From Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift” (thanks, Evelyn!)
As a parable of a gifted person, “The Shoemaker and the Elves” is also a parable for artists. Most artists early on find themselves in the position of the shoemaker on the first night — a talent has appeared, but it’s naked, immature. Ahead lie the years of reciprocal labor which precede the release of an accomplished gift. To take a literary example, George Bernard Shaw underwent a typical period of retreat and maturation before he emerged as a writer. The young Shaw started a career in business and felt the threat not of failure but of success. “I made good in spite of myself, and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposted I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting go.” He was twentry. “In Marche, 1876, I broke loose,” he says. He left family, friends, business and Ireland. He spent about eight years ‘in absentia’, writing constantly (five novels, published only toward the end of his life — and then with a note by Shaw asking the buyer not to read them). Erik Erikson has commented:
“Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for theif gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature.”
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
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