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The Problem of Kenneth S. Davis

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Experience of War'A very long time ago, I checked a book titled The Experience of War out of my high school library. It didn’t look too inviting–the cover is a photo of small black figures–soldiers–walking across a dark gray field, silhouetted against a light gray sky. The pages were filled with long, dense paragraphs of small print. But it was two inches thick, and at the time, I thought size mattered–at least when it came to impressing my classmates with my seriousness.

I only got about 200 pages into the book before I had to return it, and for whatever reason, I didn’t check it out again. But I can remember being profoundly impressed by how … well, I guess I would say, cinematic the book was. It wasn’t like other history books I’d read–setting aside things like The Great Escape as adventure rather than history, that is. It wasn’t a sequence of “this happened and then this happened” facts, with an occasional bit of analysis. It was a series of scenes. Wendell Willkie in the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan, listening to the returns from the 1940 Presidential election. General Jonathan Wainwright waiting for the end in a tunnel on Corregidor. Navy pilots spotting and attacking the Japanese carrier Kaga just as they reach the very limit of their range, opening the battle of Midway. Harry Hopkins, already suffering from stomach cancer, flying from Washington to London and then on to Moscow to meet with Stalin in the early days after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union–and then back to Scotland to meet up with Churchill and travel to the first Atlantic conference:

For twenty-four hours he is in troubled air, his sick body tossed and buffeted. He has barely strength enough to jump from the plane to the slippery deck of an admiral’s launch, at Scapa Flow, when at last the flying boat comes down. A sailor with a boat hook hauls him sprawling across the deck to the safety of the cabin. But he laughs! He laughs at this undignified arrival of the President’s personal envoy upon a British boat. He laughs at his sickness, his weakness. He waves a cheery farewell to the crew of the PBY, whose captain will later speak in awestruck tones of his passenger’s “unbelievable courage,” his “splendid devotion to duty.”

Almost twenty years later, I pulled down a copy of The Experience of War from a bookstore shelf and began thumbing through it. My first reaction was much the same as before: “Hmm … looks very thick, slow, and dry.” But then I hit that passage about Hopkins again, and I suddenly remembered, and decided right there to buy the book and immediately begin reading it again. At the time, I was flying regularly from Washington to Denver and back, usually in the same day, and a good, thick book I could sink into was something I really needed.

But then, around 300 pages into it, I ran into the following at the start of chapter ten: “Let George do it, the saying goes. So call him George.” George is a Marine, and Davis leads us through his enlistment, his basic training, his transport to Hawaii, his transport to a ship off an island in the Southwest Pacific, to George’s part in the island’s assault and bitter conquest.

George is a fictional character.

I found this quite disconcerting. Was this whole thing just a crock, I wondered? Was Davis just toying with the reader?

But eight pages later, we were back in real history, travelling around the world with Wendell Willkie on his 1942 propaganda tour at FDR’s request, and for the rest of the book, we stayed in what I considered safe territory. Edmund Morris’ Dutch was still ten years in the future and I thought mixing fact and fiction was like adding even and odd numbers–in the end, the result would always be fiction.

In his prefatory note to The Experience of War, Davis wrote,

This is a book about the American experience of World War II. It is not designed to be a formal academic history, though every effort has been made to assure its factual accuracy. Rather, its essential purpose is literary in that it attempts to rescue from the erosions and abstractions of Time something of what Webster’s Dictionary, in the definition of “experience,” calls the “actual living through an event or events; actual enjoyment or suffering.”

Looking through the reviews that greeted the publication of The Experience of War, you can see that the majority of reviewers stumbled over exactly the same point I did. Most praise the work’s overall breadth and richness of detail, but caution the buyer to beware that the whole package could be considered tainted by the one detour into creative writing. Almost three decades later, the fine historian David Hackett Fisher could still sniff that the book “promiscuously mixes fiction and fact.” Eric Goldman, writing in the New York Times was one of the very to express unqualified praise, calling it, “…[H]istory in the grand manner, broad and powerful in its themes, eloquent in style …,” and noting its “sharply etched vignettes of people and scenes.”

Soon after publishing The Experience of War, Davis began work on the project that consumed the rest of his life–over thirty years–and ultimately end unfinished: his massive five-volume, nearly 4,000-page biography of Franklin Roosevelt. His first volume, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928 published in 1972, was a critical and commercial success, earning him the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians.

From there on, however, it was a long downhill slide. Walter Goodman’s Times review of the second volume, FDR: The New York Years 1928-1933 (1985), ended with this litany of faint praises: “He is an assiduous researcher, a creditable psychologist, a fair-minded analyst and, when he isn’t trying too hard, an inviting chronicler of the most fascinating political personality of our age.” Irving Howe was much more enthusiastic about the third volume, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (1986), calling it an “admirably rich book – rich in historical substance, political thought and character portraiture.”

He did note, however, that, “Sentence by sentence, Mr. Davis is not a bewitching writer: he has a curious weakness for stiff syntax and cumbersome phrasing.” And it must be said that the significant obstacle for Davis’ readers is less an occasional dalliance with fiction but his almost nineteenth century prose style.

At times, it can be completely over the top, as in this passage from The Experience of War:

High hopes. Bright hopes …

But then, abruptly, deep disappointments. Dark disappointments, and even despairs …

The bright and the dark ran side by side in a rush of contrasting events through the weeks after Yalta; they thrust against one another and tumbled over one another as if struggling for the minds of men …

I can only imagine what Professor Sale would have written if I’d turned in a paper with that tempestuous bit of prose. It’s Bulwer-Lytton grade stuff.

Throughout Davis’ long career, which began with a wartime biography of Eisenhower in 1944 and continued through over a dozen works of biography and history and three novels for over fifty years, reviewers took exception to his stylistic foibles: thousand-word paragraphs composed from sixty-word sentences, topped off with telegraphic exclamation points for dramatic effect: “It made a great stir. Of course it would.” And, yes, those bits of poetic excess no self-respecting dispassionate historian would attempt today:

With decision came liberation. A heavy weight was lifted from Roosevelt’s mind: his long-oppressed spirits could again rise.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'FDR: Into the Storm 1937-1940'Despite the fact that Random House gave the fourth volume, FDR: Into the Storm 1937-1940 (1993), the biggest publicity push of the whole series, Davis’ reputation continued to decline. Although Robert Dallek acknowledged that the work would “take its place in the Roosevelt literature,” he found the most distinctive aspect of the book “the mass of detail on all the major and many minor events of Roosevelt’s second term.” Boy, ain’t that the kind of acclaim that sells a book: “‘A Mass of Details’ says the New York Times!”

