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News about neglected books and notices of new additions to the site.

An Update on the Recovered Books Series from Boiler House Press

The Recovered Books logo.

I haven’t made much noise about the Recovered Books series I’m editing for Boiler House Press, but as we will soon release our sixth title, Gertrude Trevelyan’s Two Thousand Million Man-Power, I thought it was worth sharing a look back at our first year and a look at where we’re headed for 2023 and 2024.

After I finished my dissertation (thesis in the U.S.) on Virginia Faulkner for the MA Biography/Creative Non-fiction program at the University of East Anglia and while my wife and I were awaiting the end of COVID lockdowns to make our move back to the U.S., I approached Nathan Hamilton, the publisher at Boiler House Press and director of the University Publishing Project at UEA, and offered to help with any publication chores he had. As an ‘in at the deep-end’ training exercise, he asked me to usher the first four titles in its Beyond Criticism series to publication and I was able to see them through to release in May 2021.

While working on this project, I asked Nathan if he would be interested in publishing one of my favorites of the hundreds of books I’ve featured on this site: Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard. I had already confirmed with Lewis’s son Michael that the book was in the public domain and I felt it could fine a small but receptive readership based on the success of its Spanish edition from La Bestia Equilatera in Buenos Aires. “Why not do a whole series?” he responded. He invited me to put together a proposal and with him to form an editorial board.

Luckily, Nathan had done some groundwork already with two UEA professors, Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett. Working with Tom and Hilary, he’d devised a project whereby, through an undergraduate module led by Thomas and Hilary studying 19th century American children’s literature, they were preparing to publish Susan Coolidge’s novel What Katy Did. Although well-known in the U.S., the book hadn’t been available in the U.K. for some years.

So, we agreed to join forces and establish Recovered Books as a series covering both adult and children’s book. As announced in The Bookseller in July 2021, the aim of the series is to bring “unfairly forgotten books of exceptional merit and resounding relevance to the attention of today’s engaged readers.” We set to work on getting What Katy Did and Gentleman Overboard ready for printing and distribution, but also on a production plan for further titles in 2022 and beyond.

We were fortunate to be able to work with some of UPP’s network of terrific book designers. Nathan arranged for two designers who’d worked on other UEA Publishing Project publications. Emily Benton worked with Thomas and Hilary’s students to design What Katy Did for maximum accessibility by a variety of readers, including those with reading challenges such as dyslexia, and Louise Aspinall worked with me to adapt the Boiler House Press fiction design and come up with the logo for Recovered Books.

Even though no joke is improved by an explanation, I will point out that the logo has a couple of them. It shows a book with the letters RE on the cover (RE-covered, see?) and the lower right edge (the pages) incorporates the “smokestacks” logo of Boiler House Press. The smokestacks commemorate the first building erected on the UEA campus: the heating plant (boiler house).

Building further on elements of Boiler House Press’ branding, Louise helped us establish a template for the series that maintains a consistent look and feel while including a variety of elements unique to each title. The cover design is the most obvious variable, of course. Louise created a modern adaptation of the original U.S. dust jacket for Gentleman Overboard that conveys in simple, powerful terms the predicament of the novel’s forlorn hero, Henry Preston Standish. It’s a design, I’m happy to announce, is being used for the German edition of the book, Gentleman über Bord, due out from Mare Books in March 2023.

The cover designs of the 1937 (left) and 2021 (right) editions of Gentleman Overboard.

Other design elements that vary with each title include a full-page photo of the author opposite the title page and a glyph (the life preserver on the title page) used throughout the book as a divider.

The facing and title pages from Gentleman Overboard.

We also included two-page images for the endpapers at the start and end of each book, images that convey a sense of the narrative or the spirit of the book. In this case, an advertisement for a cruise of the type Standish takes from Honolulu before his unfortunate accident and a barren moonlight seascape — the emptiness left after he goes under for the last time.

The front and back endpaper illustrations from Gentleman Overboard.

For me, the biggest challenge was laying out the plan for 2022 and beyond. Or rather, carrying out the plan. For each title, unless it’s in the public domain — and most of our Recovered Books titles are not — three contracts have to be established: one for the legacy permissions, one for the book’s introduction, and one for its afterword. With the legacy permissions, the primary obstacle is often the difficulty in locating who has the legal authority to sign such an agreement. I have been lucky in most cases so far, but a number of the books I’d most like to reissue are still on hold as we continue our hunt for the responsible legatees.

One of our aims for the Recovered Books series is to help current readers discover these wonderful books, and a short introduction by a contemporary writer with some name recognition is part of how we do that. We’ve been lucky in attracting the support of writers such as George Szirtes, Vivian Gornick, Julia Blackburn, and Rachel Hore to this end. But another aim is to encourage further study and research, to help enrich the understanding of the canon by bringing these neglected books and writers back into English departments. And for that, we’re recruiting scholars such as Dr. Paula Rabinowitz, professor emerita of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Nicola Darwood of the University of Bedfordshire, to write afterwords placing each book in its historical and literary context.

This May, we released two titles in the series. Stella Benson’s Pull Devil, Pull Baker is a book that’s fascinated me ever since I stumbled across it a Missoula bookstore back in 2007 and wrote about it here. It’s easily one of the least classifiable books I’ve ever come across: part memoir, part fantasy, part criticism, part melodrama, part revisionism — really a book that anticipates by decades the sort of fiction/nonfiction hybrids that are regarded as uniquely 21st century inventions. Pull Devil, Pull Baker is so odd that after Julia Blackburn, who generously agreed to consider writing the introduction, first read it, she wrote me asking if I would release her from the commitment. Fortunately, I convinced her to take another look and she reached a perhaps grudging truce with Stella Benson’s mercurial creation.

Our second May release proved unexpectedly satisfying. I had been in contact with the journalist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Peter Davis after writing about Life Signs, a novel written by his first wife Johanna Davis. Peter is the son of the film producer Frank Davis, one of Irving Thalberg’s right-hand men, and Tess Slesinger, who wrote several works of fiction before moving to Hollywood, becoming a screenwriter, and marrying Davis, and he confirmed that his mother’s short stories, which had been collected several times, were out of print. Peter was delighted to work with us to publish a new collection and suggested that we look into Slesinger’s uncollected work as well. With help from UEA’s library, I was able to obtain copies of all Slesinger’s uncollected stories and sketches, which appeared in magazines ranging from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to small magazines such as Pagany and This Quarter. He also agreed that we would use the title of Slesinger’s first collection, Time: The Present, instead of that of the 1971 collection he helped edit (On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover and Other Stories). I think it’s safe to say that the result is the single best introduction to Tess Slesinger’s short fiction and a collection that merits a place in the American literature section of any college library.

We had a bit of a puzzle over the cover for Pull Devil, Pull Baker. The title comes from an expression connoting a contest between two opposing forces, but in this case, the opposing forces are Stella Benson’s sense of truth and the significantly more fantastic sense of her devil, the down-and-out Russian nobleman Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine. Louise Aspinall came up with a simple, striking image of a knotted rope caught midway between unseen hands pulling against each other. I found the photo we used for Slesinger’s Time: The Present as an illustration for “For Better, For Worse,” a story that appeared in a long-defunct women’s magazine called The Delineator, but it was Louise who had the brilliant idea to tint it a deep, dramatic purple. I fell in love with it the moment I first saw it attached to her email.

Covers for the Recovered Books editions of Pull Devil, Pull Baker and Time: The Present.

