I reorganised my books last week. In the course of culling and re-ordering a chaotic library I found myself pondering some recent myths about books.
These myths, I noted, are all the more potent right now thanks to the internet and ebook revolution. Nostalgia has become a default position for every book-lover – and why not? Today, every Luddite is inclined to locate the golden age in the 1960s and 70s, a time of plenty when Old Style Publishing was at its zenith. Looking back to those glory days, it's difficult not to fall prey to the persuasive allure of at least five myths.
Myth One: We are uniquely afflicted by cultural crap. Nonsense. The present age of literary excess does not wield a monopoly in the publication of bad books. There was plenty of rubbish published in the 1960s and 70s; perhaps not in quite such volume, but then there are more books published now than ever before. As I piled up a shoddy ziggurat of gaudy paperbacks (five shillings here, 50p there), wartime derring-do, James Bond rip-offs, and pop psychology, I was forced to conclude that every age creates its share of ephemera.
Myth Two: Books used to be better produced. Actually, this is at best half-true. And the reason for that is that hardbacks used to be printed by hot metal, which has its own distinctive quality. But in almost every other respect (paper, margins, binding, jacket art etc) my old hardbacks are inferior to the majority of the new books I have acquired this century. Most books today are superior, as objects, to almost anything that's gone before.
Myth Three: In the good old days, books were longer, and more demanding. Today, given the minuscule attention span of the Twitter Age, the classics of yesteryear will inevitably slip off the modern reader's radar. This is simply not true. For every mammoth Dickens or Henry James (and yes, there are plenty of those), there were also miracles of brevity. The Great Gatsby is barely 60,000 words long. Most Graham Greene novels come in at about 220 pages; Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall is barely 175 pages in my edition. With the exception of 1984, George Orwell rarely wrote more than 250 pages. Michael Ondaatje's brilliant first book, Running in the Family, is scarcely 180 pages; Elizabeth Taylor's marvellous novel The Wedding Group just 230 pages. And so on.
Myth Four: Literary hype is a 21st century affliction. There has always been hype. I lost track of the number of titles (thrillers mainly) bearing the fatal legend, Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture, or flashing some egregious quote from a contemporary celebrity such as RD Laing, or Anthony Burgess.
Myth Five: There was a Golden Age. There wasn't. Nor is there an End of Literary Civilisation as We Know It. The truth is that narrative novel is alive and well. It may not always appear to be in the hands of contemporary masters, but (in truth) how often does that happen ? Looking back over the 20th century, there are many fallow seasons. We can celebrate 1922 for Ulysses, and 1929 for The Sound and the Fury, but from 1935 to 1949 there are surprisingly few novels of lasting power, excluding 1984, of course. And besides, who are we to say that, in the long run, these are the books that will survive?
