A CONVERSATION AT THE CENTER

MONDAYNIGHTDINNER

A CONVERSATION

AT THE CENTER

Kate Moses interviews writer Fenton Johnson on solitude, artistry, and his new book

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Photograph byJeff Mertz Sicilian picnic during La Via Di Gangivecchio,

Fall 2019

You have to feel badly for any writer whose book was published in the midst of the coronavirus lockdowns. Except for Kentucky-born novelist and memoir writer Fenton Johnson: his fourth work of nonfiction couldn’t be more timely. At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life hit bookstores just as the global COVID-19 pandemic began to infect the lives of Americans, ushering in an unprecedented lexicon: social distancing and flattening the curve and the difference between the CDC and the WHO, between quarantine and isolation, between alone and lonely. With the lyrical precision, seamless grounding in research, and elegant narrative logic that make his novels and memoirs a literary joy to sink into, Fenton identifies the state of solitude as part of the essential discipline of creators, as necessary as language to writers or clay to ceramicists. “. . . It is the struggle with and in solitude that defines the artist,” he writes early in the book, going on to illuminate the lives of elevenplus “solitaries” as he calls them, iconic figures acrossthe disciplines of painting, philosophy, music, poetry, fi c t i o n w r i t i n g , a n d photography.

“We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than w h e n w e s t a y i n o u r chambers,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, a sentiment many now sheltering at home might find to be untrue -- unless they’re homeschooling for the first time, in which case they would likely agree that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Fenton tells us that Thoreau spent four times as long writing his transcendental opus as he spent living on the pond– “eight drafts in ten years” – and that the book was out of print at the philosopher’s death. We learn that Fenton was present, as a Stanford undergrad, when another student asked Eudora Welty – who had been recently called “America’s greatest living writer,” recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom – “Miss Welty, how is it that you, who have never been married, can write so eloquently of love?” The entire room held its collective breath; awkward as the question was, it wasn’t unreasonable. Until the second half of the twentieth century few of

“Being a writer or an artist demands that we develop a relationship with our solitude.”

the women artists who achieved fame on the level of their male counterparts were married or mothers. “After a moment Miss Welty responded,” Fenton tells us, “simply and powerfully, ‘I have known love. I have been lucky, in love.’” To be solitary, in Fenton’s view, is not to be without love, to be less than, but to preserve the psychological and practical autonomy that gives us an opportunity for a richer inner life.

Adding to the cross section of lives of solitary artists captured in these pages are Fenton’s own and those of his parents: while raising nine children (Fenton the youngest), his mother retreated daily to a greenhouse where she grew orchids, all the more exotic for their location in the rural Kentucky hills; his father was a sculptor who built his own “HERMITage” deep in the woods out of materials salvaged from the modernization of the bourbon distillery where he worked. Growing up, Fenton was influenced not only by his parents and their big Catholic family but by theirneighbors and close friends, t h e Tra p p i s t m o n ks o f Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani (who, with all the Johnson kids, helped on Fenton’s father’s building projects, their walls whiskeys c e n t e d f r o m r e u s e d cypress).

“Being a writer or an artist demands that we develop a relationship with our solitude,” writes Fenton, although he ultimately sees the “challenge and solace of solitude” as far more widely applicable, however essential it may be to artists in particular. “If the journey through our interior landscape is so critical to our characters, let us become more informed and responsible travelers. Let us start by turning off our phones and spending more time alone.”

Kate Moses of The Gardan had a chance to catch up with Fenton Johnson via Zoom – what else? – learning that he was awaiting the arrival of a new laptop, which had been shipped from . . . Wuhan, China.

TGJ: Oh my god, you’re kidding.

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FJ: No, I’m not! And another coincidence – I have an abiding interest in the Adirondacks. I’ve thought about leaving Tucson, where I live now, as much as I love T u c s o n , a n d I ’ m considering a move to the Hudson Valley, which I know well and like a lot. But the Adirondacks – those winters are long. I’ve driven down from Montreal through the Lake Champlain Valley, down to Lake George. It’s certainly very beautiful, beautiful country.

TGJ: The Hudson Valley is similar . . . But there are certain things about the w e a t h e r i n t h e Adirondacks that you just can’t replicate. After my first long muggy and buggy summer here, when Autumn arrived I cried the first time I saw the leaves turn color. The second week of October or so, it’s jaw-dropping. I’d never imagined it like that – the colors just killed me. It was probably that much better because s u m m e r i s k i n d o f miserable for a westcoaster and it seems as long as winter. Almost.