This month, we have two more books coming out. From Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett we have Five Little Peppers & How They Grew by Margaret Sidney, again with design and editorial approach led by their undergraduate students. And we are bringing out what I hope will be the first of three or four titles by Gertrude (G. E.) Trevelyan, a writer I’ve been championing since learning of her work back in 2018. Despite its awkward title, Two Thousand Million Man-Power, which I wrote about here, is probably Trevelyan’s most accessible title, a realistic account of the lives of a couple, Katharine and Robert, from New Year’s Eve 1919 to the funeral of King George V in 1936. Trevelyan was influenced by John Dos Passos’s U. S. A.trilogy and incorporates snippets of newspaper headlines and radio reports into her text, creating a vivid picture of English life during this period. At the same time, it’s a caustic view of life in a capitalist society, one as radical in its outlook as George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I hope that Two Thousand Million Man-Power will build upon the interest in Trevelyan’s work that started with the Abandoned Bookshop’s reissue of Appius and Virginia two years ago.

Covers of the Recovered Books editions of The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and Two Thousand Million Man-Power.

Looking ahead, we have a full plate of reissues lined up for 2023. In May, we will release two books:

• Quarry, by Jane White
I wrote about this, White’s first novel, published in 1967, a year ago. Having read the book again several times in the course of preparing the text, I can say that this is among the most unsettling books I’ve ever read. White manages to combine a story full of evil and violence with a tone that’s almost eerily normal and dispassionate. It will not be a book people like. I do think, though, it will be a book that gets under the skin — and a book that revives interest in one of the more challenging English novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a writer long overdue for recognition. Anne Billson is writing the introduction and Dr. Helen Hughes of the University of Sussex (and White’s daughter-in-law) the afterword.

• The Sanity Inspectors, by Friedrich Deich
This black comedy about the moral and intellectural difficulty of trying to remain good in an evil system was brought to us by Dr. Chris Maloney, a member of our editorial board and a psychotherapist with deep experience in social causes. The book was first published in 1955 and translated soon after into English. We were honored that the Hoffnung Partnership agreed to let us reuse Gerard Hoffnung’s original dust jacket illustration for our own cover. Chris Maloney wrote the afterword and the historian and novelist Sinclair McKay contributed the introduction.

In September 2023, we’re publishing two books:

• William’s Wife, by Gertrude Trevelyan
I will be eager to see how this book is received. Trevelyan’s story of how Jane Chirp goes from being a lady’s companion to scavenging for discarded produce in the gutters and dustbins of London’s markets is unlike anything I know of in English fiction of the 1930s. It’s one of the most powerful accounts of psychological breakdown I know of, and all the more so because so much of the damage is self-inflicted. Pritchett and PEN/Ackerley prize winning author Alice Jolly will provide the introduction and Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith is writing the afterword.

• Selected Poetry and Prose, by Genevieve Taggard
I discovered Genevieve Taggard’s work back in 2015 and wrote a long piece about it here. Taggard is certainly the most neglected of the major American modernist poets. Her work is full of powerful images and rooted in both a love of nature and a passion for social justice. In addition, she wrote a number of autobiographical and critical essays that are just too strong and good not to be in print. And yet, since her death in 1948, there has been no comprehensive collection of her work. I’m pleased to be working with Dr. Anne Hammond, who’s editing and providing critical commentary for the collection and the poet and biographer Terese Svoboda, who’s providing the introduction.

In November 2023, we’re bringing out three books:

• Stories by Lydia Maria Child
This collection of children’s stories by an American abolitionist and activist for the rights of woman and indigenous people will be produced by Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett’s undergraduate programme.

• No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles
I’m really excited about this title. A story about a young woman growing up on a rance in remote northern Nevada belongs on the shelf beside Joan Didion’s early novels of California — yet it’s never been published in the United States. As I wrote here in 2021, No More Giants was published in England as part of the Hutchinson New Authors series in 1966 and quickly forgotten. The subject probably held little interest for English readers, and so the book vanished. I hope that Howles, who is in her nineties and living in London now, will be able to see her book reach U. S. readers for the first time. Judy Blunt, who directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana is writing the introduction and Dr. Nancy Cook, an expert in literature of the American West, is writing the afterword.

• Time Stood Still, by Paul Cohen-Portheim
This account of Cohen-Portheim’s confinement in England as an enemy alien during World War One is, in my opinion, one of the truly great works of humanism. A man who worked as a theatrical designer, Cohen-Portheim was not physically abused or singled out for mistreatment. Yet as he shows in moving terms, the fact of being imprisoned for no crime other than having been born in the wrong country was a punshment of a thousand little cuts: “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence, and to unimportant little tricks endlessly repeated.” We are fortunate to have this little classic introduced by Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps and other books, and an afterward written by Dr. Panikos Panayi of DeMontfort University, author of Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees During the First World War.

We’re still working on the details of our plan for 2024, but I can announce at least the following titles:

• Mortal Leap, by MacDonald Harris
I first discovered this book back in 1980 and as I wrote here, Mortal Leap was one of the works that convinced me that there were riches to be found in unknown and long-forgotten books. Mortal Leap has a small but passionate following on Goodreads and used copies have become almost impossible to locate.
• A new translation of Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus
After I wrote about the first English translaton of this book as The Red House, I was contacted by Dr. Stephanie Ortega of the University of Texas, who is currently finishing a new translation. This version will, for the first time, make the complete text of Jerusalem’s novel about a house of prostitution in Vienna available to English readers.
• Broken Images, by John Guest
Over the years, I’ve had several friends pull out of copy of Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek and read from it in a fever of excitement over the power and beauty of its prose. I’ve had that same feeling about Broken Images since I first read it in 2014. As I wrote in my essay about it, Broken Images shares with its reader “a sensibility to life that never, despite all the drudgery and monotony of Army life and all the strains and fatigue of combat, seems anything less than fresh and alert.” I like to call it the most beautiful book written about World War Two, despite that seeming an oxymoron. I’m delighted to be able to bring this back to readers.
• Trance by Appointment, by Gertrude Trevelyan
This was Trevelyan’s last novel. Looking back at what I first wrote about this book in 2019, I can see how much has changed. “I’m not sure what the point of this post is,” I wrote then, gloomy about the prospect of ever seeing Trevelyan’s amazing books back in print — or even noticed. Now, I can say that it looks like six out of Trevelyan’s eight novels should be back in print by the end of 2024, just five years later. I am eager to see if other readers find her work as stunning as I did when I first encountered it.

We have yet more candidates in development, but it looks like Recovered Books is slowly becoming what I hoped it could be when Nathan Hamilton invited me to put the series together: a small but significant project in bringing lesser-known books and writers back to the attention of both readers and scholars.

A conversation about G. E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia with the Lost Ladies of Lit

Kim Askew and Amy Helmes of the wonderful Lost Ladies of Lit podcast recently invited me to talk with them about G. E. Trevelyan’s remarkable first novel Appius and Virginia. Back in print now thanks to Eye Books and the Abandoned Bookshop Press, Appius and Virginia started me down my journey of discovering Trevelyan’s work a little over three years ago.

You can listen to the full conversation at the Lost Ladies of Lit episode 59: G. E. Trevelyan — Appius and Virginia.

Interview with Michael Walmer, Publisher and Rescuer of Forgotten Books

Michael Walmer Imprint

Michael Walmer is both one of the most modest and one of the most ambitious of the growing number of small independent publishers specializing in reissuing the work of forgotten and under-appreciated authors. A one-man firm operating from a cottage in the Shetland Islands, Michael Walmer has not only built up an impressive catalog over the course of the last nine years but is branching out with a new series, Northus Shetland Classics, later this year.

