fbpx

We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them

A surveyor ready to explore the wilds of southern California, circa 1890.

Apoorva Tadepalli published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times recently, titled “We Need to Read the Forgotten Geniuses, Not Rescue Them.” As anyone who’s familiar with this site can imagine, this was an article I read with interest. For over forty years, I’ve been fascinated with looking for forgotten writers and reading their books, a fascination that I’ve used this site since 2006 to share, a fascination that led in 2021 to the creation of the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press and my own rescue of a few of my discoveries. So I was eager to learn what Tadepalli had to say and agreed enthusiastically with some of it. But I hope she will allow me the right to quote some of her points and offer my thoughts in response.

“Critics,” she writes, “play a role in determining which books published today should be branded ‘instant classics,’ which authors are best described as ‘little-known’ and which books published in past decades or centuries merit re-examination.”

Ah, if it were this simple. The role of critics in the publishing process is almost entirely post-natal. When a book is first published, critics can influence its sales and its reception by the reading public by what they say in reviews, but few publishers consult any critic when deciding to reissue a book that’s been out of print — and in most cases, consequently out of any critical conversation — for some time. What a reissue publisher, at least any not exclusively targeting an academic audience and sales to university libraries, considers are three questions foremost: Is the book good (meaning of sufficient merit to justify being associated with the imprint)? Is the book in the public domain or are the rights attainable for a reasonable price? Will enough readers buy the book to recoup costs and, with some luck, earn a profit?

The first question — merit — is in the critic’s territory only to the extent that the football is in the territory of a fan watching the game. Except in this case, the stands are deserted, aside perhaps from a lone die-hard or two. We owe the rediscovery of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, for example, to the fact that Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler, two of the more prominent critics of the time, both named the book as one of “The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years” when queried by The American Scholar magazine. Their enthusiasm for Roth’s novel, along with Irving Howe’s (another influential critic) convinced Avon Books to reissue the book — accompanied by a remarkable amount of advertising, for a paperback edition of a forgotten book, in places like The Saturday Review of Literature.

In the same American Scholar article, however, Morris Bishop, who brought Vladimir Nabokov to Cornell and whose credentials as both critic and scholar are equal to anyone else’s in his generation, recommended Geoffrey Dennis’ The End of the World, a survey of postulations about how the world would end that won the 1930 Hawthornden Prize as the best work of “imaginative literature” published in the U.K. Geoffrey Dennis wrote nine books between 1922 and 1957, all of them getting favorable reviews and none quite like the others in subject, genre, or style. But Morris Bishop’s recommendation did nothing to change Geoffrey Dennis’ fate. All but his as-yet unpublished last book, Till Seven, were out of print in 1956; almost 70 years later, all his books, including Till Seven, are out of print now, and I doubt any working critic on either side of the Atlantic knows his name, let alone the merit of his books. (I have four of his books, by the way, and I would say they’re all intriguing but not immediately gripping, which is why I haven’t made it past page 20 in any of them.)

The second question — availability of rights — is of no interest whatsoever to the critic. If a book he or she loves remains out of print due to difficulties in obtaining the necessary permissions, it may frustrate them but it probably won’t inspire them to set off on the hunt. Unfortunately, for a publisher interested in staying out of civil court, it’s a crucial consideration. Even in the U.K., which has the advantage of a national database of wills, it can be practically impossible to track down who has inherited the copyrights from a dead author. The database, for one thing, is incomplete. There are millions of wills missing. There are plenty of writers who failed recognize their copyrights as inheritable assets and didn’t bother to mention them in the will. And there are plenty of writers who simply didn’t bother to have a will drawn up in the first place. Every publisher involved in the reissue business can name a dozen or more writers they’d love to publish, if only they could find legatees empowered to sign the necessary contracts.

So, we come to the last question: Will enough readers buy the book? This is always a bit of a gamble. Some publishers who specialize in reissuing forgotten books — Persephone, for example — rely heavily on brand loyalty, on a body of readers who will buy a new title out of a base of positive experience with previous books. People scan lists of forthcoming titles from NYRB Classics because they’ve come to trust that their books are going to be well-written, of original style and subject, and well-packaged. Readers operate to a great extent on what statisticians call persistence. If I’ve read three Agatha Christie novels and enjoyed them, I am much more likely to continue buying Agatha Christie novels. Publishers know this and play to it in their choice of books and their presentation of them. Harper Collins uses design templates to make sure that one Poirot novel looks like another. Harlequin Romances and their ilk are the extreme examples of publishing for persistence. I remember once overhearing a conversation between two Harlequin fans in a bookstore (“Oh, 47! I’ve been looking for this!” “You’d like 63, then, or 94”).

But how does a publisher get a reader who knows nothing about the book, the writer, or the publisher’s reputation to look at, let alone buy it? If the publisher has a respectable checking account, they can flood critics, bloggers, BookTok influencers, magazines, and stores with copies and marketing materials to try to win precious review column inches or display table space or staff guinea pig readers. If the publisher is just getting by — which is most of them — then it comes down to developing a reputation, word-of-mouth enthusiasm, and luck.

To summarize, reading forgotten books, and even writing and talking about them, does almost nothing to get anyone else to read them. Just look at this site. Of the hundreds of books I’ve featured here, most are still out of print and forgotten. Once in a while someone reads a piece here that inspires them to go out and find a used copy and read it, and sometimes they even contact me to let me know. But, I am sorry to inform Tadepalli, it’s not enough to read forgotten geniuses. They truly do have to be rescued. And that is the role of the publisher.

She also argues that the literary world overuses “unjustly neglected” as way of trying to justify why a writer’s work is being brought back to print, or worse, of trying to shame critics and readers into paying attention. Which is an absolutely fair criticism. Too often, this comes with a mantle of victimhood. The writer was neglected due to a prevailing prejudice or even some conscious or unconscious conspiracy to slight his or her work and preserve the prestige and sales of established favorites. This is often a simplistic and unhelpful interpretation, however, because it ignores practical factors that often play an even more important role in whether a writer stays in print or falls into oblivion. Herbert Clyde Lewis published a remarkable anti-war fable, Spring Offensive, set in the no-man’s land between France and Germany during the “Phony War.” It hit the bookstores on Monday, May 6, 1940. On Thursday, May 9, 1940, Germany invaded France, ending the Phony War and eliminating most Americans’ interest in anti-war fables. Hitler certainly wasn’t concerned about Herbie Lewis’ little book. It was just a matter of bad timing.

But Tadepalli is looking at the situation through the wrong end of the telescope. The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between.

If people today are going to read a book that lies in the dark, overgrown thickets on either side of the path of the canon, someone has to pick up a machete and start exploring. That exploration is not guaranteed to be fruitful. Just like scientific experimentation, reading a long out of print book, even one that got rave reviews when it came out, isn’t necessarily going to result in another “unjustly neglected” masterpiece worthy of being read today. But without the search, nothing that isn’t already familiar will ever be found.

I have been searching for neglected books for over forty years and the one thing I can say with unshakeable confidence is that there are more great (and even just seriously good) books out there in the thickets off the beaten path of the canon than I or anyone else can ever hope to discover. Because that is the fate of most books and writers: to be forgotten — regardless of their merit or whether they “resonate” with today’s readers. “Unjustly neglected” is not an overused trope of academia and the publishing world: it’s the lot of many, many more writers than all of today’s reissue publishers will ever be able to bring back to print, more than all of today’s readers will ever be able to appreciate.

But that doesn’t mean those books don’t exist or don’t matter or don’t have connections to the canon or don’t illuminate some aspect of our lives. Their writers just weren’t lucky enough to make the journey from being new and unknown to being securely established in the canon seamlessly in the way that Charles Dickens or T. S. Eliot or Doris Lessing did. This is the problem with the canon: it’s short-sighted, erratic, and unreliable. As Tadepalli notes, even Moby Dick, which some would call the greatest American novel, was out of print and forgotten for decades until it was recognized as “unjustly neglected” and rescued by Lewis Mumford, and published as #119 in the Modern Library series.

It’s true that the books and writers that make it into the canon and stay are, generally, good and relevant. But the corollary to this principle is not: what’s neglected is not necessarily justly neglected. Which leaves us with label “unjustly neglected” to apply to the works that we pull from the vast territory of forgotten book and bring back into today’s conversation. If it seems to be overused, that’s only because some folks fail to recognize that there’s more good literature that’s forgotten than not. “To only consume art that was created in our lifetimes is a terrifying thought,” Tadepalli writes. I would say that the same is true if we only consume art that is considered to be in the canon. But many readers won’t go looking beyond what’s familiar (hell, many men still don’t bother to read anything written by women), which is why we need searchers and reporters to find what’s been forgotten and reissue publishers to bring it back into the realm of the familiar.

