Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor

Conversations with literary and visual artists

Lois Oppenheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415713849
• eBook ISBN: 9781317589532
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor offers an intriguing window onto the creative thinking of several well-known and highly creative individuals. Internationally renowned writers, painters, choreographers, and others converse with the author about their work and how it has been informed by their life experience. Creative process frames the discussions, but the topics explored are wide-ranging and the interrelation of the personal and professional development of these artists is what comes to the fore. The conversations are unique in providing insight not only into the art at hand and into the perspective of each artist on his or her own work, but into the mind from which the work springs.

The interviews are lively in a way critical writing by its very nature is not, rendering the ideas all that much more accessible. The transcription of the live interview reveals the kind of reflection censored elsewhere, the interplay of personal experience and creative process that are far more self-consciously shaped in a text written for print. Neither private conversation nor public lecture, neither crafted response (as to the media) nor freely associative discourse (as in the analytic consulting room), these interviews have elements of all. The volume guides the reader toward a deeper psychologically oriented understanding of literary and visual art, and it engages the reader in the honest and often-provocative revelations of a number of fascinating artists who pay testimony to their work in a way no one else can.

This is a unique collection of particular interest for psychoanalysts, scholars, and anyone looking for a deeper understanding of the creative process.

1 EDWARD ALBEE

DOI: 10.4324/9781315743578-2

EDWARD ALBEE's many plays include The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The American Dream, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tiny Alice, A Delicate Balance, Seascape, The Lady From Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Three Tall Women, The Play About the Baby, The Goat Or, Who Is Sylvia?, Occupant, At Home at the Zoo, and Me, Myself & I. He has received an extraordinary number of awards for his work, among which are three Pulitzer Prizes (for A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women). Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, though selected by the Pulitzer advisory board, was ultimately turned down because of its profanity and sexual themes. Had he been awarded that prize, Edward Albee would have been the only playwright other than Eugene O’Neill to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Additionally, Edward Albee was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980; the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts, both in 1996; and, in 2005, a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild Council and President of The Edward F. Albee Foundation.

This interview took place November 12th, 2010.

LO: Let's begin by talking about when you first began to write. I don't mean when you had your first play produced, but when you really began to be interested in writing. I believe you were twelve when you wrote a three-act sex farce called Aliqueen. Do you remember much about it?

EA: I was fourteen, but I began writing much before then. I began writing poetry when I was about nine and I wrote poetry for twenty years.

LO: Was it published?

EA: It was published in the various literary magazines of the schools I was in briefly before I got thrown out. I also had a couple of poems published in my middle teens in little poetry magazines in West Texas. Why in West Texas? I don't know. The interesting thing there is that, on both occasions, the issue in which they published a poem of mine was the last issue they ever published. I don't know if that has more to say about my competence as a poet or their competence as a magazine!

LO: Did you see yourself as a good poet?

EA: I was not bad; I knew how to imitate very, very good poets.

LO: Did you ever consider poetry as a career?

EA: No, because I had the terrible habit of being onto myself: I never was going to be good enough to consider myself a poet. I always thought of myself as someone who wrote poetry and that wasn't enough. And before I started writing plays I wrote two novels in my teens that are the two worst novels that an American teenager could possibly write.

LO: Were they ever published?

EA: Good God, no! I wrote them long hand and never typed them. I tried the short story and that wasn't any good either.

LO: How did you happen to start writing plays?

EA: I wrote plays because I failed at everything else. The Zoo Story was the first, aside from the sex farce.

LO: Your mother destroyed the farce…

EA: She was my first critic, my adoptive mother. I don't know what my biological mother would have done had she read it. I like to think that she and I were related in some kind of cosmic way and perhaps she would have appreciated it.

LO: You don't know anything about your biological mother, do you?

EA: Back in the day when I was adopted, which is now eighty-three years ago, there were laws that the natural parents weren't allowed ever to know anything about who adopted the child or what happened to them. And the adopting parents weren't allowed to know anything about who the natural parents were. And the child wasn't allowed to know who anybody was!

LO: There came a time when you could have begun to research that and you chose not to. Why?

EA: I think I probably would have found some things, but at that point I had figured out who I was and I didn't really need to know anything about anybody else. Also, it would have gotten in the way of my objectivity, which is essential for a writer.

LO: When you started writing one-act plays, there were four that received tremendous commercial success before Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

EA: The Zoo Story was very successful in all of Europe and in America, but only in small theaters where it belonged.

LO: I am interested in the fact that you won't allow it to be produced now that there is a prequel.

EA: I don't accept the term “prequel.” It's an ugly concept. There is now At Home at the Zoo, the first act of which is called “Home life,” which I wrote forty-two years after I wrote the second act, still called “The Zoo Story.”

LO: So it is true that you will not allow any professional production of The Zoo Story as I knew it when I first saw it?

EA: I discovered, after I put the two together and saw the first couple of productions of the two-act version together, that it is so much better a play that I don't want any more commercial productions of the imperfect The Zoo Story. If students want to do The Zoo Story by itself in school, I don't mind.

LO: What about the Edward Albee of the 1960s when Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Brecht, and Pirandello were writing? How did you see yourself in relation to the Theater of the Absurd?