He took some time recently to answer a few questions about his imprint and where it’s headed.

• What inspired you to start up your own publishing firm?

My inspirations are twofold: first, obviously, an enduring love of writing and of writers – the capacity of some individual humans to craft language in such a way that illumination and beauty comes. And also the fact that many writers have not been celebrated with the same relish that the acknowledged classic writer might garner, despite their having equal or greater skill, to my mind – that’s the ‘neglected’ part.
My second inspiration was the feeling that I could do it in a practical sense. I had served my time in publishing with a well-known literary publisher and, because of the small size of that house, had learnt much of the trade at first hand, from contracts to editing to design to sales. Also, the advent of print-on-demand technology meant that I didn’t have to be wealthy to publish.

 

Covers of recent Michael Walmer Titles

 

• Where did your initial list of titles come from? Were these favorites you’ve wanted to see back in print?

The initial list established the idea of the republication of oeuvres, rather than solo titles. The tone of the list came from the desire to underline what brilliance there was in comic writing – six of the first ten were wits: Max Beerbohm, Ada Leverson, Ronald Firbank, Kylie Tennant, Stella Benson and Saki. And comedy was a tonic in a world that I found depressing – there was added value on that score. Anger at the state of the world and the release from that which comedy (specifically satire) gives, is the personal background.

Then there were four others who were ‘serious’ but interesting for a variety of reasons: George Sand because she was remembered now more as a romanticized celebrity than a writer; Mary Webb because she is consistently misunderstood; W. Clark Russell because sometimes a straightforward novel of events can be a huge pleasure; and the tenth ‘spot’ was given over to single works which I think deserve more attention – the first was M.R. James’ only novel, the weird The Five Jars.

These are ‘favourites’, but not the only ones – the list of potential inclusions is lengthy!

Now this remit has expanded into several additional series: a belles-lettres series of non-fiction, a poetry series, a series of classic translated fiction, a series of pre-Victorian classics, a series of great short works, and a series of modern classics. Most recently, I’ve teamed up with Robert Alan Jamieson on Northus Shetland Classics to reissue a series of key works from the literature of my new home, Shetland. The series is divided into four ‘streams’ using identifiers from the Shetland dialect: Yarns (fiction), Poyims (poetry), Myndins (memoir) and Alting (a forum for general non-fiction)

• What readers are you hoping to interest in your books? What’s been their responses so far?

Anyone with a hunger for the less traversed regions of literature, like myself, and yourself. That feeling that you will do best if you play to your passions enlivens that. It’s the same reasoning that keeps me from publishing something that I don’t respect just for the money.

Lots of great individual responses, in terms of readers and bloggers getting on board, taking up review copies and spreading the word. But I’m just about to start a new phase where I look to the trade more – the current experiment is going from being firm sale to being ‘sale or return’, so as to be an attractive proposition for more prospective buying by bookshops, and then developing a mailing list to let them know of new titles as they come. We’ll see how that goes – early days!

 

Covers of Michael Walmer titles

 

• What unexpected challenges have you run into?

All sorts of challenges, all the time. Challenges from within, where I don’t feel I’ve nailed it with a particular design or blurb. Also from without, where I thought I’d get good takeup on a particular effort and didn’t. And, of course, those things that always happen in the background of publishing, that I can’t comment on specifically – difficult estates, or irritating agents, or whatever! But then again, those times are always balanced by their opposites – brilliant responses, designs that really sing, and such.

• What books would you love to reissue but, for whatever reason, have been unable to?

Two thus far, and for the reasons above. I’d better not say too much more!

• What lessons have you learned in the process of getting your initial titles out?

That responses can always surprise, which is wonderful. Also, for some strange reason that I don’t quite understand, that the picture in my mind’s eye of any book I do always looks a lot worse than the real thing – somehow I imagine it less svelte, less balanced, less OK than it really is. Hmmmm, that seems like a problem for a psychoanalyst! Not to rely on / assume too much – just keep flexible and patient.

 

Titles of recent Michael Walmer releases

 

• Why do you think there’s an increased appetite now for rediscovering little-known books from the past?

Culturally, I think that’s been born of the digital revolution. Prior, access to these titles was extraordinarily restricted – literally visiting libraries of preservation like the British Library, the Bodleian or the Library of Congress was the only way of seeing them, copies were so rare. Or finding them through old ‘analogue’ second-hand book-search methods, like those little slips of paper from dealers with offers, sent all around the world in response to requests in trade journals! Now digitisation has meant that these titles which are out of copyright can be made available (admittedly often pretty poor quality photo-reproductions) to anyone who has online capacity. The further reaches of literature then become open to examination, rather than an effectively closed territory.

This has been the baseplate for interest to grow into other realms: material which is still in copyright is not usually available this way, but interest is peaking, exemplified by your blog, among some notable others, like Furrowed Middlebrow, Bear Alley and the like. Then it takes dedicated people to start making them available in pleasant editions to give them a happier new life – there are a growing group of us doing that, which I think is splendid. When I started, in 2012, there were only House of Stratus and Valancourt really, in the ‘curated’ (non-generic) print-on-demand field, anyway. Now there are loads of us.

Michael WalmerYou can browse the complete Michael Walmer catalogue and order online at www.michaelwalmer.com.

Alice Koller, author of An Unknown Woman, dies at age 94

Cover of An Unknown Woman and photo of Alice Koller

Most of the people I write about are no longer with us. And when I began my research for the post about Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman five years ago, I assumed she was, too.

Instead, I discovered that she was not only alive but was still on her quest to carve out a place for herself in the world as a solitary woman, a woman not tied to marriage, family, job, or place but only to her own need to find meaning in our world. She was a Diogenes of our time — except her search was not for an honest man but for the purest level of self-honesty. Unfortunately, this is not a kind time for a Diogenes. Rent, food, taxes, cards of identity, and the fact that our world today requires one thing foremost of a person — a fixed address — all worked against her.

Nor was her quest free of other complicating factors. These were hinted at in An Unknown Woman but more obvious in its sequel, The Stations of Solitude (1990). She cut ties with her family in Ohio over wrongs that may have been more perceived than real. She got jobs with her exceptional intelligence — she had a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard — and lost them over her unwillingness to comply with institutional norms. When she grew uneasy with her connections to a place, she would load up whatever junky car she had and head for another place. Even the website she set up some years ago required the help of a friend in Colorado and once set up, she tended not to respond to people who wrote her through the contact form it provided.

Berkeley librarian Francisca Goldsmith noted the problem in her Library Journal review of The Stations of Solitude. Koller, she wrote, seems to “take pride in her independence but complains when others have not come to her assistance as thoroughly as she believes they might.” As a result, Goldsmith wrote, Stations “is a disappointing book, primarily because Koller seems to be writing for herself, failing to invite readers into her exclusive domain of solitude.”

In An Unknown Woman, Koller acknowledged the paradox she embodied. She was engaged, she wrote, in a battle: “I’m defending, and laying siege, all at once.” “I’m even the prize,” she joked — “But I’m also the only one who’d want it.” Koller understood — and accepted the consequences of her honesty. Honesty may indeed be the best policy, as the saying goes, but as another saying goes, the truth hurts. Alice Koller’s life in some ways is testimony to the cost of honesty when taken to its extreme.

