Chapter 18

Pitfalls

“Good Taste will put you out of business,” [Vonnegut] declared.… “For some reason almost all good writers are drop-outs,” he said. “English departments have never produced a (good) writer.” He suggested that this is because people learn what is considered “good taste” at a stage “when they themselves aren’t capable of doing very good work. So what they learn makes them hate what they write. And they stop before they ever get started.”234

Any artist of any kind has to be able to stomach falling short of the mark, continually, in all kinds of ways. But perhaps especially when starting out. As the poet William Stafford often said to students: You’ve got to lower your standards! You can’t compare yourself with the most renowned writers in the history of literature, for example.

Another thing that will put you out of business: the “third player.” Vonnegut invented this phrase in a preface composed for the Franklin Library edition of Bluebeard, reprinted in Fates Worse than Death:

Children… get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything… such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks… or banging on a drum and so on. Only two people are involved: the child and the Universe.…

… Professional picture painters, who are what a lot of this made-up story is about, are people who continue to play children’s games with goo, and dirt, with chalks and powdered minerals mixed with oil and dead embers and so on, dabbing, smearing, scrawling, scraping, and so on, for all their natural lives. When they were children, though, there was just they and the Universe, with only the Universe dealing in rewards and punishments, as a dominant playmate will. When picture painters become adults, and particularly if other people depend on them for food and shelter and clothing and all that, not forgetting heat in the wintertime, they are likely to allow a third player, with dismaying powers to hold up to ridicule or reward grotesquely or generally behave like a lunatic, to join the game. It is that part of society which does not paint well, usually, but which knows what it likes with a vengeance. That third player is sometimes personified by an actual dictator, such as Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini, or simply by a critic or curator or collector or dealer or creditor, or in-laws.

In any case, since the game goes well only when played by two, the painter and the Great Big Everything, three’s a crowd.235

Children, too, can get stunted by the “third player.” In second grade, for example, my teacher told me that my blue sky across the top of the page was not how the sky appeared. It was everywhere, not just at the top. She took me outside to prove it. But I didn’t see blue all around. It looked bluer up higher. I have a vivid memory of her staring down at me. She was a lot bigger than me, an authority. Her perception trumped mine.

I avoided drawing or painting from then on until I was in my late thirties at an art colony, and suddenly became impatient with words as tools to describe a magnificent purple cabbage in the garden. I snatched it up, began drawing it. An artist walked by. “I’m drawing!!” I exclaimed. “What should I do?”

She drew in breath. “Just follow your own eye. Everything else you can learn later.”236

Only after that permission did I recall the scene with the teacher.

The most insidious “third player” is the one in your own head. You may not even know where it came from. Become acquainted with it. Beware of it.