that somehow equates with death. When the artist discovers creation can, indeed, allay that fear, it produces the situation and form of desire that manifests itself as Begeisterung. When, from time to time throughout the artist’s life, Begeisterung fails, often terror lies beneath.
Having mentioned the basic importance of Begeisterung, I’ll go on to outline another use.
Let me describe two students in a midwestern graduate creative writing workshop I taught once. One was a young man of twenty-six from a solidly middle-class background, who had entered the university writing program with extremely good marks and high scores on his GREs (Graduate Record Exams). From the general discussion of the student stories we analyzed in the workshop, clearly he was an intelligent and sensitive critic. Certainly he was among the smartest and the most articulate of the students in the group. He was not particularly interested in publishing, however, and in a discussion during which I asked students what they wanted to do with their writing and where they saw themselves going, he explained that he wanted to improve his writing and eventually publish a collection of stories in a university series that was committed to doing graduate student and junior faculty work. He had no particular series in mind but was sure one such existed, which would accept his work, preferably without reading it, purely because some other writer—perhaps a workshop teacher—had judged him personally “ready for publication.” When I told him I knew of no such series, nor had I any personal criteria for “publishability” other than finding a given story a rewarding and pleasurable read, he was not at all bothered. If such a series did not exist now, he was sure that in four or five years it would—because that was the right and proper way the world should work. Through continuing in workshops, he would eventually get his chance. If he didn’t, finally it didn’t matter. He felt no desire to have his work appear from a large commercial press, however, or from a small press only interested in supporting work it judged of the highest quality. As soon as any sort of competitive situation arose, he felt there must go along with it some bias based on nonesthetic aspects—actually an interesting theory, I thought. Though he sincerely wanted to improve his work for its own sake, he felt, when and if his work was published, it should be published because there was a place that published work such as his and it would simply be, so to speak, his turn. Competition, he believed and believed deeply, was not what art was about. He articulated this position well. The other students in the class were all impressed with his commitment to it—as, in fact, was I.
Myself, I had seen no evidence of what I could recognize as talent in his writing, however, and his stories struck me as a series of banal romances in which the hero either discovered his girlfriend was cheating on him and left her sadly, or another girl began an affair with a hero recently cheated on and stuck to him despite his gloom. They were well written, in precisely the sense I describe above, but they were without color or life—and always in the present tense. That made them, he explained, sound more literary. And that’s the effect he wanted.
If I had seen what I could recognize as talent, I might have been even more interested in his aesthetic position. But personally I could not distinguish his stories from many, many others I had read in many other workshops. Nor did the fact that they seemed so similar to so many others bother him at all, since—as he claimed—competition was not the point.
Once he used the term “classical” about what he wanted to achieve in his own stories. “But,” I said, “your model doesn’t seem to be the great classical stories of the past, but rather the averaged banality of the present.”
“Well,” he said, “perhaps that is today’s classical.”
I couldn’t take the argument much beyond that point. As a teacher, for me to say too much more would have been unnecessarily insulting—and I felt I had already come close to crossing a line I didn’t feel was good for purely pedagogical reasons. I decided to let him have the last word.
In the same class was a young woman of twenty-nine, from a working-class background. She was no slouch either as a practical critic, but she had nowhere near the self-confidence of the first student. Her GREs were eccentric: high in math, low in English. Her written grammar was occasionally faulty. Often she seemed at sea when critical discussions moved into the abstract. Several times, in several descriptions in her stories, however, she had struck me as talented—that is, she had made me see things and understand things that I had not seen or understood before. Interesting incidents were juxtaposed in interesting ways in her stories. Her characters often showed unusual and idiosyncratic combinations of traits. Words were put together in interesting ways in her sentences. But it was also clear that her stories were pretty much an attempt to write the same sort as most of the other students in the class, which tended to be modeled on those of the first young man—in her case with the sexes more or less reversed. When I asked her what she wanted to do with her writing, she said she’d like to go on and “be a writer” and “publish books,” but she offered it with all the hesitation of someone confessing to a history of prostitution.
At one point, after we had just read the story for class, I mentioned that Joyce had written “The Dead” in 1907, when he was twenty-five, though it was not published till 1914. I told them I would like to see their stories aspire to a similar level of structural richness and a similar richness of description of the various interiors, exteriors, and characters.
Immediately the young man objected: “You can’t tell us that! That just paralyzes us and makes us incapable of writing anything.”
But three weeks later, the young woman handed in a story she had gone home and begun that same night. It was far more ambitious than anything she’d done previously: incidents in the story had thematic and structural resonances with one another, and the physical description of the places and characters was twenty-five to thirty-five percent richer than anything she’d previously handed in. When I mentioned this to her after the workshop, she said, “I guess I went back to my math—that’s what my degree is in. I made a little geometric picture of how I wanted the parts of the story to relate to each other. Has anybody ever done that before?” I said I often did it myself, but that it seemed too idiosyncratic to talk about in a general workshop. (Her comment is one of the things, however, that convinced me to write about it in the essay “Of Doubts and Dreams.”) As well, it was the first piece I’d seen from her that was not basically a disappointed romance about a graduate student with no mention of how she supported herself. (The woman was happily married to a very successful and supportive engineer.) Instead, she had taken another hint from Joyce and mined her own childhood material for her tale, in her case the Pittsburgh foundry where her Hungarian father had worked and the men and women who’d worked with him (I’d never known women worked at foundries before), whom she used to know when she was a child. She’d based her main character on a young woman, a few years older than herself, who’d had a job there, something that seemed to my student exciting and romantic. When she’d been twelve she’d desperately envied this young working woman of seventeen. A few years later, however, when she herself had reached twenty, she now realized this wonderfully alive young woman was actually trapped in a dead-end job by family and social forces, which led nowhere. Speaking to me privately after class, she said, “When you pointed out how old Joyce was when he’d done it, I realized there was no reason I couldn’t do it, too.” Though the fact was, her story shared nothing with Joyce’s save the jump in descriptive and structural richness.
I have said most of the news about writing is bad. But much of the news—such as the age writers were when they wrote this or that work—is neutral. However neurotic its basis, Begeisterung or its lack is what turns these neutral facts into good news (Hey, I can do that!) or bad news (Nobody can do that!). Perhaps you can see from these last examples why the usual translation of Begeisterung—“inspiration,” without the added energy of enthusiasm—doesn’t quite cover the topic.
The idea that everyone can have a turn at publication is unrealistic—nor, outside a carefully delineated student context, do I think it’s desirable. When our current-day democratizing
