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Month: June 2007

Lost Literary Classics, from “Talk of the Nation” on NPR

Back on Boxing Day in 2002, the NPR show, Talk of the Nation talked with about a half-dozen writers about their favorite “lost” classics. Among their suggestions:

• Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination — suggested by NPR’s Neal Conan, host of Talk of the Nation

• Darcy O’Brien’s A Way of Life, Like Any Other — suggested by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient

…[I]t’s about (O’Brien’s) parents, about himself as a boy and his parents, who were silent movie stars. And after they divorced, he’s sort of brought up by both of them very ineptly. It’s a very, very funny book and quite devastatingly critical of his parents, but it’s something like Catcher in the Rye, really, for our time. It’s a very, very good book.

• Louise Bernikow’s The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552-1950 — suggested by Honor Moore, poet, author of Darling, A Collection of Poems

[P]ublished in 1975, and at that time there were so many fewer women poets in the canon than there are today. …the poems that she chose from these poets were chiefly poems about or out of human experiences had mainly by women, like childbirth, relationships between women, mother-daughter, so on and so forth.

• A.R. Luria’s The Mind of the Mnemonist — suggested by Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire

[T]he story of a man, a Russian, in the 1930s whose memory had no testable limits. He remembered everything that ever happened to him. And it became a torment, because, you realize, forgetting is almost as important as remembering things, forgetting through life.

• The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, Donald Justice, editor — suggested by Anthony Lane, author of Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker

[I]’m quite interested in a poet called Weldon Kees, who’s a very semi-mythological figure, which means he’s almost entirely unread. Kees was born in 1914, and in 1955, his car was found near the Golden Gate Bridge, and it’s presumed that he disappeared or went to Mexico like Ambrose Bierce….

You can listen to the full segment at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=894272

Antioch Review’s Neglected Books Contest

In his preface to the Spring 2007 issue of the Antioch Review, editor Robert Fogarty issues this challenge:

The reader who sends the best and most persuasive list of “neglected” books will get a free one-year subscription to the Review. You must include a paragraph stating your reasons and it must arrive here by December 31, 2007.

Send your lists to:

Neglected Books Contest
c/o The Antioch Review
P.O. Box 148
Yellow Springs, OH 45387

Good luck!

Classics of the Future, by Alan Cheuse

In the Spring 2007 issue of the Antioch Review, noveliest and critic Alan Cheuse speculates on “what variety of fiction might have a chance to survive what Norman Mailer in a recent interview dubbed ‘the thirty-years-out rule,’ by which he means that the test of a contemporary writer’s work begins at about thirty years after his death when we can see whether his work is still in print.”

As evidence of the evanescence of contemporary fame, Cheuse cites Mrs. Fanny Trollope’s list of good American writers of the early 1830s in her Domestic Manners of the Americans. Among the best, in her opinion: Timothy Flint. “There is a vigor and freshness in his writing that is exactly in accordance with what one looks for, in the literature of a new country….”

Timothy [who?] Flint doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, although you can find his Columbia Encyclopedia entry on Timothy Flint doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, although you can find his Answers.com. It turns out that Flint was a clergyman whose biography of Daniel Boone, The First White Man of the West (subtitled Life and Exploits of Col. Dan’l. Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky; Interspersed with Incidents in the Early Annals of the Country) can be found online at Project Gutenberg.

Cheuse goes on to offer “a group of test cases” of the durability of contemporary fame:

• John O’Hara

“At the height of his powers, O’Hara was writing stories thick and fast for the New Yorker, when that distinguished magazine stood at the pinnacle of contemporary fiction publishing. A snapshot of that moment — which lasted, actually, for nearly twenty years (from 1930 to 1949) — would show a fiction writer with a devoted audience destined to stay around for a long time…. Not even Geoffrey Wolff’s intelligent biography of O’Hara [The Art of burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara] has done much to bring him back into the American canon.”

