"The truth is that it's a bit embarrassing, but I have to admit that I had never read Dickens until I turned 21," confesses with laughter Nick Hornby (Redhill, 1957) on the other side of the screen. A popular writer, fond of mixing in successful novels like High Fidelity, About a Boy or Fever Pitchcreative worlds as disparate as literature, cinema, music, and even football, explains that to top it off, at that time he was studying English Literature at the University of Cambridge.
"I wasn't a very good student, to be honest, but when I started reading his novel Bleak House I was amazed to realize that it was affecting me much more than any other novel, that it didn't seem like another book to study, but that it was very entertaining and it hooked me to know what happened next. I felt a special connection and it was one of the first times in my life that I thought, 'I really want to study this'," delves the writer, who also abundantly uses humor.
Interestingly, it was also in 1978 when Hornby first came into contact with another artist who would enter the list of what the writer calls "My people", individuals who have shaped and inspired his work: the American musician Prince. "At that time we listened to a lot of music, we were very attentive to the news. Just then, a friend bought For You Prince's first album and played me the first song. I remember being at this friend's house and thinking: 'Wow, this sounds interesting'," recalls Hornby. "I know that both cultural experiences seem to belong to different fields and it wasn't until many years later that I realized that everything happened in just a few weeks."
Indeed, many years later, Hornby, who in recent years has enhanced his role as a television screenwriter with series like Love, Nina and State of the Union, noticed that the lives of both giants, the Victorian novelist and the one-man band from Minneapolis, had many points in common despite almost a century and a half of difference. "Almost without thinking, one day I realized that, incredible as it may seem, Dickens, driven by necessity but also by his personality, often worked on two different novels at the same time. And he combined this with writings in the press, his huge daily correspondence, and many other commitments. Then I thought that I didn't know anyone like that. And suddenly I said to myself: 'Prince also overlapped one album with another, gave concerts, composed and recorded for many others...'. In this and in their immense talent, they were kindred spirits," affirms the writer.
"Delving into the story, similarities soon began to emerge: a childhood of poverty and abandonment, how young they were when they started, and the great fame they achieved almost immediately, their controversies, their fondness for women... And I embarked on an investigation," he summarizes. From this research emerges Dickens and Prince. A very particular kind of genius (Anagrama), an entertaining and passionate essay in which Hornby connects the life and work of two creators of immense talent through many biographical coincidences, their overwhelming productivity and work ethic, their struggles to change their respective industries, and the tragic ending that came too soon.
Work, work, and more work
In the style of Plutarch's parallel lives, Hornby recounts in a casual and humor-filled tone the mirrored lives of Dickens and Prince by linking valuable anecdotes with personal opinions and his particular reading of both creators. The first chapter is childhood, marked in both cases by poverty and parental abandonment. "From a very young age, Prince filled his life with music, he was fascinated by it. There is a wonderful story about a time when he sneaked out to see a concert by Joni Mitchell, which she herself recounted years later, about a black boy with thick hair and big eyes looking at her excitedly from the front row. Only years later did the singer realize that it was Prince."
But beyond the passion, Hornby explains, the singer used music as an escape route. "Abandoned by his parents at around 12 years old, something he never wanted to fully disclose, he ended up living in the basement of a family in the neighborhood where the youth band where he was already playing at the time kept their musical instruments," recounts the writer. "As far as we know, he spent his time practicing with the instruments because he had nothing else to do. Hour after hour, day after day...".
"Prince and Dickens were very humble. You have to be to achieve such colossal success and keep reinventing your work time and time again"
Dickens's story, which was already the subject of several biographies during his lifetime, is better known. "Also around the age of 12, his father was imprisoned for debt non-payment. From one day to the next, Dickens went from being a middle-class child to the harsh poverty of London and had to stop studying and start working in a shoe polish factory. And that is something he would never forget throughout his life," points out Hornby, to the extent that many of his most emblematic characters, like David Copperfield, were born from his memory. "With all this, I don't mean to say that you have to be poor to be a star, that's ridiculous, but it does show that true talent overcomes all the obstacles that life can offer," the author concludes.
Precisely talent, on which Hornby does not dwell much due to its obviousness, is perhaps the great common aspect of the writer and the musician. A talent that would lead them to achieve colossal success at just 25 years old. At that age, Dickens, after working for a few years as a judicial, journalistic, and parliamentary stenographer - which would provide juicy material for his future work - published The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in twenty monthly installments, each of which sold more than 40,000 copies. On the other hand, after four notable but irregularly resonant albums, Prince consecrated himself with the album 1999, a massive success that sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and with four singles certified as quadruple platinum.
In addition to this precocity, more exaggerated if we consider that in the following two years the writer would release works like Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby and the musician an icon like Purple Rain, Hornby highlights precisely their creative voracity, which in his opinion arose not only from passion but from a work ethic out of the ordinary. "Today we talk about them because they are among the best writer and musician of all time, but back then that wasn't known. Both had an unusual and enviable self-confidence in their abilities," points out the author, who, however, asserts that this faith should not be confused with arrogance.