A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  The term ‘bestseller’ is of relatively recent coinage (the first recorded usage is 1912), as is the bestseller list. The first such chart appeared in America, in 1895. One of the persistent British anxieties about ‘bestsellerism’ is that it represents an unwelcome ‘Americanisation’ – the bestseller is ‘an American kind of book’, fine for America, but not for the rest of the world. The British book trade stoutly resisted introducing any authoritative bestseller list until 1975. Books, it was felt, did not ‘compete’ with one another like horses in the Grand National. Worse than that, bestsellerism cheapened the quality and diversity of books. It worked against the necessary ‘discriminations’ (this, not that, or perhaps, this then that) which the intelligent reader should make. The argument goes on.

  The question is made more complicated by the fact that bestsellers frequently ‘come out of nowhere’. Fifty Shades of Grey, for instance, was first written as a work of fanfic, online, for an Australian reading group, by an author with no ‘name recognition’ whatsoever in the book world. Publishing companies have risen to the challenge of developing three strategies (again, mainly in the USA) to minimise the out-of-nowhere factor: ‘Genre’, ‘Franchising’ and ‘Me too-ism’.

  As Chapter 17 suggested, if you go into a bookshop you are free to ‘browse’ – but the shop will be guiding you toward the kind of fiction that would work for you by racking books of a similar appeal on ‘genre’ shelves: Science Fiction and Horror, or Romance, or Crime and Mystery. ‘Franchising’ works rather differently. Readers build up what retailers call ‘brand loyalty’. They will buy ‘the latest Stephen King’ (his name is invariably larger on covers than the title of his latest work) because they enjoyed that author's previous works. ‘Me too-ism’ is simply ‘follow my leader’. Fifty Shades of Grey, for example, inspired a veritable tsunami of lookalike covers, titles, themed works and spoofs. (My favourite was Fifty Shames of Earl Grey.)

  The bestseller list, if one thinks about it, does not merely chart sales, it stimulates them, setting in process a kind of ‘herd response’. You read a bestseller because everyone else is reading it. Once the herd is galloping the usual mechanisms of choice and ‘discrimination’ (some careful thought about what to read) are overridden. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, when it was published in 2005, received almost universally negative reviews. Yet for two years it out-sold every other novel. The thundering herd, as always, voted with their hooves. And their wallets.

  Most bestsellers quickly come and go. They are, usually, ‘books of the day’, and this year's bestseller list will contain a different set from last year's. A few, however, enjoy a long life and we can learn a lot about the machineries of popular literature from examining their career through the years – sometimes through centuries. Les Misérables is a good example. Victor Hugo published his story of Prisoner 24601's epic struggle with Inspector Javert, set against France's never-ending political upheavals, in 1862. It was initially published in French and ten other languages simultaneously. As a global enterprise, Les Misérables was immensely and immediately successful. Hugo's novel was reportedly the most-read book by both armies in the American Civil War in 1861–65. Dramatic versions became staples on the stage, worldwide, for decades after. Les Misérables has been filmed no less than twelve times. In 1985 an unambitious musical stage version was premiered at the Barbican in London. Despite poor reviews, it took off, and became what the official ‘Les Mis’ website describes as ‘the world's longest-running musical’ – ‘Seen by more than 65 million people in 42 countries and in 22 different languages’. At the 2013 Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles, the latest film version (of the 1985 musical) pulled in a creditable three awards.

  No one would call Victor Hugo's Les Misérables anything less than popular. Neither, if we're being honest, would we call it ‘great literature’. It falls into the category of what George Orwell called ‘good-bad books’. All the adaptations of the original novel, in different ways and with different degrees of fidelity, retain the core element: the long feud between the prisoner and his jailer and the original novel's social message, what Hugo called the ‘social asphyxiation’ which causes crime (in Jean Valjean's case, stealing a loaf of bread for his starving family).

  Should the long passage of Les Misérables through all its different manifestations be seen as cheapening exploitations of the original text? I don't think so. It's more in the nature of a great work of popular fiction being able to evolve, adapt itself, like flowing liquid, to the ever-changing literary-cultural environment of the time. Some works of popular literature can do it, but most can't. Chances are there won't be a musical version of The Da Vinci Code, or Fifty Shades of Grey, winning any Oscars in 2120.

  And what about poetry? Unthinkingly one might imagine that it is always something of minority interest, confined to ‘little magazines’, slim volumes, and an elite of highly-skilled readers. ‘Bestselling poetry’, one might argue, is a contradiction in terms – like ‘jumbo shrimp’. If we think laterally, however, poetry has never been as popular as it is today. And we hear, over the course of a week, many more hours of it. We live ‘in poetry’ in ways that no generation before us has done. How come?

  The most influential single volume in the history of the form is probably Coleridge and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. It helps to unpack the root-meanings of those two words. ‘Lyrical’ goes back to the ancient musical instrument, the lyre – forerunner of the guitar (Homer is traditonally thought to have recited his epics to lyre accompaniment). ‘Ballads’ goes back to ‘dance’ (as does ‘ballet’). So what, then, are Bob Dylan's lyrics, sung to his guitar? What are Michael Jackson's, or Beyoncé's, dance and song videos? What is each new generation's recordings of the ballads of Cole Porter? It's not too outrageous a stretch, for those of an open critical mind, to see as much ‘literature’ in popular music as there was in that 1802 slim volume by Coleridge and Wordsworth. Put another way, look hard and you'll find pearls in the crud.

