Forum; Phenomenon of Double Talents

🎶 🎶 From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, I'm Eileen Rennman, and welcome to Forum. Probably one of the most rewarding compliments an artist receives from an audience is a recognition

of talent. We hear a stirring piece of music and give praise to the musician's talent for music. We experience a moving piece of art and note the artistic acuity of the creator. In a world where increasingly available talent affords us the luxury of experiencing only the best, most highly competitive art, specialization of talent has become the order of the day. A musician receives visibility for his music, a writer for his prose, an artist for his work. However talent is not necessarily limited to one mode of expression. So says Dr. Leslie Wilson, professor of Germanic languages and editor of Dimension, a magazine that explores the phenomenon of double talents. The work of 20 German writers, original essays, poems and stories accompanied by their art is included in the magazine published three times a year. We'll talk to Dr. Wilson about double talents, artists and their work, all coming up on forum. The artistic talents of writers have largely

been overlooked, believes Dr. Leslie Wilson, and to fully understand the work of a doubly talented person, attention must be paid to both artistic activities. Dr. Wilson began publishing Dimension, a forum for double talents in 1968. The magazine became at once a literary contact between the American reader and the German author, and served as an outlet to the artist with double talents. Double talents are talents that are expressed by authors say who are also painters or musicians who may also be stage designers. You think in the 19th century of Wagner, who not only wrote the music and wrote the words for his operas, but also had a great influence on the stage design. So we usually think in terms

of talent as, oh this person is a great writer or oh this person is such a wonderful artist, but that's not necessarily the case. Well the doubly talented person seems to me makes use of more than one talent that he has in his professional and in his creative life. We can go way back to Michelangelo, whose principal talent was painting and sculpture too, which is considered to be two different kinds of activities by some, but he also wrote Sonnet sequences, which were very private and personal expressions. His art work was more a public expression of his talent. And in more recent times, D.H. Lawrence, for example, is well known as a poet, better known as a novelist, painted a series of pictures that hang in a hotel gallery in Tals de Mexico, which would cost you $1 to look at them.

But terrible. He was not talented as a painter, yet he was moved to express again something rather personal in an artistic way, and he did it on canvas. There are some talents that are not recognized as such immediately, perhaps. I think of comic strip writers, many of whom also draw their strips themselves. And these have existed in the 20th century for a long time. Everybody knows who they are, Dune Spurry. I mean he writes and draws. This is just a very common thing. This exists everywhere in the world too. It isn't restricted to one nation, one language, one culture, one century. A very famous example is William Blake. But I think of a very great difference between someone like Michelangelo, for example,

or someone like Blake in regard to someone today. A double talented person today has a much easier time of it in a way. Because Blake spent innumerable hours drawing, writing. And then discovered that the dissemination of these two talents was something required additional additional time. And today with the media the way it is, reproduction, photography, through photography, other kinds of duplication. A person who is a talented author, that is who is an author, say, who also draws, may spend a lot of time on it etching. But then when his etching is finished, he can reproduce it so easily today. And it can be all over the world in a few hours. This is something that didn't happen in previous centuries, took

a long time. But double talents are often ignored. That is not the two talents. Maybe a person that focuses on one, principally, and is best known for that particular one. The average person who may know an author, say, for plays that he's written. And now I think of the German author, Peter Weiss, who became world famous for his Marra side play. I don't think ten persons out of a hundred, even those who know Weiss very well as an author and a dramatist, know also that he was an artist, a consummate artist. He trained as an artist, did many portraits of himself, great many self-portraits, and became a very expert collage artist, incredible collages. You won't find this noted, I think, in most

works about Peter Weiss. Everyone knows that Blake also was an artist. But many of the contemporary authors, particularly, and not just in Germany, which I'm most familiar, but in other lands, France as well, in England. How many people know that C.S. Lewis, who wrote those fantastic tales, is also an artist, or that Tolkien illustrated his books himself. There are occasionally outlets for such people that is a single, let's say, a magazine in which they can cultivate both the talents. I think in the United States of the New York magazine, which has the capability of printing artwork as do most magazines. And someone like James Thurber, the great humorist of the 20th century, who wrote four years with the New York

magazine, who also drew whimsical pictures to illustrate some of his stories that became then world famous. He was not a consummate artist, I would say, as others may have been. In this world of specialization, where really everything is becoming so competitive that unless you're absolutely the top of the line, you may not be able to support yourself and survive. We tend to tell people, pick your thing and do it. Do you think that we're perhaps inhibiting creativity by having become so specialized? Maybe in some instances, but not, I think, in those important instances. That is, those instances where an author is also an artist. If he is so moved, if he is deeply moved by his artistic impulse, in addition to his authorial impulse, he's going to do both. He may not indulge

in both publicly. His art may be something for relatives or just for his own entertainment. It depends on the kind of relationship there is, I think, between the two talents. In some instances, the talent is so essential, a part of a person's whole artistic being and artistic in the largest sense of the word, that the painting or the drawing or the etching cannot be ignored. And it also depends on what that particular author may make of his other talent, whether he uses it as does. Going to Gras, for example, to test the metaphors, say, of the poetry or the metaphors in the novels in an interview that I had had with Gras. He told me, that's what he does. I pointed out to him, he's something he knew very well, that most of his work is black and white.

