A Song for the Ages?
Decades from now, when only old men and women can dimly recall when somebody told a friend of mine about a dancing human spaceman that can read my mind when we got the radio on, there may be 9-year-olds that sing together “Joel, the Lump of Coal.”
In 1986 Anthony Burgess wrote, “I first published the novella A Clockwork Orange in 1962, which ought to be far enough in the past for it to be erased from the world’s literary memory. [. . .] I should myself be glad to disown it for various reasons, but this is not permitted. [. . .] It seems likely to survive, while other works of mine that I value more bite the dust. This is not an unusual experience for an artist. Rachmaninoff used to groan because he was known mainly for a Prelude in C Sharp Minor which he wrote as a boy, while the works of his maturity never got into the programmes. Kids cut the their pianistic teeth on a Minuet in G which Beethoven composed only so that he could live to detest it.”
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
Bruce Charlton
December 17, 2014
‘Lump of coal’ aside (which I never heard of before now), and the mega-trivializing meme-power of pop culture aside – On the other hand, artists are seldom reliable judges of the value of their own work: tending to overvalue those things they struggled with self-consciously.
e.g. CS Lewis perversely believed that the novel Till We Have Faces was his best work – rather than Narnia or the Christian writings such as Screwtape, or his lit crit. ‘Faces’ took a lot of heard work and involved his wife as editor – but his best work was rapid and almost effortless.
But Burgess was a different case. Clockwork Orange is a nasty novel which became a cult among nasty people for nasty reasons (not for the good qualities is has, but for the bad). However, I think Burgess never wrote anything of really high value – he didn’t have it in him, was striving too hard to impress, and was insufficiently honest.
And something similar applies with highbrow critics versus the public – the public rightly loves Beethoven for his Pastoral Symphony and Moonlight sonata; not for the Hammerklavier or late string quartets.
G.
December 17, 2014
Faces is one of Lewis’ best works, so that may not be the best example. On the other hand, in some ways, its less Lewisian.
Zen
December 17, 2014
Til we have Faces really impressed me. While it was a very different Lewis, what really struck me, is how much like the ugly sister, I was.
But no matter how much Lewis detests The Screwtape Letters, that will probably be one of my eternal favorites. I purposely do not leave it laying around the house, because I will pick it up, and automatically lose an hour or so of my time.
Bruce Charlton
December 18, 2014
John C Wright gives a good example of what I mean in today’s blog post:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/12/radioactive-dinosaurs-writing-as-fishing/#more-13026
“The difference between doing one’s best and doing a masterpiece is the difference between a comparative and a superlative. Doing one’s best means straining each nerve and muscle to the utmost, whether those efforts are met by success or failure. Writing a masterpiece means the work itself merits fame and applause, whether it was done with great effort on the author’s part, or, ironically, tossed off without a second thought.
“My editor says my best work, the best thing I have ever written, is a short story that I penned in an afternoon off the top of my head in one draft. The story made no impression on me and I hardly remember it.
“On the other hand, I sweated and labored over my favorite thing I ever wrote, and expected it would win awards. When it appeared in the magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, it received no comment, no applause, no awards.”