On Prodigies Part II

Part II

In The Iliad, we find, in inchoate form, the two options offered to a prodigy, viz. an early death with eternal renown or a long life without eternal renown. Achilles is presented with these two options. If he fights in the Trojan war, he will die. The fates have decreed it. As a fact, it is non-negotiable, immutable. However, if Achilles chooses to remain home and avoid the war, he will live to stiff-jointed old-age—but his name will be forgotten. Achilles chooses eternal glory over a long life, and he becomes the original prodigy—O.G. Prodigy, if you like. And more than that, Achilles becomes the paradigm for prodigies, the character from whom all future prodigies would take inspiration. Like a true prodigy, Achilles is young—most likely in his mid-twenties during the events of the Iliad—and like a true prodigy, he is extraordinary. He is the greatest warrior alive. His martial prowess is without equal. His strength, speed, and dexterity make him the supreme weapon of the invading Greek army. Achilles is also beautiful, and although being beautiful is not necessary to be a prodigy, it helps. The death of the prodigy is rendered more poignant when the prodigy is beautiful. The death of a young person is sad, it seems. The death of a beautiful young person is tragic.

Achilles’s hot and nervy youth is contrasted with the tempered wisdom and old age of Nestor. Around 70 years old, Nestor is a counterweight to Achilles. With Nestor, we see the realization of the second option offered to prodigies—a long and forgotten life. Nestor is definitely accorded his share of respect because of his age and wisdom, but he has a tendency to tell long and discursive stories about his own heroic exploits. He reminisces on his glory days—he’s the type of guy who would tell you, with all due solemnity, that the music the kids are listening to today is garbage compared with the music of his youth (probably Steely Dan). At 70, he is too old to partake in the fighting on the plains of Troy. So it’s possible he tells these long and rambling anecdotes, which soldiers listen to, I imagine, with impatience, as a hedge against being forgotten. But he has already been forgotten. Achilles and Odysseus, both younger men, have eclipsed him in fame.

After Homer, we have Chaucer, who wrote in the final verses of The Knight’s Tale, a poem within his larger poem, The Canterbury Tales,

“And certainly a man has most honour

In dying in his excellence and flower,

When he is certain of his high good name;

For then he gives to friend, and self, no shame.

And gladder ought a friend be of his death

When, in much honour, he yields up his breath,

Than when his name’s grown feeble with old age;

For all forgotten, then, is his courage.

Hence it is best for all of noble name

To die when at the summit of their fame.

Here Chaucer exalts the idea of dying young, at the height, or “summit,” of one’s fame. It’s an evocation of the burn-bright-die-young philosophy that seems to captivate us so completely. And it’s a sentiment that Neil Young would echo in his song “Hey Hey, My My,” in the second verse of which, he sings,

“The king is gone but he's not forgotten Is this the tale of Johnny rotten? It's better to burn out than fade away The king is gone but he's not forgotten.”

Neil Young’s idea is the exact same one as Chaucer’s—they’re both celebrating an early death when one’s at the peak of their celebrity instead of a longer life over which time one is forgotten. They’re both panegyrics to dying young. Same sentiment, expressed over 600 years apart.

Chaucer gives way to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare, like those able bards before him, is drawn to the poignancy of an early death. He explores early deaths in plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet, the two star-crossed lovers, die at sixteen and thirteen, respectively. Hamlet, whose volatile angst and bleak morbid thoughts are comparable in intensity to those of a hormonal teen—he would be at home in a hot-topic—takes up Achilles’s mantle. Hamlet is the prince of Denmark. Hamlet is handsome and intellectual, and he shows great promise. But Hamlet is troubled—driven to madness by his uncle’s betrayal and his mother’s lack of constancy. He dies at the end of the play, and Fortinbras, the prince of Norway, assumes control of the Danish throne. On discovering Hamlet’s corpse, Fortinbras says,

“Let four captains Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage, For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royal.”

This one sentence is loaded with meaning—part of Shakespeare’s genius is his ability to cram meaning into his sentences. The main thrust of this sentence, though, is the idea that Hamlet’s legacy will be one of unconsummated potential. His legacy won’t be enriched with heroic deeds, with territories conquered and battles won. But his legacy won’t be sullied with any failures or defeats, either. His legacy, instead, will be perfectly neutral, perfectly pristine. It will be a legacy that suggests greatness, but this greatness will always be a speculation, a belief in the young prince’s potential, but a belief that is uncorroborated by deeds.

The suggestion of greatness, the whiff of brilliance is potent—sometimes more potent than a legacy of actual greatness and brilliance. And therein lies the chief charm of an early death. By dying young, prodigies can remove the burden of fame, the burden of unrealistic and galling expectations from their backs. They can rest eternally assured of their legacies. They can slumber six-feet under with the sweet knowledge that their fame and name will endure. Again, the drawback is that they die.

It’s fitting that the words of Chaucer and Neil Young were compared earlier because musicians have largely inherited the poet’s job of lauding the young and famous dead (Achilles is seen early on in the Iliad playing a lyre, almost in anticipation of this hand-off). Rock music contains a kind of continuation of poetic ideals. And one of the ideals that rock music has maintained—one of the most cherished and central ideals, it seems—is the ideal of dead, talented youth. There are musicians who die young—John Lennon, dead at 40; Elvis, dead at 42. And there are musicians who die really young: Jim Morrison, 27; Jimi Hendrix, 27; Janis Joplin, 27; Brian Jones, 27; Kurt Cobain, 27; Amy Winehouse, 27—each of whom is a member of the “27 club,” a superstitious grouping of famous musicians who died at the age of 27.

