I think I said somewhere that I consider Arthur Ransome my literary muse. A safe enough choice - nobody is going to accuse me of hauling my flag too high. Not like poor old Keats, for example, who somehow convinced himself he had inherited Shakespeare’s soul.
Interestingly, all three of these characters were precocious writers, although only one was cursed.
Robert Greene tried to take the young Shakespeare down a peg or two, famously calling him an “upstart crow … who now believes that he can write as well as the best scholars …” The difficulty with the line of attack was, of course, that he could.
Ransome aged 21 was living out his Bohemian dream in Clapham, penniless but happy, scribbling away day and night, churning out stories, articles, even poems. In his autobiography he writes that he showed some of his work to one of the young men in the boarding house: “He read it and looked at me with pity. ‘I say,’ he said ‘if you think anybody is ever going to pay you for stuff like this, you’re mistaken. You’d much better chuck it. Why not do fretwork instead? Then you’d have something to show for all the time you’re wasting.” Ransome was well into his forties before he wrote his children’s novels.
But Keats? He really did seem cursed. “Snuffed out” as Shelley put it, by a review of his poem Endymion, in which a crabby reviewer slated him for being a “cockney” and for not being Leigh Hunt. He was only 23. It’s an exaggeration, of course: Keats was suffering from advanced TB, that’s what killed him. But although he wrote a lot after his “golden year” (1819) none of it was much good.
So what is the curse of precocity? Starting to write this essay, I wondered where the phrase came from. Who on earth dreamed it up? I entered the curse of precocious talent into Google and was duly delivered the truth of the matter. It appears I invented it! In my novel Lucy. So I am, somewhat to my surprise, put to explaining what, if anything, I meant.
Lucy is a successful painter who had been a child prodigy. Hugely talented as a child she finds herself unable to negotiate a way of living. Even as an adult, faced with a significant problem, “Suddenly she was a child again. It was her nature never really to grow up – she would carry that innocent girl on her back for ever.”
My argument is that the precocious flowering of prodigious talent can trap you: not always, perhaps not often, but if it does, the consequences can be dramatic. Investing so much spiritual capital in an early phase of your life, will play havoc with your psychological adjustment. You never grow up properly.
Now I don’t deny there are advantages to never becoming an adult in this wicked world. But remember, whether you like it or not, the world does not belong to children: they are inevitably and invariably at a disadvantage. My character Lucy believes she is in control of her life, forgetting that “children” (even adult ones) cannot be in control. Sooner or later you must acknowledge you are deceiving yourself. And that is when you discover that fame and celebrity afford no protection at all – the reverse, in fact. The greater the early fame, the greater the likelihood people will only see you through the lens of the precocious child you once were. “[Lucy] knew why people simply took her in hand like this. It was the curse of precocious talent. She had always been the freak at the show: the prize exhibit was always going to be the painter, never the paintings. Too late to say you had grown into yourself; they looked and saw no more than the child they had always feared a little.”
The poet Stephen Spender had something to say on this subject, “The safest part for a writer to play,” he wrote, “is a return to childhood … one’s best relationship with one’s colleagues is for them to think of one as slightly mad but full of good will.” At first sight, this seems an artful inversion of my argument; my response is you have to be a knowing adult to play that sort of game – and a rather cynical one to boot.
So there it is, as baldly as I can put it. If you are lucky enough to have your tender years burdened with fame, reflect on what “lucky” means. Beware becoming the freak at the show. If you suspect it is the writer, not the writing, that is of interest to your readers, you may very well be already sitting in that famous handcart merrily on its way to hell.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
More about Lucy here.