• Lawrence Durrell

“Another writer whose day was seen as one that would last into infinity…. Justine, the first volume of his “Alexandria Quartet,” first published in the United States in 1961, turned all our heads toward his future and ours, which we saw as intertwined. Like some creature trapped in a bog, the book slowly sank out of sight. Has anyone recently tried rereading Justine?”

• Marguerite Young

“… Young’s two-volume novel [Miss Macintosh, My Darling]… was highly praised at the time of publication in the New York Times Book Review, among others, by novelist William Goyen (his own quickly faded reputation now nearing the death-plus-thirty-year mark), by Anaïs Nin (who only last month reached the death-plusthirty-year mark), by the, fortunately, still vital Kurt Vonnegut and, when the novel appeared in a reprint edition in 1993, by the astute Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda. Even so, she is not read much today.”

• John Fowles

“… whose reputation had languished even within his own lifetime (due in some part to the accident of a debilitating stroke) and now in the wake of his recent demise comes into question. Last year I reread The Magus and found that it cheered my soul (in a shivery sort of way). Let’s all reread Daniel Martin, the novel we all took to be a work of genius when it first appeared, and meet next year and compare notes. Is Fowles a writer for the millennium? Or is he just another flash in the pan whose novelty we mistook for brilliance?”

In Cheuse’s view, these examples raise “the larger question of exactly what is, if we can determine anything in human studies with any exactitude, a classic? Classic. A classic writer is a writer of the first rank. A classic work is outstanding work of the first order. Classic works are those works that endure over time, over generations, over centuries.”

He offers a few books he considers “valuable, which few others seem to care enough about to read and reread”:

“But we can never be sure…. Reputations rise and fall, and rise again.”

He concludes with the example of the novelist Mary Lee Settle who died in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 28, 2005. “She did some work that will last,” George Garrett said.

“Yes,” agrees Cheuse. “That’s the best tribute one writer can give to another. But the thirty year clock is ticking — twenty-eight years to go — and despite all our best predictions chances are her work will, alas, end up like her ashes, cast on the Rivanna River, on a rainy early autumn afternoon, disappearing into the flow.”

“Or, again, maybe not. Perhaps her wonderful love story Charley Bland will come back to haunt the lives of deep-hearted Americans in, say, thirty or forty years. And her joyful novel of quandary and religious faith, Celebration, will find a home in the minds of future citizens trying to live with the large and awful questions of destiny and vocation.”

Cheuse also reprints the complete list of titles from David Madden and Peggy Bach’s Rediscoveries II, obviously cut-and-pasted from this site.

“Breakthrough” Neglected Books, from Lingua Franca magazine

Lingua Franca, the now-defunct “Review of Academic Life”, has a regular feature called “Breakthrough Books”, where academic experts recommend the groundbreaking books in their various fields. Way back in June 1997, the field in question was neglected books. The magazine asked thirteen writers and academics to share their favorites. Here is a sample of their responses:

• Terry Castle, professor of English at Stanford and author of Noel Coward & Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits

The extraordinary Irish novelist Kate O’Brien is virtually unread today, but her sometimes sentimental-sounding titles — Pray for the Wanderer, As Music and Splendour — conceal works of great beauty, intellectual precision, and moral candor. The pellucid Mary Lavelle (1936) — about an Irish governess’s sensual and emotional awakening in Spain-is perhaps her most subtle, ardent, and delighting fiction.

And I continue to be amazed by the (relative) neglect of Elizabeth Bowen — a novelist, in my view, far superior to Virginia Woolf. Her early novel The Hotel (1927), in which a young woman staying with friends in an Italian pensione falls painfully in love with a Madame Merle-like older woman, is at once heartrending, fierce, and almost achingly well written.

• Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review and author of Pictures at an Execution

Two neglected books that I am always recommending are Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows (1956) and Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy about the World War I, Parade’s End (1924-1928). Ford’s portrait of a society dealing with a despised war and its returning veterans will remind my generation of our own Vietnam era; and for readers who love great characters, none can beat Christopher Tietjens and his malicious wife, Sylvia.

