Creators (16 page)

Hokusai—like Turner—emerges from his work as an unforgettable creative personality. He was ever changing and always developing, yet always consistent in essentials—again like Turner.
A truly creative personality is always Janus-faced, revolving and evolving, yet always still too. Some of Hokusai’s letters to publishers survive, often illustrated. “This month, I have no money, no clothing, no food. If this continues for another month, I will not live to see the Spring.”
³⁹
He tells how, in his seventies, he had some sort of seizure, and cured himself by taking a strong dose of lemon pulp mixed with “the best sake” (he gives the recipe). During another phase he says he has been drawing lions’ heads every morning by way of exorcism (of bad luck). His
Book of Exorcism
was published. He went on working, like Turner, virtually to the end. There is a beautiful drawing (in the collection of the Victoria National Gallery, Melbourne) of him, as an old man, singing his heart out, with a girl accompanying him. At the age of eighty-seven, in 1847, he painted on paper a magnificent eagle in a blizzard. Another fine drawing survives from 1849, when he was eighty-nine; it shows a woodcutter smoking a pipe. From the same year we find a painting on silk,
Tiger Roaring in the Rain
; and
A Dragon in the Smoke Escaping from Mount Fuji
.
⁴⁰
Only death stilled his active drawing hand, the year before Turner; stricken, he threw down his brush at last. So these two little men, giants of art, ended their long, fruitful lives.

U
NTIL ALMOST OUR OWN TIME
,
and certainly until well into the twentieth century, women striving to reach the heights of creativity led isolated, lonely, and often desperate lives. Most gave up the struggle early, and we hear nothing more of them. A few succeeded, often because of a supportive family, but their success was always precarious because of their sex; and the way in which they scaled the mountain, usually alone, is obscured by family censorship of the record after their death: until recently a woman creator was always a source of embarrassment to her kin, even if they had helped her on her way. The outstanding case is Jane Austen (1775–1817), one of the world’s greatest novelists. Her oeuvre is slender, because she was never able to become a full-time writer, having domestic and social duties to perform which took priority, and she died at the age of forty-one, of Addison’s disease, then incurable. In effect her output consists of six “mature” novels:
Sense and Sensibility
,
Northanger Abbey
,
Pride and Prejudice
,
Mansfield Park
,
Emma
, and
Persuasion
(in order of composition). Her fame was beginning to establish itself at the time of her death, and it has continued to grow. She became a cult figure among upper-middle-class and upper-class intellectuals and then, more recently, a worldwide popular celebrity, deified by movies and television series. Her six novels have never been out of print for two centuries, and now more than a million copies a year are sold in paperback in the English-speaking world alone (another million copies are now produced in, for instance, Hindustani each year).

Unfortunately, we know comparatively little about Austen’s
ascent to creativity because her family, beginning with her elder sister Cassandra, and continuing for two generations, suppressed or censored her letters (she was a constant and lively, at times inspired, correspondent). Cassandra admitted that she burned many of the letters, and we know she cut the survivors heavily. The family also altered and distorted the record in order to make Austen appear more genteel and socially law-abiding than she actually was.
¹
In effect, they tried to turn her from essentially a Regency woman into a Victorian, and succeeded in taking in many of her twentieth-century biographers, such as Elizabeth Jenkins and Lord David Cecil. It is now impossible to use the altered evidence to reconstruct her life and character, though hints exist and surmises can be made: two words she used about herself, describing her states of mind, not her actions, were “wild” and “wicked.”
²

It helps to compare Austen with her contemporaries. She and Madame de Staël (Germaine Necker) died in the same year, 1817, though de Staël was nine years older. Among other works, de Staël wrote two novels—
Delphine
(1802) and
Corinne
(1807)—which Austen certainly knew about, though we have no positive evidence that she read either.
Delphine
is in tiresome letter-form, then a mark of an inexperienced or amateur writer of fiction, and
Corinne
, a much longer book, is weighed down with elaborate descriptions of Italian scenery and culture, so that neither is much read today. But when these novels appeared, they appealed strongly to intelligent women because their common theme is the isolation of such women in society, especially when they seek to express themselves creatively. Both heroines are forced to choose between an intellectual life and an emotional life—to follow the dictates of the head or of the heart—and both find death in consequence: Corinne dies of grief and Delphine poisons herself.
³
Women, de Staël argues, are faced with these impossible choices because, though both men and women are imprisoned by convention, the prison is much more rigorous and inflexible for women, and the chance of escape virtually nil. Women, in practice, cannot leave their family except to marry (a different form of imprisonment), and their chances of expressing themselves depend, therefore, on the kind of family they spring from.

