Creativity (34 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Everything in the Universe Is Interrelated
If the survival of the human spirit is one central theme in L’Engle’s work, another is the interrelation of action and reaction, of events at the cosmic and the microscopic levels. A sort of a karmic web pervades her narrative, where violence inside the cells of a body can have repercussions among the stars. Her books are a mixture of science fiction and medieval morality tale. She drew on particle physics and quantum mechanics for
A Wrinkle in Time
, on cellular biology for
Wind in the Door
, and
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
combines the singing magic of the druids with relativity theor
y. Like most creative individuals, her contribution has been to bring together domains that appear to have nothing in common.
A lot of ideas come subconsciously. You don’t even realize where they’re coming from. I try to read as widely as possible, and I read fairly widely in the areas of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because to me these are very exciting. They’re dealing with the nature of being and what it’s all about.
One of the things that we have learned, having opened the heart of the atom, is that nothing happens in isolation, that everything in the universe is interrelated. Physicists have a favorite phrase, “the butterfly effect.” That means that if a butterfly should fly in here and get hurt, the effect of that accident would be felt in galaxies thousands of light-years away. The universe is that closely interrelated. And another thing they’ve discovered is that nothing can be studied objectively, because to look at something is to change it and to be changed by it. Those are pretty potent idea
s. I’m reading now a book on the necessity of seeing to light. It’s like
the tree falling in the forest; it doesn’t make a sound if it’s not heard? Well, the same thing with sight—light is not there unless it is seen.
L’Engle believes that telling stories is an important way to keep people from falling away from one another and to keep the fabric of civilized life from unraveling. Helping the relationship among people remain harmonious is one of her central tasks. She believes her calling is to reflect on what she has learned from experience and share it with other people, especially children.
In America we no longer value the wisdom of older people. Whereas in so-called primitive tribes, the older people are revered because they have the “story” of the tribe. I think as a country, we’re in danger of losing our stories. Planned obsolescence cuts across everything; it doesn’t only hit refrigerators and automobiles, it hits people, too. I have wonderful friends of many generations, and I think that’s important. I think chronological isolation is awful and chronological segregation is one of the worst of the segregations.
Risking Failure
Like many other creative individuals, L’Engle attributes her success in large part to the ability to take risks. She has been adventurous in her personal life, trying to follow an inner sense of what was right even when it went against the norms and expectations of her social milieu. She flouted popular wisdom by writing in a style that editors and critics thought was too difficult for young people to read, too childish for adults—even though the scientific concepts and philosophical ideas actually were not that easy even for grown-ups to grasp. So it took ten years for her u
nusual stories to be published. The manuscript of
A Wrinkle in Time
collected rejection slips for two and a half years before a publisher took a chance on it. “You cannot name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. They all did.” But she was never tempted to compromise her vision in order to play it safe.
One episode she remembers in this context concerns a time early in her career when she was invited to give a talk to a women’s group on the West Coast. She prepared a humorous talk but one that
adroitly avoided controversial issues. When she showed the draft of the lecture to her husband, he said: “‘Well, dear, it’s very funny. But they’re not paying you to go all that way just to make them laugh. They think you may have something to say. Stick your neck out and say it.’ And so I did. Sticking my neck out has been something I have learned to do. And I think it’s a good thing.”
Her personal credo is well summarized by these few lines, which reflect the stubbornness that has stood her in such good stead so far:
Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it’s dead. But we’re allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that’s how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again. If I’m not free to fail, I will never start another book, I’ll never start a new thing.
A
DDING TO THE
W
ORLD
Richard Stern, novelist and professor of literature, recalls three formative stages in his childhood. First when he was exposed to oral narrative, then when he learned to read, and finally when he tried writing himself. Each of these steps enlarged tremendously the limits of his experiential world. His first brush with fiction involved listening to the stories his father told when Richard was practically an infant. This experience is still quite vivid in his mind:
My first memory, and I think it’s a memory, is of lying in the dark. And I swear I have the sense, but I think that’s probably imposed, of seeing the slats of my crib. I know that I’m on the right side of the room. On the left side of the same room, in the other corner, is my sister, four years older than I. Somewhere in the middle is my father. And each night he comes in and tells us stories. He was a wonderful storyteller. And his voice and the stories are present to me. I’ve used the names that he invented in stories later on.
Stern started reading early, and the fairy tales that were his first fare had such an impact on him that his mother, afraid that he would get ill from overexcitement, forbade him to check out any more books
from the neighborhood library at Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-second Street in New York City. Stern found ways to take books out anyway and continued to read voraciously. Reading widely, of course, is how writers learn to master the domain of literature. Stern echoes what everyone else in his field says: “I don’t think there are any writers who have not read, who have not been enchanted by books, by stories, by poems.”
Finally, during his freshman year at Stuyvesant High School, he experienced his first success as a writer. As is often the case, the success was modest but memorable—it confirmed that he had the ability and provided the first heady taste of admiration:
A wonderful teacher, Mr. Lowenthal—I can see him now, in his blue suit and high collar, large nose and large Adam’s apple, black hair—asked anybody who wanted to write a story. And I had been reading stories so I wrote a story. And the class laughed, and Mr. Lowenthal approved, and I knew this was very important.
Before this episode, Stern wanted to be a Supreme Court justice. As a young Jewish boy who had been inspired by the lives of Justices Brandeis and Cardozo, about whom he had read in a book he thinks was called
The Nine Old Men
, he believed this to be the highest ambition to which he could aspire. But after tasting the exhilaration of authorship in Mr. Lowenthal’s class, he sensed that his future direction lay in writing. And he never looked back: He enrolled at the University of North Carolina when he was sixteen years old and almost immediately fell in with a group of poets and writers who
remained lifelong friends. They had a literary society, a literary magazine—in short, all the makings of a small field. From college he went on to Harvard, and then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where it was possible to get a Ph.D. by writing fiction instead of an academic thesis.
