The holidays are coming, so why not talk about eating. And appetite in all its forms.
I don’t remember if it was Christopher Hitchens or some other overindulger who recently said, “Every one of my favorite writers overindulged.” Great artists, he meant, couldn’t hold back from the delights of food and drink, because food and drink can sometimes feel as delicious as words do. Big artists are big artists because they love to take things in. They eat it all up: absurd human scenes, drink at those parties, the food that keeps you up all night, and all of it.
And, of course—on the other hand—some artists were famously abstentious. They wanted to live off the fruit of the mind and reject the second-rate fruit of the Earth. They under-indulged. They refused to eat the word’s bologna, and so become anorexics of sorts, refusing to digest the everyday, holing themselves up, producing the purities that can only be made in solitude.
I do think that the artistic impulse is highly connected to the earthly appetitive impulse. Freud certainly said this. He described this idea when he defined the “anal stage.” Freud said that around age 2, we learn to control our sphincter muscles—or how and when to poop. As we do this, we learn that we are in control of what comes in and out of our bellies. We can either shut people (or food, or information) out; or we can let it in. And, while we become conscious of this independence, we can generally take one of two routes. We either become relatively defensive about the in-and-out function and claim tight control of that passageway, becoming “anally retentive.” Or, we giggle at the chaotic intake and outtake, and so eat and poop just about everything. We become “anally repulsive,” with a relative tendency toward indulgence and/or promiscuity.
Earthly appetite says a lot about how we relate to the world. Some of us just eat stuff up; some of us are more careful about monitoring what comes in. Great artists have certainly assumed both sides of this spectrum. After all, art is the process of eating up the world and spitting it out for others to inspect.
Because that input-output process is so central to art, lots of great writers have had major issues with appetite. I do mean concrete appetite: Lots of artists, dealing with the mind’s consumption, became neurotic about earthly consumption. Lots took to extremes when it came to sex and food.
I’m gonna list some of my favorite appetite maniacs here. Tell me what you think. Do you think that earthly appetite (for sex or food etc.) relates to the creative arts, and if so, how? (E.g. How many of you need to drink coffee or nibble on crackers when you read?)
The Abstainers
Jesus Christ: He didn’t love food and rejected almost all of the purely earthly pleasures. “When you fast...Your Father shall reward you openly” (Matthew 6:17-18). Abstain, and so purify. Reject the fat of the Earth.
John Ruskin: He salivated at the sight of art, becoming the greatest art critic of his time, and perhaps of all time. But as much as he loved the sensuous trace of a paintbrush, he gagged at sex. Married at 29, he was struck with fear when his wife undressed. This was the first naked female body he’d seen. He promised his wife they’d have sex in six year’s time. But they never did. His wife, Effie, annulled the marriage on account of Ruskin’s "incurable impotency." She went on to marry the painter John Everett Millais and lived pretty happily.
Thomas Carlyle: A genius Scottish satirist. He lived a sexless life with his wife, Jane Welsh. It was a sad marriage. They fought incessantly, perhaps playing out erotic energy through anger. Alfred Lord Tennyson satirically defended the marriage between these two: “By any other arrangement, four people would have been unhappy instead of two."
Franz Kafka: He was a vegetarian who believed in the massive consumption of unpasteurized milk. He thought sex was disgusting; lived with his parents until his early 30’s; and kept such a thin frame that he was often confused for a 15-year-old when he was in his late 20’s. Definitely a loner.
Friedrich Nietzsche: He also tried vegetarianism (nothing against vegetarians), but he also thought sex was disgusting and holed himself up away from almost all human contact. (“And finally, woman! One-half of mankind is weak, chronically sick, changeable…. Woman requires…a religion of the weak which glorifies weakness.” )
Other likely virgins: Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Gerard Manley Hopkins. George Bernard Shaw was not a virgin but had no sex with his wife over 45 years of marriage.
There are Tons of Other Anal Artistic Geniueses, but Now Onto the Heavy Consumers:
Dickens: I’m not sure if he’s a Christopher Hitchens, but he did grow a belly, had ten kids, and had multiple affairs. He finally left his wife for a younger actress. This male paradigm of the “Victorian” life did love sex, a whole lot.
Charlie Chaplin: He had a hankering for younger women. At age 35, he married a 16-year-old. Soon thereafter he began an affair with a 19-year-old. At 54, he married an 18-year-old. That’s a specific sort of appetite, no?
And think of all the writers with massive desires for alcohol consumption: Sartre, Hemingway, Faulkner, et al. And there’s the fabulous Lord Byron (lots and lots of sex) and the Marquis de Sade, and Picasso, and Orson Welles, and Tallulah Bankhead, the actress, who reportedly had 5000 lovers.
I do think artistic minds go haywire in terms of appetite. What do you think? How does a desire for earthly intake parallel the desire for intellectual meat? Do you, yourself, find yourself wanting to eat or drink a lot when you read?
Message Edited by IlanaSimons on 02-27-2009 07:42 PM