The Fountain Overflows is a book that nobody I know has read without my recommending it, yet it is one of the great turn-of-the-century novels. It is about sibling rivalry, musical families, genteel poverty, unreliable fathers, the death penalty, the newspaper business, the market for old master paintings-and it is also, despite all this plot, an invitingly autobiographical, intimate book.

• Sandra Gilbert, professor of English at UC-Davis, author of Ghost Volcano: Poems

Because I am myself a poet as well as a critic, I have a special fondness for fiction produced by poets, a frequently overlooked genre. Karl Shapiro’s novel Edsel is a case in point. Published in 1971 (and currently out of print), it’s been virtually forgotten. Yet it’s a scandalously funny account of the travels and travails of poet-professor Edsel Lazarow, marked by the same verbal pyrotechnics that give Shapiro’s poem “The Bourgeois Poet” (1962) its satiric zing.

• Timothy Brennan, professor of English and comparative literature at SUNY Stony Brook and author of At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now

Even among Caribbean writers, George Lamming is shamefully unheralded, while being in some ways the English Caribbean’s last word. Natives of My Person (1972) is his (and my) favorite. Nothing like it has ever been written anywhere, with its weird mock seventeenth-century prose, its setting in a slave ship off the Guinea coast, and its fantastic allegory of women’s oppression as the intimate result of the triangular trade.

No one thinks of reading Fyodor V. Gladkov’s Cement (1925), because we all suppose Soviet socialist novels are junk, but it’s among the shrewdest and most inspired treatments of the pathos of organizations and the sacrificial impulse of the makers of new worlds.

• William Gass, author of The Tunnel and Finding a Form: Essays

Wyndham Lewis’s greatest novel, Self Condemned (1954) — written after he had gone blind, in Canada and about Canada, in condemnation of Canada, in condemnation of himself for inexplicably abandoning England and coming to Canada, whose bleak unlit winters bore upon even a blind man-was received with some interest in Canada but with unopen arms, selling 7,000 copies during its first two years there. Not bad for Lewis, not bad for Canada, but even in Canada it failed to achieve the audience it ought to have had, an audience which, had it been there, would have condemned the book just as its protagonist, Harding, was condemned…. The book’s movement is glacial and grinding, the writing brilliant, the mood cold and sterile, but the hotel is set on fire (as Lewis’s was) only to become a fire hose’s frozen shell, like Harding himself, who, after his no-longer-loved wife is crushed under a car where she’s rolled herself, is empty enough now, hollow enough now to become an American academic.

The complete article can be found online at http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Special/books.9706.html

And Gladly Teach, by Bliss Perry

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'And Gladly Teach'

· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
· Locate a Copy

Editor’s Comments


Bliss Perry was a minor figure in American literary history. A professor of English literature and language, he taught at Williams and Princeton for roughly ten years each at the end of the nineteenth century, edited the Atlantic Monthly for ten years, then taught at Harvard for twenty years. He wrote dozens of books, mostly collections, essays, and biographies of American writers such as Emerson and Whitman.

Perry’s memoir, And Gladly Teach, is a book of muted tones and little drama. As he admits in the book,

… I suppose that even at home I have had, more than most men, what would be considered a sheltered life. There has been no feverish anxiety about money, for there has always been a modest salary and no fear of losing the job; always a roof over our heads; always food and fire and libraries and friends, to say nothing of a household happiness so perfect that I cannot attempt to describe it here.

This is an excursion back to another world, to the orderly and reasoned life of an academic and scholar at a time when the entire faculty of a college could sit around one not very large conference table and when reading and thinking were considered priorities to which a professor was expected to devote much of his working day:

I choose for illustration four English authors on whom I happened to be lecturing at Williams in the eighteen-eighties, at Princeton in the eighteen-nineties, and at Harvard in the nineteen-twenties. It is clear that the lecturer, at the outset, should have read the entire work of each author. Then comes the task of thinking, for, as W. C. Brownell used to say: “To produce vital and useful criticism it is necessary to think, think, think and then, when tired of thinking, to think more.” The third stage is the selection and arrangement of such significant facts, conclusions, queries, as can be presented to a class in fifty minutes….

