What Makes a Classic?

 I was hoping today’s blog entry would be a review of Pierce Egan’s Life in London, a work really at the cusp of even the long eighteenth century, being published in 1821. Unfortunately, I just haven’t finished it yet. Life has got in the way and, while it’s not un-entertaining, it’s not something that grips. As I’ve been reading it, I’ve been struck with the distinct notion that it’s not a classic and I’ve been wondering why. What makes ‘a classic’?

My sister is a keen reader, but prefers modern books and so forces herself to read ‘a classic’ every few months. It’s funny how she uses the word, as if it’s a genre in itself. As someone who prefers something a little long in the tooth, works labelled classics come in all sorts and can’t be homogenised so easily, but to many they can.

Is it age that makes a classic? Despite the term ‘modern classic’, a classic is usually regarded as an old book but it’s not the age alone that gives the book its classic status. Life in London is just over two hundred years old, so it passes the age test, but the edition I’m reading is a (pretty classy) print on demand scan by the Cambridge University, scandalously retailing at over forty pound new. Time has withered its initial freshness and it being so of the moment when it was released, its of only scholarly interest now - the edition being aimed at students of the 1820s as a source, not as an enjoyable book in itself.

Is a classic a book of cultural relevance and high sales? It’s true, many classics are the bestselling books of all times but very few bestselling books become classics. I read Anthony Adverse, a bold, ambitious story that was a publishing phenomenon the year it came out, but is nowhere now. Martin Tupper was the most read poet of his day and he’s never read and barely heard of. Life in London was the inspiration behind the first play to break a hundred night run on the West End, but is unknown today. 

It would seem that a classic is one whose cultural relevance and public popularity is stress-tested by time. Yet that’s hardly a fair way to winnow out great works. I’m making my way through the Mothers of the Novel series of classic reprints consisting of works by women which were engineered out of popular and critical consciousness. My recent reading of Fifty Books We Could Do Without showed a number of books the writers were arguing need not be classics, which are very little thought of today.

Then there’s the authors who have some works regarded as classic and the others ignored. Daniel Defoe wrote great reams of stuff, but his reputation as a classic author really only stands on Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and, to a lesser extent, Roxanna and Journal of the Plague Year. Yet I found Colonel Jack to be just as good as those works and The Life and Adventures of Captain Singleton to be better.

Perhaps ‘classic’ is nothing more than a marketing trick. My eyes will always be drawn to the black and white of a Penguin Classic, or the white and red tip of an Oxford. And who really reads them all anyway? I’m a fond devourer of the beasts but there are oodles of them I’ve never read, some I may never read. 

All I can say for definite is that you know it when you see it and there’s something about Life in London that is not quite it. I think it’s how faddy it is, how specific to its own time and place, but many books are classic because there specificity somehow becomes universal. Yet that’s not to say that there’s nothing to enjoy in it, but I’ll talk about that next week.

Oh - and how did Morrissey get his autobiography into the official Penguin classics range?

Review: Leon Garfield by Roni Natov

 I can’t believe it’s over ten years since I read my first Leon Garfield book. I was thirty at the time, a little older than his marketed age-range (usually 12-16 or so, I’d say) but there was an exuberance in the narration, a pleasure in the melodrama and a general sense of good storytelling that I spent the next few years collecting and reading all his published books.

One of the things that began to fascinate me, was who the man Leon Garfield might actually be. Internet sources were pretty sparse and I found myself in the position of actually having the art without the artist. As such, I drew certain conclusions from what I read without knowing anything about the author. I supposed him to be a big Dickens and Stevenson fan and I supposed him to be a Quaker or Unitarian - as there was definitely some sort of religious element to much of the work, but without a formal religionism. Turns our Leon Garfield was a secular jew, was brought up in my birth-town of Brighton and lived up in Highgate, near where I first settled in London.

Roni Natov’s books on his, as part of the ‘Twayne’s English authors series’ is pretty much the only book I’ve found about Garfield. It’s principally a literary view of his work but does begin with an interview with him, which I found fascinating.

