Portrait of the Artist as an Egotist

When my boyfriend Paul's kids stay over, they sleep in my office. If I'm not finished working by their bedtime, they have to go to sleep in our bedroom, and Paul and I move them as soon as I tear myself away from my writing, disrupting their sleep and keeping Paul from going to bed until I--the holy, creative one--finish my very important work. My peak creative time usually kicks in about four in the afternoon, after a good long day of stewing, staring, snapping my gum, and checking my e-mail. Though I hate to admit it, I rarely hesitate to be self-indulgent, self-absorbed, in regard to my loved ones. Much of the time, I want nothing more than to be left alone--often to write about them in a way that exaggerates their mishaps and flaws.

Does this make me a bad person? Or is all of it the accepted immorality of a creative soul? Mary McCarthy discarded one erudite bedfellow for another, only to write scathingly of each of them later. Philip Roth refused to live under the same roof as his stepdaughter, according to his ex-wife's tell-all memoir. If the age of public confession has only just dawned, it's not for lack of personality flaws in artists' lives. Pick up any biography of any creative person from any time in history, and there's a good chance the pages will be crammed with descriptions of mercurial personalities and stubborn, manipulative behaviors.

Living the "artistic life" means one is granted tremendous leeway we'd never give to regular working stiffs. On the contrary, we glorify artists' detachment and self-absorption, chalking up aloofness to some by-product of creative genius. The writer who blatantly cheats on his spouse is fueling his need for drama. The painter who doesn't come out of her studio for days on end, neglecting her family, friends, and perhaps not even taking a shower, isn't a malodorous egotist, she's following her muse.

I can sympathize. Blatantly thoughtless behavior like cheating shouldn't be tolerated under any circumstances. But the need for long periods of solitude, is, for better of worse, a fact of artistic life.

The lay world isn't organized to accommodate the artist's stints of isolation. Most people operate on a 9-5 schedule. They leave early on Fridays and meet their friends at happy hour. They go to parties on Saturday night and to the park on Sundays. They do not refuse to go to the movies because they want to stay home and work. They do not spend all weekend laboring at their word processors. They don't go to the kitchen every four hours, where they will add one more dirty dish to the collection piled up in the sink. They do not play little games with themselves wherein they won't "allow themselves" to the dishes until they have finished writing Chapter 5.

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