Informant38

Also, there is a quite explicit assumption (I know all too well, from personal experience) that Art must be produced only at the cost of great Suffering; that it must never be enjoyable, natural, spontaneous; that the "tragic view of life" is incontestably the only view for intellectual" (to the extent to which one worried critic, whose name I won't mention, wrote of the "strange" rejection by Indian literary scholars and critics of this "tragic view" as it was argued by Westerners at a scholarly convention in India some years ago�they strenuously resisted this missionary attempt, for some unknown reason); that Virginia Woolf's statement concerning the artist's necessary "anguish" is taken as a sane, reasonable remark, rather than the personal, limited, and in my opinion totally irrational remark that it is.

In a scolding review in the New York Times Book Review recently, the professor-critic spoke of his subject (John Gardner) as an "over-achiever." Presumably, from the spiteful point of view of the "underachiever," anyone who seems reasonably sane, reasonably happy, unburdened by a priori assumptions of Original Sin, and more or less happily involved in writing�in contrast to concocting imaginary "musts"�is an "over-achiever" and must be punished. When Virginia Woolf said she liked it that Tolstoy had to labor so much in the writing of War and Peace, she was speaking for all puritans�whether they imagine themselves completely secularized or not�and what she says is absurd. One may as well say that he "likes it that" Berryman did suffer, in order to have created some good poetry. The Puritan is a sadist.
Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books