The other music book I read this month, Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money, is about the Beatles, the greatest band in the history of the world etc., rather than Sudden Neurosensory Hearing Loss, and therefore you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was infinitely more likely to inspire and delight. You’d be wrong, though. It’s not Doggett’s fault, but rather the fault of the band itself: You Never Give Me Your Money is about the Beatles after the split, a subject I thought I might be interested in, but which only left me disliking intensely four people for whom I had only ever previously felt admiration and fondness. John and then Yoko, Paul, George, and Ringo spent most of the ’70s and ’80s suing—suing each other, suing management companies, suing record companies, suing computer companies with the temerity to name themselves after a piece of fruit that the Beatles had, inexplicably, been allowed to claim for themselves. This book gives the impression that the surviving Beatles are extremely likely to sue me for saying that they spent a lot of time suing. It had to be done, I suppose, a lot of it, and who is to say that any of us would have acted any differently? It’s not like all four constituent parts of the band were identical. That was one of the reasons the Beatles worked, because if you couldn’t identify with John, you’d be able to identify with Paul. Which Beatle were you? Or, more pertinently, which Beatle would you have sued like? Bitter John? Chippy Paul? Smoldering George? Or drunk Ringo? (Hey, good luck, Believer fact-checkers!) When the Beatles initially settled with Apple, by the way, the latter promised that it would never have anything to do with the music business. I don’t really follow the ins and outs of Silicon Valley, so I have no idea whether this is a promise that has held up.
Doggett’s grasp of the legal complexities is entirely admirable, and rather intimidating; ditto historian John Guy’s elegant presentation of the philosophical conviction that led to Sir Thomas More’s execution by Henry VIII in A Daughter’s Love, a book I read for professional purposes too nebulous to go into here. In fact, this month, one of the lessons I have learned from my reading is that I am unlikely to try my hand at biography. I loved every page of Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, but the very first chapter, in which Kellow describes Kael’s early life in a tiny rural town in California, contains the following half sentence (I did read the rest of it, eventually, but I became distracted):
To Kenneth Kann, author of Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, an oral history of farm life in Petaluma, the town was “a community of idealists, people who were not so…”
Hold on a moment, you find yourself thinking. In order to write a biography of the New Yorker’s film critic—a pretty nifty way, it turns out, of writing about postwar cinema—Brian Kellow has to read oral chicken-ranch histories? Of course he does, because he’s a thorough and serious biographer. But… damn. There’s another job I can’t do when I grow up.
Pauline Kael was one of the people who made me want to write in the first place. I had never read the New Yorker before I came across a collection of her reviews on one of my very first visits to the U.S., when I was still in my teens. And I can’t remember now what made me pick the book up, other than that it was on the remainder pile in Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue in New York. But I loved her energy, her enthusiasm, her informality and her colloquialisms, her distrust of phoniness, even before I realized that these were qualities I wanted to steal from her. The art-house audience, she wrote in 1964, “accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity’ and as style.” (She’d be amazed, I think, to find that she could write the same sentence nearly fifty years later, on just about any page of any reviews section.) Stuff like that made me want to read her standing up.
What’s much harder to stomach is her frequent line-crossing: Kael, it seems, wanted to pal up with the important filmmakers of the day, while reserving her absolute right to excoriate them in print. “If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away,” she wrote in a review of Stardust Memories, “this picture should help him stop worrying.” “After that, her friendship with Allen froze solid,” says Kellow. You don’t say. Meanwhile, Kael was frequently mystified and hurt by attacks that fellow critics and, occasionally, directors made on her. One of the most substantial came from Peter Bogdanovich, who forensically demolished her essay on Citizen Kane (an essay that relied heavily on the research of another, uncredited writer). It was Woody Allen who advised Kael on how she should respond: “Don’t answer.” Maybe Kael would have seen no contradiction in any of this. She wanted to hang out with people who made good movies, and when they stopped making good movies, she wanted to be able to tell them so, in print, and at length. Perhaps this is what good critics do, but that doesn’t mean you have to like them.
May 2012
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Stumbling on Happiness—Daniel Gilbert
Prunella: The Authorized Biography of Prunella Scales—Teresa Ransom
The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens—Jenny Hartley, ed.
Joan’s Book—Joan Littlewood
The Submission—Amy Waldman
Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’ Be: The Lionel Bart Story—David and Caroline Stafford
BOOKS READ:
Imagine: How Creativity Works—Jonah Lehrer
Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’ Be: The Lionel Bart Story—David and Caroline Stafford
Beautiful Ruins—Jess Walter
Citizen Vince—Jess Walter
Ready Player One—Ernest Cline
I am a creative professional. The temptation to qualify that sentence with an “I suppose” or a “for want of a better description” or an “on a good day” or a “whatever you might think” or just a simple “not” is almost overwhelming; it feels as though I just began a column with the sentence “I am very good at sex.” Actually, it’s even worse than that. I am likely to have sex with only a very small minority of you, for various reasons that we don’t need to go into here, some of them surprising, so word is unlikely to spread. But you can all buy or borrow a book or a movie or even an album I’ve written, and make up your own minds about my creativity. One of the many admirable things about Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine is that he does not argue that to be creative is the same thing as to be special, or clever, or gifted, and that’s what sounds uncomfortable about that opening sentence: I seem to be saying something more than “I make stuff up, and someone shells out for it.” I’m not, though. Honestly.
