to be recognized for their work in their lifetime, no matter how grotesque what they put out is. That is a strange aspect of the artistic sensibility; ‘I have been unpleasantly honest about the reality of life; please show your appreciation.’
Yet whether that appreciation comes or not seems random; we can only say that there are artists who break through and those who do not, and that this is no guarantee of happiness either way; the eventual fate of their work is the same, which ends up with whatever reputation it does. Critical culture can hype average work to prominence in the short-term, but not over the long.
So what are the advantages and disadvantages to not breaking through?
For there are certainly positives as well as negatives here.
The first advantage of not achieving commercial success is that you are left alone to do what you want to do. You are not celebrated; you do not get too big for your boots. You do not feel commercial pressure, which is often the pressure repeat yourself, to offer minor variations on the same small repertoire, in the way a popular restaurant has to keep serving the same food. You can go about assembling a body of work on the schedule and in the manner you see fit.
But, in terms of the artistic process, if you have decent judgment, and I see no reason that you can’t form good critical judgement (and also utilize that of others) in the absence of institutional support, you can create your artworks in a way which means they are as they need to be rather than how the market wishes to receive them; you are closer to a pure pursuit of creativity.
Obviously, one of your central questions in life then becomes how you then go about paying for that pursuit. Unless independently wealthy, you will need to do money work, which keeps both you and your artistic practice in contact with most people’s lives; although you have the challenge of finding time to do creative work, I truly believe that the need to work in other fields can provide a kind of healthy blood-flow to the artist, and often make their oeuvre appear more vital. As long as there’s some sign that the creativity itself is going somewhere in its reception, most artists can hold out the day job.
Yet that also suggests the first main disadvantage of obscurity – it limits the scale of what you can do. Of course, necessity is the mother of invention and having limitations forces you to innovate. But innovating on a shoestring is a different proposition at 20 years old than at 60. The filmmaker Margaret Tait said how difficult it was to go back to DIY filmmaking after having had a proper budget to make her first feature. There are few better ways to get everything out of you you have to give than being given proper institutional support and access to resources.
In addition, you tend to get more focused and more exhausted as you go along, more aware of what you want to say and how to say it, but also less able to generate it out of nowhere for yourself. Nothing energizes like success. And of course, validation of any kind is a tremendous encouragement to keep going – although I do believe that many celebrated artists reach a point where it is time for them to stop, and, because of their status as capital ‘A’ artists, who should be making work, continue.
This brings us to the second main disadvantage of breaking through, which is becoming known for a particular thing.
Established as the person who does something, the market will demand it from you again, even if you yourself have moved on from that thing or would like to. The optimal outcome here in preserving artistic quality is being someone like the topic of last week’s email, Stewart Lee, providing minor variations of the same small, high-quality product, though never changing it quite enough to alienate his core audience – indeed, carefully calibrating his work so that it presents that audience as superior for ‘getting it’. Ironically, the only way you can take real creative risks as a successful artist is to be a hugely successful one; the band Radiohead had such a large following by the time of Kid A that they could afford to radically change their sound and still make a living. And arguably in the long-term taking those risks made them more durable.
Otherwise, mid-ranking artists can easily become constrained, limited and measured against their own earlier success, paralyzed by both the inability to recapture what they were known for and a lack of interests when they attempt to do something new. The new stuff isn’t as popular; the old stuff can’t be recaptured. A band might want to record another song like the one which made them famous, it’s just that they’re no longer the same people.
Yet the enemy of the unheralded artist is much simpler – despair. Artists often have to be their own cheerleaders, but unheralded, unpromoted, unfashionable artists feel this more than most; that they are stood there in the marketplace of ideas banging their drum into general indifference.
And this can oddly arrest artists emotional development. How on earth are people supposed to realize that success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if they never achieve success? How can bands make their ‘fame is rubbish’ album while still dreaming of fame? And don’t forget until you have a break you are always dreaming of one - whereas if you’ve broken through, you’ve answered that hope. You got your share of the miracles.
The documentary ‘Lawrence of Belgravia’, about the legendary and commercially moribund British songwriter Lawrence, captures him speculating that he is perhaps the longest person trying to become a pop star not to have made it, looking out on London speculating as to why three decades producing perfect pop has failed to bring him a wider audience.
Lawrence to his credit seems to lack self-pity. The risk risk there is that the despondency of the unheralded artist becomes the subject of their work – that they find themselves caught up in the drama of their own failure, and the bitterness of not being recognized comes to dominate the tone of what they make. Their ideas reference themselves; there becomes something forlorn in the way they have to trumpet its merits; they lack the dialogue with an audience which keeps their work alive. It’s sad.
This is the condition Yeats wrote about to Lady Gregory in his great poem ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’:
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
And I think that is just right – the artist who isn’t recognized and has talent really is on a hard road, particularly when all the things that make work last – its ambiguity, a refusal to obey fashion or sentiment – often see it fail to grab attention at the time, certainly amidst a critical culture permanently in thrall to the instantly digestible.
Personally I find it rather consoling that, however lacking in support and resources I feel, over 700 of you currently read this newsletter. (A special thanks here are due to my paying subscribers, who keep it going). Some of you even take the time to write to me about how much you enjoy it, which always means an awful lot. Of all aspects of writing, this is the part I enjoy most; my writing is in part an attempt to gain company of people I like and admire; I write, above all, to communicate with others.
Small an audience as mine is, that’s more than many of the artists I mention above had – Blake and Rhys, to name but two – and, given that they kept going, so shall I. Regardless of the breaks.
Breaks come to those who have the persistence and the patience to keep going, no matter what.