Most geniuses go unpublished

If you believe our literary culture is broken and terrible, then it is impossible to believe genius always wins out

Imagine you are a well-respected author and editor, and you get a manuscript from a man you vaguely know. He is the darling of salon society, and he knows many high-society ladies that you perhaps regard as quite dull. For two decades you have heard this man wants to be a writer, but he has never produced much: a few essays, a few fragments of fiction. You have seen the work of many dilettantes in your life. You look at the manuscript. It is very thick. Perhaps you never read it, but perhaps you do, and you notice immediately it is long and meandering, terribly self-indulgent. Either way, whether you’ve read it or not, you reject it as “too snobbish”, which seems to fit, because you know the author is indeed quite snobbish.

You are Andre Gide. The author is Marcel Proust. The author is of private means, and he pays a rival printer, Gallimard, to publish the book, and you see with satisfaction that it disappears. But then a second volume appears! And perhaps because this volume contains depictions of fashionable figures in Paris, it is widely read, and you hear much more of it. Now, with trepidation, you sit down and read the entire thing closely, and you find yourself mesmerized by its quietness, by its looping form, and by its plastic depiction of human character and memory.

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I was not surprised by the response to my previous piece. The sentence “Literary talent is not rare” would once have been provocative to me as well. And yet, if one is to argue against it, one ought to do so in an internally consistent manner, to make sure that one’s beliefs about the prevalence of literary talent are compatible with one’s other beliefs.

When I say literary talent is not rare, I mean that it is not the limiting reagent when it comes to our supply of good books to read. There are many more good books, and even works of genius, being written than are currently published. This is mathematically true, obviously, since only a subset of written manuscripts are published. But I would argue that the number of great manuscripts is at least a hundred times greater than what we see, and that if publishers merely accepted every great manuscript they saw—accepted every Proust—then the shelves would bulge with greatness.

This is provocative, and what militates against it is that most of us have had the experience of reading unpublished manuscripts that aren’t that good. Or that are good, but not quite ready for prime-time. Or reading a manuscript that was good and didn’t get published, but the author published the next one.

I am apparently unique in having read not just one, but at least three, manuscripts that I thought were amongst the best of contemporary fiction, and seeing them all rejected, and knowing that none of these authors has yet had another novel published. I am not saying these writers would have been Proust, but they would surely have been in the running to be a Franzen.

And if we are speaking of the merely good, I have seen umpteen novels and memoirs that are better and more interesting than most of what is on the shelves. And I have to think that that these authors, if they sold their books and made a career in the arts, could produce far greater work in the future. After all, I have read Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, and nobody reading that novel could think the man had War and Peace in him. And yet if he had not published his first books, would he have written the later ones?

I think many of the people responding to me would answer with an unequivocal yes. Tolstoy would have been driven to keep writing and publishing. But I don’t know. This is a man with a deep ambivalence about the social worth of literature. He could very easily have become more of a saint or soldier than a writer. It’s hard to say.

But even if you have not read any unpublished works that you regard as being works of genius, think of Andre Gide. He had no doubt in his mind that Proust’s novel was not worthwhile. There was no ambiguity in his response to it. And if you or I were confronted with a novel like Proust’s, wouldn’t we say the same? Too unwieldy, too self-indulgent, we would say.

How many times have your students or mentees or friends presented you with a large, sagging, overly-ambitious work? And how often have you seriously considered that it might be a work of genius? When it comes to our tastes, why should we think ourselves better than Andre Gide?

This is why I think that a person’s personal experience—of not having read any great unpublished manuscripts—is not a particularly compelling argument against my point. Because if you believe in literary greatness, then you also believe in the sorting process that delivers greatness to us: the critical consensus that builds up over fifty to a hundred years about an author’s work. You think this process is valuable and generally correct.

But a necessary concomitant of this belief is that you think short-term judgement is usually incorrect. You think that the people of a given time and place are unable to judge a work’s true merit.

And yet why except ourselves from this distrust? Why should our ability to evaluate unpublished work be better than Andre Gide’s? Moreover, given that the vast majority of manuscripts go unpublished, why should we think that at least one editor is sure to publish a great book? Why is it not more likely that all editors will respond negatively to it, and it will go unpublished? And if the answer is persistence, then I will say, how many novels did Proust have in him? Only one. How many great novels did Tolstoy have? Would Jane Austen be remembered today if she had only published Sense and Sensibility? If a person’s one great book does not get published, then are they really a published author at all?

Moreover, what if they die whilst being persistent? What if their great book comes late in life? It took Proust ten years to get the first volume into publishable shape. He died at 53. Given those odds, it is rather more likely than not that if his path to publication had been longer, he would’ve died before seeing it through.

