How Heartbreak Pushes Artists to Their Greatest Achievements

For all its many inconveniences and agonies, heartbreak appears to have a longstanding and curious power to push artists towards some of their very greatest creations, to heights that they will never again reach once stability has returned: to such masterpieces as Face Value (Phil Collins), Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), Odi et Amo (Catullus), Self-Portrait (Gwen John) and Blood on the Tracks (Bob Dylan). The link between heartbreak and creativity is striking – a testament to how loss can become a gateway to unexpected artistic truth.

Why should abandonment have such salutary side effects – and what, if anything, might those of us who have no plans to cut an album or paint a picture, but who may also have recently suffered a loss, derive from this phenomenon?

The Liberation of Not Caring

We might say that heartbreak encourages us, first and foremost, not to care anymore – and when we cease to do so, some remarkably true and essential things may emerge. By ‘caring’, we mean caring what the neighbours think, caring what it’s ‘nice’ or ‘wise’ to do, caring to be the good boys and girls we’ve aspired to be since childhood. Suddenly, under the weight of grief, none of it matters. We no longer give a damn what anyone thinks, so torn apart and wrecked are we. The person with whom we had imagined the rest of our lives has gone; everything settled and happy has dissolved, and nothing, truly nothing, retains its solidity. We might throw our belongings out of the window, shave our head, crawl naked across the central square, eat mud, spray-paint the apartment, swim out into the ocean and declare ourselves a horse or a lobster. We don’t care if anyone sees us weeping, or if we’re up at 3 a.m. walking in the park singing to ourselves. We don’t mind if we live or die.

And such drastic conditions, far from presaging artistic chaos, may offer precisely the setting in which – finally – we throw off convention, timidity and fear and do what we’ve always longed, but felt too inhibited, to do. Sorrow unblocks our channels of feeling. Desperate, we speak in our authentic accents. Against a backdrop of despair, we risk saying it like it really is. We push our thoughts towards their most dangerous, unconventional conclusions; we articulate ourselves with heedless, unfrightened sincerity. Convention hasn’t saved us; we may as well trust oddity and waywardness. We surrender to our rawest instincts. It’s the last throw of the dice – a final bid before the jump.

The Link Between Heartbreak and Creativity

The great essayist Emerson once wrote: ‘In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts.’ And it may be our grief that lends us the bravery to be newly faithful to these neglected thoughts – and thereby ushers in our genius. The standard ideas have led us nowhere, only to our present misery and solitude, so let’s trust a little more in what we’ve actually been thinking all along but have been too shy to dare to think. Through our tear-stained disinhibition comes creativity. Works emerge that seem to presage and articulate everyone’s real intentions; that speak of how humankind would always wish to speak to itself, were it not so scared.

Loss also helps us to notice what still remains precious. Most of existence feels plunged into darkness, excrement covers the earth – and yet, in the turmoil, one or two things stand out with new brilliance. We have to wait until we’re properly questioning whether we want to go on before we notice – as if for the first time – how ecstatic a flower can be, what gentle encouragement a tree might offer, what delicacy a fig can contain. The big pillars of contentment have been systematically blown up, but there is now room for the more neglected, yet in reality more essential, sources of joy to have their due. We begin to see the grace in a flock of birds, a field of lavender, an Emmental sandwich, a warm bath.

Great art is, in the end, mostly a business of some enlightened (though now we see, also heartbroken) person trying passionately to hold on to reasons to live, while telling us, in effect: notice the clouds; appreciate the apples; don’t bring things to an end before you’ve properly been awed by the spring, a child’s laughter, or four ducklings following their parents across a lake at dusk.

Another motive lurks behind artistic greatness: an intense wish for revenge. The abandonment has rocked the artist to the core. The rascal-like ex-partner is now with their best friend, on holiday in Morocco with the manager from the Berlin office or has run away to a cottage with a viscount from Austria. The sense of rejection and inferiority is beyond endurance. How could they do this to me? Why am I – with all my apparent brilliance, talent and sensitivity – not enough? What was missing? And from such shame and anger is born a new will to try yet harder, to make sure that the deserter will regret their perfidious cowardice for eternity. I may not be enough for you – you might think me boring or routine – but people not yet born will be stirred to the depths by the lyricism of what I am about to create. My work might not have satisfied you, but it will render your abandonment absurd for the ages. To leave the person who made In the Air Tonight (Phil), or Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (Vincent)… Be forever humbled by all that you’ve missed out on, all the sweetness and tenderness and complexity of the soul that you have turned away from – for Derek, Melanie or Luciano! 

Later, of course, the artists recover. They forget about Derek – or Livia or Roisin, James or Akiko. The accolades come in and they find new, more loyal partners who love attending award ceremonies with them and will do up their Mediterranean holiday homes in soothing pastels (funded by royalties from their near-death experiences). And in the process, they grow pompous, happy and smug. No longer do they dare to see life with the freshness of despair. No longer does agony guide them towards the truth. They become frightened of losing the adulation of the crowd and so their output becomes sterile, imitative and largely forgettable. 

The Gift of Suffering

None of this has to be about art narrowly conceived. It’s about how pain can keep us honest and how suffering awakens us to beauty and sweetness. It’s about the hidden gifts of loss and the connection between heartbreak and creativity. It’s about how we may have to wait until nothing makes sense anymore before we’re brave enough to pioneer true meaning. 

It may – ultimately – be about allowing ourselves a moment of pride in our desperate state. There is very little that is fun about being heartbroken. It’s hard to wake up crying every morning for someone who is currently in bed with our old friend, or someone they hooked up with behind our back online. But there can be recompense in the ashes. We may never have thought so clearly before. We may never have been so alert or so alive. We may never have seen so much or been so kind. So much has been taken from us; and yet, we have gained a world.