Philip Roth and the “Writers from the Other Europe” Series

Covers from the Writers from the Other Europe series

In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writing experience.” In preparation, he read as much as he could find of the work of contemporary Czech writers. He met and became friends with several writers, which led him to look for works in English translation by novelists working throughout Eastern Europe — still behind the Iron Curtain — since the end of World War Two.

from this, he was able to interest Penguin Books in starting a series of reprints called “Writers from the Other Europe,” for which he served as general editor. Between 1976 and 1983, the series published a total of 17 books, starting with Kundera’s Laughable Loves and Ludvík Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs. As Roth wrote,

The purpose of this paperback series is to bring together outstanding and influential works of fiction by Eastern European writers. In many instances they will be writers who, though recognized as powerful forces within their own cultures, are virtually unknown in America. It is hoped that by reprinting selected Eastern European writers in this format and with introductions that place each work in its literary and historical context, the literature that has evolved in “the other Europe” during the postwar decades will be made more accessible to an interested American readership.

Roth’s reputation and significant network of contacts enabled him to get an impressive range of authors to write introductions. Contributors included Carlos Fuentes, Irving Howe, Joseph Brodsky, Heinrich Boll, Angela Carter, Czesław Miłosz, Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Kott, John Updike, Josef Škvorecký.

Advertisement for the Writers from the Other Europe
Penguin ad announcing the “Writers from the Other Europe” series.

In most cases, the books had already been published in English translations, usually by academic presses. Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, for example, had been published in Michael Kandel’s translation by Walker and Company in 1963; Konwicki’s Dreambook was published by the MIT Press in 1969; neither attracting any real notice.

Among other things, the effort led to the discovery of the work of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz after the publication in 1977 of his two books, The Street of Crocodiles and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. When Roth learned that Isaac Bashevis Singer had been one of the few to review The Street of Crocodiles when it was originally published in 1963, he contacted Singer and the two men had a long conversation about Schulz that was later reprinted in the New York Times. Singer confessed to Roth,

The more I read Schulz — maybe I shouldn’t say it — but some of the stories, when I read him, I said he’s better than Kafka. There is greater strength in some of his stories. Also he’s very strong in the absurd — though not in a silly way, but in a clever way. I would say that between Schulz and Kafka there is something that Goethe calls Wahlverwandtschaft, an affinity of souls which you have chosen for yourself.

Cynthia Ozick, who went on to write a novel (The Messiah of Stockholm) based on the rumor that Schulz, who was killed in the Holocaust, had been survived by a son who himself became a writer. Ozick called Schulz one of “the most original imaginations in modern Europe’; John Updike, who wrote the introduction to The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, rated Schulz as “one of the great writers, one the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” Jerzy Kosinski initiated an annual literary prize in Schulz’s name, to be awarded by a PEN American Center jury to a writer considered “insufficiently known.”

Covers from the Writers from the Other Europe series

Long after the series ended, its reputation lived on. In 1993, Herbert Mitgang called it “indispensable.” In their New York Times “By the Book” interviews, both William Vollmann and Nicole Krauss mentioned it. Vollmann singled out Konwicki’s A Dreambook for Our Time as an “underappreciated masterpiece,” “one of the many treasures from the late, lamented” series. Krauss said, “I’m a sucker for that entire ‘Writers from the Other Europe’ series that Penguin and Philip Roth published in the ’70s and ’80s.”

Even better, virtually all of the books are still in print nearly 40 years later — in a few cases, from Penguin itself.

The 17 titles in the “Writers from the Other Europe” series are:

  • The Guinea Pigs, by Ludvík Vaculík
  • Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz
  • The Joke, by Milan Kundera
  • The Farewell Party, by Milan Kundera
  • The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera
  • Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera
  • The City Builder, by George Konrád
  • The Case Worker, by George Konrád
  • The Polish Complex, by Tadeusz Konwicki
  • A Dreambook for Our Time, by Tadeusz Konwicki
  • A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kiš
  • Ashes and Diamonds, by Jerzy Andrzewjewski
  • Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal
  • This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski
  • Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, by Bruno Schulz
  • The Street of the Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz
  • Opium and Other Stories, by Géza Csáth

The 1970s: When Lit Went SF (and Vice Versa)

Cover of the paperback original of The Godwhale

A tweet about T. J. Bass’s wildly ambitious and imaginative Nebula Award-winning novel The Godwhale (1974) triggered a short discussion of favorite novels from the 1970s. I was struck by how many of them were — well, if not science fiction, then at least strongly influenced by SF. I started buying books — almost always cheap used pocket paperbacks — for myself around 1973, and as I began to recall those purchases, I realized that my own favorites were novels that sat on the border between SF and literary fiction.

Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick pioneered this territory in the 1960s, writing books we now recognize as key works of 20th Century literature without any suggestion that they’re somehow lessened through their origin as Ace, Daw, Dell, and Panther paperbacks deliberately packaged to turn off non-SF readers. When Collier released its paperback edition of Italo Calvino’s SF fables Cosmicomics in 1970, the publisher just as deliberately Doris Lessing gave it imprimatur of legitimacy with her dystopian novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), then returned to give it a gargantuan world-building embrace with her five-volume Canopus in Argos starting with Shikasta in 1979. (I’m pretty sure I have all five volumes of the Knopf hardbacks somewhere in storage: they quickly became fixtures of remainder tables. Literary appetites were not quite ready to follow Lessing to such lengths.)

Writers who ventured into this territory faced considerable obstacles. SF writers struggled to be taken seriously by critics and readers of mainstream fiction. Straight fiction writers risked being marked forever with the stigmata of the space opera. When one of the toughest of straight fiction writers, Harry Crews, opened William Hjortsberg’s second novel, Gray Matters in 1971 and read the first sentence, he later recalled, “My heart sank. I thought, ‘My God, he’s committed science fiction.'” Crews was willing, at least to state his objections:

Without going into too much detail, I think honor demands that I admit my prejudice against and contempt for most of what is called science fiction. Here is the formula — and therefore much of the reason for my contempt — for successful SciFi: it must have an anonymous ruling force; dehumanized people; totalitarian one?world drive to power; violence of mindnumbing dimensions ( people who have no stomach for the violence of their own everyday lives seem to read the violence of the future as morally instructive); and nuclear warfare.

“Every one of these elements of the SciFi formula are in Hjortsberg’s novel,” Crews acknowledged, the result, in his opinion, was simply “an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.”

Here is a survey of 25 novels from the 1970s that looked beyond the labels that booksellers and librarians crave and forced their readers to wonder if they’d stumbled in the wrong section. It’s not a comprehensive list by any means (omitting the significant arrival of feminism to SF that took place at the same time), but I hope it suggests that there are plenty of reasons not to write off the 1970s as just the decade of polyester shirts and leisure suits.

A Very Private Life (US paperback)

A Very Private Life, by Michael Frayn (1968)

I’m stretching the envelope of “the 1970s” to include this gentle fable. Frayn makes his leap into the future with his usual elegance of phrase: “Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber,” the book begins. He depicts a world where almost everyone is controlled through drugs and isolation has become a prevailing mode of existence. Among other things, its spare prose and pared-back descriptions offer a marked contrast with the next four titles.

 

Barefootin the Head cover

Barefoot in the Head, by Brian Aldiss (1969)

Perhaps the wildest, druggiest, and word-drunk-est of the orgy of SF novels written by Brits in the midst of the psychedelic era, in Barefoot in the Head Aldiss tosses LSD, James Joyce, fascism, and the Christ myth into the blender and comes up with a perfect cult classic concoction: unreadable to many, a nectar of the gods to a few. Reissued as a Faber Find.

 

The Big Win paperback cover

The Big Win, by Jimmy Miller (1969)

Jimmy Miller was Jane Miller, known to everyone as Jimmy, and the widow of novelist Warren Miller. This first novel was published by Knopf, which was not known for its SF work at the time. Set in the future — i.e., 2004 — it depicts a world devastated by a combination of a Chinese virus (hmm …) and a nuclear war started by the French. New York City has become the refuge of the Richies, who play a human-hunting game with the Poories. The Big Win makes a Poory a Richy. The Big Lose, as you can imagine, is terminal. It’s a bit of a mess but a crazy sort of fun featuring, as Raymond Sokolov put it in his New York Times review, “plenty of unquotable and impressive lubricity.”

