Book Review- 'Creators' by Paul Johnson

God’s Gift to Man

by ROGER KIMBALL
http://www.nationalreview.com


In 1988, the British historian Paul Johnson published a slim volume called Intellectuals. What is an intellectual? Johnson defined the beast as “someone who thinks ideas are more important than people,” and proceeded to take readers on an entertaining, though decidedly unedifying, tour of typical intellectuals from Shelley and Karl Marx to Bertrand Russell and D. H. Lawrence. My, what an unlovely tribe! Self-absorbed, hypocritical louts, most of them, infatuated above all with the thought of their own higher virtue.

Johnson is a consummate storyteller, and Intellectuals became an instant bestseller, gobbled up eagerly by nearly everyone except those whose follies it anatomized, intellectuals themselves. What really rankled, especially among academic intellectuals whose audience generally numbers in the low three figures, was the book’s popular success. Among other things, Intellectuals illustrated a principle enunciated with all possible clarity by the English music critic Ernest Newman: “Journalist,” said Newman (himself a fixture for decades at the London Times), is a term of contempt employed by writers who are not read to refer to writers who are.

What especially infuriated critics was Johnson’s systematic unwillingness to take intellectuals at their own self-estimation. These people, most of them, were bad hats, and Johnson did not forbear to point out their brutality; their cavalier disregard of friends, family, and supporters; and their often comical inflation of their own importance. Most readers found the book hugely entertaining, but some complained that it was “mean-spirited,” concentrating on the failures and foibles of human ambition, not its aspirational yearnings. Creators is in part a response to that criticism.

The book, Johnson tells us in his opening pages, forms the second part of a trilogy that began with Intellectuals and will end with Heroes, which will dilate on those “who have enriched history by careers or acts of conspicuous courage and leadership.”

There are a few surprises in Creators. I for one was dismayed to find that Johnson’s list of the five architects of outstanding accomplishment in the English-speaking world did not include Stanford White. (Had I to choose, I’d substitute White for Johnson’s candidate Frank Lloyd Wright.) But this is a quibble.

Creators is a riveting collage of a book. Its ambitious scope is adumbrated by its subtitle: “From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney.” Shakespeare, Bach, Jane Austen, Turner, and T. S. Eliot are here; so are Wagner, Tiffany, Victor Hugo, and the dress designer Cristóbal Balenciaga. (The chapter on Balenciaga and Christian Dior is a special delight.) Along the way Johnson glances at figures as disparate as Imhotep, vizier or chief minister to a succession of Egyptian pharaohs circa 2600 B.C., and Thomas Telford, the great Scottish bridge-builder and engineer.

Johnson has prepared the widest possible canvas upon which to paint his tableau. Creativity, he points out, is a fundamental God-given grace of human life, inherent in all of us, as much in the humorist whose creative gift issues in the transient if utterly absorbing phenomenon of laughter as in the architect, painter, musician, or writer, whose creativity issues in more lasting monuments.

One of the reasons that Intellectuals garnered the criticisms it did was that it was misread as an exercise in intellectual history. Johnson was not endeavoring to explain the ideas of (say) Karl Marx or Jean-Paul Sartre. That has been done a hundred times over. Instead, he endeavored to provide a sort of moral archeology of the figures he discussed. His aim was to understand their work, their ambition, in the context of their lives. He is up to something similar in this book. Creators is full of fascinating aperçus and asides. I especially liked Johnson’s recollection of his meeting with T.S. Eliot at a party in 1953. The sole comment the poet addressed to him was, “There is nothing in this world quite so stimulating as a strong dry martini cocktail.”

Still, Creators is not a book “about” Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or any of the other characters who populate its pages. Instead it canvasses the pains and pleasure of creativity, offering an inventory of some of the most significant ways in which the urge to create has incarnated itself in human history. Johnson aims to provide a Baedeker for high-level creativity as it has manifested itself in (mostly) Western art and culture. It is worth noting that the expression of creativity, even creativity at a high level, does not require genius.

Johnson devotes a chapter to Jane Austen (along with some other women novelists), and though he greatly admires Austen’s novels — what sane person does not? — he is probably right that she “was not a genius.” This is not to diminish Austen’s achievement but rather to suggest that genius may not be the essential concomitant of superlative artistic, intellectual, or cultural achievement. There are after all plenty of geniuses about. Often, their productions are more curious than substantial. Think only of Hegel: a man, as Kierkegaard said, who built an intellectual palace but lived in the guard house. As the English essayist Walter Bagehot observed in another context, “In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.” The allotropes of creativity are as various as the individuals who embody the creative spirit. Nonetheless one can discern leitmotifs of the creative spirit.

