Grace versus Grunt - Cathy Butler

Most people would agree that talent and hard work are both important ingredients in any artistic or sporting career, and indeed in many other endeavours. But which is more important? And which is more to be admired?

It’s a difficult thing to measure, but my impression is that in British culture there’s been a gradual shift in emphasis over my lifetime, from talent to hard work. For example, in the early 1970s my favourite tennis player was Ilie Năstase, and the main reason I liked him was that his play was so beautiful and imaginative. It didn’t matter that he never won Wimbledon – that was part of what made him rakishly attractive, like a top button left artfully undone. Then, around 1974, I was surprised to hear another player grunt loudly and effortfully as he hit the ball. The grunter was Jimmy Connors, a hardworking but unlovely player, who did win Wimbledon, twice. (Both were soon to be eclipsed by Swedish Jesus-lookalike Bjorn Borg, who successfully combined grace and power.) Connors’s grunts were unfavourably received by old-school BBC commentators such as Dan Maskell, ostensibly because they had the potential to distract his opponents, but I think the real reason was that it made his play look altogether too much like hard work. No doubt Borg and Năstase practised, but they did it out of sight: their performances were cool iceberg tips, never mind what lay below the surface. Today, by contrast, all sportspeople are expected to give 110% as a bare minimum, and Andy Murray’s matches, for all their skill, frequently recall the boxing scene in Cool Hand Luke. If you’re not visibly suffering, you don't deserve to win.

Amongst writers too hard work is admired, but it's also very slightly suspect.  We may praise Anthony Trollope for getting up at 5.30am each morning and writing 3,000 words before leaving for his day’s work at the Post Office (if he finished a novel before 8.30 he would take a fresh sheet of paper and start on the next); but our admiration is not unmitigated: his routine sounds anything but inspiring or inspired.

In The Courtier (1528) Baldassare Castiglione coined the useful term sprezzatura to denote the seemingly effortless skill with which a courtier should be able to ride, fence, dance, play an instrument, and so on. Its employment as a positive description is interesting, for the word comes from the Italian for “contempt” or “negligence”, qualities we don't normally admire. But aren't masters of sprezzatura merely con merchants, working feverishly behind the scenes to acquire the skills they pretend to have naturally?

More fundamentally, why should we praise people for having talent in the first place? While some people certainly have more natural ability than others (no matter how hard I train I will never be able to run as fast as Usain Bolt), surely being given a head start by your DNA doesn't make you praiseworthy, any more than winning the lottery or inheriting a business empire makes you a hardworking entrepreneur. Anyway, why would we want to look like someone who’s never had to try? Aren't the admirable people the ones who do a lot with the resources they have?

I suspect that somewhere at the back of all this there’s a need to feel that some people are simply special, touched by the gods, and that the ease with which they produce great work is a measure of that specialness. Hence Heminge and Condell's compliment to Shakespeare on producing great plays while seldom blotting a line. It feels good to know that such people exist, even if they aren't us.

It's true that the subjective experience of writers is often that the best lines, the best ideas, appear to fall fully-formed into one’s lap, without apparent effort. However, remember the anecdote about the consultant who fixed a problem in a factory by turning a single lever – the work of a moment – and charged a £1,000 fee. When the factory owner questioned a bill of £1,000 for a moment’s work, the consultant replied that the fee was for the decades of experience and training that meant she could fix the problem in a moment. Perhaps it’s like that for writers: those “free” inspirations have actually been earned through years of grunt and grind.

Or, as a golfer once famously put it, “The more I practise, the luckier I get.”