More marks on paper

Life is not fair. Talents are not distributed equitably. The likelihood is that if you are good at one thing, you will be good at other things too. But there is a twist in the tail. The more things you are good at, the less you will be perceived as pre-eminent in any of them. The American Paul Horgan, for example — singer, actor, set-designer, painter, poet, writer of stories, essays, novels, plays and libretti — is quoted in The Writer’s Brush as deploring his ‘accursed versatility’, and the truth is that I, unlike my better-informed readers, am unfamiliar with his oeuvre.

A few of the writer-artists featured in this hefty book are first-class at neither authorship nor art, and most are much better writers than they are artists, or vice versa. Proust was rubbish at drawing. Oskar Kokoschka has ‘dozens of published works’ to his name, but that’s not why he is famous.