Perhaps because there are few real ones around, America is currently preoccupied by geniuses. Nowhere is this clearer than in our written culture, which abounds with them, creating a new class of celebrities. A physicist with a terrible disease writes a book which, although few people read it, nevertheless becomes a best-seller owing to his compelling personal status: the crippled genius. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman goes the title of another best-seller, followed in the bookstores by Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb. Geniuses are especially common in feature journalism. Until recently, every other issue of The New York Times Magazine seemed to contain a profile of some individual of extreme brilliance—the “Genius of the Week,” a friend of mine called this feature. In a specially queasy profile of Susan Sontag last year, the interviewer couldn’t stop mentioning the “rigorous and pure intellect” and “enormous intelligence” of Miss Sontag, her ex-husband, even her sister Judith, “who is also extremely intelligent.”
You know you are reading about a genius when, at the start of the customary biographical sketch halfway through the article, it is noted with awe what a voracious reader the subject was as a child. (“‘I would read anything, absolutely anything,’ recalls Smith. ‘If I was eating breakfast cereal, I’d read the label and memorize the ingredients.’”) In Body & Soul—hotly awaited, since the author has published only one other book since his first