Palliser's Theory

by Ian Marchant


My friend Charles Palliser, a fine literary novelist who has sold books on a commercial scale (notably his masterful ‘Quincunx’) once told me his theory about a sliding scale of writers, with fame at one end, and riches at the other.

‘Think of the most famous writers in the world, those that everyone has heard of; Joyce, Beckett, Yeats etc. Never earned a penny in their lifetimes, not really. Contrast them with the writers you’ve never heard of who sell millions. The trick is to be about halfway in-between.’

I was reminded of the force of Palliser’s Theory last weekend when James Patterson was the subject of the Q&A feature in the Guardian Weekend mag. Who he? He the world’s best selling novelist. I’ve never read a word, but I doubt very much that he’s a great writer. In fact, I bet you that I’m a ‘better’ writer than him.

On what evidence do I base this bold claim? Because I have ‘literary’pretentions, by which I mean I’m attempting to justify every word I write. This ‘and’ is here, that semi-colon is there for a reason. It doesn’t, it can’t, always work. Perfectionism is the enemy of art, and although poets might come closer, a prose writer is pretty much always going to miss the target. But a ‘literary’ writer is at least having a go at getting it right. Patterson, I strongly suspect, isn’t even trying because he doesn’t have enough time, but I don’t think that matters, because his stuff has narrative vim. He is spinning yarns, very profitably, and bloody good luck to him. Trust me, if I could knock out a unit shifting thriller, I’d start today.

For the giants of literature, there never was a split between literary and commercial. Truly great writers like Austen or Dickens or Orwell sweated to get their manuscripts ‘right’; and then sold high numbers because they were also wonderful story-tellers. This artificial distinction grew as a consequence of high Modernism. Virginia Woolf hated the idea of writing for money, just as much as she hated the idea of universal education. She and her circle objected to a literate hoi polloi, because that meant that the ‘white slugs’ (as Mrs Woolf called the working class) might feel that they could understand minds as refined as those of the Bloomsburies, which was not on. Universal education was levelling, and for Mrs Woolf, that was an unbearable thought. Her especial ire was reserved for Arnold Bennett, because he sold so many books that he could afford a steam yacht. She saw what she did as ‘art’, as ‘literature’, and that was something that could only be achieved by the very best quality people.

‘Literature’ is a genre, a sub-set of writing, and admission to the genre is controlled by a small self-selected coterie of critics. The study of English Literature in universities is roughly coterminous with the rise of Modernism. Only critics and academics hold the keys to the doors of ‘literature’. Despite my fretting about getting my books ‘right’, I doubt that I’ll be admitted to the canon, because working class people still aren’t really expected to write. My concerns are not theirs; my voice is common, vulgar, no matter how much I might work on my texts so that I can bear them to be read. Patterson and Brown, however much people might like reading their books in the bath, on holiday, at the end of a long day, could never get through the gates of literature in a billion years. Only time can decide if a writer is truly great, but I suspect that those who make it will be loved by the critics, and sell shed loads of books too. Getting that particular double is just as hard now as it has ever been.


Literature by Ian Marchant:
Something of the Night
The Longest Crawl
Parallel Lines: Or, Journeys on the Railway of Dreams