The art of thoroughness

The life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his book Representative Men, “showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage and thoroughness.” I’ve never forgotten this sentence, in large part because the qualities that Emerson lists—apart from courage—are all so boring and mundane. Emerson, I think, is being deliberately provocative in explaining the career of Napoleon, the most overwhelming public figure who ever lived, in terms of qualities that we’d like to see in a certified public accountant. But he’s also right in noting that Napoleon’s fascination is rooted in his “very intelligible merits,” which give us the idea, which seems more plausible when we’re in our early twenties, that we might have done the same thing in his position. It’s an observation that must have seemed even more striking to Emerson’s audience than it does to us now. Napoleon rose from virtually nothing to become an emperor, and he emerged at a moment, just after the fall of a hereditary monarchy, in which such examples were still rare. A commoner could never hope to become a king, but every citizen could fantasize about being Napoleon. These days, when we tell our children that anyone can become president, we’re more likely to take such dreams for granted. (It’s noteworthy that Emerson delivered this lecture a decade before the election of Abraham Lincoln, who fills exactly that role in the American imagination.) As Emerson says: “If Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.”

This is true of other forms of achievement, too. I’ve been thinking about this passage a lot recently, because it also seems like a list of the qualities that characterize a certain kind of writer, particularly one who works in nonfiction. I can’t speak for the extent to which courage enters into it, aside from the ordinary kind that is required to write anything at all—although some writers, now more than ever, display far greater courage than others. But the more you write, the more you come to value the homely virtues that Emerson catalogs here, both in yourself and in the books you read. Even fiction, which might seem to draw more on creativity and inspiration, is an act of sustained organization, and the best novels tend to be the ones that are so superbly organized that the writer can take the time to see clearly into every part. To stretch the military analogy even further, there’s a fog of war that descends on any extended writing project: it’s hard to keep both the details and the big picture in your head at once, and you don’t have time to follow up on every line of investigation. All books inevitably leave certain things undone. For a writer, personal attention and thoroughness come down to the ability to keep everything straight for long enough to develop every element exactly as far as it needs to extend. One of the attractions of a book like The Power Broker by Robert Caro is the sense that every paragraph represents the fruits of maximal thoroughness. The really funny thing is that Caro thought it would take him just nine months to write. But maybe that’s what all writers need to tell themselves before they start.

There’s a place, obviously, for inspiration, insight, and other factors that can’t be reduced to mere diligence. But organization is the essential backdrop from which ideas emerge, exactly as it was for Napoleon. It may not be sufficient, but it’s certainly necessary. Our university libraries are filled with monuments to thoroughness that went nowhere, but there’s also something weirdly logical about the notion of giving a doctoral candidate the chance to spend a few years thoroughly investigating a tiny slice of knowledge that hasn’t been explored before, on the off chance that something useful might come of it. Intuition is often described as a shortcut that allows the thinker to skip the intermediate steps of an argument, which suggests to me that the opposite should also be true: a year of patiently gathering data can yield a result that a genius would get in an instant. The tradeoff may not always be worth it for any one individual, but it’s certainly worth it for society as a whole. We suffer from a shortage of geniuses, but we’ve got plenty of man-hours in our graduate schools. Both are indispensable in their own way. To some extent, thoroughness can be converted into genius, just as one currency can be exchanged for another—it’s just that the exchange rate is sometimes unfavorable. And it’s even more accurate to say that insight is the paycheck you get for the hard daily work of thoroughness. (Which just reminds me of the fact that “earning a living” as an artist is both about putting a roof over your head and about keeping yourself in a position to utilize good ideas when they come.)

