The Dark Night of the Artistic Soul: American Idol, Dorothy Sayers, and the Unnecessarily Long Subtitle

I recently read a terrible book. Not “terrible” in any way relating to vice - very well intentioned - but terrible artistically. I will not describe or name it, as that’s not the point of the post. I’m sure you’ve read a terrible book at some point in your life, so assume it was that one. (Unless you are thinking of Gaudy Night. Then I will be forced to hunt you down.) But that book was published. People paid money to print it, and people have paid money to read it.

Terrible books unnerve me. (So do really great books, but for different reasons.) Terrible books invalidate all of my hopes of validation, my faith that, even though I can’t judge my own work, other people can tell me whether it’s good.

See, not everyone is supposed to be an artist. But as the annual rounds of American Idol auditions amply attest, not everyone who thinks they’re an artist is an artist. So when that little voice starts whispering that there are plenty of untalented people in the world, and who are you to think you’re not one of them...well, how do you know whether that’s “just” depression, or the depression is actually telling you the truth?

Not all opinions are created equal, of course. How about the opinions of people you trust, people whose own work you admire, people whom you try to emulate? Better, but still not good enough. You see, I used Gaudy Night for a reason, up above. If you were to pin me down to one favorite novel, that would probably be it. Now take a look at this:

“I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet.”

That’s J.R.R. Tolkien. (It’s in a 1944 letter to his son Christopher quoted in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.) And it’s not just a matter of taste, not a “does nothing for me but I can see the merit in it” assessment. He genuinely hates it, and hates it much more strongly than I hate the unnamed, not-Gaudy Night book that inspired this post. If one of my literary idols loathes the work of another of my literary idols, then how can I be sure of anything? Maybe Tolkien would loathe my work, and maybe he’d be right. In fact, maybe that terrible book isn’t really terrible. After all, it was published. People paid money to print it, and people have… [Cue vicious circle.]

What’s an aspiring writer to do?

I reject the idea that there is no such thing as “bad art”. There are “singers” who cannot sing, “writers” who cannot write, and “actors” who cannot act. (If you’re thinking of Gary Oldman, I will be forced to hunt you down.) But if I can’t trust myself, and I can’t entirely trust other opinions, then how do I know whether I’m a writer or not?

And this matters. Spiritually matters. We will be held accountable for how we have used our time. If I’m not a writer, I should give up pretending to be one and go figure out what I’m supposed to do with my time.

I’ve actually tried that. Oh, how I have tried. Told myself I would be happier, calmer, and much nicer to the people around me if I gave up on writing all of these things no one will ever read. The trouble is, it doesn’t work like that. I wind up jonesing - literally, my fingers start tapping for a keyboard because someone who never existed and who never will exist is talking to me.

Perhaps this is where depression is useful, even a spiritual gift (although, like many spiritual gifts, it’s in a color you hate and you scour the box for the return receipt). It reminds you just how minuscule the odds of success are. And that hurts like all heck, but somehow it doesn’t make a difference. You write anyway.

“It had overmastered her without her knowledge or notice, and that was the proof of its mastery.”

Yes, that’s from Gaudy Night.

Nightmares Should Be Heard, Not Seen

Okay, so I’m a year late on this one.

While hunting for something with which to ameliorate the tedium of jury duty, I discovered a) that the BBC had done a full radio dramatization of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and b) that it was available on iTunes. It was a joyful discovery on at least three counts.

First, it is beautiful in and of itself: as marvelous a cast as one could hope for (seriously, look at that cast), performing a well-paced and graceful adaptation by Dirk Maggs. In a list of worthy contenders, this may be my favorite James McAvoy performance. His Richard is at once ordinary and unique, frustrating and charming, flawed and glorious - in a word, real. And though he sets the bar very high, none of the others falls short.

Second, having road-tested it, I highly recommend it for jury duty (but be prepared to restrain the urge to laugh out loud).

Third, it met a need I had begun to despair of filling. While I am often wary when a book I love is put on film, I generally want to see the result. Even if the adaptation is profoundly unsatisfactory, it can send me back to the book with a new perspective, if only by making me articulate more clearly why a particular choice was wrong. And even in an unsatisfactory adaptation, one can find treasure. For all the faults of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit (or, “Are we there and back again yet?”), it has given us Martin Freeman’s Bilbo.

But while I knew that there was a miniseries of Neverwhere - and knew that, in fact, the miniseries was the story’s original form - I didn’t want to see it. I’d read mixed reviews, but the aversion was more fundamental. I felt, in some way, that film was not the right medium for this story.

London Below is a collection of fragments, conjured in glimpses. Having the whole picture would diminish both the terror and the wonder, and that’s not just because the picture might be inadequate or not conform to the one I had formed. Richard spends most of the story metaphorically (and often physically) in the dark, and that impression is made stronger when we, as the audience, have only sound to guide us. Take the Night’s Bridge sequence: no visual medium could so completely isolate us in the darkness, with the nightmares waiting on all sides.

But of course sound, too, has its limitations. Lost here, for example, is the brief and beautiful passage about de Carabas’ fear of sleep. And radio requires more words to explain the ending, thus losing the novel’s exquisite simplicity.

The whole question of adaptation - of translating to different media, and what’s gained and what’s lost - gets at the limits of subcreation. The story is always bigger than any of our attempts to tell it. Yes, some versions will be better than others, but I don’t always want to have to choose. Take, if you will, Gaiman’s passage introducing Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar:

“There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar’s eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelry; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.”

Now, that passage only belongs in a book. It has no place in radio. What you get in radio are Anthony Head and David Schofield. Who are utterly perfect, every bit as laugh-out-loud funny and breath-catchingly horrible as you want them to be.

And that’s the problem: I want both. I am still savoring Gaiman’s prose AND I am still chuckling over Head’s reading of “The corpses-to-be have a point, Mr. Vandemar.” They are both part of the story, but they can’t coexist in any medium we could use to tell the story.

And for all I have said about the superiority of radio over film in this case, even radio and novel combined are still incomplete. There is at least one thing I want to see. At the very end, I want to see that open door.

The pain we get from beauty is always the pain of desire. Nothing we can create is ever perfect, and somehow, the closer it gets to perfection, the more aware we are of the gap that remains. That gap is as frightening (to me, at least) as the gap that nearly ensnares Richard.

I’m starting to think of Heaven as the place where we get the whole story - not just one telling of it. Until then, I guess we have to “Mind the gap.”