'Nothing’s More Corrupting Than Power'

From Nige at Nigeness: “Would any publisher today stick with Ivy Compton-Burnett year after year? Would most of Evelyn Waugh’s and Kingsley Amis’s novels, and a good many of Philip Larkin’s poems, get published by any mainstream publisher today?”

 

The answers are self-evident. What chance would Vladimir Nabokov have getting Lolita published? It was tough enough in the supposedly repressive 1950s when, before an American publisher would touch it, Nabokov resorted to the Paris-based, quasi-pornographic Olympia Press to bring out his “enactment of a moral experience.” Today, pipsqueak Zhdanovs would scuttle it without reading it. Suddenly, it seems, we have entered an era of internalized Comstockianism. Among its perhaps unintended consequences is to make the literature that survives the censors’ gauntlet boring. What is more tiresome than self-righteous earnestness?

 

I’m especially pleased Nige cites Compton-Burnett. Her novels are short, grim and funny enough to serve as the ginger between heartier courses. I reread them on impulse, the way the guilty inhale Häagen-Dazs. Compton-Burnett shares with Henry James a concern with the way humans dedicate their lives to controlling other humans. It’s a primal characteristic of our species, and Compton-Burnett reenacts its dynamics in the family setting in novel after novel. In a 1960 interview with John Bowen, she says:

 

“I think there was a tendency for parents to misuse power, and I think there’s a tendency for power to be misused. Nothing’s more corrupting than power. Very few people stand it, I think.”

 

Another casualty of the Dullness Police taking over is the banishment of humor. Who would publish Thomas Berger’s greatest novel, Little Big Man, guilty as it is of cultural appropriation? Or his Carlos Rinehart tetralogy? Or Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution? Nige writes:

 

“[W]herever genuinely funny writing is happening now, it is not often in book form, or even print; increasingly it is being driven to the fringes of the online world. Real comedy, being more than most forms ‘liable to offend’, is not likely to find a place in today’s po-faced, narrowly restrictive publishing world; nor is fiction that does not conform to the political and emotional correctness that is now de rigueur.”