Wednesday, August 27, 2014

The composing influence of Standard Literature - Wilkie Collins, first and greatest

What amazes me about The Moonstone (1868), I mean what is right on the surface, what makes for the shallowest possible blog post, is not just that it is “first and greatest of the English detective novels,” as T. S. Eliot called it, but that it contains so much of what later became identified with detective fiction, “the same old futzing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window,” as Raymond Chandler described the standard detective novel template (“The Simple Art of Murder,” 1950).

Wilkie Collins got it right the first time, good and bad.  He created a mold from which thousands of later novels were stamped, a Standard Literature, readymade in one novel.

In The Moonstone, a character uses “Standard Literature” to refer to 18th century books, “all classical works; all (of course) immeasurably superior to anything produced in later times; and all (from my present point of view) possessing the one great merit of enchaining nobody’s interest, and exciting nobody’s brain” (Ezra Jennings, June 25th), a funny joke in context and much funnier given the subsequent history of the detective novel, by which I mean its eventual conquest of English culture, the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Have any of my readers tried an Edgar Wallace novel?  He wrote 170 of them, and almost a thousand short stories.  Said it took about three days to write one.  I have never read him, but that supposed fact stuck with me, as did this one (quoting Wikipedia): “In 1928 it was estimated that one in four books being read in the UK had come from Wallace's pen.”  I doubt the precision of the estimate, but not the approximate truth, that the craze for a specific kind of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s dwarfed, in intensity and length, recent fads for teen vampires and dystopias.  Add in Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner, Of course, the interest has never really ended, even if much of the activity has shifted to television.  So many of us have such a strong taste for murders.

The Eliot quotation is from “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” written in 1927, so Eliot is right in the thick of things.  He is pro-detective novel:

Those who have lived before such terms as “highbrow fiction,” “thrillers” and “detective fiction” were invented realize that melodrama is perennial and must be satisfied.  If we cannot get this satisfaction out of what the publishers present as “literature,” then we will read – with less and less pretence of concealment – what we call “thrillers.”  But in the golden age of melodramatic fiction there was no such distinction.  The best novels were thrilling…

Examples: Bleak House and The Mill on the Floss (!).  That pretense is gone now, or has shifted to other kinds of books.  I wish readers arguing about so-called “Young Adult” literature would quote Eliot more.  He just wants the melodrama to be better, to be more like The Moonstone.

Some other things amaze me about The Moonstone.  One amazement per post, maybe.

28 comments:

  1. Wilkie Collins *was* amazing and Eliot was right to recognise that we can't always be reading 'great literature', sometimes we need something light and entertaining. The sad thing is, the light and entertaining nowadays is mainly badly written, plotless dross. Which I guess is why I mainly read old books.....

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  2. I don't think Eliot's "thrillers" were any better than ours. I guess they were not plotless. They had plenty of plot.

    But I think Eliot is actually arguing that we can always read great literature, and that our great literature should include satisfying melodrama and genuine thrills. There should be no opposition between "great" and "light" or "entertaining."

    I hope the Golden Age novels you just got at the library turn out to be good.

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    1. They're good, yes, and were very enjoyable over the wet Bank Hol. But - and there is a but - I was struck by the vast difference between Death on the Cherwell and Gaudy Night; in depth, complexity, characterisation, good novel writing etc Sayers is light years away from others. I shall no doubt expand on this when I get round to reviewing!! :)

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  3. I can't remember whose pet theory it is, but it often resonates, that the first example of a particular genre tends to remain the best example. I suppose that's akin to what Nietzsche meant when he said there had been only one Christian.

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  4. That theorist clearly never read The Castle of Otranto.

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  5. I am about to start teaching The Moonstone for about the gazillionth time and the really amazing thing is that it is still thrilling! Is this actually your first time reading it? Why do I find that in itself mysterious?

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  6. Hah — I read Otranto over a decade ago and I still haven't tried another gothic novel. That one fellow getting brained by an enormous helmet is a pretty good gag though.

    I've been wary of crime fiction, but after some dips into Westlake, Chandler, Thompson and a few other bad eggs, I realize I've been a damned fool and have found many good things to read. Still, I am wary of police procedurals and detective novels. As Bunny Wilson put it: who cares who murdered so-and-so. The Moonstone really is a prime candidate to give these misgivings a good kick.

    As you said last week — a good book can make just about anything interesting. Possibly even murder.

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  7. Who'd imagine Eliot as defender of thrilling novels and melodrama? Really surprised me in a positive way.

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    1. The cartoonist Martin Rowson adapted The Waste Land as a 1940s noir in a graphic novel.
      Some people say it's an improvement.

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  8. I read The Moonstone just a little over twenty years ago. It led me to get more serious about mysteries. I am not and have never been a habitual mystery reader, but I made an attempt to learn the field a bit. My tastes run more to American noir and police procedurals. The only mystery or crime writers with whom I have been at all thorough are Raymond Chandler, K. C. Constantine, and Andrea Camilleri.

    Constantine - that guy is a whole 'nother story. Jenny at Shelf Love is the only book blogger I remember writing about Constantine.

    So those are the credentials. I remain ignorant, that is my point, yet I wrote this post.

    Rohan, I plan to start harvesting your posts tomorrow. It is quite helpful, not just that you have written about the book but the way you return to it.

