Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
It is not coincidental that Hecht’s main interests in childhood were first music and then geometry. Both domains are among the most
highly ordered symbolic systems, and whoever invests attention in them must follow ordered patterns of thought and emotion. Otherwise Hecht’s early years were rather chaotic; his father’s business failed three times, and the family not only lost everything but ended up deeply in debt each time. Nor was the emotional atmosphere much more serene; he remembers suffering extraordinary anxiety and loneliness.
Music was the first of these [interests], precisely because it was abstract and therefore could be divorced from all the mess around me. I loved it. I used to listen to it all the time on the radio. I had a little record collection, and played things over and over again until I knew them really by heart. Eventually I would come to know poetry by heart in the same way. I really knew whole symphonies by heart. I knew where every instrument came in and went out and all their figures. I listened with great care, and without being able to read music I did feel I knew these pieces very w
ell indeed. And as I say, the great thing about music is that it is nonreferential so it is completely uncontaminated by anything. Even as a child I scoffed at people whose association with music was always with some sort of sentimental event. You know, “They’re playing our tune.” That meant nothing to me. A Beethoven sonata was not connected with any emotional event precisely because I didn’t want it to be. I wanted it to be pure music.
I had a geometry teacher in high school and I did extremely well, I got honors in geometry. And I loved it. Again, because like music, it’s abstract. I think probably music and math were the two things that I liked most as a child.
It is fascinating how the pursuit of artistic domains such as music or poetry, and also of scientific domains like geometry and science, is motivated not so much by the desire to achieve some external goal—a poem or a proof—but by the feeling of freedom from the threats and stresses of everyday life one experiences when completely immersed in the domain. Paradoxically, it is the abstract rules we invent to limit and focus our attention that give us the experience of untrammeled freedom.
Hecht experienced a less temporary and more physical liberation when he went off to college and enjoyed student life for all it was
worth. But the idyllic campus life did not last long: He was conscripted and in Europe saw half his infantry company killed or wounded. The brutality of the war left a deep mark that had to be exorcised in his work. Again art came to the rescue: After the war Hecht went back to school, met good mentors and colleagues, decided that poetry rather than music was his strongest suit, and was launched on what became a very successful career. One example illustrates his method of work, as well as the sources of his inspiration:
There’s an awful lot of fussing and fiddling; I feel that the writing of a poem is a very conscious act. It’s not what it is for some people like Ginsberg, and I say this without disrespect of him, but his way of writing poetry is altogether different from mine. He is annotating the activity of his mind, and I’m trying to make a formal structure. Once I have the
donnée
, the stuff that I get out of the unconscious, it’s my job to bring it together.
I can give you an example. It was a poem written about the birth of our son, who was born in 1972, in a snowstorm. And in 1972 the Vietnam War was still going on. I don’t know how this evolved—it may have been in that state between wakefulness and sleep—I realized that one of the things I was thinking about had to do with the sheer randomness of events. How there was a randomness, for example, in the whole process of sexual intercourse and conception, there was randomness in the snow as it appeared the night of the birth, where it fell and how much it accumulated. And there was random
ness in the death of soldiers in the field. And all of this somehow I knew belonged together if I could find the way to get it into a poem.
I do however find that while I’m now talking in concepts, very often poems begin, for me, with words. So that very often when I leap out of bed in the dark, the thing that I want to jot down is a set of words in a certain order, which will be the nucleus of whatever is going to come. I think much more in terms of words than I do in terms of other things—concepts, for example.
Like all other writers, Hecht learned to be one by reading extensively. He memorized poems until they “became part of my bloodstream.” Then he spent years writing in the voice of various poets he
admired: John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden. Assimilating the style of predecessors is necessary before one can develop one’s own. Only by immersing oneself in the domain can one find out whether there is room left for contributing creatively to it, and whether one is capable of doing so.
Poetry is whatever poetry has been, with any new inventions that a new poet cares to add to that. But he can’t add to it without knowing what it has been. I mean, the only way you decide to become a poet is because you’ve read a poem. So in some immediate sense poetry depends on the whole poetic tradition of the past. And once you accept that idea then you have to decide, well, out of all that enormous welter of previous poetry, what is most interesting to me? Because there’s an awful lot of stuff that nobody really likes or cares about, and there’s an awful lot of inferior poet
ry being written all the time. It takes a very long time to acquire the kind of sensibility that can make intelligent, sound discriminations, what’s good and what’s not good, what has already been done and what therefore needs now to be done which is different from all the stuff in the past. All that takes time.
As powerful as poetry is, it does not resolve all one’s problems. Mastering a symbolic style—be it poetry or physics—does not guarantee one will also bring order to those events that lie outside the rules of the domain. Poets and physicists may bask in the beautiful order of their craft as long as they are working at it, but they are as vulnerable as the rest of us when they step back into everyday life and have to confront family problems, time pressures, illness, and poverty. This is why it becomes so tempting to invest more and more energy in one’s work and forget everyday life—in other wor
ds, become a workaholic. Developing his poetic skills did not resolve all of Hecht’s problems either. His first marriage broke up after seven years, and for a decade afterward he felt that he was floundering and wasting his time, and he was unhappy about it. He credits his second marriage, in 1971, with returning him to an even keel and making “everything seem worthwhile.” A fulfilling relationship and a creative profession—what more can one ask? Especially when work consists of adding to the culture’s heritage of order and beauty.
