Life is not fair. Talents are not distributed equitably. The likelihood is that if you are good at one thing, you will be good at other things too. But there is a twist in the tail. The more things you are good at, the less you will be perceived as pre-eminent in any of them. The American Paul Horgan, for example — singer, actor, set-designer, painter, poet, writer of stories, essays, novels, plays and libretti — is quoted in The Writer’s Brush as deploring his ‘accursed versatility’, and the truth is that I, unlike my better-informed readers, am unfamiliar with his oeuvre.
A few of the writer-artists featured in this hefty book are first-class at neither authorship nor art, and most are much better writers than they are artists, or vice versa. Proust was rubbish at drawing. Oskar Kokoschka has ‘dozens of published works’ to his name, but that’s not why he is famous. Victor Hugo left 3,000 drawings, but they are not what make him immortal. With some — William Blake, William Morris — there is a complete symbiosis, and with many, drawing seems to spring from the same source as the writing. James Thurber and Tom Wolfe (with a lethal caricature of Ted Kennedy) are cases in point. With others, such as Joseph Conrad with his saucy drawing of can-can girls, the subject-matter comes as a nice surprise. We are reminded that William Trevor, before he ever became a writer, was a professional and highly gifted wood-carver and sculptor. Sylvia Plath’s painting ‘Two Women Reading’, which is reproduced on the cover, is wonderful. The whole point, for the compiler Donald Friedman, is that so many practitioners have had this urge to express themselves both ways. They are ‘category resistant’.
The 20th century loved categories and specialisms and ring-fenced expertise, and distrusted the generalist.
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