Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. By Joshua Wolf Shenk. Eamon Dolan; 339 pages. John Murray.
Society has long romanticized the creative power of the loner, be it the scientist who works all night in a laboratory or the cloistered writer wrapped up in the world of his own imagination. "For centuries the myth of the lone genius has towered over us like a colossus," writes Joshua Wolf Shenk at the start of his new book, "Powers of Two". Unimpressed, he tries to debunk the idea that "world-changing things" come from single minds, and makes the controversial claim that it is the "creative pair", rather than the individual, that has produced the most imaginative work in history.
Mr Shenk, once a writer for this newspaper, backs up his assertion with reference to three archetypal creative duos: "the liquid and the container", "the star and the director" and "the dreamer and the doer". He uses John Lennon and Paul McCartney, liquid and container respectively, as a theme throughout this book. "Paul took the challenging, defiant material John laid before him and found ways...to make it work in the vernacular of popular music," he writes. Mr McCartney provided structure and form for Lennon, who, in turn, pushed against Mr McCartney's more conventional, naive thinking. In one songwriting session, Mr McCartney suggested starting a song with the lines, "She was just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen." Lennon sneered at the second line and came back with, "She was just seventeen/You know what I mean," joining sexual experience to innocence.
William Wordsworth wrote "Daffodils" after reading his sister's account of a walk they had taken together. In this star-director pair, Dorothy Wordsworth's journal was the source material, though she chose to leave the limelight to William. The "star" member of a duo may better represent the brand. Take Martin Luther King, the face of the civil-rights movement, who called Ralph Abernathy his warm-up act in Time magazine. "In mass meetings at black churches, Abernathy would give the crowd the facts on the ground and rouse them to fight," Mr Shenk writes. "Then King would ascend to the pulpit and give a sermon...of non-violence."
The author sees Trey Parker and Matt Stone (who bonded as starving artists before creating "South Park") as a dreamer-doer team. Mr Parker spends his time in front of a computer hammering out the next episode, while Mr Stone handles the networks and studios. Yet Mr Shenk disagrees that Mr Parker is the "creative one". According to one staff writer on the "South Park" team, Mr Stone will suggest an idea rooted in current events, and Mr Parker (who focuses on character and relationships) then runs with it.
Competition, overt or not, exists in every great pair, says Mr Shenk. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, rivals and mutual admirers, fuelled each other's work: Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" was an effort to exceed the savagery of Matisse's "Nu Bleu". Each creative mind needs another to push against if it is to achieve its potential, according to this thought-provoking book. The resulting conflict can lead to extraordinary work. (Groups provide community, Mr Shenk believes, but the important work happens in twos; any additional person diminishes the engagement.) It is an interesting thesis, but Mr Shenk could perhaps have tempered his message with an acknowledgment that the lone genius does have some basis in fact. Solitary innovators do exist, though duos have certainly had more influence on the world than history recognizes. Often a seemingly solo actor has a partner in crime.
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