Creators – Paul Johnson

CREATORS: From Chaucer to Walt Disney, by Paul Johnson. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London. 2006. 310 pp.

Reviewed by Chris Chatteris SJ

If you enjoyed Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, then this latest volume would merit a place on your bookshelf.

Indeed Paul Johnson has announced his intention, if he lives long enough, to complete a quartet. After Creators will come Heroes and thereafter Monsters.

Intellectuals was his sustained critique of the foibles of those thinkers who took it upon themselves to instruct the rest of humanity on how to behave.

Johnson defined an intellectual as “someone who thinks that ideas are more important than people”, and the intriguing question he put to us was why we take seriously the philosophies of life of people who did not actually care too much about people and sometimes ruined their own lives.

Creators is written partly to respond to the criticism of “mean spiritedness” that was levelled against Intellectuals and generally Johnson’s treatment of his creators is vastly more generous than that of his intellectuals.

In the process he attempts to answer the fascinating question of what makes a human person creative.

The sub-title “From Chaucer to Walt Disney” gives a sense of the variety that he intends to display, but the title hardly reveals the half of it. Here is a fuller list: Imhotep (who, among other things, built pyramids), Chaucer, Dürer, Shakespeare, Bach (and the Bach tribe), Turner, Hokusai (a Japanese contemporary of Turner), Jane Austen and George Eliot, Pugin and his French kindred spirit Viollet-le-Duc, Hugo, Twain, Tiffany, TS Eliot, fashion designers Balenciaga and Dior, Picasso and Disney, and scientists Davy, Faraday and Edison.

It is a sumptuous smorgasbord and looks at creativity from a great variety of viewpoints.

Shakespeare’s father was a glovemaker but Bach’s genetic pool simply swam with musicians. Victor Hugo was astoundingly prolific as a writer, but Johnson thinks he was fundamentally brainless. Eliot was a buttoned-down Puritan conservative and a banker, but smashed an entire cultural-poetic mould. Pugin lived and breathed gothic, even referring to his second wife as “a first rate Gothic woman”!

What drove them to produce the quality and quantity that they poured forth? The answer remains fundamentally mysterious and this is hinted at in Johnson’s opening assertion that to be creative is to share in the divine function.

However, by getting inside their personalities one gets some sense of their different creative drives. And Johnson likes to mention the lesser motivations such as money or the even mundane creative lubricants like the dry martini he believes loosened TS Eliot up for some of his better work.

Occasionally Johnson cannot escape Intellectuals. When dealing with Picasso (Johnson himself paints), he wickedly compares him with Walt Disney and finds Picasso, though prodigiously creative, wanting, both as an artist and as a man.

Even Mickey Mouse is discussed with dead-pan seriousness in a way which must have Picasso turning furiously in his tomb and elegantly takes the Mickey out of the right thinking members of the chatterati. Johnson will at times have you laughing heartily and then suddenly realising that he’s made you laugh at yourself.

There is depth as well as humour, including the spiritual. For example, Bach’s sturdy and essentially ecumenical faith is movingly described. Dürer’s total dedication to his art is powerfully conveyed.

Some males might wonder whether they will find dress-designers of interest. Herein lies one of Johnson’s own strong areas of creativity. He can introduce the reader into a completely different life-world and hold your attention there. It is his journalistic background come to the fore, the conviction that there is a fascinating story in anything, especially if people are involved.

Elsewhere, when he is advising aspiring young newspaper columnists Johnson gives the following advice: “…make the point, from time to time, that we live in an infinitely beautiful world, surprisingly full of fascinating people, and heart-warming happenings, and laughter, and that God is in his heaven.” In Creators he takes his own advice.

Let us pray for longevity for Mr Johnson so that he may exercise his creativity on Heroes and Monsters.