A few years ago I got a message from one of the world’s more famous literary critics.  He was about to write a book on the novel as an art form and wondered if I had any ideas or suggestions.  Over the next few days I made up some notes intended to explain how and why the art form had developed.  I sent the critic my notes and told him to feel free to use any or all of my ideas and not to worry about attribution.

Well, his book came out recently, and it turns out he had no need to worry about crediting me. His book makes no use whatever of my ideas.  

I think that’s too bad — and not because the ideas are mine.

My study of the question (I believe anyway) goes a long way in the direction of answering the question of how and why major novelists appear when and where they do.  (Yes, I’m aware that I just made an outrageous claim.  In any event…)

The appearance of great art and artists is not strictly a function of the number of people endowed with remarkable genes. After all, there were only 3 million people in England when Marlowe and Shakespeare lived and not 10 million in the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Beethoven and Schubert were around. And yet now, when there are so many people in the world, we have no equals to these men.  

So what is it?

One way to begin looking at this question with respect to the novel is simply to chart the times when major novelists appeared.  

Most writers have a very conscious sense of being part of a particular generation.  This is not to deny that some writers, whether because they are long-lived or because they have started their careers early or late, may be associated with a generation or generations other than that which corresponds to their birthdates.  I have, however, attempted to make a list of a great number of the most important novelists in our language, listing them by the decade with when they first made their “splash”.  Beneath the list I’ve presented a few possible inferences which might be drawn about why certain periods appear richer and certain others leaner.
    
Allowing that recent decades have more authors listed because the process of literary extinction is less complete for these periods, we can reach these possible conclusions:

1. There are three periods when important novelists seem to have appeared with the greatest frequency: the 1740’s, the 1830’s-1840’s and the 1920’s.  All three were periods of relative peace and prosperity.  This manifestly contradicts the old claim that catastrophic events serve to act as the irritant creating the pearl in the oyster.  Wars and depressions instead appear to sap creative talent or to move talent in other directions.  This may also be why there are so few significant novelists to have emerged during the periods of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War.
   
   No major English-language novelist - not even Hemingway, whose ultimate importance is open to question anyway - saw extended service in the First World War.  Indeed, if we have the good sense to find Mailer’s work wanting, we may note that no major English-language novelist saw extended service in any war. 
   
   Depression eras tend to produce writing that’s engage. And engage writing (e.g. Farrell or Sartre) dates quickly.  Moreover, depression eras tend to produce fewer young talents in general.  Decades of economic collapse, as the 1720’s, 1820’s and 1880’s in England and the 1830’s and 1890’s in the United States, were periods when less novel-writing talent emerged.  The matter of whether or not to be become a starving novelist or a banker is evidently clearer at these times - and not to the advantage of literature.
   
   
2. The best novelists of the 1830’s, 1840’s and 1850’s (e.g. Dickens and Trollope), although not necessarily more innately talented than the best novelists of the 1740’s and 1920’s, were far more prolific. 
   
   This may be because writers in the 1740’s found novel-writing wasn’t a sustained way of making any living and had to give it up while writers in the 1920’s made such a respectable living that they didn’t need to knock out as much work.  Fielding, let us note, quit writing novels for the law and government.
   
   
3. Novel-writing went into a sustained decline after the 1960’s and hasn’t recovered since.  It may well be that most of the better imaginative writers have “followed the money” and are now mainly writing for television and film.  Of course, in these mass media a writer’s best work is usually immediately dumbed-down by producers so we never get a chance to see most of what the writer is capable of.
   
   I think a case can be made that Woody Allen, a sometime TV writer who escaped the Producers’ thumb, may have been the best working fiction writer in America over the last thirty years.  And he hasn’t written a single novel, of course.
   
   
4. “Serious” writers are less inclined to write for the general public than they once were.  Tom Wolfe may be the only novelist of importance now doing that.
   
   The novel became popular in the 18th Century when the cost of book production fell relative to the average income. Before that, of course, most books sold were either technical books or bibles. Then, around 1930 fiction sales leveled off relative to non-fiction, and total sales of non-fiction once again are in excess of fiction sales. It seems that once talking pictures were invented the general public began to turn to the graphic media for fulfillment of their needs for fantasy and escape. The 19th Century was a rare moment when the general desire for entertainment and story-telling was uniquely met by the novel.  If the novel’s first duty is to entertain by telling a story, then it may not be an accident that novel-writing began to decline not long after sound came into film.  That film relies on pictures, a less subtle mechanism of delineating mood and psychology, necessarily raises the matter of whether Marshall McLuhan wasn’t at least partly right, and, if that’s so, whether we as a species may have only begun to see the full range of adverse consequences.

And what of other languages?  

Let’s look first at the development of the novel in French.

Conclusions:

1. Again, we may notice that periods of relative peace and prosperity are associated with literary abundance.  (The Paris Commune, while violent and bloody, cannot be compared with the Napoleonic Wars in terms of either the quantity of life lost or in its power to divert men’s energies and talents.)
   
   This may also be why France did NOT produce an important new writer in the 1920’s, a striking contrast with what happened in the English-speaking world.  She was, it would seem, still too beaten up, too spent and too bruised from the war.
   
   
2. The French novel of the 19th Century was a towering force.  No French novelist of the second half of the 20th Century can be compared with the major French novelists of the 19th Century (Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola) without provoking laughter.  The French novel went into decline much earlier than the English novel and its decline has been far steeper.

And the Russians?  Why don’t we chart their novel, as well?
   

1. 1. Again, the best literature is written during periods of relative peace and (a Russian’s idea of) prosperity. 
   