FJ: This reminds me of the process of staying at arts colonies. The first time I went to MacDowell I was there for six weeks. That was a week too long. The second time I’d learned and I went for five weeks, which meant I did four weeks of really, really, really intense work. But first comes what I call the transcendent boredom, which I think of as a state that is necessary. You need it to achieve what you’re at the arts colony to do. The first few days you walk all the trails, you see the pretty sites, you say hello to the people but you get the very

The jacket art for At the Center of All Beauty is one of Paul Cezanne’s series of paintings of Mont Sainte- Victoire in the Provencal region of France; from his studio in Aix-en-Provence Cezanne painted the mountain over and over again for years.

appropriate agreement that you do not talk until late in the afternoon. And around two o’clock in the afternoon, it gets really dull. I used to fight that. I mean, I still do. But what I’ve discovered over and over again is that usually without my being aware of it at the time, a month later or a year later or six years later, I’ll go back and look at the work I did and I’ll say to myself, I was not smart enough to write that sentence. I was not wise enough. I was writing that sentence and something took charge that was smarter and wiser than I am. It’s about making a space where that deeply buried voice has enough room to emerge. We don’t realize that even if we have an open, flexible schedule like I have here in Tucson, where I spend virtually all day alone and I’m pretty disciplined, there’s still t h e o p p o r t u n i t y f o rdistraction. It’s always at hand. And the great thing about an arts colony experience is that it pretty m u c h r e m o v e s t h e obstacles, particularly if you go there without a car. You’re really thrown onto your own resources. I think it’s important when you are talking to people who are new to it, not to romanticize the experience, because it’s hard. But I found it in every case to be really productive.

TGJ: You’re right, there’s something that will take over if you allow it. And that transcendent boredom -- that’s such a great phrase. I’ve been thinking about that so much these last two months, about how people are freaking out about having to be at home. And granted,

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a lot of them are suddenly tasked with being teachers for their children at the same time that they’re trying to work. But that aside, I’m really perplexed at how many people are so deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a kind of enforced solitude that they just don’t know what to do with themselves.

FJ: That’s because capitalism makes a business out of taking charge of our time. It’s one of the many ways that capitalism infantilizes us. You know, we’ll take charge of your time for you. Which then makes it socially maladroit if you don’t know the most recent Netflix movie or HBO series or whatever, if you’re not able to talk about that, then you’re viewed as being – fill in the blanks, “hermit” is the most complimentary word. Part of the motivation behind writing this book was to take the measure of the appropriateness that attaches to being alone. And liking being alone. There’s a sentence somewhere in the book, something like, “There’s no greater crime than solitude.” That’s the context of both Cezanne and Van Gogh having the neighbor kids throw rocks at the houses where they were painting, you know, because they were crazy old men who were living alone.

TGJ: That was devastating to read when Cezanne had kids chasing him with rocks as he walked to his studio.

FJ: Kids are being taught something that a lot of times adults are oblivious to, they’ve absorbed it so thoroughly, which is that a solitary person is a misfit in some way or another and at the very least ought to have the consideration to hide away and not make herself or himself visible in society. I have been writing an Op Ed about the Industrial Revolution and loneliness. I tried to explain the word loneliness in French to someone in France. And they said, Oh, solitude. And I said, Well, no, solitude is something else, loneliness is . . . And I was trying to find the words in French. We had this conversation and finally this person said, Phht, which is sort of like, whatever.

If we had a society where we felt that we were taken care of, rather than left to fall into oblivion if anything went wrong in our lives, we would not have – at least not so acutely – this phenomenon that we call loneliness, which at its roots is the fact that one knows that if I don’t have an income, I can’t afford health insurance, and if something goes wrong I’m toast. The Dalai Lama had to have loneliness explained to him,

just like the French person. He was like, What are you talking about? What is this phenomenon? And yet everyone in Anglo cultures understands it. It’s about the mass dislocation of people from the countryside to the cities with the Industrial Revolution, with work in factories. The first use of the word loneliness in the way we see it is from 1811. It’s simultaneous with the Industrial Revolution. Whereas Wordsworth only ten years before could write famously, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” What are the associations you have with a cloud – beauty? Life-giving majesty? So isn’t it interesting that you have that transition of the use of the word “lonely” from beauty, majesty, life-giving, to – the dictionary definition of lonely is pretty good, I looked it up: “dejected for want of companionship.” That’s Merriam Webster. And that transition of meanings happens in the space of about a decade.

TGJ: That makes perfect sense to me. It seems there’s a connection among so many of the creators you illuminate in your book and their attitude to the natural world, to their surroundings, and also the society they keep, so to speak, and their comfort level with both. I’m thinking of Cezanne wanting to paint Mont Sainte- Victoire repeatedly for years, and your pointing out that it was like Cubism waiting in the wings.

