I Am the Envy of All the World and You Just Wish You Could Be Me
Written by John Erianne on July 8, 2008 – 3:13 pm -Perhaps I’m dating myself, but any of you guys remember that Kelly LeBrock commercial from the 1980’s — you know the one I mean : “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”
That old shampoo commercial came to mind while I was reading the recent issue of the Inferno, a local arts newspaper published in the Millville, NJ arts district. There is this column in the bi-monthly newspaper called “Conjuring Creativity,” authored by art dabbler and “creativity coach,” Renee Rasinger. Normally, I wouldn’t bother to comment on one of Renee’s articles because the newspaper is only distributed in the Delaware Valley area and it’s likely none of my own readership has even heard of Renee or her column. Around these parts, she’s kind of infamous and her column is a topic of heated discussion.
Anyway, her recent offering is all about “creative envy”. According Ms. Rasinger:
“It’s an unfortunate fact of life that whenever someone is successful, someone else feels envy for what they’ve accomplished.”
She throws everything in there from Edgar Allan Poe, Amadeus, Carl Gustav Jung, and even The Secret to prove her thesis that creative people are naturally petty and seek to destroy true genius.
Initially, I didn’t think much about her article one way or another. It seems pretty obvious that envy is a part of human existence.
Then, yesterday, after receiving an email from a friend and fellow writer informing me of a forthcoming publication of hers, I started to think about the article more seriously. Is envy really such a big deal? See, by rights — what, with me being a genius and all — if I were susceptible to the green-eyed monster, I should have felt poorly about my friend’s success. Instead, I quickly emailed back with my heartfelt congratulations. I was happy to see this person do well. Not simply because she is a friend, but because I happen to think she’s a damn fine writer who deserves to be successful. And you know what: If it’d been me emailing her about one of my successes, I would have received a similar response from her. And this is true of any number of writers I’ve been associated with over the years. We generally admire and respect each other’s talents. So, to that degree, envy is not a major concern — certainly not the hot-button topic Ms. Rasinger wants it to be.
And the examples she gives to support her thesis are not entirely accurate. While it is true that Poe did alienate himself to some degree by publicly accusing Longfellow of plagarism, it is a stretch to conclude that his literary criticisms were motivated by envy of more successful writers.1 And, this is not the main reason for the setbacks in Poe’s career during his lifetime — the economic conditions of the time, Poe’s own personal demons, and the lack of an international copyright law also played a part in denying him his due (had the Berne Convention been in effect at the time, Poe, no-doubt, would have been a rich man or, at the very least, solvent). I must also point out that Poe is much more popular today than Longfellow and that many of Poe’s contemporaries are unknown to many of us and are not read at all.
Does that mean that there aren’t any petty individuals out there who think the world is out to get them. Of course not, but I’ve found it to be more the exception than the rule. I do agree with Ms. Rasinger on one point — that envy is ultimately self-defeating, but what I’ve found mostly is that the converse is true most of the time. That it’s not Salieri going around trying to destroy Mozart out of envy — rather it’s the self-annointed Mozarts (who are usually nothing of the sort) going around accusing Salieri of trying to thwart them while, themselves, envying Salieri’s position in society. Afterall, Amadeus is a work of fiction.2 The real Salieri did not conspire against Mozart (although, there was a time when Mozart imagined he did, there is no evidence that this was the case). In fact, Salieri was an ardent supporter of Mozart’s music and even collaborated with him on occasion. He was one of a few people who showed-up at Mozart’s funeral to pay his respects.
Occasionally, you will run into individuals who have an inflated sense of their own importance who can’t deal with the fact that they are unimportant so they’d rather imagine that they are being thwarted by an individual who envies them and wants to keep the rest of the world from discovering their genius. To that, I say, why would anyone envy a failure? And to that end, what could anyone do to thwart that person that their own lack of talent, poor attitude, and misplaced ambitions haven’t already done to them? Envy is a problem for those select individuals and for them alone. For the rest of us, why should we care when we are simply too busy doing our own thing to bother with them?
1 Edgar Allan Poe had some very particular ideas about what constituted a genuine American literature. While Poe began as an admirer of Longfellow in his early years as a writer, as he developed as a writer and critic and his own views on literature emerged began to see Longfellow as a hack, and although Longfellow was seen as the preiminent American writer throughout much of the 19th century, as American writing evolved more and more readers began to share Poe’s view of Longfellow — which is why Longfellow is largely unread today except by Longfellow scholars.
2 It’s interesting to note that F. Murray Abraham, who played Salieri in the film and staged versions of Amadeus played a distinctly Salieri-esque character another film, Finding Forrester
