Magicians have a beautiful term. Over late-night drinks in New York, or over 3am breakfasts in Las Vegas, they love to talk to one another about “the real work”. By the “real work”, they mean the accumulated craft, savvy and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great.
We all know the real work in whatever field it is we’ve mastered. It’s shorthand, one might say, for the difference between accomplishment and mere achievement. Yet the real work doesn’t seem to be a goal of the way we live, which favours, over the real work, what we might call the rote work. We live in an achievement-driven society in which kids of all kinds and classes are perpetually being pushed toward the next evanescent achievement instead of the next enduring accomplishment. Yet anyone who is a parent of any sensitivity at all recognises that what really stirs and moves children isn’t the “A” you get in the test. No, what really moves and stirs us is accomplishment, that moment of mastery when suddenly we feel that something profoundly difficult, tenaciously thorny, has given way and we are now the Master of It, instead of us being mastered by it. That feeling may not be the very best feeling in life – there are a few competitive others – but it is, I’ve come to believe, the most sustaining feeling. I know how to do this and this is the thing I know how to do.
And so I wanted to study the nature of accomplishment and, more broadly, what I like to call the mystery of mastery. It begins with my effort, after 30 years as an art critic, making vast pronunciamientos on other people’s drawings, to actually attempt to draw a single nude body myself.
Mastery as a critic obviously means something different from what it does to an artist. And the same is true for every other skill: doing it well is different from judging it eloquently. For the longest time, that difference did not seem to me to be vitally important. Yet I came to see that we miss the whole if we don’t attempt to grasp what the real work feels like for other people as they do it.
From drawing nude bodies badly, I went on to driving a car – nervously – and then to boxing awkwardly and to dancing even more awkwardly, my feet being more recalcitrant than my hands. These episodes arose out of emotional moments more than a purposeful plan: I needed at last to learn to drive to relieve my wife and I wanted to re-cement a relationship with my daughter by dancing. But the force of what was happening was that, mostly unplanned, I found that learning one skill after another was cumulative and mutually reinforcing and that doing something well for a lifetime actually teaches us less about what the real work is than doing something badly can teach us when we start doing it anew. Everybody’s good at something. Being bad at something reminds us of how we ever got good at anything.
Everyone is good at something, yes, but what I perceived in apprenticing myself to masters in various fields is that we are surrounded by masters. I don’t mean the world-class saxophone player one might fail to recognise on the subway. I mean something more mundane. I mean the mastery all around us, all the time: the mums and dads, brothers and sisters, teachers and tutors, men and women who are, often for the most eccentric of reasons or with the most improbably eccentric practices and teaching methods, able to impart something of what they know. The people I was blessed to bump into along the way are not mere repositories of knowledge but living exemplars of a practice. The thing about the humanities is that they’re human. And human means specific, this guy or girl right here. The deeper we dive into the problem of mastery, the more certain we are to meet a master – a man or woman uniquely good at what they do and sometimes able to break it down and share it.
When, in the middle of the journey of my life, I decided to learn to draw, I wasn’t lost in a dark, enclosing forest, but I was lost in the Manhattan equivalent: a midweek dinner party that had turned the corner to 11.30 and now seemed likely never to end at all. Having exhausted the exhausted neighbours to my left and right, I turned to my neighbour across the table. I knew that we had kids in the same school. I asked him what he did.
“I’m an artist,” he said. “A teacher. I teach people how to draw.” “Would you teach me how to draw?” I asked, for reasons that at the moment seemed as clear-flying as a lark in spring air, but that, over the next two years, receded and rose mysteriously, like fish swimming in a muddy aquarium.
“Sure,” he said, only a little surprised. “Come by the studio.” His name was Jacob Collins and he explained that he supervised an “atelier” in midtown called the Grand Central Academy of Art.
I armed myself with a sketchbook and a set of pencils and went to visit the Grand Central Academy of Art. I climbed the creaky wooden stairs, took a step into the atelier and blinked. I was in a series of rooms that could have been found in Paris at the Académie in 1855. Easels everywhere, and among them plaster casts of classical statues, improbably white and grave and well-muscled and oversized. The effect was that of a cocktail party of tall white plaster people who worked out a lot. A cluster of students in mildly worn jeans worked on their drawings.
Jacob Collins had someone set me up with an easel and then gave me a small plaster cast of an eye – something taken from a statue perhaps three times lifesize. “Just try to copy that,” he said. Jacob, I knew, was a diehard anti-modernist, classically minded teacher.
I held my pencil tight and began, stabbing at the paper, trying to copy the contour of the plaster eye, then looked at what I had done. I had just made a hard line that limped awkwardly along the top of the page, enclosing a kind of egg shape, meant to be the pupil. I looked at the easels around me, at the play of shadow and shade, the real look of the thing, which seemed so natural. I flipped a page in my notebook and, gripping my pencil tighter and staring back at the eye, tried again. It was even worse, like a football inside a pair of parentheses.
After two more flipped pages, Jacob came over. In a gentle tone, he said, “Yes, well… I would argue that the space you’re asserting here in this corner could be seen as something much spacier. I think you could allow these intervals to… ” He struggled for words.
