The Ego Conundrum
Do you need to have to have a big ego to create art?
Today’s Writing Music: “On My Way” by Alex Lahey (from the Mitchells vs. the Machine Soundtrack)
Today’s Reading: This month I’m reading Moby Dick with Yiyun Li and A Public Space, and you should too!
My wife’s grandfather, Joe, was a writer. He went to the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop back in the 1950s, after returning from serving in World War II as an airman. He was shot down three times while doing bombing runs over Germany, but he managed to survive the war, just as he’d previously survived a tough childhood in Brooklyn during the 1930s. He looked and sounded a lot like Al Pacino, if Al Pacino had been Jewish. And in fact he spoke often of his double life as an actor, when he went back to school to study theatre at Sarah Lawrence and later performed in a number of plays including Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, and worked with Andrei Serban at La Mama in New York City.
Joe worked as a public school teacher in New York City for many years and then later in Ardsley, and his favorite thing to do was bring students to see plays on Broadway, especially kids from working class families that might never get the chance otherwise. He retired to Maine after decades of teaching, and while there he continued to do good in the world, volunteering early on for Obama's primary campaign, and also helping refugees from Africa to settle in Maine—this after Joe just happened to meet a man working at LL Bean one day, while shopping for some boots.
I say all of this, basically, to get across the fact that Joe was the real deal. He lived a bold life dedicated to art and teaching and helping others. At the same time he was ever-confident, always in charge, and uncompromising. Quite the role model, for me.
Before I first went up to Maine to meet Joe, while I was still in grad school, I was told about how, years earlier when Joe met my now father-in-law, he took him out to the woods and made him chop down some trees with a chainsaw. I steeled myself for some similar test of my mettle—but thankfully Joe didn’t ask me to do any lumberjacking. Instead, he wanted to read something I’d written. Which was, frankly, about as terrifying as being made to use heavy machinery.
I showed Joe a very short story called “The Theory of Everything” that I’d recently published in The Columbia Spectator. To my great relief, he liked it a lot. My reward was a three hour lecture about Studs Terkel, Kafka’s Parables & Paradoxes, how method acting taught him about character development, and Maurice Stanley Freidman’s book on Melville and Dostoevsky, The Problematic Rebel. I can count on a few fingers the things in life I’ve enjoyed more than listening to that while drinking hot coffee on a cold afternoon in Maine while staring out at the choppy waters of the bay.
Joe had strong opinions about everything. This was a man for whom there were right and wrong ways of doing everything from operating a tractor to building a snowman. If he ever was hesitant about anything, I never saw it. Over breakfast one morning he suddenly, gruffly demanded I tell him what my intentions were towards his granddaughter.
Mouth full of bacon and eggs, I said, “Good?”
And he seemed to like that answer.
At some point Joe and I ended up alone in a car together, driving back from a walk we’d all been on somewhere. We talked about writing and he recalled his own ambitions, at my age, to publish a book. He’d been told, by his professors at Iowa that his thesis, a collection of short stories about Brooklyn Jewish family life in the 1930s, had promise.
Well—actually, what they’d said was that it “failed at a very high level,” a phrase he repeated often, and with pride.
I asked him why he’d gone into acting, and teaching, instead of moving ahead with his writing back then. His answer surprised me.
“I never really had the ego for it,” he said.
Now, if I haven’t painted a good enough portrait yet of Joe, I apologize to him and to you. What I can say is that a lack of ego was not, in any way something I’d ever have diagnosed him with. Joe was the supreme authority on everything and anything he ever talked about. He was the sort of guy whose confidence came into the room ten seconds before he entered. He’d been on stage in front of hundreds of people, and worked in classrooms his whole life. I’ll spend my whole writing life removing qualifiers like “kind of, sort of, a little bit, maybe, perhaps, etc.” from my work—Joe was the sort of guy whose vocabulary simply did not contain those phrases in the first place. He lived in a world of black-and-white certainties, and spoke commandingly, if usually also kindly.
So what could he have meant by his claim that he’d never had the ego to be a writer?
In the many years since that conversation, I’ve questioned it constantly. Because I don’t live in a certain world, and never have—I’m always open to suggestion, revision, outside points of view, the possibility that I am wrong. If I come across as confident in my work, it’s usually me channeling someone who actually was—Hemingway, maybe. Joe, probably.
There I go again.
I also don't think of myself as someone with a big ego. Although I don't think I'm low on self-esteem exactly either.
Ego. Confidence. Self-esteem. Do these all even mean the same thing? I realized I had no idea.
All this time, I’ve wondered what role “ego” does play in writing—or in creating any kind of art. What does it even mean to have an “ego”?
According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the tripartite human psyche, we all have an ego. It is the part of our thinking system that mediates between our “id,” which is the impulse we have to seek what’s pleasurable, and our “super-ego,” which is our moral consciousness. Our ego's job is to negotiate our ideals and our desires with the real world in which we have to live.
Not an easy task, I’d say. It also sounds like a pretty good description of what a fiction writer has to do… translate id-based imagination and super-ego ideals into the textures and boundaries of reality.
Our “ego” is also thought of as being the source of our self-esteem: how we perceive and value ourselves. As we negotiate between what we want, what we think we should want, and what is realistically available, one major component of the negotiation is who we think we are, and how it seems others percieve us. Ultimately the ego then coordinates what value we hold ourselves in.
If I think my writing is amazing, but the real world tells me I've failed at a high level, you might call that a blow to my ego. I have to then negotiate my own former idea of myself with what reality has spit back, and figure out how that changes my valuation.
The same, funny enough, can happen the other way. If I think something I wrote is mediocre, and a critic tells me it's fantastic… I have a hard time deciding if they see more than I can, or if they are just full of it.
Making art, and sharing it with the world requires a constant push and pull between these things. So you can see why it might help to have a “strong” ego, capable of working out these disparities over and over and over.
We need to have strong self-esteem to be psychologically healthy… to hold the belief that we are good and worthy of living, receiving love, being happy, and so on.
But when we talk about someone having a “big ego” we usually think of this as a negative thing. This person has too much self-esteem. They believe they deserve too much of what they want. They value themselves too highly, or others too little. They dismiss all or most criticism, and so will likely not develop past whatever stage they've decided is already fantastic. On the flip side, if your self-esteem is low, you'll dismiss all your praise and amplify all your critiques and begin to feel like it is hopeless.
It makes sense that we equate having a (big) ego with those who are successful. They believe in themselves too much to be stopped. If someone has sculpted a masterpiece, or published a novel, then they must have thought they had something within them of unusual value. They believed that their feelings and thoughts deserved to be felt and seen by others. That these ideas were worthy of respect and admiration, even.
And here we come to the conundrum. We need a strong ego to persist in the face of reality, but if it is too strong (or weak) it will land us in an unhealthy fantasy.
Someone who believes that everyone should listen to everything they have to say, we’d call an “egomaniac”—the implication been that they have a psychologically unhealthy sense of their own importance. That they think too highly of themselves and we dislike that kind of overvaluing a lot. It makes us feel as if this other person believes themselves to be better than we are, that their thoughts are of higher value than ours, or that they think they’re more deserving of success/admiration/etc.
Often then we over-correct, and go for a hyper-humble stance, downplaying our own work and effort.
For many writers I know, and myself included, this leads to a pretty ridiculous straddling—we try and have it both ways, by striving hard to succeed in our art and then talking down our accomplishments, marking our announcements of publications with a #humblebrag, or even diminishing them in some way by saying “I did a thing!” or something like that—I think this has only become more magnified in a social media landscape where we see someone announce they’ve just one a prestigious fellowship within a half hour of posting a photo of a semi-collapsed cake they’ve just baked, or something like that.
In Joe’s day, I think, there would have been few candid encounters of that sort with famous writers he admired. I wonder if he got to see the doubts and uncertainty behind the writers and actors he admired… at least in any way that comes close to the way I can on Twitter today.
