A solid job + conservative views = artistic genius

Charles Ives

I won’t read any novels or poems or listen to any classical music, unless a professional critic somewhere, at some time, has thoroughly approved of them. Isn’t that shameful?

I’m not sure I have ever bought a novel that didn’t have an approving quote on it, or read a poem that didn’t appear in an anthology from a reputable publisher or editor, or listened to a piece of classical music unless some authority has pronounced it worth hearing.

This is a long-winded way of admitting that I’m not sure I would have given the weird and wonderful music of the American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) more than 30 seconds of attention unless I’d been assured by those in the know that he was worth persevering with (including those excellent catalogues of classical music CDs and downloads produced by Penguin and Gramophone). 

The same goes for the poet, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) - I seem to remember it was Harold Bloom’s seal of approval that made me give old Wal more than a cursory, puzzled glance.

What makes these giants of American Modernism doubly fascinating (at least to me) is that they were both eminent insurance industry figures in their homeland. They didn’t just have humble day jobs which they suffered to support their creative endeavours: they had big serious high-grade executive jobs which they were evidently very good at. 

Ives, who studied music at Yale, formed his own New York-based insurance company, Ives & Co. In 1918, his book Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax (a real page-turner, no doubt) was published. This was far more enthusiastically received than his music, which remained virtually unperformed during his lifetime. 

Wallace Stevens, a Harvard man, ended up as Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.

Famously, that other eminent American modernist, T. Eliot, worked for a while in banking before becoming a publisher with Faber & Faber.

So, three men of business, all recognized (to differing degrees) for their creative genius during their lifetime, although it was a close-run thing in Ives’s case – Pulitzer prizes for Stevens and Ives, plus a whole slew of awards for Eliot – and all men one would describe as right-wing or, at the very least,  conservative. In the case of Ives, I am inferring from some of his utterances, including: "There was not a service that I could render to my fellow man that was more important than the business of life insurance, because it instilled in the soul and mind of my fellow man the responsibility of meeting his obligations." Left-wingers tend to assume it’s someone else’s job to meet one’s obligations.

And yet all three were startlingly original– and all three are generally accepted to have been geniuses. If their poetry or music sounds less startling today than it once did, that’s only because so many lesser talents have followed in their footsteps. In particular, Ives, encouraged by his father, simply threw away the compositional rule book, presaging just about every development in classical music of the 20th Century – good and bad. 

It would be wrong to pretend that all three were happy with their combination of deeply respectable day jobs and revolutionary creativity: in his fifties, Ives suffered a series of debilitating “heart attacks” which now sound more like panic attacks; it was relatively easy to distinguish T.S. Eliot from a ray of sunshine; and Stevens had a penchant for indulging in drunken rows, including fisticuffs, with other poets and writers (notably, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost). 

But one can only wonder what their lives would have been like without their art, or what their art would have been like if they hadn’t had proper full-time jobs. As Ives put it: “The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in the corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance. There can be nothing exclusive about a substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life.”

This all makes Cyril Connelly’s pronouncement about the pram in the hall killing creativity look like a lame excuse for laziness and/or lack of focus. It also reveals as a myth the insidious modern idea that all creative artists have to be constantly aflame with the desire to better humanity’s lot: the creative arts are not a branch of the social services, no matter what the piffling pygmies of our cultural establishment would have us believe.

I know what a cultured lot my readers are, but if you haven’t come across Ives or Stevens (and I hadn’t, until fairly recently), here are some reommendations. The Unanswered Question , originally composed in 1908, but endlessly polished thereafter, represents the mystical, quietist element of Ives’s genius. In Putnam’s Camp, then second of his 1929 composition,Three Places in New England, we encounter the side of him that loved marching bands, hymn tunes and popular songs (all very American – he rejected the European classical music tradition after a few conventional early compsitions).  If you haven’t hear Ives before, I can guarantee you’re in for surprise – but I have no idea whether you’ll find it pleasant. 

As for Wallace Stevens, three of his most celebrated poems, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, and “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, can be found on this page.