 

Bug Jack Barron cover

Bug Jack Barron , by Norman Spinrad (1969)

Along with Aldiss, Moorcock, and other veterans of New Worlds, Spinrad, an American, helped bring SF into the age of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In this novel about a talk show host (Barron) stumbling into a massive conspiracy about the means of ensuring immortality, Spinrad also introduced techniques from experimental fiction, such as cut-up (viz. Burroughs, Gysin). Not everyone liked the results. Joanna Russ felt the author had taken on so much in terms of style and content that he ended up being smothered by it.

 

The Final Programme cover

The Final Programme, by Michael Moorcock (1969)

The first in Moorcock’s four novels starring his anarchic, transmutating, polymorphically gendered superman, Jerry Cornelius. Word of mouth at the time I became aware of them in the mid-1970s was that Cornelius was sort of a drug-taking hipster James Bond, but I now suspect that everyone who said that was going off the covers, not the contents. Some of the books’ sexism has not aged well, but Moorcock’s embrace of body transformations and gender fluidity may resonate better with today’s readers than it did with his largely male audience when the novels first came out.

 

Inter Ice Age 4

Inter Ice Age 4, by Kobo Abe (1970)

Abe was ahead of trend: he actually wrote this as a serial back in 1958-59. However, it was only published in English in 1970, which is why I’m including it. I turned to it somewhere in late high school after giving up on A Woman in the Dunes as just too abstract for my taste at the time. Inter Ice Age 4 should be a highly relevant book for our time, as it’s set in a world soon to be inundated by the melting of the polar ice caps. But there’s also a murder mystery, conspiracies, malevolent government and business entities, and heavy doses of biology (Abe trained as a physician). I got through it only vaguely understanding what I was reading, but I suspect now that it can hold its own alongside some of the early works of Stanislaw Lem (another writer who trained as a doctor but chose not to practice).

 

Armed Camps by Kit Reed

Armed Camps, by Kit Reed (1970)

Another vision of a dystopic America, this time told by parallel narrators: Lt Col Danny March, a war-weary veteran (“I’ll tell you something about making dead guys…. You do it often enough and you’ll get used to it.”) and Anne, a woman on the run who finds her way to a pacifist commune called Calabria, isolated deep in a National Forest. Reed referred to it as her Why Are We in Vietnam?: “We were Americans, ergo we must be brash, insensitive, militaristic types. Never mind that Apollo 11 was heading for the Moon, Teddy Kennedy had just walked away from a fatal wreck in Chappaquiddick, leaving behind a drowned girl; less than a month later the Sharon Tate murders would confirm what many would not say but secretly suspected: that Americans were a crude, savage lot.” Though Reed had published some more conventional SF stories, Armed Camps cries out to be seen as serious fiction and not somehow diminished as a work of genre.

 

Going Nowhere paperback cover

Going Nowhere, by Alvin Greenberg (1971)

There were plenty of novels written about young men running away — from the draft, from the farm, from the Establishment — in the early 1970s. But unlike most of them, Going Nowhere is far more timeless than of its time. Partly this is due to Greenberg’s approach to fiction, which always uses the most concrete details (one of his stories is about a man discovering just how far he can allow his foot to rot before it becomes inedible) to anchor the most abstract conceptions. In this case, it’s also due to the conception at the heart of the story: Unteleology, the philosophy of fundamental purposelessness that one of its characters develops. SF skeptic Harry Crews admitted in his New York Times review that Going Nowhere was the first novel with a spaceship in it he’d been able to finish since he was 10: “Any writer who will begin a novel of only 143 pages with a 400?word sentence, which sentence itself be gins with ‘Once upon a time,’ can’t be all bad. For one thing, you know he’s not playing it safe. He’s a man you can count on to take a chance.” “Alvin Greenberg,” Crews wrote, “is such a man.”

Greenberg, who died in 2015, is one of America’s most neglected metafictionists. One of his early short stories, published in Best SF 1970 (edited by Aldiss and Harry Harrison), was titled “‘Franz Kafka’ by Jorge Luís Borges by Alvin Greenberg.” He would go on to write stories such as “The Beast in the Jungle vs. A Sense of the Comic,” “Not a Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer,” and “The Mind of Emile Zola.” His work — four novels, short story collections, and poetry — is consistently theoretical yet worldly, extreme yet specific, tragic while remaining comic, and always accompanied by a genial narrative voice. You don’t always know where you’ll be going with Greenberg, but you’ll be in good company.

 

Gray Matters paperback

Gray Matters, by William Hjortsberg (1971)

This is the novel that had Harry Crews reaching for his gun when he suspected Hjortsberg of fomenting SF. And of course, it is SF if we accept that fiction set in the future that involves some extrapolation of existing scientific, cultural, and/or political developments (or degradations) as SF. I think we can all accept that SF does not always equal space opera, and in this case, there is neither space nor opera. Gray Matters is the great brains-in-jars novel. Humans exist as the merest essential vessel to keep a brain functioning. Everything else is accomplished through thought: communication, commerce, and even sex. Gray Matters also has the merit of brevity: no reader of Hjortsberg even set down one of his books because it was too long.

 

Cover of Love in the Ruins US paperback

Love in the Ruins, by Walker Percy (1971)

Subtitled The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, Love in the Ruins, envisions an America where all differences in race, religion, class, etc. have grown to their extremes (kind of like today). A lapsed Catholic scientist develops a machine to detect early signs of mental and spiritual degradation in hopes of bringing people to heal themselves. Instead, it becomes an object of great interest to the government, and soon the inventor finds himself on the run through the crumbling remnants of the United States, accompanied by Moira and her beloved pocket edition of the poems of Rod McKuen, “a minor poet of the old Auto Age.”

 

Cover of US paperback of 334

334, by Thomas M. Disch (1972)

Not really a novel but a collection of five novellas about the inhabitants of 334 East 11th Street, a housing project in Manhattan, during the second Roman Empire, which is just a few years after 1972. Samuel R. Delany was so impressed with one of the novella, “Angouleme,” that he wrote a book-length study of it titled The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction. In it, Delany argued, among other things, that 334 was SF not because of any explicit scientific content but by virtue of its imaginative breadth.

 

Cover of UK paperback of A Sweet Sweet Summer

A Sweet Sweet Summer, by Jane Gaskell (1972)

Set in a Britain cut off from the rest of the world (Brexit foreshadowing, anyone?) and controlled by alien spaceships that hover in the sky, A Sweet Sweet Summer is East Enders dialed up to 11 and projected into the future. The aliens encourage all the fringe factions — fascists, Communists, racists, and even Scientologists — to incite violence and create chaos. “Shooting, pimping, knifing, beating to death, whether of strangers, life-long buddies, close relations, evan cannibalism, these are merely the pattern of life,” as the TLS reviewer summarized it. All narrated by Pelham, whom one Amazon reader described as “possibly the most repellent protagonist I have ever read.”

 

Saw by Steve Katz

Saw, by Steve Katz (1972)

Saw was one of a short-lived series of largely experimental novels published by Knopf around this time. They were all printed in a rare — for Knopf, at least — glossy hardcovers without dust jackets, and on the rare occasions you stumble across them these days, they’re in surprisingly good shape, suggesting that Knopf shold have stuck with it. Steve Katz was the experimental fictionist of his time who most embraced the spirit of Pop Art. Although there isn’t a giant can of Campbell’s Soup in Saw, you wouldn’t be startled if one showed up. There are, however, a woman named Eileen who mates with an orbiting sphere in Central Park, a spaceship named Leroy, and a hidden hippopotamus. As with a number of the books on this list, Saw embraced (or stole) numerous elements from SF but it was never accepted as SF by SF die-hards (or later academics writing about SF in the 1970s).

 

Cover of first edition of Motorman

Motorman, by David Ohle (1972)

Motorman was the first of a series of four novels that Ohle would write over the course of forty years featuring a character named Moldenke. Moldenke is as a “bloodworker” in a gauze factory in Texaco City outside L.A. (hence the title, perhaps, but there is no Motorman in the book) but also lives in a world with multiple moons, occasional double suns, and cosmic-scale timeshifts. One reader has compared it to a mix of Italo Calvino (in his Cosmicomics stage) and Cormac McCarthy (in his The Road stage). Out of print for decades, Motorman is now available from the Calamari Press (and you have even download a PDF version of it for free). In his introduction to this edition, Ben Marcus adds to the list of comparisons, calling Ohle “the dogsbody that resulted from a glandular mishap between Flann O’Brien, Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, Borges, and Raymond Roussel.”

