15
The Varieties of Distance
High-functioning couples commonly say that one key to a good relationship is giving each other plenty of space. But a big reason there are so many dysfunctional couples, romantic and creative, is that it’s hard for a lot of us to know what that really means or what it would look like in our lives. The extreme cases we’ve considered suggest the range. But most people want something between total physical separation and as-near-as-possible fusing.
There’s no formula. Optimal distance depends on the temperaments and pursuits of each member of the couple, and how they play together. Obligations vary according to the mechanics of the field—and the phases of work within it. A writer works for years before bringing a manuscript to an editor, then talks to her every day while the book moves toward production. Cofounders of a startup spend sixteen hours a day together doing grunt work, then one recedes to a board role while the other stays at the reins as CEO.
Another complicating factor is that distance can take so many different forms. It may be geographic (whether a partner is across town or across an ocean). It may be temporal (whether the passage of time between contact is an hour or a year). These concrete, measurable qualities intersect variously with the psychological experience of being together or apart. The poets Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall lived in the same house but inhabited a “double solitude,” Hall said, writing separately, meeting for coffee in the kitchen without speaking. “In our silence,” he wrote, “we were utterly aware of each other’s presence.” Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, by contrast, haven’t lived in the same city since they worked together in Baltimore more than three decades ago, but a day rarely passes without them talking on the phone, often at length; O Magazine reported in 2006 that they talk three to four times a day.
The same basic experience of space—the same rough feeling—can be achieved on a variety of scales. When Bernie Taupin and Elton John were starting out, they worked in different rooms in an apartment they shared in London, Taupin emerging from the bedroom to bring John finished lyrics in the living room, where the pianist put them to music. Now Taupin sends the lyrics by e-mail from his horse ranch in Southern California, and John takes them directly to the studio, where he looks at them for the first time.
Over the course of a long career, transitions in distance are common—for some pairs, the changes can be dramatic. “At this point, it’s kinda like a marriage,” Matt Stone said in 2011. “It’s funny,” Trey Parker added, “’cause we’re just at that level now where it just doesn’t happen anymore that one of us can say to the other, ‘You know, one time, I was doing this.’ Because, ‘Yeah, I know. I was there.’” Yet it was around the time of this interview that the partners were really diverging. Bachelor days—in which they lived, worked, and partied together—were giving way to marriage and family. According to their friend Arthur Bradford, Matt and Trey don’t tend to see each other outside of work these days. While both have homes on both coasts, Matt makes New York City his home base and Trey’s HQ is in LA. They’re still often together in studios, in the writers’ room, in retreats, but it’s not like the old days.
Penn and Teller made the same transition but with a very different attitude. In their early days, they drove around to festivals and fairs in a Datsun 210 station wagon. They set up together, performed together, did press together, and shared rooms at Motel 6s. “If one of us wanted to have sex, the other one had to walk around the parking lot,” Penn said. Today, with a stage act in Vegas and international renown, they live very separate lives. What’s striking, though, is that Penn attributes their staying power not to any adjustment in physical distance but to a consistent emotional distance throughout.
“I believe that the volatile groups—Lennon and McCartney, Martin and Lewis . . . were love affairs,” Penn said. “Those were two people who fell in love . . . Teller and I started without any natural affection at all. I didn’t have that—you know, that feeling you have you want to hug somebody or want to be around them or really feel affectionate toward them, which I feel toward a lot of people, I never felt toward Teller. Our relationship was essentially an e-mail relationship before e-mail. It was very, very sterile, very cold.” Even their disagreements, Penn said, were “intellectual.” “It was built on respect,” Penn continued, “and respect is more important than love . . . I’ve always believed that what I did with Teller was better than what I do alone. And we’re like two guys who run a dry cleaning shop or something and [if] we don’t get along, it’s not bad at all. We kind of assume that we’re not going to get along. We’re business partners. So the guy who cleans the Slurpee machine pisses you off. So what? He cleans the Slurpee machine. You deal with it.”
Another complexity to distance is that it may emerge over a myriad of exchanges that resist broad characterization but that feel—the word that comes to mind is microscopic. What I mean is, the experience of separation from and connection with another person plays out in subtle ways day to day.
Among the most intriguing glimpses of this for me was with Phyllis Rose and Laurent de Brunhoff, who create the iconic books about Babar the elephant. Though most readers probably don’t notice, Phyllis, rather than Laurent, has been the acknowledged writer of the text of the Babar books for some time; the credit is on the publication-data page, where the text copyright is assigned to her.
