Works of Lars Eighner at Lars Eighner's Homepage

Nearly fifty years after Orwell observed the decline of the good bad book, we may say with certainty that the good bad book is dead.

There are many bad books in wire racks at the supermarket, so many bad books that we may be sure—upon the infinite-monkeys-typing-infinitely-long theory—that some small few of them are good, if only accidentally so. Yet these few are not good bad books in the Orwellian sense. Orwell distinguished books which are readable from books that have perished; by "readable" he clearly means also that the books are widely read, as readable books would be before television. Today books which are good in spite of being bad literature cannot be good bad books because they cannot, as books, become pieces of the common culture and because they have no chance, as books, of surviving.

Of the books which have appeared in my lifetime the only candidate good bad books I can think of are the James Bond books. I remember little cults of Asimov and the Dune books, but for ubiquity, nothing touched the Bond series. They were read by every boy I knew who read books for pleasure at all and by some who read nothing else. They were collected and exchanged.

Much about Bond might have aged badly, but we will never know. Once three or four Bond titles became motion pictures the books were heard of no more. Any book which threatens to obtain a large audience must needs come to the same fate so long as motion picture and television producers wish to make money.

Of course escapist reading persists. Publishers do not stock the wire racks in supermarkets out of philanthropy. But reading for escape is practiced where and when television is not available: in bed before sleep, in a public conveyance, under the hair drier, at the office. Since the viewer is exposed to fare that answers the commonest tastes, the reader may be expected to pursue particular interests: romances OR mysteries OR science fiction OR horror OR sword and sorcery OR Westerns OR romans à clef. Again, any work that transcends its genre will soon become a screenplay, whereupon the book will fade.

One might as well protest the precession of the equinoxes as decry the demise of good bad literature, but it is only the art that is dead. Although the canon of good bad literature has hardly expanded since Orwell's day—that Orwell meant for his account to answer only for Britain is proved in that he says he makes an exception to mention an American—many of the good bad authors Orwell cites have remained in print or, at least, are still reprinted from time to time. (To call the writers of good bad books, good bad authors is, in general, correct. When Orwell says the quality varies, he means only that some good bad books are not so good as others, not that the authors sometimes produced literature. In avoiding literature the authors were remarkably consistent and, with few exceptions, prolific.)

Unfortunately, the price of survival in some cases has been elevation to literature. Dickens and Kipling have become literature, at least in America. Naturally any work that becomes required reading is forever lost to good bad literature, and since it is a rule that the author's dullest and most bloodless work be selected as the required title, an educated person will hesitate to disturb voluntarily any other volume by that author. One hardly knows which to pity more: the student who is put off Dickens by being herded through Great Expectations, or the student who comes to believe that "If" is a great poem.

I suspect good bad literature gets elevated to literature because literary people are loathe to admit they are capable of enjoying a work that is free of literary value. They always try at first to deny enjoying a work of good bad literature just as some people deny enjoying or even watching commercial television. When they can no longer deny enjoying it, they discover it has literary merit after all just as apologists have appeared in turn for "Hill Street Blues," "St. Elsewhere," "Thirtysomething,""Northern Exposure," et cetera.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Orwell called "Perhaps the supreme example of the 'good bad' book," is now a history reading; any work containing a pickaninny is too dicey for an English class. Strong propaganda must, if its cause succeed, come to be seen as backwards. At any rate, no one reads Stowe for pleasure anymore.

By far the most recognizable name Orwell associates with good bad literature, from our present vantage, is that of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Indeed when Orwell comes near the topic, he mentions Holmes. Only when a subsequent reference is required does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle come into it.

Holmes has survived many attempts to commit him to literature. At least one edition of Holmes stories has been annotated as if it were scripture and a number of learned papers have attempted to psychoanalyze Holmes—of late his attitude toward women has come under scrutiny. Motion pictures, television, parody, and imitation seem to have done Holmes no harm. Perhaps this is not so remarkable for he had survived even an attempted murder at the hands of his author.

Any writer who enjoys a modicum of success is likely to desire for him- or herself a bit of the affection that comes to the work. In the ordinary course of things this jealousy is Freudian in its subtly. In Doyle's case it was not subtle. Before we reckon this a flaw of Doyle's personality we should have to think of another fictional person who grew to so dominate his author and who did so even as his author lived. That we cannot do, for Holmes is peerless.

No one need wonder what Doyle is without Holmes. Chronicle Books has reissued several of Doyle's lesser known works. Of the two I am privileged to review, Round the Fire Stories presents no problems.

A few of the stories are slight. As is well understood, the literary story needs no plot—many of them can hardly be called anecdotes. But one expects something to happen in the good bad story.

Quite a number of Nineteenth century stories, however, are not quite stories. "The Telltale Heart," for example follows a trajectory that is ballistic in its inevitability; there is nothing that can be called a twist. Checkov's "A Cure for Drinking" is likewise straightforward and barely an anecdote. Many of the Holmes stories are not really the kind of puzzle that Agatha Christi, for one, has made of the detective story—the reader has no chance to match wits with Holmes because Holmes has evidence the reader does not. In several stories Kafka is not Kafkaesque nor even notably odd. O. Henry's plots are not always up to the level of "The Gift of the Magi," although he attempts a plot more often than many of his contemporaries.

