Eileen, I’m sorry if my last email alarmed you. I did cancel all my public engagements for several months, as you know, but I was always planning to go back to work eventually. Surely you understand that this is my job? No one finds that fact more tiresome and degrading than I do, but I never meant you to think that I had actually retired from public life altogether. You have never been off work sick for more than four days at a time, so I should think my taking four months off would strike you as a pretty protracted break. And yes, I did fly out of Dublin, and back into Dublin again, at seven in the morning and one in the morning respectively. Since you also have a job, at which I understand you keep regular hours, I didn’t think waking you up in the middle of the night for a quick cup of tea and a chat would have been particularly polite. You can’t possibly think I don’t want to see you, since I have been asking you repeatedly for months on end to come and visit me, and I only live three hours away. As for the unanswered text message from Roisin, I’m confused – are you writing to me personally, or in your capacity as friendship ambassador for the greater Dublin region? You’re right, I didn’t reply to her text, because I’ve been busy. With all due love and affection, I don’t intend to file a report with you every time I fall behind on my correspondence.
As for the rest of your message: what exactly do you mean when you say ‘beauty’? You wrote that to confuse personal vanity with aesthetic experience is a grave mistake. But is it another mistake, and maybe a related one, to take aesthetic experience seriously in the first place? No doubt it is possible to be moved in a personally disinterested way by artistic beauty or by the beauty of the natural world. I even think it’s possible to enjoy the good looks of other people, their faces and bodies, in a way that’s ‘purely’ aesthetic, i.e. without the element of desire. Personally I often find people beautiful to look at without feeling any inclination to draw them into a particular relationship with myself – in fact I don’t find beauty much of an inducement to desire anyway. In other words I exercise no volition in perceiving beauty and I experience no conscious will as a result. This I suppose is what the Enlightenment philosophers meant by aesthetic judgement, and it corresponds rightly enough to the kind of experience I’ve had with certain works of visual art, passages of music, scenic vistas, and so on. I find them beautiful, and their beauty moves me and gives me a pleasurable feeling. I agree that the spectacle of mass consumerism marketed to us as ‘beauty’ is in reality hideous and gives me none of the aesthetic pleasure I get from, e.g., sunlight falling through leaves, or the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, or ‘Kind of Blue’. But I’m inclined to ask: who cares? Even if we suppose that the beauty of ‘Kind of Blue’ is in some sense objectively superior to the beauty of a Chanel handbag, which philosophically speaking is a lot of ground to give, why does it matter? You seem to think that aesthetic experience is, rather than merely pleasurable, somehow important. And what I want to know is: important in what way?
I’m not a painter or a musician, for good reason, but I am a novelist, and I do try to take the novel seriously – partly because I’m conscious of the extraordinary privilege of being allowed to make a living from something as definitionally useless as art. But if I tried to describe my experience of reading the great novels, it would not be remotely like the aesthetic experience I’ve described above, in which no volition is involved and no personal desires are stirred. Personally I have to exercise a lot of agency in reading, and understanding what I read, and bearing it all in mind for long enough to make sense of the book as I go along. In no sense does it feel like a passive process by which beauty is transmitted to me without my involvement; it feels like an active effort, of which an experience of beauty is the constructed result. But, I think more importantly, great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things. When I look at the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, I don’t ‘want’ anything from it. The pleasure is in seeing it as it is. But when I read books, I do experience desire: I want Isabel Archer to be happy, I want things to work out for Anna and Vronsky, I even want Jesus to be pardoned instead of Barabbas. Again it might be that I am a narrow-minded and rather vapid reader, sentimentally wishing the best for everyone (except Barabbas); but if I wished the opposite, that Isabel should make a bad marriage, that Anna should throw herself under the train, it would just be a variation on the same experience. The point is that my sympathies are engaged, I’m no longer disinterested.
Have you talked to Simon about any of this? I think you could rely on him to present a more coherent view of the thing than I can, because his worldview has a consistency mine lacks. In Catholic doctrine, as far as my understanding goes, beauty, truth and goodness are properties of being which are one with God. God kind of literally ‘is’ beauty (and also truth, which maybe is what Keats meant, I’m not sure). Humankind strives to possess and understand these properties as a way of turning toward God and understanding his nature; therefore whatever is beautiful leads us toward contemplation of the divine. As critics we may quibble about what is and isn’t beautiful, because we are only human and God’s will isn’t perfectly accessible to us, but we can all agree on the surpassing importance of beauty itself. It’s all very nice and self-contained, isn’t it? I could riff on it a little to explain my sympathetic engagement with the great novels. For example, God made us the way we are, as complex human beings with desires and impulses, and compassionate attachment to purely fictional people – from whom we obviously can’t expect to derive any material satisfaction or advantage – is a way of understanding the deep complexities of the human condition, and thus the complexities of God’s love for us. I can even go further: in his life and death, Jesus emphasised the necessity of loving others without regard to our own self-interest. In a way, when we love fictional characters, knowing that they can never love us in return, is that not a method of practising in miniature the kind of personally disinterested love to which Jesus calls us? I mean that sympathetic engagement is a form of desire with an object but without a subject, a way of wanting without wanting; desiring for others not what I want for myself but the way I want for myself.