At Iowa he began to publish extensively, and in 1954 one of his stories was included in the prestigious
Best O’Henry Stories
. It is there that he started on the book that made his reputation as a novelist:
Golk
. Equally important perhaps was the fact that at Iowa, and while working on the literary magazine
Western Review
, he met and formed friendships with some of the most influential writers of his generation. Saul Bellow and Philip Roth became particularly close, and
eventually both Bellow and Stern went to teach at the University of Chicago. During his travels he became acquainted with some of the most prominent European writers as well; Thomas Mann made a particular impression. Contacts like these are necessary to the creative person for several reasons: They provide benchmarks for evaluating one’s own work, they offer competition that spurs one to surpass oneself, they provide helpful criticism, and, last but not least, they open up opportunities and information that can be essential to one’s advancement.
The Conversion of the Negative
As we have seen several times already, one typically turns to writing literature in order to restore order to experience. Madeleine L’Engle is concerned with the survival of the human spirit threatened by cosmic chaos; Anthony Hecht was moved by the inanity of war; Hilde Domin by the tragedy of Nazism and the death of her mother. It is not surprising that Stern too uses his writing to exorcise some evil. In his case, the evil seems to be something more private, less dramatic, more related to the normal wear and tear of life. Perhaps one could say that his intent is to explore
the damage that psychic entropy causes to our lives—the stunted emotions, the acts of selfishness, the betrayals, the inevitable disappointments that are the conditions of existence. These are the grains of sand that cause the writer to coat them with words to diminish the pain:
The great thing about this kind of work is that
every
feeling that you have, every negative feeling, is in a way precious. It is your building material, it’s your stone, it’s something you use to build your work. I would say the conversion of the negative is very important. So I taught to myself what I try to teach my students who are becoming writers: Don’t duck pain. It’s precious, it’s your gold mine, it’s the gold in your mine.
Of course there are things in myself which I haven’t talked about—and probably won’t—which I know are bad, mean, twisted, weak, this, that, or the other thing. I can draw strength from that, without talking about them. I can transform them. They’re sources of strength. And as I said earlier, the writer takes those and they’re his material.
To overcome the pain of existence, one must be honest with oneself, acknowledging one’s faults and weaknesses. Like a surgeon, one must be willing to cut deeply into the festering sores of the psyche. Otherwise too much energy is absorbed in denial, or in ruminating over disappointments. Stern responds to the question about what was the main obstacle he encountered in his life:
I think it’s that rubbishy part of myself, that part which is described by such words as vanity, pride, the sense of not being treated as I should be, comparison with others, and so on. I’ve tried rather hard to discipline that. And I’ve been lucky that there has been enough that’s positive to enable me to counter a kind of biliousness and resentment—
ressentiment
—which I’ve seen paralyze colleagues of mine, peers who are more gifted than I. I’ve felt it in myself. And I’ve had to learn to counter that.
I would say that the chief obstacle is—oneself.
It is easier to diagnose what’s wrong with one’s life than to cure it. Like most people who are honest with themselves, Stern is aware that with all the best intentions in the world some bitterness remains, some unrequited ambition rankles, some past choices cause regret. Weakness in others is relatively easy to condone. Stern endorses Pascal’s maxim “To understand is to forgive.” In fact, one of the most exciting opportunities in being a writer, he feels, is to take a villain or criminal character and make him human by showing what caused him to be so. It is more difficult to f
orgive oneself, but writing helps to do that, too. After all, the writer is also a part of the human race, and when he explains the failings of a character, to a certain extent he excuses himself as well. And then there is joy in being able to craft a story that will add meaning to the reader’s life. The greatest reward of the writer is when the readers
have enjoyed, had pleasure in the rise and fall, in the symmetry, in the characters, in the situations, so that they feel their understanding deepened. They’ve felt pleasure, and it’s related to something that I’ve made. I have told my grandchildren stories, and my little nieces and nephew. To see two or four or five faces hanging on things you say is one of the most beautiful things in the world. That kind of attention. You know, I know some actors and
actresses well, and I see through them the connection between their work and mine. It’s making human beings comprehensible, so shaping a life in a book or on the stage that an audience suddenly gets a grasp of what’s there, what
is
.
As these five cases suggest, the domain of the word is indeed quite powerful. It allows us to recognize our feelings and label them in terms of enduring, shared qualities. In this way both the author and the reader can achieve a certain distance from the immediate raw experience and begin to understand, to contextualize, to explain what otherwise would remain a visceral reaction. Poets and novelists stand up against the chaos of existence. Hilde Domin builds a refuge of words where actions and feelings make sense; Mark Strand chronicles the fugitive experiences that would otherwise
fade into oblivion; Anthony Hecht constructs beautiful forms to stem the capricious randomness of fate. Madeleine L’Engle tries to find the connection between events happening within our cells and those happening between the stars; Richard Stern focuses on the fragility of human commitments. Their struggle leaves a record of the human attempt to bring meaning to life. For the most part, it is this struggle that serves as the inspiration for their work.
All of these writers were able to make their contribution only by first immersing themselves in the domain of literature. They read avidly, they took sides among writers, they memorized the work they liked—in short, they internalized as much as they could from what they considered the best work of previous writers. In this sense, they themselves became the forward-moving edge of cultural evolution.