There are three types of family the creative woman had (or has)
to contend with. The first type, almost universal in the early nineteenth century, and common until well into the twentieth, sets its face firmly against the idea of its female members embarking on any professional activity of a creative kind (or indeed of any other). We do not hear of many career women, because the gifted daughters never got started. This seems to have applied particularly to painting: the majority of men (and women, too, I suspect) found the idea of a woman artist abhorrent. Pliny, in Book 35 of his
Natural History
, lists six women artists of antiquity. Giorgio Vasari repeats their names in his
Lives of the Artists
, and in the 1568 edition of this book he adds the names of five Flemish women artists and ten Italians, including the admirable Sofonisba Anguisciola and her three talented sisters. But great women artists—like Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio’s disciple, or the Dutchwoman Judith Leyster—were scarcely mentioned until the late twentieth century.
⁴
Two women artists, Angelica Kaufman and Mary Moser, were among the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768, but no woman member was elected for more than a century afterward; and I recall that, as recently as the 1960s, women Royal Academicians were not allowed to attend the annual Academy Banquet, but merely permitted, on sufferance, to join the men after the toast to the royal family.
⁵

Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, vetoed a proposal by his gifted sister to set up as a professional portrait painter, and did everything in his power to stop her from painting. Male creative giants were not at all eager to see female giants emerge in their families. Wordsworth never encouraged his wonderful sister, Dorothy, to write poetry, though he was often indebted, in his own verse, to her capacity for minute observation of nature. (His most famous poem, “The Daffodils,” would have been impossible without her sight and insight, as recorded in her
Grasmere Diary
.) Rossetti never lifted a finger to help his sister Christina, a better poet than he was. Mary Cassatt, the greatest woman painter of modern times, whose superb paintings of mothers and daughters are as good as, and in some cases better than, Raphael’s, was always pooh-poohed by the newspapers of Philadelphia as the “gifted daughter of a prominent local family whose interest is sketching,” though in fact she was the most rigorously
trained, and self-trained, artist of her generation. I own a superb watercolor by Caroline St. John Mildmay (1834–1894), who was allowed by her family to acquire some training only after she threatened to starve herself to death unless they agreed, and then only on the condition that she would never sign her works or use the family name in any circumstances. The majority of women writers in England and France during the nineteenth century used pseudonyms so as not to offend their families.

By contrast, there were a few families for whom the pursuit of writing or art was their trade, and women members were expected or encouraged to participate. The outstanding example of such a family in the age of Jane Austen was William Godwin’s. He had two wives and an extended, if chaotic, family. His first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of
Vindication of the Rights of Women
, died at the birth of her daughter, Mary, who subsequently eloped with and married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Godwin then married a widow, Mrs. Clairmont, who brought with her two children: a son and a daughter, Jane, who renamed herself Claire, and subsequently had a messy affair with Lord Byron and bore him a daughter, Allegra. According to Claire Clairmont, an assiduous diarist and a prolific letter writer, but not a creative artist, “You are accounted nothing in our family until you have written a novel.” (Mary, her stepsister, wrote her first novel,
Frankenstein
, at the age of eighteen.) Mrs. Clairmont, a bossy, bullying woman, set up a publishing business turning out children’s books. It is curious that she did not get Claire to write some of them. Instead, she became an embittered governess, the fate narrowly avoided by the beautiful but penniless Jane Fairfax in Austen’s
Emma
.
⁶

There was a third kind of family, which was not hostile to daughters (or even wives) exercising their talents, but did not go out of the way to assist a career in the arts. Such families expected girls to perform their household and social duties before anything else, yet nevertheless provided a cultured and appreciative background in which talent could flourish. That was precisely the kind of family to which Jane Austen belonged, and I would argue that it constituted the perfect setting for her particular genius. But there are mysteries about Austen; and because of the censorship imposed on information about her by her overanxious sister and family,
these mysteries are unlikely ever to be solved. The first concerns her appearance. Her elder sister Cassandra had a certain talent for drawing and drew Jane’s likeness many times. But only two of her efforts have survived, and one does not show the face at all. The other does, and this is the portrait of Jane Austen that is endlessly reproduced in all the biographies and illustrated articles. It shows that she had large, luminous eyes, and this confirms other evidence but does not prove that she was either dazzlingly pretty or rather on the plain side. The fact is that as a portraitist Cassandra had no skill in conveying the essential visual truth about a subject’s face. The literary evidence about Jane Austen’s appearance is likewise inconclusive. Everyone agreed that she was a lively child and adolescent, eager, clever, talkative, and quick to learn. She was funny and loved laughter. She thought a good deal about handsome young men, and there is even a suggestion that she was a husband-hunter. Well, what normal girl was not, in those days? But no one ever suggested that she was a beauty. Had she been, the news would certainly have filtered through the censorship screens of the Austen family. If Jane had been “very handsome,” like Elizabeth Elliot in
Persuasion
, or “handsome” like Emma, or even “a very pretty girl,” like the young Anne Elliot, we would certainly have known it. The chances are that Jane Austen was no more than “a fine girl,” the rather dismissive phrase that she uses to describe a young woman who has no claim to personal distinction in her looks.
⁷