There's very little color, and he confessed to avoiding color, because color mutted the water, so to speak, for him. He said the important thing, and he's speaking not only of his art, but of his writing as well, by extension and metaphorically. The important thing is black and white, but more important is what he calls the gray area in between, and that gray area is something that could be called the middle way, a kind of a compromise, not an extreme stance, let's say, neither all black, nor all white, but something that combines the two. And the golden mean is something that's been with us for 2,000 years. In this case, what we call it, the gray mean. There are artists such as Günter Gras, for whom their artistic endeavor is as important,

is equal, of equal importance to them, as their authorial endeavors. And Gras is one who's been very successful. He has had many exhibitions, and he has art galleries representing him now, in most of the western countries, including in the United States, so you can buy a Gras etching, if you wish to spend a lot of money, or a Gras lithograph. Then there is an artist, let's say, like Andy Warhol today. Most people think of him as an odd painter, but he's also an author. He's written a novel, he's written some short pieces, he's done film scripts, he's made films, but these are secondary, and he elaborates his painting in a sense with his other art. Are there some writers who are artists, but they're not taking advantage of their artistic talents?

I'm sure there are. I know that there are some who are not artistically, let's say, expert, that is, their artistic talent is there, and they're frustrated artists. What they do, what they draw, I'm sure anyone who saw what they draw would say, I could do that, or my six-year-old can do that, or my ten-year-old, or maybe my five-year-old, because it's completely untought, it's completely undisciplined, and it's completely impulsive, I think, but because they have made a reputation, let's say as an author, they can indulge their second talent, which may not be as strong, and very effectively by combining it occasionally with their first talent.

By combining talents, the artist can use his predominant artistic expression to inspire a second. Generally, there seems to be a manifestation of preference for the artist, and this is the outlet he will take. But given time and inspiration, an artist may develop a latent second talent previously dormant. What's important is for the artist not to stifle this impulse. Any talent has to be used to be perfected. If someone has the talent for drawing or for painting, and you'd like to, it doesn't use it, it's never going to be developed into a full flowering talent, I think. And I'm sure there are some, and particularly maybe these creative people who are writers or who are musicians, do have the kind of sensibility that responds to the reality around them. And every artist, largest sense of the word, every creative person, transforms reality. In music, there's a new kind of reality there in the musical transformation,

in art itself, in a poem, in a play. There's a reformation of the reality that is around all of us. And it seems to me there are enough examples of doubly and triply for that matter, talented people who do express this transformation of reality in at least two ways that such creative persons may very well, innately, have a second talent in them that most artists don't develop. Can it ever be a problem to have double talents? Occasionally, I think it can be, I think of a Swiss German artist and author who principle has been an author, but whose art is, I think of equal importance, although he hasn't integrated it into his authorial endeavors as some have, many have. And these are two fields for him, really.

The thing that may lengthen would be some thematic concentrations perhaps. It would be difficult maybe to identify a style or a kind of outlook that is common to both. The person I'm thinking of for a while decided not to continue writing, but to devote all his time to his artwork. But he's not done that. He's still playing with both. And then there is, again, a Swiss dramatist, Durin Mat, who's play the visit of the old lady, better known in English as simply the visit, became worldwide, known worldwide, with Ingrid Bergman playing the movie role. He has always painted, not many people even know that. Now his paintings have been selected in a very thick book by a Swiss publisher to which he wrote an afterward,

a kind of commentary. And it turns out that many of the themes that Durin Mat developed in his plays, he developed, first on Canvas, inspired by some kind of convolution, the Minotaur. He has a series of Minotaur portraits, for example. And he has a play called An Angel came to Babylon, that is not known to American audiences, I think. But the seed of that play is a bat, because Durin Mat painted not only to elaborate themes before he began to put them on paper, let's say, but also his relaxation. And after several hours writing, he retired to his studio, and this was usually in the early part of the morning, let's say one, two o'clock in the morning.

And before he went to bed, he would paint for a while. A bat began to visit him, flew in through an open window, and hung around for an hour. He named his bat or the bat Matilda. And looked forward to the visit of the bat, every night, in the middle of the night. One night, he caught the bat to show it to its children the next morning, and he told his children it was a mouse angel. He let Matilda go, and Matilda never came back. His conscience began to bother him, and he suddenly found himself painting angels, angelic hosts, angels as a theme in his paintings. And this developed then into the theme of a play. So essentially, an angel comes to Babylon, to play, start off with the night time visit of a bat to the artist studio. The bat became an angel on an artist canvas, which then developed into the theme for a play.

