Kim Stanley On Talent

In the summer of 1992, I asked Kim Stanley to talk about talent, its derivation, its cultivation. Stanley had used the word talent liberally, and I wanted to pin her down on its definition. Her response led me to ask the question of everyone I later interviewed.

I have always thought about talent a lot, just as I've thought about faith a lot. I used to think that both talent and faith were things you had or you didn't. That was that. But as I got older and went through a lot of things, I came to see or to feel that we all have the capacity for talent and for faith, but these seeds, if you will, need to be found and developed--a demand needs to be made upon them.

I think there's talent for something within all of us, but it hides or is latent if nothing reaches in and calls on it to get to work. A lot of people use the word imagination to describe what I think is talent. When I suffered abuse--of various kinds--I retreated to a better, imaginary world of my own creation, and this developed within me the gifts of a storyteller, an actress, a fabulist, a mimic. If someone had put a piano or a cello in front of me, I might have thought to get lost in music, and the latent talent I had for music might have grown. I didn't sit in front of a piano and become a good pianist, but I got in front of audiences and became a good actress, which for a long time meant retreating from the reality--the very poor reality--with which I had been presented. This desire for retreat created a demand on my talents, and they came forth. For Tennessee [Williams] the demands on his talent led him to write things down and to act them out with his mother and his sister. Bill [Inge] did this, too, and writers were born.

You asked me about talent, and I want to point out that talent and genius are two entirely different things. As rare as budding seeds of talent may be, genius is truly rare, and to sit at a piano or to act or to write does not mean genius ultimately comes. I don't know where genius comes from. Does genius derive from a greater demand for a longer period of time? Does genius derive from a history in one's family or environment of great demand? I don't know, but I'm not a genius; Bill was not a genius. I think Tennessee is a genius. Picasso was a genius. But a lot of people are talented, but not that many are called upon to be talented, and when I teach, I think I'm demanding that people go within and find that place to which they retreated and to pluck from it the methods of survival they invented. That's the talent. If I get a student who looks at me like I'm crazy, and has no idea what I'm talking about, I can't work with them. This happened a lot when I taught at a university, where you walk in a lot of times and there are people in a circle and that's your class. You make do. But I would just let them know that all I could offer was something recreational or therapeutic, like square dancing or meditation: I can't work with someone as an actor if it's just not there, and it's not there if they didn't have some series of events that led them to escape from or embellish what reality had given them.

When I was growing up, there were a lot of girls who were pretty and popular and utterly content. They went to their bedrooms at night and brushed their hair one hundred times and put ice cubes on their breasts to look good in the prom photo, and they felt that the world would always fall to their feet. I called them the organza girls, and I envied them. I didn't realize there was a gift when I went to my bedroom and hoped no one would come in and fiddle with me, and  I imagined that I was Katharine Cornell or Jane Eyre or someone of my own creation. I was crafting an artist, an actress, and the organza girls were learning how to use mascara. They were utterly satisfied, and a satisfied person becomes incurious and never thinks to dig deep into anything, much less themselves.

Talent derives, I think, from dissatisfaction, and it develops also from dissatisfaction. Only a bad actor is fine with what was done. A good actor always sees the flaws, the limitations, and vows to do better the next time, the next performance. You can have talent and think that is quite enough, but you are wrong, and that is a self-satisfied actor, which is a nice way of calling someone a performer, like a trained dog. I hate working with those. They bring nothing; they take up space where work could be done.

I think talent grew in the space where I was trying to be happy and safe. It grew out of a desire to have some understanding of the world and my place in it.  Talent--whatever that is--grows out of restlessness, anger, dissatisfaction, curiosity. You can bet Eve had talent, because the perfection of the Garden was fine, but what else was there? What did it mean? Where did it end? What was over there? She was a curious woman, and those must always be punished, so some men got together and wrote a book and laid the labors of the world at her feet.

The satisfied can never be talented. The incurious can never be talented. Fulfillment comes from the constant search.

©  2018  James Grissom