My administrative assistant telephoned me at home to tell me that I had just received a letter from the MacArthur Foundation marked “confidential.”
“Do you want me to open it?,” she asked breathlessly.
To be honest, I’ve been secretly waiting for that letter since 1981, when I first heard about the famous “genius” award that confers $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached. My anticipation heightened when a political writer with whom I went to college and a neighbor who is an avant-garde performance artist both were chosen to receive the grants. If they were considered geniuses, and I knew them, then maybe, Kevin Bacon fashion, I was some degree away from becoming part of the Mac-Arthurian legend myself.
But wouldn’t someone from the foundation have called rather than written? I had to face facts: Despite my mother’s opinion to the contrary, I was pretty sure I wasn’t a genius. Still, unable to help myself, I asked my assistant if the envelope was a thick one. No, it was wafer-thin. “Sure, open it,” I told her.
I sweated out the couple of seconds it took for letter opener to slice through paper, and heard her disappointed voice telling me that, no, I wasn’t going to be a genius this year. However, the MacArthur Foundation did want me to nominate other potential geniuses. Well, if not a bride, at least a bridesmaid.
When I read through the letter and visited the foundation’s Web site, I was gratified to learn that about 100 nominators are chosen each year “on the basis of their expertise, accomplishment, and breadth of experience.” I wondered why I had been picked. Because I recently had been head of the English department at a somewhat-in-the-news institution? Had my specialty, disability studies, become more visible? Was this some kind of mission impossible to test potential geniuses who might some day be chosen if they succeeded at this particular assignment? Did a friend nominate me to be a nominator?
Ruminations aside, I set about my task, considering whom I should nominate. The foundation was interested in “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” I noted that “there are three criteria for selections of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”
Yet, the fellowship was not to be “a reward for past accomplishment.” The foundation did not want this to be a lifetime-achievement award for those who already had achieved much fame and success and were in the end stage of their career. They particularly wanted younger people, but in general were looking for people who could benefit from a half-million dollars over five years. Who wouldn’t?
This would be easy. I saw myself as a kind of latter-day John Beresford Tipton, the benefactor of the 1950s fictional television series The Millionaire, who every week gave a million dollars to some hapless person who would then either prosper or deteriorate under such largess. I began making my list and checking it twice.
But a strange thing happened; I couldn’t come up with any names, naughty or nice. My first thought was to nominate the eminent scholar/critic of postcolonial studies who has consistently failed to show up on the MacArthur list. But I realized that this would fall into the category of “lifetime achievement award.” As would grants for the feisty, pugilistic literary critic who has made a career out of shocking people and the genial friend of mine who has helped define higher education and battled against the dour right during the culture wars.
Well, what about the dazzling thinker who is closer to my age but has only written a couple of books, albeit brilliant ones? Or what about the other friend, who has published a shelf of books but hasn’t really provided a new and creative way of looking at things? I did come up with a person I thought had done new and important scholarship. I discussed her with a colleague who had received a MacArthur himself. He informed me that he had previously nominated her without success -- perhaps, he speculated, because she’d only co-written one slim book.
I tried to think of some younger people, and as I envisioned them they all seemed promising but not geniuses. It’s hard to pick out a prize show dog among the puppies. When you think about it, there really aren’t that many geniuses out there. Maybe I was focusing on intelligence too much. After all, Gore Vidal said that “Andy Warhol is the only genius with an IQ of 60.” What is a genius anyway?
The idea of genius developed rather late in our culture. Although Socrates was a smart fellow, no one considered him a genius, except in the sense of divinely inspired. People in the Middle Ages believed they had their own personal, tutelary spirits: a good genius on one shoulder, and an evil one on the other. It was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that the term cropped up in our modern sense of an exceptional, transcendent thinker or artist. Linked to the cult of the individualism and Enlightenment notions of personal perfectibility, the genius became a celebrity. Prodigies like Mozart and Beethoven abounded. But a rash of suicides and nervous breakdowns in the 19th century of people perceived to be geniuses revealed a dark side.
Many literary works of the 19th and early 20th centuries linked genius to obsessive behavior (for example, Crime and Punishment and Heart of Darkness), raising the question of whether a genius is someone who, like the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, is brilliant because he or she has a one-track mind and focuses with an intensity bordering on psychosis. The more I thought about it, the less I felt like rewarding such a potentially disagreeable person, who probably might not bother to say hello to me, because he or she would be so lost in thought or jazzed up on the latest project. I hate self-involved people, so why should I reward their behavior?
Then there was the problem of my jealousy. What if I nominated a certain acquaintance, a productive scholar working on a crackpot idea that might or might not make it, and he actually got the award? How would I feel? Schadenfreude strode allegorically out from the wings. What if that person got a fellowship and then never thought to nominate me in turn? I might spend the rest of my life resenting my own choice.
Of course, quid pro quo isn’t exactly fair or ethical, but then the human psyche isn’t either. (On the other hand, if I didn’t nominate this acquaintance, I might be thwarting the career of some brilliant lunatic who just needed recognition and money -- someone like Freud, who, before he was famous, called himself “a fantasist” in his letters to the surgeon Wilhelm Fliess, as the two of them hashed out Freud’s obsessions about sexuality and Fliess’s half-baked theories about the role of the nose in human health. Freud succeeded, and Fliess ended up operating on women’s noses.)
And then there was the MacArthur Foundation’s requirement that nominators not simply submit a name but write a twoor three-page synopsis of the nominee’s career. The prospect made me feel that I had to generate not only admiration but also motivation. Did I want to do the research and write up several pages about someone I sort of admire but don’t really know that much about? Was I going to throw away an afternoon for someone I admire but don’t really like? Or someone whose getting of the MacArthur would then irk me?
I obsessed over such questions for a couple of months, until I realized that the deadline for submitting nominations had passed. I was now in the unenviable position of having thrown away an amazing opportunity, killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and in effect having to live my life like anyone else who had never received a letter from the MacArthur Foundation.
As Mark Twain had once said, “Next to possessing genius one’s self is the power of appreciating it in others.” Clearly, I had neither ability. Or, as the poulterer said to the old lady who complained that all the chickens in his store were rotten -- after she had meticulously sniffed, prodded, examined, and discarded each one -- “Listen, lady, could you pass a test like that?” Perhaps the true test of genius is the ability to spot other geniuses. Did I fail that one because, my mother’s opinion notwithstanding, I am not a genius myself? It’s so much easier to flush out a fool than a sage.
Perhaps the whole approach of having geniuses nominated by a large group of people is wrongheaded. You can’t manufacture unanimity around someone as quirky as a genius. Swift famously once said: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him.”
If a genius is someone who by definition marches to a different drummer, why would we expect people like me to recognize the beat? Maybe, in the long run, it would be better to ask nominators to make a list of people least likely to succeed, and then pick the geniuses from that list of losers. That is a task to which I think I would be equal.
Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author, most recently, of Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York University Press, 2002).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 10, Page B5
