When Jackson Benson was an earnest young graduate student in the late 1960s, he decided to focus his scholarly work on novelist John Steinbeck and his simple, powerful stories about the quiet dignity of the dispossessed.
Yet the very tales that so moved him, Benson said, only moved his colleagues to snickers. Steinbeck was regarded by most as a low-rent scribbler of sentimental hogwash, a literary lightweight.
“If you were going to try to work in academia and go on to an important career,” Benson recalled ruefully, “I was told, ‘You shouldn’t write about Steinbeck.’ “
Some three decades later, however, Steinbeck is sizzling hot. Walk into virtually any large bookstore and behold the thick new reprint of Benson’s 1984 Steinbeck biography with its luscious chocolate-brown cover; the first-ever compilation of Steinbeck’s journalism, “America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction,” and nifty new editions of his major novels featuring handsome woodcuts on the cover.
Since Steinbeck’s been dead since 1968, how did his work suddenly improve?
The answer, of course, is that Steinbeck’s work didn’t change at all. We did. And thus the author of novels such as “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men” is but the latest exemplar of a perplexing cultural truth: Literature, which some may like to conceive of as an immutable set of timeless verities, solid as granite and fixed as the stars, instead is every bit as fragile as any other human creation. It is subject to the same whims and caprices of marketplace popularity as boy bands, tie widths and M&M colors.
Even writers who are regarded as almost sacred, as having ascended to a pantheon untouched by petty subjectivity — William Shakespeare, John Milton, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway — all have had their time in the sun and in the shadow, sometimes celebrated and other times ignored, even rewritten.
“An author’s reputation is like a stock exchange,” said Jay Parini, author and English professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. “Writers’ stocks rise and fall. Sometimes writers are blue-chip stocks for a very long time. Some have a tremendous rise early in their careers and they turn out to be Enron. You find out that the accounting was all wrong.
“If you asked someone in the 1940s about Henry James, they’d say, `Who?’ He didn’t become blue chip until the 1950s. And nobody was reading Walt Whitman in 1885, even though `Leaves of Grass’ had been out for 15 years.”
Parini, who also has written a Steinbeck biography, said he, too, was warned away from the “East of Eden” author when he set to work in the early 1990s. “He was utterly at the bottom of the charts. I can remember a colleague stopping me and saying, `What on earth are you doing?’ “
In addition to Steinbeck, other writers recently lionized after long decades when their works gradually were dropped from college syllabi and bookstore shelves include Sinclair Lewis, Rudyard Kipling and Zora Neal Hurston.
The forces at work
While there are specific reasons why certain authors’ reputations rise and fall at particular historical moments — an anniversary, a biography, a film — more mysterious, ineffable forces also are at work. All of the publicity in the world can’t make an author interesting if her or his work doesn’t resonate with readers; by the same token, some authors rise out of nowhere by the sheer power of their words.
On the flip side, once-lauded writers who seem to be on the downhill slope include T.S. Eliot and Thomas Pynchon. Eliot, who died in 1965, presumably is long past worrying about his reputation, but Pynchon might take solace in recollecting that in the 18th Century, Shakespeare’s talents were regarded as so negligible that other writers routinely spruced up his plays.
But for those who work their way back into the spotlight, the routes are varied. For Lewis, it was the publication of a new biography, “Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street” (Random House) by Richard Lingeman. For Kipling, it is the early buzz for a new biography soon to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux as well as a renewed interest in colonialism issues sparked by America’s responsibilities in war-stricken Afghanistan. For Hurston, it is, among other things, the publicity generated by an appreciative reader who just happened to be TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. A similar reassessment of a near-forgotten author occurred when playwright David Mamet praised James M. Cain’s novels in the early 1980s. Critics, too, can spark revivals of interest: Malcolm Cowley famously rediscovered William Faulkner after the Mississippi-born author’s works had gone out of print by the late 1940s.
In Steinbeck’s case, it is the 2002 centennial of his birth coupled with a major effort by public libraries and arts organizations to encourage readers to reconsider him. “There’s a real groundswell of interest,” said Susan Shillinglaw, director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University who co-edited the collection of Steinbeck’s non-fiction with Benson.
The magic of movies
Movies based on an author’s work also can reawaken readers. The novels of Jane Austen, E.M. Forster and Edith Wharton gained a whole new legion of fans when filmmakers snapped them up.
