Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (14 page)

LITERARY WORTH:
A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO ARBITRATION

“None but a blockhead ever wrote but for money.”

—
Samuel Johnson

As an academic trained in the study and appreciation of literature, I’ve spent the better part of my life staunchly defending the ramparts of literary endeavor against the slings and arrows of outrageous pop fiction lovers. I have steadily despaired of those who read Stephen King, Terry C. Johnston, Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steele, J.K. Rowling, and their ilk. I said stuff like, “If you want a good ghost story, go read Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Edgar Allen Poe can’t be beat for a good thriller. A great western is
The Last of the Mohicans.
You want a sea yarn, try
The Odyssey.”
Then I’d wait until my companion was out of earshot, switch my radio from NPR to my favorite C&W station, drive home, draw the shades, and curl up with a good Dean Koontze, Robert B. Parker, or Elmore Leonard novel. And I’d tell no one about it, for I was terrified that someone might learn that in my heart of hearts I preferred trash to treasure. After all, as a college professor, I was supposed to be an arbiter of great literature, not an enthusiastic fan of the “easy read.”

It took me a long time to come to terms with this, to understand that the problem I had lay in the egocentricity of the academic elitism in which I had been trained. Like most of my colleagues, I wanted to be an arbiter of literary worth, but I refused to admit to reading anything that didn’t have some sort of official stamp of canonical approval on it. I carried this attitude into my choice of other literary entertainments as well: plays, film, even television programming. By doing so, I was imitating my academic mentors, trying to fit my taste and sensibilities to those whose opinions I respected, whose aesthetic measuring sticks were hewn out of some solid scholarly notion of what is art, what isn’t. I aspired to be like them, and I desperately wanted to reach a point where I could eschew popular fiction and look down on it with the same conviction that draws a derisive sneer whenever I’m confronted with the latest television sitcom.

After all, I
never
watch commercial television. I
only
tune into PBS or maybe the National Geographic Channel. Right.

I think, though, that I—and they—were missing the point. If we were sincere, we were also missing a lot of good reading and viewing. And as a professional writer, I finally began to realize and embrace an alternative point of view.

You see, it’s not whether something is deemed to be literature or not that matters; it’s the question of the value of the canon (there’s that word, again) that is at stake. But that value rests more in the breadth of individual erudition, not in the depth. I do believe that the reason people can read and appreciate something that is popular, even the latest celebrity “as told to” autobiography and determine its worth or lack thereof is because they have read widely in the established literary tradition. They have experience with those works that have withstood the vestiges of time and survived intact, those that still speak to us today through their wisdom, beauty, and eloquence. These are the more genuine standards by which anything new has to be measured. As educated readers, we have no other reliable source of arbitration.

But it’s important to realize that much popular writing is written by men and women who are themselves as well read as any stuffy academic. These writers are as sensitive to what creative writing professors are wont to call “the elements of fiction”: character development, solid plot line, credible dialogue, and highly detailed settings as are any of the literary giants of the canon. Indeed, it is in their adaptation of these admittedly amorphous principles of fiction composition that their success as writers is established and sustained. That they may not do this as well as some recognized literary writers does not deny their accomplishments, although it may well diminish them; as T.S. Eliot and others have reminded us, all art depends on the established traditions of the individual talents of the past; or, to put it colloquially, when fiction is concerned, there’s precious little “new under the sun.”

Even so, Eliot was not saying—nor am I—that everything written has to be imitative or slavishly apish of the past. It is rather to say that those who decide whether or not a contemporary form has artistic merit should be measuring it against a standard of quality that a huge number of people over a large amount of time have established by their patronage if nothing else. But it’s vitally important that readers be well read in the works that established that standard; otherwise, to put it in pure business terms, they’re trying to assess the worth of something without knowing the perimeters of the market.