The thread between rock-star prodigies and poet prodigies is visible when we look at the number of musicians who have been influenced by the work of poet Arthur Rimbaud, the poet-prodigy par excellence. Before renouncing poetry at the age 21, Rimbaud produced some of the finest French symbolist poetry, and this poetry would, a hundred years later, influence the songwriting and rock-music sensibilities of Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith. What’s so incredible about this is not that they found Rimbaud’s work impressive—it is impressive. What’s so incredible is that they all discovered Rimbaud independently. They weren’t assigned his poems in school. They didn’t recommend his work to one another. Rimbaud’s poetry, in a sense, sought each musician out, and Dylan, Morrison, and Smith’s subsequent musical compositions all bear the stamp of Rimbaud.

I think Jim Morrison wanted to be Rimbaud. The role of rock-music icon was onerous. In an interview, he expressed a desire to live a life as a “quiet, undemonstrative artist.” He wrote several volumes of poetry, all of which borrow heavily from Rimbaud. As I mentioned earlier, Morrison left the United States and tried to begin a new life in Paris. Through copious scotch drinking and through the spoils of rockstardom, Morrison’s looks had deserted him. He was bloated and hairy, no longer sexy and androgynous. When he died, he was quickly interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery, an ultra-exclusive graveyard that boasts the corpses of some of literature’s finest—Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac. Morrison’s grave has since become a sort of religious relic for young people. The grave exerts a magnetic draw, and people from all over the world come to pay homage to another dead young person, a young person who once compared himself to Hamlet, writing that he had been "picked...to play The Prince of Denmark."

But all of this dreamy romanticism, all of this poesy celebrating dead prodigies does us a great disservice. It tells us that these are people to be emulated, that a brief and glorious life is far superior to a long and pedestrian one. But once you start chipping away at the gilded frames that border these lives, once you start digging under the flowery and fulsome language of the obituaries, once you start getting at the truth, you learn that the life of a prodigy is not to be emulated—it’s not even to be envied. Morrison was an alcoholic, easily swayed by the highs and lows of the tumultuous music business. His hero, Rimbaud, renounced poetry and literature altogether at 20. He grew disenchanted with its charms and possibilities and embarked on a life as a coffee merchant and gun-runner and ultimately died at the age of 37.

The Counting Crows sing, “I wanna be Bob Dylan.” Everyone wants to be Bob Dylan—except Bob Dylan, who almost gave up music entirely in his early 20s, such was the public pressure. Mozart, an exemplary prodigy, saw his name and reputation vanish before his very eyes. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Another prodigy, Thomas Chatterton, a forerunner of poetry’s romantic movement, died at the age of 17 and was afterwards immortalized in the poetry of Percy Shelley; immortalized in the poetry of William Wordsworth, who dubbed Chatterton, “the marvelous boy;” and in the poetry of my own dear John Keats. How marvelous was the marvelous boy’s life? Not very marvelous. When he wasn’t slowly starving to death, when he wasn't suffering under oppressive poverty, he wrote some poetry. He died by suicide. It wasn’t until after his death that he enjoyed the success that had so doggedly eluded him while he was alive. And in the Odyssey, when Odysseus encounters Achilles’s shade in the underworld, and remarks on how Achilles lords it over the other dead, Achilles responds,

“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man— some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive— than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

What happened to all the poetry, all of the lofty words about an early death and eternal fame? Turns out eternal fame isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

All of this is to say that young people shouldn’t feel pressure to be extraordinary. They should work hard, be assiduous, and apply themselves to their work and their art with energy. Don’t feel discouraged if there’s a blind 11-year-old somewhere who has taught himself how to play the violin with three mangled fingers. Don’t feel discouraged if there’s an 8-year-old who has penned deeply existential sonnets in crayon, sonnets that betray a philosophical insight greater than Camus and Sartre’s. The life of a prodigy is fraught with sorrow and danger, and too often the life of a prodigy peaks early.

Critics will say that Citizen Kane is Orson Welles’s best film, which he wrote and directed when he was 25. I disagree. I think he hit his stride as a filmmaker as he got older. For me, F for Fake should be remembered as Welles’s great opus, and it’s a film he didn’t make until he was in his 50s. Toni Morrison wasn’t published until she was 39. Sherwood Anderson wasn’t published until he was 40. Raymond Chandler didn’t even take up writing until his 40s, after he was laid off from his cushy job as an oil executive. Daniel Defoe wrote his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, in his late fifties. And Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote (my favorite book) when he was in his late 50s, a feat that is made even more remarkable when you consider that this was in 1605. There is still time for you to create. Time is not running out.

The poets invented the prodigy as a kind of literary device. They knew that by portraying a prodigy, and especially a prodigy who dies in their prime, they were striking some profound chord, a chord that reverberated in audiences irrespective of time and place. The media saw the kind of reverential attention prodigies received and began showcasing the talents of prodigies at once. Now the media is so thoroughly saturated with the accomplishments of prodigies that if you turn on the television, there's a 56% chance you'll find a story about a four-year-old who, in between episodes of Paw Patrol and nap-time, taught themselves calculus (56% might be wrong. I will have the aforementioned prodigy check it). It’s easy to feel inadequate. It’s easy to feel like prodigies are the norm and that your talentless self is the exception. This is not the case. Prodigies are the exception (and you’re not talentless).

Don’t feel pressure to be a prodigy. Too often the life of a prodigy is not sustainable. Focus on longevity instead. With hard-work, you can compensate for any dearth of talent or other innate gifts, and you can accomplish something, too.

Ultimately, how many years the artist has lived doesn’t matter. How many years the art lives, now that’s everything.