Norman Green

GOING NAKED

We all have our secrets.

We have all done stupid things, here and there, now and then, but most of us do so from the comfort of obscurity and even if we have been so unfortunate as to make the local newspaper, the public’s eye usually loses interest quickly and moves on. We are generally free to present to public view only those aspects of ourselves that we want people to see. We fabricate, in other words, a public persona, and we keep our inner selves quiet and safely out of view.

Artists are not so fortunate.

Take a look at Van Gogh’s ‘Avenue of Poplars.’ Even after all his long years in the grave, this one work tells you two things about the man he was: one, that he was ferociously talented, and two, that he was cut off from his fellows, and desperately lonely. Or Michelangelo: he was a brilliant sculptor and painter, and he adored the naked male form. Come on, how many naked women did he carve?

Not judging, just saying.

Writers are no different.

Take Shakespeare, the greatest of us all. He hid himself more successfully than most but still, you can see in his works his taste for strong women, his admiration of those around him whose mental processes were more reflective and less intuitive, not to mention his distaste for the leaders of his day, the upper classes that he portrayed in all their venality and greed. I find it ironic that the authorship of his work is questioned so persistently, based on nothing much more than the upper class prejudice against the ‘common’ man. No, of course it couldn’t have been him, he didn’t even have a moat! It had to have been a Lord, or an Earl at the very least.

Please.

The art reveals the man.

Take poor old Emily Dickinson, who did not lack the courage to confront her own spirituality and her own mortality but who found it impossible to step out into our wide world.  And Hemingway. Dickens, Mailer and his pal Gore, John D. MacDonald. Yeah, sure, it’s all fiction, but…

I seeee you…

So you’re a writer! And you know that you do your best work when you let your hair down, when you set your imagined characters free to rage across the page, to love and hate, to be fallibly human, to pursue their desires, to seek revenge. Don’t be afraid, nothing kills good work more swiftly or reliably than fear, don’t worry that you’re showing us, your readers, more of yourself than you might ultimately find comfortable. You can always clean that up, right? In your next draft?

Good luck with that.

And me?

Hey, you’ll have to read the book.

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