by Mark R. DeLong
Is successfully learning to drive a car an achievement of “mastery”? Is being able to pee in a public restroom also evidence of a certain form of “mastery”? I ask because in recent weeks, I’ve read two books that explore mastery—how you get to a level of achievement, what mastery “looks like,” and such. I bought the books because their subtitles—”On the Mystery of Mastery” and “The Making of a Craftsman”—suggested some sort of harmonious overlap, even though the subtitles shared no word to tie them much more than thematically. After all, we know more or less what mastery is, don’t we, and isn’t it near the center of craftsmanship?
Together, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery (Liveright, 2023) by Adam Gopnik and Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman (in USA & Canada: Ecco, 2024; in UK: Doubleday, 2024) by Callum Robinson present variants of mastery—both useful, though often profoundly opposed to each other in revealing ways. Reading them one after another (or nearly so) gave me a chance to compare them, and to see the differences that Gopnik and Robinson draw in their view of mastery.
Metaphorically, the differences come to this: Gopnik is satisfied to pull a knife safely from a drawer and slice bread or some vegetables with ease. Robinson sees the knife as an extension of his hand as he carves; his knife is a mode of expression. It is the difference of the happily common mastering of everyday tasks and a transformative and exceptional mastery. (Both, in their ways, “mysterious,” I should add.)
Everyday mastery
Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work explores seven “mysteries of mastery” mainly through the stories of Gopnik’s (mis)adventures when he puts himself under the tutelage of a master—a driving instructor, master of urban driving and an ambiguous hand wave;[1] an artist acquaintance with classical tastes of “new realism”; Gopnik’s mother, an irrepressible and talented baker; a social worker who specializes in paruresis (an inability to urinate in public places); magicians, both long-gone and contemporary; a dance instructor; a boxing coach. These are quite unexceptional performances, of course, with the exception of the social worker. (Gopnik tells his story of mastering peeing in public restrooms in a chapter simply called “Relieving,” which surely seems appropriate.)
Gopnik’s definition of mastery seems to circle matters of control or, more simply, being able to navigate in a world more or less successfully, accepting and facing risk and avoiding catastrophe in daily life. It is an attitude that turns the everyday into something more heroic, and in the process elevating the status of all who survive the wiles of the world. Mastery is common enough.
One of the training episodes that make up much of the book does involve a kind of mastery that reflects the exceptional; and, as he is a “kunst-kibitzer, a random weigher-in on the lives of painters,” it is in Gopnik’s close interest. He placed the chapter—an interlude, really—after the first of the mysteries, which he calls “The Mystery of Performance.” It involves learning to draw.
He had a couple of reasons to try learning to draw. “Partly it was simple curiosity. How do they do that trick?” he explains. “Another reason was compensatory. For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea of how to draw or of what it felt like to do it. I would distrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art with no idea how to draw?” Thus, for Gopnik, drawing does have a certain connection with his everyday, but drawing as a performance lies beyond the urban everyman’s everyday. Of course, drawing is hard; it’s especially hard in part because we recognize few who have actually mastered it—gallingly, with what seems to be apparent ease, too. You can see their drawings in museums.
Gopnik fails in his first lesson with artist Jacob Collins, an acquaintance he met at his child’s school. But later, in casual conversation while both men were waiting to pick up their children, Collins invites him to his own private studio to watch him draw and to talk. Gopnik does this for a “year or so” on Fridays. He watches, mainly, though he tells his readers, “I had an easel, to be sure, and would make a mark or two as I watched him work.” But Gopnik was observing, not drawing: “Week after week, the same sitter or skull was lit in place, and, though the act of drawing would go on, you would sometimes wonder when it would happen…. Watching Jacob draw was a bit like watching a climber on a sheer rockface, slowly trying out one crampon and then another, looking for a foothold, advancing a couple of feet and then spending the night on the rockface in his bag upright.”
When he does finally move beyond making a mark or two at his easel, Gopnik gets pointers on seeing, in effect a means of translating his observational skills into clear and simple tricks to guide the pencil in his hand. “Imagine that there’s a clock overlaying what you’re drawing,” Jacob told him. The process was a means of focusing on a part of the subject (a skull) and placing lines in relation to each other using the trick of defining angles of clock hands. After the clock-tricked calculation, a jawline emerged. “To my shock, it did have the faintest impress of anatomy, of organic life, of the way a jaw actually joins a skull.” But Gopnik also recognizes, after much practice, that “I wasn’t really drawing. But at least I was making tilts in time.”
Recall the question: “Could one write about art with no idea how to draw?” The question nagged, and came clear during a visit that Collins and Gopnik made to the Met for a show of Bronzino drawings. Bronzino didn’t impress Collins, but “a bizarre engraving from the early 1470s of Silenus, the hideous and yet entrancing fat man” made up for Bronzino’s flop. “That is great!” Collins murmured. And in front of Andrea Mantegna’s “Bacchanal with Silenus” Gopnik’s penciled “tilts in time” came together. Gopnik’s drawing practice fed his judgment.