 

Cover of Colonel Mint

Colonel Mint, by Paul West (1972)

In his prolific career, Paul West wandered in and out of just about every genre you could think of, so it wasn’t surprising that his journey eventually led into SF. In Colonel Mint, he takes a top-ranked insider — the astronaut Colonel Mint — and turns into an outsider when he sees an angel through the window of his space capsule — and then makes the mistake of reporting it. Garth Lloyd Evans, writing in The Guardian, argued that West had simply “changed the conventional traditional context for his consciousness of being alive.” Changed it, that is, “from the parochial, the provincial, the national, the routine tick of the clock, into an awareness of eternity as our natural habitat.” Unlike much of the formulaic stuff that cluttered science fiction, however, Lloyd Evans felt that “this shift of vision does not involve a loss of heart or render one invulnerable to this world, now.”

 

Cover of Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Quake, by Rudolph Wurlitzer (1974)

Quake is a dystopia novel after every Los Angeles hater’s heart. Wurlitzer operated in the realm of Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Brautigan, taking American quirks and twisting them into intricate origami. Here, we have Los Angeles after that massive earthquake we all know is coming some day. But instead of a predictable catastrophe novel, this is the story told by a writer who, if you will, inhaled. Like Hjortsberg, Wurlitzer wrote books you don’t have to set aside long weekends for.

 

Cover of The Last Western

The Last Western, by Thomas S. Klise (1974)

Klise, whose day job was running an educational filmstrip company, wrote this, his only novel, as much as a moral exercise as a fictive one. He takes an innocent — Willie, a truly hybrid American, Irish-Indian-Black-Chinese with “red hair, red-gold-black-brown skin, and blue almond-shaped eyes spangled with brown,” and injects him into a dystopian world full of complex variations on the themes of power and evil. First Willie becomes the greatest pitcher in baseball with his trademark “upcurve” ball. Then he somehow manages to become Pope and the object of nefarious plots by Vatican, government, and media. The Last Western has never been reprinted and goes for a ridiculous amount of money if you can find a copy. But you can also download it for free from the Internet Archive.

 

Cover of paperback original of Dhalgren

Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany (1975)

Depending on your perspective (or experience of reading it), Dhalgren is either a masterpiece, a gripping vision of America in its end state, or a convoluted and confusing mess. Launched with great noise as a Bantam paperback original when it came out, it may have suffered a fate similar to another thick book from around the same time, John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues. Both books struck many as too full of their own self-importance to get out of the way of their readers. Now, however, when those who read it come to Dhalgren rather than having it thrust upon them, it’s seen for what it is: a challenging, complex, and deeply considered work of modernism that also happens to be SF.

 

Comet by Jane White

Comet, by Jane White (1975)

Jane White, whose work was first recommended to me by Brooks Peters back in 2008, wrote a number of odd, edgy psychological thrillers starting with Quarry in 1967. Her last book before her death in 1977, Comet was a dystopian novel with an extreme version of life on Earth after a great holocaust — a disaster so great and so long ago that no one knows quite what it was. Life is hardly above the level of the Stone Age now, with the added twist that procreation is essentially impossible. Into one of the tribes scattered over this world come a man and a pregnant woman. Does this all lead to a Second Coming? To be honest, I can’t say, having never read this myself. But it awaits on my shelves.

 

Cover of The Hospital Ship by Martin Bax

The Hospital Ship, by Martin Bax (1976)

Dr. Martin Bax’s only novel, The Hospital Ship is the story of the Hopeful, an atomic-powered and largely self-contained hospital that sails around a world rapidly breaking down through a mix of disease, autism, and widespread psychosis. The hospital’s director decides that the solution is — you guessed it — breeding. Bax’s subject matter is heavily influenced by J. G. Ballard, so it’s not surprising that Ballard contributed a generous blurb: “the most exciting, stimulating and brilliantly conceived book I have read since Burroughs’ novels.” A number of readers have rated Bax’s technique better than his results, as he employs a variety of documentation, from letters to logs to patient records, to illuminate the story. Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review took the opposite view, however, and I recommend his review for anyone interest in learning more.

 

Cover of Plus by Joseph McElroy

Plus, by Joseph McElroy (1976)

I wrote about Plus back in 2013, when I called it my most neglected book for the simple reason that it took me 36 years to get around to reading my copy. McElroy’s writing is notoriously challenging, but even by that standard, Plus is, at least in the estimation of one Amazon reviewer, not the place to start: “If you haven’t read McElroy, don’t jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers.”

Much of the reason stems from McElroy’s subject, which is a disembodied brain floating in orbit around the Earth as the control system of a satellite. Imp Plus — the brain — has limited understanding of language and even more limited grasp of vocabulary, so McElroy has to tell his story as if manipulating by remote control. As Imp Plus becomes more sentient, his language grows and we see that McElroy is leading us through the brain’s struggle to establish an identity independent of ground control — the other being known to Imp as the Acrid Voice. It’s a bold experiment that ultimately succeeds, but it’s a bit like scaling El Capitan with your bare hands. You will work hard, but if you make it to the top, you may find it one of your most intense reading experiences.

 

Cover of US paperback of Ratner's Star

Ratner’s Star, by Don DeLillo (1976)

DeLillo wrote SF? He sure ’nuff did. In Ratner’s Star, Little Billy Twillig, a child prodigy, is enlisted by a mysterious military/scientific research institution to help them decode an enigmatic signal from space. “We feel certain it’s a mathematical code of some kind,” the director tells him:

Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

To which Billy replies, “Did you just fart?” Among DeLillo scholars, Ratner’s Star is considered a work from his formative stage, before the era of his prize-winning/bestselling books. Which means it’s both less effective as a coherent work and full of greater experimentation and risk-taking. DeLillo takes codes, the encapsulation of information in condensed packages, as an overarching metaphor for the obstacles facing all forms of communication, and so plays around with text and dives down rabbit holes like the significance of symbol-based languages like Chinese. But if you’re looking for another fat DeLillo novel to follow up Underworld, this is the natural choice.

 

Cover of Scimitar by Rick DeMarinis

Scimitar, by Rick DeMarinis (1977)

In this broad satire of the American military-industrial complex, an aging billionaire named Skylor Blue, has himself reconstituted by attaching his head to a mechanical spider run by a computer. The narrator, a failed poet and lowly copywriter in one of Blue’s aerospace companies, travels into the bowels of the Byzantine security mechanisms set up to protect Blue’s new being and comes to face the reality of life as a Six Million Dollar Man:

And my body knew what it was looking at too:It recognized immediately what the head in the mechanical spider meant to it: The body, the mortal coil, the source of despair, the thing that gets sick, manufactures aneurysms, tumors, cataracts, piles, stones in the bladder, limestone in the arteries, the shakes, the drops, the shits, the tears; the thing that hurts you so terribly, the thing that finally betrays the clever, efficient brain by withering like a leaf, is superfluous. (“The body’s only purpose is to carry the brain,” said Edison, and he should have known.)

Perhaps not surprisingly for a book written by an American male in the 1970s, along with robotic life comes new extremes of sexual experience. Comparisons with J. P. Donleavy are not out of order.

 

Cover of Fork River Space Project

The Fork River Space Project, by Wright Morris (1977)

Despite the title, I may be stretching things to say there’s a real SF element in this novel. Set in Fork River, a nearly-deserted Kansas town near the geographic center of the U.S., The Fork River Space Project is about a collection of oddballs who come together to work on what they hope will be a landing site for UFOs. Even if the guy who came up with the idea isn’t fully convinced that aliens even exist, he sees it as a way to “restore awe.” In the meantime, it’s where folks gather on Sunday, listen to music, and “go into orbit.” This is certainly one of Morris’s lesser books, but in a way it’s significant as perhaps the first mainstream novel to recognize that ever since the first Moon landing in 1969, we’ve been living on a small planet in a very big cosmos.

