Ars Interruptus

The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge provided a fascinating account of the creative process behind one of his best-known works. During a “profound sleep, at least of the external senses,” he had a wonderful vision, enough material for a long poem. “On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole,” Coleridge wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.”

So far, so good, Sam, but then . . .

“At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter . . .”

The result was “Kubla Khan,” the most famous unfinished poem in British literature.

Other artists have been more successful in overcoming an interruption, and one of them had an insight we all should remember.

Handel’s Perseverance

Before I go any further, I just have to say one thing: Man, I hope that guy knocking on the door had something really important to share with Sam. Let’s face it, though, if Coleridge’s life is anything like mine, the guy was probably there to hawk his gutter-cleaning business. It’s no wonder Coleridge lost his train of thought. (There is no record of a subsequent poem with lines like “O dampened leaves, have you no place to dwell, / Now that my gutters have been cleaned so well?”)

That story of Coleridge’s ars interruptus, so to speak, has stuck with me for decades. I even worked it into my first novel (also, by the way, inspired by a dream, I think, or maybe something that really happened—I’m honestly not sure).

The story came back to me this week after I visited the British Library and saw part of the score that Georg Frideric Handel wrote for his oratorio Jephtha. In the bottom left corner of the left page, he wrote this note (in German): “Reached here on 13 Febr. 1751, unable to go on owing to weakening of the sight of my left eye.”

As a literary scholar and a writer myself, I am fascinated by the creative process, and I welcome the occasional glimpses we get of the artist at work. In this case, Handel’s note reminds us that, whatever genius is stirring in the artist’s brain, it remains subject to the body, which lends its eyes and hands (and heart and lungs) to the completion of the work.

Unlike Coleridge’s, this story has a happy ending—well, a happier ending.

In a brief essay for Boston Baroque, conductor Martin Pearlman explains: “He saw doctors and visited watering places at Bath and Cheltenham for his health and by mid-June felt well enough to resume work, but he struggled.” Handel eventually went blind, but he completed Jephtha and even conducted the premiere the following February.

Two Breaks and an Insight

Such interruptions happen more often than we might think. Just a couple of decades after Handel had his troubles continuing his work, an American began working on his memoir when he was expecting “the enjoyment of a week's uninterrupted leisure” at a spot in England. His book had a promising beginning, but he then laid it aside—and didn’t get back to it for 13 years. When he resumed his work, he included an explanation, and it’s a pretty good excuse: “The Affairs of the Revolution occasion'd the Interruption.” OK, Benjamin Franklin, I suppose we can forgive you for getting distracted by the American Revolution.

Franklin was a busy guy, even in retirement—what with all the diplomacy and science he was trying to do—and gave into not one, but three interruptions and, alas, never finished his book. Still, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has become a classic of the genre.

A century later, another American writer broke off his work on a novel, even after writing some 400 pages of it. “I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got,” he wrote to a friend, “& may possibly pigeon-hole or burn the MS when it is done.”

Thankfully, Mark Twain did not burn Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but he did “pigeon-hole” it, completing the novel that would be considered his masterpiece some seven years later.

Twain knew ars interruptus quite well, as it turns out. He had had a similar experience while writing his first novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He described it this way:

At page 400 of my manuscript the story made a sudden and determined halt and refused to proceed another step. Day after day it still refused. I was disappointed, distressed, and immeasurably astonished, for I knew quite well that the tale was not finished, and I could not understand why I was not able to go on with it. The reason was very simple—my tank had run dry; it was empty; the stock of materials in it was exhausted; the story could not go on without materials; it could not be wrought out of nothing.

Unlike Franklin, who presumably had enough material from his rich and motley life to fill multiple books, Twain needed to fill up his tank again, as he went on to explain:

When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon-hole two years I took it out, one day, and read the last chapter I had written. It was then I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work at other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on. There was plenty of material now, and the book went on and finished itself without any trouble.

Life (and Fuel) on the Mississippi

Twain’s experience is instructive, especially when we consider what he was doing while the later novel was pigeon-holed. After his tank ran dry on his story of Huck Finn, he made a trip down the Mississippi River, the famous setting of the novel, and worked on other books, including a nonfiction account of his own life. This book, the wonderful Life on the Mississippi, includes a recounting of his childhood in Hannibal, a town that sits right on the river.

“The return to the river certainly revived Clemens’s youthful memories,” the editors of an edition of the novel explain, “but it also stoked his anger.” They continue:

The advances in the social and legal status of blacks achieved during Reconstruction, while under siege from the beginning, had been further deteriorating since 1876, and racial violence against the former slave population was increasing. With unhindered mob rule, intimidation, arson, and lynchings, the justice system in the South seemed to have entirely broken down.

Twain’s tank was filling up again, and this time the intervening experience had introduced a match to the fuel in that tank. As you probably recall if you have read it, the finished novel is, among other things, an attack on institutionalized oppression.

When Life Happens, Use It!

Interruptions will come. Life happens, as the saying goes. The question is what to do when it happens. We can abandon our projects, or we can tap into that intervening life to continue, expand, even improve our projects. After all, whether you are a composer, an author, or someone merely living your life forward—the only way it can be lived—life is a vein to be mined. If we are reflective, as artists must be, we can glean insights from every incident, every observation, every person and place and object in our lives. Every day puts more fuel—and the occasional match—in the tank.

I could go on, but I’m going to stop here. My eyesight is fine, and no one is knocking at the door. I have no role in a revolution. I am on a cruise ship, though, and there’s a lot of life to be lived here on the decks, in the theatres, in the pools. Who knows what insights I might glean from evening trivia?