Hildegarde

I’ve been having such awful luck with the Internet today, I’m reluctant to start this post. 

And, in fact, the start didn’t go all that well, as I typed all of the above while the cursor moved but no words appeared, then had to wait 15 seconds before they showed up.

So keep your fingers crossed.

For those of you who are interested, Greg’s surgery seems to have gone great.  Before it, I checked with a number of people, and although the vast majority said they could see wonderfully right away, a few others said to took days and, in one case, a couple of weeks.  Greg was in the see better right away category, and I’m going to have to take the DS away from him before it fuses to his fingers.

In the meantime, I’ve been having an e-mail discussion with a friend about why and how books last over time, and I think maybe that’s a good place to start today.

There is a rule of thumb in publishing that goes like this:  the literary merit of a novel has no effect whatsoever on how many copies it sells.

The literary merit in the above means whether or not the books is “well written,” starting with grammatical and clear and going all the way to elegant prose.

It’s not true that people do not buy and read well written books or that they prefer badly written ones.

The truth is that most people just don’t care one way or the other.  They like the books they like and buy the books they want to buy.  Some of them surely do it for the story, which is what some of you prefer.  Some of them surely do it for characters, which explains more books than we’d any of us like to admit to.

Some of them are probably like me, and go for a sense of place.

But whatever it is that readers do go for, it isn’t the sheer quality of the prose.  They’ll reject well written books and they’ll reject badly written books.  They’ll read well written books and they’ll read badly written books.

But that doesn’t get us very far.  Anybody who knows anything at all about fiction knows that there are literally mountains of old best sellers that slipped out of sight after a few years, never to be heard from again,  and a decent stack of “flops” that built audience over decades, and sometimes even centuries, to become “classics” familiar to anybody who’s gotten past the tenth grade.

And it seems to me that a number of different things are at work here, on a number of different levels.

The first is the playing field.

In 1776, a college or university could demand that a student read the sum total of the world’s acknowledged literary classics and get away with it.  There weren’t that many of them. 

I have no idea if there were dozens of other poets writing when Homer did, or when the writer of Gilgamesh did,  but if there were, they have disappeared into the mists.

We’d do better looking at the time of Vergil, who set out to write an epic to define the Roman people and to do it on purpose, and what we find is that there really weren’t all that many people in competition. 

In a world where most people were dirt poor in a way that couldn’t be equalled today except by Yanamomo Indians and aborigines in the Australian outback without the sense to come in from the rain, there also weren’t many people with the education to know how to write the stuff and the wherewithall to afford the materials. 

And then, once the thing had been written, you had to find people willing to copy it.

With the advent of the printing press, of course, the field got a lot more crowded. 

But it didn’t get very crowded, in spite of Hawthorne’s despair at the damned crowd of scribbling women. 

For crowded, you have to come to the 20th Century, and for very, very crowded, you have to come nearly to now.

And that brings up the first thing:  it’s possible that the qualities and circumstances that made it possible for a book to “last” three hundred years ago are different from the qualities and purposes that make it possible for a book to last now.

It may, in fact, be a lot easier for a book to last now than it has ever  been before, because I think the bottom line in “lasting” is a core group of dedicated people who love it.

And that core group has to have a critical mass, but the critical mass does not necessarily have to be huge.

Certainly a book like Gone With The Wind, or Atlas Shrugged, with hundreds of thousands of dedicated readers right from the start, has a better shot at reaching critical mass than a book with very few readers at the start. 

But, as I pointed out before, lots of readers at the start doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything lasting.

Still, the fact that the Internet can bring together the 5000 people that really passionately love Dance to the Band when It Roars, or whatever, and give them a cheap space to proselytize other readers around the globe, means more books have a chance to find their critical mass than they ever did before. 

The good news about that is that fewer good books will sink into oblivion without an audience.  The bad thing about that is so will fewer bad ones, including evilly bad ones.  Mein Kampf is a big best seller on the Internet.  So is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. 

And NAMBLA isn’t exactly an infrequently visited site, even among people who are not agents from the FBI.

There’s more bad news, too.  In an era when maybe a hundred books were published every year, maybe half of them novels, readers could know what they all were and even read them all if they wanted to.

These days, some of the category romance lines put up 180 titles a year,  and the total number of mysteries–even restricting mysteries to straightforward detective novels and not thrillers or serial killer books–runs into three hundred or so a year.

I get sent a lot of these books, and if you’re ever on an Edgar award committee, you’ll be sent even more.  The simple fact is that I couldn’t keep up with all of them even if I wanted to. 

I know I am missing books I would admire.  I know that I am reading things that I wouldn’t read if I knew what was in them before I started.

But along with the death of the reviewer whose job it was to “form the taste” of the public has come the death of any functional sorting system whatsoever.

If I lived in Augustine’s Rome, I would know what books to read because I would hear the people around me discussing them–all of them. 

These days, I most likely won’t know that most published books have ever been published at all.  And the venues that provide reviews are…how do I put it tactfully?

Mostly on a different planet than I am.

But then we have the other problem–just because I love a book passionately doesn’t mean people ten years from now will. 

The decline of general education means that many of the allusions even in popular books—and movies and songs and television shows, for that matter–go right over the heads of the contemporary audience.  Give them an audience a good fifty years down the road, and they’ll be largely incomprehensible.

A book can’t last if it becomes impossible to read it.

My students seem to think that everything in the world was invented the day before yesterday, and if it wasn’t it couldn’t be of any interest.

And they live in a world that is sufficiently different from what came before it, even fifty years ago, that I find myself struggling to get them to understand.

How do they read Chandler or Agatha Christie when they don’t know it was ever the case that you could be arrested for booking into a hotel room with a lady not your wife?  How do they read George Eliot or even Faith Baldwin if they don’t know that children born out of wedlock once had no right to support from their biological fathers, or even recognition from them, and were often barred from other things, like entering a convent or being admitted to certain colleges and universities?

A book does not last unless it can speak to new generations of readers.  It doesn’t have to say the same things to those new generations as it said to the generation into which it was first published, but it has to say something. 

Maybe we’re looking at a world where all the old books will fall away, not because they’re not “good stories” but because the good stories are rooted in a civilizational actuality that no longer exists, and that in the world of these new readers has never existed.

Ah, well, that’s sufficiently garbled.

In case you want to know what brought on the mood:  we started A Doll’s House today.

I had to explain that a married woman who wanted a divorce at that time and place would automatically lose her children, and could not claim alimony or support of any kind, and would no longer be received by her friends.

And then I had to explain what “received” meant.

Sigh.