"Do Poorly Written Bestsellers Ruin Literature?"

Dear Milo,

What’s your opinion on bestsellers that aren’t written well? I mean like Twilight and 50 Shades. Are they making books worse? Are they dumbing down readers?

Sincerely,

Not a Snob, Just Curious

Mansfield, CT

Dear Not a Snob, Just Curious,

Once upon a time, there was an artist named Benjamin Robert Haydon. He was a renowned English painter who, in 1846, was 60 years old and had long lived with some level of impacted eyesight from a childhood illness. He’d worked tirelessly for years in pursuit of “High Art”; studying it, creating it, and advocating for it as superior to other art forms. (In 1835, according to John Woolf, Haydon had delivered a speech on “the ‘degeneracy of taste’ prevailing in England.”)

He was also, in that year of 1846, particularly irritated. He’d booked an exhibition room in the Egyptian Hall of London, intent to showcase his two newest paintings that “reflected the flaws of government.” He sent out 400 invitations for a private viewing. Only 6 people showed up on the first day.

Meanwhile, in the second exhibition room further down the hall, people were running to see Charles Sherwood Stratton, better known as General Tom Thumb, an American with dwarfism who worked under the circus magnate P. T. Barnum. At just 7 years old, Stratton was starring in a play written just for him by Albert Smith called Hop o’My Thumb. It “transported the audience into a world of fairy tales and nursery rhymes,” in which Stratton “memoriz[ed] dialogue in rhyming couplets, learn[ed] several new songs and master[ed] stage directions that saw him outwit an ogre, ride a miniature horse and disappear offstage in a miniature chariot.” When he performed the play the year prior at the Lyceum Theatre in London’s West End, the audience included people such as Charles Dickens,  William Charles Macready, and Sir Edwin Henry Landseer.

Haydon was displeased. There he was with his 6 guests while everyone else was stuffed into Stratton’s room, day after day after day. A person who passed by Haydon’s exhibition room in pursuit of Stratton’s recalled “there was something fierce and bitter in the expression of [Haydon’s] face as he glanced across to the groups hurrying to see Tom Thumb.”

In his diary, Haydon wrote, “They rush by the thousands to see Tom Thumb. They push, they fight, they scream, they faint, they cry help and murder! and oh! and ah! They see my bills, my boards…and don’t read them. Their eyes are open, but their sense is shut. It is an insanity, a rabies, a madness, a furore, a dream. I would not have believed it of the English people.”

Haydon’s situation didn’t improve. When he tallied the numbers one week for a desperate plea in a newspaper advert, Stratton had received 12,000 visitors that week while Haydon had received 133 ½. (The ½ was apparently a little girl.)

The advert did not help—if anything, it promoted mockery of him while further elevating Stratton—and his exhibition left him humiliated and financially limited. One month after he closed his exhibition, he died by suicide.

Now, there’s a lot we could comment on here. Exploitation, exoticization, child labor, lateral ableism, the terribleness that is P. T. Barnum. Also the fact that, clearly, Haydon must’ve had other woes going on in his life beyond Stratton to have such an end. (There are hints that Haydon struggled with mental illness throughout his life.) 

But I’ll just stick to this: After Haydon’s death, England felt pretty bad. After all this time being pro-Stratton and mocking Haydon, the pendulum swung in the other direction. Hard. An outcry of “High Art versus Tom Thumb” began, and many angers and cruelties were expressed. A quote from the press read: “The display of a disgusting dwarf attracted hordes of gaping idiots, who poured into the pockets of a Yankee showman a stream of wealth one tithe of which would have redeemed an honorable English artist from wretchedness and death.”

Suddenly, Haydon was pitied as a suffering genius, the intellect of Stratton’s fans was insulted, and Stratton was trivialized into someone unworthy of his fame. (Sidenote: How about we get into the habit of leaving kids alone? Yeah? No?)

But the thing is, Stratton was as much of a genius and talent as Haydon. At 7 years old, he learned French just to star in Le Petit Poucet, another fairytale play. He was widely praised for his acting abilities and even received membership to France’s acting society. He could play multiple characters. He could fake a Cockney accent. He could do impersonations. He could sing. He was quick-witted with audiences, tossing out puns and jokes. (While it’s debated how often these jokes were scripted, he nonetheless had excellent timing and natural delivery.)

Oh yes, and he started all this at just 4 years old, already displaying “comic ability, musical ingenuity and skilled mimicry.” Woolf concluded, “This was theatre, pure and simple.” After Haydon’s death, England declared Stratton unworthy of his fame. But without a doubt, Stratton was highly talented and worked for every bit of it.