I first heard from one of Alice Koller’s death in Trenton, New Jersey last month from one of her relatives, Akiva Fox. I was hoping someone would publish her obituary but was about to give up hope when I was contacted by Penelope Green, who was looking for details on Alice’s life in preparation of her New York Times obituary. That obituary is now online and well worth reading. I also recommend that anyone interested in Alice’s life read the profile that Judy Flander first published in the Washington Star in 1977 — five years before the publication of An Unknown Woman.

Ave atque vale.

Blitz Writing: Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time, by Inez Holden (2019)

Cover of Blitz Writing

As a rule, I don’t cover in print books on this site: the fact that a book is in print is proof that it may be underappreciated, but it’s certainly not forgotten. However, I have to make an exception in the case of the Handheld Press’s recent release of two of Inez Holden’s three books about life in Britain during World War Two in Blitz Writing: Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time.

I wrote about Holden’s other war book, There’s No Story There, back in August of 2018. I owe Kate Macdonald, the owner of Handheld Press, for passing along a PDF of a well-worn copy of the book that she in turn got from Kristin Bluemel, and these two women are responsible for bringing Blitz Writing to print. Bluemel’s introduction is invaluable not just for putting these two books in the context of writings about the war but also for providing the only available overview of Holden’s life and work to be published this century.

Although Night Shift is a novel and It Was Different at the Time nonfiction, the two books are related by more than just time. As with There’s No Story There, the real strength and connective tissue of the books is Holden’s finely-tuned ear. Whether her dialogue is invented or recorded — probably a mix of both — Holden was expert at capturing a whole person in their words. Whether it’s a long recollection by Mabs, one of the factory workers in Night Shift that’s almost a one-act play about battling Romeos, or just a line or two, Holden’s gift for exposition via dialogue is exceptional.

Holden and her friend Felicity visit an art show, for example, that turns out to be an attempt to market some kind of fuzzy-minded mysticism. As they attempt to escape, one of the cult members, referred to as “Norfolk-jacket,” swoops upon them. “Is there anything you ladies would like me to explain?” Felicity mutters an excuse about being late for an appointment, but Norfolk-jacket plows ahead with a sales pitch that would please any die-hard Scientologist: “Yes, yes, I shall be happy to tell you everything about the real meaning of life. Every Tuesday at half-past two we have lectures on the great and only truth…. Not so much a lecture, you understand, as a social, when Cosmic Wisdom is given to guest free, gratis.” Nothing quite sells profound revelation of the mysteries of the universe as packaging it in the form of tea socials.

At a fancy dinner party in November 1938, a Nazi emissary of some middle rank says of German intervention in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Franco, “No, he has — I mean our Fuehrer has — absolutely no interest in Spain. He will be glad to withdraw the few thousand of broken-down troops. The Fuehrer just sent them there for the sake of Mussolini’s blue eyes. Of course he thinks it good practice for our airmen.” To which Holden observes, “This was the first time we had heared anyone speaking of killing civilians from the air as being ‘good practice.'” “For the sake of his blue eyes,” by the way is an expression one hears from Dutch and German speakers, a way of saying “It’s nothing, just some trivial thing.” Holden manages to peel back the informality of a bit of dinner party chat and reveal the cold-blooded murder running beneath it.

To give you some idea of the service that Handheld Press has performed in issuing Blitz Writing, I will bring your attention to the fact that used copies of Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time have been unavailable at any price for years, and only a few copies of either are available through libraries. WorldCat tells us that there are a total of 23 copies held worldwide of Night Shift and only 13 copies of It Was Different at the Time. Neither book was ever reprinted or reissued until now. This is what saving neglected books looks like, folks. Keep up the good work, Kate!

Complete eTexts of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage Now Available

Dorothy Richardson (rear, first on right) Dorothy at school in Putney, c. 1890 (from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Room, Yale University)
Dorothy Richardson (rear, first on right) Dorothy at school in Putney, c. 1890 (from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Room, Yale University)

As faithful readers of this site (both of them) know, I devoted nearly two months’ reading and writing back in 2016 to Dorothy Richardson’s 13-volume masterpiece, Pilgrimage, and it remains perhaps the most profoundly revealing experience in by reading life. I personally think that all self-respecting adult males should be required to read Pilgrimage, as it will immerse them as no other text into the world as seen through a woman’s eyes. As Richardson wrote in the Foreword to the 1938 J. M. Dent edition of the first 12 volumes,

… the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism….

In 1913, the opening pages of the attempted chronicle became the first chapter of ‘Pilgrimage,’ written to the accompaniment of a sense of being upon a fresh pathway, an adventure so searching and, sometimes, so joyous as to produce a longing for participation; not quite the some as a longing for publication, whose possibility, indeed, as the book grew, receded to vanishing point.

At the start of this year, I noted that the J. M. Dent 1938 edition of Pilgrimage was available in electronic formats on the Internet Archive (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4). If you wanted to read the posthumously assembled thirteen novel, March Moonlight, however, you had to locate the 1967 Dent 4-volume set or the Virago Modern Classics paperback set.

Jens Sadowski wrote me recently, however, that thanks to the hard work of the volunteers of Distributed Proofreaders Canada, all thirteen volumes are now available not just in electronic format, but with fully-corrected texts. The first six books are available on Project Gutenberg:

  1. Pointed Roofs
  2. Backwater
  3. Honeycomb
  4. The Tunnel
  5. Interim
  6. Deadlock

The remaining seven books are available on the Faded Page, a Canadian public domain text site:

  1. Revolving Lights
  2. The Trap
  3. Oberland
  4. Dawn’s Left Hand
  5. Clear Horizon
  6. Dimple Hill
  7. March Moonlight

To paraphrase Charles Ives, When you read strong feminine fiction like this, sit up and USE YOUR EYES LIKE A MAN!

Embarking on Pilgrimage, by Dorothy Richardson

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I recently embarked upon my longest voyage into the sea of neglected women writers, a journey through the thirteen volumes and over two thousand pages of what is easily the most neglected great serial novel, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. I am a little late, by this site’s standards, in coming to read Richardson, who, according to a Guardian article published last May, is finally receiving the recognition she deserves. dorothy_richardson_plaqueThe article came out the day a Blue Plaque in her honor was unveiled in Bloomsbury, at the address where she lived during 1905 and 1906, marking the centenary of the publication of her first novel, and the first book in Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs. She has her own website, run by Professor Scott McCracken, who is also the lead editor for the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project launched by Keele University, which plans to release annotated editions of all of Richardson’s works over the course of the next decade. Broadview Press released scholarly editions of Pointed Roofs and the fourth novel in the series, The Tunnel, in 2014, an online exhibition of her letters was opened a few months ago.

However, while a complete scholarly edition of Richardson’s work may become available ten years from now, today the situation is little better than it was fifty years ago, when Louise Bogan wrote, “Merely to get at Dorothy Richardson’s novels … has, of late, become so difficult that the waning of her reputation may be partly put down to the absence of her books themselves and data on their author.” The best complete edition, issued in four volumes by J. M. Dent in 1967, goes for $250 and more, if you can find it. For about $50, you can assemble the four paperback volumes issued as Virago Modern Classics in 1979, but they tend to be “well read” copies. There was also a cheap paperback set published by Popular Library in the U. S. in the 1970s, but it’s more of a wreck than a reference. I decided to compromise, picking up the four volume set published by Knopf in 1938, in excellent condition from John Schulman’s Caliban Books, supplemented with the VMC volume 4, which includes the posthumous thirteen novel, March Moonlight. However, I’ve also provided links below to free electronic editions of the first seven novels, courtesy of the Internet Archive.

