SUNDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2025

Sometimes I worry that my poetry and my essays are a bit like progrock: earnest, elaborate, portentous, too deliberate. Art walks a tightrope between banality and pretension, and the sweet spot – the wafer-thin line that we must tread or else we tumble – is devilishly hard to navigate.

It’s a very English (British?) thing, I think: this dread of taking oneself too seriously and of trying a bit too hard. Whether we’re talking high culture (Wilde) or popular entertainment (Peter Cook), there’s this wish to be seen as a gifted amateur knocking off works of art on rainy afternoons when there’s nothing better to do, or coming out with stunning ad libs and off-the-cuff bon mots. Making any kind of effort is deemed rather vulgar, something that the middle classes might do.

This is tied up, I suspect, with the fear of embarrassment which stalks the English soul much more than any grim reaper. I remember a work colleague of mine who turned up one day with a grotesquely swollen face from some kind of dental problem. The first thing she did was apologise profusely, as if she was somehow to blame for the bacteria: however much pain she was in, her embarrassment hurt much worse. (She was well-bred and Scottish, so this trait seems to cut across class and maybe isn’t restricted to the English after all.)

I’m far from immune. When I talk about my writing, I’m wary of taking myself too seriously lest I sound ridiculously self-important, someone whose friends indulge him in his fantasies of being a serious writer but probably think he should give it all up and become a fully-fledged wino instead. An author who is competent at best, but no more than that. And in many ways in England, being a competent writer is worse than being a bad one because nothing is quite as shameful as trying very hard and achieving mediocrity: better to go the whole hog and assume the mantle of the modern McGonagall.

At school I took pride in the fact that I could pass exams easily while doing almost no work and was part of a tiny smartass clique who looked down our noses at anyone who studied hard, fellow pupils we dismissed as ‘swots’. (I was a horrible adolescent – my only defence is that I was pretty screwed up at the time.) This shows that upper-class disdain for those who put in an effort had trickled down, unlike their money, to the great unwashed. And even now, I sense that when I judge artworks, I have a largely unconscious preference for the quirky and the offhand: compare my high regard for Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, with the kooky, childlike, almost slapdash poetry of Barrett at its heart, with what I consider to be the dreary worthiness of the albums that followed once he was no longer the driving force of the band.

All of which is a long-winded introduction to a piece about the two different selves that all artists who exhibit or publish their work must negotiate, regardless of their success or failure: the public and the private. Mostly this is out of our hands if we are lucky enough to break out from obscurity: the myths begin to be spun around the work and especially the private life. Artists then face the same decision as any public figure, be that president, thinker or athlete: whether to shrug their shoulders and not give a damn about their public image, or to try to forge and take control of this persona.

If they do the latter, artists have little choice but to go with the grain. There has to be some kind of consonance between the work and the human being for this persona to be in any way credible. It’s hard to imagine Plath, for instance, downing a few beers in the pub and having a good laugh with her mates. Her image has to be tragic and long-suffering like her poetry, although there is a tough streak in her work that belies this persona in my opinion. Nor can we imagine a fey Jackson Pollock lounging around in a smoking jacket with a languorous look on his face as he sucks on a cigarette holder like some latterday Somerset Maugham, or Warhol decked up in masculine drag like one of his pictures of Presley.  

No one seemed to get more pleasure out of performing his public self than Salvador Dalí, with his waxed moustache and his diving bell that almost killed him. He self-consciously created himself as a joker, or even a charlatan, but his manufactured weirdness failed to impress Freud, who found his work too contrived to be the genuine fruit of the unconscious. Dalí was part of a modern trend where the artist becomes the artwork, which we can see in embryo in fin-de-siècle figures like Whistler and Wilde. At first, though, these flaneurs were far from lacking in technical ability – Dalí, for example, is generally recognised as a superb draughtsman. By the time of Gilbert and George or Tracey Emin, in contrast, technical skill had become an optional extra. The obligatory ability in the contemporary art world is a gift for self-publicity, to make the most of a new reality in which we have lost all confidence in a defining aesthetics and anyone can go viral and become a cause célèbre.

