天才盛名背后，那些巍巍如山的草稿Behind the Genius's Fame, Mountains of Drafts

Author: Zhang Jiawei, new book: Representative Works and Works Represented

From the autumn of 2012 to January 2013, the Louvre had an exhibition called Late Raphael. Every work he could carry over (as you know, Raphael made some big pieces, The School of Athens among them, that could not be taken down and hauled to Paris) was sent from Italy for the show. As I see it, two things about this exhibition are heartening. First, with the works gathered so completely, comparison comes easy. Even through a layman’s eyes you can see that what Raphael painted in 1508, at twenty-five, is simply not as round and lively as what he painted in 1516, at thirty-three. Which is to say: even a figure this great improved little by little, rather than emerging from the womb with a brush already in his raised hand, painting away right there in the delivery room. 

Second, the exhibition shook out some of his sketches. And you discover that those divine works of Raphael’s, praised in unison by art historians as round, perfect, weightless and effortless, plucked off as if on a whim, sit atop sketches that are dense beyond measure. In truth, Raphael’s sketches look just like those of an art-school student today: overlaid strokes, outlines, plenty of tentative, uncertain gropings toward a final form, unruly here, scattered there. In short, very handsome sketches, but sketches in the end. As everyone knows, Raphael’s Madonna of the Meadow exists in three finished versions, while the poses he daubed and scrubbed out in his sketchbooks far outnumber that figure. Even someone as great as he had to cross things out countless times and try countless poses before a single design could be settled. 

Children coloring with crayons and watercolor markers have their fixed habits too. Some favor long straight strokes, some fine choppy short ones. Great figures have something similar when they paint; it is called the brushstroke. Stare closely at a drawing, say, and Van Gogh’s strokes are curls and coils, while Degas’s are fine, dense parallel lines. Delacroix, the head lion of nineteenth-century French Romanticism, was the first to shout in public, “I want my brushstrokes left where people can see them.” So when you look at his paintings, wild and unbound, rough-haired and coarsely dressed as they are, you can more or less trace how the painting came to be; the classical painters before him mostly tidied their strokes away clean, so that at first glance the picture seems born out of thin air, serene, fine-grained, utterly effortless, as if no draft had ever been needed. 

It is like going to someone’s home for dinner: the hostess, graceful and poised in every gesture, brings out a plate of maoxuewang, red, fragrant, rich and fiery, and when you peek into the kitchen it is spotless; you half suspect fairy handiwork, a snail maiden at the stove. Going by the paintings alone, Raphael is exactly that kind of being: you marvel at him as something more than human. But look at his sketches, and it is like a kitchen nobody ever cleaned. And it dawns on you: 
Oh, granted he is still a genius beyond ordinary imagining, but the old master was human after all, and like any mortal, he had to make so very many drafts! 

Legends the world over love to describe geniuses who beggar belief. Wang Bo, say, wrote his “Preface to the Pavilion of Prince Teng” as a live performance, scaring Governor Yan, who had been waiting to watch him disgrace himself, half out of his wits. Wagner, say, formally studied composition for only six months. Hugo, say, before he turned thirty, shut himself at home for half a year and wrote Notre-Dame de Paris. All geniuses, it follows, must enjoy the sheltering gift of inspiration from on high. The ancient Greek poets felt that so long as their hearts were sincere, the gods of Olympus would do them the special favor of suddenly dispatching “winged words” to “deliver ideas into men’s hearts”; it sounds rather like the “god of exams” that middle-school students worship together whenever finals come around: you don’t know the answers, but they get crammed into you anyway, and the pen flows on, inexhaustible. In Chinese legend, the great man of letters Jiang Yan once brimmed with a talent that spilled over whichever way and could not be stopped, until he had a dream in which someone took a brush away from him, and from then on “Jiang’s talent was spent.” In The Scholars, when Butcher Hu curses Fan Jin, he too says that those provincial graduates are all stars of literature come down from heaven. 

Running through all this is a similar set of values: the flow of writing, the spark of inspiration, all of it heaven-sent. Strauss said that the instant inspiration arrives, a musical idea of two to four bars suddenly surfaces, whereupon he would happily take it as a theme and spin any number of pieces out of it… In short, genius is inborn, and the inspiration of genius, like love at first sight granted from above, like “God said, let there be light, and there was light,” illuminates the world. Nietzsche held that the inspiration of genius is like sunlight, inexhaustible, pouring forth without end. The Strausses of the world believed that what a genius like Mozart created in a single lifetime would wear out even the copyist hired to transcribe it; one can only call it talent without limit. 

