In February 1850, a former sailor named Herman Melville, of New York City, began writing a very strange novel about the sea. When he finished the manuscript, some 18 months later, his British publisher — it came out in the UK first — agreed to a print run of just 500 copies, with the title “The Whale”. The American edition, coming out a month later, was retitled “Moby-Dick”, and had a print run of just under 3,000 copies. Neither the British nor American editions sold out; the novel was a commercial flop. It was a critical failure, too: many critics trashed it. In the last years of Melville’s life, “Moby-Dick” was lucky to sell a few dozen copies a year. He died in 1891 thinking his surreal tale of Captain Ahab and the fearsome white whale was a dismal embarrassment. Indeed, it was not until the 20th century that opinions began to shift — a critical reassessment sometimes called the “Melville revival” — and readers came to see “Moby-Dick” as one of the greatest novels ever written. These days Melville is frequently mentioned on literary lists alongside Dante and Shakespeare.
I love this story with its extraordinary reversal of fortune. It reminds me of an exchange in another novel that has been “rediscovered” since the author’s death — “The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard. In her 1980 novel, an interviewer says to a famous poet: “Our most eminent critic has said that only the literature that changes society will last. I take it you reject that view?”
“As to lasting,” the poet replies, “that is any man’s guess.”
It is extremely difficult to measure greatness in art. What one person considers a masterpiece, another dismisses as worthless garbage. But it is even more of a fool’s errand to try to predict what will last, what is simply so great that it will endure through time like a mountain, immovable as everything else fades away around it. “Moby-Dick” seems eternal now: of course it is brilliant! But if you’d asked Melville’s critics back in 1851 if people would still be reading about Ahab in 173 years — in 2024 — they would have laughed you out of the pub.
Literature is littered with similar examples. “Frankenstein”, “The Sound and the Fury”, even “The Great Gatsby” — none of these novels sold particularly well on release, yet we are still reading them, and probably (hopefully) our great-grandchildren will be reading them as well. Meanwhile, think about how many blockbuster novels once seemed ubiquitous, inescapable, that we now barely discuss at all. When was the last time somebody mentioned Stieg Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”? Millions of copies sold, yet it is hard to imagine it will survive the test
of time.
Tastes change, of course. In 1863, the Paris Salon, an annual show of art sponsored by the French government, rejected work by the likes of Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and James McNeill Whistler. Their impressionist paintings were so radical as to be almost incomprehensible to curators. Some of these rejected entries then appeared in the Salon des Refusés — the “exhibition of rejects” — and visitors literally mocked the paintings on the wall. Today, these same pictures, as priceless treasures, hang in national museums. One of the best is the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Alfred C Barnes, a wealthy chemist, spent years snapping up canvas by Renoir and Cézanne and Matisse for a steal because few others wanted them. When he opened his enormous collection to the public, in 1923, the Philadelphia Inquirer condescendingly dubbed it “America’s $6,000,000 Shrine For All the Craziest ‘Art.’ ” Nobody would dare put “art” in scare quotes now when describing the Barnes Foundation. Barnes himself was a visionary for his taste for the avant-garde — ahead of his time, as the saying goes.
When it comes to movies, the situation is much the same. “Blade Runner”, “Vertigo”, and “Eyes Wide Shut” were snubbed upon release, panned by critics and largely misunderstood by viewers. Now they are considered classics, revered by cinephiles. By contrast, “CODA”, “Green Book”, “Argo”, and “Crash” are watched by few, and loved by even fewer, though they all won Best Picture Oscars sometime in the past
two decades.
One of my favourite cases, right up there with “Moby-Dick”, is the Jimmy Stewart film “It’s a Wonderful Life”. This movie was nominated for a couple of Oscars, but it was considered such a financial wreck in the years after release that the studio didn’t even bother to renew the copyright, so it entered public domain in 1974. Sometimes I like to imagine what the studio executives responsible for that idiotic lapse of judgment would have thought when, in 1990, the Library of Congress added “It’s a Wonderful Life” to the National Film Registry, ensuring the Christmas classic will be preserved indefinitely.
The lesson in all of this, as Shirley Hazzard’s poet said, it that it’s “any man’s guess” what will really last. Financial success and even critical consensus are poor indicators of longevity in art. Still, it is fun to speculate about books and artists and movies, to place tentative bets on the parts of our culture that will be labelled “vital” in 50 or 100 or 200 years. Will Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” attain the status of Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur”, Frodo as legendary as Lancelot? Will people in the future talk about Miles Davis like we talk about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Will any of our contemporary movies ever be mentioned in the same breath as “Casablanca”? Will somebody in the year 2124 walk down a city street humming “All Too Well” by Taylor Swift?
Or is the thing that will endure far from the spotlight, all but invisible to us today — the dusty canvas of an artist currently languishing in obscurity; a low-budget short film buried this week by the merciless algorithm of YouTube?
I find comfort in the idea that the next “Moby-Dick” might already be out there somewhere, maybe published by a small independent press, or maybe even self-published, just waiting for that curious reader to pluck it off the shelf of a second-hand bookstore, to notice the genius hidden within, and to trigger a critical “revival” that will gift the world another Herman Melville.