EA: Define it! The whole concept of the Theater of the Absurd was invented by Martin Esslin, a very, very bright critic who realized that what he was writing about was existentialism and post-existentialism and that any play written after existentialism had to be, by definition, post-existentialist. That had to do with certain things about man's position in the universe, which made no sense, and you had to make your own sense out of that which made no sense. But that was too tricky or too intelligent a concept for the majority of people who were writing about theater, so they changed what the meaning of Theater of the Absurd was to mean a play that was not naturalistic, a play that was, to a certain extent, stylized. I never knew, when they were saying my plays were part of the Theater of the Absurd, if it meant that my plays weren't naturalistic or if it meant that I was post-existentialist. It was very hard to figure out because, for the most part, these guys didn't know.

LO: Were you aware at that time of the kind of influence Beckett would have on your writing?

EA: Yes, I was enormously aware of that. When someone as extraordinary as Samuel Beckett, extraordinary both as a novelist and a playwright, comes along, if you are not influenced by it, if you are not aware of it, then you are asleep somewhere. He was the most important playwright of the second half of the twentieth century; there's no question.

LO: You have said that the French novelist André Gide was a powerful influence— how so? Did you identify with his struggle for emotional freedom and stability, his prolonged adolescence, his homosexuality? You too were a sort of “bad boy”— thrown out of a couple of prep schools and then from college, disowned by your family… Did you identify with the “bad boy” persona… ?

EA: I was reading a lot of French writing when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Gide was one of the people I was reading. Sartre, Camus—they were all being published in the United States.

LO: It was very apparent that you were someone who was exceedingly intelligent and yet you were thrown out of these schools. What was that all about?

EA: I decided to focus very early in my education on the things I knew would be useful to me, so I would get very good grades in those courses that would be useful to my future—or my present—and get failing grades in all the areas I didn't think I needed to pay much attention to, so they kept throwing me out of school. Their notion of how I should be educated and mine were very different. I got thrown out of my adoptive family's house after I got thrown out of college.

LO: They threw you out or you decided to leave?

EA: It was a combination of the two: I knew I wanted to leave so I let them throw me out.

LO: You had previously tried to leave when you were eleven.

EA: Yes, I had wanted to go to England and I went to the Cunard Line. They were rather puzzled that I was eleven and discouraged me because I didn't have a passport. They told my adoptive parents who then came to pick me up and didn't let me out of the house for a couple of months after that.

LO: Do you think your wanting “out” of that family at such a young age might have been as intense as it was in part because it was a way of your leaving them before they could leave you, as your biological parents had previously done? Or do you think that perhaps you transferred onto your adoptive parents some of the anger you felt toward your biological parents for abandoning or rejecting you?

EA: I doubt that.

LO: Your adoptive parents had a particular notion of who and how they wanted you to be. What was that?

EA: Whatever would lead me to being a corporate thug!

LO: Was there ever a time when you thought you might fall into the identity they were trying to sell?

EA: Fortunately, we started getting along so badly so early that there was no possible chance of that. I don't think they knew how to be parents and I didn't know how to be a dutiful son.

LO: Yet you did play the dutiful son at the end of your adoptive mother's life, did you not? You re-connected with her after about twenty years. What was the relationship like at that point? Were you ever able to talk openly with her or was that a door necessarily closed forever?

EA: Well, she became a widow, she became ill, she was getting old and her friends were dying. There she was, all by herself up in White Plains (she was no longer in Larchmont at that point), so I sighed heavily and thought “come on, this will be nice for her.” And I started having lunch with her in New York.

LO: Was there any real communication then of the sort you hadn't had previously?

EA: There was no way to open up for discussion what had never been discussed. There were so many things that we did not talk about, that she had no interest in discussing.

LO: Your parents were anti-Semitic, racist…

EA: … and Republican! As if the first two weren't bad enough!

LO: I suppose they had a very difficult time accepting your homosexuality.

EA: I don't know if they had a difficult time accepting my homosexuality. The subject was not permitted to be discussed.

LO: That's a pretty clear indication …

EA: Well, there were a lot of things they didn't talk about. They didn't talk about Sartre and Camus either!

LO: You say you knew who you were and you didn't need to know about anybody else. Yet, if there is a central preoccupation that runs throughout your work it's the question of identity. Did you wonder a lot while growing up about your biological parents and whether you might have siblings?

EA: Very little. I thought about being me.

LO: Me, Myself & I is about a mother who can't tell her twins apart.

EA: Because they are identical and she named them the same.

LO: OTTO and otto.

EA: One Otto forwards and the other Otto backwards.

LO: Do any of your plays have characters with last names? I can't think of any.

EA: Mrs. Barker in The American Dream. This may be the only one....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Edward Albee
• 2 Mark Morris
• 3 Kiki Smith
• 4 Joyce Carol Oates
• 5 Adam Gopnik
• 6 Jacques d’Amboise
• 7 Edmund White
• 8 Dennis Wedlick
• 9 Gary Shteyngart
• 10 Oliver Sacks
• 11 Andrew Solomon
• Index