Written to last.(logevity of writings)

When some years ago I was the editor of an intellectual quarterly, I had in the hopper an essay by my friend Edward Shils on Karl Mannheim that, owing to its length, I could not run, as I had hoped to do, in what was to be our next issue. I called Edward to tell him that I would have to hold back the essay for the following issue. He was then in his eighties and had cancer of the liver. "My dear Joseph" he said, "not to worry. When I die, which may be soon, and should I happen to go to heaven, which I strongly doubt, I shall be so happy there that what will it possibly matter to me that I have had another essay in The American Scholar? If, on the other hand, as seems more likely, I go to hell, such will be my misery that having had my essay in your magazine also won't help. And if, as just now seems to me most likely of all, neither heaven nor hell but oblivion awaits, being in your magazine won't matter a great deal in this case, either. So, please, take as long as you like to publish the essay."

I know few better instances of thinking sub specie aeternitatis! In that same eternal light, what can it possibly matter if one's writing lives on? Yet the plain fact is that to most scribblers, no matter how wretched their reputations or pathetic their talents, it matters a lot. Each of us, despite our protestations of modesty, somewhere within holds the hope that our superior wit, perspective, generosity of spirit, intellectual courage, stylishness, perfect rightness of opinion (fill in what you think your own best quality) will win through, causing our work to live not only today but tomorrow and for all tomorrows to come. Who was it assured Robert Southey that his reputation would live long after Homer was forgot--but not until?

The only sure measure for the longevity of writing is the test of time. But the test of time is a frustrating and sometimes greatly unfair test, with many trick questions. The frustration derives from the sad fact that, as a writer, one isn't going to be around to see if one has in fact passed the damn thing. The unfairness is that sometimes writing endures for reasons extrinsic to it: Without the rising wave of academic feminism over the past thirty or so years, for example, there is a good chance that Virginia Woolf would probably have remained a minor writer, part of the Bloomsbury story, itself perhaps as much an element in the history of taste as of literature. Who knows, in another fifty or more years, very few people may even have heard of Virginia Woolf, let alone be afraid of her.

The test of time requires that one's writing will not merely be remembered but will continue to be read long after one has departed the planet. The philosopher John Dewey is remembered but--so unappealing is much of his prose--not, I would guess, much read. The tricky questions thrown up by the test of time are: remembered and read by whom? and how? and why? and, of course, for how long? How long must one's writing endure to qualify for a pass on the great test of time? In Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly said that he set out to write a book that he hoped would last ten years. Enemies of Promise did last that long, though today it is remembered, if at all, by a smaller and smaller band of readers with a specialized interest in English belles lettres in the 1930S and 1940s. Yet for how much longer will it be known even by this diminishing and less than hardy band, which every year itself diminishes even further? Cyril Connolly, who wrote elegantly and often amusingly, though scarcely on subjects of central interest, is himself a name of vanishing currency. One assumes that such writers will one day become, like old vintage wines, no longer extant, but known and remembered and talked about exclusively by over-refined connoisseurs.

As someone in the business, I have more than once been asked who writing over the past fifty or so years is likely to be read a hundred years from now. The only name I feel any confidence in putting forward is that of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I had an inkling of this some while ago when a cousin of mine, very bright but not in the least bookish, asked if I had a work of fiction around my apartment she might ...