But the non-geniuses, when no inspiration comes, how are they to live? 

Mr. Copland, musician and critic, summed it up this way: 

Inspired or not, composers “work” every day, and then something gets made; the word he used was “work,” not “create.” As everyone knows, Mendelssohn was perhaps the composer who leaned hardest on native inspiration, Mozart and Schubert aside. But as for his working attitude, consider this story: when Mendelssohn first met Berlioz, the two found no common ground, and in low spirits he wrote a letter complaining of feeling unwell: 

“Two whole days without being able to work.” 

Even Bach, great as he was, was no youthful prodigy; an American columnist once made the vicious joke that if Haydn and Bach had died at the ages Mendelssohn (dead at 38) and Mozart (dead at 35) reached, the pair of them would have sunk into oblivion. But time gave Bach his strength. In his last years, summing up his own oceanic body of great work, all he said was: 

“I worked hard.” 

To say that those great, luminous works were “worked” into being, rather than conjured at a genius’s whim, does rather spoil the scenery. For the world is fond of imagining that great creators all lead vagabond, devil-may-care lives, gleefully playing Dionysus, seizing the beautiful lines, melodies, or images that flit gossiping through their heads, then writing them down, setting them to staves, painting them, and spending the rest of their time trading in scandal, drinking, dosing themselves, and carrying on tangled affairs. 

Very romantic; the reality is nothing like it. In the 1920s, Hemingway was writing for all he was worth in Paris. Like a craftsman, he distilled a set of laws for himself. For instance: a regular life and comfortable finances are good for writing. Or: stop for the day while the writing flows at its best, and it will come easier tomorrow. He put no faith in genius, no faith in inspiration falling from the sky; he had principles, he had routines, and then he worked diligently. Stendhal, for his part, said that before writing he would first stare hard at a page of the legal code to find his cadence; Balzac, when he had money, spent it on wine and revelry, but when it was time to write he turned regular as a robot: up at one in the morning, donning a white robe as if for a ritual, writing, then revising… four hours of sleep a day. Hearing these stories, you would think they were artisans driving up production. But the great things were produced exactly this way. 

Writers’ early works, like painters’ sketches, are what give the game away most easily. Take One Hundred Years of Solitude: at first glance you are easily cowed by its riot of images and take Márquez for something superhuman. But read your way through his early fiction, Leaf Storm, say, or The Sea of Lost Time, or No One Writes to the Colonel, one piece after another, and you find the small town, the carnival, the outsiders, the banana company… well, well. So this fellow, just like Faulkner, whom he honored as one of his masters, also played the old trick of “saving up short stories to build a novel”! In fact, before One Hundred Years of Solitude was written it had been brewing a full fifteen years. Márquez piled up countless short stories and little tales, as if planting a great forest inside his own head; until, on some trip, he abruptly found the legendary first sentence, “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would recall that distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice…” The spark was there, the forest caught fire, and One Hundred Years of Solitude began. Everything before it, all those many-colored short stories, was his one long draft. 

It is like a friend I once had, a self-appointed running dog at Wang Xiaobo’s gate; reading Wang Xiaobo’s Wanshou Temple and Hongfu Flees by Night, he would heave a hopeless sigh, struck stupid; but later, after a look at “The Song Immortal” and “Thirty and Standing,” he felt mildly encouraged. Not, of course, that he had gained any confidence of “beating Wang Xiaobo outright,” but he had, more or less, made out a rising trajectory from weak to strong. 

Everyone loves genius, for the word is lovely and unencumbered, a grace bestowed by the gods; but most of the time, behind every legend of overnight ascension lie long silent years of sitting before the wall, meditating through every tribulation. Just so, when geniuses finally look back over their legendary lives, they do not always mention what stands behind the immortal works: those sheets of draft paper they climbed like stairs, strewn in disarray, heaped into mountains, filling in seas. 

When Ouyang Xiu was asked how one writes, he answered: “There is no other art to it. Only read diligently and write much, and the craft comes of itself. The trouble with people is that they write too little and are too lazy to read, and expect each piece, the moment it is done, to surpass everyone else’s; few who go about it this way ever arrive. As for the flaws, no need to wait for others to point them out; write enough and you will see them yourself.” Which is, more or less, the same idea.