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And, far from believing that editors and agents are likely to recognize greatness, most of the people who responded to me believe that such folks are actively hostile to greatness. All I read all day on substack is about how the literary culture is too woke, how it wants cookie-cutter fictions, how all the awards go to books with correct politics, etc. And I read as well about how nobody who hews to the “correct” official ideology can write a truly great book.

Shouldn’t this alone ensure that most—let’s say 99%—of great books go unpublished? Isn’t that an almost necessary belief? And yet if in any given year, there are perhaps 5,000 publishable literary manuscripts floating around, and if in every year there are perhaps one to three really good, if not great, debut novels published, then wouldn’t we assume that perhaps 500 of the unpublished manuscripts are really, really good? That they are at least as good as the one to three books that, each year, we on the edges of the literary world herald as the future of literature? Why would that not be true?

And if you say that the small press is the solution, well, if you think of any small press you can name—they get hundreds of submissions too! I don’t think my imprint, Feminist Press, is publishing another original English-language debut literary fiction this year besides mine. And I know that in one year, one of the editors got well over 300 submissions. So the number of respectable small presses swells the number of chances for someone to see you, but it does not make it certain—and, moreover—how many of those presses have an editor who is even as sagacious as Andre Gide?

If we believe that great books actively resist the contemporary reader—that they are less likely than merely very good books to be recognized—so much so that we, contemporary folk, cannot tell which of the novels published this year are great—then is it not very likely that many of those unpublished manuscripts are so outside the realm of the typically-published that no contemporary editor will touch them?

In my last post, I named a number of types of work that are unpublishable in the current climate. The example I liked best was the epic poem. Dost thou believe that nobody today is writing epic poems—the most popular and enduring form of literature in the world?

We know that most types of fiction are unpublishable because contemporary fiction follows a very small range of the available styles, relative to what we see from world history. I think people assume this is because most of those styles are dead, but they underestimate the size and diversity of the modern world. The other day I learned that there is a relatively large group of people who speak and converse and compose in Classical Latin. I am not speaking of Latin scholars (who largely cannot speak the language). I am speaking of hobbyists. And if something so niche has thousands of dedicated adherents, then why would epic poetry be different? I am sure that today there are thousands of people working on epic poems. And if they handed their poem to you, then you would say…this person is a crackpot. And yes, yes, some academic poets do get epic poetry published, but it is almost always poetry foremost, and not a story in the way that epic poems almost always were.

Or take the Proustian novel. It is not dead. We have an example quite recently of one having immense success in Norway and, later, in America. And do we not think that in the United States—a country a seventy times as populous as Norway—that there is no writer composing a large Proustian autofiction? I assure you that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such writers, and that when they present their work to publishers after ten or twenty years of labor, it will go unread. And, worse, people like you or I will laugh at them—how could they do something so out of touch? And yet isn’t it quite likely that at least a few of them have the ability of Knausgaard, if not Proust himself?

So if you believe that contemporary readers cannot accurately assess the work of their own time, and if you believe that works of genius are even less likely to be recognized than ordinary works, then is it not quite likely that works of genius are composed much more often than we recognize? Is this not in fact a logical and inescapable result of the first two beliefs?

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Sam Bankman-Fried was rightly mocked for saying Shakespeare must not have been very good, because “The Bayesian priors are damning.” To the extent that the greatness of a work is a product of individual ability, one would expect ability to follow a power-law distribution, and so the number of exceptional individuals would increase as the world population increased. Writing would be like athletic ability. The fastest people in human history are alive right now. This also ought to be true for writing. They ought to be writing right now!

One way of escaping this truth is to downplay the role of individual ability. Perhaps the greatness of the literature of a particular time and place is the result of the overall gestalt, the overall culture. I personally believe this to be true! I wrote about it with reference to medieval Iceland. If Tolstoy did not exist, we would still think 19th century Russian literature was great—we would just read Oblomov and Chekhov instead.

And yet, differences between works clearly exist. Both Oblomov and Anna Karenina are philosophical tales about the enervation of the Russian nobility, but Anna Karenina is so much more. The difference between it and Oblomov is immense. I think that, seen at a remove of five hundred or a thousand years, the differences will eventually seem as minor as the differences seem, today, between the various poets in The Greek Anthology. Nonetheless, the differences are real.

We can debate whatever extent genius exists and plays a role in a book’s greatness, but surely there is some X factor, no? Call it fate, call it destiny, or the muses, or merely product-market fit, but some X factor separates merely good books from truly great ones.¹

So now we are speaking of an X factor instead of genius—and all the above arguments apply to the distribution of the X factor as well. There are 100x as many unpublished books with the X factor as there are published ones.

