Creativity (25 page)

Ravi Shankar separated from his first wife in 1967. Several years later he met his present wife, whom he married twelve years after their meeting:

The Women’s View

The married women in our sample also felt that their husbands had freed them to concentrate on their work. The sculptor Nina Holton answered the question about what she was most proud of in her life as follows: “It’s the combination of having been so lucky to have had a very good family life, a husband whom I love and who has been most marvelous, plus my own interest in so many things, particularly sculpture, which made it a life which was so complete, and in a way stunning.” The marriage of historian and scriptwriter Natalie Zemon Davis, who teaches at Princeton, has survived much se
paration from her husband, who teaches at Toronto. They call each other every day and spend most weekends together.

In addition, husbands often served as mentors to their wives and helped them to get started on their careers. Margaret Butler says that she was able to overcome her employer’s skepticism about women scientists in great part because “I had an awful good backing in my husband. He’s the one.” In 1945 Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann founded the opinion polling institute she now directs with the help of her more experienced husband. Developmental psychologist Bernice Neugarten’s advice about balancing family and work life for professional women is:

But the unequal gender roles also inject strong ambiguities into the married life of creative women. Elise Boulding, who had played the cello and studied music in college, married a year after graduation. Her husband, Kenneth, had already achieved an international reputation as an economist. He introduced her to the literature of the social sciences and to new perspectives for understanding the task of achieving world peace, which was one of her chief concerns. She took an M.A. degree in sociology and was ready to launch herself into a career in the social sciences. Then the Bouldi
ngs had five children, spaced two years apart. The children were very welcome, but the ten years with diapers left her very far behind her husband professionally. It was not easy afterward to be always in his shadow, and it took long years for Elise to find her own scholarly identity and self-assurance.

The poet Hilde Domin was married to an eminent classical scholar. Although their marriage was strong and happy, Hilde felt that her husband was jealous of her attempts to write verse. When she first showed one of her poems to him, he said acidly: “Well, look at what the cat dragged in.” It was not until after he died that she began to devote herself wholly to writing, and not so long after she became one of the most widely read poets in Germany.

Because of this tension between two usually strong individuals, the relationship sometimes cannot take the strain. Yet most of the time the divorce is amicable, and the former spouses keep seeing each other on friendly terms. Hazel Henderson (who since remarried) says:

Brenda Milner, who says her husband had been “enormously helpful” in her career, later divorced but insists: “he is my best friend, probably. I mean, there is no bitterness between us at all, quite the contrary. To this day we influence each other a lot. We talk a great deal.”

These accounts of the relationships of creative individuals are so diverse that they cannot prove any one point. But they can
disprove
a generally held notion that people who achieve creative eminence are unusually promiscuous and fickle in their human ties. In fact, the opposite seems closer to the truth: These individuals are aware that a lasting, exclusive relationship is the best safeguard of that peace of mind they need in order to focus on their creative pursuit. And if they are lucky, they find a partner who fills that need.

T
HE
M
AKING OF
C
AREERS

Creativity is rarely the product of a single moment; perhaps more often it is the result of a lifetime, like Darwin’s slow accumulation of facts and hypotheses that resulted in his epoch-making description of the evolutionary process. It is true that in mathematics and the sciences generally, a few short papers—such as Einstein’s 1905 articles on special relativity—may make enough of a difference to change an entire domain of learning. The physicist Freeman Dyson believes that his scientific stature was established by the two papers he published in 1948 in the
Physical Review
, which took him six months to puzzle about, a few hours to see the solution of, and another six months to write. However, even in such exceptional cases, if we add in the years that preceded these great events, the years of training and thinking, then the creative process shows its real magnitude: much longer than it appears when one pays attention to just the single crucial episode.

Most creative achievements are part of a long-term commitment to a domain of interest that starts somewhere in childhood, proceeds through schools, and continues in a university, a research laboratory, an artist’s studio, a writer’s garret, or a business corporation. As this list suggests, occupational paths vary enormously depending on the domain in which a person is active. The career of a poet is very different from that of a high-energy physicist or the CEO of a banking conglomerate. Moreover, the career lines of
men and women can vary a great deal even within the same sub-field. Are there in fact
any
commonalities we can talk about in such a diverse group?

There is one sense in which the careers of all creative individuals are similar: They are not careers in the ordinary sense of the term. Most of us join an organization at an entry level, perform a prescribed role for a number of years, and leave at a higher level. What we do during this period is more or less known in advance, and others could do the same job if we didn’t. A worker may start as a tool-maker and leave as a foreman; a teacher may teach for thirty years and become a principal; a soldier may become a sargeant; a young lawyer may end up as a partner of the firm, an
d so forth. These roles are relatively fixed, and we fit into them. It is true that in the postindustrial economy we are now entering this pattern may become less rigid, but I would still be very surprised if most people do not continue to follow career lines that are laid out for them.

