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A guy I met with yesterday had met Michael Caine.
He was hired as an extra on Educating Rita. One day at the canteen, he saw Caine just behind him, waiting in line for food like everyone else. He offered to let Caine go ahead of him, and Caine refused.
“Good God, no. You’re just as hungry as I am.”
And so, he reported, in wonder, Michael Caine, despite being such a big star, had no ego.
You here these stories often, about big stars. They say Rod Steiger, or Peter Sellers, or Laurence Olivier, seemed to have no ego at all. Marilyn Monroe was famously unsure of her attractiveness.
And this is actually not surprising. It all stand to reason.
If you had a large ego, how could you be a good actor?
The whole trick of acting is to inhabit someone else’s ego. To put yourself aside, and be them instead of you for a while, to act and think and say as they would.
You need a vanishingly small ego for that.
Perhaps you need that for any art. Keats called it “negative capability.”
As to the poetical Character itself ... it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.... A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. …
When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no despondence is to be placed on what I said that day.[i]
This is why it takes a life of suffering to produce great art. This is “depersonalization,” a typical symptom of abuse: having been demeaned, rejected, criticized, the depressed have low self-esteem, low ego, and even a tendency to lack a sense of self. This makes it easy for them to temporarily inhabit other selves, giving them a keen sense of empathy for others.
This also means that anyone who can generate genuinely good art has to be a good person—someone who tends to think of others before themselves. You hear stories of artists doing “anti-social” things, but society was never a guide to morality. Being conventional is really the opposite of being moral—so long as you just do what everyone does, you are not making moral choices.
And anyone who has bad taste in art, is pretty surely a bad person. For getting fully into a work of art, or a fictional character and their struggles, takes the same talent of getting beyond ego and seeing things from a different perspective.
This is a useful test to apply in daily life. You cannot judge a book by the cover, but you can judge the person by the bookshelf.
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