Allan Massie,
"The Problem of Predicting What Will Last"
Booksonline, with Amazon.co.uk (An Electronic Telegraph Publication) 4 January 2000
As our Book of the Century series concludes, Allan Massie compares the list with one published by The Daily Telegraph 100 years ago
EACH WEEK for the past two years The Daily Telegraph’s literary editor has asked a contributor to name and describe his or her "Book of the Century", and today the series concludes with Arthur C. Clarke’s choice. The full selection invites comparison with a list drawn up by The Telegraph a century ago; we print both here.
The comparison cannot, however, be exact. All the books chosen in 1899 were fiction - the paper offered its readers the "100 Best Novels in the World", selected by the editor "with the assistance of Sir Edwin Arnold, K. C. I. E, H. D. Traill, D. C. L, and W. L. Courtney, LL. D.".
The modern list includes poetry, plays, history, diaries, philosophy, economics, memoirs, biography and travel writing. It is certainly eclectic, ranging from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, selected by David Sylvester, to The Wind in the Willows, chosen by John Bayley, and Down with Skool, Wendy Cope’s Book of the Century.
The 1899 list, on offer at the time in a cloth-bound edition at nine guineas the lot (easy terms available), is homogeneous, as the modern one is not, not only because it consists entirely of works of fiction but also because the selection was made by a small group. And since they were picking the 100 Best Novels, they were able to include books that nobody might name as a single "Book of the Century" but which many might put in their top 20 or so.
The difference in criteria between the two lists is instructive. That we today have asked our contributors to make personal choices may reflect our less deferential society. We are less willing than the Telegraph editor was in 1899 to deliver "ex cathedra" decrees and offer a list of "best books" that is not only prescriptive but splendid in its self-assurance. That said, one should bear in mind that the 1899 list was offered as a commercial proposition; ours is not.
Some of our contributors have chosen books for their influence, or for the way they have reflected or shaped our times, rather than for their literary merit or entertainment value. Perhaps if the selection committee of 1899 had prepared a list of the best books of their century, rather than of the best fiction, they would have included Hazlitt, Macaulay, Carlyle, Darwin, Arnold, Newman, Pater and Ruskin among their authors. And their list would have been much richer in poetry than ours is, for who can doubt that, say, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson and Browning all mattered more to 19th-century readers than any poet has to readers in our own century? The 1899 list was not confined to the 19th century. It included also Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy and two Smollett novels, Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle. They had all enjoyed more than 100 years of life already, and have all a lingering, shadowy existence still.
Few foreigners were then included: only Balzac (Père Goriot), Dumas, Hugo (each with three novels), Eugène Sue and Tolstoy, but with Anna Karenina and not War and Peace. So, no Stendhal, no Flaubert (thought immoral?), no Turgenev, no Dostoevsky. To be fair, Dostoevsky was then available to English readers only at two removes, in translations made from French versions of his novels. But we may fairly guess that he would not in any case have appealed to the editor of The Daily Telegraph then. Scott, with seven books, is the novelist best represented. Dickens has five, Thackeray three and Austen two. In each case, however, the selection will appear strange to modern taste. The Scott list omits Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and Redgauntlet, which most of his modern admirers would rate among his best. (The Prime Minister’s favourite - Ivanhoe - is also missing.)
Early Dickens is preferred to the now much more admired late: the two masterpieces, Bleak House and Great Expectations, are absent. The Thackeray trio does not, astonishingly, include Vanity Fair, while Sense and Sensibility would be thought by few today superior to Emma and Persuasion. Some Victorian novelists whose books are still read were not thought worthy of inclusion. George Eliot, admittedly, scrapes in, but with Scenes from Clerical Life, not Middlemarch. There was no place for Emily Brontë (although there is for Charlotte), and Hardy, Henry James and Stevenson are also missing.
There are good novelists who have fallen out of fashion, but whose names at least still signify something: Harrison Ainsworth - I loved The Tower of London in my youth; Captain Marryat and Charles Reade - both admired by Orwell, himself in so many ways a man of Victorian tastes; and also Ouida, whose Under Two Flags (included) is not as fine a novel as her The Massarenes.
But many of the names ring only a faint tinkle, and some not even that. Their presence here stands as a reproach to the vanity and aspirations of authors. Hands up, those who have read, or even heard of, The Atonement of Leam Dundas by E. Lynn Linton, or Valentine Vox by Henry Cockton. Do I see no movement? I calculate that about 40 of these novels have vanished so completely that only academics or those in search of an unexplored subject for a PhD thesis will ever now come across them.
