When my copy of Red Comet (the Sylvia Plath biography I recommended in last month’s radar) was delivered to my home this past December, it landed like a mysterious brick on my doorstep. I couldn’t remember what I had ordered at first, weighing the package in my hand while leafing through the pages of my recent memory for a receipt. Ultimately, the UK Paperback Shop return label gave it away. No wonder the friend who recommended this book to me suggested I get it on a Kindle.
I was stunned by its size: 1,158 pages. I did a quick scan of my bookshelf for some comparison. Barack Obama’s Promised Land rang in at 768 pages. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind is 443. Could life be measured in ink? And if so, who’s to say which ones warrant more of it than others? This, of course, led me to contemplating how many pages the chronicles of my own existence would amass, considering I’m about to turn 30 — the same age that Plath was when she died.
Approximately one third of the way into Red Comet, the reader is introduced to Alfred Kazin, a visiting writing professor at Smith College, where Plath was a student in the mid-1950s. While he described Plath as “not merely the most gifted student in the class, but perhaps the most interesting student writer I have seen in years.… I have even heard it said that she is the most gifted student Smith has seen for many years,” the book goes on to explore how Kazin emphasized discipline over raw talent.
It’s a debate I’ve found myself having with friends and colleagues, similarly to how we toil over discussions of nature versus nurture. Is there such a thing as innate talent, and how do you know if you have it? What is the role of luck in how we quantify success? Plath cultivated creative brilliance to such an extreme, it resulted in a fear of her own greatness so tremendous that she saw death as the only way out. In pondering the source of that kind of greatness as I chip away at her biography — while simultaneously taking the proverbial pen to my own next decade-sized chapter — I’m left with a question I’d like to ask Alice and Mary Frances this month: Is talent a myth? AR
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Amanda asks: Is talent a myth?
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In the words of...
Alice
A recurring motif of my childhood was ten-pin bowling. There would always be birthday parties held in one of the depressing bowling alleys that proliferated in suburbia, every year from the age of about 10 to 15 — with the occasional straggler at 16 having not yet discovered Nando’s or Smirnoff Ice. I hate bowling. But I’d show up dutifully, spending the afternoon scoring consistent half-strikes, my name climbing the score board displayed on the kitschy little screens above each lane. I’m not saying I’d always walk out with the trophy (besides, I was far more interested in the two-tone shoes), but I always did pretty well — much to the chagrin of my competitors. Imagine what I could have done with this nascent talent if I actually gave a shit?
Everybody has a propensity for something: throwing a heavy ball in a relatively straight line, photo-realistic painting, nuclear physics. The ability may never be discovered; the ability may be begrudged and left to wither away. The wrong ability may be fixated on, causing all sorts of distress as you set out to become a pole-vaulter when actually you are better built for accounting. I’m not saying put down the pole, but just as everybody has skills, so, too, do they have limitations. I had this minor epiphany aged 17 while revising for a history exam: The information simply would not stick. My brain just glazed over as soon as I stared at those academic texts. No amount of re-reading would work, so I gave up and accepted my subsequent subpar grade, content in the knowledge that I didn’t waste hours of my youth on such a lost cause, turning instead to writing on Tumblr.
Raw talent can take on many forms, but it needs to be polished to shine. It’s clear I was never going to be a familiar face on the History Channel, but quite possibly the only reason I’m not on the cover of Bowlers Journal International is that I never had the passion to develop my throwing style. The reason I am part of this newsletter is because of a lifetime of engaging with the craft of writing, through years of passive training on early blogging platforms and in tatty notebooks and subsequent years of hard graft and determination. AB
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In the words of...
Mary Frances
Talent is what my 4-year-old nephew would call a “tricky word.” Kim Kardashian has it. My friends’ therapists have it. The CalTech professor making snowflakes from his California garage has it. But are any of their talents, even with the skills that must be honed within them, at all innate? The romantic in me wants to jump on the roof and say, “Yes, Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht was born to be the world’s only maker of designer snow crystals, and Kim Kadashian’s It-factor is insane,” and I think I wouldn’t not be right. But it doesn’t matter what I believe, singularly, even if I could quantify my opinions with some kind of irrefutable evidence. I think talent is like every other popular myth in America, from Jesus (fight me) to Bigfoot. It might not be real, but we believe in it and build our lives around it, so in the words of Trixie Mattel, it might as well be as real as anything.
I’m not denying that people from all walks of life are naturally skilled. The narrator dude/dead chef in Ratatouille really slammed his balls on the table when he said, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” Billie Holiday was born with those pipes. But would her Talent (with a capital T) status exist without an audience? The fruition of talent often relies on a blend of circumstance, social skills, drive, and whoever decides to tell your story once you’re dead. Studies have found that the most successful athletes have a near-delusional sense of confidence, which creates a placebo-like effect on their performance that falls somewhere between fake-it-until-you-make it and magic, if you ask me.
Perhaps talent just needs some stroking. Mozart needed to be fed his bonbons, said Maggie Gyllenhaall’s character in The Kindergarten Teacher — a cautionary tale on perceived talent if ever there was one. Yet, even in near cultural isolation and rather dank conditions, there have been “outsiders” or “folk artists'' whose talents had no formal training. Consider the janitor and artist Henry Darger, or the French postal worker who built a small palace out of pebbles in secret. Sure, formally trained creatives might have technical bones to pick with outsider artists. But someone like Darger transcended technical analysis with his work, partly because it was made under unlikely circumstances, and because it oozed that je ne sais quoi element; that electric ingredient that’s impossible to learn. The It-factor exists because of who they were, or who we imagine them to be — and isn’t that so much more interesting than talent? MFK
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