The Irish-American author Frank Harris once said, only half-jokingly, "I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers."
Most of us, I suspect, would hesitate to lay any claim to greatness. Hard working? Sure. Clever? Maybe now and then. But great? My hunch is that most people think about truly great writers in the same way that Flannery O'Connor spoke about William Faulkner: "Nobody wants to be on the tracks when the Dixie Special comes barreling through."
One of the major Italian writers of the last century, essayist and novelist Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), had little regard for critical labels of any kind. In an interview not long before her death, Ginzburg said that achieving "greatness" had never been her goal. "I try to capture the reader immediately, to enter into communication with him, and not bore him," she said. "Above all, I want to be understood."
Years earlier, in the essay "My Vocation" (included in The Little Virtues, published by Arcade in 1989), Ginzburg offered this self-appraisal:
When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn't matter much to me. Only, I don't want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked "a small writer like who?" it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life.
Whether or not writing turns out to be your profession, it's quite likely to be "something you will do all your life." And thought of in that way, the goal of becoming the sort of "small writer" Ginzburg describes is itself, perhaps, a great ambition.
Selected Works by Natalia Ginzburg
- Le voci della sera (1961); Voices in the Evening (1963)
- Le piccole virtù (1962); The Little Virtues (1989)
- Family Sayings (1984)
- A Place to Live: Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg (new edition, 2003)
