Creativity (3 page)

Occasionally the refusal was due to the belief that studying creativity is a waste of time. Poet and novelist Czeslaw Milosz wrote back: “I am skeptical as to the investigation of creativity and I do not feel inclined to submit myself to interviews on that subject. I guess I suspect some methodological errors at the basis of all discussions about ‘creativity.’” The novelist Norman Mailer replied: “I’m sorry but I
never agree to be interviewed on the process of work. Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty applies.” Peter Drucker, the management expert and professor of Oriental art, excused himself in these terms:

The rate of acceptance varied among disciplines. More than half of the natural scientists, no matter how old or busy they were, agreed to participate. Artists, writers, and musicians, on the other hand, tended to ignore our letters or declined—less than a third of those approached accepted. It would be interesting to find out the causes of this differential attrition.

The same percentage of women and men accepted, but since in certain domains well-known creative women are underrepresented, we were unable to achieve the fifty-fifty gender ratio we were hoping for. Instead, the split is about seventy-thirty in favor of men.

Usually in psychological research, you must make sure that the individuals studied are “representative” of the “population” in question—in this case, the population of creative persons. If the sample is not representative, what you find cannot be generalized to the population. But here I don’t even attempt to come up with generalizations that are supposed to hold for all creative persons. What I try to do occasionally is to
disprove
certain widespread assumptions. The advantage of disproof over proof in science is that whereas a single case can disprove a generalization, even
all the cases in the world are not enough for a conclusive positive proof. If I could find just one white raven, that would be enough to disprove the statement: “All
ravens are black.” But I can point at millions of black ravens without confirming the statement that all ravens are black. Somewhere there may be a white raven hiding. The same lack of symmetry between what is called falsification and proof holds even for the most sacred laws of physics.

For the purposes of this book, the strategy of disproof is amply sufficient. The information we collected could not prove, for instance, that all creative individuals had a happy childhood, even if all the respondents had said that their childhood had been happy. But even one unhappy child can disprove that hypothesis—just as one happy child could disprove the opposite hypothesis, that creative individuals must have unhappy childhoods. So the relatively small size of the sample, or its lack of representativeness, is no real impediment to deriving solid conclusions from the data.

It is true that in the social sciences statements are usually neither true nor false but only claim the statistical superiority of one hypothesis over another. We would say that there are so many more black ravens than white ravens that chance alone cannot account for it. Therefore, we conclude that “most ravens are black,” and we are glad that we can say this much. In this book I do not avail myself of statistics to test the comparisons that will be reported, for a variety of reasons. First of all, the ability to disprove some deeply held assumptions about creativity seems to me sufficient,
and here we are on solid ground. Second, the characteristics of this unique sample violate most assumptions on which statistical tests can be safely conducted. Third, there is no meaningful “comparison group” against which to test the patterns found in this sample.

With a very few exceptions, the interviews were conducted in the offices or homes of the respondents. The interviews were videotaped and then transcribed verbatim. They generally lasted about two hours, although a few were shorter and some lasted quite a bit longer. But the interviews are only the tip of the iceberg as far as information about this sample is concerned. Most of the respondents have written books and articles; some have written autobiographies or other works that could be inspected. In fact, each of them left such an extensive paper trail that to follow it all the wa
y would take several lifetimes; however, the material is extremely useful to round out our understanding of each person and his or her life.

Our interview schedule had a number of common questions that
we tried to ask each respondent (a copy of it is in appendix B). However, we did not necessarily ask the questions in the same order, nor did we always use exactly the same wording; my priority was to keep the interview as close to a natural conversation as possible. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. I felt, however, that it would be insulting, and therefore counterproductive, to force these respondents to answer a mechanically structured set of questions. Because I hoped to get genuine and reflective answers, I let the exchanges develop around the
themes I was interested in, instead of forcing them into a mold. The interviews are rich as well as being comprehensive—thanks in large measure also to the excellent cadre of graduate students who helped collect them.

When I started to write the book I was confronted with an embarrassment of riches. Thousands of pages clamored for attention, yet I could not do justice to more than a tiny fraction of the material. The choices were often painful—so many beautiful accounts had to be dropped or greatly compressed. The interviews I quote extensively are not necessarily those from the most famous or even the most creative people but the ones that most clearly address what I thought were important theoretical issues. So the choice is personal. Yet I am confident that I have not distorted the meaning o
f any of the respondents or the consensus of the group as a whole.

