The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

When I said that to Mother Sugar she replied with the small nod of satisfaction people use for these resounding truths, that the artist writes out of an incapacity to live. I remember the nausea I felt when she said it; I feel the reluctance of disgust now when I write it: it is because this business about art and the artist has become so debased, the property of every sloppy-minded amateur that any person with a real connection with the arts wants to run a hundred miles at the sight of the small satisfied nod, the complacent smile. And besides, when a truth has been explored so thoroughly—this one has been the subject matter of art for this century, when it has become such a monster of a cliché, one begins to wonder, is it so finally true? And one begins to think of the phrases “incapacity to live,” “the artist,” etc., letting them echo and thin in one’s mind, fighting the sense of disgust and the staleness, as I tried to fight it that day sitting before Mother Sugar. But extraordinary how this old stuff issued so fresh and magisterial from the lips of psychoanalysis.