“Prithee sir, tell me it cannot be!” shout the reactionaries, casting themselves gracefully onto their chaises-longue and raising silk hankies with trembling hands to mop their brows. And yet it is so.
They have many arguments against this inclusion, specifically regarding the rather nebulous definition of the word classic. "Classics don't just cross time, they cross frontiers … Fever Pitch is a very good novel…but are they reading it in Paris, Berlin, Moscow?" asks John Sutherland, professor of English literature at UCL. Well probably, yes. Fever pitch has been published in 26 languages, and I can’t imagine the publishers wasting their money doing this if no-one were reading it. It has sold millions of copies, and been made into an internationally acclaimed feature film.
Boo sucks Mr Sutherland.
Their next quibble, which at first glance seems to be quite valid, is that a book which was published only twenty years ago cannot, by its very nature, be a classic. This theory was beautifully expressed by Dr Patrick Hayes, fellow and tutor at St John’s college, Oxford. "Whether something is a classic gets judged over an awfully long time, by readers who return to the work again and again and repeatedly discover in that work something compelling or powerful."
Personally I think my mother might take issue with this theory. She is an avid reader of many genres, including the “classics”, yet I have never, ever known her to re-open a book once she has finished with it. Over! Done! Whether she enjoyed it or not, off to the charity shop it goes. She hasn’t got a photographic memory, far from it; often she will have trouble remembering whether she has read a certain book at all. She simply has no desire to re-read a book when there are so many others out there waiting to be discovered. So, does this mean a classic is a book read many times by a certain type of person?
Regarding the actual date of publication I can see his point; is it fair to include such a recent book in a list, even of Modern Classics, which includes 1984 and Ulysses? But wait, what’s this? The Scent of Dried Roses, by Tim Lott, was published in 1996, and yet it has been on the Penguin Modern Classics list for years. Did we hear any outcry at the time? We did not. Suddenly that neatly crafted little argument begins to sound rather specious.
Could it be that a novel dealing with family trauma, depression and suicide in post-war Britain is deemed worthy to be named a classic, but a novel about – heavens preserve us – football – is not?
Do you know, I think that might just be it. When one considers the people doing most of the squealing, one can understand that this might just not be their sort of book. Far be it from me to generalise, but English professors and fellows are not conspicuous in the stands at matches, pie in one hand, pint in the other, team colours flying with gay abandon.
The popularity of Fever Pitch and the inclusion of football in the Olympics may lead you to believe that football is now classless. Not a bit of it. In the eighties the Times summed it up as “a slum sport for slum people”, and despite appearances, attitudes have not entirely changed. Pretty it up how you will, football is never going to join rowing, cricket and rugby on the “must do on a Saturday” list of the upper middles. Watching David Cameron’s awkward Chelsea victory celebratory “dance” was up there with listening to Gordon Brown eulogising about the Arctic Monkeys for sheer YEURCH factor. Fakery and fabrication.
One has to wonder; if this had been a novel about show-jumping – think Salman Rushdie meets Jilly Cooper – would there have been the same level of outrage?
Fever Pitch was about much more than football. It was about the preoccupations and lives of a certain type of man at that time, it was about the ethos of a generation. The culture of a country is not merely shaped by art, literature and music as some would have us believe. It is made up of many, many things: food, jobs, consumer durables, industries, leisure pursuits. When you study the finds from an archaeological dig and try to learn the culture behind them, what is it you’re looking at? Pots, hair accessories, oyster shells. Trivialities, you may say. But they speak volumes.
In these days of the coalition governance, much is being made of snobbery and elitism. But it does not always have to refer to lineage or wealth. In my experience, nothing exceeds the dismissive arrogance of the over-educated cultural “elite”, and I truly admire Penguin for sticking to their guns on this one.
Like it or not, football is a huge part of our cultural heritage, and, I suspect, our future. Football, or a version of, has been played for hundreds of years and it doesn’t look to be losing its popularity anytime soon. Penguin Modern Classics:1 – Mr Lott and Mr Hayes – 0.
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