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All of this seems, honestly, rather obvious to me. It is indeed an almost inescapable result of what everyone on Substack believes. If you believe our literary culture is sick, then surely the sickness must result in some loss of health, no? Because if you believe that genius always wins, and that genius always fights through, then our literary culture is not sick at all, since the purpose of that literary culture is nothing more than the cultivation and propagation of great work! What, indeed, is there to complain about?

I think this is why there is so much focus on the MFA programs, and the MFA program’s supposed faults. Because if our sick culture poisons minds and renders them unable to write well, then we can believe in the rarity of talent and the sickness of our culture at the same time.

But in MFA programs, they study the same authors that you and I love. They study Raymond Carver, Virginia Woolf, Denis Johnson, etc. They mostly study good role models for fiction! Moreover, MFA students tend to be students of literature, and, by and large, in literature programs they only study books that are at least fifty years old, and that have won out in the sorting process that we all claim to believe in!

And yes the teachers in MFAs say nonsense quite often, but people are inspired to write by the books that they love, and the books people love—the books they model themselves after—are the books that are truly great. Is it not far more likely that they would write novels in the vein of, say, Virginia Woolf than that they would write them in the vein of, say, Viet Thanh Nguyten? And if books written in the Nguyen style (voicey, first-person, distanced from scene) predominate amongst published work, then isn’t it far more likely that other sorts of books are simply being rejected, rather than going unwritten in the first place?

Literary books take five years to write, and yet people believe that the writers of novels are overly influenced by passing trends, rather than believing the trends are artificially created and propagated by those in charge of buying and publishing books.

Nonetheless, if you believe that MFA programs are squelching talent, and you believe the legions of people who didn’t do MFAs are also unable to write well, such that the number of great manuscripts is truly quite small, then you’re left with the inescapable conclusion that in the publishing industry there is really nothing to complain about! Why be so mad, why be so worked up? There just aren’t enough good manuscripts being written in this great nation of 350 million people to service the demand for great writing! It is a miserable problem, but surely not the fault of the critics and editors who you decry—they’re merely making do with what they’re given!

The implication here, then, is that for whatever reason we truly live in a fallen state. That in Austen’s time, with its much smaller literate population, it was much easier for genius to arise. Perhaps this was a function of the newness of the form! Maybe there are only a certain number of ‘slots’ for genius novelists, and they are all now filled. Maybe genius is like mining bitcoin, and the returns halve every four years.

In that case, surely there is no point in writing, no? If people could truly conceive of the numbers involved in this belief—the idea that out of the five thousand literary manuscripts bouncing around between editors, there are only two or three that are any good, and that each of those five thousand people represents ten years of active practice and a lifetime of reading, then writing truly would be a waste of time, and we should just give up.

But we don’t, and you know why? Here’s the thing, here’s the real reason people ought to believe, despite everything, that literary talent isn’t rare. It’s because you and I have it! We might not be great, we might not be Austens, but we certainly know what greatness is!

And are we special? No! We are just ordinary people who’ve read a lot of books and worked a lot at our writing. To believe that in this vast nation, of three hundred and fifty million people, that you and I are amongst the very few with even a conception of greatness? That would be absurd. You and I are not special. The books we love are the books every school-child is taught to love. There is nothing more natural than that, every year, hundreds of thousands of people think, “I want to write something as great as what Tolstoy or Austen did.” And out of those hundreds of thousands of people, can we honestly believe that every single one of them fails?

Isn’t it far, far more likely that in an industry which can only publish a few hundred books a year, and which can only talk about five or ten of them, and where most of those books are bad, that there would be a great winnowing of talent in the jump between unpublished and published?

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One final obvious point is that it is very likely that all the geniuses are being published, but you and I cannot perceive them. The idea being that only 10 percent of what’s published is good, but to each person it’s a different ten percent. It is undoubtedly true that many currently marginal writers will be considered major talents in the future, and that many people considered to be major talents in contemporary times will be considered rather minor in the future.

And while it takes a critical consensus for a writer to achieve a reputation, the threshold to publication is much smaller. You only need an editor to persuade their editorial board that you are good. Surely any genius ought to be able to persuade one person to believe deeply in them!

But if that was the case, why do almost all published works operate in established forms? Why are there no epic poems, no Proustian meanderings (in English), few omniscient novels, etc. If we are to assume that all the geniuses are getting published, then we must also assume that all the geniuses are working in marketable genres—and yet I know from personal experience that many writers, particularly ambitious ones, are, like Proust, apt to spend years working in forms that are quite non-standard.

