Patrick on the Second Rate

Ooh, Patrick Kurp knows how to hurt a guy (link)! First he’s knocking my (former) chosen profession and next he’s knocking the Great American Novelist. The profession would be journalism, where I spent my 20s, and I’ll try to fashion some non-trite nostalgia about those days later. The novelist would be John Dos Passos and I have pretty much given up on commending him to any but the already converted.

But Patrick goes on to catalog a sampling of the “second-rate,” and he has set me to thinking. Okay--I’ll grant him Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, a couple of famous-for-being-famous blowhards never so well employed as when eating each others’ brains out like Dantean sinners.

Hemingway—well, I think I am beginning to see a theme here: it's not so much writing per se as celebrity: Patrick doesn’t like celebrities who trade on the false coin of writerhood without producing anything of importance. And Hemingway certainly went through something like a 40-year dry spell, during which he did little except call attention to himself and produce galumphing portentousness like The Old Man and the Sea.

But Hemingway did write The Sun Also Rises and a dozen—okay, half a dozen--stories that capture time and place so convincingly that you can’t see those times and places without him. And that is enough, I think, to give him (however grudgingly) a pass.

John Didion certainly counts as a celebrity, although it is hard to say she is insufferable is Hemingway, Mailer or Vidal. As a writer? Well, she certainly isn’t “first-rate” in the sense that Shakespeare or Chekov are first rate. But that can’t be the only test. Short of Shakespeare, I suspect she may turn out to be one of those writers who speak for a time and a place the way Hemingway spoke for a time and a place—and with a lot less to forgive.

I don’t know what poor Steven Crane is doing in this company. He wrote a couple of priceless little items and then died, without ever making a nuisance of himself in any important way. Maybe Patrick is annoyed at the way we impose Red Badge of Courage on schoolchildren. Fine, but then let’s at least keep Maggie, a Girl of the Streets—no schoolchildren there.

But I’ve got a couple of more general thoughts. One (I guess this is trite), I can’t think of anybody who is first-rate all the time. Certainly not Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Maybe Proust comes close, but even there, we have some longeurs. But two (perhaps not as trite)—for a remarkably large number of writers, I’d say that their best stuff is not their best and (if you get my meaning) vice versa. I’ve long thought that Buddenbrooks was a much better book than Magic Mountain, certainly than Doktor Faustus. Say what you will about the late novels of Henry James, I still won’t be persuaded that they are as good as Portrait of a Lady or the best of the novellas. I’m not sure Virginia Woolf ever wrote a really good book, but she wrote magnificent lines and paragraphs (okay, might be a guy thing). And Joyce—dare one say that one would trade perhaps 80 percent of Ulysses for Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist?

I almost called this post “In Praise of the Second-Rate,” but I can see that that is not quite my point. It’s not so much first- and second-rate, as it is over- and under-valued. I certainly agree that celebrity is not the same as achievement, or even talent. But I don’t want the best to be the enemy of the good, and even a fathead like Hemingway can once in a while be a pretty good writer.