EVIL GENIUS?

by Rob Lopresti

I just read a review of a biography of Patricia Highsmith, the much-praised author of Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and other crime novels. Apparently, Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith reports that she was not a very nice person.

According to the review Highsmith was a forger, a drinker, serially unfaithful, anti-Semitic, anti-Civil Rights movement, and anti-feminist. She was also nasty to fans and critics, had bad table manners, and one assumes, probably kicked puppies and pinched babies..

To which, one may reasonably reply: Who cares? She was a great writer, and isn’t that all that matters? People who make that argument often quote Faulkner: “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can’t get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.”

Mebbe so, But the writer is also a person and the person has a duty not to be evil.

The interesting thing to me is that I have met a whole lot of people of great talent — mostly writers and musicians — and the number of nasty ones I have encountered I could count on one hand. Of course, maybe they were just pretending to be nice — but isn’t being nice to people who can’t do you any favors part of being a good guy?

The trope I often run across is that good artists (and we’ll use that word to cover writers, etc.) can be nice people, but great ones, the geniuses, are all so neurotic and/or self-centered that they can’t behave in polite company.

I wonder if anyone has done a study of that, assuming there is any way to objectively identify the geniuses. Pulitzer prize winners, or the like?

Mozart was a wacko. Tchaikovsky was suicidal. But what about Bach? I know he had tons of kids and money problems (not unrelated, perhaps) but was he crazy or evil? Not that I’ve heard.

Maybe these scandals about Highsmith should cheer us up. See? We write real literature! We have crazies too!

If you’ll excuse me, The Voices are telling me to go pet the cats.