Again, there’s plenty we could comment on here. But all I’ll say is I find it interesting how humanity has a habit of existing in extremes. Mass-appeal media is either hailed or scorned. Purveyors of “High Art” are either the ultimate artists or worth only mockery. The distaste can range from an individual book deemed poorly written to an entire genre of book to the concept of genre fiction at large (as opposed to literary fiction). And every time, the focus seems to land on perceived intelligence, whether the writer’s or the reader’s. (Don’t get me started on the concept of intelligence.)

Who says literary and genre fiction must be at war with each other? Most especially when, looking closer, they’re an essential balance for either to exist.

First, much like Stratton’s incredible intelligence to perform so-called lowbrow art, a book of any sort is a hard thing to do. It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes effort. It’s work, folks. A book takes work. And it’s one of those things that a person won’t truly understand until they’ve gone through the entire process themselves.

It’s easy to miss, that fact. Even the slowest reader reads a book faster than it took the writer to write it. Especially at the rate readers tear through books these days, it can be easy to overlook the amount of work it takes to get those critters into their hands. 

Also, the quality of a book’s writing is subjective. What do we mean when something wasn’t written well? Are we talking about the prose? The plot? The characters? Because even if a bestseller appears to us like the worst book ever written, clearly there’s something about it that people love. Many, many people. While we’re hyper-focusing on a book’s bad qualities, it has plenty of good qualities, too. (Also, spoiler alert: All books have bad qualities to them. No book is perfect. Including any you or I have written.)

In short, publishing a book is impressive, even if it’s not a book you’re personally impressed with. 

Second, any book can fill a need. In fact, that’s why some “poorly written” books jump into stardom. Inaccurate BDSM representation aside, FIFTY SHADES OF GREY was meaningful to older white cishet women. It helped them realize there was more to sex than the vanilla they’d likely gotten their entire lives. That they were worthy of orgasms and being tended to sexually. Likewise, abuse red flags aside, TWILIGHT engaged the same demographic’s desire to feel unconditionally loved. That even if one is deemed average, there’s someone out there that’ll find them special. THE DA VINCI CODE got countless people into books due to its fast-paced plot and bite-sized chapters. Such folks, usually intimidated by the act of reading, particularly appreciated this book because it showed them they were just as smart as anyone else and indeed could read for fun.

Some folks turn their noses up at genre fiction because of (sometimes) their more formulaic qualities. Their predictability, as it were. However, that predictability is sometimes exactly why readers read them; and the readers know it. When they read a crime thriller, they know the crime will be solved. When they read a romance, they know the lovers will end up together. When they read horror, the human will win over the monster. They read so-called predictable books because it’s comforting.

Anybody who lived through the 2016 election knows what that did to reading habits. Suddenly, nobody had the mental capacity for books that were deemed challenging, difficult, or surprising, whether in terms of subject matter or storytelling. Readers were exhausted, but readers also still wanted to read, and so more of them picked up genre fiction. It created a moment where they didn’t have to worry, where they knew that everything would be okay in the end—or, at the very least, exactly like they predicted it’d be. Sometimes escapism is exactly that: escapism. Genre fiction helped people sleep at night. It still does. To the point that there’s now a whole new subgenre of the genres: cozy fiction, which arguably is proclaiming the validity of struggles otherwise often overlooked in literature.

Third, if it weren’t for these “poorly written” bestsellers, publishers wouldn’t have any money left in the till to publish literary works. It’s no secret that so-called highbrow books often don’t sell well. Publishing, however, is a business. Profit has to come from somewhere. Cue the mass-appeal sell. The more money those books make, the longer the publisher can keep the lights on. For every literary fiction book we hold in our hands, there’s a good chance it exists as such because of a bestseller we’ve ridiculed. It’s a fine balance all publishers grapple with: publishing art for art’s sake and publishing art for profit’s sake. Both are art and both are important. They just exist in different ways.

Lastly, the so-called snobbery against certain books can propel such books further into the stratosphere of fame. Just like how Haydon attempted to decry Stratton in the press, all it did was make more people go see Stratton. For every thinkpiece about why a book doesn’t deserve its accolades, for every social media post ridiculing a book or its fans, that’s free publicity. Whether we love it or hate it, we’re all talking about it. And as any publisher knows, no matter how much money you pump into a marketing campaign, nothing is more successful than word of mouth.

Everything is a balance, my friend. In life and in literature. It’s not so much a proclamation of equality—as in, every piece of art should be treated no better or worse than another—but rather a statement of fact that different pieces of art serve different purposes. There’s escapism, there’s enrichment, there’s entertainment, there’s everything in-between, and there’s plenty of overlap amongst them.

Stratton and Haydon could’ve existed side-by-side, fulfilling the needs of audiences in different ways. Their art was not comparable, but rather complementary. However, one party—and later, a country as a whole—decided that this was not the case, that there must be one “better” and one “worse.” There could be only one winner in the game of art. And in that situation, as with many others, neither was. I’d love if we started moving past this mindset. 

Warmly,

Milo