On Balzac and Overthinking Things
Reading "The Unknown Masterpiece" (let's not speak of Gambara)
Balzac must have known lots of people something like Frenhofer, the fictional genius at the center of his fable, Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece). I can imagine his circle included talented writers who refused to show their work to anyone, painters who spent so much time copying the Old Masters that they shrank from producing anything of their own, poets who wrote and rewrote a single poem until it was tough as overworked dough. I can picture a scene where a fellow novelist approaches Balzac with his manuscript, the product of years of private struggle, offering him the first read — and in the next scene, the famous writer finds that his friend’s book is bloated and overwrought, with glimmers of genius just frequent enough for him to understand what has been lost in the man’s battle with himself.
The plot of The Unknown Masterpiece goes like this: two painters, one young and “emerging” and the other comfortably established, meet with a third, the old and eccentric Frenhofer. The younger artist is at first dismissive of the eccentric, puzzling over his more famous colleague’s deference. But Frenhofer soon reveals the source of his authority. When shown the established artist’s painting of Mary of Egypt he gives an incisive critique, pinpointing right away what’s wrong with the work both stylistically and technically. Then, in one of the story’s best scenes, he takes up a brush himself and finishes it, creating with a few subtle strokes a painting even more beautiful and alive than before. “It’s only the last stroke of the brush that counts,” he crows. “Porbus has laid on a hundred, I’ve made one. No one will thank us for what’s underneath. Remember that!”
The two men later discuss Frenhofer. Born into money and with a gift for painting, he has devoted his life to mastery but rarely allows anyone to see his work. He’s prone to fits of despair, fearing that all art is meaningless, and often unable to paint. “Don’t do that to yourself! Work while you can,” the older painter warns the younger. “A painter should philosophize only with a brush in his hand.”
The two artists eventually make Frenhofer agree to show them the work that is to be his magnum opus, depicting a woman named Catherine Lescault. When they enter the forbidden ground of his studio, they are overwhelmed by the beauty of the half-completed works around them, which the master waves away: “These are my mistakes,” he says. But when Frenhofer finally pulls back the cloth on his Catherine, they’re shocked to see that after a decade of finishing touches, the image has been obliterated, and on the canvas is nothing more than layers and layers of paint. The only hint of Catherine’s presence is an uncovered portion of a foot, “like the torso of some Parian marble Venus rising out of the ruins of a city burned to ashes.” Frenhofer, who rhapsodizes about Catherine’s eyelashes, cheeks, and breasts even as his friends look at the ruined canvas with shock, is unable to see that no painting remains.
The message of Balzac’s parable seems to be that if you have artistic aspirations, don’t be like Frenhofer: beware of over-intellectualizing, beware of perfectionism, beware of the impulse to pick at your work for years while hiding it away, because there lies the path to self-destruction and irrelevance. This interpretation is perhaps a little pat, but the story is itself a little pat — and the force of its argument resonated with many other artists. Picasso, according to the introduction in the NYRB edition, took a studio at 7, rue des Grans-Augistins because that’s where part of the story is set. Cezanne in a recorded interview, close to tears, identified himself with Frenhofer. Henry James, who loved Balzac, wrote a story with a theme so similar to The Unknown Masterpiece that some critics believe he must have been influenced by it, even though he doesn’t mention it in his essays.
The writer’s version of the story’s warning is easily imagined: if you must ruminate, try to do it with a pen in hand and sign your name to it. In an early scene, the younger artist is urged to sign a sketch he fears is insignificant; today, we would tell him to “put yourself out there.” Balzac’s prolificacy (there are ninety-five novels in La Comédie Humaine, at least one over a thousand pages long) speaks to his belief in this advice. He reportedly wrote at an extraordinary pace and sent things to his publishers that weren’t quite finished, later flooding them with last-minute corrections. However, the disadvantages of this approach are apparent even in my copy of The Unknown Masterpiece. Frenhofer’s story is paired in this edition with Gambara, another fable about an artist. The thematic parallels are obvious. Gambara, the title character, is a composer who writes great music when he’s drunk and bad music when he’s sober, but is unable to tell the difference. Having read it, I can say confidently that Gambara is a bad book. Even the NYRB editors tacitly acknowledge this by not naming it on the cover: only the inside title page and the last line of the back cover admit to its presence, as though it were a poor relation. The introduction does not bother to discuss it at all. It’s a reminder that Balzac’s lofty reputation rests on a fraction of his output. The novelist version of Frenhofer would have burned Gambara.
I think often of a famous talk (transcribed here) by a well-known computer scientist, titled You And Your Research. He addresses himself in the beginning to those who want to produce great work. He doesn’t mean work that will get you tenure, but the kind that could get you the Nobel prize. “Why shouldn't you do significant things in this one life?” he asks at the beginning. “When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, `Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together.''
He begins with some of the same ideas that we know from motivational books. Admit to yourself that you want to do great work, have the courage to pursue your ideas, put in the hours and immerse yourself deeply in the problem to the point that you dream about it at night — yes, yes, okay. But later on he comes to something much more interesting:
I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Frenhofer seems to be an illustration of someone who is working with the door closed, slowly losing the ability to see his work objectively. I suspect that anyone trying to produce great work can see themselves in Frenhofer — especially Balzac. Perhaps it is this anxiety that moved him to always do his philosophizing with a pen in his hand, and to publish even when the result was Gambara.
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