“All this,” Perry writes, “is preparatory to the actual delivery of the lecture.” The son of a Williams College professor, Perry grew up in Williamstown, Massachussetts, graduated from Williams, then stayed on to teach introductory classes in English. As a boy, he and his father often wandered in the hills and forests around the town, and when not studying, teaching, or writing, Perry was usually out somewhere in the New England countryside, walking or fishing. And Gladly Teach is, therefore, a quiet and pastoral book, and comes to a modern reader as an escape from the world of 24-hour interactivity.

It is also very much a book from the time when power and social status in America lay in the hands of a small number of white men, mostly from the Northeast. “My day’s work, for more than half a century, has been with gentlemen,” Perry writes, and by “gentlemen”, it is quite clear that he means men much like him. He is not, however, quite so narrow in his definition as his Harvard neighbor, who offers the following classic assessment of the world as seen from Cambridge in 1900:

The men, while taking their coffee, mentioned a then newly published book, Who’s Who in America I remarked that I was finding it useful in the Atlantic office, inasmuch as it gave biographical information about most of the men who had achieved national prominence. Whereupon our host asked, with entire seriousness, “Wouldn’t the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue answer every purpose?”

The relative inertia of the social class structure of Perry’s world extended to the relations between faculty and students as well. Perry writes unashamedly that,

Likewise I was too ignorant of the personal history of the men whom I was trying to teach. One could place the graduate students roughly, for one knew the colleges from which they came and something about their records and plans. But I never knew even the names of the majority of students in the big undergraduate courses, nor their preparatory schools nor their Harvard groupings and social affiliations. I had to leave all that to my assistants who read the blue-books and conferred personally with the men.

On this point, though, I suspect that the only thing that’s changed between Perry and many of today’s university faculty members is the willingness to admit this.

And Gladly Teach is not a major work of autobiography. “I am aware that I have not portrayed a whole life, but only such aspects of a teacher’s career as may conceivably prove interesting,” Perry writes near the end. It is, though, a sterling example of a life devoted to, and illuminated by, a deep love of the humanities, and a thoroughly pleasant place in which to spend a few hours.

Other Comments

• Percy Hutchison, New York Times, 13 October 1935

A rare book, rare in the sense that it has individuality of flavor. One the whole, Bliss Perry lived a quiet, even uneventful life. But he lived a life of the mind, of the spirit, and the will, which three together, plus friendliness toward one’s fellow-men, make personality. For this writer, who was one of Mr. Perry’s first assistants at Harvard, he lives anew in these pages, so unconsciously does Bliss Perry reproduce himself.

• G. M. Janes, Churchman, 1 November 1935

In reading the various chapters of this interesting volume of reminiscences, one has the same feeling as in biting into a juicy apple and finding it neither too tart nor too sweet, but altogether enjoyable.

• C. M. Fuess, Atlantic, November 1935

One notable feature of this book is the author’s skill in characterization, shown in little sketches…. No one can spend an hour with this book without respecting Bliss Perry’s balanced, tolerant spirit, his astonishing fund of literary knowledge, his keen intelligence, his urbanity, his blessed common sense.

• Christian Science Monitor, 30 September 1935

When the subject is worthy and workmanship good, only in the reader’s own taste lie any impediments to enjoyment of a book. The subject of Bliss Perry’s reminiscences is worthy because it is a record of life as it affect and was affected by a cultivated, idealistic, and modest man; the workmanship is as good as that of one who spent his working hours with the masterpieces of literature ought to be.