Sad, really. Once, evidently, they gave much pleasure, may even have seemed, in that word so carelessly thrown about by us reviewers, "important". And now? "One with Nineveh and Tyre," to quote Kipling, the only writer to appear in both the 1899 list (with Soldiers Three) and the modern one, with Kim, chosen by Barbara Trapido.
Given that each contributor was asked to nominate only one outstanding book, there is a chance that fewer of our selection will be forgotten. But some certainly will. Others may be known by name, but little read. Even now few people pore over Wittgenstein or curl up with Mein Kampf (Tony Benn’s choice). Its significance is unquestionable, but already faded. In 100 years it will be meat only for professional historians and the occasional lunatic zealot. Journalism has a short lifespan. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, chosen by Michael Shelden, no longer retains urgency. Artemis Cooper’s choice - Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring - which mattered when it appeared, is perhaps commonplace already.
Though humour often dates, I think, and trust, that Wodehouse will last: John Mortimer picked The Inimitable Jeeves. But while, like Philip Ziegler, I delight in 1066 and All That, I wonder what it means, even now, to a generation that learns almost no history before that of the 20th century.
As for the poetry and the fiction, much should fare better. Three people (William Boyd, Penelope Lively and Auberon Waugh) chose books by Nabokov (one his memoir, Speak, Memory). They may be right to bet on his survival; but 100 years ago many would have bet on George Meredith. Who reads him now? Nabokov, like Meredith, is a mannered writer, likely to seem tiresomely so in the future.
Richard Holmes selected Kerouac’s On the Road; a tribute to his own youth, one may suppose, rather than to that confused and ultimately empty book’s message. It is almost as dated as Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, although that was written almost 40 years before.
One of the pleasures of the list, though, is the strongly individual and surprising nature of some selections. Penelope Fitzgerald chose A. E. Housman’s Last Poems. Sixty years ago Orwell thought Housman finished: "it just tinkles", he wrote. Well, not for Penelope Fitzgerald, and not for me either. Housman lives, no doubt about it.
It is good that David Profumo selected William Trevor’s Collected Stories; sad that no one went for V. S. Pritchett’s. Two extraordinary travel books are here: Jan Morris’s choice of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta - nothing else like it in our language - and Claudio Magris’s Danube (Nicholas Shakespeare’s selection), an exploration of Mitteleurope.
Some writers here do seem to have their tickets booked for such immortality as books may enjoy: Proust, Joyce, Ford, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Waugh, Powell, Thomas Mann. Faulkner? Perhaps. Lampedusa - for art and nostalgia? Henry James - yes, but not perhaps The Golden Bowl, which Grey Gowrie chose. A Passage to India? - surely not. Sons and Lovers, chosen by Claire Tomalin, may be read as a historical curiosity only.
There are authors not represented here with a chance of survival: Conrad obviously, Camus, Mauriac, Bassani, Cheever, Simenon, Greene, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Spark; the list runs on . . . And what of the literature of, for want of a better word, entertainment? Conan Doyle has lasted more than 100 years, Buchan 70 or 80, Chandler 60. Will readers a century hence still delight in Holmes, Hannay and Marlowe? Or will they all be dead as Queen Anne?
Somerset Maugham used to put down those who babbled of undiscovered geniuses - and console himself? - with the observation that enduring books are chosen from those that are successes in their own day. On the whole the old boy was right. The 1899 list shows that, but it also shows that even a lasting success in your own century does not guarantee that you will be read in the next. But what of Maugham himself? At least we can say this: as long as English is the international language, there will be a market for his short stories - since there is no easier text offering such entertainment.