Davis died in 1999, leaving the fifth and final volume unfinished. Mary Ellen, Ralph Titus, and Robert Loomis collaborated to shape the completed portion of the book and Davis’ notes into FDR: The War President, 1940-1943, which was published in 2000. Even so, the book ends in the middle of the war, with Roosevelt screening Casablanca at the White House.

Davis was spared the indignity of the book’s reception, which reminds one of the old joke, “The food here’s terrible–and the portions are so small.” Here is Michael Lind, again from the Times:

FDR: The War President, 1940-1943 is not history. It is sensationalistic historical fiction of the kind associated with Oliver Stone and the Edmund Morris of Dutch. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reputation as a historical figure will survive this book. Kenneth S. Davis’s reputation as a historian will not.

One pictures Lind spiking his copy of the book into Davis’ grave and dancing a little touchdown jig.

Kenneth S. Davis in 1993So is that the fate of Kenneth S. Davis? To have steadily and diligently written himself into oblivion? At the moment, all but his history of Kansas are out of print. While his FDR books have been referenced by dozens of historians since their publication, as a quick Google Book search reveals, most of the time it’s for their details of color and character than the historical insights. And for readers unprepared for the task, the prospect of lugging a few pounds of a Davis book or sticking with his long, dense paragraphs probably seems like that of reading Proust without the payoff of being able to brag about it at parties.

For a few persistent and diligent readers, though, there are considerable rewards. I said early on that I remembered The Experience of War as a cinematic book. Irving Howe, on the other hand, saw the parallel for Davis’ approach in an earlier century: “… [T]he total effect of his book is strongly dramatic, reminding one of those naturalistic novels that marshal lumbering sentences in behalf of narrative drive.” Yes, there are plenty of lumbering sentences. But there are also such vivid, memorable scenes: Eisenhower pacing up and down the runway in Gibraltar, anxiously wondering how successful (or costly) the American Army’s landing in North Africa would be. John Hersey encountering the realities of combat in Guadalcanal. Oppenheimer torn between hope and dread at the first atomic bomb test. David Lillienthal wresting control of the Tennessee Valley Authority from the powerful electric utilities. An ordinary visitor experiencing the marvels of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Or FDR’s first fireside chat:

There was nothing fake about the hearty, laughing good humor, the optimistic faith (he knew everything would come out right in the end!), the indomitable courage, the incessant, stupendous joie de vivre which he exuded and which others, needful of it, soaked up as parched earth does water.

If what Davis set out to do in his books was, as he wrote in his prefatory note to Experience, to “rescue from the erosions and abstractions of Time” experience–“the actual living through an event or events,” I think we can say he succeeded, even if it was counter to critical preferences.

For the past umpteen years, I’ve usually had one or another of Davis’ books in my nightstand. In between books, I’ll pick it up, open a page at random, and dip in. And almost always, I find myself carried away through the next dozen pages by the power of his story-telling. And for that, I am grateful.

Happy Moscow, by Andrey Platonov

Excerpt

A dark man with a burning torch was running down the street on a bleak night in late autumn. The little girl saw him through a window of her home as she woke from a bleak dream. Then she heard a powerful shot from a rifle and a poor, sad cry–the man running with the torch had probably been killed. Soon afterwards came the sound of distant, repeated shots and of uproar from the nearby prison. The little girl went back to sleep and everything she saw during the following days got forgotten: she was too small, and the memory and mind of early childhood became overgrown for ever in her body by subsequent life. But until her last years the nameless running man would appear unexpectedly and sadly inside her–in the pale light of memory–and perish once again in the dark of the past, in the heart of a grown-up child. Amid hunger or sleep at a moment of love or some youthful joy–suddenly, the sad cry of the dead man was there again in the distance, deep in her body, and the young woman would immediately change her life: if she was dancing, she would stop dancing; if she was working, she would work more surely, with more concentration; if she was alone, she would cover her face with her hands. On that rainy night in late autumn the October Revolution had begun–in the city where Moscow Ivanovna Chestnova was living.

Editor’s Comments

Cover of Harvill Press edition of 'Happy Moscow'When I read the above opening passage of Happy Moscow, standing in an Oxford bookstore, I knew I had to buy the book and immediately go find a quiet place to sit and read it through to the end. Although quite different in subject and mood, Happy Moscow reminded me of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things: a dream-like book, where the characters are drawn along by some kind of irresistible force, taking actions that would seem irrational out of this context but that we and they go along with, caught up as if in a trance.

Happy Moscow is an unfinished novel first published in Russian in 1991. From what I could tell, “unfinished” in this case means “without finishing touches” rather than “without an ending.” The title refers to the woman, Moscow Chestnova, so named when tragedy leaves her orphaned and nearly amnesic, but it also refers ironically to the city, in which much of the novel takes place. I gather that this double entendre is typical of Platonov, and one of the reasons that some Russians believe his writing to be untranslatable. That should not be taken, though, to suggest that Platonov’s prose is at all difficult. On the contrary, as you can see from the excerpt above, this is simple, limpid prose–at least on the surface.

There is no real plot to speak of–just as in a dream. Moscow becomes a Soviet heroine as a daring experimental parachutist, but after an injury, turns her back on the state and spends the rest of the book wandering through a series of relationships with people who have also decided to become outcasts and marginal characters. Stalin is said to have written “Scum” in the margins of one of Platonov’s works, and you can see how the writer’s subtle rejection of Soviet idealism must have irritated him. In Happy Moscow, Platonov celebrates not the new and clean and heroic, but the second-hand and cast-off:

And there were people trading things which had lost all reason for their existence–house-coats that had belonged to enormous women, priest’s cassocks, ornamented basins for baptising children, the frock-coats of deceased gentlemen, charms on waistcoat chains, and so on–but which still circulated among people as symbols of a strict evaluation of quality. There were also many items of clothing worn by people who had died recently–there truly was such a thing as death–as well as clothes that had been got ready for children who had been conceived but whose mothers must have changed their minds about giving birth and had abortions instead, and now they were selling the tiny wept-over garments of an unborn child together with a rattle they had bought in advance.

