User @rascally5 called me out on a claim I made in my García Márquez tribute – asking me to elaborate on the distinction between “genius” and “mastery.” He wrote:

who are some writers you would consider masters? Some that (while genius) you wouldn’t? How about you PG readers?

I answered in the annotation window – check it out and leave your own thoughts there, or here!

Thanks for your thorough response! I haven’t read all of the authors you’ve mentioned, but it’s an impressive list and I’ll have to educate myself further on the one’s I don’t know.

I’ve never before thought of a writer – or any artist/professional – in terms of “mastery vs. genius” (and maybe “vs.” is the wrong way to put it, seeing as the two aren’t mutually exclusive, perhaps even are rarely so?). Not that I am confused about the differences in the two words' applications – merely that the comparison is not often made and hadn’t crossed my mind. I think it’s a fascinating question, so thanks for writing about it :)

Two people that come to my mind immediately as masters are novelist David Mitchell and poet Alicia Ostriker. I haven’t read bad work by either – they both have distinctive styles that they seem to be able to turn any way they please.

1. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favorites – but I have to think on him a bit more. Certainly he was one of those “tragic…American literary celebrities who drank himself to death”, which seems to point to a flaring genius, but I’m not sure his works can’t be considered masterful.

Thoughts on any of these three?

Thank you for asking more about it! No, I didn’t mean to suggest the two things are mutually exclusive.

I haven’t read enough of Mitchell or Ostriker to judge. Fitzgerald is a tough case. Obviously a genius, and his best works show such incredible mastery that it’s tempting to just call him a master. But he was a very erratic personality and his work is very uneven. His last full book, Tender Is the Night, has brilliant sections and sections that are badly overwritten – and it’s not as if he dashed it off; he spent years and years writing and revising it, and never fully got control of the material. That doesn’t quite fit the profile of the kind of writer I’m talking about, but I know good readers who would reasonably disagree.

@rascally5 I read Cloud Atlas a while back and I’d agree with you that Mitchell is definitely edging towards a mastery of the novel form. Quite a lot of writers seem to try the interconnected fragments approach but it works really well there.

This is a cool topic though, and I wrote about it recently in an annotation– Dante uses the word ingegno to refer to a kind of innate intelligence that contrasts what we might call mastery– slow perfection of a craft.

Two writers who might come down on either side are Coleridge and Wordsworth– scholars seem pretty sure that Coleridge had read far more, and a brief look at Biographia Literaria will tell you that he was a master critic. Wordsworth, though, seemed to have a more innate drive towards creation– it’s hard to argue he wasn’t the better poet– so perhaps he was more “genius”. Not to say they both weren’t, of course.