My brother gave me, for Christmas, a book on my to-read list. There's no way he could've known that it was there. I'd seen, some months before that there was a new biography of the great Peter Matthiessen and I'd noted it in my private list. Matthiessen is an interesting case: his book The Snow Leopard is good, a classic, but the devil is in its details, or as the Straussians might say, the meaning is in what the book doesn't say. His wife has died, says the book, but her terminal diagnosis came only just before they were to break up the marriage, the book does not say, for the cause of his unfaithfulness. He misses his son, whom he has left in boarding school, just before Thanksgiving, as he journeys to Tibet. The book doesn't include his own upper class abandonment as a child, which the biographer nudges us to think of as life-defining. There's a curse of the parents coming down upon the grandchildren here. Back to the book, though, and its writing of his trek is some of the best natural spiritual writing of our time. For example:
The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.
Here's a genius whose opportunity for masterpiece came at the direct cost of his family. How does one square that circle? That's why the biography, True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen was on my list.
Reading it, you slowly realize that the absolute freedom Matthiessen gave himself resulted in his multiple masterpieces. Those moments when he abandoned his family were not rare, but lifelong, often for months on end. He perpetually gave in to his adulterous and abandoning impulses and thereby gave himself the experiences that became his books. Harvard Business School people might call it creative destruction: creative in that books and essays and awards abound, destruction in the sense that he died leaving behind embittered children, wounded partners and angry longtime lovers. That several people, unknown to each other, at his death bridged these latter categories speaks volumes. The estrangement from his children and partners preserved those moments of freedom or absolute focus that fulminated his creativity. In Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, she gives a slightly different picture of the same maniacal focus: it's better to be transient, to have no commitments, lifelong or otherwise, to best do the creative work. The writer seldom has much left for the commitments that comprise civilization.
One wonders — do only the worst people make the best things? Does the badness of the person inversely and proportionally impact the greatness of the work?
The misanthropes among us use the inverse of this logic to justify bad behavior: I'm aiming for greatness and so, like Steve Jobs, I will park in the handicapped spot and be rude as hell to anyone in my way. Or they'll adopt some convoluted war analogy where they're on the good side and they need to defeat anyone who stands in their way. These self-conceptions are premade justifications for violating one's integrity. The rudeness or the defeat of antagonists can becomes the only thing that animates these poor souls.
On the other hand, the worst moral pedants on social media spout nonsense such as 'how you do anything is how you do everything,' as if putting your recycling in the trash container inevitably sets your course for a lifetime of tax evasions, divorces, and hit and runs. Clearly the failed marriages of so many artists is direct evidence to the contrary: you can be great in one area of life and poor in another.
My definition of integrity is functional: what things you choose to do and how you do them is who you are, regardless of what you think and say about yourself. (The Enron people had "respect | excellence| integrity | communication" on their office stationary.) Continuing with integrity, I think it's directional, too. The more aligned who you are is with what is good, the more integrity you have. There's an aspect of integration here, where the activities and the person should align across all of life. It speaks to integrity when the way one interacts with a spouse, children, neighbors, and colleagues is the same respectful and honoring and humorous style. The reason to include both what you do and how you do it is that a person who does good work but is a completely unrepentant jerk can't be said to be good. The ends do not justify the means, nor the results the inputs.
I use this definition to great effect in sneering at unlikeable people, solipsistic bosses, and the strivers I used to know. More positively, it's helpful to remember that misbehaving en route to a good objective isn't really justified: no one you hurt cares that your heart was in the right place. Put another way, I think that if you're hurting people, then your heart isn't in the right place. With these esoteric and high standards, how I could so defensive of Peter Matthiessen at book club? I thought the book so good that I defended his decision to leave his son at boarding school. When we see great work—art especially—we tend to forgive a lot of misbehavior by the people who produce it. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Reading
A Wild Life
Lance Richardson's biography of Peter Matthiessen captures the affairs, betrayals, and brilliance of the prolific writer whose award-winning books argued for a defense of the environment and of Indigenous people's rights.
The Tragedy of Mrs. Dr. Seuss
Ted Geisel was a great artist and a lousy husband
Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?
New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.