I dog-eared the page on which this passage appears when I first read the book, but now that I type it out I can see how many chinks Platonov points out in the fine facade of the Soviet state in just two sentences: the remnants from the Tsarist days that still circulate “as symbols of a strict evaluation of quality”; the notion of women changing their minds about giving birth–bringing a child into the bright future of Stalinism–and having abortions instead; that fact that even in this best of all possible worlds “there truly was such a thing as death”. It seems hard to believe that publication of Happy Moscow wouldn’t have earned Platonov and his editors a trip to the gulag.

A reviewer once wrote that, “”In Platonov’s prose, it is impossible to find a single inelegant sentence”, and another that, “Rarely does literature come this close to music.” Happy Moscow is rich with examples of such writing. Yet he also embraces the crude, the dirty, the obscene. One character, a surgeon, gets wrapped up in a search for the place in the body where the soul resides and becomes convinced that it lies in the intestines. Grabbing a handful of the excrement from a corpse, he exclaims, “This really is the very best, ordinary soul. There’s no other soul anywhere.”

Platonov’s star is finally on the rise, some fifty-plus years after his death. Harvill, which published Happy Moscow, also has two other Platonov works–Soul and Return–in print. Northwestern University Press released Mirra Ginsburg’s translation of The Foundation Pit in its European Classics series, and New York Review Books has released its own volumes of Soul and The Fierce and Beautiful World. NYRB has also announced the release of a new translation of The Foundation Pit in April 2009.

Find a copy

Happy Moscow, by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Angela Livingstone, Nadya Bourova, and Eric Naiman
London: The Harvill Press, 1999

Neglected Books and Movie Tie-ins

As I read Nicholas Lezard’s review of the new Pushkin Press edition of Stefan Zweig’s novel, The Burning Secret, I thought, “I think I saw this movie.” And sure enough, thanks to IMDB, I quickly confirmed my suspicion: it was filmed in 1988, under the same title, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer and Faye Dunaway.

About a month, ago, my wife and I watched the DVD of “Separate Lies”, starring Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson. It’s a perfect sort of movie for tired married people to watch on a quiet weeknight: human drama, a bit of tension, a murder, good acting, and well-dressed characters. Not great art, but certainly fine craft. But one credit caught my end at the opening: “Based on the novel, ‘A Way through the Woods’, by Nigel Balchin.

I recognized Balchin’s name from this page–his World War Two novel, The Small Back Room, is mentioned a number of times. Its story was also, incidentally, filmed in 1949, a Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger production. A Way through the Woods proved, upon a bit of research, to be a 1951 novel motivated, according to Clive James in what is perhaps the most extensive work on Balchin easily acccessible, “The Effective Intelligence of Nigel Balchin“, in part by the break-up of Balchin’s own marriage due to infidelity.

Just this year, Persephone Classics , a model publisher of neglected books, had the biggest break in its history when Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a novel by Winifred Watson that Persephone rescued from oblivion, was made into a film starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams, thereby raising the book’s visibility and sales considerably.

I won’t start excavating the many other examples available of film versions of neglected books–but I will recommend paying close attention to the writing credits: you never know when a good (or even bad) movie will lead you to discover an even better book.

What People Said, by William L. White

Editor’s Comments

Hardly anyone outside Emporia, Kansas today remembers William Allen White, but a hundred years ago, this editor of the town’s leading paper, the Emporia Gazette, was a figure of national renown, a major influence within the more liberal wing of the Republican Party, a man consulted by governors, senators, even Presidents. His columns were reprinted in hundreds of papers. He was considered one of American’s wise men. “The Sage of Emporia” some called him. Teddy Roosevelt usually stopped off at White’s home when crossing the country. He wrote Coolidge’s biography, advised Hoover, helped other Republicans do damage control during the Harding years. Writing from a small town at the heart of America, William Allen White was a symbol of much that was right and just.

William Allen and William Lindsay WhiteWhat People Said was written by his son, William L. White–a Harvard graduate, a highly-respected foreign correspondent and, eventually, successor to his father as editor of the the Gazette. It was his first and only novel.

“This book is fiction” states the epigraph. The assurance was necessary because, at the time, it told a story that was still familiar to most of its readers: the Kansas Bond Scandal. In 1933, a Kansas business man, Ronald Finney, was arrested, accused of numerous counts of fraud. That alone would hardly have made it national news, however, had it not been for the circumstances of his frauds. Finney’s schemes involved forging public bonds–for school construction, for sewer work, for country roads and bridges–and using them as security for substantial loans. The paper trail in this case led to some interesting places, including the office of the Kansas State Treasurer, and, just possibly, the governor himself–Alf Landon, that is, FDR’s Republican opponent in the 1936 Presidential election.

It led to the impeachment of the state’s attorney general and auditor and conviction of the Treasurer. It also led to the doorstep of the Emporia bank owned by Warren W. Finney–Ronald’s father … and a close friend and neighbor of William Allen White, the Sage of Emporia. Ronald Finney was convicted and sentenced to a whopping term of 30 to 600 years in the Kansas State Penitentiary. Soon after, bank examiners shut down the bank. Implications about improper loans, check kiting, and, yes, forgery. Warren Finney was tried and convicted, but as the county sheriff waited on the front porch to take him to prison, he went out the back door, drove off into the countryside, and shot himself.

There was never the slightest suggestion or indication that William Allen White was involved in any of this. But the mere fact that for decades he had lived with, supped with, sat in church alongside, and vacationed with Warren Finney without ever inquiring about Finney’s affairs or the recurring rumors of questionable activities led many people to wonder just how sagacious and upright was the Sage of Emporia. And to wonder what that then said about some basic American home town beliefs.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'What People Said'In What People Said, William L. White recounts the intertwined histories of two families–the Carroughs (the Whites) and the Norssexes (the Finneys)–and plays out the trail that led from the Norssexes’ arrival in Athena, Oklarada (Emporia, Kansas) to the frauds of father and son: the downfall of one family and the loss of faith in the other. Charles Aldington Carrough (William Allen White), editor of the Athena Sun is a man of national repute, a leader of the Progressive. Isaac Norssex (Warren Finney) buys the Athena Power and Light Company, moves to town, then sells the company and settles into a life of banking and various business ventures.