 

Cover of A Secret History of Time to Come

A Secret History of Time to Come, by Robie Macauley (1979)

With this novel — which I can well remember buying in hardback for its beautiful cover and opening with anticipation — we see serious fiction approaching the obstacle of the leap into imaginative fiction … and balking. Set in a largely depopulated United States after some unspecified catastrophe, this novel proved that a story about an epic journey (in this case from East to West) is bound to fail without a destination. I recall there was a lot of wandering through the overgrown ruins of cities. Nothing else stuck with me. Thomas M. Disch justly savaged the book in his New York Times review and summed up the challenge of venturing into the No Man’s Land between straight fiction and SF:

A Secret History of Time to Come fails equally at the general task of fiction and at the specific task of science fiction. The special merit of the best SF is not its capacity to predict the future but to analyze and analogize the present. It offers writers an opportunity to make scale models of moral problems that cannot be dealt with — not, at least, with the same clarity and directness — using the conventional devices of the realistic novel. At this essential science fictional task, A Secret History of Time to Come has the moral and intellectual finesse of a World War I poster exposing Hun atrocities.

Have the boundaries between serious literary fiction and SF evaporated since the 1970s? A visit to most libraries and bookstores today would suggest not. But luckily, plenty of writers don’t let that dissuade them.

A Conversation with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, author of Ascent to Glory

Cover of Ascent to Glory by Álvaro Santana-Acuña

I learned about Álvaro Santana-Acuña’s new book, Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic, from Michael Orthofer’s review on his Complete Review site, and immediately purchased a copy. What attracted me was that Santana-Acuña doesn’t just describe the uncertain process by which García Márquez’s 1967 novel became a classic recognized around the world: he also explores why five other Latin American novels—powerful novels, novels of substantial literary merit—failed to achieve the same status. He refers to these examples as “literary counterfactuals”—the classics that might have been, if you will. His point is that looking at both the success (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and the “might have beens”, demonstrates that it’s often factors beyond the text’s quality, sometimes factors beyond the author’s control, that make or break a book’s longevity.

This resonated with what I’ve seen in my years of studying neglected books and writers and especially in this last year, when I’ve dug deep into the stories of forgotten writers as part of my graduate program at the University of East Anglia. So much, indeed, that I contacted Álvaro, who teaches sociology at Whitman College and asked if he’d be willing to participate in a discussion about what leads to one book becoming a classic and another little-known, little-read relic. I was delighted when he agreed, and what follows is a distillation of what was, as we both later agreed, the fastest 90 minutes we’ve spent since lockdown.

Brad: Congratulations on the book! For the sake of readers who are learning about it here, can you give a quick overview of what you cover?

Álvaro Santana-Acuña
Dr. Álvaro Santana-Acuña

Álvaro: Thank you. What I wanted to show in Ascent to Glory was that the road to the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude was actually very bumpy and that there were other books that for different reasons were expected to be more successful—or were already successful and then disappeared from view. And the same thing happens to authors. Critics and readers were expecting, for example, José Donoso, to be the real major Latin American Boom writer and his The Obscene Bird of Night the best Latin American Boom novel. What happened was that García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude took that place and instead, Donoso’s novel is now becoming a neglected literary work. No one could have predicted how things would turn out. Of course, the quality of the work matters, but as much or more that what happens afterwards. I wanted to show that the making of a classic is a social process, and that we need to look into the social, economic, and cultural context as well as the literary content, that is, the text, to understand why—and in the case of others like Donoso, why not.

Brad: Yes! I’ve seen that with so many writers I’ve looked at. The difference between the writer who continues to be read and the one who loses his or her readers in the space of a few years so often just seems to be a matter of dumb luck. I particularly see that now that I’m back in the university and I can see that the conventions of academic study tend to lead scholars to write about the writers that other people write about. It creates the effect that a few writers — Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, for example — get intensely studied. That every year, their library sections get bigger and bigger and bigger, while a few feet away you find some old copies of James Hanley’s books, say, that haven’t been read, let alone studied or written about. And the reactions of most academics when I approach them about someone like G. E. Trevelyan — an amazing writer whose books are almost impossible to find, who’s been completely forgotten in literary history—is complete disinterest. It’s like they can’t afford to become pigeonholed as a champion of the oddballs.

Covers of Los Sangurimas by Jose de la Cuadra

Álvaro: I must say that unfortunately, I had the same experience. One of the authors I study in Ascent to Glory, José de la Cuadra, was first mentioned to me by a colleague with a tremendous thirst for literature. He was always recommending books to me. I remember vividly the day he said, “Oh, you like One Hundred Years of Solitude? Read Los Sangurimas by de la Cuadra, and you tell me whether you think García Márquez actually found inspiration for his novel in that little book.” And the fact is that there are so many similarities between them that it’s very hard not to claim that García Márquez built on Los Sangurimas to write his own novel.

The truth is that One Hundred Years of Solitude was so successful because it built on themes that were already prevalent in other regional literatures of Latin America, as in Ecuador, where de la Cuadra wrote his works. That’s the reason why, when people had One Hundred Years of Solitude in their hands, they could immediately see connections with other books that they’d read. And that’s one of García Márquez’s merits: he was really interested in other peoples’ experiences, in other people’s works, in other literary traditions. That’s something that literary critics often don’t take into account. When they look at influences on famous writers, they tend to focus on other celebrated writers—to the point that nowadays, the prevailing narrative is that García Márquez wrote in the tradition of high modernism: especially, Woolf, Hemingway, Joyce, and Faulkner.

Covers of La Casa Grande by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio

But the reality is that García Márquez was omnivorous in his reading. He read those classic authors, but there were others like Curzio Malaparte from Italy. His style and themes had a big impact on García Márquez’s early writing. In Colombia, there were local writers such as Héctor Rojas Herazo, Eduardo Caballero Calderón, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, all of whom García Márquez knew personally. And if you read what these Colombians were writing at the time, you see that they were all on the same page. The case of Cepeda Samudio is even more interesting because, as I show in Ascent, García Márquez and other friends regarded him as an extraordinarily talented writer—and indeed, his masterpiece La casa grande is praised by scholars today even if it’s neglected by most readers. So, there are legitimately major classic writers like Faulkner and Woolf that influenced García Márquez, but there are also less well-known writers who arguably had as much or more of an impact on him.

Brad: A point that I found particularly interesting in your book was the distinction between a classic and a canonical book. What is that difference, and how can it help with looking at a text?

Álvaro: One of the reasons I wrote Ascent to Glory was to offer my colleagues in literary studies a different perspective on the question of what’s a classic. What struck me in looking at the examples of the counterfactuals I discuss is that a classic is a work that can survive on its own. Hamlet will survive whether or not the Royal Shakespeare Company continues to exist, for example. If anything, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s reputation can be damaged if there is popular and critical backlash against one of their productions of Hamlet.

Hamlet is also a canonical book: you have the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the plays edited by Shakespeare scholars, you have the Folger Library, you have academics constantly working on new studies and interpretations. Similarly, Madame Bovary is a classic that thousands read every year in cheap paperback editions at the same time that you have the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition and annotated critical editions, plus dozens of film and TV adaptations.

There are other works that are canonical but not classics. They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments. I give a couple of examples in the book. One of them is Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, which depends on French publisher Gallimard to maintain its canonical status. And there are books that are classics but not canonical. Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, for example. People all over the world still buy it and read it, but the academy in general refuses to recognize it as a literary text worth studying and teaching. Of course, a canonical book can be become recognized as a classic.

Brad: Like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example? It was out of print for years, but once it was reissued and started to be written about, it got put onto course reading lists and started to take off through word of mouth until now we could say it’s able to survive in the wild.

Álvaro: Right, there are classics like The Prophet that can never become canonical unless some institution decides it’s going to stake its reputation on supporting it. The point is that when we talk about a text as canonical, we’re talking about a relationship based on dependencies. The canonical work that’s not a classic depends on the support of an institution—Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, for example, would probably not stay in print if there wasn’t an academic press to support it. But the press that publishes Epicoene also stakes something of its reputation when it chooses to publish that text.

This kind of dependency extends beyond literature. Let’s think about art museums. We know the Louvre, for example, has classics like the Mona Lisa but it also owns many other lesser known works displayed on its walls and stored in facilities underground.

