Letters of Notable People
by Milena Jesenská
Because it is not essential, I am temporarily leaving aside the question whether one has the right to publish letters of notable people. It is not a matter of right as much as of determining the value we ultimately derive from the information and testimonies obtained by such a glimpse into the private lives of celebrities. Only then can the other, subordinate question be answered.
Very often one hears people say: Getting to know an artist personally is dangerous because it’s often disappointing. Anyone who has inspired others with his music, poems, paintings, is bound to be a very unusual person, and one who possesses certain inscrutable traits; for example, he may be as greedy as a hamster, as anxious as a hare, as uncouth as a bargehand, dirty and unshaven, even greasy, he may wear a nightcap or be enamored of his parrot.
The same man who has such a passionate relationship to eternity, truth, and great deeds wears a nightcap? Yes, my dear girl. Artists don’t always look like Waldemar Psilander, unfortunately—or maybe fortunately. And if you are disappointed by an artist, by an artist as a human being, by an artist whose accomplishments provide irrefutable proof of his stature, then it is your fault alone, because you are looking at things so conventionally; you are looking at the artist as if he were a bank clerk, without realizing that what distinguishes the artist from the non-artist is not who they are, as people, but what they possess. A non-artist possesses only what he has: ten thousand krone, shares of stock, a pretty nose, two healthy hands. An artist, on the other hand, also possesses things he doesn’t quite have. His desires, wishes, imaginings—the entire world provides material for his creativity. If you are disappointed by an artist, my dear girl, this is only because you haven’t understood how to find him, and don’t know how grotesquely strange the human soul is.
Or maybe it isn’t grotesque that the great moralist of the “human comedy,” Balzac, with his fine understanding of beauty and elegance, was dumpy, ugly, and fat, always carelessly dressed or even unkempt, a man his friends had to guard constantly so he wouldn’t do something dumb, foolish, or embarrassing? Or that our sweet, starry-eyed Dvořák came from the country, was quite robust and given to habits that had nothing to do with the stars? Or that Maupassant was a surly, despairing, and mistrusting loner who tortured himself with feelings of inferiority for thirty years and for thirty years burned all his stories because he considered them imperfect? Or that Napoleon, terrible, brave Napoleon, the master of the world, was a small, frail, dwarfish little man afraid of the dark?
And so on; one could continue at will. The interest in the private life of important people stems from the fact that we aren’t just satisfied with their work, their creation. We want to know where it comes from, we want to understand the internal act preceding the creation. The more so since every great work of art is by definition inexplicable and new, for an artist does not say what exists, but what does not exist—and by saying it, makes it exist.
Ever since Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, the world knows the indecisive man unable to choose between being and not being. Ever since Dostoyevsky created Myshkin, the world knows the noble, clumsy, but thoroughly good man, the wonderful man, the idiot and savior of lives. Ever since Božena Němcová's grandmother we know the wise, radiant, rustic soul of an old woman. Ever since Zola’s Nana, we know what it is to be a prostitute in the Parisian demimonde. Of course there was a Hamlet before Shakespeare and a Myshkin before Dostoyevsky, and the earth was turning before Galileo, and there was electricity before Galvani. But the world didn’t know that; the world was unaware of electricity and went without it. It didn’t count on it and didn’t suppose it existed. Just like it didn’t know a Hamlet before Shakespeare or an Onegin before Pushkin. That is the artist’s possession: his exclusive worldview. His ability to see something for the first time, to see something new.
Naturally we ask ourselves: Good God, it’s so simple, why didn’t I know that before? How and why was he the one to discover it? Greedily we reach for the letters, expose the human element, gulp down the pages: How did he do it? Through what pain? What wish? What disease? What tension? The letters complete the work like a map completes the world. But a miracle is not enough for us doubters; we require a tangible explanation, and so we search the letters for motivations, logical clues.
Biographies are something completely different. Interesting in a completely different way. Stendhal’s biography of Napoleon reveals the author’s thoughts more than a portrait of its subject. It in itself is a work of art. We do not expect any art from letters; we expect something human.
Of course the ideas some outstanding people have about others are valuable and very much worth knowing. But reports “without any claim to artistic merit,” written in order to interest the world, represent an absolute misunderstanding. The world shouldn't be interested in Miss Lola Šetelíková, who deems it appropriate to give an exact account of what Milan Stefinik did, where he went, why he didn’t marry, and what he said at someone’s house. The simple facts cannot be interesting if they are not accompanied by some insight, some motivation, some explanation. The point is not to betray something to the world, but to enrich the individual, to provide the reader with a deeper understanding. The point is the logical connection between the world of the unnotable and the world of the chosen.
But as long as we are not quite so perfect, as long as the statement alone does not suffice for faith and understanding, as long as we must place our fingers in the wounds, like Thomas, we have the right to convince ourselves the wounds exist, and that they are deep.
[M.J., Tribuna, August 15, 1920]