Seeing that can be freeing, I think, and also frustrating. It can reassure me when I'm unsure myself, but it can also undermine my certainty when I'm feeling confident. How can I think my work is coming along really well, when even X is running around hyperventilating on Twitter that their latest draft is a disaster?
This is the ego conundrum… too much, too little? Care what others think? Don't care? Dream of fame and adulation? Aspire only to make great art, even if no one else ever notices or appreciates it?
Maybe you know someone who has a really out-of-control ego. I know a few. Have you ever been to a wedding and listened to someone deliver a toast that was actually almost entirely about themselves? I have and I've seen someone do that at a funeral too, come to think of it. I have listened to friends telling me with no trace of irony that they will succeed in something because God wants it to happen (maybe that’s religious faith, but I think it is at least also blended with a lot of ego too); I’ve listened to someone describe an app they’re developing that will absolutely save the world.
It’s uncomfortable to witness this kind of thing, and past a certain point egotism becomes narcissism and could even qualify as mental illness—I’m thinking about a certain former President right now…
All of which is to say that it’s no wonder many of us find ourselves trying to look and sound as little like this as possible, even as we work very hard to achieve big things in our lives.
What we end up needing to do, as Freud’s model describes, is negotiate between these things in our minds. To find some kind of healthy balance, where we have enough self-esteem to create, to survive negativity (internal and external), and persist through rejection and failure. But at the same time, we need to check our ego too, and remember that what we’re doing is not all about ourselves, and cannot be if we want to do it well.
I once wrote about how, with my first novel coming out, I recalled an old family saying about getting “a big head" and how it helped keep me grounded during the process (along with becoming a father.) Today I find that I need the opposite more often—some kind of pep-talk with myself that will inflate that head back up again enough to allow me to write more confidently. This isn’t a contradiction—it’s a balance, and one that we can’t strike once, but which must be continually remade as the process is undertaken.
It’s important to make the distinction between a desire to take our experiences and create something meaningful and beautiful to share—and a need to make everything in life about the greatness of one’s self. One really has nothing to do with the other at all. If other people confuse them for one another, don’t let yourself do the same.
When Joe passed, I went to the library and used the IntraLibrary Loan service to request his thesis from Iowa. To my delight, it arrived less than a week later: the original copy, bound in boards, with incredibly thin onionskin pages. Reading through it, I wondered about the “failure at a high level” comment he’d often joked about—the stories felt, to me, straight out of Call it Sleep or maybe Heller or Malamud. I even wondered if I could get permission to have one published posthumously—but I decided against it. Joe had never seemed to be unhappy with his work remaining unpublished, whatever it had to do with ego, or not.
I don’t know how much he wrote or didn’t write after finishing his thesis. I remember him saying he'd sent a story to Collier’s and gotten a rejection, and then stopped submitting his work at some point. He didn’t talk much about it… it didn't seem to bother him. He tended to, instead, talk about the accomplished students he’d taught and they books they’d published, and how great they were, and how he’d helped them find their voices and get through the gauntlet.
I know that he was still writing in his later life, and I read a few short political parables he wrote, involving talking woodland creatures and reminiscent of the Kafka pieces he’d encouraged me to read.
That day in the car, sometime after he told me about the ego conundrum, I recalled to Joe the old cliché that there is nothing scarier than the blank page. Joe agreed, but then he added something new to that.
He said, “Yeah but then there’s the part afterwards when you look back at the page, and it’s not blank anymore.”
And I agreed. Joe was right, as always.
Nothing beats that.
Writing Towards the Fun #25: This one's quick and easy and never steers me wrong. I call it the “Joe Special” and it's never steered me wrong. Open up a new document, open to a blank page… stare at that white void, and fill it up. With anything you want at all. When you're done, look back at what you've written. If you like it, or if you don't, take a second to appreciate the fact that it didn't exist a few minutes ago. Now keep going. And have fun!
Wow! thanks Kris. I needed this today.