The families become friends. They attend the same church, visit each other when sick, spend summers together at the lake. Lee Norssex (Ronald Finney) and Junior Carrough (William L. White) grow up, fishing and hunting, going to parties, playing games. Junior goes to Oxford; Lee to Oklarada State, but they stay in touch, returning to Athena and starting careers and families as their fathers sit together in church, pillars of the town establishment.

Except that Isaac Norssex is never quite as well accepted by the people of Athena as he is by Charles Aldington Carrough. A murmur of suspicion and distrust runs throughout their talk:

The substantial people in Athena accepted the Norssexes slowly. They felt it was a little presumptuous for them to buy on Federal Street as soon as they came to town. Just because you lived on Federal Street didn’t mean you immediately became intimate with Athena’s first families, whose fathers had organized the first stores in the sixties, and had saved their money and invested it in big pastures and ranches in the seventies and eighties.

The older men had a feeling that you Isaac Norssex was tricky in business. They agreed he was smart. But what did he have back of him? He had started as a trader in the equities of small light companies–buying, developing, consolidating, selling only to buy again.

The power business was probably all right. But it was new. Probably it was going to be permanent–maybe it was going to expand. Yet in the early twentieth century it was not so respectable as running a bank or a general store.

The people of Athena represent the third point in What People Said‘s dramatic triangle. Throughout the book, through every twist and turn of the narrative, through the good times of the Twenties and the bad times of the Depression, their commentary reflects upon events and characters. WPS is an apt title, for people serve as the chorus in White’s tragedy, and what they say throughout the book constitutes perhaps the most significant aspect that makes it worth rediscovery.

White’s chorus does not speak in unison. We hear different sides–from the store owners and day-labourers, from the farmers and the city folk, from the Progressives and the Stand-patters:

Oklarada’s Progressives favored child-labor legislation and safety guards over whirring gears in factories and compulsory accident insurance and couches in each women’s rest room so girl workers could lie down, and paper drinking cups. In these objectives they were opposed by the Standpatters, who found the world quite satisfactory as it was, who believed unshakably that man’s function on earth was to acquire as much as possible of its rich surface for himself and his children, and that these ends could best be served by keeping soft-headed cranks out of the Oklarada State House.

But like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, the people of Athena also pass moral judgments on the characters in the drama and their actions. Suspicions of Isaac Norssex are fed by rumors, and rumors become more and more explicit about the nature of his misdeeds:

After a few years an occasional disquieting rumor began to drift into Athena from out of town. It seemed that Mr. Norssex had a reputation for kiting checks with other bankers. It was never anything definite–just Sos-and-so said he heard it from Such-and-such, that Norssex was running a lot of checks through the Clearing House to Old Man Perky’s bank in Toluca, that Perky was a notorious old kiter, and they guessed Norssex and Perky between them must have a thirty- or forty-thousand-dollar kite floating most of the time.

When Lee graduates from Oklarada State, his father sets him up with a small bank to run. Lee soon finds it something of a dead end, less a stepping stone than a millstone around his neck. But he also learns his father’s purpose in putting him in charge–to help out with the floating of an occasional big check or two. Purely a matter of convenience, just a matter of avoiding some unpleasantness due to mistiming of intake and outflow. Unfortunately, a bank examiner eventually detects a hint or two of what’s going on in Lee’s bank and confronts Isaac. Purely a matter of inexperience, Norssex assures him. Youth and poor judgment. Lee quietly leaves the bank and goes into the insurance business. There are rumors, of course, more murmurs of suspicion. But nothing’s proved. No charges are filed. Perhaps the rumors are just spiteful.

Soon, Lee’s fortunes begin to turn. From insurance he moves into bonds, and bonds expand into speculation into stocks and commodities. No one quite understands how he manages to make money. He tells people he’s a bond broker, but just what that involves isn’t quite clear to anyone. He seems to get access to some of the top men in the state–the treasurer, legislators, maybe even the governor. But still ….

And the intermittent rumors about his father keep popping up. Charles Aldington Carrough remains far above the hub-bub and whispering, an ivory tower of rectitude. But his son Junior struggles to remain objective. He resists attempts to publish stories about questions from auditors and examiners in the Sun, going to extraordinary lengths to give the Finneys the benefit of the doubt. Even up to the point that a warrant for Lee’s arrest is issued, Junior finds it difficult to see him as anything but a life-long friend:

A guy you had always known–who you knew liked books about travel and adventures and hunting, and liked his hamburgers not rare but medium rare, liked pickled beets with cloves in them, and did not like tapioca pudding very much or dogs at all.

Yet now he was something else. He was headlines in the morning paper, he was a public newsprint figure who had a “whereabouts” which “had not been ascertained” by the morning papers. He was the “daring speculator,” he was a lot of other things besides being a guy who watched to see that they took the hamburger off when it was just medium rare.

The people’s chorus, however, is ready to pass judgment:

All that week everybody in Athena was awfully sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Norssex. People who had never liked them were sorriest of all, could imagine most vividly how awful it must be to have your boy accused of a penitentiary offense, how broken the Norssexes must be under the blow!

People who did not like Lee could now say that they had always thought something like this would happen and that they were sure sorry for Henny and the kids.

Those who liked neither the Norssexes nor the Carroughs were of course sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Norssex, but to Junior they would say, looking cynically off into space: “Oh, he’ll get out of it! You’ll see! Lee Norssex’ll never go to the penitentiary, his friends will get him off!”

In the end, Lee Norssex is convicted and sentenced, and as in the real-life Kansas Bond Scandal, the investigators carry on to indict and try his father for similar frauds. And as Warren Finney did, Isaac Norssex quietly slips out the back door of his house for a last drive, out to the family’s vacation house by the lake. Despite the fact that Isaac seems a pretty wooden figure through most of the novel, White pulls out some of the book’s best descriptive prose for his last moments:

He lifted the oak-framed kitchen mirror from the nail where it hung by a picture wire on its back. He walked out onto the screened porch, his footsteps again echoing on the wooden floor as he went evenly about what was to be done–slipping the shiny cartridges into the black holes of the chamber, which clicked as it revolved.