In contrast, creative individuals usually are forced to invent the jobs they will be doing all through their lives. One could not have been a psychoanalyst before Freud, an aeronautical engineer before the Wright brothers, an electrician before Galvani, Volta, and Edison, or a radiologist before Roentgen. These individuals not only discovered new ways of thinking and of doing things but also became the first practitioners in the domains they discovered and made it possible for others to have jobs and careers in them. So creative individuals don’t
have
careers; they
create
them. In addition, t
hese pioneers must create a field that will follow their ideas, or their discovery will soon vanish from the culture. Freud had to attract physicians and neurologists to his camp; the Wright brothers had to convince other mechanics that aeronautics was going to be a feasible career. Because careers can take place only within fields, if a person wants to have a career in a field that does not exist, he or she must invent it. And that is what people who create new domains do.

But what about writers, musicians, and artists? These are some of the oldest professions. So it must be wrong to claim that a creative poet creates the role of a poet. Yet there is a very real sense in which this actually is true. Each poet, musician, or artist who leaves a mark must find a way to write, compose, or paint like no one has done before. So while the role of artists is an old one, the substance of what they do is unprecedented. Two examples, one from the sciences
and one from the arts, may illustrate what is involved in creating creative careers.

Rosalyn Yalow’s parents had no education, but they read to their children and expected them to go to college. For whatever reason—and Rosalyn tends to believe it has to do with genetic inheritance—she always felt sure that, somehow or other, she would make it in the world. She still keeps a picture of herself as a three-year-old, wearing boxing gloves, standing above her elder brother lying on the ground (the brother went on to work at the post office). In school she found herself enjoying math:

During high school and college, Yalow was fortunate in getting a string of science and math teachers who recognized her ability and motivation and who kept challenging her with increasingly difficult tasks. During this period she also read Marie Curie’s biography, which made a great impression on her and from then on served as a distant role model. In college, in the 1930s, she formed the opinion (shared by most scientists of her generation) that “physics was the most exciting field in the world.” She was particularly attracted to artificial radioactivity because she sensed that it was a to
ol that could open up many areas of science and could become important in chemistry and biology as well.

Because of the great breakthroughs in physics during this period, her college teachers advised Yalow to go on to graduate school and become a physicist. At this time there were very few jobs in pure physics anywhere. Even such future greats as Eugene Wigner or Leo Szilard were pressured by their parents to specialize in engineering so
that they could fall back on recognizable careers if necessary. Yalow loved physics, but to be on the safe side she took up stenography so she could have a secretarial job if all else failed.

But she was lucky again. In part because World War II had left so many openings in graduate school, she was accepted at the University of Illinois and was given assistantships and research experience. The other fortunate conjunction was that a whole generation of new technology was coming on line: the cyclotron, the betatron, all the new machines that made it possible to study the isotopes whose characteristics she felt might lead to important scientific applications.

She was hired in 1947 by the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital to work in the radiotherapy department. Everyone else was an M.D., while Yalow had never taken a biology course in her life. But by working closely with physicians, she began to learn how her knowledge of the physics of radiation could help solve puzzles about human physiology and disease. In 1950 she joined forces with a physician, Solomon A. Berson, and a few years later they formed a department of radioisotope service, which then became a department of nuclear medicine. There had been no such departments before;
Yalow was one of those who “invented” nuclear medicine. Now people can have routine careers in that field, but half a century ago, it did not exist.

It was while working in the nuclear medicine lab that Yalow became involved in a series of experiments that eventually led to her most important breakthroughs. In the course of trying to figure out why some people suffered from diabetes, her lab succeeded in using radium H for measuring not only insulin but also peptide hormones and the antigens that the body produced. This resulted in the development of the radioimmunoassay method (RIA), which Yalow and Solomon Berson first used in 1959 to study insulin concentration in the blood of diabetics but which soon was successfully applie
d to hundreds of other diagnostic tasks. As a result, Yalow received some of the most coveted prizes in the field of medical research. In 1976 she was the first woman to be awarded the Albert Lasker Prize for basic medical research, and in 1977 she received the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine.

Nothing about Yalow’s career was routine. Only her basic physics training had been conventional. But after that, she specialized in the still young domain of radiation physics. Later, she was among the first
scientists to apply radiation physics to biological problems. And she was the first person to discover a way to use radioisotopes to measure what goes on inside the human body. There was no blueprint she could follow in her career. There was no job, no role for doing the kind of things she ended up doing. Of course, many favorable circumstances had to converge: the development of theory in physics; the availability of large machines for producing and measuring radiation, left over from the war effort; World War II itself, which allowed Yalow to get the education she needed; support
ive parents and all the encouraging teachers in her childhood; and finally, the recognition of an already established field (in her case, medicine) that would legitimate her attempts to develop a new one. Without this rare convergence it is unlikely that Yalow could have achieved what she did. But she had to put together all these pieces by herself without a manual. How did she do it?