Prolefeed

From Anthony Burgess’s review of “The Batsford Companion to Popular Literature,” by Victor Neuberg:

Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974) was no gentleman. During the 1930s, when he would sometimes have nearly two million words in current publication, he aimed at producing 18,000 words a day.

Editors would call me up and ask me to do a novelette by the next afternoon, and I would, but it nearly killed me. . . . I once appeared on the covers of eleven magazines the same month, and then almost killed myself for years trying to make it twelve. I never did.

[Masanao: I think you know where I’m heading with that story.]

Ursula Bloom, born 1985 and still with us [this was written sometime between 1978 and 1985], is clearly no lady. Writing also under the pseudonyms of Lozania Prole (there’s an honest name for you), Sheila Burnes and Mary Essex, she has produced 486 boooks, beginning with Tiger at the age of seven. . . .

Was Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) a gentleman? . . . . In the 1920s and 1930s, Mr Neuburg tells us, one in four of all books was the work of Wallace. [How did Neuburg estimate this? I guess I’ll have to track down his book and find out.] Everybody, especially the now unreadable Sir Hugh Walpole, looked down on this perpetually dressing-gowned king of the churners, who gave the public what it wanted.

Burgess continues:

What the public wanted, and still wants, is an unflowery style woven out of cliches, convincing dialogue, loads of action. Is the public wrong.

The added emphasis is my own.

I’ll have more to say at some point about the popular literature of the past, but for now let me just note the commonplace that once-bestselling melodramas often seem unreadable to present-day audiences. I’m guessing that it has something to do with the cliches not working any more and the dialogue no longer being convincing. I’m sure there will even be a day when Eddie Coyle’s words no longer sound natural. (Not that that book was ever extremely easy to read, nor was it a major bestseller.)

2 thoughts on “Prolefeed

  1. Speaking as an elitist, you, sir, are being too elitist.

    The worst offenders would be scholarly art criticism and semi-scholarly political polemics. These are also stitched together from cliches, but they are removed from all human reality, and thus a most worthless form of bloodless stupidity. At least "prolefeed" has the benefit of being about events of human interest.

  2. It's late but here are a few quick points:

    1. Though the term didn't mean as much before 1900, popular literature includes Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, etc.;

    2. Popular writers work fast and usually expect their books to be read once. This can hold down the quality but;

    3. It's not immediately clear that popular literature and other arts age that much worse than their serious brethren when you take into account the fact that for about a century (starting with the rise of magazines like the Strand) it was a lot easier for a popular writer to get published. Published 'serious' writers by comparison represented a select group. You might have a fair comparison if you put 'serious' writers up against the top five or ten percent of popular writers.

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