The springs of the long porch swing creaked familiarly as he sat down on its gaily striped cushion. The surface of the kitchen mirror was wavy, but by holding at arm’s length he could see that the slender black barrel pointed at the proper angle into the neatly trimmed iron-gray hair. When he was sure it did, he met the gaze of the calm and determined eyes that looked at him from the wavy mirror.

Afterward it was very still again except for a breeze which now and then rustled the awning outside the screened-in porch, and the car engine, which ticked away the last of its heat on the hilltop, at the end of the long, straight road.

What People Said betrays some of the weaknesses of many other first novels–a narrative thread or two that wanders off, never again to be seen; characters that exist purely to fill in a gap in the story; and a protagonist (Junior) who manages to see and hear more than anyone else but himself lacks any solid characteristc. It’s a long book, over 600 pages, that could easily lose a hundred without much disadvantage.

But it’s also a remarkable novel with a very strong narrative momentum. I devoured the book in under six days, usually gulping down a hundred or more pages at a sitting. You know from the very beginning that something is going to go very wrong with the Norssexes, but White manages to sustain the reader’s morbid fascination in seeing it all unfold, step by step.

It’s also substantial portrait–in large scale and small–of small town, middle America in the first third of the 20th century. Hardly anyone in town owns a car at the start of the book. Roads peter out a mile or so out of town. Everyone knows in fine grain the stratification of the Protestant churches–Presbyterian on top, Methodists in the middle, Baptists on the other side of the tracks, Lutherans for the Germans and Swedes. Athena sends some of its boys off to France in 1917. After the war, some of them revive the Ku Klux Klan to “protect the working man.” Publicly, the town supports Prohibition. Privately, you know who to call if you want a bottle of “gin” brought round the kitchen door once a month.

As a town built around agriculture, Athena feels the effects of the Depression early and deeply. Farmers default on mortgages. Hoovervilles rise up beside the city dumps. The proud businessmen who were optimistic boosters during the Harding years grow “hopeless, staring out of empty stores with a hopeless little stubble on their chins, hopless bags in the knees of their once natty gray worsted suits.”

And, throughout the book, there is that chorus–wonderfully catty, hypocritical, Puritanical, earthy, cynical, altruistic, bitter, hopeful, but always ready with something to say:

That winter, people were afraid to grumble much about Lee Norssex’s success. You could see plainly he was making a lot of money. And nobody else was. He was into all kinds of things. Probably some of them would not turn out so well.

But if you said this, people would say you were jealous, picking on some little detail, just because your business was bad. Because you hadn’t been smart enough to think up things which would make money, as Lee Norssex had.

People would be right, too, because you were jealous. But you tried not to be. Every time you heard that Lee had made some money on a deal, or heard that he had bought something which you would like to own but probably never could, you would smile and say, “Well, by George, that’s fine. I’m awfully glad to hear that!” You would try to be glad, too. Even though your business was going to pieces before your eyes in spite of everything you could do, you did not want to become a bitter little man.

It would be unfair to label What People Said a “regional” novel. I think it deserves a place on the shelf alongside and perhaps ahead of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and Main Street. It’s a rich tapestry of American life well worth rediscovery.

Find a copy

What People Said, by William Lindsay White
New York: Viking, 1938

The Horrors of Love, by Jean Dutuord

Rabbi David Wolpe writes to recommend a favorite title that’s now long out of print and largely forgotten: Jean Dutourd’s 1963 novel, Les Horreurs de l’amour, released in English in 1967 as The Horrors of Love. This description of the book and its plot comes from Time magazine’s original review:

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Horrors of Love'The Horrors of Love is an often ridiculous, sometimes funny tale of a middle-aged member of the French Chamber of Deputies who becomes tragically involved with his young mistress. At first glance, the story seems to be as obviously and simply French as a pair of lovers sneaking off to a bedsitter in the Square St.-Lambert. Yet it is not only the Gallic spirit that intrigues Dutourd, but the human spirit as well.

The rambling story unfolds in a dialogue between Dutourd and a friend. As they stroll in Paris, they discuss the unhappy case of Edouard Roberti, the 52-year-old Deputy who has been sent to prison for killing his mistress’ brother. It is apparent that Roberti, a respectable, loving father and husband, was all too ordinary — not so much evil as weak, not so much stupid as pitifully vain. By way of examining how it was that such a commonplace, decent man could become trapped in a senseless and sordid mess, Dutourd’s dialogue ranges through all sorts of philosophical detours. Courage and cowardice, honor and honesty, art, letters, manners, politics and morals become way stations as the two friends chat and argue.

This is not the first mention of The Horrors of Love in these pages. In the Los Angeles Times’ 1999 feature, Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium, John Lukacs called it a “stunning exception” to the overall decline of the novel. Lukacs wrote,

One oddity about it is that it is written in the second-person singular; it is a long dialogue between two super-intelligent Frenchmen (both sides of Dutourd’s own character) walking through Paris, ambling in and out restaurants, reconstructing the pride and fall of a Parisian politician who gradually falls in love with his younger mistress and ends up in jail. It is a delicious and profound work of art, from beginning to end. Andre Maurois likened it to Proust; but in some ways it is better than Proust, sprightlier and more imaginative. The language itself is superb.

And in nosing around the Net, I found a third strong thumbs-up from the fine novelist, Diane Johnson, in an issue of Archipelago from a few years back:

My first choice would be Jean Dutourd’s The Horrors of Love, which is translated into English and was published in the sixties. It is an incredible tour de force — a dialogue running to more than 600 pages, between two men who are walking through Paris, talking about the fate of a politician friend of theirs who was brought down by an erotic entanglement. Urbane, wise, humane, funny, even suspenseful — this is a worthy successor, as someone said, to Proust. Dutourd is the greatest living French novelist, and the only witty one since Proust; and before that? Voltaire? Laclos?

