'Small But Real Pleasure to His Readers'

An amusing coda to Saturday’s post on major and minor writers: "I come from a family of minor writers and intend to join that class in due course. By ‘minor’ I mean something like third-tier–not third-rate, now. What characterizes a third-rate writer is that he can’t write. Not that I would object to being a third-rater myself; many third-raters become fabulously rich, and in any case there’s something to be said for a man who can make millions by doing something he’s no good at.”

 

The writer is Barton Swaim, a columnist and book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. I recommend his book The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (2015), which manages to make contemporary American politics interesting. The passage quoted above is from Swaim’s “Literary Minority," a column published in 2009 in the Washington Examiner. Call Swaim a comic realist:

 

“The minor writer never gets rich, never achieves anything more than momentary fame, and nobody would call his works important. He has admirers, and he may write a highly regarded book now and again, but he is destined to be remembered, if at all, in the footnotes of monographs nobody reads.”

 

Unless your last name is Proust, to set out to achieve the status of “major writer” is a mug’s game, a delusion of Norman Mailer-esque proporations. In today’s literary culture, it’s a stone-cold impossibility. In Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013), Joseph Epstein writes to his friend Frederic Raphael praising the stories of the wonderful Francis Wyndham, an English writer hardly well-known, especially in the U.S.:

 

“Wyndham is, I suspect by deliberation, a minor writer. He wrote well, but was modest in his ambition, not very productive, content to give small but real pleasure to his readers – and, I assume, to himself. Nothing wrong with any of this. To give pleasure is a fine thing, n’est-ce pas? Some of the writers dearest to me – Max Beerbohm, Sydney Smith – are minor writers.”