Keep on Smiling!
No, of course you can’t (well, I can’t, anyway), because in the world of media only those who shout loudest, or about the most miserable things, or who jar our concepts of functional personality are conspicuous. Well, that’s the way it’s always worked, you might say. But does that make it right?
Are we disallowing the credible appearance of a new generation of writers who are well adjusted by producing endless biographies, and biographical films of these hopeless characters from literary history? It seems to me that we are pushing the youth of today into an impossible position: mental health and lack of success/fame/money, or a lifetime of heartache, hospitalisation, drug rehabilitation, but massive fame and ‘success’.
It doesn’t stop with the literary world either; composers through the years have become imortalised in the coloured history of lunacy. Beethoven was a depressive who spent many a rainy afternoon moaning the classic artists cry: that nobody understood his work. Mozart became possessed by the idea that the requeim he was writing was indeed for himself. This somewhat morbid fixation drove him to alcoholism and, a few weeks later, a paupers funeral. Continuin g this happy idea is the famous piantist, Alfred Brendal, who is as famous for his fixation with death as he is for his piano playing. A little less serious was the case of Erik Satie, the composer whose slightly eccentric nature included an umberella fetish.
Last month another book was published on Iris Murdoch, a philosopher, critic, novelist and all-round intellectual who seems destined to be immortalised instead as ‘the Alzheimers lady’, a lesbian nymphomaniac who ruined other people’s lives. And coming soon is a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, as no other than our beloved Sylvia Plath. Seen on set with Chris Martin, looking suitably miserable, I wonder if she’s been practising ‘eating men like air’. Is that why the wedding is off?
Making films about writers is always going to be difficult, but they only ever appear to be a vehicle for the outdated idea that good art can only come about from misery, mental anguish and a difficult life. When you think of Van Gogh, you think of the missing ear. Think of Kerouac, and remember the drug-fuelled, media-encouraged journeys into mental and physical collapse. Huxley? Shot his wife? Hughes? Misogynistic abuser? Plath? Well, a damn fine poet if you ask me, but then, you might not give a damn. All you’re thinking is ‘head in oven’.
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