Phyllis’s son, Ted, is my best friend, so I’ve seen Phyllis and Laurent often over the years. I wrote the last chapter of Lincoln’s Melancholy in their guest cottage in Key West. On the face of it, they live very separate working lives: Phyllis is an essayist and biographer (and the author of a seminal work on creative intimacy, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages). She is the doyenne of her house—a party-thrower, an intellectual provocateur. Laurent is far quieter. I think of him wearing a sweater vest, at his drafting table, drawing elephants.
Also, while Babar accounts for Laurent’s work life and identity, it is but a minor piece of Phyllis’s world. Yet, when I asked Phyllis and Laurent directly about their exchanges, it became clear to me how freewheeling each book’s creation is, and how much depended on what Phyllis described as Laurent’s “twenty-four-hour access” to her ideas and opinions. This is fitting, because the first Babar book, authored and illustrated by Laurent’s father, Jean de Brunhoff, began with a bedtime story dreamed up by Laurent’s mother, Cécile. When her boys repeated it to their father, Jean developed it into a written and illustrated story.
Seventy-nine years after that first book was published, I met with Phyllis and Laurent as they were developing the sixty-first Babar, and the fifty-fourth of Laurent’s tenure as its author and illustrator. Called Babar’s Celesteville Games, the story joined two fancies shared by Phyllis and Laurent: the Olympics—which they’d been watching the summer before, and during which Laurent sketched elephants diving and playing volleyball—and to do a book on weddings, inspired by a dramatic ceremony they’d attended in India. When I met with them, Laurent was nearly done with the sketches for the book, in which the Olympics comes to Celesteville, and Babar’s daughter falls in love with one of the athletes, leading to a wedding. Phyllis had written a draft of the story. Laurent had been peppering her with questions on everything from how many birds it would take to lift up a pair of elephants in a chariot to what expression on a girl’s face would communicate amazed. “I wasn’t joking about twenty-four-hour access,” Phyllis told me. “I think one thing that happens as you move through life is that you kind of want things more irregularly, and then the formality of going to an editor—it’s not realistic. You just need someone around that you can talk to all the time.”
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky also enjoyed open access to each other. They spent so much time together that Tversky’s fifteen-month-old son described his father’s profession by saying: “Aba [Hebrew for “Daddy”] talk Danny.” They were “twinned,” Kahneman said. Yet the twin-ship thrived with ample time together and apart. “Amos was a night person,” Kahneman said, “and I was a morning person. This made it natural for us to meet for lunch and a long afternoon together, and still have time to do our separate things. We spent hours each day, just talking.” And they spent hours each day not talking. Each knew the other’s mind as well as his own, Kahneman said, yet “somehow we also kept surprising each other.”
Starting in 1971, Kahneman and Tversky published a series of papers that challenged long-held views of how people formed opinions and made choices, demonstrating that human judgment often runs against what a rational model would predict. They essentially founded a new field of study, behavioral economics, and their careers exploded.
But a relationship originally buoyed by distance was eventually sunk by the same factor. In 1978, Kahneman took a job at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Tversky went to Stanford, in Palo Alto, California. Though they spent every second weekend together and talked on the phone multiple times every day—sometimes for hours—the collaboration eventually languished. “We had completely failed to appreciate,” Kahneman said, “how critically our successful interaction had depended on our being together at the birth of every significant idea, on our rejection of any formal division of labor, and on the infinite patience that became a luxury when we could meet only periodically.”
That Lennon and McCartney maintained an ability to surprise each other was facilitated by distance as well. In the days of frenetic touring, the Beatles practically lived together, and the closeness suited them. They cooked up all kinds of schemes for Beatles retreats—a Greek island they’d buy together, or an entire English village with a common green and houses on four sides. “We were going to have a side each,” Ringo said.
But in the mid-1960s, they also found a critical separation. John moved to an estate in a wealthy London suburb called Weybridge. Paul made his home in the St. John’s Wood section of London, about an hour’s drive away. Though they still met for regular writing sessions, their lives in the off-hours had distinctly different flavors, with Paul spending more time at the studio, catching John Cage performances, hanging out at the avant-garde Indica Gallery that he helped fund, and screening his little abstract films for Michelangelo Antonioni, which Paul pronounced, “Dead cool, really.”
John spent an increasing amount of time at home, in the sitting room off his kitchen, taking acid, watching TV.
The struggle for space is sometimes like a ground war where every inch must be defended. My friend Adam Goodheart, while writing 1861, his celebrated study of the origins of the Civil War, had the good fortune to live near the legendary nonfiction writer Richard Ben Cramer. Adam told me that, more than once, Richard gave him this advice: “Don’t be afraid to be a son of a bitch.” Meaning: Say no, ignore phone calls, hole up and do what you need to do.