This is where the dilution of the canon in the name of political correctness hurts. Dredging up works that have not sustained a readership over a period of time and touting them merely because of the identity of a writer effects an erosion of the standard. It suggests that lesser works are valuable because who wrote them was this or that sort of person, not because of the works’ innate quality or originality. What’s ignored is their staying power, their capacity to excite and amaze multiple generations of readers over long periods of time.

Now I agree that research applied to finding previously ignored writers of the past and adding them to the greater body of Western Literature—heretofore, mostly a collection of Old Dead White Guys—is a worthy enterprise, so long as the critical standard applied to such works is the same as would be applied to works that have already been canonized. Again, breadth is more important than depth. The problem is that some of the sudden replacements one finds in anthologies for the works of many of these ODWGs are sometimes not as good by a long shot as the stuff that was taken out to make room for them. Sometimes, they’re considerably inferior, often embarrassingly imitative, derivative, or just plain “bad.”

Of course, one might argue that—traditional standards be damned—deciding what is “good” and what isn’t is a subjective process, often colored by the evaluators’ personal priorities. But I would respond that if a reader decides something is
ipso facto
“bad” merely because it appeals to a great many less-than-well-educated people, then hasn’t he applied the same sort of prejudice that may well have excluded some writers from the canon all along? Actually, when literary history is examined, isn’t this the same sort of prejudice that has kept the novel from achieving literary respect for nearly two hundred years?

At the same time such novelists as Trollope and Thackery and certainly Charles Dickens were penning their fiction with a close eye on what the public wanted to read, numerous intellectuals and prominent individuals, including several American presidents, proudly proclaimed that they had never read a novel and had no intention of doing so. In this time, the novel was rarely if ever taught as a literary form in universities, and the works of such writers as Balzac and Flaubert, Sterne and Fielding were kept hidden in public libraries, reserved only for those indiscreet enough to ask for them. But in the midst of such fine distinctions between literature and popular reading, the public—the popular reading public—was calling for more of the kind of thing that gratified their sensibilities and satisfied their reading appetites. This, I believe, is what led to the elevation of the novel to literary form by such writers as Henry James, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, as well as many others; it is fundamental to the cause that William Dean Howells championed from “The Editor’s Chair” for years. But it’s important to remember that at the same time Howells was promoting the popular novel, Henry James was castigating many of his American contemporaries (particularly Samuel Clemens) who pandered to lower standards, baser tastes. James wanted literary quality to be the arbiter of literary art; Howells understood there were other important appeals required to sustain a readership.

But demand for literary quality is by no means ignored, even by the most common denominator of audiences. Today, when people attend a popular film or play, I think they are seeking the same quality they might find in bona fide literary reading, more or less. It may be that they’re merely seeking pure entertainment or escape, but there is ample literary effort geared in that vein, too. Much of Shakespeare is frivolous and escapist, just as is much of today’s writing. And he wasn’t afraid of the Elizabethan equivalents of blood-and-guts violence, gratuitous sex, and slapstick silliness. He also wasn’t writing exclusively for Oxford dons and delicate intellectual sensibilities and monitors of political correctness and moral certitude. By and large, he was writing for unwashed and unlettered “groundlings” who paid a penny apiece to be entertained. And he was writing for a queen who had a remarkable sensitivity to good humor and sentimental love stories.

That Shakespeare did what he did better than most substantiates his works’ survival over four centuries, but he wasn’t the only person of his time writing good stuff. Still, few of us would plunk down Broadway prices to see a revival of
Ralph Roister Doister
or
The Dutch Courtesan,
although they’re both extremely funny, well-written plays. And consider this: if Shakespeare’s entire reputation stood entirely on
Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens
or
Two Gentlemen of Verona,
he probably wouldn’t have survived as a literary figure at all. Certainly, his name would be no more familiar to most of us than are those of Beaumont and Fletcher or Thomas Marston.