And it’s very appropriate to devote a month to Richardson during this (second) year of exclusively reading the works of women. For Richardson was never anything but ferociously her own person, and that person was most definitely female. As Derek Stanford wrote in an obituary piece in 1957, “In all the two thousand pages of Pilgrimage there is not one effort to see the world from a man’s point of view.” Pilgrimage was, for Richardson, more than a work of fiction. Indeed, much of what occurs to Miriam Henderson, the heroine of the novels, is what happened to Richardson. The places, events, and characters can almost all be traced to their real counterparts in her life. As Horace Gregory wrote in his marvelous introduction to her work, Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery (1967), “To reread Pilgrimage today is to recognize that this particular work of art is closer to the art of autobiography than to fiction.”

Dorothy Richardson, circa 1920
Dorothy Richardson, circa 1920
Yet Pilgrimage is also much more than Richardson’s autobiography. I think Gregory got it right: writing the books was Richardson’s form of self-discovery. One of Richardson’s earliest supporters, the novelist May Sinclair, mistook her technique as imaginative in a purely fictional sense, referring to William James’ phrase, the stream of consciousness:

In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on…. In identifying herself with this life which is Miriam’s stream of consciousness Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. No attitude or gesture of her own is allowed to come between her and her effect.

Writing to an inquiring reader some thirty years after beginning Pilgrimage, Richardson was a little uncomfortable with the “autobiography” label but most definite that what the books weren’t was fiction:

If by “autobiographical” you intend the telling of the story of a life, then, though all therein depicted is dictated from within experience, Pilgrimage is certainly not an autobiography. Nearer the mark, though too suggestive of “science” in the narrowed, modern application of that term, would be “an investigation of reality.” The term novel as applied to my work took me by surprise; but I did not then know what was beginning to happen to “the novel.

Vincent Brome, who was the last person to interview Richardson, shortly before her death in 1957, tried to capture what she described as the experience of writing the books: “She would feel herself surrendering to the consciousness of what seemed to be another person, to look out on that brilliant world, awaiting the final metempsychosis … until all signs of self-consciousness vanished and she was no longer herself; and then disconcertingly, it seemed to her that this other world had identities with a buried self dimly apprehended in states of reverie. Her plunge had become a plunge into her own unconscious.” When she reached this point, Richardson said, the writing flowed, accompanied with “a sense of being upon a fresh pathway.”

Indeed, in the final volume of Pilgrimage, March Moonlight, Miriam/Dorothy defined writing as a form of establishing reality from her reflections:

While I write, everything vanishes but what I contemplate. The whole of what is called “the past” is with me, seen anew, vividly… It moves, growing with one’s growth. Contemplation is adventure into discovery; reality. What is called “creation,” imaginative transformation, fantasy, invention, is only based on reality. Poetic description a half-truth? Can anything produced by man be called “creation?”

Richardson, asserted Louise Bogan, “is not recounting it to us retrospectively; she is sharing it with us in a kind of continuous present. Not this is the way it was, but this is the way it is.” And it is this quality that makes Pilgrimage vibrant and enthralling reading even a hundred years after it was written.

And so, we set out on Dorothy Richardson’s voyage to discovery her own reality. There is no better synopsis that the one provided by Bogan in her review of the 1967 J. M. Dent complete edition:

[W]e finally have Richardson through “Miriam” complete: the brave, if not entirely fearless (for she is often racked by fear), little wrong-headedd-to-the-majority partisan of her own sex (and of living as experienced by her own sex), in her high-necked blouse and (before she took up cycling) long skirt, from which the dust and mud of the London streets must be brushed daily; working endless hours in poor light at a job which involved physical drudgery as well as endless tact; going home to a tiny room under the roof of a badly run boardinghouse; meeting, in spite of her handicapped position, an astonishing range of human beings and of points of view; going to lectures; keeping up her music and languages; listening to debates at the Fabian Society; daring to go into a restaurant late at night, driven by cold and exhaustion, to order a roll, butter, and a cup of cocoa; trying to write, learning to write; trying to love andyet remain free; vividly aware of life and London. And continually sensing transition, welcoming change, eager to bring on the future and be involved with “the new.” And reiterating (on the verge of the most terrible war in history, wherein all variety of masculine madnesses were to be proven real): “Until it has been clearly explained that men are always partly wrong in their ideas, life will be full of poison and secret bitterness.”

Pilgrimage, by Dorothy Richardson

Individual Novels

Collected Editions

  • Pilgrimage (4 volume set), London: J. M. Dent and Cresset Press, 1938 (included an 12th novel, Dimple Hill published for first time)
  • Pilgrimage (4 volume set), New York: Knopf, 1938 (includes Dimple Hill)
  • Pilgrimage (4 volume set), London: J. M. Dent, 1967 (includes a 13th novel, March Moonlight, which was published posthumously)
  • Pilgrimage (4 volume mass market paperback set), New York: Popular Library, 1976 (includes Dimple Hill and March Moonlight)
  • Pilgrimage (4 volume trade paperback set), London: Virago, 1979 (includes Dimple Hill and March Moonlight)

In the news: Constance Woolson, Pamela Moore, Lola Ridge … and this site

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Neglected women writers have been making the news in the last month:

From the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, articles marking the release of Anne Boyd Rioux’s biography, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, as well as Miss Grief and Other Stories, a collection of Woolson’s short stories.

From Marie Claire, “The Sylvia Plath You’ve Never Heard Of,”, a fascinating piece by Koa Beck about Pamela Moore, whose precocious debut, Chocolates for Breakfast, established an artistic mold she never managed (or was allowed) to break out of.

From The New Republic, “The Forgotten Feminism of Lola Ridge,” by Terry Svoboda, adapted from her biography, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, published last month by Schaffner Press. Ridge’s poem, “Train Window,” was reprinted here a year ago.

And, in other news, from the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, “The Custodian of Forgotten Books,” a short piece about this site and yours truly.

The Year of the Neglected Woman Writer, Part Two

womenwriters2

A year ago, I made a public pledge to devote 2015 to covering the works of neglected women writers. I was reacting to Phyllis Rose’s comments in her 2014 book, The Shelf, who was, in turn, reacting to Chris Jackson’s post, “All the Sad Young Literary Women,” which appeared on the Atlantic’s website in 2010. In it, Jackson committed himself “to balance my own reading–consciously trying to read at least one piece of fiction by a woman for every one I read by a man.” Rose’s reaction to this pledge was to find it “lovable and, could it be legislated, highly effective, solving all kinds of problems, including, probably, the one of respect for women writers.”

Although I have covered the works of numerous women writers on this site, the fact was that, prior to 2015, men and their writings accounted for over 75% of my material. At a minimum, I felt that a year devoted to women would help correct that imbalance, but I also suspected that the experience might pry open my own blinders a little. I grew up in a household where my mom was the only female, and she was the only daughter in a family with ten sons. Living with my wife continues to be a daily learning process, and having my own daughter has been delight, even if it’s occasionally put me in situations for which I’ve had no point of reference as a male … like the day when, as the only parent home, I had help her shop for her first feminine hygiene product. But if I step back and take a look at my studies, my work, and my interests, the fact is that they’ve been dominated by male voices and perspectives.