  CHAPTER 39

  Who's Best?

  PRIZES, FESTIVALS AND READING GROUPS

  There have always been prizes for the highest literary achievement, from the ancient world's laurel-leaf crown to the ‘biggest ever’ advances which (lucky) modern authors receive. ‘Laureateships’ are prizes of a kind. Tennyson's forty-two-year tenure of the post of British poet laureate (Chapter 22) confirmed his supremacy in the world of poetry, as did the peerage, and the state funeral (in all but name), which a grateful Queen and nation awarded him on his death in 1892.

  But systematically organised literary prizes – delivering a jury's verdict that this or that is the best novel, poetry collection or play, or recognising a lifetime's literary achievement – is very much a twentieth-century phenomenon, and of our time. The first such prize to be founded in France, the Goncourt, was awarded in 1903, and the UK and USA followed suit in 1919 and 1921 respectively. Since then, literary prize-giving has grown explosively. It has become like the proverbial Christmas party gift, cynics say: everyone must have one. There are now many hundreds of literary prizes that authors can compete directly for – or be entered for, usually by their publishers – in a large number of countries. And more of them are set up every year.

  There is, among them all, a bewildering array of ‘category prizes’: awards for the best second novel of the year (named, wittily, the Encore); for the best detective novel of the year (the Edgar, named after the founder of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe); for the best historical novel (the Walter Scott, ditto); for the best woman's novel (the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly the Orange Prize and since 2013 the Baileys Prize); for the best any kind of literary book (the Costa Book of the Year); and for the best collection of poetry (the T.S. Eliot). Some give large sums of money, some just ‘honour’ – and some dishonour (notably the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award). The biggest cash prize is splashed by the McArthur Foundation's Genius Grants in the USA, giving lucky authors half a million dollars to spend as they please, just for b
eing geniuses. One thing all these prizes have in common is that they do not specify too closely what precise quality they are rewarding, or by what criteria they are judging. Judges and committees have a free hand in deciding what they regard as the worthiest effort.

  Before examining a few of the premier prizes, let's ask some important questions. Why has this happened, why now, and why do we need such awards? A number of answers suggest themselves. The most convincing is that we live in an age of competition, where ‘winning’ is all-important. Everyone, it is said, loves a horse race. The prize system introduces the exciting ingredient of winners and losers into literature. It makes literature a kind of sports stadium, or gladiatorial arena.

  In the last twenty years, bookmakers have begun offering odds and taking bets on who will win the Booker, in Britain, or the Pulitzer, in the USA. The big prizes are announced at award ceremonies that each year come more and more to resemble the Oscars. Only the red carpet is missing, and that may come soon.

  Another reason for the current obsession with prizes is impatience. As George Orwell observed, the only real judge of whether a work of literature is any good or not is time. When literature first appears, we are very bad judges of how good or bad it is. That includes reviewers, who very often have to make ‘authoritative’ judgements within days – shooting, as it were, from the hip. Sometimes they miss badly: one early reviewer complained that The Wind in the Willows was zoologically inaccurate as to the hibernating habits of moles, which it almost certainly was. Many would have backed Ben Jonson against Shakespeare, in his day. Dickens, discriminating readers believed, was ‘low’; you should read Thackeray – much better stuff. Wuthering Heights? Don't bother. One could go on. After a few decades, the winners and losers emerge from the fog. They become our ‘canon’ and are studied in the classroom. Time has done its job. But the reader wants to know now who the great contemporary writers are. They won't be around in a hundred years to learn history's verdict. Prizes satisfy that need to know.

  The third reason for the profusion of prizes is ‘signposting’ – giving readers some direction so we might better find our way through the ever more daunting profusion of literature available nowadays. We desperately need guidance. Where shall we find it – the bestseller list? The book all the critics are raving about in this week's newspaper? The book that has the showiest advertisements in the underground station? That ‘unmissable’ book a friend has mentioned, whose title we can't quite remember? Prizes, judiciously selected by panels of experts who have coolly surveyed the whole field, offer the most reliable of signposts.

  For its part, the book trade loves literary prizes. The reason is obvious enough: they help remove the chronic uncertainty which is the bane of their business. The rule-of-thumb ratio often cited is that for every four books that lose money for a publisher, one makes money – and, with luck, pays for the other four. With a prize-winner's medal hanging from its neck, the odds are shortened that a title (or the next one the author writes) will earn its way. And it's not always necessary for the book to be a winner: to be on the short list, or even the long list, is enough to give the title ‘profile’.

  Which, then, are the top literary prizes? First in the list, as it was historically first, comes the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was set up in 1901. The prize is one of a set of five, each for outstanding achievement in a different field. Alfred Nobel was the Swedish inventor of dynamite, the first stable high explosive. It proved to be valuable in the construction and mining industries but also a terrible weapon of war. In his will, Nobel left most of his vast fortune for the annual awards in his name. Some think it was moral reparation. The annual literary selection is made by the Swedish Academy, with (anonymous) expert advice.

