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There’s a certain kind of perfectionism that we associate with artistic genius. Consider, for example, James Joyce, the patron saint of literary obsessiveness, working for years on his last two books, revising and rewriting and rearranging even as he went blind. Think of this oft-repeated anecdote from his friend Frank Budgen’s book on the making of Ulysses:
A cold wind was blowing when I met Joyce on the Bahnhoffstrasse. The brown overcoat buttoned up to his chin lent him a somewhat military appearance… I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing?
“I have been working hard on it all day,” said Joyce.
“Does that mean you have written a great deal?” I said.
“Two sentences,” said Joyce.
I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert.
“You have been seeking the mot juste?” I said.
“No,” said Joyce. “I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.”
Writers still pass this anecdote around, nearly 90 years after Budgen’s book was published, for two reasons: It speaks to the obsessive, borderline-ridiculous perfectionism that we expect from our literary heroes, and it reminds us that writing well is supposed to be really, really hard. Sure, we can’t all be geniuses, but anyone who has ever devoted themselves to writing knows how it feels to spend a whole day revising the same two sentences. (And if you don’t, let me tell you: it doesn’t feel great.)
And it’s not just literature; we admire Joycean perfectionism in musical genius as well. Who doesn’t enjoy hearing about a 23-year-old Brian Wilson obsessing over every single detail of “Good Vibrations,” recording 90 hours of tape in four different studios and convincing his bandmates to record up to 30 takes of even the most minor vocal parts, all to make a song that lasts for three minutes and 35 seconds? But it’s a perfect song. How can any artist reach perfection without being a perfectionist?
Occupying the opposite end of the spectrum from the Perfectionist Genius, we have the Prolific Genius. Driven by economic imperative or artistic compulsion, these figures create quickly and constantly, barely stopping to tinker with or obsess over any single work, moving on to the next project right away (or even before they finish the last one). And they manage to create masterpieces, too. Nick Hornby’s new book, Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius, is about two such mind-bogglingly prolific artists whose lives and work might make us rethink our own assumptions about creativity.
On the surface, Charles Dickens and Prince Rogers Nelson have little in common as artists. Part of the charm of this very slender volume is that it exists at all: the market hasn’t been crying out for a lot of book-length essays comparing Dickens and Prince. But Hornby makes a convincing case that these two incongruous figures share something profound in their prolific approach to making art. They are both, he writes, “a particular kind of genius.”
Much of the book is biographical. Hornby is interested in how the complicated childhoods and young adulthoods of these two artists might have spurred their astounding creativity, but he’s even more interested in how the absence of an artistic “off switch” shaped their lives: “Did it damage them in some way, personally, professionally? Is there any way of knowing where it came from? Did it kill them?”
Both Prince and Dickens had difficult, even catastrophic childhoods (“It wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe both of these young lives as Dickensian,” he notes). These early experiences seemed to fundamentally shape their future art. When Prince’s musician father abandons his family, he leaves behind a piano, which Prince would later play whenever his stepfather, in Hornby’s description, “locked him away for long periods of time.” And when his stepfather kicks him out of the house as a teenager, he stays in a friend’s basement, which happens to be where his band stores all their instruments. Hornby suggests that Prince’s virtuosity—he played every instrument on his debut album—may have come, in part, from the adversities and isolations of his youth.
Dickens, of course, had his own childhood adversities and extreme privations. As Hornby puts it, “how do you go from working in a blacking factory to becoming a celebrated author in your midtwenties?” Dickens leaves school at 15 (“money troubles at home, again”) and then moves from job to job, finding a position as a clerk, teaching himself shorthand, and working as a reporter for “the ecclesiastical legal society.” During this time, he’s not writing fiction at all, but he is gaining worldly experience. “He reported on divorces and wills,” Hornby writes, “and you can almost see the world being poured into the writer’s head: lawyers, legal suits, complicated and mysterious estates, glug glug glug.”
As Dickens and Prince goes on, it becomes more apparent that Hornby isn’t only telling a story about their lives—he’s making a series of arguments about creativity. And these arguments are what make the book worth reading. I won’t spoil the specific arguments, but the ultimate thesis might be this: Dickens and Prince remind us that perfectionism isn’t an absolute requirement of creative genius—or of creativity in general. Hornby presents both artists as restless and relentless creators, object lessons in the kind of creative life that focuses on invention over perfection.
By the time Prince was in his mid-twenties, he’d already made six albums, including Purple Rain and 1999, often while simultaneously working on projects for other artists. He wrote and recorded incessantly, leaving hundreds of songs unreleased, quickly moving on to the next idea, the next song, the next album. Hornby notes that people close to Prince described him as “addicted to the creative process.” He shares a telling observation from Prince’s engineer, Susan Rogers: “He wouldn’t have had that output if he’d been a perfectionist…It just poured out of him—he couldn’t wait on perfection.”
Hornby acknowledges that the astonishing accomplishments of these two hyper-prolific figures are largely inimitable. You can’t draw comforting, oversimplified conclusions about creativity based on their lives and work. We will never be Dickens or Prince. At the same time, as Hornby writes in a passage about Dickens, “there’s something very liberating about his method of working, because it immediately explodes the idea that there is a right way of doing things.”
Hornby quotes some typical advice for writers about the “right way” to approach the craft: “Cut until you can cut no more”; “Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away”; “Proceed slowly and take care.” Hornby’s book, written in his characteristically entertaining and conversational style, reminds us that not every writer embraces such maxims: “Dickens, one must presume, given his schedule, did none of these things.” We may not be Dickens, but we should remember his endless artistic improvisation whenever someone suggests, as Hornby puts it, “that creativity is hard, rare, precious, inaccessible, or needs treating with suspicion.”
Instead, we might be more suspicious of the notion that we’re doing art wrong if we’re not subjecting our work to years of painful, perfectionist tinkering. It’s okay to create quickly and move on. It’s okay to create for the present and not posterity. In fact, Hornby suggests, this approach to creativity may even be a financial necessity, as it was for Dickens, if you’re attempting to actually live off of what you create.
“Only a fool would argue that great literature is only produced quickly, and through financial necessity,” Hornby writes. “But the opposite argument—that great literature is only produced slowly, and with no consideration for money—is even madder. The truth is that nobody knows anything.” Hornby’s book is a refreshing and thought-provoking reminder that there’s more than one way to be creative. If you’re anything like me, the book will make you want to read a lot more Dickens and listen to a lot more Prince. More than that, it will make you want to devote more time to creating and less time to perfecting.