The first half of Imagine is about what happens in our brains when we make stuff up, and it’s riveting, especially, perhaps, if that’s what you’re paid to do. The frequent appearance in this column of biographies, typically biographies of artists, can be explained by my enduring interest in this very subject. The main reason I pick up those books in the first place is because I want to know how Preston Sturges or Richard Yates or Lucille Ball or, most recently, Charles Dickens did what they did; I want to know what it felt like to be them. Well, Lehrer’s subject is the mother ship. This is the literary biography that bypasses the details of advances and failed marriages, leaves out the names, even, and attempts to deal with the literal source of all creativity. There are many reasons why Dickens became Dickens, but none of them would have counted for anything had it not been for the alpha waves emanating from the right side of his brain, the part of us that enables insight and epiphany, working in conjunction with his prefrontal cortex, where his (admittedly prodigious) working memory was kept. Coffee and alcohol might have helped, and his legendarily long walks played a part, too. Dickens wouldn’t have known about amphetamines, which were first created in Germany in 1887, seventeen years after his death—is there nothing this column doesn’t know? But if he had, he’d have shoveled them in like M&M’s, which, incidentally, weren’t actually patented until 1941. (OK, I’ll stop now. It’s not even actual knowledge I’m dispensing. It’s bits of Wikipedia.) It also helped, Lehrer explains, that he traveled and lived in a city, and that he had to battle with constraints
of form, in his case imposed by the monthly serialization of most of his books.
Most of us sense, vaguely, that a walk will clear our heads, that drugs and coffee might help us to concentrate, that we find it easier to create if some kind of boundary is placed around our imagination. When a teacher asks for a story about anything at all, then the student will struggle; tell a kid that you want a story about a talking sponge who wants to take part in the Olympics and you’ll get something pretty cool. What’s enthralling about Lehrer’s book is that he has neuroscientific explanations for why our habits and dependencies work. Speed, for example, increases the amount of dopamine in the synapses, and this helps us to pay attention: suddenly everything seems interesting. This means it’s an editing drug rather than a creative drug, because we suddenly find we’re getting pleasure from, say, messing about with the rhythm of a single sentence. In one of the most thrilling parts of this book, Lehrer compares the taut, spare, simple (and brilliant) poetry Auden wrote while using Benzedrine with the long “vomit”—Dylan’s word—of “Like a Rolling Stone,” an epiphanic right-hemisphere production if ever there was one.
The breadth of reference in Imagine is a joy in itself: Auden and Dylan, Milton Glaser, Yo-Yo Ma, John Lasseter, Clay Marzo, and Arthur Fry, who came up with the Post-it note. But the real stars of the book are the scientific researchers. It turns out that there is no area of creativity that someone hasn’t devised a test for. Brian Uzzi, for example, wanted to test the optimum conditions for group creativity, so he chose the Broadway musical as his ideal model, and produced a study of every musical staged between 1877 and 1990. He used reviews and box office as his indicators of success, and came up with a measure, Q, to quantify the density of the connections between the major collaborators, the director, producer, composer, librettist, and so on. How often had the people behind a production worked with each other before? How often did they admit new people into their working circle? And what he found was that you needed a medium Q score for a successful show. A flop was more likely with either a high or a low Q—a high Q possibly indicating staleness and a refusal to find room for fresh ideas and voices, and a low Q suggesting inexperience and unfamiliarity with the creative processes of colleagues. The conclusions are interesting, of course, but the fun comes when you attempt to imagine Brian Uzzi’s working life, which for the last part involved poring over 1930s theater programs. Charles Limb at Johns Hopkins found a way to scan the brains of jazz pianists while they were improvising. Earl Miller has taught monkeys to press buttons when a picture of randomly scattered dots on a screen looks a little bit like another picture of random dots. Jonathan Schooler evaluated daydreaming by making subjects read one of the less-gripping passages from War and Peace after a slug of vodka. (And there we have it: the true value of literature. The stupor it induces results in creative thinking.) Joe Forgas at the University of New South Wales hid plastic animals and toy soldiers near the checkout counter of a stationery store on rainy days and made the shop play sad music, in order to collect data on whether people noticed more when they were depressed. (They did—four times as much.) These people, the Uzzis and the Schoolers and the Limbs, are all ingenious, charming, and almost certainly insane.
