Paul Johnson is my favorite historian (my dear friend, Brad Birzer, is my favorite living historian!). Johnson takes complicated subjects, makes them understandable, and he does it in an entertaining way. He’s British, but he has written a fantastic history of the United States, A History of the American People. Other excellent books of his are The Birth of the Modern: World History 1815 – 1830, and Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. Creators was written after his book, Intellectuals, received some criticism for focusing too heavily on the hypocrisy of some of history’s most famous and influential intellectuals. As he explained, “I defined an intellectual as someone who thinks ideas are more important than people.” I, personally, appreciated learning about the moral failings of Rousseau, Marx, Ibsen, Sartre, and other thinkers who have been lionized by our intelligentsia. It’s the eternal story: “Do as I say, not as I do.” Anyway, Creators is, on balance, a more positive and inspiring collection of portraits. In it, Johnson gives us brief descriptions of Chaucer, Durer, Shakespeare, J. S. Bach, Turner and Hokusai, Jane Austen, A.W.N. Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, Tiffany, T.S. Eliot, Balenciaga and Dior, and Picasso and Walt Disney. Throughout these portraits his admiration for these artists’ work shines clearly. Johnson is the master of providing the interesting anecdote that humanizes and makes real his subject. For example, he writes that the composer Wagner

required a beautiful landscape outside his windows, but when he wrote music, the silence had to be absolute and all outside sounds, and sunlight, had to be excluded by heavy curtains of the finest and costliest materials. They had to draw with “a satisfying swish.” The carpets had to be ankle-deep; the sofas enormous; the curtains vast, of silk and satin. The air had to be perfumed with a special scent. The polish must be “radiant.” The heat must have been oppressive, but Wagner required it. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 9). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Johnson praises Chaucer for creating the very idea of English literature. Before him, all politics and creative arts were conducted in French and Latin. He was the first to proudly use English in his poetry, and his portrayals of various classes of people are unparalleled. In my opinion, Creators is worth reading for his chapter on Shakespeare alone. Johnson does a wonderful job explaining how a man with humble beginnings could attain such incredible heights of literary excellence. Interestingly, he makes the case for Shakespeare not being an intellectual. In other words, for Shakespeare, people  were more important than ideas.

He [Shakespeare] rarely allows his opinions open expression, preferring to hint and nudge, to imply and suggest, rather than to state. His gospel, however, is moderation in all things; his taste is for toleration. Like Chaucer, he takes human beings as he finds them, imperfect, insecure, weak and fallible or headstrong and foolish—often desperate—and yet always interesting, often lovable or touching. He has something to say on behalf of all his characters, even the obvious villains, and he speaks from inside them, allowing them to put forward their point of view and give their reasons. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 54). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

I also learned that no one has created as many words and phrases that have entered common use as Shakespeare. Some estimate he coined as many as 6700 new words! Like Harold Bloom, Johnson has nothing but praise for the two Henry IV plays and Hamlet. Johnson’s explication of the psychological and moral dilemmas explored in Hamlet  is fantastic.

It is characteristic of this stupendous drama that the long passages of heroic reflection, which never bore but stimulate, are punctuated by episodes of furious action, the whole thing ending in a swift-moving climax of slaughter. No one can sit through Hamlet and absorb its messages—on human faith and wickedness; on cupidity, malice, vanity, lust; on regeneration and repentance; on love and hate, procrastination, hurry, honesty, and deceit; on loyalty and betrayal, courage, cowardice, indecision, and flaming passion—without being moved, shaken, and deeply disturbed. The play, if read carefully, is likely to induce deep depression—it always does with me—but if well produced and acted, as Shakespeare intended, it is purgative and reassuring, for Hamlet, the confused but essentially benevolent young genius, is immortal, speeding heavenward as “flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.” It is, in its own mysterious and transcendental way, a healthy and restorative work of art, adding to the net sum of human happiness as surely as it adds to our wisdom and understanding of humanity. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 75). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Johnson’s next subject, Johann Sebastian Bach, was a solidly middle class man who was confident in his extraordinary ability to compose music, even if he wasn’t recognized for it during his lifetime.

