John Self

The novels that became instant classics

In the mid-20th century Penguin found a new way to promote outstanding writers such as Waugh, Greene, Orwell and Woolf

• From magazine issue: 15 January 2022

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• The Penguin Modern Classics Book

  Henry Eliot

  Particular Books, pp. 624, £30

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But in other respects, Penguin’s list dragged its heels. After a century of emancipation, during which Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman elected to the Académie Française (Jean d’Ormesson observed that the toilet doors would need to be relabelled ‘Messieurs’ and ‘Marguerite Yourcenar’), the list is still only 20 per cent female. But efforts have been made elsewhere: in 2011, only three writers of colour were published in PMCs; in the last year there were 12.

The story of literature is a human story, and it’s the authors as much as the books that fascinate in Eliot’s commentary. In the connected 20th century we can trace six degrees of separation from, say, Ivy Compton-Burnett to R.K. Narayan. Compton-Burnett was friends with Olivia Manning (about one of whose books she nonetheless said: ‘It really is full of very good descriptions. Quite excellent descriptions. I don’t know if you care for descriptions? I don’t’); Manning had, in Stevie Smith, a mutual friend of George Orwell; Orwell went to Eton with Cyril Connolly, who befriended Graham Greene at Oxford; and Greene was instrumental in getting Narayan published.

There are common themes in writers’ lives: ‘alcohol’ appears almost 50 times, and deaths, where a really good one — Boris Vian ‘died of a heart attack while attending a screening of an unsatisfactory film adaptation of his book I Spit on Your Graves’ — can give a writer’s reputation a little frisson. As this suggests, The Penguin Modern Classics Book is at its most entertaining when filling its sidebars with juicy trivia, such as Maugham calling the Angry Young Men ‘scum’, or the Japanese bizarrist Kobo Abe patenting a new brand of snow chains for car tyres. The cross-references — author to author, movement to movement — give it dynamism, forever suggesting new routes.

And just as writers are always joining the modern canon, so other writers fall away: who now reads Richard Pennington’s Peterley Harvest? But its day may come again, just as Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger, out of print since briefly appearing in PMCs in 2002, will be reissued in the series next year. Perhaps one day David Karp will rise again, as future generations are poring overa later edition of this book and asking: ‘F. Scott who?’