egg and I .... winning the heart

1946, Betty McDonald’s whimsical autobiography was as popular as baked beans; now it’s almost completely forgotten, but, tellingly, still in print. Alas, after an hour or two with The Egg & I, it was excruciatingly obvious that Betty McDonald’s book is not a classic. On some weeks, there might be as many as five competing challenges for each nonfiction slot, but rarely as straightforward as this.

Literary classics cluster on the north face of Parnassus. For this vertiginous terrain there are different sherpas. Italo Calvino says that a classic is “a book that has never finished what it wants to say”. Ezra Pound identifies “a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness”; TS Eliot, much more astringent, observed in The Sacred Wood that “no modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense I have called Virgil a classic”. Alan Bennett wryly notes: “Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.”

Among nonfiction classics, the most treacherous category is that creature beloved of publishers – “the contemporary classic”. A second cousin to that notorious impostor is the “instant classic”. Such books will have been judged by slippery criteria: popular and literary critical fashion, a changing marketplace and new technology, bestseller lists and hype. In the past 100 years, a familiar palette of blurbish adjectives has given shape and colour to a moving target: provocative, outrageous, prophetic, groundbreaking, funny, disturbing, revolutionary, moving, inspiring, life-changing, subversive…

a portrait of sir walter raleigh wearing a brocaded and beaded doublet
The 100 best nonfiction books: No 99 – The History of the World by Walter Raleigh (1614)
Read more
This list raises another troubling question: is nonfiction “the new fiction”? There are some good writers who will argue that this is so, but I believe that nonfiction (which can sometimes successfully bring together many genres) is not, strictly speaking, a genre of its own. Creatively – yes – using narrative techniques borrowed from fiction, it’s possible to give certain kinds of nonfiction the aura of a distinct new genre. Yet, at the end of the day, “nonfiction” fractures into time-hallowed categories such as philosophy, memoir, history, reportage and poetry (see below), etc. This is particularly true of “nonfiction classics” from the 18th and 19th centuries, titles such as A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume or On Liberty by JS Mill. By that yardstick, a recent classic will be quite distinct, chiefly because its literary and cultural milieu is so different