The seventeen Round the Fire Stories cannot be brought to account by modern categories. Although Doyle was not born until Poe was ten years dead, many of Doyle's stories, like Poe's, belong to an undifferentiated precursor of today's more specialized genres: detective, mystery, horror, intrigue. For reasons I hope to make clear, it is important to note that two of these stories involve the materialization of spiritual beings, including one ghost.

Doyle has only one narrative voice. But it is a charming voice. Of course since Doyle is a writer we expect he has a facility with language above the norm, but as he must have meant to be understood we know the norm was once higher than it is now. This was a time in which the opposite of "gravity" was "levity" and not "antigravity," and words like "animadvert" and "lucubration" might not send every reader in search of a dictionary.

One gets past the feeling that all of these stories are told by Watson. But if several of the stories are taken at one sitting the narrators run together. Both among the narrators and the other characters we have a number of young, struggling medical men who remind us that a career in medicine has not always implied a great income, and we have several examples of upper-middle-class youth who have fit themselves for life as gentlemen of independent means and who, when their expectations come to nothing, find themselves unfit for any other occupation—this must have been a fairly common situation as the empire began to settle a bit on its foundations.

No one here is in any sense comparable to Holmes, nor is any really distinctive character wanted. For the most part these are supposed to be ordinary people put in odd, decidedly peculiar, or bizarre situations. One can easily imagine these stories were written by someone other than the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and it is altogether desirable to so imagine. It is the shadow of Holmes rather than any defect in these stories that accounts for their obscurity.

Round the Fire Stories is a good bad book.

When the World Screamed and Other Stories is more problematic.

The publisher's title is misleading. Besides "When the World Screamed" the volume contains only one story and the rest is a novel. The subtitle is more accurate; Professor Challenger appears in both of the stories and in the novel.

Challenger is supposed to be a character to rival Holmes and perhaps precisely for this reason he was Doyle's favorite. Challenger is a gentleman scientist of enormous intellect, but we have little evidence of his mental powers. For Holmes we have not only the report of his monograph on cigar ash, but also numerous demonstrations of his deductive powers—at least one tour de force per episode. For Challenger we have only reports of his papers.

In "The Disintegration Machine" Challenger is presented with a Gordian knot and his solution is Alexandrian. All the evidence we see of Challenger's intellect is a slight ruse. This is most unsatisfactory.

There is nothing in Challenger suggestive of the almost Continental darkness in which Holmes broods. Challenger is all too positive, absolutely positive. Challenger is domineering, demanding, stubborn, argumentative, abusive, and unpleasant. That he is slightly less so with his intimates hardly makes him endearing; at his most familiar he is, by our standards, cold and reserved. Challenger is, in a word, English.

Doyle seems well aware that Challenger cannot be swallowed in large doses. Challenger appears suddenly with the violence of a summer storm and, to the relief of the reader, disappears just as quickly. For the most part we are entrusted to a young journalist, who sounds very much like Watson and also like Doyle. The Land of Mist, which is the novel, follows the young journalist's viewpoint, but evidently the novel is told by Doyle in propria persona—an exceptional if not singular manner of proceeding.

I assume that it is a publishing accident—that these three Challenger works happened to fit into one volume—but it is remarkable that each of these works presents a concept entirely familiar to New Agers.

In "When the World Screamed" we are introduced to the thought that the earth may be a living organism. Today this concept is call Gaia, for such is a planet described, if memory serves, by Asimov, which can be thought of as a single organism in the same way that an ant colony can be thought of as a single organism; all of the beings on the planet and indeed of the material of the planet is alive and interconnected. New Agers say this is really the situation on Earth and Gaia is not allegory, but literal fact.

Doyle's vision is not so refined. He means the planet is really alive, but we live upon its outer shell as tiny parasites, the earth as unaware of us as we are of its life. So Challenger proves it to be.

This is, of course, nonsense even by the geology of Doyle's day—as was the premise of The Lost World, a previous Challenger novel which supposes that prehistoric creatures have survived in some isolated area. That Challenger may live in a parallel universe is a possibility to be borne in mind.

In "The Disintegration Machine" we meet the prototype of the Star Ship Enterprise's transporters which in their imperfect state gave us also "The Fly." If "The Disintegration Machine" were a Holmes story the device would be a fraud and after some private cerebration, to be explained later, Holmes would expose it. Anyone who prefers Holmes—I think I have made my sympathies clear—is bound to be disappointed by this story. In Challenger stories, at least in these, everything is as it purports to be.

Channeling, as it is called in the New Age, is the subject of the novel. In Doyle's time it was a Christian sect known as Spiritualism, a sect which remains a living religion barely—I pass a little whitewashed Spiritualist church as I go to the post office. The problem is that The Land of Mist is a perfectly serious piece of Spiritualist propaganda.

I resisted this conclusion as I read the novel. Perhaps the Appendices were an attempt at verisimilitude, like the epistolary form of Dracula. That position can be maintained for one or two or even three chapters. By then it is clear that Doyle is not kidding.