I didn’t think that respect for women writers was a problem for me, but I would have to say that it’s largely been something I’ve tended to keep from a distance. And spending this last year reading nothing but the words of women has given me respect for something I don’t think I ever really appreciated before. For some weeks, I’ve been mulling over how to express this, and the right words still elude me, but to put it simply, throughout all the books I’ve read this year, the one absolutely consistent difference in perspective I’ve found between the writings of women and those of men is that women never assume that they–or others like them–are running the world. They may run the household or make their own decisions about where they live, what they do, who they love, but there is always sense of a culture, government, economy, society, and geography controlled by others … meaning men.

Of course, there are many male writers who write from a position of dis-empowerment, whether it’s political, economic, class, or cultural, so that’s not quite the differentiating factor. But Solzhenitsyn, Frederick Douglass, Franz Fanon, or Victor Klemperer were writing against oppression organized and carried out by other men, and implicit in each of their messages was the assumption that a world free of the oppression they opposed would still be a world run by men.

Now, just from observing the informal organizational abilities of my wife and daughter and comparing them to mine or those of my sons, I often wonder why women aren’t running the world. Take, for example, this viral video of a college women’s swimming team goofing around at an airport or, closer home, this music video made a few years ago by some of the girls on our local high school volleyball team during a long bus ride back from the U.K.: how many boys’ teams would have the level of creative inspiration, motivational spirit, and organizational ability to put something like these together? OK, it does happen–but it’s more likely that most of them are just hunkering down, focused in on their iPhones, and killing time. So I support Sheryl Sandberg’s message that more women should “lean in” and take leadership roles, and I hope our first woman President follows our first black President without too many more years’ delay. But this isn’t the world we’re living in yet, and it certainly wasn’t the world in which any of the women I’ve read in the last year lived.

The other significant different in perspective I’ve come to appreciate is that of women’s grasp of the particular. When any of these women imagines a utopia, it is a small world, centered on their own lives, often just involving the freedom to make simple choices or be free of certain narrow social conventions. It’s not a vast, abstract concept peopled by generic bodies with no distinguishing identity. When E. F. Schumacher wrote Small Is Beautiful, it was received as something of a revolutionary message, but women writers have always understood this. And, in truth, attention to the particular almost always makes for more interesting writing.

The final observation I draw from this last year is that there is a wealth of fascinating but forgotten books written by women, and even one year’s exclusive study wasn’t enough to make a serious dent in this trove. I had been planning for some months to focus on the short story in 2016, since short story collections are, more often than not, sales dogs in the publishing world, and, unless included in some anthology, short stories tend to be far more perishable than novels. But as I reviewed the long list of titles I collected a year ago, I realize that I really don’t have a good reason to stop mining this particular vein. I recently bought a fine copy of the four volume edition of Dorothy Richardson’s pioneering novel sequence, Pilgrimage, from John Schulman’s excellent Caliban Book Shop, and the quality of Richardson’s writing captured me with the very first page, and convinced me that I would have to keep going and finish the nearly two thousand that followed it. That no one has made a connection between Richardson’s fictionalized autobiographical sequence and Karl Ove Knausgård’s much-discussed My Struggle series just demonstrated how much the world has forgotten her work.

And so, instead of bringing this experiment to a close with the end of 2015, I’ve decided to extend it for a second year, and to continue devoting these posts to bringing the neglected works of fine women writers to light. Although evidence such as the recent list of the top 200 most-used texts in college curricula published by the Open Syllabus project demonstrates that the work of women writers commands a larger share of the canon that ever before, one only has to look at counterexamples, such as Claire Vaye Watkins’ recent essay for Tin House, “On Pandering,” to see that the balance is still in need of some shifting.

And, of course, I can’t help but feel tremendous empathy for her call for readers to create their own canons:

Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white fucks at Oxford.

I’d like to think that Watkins’ ending manifesto speaks not just to the need to judge the work of women writers without recourse to comparisons with that of males or that of an arbitrary list of books but only based on “what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up.” I can honestly say that not a single book I read during 2015 failed to challenge me and to open me up to perspectives and sensibilities I had never really taken the time to consider. And that is reason enough to keep going.

2015, the Year of the Neglected Woman Writer

womenwriters

In my recent post on Phyllis Rose’s latest book, The Shelf, I mentioned that Rose’s comments about the continued challenges faced by woman writers was making me think that I should set aside 2015 as a year to focus on the neglected works of women writers. Rose was reacting to Chris Jackson’s post, “All the Sad Young Literary Women,” which appeared on the Atlantic’s website in 2010. In it, Jackson recounts a conversation he had with a fellow editor:

I was going on about some novel I was reading and loving and she cut me off and asked, “When was the last time you read fiction by a woman?” And I honestly couldn’t come up with anything for a few minutes. It was a pretty shameful moment … because I’ve spent a lot of time advocating the reading of books outside of the reader’s direct experience as a way of understanding the world … and apparently I’ve been ignoring the literary output of half the human population.

To make amends, Jackson committed himself “to balance my own reading–consciously trying to read at least one piece of fiction by a woman for every one I read by a man.” Rose’s reaction to this pledge was to find it “lovable and, could it be legislated, highly effective, solving all kinds of problems, including, probably, the one of respect for women writers.”

Reading this passage in The Shelf caused me to take a look at my own track record. Over the 8+ years I’ve maintained this site, I’ve written about 240 pieces on individual books. I’ve certainly tried to highlight the work of a number of women writers–Isabel Paterson was an early discovery, I featured Katharine Brush’s This is On Me as a unique illustration of the craft of writing for a living, and devoted considerable space to such forgotten woman writers as Thyra Samter Winslow, I. A. R. Wylie, and the diamond-in-the-rough Ada Blom. Helen Bevington was my favorite discovery of 2013 and Anne Goodwin Winslow the best of 2014. And my article on Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine led, indirectly, to that novel being reissued in 2009 and her unpublished novel, Clair de Lune, being issued by Harper Perennial in 2012.

Still, the numbers don’t lie. Less than a quarter of all the pieces are on works by women. And perhaps more tellingly, a small fraction of my Amazon Wish List items are by women. That puts me ahead of Rose’s “Joe Pubgoer,” who doesn’t even try to read writing by women, but in the ranks of her “Really Good Guys”: “The Really Good Guys know they should respect women writers, but it doesn’t come naturally.”

As any good music teacher knows, some of the best habits in the world are those that don’t come naturally. What comes naturally, as William James pointed out in his classic piece on Habit, is often what takes the least effort and attention. What becomes second nature becomes the rut in which we roll back and forth without variation. “It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice.”

Replacing a nurtured habit with good one takes more effort, particularly at the start. As James advised, “We must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.” “Put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way,” he wrote: “Take a public pledge, if the case allows.”

Well, this case certainly allows. So let this be my public pledge to devote this site to the coverage of the work of women writers in 2015, in hopes that they will continue to have a prominent place in 2016 and beyond.

I’ve already had some help to this end. D. H. Sayer wrote recently to recommend the work of Carol DeChellis Hill, whose life and work he covered in remarkable detail in this post on his own blog from 2013, and Tom Frick pointed me toward this article from the Poetry Foundation on Rosemary Tonks, an English poet and novelist whose collected poems were released as Bedouin of the London Evening by Bloodaxe Books just before Christmas. And as I do my research for this year’s reading, I observe the same kind of domino effect I’ve noticed ever since creating this site–namely, that finding out about a book or writer I’ve never heard of leads more often to another and another and another than it leads to a dead end. Already I have a stack building: Helen Bevington’s journals from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; more novels by Isa Glenn and Anne Goodwin Winslow, both previously covered; several each by the fashionable radicals Elizabeth Hawes and Marya Mannes; short story collections by Katinka Loesser, Ivy Litvinov and Cora Jarrett; memoirs by Mina Curtiss and Joan Colebrook; and science fiction by Rosel George Brown and Naomi Mitchison. I also hope to dip into the vast number (70+) of “silver fork” novels by Catherine Gore, whom the Times once called “the best novel writer of her class and the wittiest woman of her age.”

