Theater critic Terry Teachout made an interesting point the other day in this W$J op-ed about one of the hazards of great achievement relatively early in one’s career:

Leonard Bernstein set Broadway on fire in 1957 with “West Side Story,” a jazzed-up version of “Romeo and Juliet” in which the Capulets and Montagues were turned into Puerto Rican Sharks and American Jets. It was the most significant musical of the postwar era — and the last successful work that Bernstein wrote for the stage. His next show, 1976’s “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” closed after seven performances. For the rest of his life he floundered, unable to compose anything worth hearing.
What happened? Stephen Sondheim, Bernstein’s collaborator on “West Side Story,” told Meryle Secrest, who wrote biographies of both men, that he developed “a bad case of importantitis.” That sums up Bernstein’s later years with devastating finality. Time and again he dove head first into grandiose-sounding projects, then emerged from the depths clutching such pretentious pieces of musical costume jewelry as the “Kaddish” Symphony and “A Quiet Place.” In the end he dried up almost completely, longing to make Great Big Musical Statements — he actually wanted to write a Holocaust opera — but incapable of producing so much as a single memorable song.

Teachout goes on to discuss the career of Orson Welles, another performer who peaked early with “Citizen Kane” and then spent the remainder of his career attempting to scale that peak again. Teachout compares Welles and novelist Ralph Ellison to choreographer, George Balanchine:

Contrast Ellison’s creative paralysis with the lifelong fecundity of the great choreographer George Balanchine, who went about his business efficiently and unpretentiously, turning out a ballet or two every season. Most were brilliant, a few were duds, but no matter what the one he’d just finished was like, and no matter what the critics thought of it, he moved on to the next one with the utmost dispatch, never looking back. “In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse,” he said. “Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time.” That was the way Balanchine saw himself: as an artistic craftsman whose job was to make ballets. Yet the 20th century never saw a more important artist, or one less prone to importantitis.

I’ve admired the trait that Teachout notes in Balachine in Texas novelist, Larry McMurtry, who churned out interesting novels and short stories for 25 years or so until he reached the pinnacle of his profession at the age of 50 with his 1985 Pulitizer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove. Even after hitting a grand slam with Lonesome Dove, McMurtry didn’t rest on his laurels; he went back to work producing a novel every several years or so. Although many of those novels and other works (the screenplay to Brokeback Mountain, for example) have been highly entertaining, he has not been able to produce a work on the level of Lonesome Dove. The odds are that McMurtry won’t (he is 72 now), but my sense is that he is much more likely to do so pursuing his craft the way in which he is doing it rather than sitting around contemplating what the next great American novel should be.