Last night, as I lay in the tub recovering from Firewood Weekend, I was reading a New Yorker article about a playwright I'd never heard of before and whose plays I will probably never see. I soon realized that if this article (written by Alec Wilkinson) was trying to make me very interested in Jez Butterworth's plays, then it was failing because I really couldn't quite figure out what they were about (though lying in hot water after a long day of stacking wood may have had something to do with that fog). However, it did make me very interested in Butterworth as a guy to hang out with because it was sprinkled with numerous intense remarks about other artists' struggles to make art--or to deal with not making it. For instance:

Butterworth quoted Harold Pinter, with whom he'd grown very close. Pinter, who died in 2008, once said that "when you can't write, you feel you've been banished from yourself."

And this:

He recalled watching a Miles Davis interview on YouTube, in which the jazz legend was asked how, having spent years in the seventies doing pretty much nothing, he had managed to return to work: "And he said 'Dizzy Gillespie came round my house and said "What the fuck are you doing?" and I went back to work.'" Butterworth laughed. "I just loved the idea that it's that simple."

And also this:

A few years ago, Butterworth went to an exhibition of Robert Capa photos in New York. Capa's contact sheets were on display, and you could see the pictures leading up to each famous shot. The differences between photos came down to a matter of milliseconds, yet, Butterworth said, "the one before, that is so nearly the shot that rings like a bell forever," had no resonance at all. "And it taught me something about the difference between nearly and really. Those days when you're looking at a page and thinking this is an imitation of itself--it could be as close as the frame before the actual one, and it's nothing. It's nothing."

Here's his reaction to listening to his friend, the Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance, read Ted Hughes's poem "Daffodils" aloud:

It had such a fundamental effect on the play [Butterworth was trying to write, Jerusalem], because you were suddenly aware of what this person was capable of. You knew the second that it began that what you were hearing was the poem; it was the clearest transmission. It came through on the clearest frequency, and I had never experienced anything like it in my life. It was like hearing Aretha Franklin sing.

Yet even though he seems to have spent much of his interview with Wilkinson acknowledging the power of influence, he was also able to speak precisely about its dangers, especially those that emanate from the work of an admired and well-loved mentor. For we can love our mentors too much; we can begin to pretend that their vision of the world is our own. And it never is.

He says Pinter's friendship was as important to him as Pinter's work, yet he acknowledges that he went through a Pinter "phase," something he was glad to emerge from. "Harold was such an inspiring man and guiding light, and so relentlessly himself. But a play like 'The Homecoming' is fucking horrible--what that is saying about relationships and people. It's unbelievable and brilliant, and so true. But, Christ, it is horrible."

Still, my favorite anecdote appears in the article's final paragraph, when Butterworth is shrugging about the likelihood that audiences will be disappointed by the modesty of his newest play, The River. His remarks are a good reminder that we have to stay attentive to the shifts in our creative paths. It's not our job to give the audience what it expects but to open a door and ask them to walk through it.

Quite apart from taking pride in the show, Butterworth is pleased with [the play] for reasons of perversity. He talked about Neil Young, one of his musical heroes, following up his hit album of 1972, "Harvest," with a series of more muted records, among them "Tonight's the Night." He said, "He's playing 'Tonight's the Night' to an English audience, and they're screaming at him for songs off 'Harvest' and they're all off  'Tonight's the Night,' and at the end he goes, 'I'm going to play you something you've heard before,' and they all cheer, and he played 'Tonight's the Night' again."