Using experience and making experience
Two articles in the Guardian 'Family' section today caught my eye as being about very different ways of turning experience into, well, if not capital-A ART at least a saleable narrative.
There are things that I totally cringe at in this interview with Simon Gough, the grand-nephew of Robert Graves who got disastrously involved in the complex emotional dynamics of the Graves menage. All of which more or less confirms my belief that Graves was 'run away NOW, girl! don't walk, don't hesitate, just RUN!' bad news (and that this didn't just apply to the women he decided were his muses).
Gough, as a young student studying at Madrid University, was supposed to be keeping an eye on Margot Callas, the current muse, only a few years his senior, with whom he fell hopelessly and inarticulately in love himself, and who then began an affair with another older man.
Blood thicked with cold:
Gough recalls conversations in which
Callas struggled with feeling trapped by Graves' insatiable dependence on her for his creative process. As Gough relates in his book, when he told Callas that Graves needed her, she replied that Graves needed poems. "Whatever he wants from me … I give, and the poems pour out of him," Callas told him, "but everything inside me just drains away."
but can still say:
"It was my fault.... The betrayal was my falling in love with Margot. She was his muse. She was nothing to do with me.
....
She was magical and mystical, and we couldn't do without her. She was by far the most productive of his muses, and inspired by far the best of his love poetry."
So much aaaaargh there, no?
But even so, Gough didn't set out to have an affair with one of Graves's muses that would scar his life ever after, but did later return to it to write what 'calls an "autobifantasy" - he admits his memories are no more reliable than anyone else's' generated by that experience.
How different, I muse, from this, which has 'Book Deal!' flashing in neon lights all over it:
As a Christian, Rachel Held Evans was intrigued to find out what sort of advice the Bible could offer a wife in a modern relationship. So she decided to take its instructions to women 'hyper-literally' for a year.
So many questions there. Let us, for example, consider the example of Jael, wife of Heber. Deborah the prophetess and judge of Israel (married to Lapidoth). Ruth and Naomi. The marriage of Abraham and Sara...
But whatever with what bit of the Bible and its instruction for wifely conduct, the whole concept strikes me as being very much in that same genre as the woman who decided to be celibate for a year and the couple who decided to have sex every night for the same period and similar life experiments which seem entered into entirely for writing them up as a best-selling book at the end of it.
Am I cynical?
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