Mona Lisa crowd at the Louvre

Brad: Yes! The vast majority of the works on display in the Louvre are not classics: there is only one Mona Lisa, there is only one Raft of the Medusa. And most art museums can’t aspire to only have classics because then most of them would be empty. That’s what I love about art museums, in fact: you can almost always count on seeing something you’re not familiar with. Here in Norwich, in the museum at the Castle, for example, there’s a wing devoted to the Norwich school of painters, who were around the time of J. M. W. Turner, who knew him, who inspired him and were inspired by him—but who weren’t Turner. So, it’s full of works that are amazing—but that aren’t the few classics people associate with Turner. Certainly, some of my favorite painters are artists I wouldn’t have known unless I’d seen their work hanging in a gallery or museum.

Covers of The Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso

Álvaro: That’s a good example, because it helps us understand why Turner became the pinnacle of this form of artistic expression: he was building upon a whole school, a whole aesthetic movement. Going back to One Hundred Years of Solitude, when we talk about the style known as magical realism, the perception is that García Márquez invented it. But the reality is that, when he wrote the novel, the term magical realism itself had been around for at least twenty years, and there were already people like Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, who were also writing in this style. So, when One Hundred Years of Solitude’s came out, it was building on that magical realist tradition.

But something happened: a dislocation of the tradition. When a book becomes an exceptional success, like One Hundred Years of Solitude’s, it tends to overshadow what came before. If you think about it, Shakespeare managed to kill his predecessors—and for decades after also managed to kill his successors. And that’s what classic books and classic authors do. García Márquez’s and One Hundred Years of Solitude’s success makes it seem like there’s nothing in Colombian literature before or after this writer and his novel.

Covers of The Fox Up Above and the Fox Down below by  José María Arguedas

In reality, Latin American literature was far more diverse than just magical realism. I point to the example of the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, who had a different conception of what being Latin American meant. He was a supporter of indigenism. He wrote the superb but neglected novel The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below. Arguedas was proud to say, “I am a provincial writer!” And he wasn’t alone. But all these alternatives disappeared, and we only have that pinnacle—García Márquez and a few others—representing Latin American literature.

Now, if you do some digging, you find all these other writers and ideas that were active at the same time. Unfortunately, a lot of my academic colleagues say, “Yeah, but I’m not really interested in those minor writers,” while for me, it’s a passion. It really gives you a better and deeper understanding of what goes into making a Turner or a García Márquez.

Highway map

Brad: Absolutely. It’s all part of what makes literature. Literature is not just the classics. I like to use the analogy of a landscape. Today, the fastest route between two places usually involves driving on some freeway—which in the American West is often practically a straight line. But there’s so much to be seen if you get off the freeway, if you follow the two-lane roads that wind around a little more, that take you through the smaller towns, that show you features of the landscape that nobody taking the freeway ever knows about. The landscape is not just that strip you see as you rush along the freeway—in fact, most of the landscape is what you can’t see from the freeway.

And literature is like that. The works and the writers that people were reading at the same time that García Márquez was becoming known worldwide are part of Latin American literature even if now most people have forgotten them. One reason your distinction between a classic and a canonical book intrigued me is that it opens up ways to rebalance the situation, to bring the forgotten parts of literature into the discussion.

I have to confess that until I read Ascent to Glory, I always associated the idea of a canonical book with things like Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: that the canon was limited to 50 or 100 books—the pinnacles, as you put it—and that anything that wasn’t in the canon was, in effect, second class, not worth bothering about. Your interpretation, on the other hand, says that we can bring forgotten books back into the discussion—but they will need some support: a publisher willing to keep them in print, academics willing to study and write about them.

Covers of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Álvaro: You’re right. Ascent to Glory is an anti-reductionist book. That’s in part because I’m a social scientist, and one of the things I like about the social sciences is that they give you the tools to offer multi-layered understandings of how society works. Something as simple and concrete as a book requires the collaboration of so many people, not just the labor of the writer. Whether it’s a classic or a canonical book, that collaboration continues and can become highly complex. And this multi-layered perspective makes it impossible to take a reductionist view and claim that the fame of a classic rests only on the quality of the text.

Because this is not true. And I’m sure people reading our conversation now can remember reading a book written in absolutely amazing prose and asking themselves, “How is it possible that this book is not better known?” That’s what happened to me when I read Los Sangurimas. I said to myself, “This is a gem and nobody knows about it.”

That’s why I talk about it in Ascent to Glory: I wanted to make the story about One Hundred Years of Solitude a little more complex. I wanted to show all the obstacles that the book faced—in order to show that it wasn’t just magic. García Márquez took 15 years to write the book. At the same time, Latin American literature was emerging after decades of facing its own obstacles. And the book wasn’t expected to be a bestseller. In fact, as I show, the novel met all the conditions to be a complete failure. That’s why I quote publisher Alfred Knopf in the Introduction: “Many a novel is dead the day it is published.” Because that’s the truth.

Ascent to Glory aims to show that the road to any artwork’s attaining the status of a classic is not straight, that it depends on a lot of factors, and any one of them can easily go wrong. Actually, when an artwork becomes a classic, it’s more like an alignment of planets, where each planet is a different factor. The skills of the creator matter, of course, but also his or her professional connections of the creator, the support of peers, the quality of the artwork, the precise historical moment, the gatekeepers, the distribution channels, and the market—and when you put all these factors together, you understand how one book—One Hundred Years of Solitude—became a classic where another—say, José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso—didn’t.

This doesn’t mean that the planets can’t align in future for a neglected book. As a matter of fact, we often see rediscoveries in art, works that have been forgotten, come back to life, and even become classics.

Brad: Like Their Eyes Were Watching God

Álvaro: Right. Another one is The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. Due to the political conditions in the Soviet Union when it was written, this novel couldn’t even be published during Bulgakov’s lifetime. But when it was published outside the Soviet Union in the 1960s, you had an audience ready to praise it as one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.

Mural in the Bulgakov Museum in Moscow

Brad: And, according to something I read recently, the most popular book in Russian prisons today.

Álvaro: It’s incredible. I didn’t know that. This would have been impossible fifty years ago. And that confirms the idea that there are factors that can be obstacles—the political environment in the Soviet Union, for example—but not forever. One factor I talk about in Ascent to Glory is gatekeepers like literary agents. Carmen Balcells was a Spanish agent who got to know Vargas Llosa and García Márquez when they were living in Barcelona and played a major role in their careers. Another of her clients, José Donoso, on the other hand, came to resent and even attack her, and she was not supportive in return. But gatekeepers like agents and agencies come and go, and when they do, things can suddenly become possible. It would have been hard to envision a TV or film adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude just a few years ago because of the influence of García Márquez’s agent. Netflix is now working on the first adaptation.

Let’s not forget that books are social objects. Their production follows social patterns. And what I’m trying to show in Ascent is that the transformation of the social object we call a book into the social institution that we call the classic needs a social explanation. We cannot limit the explanation to talking about the quality of the text. And there are social patterns we can see when we look at numerous classics—the Mona Lisa, War and Peace, Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn—that are like the freeways, to use your example.

Brad: Right. It’s not just that the freeway is the fastest, most direct route. It’s also that the freeway has rest stops, has places where you can refuel, get food, spend the night. In the same way that the classics have reproductions and adaptations and Cliff’s Notes and other things that make them more accessible.

Álvaro: Exactly. And I’m offering some ways in which we can understand these patterns. One is the imagination of the author—how the work is envisioned by its creator. Another is the production process—the way the work gets produced and marketed. And the third is the distribution process—how a book, for example, gets circulated, translated, reprinted, and adapted into other formats.

Even imagination is a social activity. García Márquez had colleagues he talked with as he was imagining the book, even before he started writing it. He had the works of other writers to inspire and guide him. And even as he was writing the novel, which after all took him over a decade in the end, he was talking about it, he was reading new things. Even though it was his hand putting the words on the page, in some ways it was more like a mural—the work of many hands.

In my book, I try to disassemble this collective process, which I call “networked creativity,” to identify the elements that fed into García Márquez’s imagining One Hundred Years of Solitude. And what I try to show in Chapter 7—“Indexing a Classic”—is that this social collaboration in the imagination stage continues in the circulation stage. Over the decades, as different people approach the book, at different times, languages, and social and political contexts, they find units of significance—indexicals, I call them—that become reinforced. Like the opening line of the novel…

Brad: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Álvaro: See! You know it by heart, too. You also run into people comparing their own experiences to that discovery of ice, people pointing to the impact of the words, different critics coming up with different interpretations—Freudian, semiotic, religious, etc.—of those words, until that line becomes something that even people who’ve never read the book can recognize and even memorize parts of it.

