Terry Teachout's column this in the Wall Street Journal this morning is about Andrew Robinson's new book, Sudden Genius: The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs, which argues something similar to my point above. Hard work is necessary but their must be the spark of creative genius to begin with. Robinson and Teachout both reject the elitist notion that there is no such thing as genius. From Terry's column:
It's easy to see why the Ericsson-Gladwell view of genius as a form of skill-based expertise has become so popular, for it meshes neatly with today's egalitarian notions of human potential. Moreover, there is much evidence for the validity—up to a point—of the 10,000-hour rule. My own favorite example is that of Charlie Parker, the father of bebop. As a teenager, he embarrassed himself by sitting in at Kansas City jam sessions before he had fully mastered the alto saxophone, thereby acquiring a citywide reputation for incompetence. In 1937 the humiliation overwhelmed him, and he took a summer job at a Missouri resort and began practicing in earnest for the first time in his life. Eight years later, he had metamorphosed into the glittering virtuoso who teamed up with Dizzy Gillespie to record "Ko-Ko," "Groovin' High" and "Salt Peanuts," thereby writing himself into the history of jazz.
The problem with the 10,000-hour rule is that many of its most ardent proponents are political ideologues who see the existence of genius as an affront to their vision of human equality, and will do anything to explain it away. They have a lot of explaining to do, starting with the case of Mozart. As Mr. Robinson points out, Nannerl, Mozart's older sister, was a gifted pianist who received the same intensive training as her better-known brother, yet she failed to develop as a composer. What stopped her? The simplest explanation is also the most persuasive one: He had something to say and she didn't. Or, to put it even more bluntly, he was a genius and she wasn't.
Mozart is the person most often thought of when we argue genius due to his prodigious and obvious gifts as a child. Rightly so. I would point out though, that the vast majority of what we now listen to of Mozart is his later work as a mature composer: his operas, piano concerti, chamber works and major symphonies all come from the Vienna days when he was past the age of twenty-five. He had the genius to start with, without question, and he wrote some fine music when he was young. But he developed that genius through years of hard work and became arguably the greatest composer of them all. If Mozart had died at the age fifteen rather than thirty-five, he'd be a little known curiosity today.
Also in the journal today as part of their Five Best series is David Thomson's First-Rate Tales Of Making Movies, which lists Pauline Kael's "The Citizen Kane Book" as one of those tales. I think he gets Kael and her intentions wrong though:
It's clear in "The Citizen Kane Book" that Pauline Kael meant to put the knife into Orson Welles and deflate what she regarded as an overrated film. So she set out to show how screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz had been cheated of proper praise and credit. Kael printed a draft script and the movie's final cutting-continuity instructions—both revelatory of Mankiewicz's vital role in forming the movie—along with an extended essay on the importance of smart, cynical writers in the 1930s and on the jazzy élan of America's best talking pictures. The book is unfair but riveting, and it had the effect of drawing attention to the uncanny genius of Welles and his movie, helping to establish it as the all-time champion in critics' polls. Scripts don't often read well, but "Citizen Kane" is an exception. The book, in addition to showing us how unkind Kael could be in her exhilaration, was the closest she came to publishing a full-length study, as opposed to her collected reviews.
I've read "The Citizen Kane Book" many times, and as recently as a few months ago, and I've never gotten the feeling that Kael was trying to 'put the knife into Orson Welles and deflate what she regarded as an overrated film." On the contrary, she acknowledges the films greatness, and Welles'. Her point, it seems to me, is to undo an historical inaccuracy which gave Welles full-credit for the movie at the expense of Mankiewicz and others. If she's trying to deflate anything it is not the movie itself, but rather some of the overblown reverence for the movie that cites it as a masterpiece that transcends film itself. Rather, she was trying to fit it into its proper place in film history, at the pinnacle of the great screwball and newspaper traditions of the thirties. If she slights Welles at all, it's in not spending enough time on the story-telling and camera techniques that were new in "Citizen Kane." Thomson even admits that Kael's essay, "had the effect of drawing attention to the uncanny genius of Welles and his movie." How one draws attention to someone's uncanny genius while at the same time taking a knife to him is a mighty feat indeed, one I'm not sure even the brilliant Ms. Kael was capable of. And that Welles was some sort of genius is pretty much a given these days (for a delightful take on his genius rent the movie Me and Orson Welles, a fictional account of the making of Welles' historic Broadway production of "Julius Caesar") it does us no good to simply bow down to that genius and not look further into the man. It's too long to excerpt here but reading the final pages of Kael's essay finds her defending Welles from his undeserved reputation as a failure, as "the man who let everyone down":
He has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn't lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him. No one has ever been able to do what was expected of Welles - to create a new radical theatre and to make one movie masterpiece after another - but Welles' "figurehead" publicity had snowballed to the point where all his actual and considerable achievements looked puny compare to what his destiny was supposed to be. In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.
Sounds more like an attempt at rehabilitation than deflation.
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