“Bellow and myself and a couple of others were very much smaller than Faulkner and Hemingway.”
— Norman Mailer, as told to the New York Times
Growing up the late 1960s through the late ’70s, it was always interesting to see what books your friends’ parents had on their family room or living room shelves.
There were certain best-sellers and highly regarded “serious” books of the day that tended to show up fairly frequently. One I remember as being almost ubiquitous in the homes of those whose children I babysat in my younger teen years was “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach.
So popular was this self-improvement book told from the point of view of an avian scavenger that it topped the best-sellers lists two years’ running, 1972 and 1973.
And yet, few people under the age of 45 today have heard of it — and few over that age will admit to having read it, much less owning it. (The great film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the subsequent film, “It is based, to begin with, on a book so banal that it had to be sold to adults; kids would have seen through it. ‘The Little Engine That Could’ is, by comparison, a work of some depth and ambition.”)
The best-selling work of fiction in 1970 was “Love Story” by Erich Segal - another book that nearly every family on our block had on their shelves; another book that, except for the film based on it (in this case, infinitely superior to the movie version of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”), would be just as forgotten. (Of the novel “Love Story,” Ebert wrote that Segal’s style was “sort of a cross between a parody of Hemingway and the instructions on a soup can.”)
Other best-sellers from the 1970s that were omnipresent on the bookshelves of America’s wood-paneled family rooms included a trilogy of Carlos Castañeda (“The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” “A Separate Reality” and “Journey to Ixtlan”) that were purportedly non-fiction memoirs of psychedelic drug use among Native Americans. In that same category of fictional non-fiction were a series of books by Erich von Däniken (“Chariots of the Gods,” “Return to the Stars,” “The Gold of the Gods,” et al) that claimed to prove that human beings were the descendants of space aliens.
Written from the late 1940s to late ’50s, but still widely popular in the 1970s, was a series of books by Thor Heyerdahl detailing sea journeys he made in primitive sailing vessels which he used as “proof” that Incas could have settled the Pacific Islands, or that Africans could have discovered the Americas.
And the original pop psychologist (although he would have abhorred being grouped in with Dr. Ruth, Dr. Phil and Dr. Joyce Brothers), B.F. Skinner, would appear on the bookshelves of the more intellectually inclined — although if one takes his arguments in “Walden Two” (1948) and “Beyond Freedom & Dignity” (1971) at face value, folks only purchased and read those books as a reaction to an environmental variable, not because they freely chose to.
All of these books were not only widely read, they were widely discussed — even by those who hadn’t read them. Their authors were frequent guests on the talk shows of the day, and many of the titles were taught in high school and university classes. They were all hugely influential on the popular culture of the day.
Today, most of these books are forgotten — the non-fiction books almost all discredited. Few of those titles are still being read — except, perhaps, as artifacts of their time, curiosities as it were.
On the other hand, certain writers from that era are still read — their works of that period considered classics, even today. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Ursula K. LeGuin are all considered giants of science fiction — they are still being read, and new movies are still being made about their novels.
Going back even further, Frank Slaughter was a hugely popular writer of hospital dramas from the 1940s through the ’70s — he rather invented the genre that continues to populate TV shows even today.
As a novelist, however, he is largely forgotten, and almost entirely unread.
While popular tastes change over time, and yesterday’s best-seller is often relegated to the thrift store shelves today (I’m looking at you, Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins), in an odd twist, the same fate likely awaits Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and John Irving. These three “serious” authors were at one time darlings of the literary establishment, held up as worthy replacements for the often-reviled Ernest Hemingway as the greatest American novelist.
There was a time when Hemingway was the ultimate American writer. He was both a best-selling author and considered a literary heavyweight — winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was also a celebrity in the pre-Internet age when one had to work a bit harder at being a celebrity. He drove a military ambulance in World War I, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and was a war correspondent during World War II. He went on African safaris, owned a home in Cuba, and single-handedly put the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona Spain on the bucket lists of young men the world over.
But Hemingway’s unabashed patriotism and unbridled machismo put him at odds with intellectual values in the 1960s and ’70s — and despite the fact that Hemingway had built on Stephen Crane and Mark Twin in modernizing the American novel, he was soon being dropped from reading lists in English departments at major American universities and colleges. (This despite that fact a student of American English cannot possibly account for the writing style of, say, Toni Morrison without first taking into account Hemingway, who had helped pioneer the use of informal vernacular in serious novels.)
Even by the 1950s, younger novelists Mailer and Vidal were being hailed as the Next Big Thing, the writers who would push Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald out of the way and finally write the Great American Novel. Talented writers both, early works had shown flair — and their celebrity-driven egos consistently promised even greater books to come.
In the late 1970s, John Irving — maybe the first product of writers workshops to be so hailed — became the hot new literary fashion. His books were added to university reading lists and films were made of his novels. He, too, was heavily touted as the man who would finally kill off Hemingway in the American imagination.