   It’s interesting to note, however, that two of the major Russian novelists, Tolstoi and Solzhenitsyn, did see war up-close.  Plainly, this is a big a part of the reason why the Russian war novels are noticeably superior to our own.  An interesting side question might be why the American Civil War produced so little good fiction.  Could it be that American writers were disinclined to offend their readers by addressing the immorality of the Southern cause in an era when racist attitudes were ubiquitous and military courage was regarded as a paramount virtue?  Were they unwilling to make, even if implicitly, an unsettling critique of American life when Americans uniformly thought that their society and culture was self-evidently glorious? 
   
   
2. Much Russian literature has nothing to do with the “slavic soul” or mysticism.
   
   
3. The novel arrived in Russia late, but it was a guest worth waiting for.

And what about the Germans?    

Conclusions:

1. There are, of course, well-known German novels depicting society that were written in the 19th Century.  (Think of Jenny Traubel, for instance.)  For the most part, though, the German 19th Century novel found its outlet in Opera and German emigration to the United States.  Notice, by the way, that none of the writers above lived in Vienna, the Opera’s home.
2. The lack of good German novels from the 19th Century may also be related to the fact that “Germany”, like “Italy”, was a fragmented non-country for much of the century.  Thus, trade was difficult up until the formation of the Zollverein.  This may have made novel-writing particularly unprofitable and encouraged writers to move to Paris and write poetry (as Heine did), to move to Vienna to write opera librettos or to move to the Americas where there was little in the way of a German press to publish fiction.  It’s certainly clear that the 19th Century’s best novelists appeared in the countries with the strongest national cultures: Russia, France, Britain and the United States…

Beyond what these charts tell us, there are some other general observations which I think can be put forward.

I worked as a public high school teacher for a number of years.  During this time, I assigned several dozen classic titles to over a thousand children for book reports.  I would always ask the children to end their reports by saying whether they liked their books or not and to what degree they felt as they did.  In general the kids appear to have been honest.  Because most of the kids liked being caught up in a world other than their own, most of them liked the books they were asked to read.  

However, there were children who disliked Twain, ones who disliked Dickens, and so on.
 
But I found two books that every child who ever read them really liked.  Not one of dozens of children ever said anything but that they really liked — more often loved — these books.  What struck me as odd was that the two books, Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles and Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, were so outwardly dissimilar. What did a sensitive story of an innocent young woman’s tragic seduction have in common with a cynical tale of decadent Parisian life?
    
A friend provided me the answer: “They both deliver the goods.”  The stories “pay-off”.  I don’t think one can underestimate the importance of an ending in a story.

Worth bearing in mind, yes?

Another thing that’s striking about novel-writing is how many of the best novelists have been snobs and phonies.  De Foe and Balzac were born Daniel Foe and Honore Balzac.  Thackeray, in part as self-criticism, wrote his Book of Snobs.  Arnold Bennett loved yachting and especially liked to dress to go yachting.  Faulkner wore a pretend peg-leg for a time and claimed to have lost his leg in “the war” — which he never served in.    Similarly, one cannot but be struck by how many of them have been spies (De Foe, Maugham, Greene) and physicians (Chekhov, Conan Doyle, Maugham).  Both occupations, of course, provide good training in making detailed social observation.



When critics write about great authorial talents that have gone bust they almost invariably fall back on the explanation that their subjects destroyed their talents through drink.  One interesting subject not often talked about is the way in which many writers have instead ruined their talent by coming to dictate their writing.  Consider a list of authors and a few of their early handwritten books.  These are contrasted with their later dictated works.  Notice that the early novels are rich in pointed detail and perspective, the later novels suffused with authorial preaching or blathering detail.

      
One final point: most critics tend to have an automatic and innate disdain for genre novels.  The genre novel is looked down on as something vulgar intended for those who read principally for story.  (Why it is bad to read principally for story has never been adequately explained.) But this hostility to genre fiction is curious when one considers that so many of the best novels ever written have been genre novels (mystery, suspense, historical, etc.) and that the novel’s rise can be correlated with the growth of popular genres and its decline with its movement away from genre or towards literary styles which appeal far less to the general reader (stream of consciousness, magical realism, metafiction) as they lack consistent or consistently well-told story and cannot be read for it.

By contrast, the rise of magical realism is in many ways akin to the appearance of abstract expressionism in painting.  Both were invented by people (Pollock and Garcia Marquez) who imagined themselves to be bold critics of the established order.  Yet, their work appeals to many expressly because of its absence of obvious social criticism: content for all intents and purposes.  Is it any surprise that Pollock has proven so popular in corporate office buildings given that big corporations are concerned above all else with avoiding display of anything that anyone might find offensive?  (Who could be offended by a bunch of bright, happy colors?)  Where there are no subjects, no offense may be taken.  

Similarly, the big capitalist publishing companies - which can’t be bothered to aggressively market most Spanish or Portuguese authors abroad - are gleeful at the thought of shipping Garcia Marquez paperbacks into every market on earth.  Were they to try and sell Vargas Llosa’s erotic fiction into Saudi Arabia think what the response might be.  Garcia Marquez serves the capitalists’ needs ideally.  In most of his work he doesn’t say anything or criticize anyone.  

Note, also typically, that Clinton’s favorite novel was Hundred Years of Solitude.  Why?  Isn’t this the ideal novel for the man who doesn’t want to think - as, for instance, on the fact that he’s betrayed every liberal principle that he claimed to represent when he was elected?

Is Magical Realism the sitcom entertainment of the self-professed intellectual?

I’m not sure. I am sure, though, that you can track the rise of different genres with the appearance of major works within the genre.


In each case, these genres were then further developed and exploited, sometimes with more overtly literary intentions, by….

Rather an impressive list, isn’t it?  So let us salute the genre writer!  And let us hail those who strive to tell a story for the great mass!  Bravo!  Bravo!