I suppose the point I’m making is that there’s no end of fun to be had once you get into the Christian mindset. For you and me it’s harder, because we can’t seem to shake the conviction that nothing matters, life is random, our sincerest feelings are reducible to chemical reactions, and no objective moral law structures the universe. It’s possible to live with those convictions, of course, but not really possible, I don’t think, to believe the things that you and I say we believe. That some experiences of beauty are serious and others trivial. Or that some things are right and others wrong. To what standard are we appealing? Before what judge do we argue our case? I’m not trying to tear you down, by the way – I occupy what I suspect is exactly your position. I can’t believe that the difference between right and wrong is simply a matter of taste or preference; but I also can’t bring myself to believe in absolute morality, which is to say, in God. This leaves me in a philosophical nowhere place, lacking the courage of my convictions on both sides. I can’t have the satisfaction of feeling that I serve God by doing right, and yet the idea of doing wrong disgusts me. Even more to the point, I find my own work morally and politically worthless, and yet it’s what I do with my life, the only thing I want to do.
When I was younger, I think what I wanted was to travel the world, to lead a glamorous life, to be celebrated for my work, to marry a great intellectual, to reject everything I had been raised with, to cut myself off from the narrow world. I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness. Maybe if I had understood that, as I think I do now, at least a little bit, I would never have written those books, I would never have become this person. I don’t know. I know that I couldn’t write them again, or feel the way I felt about myself at that time. It was important to me then to prove that I was a special person. And in my attempt to prove it, I made it true. Only afterwards, when I had received the money and acclaim which I believed I deserved, did I understand that it was not possible for anyone to deserve these things, and by then it was too late. I had already become the person I had once longed to be, and now energetically despised. I don’t say this to slight my work. But why should anyone be rich and famous while other people live in desperate poverty?
The last time I fell in love, it ended badly, as you know, and then in the aftermath I wrote two novels. While I was in love, I tried to write a little here and there, but my thoughts always returned to the object of my affection, and my feelings ran back inexorably toward her, so my work could never develop any substance of its own, and I had no meaningful place for it in my life. We were happy, and then we were unhappy, and after some misery and recrimination, we broke up – and only then could I start giving myself to my work in a serious way. It was like I had cleared a space inside myself, and I had to fill it up somehow, and that’s how I came to sit down and write. I had to empty my life out first and begin from there. Looking back now on the period when I wrote the books, I feel like it was a good time in my life, because I had work I needed to do, and I did it. I was perennially broke, and lonely, and anxious about money, but I also had this other thing, this part of my life which was secret and protected, and my thoughts returned to it all the time, and my feelings orbited around it, and it belonged to me completely. In a way it was like a love affair, or an infatuation, except that it only involved myself and it was all within my own control. (The opposite of a love affair, then.) For all the frustration and difficulty of writing a novel, I knew from the beginning of the process that I had been given something very important, a special gift, a blessing. It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before. When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.
Other than a little criticism and some very long emails, I haven’t written anything now for almost two years. And I think the space in my life has been cleared out at this stage, and it’s empty, and maybe for that reason it’s time for me to fall in love again. I need to feel that my life has some kind of centre, somewhere for my thoughts to return and rest. I know, by the way, that most people don’t need any such thing, and I would be much healthier if I didn’t. Felix doesn’t feel the need to arrange his life around a central principle, and I don’t think you do either. Simon does, but he has God. When it comes to putting something at the centre of life, God strikes me as a good option – better at least than making up stories about people who don’t exist, or falling in love with people who hate me. But here we are. It’s still better to love something than nothing, better to love someone than no one, and I’m here, living in the world, not wishing for a moment that I wasn’t. Isn’t that in its own way a special gift, a blessing, something very important? Eileen, I am sorry, and I do miss you. When we see each other after all these emails I’m going to get very shy and hide my head under my wing like a little bird. Give your sister and her groom my best wishes this weekend – and then, if it’s not too much trouble, come and see me, please.
