How To Recognize A Classic

wwnorton:

Literary history informs us that in every generation there have always been so-called “false positives” – writers deemed brilliant, their works hailed as classics, yet who ultimately recede or plummet from view.  Public decorum, not to mention my future as a publisher, precludes an intimate discussion of which writers might today be labeled “false positives,” but I urge you to examine the long list of Nobel Literature Laureates and Fiction Pulitzer Prize winners to determine how many writers have actually weathered the shoals of time.

Let’s take, for example, the celebrated career of Lillian Hellman, that renowned American playwright and memoirist, who achieved extraordinary prominence in her lifetime. Cigarette ashes trailing her wherever she strode, she once posed in a long black mink for a fur ad under the slogan, “What becomes a legend most.” With her prominent proboscis, her appearance suggested the look of a famous French intellectual, which she no doubt aspired to be.  The partner of Dashiell Hammett, she wrote an autobiography called Pentimento, which was turned into an Oscar-winning movie, Julia, adapted from her heavily invented “memoir.”  Now, however, twenty-nine years after her death, she might be more extolled for her highly honed ability to cause public uproar, as in her venomous row with the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, who famously commented that “every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”      

One need not be a grasping literary overachiever to fit into this “false positive” category.  Let’s take another case, this being the tragic story of  Ross Lockridge, Jr., whose first novel, Raintree County, a 1,066-page tome framed, with a Joycean conceit, on one single day in a small Indiana town, propelled the thirty-three year-old Hoosier to national fame in 1948.  Pregnant as one critic remarked with “Darwinian, Frazerian and Freudian symbols,” evoking a “pure spirit mystically Emersonian in its transcendental transmutation,” Raintree County, hit the bestseller list.  Compared then to works by Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Thomas Wolfe, the novel received so successful a publishing send-off that the movie rights were snapped up before publication by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the author guaranteed a $150,000 movie bonus. As the critic Jonathan Yardley wrote decades later, “It was…precisely the right novel for its time, 1947-48, when Americans were at once triumphant and befuddled, when in the midst of postwar upheaval they were seeking an affirmation of a link to the past.  Raintree County, so consciously a ‘great American novel,’ provided that.”  Yet Lockridge, burdened by bouts of depression, mired in fights with his publisher and MGM, snuffed out his all-too-brief life by poisoning himself in the family garage five days after publication.  Though his book, today barely in print, was turned into a 1957 movie starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, it failed to become the “Great American Novel” its champions had so hyperbolically predicted.

-Liveright Editor-In-Chief Bob Weil, excerpted from a Chautauqua Institution talk