Call from Don Z.

2010_1_28 Call from Don Z.
I got a call from Don this afternoon, shortly after I had written him an email. We talked for an hour, which is my limit on the phone. It was only the second time he has called so I had to give him an hour. I hadn’t heard from him for 8 days so I wrote to find out if he was okay. He was.
We talked a lot about success and failure, something I know something about. It was tied in with how good or bad was our judgment about people. I started out telling him about Dan Christensen, a young man I had worked with at Bookman’s in the late 1990s; his ambition was to be a cartoonist and writer of graphic novels. I was skeptical he could make it in that field, as he had showed me some of his work and I thought it was okay but not great. He upped and moved to Paris in 1998. We exchanged letters for a couple of years, than I had no contact with him for a decade. Then two weeks ago he found me through Facebook.com and we have exchanged a couple of emails since then. And guess what? Not only is he now married with two boys, age six and four, he is making his living as a graphic novelist, having so far published six books, with three of them being color hardbacks. He said he wasn’t wealthy but he was able to sustain himself and his family on what he made as a cartoonist/writer. The important fact is he is doing what he likes to do. He is currently working on 140 page graphic novel about a fencing master who commits a murder but is arrested for a murder he did not commit. So far he hasn’t found a publisher but he remains hopeful.
Don in turn told me a story about one of Holt Murray’s sculpture students at Cabrillo College. He was great admirer of Holt and Modernism’s “cut-open-an acorn-and-see-the-beauty” aesthetic; but when he arrived at the University of Washington Grad School, when Don knew him, his work did not impress him. He thought it was pretty common within the framework of abstract sculpture. The guy told Don he wanted to be an artist/professor just like he and Holt. Don scoffed at that idea; he thought it would never happen. Several years then went by. Recently he found out the guy was teaching at some Eastern University and that he had just signed a contract with the City of New York to do a Public Art thing for a quarter million dollars. Don said he didn’t mind being wrong; indeed, it was more fun that way.
Neither Don nor I have ended up a great success in the eyes of our peers and the world’s judgment, although Don stuck it out as a University Professor. Part of me says, well, it takes a long time to tally the score. Is that wishful thinking? Who knows? But at the moment I can see myself as a failure, at least according to the conventional measurement. I had a successful entry into the world of professional art and university teaching, but in a few years I blew it, with political activism and disillusionment with college life and teaching. I felt very confined and angered by modern institutionalism. “You went to the top of the mountain, and then jumped off,” was how my situation was encapsulated by an academic friend of mine. I would add, “Into the unknown.” Yeah, something like that. Following that leap into the abyss I went off into a very private direction creating a very personal art, achieving what I set out to do, spending no less than 40 years in the effort, so within my own frame of reference I consider my art and writing a great success, a fulfillment of intentions in a worthy manner, even if the larger, public world doesn’t know it. I amuse myself by saying it is recorded in The Great Book of Life. But I am not so naïve as to ignore the fact that at this moment most people do regard me as an abject failure, one of those individuals who showed a lot of promise but fizzled in his mid-thirties and failed to reach his potential. Ah yes, I fell off the map and disappeared into a black hole of my own making. I have been treated that way by certain individuals, like, for example, my mother. She never forgave me for lacking the ambition to be a conventional success so she could brag on me like her woman friends could on their sons; and taking a job as a janitor as an alternative way to make a living was the absolute low point for her. Well, no doubt it was an unorthodox thing to do. But it fit with my background and who I was.
Looking back to San Jose, I remember a conversation I had with another grad student, Doug Vogel, who was utterly involved with the idea of “making it,” as the expression went in the early sixties, when I told him I thought I’d be a “beautiful failure” rather than a “worldly success.” That is a goal I have managed to attain, or perhaps it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why I said that in 1960 is a mystery to me, but I now look at it as a deeply intuitive thing to say.
The person in the Arts who I measure myself against in regards the issues of success and failure is Herman Melville. After his initial success of his popular sea tales and being characterized as “the man who lived with cannibals,” he went on to write MOBY DICK and PIERRE OR THE AMBIGUITIES, both failing miserably with his genteel readership, so when he died in 1891 no one remembered who he was or what he had written. After publishing a few short stories in magazines in the 1850s he went into hibernation, earning his living as a custom official on the docks on New York. He held that job for 22 years.
This is not to say I regard myself in the same category with Melville, no indeed, but I do see a dynamic between us that is similar: some initial success followed by years of obscurity and a dead-end job not equal to my talents. When Melville saw Hawthorne when they met in England after Herman’s dire days of public defeat back in America he told his friend and fellow writer, “I have decided to be annihilated.” I understand what he means and it can be an appealing choice after such a grim defeat of great purpose, but I have fought that feeling, pursuing my goals against all odds with as much passion as I could sustain over the long haul.