Today’s posting comes from the Orcadian writer and poet George Mackay Brown. This passage is from his posthumously published autobiography “For the Islands I sing” (John Murray, London. 1996) It resonates with Passive Complicity understandings.
When I was a boy I was intrigued by the name “Anon” at the end of some poems in our verse-books. Anonymous, I was told – the name of the poet is lost. I have the feeling that not one person made those great ballads; in a real sense they are the work of an entire tribe or community. One illiterate person might indeed have rough hewn them with their voice; thereafter being vividly uttered and remembered, they are part of the inheritance of a community. Words and phrases, whole quatrains are changed over generations to conform to the life of this market-village or that hillside farming community. The wandering minstrels are abroad – a few of them poets to – and now and then a crude phrase gets touched to felicity or purest magic. Time flows over the ballads, and wears them to this shape or that. Such ballads as Lord Randal which has variations even inside Scotland, were carried across the Atlantic and now have American accents and images.
One phrase of Thomas Mann struck me, that art is somehow ‘anonymous and communal’. Over the past four centuries there has been to much emphasis on the life and personality of authors – great streams of reminiscence, biography and autobiography. In fact the lives of authors are not greatly different from the lives of plumbers; except that, in the romantic age, writers struck poses and behaved in wild eccentric ways – not so much because those aberrations were part of their nature as because the public expected it of them: ‘true genius is to madness near allied’. In the late nineteenth century no poet or artist was genuine unless they broke most of the social rules, steeped themselves in drink and laudanum, got syphilis or consumption, fled to wild barren places of the earth, manned barricades, was alternately in a trough or on the crest of the spirit, flirted with demons or the angelic (or both).
It seems to me that under all the masks, the lives of artists are as boring and also as uniquely fascinating as any other or very other life. They put their name and copyright to every novel, poem, sonata, or painting; but in fact the works are not theirs only but have come from the whole community in which they live. Tolstoy understood this and acted on it.