a possibly better 20th century writer

Concerning the other really elite writers of the 20th century, who is Greenberg’s competition? To simplify the exercise, let’s limit ourselves to non-fiction.

If the proverbial gun were held to my head and I were forced to name the greatest writer of the 20th century, it would probably be Freud. People complain about Joyce, Proust, and Kafka never winning the Nobel for Literature, but I think Freud’s omission is at least as great a crime.

Often people don’t even bother to read Freud. He is so culturally ubiquitous, so widely known as the source of a handful of useful tricks in interpersonal dealings (“if someone leaves something at your house, they want to come back”) and a few other boiled-down conclusions that can be offensive to women, homosexuals, and some other groups.

So, you feel like you know him in advance. “Everything is sex,” or some other vulgarization along those lines. And that’s why I never read a word of Freud until my senior year in college. But the experience was so powerful that I spent the summer after graduation doing nothing but reading almost everything he’d ever written.

The lucidity and power of Freud’s thought processes are all the more impressive when you consider that for much of that time he was wandering in a forest with only a handful of supporters. Almost any time you pick up an essay by Freud, you can bet that it will be magnificently constructed, easy to follow, and contain several major surprises that will stick with you for hours if not days.

But it’s likely that I didn’t even fully appreciate Freud until teaching him in Egypt. Here, his ideas are not part of the stock cultural fund of interpersonal psychology. They’re somewhat unfamiliar, in fact, and one of my most satisfying experiences as a teacher was doing a whole semester on Freud at AUC and seeing how many doors he opens, and how quickly, for people who essentially have no prior notion of his theories at all.

Anyway, Freud is a tough competitor for Greenberg as a prose writer. Freud probably has the edge due to his greater mastery of larger structures of writing. Greenberg is at his best with one-liners and two-liners and three-liners.