Even though the voice of some respondents is not represented by even a single quotation, the content of their statements is included in the generalizations that occasionally are presented, in verbal or numerical form. And I hope that either I, my students, or other scholars will eventually tap those parts of this rich material that I was forced to shortchange.

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Contrary to the popular image of creative persons, the interviews present a picture of creativity and creative individuals that is upbeat and positive. Instead of suspecting these stories of being self-serving fabrications, I accept them at face value—provided they are not contradicted by other facts known about the person or by internal evidence.

Yet many social scientists in the last hundred years have made it their task to expose the hypocrisy, self-delusion, and self-interest
underlying human behavior traits that were never questioned scientifically before the end of the nineteenth century. Poets like Dante or Chaucer were of course intimately acquainted with the foibles of human nature. But it was not until Freud explained the possibility of repression, Marx argued the power of false consciousness, and sociobiologists showed how our actions are the outcome of selective pressures that we had systematic insights into why our reports about ourselves may be so deceptive.

Unfortunately, the understanding for which we owe Freud and the rest of those great thinkers an immense intellectual debt has been marred to a certain extent by the indiscriminate application of their ideas to every aspect of behavior. As a result, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, our discipline runs the risk of degenerating into a “de-bunking enterprise,” based more on ideology than evidence. Even the novice student of human nature learns to distrust appearances—not as a sensible methodological precaution that any good scientist would endorse but as a certainty in the dogma t
hat nothing can be trusted at face value. I can imagine what some sophisticated colleagues would do with the following claim made by one of our respondents: “I have been married for forty-four some years to someone I adore. He is a physicist. We have four children, each of whom has a Ph.D. in science; each of whom has a happy life.”

They would probably smile with refined irony and see in these sentences an attempt on the speaker’s part to deny an unhappy family life. Others would see it as an attempt to impress the audience. Still others may think that this person’s optimistic outburst is simply a narrative device that arose in the context of the interview, not because it is literally true, but because conversations have their own logic and their own truth. Or they would see it as the expression of a bourgeois ideology where academic degrees and comfortable middle-class status are equated with happiness.

But what if there is actual evidence that this woman has been married for forty-four years, that despite her busy schedule as a leading scientist she brought up four children who worked themselves into demanding professional careers, and that she spends most of her free time with her husband at home or traveling? And that her children appear contented with their lives, visit her often, and are in frequent contact with the parents? Should we not relent and admit, however
grudgingly, that the meaning of the passage is closer to what the speaker intended than to the alternative meanings I attributed to the imaginary critic?

Let me present a passage from another interview that also illustrates the optimism that is typical of these accounts. This is from the sculptor Nina Holton, married to a well-known (and also creative) scholar.

Again, a cynical reading might lead one to conclude that, well, it must be nice for a two-career couple to have a good time while being creative, but isn’t it common knowledge that to achieve anything new and important, especially in the arts, a person must be poor and suffering and tired of the world? So lives like these either represent only a small minority of the creative population, or they must not be accepted at face value, even if all the evidence suggests their truth.

I am not saying that all creative persons are well-off and happy.
Family strain, professional jealousies, and thwarted ambitions were occasionally evident in the interviews. Moreover, it is probable that a selection bias has affected the sample I have collected. Focusing on people beyond sixty years of age eliminated those who may have led a more high-risk lifestyle and thus died early. Some of the individuals we asked to participate and who did not respond or refused may have been less happy and less adjusted than those who accepted. Two or three of those who initially agreed to be interviewed became so infirm and despondent that after the appoi
ntment was made they asked to be excused. Thus the individuals who ended up as part of the sample are skewed in the direction of positive health, physical and psychological.

But after several years of intensive listening and reading, I have come to the conclusion that the reigning stereotype of the tortured genius is to a large extent a myth created by Romantic ideology and supported by evidence from isolated and—one hopes—atypical historical periods. In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthful conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse. If so many American poets and playwrights committed suicide or
ended up addicted to drugs and alcohol, it was not their creativity that did it but an artistic scene that promised much, gave few rewards, and left nine out of ten artists neglected if not ignored.

Because of these considerations, I find it more realistic, if more difficult, to approach these interviews with an open skepticism, keeping in mind the bias in favor of happiness these people display and what we have learned about the human tendency to disguise and embellish reality. Yet at the same time, I am ready to accept a positive scenario when it appears to be warranted. It seems to me a risk worth running because I agree with these sentiments of the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies: