Every week in our art class we sit around a table for a chat before we start working. Usually we talk about what we’re going to be working with that week and today we worked on abstraction. But before we began one of our group said she sometimes wondered why she was doing art. She has a very good job and doesn’t sell her art, at least not at the moment. So, is it worth the time and effort? We all agreed that we have a good time on Saturday mornings but is that all that’s happening and is it enough?

In my last post I was (curiously) asking much the same question. If we are not making a splash is it worth swimming? We went around the table and everyone spoke about what doing art is about for them. One of our artists said that she does art for mental health. It’s a lot like meditation. It takes us to the place of peace so that’s a good thing right there.

This same person said that the creativity we consciously nurture in making art becomes much more present in other aspects of her life. When I think about creativity I think about abandoning preconceptions, of diving into the unknown, of learning to trust, of failing and succeeding, of playing and having the courage to go where we haven’t gone before. It does alter our lives when we internalize these qualities.

All very cool. Still, I think of a memoir I read, Final Edition, by the British writer E. F. Benson who wrote the wonderful Mapp and Lucia stories. In the book he told of a friend who had decamped to the island of Capri and for twenty-five years labored on the definitive poetic translation of a selection of ancient Greek epigrams. “He read me some of them, his voice, charged with emotion, trumpeting out the emotion of the triumphant lover or falling to a whisper as it mourned for the untimely death of a beloved youth.” And then, “my heart sank at his elation.” The result was wooden. “Happily the gods in their mercy had withheld from him the perception of his own incompetence.” The man died without publishing his long labors. They were left to E. F. Benson in the will in the hope that Benson, an established writer, might take on the task of getting it published and promoted. But he could not.

I really love that story. I love the man’s devotion. He got to where he got to and enjoyed some of the fruits of a romantic life on Capri. A consolation.

In the same book, E. F. Benson wrestled with the question himself. His first novel, Dodo, a book no one ever reads now, launched his career and made him famous and rich. Curious no one reads it now, isn’t it? Then he wrote several more books and they were soundly trounced in the press. He thought his career might be over and went into a period of deep questioning. It was writing he loved and he couldn’t turn away from it. He decided to carry on and to ignore the public, to write only what he cared about. From that came Mapp and Lucia. Those stories are not widely read now but they were for a good while, are brilliant fun and may come back again, who knows.

Who knows the permutations between these two realities? But, to me, it all looks rather fabulous, one story really no better than the other. Each person was on his own journey and neither gave up. So moving, really. Writing took one man to Capri, the other to fame and fortune. You can’t lose.