You know about the Oscar curse: The notion that winning the Academy Award for Best Actress is great, but often followed by professional oblivion. Is there a New York Times curse as well?
I thought of this over the weekend when I read two separate Times essays—one by Ben Brantley, the other by Matt Trueman—on a new London theatrical production of Angels in America (1991) by Tony Kushner. Reading between the lines of both pieces, I got the impression that neither Brantley nor Trueman were especially pleased by what they saw; but as always in the Times, Kushner’s seven-hour drama was showered with superlatives: “Epic” is Trueman’s offhand term; Brantley thinks Angels in America is a “miracle.”
I happen to think that Angels in America is a bloated, kitschy, self-indulgent journalistic piece which, like all political theater, now requires footnotes for the rising generation (the second installment is titled Perestroika) and largely delights those who agree with its politics. But for all the academic honors and civic deference accorded its author, Kushner has failed to produce anything equally memorable in the quarter-century since. His timing was good for a now-forgotten play called Homebody/Kabul (2001), which appeared shortly after 9/11 and the subsequent overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But he seems to have moved permanently from the theater to Hollywood and the occasional politicized screenplay.
The same might be said of another perennial Times enthusiasm, Art Spiegelman, whose “graphic novel” about the Holocaust, Maus (1991), appeared in the same year as Angels in America and, like Angels, won the Pulitzer Prize. I confess that I happen to hold a low opinion of graphic novels (otherwise known as comic books) as high art; but like Kushner, Spiegelman was engulfed with such praise and overpraise, in the Times and elsewhere, that it seems to have paralyzed his creative impulse. And like Kushner, Spiegelman coughed up a much-awaited, well-publicized 9/11-related work—In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)—that even the Times now treats with benign neglect.
Of course, none of this has clogged the global honors spigot: Kushner was recently presented with the National Medal of the Arts by President Barack Obama; courtesy of the French government, Spiegelman is now a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Spiegelman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as is Kushner, who was recently elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society (!). Better yet, the process shows no signs of slowing down, as this past weekend’s Times pieces attest. What was once said of the famously writer’s-blocked novelist E.M. Forster—that his prestige waxed with every he book he didn’t write—may usefully apply to Art Spiegelman and Tony Kushner.
The lesson seems obvious. Writers often become writers because they are deeply neurotic, painfully self-conscious and insecure, beings, and lavishing them with overpraise does paradoxical harm. Sometimes the talent/veneration gap is a yawning chasm, and the realization produces tragic results—as another Times enthusiasm, the Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinki, discovered. Or in the case of another favorite Times cultural hero (Harper Lee of To Kill a Mockingbird fame) it yields a prolonged, perhaps merciful, silence.
Still, while it is pleasant to accumulate honorary degrees, and bask in the attention of Charlie Rose and Vanity Fair, is the Times curse worth the price of the loss of creativity?