“I knew the Mantegna was great,” he writes, “but, for the first time, I thought I saw why it was great: the discipline of drawing in play with an instinctive feeling for form, and unwillingness to compromise on what a fat, drunken old oracle would look like—those rolls on his thighs, the three chins, not neat orbs of cherub-chubbiness but real human lard—intermeshed with the dignity of myth. My hand tingled at the thought of trying to draw that way.”
Gopnik continued to learn ways of breaking through his repertoire of form as he drew, and skills grew. But Gopnik’s “mastery” of drawing would not get his work into the Met—but, then, achieving that level of mastery wasn’t his goal. His drawing ability was an accomplishment because it deepened his understanding of art. And that may be the point. “What had I learned?” Gopnik asks at the close of his chapter on drawing. “Accomplishment, and even mastery of Jacob’s perverse and proud kind, was a composite of small steps. There is no straight line that you can draw around a circumstance to take its shape away; there are only marks, made underhand, tilts in time that you erase and adjust and erase again, over and over, until the black dog barks and the afternoon ends and you close your pad, and call it life.”
The mastery that emerges from Gopnik’s essays best applies within an individuals’ or perhaps also families’ and smaller groups’ performances—that is performances of tasks that serve a purpose within their relatively narrow context and executed competently, sometimes (but not necessarily) exquisitely. Yes, life—familial and work life included—is often hard, and there is a certain heroism to abiding and thriving in it.
Still, I hesitate. I find it a little odd to praise the mastery of, say, those who emerge, relieved, from the doors of public restrooms in Manhattan office complexes or from cramped airplane restrooms, however much of an ordeal the task was for the individual. As a category in worlds of accomplishment, I still think mastery distinguishes a performance practiced by thousands, or even millions. I’m sympathetic with Gopnik’s picture of mastery that emerges in the series of his learning experiences. But I can’t help but feel that it is mastery writ small, even though Gopnik is right to emphasize that because of that, the form of mastery he lays out is, well, pretty much everywhere. If so, Gopnik’s form of mastery is “large” only by virtue of being common and powerful because of society’s multitudes.
The Real Work is organized episodically. Seven “mysteries” explore facets of mastery, and interspersed chapters depict Gopnik’s more personal stories; their titles reveal their focus: “Drawing,” “Making Magic,” “Driving,” “Baking,” and “Relieving.” Those chapters I found most entertaining and useful. This episodic framework gives the chapters a stand-alone quality, and I suspect that the structure seems to suggest that Gopnik would seem to learn mastery in transactional fashion. It accumulates by exchange: the paid driving or dance instructor, the medium of the lesson or session.
Mastery that gets passed to the next generation
In contrast to Gopnik’s book, Callum Robinson’s Ingrained reads like a novel, his exploration of mastery intrinsic to the book’s overarching story of rebuilding and recasting a design and woodworking business in Linlithgow, Scotland. Like The Real Work, Ingrained draws from personal experience, and Robinson carefully weaves these episodes into the overarching narrative, strengthening the memoir and clearly tying the rigors of acquiring mastery to the book’s more business-related story.
Robinson’s own development as a craftsman emerges from a complex social setting, including his wife Marisa Giannasi, his talented staff of woodworkers, his father and extended family, and even the townspeople of Linlithgow, where he and his wife set up their handmade furniture store called “Method 74.” That is to say that his is no conventional apprenticeship. But Robinson’s story of becoming a craftsman arises from his deep knowledge of wood and nature, and that knowledge came from long experience, some haphazard, though often expertly (even gingerly) guided by his father, who serves as Robinson’s teacher, counselor, boss, inspiration, and task-master.
Robinson’s use of the term craftsman conveys a deep and essential quality: it is a state of being, a “profession” of sorts that one becomes and that frames a way of looking at the world and navigating within it. In Robinson’s case, mastery grows like the trees in the Scottish forests: persistently, stubbornly, resiliently.
One doesn’t achieve the craftsman’s mastery. One lives it.
The book begins with wood. Robinson and his father arrive at Ben’s timberyard, a ramshackle collection of wood drying sheds, rusting hulks of Land Rovers and equipment, scurrying chickens, a whining sawmill. Ben’s place is no Lowes or Home Depot. “This yard has no sign, no digital footprint, it doesn’t even have a phone,” Robinson tells us. “Secreted away at the end of an unmarked track, five winding miles from the nearest village of any size, its name and whereabouts have spread quietly, organically.” Ben’s timberyard swells with wooden treasure, and that makes Robinson and his father hopeful prospectors or maybe some sort of adventurers: “All I see is possibility. There is rich, golden oak, dense and heavy as bullion, skillfully wrought by carpenters for three thousand years…. There is ghostly, almost luminescent sycamore. Fecund and prolific, a rampant tree. One that, according to tradition, must be cut in the light of the full moon.” He lists the trees and their qualities. “Vivid-orange yew.” “Hard maple, sweet chestnut, black walnut and great wide immovable slabs of flesh-colored beech.” And elm, “the tenacious swaggering dandy of the forest.”[2]
He lands on an oak board that “has the face of an aging football hooligan.” Robinson runs his “hands over the board … feeling the shape and the texture, the live edges—and the attitude—I do know one thing: I know that it makes me smile.”