1899 100 Best Novels
W. H. Ainsworth James Grant Capt Mayne Reid
The Tower of London The Aide de Camp The Headless Horseman
Old St Paul's The Romance of War Amelie Rives
Windsor Castle Bret Harte Virginia of Virginia
Jane Austin Gabriel Conroy Olive Schreiner
Pride & Prejudice N. Hawthorne The Story of an
Sense & Sensibility The Scarlet Letter African Farm
Honoré de Balzac The House of the Seven Gables Michael Scott
Pere Goriot O. W. Holmes Tom Cringle's Log
J. M. Barrie Elsie Venner Cruise of the Midge
A Window in Thrums Anthony Hope H. Sienkiewicz
W. Besant and J . Rice The Prisoner of Zenda Quo Vadis?
The Golden Butterfly Thomas Hughes Sir Walter Scott
Rolf Boldrewood Tom Brown's Schooldays Rob Roy
Robbery Under Arms Victor Hugo The Bride of Lammermoor
M. E. Braddon Les Misérables Old Mortality
Lady Audley's Secret Toilers of the Sea Kenilworth
Charlotte Bronte Notre Dame Guy Mannering
Jane Eyre Charles Kingsley Woodstock Shirley Two Years Ago The Talisman
Hall Caine Alton Locke Frank E. Smedley
The Deemster Hypatia Frank Fairlegh
Henry Cockton Henry Kingsley Tobias Smollett
Valentine Vox The Recollections of Geoffrey Roderick Random Hamlyn Wilkie Collins Peregrine Pickle Rudyard Kipling The Woman in White Mrs F. A. Steel Soldiers Three The Moonstone On the Face of the Waters George Lawrence J. Fenimore Cooper Laurence Sterne Guy Livingstone The Last of the Mohicans The Life and Opinions of Charles Lever The Pathfinder Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Harry Lorrequer The Prairie H. B. Stowe Charles O'Malley F. Marion Crawford Uncle Tom's Cabin E. Lynn Linton Mr Isaacs R. S. Surtees The Atonement of Charles Dickens Soapey Sponge's Sporting Leam Dundas Tour Martin Chuzzlewit Samuel Lover Eugene Sue Nicholas Nickleby Handy Andy The Wandering Jew The Old Curiosity Shop Rory O'More W. M. Thackeray Dombey and Son Lord Lytton The History of Henry Esmond Oliver Twist Last of the Barons The Newcomes Conan Doyle Night and Morning The Memoirs of Barry The Firm of Girdlestone Lyndon Rienzi Alexandre Dumas Count L. Tolstoy The Three Musketeers The Caxtons Anna Karenina
Twenty Years After Captain Marryat Anthony Trollope
The Count of Monte The King's Own Orley Farm Cristo Peter Simple Mrs H. Ward George Eliot Jacob Faithful Robert Elsmere Scenes of Clerical Life Midshipman Easy D. C. L. Warren S. Henry Fielding George Meredith £10,000 a Year Tom Jones Diana of the Crossways E. Wetherell Joseph Andrews D. M. Muloch The Wide, Wide World Mrs Gaskell John Halifax, Gentleman G. J. Whyte-Melville Mary Barton Ouida Market Harborough
Under Two Flags Inside the Bar
Charles Reade Mrs Henry Wood
It is Never Too Late to Mend East Lynne
Peg Woffington and Christie Johnstone
Hard Cash
1999 100 Books of the Century
J. R. Ackerley A. E. Housman Homage to Catalonia
My Father and Myself (chosen by Last Poems (Michael Shelden)
Francis King) (Penelope Fitzgerald) Nineteen Eighty-four
W. H. Auden Aldous Huxley (Alan Judd and Collected Poems Brave New World Jane Gardam)
(P. D. James) (J. G. Ballard) Frances Partridge
J. G. Ballard Henry James Good Company: Diaries
The Atrocity Exhibition (Michael The Golden Bowl (Susan Hill) Moorcock) (Grey Gowrie) Boris Pasternak Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology Sebastian Junger Doctor Zhivago of Mind The Perfect Storm (Clare Francis)
(Nicholas Mosley) (Patrick O'Brian) Anthony Powell
Samuel Beckett James Joyce A Dance to the Music of Time Waiting for Godot Ulysses (Hilary Spurling) (Simon Armitage) (Salman Rushdie) John Cowper Powys Saul Bellow Franz Kafka A Glastonbury Romance Humboldt's Gift The Trial (Margaret Drabble) (Justin Cartwright) (Mordecai Richler) Marcel Proust Brigid Brophy Jack Kerouac A la recherche du temps Flesh On the Road perdu
(Shena Mackay) (Richard Holmes) (Muriel Spark,
Mikhail Bulgakov J. M. Keynes Anita Brookner and Doris Lessing) The Master and The General Theory of Erich Maria Remarque Margarita Employment, All Quiet on the Western (Elaine Feinstein) Interest and Money Front