Other creators will find that the trick is not so much in saying no as it is in gauging the precise balance of social sustenance and solitary pursuit. As we’ve seen, being in the same room with another person brings a massive quantity of data that goes way beyond language, way beyond even conscious awareness. The question often becomes, How much should you take in? We live in an especially interesting time for that question, as varieties of technology make both physical and virtual presence easier than ever before. The issue for pairs is how to use the tools. One pair of architects I interviewed work 5,400 miles away from each other. Abigail Turin is in San Francisco; her partner, Stephania Kallos, in London. They talk every day on Skype, Turin told me. But they don’t turn on the video. Without daily Skype talks, they might be too far. But video—it’s too close.
Optimal distance may seem to contradict the necessity for confluence, but both are basic qualities of pairs that proceed from the simultaneous human need for intimacy and autonomy. This basic tension is with us all from the start. “Our physical and emotional dependence on our parents surpasses that of any other living species, in both magnitude and duration,” wrote the psychologist Esther Perel. “It is so complete—and our need to feel safe is so profound—that we will do anything not to lose them.” Yet as we develop, we need to crawl with our own legs, stand on our own feet, and dart off in our own directions. The art of living, as Perel wrote, is to “balance our fundamental urge for connection with the urge to experience our own agency.” *
It’s clear, then, that autonomy and intimacy both serve human health. How do they serve creativity? The overarching answer is that alone time and social connection are each conducive to certain ways of thinking; while each mode has its distinct advantages, the real magic happens when they can be applied in alternating fashion.
In general, when alone, we have greater access to the unconscious, to unfettered, wandering, ruminative thinking. An extreme example of this mind state is in sleep, which has long been understood as a fertile time for creativity. “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it,” John Steinbeck wrote in Sweet Thursday. Recent research has borne him out.*
Many famous insights—ranging from Dmitri Mendeleev’s vision of the periodic table to Keith Richards’s riff for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—have come directly from sleeping states. Even more commonly, breakthroughs emerge from states of relaxation. “When ordinary people are signaled with an electronic pager at random times of the day and asked to rate how creative they feel,” writes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “they tend to report the highest levels of creativity when walking, driving, or swimming; in other words, when involved in a semiautomatic activity that takes up a certain amount of attention, while leaving some of it free to make connections among ideas below the threshold of conscious intentionality.”
But the novel ideas that come to us while sleeping or walking need to be tested and ratified by another way of thinking. “Later on, as we try to fit it into ‘reality,’ that original thought may turn out to have been trivial and naïve,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote. “Much hard work of evaluation and elaboration is necessary before brilliant flashes of insight can be accepted and applied.” Or rejected and discarded. A creative person may need to entertain a thousand solutions in order to find the one that works. Unfettered thinking generates the thousand. Analytical thinking helps us see the one that works.
“A key element to creativity,” said the psychologist Greg Feist, “is to separate idea generation from evaluation and elaboration. For many creative people, the generation phase is best done in solitude, and they tend to be relatively uninhibited.” The presence of other people draws you toward that testing state of mind. You share an idea and see a nodding head or a furrowed brow. Perhaps your partner takes up the idea like a baton in a relay race. Perhaps she puts it away like a broken toy. Even if she doesn’t react, you can’t help but devote some mental energy to imagining what she’s thinking.
With ample distance, pairs can move between these two modes of being and thinking. The same rhythms come to affect work sessions, where two partners may move between generating and testing ideas, between focusing on a task and goofing off, between rumination and association. A good illustration is when John and Paul wrote “With a Little Help from My Friends”—the story that opened this book. They played with the lyrics, then broke into old songs and stories, then came back to the song, then broke for cake, then returned again. Their sessions always had this expansive quality. There was no rush and lots of room.
And in the larger scheme of things, they also came to feel that they could choose to be apart or together, as they liked. “We’ll work together only if we miss each other. Then it’ll be hobby work,” McCartney said after they stopped touring. “It’s good for us to go it alone.” He wrote the score for a film called The Family Way. Lennon went to Spain to play the role of Private Gripweed in a movie called How I Won the War. “I had a few good laughs and games of Monopoly on my film,” Lennon said, “but it didn’t work. I didn’t meet anyone else I liked.” After the band reconvened in November 1966 to begin a new album, John said, “I was never so glad to see the others. Seeing them made me feel normal again.”