Locate a Copy

And Gladly Teach, by Bliss Perry
Boston and New York: Hoghton Mifflin Company, 1935

“Their Back Pages”: Forgotten books by famous authors, from the Village Voice

In “Their Back Pages”, from the 26 September 2005 issue of the Village Voice, Paul Collins amusingly discusses forgotten books by famous writers. Among those mentioned:

• Casing the Promised Land, by Caleb Carr

A first novel from the author of The Alienist, this rock-n-roll saga led Carr himself to post the following as an Amazon review:

I am the author of this book. It has a few good scenes, but is essentially “roman a clef” nonsense that every writer has to get out of his system early on. Do yourself a favor and read ANYTHING else I’ve written (you’ll be doing me a favor, too).

• Franklin Evans: Or, The Inebriate, by Walt Whitman

As Collins puts it, Whitman “fortified himself with hooch while writing his tale of a country boy corrupted by the city and the demon dram.” Of this attempt to emulate the success of T.S. Arthur’s temperance best-seller, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, Whitman wrote, “It was damned rot — rot of the worst sort….”

• Invasion of the Space Invaders, by Martin Amis

Nine years before his first Booker Prize nomination (but surprisingly after publishing three novels), Amis wrote this guide to the first generation of computer arcade games, subtitled, An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines. Although copies fetch $130 and up on Amazon, Amis has preferred to omit it from his credits in subsequent books.

• Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book, by Len Deighton

“A shockingly good cookbook,” writes Collins, despite the tongue-in-cheek cover showing a holstered Deighton scooping up spaghetti. This is actually a collection of “cookstrips” Deighton wrote for “The Observer” back at the time his first thrillers were being published. Also published as Cookstrip cook book and Ou est le garlic?, this is not only an introduction to cooking even complete novices can handle (historian Simon Schama recalled that it “showed the idiot novice male how to dice an onion without it falling apart”), but also something of an innovation, perhaps the first time comic art came to the aid of cuisine. Writer Matthew Christian salutes the quality of Deighton’s recipes and English graphic designer Richard Weston celebrates its graphic and design on his “Found Things” blog

Collins repeated the story on NPR’s Weekend Edition: you can hear the excerpt here.

Collins takes the punchline of his piece from Annie Proulx, writing on the task of examining used cider barrels in her early (but still in print) work, Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider: “Don’t be shy. Put your nose right up to the bunghole.” Good advice for those willing to look beyond the best-seller lists for their reading material.

Inside, Looking Out, by Harding Lemay

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments

· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Inside, Looking Out'
After Marianne left with her husband and baby, I prepared a light lunch which Vincent and I ate around Mother’s bed. Then he escaped, first to wash the dishes and then to so unrevealed diversion, and I sat by my mother’s bed, along with her for the first time since I had run away from home thirteen years earlier. Propped up against her pillows in a bedjacket one of her children had sent her, she seemed unusually lucid and oddly girlish. She whispered that she knew I would take care of her; I was the favorite of all her children and I wouldn’t let Marianne go on mistreating her. Her customary lethargy gave way to flirtatiousness and quick, energetic gestures. Grasping her hot hands in mine, I looked into eyes I had evaded for many years and told her than I would not, and could not, rescue her from Marianne. She stared at me in utter disbelief, nodding her head at everything I said, hearing nothing. I told her I was getting divorced (she had never seen my wife), and she nodded her head in approval. I told her I was going to marry again (she had never met Dorothy), and again she nodded approvingly. She forgot, I think, the promise she had tried to extract from me, and rested quietly for most of the afternoon. Once, turning to me, she asked with a childlike clarity of speech, “How old are you, Harding?” “Thirty,” I replied, and she fumbled for my hand. “You’re in the prime of life,” she comforted me, patting my hand as she had often done when I was a boy.

Lying back, she muttered something I couldn’t understand until her urgent movements made me realize she required the bedpan. I raised her flaccid body to perform that function, which embarrassed me far more than it did her. When I came back from emptying the pan in the bathroom, she was asleep, her face peaceful against the pillow, her breath coming in sharp little grunts. I watched her as I was to watch, in later years, our young children asleep in their cribs, merriment and tantrums wiped from their faces, leaving only blank slates upon which a father (a son?) can write what he pleases. She was still sleeping quietly when Marianne and Lou returned, and I made my way back to Manhattan.

