The Perpetual Orgy

How to write a masterpiece? I haven’t a clue, but if a young composer were to ask me that question on this particular day I would unhesitatingly direct him or her to “The Perpetual Orgy” by Mario Vargas Llosa. And I’d then specify the middle part of the book called “The Pen-Man.”

“Perpetual Orgy”….hmm…at my age I’m not sure whether this phrase strikes delight or anxiety in my soul (maybe a little of both?) but the phrase is in fact a line from a letter written by Gustave Flaubert:

“The only way to endure life is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”

Vargas Llosa, himself a fine novelist and perhaps my favorite essayist—I read his articles online in the Madrid newspaper El País— chose “perpetual orgy” for the title of his 1975 book that is exclusively about Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” It’s in part a love letter to Flaubert, his incomparable novel and to the provocative and irresistible Emma, the novel’s main character. But it’s also a study about the act of creation—and although he means literary creation, much of what he describes can easily be ported over to composing.

Why would I direct a young composer to this book? Because it describes Flaubert’s working habits, the regularity of his days, the immense care he gave to the tiniest detail, and his sovereign unwillingness to release anything until he was absolutely certain he’d gotten it right. As far as Flaubert was concerned, deadlines were for hacks.

Everyone knows the expression “le mot juste,” but not everyone realizes it originated with Flaubert. But finding the “right word” was just the beginning. He was also intensely sensitive to the work’s formal balance, in other words the rightness—not only of length, but also with how areas of high-density, emotionally hot activity are modulated with cooler, more dispassionate ones that would provide relief for the reader. In these types of concerns, what is both a matter of feeling and form, the novelist’s concerns are not much different from the composer’s.

When he’d finished with a chapter he often would invite some discerning friends over and read it to them. But even before this unveiling, he would have spent dozens if not hundreds of hours reading it out loud to himself because he demanded that the SOUND of the sentences (not just their thought content) be perfect to his ear.

Flaubert had a firm conviction: a sentence is well written when it was musically perfect. “The more beautiful an idea is, the more sonorous the sentence; you may be certain of that,” writes Flaubert. “Precision of thought makes for (and is itself) precision of language.”

Here is Vargas Llosa, describing the process:

“…when a sentence seems to Flaubert more or less finished, he reads it aloud, acts it out, increasing the volume, striding about the room, gesticulating. If it does not SOUND good, if it is not melodious and irresistibly rhythmic, if its qualities as pure sound do not constitute a value in and of themselves, it is not correct, the words are not the right ones, the idea has not been perfectly expressed…

Flaubert wrote thousands of letters, so it’s possible to track the progress of his works, the ups and downs of his creative life and all the moments of disgust, of freaking out, of utter despair that go into the writing of his books.

He is a writer obsessed by the process. He works every day, following the same regimen. Sometimes he will finish half a page at the end of a tortured eight hours of struggle. He agonizes over both the smallest and the largest issues. Is that the best possible verb? Has he used a common word too often? He is bedeviled by certain consonances and assonances, “cacaphonies, certain conjunctions that tend to repeat themselves.” HE WANTS TO GET IT RIGHT!

And writing his perfectly crafted sentences never ever gets any easier for him. His life is consumed by the activity. What we would call his “personal life” is limited to the rural home that in which he lived a bachelor’s life along with his mother and the occasional visit by friends. He had longstanding relationships with both men and women, but he liked to have them on his own terms in a way that would never impinge upon the discipline of his work habits. Literature was life for him. Going to a friend’s funeral he was both saddened by the loss and stimulated by the opportunity for real life detail that it provided him, grist for his novelistic mill, as it were.

I would put him at the antipode from, let’s say Jack Kerouac, for whom the “raw” is eminently preferable to the “cooked.” This is not to say that I don’t appreciate Kerouac, but his writing, compared to Flaubert’s, is a rough sketch, a spontaneous riff, a snapshot compared to a painting. What we love about Kerouac is the adventure of it, the evocation of place, the sense of breaking through to freedom, the impulsiveness of his archetypal characters. But there is also something pale and thin about the prose. You know that the first word that came to mind was the one he ended up using, and too often it was not wrong, but just plain, ordinary, a bit lacking in flavor, like a supermarket melon.

I’ve heard it said that Kerouac “used the typewriter like Charlie Parker used the saxophone.” But I think whoever said that is utterly wrong and only reveals an innocence of how complex is the mental activity required to play speed-of-light bebop.

Kerouac’s writing is less like a great jazz improviser and more like a fifties Ab-Ex painter lunging at a canvas. Sometimes the words and images stick, producing a powerful affect. Who doesn’t love the best passages in “On the Road” or “The Dharma Bums?” But more often they drone, and Jack’s unwillingness to truly suffer a word choice, Flaubert-style, or his resistance to sweating out the agonies of formal modulation result in, well, acres and acres, miles and miles of frankly boring prose.

Fortunately great books and great pieces of music don’t come into the world by any one way. Flaubert may have spent five long years, working every day to make “Madame Bovary,” just as Joyce labored over Ulysses for seven. But some perfect works have come into the world with astonishing speed. Beethoven at his most confident and fertile produced a long string of groundbreaking, shockingly perfect works in the space of only two years—consider for example the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, the Opus 59 Razumovsky quartets, the Triple Concerto, the Appassionata Sonata and the first version of what became Fidelio. All these were composed between 1804-1806. And Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus in less than four days holed up in a room in the Swiss Alps. There are moments in the development of an art form when the terrain is virgin, the new-found language is potent, and an artist of exceptional talent—of “genius”—gathers it all up and disgorges one masterpiece after another.

That happens. But the other kind of process, that of the laborious, careful, step-by-step, note-by-note version of creativity is probably the more successful one. And if that’s the case, Flaubert’s your man.

Composing in the Brave New World era of computer-assisted technology has become seductively easy. Young composers have to resist the lure of getting something cranked out quickly and uncritically. It’s good to know that there’s an audience out there, at Le Poisson Rouge or at Green Umbrella, or wherever. In some ways we’re quite possibly entering into a period—who knows?—maybe even a Golden Age when young composers might actually generate and maintain a sizeable and enthusiastic audience. But the models current today, many taken from the indie pop world or from the blandest forms of minimalism, need to be viewed with a healthy skepticism. There’s little to be gained by having a big audience of unsophisticated listeners. The tradeoff entails writing to the lowered expectations of your audience.

Here in the US of A “culture,” if it is to have any impact at all, usually means “popular culture.” We praise the demotic, the spontaneous, the simple, the uncomplicated. Beginning some time in the 1960’s pop ascended to a level of great prestige, to the point that nowadays we accord the highest value to that which speaks in the lingua franca of pop.

That’s understandable in our current media-soaked environment, but the down side of this change is that we’ve come to suspect a work of art that’s the product of long gestation, of slow growth and careful pruning. Such a work is a hard sell when our attention spans are constantly being challenged. Furthermore, these works usually require a concomitant effort and concentration to appreciate them. Bummer, man!.

You probably wouldn’t want Flaubert’s life, nor Joyce’s and certainly not Beethoven’s. I wouldn’t. They were difficult people. But their devotion and their care brought about the best stuff. It’s worth pondering before launching that next piece, the one with the deadline only a month away.