The Facts of Life

By Dan Hagen

Running my eye along my bookshelf of biographies, I am struck by how many of these people accomplished significant things in the broad world while pretty much being shits in their immediate world.

Charles Schulz, Dorothy Parker, Alan Watts, Ayn Rand, Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman — none of them made it easy on their friends, or even on themselves. All are best appreciated at a distance in time and space. They aren’t people with whom one could be comfortably involved.

What’s that all about? Does stellar accomplishment in one’s art or career require so much drive that it distorts the personality, drains it of some of the energy and empathy necessary for day-to-day decency? That’s another price that has to be paid for greatness, maybe. The great run up quite a bill.

But happily, some seem to avoid the charge. That shelf also displays the biographies of people I would have liked to befriend.

There’s Julia Child, a genuinely loving woman who understood that expert cooking is a way of nurturing and protecting the most intimate of human relationships on the most ineffable, elemental level.

There’s David Hockney, the visual artist whose talent never seems to run dry because he constantly replenishes it from the well of childhood wonder and play that he has carried with him into advanced age.

There’s Daniel Boone, who was mystified at his transformation into a mythic frontier hero during his own lifetime and horrified at being ballyhooed as an unstoppable “Indian fighter.”

“I never kilt but three,” Boone said plaintively, guiltily.

And there was Dashiell Hammett, the essential author of the hardboiled American private detective story, once a hardboiled American private detective himself and yet a man of deep social conscience who gave away his considerable earnings to people in need about as fast as the checks came in.

Despite his crippling alcoholism, I’d have loved to know the man. Hammett was a genuine stoic, a man who could go to prison for his convictions without complaint.

Hammett has one of his protagonists say, “I can stand whatever I’ve got to stand.” That sounded like fiction, but it wasn’t.


Incidental Intelligence:

I asked my friends to chime in on this topic. Here’s some of what they said:

Lynne Parker: I think it just shows that the arts are peppered with assholes the same as the rest of the population.

Dan Hagen: Yet I would have thought better of people of deep understanding.

Lynne Parker: That is confusing intellect and emotion. I'm inclined to believe the greater the understanding or intellect the more outraged a person may be. Far from being one of the media benumbed sheep, they know what is going on. I can't help but think of my own brother as well. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He was bullied during his school years and continues to house a deep rage over it. He is, however, one of the most intelligent people I know. Far smarter than I am.

Aren't most very intelligent or creative people a "little off"? Society treats such people poorly until everyone agrees on that person's worth. Then they are treated as celebrities.

Patricia Poulter: As always, thought-provoking. Perhaps it is that some people, in focusing on the broad human condition, become myopic with regard to the beauty and necessity of genuine human(e) interaction.

Michael Jones: I often think that walking around with that kind of demanding, consuming genius inside tends to make 'victims' a little antisocial, impatient, otherworldly and obsessive. NOT a good combination for those who would live in peaceful, mutually considerate relationships with them. Look at Picasso. Beethoven. The more intense the genius, the more difficult to be a human.

Thommy Berlin: Oh I think I'd have enjoyed getting drunk with all of them. NONE of us are perfect.

Hell, You could launch a Saturn 5 at perfect from here and fall short, lol.

I've had the good luck to meet several of my 'heroes' (all musical) and by and large was very favorably impressed.

Our Mr. Hagen here (who I have never met), is impressive.

So there you go.

The inability to focus on anything beyond themselves.

I find only one thing repellent in humans:

Michelle Mueller Teheux: Can all of us just blame all our faults on our genius?

Sam Lisuzzo: In years gone by genius expressing bad behavior often seemed to have a special societal privilege and were often forgiven. I think of Jackson Pollock, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Eugene O'Neal or Arthur Rimbaud. Today there is advanced cognitive therapy, numerous forms of meditation and "Rehab.” I don't think in today's society genius and chronic dysfunction need necessarily be tantamount to each other. As you love Hammett, I love his soul-mate, Lillian Hellman.....

Dan Hagen: She was a handful, though. I did became a close friend/protégé to one of my great heroes — the novelist Elleston Trevor/Adam Hall — and he was everything I expected him to be, and more. No clay on those well-shod Brit feet.

Sam Lisuzzo: Hellman was a handful... A year or so ago I sat at a dinner for two hours with Van Cliburn. He was quite the gentleman I'm happy to report. We had great fun.

Tom Key: I am surrounded by "handfuls" who are not likely to be known to history. I'm going to tell them to step it up.

Phyllis Nastri-Nelson: Yes, I would say that in my experience (both live & from books) most genuinely creative people are high maintenance. If by chance they are also mentally stable, then they might also be emotionally intelligent - which makes for quite a unique human being indeed! I met a few of each in my life.

Michelle Mueller Teheux: Another reason newsrooms tend to be very interesting places to work ... Lots of creative weird people not concerned about social norms. Not always geniuses, but usually quite thoughtful.

Dan Hagen: I'm starting to think that greatness may be overrated.

Sam Lisuzzo: I love Virginia Woolf. She committed suicide probably because she was having a difficult change of life. I find her death a great tragedy. Perhaps if she'd had resources that are available today, the greatest female writer ever might have enjoyed a longer life. It hurts me today that she took rocks and put them in her pockets to ensure her total demise. The sadness and loneliness she experienced is unspeakable. Damn it, I'd have liked a better end for such a great lady!

Phyllis Nastri-Nelson: Thank goodness there are so many artistic & creative ways for great minds to have worked out some of their angst — albeit messing up personal relationships in the process.