And it gives me hope for my current project. John W. Campbell, of all people, put it best. On July 5, 1967, he wrote to Larry Niven: “The readers lay their forty cents on the counter to employ me to think things through for them with more depth, more detail, and more ingenuity than they can, or want to bother achieving.” This is possibly my favorite thing that Campbell ever said—although it’s important to note that it dates from a period when his thinking was hideously wrong on countless matters. A writer is somebody you hire to be thorough about something when you don’t have the time or the inclination. (Journalism amounts to a kind of outsourcing of our own efforts to remain informed about the world, which makes it all the more important to choose our sources wisely.) I’m about halfway through this book, and it’s already clear that there are plenty of other people who would be more qualified than I am to write it. My only advantage is that I’m available. I can think about this subject every day for two to three years, and I can afford to spend my time chasing down details that even a diligent writer who only touches on the topic tangentially wouldn’t be able to investigate. All writing comes down to a process of triage, and as I work, I’m aware of potential avenues that I’ll need to leave unexplored or assertions that I’ll have to take on faith, trusting that someone else will look into them one day. The most I can do is flag them and move on. There are also days when even the humdrum qualities that Emerson lists seem impossibly out of reach, and I’m confronted by the physical limits to how thorough I can be, just as I’m aware of the limits to my insight. As a writer, you hope that these limitations will cancel each other out over a long enough period of time, but there’s no way of knowing until you’re finished. And maybe that’s where the courage comes in.

How not to read the news

In “How Not to Use a Cellular Phone,” an essay first published in the early nineties, the late author Umberto Eco described what seemed, at the time, like the most obnoxious kind of cell phone user imaginable. It was the person who is anxious to show us how much in demand he is “for complex business discussions,” and who conducts these conversations at great length in public spaces like airports or restaurants, thinking that the impression he makes is “very Rockefellerian.” Eco observed:

What these people don’t realize is that Rockefeller doesn’t need a portable telephone; he has a spacious room full of secretaries so efficient that at the very worst, if his grandfather is dying, the chauffeur comes and whispers something in his ear. The man with power is the man who is not required to answer every call; on the contrary, he is always—as the saying goes—in a meeting…So anyone who flaunts a portable phone as a symbol of power is, on the contrary, announcing to all and sundry his desperate, subaltern position, in which he is obliged to snap to attention, even when making love, if the CEO happens to telephone…The fact that he uses, ostentatiously, his cellular phone is proof that he doesn’t know these things.

At first glance, Eco’s point might seem dated. Few people these days regard the mere act of using a cell phone as a status symbol, and if anything, the sight of someone actually talking on one has begun to feel slightly quaint. In fact, of course, the essay isn’t dated at all. The only difference is that we’ve all been transformed into the sorry figure whom Eco describes. Like him, we’re expected to be available at all times for emails, texts, tweets, and even the occasional phone call, and we don’t have the consolation of thinking that it makes us special. Instead, we’re all uniformly vulnerable to constant interruption, not only by friends and colleagues, but by strangers, spammers, and nonhuman sources of distraction. I’m thinking, in particular, of the news. The gap between an event in the world and its dissemination, analysis, and dismissal online has been reduced to invisibility, and it’s only going to get worse. During the election, there were times when I felt like a slave to information, which is just one step away from noise, and I took steps to insulate myself from it. At the time, I thought it was a temporary measure, but now it looks more like a way of life. Which, in a way, may be the only truly positive outcome of this past year. It forced me to do what I never would have been able to accomplish voluntarily: to take a step back and think more critically about my relationship to the unending deluge of data in which we live.

You could make the case we have a moral obligation to be informed of all events as soon as they occur, or that unplugging is a form of denial in itself, but those who lived through even more stressful times knew better. In a letter dated December 21, 1941, two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Robert A. Heinlein described his own “mental ostrichism” to John W. Campbell:

A long time ago I learned that it was necessary to my own mental health to insulate myself emotionally from everything I could not help and to restrict my worrying to things I could help. But wars have a tremendous emotional impact and I have a one-track mind. In 1939 and 1940 I deliberately took the war news about a month later, via Time magazine, in order to dilute the emotional impact. Otherwise I would not have been able to concentrate on fiction writing at all. Emotional detachment is rather hard for me to achieve, so I cultivate it by various dodges whenever the situation is one over which I have no control.

