Auden, discussing Troilus and Cressida, remarked that major writers set themselves new challenges, and so risk failure, while minor ones are content to do the same thing as before and so risk nothing. There’s something in this, though, like many of his pronouncements, it’s too sweeping to be altogether true. (Besides which, the major/minor categorisation is tiresome, even if we all resort to it from time to time.)
Instead of indulging in the sheep-and-goats of major/minor, it may simply be that some writers become bored with what they have done, or fear becoming what Graham Greene called ‘prisoners of their method’, and so strike out on a new line; plenty of bad writers after all set themselves new and different challenges, even if they fail to meet them. Others, good and bad alike, are content to refine their method, rework their material. In any case novelty doesn’t require a marked shift in tone or content. Shakespeare has a scope denied to Racine, but Racine is capable of a more intense concentration of effect.
This is a diversion or distraction — something Shakespeare allowed himself often, Racine never — because really I wanted to talk about Angus Wilson, who on this matter agreed with Auden. In an affectionate essay Rose Tremain wrote that Wilson taught her ‘to take risks, to resist petrifaction, to try to chart in each book new territory, to be sceptical about what one has achieved so far’.
He wrote only eight novels himself, and in each he set himself a new challenge, explored new territory, leaving far behind the material and manner of the excellent short stories with which he made his name. The stories themselves remain to my mind wonderfully good; nobody catches so precisely the post-war world of the shabby-genteel where dubious majors pass dodgy cheques.
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