Rachel Carson (Roy Jenkins) (Dirk Bogarde)
Silent Spring Rudyard Kipling (Artemis Cooper) Kim Henry Handel Richardson C. P. Cavafy (Barbara Trapido) The Getting of Wisdom Collected Poems Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Germaine Greer) (Paul Bailey) The Leopard Salman Rushdie Apsley Cherry-Garrard (Peter Vansittart and William Midnight's Children The Worst Journey in Waldegrave) (Malcolm Bradbury) the World D. H. Lawrence Bertrand Russell (Beryl Bainbridge) Sons and Lovers The Problems of John Stewart Collis (Claire Tomalin) Philosophy
The Worm Forgives Halldór Laxness Independent (Francis Partridge) People the Plough History of Western (Fay Weldon) Philosophy (Angela Huth) Munro Leaf (John Cole) Cyril Connolly The Story of Ferdinand J. D. Salinger The Unquiet Grave (Victoria Glendinning) The Catcher in the Rye (Sybille Bedford) Primo Levi (Christopher Hope) Jim Corbett If This Is a Man André Schwarz-Bart Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Marina Warner) The Last of the Just (Martin Booth) Sinclair Lewis (Bernice Rubens) Charles Doughty Babbitt W. C. Sellar and R. J. Travels in Arabia Yeatman (Jeremy Lewis) Deserta 1066 and All That Wyndham Lewis (Jan Morris) (Philip Ziegler) Blasting and T. S. Eliot Vikram Seth The Waste Land Bombadiering: an A Suitable Boy
(David Lodge) Autobiography (Gerald Kaufman)
William Faulkner 1914-1926 Mikhail Sholokov
The Sound and the Fury (George Walden) Quiet Flows the Don
(Joyce Carol Oates) Hendrik Willem Van Loon (Hilary Mantel)
F. Scott Fitzgerald Van Loon's Lives Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Great Gatsby (Bernard Levin) The Gulag Archipelago
(Anthony Powell) Rose Macaulay (Brian Aldiss)
Ford Madox Ford The Towers of W. Olaf Stapledon
The Good Soldier Trebizond Last and First Men
(William Trevor) (Joanna Trollope) (Arthur C. Clarke)
E. M. Forster Robert McAlmon and Kay Edward Thomas Boyle A Passage to India Poems Being Geniuses Together: 1920- (Anita Desai) 1930 (Andrew Motion)
Robert Frost (Carmen Callil) William Trevor
Mountain Interval Claudio Magris The Collected Stories
(Paul Muldoon) Danube (David Profumo)
North of Boston (Nicholas Barbara Tuchman
(D. M. Thomas) Shakespeare) The Proud Tower
Kenneth Grahame William Manchester (John le Carré)
The Wind in the Willows The Last Lion: John Updike
(John Bayley) Winston Spencer Churchill - Pigeon Feathers Alone Gabriel García Márquez (Carol Shields) Love in the Time of 1932-1940 Kurt Vonnegut
Cholera (George V. Higgins) Breakfast of Champions
(Mary Wesley) Thomas Mann (Maggie Gee)
One Hundred Years Joseph and His Brothers Sylvia Townsend Warner of Solitude (David Malouf) Mr Fortune's Maggot
(Rose Tremain) Daphne du Maurier (Michael Holroyd)
Henry Green Rebecca Evelyn Waugh
Pack My Bag: a (Patrick Gale) The Loved One
Self-Portrait Michael Moorcock (Alice Thomas Ellis)
(Emma Tennant) Jerusalem Commands H. G. Wells
Vasily Grossman (Iain Sinclair) The History of Mr Polly
Life and Fate Vladimir Nabokov (Michael Foot)
(Antony Beevor) Pale Fire Geoffrey Willans
Thomas Hardy (William Boyd) Down with Skool
Collected Poems Speak, Memory (Wendy Cope)
(Dan Jacobson) (Penelope Lively) Tennessee Williams
Ernest Hemingway Lolita A Streetcar Named Desire
In Our Time (Auberon Waugh) (Christopher Bigsby)
(Allan Massie) Flann O'Brien Chester Wilmot
Christopher Hibbert The Third Policeman The Struggle for Europe
Cavaliers & (A. L. Kennedy) (John Keegan)
Roundheads F. S. Oliver Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Barbara Cartland) The Endless Adventure Adolf Hitler (W. F. Deedes) Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus Mein Kampf George Orwell (David Sylvester) (Tony Benn) Animal Farm P. G. Wodehouse Gerard Manley Hopkins (Ruth Rendell) The Inimitable Jeeves Poems (John Mortimer) (Rachel Billington) Virginia Woolf
The Diary of Virginia Woolf
(Isabel Colegate)
W. B. Yeats
The Tower