It’s a statement that seems all the more remarkable to me the more I think about it. Whatever his other flaws, Heinlein wasn’t a mental weakling, or a man inclined to avoid confronting reality, and the fact that he felt the need—as a form of preventative mental hygiene—to delay the news by a month is tremendously comforting. And it reassures me that I’m justified in thinking hard about the way in which I relate to the information at my disposal.

To put it bluntly, there’s nothing wrong with reading the paper every morning, absorbing what seems to have mattered over the last twenty-four hours, and then turning off the spigot for the rest of the day. It’s how people got their news for most of the twentieth century, which certainly wasn’t lacking in meaningful events. (Increased coverage doesn’t always lead to greater understanding, and you could even make the case that the sheer volume of it—which has diffused the impact of what is truly important and paved the way for the rise of fake news—has inhibited our ability to respond.) It may even turn out to be more useful to postpone these confrontations to a modest degree. When Napoleon was the Emperor of France, he developed a strategy for dealing with the massive amount of correspondence that he received: he would wait a week before opening any new letters, and by the time he got around to looking at a particular problem or request, he would usually find that it had been resolved, or that the passage of time had put it into perspective. The news works in much the same way. There are very few items that can’t be better understood after a day or two has passed, and for those rare events that are so urgent that they can’t be ignored, there will always be a chauffeur, as Eco puts it, to whisper it in our ears. As Heinlein understood, when you can’t help something in the short term, you have to manage your relationship to it in ways that maximize your potential impact over the long run. It’s measured in years rather than seconds. And it starts right now.

The world of Tlön

Last month, my wife suffered a miscarriage in her eighth week of pregnancy. We had been trying for a second baby for a long time, and it devastated us. She has already written about it more eloquently than I ever could, and I don’t want to relive it all here. But there’s one memory that I’ve been turning over in my head for most of a sleepless night. It was during our first visit to the hospital, when we were waiting to go upstairs to hear the results of my wife’s blood test and ultrasound. I ended up alone in the lobby for a little while, and I caught myself wondering if this would be the last happy moment I would ever have. At such times, you try to strike bargains with the universe, and my personal life already felt so entangled with the election that I made a silent offer: I would accept a Trump presidency, if only it meant that I could have this baby. A few minutes later, we were seated across from a midwife who told us that the fetal heartbeat was abnormally slow, and that it didn’t seem to be viable. There was a chance that it would survive, but it was very low. We went home, spent a tense week waiting to see what would happen, and finally returned for a second appointment. The fetus was already gone. And when I think back now to the deal I tried to strike—Trump in exchange for that baby—I’m reminded of what the late Gene Wilder screams at Charlie at the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: “You get nothing.”

Of course, that isn’t exactly true. I’m fortunate enough to have a life that is mostly shielded from the obvious fallout of a Trump administration. There isn’t any risk that I’ll be deported. I’m a heterosexual male in the middle class. If I want to tune out the news for weeks or months, I’ve got an absorbing project that was going to take up most of my time anyway. But the prospect of doing any work on my book now reminds me of how Jorge Luis Borges ends the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which the world is devoured by the alternative reality of a fictional encyclopedia:

Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a resemblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly…Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne’s Urn Burial.

We’re all about to take the plunge into unreality that Borges describes here—and it isn’t a fantasy spun by a secret society of encyclopedists, as the Borges fan Karl Rove might have foreseen, but the product of a single man’s brain. And part of me is tempted to pay no attention to it and go on revising.