As I crossed Sixth Avenue two hours later, I was filled with feelings of helplessness and stupidity and impotence that I had not experienced since elementary school. Why was I so unable to do something so painfully simple? Having to make a drawing that looks like the thing you’re drawing was something I had given up not because I was too busy but because I was no good. Now I knew that I never would be.
The little urge that had made me want to learn to draw was still intact, though, and, for the next six months, tugged on my insides like a bad conscience. Could one write about art with no idea how to draw? Still, I would have let the plan to learn drawing moulder in the pile of my unfulfilled ambitions – the pile that sits on the desk of life right next to the pile of escaped obligations – had I not bumped into Jacob one day at the school both of our children attended.
“Hey,” he said. “If you’re still interested, why don’t you come around to my studio sometime and watch while I draw? We can just talk.” And so that Friday I went over to his studio to watch him draw.
It was an old renovated stable and, in decor, was like a smaller version of the atelier – classical busts on shelves and even a hanging skeleton – but more intimate and with Jacob’s own sober paintings (a genial-looking older man, beautiful half-torsos of grave young women, a Berkshire winter landscape or two) hanging above our heads. There was a black lab, who nuzzled visitors, and slept and barked loudly when someone came to the door. Instead of the fluorescents of the atelier, there were jerry-rigged spots, small lamps clamped as needed to wooden pillars to throw a narrow tunnel of warm light on the object to be drawn.
I liked it there, a lot. So, for the next year or so, I went often to the studio on Friday afternoons and kept Jacob company as he drew in semi-darkness. His paintings had a sombre, melancholic cast, in the manner of Thomas Eakins. But his drawings were prestidigitations, magical evocations of the thing seen, pencil drawings as accurate as photographs but with the ability that a photograph lacks to distinguish the essentials. He drew still lifes, nudes and portraits in the same timeless, distilled style.
Over the weeks of listening and watching, I began at last to draw the thing in front of me, or to try to. Jacob made one adjustment in what might generously be called my “technique”. Instead of holding the pencil tight and stabbing away, I was to hold it underhand and make large sweeping, fencing-like gestures that might block out the general shape of whatever it was we were looking at. And then he told me to place an imaginary clock face on top of those first broad, easy underhand gestures.
“Just make tilts in time,” he said. “Imagine that there’s a clock overlaying what you’re drawing. Then make one tilt on the clock, then check to see if it matches up with what you see and then correct it. Now, there, you’ve got that line” – a descending scrawl meant to indicate the upper slope of a skull we were drawing – “and it’s at, oh, what would you say, 12.10? I mean in relation to the vertical axis.”
He stepped back and looked at my easel. “I would argue that, if you look at it again, the time on this clock is really much closer to 12.11 or 12.12…” He trailed off and looked fiercely at the page, then erased my line and let me add another, two degrees lower.
I looked again at the erased space and the new scrawl. To my shock, it did have the faintest impress of anatomy, of organic life, of the way a jaw actually joins a skull.
“Yeah,” Jacob said, nodding, as he looked at the new lean of the line, touching my shoulder as though my pencil had somehow just spat out a Raphael cartoon. He cheered up and went back to his own easel. “Now, don’t worry about, you know, drawing or art. Just draw that clock hand in your head, one contour meeting the next, and ask, What time is it between them?” And so for hours, weeks, that’s what I tried to do. I wasn’t really drawing. But at least I was making tilts in time.
When I decided to learn to drive, I wasn’t, I told anyone who would listen, searching for a metaphor of middle age, or declaring my emancipation from my pedestrian past, or making up for time wasted in the passenger seat. My immediate trigger was simpler: as well as wanting to relieve my wife from being the sole driver, my son, Luke, turning 20, had to get his licence – he was a sophomore at a liberal-arts college just out of town.
“Let’s learn to drive together,” I said. But where, in the typical contemporary memoir, the troubled youth and the alienated father would silently acknowledge their vexed journey toward mastery and adulthood, he merely gave me an opaque look and asked if I was really sure this was a good idea and had I run it by Mom? “Your reflexes are a bit funny, Dad,” he said. I made a joke about being guys together, he mumbled something about gender fluidity, which he had been studying in college, and we agreed to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles together and take the test for learner’s permits.
The very next week, permit in hand, I signed up with a driving school in Manhattan that was supposed to be particularly good with later-in-life students. At 5.30 on a Tuesday afternoon, I got into the driver’s seat of a car parked outside my apartment building and advertised on the side as “Student Driver”.
“I love it, yuuusss, I love it!” Arturo Leon, my driving instructor, said with more enthusiasm than I expected as I adjusted my mirrors. And then, to my shock – I expected to be eased into the pool, inch by inch – he had me pull out into the street and make a left turn on the adjoining avenue and there I was – at rush hour on the Upper East Side, heading north among impatient taxicabs, doing a steady, frightened 15mph while the world roared around me, speeding past our little car. Arturo, I noticed, kept his foot alarmingly well away from the extra brake on his side.