Jean DutourdPraise such as this makes me want to hang my head in shame for not having read it yet, even after skipping past used copies in bookstore stacks perhaps a hundred times over the year (I think it was a Literary Guild selection, so there are plenty of cheap used copies out there in the U.S.).

Dutuord, who’s managed to put out nearly a book a year since 1946, is still living and, I assume, writing. His 1950 satirical fantasy, A Dog’s Head, was reissued by the University of Chicago Press as part of its Phoenix Fiction series in 1998 and is still in print. His other novel of that year, Au bon beurre, scenes de la vie sous lâ Occupation, translated as The Best Butter has been called the best French novel to come out of World War Two.

The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976, by Charlton Heston

Excerpt

July 19, 1967
Another long day sloshing around inside that space capsule, gargling my lines through torrents of water spraying in from off camera. It occurs to me that there’s hardly been a scene in this bloody film [“Planet of the Apes“] in which I’ve not been dragged, choked, netted, chased, doused, whipped, poked, shot, gagged, stoned, leaped on, or generally mistreated. As Joe Canutt[son of the legendary Yakima Canutt–Ed.] said, setting up one of the fight shots, “You know, Chuck, I can remember when we used to win these things.”

Editor’s Comments

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'The Actor's Life'This book has stuck in my head ever since I heard Wallace Shawn (the character, not the actor) say, in the 1981 film “My Dinner with Andre”,

I’m just trying to survive, you know. I mean, I’m just trying to earn a living, just trying to pay my rents and my bills. I mean, uh…ahhh. I live my life, I enjoy staying home with Debby. I’m reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, and that’s that! I mean, you know, I mean, occasionally maybe Debby and I will step outside, we’ll go to a party or something, and if I can occasionally get my little talent together and write a little play, well then that’s just wonderful. And I mean, I enjoy reading about other little plays that other people have written, and reading the reviews of those plays, and what people said about them, and what people said about what people said, and…. And I mean, I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook; I enjoy going through the notebook, carrying out the responsibilities, doing the errands, then crossing them off the list!

I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, or, you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night, still there for me to drink in the morning!

If Charlton Heston’s autobiography (or journal, to get picky about it) was worth mentioning in “My Dinner with Andre”, I figured, it must be worth checking out. So when Heston died earlier this year, I decided it was time to give it a try.

By the time he died, Charlton Heston had become a figure it was tough to take a truly objective look at. Although a vocal and visible supporter of civil rights and other liberal causes in the early 1960s, he came out as in favor of Richard Nixon in 1968, and for this and other political stands, especially his stint as president and chairman of the National Rifle Association, Heston got dragged, choked, netted, chased, doused, whipped, poked, shot, gagged, stoned, leaped on, or generally mistreated all the way to his grave. Or, if you were of a different political viewpoint, he got exactly what he deserved.

Whether you agreed with his politics or not, however, credit is due to his body of work as a serious film actor. For some, his seriousness can get a bit relentless at times. Imagine sitting through a marathon of “Ben Hur”, “El Cid”, “The War Lord”, “The Agony and the Ecstacy”, “Khartoum”, “55 Days in Peking”, and “Soylent Green”, just to name a few of his big movies. In all of these and more, Charlton Heston was the archetypal Stoic hero. Heston’s character never trembled in fear, screamed in pain, or whined about his hardships. Hell, he almost never smiled or laughed–a serious man didn’t lighten up. When your Dad told you to, “Be a man!”, this is what he meant.

The Actor’s Life is a generous selection of entries from the journals Heston kept through his most active and successful years as a major star. As he explains in his introduction, Heston began keeping a journal because a yearly agenda book his wife gave him had space at the bottom of each page for a hundred words of diary notes for the day. Heston stuck with these books and this regime for at least twenty years, publishing this collection in 1978, as his career was beginning to wane.

The constraint of space at the bottom of the agenda page gives this book a somewhat odd feeling. There are no long, introspective entries or rambling meditations or verbose descriptions. Rather, this is a collection of 480 pages of life-bites. To be perfectly crude, this is an excellent bathroom book. Just leave a copy by the fixture, catch up on progress toward getting a backer for “The War Lord” or the many Roman dinner parties held during “Ben Hur” or “Agony”. Read about Charlton playing tennis with Rod Laver. Or dining at the White House. Or taking innumerable flights between L.A., London, Rome, or New York–all in first class, of course.

Heston makes no great bones about the trappings of celebrity, of course–it came with the job, in his view. If you enjoy reading about lifestyles of the rich and famous, The Actor’s Life provides plenty of material.

But there is also a wealth of information about all the details and steps involved in getting a movie conceived, produced, and distributed. And about the problems and considerations of acting on film (and on stage–Heston kept up a steady stream of stage work throughout this period). Shooting “The Greatest Story Ever Told” at Cinecitta in Rome, Heston recognizes costumes from “Ben Hur” among the extras. Days are lost on “Hur” thanks to Stephen Boyd’s blue contact lenses (because, as we all know, real Romans had blue eyes). A scriptwriter comes in and makes a hash of things; another (Robert Ardrey) hands in a first draft that proves to be almost verbatim what they end up shooting on “Khartoum”. You learn about some heroic stuntmen, some asinine producers, and, yes, some temperamental actresses.

And you learn that Charlton Heston truly was a serious actor–meaning, an actor serious about his craft, his profession, his technical and artistic skills. The one consistent motif throughout his entries about film-making is his analysis of his own work.He criticizes himself for not achieving the effect he wanted, or for forcing a shot to taken and retaken. He considers what he might have done better. He gives himself credit for getting it right sometimes.

The Actor’s Life could never be considered great literature. A hundred words or so a day cannot lead to art unless you’ve been trained in haiku. But it is a book of undeniable interest and merit if you want to know something about acting, film-making, and life in the public eye. And if you don’t come away from reading it without some measure of respect for Charlton Heston as a man who took his work and his life seriously–well, then I’d have to say that you’re better off sticking with comic books. There are certainly worse role models if you’re trying to “Be a man.”