And yet, despite all the official disapproval by trendy English profs at supposedly elite schools, Hemingway remains both a cultural fixture and a popular read. (When his final unpublished manuscript, “True at First Light,” was edited by his son, Patrick, and published in 1999, it immediately shot up the best-sellers lists — 38 years after the author’s suicide.)
Walk into nearly any new book store, and there will be at least a couple Hemingway titles available (while Mailer and Vidal are likely to be utterly absent). Heck, many university and college bookstores still carry posters featuring Hemingway — likely to the great dismay of the English Department profs who would much rather their students read something more politically correct, if also more forgettable.
If Hemingway’s reputation has outlived repeated assassination attempts, university English lit departments have been more successful at killing off the concept of a literary canon.
It wasn’t so long ago that literary critics and college English professors shared the heady duty of deciding which works belonged to the canon — an unofficial but accepted roster of works that represented the best of the best in literature. In fact, the canon itself defined literature — if a book was accepted as part of the canon, it qualified as literature. Otherwise, it was just fiction.
Required reading lists at universities were widely reflective of the consensus on the canon: Hawthorne, Crane, Twain, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway — there was a historical progression in American literature. (On the other side of the pond, the progression would range from Shakespeare to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens to the Brontë sisters, George Eliot to George Orwell.) For a young up and coming fiction writer like Mailer or Vidal, having your works accepted as part of the canon was the height of your professional goals. It was the hall of fame for novels and poetry.
Winning major prizes was part of the process of getting added to the canon: The Pulitzer, the Nobel — this kind of validation was considered a key endorsement of the value of your work.
But by the 1970s, “deconstruction theory” and a general anti-establishment mood on campuses was undermining the authority of the awards, as well as belief in a canon — a shared cultural touchstone.
Younger, trendier writers began to be featured in required reading lists. One could be awarded an English literature degree from a major university without ever cracking Crane, Twain or Hemingway. We had supposed “experts” on American literature who had never read some of the most influential American writers, writers whose stylistic innovations had helped differentiate American literature from the rest of the English-speaking world, writers who had made it possible for counter-culture writers in the 1970s and ’80s to find publishing houses willing to accept their manuscripts and bring them to a wider audience.
Ultimately, however, there is a sort of unofficial literary canon — one composed of the novels of previous generations that continue to find an audience, novels that have stood the test of time and that have, mostly through word of mouth, continued to find new readers in subsequent generations.
This canon - the one that matters, for it signifies what is actually being read - isn’t maintained by literary critics or college faculty: It is one created organically by readers. There are no real gatekeepers — now that books can be ordered online if the local shop doesn’t carry a title, people can read what they want more than ever.
The ultimate quality needed for inclusion in this living canon is this: Do modern readers find a book worth reading?
By that standard, Hemingway continues to stand the test of time, as do Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and the above-mentioned sci-fi authors.
Other once-popular authors have been forgotten — much like the 18th century composer Antonio Salieri, who owes what little regard he still possesses to the 1984 film “Amadeus.”
And maybe classical music contains some lessons for helping us make sense of which, of any, of our contemporary writers will be celebrated by future generations. Not only was Salieri famous in his lifetime, only to be forgotten after, but Johann Sebastian Bach was known during his lifetime mostly as a gifted church organist. His great fame as composer only came in subsequent centuries.
If the concept of an official canon of Great Literature died in the campus culture wars of the 1990s, perhaps that liberates all of us who are fans of engaging writing. Rather than worrying about what the self-proclaimed experts say — whether they’re inveighing against the former classics, or pushing some new trendy upstart on us - we can simply enjoy those writers we enjoy, without worrying about whether they’ll be read or even remembered by future generations.
Other than leaving some personal favorites on our bookshelves for younger visitors to peruse, there really isn’t much we can do to influence that anyway.
“The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors”
By James D. Hornfischer
I’ve been on a bit of a World War II bender of late. This one appealed to me because I had a close friend who served on a frigate in the Cold War (the USS Albert David). It was the only combat ship I ever visited — and wearing one’s Air Force uniform aboard a Navy vessel probably isn’t the wisest move, but I had ROTC that day and no time to change before heading to 32nd Street Navy base.
This book revisits the Battle of Samar. With Admiral Bill Halsey having chased a Japanese decoy fleet north, leaving the Philippines with no air cover, the small group of escort carriers and their accompanying frigates found themselves cornered by the largest Japanese fleet of the war, including the giant battleship Yamato, with its 18-inch guns.
The author does a nice job of bouncing from ship to ship, weaving in survivors’ reminiscences with official naval histories and memoirs.
The battle was as unusual as it was unexpected for both sides. The Japanese thought they’d caught Halsey unawares; the Americans hadn’t been told the main fleet carriers had left the area.
I’m about halfway through, but already can recommend this book for any fans of World War II history.
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