Moreover, I think we would still be operating on a very peculiar vision of genius and a very peculiar vision of the marketplace. We would be positing that in a marketplace with perhaps fifty to sixty publishers of even nominal size, that these publishers collectively are mostly able to get it right! They mostly find and publish works of genius! They are collectively able to do what Andre Gide could not!

We would also be saying that, with all the stories we have of works of genius just narrowly surviving (often because their authors had private means or social connections, as Proust did), that we cannot imagine that there are 10x or 100x as many authors who wrote just as well, but did not have those backstops.

At the very least, we know that several authors have come down to us only because their heirs disobeyed their last testament and refused to burn their work. And yet we also know that family is usually eager to obey a person’s last testament and eager as well to declutter and get rid of old papers. And yet we refuse to believe that in 99 out of 100 cases, the genius gets their work burned up, as Richard Burton’s widow burned up his manuscript of The Scented Garden.

Now think of all the geniuses whose work only exists because of happenstance—the authors who were made offers by only one publisher, or because they had a friend, or who were championed, at an odd moment, by a strange outsider (as EM Forster did with Cavafy). Cavafy is a perfect example: he wasn’t even famous in Greece—he was well-known only in the tiny Greek community of Alexandria. And yet he is a genius! How many hometown heroes never managed to become more than locally well-known?

Publishing a book is not like crossing the street. When you set out to cross a street, you expect to survive. If a car hits you, and you’re killed, people say, if it was not for that car, they would have lived! But if you set out to publish a book, you generally fail. Most books are not published. So publishing a book is more like swimming across a raging river. Most people don’t make it; they die. And if we have observed that there is a species of person—the genius—who is handicapped by their unworldliness and only just barely makes it to the other side, then is it not logical, and in fact likely, that this species of person is overrepresented amongst the vast hordes of people who die in attempting to cross?

It is a rank fallacy to look at the survivors of a terrible winnowing and to assume that their population makeup is the same as what it was before the winnowing occurred.

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I have summarized the logical case that literary talent is not nearly as rare as it appears to be. My view is a very uncommon one, actually, and I have met few people who agree with it, because it is a view that contradicts the directly visible evidence of our senses: we perceive that mediocrity is rife in almost all the work that comes to our attention. It is only if you are capable of percieving this overwhelming mediocrity that the issue of genius even becomes an issue. Thus I do not think that the question of social equality or democratic vs. aristocratic leanings or the existence of innate talent even comes into the picture.

Grand Hotel Abyss

said we don’t like to think “it is lonely at the top” because we want to imagine people are equal. But does anyone truly imagine that all writers are equal in ability and in the worth of their output? Obviously not! And if they do, then this entire post is useless to them, because they likely do not believe in world-historical genius in the first place.

But to believe that Tolstoy and Austen are world-historically unique—such that they were the best writers of an entire era, and no one who put pen to paper even came close—that goes beyond beliefs about human nature, and it starts to require certain metaphysical assumptions about the power of the written word. It is to say that certain people are so special, so insightful, that only a handful of other people in existence can compare to them in ability and, moreover, to say that their work is so special that is compels editors to publish it, such that no Tolstoys and Austens could go unpublished.

And yet, we know that great work is ignored or denigrated all the time. So now we are positing a very special sort of specialness that compels a book into print, but not into a great reputation.

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And yet, when we read Tolstoy and Austen and a few other writers, they do indeed appear to stand head and shoulders above everyone else! I have never read another Regency-era British author who even approaches author in sagacity and compression. How can we explain this?

But, I would say, this is not an argument against my points—it is an argument in favor of them. For what if we posited that there are two pools of writers: geniuses and duffers. And that editors are looking, by and large, to publish duffers and only publish geniuses by accident. Wouldn’t we then have a situation exactly like the one we see—where some authors almost appear as a different species? Like they’re playing some other game entirely?

And, moreover, wouldn’t a logical outcome of this be that most—let’s say 99 percent—of the geniuses in any era would go unpublished? This allows us to escape the metaphysical conundrum of positing that Tolstoy and Austen are world-historically unique, but it does allow us to explain the fact that they do, in fact, seem world-historically unique. After all, it is quite rare, when you order regular french fries, to get a curly fry accidentally in your order—but that does not mean that the curly fry was special! It simply means that your fry cook made a mistake—they weren’t trying to serve you curly fries, but they accidentally did. That is why the curly fry has a range of variation far outside that of the typical fry: it is a different color and shape and consistency. It is a different thing! And yet it is not unique.