FJ: What I realized about Cezanne, who was an untreated diabetic, is kind of amazing, and it’s because I dated a diabetic for a while and he taught me this. Right at the time I was dating him was when they invented and perfected the pump, subcutaneous pumping, where you have insulin delivered at a steady rate. So he would no longer have these enormous fluctuations of mood, highs to lows. And he didn’t want to get the pump, because for him, those highs and lows were like taking LSD or something, it was like a hallucinogenic high for him. I’ve talked to other diabetics and they say the same thing. So when I was looking at Mont Sainte-Victoire and thinking of Cezanne, I realized here was a diabetic with no insulin. Insulin didn’t come along until twenty years later. What he was painting was a result of his untreated diabetes – it was hallucinogenic, fractured, you know, sort of like Monet painting waterlilies that way because he had cataracts, and he was painting what he saw. Cezanne was painting what he saw in these hallucinogenic moments in which, you know, almost undoubtedly he painted to the point of diabetic collapse.

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An Evolving Course

We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then to being human.

And always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring, when we dimly recall being green again.

That is how a young person turns toward a teacher, how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively.

So humankind is being led along an evolving course through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream.

It will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.

— Rumi

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TGJ: Isn’t this where your idea of ‘transcendent boredom’ comes in, in a way – Cezanne painting what he sees, again and again, until it becomes something else, and you thinking about Cezanne within the context of his body, his obsessive painting over and over the same mountain, and your coming to arealization. I love that as an artist you can actually slough off everything else and get to whatever it is, that vein that you need to get to for your own creative work. You have to be present for it, sometimes physically present too, as you were in Provence, v i s i t i n g M o n t S a i n t e - Victoire.

FJ: What this period of time we are living through is revealing to me is that there are real advantages to technology that inperson presentations can’t always duplicate. One of them is music, the moving image is another, and having people who are at r e m o t e l o c a t i o n sparticipate. If you can make it work, there can be a symbiotic relationship between the technological presence and the other e n d , t h e i n - p e r s o n presence. As writers we’re r e a l l y l u c k y a t t h i s moment, because writing lends itself organically to b e i n g r e a d , t a u g h t , experienced online. There are those who say, and I’m one of them, I love the printed book, I can’t read anything of great length or seriousness online. But the technological medium is sympathetic to writing and teaching writing. If you’re teaching dance or teaching sculpture, then online is a lot more problematic.

Our situation now is forcing people to grapple with having an online presence, and the resultant potential dilemma for being in the physical presence of art. It’s likely that people will be slow to coming back to large gatherings, they will be reluctant, at least

“It’s a vision that is encountering the same challenges and difficulties and stumbling blocks that any vision is going to encounter as part of becoming realized. In that way there is no such thing as bad art, good art. Go out and make art. Make more art."

for the next six, eight months, maybe longer, to attend a physical event, a live event. So we will have to figure out some way that these two ways of approaching art can work together.

I was having a discussion over dinner about six or eight months ago and we got to talking about the term homo sapien, you know, we’re homo faber, man (or better, people) the makers. We make things with our hands. We have opposable thumbs. It's what we do. Where does that energy go? It’s got to be put somewhere. I said, We should subsidize everybody making art. My friend said, The Dutch tried that andthey have warehouses filled with bad art. And I said, We have warehouses fi l l e d w i t h d e c a y i n g nuclear weapons, which would you rather have? We as people need to make things with our hands. That’s what we do. I d o n ’ t k n o w o f m a n y people who have been killed by bad art.

And then I went on to say: and who’s to say w h a t ’s b a d a r t ? Fo r generations we knew about cave art and we called it scribblings. Pr i m a t i v e . A n d t h e n Picasso came along and said, “I'm going to imitate that.” And suddenly it was great art.

Maybe no one would come to this conclusion but me. I feel this book is an environmental book, because I believe Pascal when he says, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s” – let’s say people’s – “inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We go out and destroy the world rather than make peace with what has been given to us. If we can do a better job of making peace with what has been given us then we will treat the world and its creatures – by which I mean the plants, the rocks and the trees, the animals – better than we currently do. In the book I quote Jesus

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saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And I think he means literally, right here. That’s what it means. Right here, right now. I have the greatest admiration for people who are down on the frontlines trying to prevent mountaintop removal or whatever might be the case. The reason I write about issues of spirituality and philosophy is because I feel the bigger issue is we have to change how we live on the planet.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Michael Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans. It’s getting a lot of attention right now, and it’s free on YouTube. Basically I agree with everything he has to say, although he ends at a very bleak place. What I would have had him do — and I don’t think this is Pollyannaesque at all — I would have had them go where somebody is actively addressing the challenges that he has so eloquently set forth. Like a Craigardan. Whether it saves us or not, whether it ultimately works or not, you’re doing it and as long as you’re doing it, then it’s not some sort of fantastical vision. It’s a vision that is encountering the same challenges and difficulties and stumbling blocks that any vision is going to encounter as part of becoming realized. In that way there is no such thing as bad art, good art. Go out and make art. Make more art.

FENTON JOHNSON At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life $26.95, 244 pages W.W. Norton & Company ISBN: 978-0393608298 (Also available in Audiobook, Audible, Kindle) BUY NOW ONLINE

Photograph of Artist-in-Residence Emma Silverstein forming a pot by Ben Stechschulte

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