Two similar tasks on which I’ve been engaged over the past couple of weeks have prompted similar thoughts–although perhaps for different reasons. The first involved reviewing, sorting and largely shredding an enormous collection of personal correspondence dating back to the early 1980s. The second (completed today) involved sorting out all of my old academic publications, and organising these into some kind of intelligible order. In each case I have found myself asking why I am doing it, and who (if anybody) might be interested in the result.
By coincidence, my wife and I have decided on a partial reorganisation of a couple of our rooms, one of which serves as a kind of study for her. The process has thrown up a further question of how I store my pictures. Clearly I need to do some sorting out in that area in the near future. Once again, I find myself asking for whose benefit and to what purpose I am storing all of this material.
I all of these three cases there are two aspects to the problem. Obviously each of these tasks has been prompted in some measure by the convenience of my own life, and the space we inhabit. (Can I find what I want when I want it, and so on.) There is another side to the problem, however, and that has to do with the extent to which any of this material will be of use or interest to other people when I die.* In other words, what am I leaving to “posterity”? The answers I have been forming are significantly different in each of the three areas of activity mentioned.
In the case of the record of my personal relationships that has been distilled from the correspondence, I am clear that it will be helpful to members of my family to gain some understanding of me, and the value I have placed on these relationships, and how they have led me to my current situation. Most people seem to have some degree of interest in family history, and what I have tried to do is to clarify an aspect of that about which my family are probably unclear. Over the years I have accumulated a pretty substantial archive of family materials, and the sorting of my correspondence recently will contribute to that general record. Just as I have derived a good deal of satisfaction from finding out about my own great-grandparents, so I assume that a generation as yet unborn might (for a variety of reasons) be curious about me.
My relationship to my academic materials is quite different. I think that I am fairly proud of what I achieved, and I have gained considerable satisfaction from contemplating the evidence for that. I don’t expect any of my family to read through this accumulation of what they would probably find to be turgid academic prose. They can chuck it all away when I’m gone, and unlike my digest of personal correspondence they probably will do so. If I have contributed anything to “posterity” through my academic writing it has taken the form of my engagement in an ongoing collective endeavour to understand the world, though the discipline of sociology. My contribution to that will be, in the longer term, anonymous. Even so, I get a certain amount of satisfaction from the evidence that I have been a part of that shared project.
My thoughts about the possible future for my art were prompted by a TV programme about the problem of demonstrating the true provenance of a picture claimed to be by Vuillard. I have to recognise also that on several occasions my wife has asked (looking at the racks of my pictures) what she will do with all of this when I’m gone. Do I expect there to be, in some future time, an ardent (and remunerative) interest in the provenance of a picture claimed to be by me? Will any of my pieces appear in the sale room at Christie’s? Oddly, these questions don’t actually interest me very much, and I’m certainly amused rather than concerned by them. I’m far more interested in the experience of painting a picture than I am in its future. Of course, it is satisfying to see one’s work on display for others to see, and very gratifying when something I have painted appeals to somebody else to the extent that they want to buy it. Even so, I have to admit, if I am honest, that I really paint for myself rather than for any potential market.
I expect to continue this discussion tomorrow, with an anecdote about a particular picture I painted, but enough is enough for one day.
*I have no intention of doing so at the moment, but at the age of 77 clearly this event is getting closer, and coming into focus.