In many ways, it feels like any reasonable person is faced with two alternatives. Either you can fully accept that this is the time that you’ve been given, as Gandalf says to Frodo, and gird yourself for four years of battle, or you can withdraw, tend your own garden, and try to make as much happiness as you can for yourself and your loved ones—which is a luxury that not everyone can afford. I’m an imperfect creature, so I suspect that my reaction will be some combination of the two. I’ll unplug for a while, wait for the noise to die down, and then figure out a way to muddle through and do the best I can. It’s not so different from the way in which I dealt with the George W. Bush administration, which, in retrospect, encompassed eight of the happiest years of my life. It had nothing to do with politics: I was in my twenties, I was making my way in the world for the first time, and I felt no need to identify with the man in the White House. Trump may well turn out to be similar, if far worse. For one thing, I’m not twenty anymore. But I’ve also been spoiled by Obama. For most of the last decade, the president was a man I admired and understood. He made me feel that I was part of something larger. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that way again. Part of me sensed this, which is why I tried to savor this last, awful year in whatever way I could. Maybe my relationship to politics has simply been restored to what should be its natural state, as forcefully and abruptly as possible. But that doesn’t make it any less painful.

As for Trump himself, I don’t think there’s any point in denying that what he did was extraordinary. As L. Ron Hubbard, a charismatic leader with disturbing affinities to Trump, once wrote: “I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed.” Trump did this unequivocally, and along the way, he reminded us of how little we know about anything, both individually and collectively. Maybe it’s a lesson that all we needed to be taught, although I sincerely doubt it will be worth the cost. And I still don’t know what to make of it. Goethe said of another historic figure:

The story of Napoleon produces in me an impression like that produced by the Revelation of St. John the Divine. We all feel there must be something more in it, but we do not know what.

Despite its apocalyptic tone—or perhaps because of it—this is pretty much what I’m feeling now. I don’t have any illusions that Trump will be a decent president, and even a mediocre presidency seems like too much to ask. What consoles me now is that there are good things in this country, and in all our lives, that Trump can never take away. As the world becomes Tlön, the rest of us will muddle through, even if it has to be on our own. My wife and I lost one baby, but we’ll try for another. But I still don’t know what to say to my daughter.

Napoleon and the art of the next

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike for bread, and the king and his ministers, knowing not what to do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon understood his business. Here was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth, without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and after each action wait for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the world, if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action…

We can not, in the universal imbecility, indecision and indolence of men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage and thoroughness.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Napoleon, or The Man of the World”

The art of the impossible

A couple of years ago, after I saw Jack Reacher, I wrote the following about Tom Cruise, whom I still regard as the most interesting movie star we have: “He’s more of a great producer and packager of talent who happens to occupy the body of a star who can also get movies made.” I didn’t think much of that observation at the time, but when I look back, it seems to explain a lot about what makes Cruise both so consistent and so enigmatic. A producer credit can mean just about anything in Hollywood, from the person who willed an entire movie into existence to the financier who signed the checks to the studio executive who was in the right place at the right time. On the highest level, though, a producer is an aggregator of talent and money, a magnet to whom capable professionals and funding are drawn. By that definition, a major movie star, whose involvement can be all that takes a project out of turnaround and puts it into production, is frequently the only producer who counts. If you start to think of Cruise, then, as less a star than an industry player who can get movies to happen, he ranks among the greatest producers in history. And the Mission: Impossible franchise is the jewel in the crown, a series of sandboxes for five distinct directors to play with the idea of a studio tentpole, linked only by the master orchestrator who assembles the pieces.

This may be why it has taken so long for the series to get the recognition it deserves. The Mission: Impossible movies have always been financially successful, but it wasn’t until Ghost Protocol—and now Rogue Nation, which by all accounts is just as superb—that they began to inspire anything like affection. Most franchises thrive on our fondness for a central character, but Ethan Hunt is nothing but whatever the screenplay happens to require. Cruise is the undeniable creative force behind these films, but he’s also turned himself into a studio executive’s idea of an obedient movie star, a pro who gets to the set on time, always gives everything he has, and defers throughout to the overall operation. Each installment is less a movie in itself than a kind of object lesson, with endless variations, in what a big studio production ought to be. Hence the way Cruise, with a producer’s sure instincts, has used the franchise as a springboard for untapped talent (J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird), a showcase for memorable sidekick or villain performances (Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Philip Seymour Hoffman), or a halfway house for gifted screenwriters who had spent years in the wilderness (Robert Towne, Christopher McQuarrie). The result works precisely to the extent that it gives us our money’s worth, and few franchises over the years have so consistently embodied the basic reasons I go to the movies.

