The Giants: Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann

During Admiral Kirk and Captain Spock's memorable bus ride in twentieth century San Francisco in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home Spock asks Kirk about the saturation of the speech they hear in this time with "colorful metaphors." Kirk explains to Spock that in contrast with their own time it is the case that unless one swears every other word no one pays any attention to them and points to the literature the era produced, specifically citing the collected works of Jacqueline Susann and the novels of Harold Robbins.

"Ah," Spock remarks, "the giants."

It is a memorable bit of satire, these visitors from a saner, more civilized time less accustomed to profanity simply because in the interstellar version of a Wellsian World State that is the Federation the "struggle for cultured speech" has long since been won, and the unhappy expression of a culture of personal dominance, subordination and abuse that is profanity waned along with said culture (simply put, people don't swear there because the impulse and habit and context that gave rise to swearing passed along with the more material evils associated with them), with all that says about the sorry state of '80s-era America by comparison. It was a reminder, too, that those works which the appointed guardians of culture esteem are not always those which endure as significant, and vice-versa, with the idea that in the twenty-third century people will still be reading Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann adding a further layer to the joke--given how remote these traffickers in soapy tales of the unfolding of the passions and tragedies of "beautiful people" in luxurious surroundings were from critical respectability.

Still, I recently had occasion to check out the evidences of their present readership on Goodreads--and to go by them these authors aren't even read in the twenty-first century, with all that means for the odds of their being so well-remembered in the twenty-third. The Harold Robbins book which has the most ratings here is The Carpetbaggers with under five thousand ratings, and the figures plummeting from there for his other books. Jacqueline Susann's most-rated book is, predictably, The Valley of the Dolls, with 76,000 ratings, after which the ratings plummet almost 90 percent between this and her next book (Once is Not Enough), which has just eight thousand, as the numbers also continue to fall from that not-very-high-for-a-former-megaseller level--and all that even with the benefit of a measure of screen success, and continued interest in the figures who clearly inspired the stories. (The Carpetbaggers, which was inspired by the figure of Howard Hughes, interest in whom seems perennial, was the basis of a film in 1964 that was very popular at the time, while The Valley of the Dolls inspired a commercially successfully film adaptation, and an in its way more successful sequel, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls--which if critically reviled won a cult following with its excesses, all as I would not be surprised if making an obvious stand-in for Phil Spector a significant figure in a way that could seem to prefigure his murder trial has not also boosted the book.) By comparison their contemporary Mario Puzo's The Godfather, which if a more substantial work in many ways, trafficked in the same sort of glamour and sex-filled soap opera so as to make it useful as a point of reference, had 458,000 ratings at last check--about a hundred times the number of ratings for Robbins' most successful book, and six times the number of ratings for Susann's.

Perhaps at some date in the future critics armed with a new perspective on these matters will find significances in the works of Susann and Robbins that have so far eluded their twentieth and twenty-first century counterparts. (It wouldn't be the first time that "trashy" material later became canon--all as one should not forget how much of the canon consists of what, looked at with open eyes, really is trashy entertainment of types not too dissimilar from the tales of Susann and Robbins, tawdry tales of the private doings of the ultra-privileged.) Perhaps the critics will simply remain interested in Susann and Robbins in a cultural history way, as offering a measure of understanding of just what the popular culture of late twentieth century America was like, with what that implies about the society more broadly--as the highly literate Admiral Kirk does while on that bus. And perhaps, as I suspect most imagine, those authors will be forgotten almost entirely by all but the antiquarian in a society done altogether with reading fiction--if, indeed, such a thing as society endures at all in a timeline that so far leaves those of us who would have hoped for a future like that of the United Federation of Planets find ourselves fearing that our world is heading toward a very different sort of twenty-third century.