'The Requirements of Both Categories'

“Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann and Emile Zola are great novelists, but it is perhaps inaccurate to say that they are great storytellers. Jack London, H.G. Wells, and P.G. Wodehouse are grand storytellers, but we may debate whether they are great novelists. Cervantes, John Bunyan, and Mark Twain would seem to fulfill the requirements of both categories.”

The verdict is Fred Chappell’s, a noteworthy novelist/storyteller (and novelist/poet), and is probably not intended to be taken as an ironclad Law of Literature. Rather, it suggests a bookishly provocative little parlor game, like debating the volumes we pack for that mythical desert island. I’m not troubled by matters of literary taxonomy, categories imposed on books post facto by critics and sometimes even readers. I won’t stop reading Wodehouse on a semi-regular basis because he’s no Proust, and my love of a good story won’t prod me into reading London and Wells again.

Chappell’s occasion is the death of his friend George Garrett (1929-2008), the novelist, poet and fellow Southerner. I’ve read little of his work. Long ago I started reading his best-known novel, Death of the Fox (1971), but never finished it and can’t remember why. Like a thousand other writers, I know him by name only and have no judgments to pass on his work, but Chappell’s novelist/storyteller distinction seems worth considering.

The impulse is to plug a writer’s name into the n/s algorithm and wait for the results. Henry James? Definitely an n. The same goes for George Eliot and Henry Green. Who is unambiguously an s? Certainly Daniel Defoe, Melville and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Who are the hybrids, a little n, a little s? Tolstoy, Cather, Nabokov. I doubt whether such classifications have much to do with which writers we choose to enjoy and admire. The pull of sheer storytelling is tough to resist. Would anyone stop reading Eudora Welty out of priggish literary rectitude?