Yet there’s something about the impersonality of the result that can be a little alienating, and I think this has contributed more to the ambivalence many viewers feel toward Cruise than any of his public missteps—which, in any case, are far less damaging than countless transgressions for which many lesser stars have been forgiven. It’s hard to feel much love for him, any more than we feel love for, say, Brian Grazer, and Cruise himself seems increasingly reluctant to build a film around his star power alone. When you look at the trailers for his movies, you find that many of them fall back on the same gimmick: instead of opening on the star, as the ads for most movies would, they establish the story and situation for up to a minute without showing Cruise at all, and when he first appears, it’s as a slow fade into a glowering closeup of his face. (You see the same pattern in the teasers for Mission: Impossible III, Collateral, Ghost Protocol, and Jack Reacher, and there are probably others I’ve forgotten.) It sells us on the movie first, then slides in Cruise toward the middle, as if to seal the deal. It’s a neat trick, but it also has the effect of subordinating the star to the producer. He’s an important piece, even the keystone, but he derives his value solely from the machine he sets in motion. And we might like him better as a human being if he’d stuck to movies like Cocktail or Days of Thunder, in which he coasted on his considerable charm alone.

But the history of popular entertainment is richer and more intriguing thanks to Cruise’s withdrawal into the producer’s chair. At times, he reminds me a little of Napoleon, and not just in terms of stature: both are genetic freaks who were statistically bound to emerge sooner or later, and their success depended largely on being born into a time that could put them to use. Napoleon was a political and administrative genius who also had the physical endurance and luck of a soldier; Cruise was a handsome kid with a knack for acting who also had a relentlessly pragmatic sense of the possible. Which isn’t to say that his instincts are always infallible, any more than they were for Spielberg or Hitchcock. His attempt to become something like a real studio mogul at United Artists fizzled out quickly, and efforts like Lions for Lambs, Knight and Day, Oblivion, and Rock of Ages have revealed something less than a flawless understanding of what the public wants. In recent years, he has seemed content to be nothing but an action star, and he’s proven just as capable of this as might be expected—although I also feel the loss of the actor who starred in Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia. As always, his choices serve as a microcosm of the movie industry as a whole, which has moved away from human stories to four-quadrant blockbusters, and Cruise seems determined to demonstrate that he’s as good at this as he was at anything else. And he is. But convincing audiences to love him for it may be the most impossible mission of all.

The art of postponement

When Napoleon Bonaparte was Emperor of France, he developed a useful strategy for dealing with the massive amount of correspondence he received: he would wait a week before opening any new letters, and by the time he got around to looking at a particular problem or request, he would usually find that it had been resolved in the meantime. At first glance, a writer might not seem to have a lot in common with Napoleon—although he did write fiction as a young man—and the process of writing a novel, while daunting, is slightly less difficult than administering an empire. But there’s a lot of wisdom in this approach. When you’re a writer, you can feel overwhelmed by the amount of material and detail required by even the simplest story. How does Trevor dispose of the gun? What kind of outfit would Barbara wear to the restaurant? How can Amanda get out of the upstairs bedroom before Don gets home? Sometimes a solution will present itself at once; occasionally you’ll rack your brains for hours without coming up with anything good. But I’ve found that when you don’t know the answer, you’re often better off just postponing it for later.

Which isn’t to say that a writer should plunge blindly into a story without any sense of the destination, or that I don’t prefer to plan as much as possible in advance: I’ve spoken at length about my love of outlining, and I like to have at least the overall shape of a story sketched out before I start work on the first page. As I’ve grown more experienced as a writer, though, I’ve learned that it’s better to work around—or just omit—a tricky section rather than let it sap the momentum you’ve built up so far. You may not be happy with the page as it stands, but if you insert a placeholder and move on, when you go back to revisit it, you’ll often find, like Napoleon, that the problem has taken care of itself. Either the troublesome section ends up being condensed or cut entirely in the rewrite; or something good will occur to you eighty pages later; or you’ll find that the makeshift solution you cobbled together works just fine, at least within the role it needs to play in the larger story. It’s impossible to know really matters until the entire rough draft is done, and it’s far more dangerous to get hung up on trifles while putting the entire project at risk.

