Better sellers
Benny Green
I find it rather surprising that none of the reviewers of Claude Cockburn's book Bestseller has taken its title seriously enough to expose it as fraudulent. None has mentioned the fundamental absurdity of a book which purports to be based on a nebulous concept like the bestseller, and yet which fails to provide so much as a single statistic, a single publishing history, a single definitive sales figure. None has suggested that such a book is about as useful as an edition of Bradshaw's Railway Guide with the train times left out, and only one reviewer to date, Mr Frank Swinnerton, who probably knows more about the fluctuations on this century's literaryaesthetic stock exchange than any man alive, has said anything about the origins of bestsellers, and mildly remonstrated with Cockburn for propagating the peculiar idea that it all has something to do with Edwardian middle-class decadence. Clearly What has happened is that Cockburn has advertised one book and written a different one altogether, and the fact that this other book is a great pleasure, not to say a Positive self-indulgence, to read, is beside the point at issue, which is that those who come to Cockburn hoping to learn about the reading habits of the British in the last seventy years are likely to be woefully misled.
Cockburn, of course, has not the dimmest notion what constitutes a bestseller. If he had he would have written one years ago, instead of turning out novels like Beat the Devil and Overdraft on Glory, Whose elliptical technical sophistication renders them essentially minority material. However, if Cockburn doesn't know what a bestseller is, he can take comfort in the fact that nobody else does either, least of all the publishers, who have been known to toss an eventual moneymaking manuscript from one to another as though it Were some kind of unexploded bomb. Cockburn won his reputation as a gnat circling the dim political lamps of the 'thirties, although as those lamps had all gone out all over Europe at least twenty Years before, on the unimpeachable authority of that distinguished Liberal electrician Sir Edward Grey, it could not have been a particularly rewarding occupation. It seems, however, to have left him With an awareness of the advantages of selection, for in an excessively specious introduction Cockburn eliminates all American books "because to have included them would have . . . monstrously increased the cost of this book "; all detective stories, thrillers, shockers and suspense novels because "to include them would have produced the equivalent of an urban
. sprawl "; and all books not "taken Lseriously " by their readers, which criterion " decided me to exclude the ' Tarzan ' books '', although why the assumption that
anyone took Tarzan any less " seriously " than they do, say, Cockburn is not explained. A further excluded category, although unacknowledged, is light humour, which presumably explains the absence of Wodehouse, Jacobs and Yates.
But as he clears his ground, we begin to perceive the intent. Cockburn desires, not to discuss bestsellers, but to epater le bourgeois, using as a blunt instrument the cudgel of literary sensibility. This seems commendable enough, but the trouble is that he only epaters some of le bourgeois, giving no reason for his omissions, or even that he is aware there are any. Let us take the title of Cockburn's book a little more seriously than he does himself, making what allowances we can for the fact that as nobody has ever defined a bestseller to the satisfaction of anybody ase, we are dealing with a term whose imprecision excuses a multitude of sins.
In the period from 1900 to the start of the second world war, several books impinged themselves in the general consciousness which were later spoken of in the following terms: Carnival has been published by some eight publishers, and the total sales in Britain and America were over half a million when it went out of print in the second war (Compton Mackenzie).
My publishers risked printing 10,000 copies of The Good Companions . . . towards Christman the daily sale was more than the total advance had been (J. B. Priestley).
After the war Mr Britling Sees It Through sold 100,000 copies in England. (Frank Swinnerton).
It was put into World's Classics . . . Then Hutchinsons, by their marvellous salesmanship, sold enormous numbers. The result is that Nocturne has lost all computation (Frank Swinnerton).
Whether the books mentioned above, or the sales figures attributed to them, constitute bestsellers or not I cannot say, but it seems ridiculous for Cockburn not to mention any of them, nor Magnolia Street, Of Human Bondage, The Four Feathers, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Windyridge, The Loom of Youth and many others which made a pretty pile for their publishers. As for those two darlings of the middlebrows in the 'thirties, A. J. Cronin and James Hilton, The Citadel gets one line, Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr Chips nothing at all.
But even if all these items really did have sales figures diminutive enough for Cockburn to exclude them with a clear conscience, he is still wrong, for two reasons. First, the truly significant statistic is not how many copies are bought, but how many people read those copies. In confusing who bought books with who read them, and assuming that the two are the same, Cockburn is guilty, unwittingly or not, of implying that the lumpen proles were either too drunk or too hungry to use the free libraries. Second, the real measure of a book's pervading influence is not how many people buy it, but how many times they read it. Most of the works Cockburn analyses were perishable goods, hence the definition of a bestseller as a book which once put down, can never be picked up again. It is pointless telling us how many people enjoyed The Constant Nymph or
Sorrell and Son. What matters is how many times they enjoyed them. If a novel is to impose itself, then the first runthrough is a mere overture, and if Cockburn feels like disputing the point he is free to do so, but not with me, who, having read Beat the Devil twice, find myself unable to read Precious Bane or If Winter Comes even once.
But if Bestseller is not about bestsellers, and if its theories collapse in the face of scrutiny, why is it so pleasurable? Why do I reject its findings and yet intend to read it a second time very soon? The answer is that what Cockburn has really written is a wryly affectionate book about all the lousy books he has ever enjoyed. We all have our short list of good-bad books whose literary content we suspect is nil, but which we keep reading. (Mine includes The Prisoner of Zenda and Random Harvest). Masquerading as a social commentator, Cockburn has hauled all the skeletons out of his literary closet and decided to make them dance. But even as the modern sceptic takes the measure of Cockburn's list, let him not feel too superior. Cockburn's first choice is When It Was Dark, a 1903 unintentional joke involving the destruction of Christianity by faking the archaeological evidence. A week before Bestseller was published, two new novels appeared, The Word by Irving Wallace, and Judas by Peter van Greenaway. Both were based on the idea of destroying Christianity by faking the archaeological evidence. It seems that nothing much has changed.
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