DICKENS, PRINCE AND MY DEAD HOMIES

Reaction to reading Nick Hornby's book on two legendary artists

I have several friends who have died in their late fifties and a few others who barely made it past sixty. I should point out that they were all men and all in the popular arts — music, acting, film — and all spent most of their adult life in big cities, didn’t marry or did only briefly, and who howled at the moon until the sun screamed back.

So I read Nick Hornby’s ‘Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius,’ a celebration of two incredibly prolific artists who died at fifty-eight and fifty-seven respectively, with the middle-aged creative lives I’ve seen cut short hovering over the text. Of course Dickens and Prince were special cases. Hornby, a bestselling novelist and successful screenwriter, wouldn’t have been inspired to match up two men who worked in different disciplines, countries, and centuries.

Still, in breezing through this brief book (at 169 pages it’s actually more like a long magazine essay), I identified so many familiar elements — artistic ferment, romantic messes, and prolific production — as a road to self-destruction. A creative life can be an obsession that both stokes and drains your life force. The act of making things generates a powerful momentum that can blind you to the chaos you’re making in other people’s lives, the physical toil on your body, and the need to just stop and enjoy life.

According to Hornby, “Dickens’ novels total something like four million words,” not counting the sixty some letters he wrote a day. There are twelve volumes of collected letters, including 1004 pages in Volume 7. But between 1850 to 1870 he wrote six complete novels, including three over 300,000 words long. He did all this while having ten kids, a scandal plagued love life, and doing live readings around the United Kingdom and the United States. Not to forget ‘A Christmas Carol,’ written in 1843, still dominates the holiday season.

Of course Prince was busy too. In 2020, his 1987 masterpiece ‘Sign O the Times,’ was released with a boxed set with sixty-three tunes that didn’t make the album. Sixty-three! According to a fansite Pince recorded at least 102 songs in 1986 alone. The legenday vault is said to contain five to eight thousand songs. Hornby suggests that his estate could release “a ten song album every six months for the next three to four hundred years.” Not to mention a celebrated love life that included two marriages. Hornby’s two heroes didn’t just create “content” like some relentless 21st century influencer. Clearly Dickens books have stood the test of time — Paul Giamatti was playing Scrooge in a TV ad all December. Prince has only been dead since 2016 and his stature has only grown.

Still, and I say this with all due respect, I can’t help but wish both these men could have regularly shut down their peripatetic minds, put down the quill and guitar, and found satisfaction in activities that prioritized their health. And yes, I am absolutely projecting my sadness over departed friends onto Dickens and Prince. Shutting off the voices in your head is, for any artistic person, can be difficult, especially if they define themselves by their output. But the trade off could be, not just years more of life, but a quality of existence one more book or song does not provide.