Feel free to offer your own recommendations, which are always welcome. And if the list grows too long to finish this year, I guess we can keep going into 2016 and beyond.

Extreme Reading: Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf (2014)

shelfcoverI kick myself for letting the publication of Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf, subtitled, “From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading,” go unremarked, for it’s likely the most prominent celebration of neglected books to come out in many years.

“This book records the history of an experiment,” Rose writes at the opening of her book. “Believing that literary critics wrongly favor the famous and canonical–that is, writers chosen for us by others—-I wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature.”

In fact, as she goes on to explain, not just the canon is chosen for us, but much of what is generally read. Even if the decision to pick up a particular book is yours, your access to the book is shaped by others in many ways: by booksellers in their choice of they stock and what they display; by reviewers in what they praise or condemn or simply deprecate; by editors in what they select to have reviewed; by librarians by what they choose to purchase, to retain, and to discard; by schools and professors by what they choose to put on their reading lists; and by other readers, whose choices produce best-seller lists and guide booksellers and librarians through feedback mechanisms that reinforce the success of the popular and, as Rose details with examples throughout the book, ensure the neglect of the unlucky.

Rose’s experiment was to read off-piste–that is, to read a selection of books with only an arbitrary criterion, and no received advice, as a guide. In her case, she eliminated a variety of options and settled on one particular shelf in the fiction section of the New York Society Library containing books by authors whose last names ran from LEQ to LES, “running from William Le Queux to John Lescroart, by way of Rhoda Lerman, Mikhail Lermontov, Lisa Lerner, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Etienne Leroux, Gaston Leroux, James LeRossignol, Margaret Leroy, and Alain-René Le Sage.” As she sums up in her closing chapter, the experiment covered, “Twenty-three books. Eleven authors. Short stories and novels. Realistic and mythic. Literary fiction and detective fiction. American and European. Old and contemporary. Highly wrought and flabby fiction. Inspired fiction and uninspired.”
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Rose found the experiment a bit of a trial at points. Sticking to the well-trod paths does provide a sort of guarantee: if others found a book worthwhile, chances are better that you will, too. There’s risk in going off-piste: sometimes, the experience isn’t worth the time. “I did not want to report on novels I found merely interesting,” she writes. “Yes, my disappointment could be made amusing up to a point, but what was in it for either of us, me or you? I wanted to address the life-enhancing possibilities of literature.” (I’ve tried to follow much the same approach with this site.) Rose goes beyond the call of duty in devoting time and thought even to her disappointments, giving, for example, the works William Le Queux more attention than they deserve even as historical artifacts.

But had there not been a few high points along her way through the shelf, it would have been easy to give up and head back to the plowed runs. For Rose, a high point is a book that passes a certain simple test: “The fiction I esteem is fiction I would reread. The test of time is beyond us as human beings with a limited life span, but the test of times is possible.” In her case, she found three books that passed–“texts to keep me company through life”: God’s Ear, by Rhoda Lerman, The Adventures of Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage, and Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time.

Along the way, however, she also discovers a few titles more than just interesting, if not life-enhancing. These include:

• Baron Bagge and Count Luna, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

These two short novels by Lernet-Holenia, an Austrian writer whose early novel, The Glory is Departed, AKA The Standard, I reviewed here about a month ago, are little gems–one a supernatural love story (Bagge), the other a black-as-death comedy of paranoia gone wild (Luna).

• The Habitant-Merchant, by James Edward Le Rossignol

A collection of short stories, published in 1939, centered on a habitant-merchant–a Québécois farmer–turned shopkeeper and his family. Rossignol was something of a polymath, having studied philosophy and psychology, taught economics, and researched and written extensively on politics, education, economics, in addition to writing fiction.

• Just Like Beauty, by Lisa Lerner

This, Lerner’s one and only novel, a funny, savage, and yet somehow tender tale of a sexual dystopia, fell into neglect on the strength of one bad review in The New York Times, which ensured few other papers or magazines reviewed it, and left its fate to the enthusiasms the few readers who discovered and cherished it.

While extreme reading, might, in the words of The New Yorker’s feature on the book, require “special personal traits,” including “a dash of perversity,” Rose found it had rewards more than worth the effort. In fact, it’s an act of individual empowerment:

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it’s just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for and then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

All of which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t rename this site ExtremeReading.com (well … maybe not).

Unlike Rose, I spend most of my time reading off the beaten path, and so I am sparing in my choices of current books. The Shelf, however, was a thorough delight, not only introducing me to the works of a few writers even I haven’t come across, but also full of thought-provoking observations. (Her comments about the continued challenges faced by woman writers is making me think that I should set aside 2015 as the year of the Neglected Books by Women.)

So if you’re hesitant to break out into uncharted reading territory, I recommend The Shelf for an initial shot of courage.

The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading, by Phyllis Rose
New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

“10 overlooked novels: how many have you read?,” from the Guardian, 6 May 2014

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Source: “10 overlooked novels: how many have you read?,” by John Sutherland, The Guardian, 6 May 2014

Link: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/06/10-overlooked-novels-how-many-you-read

In part to plug his new book, How to be Well Read: A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities, John Sutherland–who may carry around more literary facts and trivia in his head that any other English speaker around–writes,

What other dead and forgotten works would one dig up from the dusty vaults of the British Library? Everyone will have their own overdue for resurrection list: here’s my top 10. Not all of them are what the critics would call “great novels” (a couple most certainly are) but they are, I can guarantee, great reads. And what more do you want from a work of fiction?

Sutherland’s suggestions are eclectic but not likely to pass muster from any serious fans of neglected books. #10, William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley has been out as a New York Review Classic for several years. #6 is Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: seriously? Has it ever been out of print? Has anything by Anne Tyler ever been out of print? And #1 is Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. Not as well know as Crime and Punishment? Granted. But it’s been in print ever since Penguin started releasing its World Classics series and is certainly accepted as one of the top 10 greatest Russian novels of the 19th century. The only title on Sutherland’s list that narrowly qualifies by my standards is Junicho Tanizaki’s 1961 novel, Diary of a Mad Old Man, which is out of print at the moment, although it had a Vintage Modern Classic release back in 2000.

This list aside, however, there are more interesting genuinely neglected books to be found in How to be Well Read: A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities, which is not yet available from a U.S. publisher, but probably will be soon.

Video feature on Herbert Clyde Lewis, a neglected writer long overdue for rediscovery

Now available on YouTube–a video feature on the life and works of Herbert Clyde Lewis:

All four of his novels have been featured on this site:

I just learned that Gentleman Overboard has been published in a new Hebrew translation by Zikit Books in Israel. When will an American publisher discover this fine writer’s work?

New page added to Sources: Recommendations from Phillip Routh (not Roth)

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Phillip Routh, whose blog, How Jack London Changed My Life, chronicles his prolific and eclectic reading, contacted me recently with a couple of recommendations–Gontran de Poncin’s memoir, Father Sets the Pace (“a withering biography of a supremely selfish man”), and Valery Larbaud’s short 1911 novel, Fermina Márquez. Knowing the breadth of his taste, I invited him to provide a longer list of recommendations to be included among the Sources on this site.