  Scandinavia has its great writers (Ibsen, Strindberg and Hamsun, for example). But the Nobel net, from the start, was cast worldwide and over anything that could legitimately be called literature. Scandinavia, on the edge of Europe, was ideally placed to be objective and disinterested in its judgements. One of the undeniable achievements of the award has been to ‘de-provincialise’ our sense of literature: to see it as belonging to the world, not any single country. The Nobel Prize is awarded for a lifetime's achievement and the sole criterion for the prize is that it should go to writers who have produced ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’.

  The Nobel Prize Committee has always seen itself as having influence in international politics. In choosing to award prizes to Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, it was well aware that the USSR would never let them come to collect their award. Disputes over who should have won the Nobel crop up with predictable regularity year after year. Accompanying them is a miasma of (probably apocryphal) Nobel lore. Did Joseph Conrad not get it because of the dynamiting villains in The Secret Agent? Did Graham Greene not get it because of the offensive depiction of the Swedish ‘safety-match king’, Ivar Kreuger, in England Made Me? Would the British-born W.H. Auden (widely reported to be a frontrunner in 1971) have won had he not been a US citizen at the wrong time of his life – namely during the bloody Vietnam War? For writers, such gossipy imaginings add spice to every year's announcement. And they are, backhandedly, a tribute to the importance attached to what is undeniably the world's major prize for literature.

  The French Prix Goncourt, founded in 1903, is the ‘purest’ of the prizes, from the point of view of literary criticism. It was set up with an endowment by the eminent French man of letters, Edmond de Goncourt, whose high literary ideals it honours. A jury of ten, all distinguished in the literary world, and long-serving, meet once a month in a restaurant (this is, remember, a Parisian prize) to elect a particularly worthy book of the year. Literary quality is all. The cash prize is a derisory ten euros, to emphasise the point that this is not about money. Perish the thought. The lunches probably cost a fortune.

  America's National Book Awards, nicknamed ‘Literature's Oscars’, began in 1936 during the Great Depression as an initiative by publishers and the American Booksellers Association to stimulate interest and sales at a low time in their industries. Over the years it has developed a wide array of prizes – almost as many as there are category bookshelves in a city bookstore. In 2012 they even had a niche award for E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey. It could be argued that the impact of the NBAs is muffled by there being so many of them. Like the Oscars, one yawns as yet another envelope is opened.

  No yawning at the annual ‘Booker evening’ every October. What is now acknowledged as the world's premier prize for fiction was set up in 1969 as the ‘English Goncourt’. Unlike its cross-Channel ancestor, however, it gladly accepted the embrace of commerce and gave handsome cash prizes (and, with the publicity, the knock-on certainty of big sales). Booker McConnell, the original sponsors, had interests in West Indian sugar cultivation. One Booker winner, John Berger, used his speech to attack his ‘colonial’ benefactors and passed half his prize money to the Black Panther movement. In recent years the prize has been sponsored by a hedge fund and thus renamed the Man Booker Prize. With Anglo-Saxon pragmatism the administrators of the prize have no problem with the deal they make with capitalism.

  The long-serving ten Goncourt judges are all from the literary world. The five Booker judges, who serve for one year only, are from the ‘real world’ – sometimes, controversially, showbiz. The book trade not only likes literary prizes, it likes the controversy which attends them – both before and after the awards ceremony. The administrators' cunningly programmed release of who is serving on the Booker panel, the long list, the short list, all culminate in a night of banqueting, TV coverage, suspense and, usually, fierce debate. A lot of novels, in the process, are bought and consumed. Is literature's contemporary prize-culture a good thing? Most would say it is: if only that it gets literature read. But we should see it as part of what is a changed, and fast-changing, literature scene.

  Another twentieth-century novelty is the ever-expanding number of book and literary festivals which began i
n the period after the Second World War. These events, large and small, bring together congregations of book lovers, and in their genteel way they have become the pop concerts of literature. En masse, these fans make their preferences felt to authors, who meet their readers face to face, and to publishers, who pay very close attention to what is selling in the now traditional ‘book tent’. Call it a meeting of minds.

  Even more recent is the explosive growth of local reading groups, in which like-minded book lovers get together to discuss a series of books they have chosen for themselves. There is nothing overtly educational or self-improving about these groups. There are no fees, no regulations – just a sharing of critical views on literature which is thought to be worth a read, and some lively discussion. Again, minds meet – always a good thing where literature is concerned.

  Reading groups have changed the way we talk about literature and have opened up new lines of communication between producers and consumers. Many publishers nowadays package their fiction and poetry for reading groups, with explanatory author interviews and questionnaires. They are democratic in spirit. There is no top-down instruction: it's more bottom-up, and selections are more likely to be titles chosen from ‘Oprah's picks’ than the book that has got appreciative reviews in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books or Le Monde. Reading groups help to keep reading alive and pleasurable. And without that, literature itself would die.

  CHAPTER 40