For example, most visual artists of superlative accomplishment begin young — three is the age Johnson mentions — and follow their careers with an all-absorbing passion. Dürer was typical: “As soon as he could hold a pen,” Johnson tells us, “he was drawing.” It was the same with Turner and his Japanese equivalent Hokusai, the 19th-century painter who “in effect created Japanese landscape painting from nothing.” Turner had his first watercolor accepted by the Royal Academy when he was 16, his first oil four years later. He became a full Royal Academician at the unusually young age of 27. Hokusai, who lived to his late 80s, began young and pursued his art with astonishing single-mindedness. At 83, he sent an autobiographical fragment, as touching as it is whimsical, to his publisher:

From the age of six I could draw forms and objects. By 50 I had turned out an infinite number of drawings. But I am not happy about anything I did before 70. Only at 73 did I begin to understand the true form and nature of birds, fish and plants. By 80 I had made a lot of progress. At 90 I will begin to get to the root of it all. By 100 I will have reached a Superior State in art, undefinable, and by 110, every dot and line will be living.

It is clear that Johnson — himself an amateur watercolorist of impressive accomplishment — greatly admires the creative spirit in action. But it is also clear that he is under no illusions about the moral claims of creative spirits. Writing in passing about the dissolute poet Dylan Thomas, Johnson notes that no one who studies creators will find them “a particularly amiable or grateful tribe.” Indeed, many of the creators he discusses — Wagner, Victor Hugo — were prodigies of egoism and worse. To what extent they go together — the egoism and the creativity — is a question Johnson touches on but does not settle.

The biggest offender in Johnson’s menagerie is undoubtedly Picasso, one of the most curious cultural figures of the 20th century. Long before his death in 1973, Picasso had emerged in the public imagination as perhaps the creative artistic genius of the period. For many, Picasso was to art as Einstein was to science. Of course, not everyone was susceptible. Few perhaps went as far as Evelyn Waugh, who for a period ended his letters with the valediction “Death to Picasso.” But there were many who contemplated Picasso’s deliberate assault upon nature and the human figure with horror, not admiration.

What seems clear from our vantage point thirty-odd years after Picasso’s death is that his reputation owed as much to the public intoxication as to his achievement. Picasso may have been, as Johnson observes, “the most restless, experimental, and productive artist who ever lived,” but he was also an artist whose primary endowment was the ability to sense “exactly how much the vanguard of the art world would take.” The two words that best describe Picasso’s activities as an artist — as a man, too — are “cunning” and “rage.”

From an early age, Picasso knew (in Gertrude Stein’s phrase) exactly how far to go in going too far. The astonishingly protean quality of Picasso’s work — from the sentimentalities of the Blue Period to the depredations of his cubist and post-cubist “portraits” — bespeaks not only an abundance of creative élan but also a fundamental vacuum at the center of his art. “Obviously,” Picasso said in an aside that speaks volumes about his attitude toward his art, “Nature exists so that we can rape it.” Johnson describes Picasso as “essentially a fashion designer,” catering with perfect pitch to the fickle vicissitudes of avant-garde taste. It is worth noting, I think, how much smaller Picasso’s achievement seems now than it did even a decade ago. In time, I predict, he will be seen primarily as a gifted caricaturist who also happened to be a thoroughly repulsive man.

It was of course naughty of Paul Johnson to pair Picasso with Walt Disney, the inventor of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Naughty, but also instructive. Where Picasso made war on nature, Disney always endeavored to follow it. He and his team of animators spent countless hours observing the movements of the animals they brought to life in their cartoons. Picasso’s attitude toward nature was consonant with his attitude toward women: They were, as one of his mistresses bitterly recalled, either “goddesses or doormats,” and Picasso’s chief ambition was to transform the former into the latter. Picasso wanted to get nature. Disney and his team wanted to get it right.

How shocking to compare, and compare favorably, a mere cartoonist to an avant-garde artistic icon. Oh, how the academics will hate that! But Johnson is on to something important, and this wise and entertaining book will delight and instruct the serious reading public as much as it will irritate the clerks for whom genius provides a blanket indemnity from all moral scruple.

Mr. Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books and co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion.