This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
For Helen Lewis, there is a “political message smuggled within” the very word “genius”, because “it champions the individual over the collective”. Her new book examines “why the rest of us need geniuses, and how we bestow the label” — partly with a view to combatting their “dangerous allure”.
Lewis is one of the best political journalists around, and I really liked her first book, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, which explored how a series of single-minded, often rather exasperating campaigners drove through major improvements in women’s rights. She herself describes The Genius Myth as a “continuation” of that book, but, though it is equally lively and illuminating, it is built around some very debatable central claims.
Whilst she does offer powerful first-hand responses to individual artworks and never denies the reality of exceptional talent, Lewis focuses on the contingent factors which lead to some people becoming, and being anointed as, “geniuses”.
Striking stories have been attached to them, all the way from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists to Hollywood bio-pics. Standard accounts of the careers of Galileo, Thomas Edison and Alexander Fleming simplify their achievements and play down any elements of chance. (Fleming was a good shot and only chose bacterial research because his supervisor wanted to keep him in the hospital rifle club.) We seldom get to hear much about the assistants, the collaborators, the government grants, the supportive wives or the estates which kept the flame of their reputations alive.
There is an amusing set of chapters on “genius hunters”. In 1904, the sexologist Havelock Ellis published A Study of British Genius, which drew up a list of about a thousand individuals based (rather absurdly) on the length of their entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He soon realised he had to modify his criteria to include Jane Austen because she was undoubtedly a genius but led the kind of under-recorded, uneventful life which doesn’t, or didn’t then, encourage long biographical treatment.
Once he had his cohort of “geniuses”, he crunched the numbers and concluded, seemingly with a straight face, that East Anglia “has no aptitude for abstract thinking”, whilst Scottish genius was concentrated in “the tract between the Cheviots and the Grampians”.
Cyril Burt and Hans Eysenck turned to IQ tests as a supposedly objective measure of genius, though both seem to have been willing to fudge the data in service of their unsavoury political views.
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor, also embraced eugenics and shattered his reputation still further when he revealed his “donations” to the Repository for Geminal Choice, better known as “the Nobel sperm bank”.
One of the alternative titles for her book, Lewis tells us, was “Special People”. She is understandably irritated by the cult of “the genius”, which can lead people so designated to stop thinking of themselves as any combination of talented, lucky and hardworking, and instead come to imagine that they are a superior sort of human. If you’ve ever watched a supposed “public intellectual” express a political opinion so basic and uninformed it makes your teeth ache … you will know what I mean.
A prime example is Elon Musk, perhaps the definitive case of today’s genius as “disruptor”. He has clearly “succumbed to the idea that he is … a special person”, Lewis points out, and has created a “secular cult” around himself which turns everyone else into “either a believer or a heretic”. Wouldn’t it be better if we could accept that a person can be both a “visionary” within a limited field and an “idiot” outside it?
Though she ranges widely from the Renaissance to today, Lewis’s historical analysis is often, to put it mildly, broad-brush. (Edison’s fame, we read, marked the moment when “the Romantic idea of genius — the tubercular poet communing with nature — yielded to the modern one of a workaholic tech bro harnessing the white heat of technological innovation”.)
She is clearly most interested in intervening in present-day debates such as those around how far we should indulge artists and sometimes scientists for objectionable behaviour.
Lewis argues Sofia Tolstaya was essential to Leo’s career beyond mundane practical support
It is hard not to be horrified by the way Leo Tolstoy treated his wife Sofia, whose “copying duties were not to be interrupted by her frequent pregnancies, and she kept working whilst in bed, recovering from childbirth” — before he effectively renounced her.
Yet Lewis wants to go beyond the familiar feminist point that their relationship was exploitative and to argue that Tolstaya was essential to her husband’s career in a way that went beyond mundane but exhausting practical support: “Anyone who disbelieves the importance of a great wife to a genius … is invited to read Anna Karenina. And then read anything that Tolstoy wrote after the age of 55.”
Regardless of whether he deserves a place in the book alongside Einstein and Leonardo, there is a very interesting chapter on the radical playwright and director Chris Goode, whose “challenging” work addressed “taboos like child sexuality, sadism and rape”. He was lionised by admirers and hangers-on determined to prove they were unshockable, largely “middle-class women with a taste for the dark side”, before being exposed as a paedophile (and swiftly “cancelled”). Though in general Lewis believes in “try[ing] to separate the art and the artist”, Goode, like Roman Polanski, makes that impossible, because their “art is propaganda for the crime”.
I grew up in a showbiz family and broadly share Lewis’s impatience with the kind of sycophancy and indulgence granted to some talented but pretty nasty people. But I can also recognise that some of them produced work which has enriched my life.
It is undoubtedly true, though hardly a secret, that much high achievement in the arts and sciences is deeply collaborative. Even the credits for movies now list the focus puller, “best boy” and the third assistant dog trainer. But isn’t it also true that we go and watch Hitchcock, Spielberg or Bergman films to be exposed to a distinctive vision of the world which is enriching (or not) precisely because it is individual rather than collective or, even worse, “designed by committee”?
I am also unconvinced that geniuses always require a dramatic narrative. It may be hard to imagine Van Gogh, Byron and perhaps Picasso without the stories attached to them. But there are also many exceptions. I know that Bach had lots of children and that Mozart liked lavatorial humour.
I know even less about the lives of Raphael and Vermeer. But I share the common view that they were all geniuses because their uncanny technical skills still speak to us across the centuries. If we are going to have heroes at all, they seem a good place to start. Is there really much of a downside to worshipping Schubert or Cézanne?