Other writers have offered similar advice. In his book This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosley observes:

There will be moments when you will want to dally over details. Do Georgia geese fly south in April or June? Is it physically possible for Bob Millar to hear the cult leader yelling from a mile away—even in a desert? Would the police arrest Trip if the women were allowed into the bar and were served by the owner?

All of these questions are valid. Before the book gets into print, you should have the answers. But many writers allow questions like these to help them procrastinate. They tell themselves that they can’t go on until these questions are answered.

Nonsense. Put a red question mark next to the place where you have questions and get back to it later.

And I’ve found that this red question mark is useful for far more than just research issues. The great film editor Walter Murch talks about leaving “a residue of unresolved problems for the next stage” of any creative project, both because it keeps the process interesting and because the version of yourself who confronts the problem will be better equipped to deal with it. Writing a novel is essentially an extended collaboration between your past, present, and future selves, with the process stretching across many months or years. It’s unreasonable to expect that your present self will have all the answers, and in fact, your future self will probably know more than you do now, once you’ve invested more time into the project. (That’s why I always advise writers to finish a complete first draft before going back to revise: an issue that seems insurmountable in Chapter 1 may have an obvious solution in Chapter 20, but only if you’ve written the intervening eighteen chapters first.) All that matters is that you get something down, even if you suspect that you’ll need to change it later. It can’t be postponed forever, of course. But it often helps to postpone it for just long enough.

So what exactly is genius?

I throw around the word “genius” a lot on this blog. Over the last few years alone, I’ve written posts with titles like “The neurotic genius of Dan Harmon,” “Vince Gilligan and the dark genius of Breaking Bad,” and even “The lost genius of Family Circus.” I’ve applied the term to individuals as diverse in their fields as Charles Schulz, Ferran Adrià, Matthew Weiner, Umberto Eco, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Dr. Seuss. The more I look at the word, though, the less satisfactory it seems. When I think of genius, isolated from any particular case or example, I tend to picture something inexplicable, maybe even a little sinister, as Goethe says about the career of one incomparable genius of the world:

The story of Napoleon produces on me an impression like that produced by the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. We all feel there must be something more in it, but we do not know what.

That sense of something unknown that we haven’t yet been able to grasp is central to the traditional spirit of genius, but at a time when most of our geniuses are so open to interviews, profiles, and commentary tracks, it’s hard not to feel that its meaning needs to be reappraised.

Originally, “genius” was a term with a touch of the supernatural, describing a guiding spirit or deity. Even now, we often think of genius as something other than ordinary consciousness, and it feels this way even to those who seem to possess it. This fits reasonably well with what we know about the brain: impulses and ideas do appear to filter up from lower strata to be sifted or processed on a more conscious level, and they range from the decision to brush one’s teeth to the melody for “Yesterday.” In The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes hypothesizes that this division between inspiration and action used to be even more stark: messages would originate in the right hemisphere of the brain and wander into the left, where they were interpreted as the voice of a god or inner daimon. And one of the implications of modern neurological research is that this division still exists, and we’ve simply become better at attributing these impulses to our sense of self.

In short, there’s something occult and mysterious about the process of genius, at least as it’s traditionally understood. These days, however, much of it seems to unfold in public. Many of the individuals I mentioned above are geniuses in areas that don’t reward solitary visionaries so much as superb organizers: a television showrunner or film director may well follow a voice from his unconscious, but he also needs to be good at dealing with actors, coordinating the work of various creative departments, and deciding on the color of the wallpaper. As the case of Dan Harmon indicates, a strong creative vision may even be a liability if it makes it hard to work with others. And even a deeply original genius may find that inspiration is less important than methodical, systematic attention to detail. Kubrick, for instance, was as close to an intellectual genius as the movies have seen, but it manifested itself as much in his care and patience as in the conceptions of his films themselves. Genius is the engine that drives the project, but diligence brings it home.

