Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

Prince and Dickens tell me, every day, Not good enough. Not quick enough. Not enough. More, more, more. Think quicker, be more ambitious, be more imaginative. And whatever you do for a living, that’s something you need to hear, every now and again. Were they happy? Probably not. Were they crazy? Probably. That too is beyond the scope of this book.

The truth is that nobody can stay hot for ever. All one can hope for is that one’s talent lasts for an entire career in a way that makes some commercial sense to the people who pay for it. That’s the whole thing. That’s the prize: a lifetime spent doing what you want to do.

In John Carey’s brilliant book What Good are the Arts?, he demolishes, one by one, all the lessons and rules and theories that people have applied to culture and its significance – their attempts to ‘prove’, through science or logic or philosophy, that great art does this to you, and is better than not-great art because it has that. Ostensibly clev

Talent, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has suggested, is ‘best thought of as any package of personal characteristics that accelerates the acquisition of expertise’.

‘Sometimes I think that the thing that Prince shared with other geniuses – Ray Charles, Bessie Smith, and James Brown – is that they were abandoned, at some level, by their mothers,’ said Questlove in a Rolling Stone piece published after Prince’s death. ‘Many artists in black music were abandoned by fathers, but an absent mother creates a faultlin