For the same reason composers with as much or more popularity than Beethoven in his day are rarely heard of now. Judgements can be made. Some things are palpably better in a given creative form than others. They define, nail, encapsulate its quintessence at its highest. Call it Darwinism if you like, or snobbery, but it palpably is so. A cruel fact (and I don’t for one moment believe I am anywhere other than near the bottom of the food chain).

Why do folk keep pussyfooting around this? It isn’t all relative. That is the death of art in any meaningful sense if people buy that. This is the same drive to excellence, presumably, that makes an editor suggest a writer remove this or that superfluous adjective, or clarify a plot thread or excise a passage that adds nothing to the ongoing momentum of a tale. Once again, I maintain that not *my* consensus, but a common sense consensus can be made about what is a surpassing achievement in a given artistic sphere and what palpably is not.

I think over the years contemporary popularity is the last thing that will dictate whether a book is great and lasting as literature or not. There is every indication that contemporary popularity is a beast with no telling, discerning artistic taste which can be relied upon to stand the test of time at all. You can study the medium and come to an understanding of why something is great, why it has stood the test of time. You don’t have to either sound like or be a comic book Brian Sewell characature to be party to, arrive at that awareness. Cultural relativists denounce hard-worked, hard-earned informed judgement as mere elitist snobbery. That’s where Tall Poppy Syndrome comes in (few nations do it as well as we do). Relativism, while it might appear to be the enemy of it, is in fact its agent.

If my thoughts have convinced me of anything it is not to blog or forum post any more, just to get on and write some fiction. It’s hard enough trying to do that as it is. Thinking out aloud like this adds nothing to the pursuit for me personally, in fact I am finding it diminshes it! Anyway, I shall now proceed to attempt removal of that poker from my behind.

Nick – I do read poetry from time to time, though not as often as others. About one or two books a year – I dip in and out, and find there’s so much else to read, and so little time! Thanks for the reading list – I’ve read some of those, yes. Loved Eliot, though intense, and I’d probably need to re-read again to speak with any use on the subject.

I think it’s always tough to say what will end up being memorable or not, in cultural / art terms. I mean, I dare say that “popularity” is something that dictates who ends up being revered. Dickens et al were all very popular in their own time…

Mark (if you haven’t already done so) read some Keats (1820 collection contains his greatest poems, he died in 1821), some Ted Hughes (Wodwo, Crow), some Seamus Heaney (Field Work, Seeing Things) some Derek Walcott (The Arkansas Testament, Midsummer), some Eliot (The Waste Land, Prufrock, The Four Quartets, Journey of the Magi – this last could effortlessly slot into a trad fantasy novel as a monologue), some Sylivia Plath (Ariel), some Carol Ann Duffy (The World’s Wife) to see beautiful violence performed upon the rules of the English language. It is a liberation for a prose writer. It never surprises me (not saying that includes you, I don’t know whether it does or it doesn’t) not only how few novelists read poetry but how few actually get it.

I have read novel after novel (including lots of genre, I’m reading a couple now) and however neat the ideas may be, the story great even, I cannot remember a single bloody memorable sentence in most of them. Something wrong there. Very often the *way* something is said *is* its meaning. There is almost an editorial fascism (not everywhere, but it seems out there because I read the end product) that dictates: if a line or sentence draws too much attention to itself it must be changed. Because too few of them stick in the mind: a memorable turn of phrase, a vivid simile or metaphor, the cumulative momentum of sentence cadences within a paragraph.

Some writers have great ears, others are tone deaf even if their story is a memorable one in itself. Where the two together exist the art is on another plane, call it high art of you like, but do so at your peril. We have become so culturally relativist and so ashamed of celebrating surpassing excellence. Very often the knee-jerk response is to say: who are you to define what it is? Well I don’t, there is a collective common sense (remember that?) consensus that can be arrived at. To be a master of both those things for example: a memorable tale memorably told (with memorable lines enhancing meaning) raises it a notch above only a memorable tale artistically – that’s common sense, surely? (And let’s not even begin on thematic variation, resonances, foreshadowing etc and mastery of that.) The mere notion of ‘high art’ seems a cause for condemnation and mockery out of the mouth of the person suggesting it. And yet it is great to discover it where it exists.

I expect that within this general atmosphere as a published novelist it might well feel that you can’t improvise with words. Hopefully I will get published one day and then I’ll learn!

Eliot, The Waste Land:

On Margate sands. I can connect
Nothing with nothing…

That full stop has no place where it is. It shouldn’t be where it is. But it is precisely because Eliot is in a state in which he can connect ‘nothing with nothing’ that it should be there. Just like sometimes the only way a sentence can begin is with ‘And’.

C.S. Lewis writes about it being the business of the novelist to put that kind of thought into his or her work, even if it is hidden, because it has a cumulative effect on atmosphere, on the depth of overall meaning. (Ward argues in the brilliant ‘Planet Narnia’ that it is just so in The Chronicles of Narnia, the seeming jamboree bag of each book modelled on the Mediaeval planetary system and the symbolic meaning of each planet infusing the books).

There are frankly a lot of writers out there who haven’t even got a grasp of that concept, let alone execute it. Indeed, WYSIWYG. That’s not enough for me as a reader, never has been. But it is very likely the case, given what is shifting on the shelves, that I am among the minority and my over-wrought prose is destined for the small press, if even that!