Bach was by far the most hardworking of the great musicians, taking huge pains with everything he did and working out the most ephemeral scores in their logical and musical totality, everything written down in his fine, firm hand as though his life depended on it—as, in a sense, was true, for if Bach had scamped a musical duty, or performed it with anything less than the perfection he demanded, he clearly could not have lived with himself. It is impossible to find, in any of his scores, time-serving repetitions, shortcuts, carelessness, or even the smallest hint of vulgarity. He served up the highest quality, in performance and composition, day after day, year after year, despite the fact that his employers, as often as not, could not tell the good from the bad or even from the mediocre. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (pp. 82-83). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

It’s almost a miracle that we have as many works of his today to perform, as they were scattered amongst his descendants after he died. If not for the efforts of Mendelssohn to restage Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1827, we might not have had the revival of his music that we enjoy so much today. Johnson uses this event to share another fun anecdote:

Afterward, at Zelter’s house, there was a grand dinner of the Berlin intellectual elite. Frau Derrient whispered to Mendelssohn: “Who is the stupid fellow sitting next to me?” Mendelssohn (behind his napkin): “The stupid fellow next to you is the great philosopher Friedrich Hegel!” Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 93). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The chapter on the artists William Turner and Hokusai is very interesting. Both began drawing from the age of three. Turner was somewhat controversial because of his new and unusual way of painting light, but he ended up one of the most popular and wealthy artists in history. Unfortunately, time and bungling “restorers” have kept us from appreciating his radical use of color. Even his contemporaries could see how his paintings faded not long after he finished them. Hokusai never profited much from his prodigious output, always begging benefactors for money. According to Johnson, he pretty much invented landscape art in Japan. He was quite a character:

There was a restless rootlessness to him, reflected in the fact that he changed his name, or rather the signature on his works, more than fifty times, more often than any other Japanese artist; and in the fact that during his life he lived at ninety- three different addresses. The names he used included Fusenko, meaning “he who does only one thing without being influenced by others”; “The Crazy Old Man of Katsushika”; and “Manji, the Old Man Mad about Drawing.” After he fell into a ditch, as a result of a loud clap of thunder, he signed himself “Thunder” for a time. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 108). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Johnson’s chapter on Jane Austen is the slightest one, not because of any fault of Johnson, but because we know so little of Austen. Her family suppressed most of her personal correspondence, and they tried to make her into a Victorian woman, rather than the Regency one she was. However, according to Johnson, we can glean some personality traits from the letters and reminiscences that do exist and conclude that she was fun-loving young woman, which was the source of her genius:

Laughter was the invariable precursor, in Austen’s life, of creative action—the titter, the laugh, the giggle, or the guffaw was swiftly followed by the inventive thought. Once Austen began to laugh, not with the melodramatic novels she read, but against them, she began to look into herself and say, “I can do better than that.” Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (pp. 130-131). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Pugin and Violett-le-Duc were both architects, the former responsible for the Gothic revival in England. We have Pugin to thank for the beautiful Houses of Parliament in London. The chapter on Victor Hugo is a very interesting one. In it, Johnson poses the question,

That Hugo was phenomenally creative is unarguable: in sheer quantity and often in quality too, he is in the highest class of artists. But he forces one to ask the question: is it possible for someone of high creative gifts to be possessed of mediocre, banal, even low intelligence? Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 156). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Johnson does not have a lot of admiration for Hugo, pointing out how contradictory his political opinions were, depending on what party was in power. He also kept many mistresses, well into his eighties! Mark Twain comes in for more respectful treatment. Johnson posits that his genius was as a storyteller – to truly appreciate his work, we need to hear it “performed”. He also had a knack for making great literature out of almost nothing:

His creativity was often crude and nearly always shameless. But it was huge and genuine, overpowering indeed, a kind of vulgar magic, making something out of nothing, then transforming that mere something into entire books, which in turn hardened into traditions and cultural certitudes. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 171). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

