`Special Writers'

Joseph Epstein has identified and named a much-needed literary niche:

“There are major writers and minor writers, and somewhere in between there is, or at least ought to be, another category known as `special writers.’ Special writers are those we react to in a special, usually quite personal way, for we feel a kinship between their imaginations and our own. A.J. Liebling was a special writer for a great many people. I, for one, have missed his prose more than that of any other writer who has died in my lifetime.”

This comes from “The Minnesota Fats of American Prose: A.J. Liebling,” published in Book World in 1971 and collected in Epstein’s Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (1985). It’s significant that Epstein singles out for praise Liebling’s prose, for too often he is judged by journalistic standards. That is, he is admired for writing about food, France, boxing, Southern politics, the press or World War II. None of these categories would matter if Liebling had merely been a journalist, a plodder who crafted drab sentences. It’s his combination of elegant, witty prose and diversely raffish subjects that makes Liebling, in the sense defined by Epstein, a special writer.

I assembled my own list of special writers, a list that by definition is idiosyncratic and, to some degree, beyond criticism. I certainly have no interest in rationalizing or defending it. In a sense, special writers are the major writers for at least one reader. Here’s my spontaneously generated list, arranged alphabetically to discourage any suspicion of ranking by degrees of “specialness”: Sherwood Anderson, Whitney Balliett, Thomas Berger, Aldo Buzzi, Raymond Chandler, Theodore Dalrymple, Guy Davenport, Manny Farber, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Green, B.S. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Joseph Mitchell, Flann O’Brien, S.J. Perelman, J.F. Powers, V.S. Pritchett and Richard Yates, among others.

All are writers who consume significant space on my shelves and whose books I often own in multiple copies for reasons of generosity or greed. When I visit a deeply stocked bookstore I look for their work. All reliably deliver pleasure of various sorts. I note with curiosity that about half of them are known best for working in forms other than the novel, the medium that still dominates literary thinking, at least in the United States, which brings me back to Liebling. In 1994 the University of New Mexico Press brought out Liebling at The New Yorker: Uncollected Essays, edited by James Barbour and Fred Warner. In his introduction Warner writes:

“There are few places in the literary pantheon for the writer who does not chiefly write poems, plays, stories, and novels. One reads that W.H. Auden admired M.F.K. Fisher, but one hears also that most of her work is just about food and travel, and that her lean, supple prose ought to have embraced real writing….So where does one put Liebling and his compatriots at The New Yorker – Joseph Mitchell, S.N. Behrman, Philip Hamburger, Wolcott Gibbs, Janet Flanner, and many more? Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley receive, from time to time, a bit of notoriety, but one wonders if anyone actually reads their wonderful work.”

Thanks to Epstein, we can put some of them in what is, for dedicated common readers (the truest of all critics, after all), the supreme category: special writers.