Lest we go totally off the rails here, not all artists are "tortured souls." In fact, it's fairly evident that the vast majority of artists (using the term "artist" in the broadest sense:   painters, sculptors, other visual artists, singers, musicians, composers, conductors, writers, poets, actors, the whole schemer) are reasonably well-adjusted people, at least as well-adjusted as most people are.

One can make up a substantial list of artists who have mental or emotional problems (without necessarily qualifying as "insane") or who managed to do themselves in in an irrational manner, such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jussi Björling, Townes Van Zandt, Hank Williams, Vincent Van Gogh, and the rest. But if you were to break down the various categories of occupations, I'm not really sure that you would find more artists meeting this kind of end than you would find business executives succumbing to the ravages of the three-martini lunch, stock brokers dying from illnesses brought on by stress, or computer programmers eventually snorting themselves into oblivion.

It may be that some artists are tortured souls for reasons other than being in the Arts. Take Beethoven, for example. A recent documentary on PBS said that there is evidence (forensic analysis of strands of Beethoven's hair taken from a lock of his hair at the Beethoven museum) that he suffered from nerve damage from lead-poisoning, which may have had much to do with his chronic illnesses and difficult personality, and was also quite probably the ultimate cause of his deafness. Imagine a musician of Beethoven's caliber noticing that he's going deaf! That, I would say, is ample cause for him to be disturbed, and even though it interfered directly with his music, his musical bent per se was not necessarily the problem.

In contrast to the "tortured soul," I know personally many singers of folk songs, a lead guitarist in a well-known Canadian rock group, a recently retired opera singer (I went to high school with her before she hit it big), and a best-selling science fiction writer (some of these people have names you'd recognize) who are all pretty darned happy people, just tickled pink that they're able to make a good living doing what they love to do.

Sylvia Plath committed suicide. But how many poets are there who have led relatively contented lives? Ernest Hemingway drank like a fish and eventually blew his brains out. But you can easily name a long list of famous writers who did not.

My wife, Barbara, who is a writer and poet, gets pretty tweaked at the idea that you have to be nuts to be truly creative, and I agree with her. We both feel that artists with emotional problems are creative despite their emotional problems rather than because of them. Or at the very least, their emotional problems and their creativity are concurrent characteristics, rather than having a causality relationship. It may be that the stresses of trying to make it as an artist aggravate their problem, but rather than being a necessity for their artistry, it more than likely tends to interfere with it.

I really think the "disturbed artist" is one of these stereotypes that has enough actual examples to make a lot of people think that this is the rule. Consider the number of artists who show no particular signs of mental problems and whom most psychiatrists would declare perfectly normal (at least within "normal" parameters). I think we notice these people more because a) they are the exception rather than the rule, and b) they're usually relatively famous.

Don Firth