Spirits of course appear throughout literature, both good and bad. Sometimes they are exposed as utter frauds. Other times whether they exist is left an open question—we do not doubt Hamlet and MacBeth see the ghosts, but we may, if we wish, make the case that Hamlet and MacBeth are hardly in objective frames of mind and that other reports are merely rumors among the ignorant. Even when the spirits are supposed to be actual no materialist can object. The spirits are real for the sake of the story. The author may have to convince various skeptical characters. But he does not undertake to convert the reader to Spiritualism.

From the Round the Fire Stories we know that Doyle knows how to present spiritual beings in the conventional manner. There Doyle presents his materializations and the reader may take them or leave them.

But to convert the reader to Spiritualism is precisely what Doyle attempts in The Land of Mist—some passages are as unreadable as any of the polemic orations in Ayn Rand although, mercifully, Doyle is very much briefer.

Evidently in his dotage Doyle desired very much to believe in a life hereafter and to have evidence that there were such a thing. That he found evidence sufficient to convince himself is hardly surprising—he is by no means the first old man to do so.

Doyle needs no further excuse for coming to believe as he did, but it ought to be said that he had survived long enough to see that science had not the power, after all, to bring about a secular millennium. He speaks of ether as if it were fact because he no longer bothers to keep abreast of science. We suspect he, like his character Challenger, was the lukewarm kind of materialist who never could quite accept the implications of materialism and who therefore made a faith of science. He is thoroughly disillusioned with science as anyone must be who tries to make it bear what it cannot.

As Orwell counts Uncle Tom's Cabin the foremost work of good bad literature, The Land of Mist cannot be discounted as a good bad novel solely on the grounds that it is propaganda. We may wonder whether Stowe's novel did not become good bad literature only after its issue was resolved; indeed Orwell has not, to my knowledge, cited any good bad book in English that deals with a controversy still living as he writes. Laying channeling aside, for it is a phenomenon that admits of several explanations other than conscious fraud and does not claim to materialize spirits apart from the body of the medium so far as I know, the issue of The Land of Mist is nearly as dead as slavery.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is bad literature because it is melodramatic. Stowe cannot pass up a chance to manipulate the reader's sentiments. Her plot is ridiculous and her characters are caricatures. But these things, which make bad literature, make excellent propaganda and are also precisely the stuff of good bad books. Stowe, viewed in retrospect—Orwell's vantage and ours—had also a rare combination of advantages: she was right and she was on the prevailing side.

Doyle, on the other hand, seems to want to convince us intellectually. At least two of the psychic researchers he introduces—Camille Flammarion and Charles Richet—were actual persons, alive when the novel was first published. No doubt so were some of the other characters, although too obscure to be recognized today. Given that British libel laws were—as they are—draconian, we may be sure that Doyle proceeded with the imprimatur of orthodox Spiritualism.

The result simply will not work as good bad literature. Manipulation, parlor tricks, the petty frauds of table-turning are anathema to a Spiritualist, who wants above all to be taken seriously. Yet it is only by the literary equivalent of those things that Doyle might have succeeded.

Several episodes are not satisfactorily resolved—-one would very much like to know, for example, what the apparition and the Anglican cleric had to say to each other in the haunted house. Doyle would have told us, sooner or later, if he had known he were writing fiction. Evidently he does not want to get beyond his sources. Spiritualists, we are told, have had unfortunate experiences with the press that have convinced them to confine their claims to what they believe to be fact.

In spite of being sure what Doyle is about, a reader more familiar with Holmes may plow on in the hope that Challenger, materialist as he is in the beginning, will expose the fraud and explain all of the phenomena. That is what Holmes would do and it is no doubt why Doyle has not employed the more popular character to promulgate the ideas he wishes to popularize. But as I have said, in a Challenger tale, all is as it seems. Challenger is converted.

One feels very deeply that the whole proceeding is unfair—-as if one picked up the latest number to discover Superman has become a Roman Catholic. Lex Luthor has given up kryptonite and instead hurls the Problem of Evil at the Man of Steel. It is not a matter of objecting to a discussion of Catholicism or of Spiritualism, nor is it even to claim that some good bad books might not propagandize on such subjects. It is, I think, a failure of predictability.

Orwell goes to lengths in observing the predictability of the boys' weeklies. He seems to think this may be attributed to the sloth of the writers and, possibly, to the propaganda objects of the publishers. Yet I wonder whether predictability is not, after all, something readers desire of good bad writing. Doyle's novel is not what we expect of Doyle. Moreover, if it were a boys' weekly Doyle would have violated a cardinal rule; by converting Challenger he has tampered with a running character.

The Land of Mist is not a good bad novel, but a novel failed altogether. I note that the publisher has equipped the volume, unlike the Round the Fire Stories, with little flaps which, like the flaps of the dust jacket of a hardbound book, are useful as bookmarks. The reader will make use of these for it is difficult to make headway in the book. That it is worth reading as a curiosity—and perhaps comes off better to channelers and Spiritualists—is beside the point. It is not an entertainment and the stories that accompany it in this volume are not sufficient to buoy up the whole.