The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976, by Charlton Heston
New York: Henry Robbins/ E.P. Dutton, 1978

Old Street Books publishes Max Blecher’s “Scarred Hearts”

UK publisher Old Street Books has just released the first English translation of Scarred Hearts, a 1937 novel written by the Romanian-Jewish novelist, Max Blecher. The publisher provides the following precis on the novel:

It is Paris in the 1930s and Emanuel, a young Romanian student, finds himself dangerously ill with spinal tuberculosis. He is sent to a sanatorium near the French coast where for a year he remains wrapped in a plaster body cast – the conventional treatment for his disease in the thirties.

In the eerie, isolated world of the sanatorium Emanuel discovers that life goes on. He suffers his horrendous cure and his body slowly deteriorates – but, unexpectedly, he falls in love. This tender, doomed love affair between two patients is at the emotional core of an rare, unforgettable novel that leaves the reader with a fresh understanding of what it means to be human.

In his introduction to the book, Paul Bailey calls it, “… a masterpiece, and all the more poignant for being so beadily accurate about human behaviour in extremis. It is a book to live with, to read again and again, as only great literature demands us to.” Its recent German translation has sold well and been cited as a notable work by several papers.

Writing in the The Independent, on the other hand, Mark Thwaite rates it, “… a weak pastiche of Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Sadly, this is a lost classic that did not need to be found.” The Financial Times reviewer found it, “an elegant and powerful rejoinder to Emmanuel’s despair at life’s futility.” The always fair-minded Complete Review takes a more balanced view:

Like many books in the briefly flourishing sanatorium-genre (think The Magic Mountain), Inimi cicatrizate [the original Romanian title] describes an isolated world standing almost still, full of longueurs and the frustration of not being able to move towards a future, many of the patients almost completely immobilized in a body-armour that keeps the world even more at bay. Blecher conveys this atmosphere more convincingly than most: presumably writing from experience helps, though occasionally he seems almost too close to his material, trying but unable to maintain the distance that he’s trying to achieve in this fiction.

A site visitor alerted me to another work by Blecher now available in English–in this case for free, from www.maxblecher.org. Titled Adventures in Immediate Unreality (from the Romanian original ÃŽntâmplări în irealitate imediată ), it’s translated by Jeanie Han and available in an easy-to-read 97-page PDF file.

Looking for reader recommendations: Great city novels

I am in the process of watching the fifth and last season of the remarkable HBO series, The Wire. For me, it’s one of the best things ever done in the medium, and knowing there are no more to follow leaves me looking for a great big messy jaded city novel to sink myself into. Others have already made this comparison, but The Wire was really like a novel in David Simon’s willingness to take time to let the story unfold through detours into minor and major characters, to move up and down the social strata, to delve into intrigues high and low.

But what can one novels compare to The Wire? I can think of a few: Bleak House, at least in its span of social class and its unforgettable opening description of London; some of Zola’s Paris novels, such as Money. Mark Smith’s loose baggy monster Chicago novel, The Death of the Detective. I recently devoured a pretty good novel, William L. White’s What People Said, with a similar range but in the far tamer setting of several Kansas towns of the early 20th century.

But I’m putting out a call to other readers: can you offer some other suggestions? There must be a few more juicy word-packed book that can compete with the likes of The Wire.

Terry Teachout on Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

In Commentary magazine “Contentions” blog, critic Terry Teachout salutes the fine series of reissues from New York Review Books and reflects on one of its titles, Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes:

Originally published in 1956, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was a deliberate attempt to write a novel in the style of Dickens and Trollope whose subject matter was unambiguously contemporary. It tells the tale of Gerald Middleton, a wealthy, washed-up historian who at the age of sixty upends his comfortable but unsatisfying life by investigating a Piltdown Man-like archaeological fraud for which the great friend of his schooldays turns out to have been responsible. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is at once deeply felt, brilliantly witty and morally serious to the highest degree, a combination of traits rarely to be found in a single novel.

This is a far more generous view than Time magazine’s reviewer took when the book was first published in 1956:

Angus Wilson is a social satirist with an itchy trigger finger. The novel is his shooting gallery, and the characters he sets up as targets not only have clay feet but clay minds and clay hearts as well. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is his longest, cleverest and most annihilating display of literary marksmanship to date, and after it is all over, what hangs in the air is the acrid odor of an unrelenting misanthropy.

Wilson’s renown may be back on the rise again. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is back in print on both sides of the Atlantic–from NYRB in the US and Faber Finds in the UK. His work is certainly worth a look for anyone who wants the richness of a 19th century novel combined with the moral complexity of a 20th century work.

Catching Up

I wanted to take a quick moment to note some items of interest to neglected books fans:

• Reviews of two novels by Vance Bourjaily

Malaysian blogger Raj Dronamraju recently posted reviews of two novels by Vance Bourjaily. Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Man Who Knew Kennedy'Bourjaily’s is among the names most often mentioned in the emails I receive from site visitors. Dronamraju covers the two Bourjaily novels I’ve always been most intrigued by: The Hound of the Earth (1955) and The Man Who Knew Kennedy (1967). Hound is about a scientist involved in the construction of the first atomic bomb who deserts the Army in disgust with the results of his work and spends seven years as a fugitive. Kennedy is about a man of the same generation who briefly comes into contact with John F. Kennedy in the war and is more elegaic in tone. Dronamraju describes Bourjaily’s writing as, “… a cross between Nelson Algren and Dostoevsky ….Like Dostoevsky, he is a master psychiatrist and shows motivation very well without being too transparent….Like Algren, he speaks in a hard boiled voice with a lot of similes and metaphors.”
[Editor’s note: Kennedy takes its title from another neglected book, Sinclair Lewis’ 1928 short fiction, The Man Who Knew Coolidge (subtitled “Being the soul of Lowell Schnaltz, constructive and Nordic citizen”) is a set of monologues by a Babbitt-like character that one reader summed up as, “… all voice, a very long-winded voice that won’t shut up, even long after ceasing to amuse readers (at least this one).”]

• Release of Strange Harbors, its 15th annual anthology of international writing in translation

Each year, the Center for the Art of Translation, based in San Francisco, releases a compilation of poetry and prose translations, often of writing little-known in the English-speaking world. This year’s anthology includes an excerpt from a 1986 Spanish novel, Beatus ille, by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by the renown Edith Grossman as A Manuscript of Ashes, along with pieces from over two dozen other writers.

