At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discusses “the difference between a major and a minor writer—which is not necessarily the difference between better and worse.” This theme preoccupies me. Recently I encountered yet another reviewer who dismisses the author in question as “minor,” which clearly he intends as a qualitative judgment meaning dull and just plain lousy. The designation comes off as snotty and critically lazy.
Auden clarifies things: “We can forget the bad writers. The minor artist, who can be idiosyncratic, keeps to one thing, does it well, and keeps on doing it—Thomas Campion, for example, A.E. Housman, and in music, Claude Debussy.”
American literature seems
especially rich in excellent minor poets (Yvor Winters, Henri Coulette, Turner
Cassity, Kay Ryan), in part because we have so few major poets (Dickinson, Robinson,
Frost, Eliot). As to classical music composers from any country, think of Erik
Satie and Aaron Copland. Auden resumes:
“There are minor writers
who can mean more to us than any major writer, because their worlds are closest
to ours. Great books can be hard to read—in a sense, boring to read. Whom do I
read with the utmost pleasure? Not Dante, to my mind the greatest of poets, but
Ronald Firbank. The minor writer never risks failure [dubious]. When he
discovers his particular style and vision, his artistic history is over [also
dubious].”
Among the first-rate minor
writers are Colette, Max Beerbohm, Walter de la Mare, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, J.V. Cunningham, Peter Taylor, Guy Davenport.
[See Auden’s Lectures
on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]
4 comments:
Firbank is one of those names I seem to always be encountering but have never read any of his work. Time to remedy that. An article about Firbank was in one of this May's issues of The Observer: https://observer.co.uk/culture/in-real-life/article/bright-young-thing
Raymond Chandler.
I recently read the Wikipedia page for microhistory. It partially defines that concept as asking big questions in small places.
That definition describes some minor writers as well, although I can think of exceptions — writers who limited themselves to small questions in small places, with great success.
To clarify the idea, one can imagine a graph with axes for artistic value and scope. There are many writers who ask big questions poorly — Ayn Rand comes to mind — some writers who ask big questions successfully (most of the greats), and a few writers who ask small questions extremely well. The latter category is hardest to populate. Henry Green is the first name that pops into my head. Janet Malcolm. Firbank who I have never read seems a likely inclusion.
I think I first came across Auden’s writing in his forward to Markings by Dag Hammarskjold. He has always impressed me as a commonsensical writer.
I ran into a reference to Kay Ryan in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book, The Song of the Cell.
“It takes a courageous person to leave spaces empty.” — Kay Ryan
Mukherjee introduces this line in the chapter “The Contemplating Cell: The Many-Minded Neuron” where he discusses how the brain works not only through what is present, but also through what is absent—gaps, pauses, and spaces between neurons (the synapses).
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