Panic enveloped me. Taxis were honking furiously – furious, I dimly realised, at me! “Let’s give him the hand,” Arturo said, showing me a gentle, palm-out wave. “Just give him the hand: ‘Yes, thank you for sharing.’” He was addressing the car alongside us as its driver yelled soundlessly. He smiled. We moved forward up the avenue. I broke out in a sweat – up Madison into the South Bronx, incredibly doing this thing.
Though I kept my eyes mostly pointed rigidly ahead, in the moments when we stopped at a red light, I got to study my teacher. Cherub-faced and immense, he worked nights as a DJ with his brother, loved to sing scraps of old Motown songs as we drove and thought that rush-hour Manhattan and the crowded shopping streets of the South Bronx, where he lived, were the perfect arena for learning to drive. As I drove, struggling to keep the terror down, Arturo kept up a nonstop patter. I learned about his Ecuadorean parentage and his immigrant upbringing, his failed marriage, his two beloved children and his future prospects, both erotic and professional.
“OK, we’re going uptown, please continue straight ahead – excellent,” he would say casually, hissing the xc. And then: “I love it!” We would head north to approach the Madison Avenue Bridge. “Do I turn here?” I would say, my voice shaky, as livery drivers and cabbies raced around and ahead of me. “If you would just push the car slightly left just here?” he would reply. “Just slide into the left lane. Just look and signal and sliiide. Thank you! Excellent. I’m so happy with the way you did that.” And then: “Thank you for doing that so easily. And we’ll just continue here and now I’m going to stop you here.” He nimbly slipped his foot sideways on to his own brake, as, coming off the bridge at my steady 15mph, I narrowly missed a 16-wheeler coming the other way. The truck driver blasted his horn – his steam siren, really – and Arturo waved gently at him. “Let’s give him the hand, right here,” he said. “The hand means thank you, bless you, fuck you. The hand means thank you so much for signalling to us! Sharing is caring!”
“Become the noodle!” he kept insisting and I soon learned that this meant to relax completely, go limp from head to toe. His constant talk, I decided, was intended to make you become the noodle by not allowing you to think too much. Arturo had me on the FDR Drive at rush hour before I had a chance to think about it.
Unlike drawing, driving seemed at first to negate the usual path of learning: the incremental steps, the curve we go up as one small mastery follows another. Driving, I realised, isn’t really difficult - it’s just extremely dangerous. You hit the gas and turn the wheel and there you are – in possession of a two-ton weapon capable of being pointed at anything you like. The poor people in the crosswalk – the guy in the tank top striding indifferently forward; the mother yanking at her child’s hand – had no idea of the danger they were in with me behind the wheel! I had no idea of the danger I am in doing the same thing, day after day. Cars are terrifying and cars are normality itself.
Arturo’s method, assuming that there was one, was, in part, to make driving a car more like walking on a sidewalk, full of recognitions and hand waving and early avoidance, tamping down sudden shocks. Driving so much with Arturo, I began to enjoy it and to see that driving is one of the last democratic things we do. I had long thought of cars as a weapon against civilisation and had said as much many times in print. But now I saw that driving was, in another way, civilisation itself: self-organising, self-controlling, a pattern of agreement and coalition made at high speed and, on the whole, successfully. “Just signal and slide over,” Arturo would urge me on the highway, and, as I signalled, other cars – other drivers – actually let me slide over! No cop appeared at the edge of the road to enforce the rule. They just did!
The day of the road test arrived at last and I drove all the way to Bronxville, Arturo in the seat beside me, to collect Luke from his university campus. The tests were being given in a neighbourhood not far from there.
I took the exam first. When I got out of the car, some minutes later – having parked, turned and reversed to the satisfaction of the unsmiling examiner – clutching my little piece of paper, Arturo embraced me and we jumped up and down like a pitcher and catcher after the last out of the World Series. “I knew you could do it! I knew it! I knew it!” He seemed almost as excited as I was.
I called my dad, in Canada. He was pleased but didn’t seem particularly impressed. “The important thing is that now you know how to drive,” he said. Now you know how to drive – the simple monosyllables hovered in the air. There was wisdom buried in their simplicity. The highlights of life are first unbelievably intense and then absurdly commonplace. I am now a licensed driver. But almost everybody is a licensed driver. Having a child born is a religious experience. But everybody has kids. Everybody drives and now I can too.
It seems that if you surrender sufficiently to allow a simple pattern to imprint itself on your mind, an inordinate gift will blossom. At least, that is the promise of mastery. Commit to the tilts or the finger patterns – or for that matter to being the noodle – and you’ll achieve something that, if not exactly mastery, is at least an actual accomplishment, a happy patch, a bit of software that you had never had before. Having it now, however poorly you install it, makes yours an expanded and extended mind and body, a significantly different self than the one you were assigned at birth. Repetition and perseverance and a comical degree of commitment – simply the commitment both to recognise the absurdity of your effort and the sincerity of its goal – are disproportionately rewarded in the real world of the real work.
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This is an edited extract from The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery by Adam Gopnik, published by riverrun (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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