Creative people can be sacred monsters or just plain monsters
Recently I reread Anthony Powell's roman fieuve A Dance to the Music of Time and, as a pendant, the new biography of him, written by Michael Barber, It is an excellent piece of bookmaking, strongly recommended to anyone interested in how writers work, though marred by some egregious vulgarities. The haphazard way in which Uncle Tony (calling him this is a habit I acquired from the Pakenham girls) stumbled into his immense work and brought it to a triumphant conclusion is an insight into the vagaries of the creative process. There are instructive parallels with the history of Waugh's great war series, Sword of Honour. As a result I am now minded to write my book Creators, which I planned a few years ago but dropped in order to do my giant book on art.
What, I want to ask, is creation? Most books on the subject I find unsatisfactory. All I can go by is examples. I know, for instance, that I am not truly creative. I can write (very fast) about almost any subject in the world — indeed I have to, producing an essay on a different topic 52 weeks in the year — and have all the tricks of a journalist and book-writer who has been at it for over half a century. But I can't actually produce anything truly new in the way old Kingsley did with Lucky Jim or Tom Stoppard did with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The kind of originality repeatedly shown by a nasty piece of work like Dennis Potter is beyond me. I used to discuss this with old Jack Priestley, not a modest man but a realist. I'd say, 'The Good Companions is a highly original novel, a work of true creation.' MP: 'Not really. It's an epitome of a certain kind of novel. It's a fine piece of brass and mahogany work, though, make no mistake. I'm not one of these geniuses but I've got a hell of a lot of bloody talent–Who's a genius then?' 'Not that fellow Forster, that's for sure.' (Chuckles.) `D,H. Lawrence perhaps. When I read Sons and Lovers it pulled me up short. I thought, Ee, Jack, there's been nowt like this before.'
My opening piece in Creators will be on Chaucer, I think. I've written about his originality before in this space but I'd like to probe deeper into what he did to the English language, and compare it with how Dante transformed Florentine into Italian. Another good candidate is Darer, because he achieved a creative synthesis of south German artistic skills and the techniques of the Italian Renaissance. We know a lot about him — much of it in his own words — and we know, for instance, what he thought of older contemporaries like Giovanni Bellini, to whom he makes an instructive contrast. In searching for the secrets of the creative gift it is always illuminating to study two people, both highly original, working at roughly the same time.
I like these juxtapositions of creative people even when they never met or were unaware of each other's existence, as in the case of Hokusai and his younger contemporary J.M.W. Turner, about whom I wrote here not long ago. Hard to think of two artists with more genius and originality in them. I may write, too, of A.W.N. Pugin, an astonishingly creative man, who could pull out of thin air a design for a chair or a monstrance or a roll of wallpaper. It would be interesting to contrast his creativity with that of Viollet-le-Duc, whose mind was more antiquarian than original; with William Morris, an artist of exquisite taste rather than creativity; or even Whistler, who could design an entire room.
But if I do Pugin, will there be a place for another essay on Tiffany, an artist I admire greatly and a creative technician of pure genius, who helped Sullivan the architect to create the first modern theatre? Tiffany's work has suffered more than that of any other artist in the last 150 years at the hands of vandals, including the ferocious Theodore Roosevelt, who smashed up what was perhaps his masterpiece, the superb dining-room screen he did for the White House, on the grounds that 'that man laid his hands on other men's wives'. Tiffany now has had justice done to him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but most of his original work was ground to powder. I am going to do Wagner, too, because we know more about his creative processes (thanks to copious diaries, letters, etc., by him and his witch-wife Cosima) than we do about almost any other great composer. With all his highfalutin theories about musical theatre, he makes a fine contrast to unpretentious Verdi.
I must include Mark Twain, my favourite American author, if only because of his sheer creative skill in turning a banal incident into a roaring joke simply by verbal manipulation. And, again, nobody was ever before so creative in his use of accents, especially in Huckleberry Finn, which is basically a triple fugue of three contrasting demotic speech patterns. Among more contemporary writers, Waugh is a good choice, being the creative writer par excellence, from whom one can learn a great deal; and Anthony Powell, though far from Waugh-andwater (as I used to think), is an illuminating doppelganger. Another couple I would like to explore are the Basque Cristobal Balenciaga and that laid-back Frenchman Christian Dior, who were the big cheeses in the fashion scene when I lived in Paris in the 1950s. Most fashionhistorians would rank Dior as the more creative because of the explosion of his New Look, which introduced an entirely fresh fashion epoch in 1947. But I'm not sure Dior himself would have agreed. He always addressed Balenciaga as maitre and treated him with the greatest possible reverence. I think in my essay I will reverse the order of precedence, on the grounds that the perky Basque did not need to aim for originality; he just was instinctively and inescapably creative. Finally I think I will include Walt Disney, by far the most influential artist of the 20th century.
However, this outline of a book on creators which I have just given is itself unoriginal, since it limits the subject to artistic paragons. But there are countless forms of creativity. Take, for instance, a dim. dumb, almost inarticulate professional army officer like General Baden-Powell, the son of a professor of geometry, but dismissed by Jowett as 'not up to Balliol form'. His invention of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides was one of the most creative acts of the 20th century, still going strong (stronger than ever, I believe) and providing cheap, harmless and useful delight to hundreds of millions of children. Then there are the creative politicians. Nye Bevan, whom I knew well and admired enormously for his dazzling rhetoric, was in many ways a destructive man, but his National Health Service was an act of pure creation, worked out in a few weeks (really, one week) and implemented in a mere 18 months. It was the only positive thing Nye did in his life but what an invention? Truly creative politicians are rare. I suspect, though it is horrible to say it. that Hitler was one of them, including in his record son-et-lumiere, the autobahn and the Volkswagen, as well as a brilliant set of insignia and sumptuary, the real reason why Nazi memorabilia are so eagerly collected.
Creativity, then, can be a dangerous as well as a sanctifying gift. Many writers, for instance, do infinite harm, and I am not just thinking of obvious examples, like de Sade and de Maistre. Tolstoy was a huge milestone on the road to the Gulag, just as Nietzsche pointed the way to Auschwitz. And Sartre, come to think of it, goaded the Muslim world, through Algeria, into the abyss of international terrorism. So writing about creative people is a daunting task morally.
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