Dernmott's relaxation in night time painting gave birth to the theme for his play, and angel came to Babylon. Dr. Wilson cites this example to illustrate the relationship between artist talents and how deeply one affects another. There are other ways a writer can integrate a second talent. He can illustrate his work, and this is done occasionally. It was done by Thurber. It's done by an East German writer, who now lives in West Germany, whose name is Kuhnert, formerly a visitor at this university. It's done in a sense by Gras, because he did Ginter Gras was very unhappy with the first dust jackets of his books. Consequently, he designed his own dust jackets, and early on, each of the Gras novels had two dust jackets on it, one for you to use to protect the book and one for you to frame if you wanted to.

This is no longer going on, probably got too expensive for the publisher, but an author may also use his other talent to make an expression that he can't in his first, let's say. Take a talent like Paul Klee, best known as a very revolutionary artist, fascinating 20th century artist. He has a few poems, very few, maybe 20, but the poems reveal a side of Mr. Klee that no one knows about, unless you are a Klee expert, say, a very intense religious side to him, for example. There is also the possibility that an artist can somehow integrate the two arts. I think this is most rare, but it has been done. I'm thinking again of a contemporary artist in Germany, an author, principally an experimental poet who has what he calls kind of word drawings, a word, a single word, as though it were written

on a blackboard, on a white blackboard, let's say, with black chalk. The way he scripts or writes that word on the board contains the very essence of the meaning of the word. If he wrote wind, for example, it would lean at a 45-degree angle in one direction, maybe, implying the force of the wind, or if he wrote the word hurry or fast, this is done in comic strips. The word would almost take off across the blackboard. What do you think talent is? Compulsion. Plus good motorability. Plus imagination. So then it can be expressed in any way? Oh, almost. I can say almost. I can think of a few examples

of let's say art that haven't impressed me a lot. I think there's an American artist who does things on landscapes that is not. He doesn't do landscapes himself. He does things with landscapes. He may build, he did in Colorado, I think, build a fence that consisted of simply white sheets that went over Hill and Dale for 15 miles and it blew away in a few weeks. But that was an artistic endeavor of his, and you could photograph it from the air and coming and going for blocks around. This didn't impress me a lot, and there are some artists, I think, whose originality really defies the imagination. It isn't persuasive to me. I'm very sentimental, I'm very romantic, and although I like non-objective art a lot, because I think non-objective art gives every viewer

the opportunity to exert his own imagination, and I think everyone has an imagination. We all have imaginations as children. Unfortunately, many of us when we grow up seem to lose contact with our, the part of our mind that is an imaginative, has an imaginative function. But I think beauty is a part of art, although beauty itself is something that cannot be defined. When you think simply of art itself, something that may be on this surface, horrid, terrible, can't have a, and can be imbued by the kind of humanity that is beautiful. And this is done in a more leisurely way, in a poem, and in a, even more leisurely way than that in a novel, I'd say, of 400 pages.

But it also can be done on a canvas or a piece of paper so that the viewer gets in essence the same message instantaneously, not in depth, but nevertheless instantaneously. What about not only dual artists, but someone who is perhaps functioning not necessarily in artistic realm like a politician or a state's person? Mr. Eisenhower was a painter, but that was very amateurish. I mean, his paintings will never hang in galleries because of their artistic value. Mr. Churchill was a painter, and Churchill's paintings are very fine paintings. I think that both the statesmen painted for relaxation. Relaxation is a, you can be constructive, you can be creative in your relaxed moments too, rather than do what I'm tempted to do a lot, simply lie in the sun,

make use of those hours you spend in essence not doing anything unless your mind is working full speed. Hesse, Herman Hesse, who became a phenomenon in America in the 60s and 70s, read by everyone between the age of 15 and 23, let's say. He was a painter, and he has a number of paintings and some drawings, a few poems, principally a prose writer, but his painting is not integrated into his other artistic endeavors. You can see something maybe of a stylistic resemblance. The simplicity of line of his painting, I think, is found also in the simplicity of the style of his prose. But these two worlds of artistic creation, he did not combine, whereas Gras can't avoid it. He has to do it.

Gunter Gras, in the interview I mentioned, told me that he often tests a new idea in a drawing before he puts any words on paper. And if this theme, kind of a metaphorical theme that he has in his mind, works in black and white in his great areas that are so important, then he's convinced he can try him in a poem. And very often he tries it in a poem. If it works in the poem and is also worked in the art, then he may try it in a play, or he may do a short, let's say a short kind of dramatic sketch trying it. And then may go on to prose. prose is the pinnacle, I think, of his work, of his art. He's written plays. He writes poetry.

He's written political speeches, which are also works of art. Well then for some of us who might begin to be dabbling in different kinds of things, would you say then that people shouldn't be afraid to experiment with the whole new form? Do it. Do it all the time. Go in every direction. Of course, you have to take time into consideration. You might not have time simply to develop several different forms of art. But I think you should follow your own impulses. And if the impulse says expand your horizons, you might be a prime candidate for developing your own double talents. With Dr. Leslie Wilson, Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin, I'm Eileen Remmon, and you've been listening to Forum. Comments about this program are welcome, and cassette copies are available and may be

purchased by writing Forum. The Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, 78712. That address again is Forum, the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, 78712. Forum is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services at the University of Texas at Austin. Technical producer for Forum is Scott Compton. This is The Longhorn Radio Network.