Fenton Johnson - At the Center of All Beauty

ALSO BY FENTON JOHNSON

Crossing the River

Scissors, Paper, Rock

Geography of the Heart: A Memoir

Keeping Faith: A Skeptics Journey among
Christian and Buddhist Monks

The Man Who Loved Birds

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays

Solitude and
the Creative Life

FENTON JOHNSON

Copyright 2020 by Fenton Johnson

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Jacket design by Sarahmay Wilkinson

Jacket art: Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 19041906 (oil on canvas), Cezanne, Paul / Buhrle Collection, Zurich, Switzerland / Bridgeman Images

Book design by Ellen Cipriano

Production manager: Lauren Abbate

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Johnson, Fenton, author.

Title: At the center of all beauty : solitude and the creative life / Fenton Johnson.

Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044449 | ISBN 9780393608298 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393608304 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Solitude. | Personality and creative ability. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) | Johnson, Fenton. | Gay menUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC BF637.S64 J64 2020 | DDC 155.9/2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044449

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For Paul Quenon
poet, rascal, friend, monk

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

Frank OHara, Autobiographia Literaria

I was always my own teacher.

Eudora Welty, One Writers Beginnings

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
Monks and Rascals

CHAPTER 2
The Forging of a Solitary

CHAPTER 3
I to Myself (Henry David Thoreau)

CHAPTER 4
The Psychology of the Earth (Paul Czanne)

CHAPTER 5
Formidably Alone (Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson)

CHAPTER 6
The Generosity of Bachelors (Henry James)

CHAPTER 7
All Serious Daring Begins Within (Eudora Welty)

CHAPTER 8
The Lover of God (Rabindranath Tagore)

CHAPTER 9
A Soundless Island in a Tideless Sea ( Zora Neale Hurston)

CHAPTER 10
A Man Alone, A Single Woman (Rod McKuen and Nina Simone)

CHAPTER 11
Those Who Seek Beauty Will Find It (Bill Cunningham)

CHAPTER 12
From Loneliness to Solitude

I N MY SEVENTH GRADE , on a spring day deep in the Kentucky hills, aged and tremulous Sister Marie-Thrse (with the dead-on cruelty of children, we nicknamed her B.C.) assigned us to draw posters illustrating some important principle from our Roman Catholic catechism. I chose to draw Three Roads to Heaven, illustrating a page from the chapter on vocationslife callings; the word owes itself to the Latin verb vocare , to call.

A series of coincidencesif such existhas brought that poster across forty-plus years of time and a thousand miles of space to hang on my office wall. In it I drew the path of life leading through a field of smudges toward a heaven of puffy cloudsthe smudges had been yellow tulips, but Sister Marie-Thrse, an intelligent woman born to a hardscrabble rural life and thus one who would know, declared there were no yellow tulips on the road to heaven and hovered, rubber-tipped pointer poised to strike at any sign of resistance, while I erased them one by one.

Where the field ended, I drew two footprints pausing before a question mark. The road forks into three paths, each leading to one of the three church-designated callings. The leftmost path leads to THE RELIGIOUS LIFE , where I drew a cloud enclosing a cross, a priests biretta, and a book labeled Divine Office . The middle path leads to MARRIAGE, whose cloud encloses a wedding ring, a baby bassinet labeled Junior , and a page from a legal contract (how prescient I was!). The rightmost path leads to a cloud labeled SINGLE , which our catechism offered as a legitimate calling, officially on a par with the other two options. I recall an evening spent trying to conceive a visual metaphor for the solitary life. Finally I settled on a series of musical notes dancing over the caption Party Time!

Well into midlife, what I find most remarkable about that poster is my catechisms teaching that being single was a legitimate vocation, i.e., like the religious life, like marriage, a response to a particular and urgent summons from a force greater than individual need or choicea summons, as you wish, from destiny, from the gods and goddesses, from God. That the growing good of the universe includesindeed, requiressolitaries is a revolutionary teaching. The Hebrew Bible hasnt much to say on the subject, but the cultural imperative in Judaism to marry and bear children is as strong, possibly stronger even than in Hinduism. Islam views solitaries as shirkers at best, troublemakers at worst. Buddhism grounds itself in monastic practicesolitaries living in communitybut presumes that anyone living outside that community will marry.

Another remarkable aspect of that poster: at twelve years old, I already knew which path had chosen me. Father Gettelfinger, even more aged than Sister Marie-Thrse, asked each student in my class. I was the only one to respond, Single.

Popular culture tells us that, even in our postmodern age, being single is party time (see my poster) for people in their teens and twenties. After that, single is a way-station until marriage, or between marriages, or a dumping-ground designation for those unable to attract a mate, or those who are too picky, or those who are so sexually repressed or ravenous or selfish that they cant submit to the civilizing bonds of conventional marriage, which ( pace Freud) is the most healthy option and the most selfless path an individual may follow.

Or such was the myth, until now. We are in the midst of a demographic revolution whose long-term implications may be as significant as the twentieth centurys mass migration from the countryside to the city. I speak of the astonishing numbers of people worldwide who are choosing to live alone or who deliberately carve out periods of solitude from otherwise conventionally coupled lives. The evidence is accumulating that when people, especially women, are presented with the opportunity and the means to live alone, many will sacrifice to seize it.