Tom Rachman, a novelist, recently asked in an opinion column in the Sunday Valley News if artists are “even capable of political influence nowadays.” He is not hopeful about American artists, although he has great respect for those abroad like Ai Weiwei in China who take great risks when they speak out about injustice.
The problem in the U.S., Rachman believes, is that artists who deal with politics must choose between addressing a limited audience likely to agree with them or a more vociferous bunch inclined to boo. No one on either side, he feels, will change their mind anyway. But he believes giving up and turning to cautiously apolitical art doesn’t work so well either: “Those under Nazism who blithely painted mountainscapes cannot be easily rehabilitated.”
In the same Sunday Valley News (Feb. 12) where Rachman shared his pessimism about the political influence of art, Norwich writer Mary Otto provided what seems to me the beginning of a convincing counterview in “The Companionship of Solitary Writers.” Otto tells of the influence of communities of writers in her life.
My hunch is that not much good art is made without the support of communities and friendships and love despite the enduring myth of the solitary artist. Consider the example of two reputedly reclusive 19th-century New England writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, whose novels and short stories often focused on gloomy isolated figures. Hawthorne tried life at Brook Farm, a transcendentalist commune, before writing a novel about it, and both writers accepted political jobs.
More importantly, the Hawthorne-Melville friendship probably made it possible for them to produce their greatest works, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Moby-Dick (1851). In 1850 Melville wrote an anonymous essay about Hawthorne in which he praised his friend for having a soul “shrouded in blackness, ten times black.” He might have been describing himself and the novel he was writing about a white whale and a courageous, autocratic, enraged whaleship captain. His friend Hawthorne, Melville knew, would understand what he was saying in Moby-Dick, but it would be the 1920s, following the disillusionments of World War I, before many Americans began to appreciate the grim insights in Moby-Dick.
Recently critics have commented on the prescience of George Orwell’s 1984, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, to name just a few novels that might have prepared us for this time of Donald Trump. If these artists heard booing, they had friends and fellow writers to let them know they were not hallucinating when they imagined political threats to free societies.
In addition to forgetting the encouragement and inspiration artists find in friendship and community, Rachman may have forgotten the artistic power of youthful rage. At 78 years of age, I take no credit for recalling this source of courage and inspiration, but I mentioned the art and politics question to a friend who, like Rachman, is approaching middle age. He was a punk rocker for several years, and he said punk music was partly a response to the politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He directed me to Nigel Tassell’s article in The Guardian about British punk rockers whose political rage has turned in middle age to mellow altruism.
Youthful artistic rage will probably arise soon here in the United States, if it has not already. But when I went recently to the Lebanon Opera House to hear Garrison Keillor, who is almost my age and perhaps the finest storyteller of our time, I found something that might be more important than rage as we try to find our bearings in this time.
Keillor has been writing good political satire since his retirement from Prairie Home Companion, his radio show for 42 years. But instead of politics he gave us more than two hours of what we have in common. We sang with him songs about America and love, and he told stories, some sad and many hilarious, about happenings like driving through a snowstorm, finding good work and growing old. He seemed to be telling us about the experiences that have to matter before politics can mean a thing.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.