“There’s success in obscurity,” claims a
recent article in The Guardian Weekly (Nov 5 - Dec 5 2013). Lionel Shriver,
apparently, has been writing of the woes of the commercially successfully
author and growing nostalgic for the days when “the books were still fun to
write, even if nobody read them.” The article muses on writers whose early
success set them up for later failure (Ralph Ellison, Scott Fitzgerald),
writers whose egos get seriously out of control (Martin Amis – Gert gave a loud
cheer when she read this), and on writers who might be said to have benefited
from obscurity (Kafka) or whose work got better even as their sales declined
(James, Melville).
Is this consolation, as The Guardian says, for the many writers
as yet unpublished? Probably not. Even those of us who genuinely
did start writing for the fun of it get contaminated by the desire to have our
work publicly recognized. And what is that desire all about? It’s surely not any
expectation of great fame and riches. Maybe it’s just what fond parents want -
for everyone to like their children as much as they do themselves.