But if one generation’s classic literature is another generation’s junk, by what standard do English professors make assignments? What’s to keep an upstart student from rejecting a proffered critical judgment as just somebody’s opinion du jour?
“This does unsettle people,” said Gerald Graff, English professor and assistant dean of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “They find it very disturbing that categories can change historically — it smacks of relativism. And some students do come in convinced that judgments of taste and value are subjective and personal. They say, `Who’s to say what’s good and what’s bad?’
“My notion is that the work hasn’t changed but different qualities get picked out as important,” said Graff, author of “Professing Literature” and “Beyond the Culture Wars.” “If my car ran into a pole last Thursday, it won’t cease to have run into a pole 10 years from now or a million years from now. If Jonathan Swift intended to satirize British cruelty to Ireland in the 18th Century, then he can’t have ceased to have done that a thousand years later. Speech acts have a finality that can’t change.
“On the other hand, the meaning of what Swift did or of my running into the pole may change a lot over the years.”
A fickle field
How authors fare in literature departments, some might argue, is different from how authors fare among ordinary readers. Certainly some authors are more scrutinized than revered, their works showing up more frequently in students’ backpacks than in beach totes. But both arenas — the seminar room and the best-sellers list — are equally fickle when it comes to authors’ reputations.
James Hynes, author of the recent novel “The Lecturer’s Tale,” said, “People fall into and out of the academic canon.” His book satirizes the politically-motivated trends in English departments that keep authors’ market values volatile. As a character rails, students are told to like Jane Austen and then, “`Hey, presto! You were wrong to like her! She’s a racist and an imperialist because she never mentioned the poor orphaned Jamaicans!’ “
Literature may seem to be as prosaic and interchangeable as any other commodity that rolls off the assembly line such as soap or cans of beans, but it isn’t — or, at least, it isn’t only that. Something else must click in to make the authors’ work suddenly return to relevance.
For Steinbeck, that click comes from contemporary events, said Shillinglaw. “As we’re more and more aware of environmental issues, he becomes more and more important. He writes about the American experience, about movements and dreams and a promised land, about people in need. The [word] pictures of the Joads [in “The Grapes of Wrath”] and the piled-up cars by the side of the road look very like the pictures of the Afghanis fleeing for a better life.”
Melville’s moment came in the 1920s, said Elizabeth Renker, English professor at Ohio State University and author of “Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing.” When the author died in 1891, he was “utterly unknown,” she said, and his books forgotten. Then critic Raymond Weaver wrote an influential magazine essay about the “Moby Dick” author in 1919, followed by a biography.
The timing was right
But that alone might not have catapulted Melville into his current place as an iconic American author, Renker said, without other factors: “In the wake of World War I, there was a lot of interest in nationalism, a yearning to find American materials worth studying. Also, Melville had a problem with reception in his own age, but by the 1920s, modernism had already occurred. Modernist sensibility was much more receptive to his experiments with form.
“Literary reputations,” she added, “aren’t timeless — they’re time-bound. People sometimes want art to stand for something transcendent, to not be sullied by being part of the marketplace. But it’s always part of the marketplace.”
Her students don’t seem to mind the fact that literature is not as stable across the decades as, say, the periodic table of elements, Renker said. “One said it gave her faith in her own opinion. Another said he liked the idea that some literature was misunderstood in its own time, that it wasn’t an automatic `great thing.'”
Publishers that specialize in reprinting the works of neglected authors are always eager for popular revivals, said Cheryl Hurley and Martin Riker. Hurley is chief executive of the Library of America, a non-profit publisher based in New York. Riker is senior editor at Dalkey Archive, a Chicago-based non-profit publisher.
“We listen for when the cauldron starts bubbling” for a neglected writer, Hurley said. “We try to maximize the moment for each author. Think of Edith Wharton. Twenty years ago, she was hardly read. Now Wharton seems very much a part of the culture. Writers’ reputations — a very, very tricky thing.”
The reality of it all
Parini, who recently published a novel titled “The Apprentice Lover,” often reminds his students of the ephemeral nature of it all, of the will-o’-the-wisp quality of literary judgments no matter how thunderously delivered, of the fact that today’s fame can dissolve like chalk in the rain.
“I love to tell them about the first review of Wallace Stevens’ `Harmonium.’ Stevens is one of the most important poets of the 20th Century. This very important reviewer writing in a major journal said, `Mr. Stevens is not a bad poet, but let’s face it — he’s no Trumbull Stickney.’ “