Robinson ushers his story in with this kind of love and pleasure and treasure-hunting spirit that’s cradled in the near-magical place of Ben’s timberyard. Then in the next chapter, set in his not-so-magical office, he unfolds the essential challenge of the whole novel-like book. He talks with Chris, with whom he’s been working on a very big, very lucrative project—the perilously sole focus of his shop. “His voice, though, is unusually somber, and he gets right to it. ‘I’m really sorry to tell you this, mate … we’ve just found out ourselves. There’s, ahh, there’s been some changes of management and, well … the client has decided to go another way. It’s not happening. The job’s dead.’ ”
Thus, with the contrast of the warm magic of wood and the cold practices of business—especially lost and counted-on business—emerges the essential tension of Ingrained. How to save a business from failure? Keep a small team of craftsmen together? Pay debts and keep body and soul together? Find meaning in work?
The book’s main current runs through matching such challenges, and it is a great story. But the current is fed by tributaries that reveal Robinson’s gradual mastering of woodcraft and creating a place for his craft. Many of these rivulets run through his family—mainly through his father’s sensitive and persistent example—but when I consider the whole of the book, I see Robinson’s focus fall intently on his training after he recounts the story of the opening of his and his wife’s furniture shop in Linlithgow. After that chapter, around two hundred pages into the book, Robinson begins his portrait of the craftsman as a young man. His grandmother gives him the essential push.
If she was a master of anything for Robinson, “granny” must have mastered channeling his youthful and inventive need for challenge. She was, as Robinson put it, “my partner in crime, and she was my friend. But she was more than that, too. Artisans all need patrons; granny was my first.” That first patron gave him a series of commissions; and his father, his most beloved and talented mentor, became his helper in fulfilling them. They were simple at first: “the base for an embroidery, a picture frame, candleholder or breadboard” paid for with what amounted to pocket money. Gradually the commissions grew in complexity: a side table, a coffee table in ash, and cabinets. Robinson’s recollection of his granny is probably the most touching and sentimental of the whole story, and I count it as the most generous tributary feeding the current of Robinson’s account.
Apprenticeship isn’t all sentiment, though. Ingrained recounts other hurdles that had to be surmounted. After working with his father for five years, making beds, cabinets, chairs, tables “and a hundred other things besides” twenty-four year old Robinson decides it’s time to see the world. He heads out, and “several beery weeks later, having burned through most of my cash and just as southern winter was giving way to spring, I washed up in a quiet beachside suburb on the windswept coast of Christchurch, New Zealand.” Sounds wonderful, except for the part of having little cash.
Robinson manages to land a job at a furniture maker of “well-made oak reproductions. French provincial … sort of,” in spite of having dubious qualifications. (Experience? “onetime barman” and “unqualified furniture maker.” Reference? Father.) With newly purchased hand tools, and what I’d call strength of spirit, Robinson manages to crank out a sort of French provincial piece within the required time of eighteen hours. “I have never worked so desperately in all my life,” he recalls. “Battling the clock, and the crowds [of fellow workers], for three frenetic days I ran everywhere, hurried everything. Never more than a degree away from full-blown hysteria.” It was a job. It was an education, too. “By the time I left, I was a journeyman: a craftsman living off his wits and his hands. I had the beginnings of an identity at last, and I would be returning home with a few new tricks up my sleeve.”
The products of the real work, the meticulous repetitions of training and labor with tools—these add up to mastery. Products become emblems of mastery itself. Toward the end of the book, Robinson is back at a woodyard, this one not nearly as storied as Ben’s hidden and magical place. As he looks for elm and shuffles through some recently kiln-dried stock, he notes that “I find the heavy lifting is a little easier than it once was. Those early morning hours in the workshop, the painting, sanding, and oiling have had an effect…. It occurs to me too, as I haul those boards that catch my eye out into the daylight, that the few pieces I choose today will go into someone’s home. That they will be treasured, and maybe one day even handed down to the next generation. That they will have a second life.”
That is Mastery writ large. Adam Gopnik is right when he claims that mastery is performance, but Callum Robinson is right—and, I think, probably truer—by pointing out that mastery also abides and lives on, whether its product be a solid piece of furniture or a luminous phrase or a timeless thought.
Neither The Real Work nor Ingrained includes pictures. That is especially regrettable for Robinson’s book, which begs for photographs. But you can see pictures of Robinson and his wife, their shop in Linlithgow, a staff picture, some of their creations, and Robinson’s father’s marvelous carving of the osprey in elm on the web. Oh, and Robinson’s beloved dog shows up there, too—the only photo rendered in artistic black-and-white. Sadly, the Method74 shop is no longer open, but the work goes on a few miles away in the woodshop.
[1] Gopnik’s article that appeared in The New Yorker in 2015 made its way into the book in the chapter called “Driving.” It was also the “most assigned contemporary piece” in college syllabusses in 2020, with 1150 classes assigning it.
[2] Yes, elm. Despite the ravages of Dutch Elm Disease, the species is holding on in Scotland, “[s]urviving, like a forty-a-day whiskey-sipping octogenarian Highlander, for reasons science still cannot entirely explain.”
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