The Virtue of Not Being a Genius

Even though my reading backlog is as clogged as Highway 64 at 5:30 on a Friday, it often happens that I suddenly have a strong desire to read a particular book, totally out of my carefully planned sequence. Today it was George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Barcelona in the besieged region of Catalonia as a journalist, but soon found himself joining the local socialist militia to fight against Franco’s fascist army, because “at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” The memoir recounts Orwell's evolving understanding of the cold realities of the war alongside the relationships he made with the people he served beside. Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the book intersects pleasantly with a discussion we've been having in my creative nonfiction workshop at Truman about essays. This excerpt sketches pretty succinctly what it means to be an essayist, and why we are drawn to read their work:

“If we ask what it is that [Orwell] stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do. We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us. They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel that they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us. We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing. Beside them we are so plain, so hopelessly threadbare. How they glitter, and with what an imperious way they seem to deal with circumstance, even when they are wrong. Lacking their patents of nobility, we might as well quit. This is what democracy has done to us, alas—told us that genius is available to anyone, that the grace of ultimate prestige may be had by anyone, that we may all be princes and potentates, or saints and visionaries and holy martyrs of the heart and mind. And then when it turns out that we are no such thing, it permits us to think that we aren’t much of anything at all. In contrast with this cozening trick of democracy, how pleasant seems the old reactionary Anglican phrase that used to drive people of democratic leanings quite wild with rage—'My station and its duties.'

            

Orwell would very likely have loathed that phrase, but in a way he exemplifies its meaning. … [His works] seem to become what they are chiefly by reason of the very plainness of Orwell’s mind, his simple ability to look at things in a downright, undeceived way. … He is not a genius—what a relief! What an encouragement. For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do.

           

Or could do if we but made up our minds to do it…”