Barry Moser and I will do children’s books together. We have met once only, and begin to know each other by letter. Collaboration can be difficult, or disastrous, even when one artist works in sentences and the other in pigment. We need each to develop a feeling for the other, what the other loves and hates, what he is best at. Just now, he has sent me the draft of a lecture he will deliver to the American Booksellers’ Association, and I feel the pleasure and relief of affinity. “I’m up between six and seven,” Moser says, “make coffee, feed the dogs, cats, and occasionally my granddaughter. I sit down at my drawing table by eight, and begin my work designing, drawing, painting, engraving, or doing calligraphy. I work until 11:30 or thereabouts, at which time I go to fetch my mail, grab a sandwich, do my shopping for the evening meal, run my errands, and get back to my drawing table by about one o’clock. Then I work till the sun goes over the yard arm, which on my hill comes somewhere between five and seven in the evening. This is a seven day schedule for fifty or so weeks out of the year….”
Writers envy visual artists their muscular activity. Writers sit at desks and die early. Painters and sculptors work all day moving about, tapping, chiseling, modelling, mixing paints, and live to be ninety-seven praising work. Visual artists say the best things about work: Georgia O’Keeffe said, “The days you work are the best days.” “Work is paradise,” said Matisse. “To work,” said Rodin, “is to live without dying.” “You have to be with the work,” said Louise Nevelson, “and the work has to be with you. It absorbs you totally and you absorb it totally.”
There is work and work, for the visual artist as for others. Years ago when I spent some hours with artists in England—Eduardo Paolozzi, Jim Dine, Philip King, Isaac Witkin, R. J. Kitaj, even Francis Bacon—I was surprised by their general knowledge. Then I discovered that many of them kept BBC radio Home Service on all day as they worked. I cannot listen to All Things Considered while writing, but the examples are nonparallel because for me word would compete with word. I suspect that for an intellectual painter like Kitaj, radio-distraction may help by occupying the surface of the mind and allowing the hand a greater spontaneity of invention. Gertrude Stein sometimes wrote parked in her Ford at a busy intersection in Paris where French law required all drivers to squeeze their klaxons as they approached cross-streets—because, as she said, the clangor took the top of her mind away.
On the other hand, painters or poets or CEOs—everybody in the world—can fool themselves by a busy laziness, like the “false hustle” Red Auerbach observed in athletes who pretend to give out more than they give. Henry Moore felt the middle-aged worker’s contempt for young artists who could not manage more than an hour or two of labor a day. But he was wary as well of work’s deceit. A sculptor can tap-tap-tap all day and night, he often said, and remain lazy. It’s this deception that I fear for myself. I pile pages and add lines, I accumulate publication; maybe I use numbers to prove to an internalized authority that Donald is a good boy and has finished his homework, stacked the wood, fetched the eggs, washed the car, and weeded the cabbages. Now please can he go to bed (or whack his doodle) without reproach?