'A Kind of Eccentric Attraction'

“I am a minor writer because I deal in mere frissons and adventitious insights, and with things peripheral.” 

There’s nothing minor about a writer who can reliably deliver a good frisson. Musicians have it easier. Erik Satie and Bill Evans give me chills even after a lifetime of listening. Writers have to work harder. “Major” is overrated. Often it’s a cover for trendy, topical or “opinions I agree with.” Or “bestselling.” Or yet another excuse for snobbery. Is Francis Wyndham a major writer? Italo Svevo? Stevie Smith? They are to this reader. Let’s put it another way: Is Shakespeare a major writer? A nonsensical question. In today’s aliterate world, all writers are minor. The self-describing minor writer speaking at the top is Guy Davenport, who calls himself  “a minor prose stylist” in a 1995 interview:

 

“Minor writers may have charm, a polished finish, and a kind of eccentric attraction. Thomas Love Peacock, Colette, Simenon, Michael Gilbert -- fine fellows and impeccable stylists, but when compared to Tolstoy, Cervantes, Balzac, or Proust, minor. I would place Poe and Borges among the minors, splendid as they are. They are narrow. A Martian could not learn about human nature from either of them.”

 

It's a mistake to underestimate charm. I suggest we dump “major” and “minor” – and replace them with what? “Good” and “bad” will never do. “Important” and “unimportant”? We’re getting back to the reductively subjective. Any assiduous reader knows his own mind and what he will reread or never read again. That suggests another way to qualitatively describe books and writers: rereadable or not.

    

We shouldn’t mistake Davenport’s statement at the top for the ersatz humility of a bloated ego. Davenport rightly weighs his worth, though only the broadly read can make such judgments and stand by them convincingly. I love Colette but feel no impulse to burden her with superlatives. She doesn’t need my help, and hype only hurts. Here is Joseph Epstein on a major contender from the minor leagues: “Max Beerbohm was the world’s greatest minor writer, with the full oxymoronic quality behind that epithet entirely intended.”

 

There’s often something oxymoronic about our love for certain writers. Their failures don’t detract from their triumphs. George Santayana and Charles Lamb can be anti-Semitic shits but I’m usually ready to read them again. I’ve read all of the published Davenport at least once. Twenty-three of his books sit on my shelf. Some of his stories I’m likely never to read again. Some of his essays – “Finding,” “On Reading” – I’ve read dozens of times. He’s a rare writer one accepts as a teacher, and “major”/’minor” is irrelevant.

 

Davenport was born in Anderson, S.C., on this date, November 23, in 1927, and died in Lexington, Ky., on January 4, 2005, at age seventy-seven.