Spare a thought for the authors who pass from celebrity to oblivion within their own lifetimes
Robert McCrum - The Guardian
Transient impression … footprint in sand. Photograph: Johner/Getty Images
This last week, I've been reading Now All Roads Lead to France, Matthew Hollis's enthralling account of the last years of the poet Edward Thomas. The last years, but not the least: it was only at the end of his tragically short career that Thomas found his true vocation as a poet, rather than an indigent literary hack journalist and Grub Street dweller.
Hollis's book contains several incidental pleasures. First, after a year in which we have been told that publishers no longer bother with literary biography that's not about Dickens or Woolf, it's good to see a scholarly biographical monograph so well published that it's now become one of the favourites for next week's Costa book of the year award.
And secondly, Hollis tells the reader from the very first page about the celebrated, but now forgotten, poets of the age: Wilfrid Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, WH Davies, FS Flint, and John Drinkwater. To hear about the contemporary significance of these lost souls is to experience a particularly thrilling kind of schadenfreude.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson offers an especially interesting memento mori. Easily the most popular poet of his day, DH Lawrence said of him, "I think Gibson is one of the clearest and most loveable personalities I know". To Robert Frost, fresh from New Hampshire, meanwhile, he was "just one of the plain folks with none of the marks of the literary poseur about him - none of the wrongheadedness of the professional literary man".
Gibson went on to publish the most widely read book of (first world) war poetry by a non-combatant, including the very popular "Breakfast", an instant candidate for any new edition of The Stuffed Owl. But in the wake of the war, and with the rise of modernism, his fame quickly faded. Poignantly, Gibson himself was only too conscious of his short lease. In 1934, according to Hollis, he wrote to Frost to say, "I am one of those unlucky writers whose books have predeceased him".
This line, I think, deserves a special prize for candid self-knowledge. It's also provoked me to wonder about other writers (in all genres) who, similarly, outlived their literary success. I suggest that this is not the same category as "one book wonders", but more to do with writers whose work, by the end of their lives, no longer seemed of importance.
My top three:
Arthur Koestler, who cheated by committing suicide.
Alfred Austin, the poet laureate who was a national joke even in his own lifetime.
Barbara Pym, whose career as a novelist was famously revived by Philip Larkin's intervention on her behalf in the TLS.
Hollis's book contains several incidental pleasures. First, after a year in which we have been told that publishers no longer bother with literary biography that's not about Dickens or Woolf, it's good to see a scholarly biographical monograph so well published that it's now become one of the favourites for next week's Costa book of the year award.
And secondly, Hollis tells the reader from the very first page about the celebrated, but now forgotten, poets of the age: Wilfrid Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, WH Davies, FS Flint, and John Drinkwater. To hear about the contemporary significance of these lost souls is to experience a particularly thrilling kind of schadenfreude.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson offers an especially interesting memento mori. Easily the most popular poet of his day, DH Lawrence said of him, "I think Gibson is one of the clearest and most loveable personalities I know". To Robert Frost, fresh from New Hampshire, meanwhile, he was "just one of the plain folks with none of the marks of the literary poseur about him - none of the wrongheadedness of the professional literary man".
Gibson went on to publish the most widely read book of (first world) war poetry by a non-combatant, including the very popular "Breakfast", an instant candidate for any new edition of The Stuffed Owl. But in the wake of the war, and with the rise of modernism, his fame quickly faded. Poignantly, Gibson himself was only too conscious of his short lease. In 1934, according to Hollis, he wrote to Frost to say, "I am one of those unlucky writers whose books have predeceased him".
This line, I think, deserves a special prize for candid self-knowledge. It's also provoked me to wonder about other writers (in all genres) who, similarly, outlived their literary success. I suggest that this is not the same category as "one book wonders", but more to do with writers whose work, by the end of their lives, no longer seemed of importance.
My top three:
Arthur Koestler, who cheated by committing suicide.
Alfred Austin, the poet laureate who was a national joke even in his own lifetime.
Barbara Pym, whose career as a novelist was famously revived by Philip Larkin's intervention on her behalf in the TLS.