    Øystein - I am afraid that The Moonstone also has a "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd" problem. It really is an ideal example of its form. But who cares who cares? The first 50-60% of The Moonstone is magnificent.

    Eliot's essay is primarily about Collins as contrasted with Dickens, not about detective fiction as such, but the part that deals with mystery novels is open and generous. It made me wish for a list of Eliot's recommendations. The books he takes a stab at as dull and useless are "'psychological' novels," what many people today for some reason call "literary fiction."

    I had never heard of the Rowson book. Very nice.

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    1. By the way, in what collection can the essay be found?

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  9. My contrarian streak looks forward to when you'll start talking about the remaining 40-50% of the book. Most Wilkie fans conveniently overlook that part of the non-magnificence of The Moonstone!

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  10. It always tickles me that the great T.S. Eliot was such a fan of detective fiction. His quote on our need for melodrama is really interesting given his poetry is so lacking in it, but obviously for him poetry and fiction have different functions. His prediction about thrillers has certainly come true for better or worse.

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    1. "It always tickles me that the great T.S. Eliot was such a fan of detective fiction. His quote on our need for melodrama is really interesting given his poetry is so lacking in it, "

      Really? Eliot's own poetry is full of melodrama. The Sweeney poems reek of it. He used chunks of the Sherlock Holmes story The Musgrave Ritual in Murder in the Cathedral. It's interesting that Eliot admired and stole from Henry James so much, when James had the same delight in melodramatic material as a basis for his stories.
      It's a pity Eliot used drawing room comedies as the models for his later plays- what would his versions of Sweeney Todd or a gangster thriller have been like?

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    2. There is certainly drama in Eliot's poetry but I find the emotional tone to be very understated so that I wouldn't call it melodrama which I see as more overt. Granted, I've not read all the Sweeney poems, but Sweeney among the Nightingales is more comic than melodramatic and Eliot undercuts the comedy at the end with reference to Agamemnon. Perhaps the others are different?

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    3. Someone who suppresses emotion as thoroughly as Eliot does in his poems has got a lot of emotion to suppress. Melodrama and comedy are very close- we laugh when melodrama fails to thrill us, but it also challenges us to laugh at it- it's a bit like Orwell's remark about the goosestep. It says "Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me,"

      Sweeney among the Nightingales is both comic and melodramatic- a disconnected plot or set of plots involving women and conspiracies which could be imaginary.... And what is Agamemnon doing there? Is Sweeney as significant as Agamemnon, or is Agamemnon no better than Sweeney? Or is it just chance and the logic of rhyme? Once you start looking for melodrama you'll find it. And if you don't look for it, it'll find you.

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    4. Hmm, you are right, Eliot does have an abundance of suppressed emotion -- still waters run deep as the saying goes -- and that emotion messes with all his characters in his poems in one way or another. I can see your point about melodrama. I always expect it to be an in-your-face sort of thing probably because I have read far too many gothic novels for my own good!

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  11. Eh, don't get your hopes up. I won't be all that negative. But if the entire book were written like the last half, it would be stuck, like two-thirds of Collins novels, with a rather more specialized audience.

    I read the Eliot essay in the 1960 Selected Essays. I suppose it must be in the 1932 edition, too. An onlin eversion of unknown quality. Miguel, you'll enjoy Eliot's praise of Chesterton (his criticism, not his detective stories, unmentioned).

    Stefanie, the, what to call it, contemporary relevance of Eliot's essay was a surprise.

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  12. How we all dislike Otranto. Someone should write an impassioned contrarian defense.

    I was wondering about Eliot's plays. I don't know them at all. Eliot's essay addresses James, enlisting him as one of the writers of interesting, thrilling (if subtle) melodrama.

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    1. Ermmm - I shall be reviewing it soon and although not passionately defending it, I didn't think it was *too* bad!!

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    2. I read all Eliot's plays over forty years ago after I'd been knocked over by his poems. The only one I felt like going back to was Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot's plays came from his later life, when he seems to have been contented and even happy, while his great works come out of early misery and despair: do we have the right to regret his happiness, I wonder?

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    3. Am I weird if I say I liked Otranto? Granted I liked it because it was so over-the-top it was funny and the writing was so bad it was good. But I giggled and rolled my eyes all the way through and had a grand time :)

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    4. "I giggled and rolled my eyes all the way through and had a grand time".

      Well, that's the way Walpole wrote it. He wasn't out to write something Significant, but trying to amuse himself and his friends.

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  13. Good, a defense is on its way. I won't believe it until I see it. I will be pleased - surprised but pleased - if you found one good sentence unrelated to that crazy helmet.

    Roger - now there is a good ethical question!

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    1. Auden in his teaching daysthought “Let each child have that's in our care.
      As much neurosis as the child can bear”

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  14. Stefanie, not weird, no. I believe you read Otranto in the proper spirit. Even a much better Gothic novel like Frankenstein is improved by eye-rolling.

    The "melodrama" question is interesting. Eliot never exactly defines it, but he sees it as something fairly broad. Henry James, for example, "had a very cunning mastery of the finer melodrama." He identifies The Mill on the Floss as melodrama - and as "thrilling," another point in Eliot's favor.

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