A few days later, he posted a list of ten titles with his comments, along with additional recommendations for most of the writers. “I had difficulty in selecting ten books, because so many were jostling for inclusion,” he wrote. I’ve just uploaded it to the site: you can read it now: Recommendations from Phillip Routh.

Thanks for your contributions, Phillip!

Invisible Ink: Christopher Fowler on Forgotten Writers

Cover of 'Invisible Ink' by Christopher FowlerBritish writer Christopher Fowler has been publishing a regular column on neglected writers in the Sunday Independent since 2008. Excerpts from these can be found on the Invisible Ink page on this site.

The first 100 of these pieces have now been collected and published by the Strange Attractor Press in the book, Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared.

The press release for the book pitches it more as a book about disappearances than about the authors’ works: “Adopting false identities, switching genders, losing fortunes, descending into alcoholism, discovering new careers, the stories of the missing authors are often more surprising than any of the fictions they wrote.” In reality, many of the writers passed from notice in the most usual fashion: popular tastes turned a different way and they were left behind. Not that it should matter to any fan of neglected books–what matters is the pleasure of discovering a writer as deserving as any you’d find in Barnes and Nobles or Waterstones, whether they were eaten by a tiger, switched sexes, or just grew old and died.

You can purchase Invisible Ink online from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and direct from the publisher.

Alexander Saxton, historian and novelist, dies at age 93

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Grand Crossing'The New York Times yesterday published the obituary of Alexander Saxton, a radical historian and novelist. Although Saxton published a number of well-regarded works of history after earning his PhD at the age of 43, he first came to critical attention when he published his first novel, Grand Crossing, in 1943. Though only 24 at the time, Saxton had already lived a varied life. He attended Harvard and the University of Chicago, and then dropped out to take on work he felt more directly useful to the world. He got a job as the brakeman on a railroad crew and began writing a column for the Daily Worker.

Although Grand Crossing had its share of a young man’s pontifications, the book was bold, ambitious in scope, and full of energy conveyed, in part, by the title of its French translation: “Chicago-Triage.” As a fan of great big Chicago novels like The Death of the Detective, I picked it up recently and it’s been sitting in my “to read” stack. I certainly must read it now.

Alexander Saxton, 1948Saxton’s most-acclaimed novel, though, was The Great Midland, which he published in 1948. Midland is even more ambitious in its scope, covering thirty years in the lives of a man and woman deeply involved in the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The University of Illinois Press reissued the book in 1997 as part of its “Radical Novel Reconsidered” series.

Saxton’s last novel, published in 1958, Bright Web in the Darkness, was somewhat shorter than the other two, and more mature in both perspective and structure. It dealt with the experiences and relationship of two women–one white, one black–who meet while training to become welders in a defense plant in World War Two. Bright Web in the Darkness was reissued in 1997 by the University of California Press as part of its excellent “California Fiction” series.

In reviewing the reissue of The Great Midland, one writer noted that, “the novel’s exposition is at times flattened out by the writer’s documentary calling.” Other critics observed that few of the characters in Grand Crossing were more than symbols or stereotypes. It may be no surprise, then, that Saxton found his natural voice more as a historian than a writer of fiction. In an email interview conducted just two years before his death, Saxton commented, “The novel claims only a brief span in human culture and may not continue to play a key role.” Still, one may fairly claim that Alexander Saxton’s three novels merit being written of and studied every bit as much as those of his better-known contemporaries such as Nelson Algren and John Dos Passos.

Ads from the Saturday Review of Literature

I had the chance to pick up an assorted lot of bound issues of the Saturday Review of Literature from the 1920s to the 1950s and have been going through them in search of well-regarded but since forgotten books.

However, just as interesting as the reviews have been the ads–particularly the personal ads, which became a regular feature of the magazine somewhere in the early 1930s. These are touchingly open and naive, amusingly pompous, cryptic, or–often–downright bizarre. Here are a few examples:

  • Correspondence invited concerning social patterns, individual reactions, one more script, the country, pox, or your favorites. By mature man. Box 520-D.
  • AMIABLE MALE wishes employment based not solely upon his 23 years. Some education (art), much erudition; deep love of music. Long fingers, but firm palms. Though no derring-doer, worn or untrod paths considered. Box P-973.
  • HEY GALS! Let’s swap hats! If your friends are tired of seeing you in that hat send it to us with $3.00 and we will send you a new-to-you sterilized hat. What can you lose? No junk, please. Hat-to-you, 816 Broad St., Chattanooga, Tenn.

  • TO JUNKETS—alone and palely loitering. Yes.—you were saying… .? SANS MERCI.

So, to share some of these wonderful snippets of past lives, I put together a Tumblr site that will offer up other samples once or twice a day:

saturdayreviewofliteratureads.tumblr.com

There’s enough of a supply to keep this going for a year or so. Check it out.

Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard Reissued–in Spanish

Several years ago, Diego D’Onofrio, one of the partners in La Bestia Equilátera, a small press located in Buenos Aires, contacted me asking for suggestions of neglected books that might be of interested to his readers. La Bestia Equilátera, which translates literally to “The Equilateral Beast,” had already published the works of a number of English-language authors that qualify as neglected–or at least until-recently-neglected: Julian McLaren-Ross; Alfred Hayes; David Markson; Ivy Compton-Burnett; and Lord Berners.

Cover of 'El caballero que cayó al mar' translation of 'Gentleman Overboard'After a quick check of La Bestia’s catalog, I knew just what to recommend: Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard, which I’d just featured on this site. Gentleman Overboard is a small masterpiece, a marvel of precise writing and imagination. One reader on Goodreads describes it as “Wodehouse meets Sartre”–which is an excellent précis. It starts out as a restrained comedy and evolves into a profoundly moving meditation on existence.

I didn’t hear from Diego again until a couple of months ago, when he contacted me looking for some more recommendations. To my surprise and great pleasure, he informed me that La Bestia Equilátera had, in 2010, published El Caballero que Cayó al Mar: a translation in Spanish by Laura Wittner of Gentleman Overboard. Diego reported that the book had sold well and earned some good reviews from critics and bloggers. They had even put together a fun little website dedicated to the book: elcaballeroquecayo.com.ar, where you can read the first chapter.

Diego was kind enough to send me a copy of the book, along with two others from La Bestia that deal, at least in part, with lesser-known books. Siluetas, by Argentinian writer Luis Chitarroni, an editor at La Bestia, is a collection of essays and reviews of a wide range of authors and their works. Many are fairly well-known, even best-sellers such as P. D. James. However, there are also a few that will appeal to any fan of neglected books–including William Gerhardie, Flann O’Brien, Logan Pearsall Smith, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Informes de lectura/Cartas a Montale is a collection of letters written by Roberto Bazlen, a lifelong resident of Trieste, to friends, writers, and publishers about books. Bazlen was a voracious reader, fluent in a number of languages, and he was constantly championing the works of writers from far and wide. Bazlen was, in particular, a friend of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale, and the second half of the book is a selection of letters Bazlen wrote to Montale between 1925 and 1930.

I won’t mention the books I recommended when Diego contacted me again in May, for fear of jinxing them, but one of them was one of Isabel Paterson’s three amazing novels from the 1930s. I notice that all three are available now from Amazon in Kindle format, but when the heck will someone reissue one or all of them in paper?