Covers of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Brad: I found your model of the process—imagination, production, circulation—striking for a number of reasons. One is that it seems as if only the first stage ever gets discussed in traditional literature courses. I mean, I took an undergraduate degree in English literature and we never talked about two thirds of this process. And yet now that I’ve been studying and writing about neglected books for years, I’ve come to appreciate how much of an impact things like the design of the cover or the prestige of the publisher or whether it was easy to translate and appealed to readers in other languages can have on whether a book succeeds or fails in the long run.

In Ascent to Glory you show, for example, how publishers in Spain dominated the development of Latin American literature for years because especially publishers in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina operated on a more limited local or national basis.

Álvaro: Yes. The control of the production and circulation of books on a wider basis throughout Latin America was in the hands of a small number of Spanish publishers. And because they had such control, they exercised a homogenizing, standardizing influence over the kind of books that Latin American readers—including writers—read.

Things have now changed. With the rise of the Internet, readers all over the world can learn about books, can buy and download books, and can start up their own discussions through everything from Goodreads to Twitter to blogs like yours. And that means that no single agent or critic or broker can have the impact that someone like Harold Bloom had just 20-30 years ago. The age of literary criticism as this sort of global religion is over.

Brad: I spoke with a number of publishers earlier this year and it was striking how many of them reported that attracting social media influencers were as or more important than getting reviews in major trade journals in how they marketed books. So, some publishers will routinely push free copies to Amazon “Top One Hundred” reviewers because those early five-star reviews can be as critical as a good review in the New York Times.

Álvaro: It doesn’t surprise me. Compare this to how readers would communicate about a book before the Internet. What would they do? They’d only know a handful of other readers and they’d have to write letters to them, or they’d write letters to newspapers or magazines. And the editors of those newspapers or magazines would choose what letters did or didn’t get published and then control the conversation about newly published books. Whereas now, with Goodreads and other social media platforms and even the comments section at the end of many online newspaper articles, we see a plurality of voices, even about neglected books. And those voices are reinforcing the idea that there are thousands of good books and thousands of good writers—and not just living writers and in-print books.

To go back to your landscape analogy, these social media discussion platforms are acting as avenues that open up the landscape, that encourage us to discover the diversity of writers and perspectives that exists beyond the narrow and straight lines of the “Western Canon.” For example, new platforms are helping to make more visible the literary works of female Latin American writers from the 1960s, some of which, such as Elena Garro’s Recollections of Things to Come, are said to have influenced the works of their more famous male peers, including García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But there are still obstacles, and some are in academia.

Brad: Publish or perish.

Álvaro: Correct. There is a risk-averse atmosphere in academia and especially in some disciplines at present, which I think explains some of the responses you got when you approached academics about several neglected works and authors. This atmosphere makes it difficult to undertake long-term writing projects like Ascent to Glory. It took me eleven years to write this book. When I started it, I knew that it was a risky move from an early career standpoint, which demands from raising scholars shorter writing projects and a fast publishing turnaround. I’m happy to say that this is the book that I wanted to write. And it makes me even happier that Ascent is finding its way to readers with a passion for neglected authors and works, because, let’s not forget it, the prestige of classics stands not only on the shoulders of giants but also on the shoulders of neglected creators and neglected works of art.

The Five “Literary Counterfactuals of Ascent to Glory:

Who Owned This Book? Elizabeth Seeber

Elizabeth Seeber's signature in her copy of <em>Appius and Virginia</em>
Elizabeth Seeber’s signature in her copy of Appius and Virginia

I often wonder about the people whose names I find written in copies of old books I buy, but I rarely do anything more. But I was so impressed by G. E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia when I reread it recently that I began to wonder who would have bought it. My copy — the U. S. edition published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York in 1933 — is signed, “Elizabeth Seeber, 10 Mitchell Pl.”

Who was Elizabeth Seeber? Well, I did a little rooting around the Internet and learned that she was a single woman every bit as courageous and independent as Trevelyan herself. Born into a German-American dairy-farming family living near Canajoharie in upstate New York in 1881, she worked for several years before entering Smith College in 1905. After graduating three years later, she went to work as a teacher of math and German at East Orange High School in New Jersey that fall. She switched to the New York City public school system a year or two later, first at Flushing High School and later at Newtown, and remained a teacher for most of the next forty years.

Even before the U. S. entered World War One, she helped organized fundraisers for displaced French and Belgian civilians. Then in the fall of 1917, as U. S. troops began shipping out for France, a group of Smith alumnae decided to organize a volunteer unit to provide moral support near the frontline. Equipped with field kitchen equipment and other gear to allow them to provide refreshments, a few hours’ respite, and entertainment to troops on their short relief periods while serving on the front lines. When the first group of ten women sailed for France in the spring of 1918, Seeber was among them.

The women spent several months in Paris making their administrative and logistical arrangements, and then the first group left for the front. Seeber was their unofficial correspondent. In August she wrote,

. . . One day in June Mr. Chesley, the regional director, came into our station and said he wanted a strong person with strong nerves to go to a city as near the front as women work. He looked at me and I began to pack up. I knew the minute I saw the house that that was where I belonged. It is an adorable house facing the Marne, with a little walled-in rose garden front and back. The back one has pretty green lattice work over the brick wall and lots of ramblers vining over it. Of course, in the center there is a rose tree and a garden seat and table. Think what that meant to the men right in from the trenches!

How the boys did love that house!

They came in sometimes as early as six in the morning — boys who had been at the batteries all night — and they were there as late as they dared stay at night. I think perhaps they loved the kitchen best of all. They said the only thing they didn’t like about it was that it made them homesick. They are so glad to see an American and sometimes look and look at you as if you couldn’t be real. You would never doubt for one moment that the work was worthwhile if you could have spent just one day with me there. We knew of course that the offensive was coming and one day the boys said their leave was up at five instead of nine because they had to be back ready for action. I’ve never heard such a frightful murderous roar as the artillery made— the sky was just one glare of light….

I’m helping at the canteen here and visiting the hospital and taking lemonade to all the wards, and so forth. It’s rather wearing, but the patients do like to have us come. There are no women nurses, and while the care is excellent, men apparently do not care to get on quite without women. They are the very bravest chaps I’ve ever seen. They don’t want to hear a word about the “hero stuff,” so I just put on my freshest summer dress and white shoes, and smile and talk merrily when I have all I can do to keep the tears back.

“I have all sorts of plans,” she confided. “There is scarcely a pane of glass in the house, the spaces are filled in with that thick, oiled cloth the French use, but before winter something will have to be done.”

She sent a second letter in early September:

Two weeks ago I rushed into Paris to hunt up furnishings for our house and was most successful in getting an order from the Y. and in finding the things I wanted. Amy Ferris helped in the buying of curtains, — windows have to be curtained to keep in the light at night, — and they are lovely. Since then Jean and I have worked almost day and night making huge curtains, valences, cushions, table covers, and simple lamp shades — the result is almost the prettiest house in France, we think. The men like it immensely because it looks so American.

I also hunted up an ice cream freezer and a gas oven so we can easily make ice cream and pies. I don’t suppose you can realize the devotion of the ordinary American boy to pie — it’s touching…. Almost all our men are eating at French messes and miss really American food. One day some of the officers were longing for ice cream, and we said, “All right, get the ice and salt, furnish a man to grind it, and you shall have it.” In an hour’s time it was all done and a cake besides, and they were as happy as boys. We let them all lick the dasher and hang around while things were being done, and one of them said, “Well, for one hour Sherman was wrong!

Even after Armistice was declared on November 11th, the Smith women stayed busy. Seeber wrote late in that month,

When the Second Division was brought out of the lines they began giving them passes to Chalons and all at once we were simply swamped with boys — their first day off in eight or nine months, and they stood in line sometimes more than an hour just to get to the counter in our little store; there was never a murmur. Luck was with us for with the arrival of the hordes came a carload of supplies. For two days our two men were unloading it, leaving Jean and me to do everything — tend store at the maddest rate you ever saw — I can beat any cash girl at Childs’ now — make and serve hot chocolate and try to keep the house in some sort of order.

The first day the boys had 24-hour passes and of course they couldn’t all find places to sleep, so we let them have the lower floor of our house and there 35 or 40 of them slept on the floor, with no blankets, but quite as cheerful as could be. They had to leave town at 7 A. M., so Jean and I arose at 5:30 to get breakfast for them — hot chocolate, bread and butter and jam with seconds all around. Before we finished we had fed about 70.