And this deserves to be respected, even if it doesn’t fit the standard conception of genius—unless, of course, we use the alternative definition, as famously enunciated by Thomas Carlyle, that genius is a “transcendent capacity of taking trouble.” Napoleon, not surprisingly, embodied both qualities in one career, with a nearly supernatural level of intuition and decisiveness united to a bottomless appetite for facts, figures, and the daily bureaucratic grind of running an empire. (It’s no wonder that Kubrick was so obsessed by him.) A while back, I noted that the solitary geniuses of science, like Darwin or Freud, have largely been replaced by geniuses of collaboration, as science becomes an endeavor that requires increasing specialization and coordination. It’s likely that we’re seeing something similar taking place in the arts. The most visible art forms of our time—film, television, even music—are the work of little Napoleons, where the shadowy side of genius is enabled by the gifts of great producers and administrators. It’s the age of left-brained genius. And now it’s the right brain that seems to be taken along for the ride.

The mind of Napoleon

No one knew so well as he how to sort papers, documents, and statements. Lists were to be all of like dimensions, clothed in uniform bindings, arranged in identical order. The same with estimates…And it is he who combines and arranges these portfolios…

On all subjects he has a collection of information of the same order, dictionaries of individuals arranged by classes or by states. One of the Emperor’s nephews relates that every day Napoleon received and carried about on his person, written on a very small piece of paper, a statement of that which he called the fortune of France, and also the state of his own fortune,—that fortune which was only one of the reserves of the nation. He had this paper in his pocket and consulted it many times during the day.

It is this machinery, this spirit of order and method which he brings to bear on everything, that choice of those around him, which alone are capable, not of explaining, but of rendering credible, the amount of work which Napoleon got through, and which is actually ten times more important than one imagines; for he was not content to grasp the whole, he entered into the smallest detail, and for fourteen years it was he who thought for eighty millions of men.

—Frédéric Masson, Napoleon at Home

Let us now forget famous men

“More books have been written about [Lincoln] than any figure in human history, with the possible exception of Jesus Christ.”

The photo above was taken three years ago by my then girlfriend, now wife, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. I didn’t get to go, alas—I was living in New York at the time—but the museum, as I was endlessly informed over the next few days, is tons of fun, with elaborate dioramas of the White House, Ford’s Theater, and other family-friendly attractions, including life-size figures of the entire Lincoln clan. When I saw the text of the plaque above, though, I was outraged, for reasons that might seem hard to understand at first. Here’s my verbatim response, at least as well as I can remember: “What about Napoleon?” I demanded. “What about Napoleon?”

You see, I like Napoleon. I like him a lot. Twenty or so books about Napoleon line my shelves, and I’m always on the lookout for more, the older and more adulatory, the better. Why? Emerson’s essay from Representative Men provides a decent starting point, but the short answer is that Napoleon is the most fascinating person I know in world history—”among the most perceptive, penetrating, retentive, and logical minds ever seen in one who was predominantly a man of action,” as Will Durant nicely puts it. He’s the foremost figure of Western history, a man who, for all his flaws, embodies more than any other individual the limits of human energy, intelligence, and ambition. And I was pretty sure that more books had been written about him than anyone else, including Lincoln.

And yet here’s the thing. Napoleon came from almost nothing, and became emperor of Europe. At his coronation, he took the crown out of the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head. He was, by almost any measure, the most purely productive human being who ever lived. But these days, all that most people could say about Napoleon, if they recognized the name at all, was that he was a short little guy with a funny hat. (Not that short, by the way: he was 5 feet, 7 inches, or roughly the height of Tom Cruise.) That’s what time does: it reduces even the most monumental figures into caricatures of themselves. Two centuries is all it took to turn the leading light of Western civilization to Ian Holm in Time Bandits. It will happen to Lincoln, too, if it hasn’t already happened.