Personally, I feel mixed about this. It adds to the gaiety of nations, for sure, and does a lot to prick the pretensions of the artistic elite. But in another way it has become a method of adding to its pretensions in a world where name-dropping the correct intellectuals (ideally French) can conceal an emptiness of thinking and an art that can talk the talk but often fails miserably to walk the walk. Ultimately, Art is pretty simple, or should be, and the poem or the painting or the music should speak for itself. My saying this, however, betrays a certain naivety on my part, a belief that there can be a world in which a purity of response to a work of art is possible, free of any distortions that arise from social class and pretensions and expectations. I have serious doubts about the option to evaluate a work of art with genuine disinterest.

And almost all of us love a good story: Rimbaud and Verlaine, Plath and Hughes, Orton and Halliwell, Kahlo and Rivera, the Bloomsbury Set – these add a sense of ordinary humanity to what might otherwise feel like daunting and obscure aesthetic concepts. Narrative will trump theory nearly every time. Also, few of us have the leisure or the inclination to delve really deeply into the work of an individual artist, so these thumbnail personae have to do the heavy lifting. The stereotypes may be shallow but they serve a useful function.

Then there’s basic economics. Artists have to eat (or at least be able to pay for their absinthe). They may no longer need to suck up to the church or to rich patrons or to an intellectual cognoscenti but in the modern world they do have to know how to work the media and the marketplace. I don’t want to sound too cynical here but it’s hard not to conclude that the most famous painters of the last fifty years or even longer have been those who were dab hands at self-publicity. Perhaps talent, like murder, will eventually out, but a dash of notoriety can make a wonderful lubricant in the meantime.

So what exactly is the relationship between the private person and his/her public art? In many ways, a poem or a song or a painting, or sometimes even an entire oeuvre, can capture only a tiny part of the complexity of a human being. Someone reading my poems, for example, might imagine me a miserable neurotic who spends his days fighting off the black dog of depression, for I tend to write when I am down. When I’m up, I’m chatting online or reading a good book or scoffing food in a restaurant by the sea. Does that make me fake? I hope not, because the mood I’m in when I write feels authentic enough; I’m honestly not trying to come across as some throwback to the Romantics, sharing my existential angst with the world.  But it does mean there’s a gap between my public poetry and my private self.

We live in a modern space in which there remains very little art created by a society as a whole, where everyone becomes a performer as, for example, in ‘tribal’ music and dance. In the west, there were once elements of this communal artistry in things like the mystery plays, where an entire town took part in the making of the work and acted as both creators and spectators. Even today, remnants of this collective invention remain in the flamboyant excesses of the modern carnival or artforms like gamelan orchestras. But in general we now rely on a special caste of people called artists who create work for the mass of passive spectators, and an inevitable consequence of this is the rise of the individual artistic persona.

In a sense this persona is merely a more complex version of what we all do in everyday life: present a self to the world. This self is partly under our control, but is always open to differing, and sometimes even perverse, interpretations. And once our self-image spins beyond the people we meet face to face and branches out into the abstract realm of the public domain, it can metamorphose into something we can no longer hope to control. Ultimately, even in a case like my own, where my obscurity limits this public persona to friends and acquaintances who read my work, the fact that I choose to self-publish it means that I have no right to complain about what I feel are distortions in its reception. Like most poets and writers, I feel the need for an audience to complete what I create and in the process both the poem and the persona take on a life of their own.

In the end, though, I believe we can only write or paint or dance in a way that goes with the flow of whatever talent we possess and our basic disposition. The public image may be skewed in the sense that our art only reflects a part of who we are, as in my personal tendency towards gloom, but it cannot be skewed too far. With some artists, this manipulation of the image is conscious and deliberate; with others, it is merely an unavoidable consequence of going public. In a modern, consumerist globe where we all become brands to some extent, building a distinct public persona may make for a better career and more money and renown, but I hope that over time evaluation genuinely becomes disinterested and that the bubbles of reputation built on self-promotion will burst, while the best work will earn the reward that it deserves. But then again, perhaps, this is my being hopelessly naive.