When the American Army moved in as part of the occupation forces along the Rhine in late 1918, the Smith College canteen was integrated with a larger YMCA organization assigned to support the 3rd Division, and Seeber remained there until it was disbanded in July 1919.

She returned to New York City and resumed teaching at Newtown High School in the fall of 1919. Aside from several sabbaticals, she remained there for the next 28 years. In the mid-1920s she enrolled as a graduate student in education at Columbia, but appears not to have finished that course.

In the May 1931 edition of the German Quarterly, Henry Holt and Company announced two new texts for teaching German coming out the next month. The second was Klein Heini, edited by Seeber — a new edition “prepared especially for young American students.” The book was a young adult novel written by Richard Hennings with the original title of Klein Heini: ein Grossstadtjunge (“Little Heini: a Big City Boy”). The book must have done well enough, because Seeber renewed her copyrights again in the late 1950s.

In 1933, she wrote the Smith Alumnae Quarterly that she was taking a sabbatical year (after over 20 years of teaching) and “can’t decide whether to buy a tiny house in the country and provide for my old age, or to go forth on the Seven Seas. In the next update, we learn what she decided: “Elizabeth Seeber has bought a place in Kent (Ct.) where she has been spending her sabbatical.” She remained an active Smith alumna for many years. Her name pops up in the New York Times ever so often — the first time in 1915, the last in the late 1940s — as the organizer of fundraisers by the Smith Club in Manhattan and hostess of teas for dignitaries such as Mrs. Dwight Morrow.

We know from her inscription that by 1933 she was living at 10 Mitchell Place, and from census reports we know she had an apartment to herself. She was still living there, according to the three-sentence obituary that ran in the New York Times in June 1964. The Times managed to get one fact wrong in that brief piece, stating that “Miss Seeber served with the American Red Cross in France throughout World War I”–the sort of thing that gets passed along by a friend or relative filling in gaps from whatever comments Elizabeth herself might have made over the years.

In Appius and Virginia, Trevelyan’s spinster, Virginia Hutton, worries about becoming a useless old woman living out her days in a women’s hotel in London:

She would go back to Earl’s Court and her bed-sitting-room – gas fire and griller, separate meters; to her consumption of novels from the lending library; her bus rides to the confectioner’s; her nightly sipping of conversation and coffee in the lounge: to middle-age in a ladies’ residential club. Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus.

It’s clear this was something Elizabeth Seeber probably never worried about.

I will have to look into my books’ previous owners more often.

Odd Women in the City

Bus Stop No. 98 by Mark Garbowski
Bus Stop No. 98 by Mark Garbowski

In her recent book, The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick aligns herself with what she calls the Odd Women, taking the phrase from George Gissing’s novel, which, in turn, took it from the perception that there was an excess of single women in England at the time, and that so many women were destined to find themselves the odd woman out, unable to find a man to marry them. Gornick, as usual, weaves a moving and thought-provoking series of reflections on love and loneliness around this theme of people who find themselves the odd person out, living alone in a world that tends to equate life in a relationship with success and happiness.

Gornick cites the example of Mary Britten Miller, who, as Isabel Bolton, published three critically celebrated novels in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when she was well into her sixties. As described in her 1966 book, Under Gemini, discussed here back in 2011, Miller’s great tragedy was the loss of her identical twin sister, Grace, in a swimming accident in their early teens. When she reached adulthood, Miller settled in Greenwich Village, where she lived alone until her death at 92: “She was never married, and she seems not to have had a lover anyone ever knew. What she did have was friends, some of whom described her as witty and mean, entertainingly haughty, and impressively self-educated.”

In her novel, Do I Wake or Sleep?, Bolton wrote: “Christ, how we loved our own aloneness… We were incapable of giving because there was so much within our reach to grab and snatch and gather for our own, our solitary souls.” As Gornick writes, “She sees what Freud saw–that our loneliness is anguishing and yet, inexplicably, we are loath to give it up. At no period in psychological time are we free of the contradiction: it is the conflict of conflicts.”

It struck me in reading The Odd Woman and the City that a fair amount of my two years of focusing exclusively on the work of women writers has been devoted to what Gornick would call odd women: Alice Koller, whose book An Unknown Woman: a Journey to Self-Discovery could be considered the Bible of odd womanhood; Eve Langley, who was packed off to a mental asylum when her oddness grew too much for her husband to bear; Abbie Huston Evans, whose geologic sense of time could make her 101 years seem like a jog through a very small park; Ouida, who, having wasted a fortune on a wastrel lover and other lost causes, died in neglect, surrounded only by her many dogs; Stella Bowen, who learned her lesson in love at the hands of Ford Madox Ford and, thus the wiser, devoted her remaining years to surviving and to putting her own art first. Even Dorothy Richardson, though she spent over thirty years in a rather odd sort of marriage to Alan Odle, wrote, in Pilgrimage, the magnum opus on the challenge of living one’s own life–alone more often than not.

In discussing another odd woman, the novelist Evelyn Scott, Gornick quotes a letter from Louise Bogan that I will take the liberty to reproduce in full:

Dear May:

I had a sad and rather eerie meeting, early this week, with poor old Evelyn Scott. I sad old advisedly, since she really has fallen into the dark and dank time–the time that I used to fear so much when I was in my thirties. She is old because she has failed to grow–up, in, on … So that at 62, she is not only frayed and dingy (she must have been a beauty in youth) but silly and more than a little mad. She met me only casually, years ago, with Charlotte Wilder [sister of Thornton Wilder], but now, of course, she thinks I can do something for her–so transparent, poor thing. She is not only in the physical state I once feared, but she is living in the blighted area of the West 70’s, near Broadway: that area which absorbs the queer, the old, the failures, into furnished or hotel rooms, and adds gloom to their decay. It was all there! She took me out to a grubby little tea-room around the corner, insisted on paying for the tea, and brought out, from time to time, from folds in her apparel, manuscripts that will never see print. I never was able to read her, even in her hey-day, and her poetry now is perfectly terrible. Added to all this, she is in an active state of paranoia–things and people are her enemies; she has been plotted against in Canada, Hampstead, New York and California; her manuscripts have been stolen, time and time again, etc., etc. –We should thank God, that we remain in our senses! As you know, I really fear mad people; I have some attraction for them, perhaps because talent is a kind of obverse of the medal. I must, therefore, detach myself from E. S.. I told her to send the MS to Grove Press, and that is all I can do. “But I must know the editor’s name!” she cried. “I can’t chance having my poems fall into the hands of some secretary….” O dear, O dear….

Love from your hasty
Louise

Yet Bogan herself spent her share of decades as an odd woman, in what she called the faubourg of Morningside Heights. And she could write, in a notebook quoted in her posthumous autobiography, Journey Around My Room,

When we have not come into ourselves we say, in solitude: “No one loves me; I am alone.” When we had chosen solitude, we say, “Thank God, I am alone!”

For Bogan, however, the struggle with loneliness never ended. She wondered as the spirit she saw in others her age and older:

But people keep hopeful and warm and loving right to the end–with much more to endure than I endure. –I see the old constantly, on these uptown streets–and they are not “depressed.” Their eyes are bright; they have bought themselves groceries; they gossip and laugh–with, often, crippling handicaps evident among them.

Where has this power gone, in my case?

I weep–but there’s little relief there.

How can I break these mornings?

And she found herself rising too early, as she wrote her friend Ruth Limmer less than a year before her death in 1970:

I waken at v. odd hours, having gone to sleep so early. –Remedy I: Put on light and try to read. II: Get up, and do not light a cigarette, but pour yourself a nice slug of Gordon’s Gin. This usually works ….

For Gornick, it’s living in a city that provides the only effective remedy:

It’s the voices I can’t do without. In most cities of the world the populace is planted in centuries of cobble-stoned alleys, ruined churches, architectural relics, none of which are ever dug up, only piled one on top of another. If you’ve grown up in New York, your life is an archaeology not of structures but of voices, also piled one on top of another, also not really replacing one another.

I think one reason the works of these odd women have so interested me is that they all, in one way or other, get to the heart of the fundamental question of what it means to be an individual. Defining oneself inherently involves separating from the things and people you are not, and there is no way to do this without risking some amount of loneliness. Which requires a certain share of courage and rarely comes without a fair share of second-guessing as well. I’m still figuring much of this out for myself, but I know that I draw more than ever on the words and experiences of women like Gornick, Koller, Bolton, and Bogan.