Napoleon, of course, isn’t alone. I was recently reminded of this whole kerfuffle while reading Dean Simonton’s Origins of Genius, inspired by the Malcolm Gladwell article I mentioned last week. Simonton mentions the work of the psychologist James McKeen Cattell, who, back in 1903, made one of the first systematic attempts to rank the thousand most eminent men in history—there were hardly any women on his list—by toting up mentions in major biographical dictionaries and tabulating the results. Here’s his top hundred:

Napoleon, Shakespeare, Mohammed, Voltaire, Bacon, Aristotle, Goethe, Julius Caesar, Luther, Plato, Napoleon III, Burke, Homer, Newton, Cicero, Milton, Alexander the Great, Pitt, Washington, Augustus, Wellington, Raphael, Descartes, Columbus, Confucius, Penn, Scott, Michelangelo, Socrates, Byron, Cromwell, Gautama, Kant, Leibnitz, Locke, Demosthenes, Mary Stuart [the only woman on the list], Calvin, Moliere, Lincoln, Louis Philippe, Dante, Rousseau, Nero, Franklin, Galileo, Johnson, Robespierre, Frederick the Great, Aurelius, Hegel, Petrarch, Horace, Charles V (Germany), Mirabeau, Erasmus, Virgil, Hume, Guizot, Gibbon, Pascal, Bossuet, Hobbes, Swift, Thiers, Louis XIV, Wordsworth, Louis XVI, Nelson, Henry VIII, Addison, Thucydides, Fox, Racine, Schiller, Henry IV (France), W. Herschel, Tasso, Jefferson, Ptolemy, Claudius, Augustine, Pope, Machiavelli, Swedenborg, Philip II, Leonardo da Vinci, George III, Julian, Pythagoras, Macaulay, Rubens, Burns, Mozart, Humboldt, Comte, Cousin, Cuvier, Justinian, Euripides, Camoens.

Now, much of this list remains unimpeachable. The top ten, in particular, would presumably be very similar today, though Bacon would probably give place to Newton, and we’d need to find room for Einstein and, yes, Lincoln. (Also, hopefully, for some women. The only other women, besides Mary Queen of Scots, to make Cattell’s top two hundred were Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, although, at this rate, it’s only a matter of time before we see Sarah Palin.) But with all due respect to my French readers, when I see names like Guizot, Bossuet, Thiers, Comte, and Cousin, among others, my only response is a blank stare. And this is coming from someone who loves Napoleon.

All in all, though, Cattell’s list reminds us how quickly even major reputations can fade. (For an even more sobering reminder, look no further than the bottom of his top thousand. Fauriel, Enfantin, Babeuf, anyone?) And I have no doubt that a contemporary list of the top hundred figures in history, like this one, will look equally strange to a reader a century from now. Just because you made the list once, it seems, doesn’t mean you’ll stay there.

Walter Mosley and the red question mark

For the last word on research, I’ll turn things over to Walter Mosley, author of Devil in a Blue Dress, who isn’t necessarily known for his research skills—as he puts it, “I write books about places I’ve been and people I like to think I understand”—but who has, you’ll probably agree, done pretty well for himself. In This Year You Write Your Novel, Mosley says:

There will be moments when you will want to dally over details. Do Georgia geese fly south in April or June? Is it physically possible for Bob Millar to hear the cult leader yelling from a mile away—even in a desert? Would the police arrest Trip if the women were allowed into the bar and were served by the owner?

All of these questions are valid. Before the book gets into print, you should have the answers. But many writers allow questions like these to help them procrastinate. They tell themselves that they can’t go on until these questions are answered.

Nonsense. Put a red question mark next to the place where you have questions and get back to it later. [Italics mine.]

Don’t estimate the power of that red question mark—or of saving a problem for later. Once you’ve moved on, time has a funny way of resolving plot problems that seemed insurmountable. And like Napoleon, who always waited a week before responding to any letters, you may find that by the time you get around to the problem, it has already taken care of itself.