And that, hard as it may seem to say so, was to the advantage of all, certainly to Austen’s readers. For the Austen family was very social, had some links to the gentry and aristocracy, was respectable and presentable, and had an enormous acquaintance. The Austens were much visited and did much visiting, attending balls regularly, and the girls had ample opportunities of meeting eligible young men. Cassandra, indeed, became engaged to an entirely suitable person who, alas, died suddenly before the marriage could take place, and she was evidently so stricken that she never formed another attachment. Jane herself got engaged, repented overnight, broke off the match the following day, and thereafter had no strong fancy or luck. Both sisters were particular. But Jane was strongly romantic, we know, and believed in love, and had she been a beauty the Darcys would no doubt have been forthcoming; she
would have married and produced children instead of novels. We would never have heard of her.

In the nineteenth century, the probability was very strong that a woman, however gifted she was, would never produce great works of art; were she a beauty, the probability was overwhelming. Take the case of de Staël. Her father, Jacques Necker, the great financier and finance minister of prerevolutionary France, was a millionaire and major landowner, the disposition of whose fortune put it beyond the powers of the sansculottes to confiscate; and Germaine was his only child and sole heiress. Had she been a beauty in addition, she would have made a grand marriage, into the ducal or princely class, and the life of a writer and den mother of a literary coterie would have been forbidden to her and probably not to her taste, either. As it was, she was plain, though not uninteresting in looks, as dozens of portraits and drawings testify; and the best that she could do, or that could be done for her, was marriage to the Swedish ambassador in Paris, Erik de Staël-Holstein, a man she never could or did love. Her marriage was thus the prolegomenon to her literary aspirations, her life at Coppet, and the amours which enlivened it and spurred on her works.

A similar point could be made about Aurore Dupin, the Baroness Dudevant (1804–1876)—or George Sand, the name with which she signed her writings.
⁸
Aurore, as she liked to be called, had a number of advantages in life. She was brought up on a beautiful property called Nohant, which she eventually inherited and which (like de Staël’s Coppet) was the setting for some of her many liaisons and the place where she wrote the majority of her large oeuvre (106 volumes in the comprehensive edition). Her family, though difficult and quarrelsome, had some very grand connections on both sides; her father was an aide-de-camp to Prince Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and best cavalry commander. Her father, Maurice Dupin de Francevil (the name was shortened to Dupin during the Terror), was descended, illegitimately in some cases, from King Augustus III of Poland. Sand herself was related by blood to Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X, all legitimate kings of France in their day. She aroused, and still seems to invite, extraordinary animosity and accolades. Chateaubriand thought her “destined to be the Lord Byron of
France.” Baudelaire called her a “latrine,” Nietzsche “a writing cow,” V. S. Pritchett a “thinking bosom,” and Virginia Woolf “France’s Jane Austen.” Saint-Beuve, who knew her well, thought she had much in common with Madame de Staël: each married to escape her mother, both were disappointed in marriage and treated it as a nullity, and both took lovers frequently younger—even much younger—than themselves. There is some mystery about George Sand. One of her lovers, Alfred de Musset, was not only younger than she but attractive and pleasing to women, as well as famous; another, “Freddie” Chopin, was also younger, handsome, and a European celebrity. They saw something in her. But what? Many portraits testify that she was plain, like de Staël, with a long, lugubrious face. Her figure was not boyish, as is erroneously supposed, but gross. Saint-Beuve testified: “She had a great soul and a perfectly enormous bottom.” Gustave Flaubert, with whom she conducted a fascinating correspondence, also noticed it and, being a rude Norman, was not diffident about telling her so. When she asked: “Does my bum look big in this bombazine?” he replied: “Madame, your bum would look big in anything.” Like de Staël, George Sand had connections and prospects that, if she had been given good looks too, would have enabled her to do well and move several steps up the social ladder. As it was she had to make do with a retired army officer, Baron Dudevant—a “washout,” as she put it. So she lived her literary life, like de Staël, and the books flowed, a
roman-fleuve
indeed.