On the side of genius

Published 31 July 2006

Creators: from Chaucer to Walt Disney Paul Johnson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 310pp, £20 ISBN 0297851233

It may be unimaginable today, but the leftist credentials of New Statesman editors have not always been beyond question. In the mid-1960s, while everyone else was swooning over Donovan, this paper was mounting a spirited rearguard action against the depredations of youth culture - spearheaded by its soon-to-be editor Paul Johnson. "If the Beatles and their like were in fact what the youth of Britain wanted, one might well despair," he grumbled in 1964, noting that the decay of the nation hinged on the fact that "more and more intellectuals have turned their backs on their trade and begun to worship at the shrine of 'pop culture'." Curiously, Johnson decided that the best way of countering this rising tide of populist filth was to write a pulp novel, Merrie England, in which "the several estates of the establishment are involved in a bugged love temple that delivers TV tapes of the rites therein".

Johnson soon changed his political spots (after enduring five more years in the socialist bowels of the NS, he defected to the more cultured Spectator, Mail on Sunday, &c.), but his patented Merrie England blend of knee-jerk conservatism and light titillation has altered little over the past 40 years. "Since he abandoned the editorship of the New Statesman in 1970, his typewriter has smoked day and night," wrote Hugh Kenner, with a hint of weariness, in 1977; it has barely stopped since. Johnson's oeuvre - "more than 40 books and countless newspaper and magazine articles" - includes such modest enterprises as histories of the Jews, Ireland, "the American people" and "modern times". Creators: from Chaucer to Walt Disney is a riposte to critics of his best-known book, Intellectuals (1988), which swiftly became notorious not so much for the opprobrium heaped on famous brainboxes ("they are not morally fit to give advice to humanity") as for its disproportionate interest in their sexual predilections and peccadilloes.

This time, there is no doubt that Johnson is on his subjects' side. More than that, he is one of them: a fact emphasised by the cover, on which his name is lovingly highlighted alongside Shakespeare, Jane Austen and, weirdly, Balen ciaga. "I count myself doubly fortunate in that God gave me the gift of writing, and the ability to draw and paint," he reflects languidly before launching into a series of hagiographies of this eccentric canon.

So what unites these "creators"? Well, first, the scale of their achievements, for which no superlative is left unturned. Chaucer "was perhaps the most creative spirit ever to write in English"; Turner "has never been approached, let alone equalled"; Shakespeare "is the most creative personality in human history". As a sop to non-genius readers, these abstractions are spiced with first-person despatches from the creative coalface: "Dürer discovered (as I have)," notes Johnson modestly, "that watercolours are perfect for a travelling artist." Such hard-won insights inform many of his wackier analyses of cultural history: he confidently asserts, for instance, that Toulouse-Lautrec's unusually small stature "helped his art" because "he had to stand right up to the canvas and thus avoided impressionistic fuzz".

But these are colourful diversions: the serious business of Creators, like Intellectuals, is not cultural-critical but moral. According to Johnson's rococo prose style, the Egyptian architect Imhotep "caused to be built the famous stepped pyramid at Saqqara", and the man sweeping Johnson's street hails from "Isfahan, in Persia, wherein lies the grandest and most beautiful square in the world". These are the kind of quasi-biblical heights last seen in high-Victorian works such as Charles Doughty's Arabia Deserta, in which a characteristic sentence runs: "It is their caravan prudence, that in the beginning of a long way the first shall be a short journey: the beasts feel their burden, the passengers have fallen in that to their riding in the field." The resemblance is no accident; Johnson admires that upright era sufficiently for his greatest praise of Shakespeare to be that "his love of improvement would have made [him] an eminent Victorian" - if, of course, he hadn't wasted his time writing unimproving trash like Twelfth Night.

With the age of Gladstone set as Creators' moral yardstick, the book's ranking of Walt Disney and Louis Tiffany alongside Chaucer and Bach begins to seem less capricious. Johnson's "creator" is not so much the divinely inspired genius of Romanticism as a celestial moral agent, locked in an eternal battle with miniskirts and commies. Balenciaga fought valiantly to create conservative haute couture, but became "one of the many casualties of the lunacy of the 1960s"; Disney, meanwhile, was "a strong supporter of what would now be called family values and traditionalism" who "refused to allow his organisation to promote collectivism or socialist values".

But Tory chunterings only work for those (Alan Clark, or possibly Boris Johnson) with the wit and shameless panache to pull them off. Johnson stumbles over his metaphors (asserting that "male creative giants were not at all eager to see female giants emerge in their midst", and that the English were Chaucer's "literary meat") and is constantly sidetracked by gruesome soft-porn reveries. "The genital organs, both male and female, are too large, though in other respects realistic," he growls of prints by the 19th-century artist Hokusai, then complains that Turner's erotica is, by contrast, "painfully unstimulating". Unfortunately for those of a sensitive disposition, this kind of thing isn't confined to his discussion of erotic art. Chaucer's "love of humanity", we learn, "had to come out, just as did the hot, foaming words in which he expressed it", while Shakespeare "not only fills the hole but constantly enlarges it and pours in more so that it overflows", exploding in "an irresistible torrent, a raging, foaming river of felicity".

Tumescent prose and an unhealthy fetish for the Canterbury Tales: this is obviously what happens to you if you abandon the left. As a literary or moral enterprise Creators, like Merrie England, may not be much cop. But it is a useful cautionary tale for the inheritors of Johnson's editorial seat.

Rachel Aspden is deputy arts and books editor of the New Statesman

Post this article to