Unconscious but systemic ageism

From Whatever Happened to Graham Greene? by James MacManus.

Over lunch with a colleague in London the other day I mentioned that business managers face a problem summed up by Graham Greene in the title of his book, The Human Factor. I was expounding my view that even the most experienced and intelligent members of staff could make irrational and expensive errors of judgment when I saw her face retreat into a questioning frown.

Who is Graham Greene she said? For a moment I was speechless. Here was a 30 year-old university educated English woman who had never heard of one of most famous novelists of the 20th century. Some days later I reported this episode to an executive in her forties who works in the HR department of a City law firm. She is an intelligent, lively woman with a passion for outdoor sports. To my amazement she shyly admitted that she too had never heard of Graham Greene.

[snip]

For an answer I turned to my friend Erica Wagner, the starry literary editor of The London Times. She told me that Greene may well be entering the no-man's land between currently fashionable writers, be they alive or dead, and the enduring classic authors such as Hemingway, Wodehouse and Dickens. Her view is that this no mans land can swallow a writer and his work and some never re-emerge.

To make her point, Erica told me that she continues to champion the wonderful Canadian novelist Robertson Davies who has dropped beneath the literary radar since he died in 1985. And that gave me a pang of acute embarrassment : I'd never heard of him.

MacManus reinforces a point I make to reading enthusiasts, to little avail, that enthusiastic readers lose perspective on what people know, and just how meager is the consumption of books among the general public, even the educated and informed public.

With these examples, I have read several Robertson Davies books and enjoyed them, even though I am not much of a fiction reader. But I haven't heard anyone mention him in years.

Graham Greene is one of those authors where I have purchased several of their books and even started a few, but never have become engaged with any of them. I suspect that there will come a time in my life where they may become interesting or pertinent, but I haven't encountered it yet.

In the book community, it is almost as if we are so focused on the new and the edgy and the book ever more targeted to a microscopic demographic, that we fail to tend those masterpieces that actually could have broad appeal. Unconscious but systemic ageism, perhaps. More likely just a function of the structure of commerce but still, there seems an opportunity out there somewhere.