The point is that every age has its
Laverne and Shirley
s or
Brady Bunch
es, or
Married with Children
s and has even produced the comparatively easy humor of its
Seinfeld
s, the romantic melodrama of its
The Waltons,
and marginally silly imaginative speculations of its
X-Files
or
Star Trek
s. But it’s also produced its
Twelve Angry Men,
its
Requiem for a Heavyweight
s,
its
Roots, Forsyte Saga
s,
Upstairs Downstairs,
and
I
,
Claudius
es, as well as its
The Sopranos
and
Deadwood
s.

Every age has also produced its version of celebrity books and biographies. And every age has had its share of naysayers. Samuel Clemens, whose satiric disparagement of Fenimore Cooper is legendary, also pronounced one library to be “excellent” on the basis that the librarians “had the good taste” to exclude all volumes by Jane Austen, “whom the British mercifully permitted a natural death.” Such an execution was, apparently, the precise intention of Laurence Sterne’s neighbors, who legendarily refused to rescue him from a frozen pond when he fell through the ice, so upset were they over the puerile contents of
Tristram Shandy.
We are also reminded that readers were so outraged by E.M. Forster’s
Passage to India
that travelers passing through the Suez Canal littered the surface of the Red Sea with copies thrown overboard in disgust; incensed and overly pious readers burned copies of
Ulysses
as trash; and in the thirties, school boards across the country had Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected works banned from school libraries because they were deemed “a popular distraction.”

The same thing has happened to
The Tropic of Cancer, The Naked and the Dead, Suddenly Last Summer, Invisible Man, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Catcher in the Rye, Equus,
and
In Cold Blood.
Even more recently, the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jerzy Kozinsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and of course, Mark Twain, have been targeted, although their novels are commonly studied as part of the contemporary American literary tradition.

Paul Scott, author of the celebrated
The Raj Quartet,
which included
The Jewel in the Crown
(filmed, naturally, for PBS), once told me, “The greatest curse for a contemporary writer is to be labeled ‘popular.’ It is in their unpopularity, their obscurity, their obtuseness that their worth is measured, not in their appeal to a broad number of people.” Scott, who, as a literary agent, discovered John Brain and John Waine, among others, lamented that the true literary genius of these writers was thwarted by their being touted as “popular.”

“The worst thing that ever happened to John Fowels,” he said, “was to have published
The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
He’d have been called a ‘great writer’ otherwise, not merely a clever romanticist.”

The same might be said of John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Ann Rice, or even Stephen King, who from time to time aspire to write literary art, and sometimes come very close to achieving it, although they are fundamentally labeled as “popular,” a label that, somehow, has by no means tarnished the reputation of J.R.R. Tolkien, P.G. Wodehouse, or Pearl S. Buck, although it has relegated the works of H. G. Wells, C.S. Forester, and Edgar Rice Burrows, as well as Zane Gray, Ray Bradbury, and Dashiell Hammett to the “popular fiction” bin.

Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Erika Jong, Michael Crichton, and Ann Rand have all gone on record at one time or another stating that they were torn between the desire to be popular and widely read (to say nothing of well-paid for their work) and the desire to be taken seriously by the canonical arbiters of the academy. Edward Albee once stated that if he could exchange places with Neil Simon, he would. At least, he said, he would exchange incomes. But he just couldn’t write “easy plays,” works that appealed to the masses. “I’ve tried,” Albee said in response to a student’s question, “but I just can’t. I have to write for something higher.”

“Higher?” How so higher? Are height and width literally exclusive from lower and narrower? Are we, as readers, truly justified in scoffing at the common denominators of popular fiction? Are the paperback romances and westerns and crime novels that occupy grocery stores’ checkout lane racks truly nothing more than passing fancies, worthless trash, facile entertainments? How does one define “entertainment,” anyway? And who has the right to say that simply because something amuses, enthralls, occupies our hearts and minds for a space, however small, that it is somehow less worthy than a more artistically self-conscious effort that’s, well, often boring if not impossible to penetrate by any but the most intellectual mind?