by Christopher Horner
Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last – Dr. Johnson.
Where are the authors of yesterday? And where will today’s be tomorrow? Look for some principle of sorting, some logic to the winnowing process that consigns this to the bin and that to perpetual presence. You won’t find it. I wish the reliable answer was ‘quality’, but it doesn’t seem so. Nor is popularity: plenty of best sellers are consigned to oblivion. Is there a kind of ‘natural selection’ going on? Is it just luck?
Some writers are strongly identified with a decade or so, are popular, wildly so in some cases, and then completely fade. Others survive and are still read, though sometimes only via one book – the rest of their output goes into the dark. Getting on a school or University reading list can help, or having a film version, but even that isn’t always enough. When I was boy certain writers were ubiquitous, but seem very dated now: Neville Shute, John Wyndham, Paul Gallico, Lawrence Durrell. They were all set texts in their time. Does anyone think they’ll be revived? Steinbeck, though, is regularly set for students, and lives on. Not in all of his books, though: only about half a dozen of his 33 books are often read. But this is more than enough for immortality: it’s hard to imagine The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, ever going out of print: it is too clearly a very great novel for that. Or so it seems to us.
Orwell has surely been safe for ages – through just two famous books, neither of which is Keep the Aspidistra Flying. His essays seem alive too. Ideology plays a role here: he was saying things in Animal Farm and 1984 that influential people wanted disseminated. You couldn’t get through school in Britain without being made to read him. I persist in thinking him overrated. Will he fade without the Cold War? There’s no sign of it yet.
This is all very hit or miss. Dr Johnson was famously wrong about Lawrence Sterne. Yet can we imagine the novels of John Fowles, once the big thing in 70s, getting his The Magus read in 2525, or next year? Even The French Lieutenant’s Woman seems irretrievable. But stranger things have happened.
From earlier decades, Rumer Godden, Rose McCauley, the Powys brothers, Stella Gibbons, all seem very ‘period’. Yet Elizabeth Bowen has survived and flourished. Is it just that she’s better or lucky? Better, I’d want to say. And its true, too that the apparently forgotten can make a sudden return, thanks to some one prepared to advocate for them and get the ear of publishers, academics and reviewers. And of course, the canon gets reimagined as we begin to correct the injustices of patriarchy, race and class. Bette Howland, John Williams, Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Green have all returned from the dark.
Some voluminous writers survive via one thing, it seems: Priestley through An Inspector Calls, for instance. Others fade completely: George Meredith, for instance, from the 19th century, while George Gissing in contrast, gets republished and reread. With Meredith v Gissing it seems that the answer is clearly to do with the kind of prose the former churned out, which most readers today find indigestible. Perhaps tastes will change, but it seems unlikely. Still, a return from the dead can never be entirely ruled out. I’d make an exception, though, for the once hugely popular Night Thoughts by Edward Young: once tastes had shifted from that kind of edifying poetry, his sub-Miltonic blank verse was doomed. Despite the judgment of Boswell, who thought it ‘the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has produced’ it’s dead and gone. All that remains is one quotation: ‘procrastination is the thief of time’. He’s not coming back.
Marie Corelli, huge once, is surely gone for good. Or maybe you have a well-thumbed copy of her huge selling The Sorrows of Satan at home? Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria did, apparently. (Side note: she invented the name ‘Mavis’ in the book, which then became popular for a while as a first name for girls.). Still, she was never taken very seriously, even then – unlike George Meredith.
Who’s for the dustbin of literary history? Among our current ‘big’ writers, who has the mark of death on them? One can’t be sure. I think McEwan is vulnerable, as is Martin Amis, and his Dad, Kingsley, but who else? Barnes, Rushdie? I think JD Ballard’s unique take on modernity’s atavistic dark side will seem indispensable. But again, no crystal ball is available. Picking winners leaves one open to the incredulous scorn of posterity.
I’m even less clear about US and European names. Will Updike and Roth live on? I’d have guessed yes, but their difficulties in writing well about women may make them increasingly hard to accept. Henry Miller seems prehistoric already. Jonathan Franzen I’d hazard, no. George Saunders, yes. But Michel Houellebecq? Gunter Grass? Herman Hesse? It’s all very hit or miss, and someone in the future – if anyone is around to look at this in, say 2125 – will likely spot some serious miscalls on my part. Apart from the big names like Proust, Joyce, Melville and so on, can we predict who will get the ticket to immortality and who the drop into the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’. Any ideas?
