Amy March of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is unfairly maligned. She is bratty and selfish and superficial. But she has two traits that render the rest of her failings irrelevant: self-knowledge and ambition. She learns that she is a talented painter but comes nowhere close to genius. “Talent isn’t genius,” she upbraids herself. “I want to be great, or nothing,” she adds at the very moment I realised she was by far the most interesting and lovable of the four March sisters.
I thought about her this week. It was the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) awards on Sunday evening and Timothée Chalamet won the best actor award for his Bob Dylan impression in A Great Unknown (Dylan, we know, exists on the genius end of the talent-genius spectrum).
“I can’t downplay the significance of this award, because it means the most to me,” Chalamet said in his acceptance speech. “I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me, but the truth is this was 5½ years of my life. I poured everything I have into playing this incomparable artist ... I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in the pursuit of greatness ... I wanna be one of the greats, I’m inspired by the greats ... I wanna be up there.”
Such open aspiration is refreshing and rare. It is far more common for the starlet to play faux “who, me?” humility in moments like these, to feign shock and awe, to pretend that their beauty and talent is a surprise to them, that they are just passive vehicles of brilliant performances. Take Olivia Colman’s acceptance speech for best actress at he Oscars in 2019. Winning was “genuinely quite stressful”, she laughed. “This is hilarious! I’ve got an Oscar!” she added (vom). The twee, self-effacing countenance of Hollywood may be the worst thing about it.
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There is another version of this trait – though it all comes from the same place (the very real fear of looking like you’re trying). It crops up as a kind of studied indifference too, more common with the novelist or journalist than the actor. These people aren’t disinterested in success, often they are more ruthlessly ambitious than anyone, but they are extraordinarily anxious to reveal any effort. Tennis player Nick Kyrgios possesses the quality: “Every coach I had tried to tame me, tried to make me more disciplined ... I’ve just been playing on instinct, I feel like it’s been successful.” So casual to, like, get to the Wimbledon final, y’know.
Chalamet’s speech is a tonic to the jaded insouciance that has taken over – and not just the artistic realm but the social one too. I sometimes wonder if there is any characteristic I like more in people than earnestness (this is also why I like Americans). And yet, it’s in such short supply.
Instead, the general disposition is teenage. Succeeding is cool, but being seen to try and still failing? Fatal. Best not to try, etc.
Of course almost all brilliant people are open about their ambition and efforts. This is precisely the reason why Chalamet will make good on his promise to himself. Taylor Swift has never once pretended that her albums were anything other than the product of slog, hard work and nearly two decades of practice. Pablo Picasso was open about the fact he had to draw photo-realistically and stretch his own canvasses before he could begin to subvert and stretch reality. Martin Amis’s novels are brilliant because of the depth and effort he put into literary criticism. An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021 displayed 281 works by Paul Cézanne. None of these people were ever insouciant about the work.
The other trait great artists share, with almost no exception, is that they’re prolific. The great late art critic Peter Schjeldahl has a great counterintuitive take on it: quantity intensifies quality. More films, more albums, more sketches – the practise alone makes one far more likely to create something genius; in the very least it will lead to some healthy improvement.
There comes a point in most adults’ lives when they stop being governed by the fear of cringe. It comes more easily to some than others: Chalamet and Swift never once possessed the limiting belief that open, arriviste ambition is something to be embarrassed by.
And on that, I have never really understood why try-hard is such a loaded insult, when every successful government is run by them, every good painting I’ve ever seen has been rendered by one. I doubt I’ve ever loved an album that has been generated from a place of slapdash, effortless nonchalance. I’m glad to hear Chalamet is “in the pursuit of greatness”. A lot of people are, but only the ones who own up to it ever get anywhere.