I learnt that Jack Holborn was his fifth written book, but his first published. It had originally been more than twice as long and intended as an adult adventure novel but his publisher had suggested he strip it right down and market it to children as an adventure story in the style of Treasure Island. Interestingly, it was Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae that served as a more direct inspiration. Having his first book sold as a children’s book led him to be known as a children’s author, even as he showed no real interest in writing books aimed at children. As Natov says, “Garfield’s status as a youth author has more to do with the way he has been packaged by publishers than in his suitability or dedication for children.” I wish I’d discovered him about the age of 12, he’d have really bridged the gap between adult and children’s books better than what I had around me then.

I learnt a little about the man himself. He’d been drafted in the medical corps out of art school because it was assumed he would have studied a little anatomy. He went to Belsen shortly after it was liberated and served as a translator even though he knew no German. He lied about knowing some to avoid being sent to the still ongoing Eastern Front. That his wife gave him the ideas for some of his novels and that he initially wrote in first person because he thought the limitations of it would disguise any lapses in history. His publisher actually begged him to write in third person sometimes, something that’s a little surprising now that first person is so commercial. As he wrote more, he became less worried about the historical details.

There’s a real sense of him as a workaday writer, aware of the poverty of his earlier failures and taking jobs to keep the money coming in. Both of his ostensibly ‘adult’ books were commissions. One being a continuation of Dickens’s Edwin Drood, the solution he found pretty obvious from the text itself. Despite his comparisons to Dickens, he doesn’t seem to have been a huge fan and hadn’t read Drood before. His other adult book House of Cards he admits as business as usual, just longer. Presumably it didn’t do gangbusters, as he was back to being marketed at children.

The work he is most proud of is Apprentices, his sequence of novellas. Originally the first story about ‘Possul, the lamplighter’s apprentice was commissioned for the ‘Long Ago Children’ series of books but he saw more in it to develop and so wrote the Monkey and Boy series for them instead. He enjoyed the hints of mysticism in the lamplighter’s story and wanted to write them all about aspects of light, running out of ideas for that in his second story about a mirror-maker’s apprentice. Each one of the stories takes place on a feast day and form a year between them, they all have Bible verses in them, as well as the character of the link-boy. Most of the characters have bird names also (something I picked up he does a lot, though there’s no explanation in this book why).

There was a little in there about his Shakespeare retellings, another commission. How he grew more comfortable with the task as he went on, and how it helped him put of a writing hole. He remarks on how another commission his House of Hanover, took the form of a trip to the National Portrait Gallery because he didn’t know much of the actual history of the eighteenth century, and that the book had been very definitely not a success. I was also charmed that The Wedding Ghost stemmed from his habit of telling his daughter Sleeping Beauty backwards, because he felt it had more mystery that way, (I noted this because I thing the story of Goldilocks would be better if the bears were a surprise at the end, not set up at the beginning.)

The rest of the book consists of Natov’s analyses of Garfield’s works. She places them in periods; the early eighteenth-century adventure period of searching for a father figure, ghost stories, comic works, stories grounded in a specific historical moment, myths and legends, then a return to searches for the father but in an earlier nineteenth-century context and with more social exploration.

There were some interesting discussions in this essays. Although I was definitely aware of Garfield’s fondness for a morally ambiguous father figure (probably inspired by his own extravagant father), I hadn’t picked on how often his characters resolve by being settled into lower than higher status. Nor had I picked up on how much doubling there is in Garfield’s work, how many twins and reflections. I was also amused by the note that Bostock and Harris is a prequel to Wuthering Heights. 

A lot of the discussion comes from the psychological lenses of Freud and Jung. There’s a lot of anima, animus, dark fathers and mothers, oedipal desires and such. Bakhtin is mentioned a lot. I, however am not very up on these lenses and theories, not only did I not take English Literature at university, I didn’t even take it at A-level, because I always enjoyed a book more if I came across it myself. As such, while I could grasp the points Natov was making, I’m not really all that alive to the structures Natov was appealing to. (A cursory glance at Bakhtin’s wiki-page does reveal how apt a lens his is to look at Garfield’s work though). As such, this book was primarily enjoyable to me for the interview at the beginning than the bulk of the rest of it. It’s also made me think I should re-read John Diamond at some point, I didn’t much like it at the time but the discussion in this book certainly makes me feel I missed something.