The only true judge of an author's merits is posterity. But why do some literary reputations last while others founder
'Shares in Iris Murdoch are in freefall …' Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer
Towards the end of his long and industrious career, the literary jack-of-all trades Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) sat down to ponder the enticing topic of his reputation. No doubt about it, he briskly informed his friends, in 200 years' time he would be spoken of in the same breath as Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter. Naturally, there is still quite a long way to go before this prophecy is, or isn't, fulfilled, but one doesn't need a crystal ball to suspect that the odds on Nichols's Cats ABC or Down the Garden Path re-emerging as Penguin Modern Classics sometime in the 22nd century are rather on the long side.
On the other hand, in suggesting that the really vital critics of his work were not the newspaper reviewers or a galère of impressionable fans, but a pantheon of invisible readers crowded around some futuristic judgment seat whose criteria he could only guess at, Nichols was making an important point about literary reputations and how they endure. For the only reliable judge of a novel's merits, as Martin Amis once declared, is that grim and exacting arbiter, posterity, and, set against the reckonings of the future, present applause is only a little light murmuring heard a long way off.
The question of how the writer ends up with posterity on his, or her, side assumes an even sharper focus when you consider the fates of all the men and women of letters who have failed to pull off this Herculean feat. The English literary world of the last century is littered with the bones of once-gargantuan reputations now crumbled into dust. Whatever, for example, happened to Charles Morgan, a novelist taken immensely seriously in his 1930s heyday, and now all but vanished from the reference books, or Angus Wilson (1913-1991), knight of the realm and president of the Royal Society of Literature, the collected edition of whose works, urged into print by his admirers after his death, ended up in the remainder bins?
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On the other hand, in suggesting that the really vital critics of his work were not the newspaper reviewers or a galère of impressionable fans, but a pantheon of invisible readers crowded around some futuristic judgment seat whose criteria he could only guess at, Nichols was making an important point about literary reputations and how they endure. For the only reliable judge of a novel's merits, as Martin Amis once declared, is that grim and exacting arbiter, posterity, and, set against the reckonings of the future, present applause is only a little light murmuring heard a long way off.
The question of how the writer ends up with posterity on his, or her, side assumes an even sharper focus when you consider the fates of all the men and women of letters who have failed to pull off this Herculean feat. The English literary world of the last century is littered with the bones of once-gargantuan reputations now crumbled into dust. Whatever, for example, happened to Charles Morgan, a novelist taken immensely seriously in his 1930s heyday, and now all but vanished from the reference books, or Angus Wilson (1913-1991), knight of the realm and president of the Royal Society of Literature, the collected edition of whose works, urged into print by his admirers after his death, ended up in the remainder bins?
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