classics of the future
http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4065172-99931,00.html
What is the secret of a book's enduring popularity? Why do great books
disappear into obscurity while lesser works survive? According to one critic,
the secret boils down to a couple of simple rules. Nick Lezard is not so sure
Nick Lezard
Saturday September 16, 2000
guardian.co.uk
I've lost my copy of Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. This might seem
like an unusually banal start to an article, but it does carry its own little
poignant message. For Connolly's book concerned itself chiefly with how one
could write a book that would last 50 years. The figure is arbitrary, as
Connolly conceded; what he meant to ask was how one could produce something
that would last. Fifty years would do, but I have a feeling he meant
eternity.
I know I have a copy of the book, somewhere, but a few days of unenthusiastic
searching have failed to turn it up. I could go to the British Library, but I
might as well stick with what remains in my head of the book; and, insofar as
my book collection is so impractically large that as far as my wife is
concerned, it is the British Library, and so in itself a symbol of literary
survival in the early 21st century, I might as well pretend that, for all my
practical purposes, it has become a lost book, a folk memory, like
Aristotle's treatise on comedy, or Byron's autobiography.
Connolly's book consisted, as I recall, mainly of advice to the would-be
writer, and the two pieces of advice I remember are: don't be seduced by
journalism, and don't have children. Only then will your mind be uncluttered
enough to produce the lasting work of art that will be reprinted in Penguin
Modern Classics, and, eventually, Penguin Classics. These, and the other
pieces of advice which Connolly himself failed to carry out to the letter,
are actually no more than apologies to himself as to why he had failed to
write an enduring work.
The point is that the pram in the hall and the Blue Bugloss (as he called
children and journalism) didn't stop Thackeray, Dickens, and God knows who
else from producing brilliant and eternal works. Enemies of Promise survives
- in better-organised libraries than mine - but only because it cheats by
addressing the very issue of survival itself.
It's a question that is implicitly asked by the very fact of publication: how
long will this work endure? It's not an easy question to answer, although you
feel that it should be. After all, rubbish is rubbish, the good stuff is
good, and that's that. But as soon as you say that you know that that's not
right, either. Somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 books are published every
week in this country alone. If those were people being born rather than books
we'd be talking about a decent-sized county. Trying to finger any one of
those out for any qualities whatsoever, never mind longevity, is daunting in
the extreme; and as tempting of fate as wondering which baby in a maternity
ward is going to grow up to be famous.
You can't use sales as a test. Ouida, Bulwer-Lytton, and plenty of other
names at the fringes of our literary consciousness sold massively in their
time; bewilderingly massively, when you consider the oblivion to which their
works have now been consigned. They remain, if they remain at all, as
examples of rotten, melodramatic prose. (The Bulwer-Lytton Prize is awarded
to the novel with the worst opening line published that year; it is based on
his own opening line - not his worst, apparently, by far: "It was a dark and
stormy night," the line with which Schultz's Snoopy would always begin his
unfinished meisterwerk.)
You can't, conversely, use poor sales as a guide either. Kafka may have sold
zero copies of his work in his lifetime - mainly because his work was
published posthumously (and against his wishes); Beckett's fiction, up until
the astonishing success of Waiting for Godot, may have been regarded by the
very few who saw it as one of the Mysteries of Modern Publishing, but there
are plenty of novels out there which sold very few copies not because their
time was yet to come but because they were, and always will be, crap. And
Tennyson and Dickens sold as much as Bulwer-Lytton etc.
But I can't faff about indefinitely and say that literary longevity is
unknowable. I am, after all, a critic, and this is the kind of thing I should
be doing. So, assuming that publishing is holding its own against the
internet (indeed, it would appear that each is doing the other a continuous
series of favours), here are my rough guidelines as to what makes a classic,
and which writers are our best bets for producing them. There is also the
strict caveat that far too many books and writers which deserve to survive
don't, simply as a matter of pressure of space and time. And that survival is
itself mutable and varied: Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy survives
among the cognoscenti, but there's no Penguin Classic of the book, and it
would be difficult to see how there could be.
First, the book has to be not only the product of a good literary
intelligence but also sincere in its forms and aims. This is why I would rule
out all examples of clever historical fiction - Orlando and Scott's
historical novels survive, but only because there is a Scott industry and a
Woolf industry to keep them going. Clever pastiches like The Name of the Rose
and its numerous epigones will not, outside of academe. The works have to be
contemporary; and it helps if they are fired by satiric grievance. So much of
Martin Amis's work will survive (his father, a less competent writer, I will
not lay money on), as will Evelyn Waugh's. But there mainly has to be a
reason for people to want, and want badly, a certain work or writer to
endure; for this reason I would put a fiver on Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit, to be collected by my descendants.
But in the end it isn't the critics who decide this matter. The best of them
all, Doctor Johnson, said scornfully of Tristram Shandy, as it enjoyed a
freak success in the mid 1760s, "Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy
did not last", little knowing that history was slowly pulling the rug from
him as he spoke. Critics have been wary of making pronouncements about
longevity ever since. That's why we leave it up to the publishers - and the
people who buy their books - to sort that one out for us.
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