August 14, 2008

Dark as a rainy morning, though there is no rain. All a tease. Lake Logan is bright and wave-strewn at the deep end, but, drained to supply the towns, most of it is a great mud flat, rather horrible to compare to its usual self. I know this because we hauled out there last night to do As You Like It in the dining hall of the conference center. I don’t know whether to call it a success. It could be that the average-age-about-75 crowd found it exhilarating and life-changing, and if so, it was all well. I had the unusual chance to watch the whole production from the next room, and it is rather inexplicably bad. Jacques is good. Phebe and Silvius are good together. I hope I’m good. But the rest lacks. . . something . . . not competence. . . . I said the exact quality was inexplicable. . . perhaps full understanding of what we are doing, and why. We are a blank verse-spouting automaton. Our energies are focused on ourselves rather than on the play. We are playing players playing Shakespeare. Audiences have seemed to enjoy our production, and that is good enough reason to plunge ahead. The van ride back was exactly as I remember from high school.

It has been the most transformative year for me since I was in grad school. Now the latest: In the past, success as an economic being was linked in my mind with success as an author. I’d write best sellers or Broadway shows, and the money would roll in– or roll in proportion to my rather modest vision of such things. Solvency was directly related to acceptance as a writer. Other than finding gold in the backyard, I saw no other way it was to be achieved. I’d fallen into profound debt waiting for the success I was having to turn from praise and "opportunities" into cash. Father’s money has changed that. My vocation and my wallet are sundered. I know that is making a difference, but what kind of difference it is too early to tell. Will my writing soar because it no longer needs to please anybody, or will it crash and disappear because it no longer needs to please anybody? I haven’t written anything significant–chipped away at the novel some–since the money arrived, though I have taken time to tutor myself in the stock market and investment strategies, and I have been happy doing so, more like a past time than a custodial duty. Actually, I have lost no more time than I would have, say, from a customary summer in Ireland. But something is different. I’ve always been something of an aesthetic purist, assuming that the struggle to stay pure as an artist while making a living is too difficult for most of us. It was probably too difficult for me, for whether it affected my art or not, it made me resentful and despairing. It made me a bitter man when I couldn’t overcome it in the spirit. What will I do now that leaden armor is off? It’s a question like those questions I ask my students during lecture, for which I myself have no answer.