I’m happy that I do the job I do, but my bad days irritate the hell out of me—the hours spent playing (currently) Jelly Defense, the despair, the occasional petulant act of self-sabotage. What is simultaneously comforting and alarming about Imagine is that it turns out I’m doing more or less everything right. These aren’t avoidable professional hazards at all, but tools of the trade, at least as essential as a computer. Oh, and 80 percent of writers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop interviewed by a neuroscientist in the early 1980s were properly, formally depressed. Who’d have thought the figure would be as low as that? The depressometer I invented and affixed to the underside of my desk never dips below three digits. I can’t imagine that there are many readers of this magazine who won’t want to quote great chunks of Imagine to a significant other, if only to excuse and explain recent awful behavior.
It would have been interesting to think about David and Caroline Stafford’s biography of Lionel Bart, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’ Be, in the illuminating light cast by Jonah Lehrer’s book. Regular readers, however, will already know that if there is an uninteresting way to think about something, this column will find it, and so I read the two books the other way round. There is an awful lot in the Staffords’ book that is relevant to the work of both Jonah Lehrer and Brian Uzzi, however: Bart popped out a couple of moderately successful musicals before writing, with apparently vomitical speed and necessity, the astonishingly successful Oliver! in 1960, when he was thirty years old. Uzzi would have fun Q-crunching; Bart worked with the same people, mostly associated with the Theatre Royal Stratford East run by the extraordinary Joan Littlewood. Lehrer, meanwhile, would understand the apparent effortlessness of the show’s appearance from thin air, its relationship to Bart’s tough East End Jewish upbringing, and his eventually ruinous drug use. It’s all pretty much downhill after Oliver!, though. Twang!!—and there is almost certainly a piece of research being conducted on the inverse relationship between exclamation marks and commercial success even as we speak—remains one of the most famous theatrical disasters of the twentieth century. Its calamitous failure destroyed Bart, not least because he invested past, present, and future earnings from Oliver! in it, despite all wise advice to the contrary. Any biography of a minor cultural figure stands or falls on the quality of its supporting roles, and Bart “cast up,” as film people say—filled his life with just about anyone who was alive and talented and interesting in the 1960s. He knew Judy Garland and Noël Coward, the Beatles and the Stones. Michael Caine, Lucien Freud, Cassius Clay. But it was Joan Littlewood, who directed his first hit, the eponymous Fings…, whom I wanted to know more about, hence the appearance of her autobiography in the Books Bought list above. A similar, now entirely incomprehensible fascination with Ronald Reagan once led me to buy a book about his years working for General Electric. That book is on the shelves above my bed, so I am reminded of the brevity and idiocy of my enthusiasms every night of the week. I’m sure Joan will go the same way, but look at this:
Joan Littlewood ran away to Paris, arriving just in time to enjoy the street riots of 1934, which left 15 dead… London, when she returned, seemed lacklustre, so she decided to go to America. With £9 to her name, fares were a sticking-point, but a few shillings could be saved if she walked to Liverpool, so she did just that… In Manchester, the BBC came to her rescue with an invitation to give a talk about being a lady tramp. There she met a man called Jimmy Miller. They married. Jimmy later changed his name to Ewan MacColl, and wrote “Dirty Old Town” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
And this is all before she began the career for which she became famous, her revolutionary theater work in a disused theater she rented, cleaned up, and fitted herself, where she directed and produced Oh! What a Lovely War, and plays by Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney. (Is this all a bit too British? Well, tough. She was a big deal here.)
I am now convinced that every nonfiction book contains one weird fact which you want to put in your pocket and pull out to show friends at every available opportunity. Last year I learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald used to stand on his balcony watching Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz fight; now I learn that Bart’s father may well have been in an internment camp on the Isle of Man with a cranky old geezer who made everyone do the fitness exercises he’d invented, a chap called Joseph Hubertus Pilates. I’d always presumed Pilates was an obscure offshoot of Greek science.
Jess Walter, one of my favorite contemporary American novelists, has written a novel in which you half expect Lionel Bart to turn up at any second. Oliver! was written in 1959, in a fishing village in Spain; chunks of Beautiful Ruins are set in a fishing village in Italy three years later, and its characters include Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who would almost certainly have met Bart, maybe even
attended one of his scary-sounding showbiz parties. I don’t think I’m going to tell you what Burton is doing in this book, apart from filming Cleopatra; all you need to know is that Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you’re likely to read this year. It jumps between the Italian village and contemporary Hollywood, and there’s a long, sad love story in it that reminded me a little bit of Love in the Time of Cholera, and it’s full of stories, in lots of different forms—pitches for movies, extracts from plays, chunks of fictional memoirs. And just when you’re beginning to doubt whether Walter can pull it all together, he hits you with a sucker punch, a long, delirious ending that ties up all the strands while managing to say something about the beauty and brevity of our time on this planet. And if there’s nothing in there that you find interesting, then there won’t be much else for you in the rest of this magazine. Ever. I re-read Walter’s Citizen Vince this month, too, for Professional Purposes, and was reminded not only of what a great book it is, funny, clever, and beautifully plotted, but of what a surprising writer Walter is: his last four novels really bear no resemblance to each other, except in their freshness and originality.