Editor’s Comments

Harding Lemay’s memoir, Inside, Looking Out, struck critics and readers alike as an exceptional novelty when it was first published in 1971. At the time, this soul-baring account of Lemay’s painful escape from the poverty, alcoholism, violence, and ignorance of his upbringing and his fitful attempts to establish himself in a career and as a family man stood out from the mass of autobiographies. Disreputable relations, bad habits, and errors of judgment were considered best left unmentioned. Now, after the success of Angela’s Ashes, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Running with Scissors, and other such tales of adolescents emerging from troubled situations, Inside, Looking Out probably seems a bit old hat.

Lemay is best known for his work in the 1970s on the soap opera, “Another World”. When he wrote Inside, Looking Out, however, he had little in the way of conventional accomplishments on which to base an autobiography. He had written a few plays, none of which had got past an off-off-Broadway weekend run. He had spent nearly ten years working for Alfred and Blanche Knopf in their publishing firm, rising to a fairly senior level, but he’d quit that to devote himself full-time to writing. Before the Knopfs, Lemay had worked as a largely unsuccessful actor. His only starring roles were with touring company that performed abridged versions of the classics for high school audiences. His first marriage had ended in divorce; in the Army, he’d deliberately flunked out of officer training; and before getting drafted, he’d lived in a home for wayward boys and shelved books at the New York Public Library. A memoir was hardly what anyone would have expected him to write.

It’s not the facts of Lemay’s life that make Inside, Looking Out worth reading. Instead, Lemay introduced a new dimension to American autobiography. This is a story of mistakes, embarrassments, bad judgments, problems ignored, and hard choices avoided. What makes this something of a novelity for its time is that Lemay portrays his own failures and foibles as honestly as he does of others.

But what makes is most remarkable about Inside, Looking Out is that Lemay does — gradually, haltingly — come to find the character within himself to make those hard choices. He comes to admit that his first marriage is a failure. As he leaves, he throws into a garbage bin all the bits of theatre memorabilia he has made his hobby and his escape. He later leaves a solid position and an excellent salary at Knopf when he comes to recognize its toll on himself and his family. And, as in the excerpt above, he comes to terms with his parents. Lemay never takes his own growth as an excuse for judging others:

For memory may be nothing more than another form of fantasy, in which we ceaselessly arrange and rearrange the incidents of our lives into a pattern we can accept. The honesty with which we present our motives to ourselves may be merely rationalizations for actions we not longer dare to confront, and those we’ve loved and hated, blur together into one haunting image.

Inside, Looking Out was nominated for the 1972 National Book Award for Biography. It lost to Joseph Lash’s Eleanor and Franklin. Dorchester Publishing reissued the book as a paperback in 1982, but it’s been out of print since then. For anyone who appreciated the like of Angela’s Ashes, it’s certainly worth looking for.

Other Comments

Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek, 3 May 1971

Harding Lemay’s story is an American classic. … Not a man to attract a biographer’s attentions, but that is the joy of a personal memoir. It does not matter who the author is or what success he has achieved — what matters is the book he fashions from the rough materials of his life. I think that Lemay’s recollections of his family and his service in the court of the Knopfs are themselves worth the book, but the whole is better than that. It is a very tough, unsparing self-evaluation, an honest book that shows how a man not used to honesty can work toward it. It shows how difficult it can be to learn to accept what one is and to build on that. It is, very simply, an account of how a man forced himself to become as full a man as he could be.

Haskel Frankel, Saturday Review, 5 June 1971

[This is] a literary event, and — much as I suspect this will embarrass Mr. Lemay — a true inspirational work. He cannot help but be meaningful to the majority of us who just gasp for air in the stranglehold of status and possessions and titles that never produce the happiness we thought came as part of the whole package. In short, I think Inside, Looking Out is as important for what it says as it is beautiful for the simple, controlled way it says it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Locate a Copy

Inside, Looking Out: a Personal Memoir, by Harding Lemay
New York: Harper, 1971