In Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Stephen King has a short story about a poor black woman who uses magic to make a rich white man the "natural" father of her unborn child. The child's biological father is a hate-filled crack addict; the other man is a hate-filled, but talented novelist.

In a note about the story, King says he was attempting to deal with an issue that had long puzzled him: why it was that so many gifted persons were often such awful human beings. He had, he wrote, once met an undeniably great novelist who was an absolutely appalling person; and he had met sufficient other writers who displayed such attributes as racism and sexism for him to wonder.

In my column last week, I quoted figures for mental illness - ranging from hypochondria, manic depression, psychotic hallucinations, suicide attempts to moody and introspective fits - among eminent creative persons. The rates are 59 to 69 percent for painters, composers and non-fiction writers; and 70 to 77 percent for poets, musical performers and fiction writers. By contrast, it was only 18 to 29 percent for eminent natural scientists, politicians, architects and businesspeople.

Now this raises an obvious question: if creative people have all these emotional problems, why should ungifted human beings listen to anything they have to say? The question is especially applicable to writers, who we assume to have some finer sensibility, some deeper fount of wisdom. We assume this because we believe that anyone who has mastery of language is in some way superior to the rest of us. We also assume that Art, the work produced by the writer, is in some way independent of his merely human self.

The latter assumption is merely a superstition, an unquestioned catechism of the cult of Art. The former assumption is partly true, inasmuch as eloquence in all known cultures is always a device that wins prestige for its possessor. But superstition also intrudes here, in the assumption that linguistic superiority is equivalent to wisdom.

Frankly, I agree with Flannery O' Connor who, when asked if he thought the university stifled writers, replied, "My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them." The vast majority of writers are definitely worth ignoring. Yet there are also these great, disturbed writers, whose works have added true wisdom and beauty to our world. How is this possible?

The answer, I think, lies in evolution. Survival is a fundamental axiom of all organisms. Part of the mental equipment evolution necessarily equips organisms with is a radar for threats to its well-being. In How The Mind Works, Steven Pinker writes: "The psychologist Timothy Ketelaar notes happiness tracks the effects of resources on biological fitness...There are many ways to become infinitely worse off...and not many ways to become vastly better off. That makes prospective losses more worthy of attention than gains."

For most organisms, "well-being" is defined in physiological and environmental terms. But, for more complex animals, well-being also has to do with emotional and mental threats. And no organism has more complex mental equipment than homo sapiens sapiens.

That complexity has created a social world which is not merely as complex, but more complex than any individual human being. Thus, the specialization that is necessary for even an agrarian economy has also become necessary in other areas: political, social, even psychological.

This is what writers do. They confront those problems, plumb the depths, and scale the heights that the average person cannot or will not. The novel works like an experiment: it creates situations which we can explore imaginatively, stimulating those modules in our brains designed for learning and/or emotional pleasure. Novels written to entertain are rarely described as great books, but I don't think this is necessarily because of any aesthetic inferiority - it is simply because there are twice as many negative emotions as positive ones. Art provides a safe mechanism for dealing with the negative feelings, and for experiencing the positive ones more frequently and more intensely than is possible in the real world. The novelist, through his work, allows us to vicariously experience situations or emotions that might be destructive or overly distracting if real, preparing us to deal with such situations if they ever do become actual. (It is for this same reason that no newspaper that contained only good news would long survive.)

Being bipolar or alcoholic or moody makes you more familiar with the dark side of life. But it isn't necessary for creativity - there remains the 20-30 percent of writers who are quite normal and still produce good work. There are lots of people, however, who use neurotic behaviour as their main evidence of genius. But I very much doubt that Dhanraj Singh will emerge as the next Naipaul or Walcott.

Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh