While
re-visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame for the first time in several decades, I
stepped into an old used bookstore.
Cooperstown, New York a town that has preserved the past well, puts you
into a time warp as you walk down its streets of 19th century
architecture. The bookstore, filled with
old books, is simply a collection of floor to ceiling shelves filled with books
by deceased authors who wrote about bygone eras. One such book was The World’s Ten Greatest Novels:
Great Novels and Their Novelists.
The mass market book from 1958 was filled with brittle, yellowing
pages. It held great content from the
pen of W. Somerset Maugham, who was a British playwright, novelist and short
story writer. He lived to be 90 and
reportedly was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the
highest-paid author during the 1930s.
His
book is filled with essays about the 10 books he deems as the greatest novels
ever written, but what’s more interesting is what he says in his introduction and
his postscript. Though he acknowledges
many different books would fill anyone’s top 10 list, he names these as his best 10:
·
Tom Jones
·
Pride and
Prejudice
·
The Red and the
Black
·
Old Man Goriot
·
David Copperfield
·
Wurthering heights
·
Madame Bovary
·
Moby-Dick
·
War and Peace
·
The Brothers
Karamazou
Interestingly,
he says though all of these books were best-sellers, three of them “were dead
failures when first published,” referring to Moby-Dick, The Red and the Black, and Wurthering Heights.
Why
were those three initially abject failures?
He writes:
“Such
critics as noticed them had little good to say of them. The public ignored them. That is easy to
understand. They were highly original.
Now, the world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it
is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is
one of anger. It needs a long time, and
the guidance of perceptive interpreters, before it can abandon its instinctive
recoil and accustom itself to novelty.”
Here are selected excerpts:
1.
Let
me begin by saying, however, that to talk of the ten best novels in the world
is to talk nonsense. There are a
hundred, though even of that I am far from sure; if fifty persons, well read
and of adequate culture, were to make lists of the hundred best novels in the
world, at least two or three hundred, I believe, would be mentioned more than
once; but I think that in these fifty lists, supposing they were made by
persons of English speech, the ten novels I have chosen would find a place.
2.
Now
this great diversity of opinion can be somewhat easily explained. There is a variety of reasons that may make a
particular novel so much appeal to a person, even of sound judgment, that he is
led to ascribe outstanding merit to it.
It may be that he had read it at a time of life or in circumstances when
he was particularly liable to be moved by it, or it may be that its theme or
its setting has a more than ordinary significance for him owning to his own
predilections or personal associations.
3.
But
the chief reason for the great diversity of opinion that exists on the
respective merits of novels comes, I think, from the fact that the novel is
essentially an imperfect form. No novel is perfect. Of the ten I have chosen there is not one
with which you cannot in some particular find fault.
4.
I
think Balzac is the greatest novelist the world has ever known, but I think
Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the
greatest novel. No novel with such a
wide sweep, dealing with so momentous a period of history and with such a vast
array of characters, was ever written before, no, I surmise, will ever be
written again. It has been justly called
an epic. I can think of no other work of
fiction that could with truth be so described.
5.
But
before I enlarge upon this statement I wish to say something about readers of
fiction. The novelist has the right to
demand something of them. He has the right to demand that they should possess
the small amount of application that is needed to read a book of three or four
hundred pages. He has the right to
demand that they should have sufficient imagination to be able to envisage the
scenes in which the author seeks to interest them and to fill out in their own
minds the portraits he has drawn. And
finally the novelist has the right to demand from his readers some power of
sympathy, for without it they cannot enter into the loves and sorrows,
tribulations, dangers, adventures of the persons of a novel. Unless the reader
is able to give something of himself he cannot get from a novel the best it has
to give something of himself he cannot get from a novel the best it has to
give.
Now I will specify what, in my opinion,
are the qualities that a good novel should have. It should have a widely
interesting theme, by which I mean a theme interesting not only to a clique,
whether of critics, professors, highbrows, truck drivers or dish washers, but
so broadly human that it is interesting to men and women of all sorts.
6.
The
story should be coherent and persuasive; it should have a beginning, a middle
and an end, and the end should be the natural consequence of the
beginning. The episodes should have
probability and should not only develop the theme, but grow out of the
story. The creatures of the novelist’s
invention should be observed with individuality, and their actions should
proceed from their characters; the reader must never be allowed to say: So and so would never behave like that; on
the contrary he should be obliged to say:
That’s exactly how I should have expected So and so to behave. I think
it is all the better if the characters are in themselves interesting.
7.
And
just as behavior should proceed from character, so should speech. A fashionable
woman should talk like a fashionable woman.
8.
The
narrative passages should be vivid, to the point and no longer than is
necessary to make the motives of the persons concerned and the situations in
which they are placed clear and convincing.
The writing should be simple enough for anyone of ordinary education to
read it with ease, and the manner should fit the matter as a well-cut shoe fits
a shapely foot. Finally a novel should
be entertaining.
9.
But
even if the novel has all these qualities, and that is asking a lot, there is,
like a flaw in a precious stone, a faultiness in the form that renders
perfection impossible to attain.
10.
When
I consider how many obstacles the novelist has to contend with, how many
pitfalls to avoid, I am not surprised that even the greatest novels are not
perfect, I am only surprised that they are not more imperfect than they are. It is largely on this account that it is
impossible to pick out ten and say that they are the best. I could make a list of ten more that in their
different ways are as good as those I have chosen: Anna
Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Cousin Bette, The Charterhouse of Parma,
Persuasion, Tristram Shandy, Vanity
Fair, Middlemarch, The Ambassadors, Gil Blas.
I could give good reasons for choosing those I have just
mentioned. My choice is arbitrary.
11.
It
is to induce readers to read them that this series has been designed. The attempt has been made to omit from these
ten novels everything but what tells the story the author has to tell, exposes
his relevant ideas and displays with adequacy the characters he has created. Some students of literature, some professors
and critics will exclaim that it is a shocking thing to mutilate a masterpiece,
and that it should be read as the author wrote it. But do they actually do this? I suggest that they skip what is not worth
reading, and it may be that they have cultivated the art of skipping to their
profit; but most people haven’t: it is surely better that they should have
their skipping done for them by someone of taste and discrimination. If he has made a good job of it he should be
able to give the reader a novel of which he can read every word with enjoyment.
12.
They
will lose nothing that is valuable, and because nothing is left in these
volumes but what is valuable, and because nothing is left in these volumes but
what is valuable, they will enjoy to the full a very great intellectual
pleasure.
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Brian Feinblum’s insightful views, provocative
opinions, and interesting ideas expressed in this terrific blog are his alone
and not that of his employer or anyone else. You can – and should -- follow him
on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels
much more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2018. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in
Westchester. His writings are often featured in The Writer and
IBPA’s Independent. This was named one of the best book
marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2018 as one of the
top book marketing blogs. Also named by WinningWriters.com as a "best
resource.” He recently hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America
and participated in a PR panel at the Sarah Lawrence College Writers Institute
Conference.
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