T. S. Eliot was a paradox – very conservative in his personal life, yet revolutionary in his poetry:

Eliot was never once (except on holiday) photographed without a tie, wore three-piece suits on all occasions, kept his hair trimmed, and was the last intellectual on either side of the Atlantic to wear spats. Yet there can be absolutely no doubt that he deliberately marshaled his immense creative powers to shatter the existing mold of poetical form and context, and to create a new orthodoxy born of chaos, incoherence, and dissonance. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 204). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The turning point in Eliot’s career came when he met Ezra Pound, who introduced him to lots of European literary stars and convinced him to emigrate to England. He married Vivian Haighwood, but it doesn’t sound like the relationship was much fun:

From the early days of their marriage they engaged in competitive hypochondria. Both became valetudinarians and were always dosing themselves, complaining of drafts, and comparing symptoms. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 213). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

However, this dismal marriage, coupled with his job at Lloyd’s bank in London, spurred Eliot to create his masterpieces, The Waste Land and Four Quartets. As Johnson puts it, The Waste Land‘s strength is its elusiveness:

The greatest strength and appeal of the poem is that it asks to be interpreted not so much as the poet insists but as the reader wishes. It makes the reader a cocreator. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 219). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Four Quartets solidified Eliot’s position as the leading poet of the twentieth century, even though, in Johnson’s words, “they are not about anything”. What they are is evocative of a nihilistic mood that dominated mid-twentieth century western culture. The appalling meaninglessness and slaughter of WWI that led into WWII left a cultural elite with almost no hope Eliot was their spokesman. I wish I could have been present at the gathering Johnson describes below!

The Four Quartets were much discussed when I was a freshman at Oxford in 1946, and they, too, were still fresh from the presses. I recall a puzzled and inconclusive discussion, after dinner on a foggy November evening, in which C. S. Lewis played the exegete on “Little Gidding,” with a mumbled descant from Professor Tolkien and expostulations from Hugo Dyson, a third don from the English faculty, who repeated at intervals, “It means anything or nothing, probably the latter.” Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 223). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

In his chapter on Picasso and Disney, Johnson praises Picasso for his incredible creativity and canny judgment:

… Picasso became the champion player, and held the title till his death, because he was extraordinarily judicious in getting the proportions of skill and fashion exactly right at any one time. He also had brilliant timing in guessing when the moment had arrived for pushing on to a new fashion. Although his own appetite for novelty was insatiable, he was uncannily adept at deciding exactly how much the vanguard of the art world would take. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 253). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

But he also exposes a very dark side of Picasso; how he abused women and men, stabbed friends in the back, and seemed to have no moral sense.

He would create situations in which one mistress angrily confronted another in his presence, and then both rolled on the floor, biting and scratching. On one occasion Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter pounded each other with their fists while Picasso, having set up the fight, calmly went on painting. The canvas he was working on was Guernica. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 256). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Walt Disney, on the other hand, comes in for quite a bit of praise. I really enjoyed Johnson’s detailed explanation of just how revolutionary Disney was when it came to combining sound and animation in a film. Practically all animated content we enjoy today owes a debt to Disney. What was his strength as a creator? According to Johnson,

Whereas Picasso tended to dehumanize the women he drew or painted. Disney anthropomorphized his animal subjects; that was the essential source of his power and humor. Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 258). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The final chapter, Metaphors in a Laboratory, addresses the idea of scientific creativity. Johnson argues that through the use of metaphors, scientists are able to communicate their ideas and spur others to innovate. A lot of this chapter rehashes persons and topics he covers in The Birth of the Modern – how Wordsworth and the scientist and inventor Humphrey Gray were great friends and shared ideas with each other, how the engineer Telford transformed the British landscape with canals, roads, and bridges of simplicity and beauty. Creators is a wonderful celebration of one of the greatest human characteristics: the ability to create. Even though some of the creators were not the nicest people who lived (such as Picasso), their works survive to inspire others.