On vomiting and a private life – Colm Tóibín in The Paris Review (thanks to my friend P):

‘In 1959, in reply to a question about whether the fifties as a decade “makes special demands on you as a writer,” Baldwin adopted his best style, lofty and idealistic and candid, while remaining sharp, direct, and challenging: “But finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement.” Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his white novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”’ Read the article here.

Foucault might have vomited to hear that all art is a confession. The time of faux confessions has not ended yet.

Is there any truth worth the name that’s not difficult?

But I agree, artists if they want to survive are forced to go beyond the pleasantries of the social games we play in order to survive. I’m not sure if all art is confessional, but the attempt to change the rules, in order to uncover something essential is of the essence.

That after the uncovering there is always something else to uncover is clear as well.

And now back to ‘Giovanni’s Room’.