As a change of pace, I thought I would join Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’ semiannual reading club, this time focused on the books of 1930 (#1930club).
To make things simple, I headed to The Times Literary Supplement archive and simply looked for the first work of fiction reviewed in the first issue of 1930. There, in the first column of page 10, under the title, “Woburn Books Again,” we find a list of titles starting with Fame by May Sinclair. As the review notes, Sinclair’s subject is “the literary fame of Liston Chamberlin, who ‘died for love of his own immortality.'” Having recently started a dissertation on the life of the forgotten novelist G. E. Trevelyan, I thought Fame seemed the perfect book for the occasion.
It was a bit of a cheat, however. Fame is all of 40 pages long, really a long short story rather than a novel. Woburn Books was a series of books published by the London firm of Elkins Mathews and Marrot in 1928 and 1929 (meaning it was also a cheat, having only been reviewed and not published in 1930: I promise to stay after school and write another piece to make up for these sins). As John Krygier on Ohio Wesleyan University writes on his excellent website, A Series of Series, Woburn Books were perhaps cynically aimed at suckers. Advertisements for the series, which ran to a total of 18 books, use a tried-and-true baiting technique:
We are at once pleased and sorry to say that our WOBURN BOOKS are all out of print or greatly oversubscribed; so, if you covet one of these charming and inexpensive limited editions as a Christmas Gift, you will be wise to apply early to your Bookseller.
Which if literally true, of course, would have meant there was no point in applying to any bookseller. But what worked for Tom Sawyer and fence-painting seems to have worked for Woburn Books. Compared to most limited-run (530 copies, 500 of them for sale) books from 90 years ago, they’re still relatively easy to find and inexpensive. The list of Woburn Book authors included some still recognized names (G.K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Graves, and Algernon Blackwood) and a few largely-forgotten ones (R. H. Mottram, Martin Armstrong, Stella Benson, Joseph Hergesheimer). In its review of the first set of Woburn Books, however, TLS made its opinion of the whole venture clear: “Here are three short stories, perhaps designed for invalids, since they are so light to hold and so clearly printed, besides having nothing to distress or agitate the mind in any of them.”
Fame is an entertaining story about a diligent biographer in quest of a subject who’s been equally diligent in trying to shape his reputation for posterity. If fame means posthumous celebrity, Sinclair’s narrator writes, “I’ve only known one man who really cared about it.” That man was Liston Chamberlin:
His passion was corroding in its very cleanness. It bit into him like pure acid and consumed him. You may say he died for love of his own immortality.
Yes. Immortality is a large order. And you can reckon the chances at a million to one against it. You and I and the rest of us have got our celebrity here and now, and we wouldn’t barter our solid chunk for such a ghost of an off-chance. He wouldn’t have sacrificed that millionth chance of his for anything you could offer him here and now.
Chamberlin is a rough-hewn novelist (“brutal before brutality became the fashion”) who, on his deathbed, asks Walter Furnival to write his biography. Furnival was a faithful and admiring friend, so Chamberlin probably assumed he would produce a suitably rose-hued portrait. Instead, Furnival is a bloodhound who follows every lead, who haunts for week and week places where Chamberlin lived, interviewing anyone and everyone he might have come in contact with. And whose radar sweeps relentlessly for sign of the biographer’s most prized target: letters. He keeps searching for bundles of letters from Chamberlin, becoming especially alert when he uncovers a failed romance in the writer’s past.
Ironically, the letters that play the biggest role — not just in the story but in shaping posterity’s view of Chamberlin — aren’t his letters. They are letters sent him by a woman who supported him emotionally and financially, who ruined her eyesight transcribing his sparrow-scratch handwriting, and who never lost hope that he would eventually return her love in kind. Fame offers useful proof that history does have its own way of bring the true shits in the world to some sort of justice.
Sinclair included Fame in her 1930 story collection Tales Told by Simpson and told at least one acquaintance she considered it her favorite story.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first listing in the TLS.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first listing in the TLS.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first listing in the TLS.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first listing in the TLS.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first listing in the TLS.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first listing in the TLS.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first listing in the TLS.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first listing in the TLS.
I promise not to pick my next book from the first list….
Sounds interesting, and what a fun way to choose your book – even if it means you’ll be in detention! I’ve really enjoyed the Sinclairs I’ve read, and they’ve been quite varied.
Neither had I until now.
Sounds very entertaining and a good choice for 1930! To my eternal shame, I’ve not yet read Sinclair and I really should…