A
J
OYFUL
R
ESPONSIBILITY
Madeleine L’Engle is best known for her children’s stories (which are just as interesting to adults), but she has written books of all sorts, to the tune of about one a year for the last few decades. She married at twenty-seven, and her husband, an actor, was her “best editor” for the next forty years. Their three children have been an inspiration in her work, which became really successful only when she herself turned forty, with the publication of
A Wrinkle in Time
, which won the prestigious Newbery Award and became the first volume of a classic trilogy.
L’Engle started writing stories when she was only five years old, and although she also wanted to be an actress and a pianist, she always knew that writing was her true vocation. After college she worked in the theater and started publishing her stories. She still plays the piano, and in a way that is similar to Mark Strand’s strategy of driving a car or running errands when the focus on his work becomes excessively absorbing, she uses music to help clear her mind and
get back in touch with experiences beyond the compass of rationality:
Playing the piano is for me a way of getting unstuck. If I’m stuck in life or in what I’m writing, if I can I sit down and play the piano. What it does is break the barrier that comes between the conscious and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind wants to take over and refuses to let the subconscious mind work, the intuition. So if I can play the piano, that will break the block, and my intuition will be free to give things up to my mind, my intellect. So it’s not just a hobby. It’s a joy.
Her early school years were a dismal experience: “In the middle grades I had terrible teachers, who decided that since I wasn’t good at sports, I wasn’t very bright. So I did no work for them. I learned nothing in school till I got into high school, and what I learned, I learned at home. I learned absolutely nothing in school. Then I had some good teachers in high school and some really excellent teachers in college.” Indirectly, however, the bad school experience and a physical handicap—a bad knee—turned out not to be a total loss. Shunned by peers and teachers, Madeleine spent much of her
child
hood reading and thinking alone. Now she feels that she couldn’t have written her books if she had been happy and successful with her peers. Like most individuals in our sample, she showed her creativity first of all by being able to turn a disadvantage into an advantage. Later in high school, and then at Smith College, she found supportive teachers. It was in a college writing workshop that her literary career became confirmed.
The family environment, on the other hand, seems to have been supportive from the very beginning. Her father had been a journalist, a foreign correspondent. He and her mother married late, and she was the only child of two very busy parents who neither pushed Madeleine nor held her back. They were neither critical of her accomplishments nor overly approving—and L’Engle believes that too much encouragement can be almost as bad as too much discouragement. It was an atmosphere where artistic expression was considered a normal part of life. Then when she was seventeen, her father died, and at t
hat crucial time her mother’s unselfishness made a great difference:
The best thing my mother did, and it was, I think, remarkable, was when my father died. My mother was a Southerner and it was expected by her Southern family that, of course, I’d come home and take care of my poor, widowed mother. And she did everything that she could to free me, to go on to college, and after college, to go back to New York and do my own thing. She in no way held me back. She did not expect me to give up my own work for her. So I was able to go to New York after college without any feeling of guilt and start doing my own thing. Earning my living any way I co
uld and writing my first book, half of which I had written in college.
The situation L’Engle describes is familiar to many creative women but practically unknown to men. Women feel responsible to their families of origin and extended relatives in ways that men do not. Of course, the men in our sample feel a great deal of responsibility to their wives and children, and the depth of guilt they experience if they feel unable to meet their obligations can be overwhelming. But their sense of responsibility is generally limited to the role of husband and father, whereas the women’s usually embraces a larger web of kinship.
The Survival of the Human Spirit
The central themes of L’Engle’s writing circle around the need for hope. Her fiction, even that aimed at children, typically deals with doomsday scenarios that reach a happy ending because the main characters never lose hope even in the grimmest situation, and they learn from adversity to act with mercy and forgiveness. As in the stories of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien, which share with L’Engle’s the assumption that powerful evil forces are always threatening to reduce the world to chaos, innocence wins because it refuses to take the easy way out, because it won’t use violen
ce even when it is expedient to do so. She feels that it is especially important to remind readers of these grim realities nowadays, when the media are unable to present a meaningful picture of how things work:
Television commercials give such a strange view of what life is supposed to be. And a lot of people buy it. Life is not easy and comfortable, with nothing ever going wrong as long as you buy the right product. It’s not true that if you have the right insurance everything is going to be fine. That’s not what it’s really like. Terrible things happen. And those are the things that we learn from. People are incredibly complex. I read a book last winter called
Owning Your Own Shadow
, by Robert Johnson. And one of his theories is that the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Which is often true.
In her own work, L’Engle feels that the enjoyment of writing comes first, followed by a sense of responsibility for what she writes. Because she knows that her books influence a lot of readers, she is concerned about not passing on a destructive message. Even when the characters in the book suffer and seem at the end of their rope, she believes that “you have to get them out, into some kind of hope. I don’t like hopeless books. Books that make you think, ‘Ah, life’s not worth living.’ I want to leave them thinking yeah, this endeavor is difficult, but it is worth it, and it is ultimately joyful.
”
This sense that despite encroaching darkness there is always a silver lining is not just a rhetorical device for L’Engle; it is a belief that pervades her attitude toward real life as well.
Oh, I’m a little less idealistic about the world than I might have been thirty years ago. This whole century has been difficult, but
the last thirty years have been pretty awful in many, many ways. I mean, if thirty years ago I had listened to the six o’clock news, I wouldn’t have believed it. War is all over this planet. On the other hand, there’s a black president in South Africa! Wonderful things happened even while there’s terrible things. We wouldn’t have believed thirty years ago that the Soviet Union would be dissolved. It’s like weather, it’s unpredictable. The amazing thing is that despite all the things that happen, the human spirit still manages to survive, to stay strong.