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. Read more »