I am not entirely sure that I believe that the greats are discontinuous from ordinary writers. I am more likely to believe that there is an uncanny valley of ability, where your work approaches greatness, but isn’t good enough to compel people to shift their views regarding what constitutes good fiction. Which is to say, if you wrote this book after Tolstoy, people would say it was a very good book (though derivative of Tolstoy), because they had been educated by Tolstoy. But if you wrote it before Tolstoy, it simply wouldn’t be published. And I think it is this uncanny valley that causes the sense of discontinuity.

As to questions about democracy and equality, I do not believe that literary talent is as common as having brown hair, but I do think that, amongst writers at a certain level, it is probably about as common as left-handedness. Which is to say, amongst writers who are writing publishable literary fiction, probably about ten percent of them are producing work that is better than most of what gets awards today, and out of that ten percent, maybe 10% is producing work that, if it was published, might be regarded in a hundred years as world-historically unique. So out of serious writers, producing publishable work, maybe one in a hundred writers is an Austen or Tolstoy?

This accords, too, with my understanding of the demographics of Regency England or 19th-century Russia. If we say that one in a hundred people who aspires to write is able to actually reach the level where they write something publishable, and one in a hundred of those people has a chance of writing fiction that would seem, to us, to be world-historically unique, this means that in a population of, say, ten thousand aspiring writers, we would find one who is producing world-historically unique fiction. In modern-day America, with its population of, at a conservative estimate, a half-million aspiring writers of literary fiction, we would have 500 Tolstoys or Austens working today, and 5,000 whose work, if published, would be superior to most of what is extolled by the industry.

Compare that to classical Athens, which had an entire literate male population of, what, thirty thousand, who passed through at some point in the course of the 100 year Classical period? And which had six world-historically unique writers amongst them (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, and Thucydides). Surely no more than ten percent of the population of Athens could aspire to write, so we are still saying that out of a population of three thousand aspiring writers, they produced six writers of genius (I can even call it five, discounting Aristotle because he was born elsewhere). That gives them a proportion of about 16 per ten thousand, which is sixteen times higher than that which I posited for modern-day America! See, culture does matter! If you lived in ancient Athens, it would’ve been almost impossible not to be personally familiar with a world-historical genius.

To say that out of every 10,000 aspiring writers of serious literature there are 100 who eventually write publishable work and 10 whose work is very good and 1 whose work could be world-historically unique, if published, seems very consonant with what we know from history and, honestly, from human nature. It is simply impossible to believe that modern Americans are that much less talented than the people of prior era.

But since we all know at least 100 writers who are writing publishable work, that means we know at least one genius! The only problem is that we have no idea who they are.

That means that out of the several-hundred people who read this post (many of whom are fairly accomplished writers), there is a strong likelihood that there is at least one genius amongst them.

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And I always operate with the belief that there might be a genius amongst my audience. And I think, what can I offer this genius? What advice might I have for them? And, first of all, given the sorry state of what the publishing industry puts out, the genius probably thinks that they are alone in their genius. They think they are one of very few geniuses working in America today. Either that, or they do not know they are not a genius.

So I tell them that they are wrong. They are both exceptional and quite common.

And I also tell them that finishing their manuscript is only the beginning of the battle. Because the book will be rejected for precisely what is good in it,

I know that the genius will hope to win over the industry with their genius, and I tell them this won’t happen, because the industry is immune to genius. Indeed it actively resists genius. So what is my advice? Smuggle your genius into the market. Pretend to be something else.

To me this advice is quite logical. The genius can take it or not as they see fit. I do not believe that the genius will accept what I am saying, but I do think that, someday, after their manuscript is widely-rejected, the genius will remember these blog posts, and they will think, “Goshdarnit, Naomi was right.” (Yes, the genius is Mormon and talks like Goofy from A Goofy Movie.) And I hope that realization will give them both direction and solace.

1. Some might say that this X factor does not inhere in the individual writer or even work—it operates at the level of society. They might say that the impression that some works stand out as being of unusual greatness or genius is a sort of shared delusion, created through a variety of mechanisms that are not implausible. But in this case my original point only becomes more true, rather than less. If genius is a collaboration between society and the individual, then what is the marketplace other than the voice of society? And if society will always find people upon whom to bestow the title ‘genius’ then what does it matter if you are that person or someone else is? What value in this case is there to sticking to your own private sense of what work is worthwhile and what isn’t? Moreover, if the X factor operates at the societal level, then it is even more true that whatever personal talent Tolstoy or Austen had must not have been particularly rare.