lasting fame

We went last night to a lecture about Charles Dickens.  To be specific, it was about Dickens and his relationship to the artists of his day.  (Spending Friday night on a not madly comfortable chair in a village hall listening to an Emeritus Professor of literature talking about Dickens would not normally be the the Systems Administrator's first choice of how to have a good time.  In fact, it would come a distant second to going on with the box set of The Sopranos, but the SA is good that way about acting the supportive partner when required, and we'd been invited to the supper after the lecture, and I wanted to go, and anyway I am on the committee).  It was an interesting lecture, though it confirmed my impression gathered from reading some of his books and the odd Radio 4 documentary about him that Dickens was rather a pain in the neck.  Even the Emeritus Professor expressed some surprise that Dickens was quite so popular at the moment, reminding us that it was the two hundredth anniversary of Thackeray's birth last year, and that passed without a murmur, let alone a spate of TV adaptations.

This set me musing on how ephemeral popularity and critical esteem are.  Reputations rise and fall, and sometimes rise again, or else disappear from the cultural map leaving no trace, except to the most dedicated researchers and trawlers of archives.  Among my stationery supplies I have a box of postcards, originally one hundred of them (I've used some) all based on original Penguin cover designs.  Many of the authors are still well known, like Evelyn Waugh and Emily Bronte, but have you heard of Siren Land by Norman Douglas, Siamese White by Maurice Collis, or Mantrap by Sinclair Lewis?  And if you have heard of them, have you read them?  Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.  Some of his books are still in print, though I'm not sure about Mantrap, which doesn't come up on Amazon.  His first listed novel on the Amazon search, Babbit, ranks at number 214,915 in Books.  It actually sounds quite good, being about a prosperous, unpleasant real estate agent from Ohio whose middle class existence is shattered when his friend is convicted of murdering his wife (I presume Amazon means the friend's wife, not Babbit's wife), but the only way it's likely to make the best-seller lists is if someone makes a film of it (starring Leonardo DiCaprio, maybe?).  You get the Nobel Prize for Literature, and eighty years later almost nobody reads your books.

Other prize winners have lasted better.  Thomas Mann won the year before Sinclair Lewis, and Buddenbrooks was a set text for those reading German when I was at Oxford.  I have read it (in translation) and it is jolly good, though not a light read (you wouldn't expect it to be).  It was turned into a film in 2008, though in Germany rather than Hollywood.  The film is two and a half hours long, and IMDb only gives it 5.8 out of 10.  The Forsyte Saga was turned into a TV series in 1967 and again in 2002 and we've all heard of it, even if we haven't read the novels, but how many of us realise that John Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932?  People loved the series, especially the original one, but nobody has much to say nowadays about the books.

Here is a link to the list of all 104 winners in the history of the prize so you can amuse yourself seeing who else history has forgotten, or preen yourself about how many of them you've heard of, or even read.  You can play the same game with winners of the Man Booker Prize.  Midnight's Children, Schindler's Ark, Moon Tiger.  Yeah, yeah, we've heard of those, and read them.  Quite a few have been made into films, which generally gives the book sales a nudge (or at least makes it easier to pretend that you've read it).  John M Coetze went on to win the Nobel Prize.  But how many will stand the test of time?  I've read (I think) 15 out of the 45, the most recent from 2000.  Barring unexpected advances in medical science, I won't be around in 82 years to find out how many of them are on the average keen reader's late twenty-first century's equivalent of the Kindle (I think we can say that the concept of novels being 'in print' by then will be well and truly dead) but I'd be surprised (if I weren't well and truly dead as well) if it was as high a third.