• Forgotten Book Fridays

I finally came across Forgotten Book Fridays a tag-team blogging effort launched by Patti Abbott, aimed at garnering “recommendations of books we love but might have forgotten over the years” from a group of fellow book bloggers. In the course of a little over four months, a growing army of bloggers have provided recommendations, both on Patti’s site and their own. The majority of titles proposed and discussed so far have been mysteries and thrillers, but with such a diverse group, everything from Peter Beagle’s lovely fantasy, A Fine and Private Place, to Dumbo the Flying Elephant has popped up. There’s no simple way to keep track of all these posts, although the search string, “forgotten books Friday” works pretty well.

Across Paris, by Marcel Aymé

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Across Paris'
I’m always amazed that, in the English-speaking world, the works of Marcel Aymé aren’t given a smidgen of the critical and popular attention paid to Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and even Queneau. There certainly seems to be some preset filter that blocks the passage of any French writer with at least a 50/50 ratio of theory to art.

Against such a filter, Aymé couldn’t stand a chance. “People will be people” is probably as much of a philosophy as he ever bothered with. And people, in all their quirks, prejudices, bad habits and good, their love for food, wine, sex, and politics, their dreams and nightmares, were something he found endlessly fascinating.

Across Paris comprises a dozen of Aymé’s short stories culled by translator Norman Denny from a half-dozen collections published in France between 1932 and 1950. (Denny published another collection, The Proverb, in 1961). It’s an excellent introduction to Aymé’s unique approach, which manages to juggle earthy humor, wild fantasy, tender affection, and wry skepticism without too many slips or collisions.

Marcel Aymé'The title story Across Paris was made into a highly successful comedy starring Jean Gabin, La Traversée de Paris, in 1956. In Aymé’s original, however, the story of two men smuggling 200 pounds of black market pork through Nazi-occupied Paris ends in murder, and illustrates the violent tension between existentialism and the older world of tradition, rules, and manners. At least, that’s the underlying conflict that drives the story. Aymé would never have bothered to be so crude as to drag a message into his writing.

Aymé’s most famous story, “Le Passe-Muraille”, here translated as “The Walker-Through-Walls” also appears in Across Paris. This tale is an example of Aymé’s gift for fantasy. A middle-aged clerk suddenly discovers one day that he can pass through walls, doors, and other solid matter with little effort. At first he merely attempts it for the novelty, but soon he uses it to indulge his vices. A theft here and there leads to sneaking into bank vaults and jewelry stores. In the end, as he leaves the bed of a woman he has seduced, his powers suddenly fail, trapping him forever inside a wall.

Jean Marais' statue of Marcel Aymé as 'Le Passe Muraille' in Place Marcel Aymé in Montmartre, Paris'The sculptor Jean Marais paid tribute to this story with a statue that can be found in the Place Marcel Aymé in Montmartre. The statue captures Aymé emerging from the wall just like his character.

Another story, “Martin the Novelist” may remind some readers of the work of Raymond Queneau. Martin’s formula, through a dozen or more successful novels, has been to have his lead character die some tragic death near the end. No matter how he tries, each protagonist winds up dead. As he starts his newest book, however, the protagonist’s wife pays a call on him to plea for her husband’s life. The situation quickly gets more complicated as Martin’s publisher falls in love with the woman. Suddenly, the publisher tries to conspire to have Martin eliminate the husband. Martin and we both find it increasingly difficult to tell fiction from reality. It’s a sign of Aymé’s skill that everything flows smoothly along despite the fact that we all left disbelief behind somewhere around the story’s second or third paragraph.

Hardly anything by Aymé remains in print in English today. His children’s story, The Wonderful Farm, is available, probably due as much to its illustrations by Maurice Sendak. And very recently, Pushkin Press released a new translation of “La belle image”, Beautiful Image, which has variously been issued in the past as The Second Face and The Grand Seduction.

Karen Reshkin has published her own translations of “Le Passe Muraille” (“The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls”) and several other Aymé stories on her StressCafe website.

Locate a Copy

Across Paris, by Marcel Aymé
New York: Harper, 1950

Afterwords on a few neglected books, from BookSlut

Source: BookSlut.com

Michael Antman passed along links to a short series of articles he wrote for BookSlut.com back in 2006. Titled “Afterwords,” the series focussed on “… some unfairly neglected books of the past century that may not survive much longer in this one.”

Unfortunately, only 5 articles were posted, and even these can only be located by searching for Antman’s contributions to the site. But the essays are eloquent, personal, and insightful, and well worth savoring.

The titles he covered were:

· All the Little Live Things, by Wallace Stegner

“… one of those novels that, from the standpoint of the official arbiters of culture, has very little to recommend it except for its near perfection.”

· The Collected Poems of Conrad Aiken

“But it is sometimes hard to remember that not very long ago, poetry was, if nothing else (and, admittedly, sometimes there was nothing else) a pleasure to read in an almost physical, sensuous way, in the rush and the rhythm of its words. And there were few poets in the twentieth century more purely pleasurable to read in this regard than Conrad Aiken, who possessed a quality of musicality not only greater than any current poets but greater, I think, than nearly any of his contemporaries.”

· The Log from the Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck

“… Steinbeck took the world on its own terms then, as he would do if he were alive and writing today…. And it is this clear-eyed view of the world in both its fecundity and its ongoing destruction that makes Steinbeck’s worksuch an absorbing account of a time long past. In an age when ocean-dwelling, and for that matter, land-dwelling, creatures are being depleted at an ever-increasing rate, Log from the Sea of Cortez remains an enriching and indelible document.”

· The Night Country, by Loren Eiseley

“Read The Night Country for its beautiful prose and its scientist’s eye. But read it, as well, for its calm assurance that we are part of something much bigger than us, that we cannot know the future with absolute certainty, and that we should proceed with a little less dread of what unknown or self-created terrors may some day desecrate “the very heart of the human kingdom,” and with a little more open-mindedness and, perhaps, playfulness even as we walk into the uncertain dark.”

· The Power of the Dog, by Thomas Savage

“… when a novel succeeds (as Anna Karenina of course does) in creating a character that at least begins to approach the unfathomable complexity of an actual flesh-and-blood human, we consider it to be at least in some degree a great work….

By that measure, Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel The Power of the Dog, set on a Montana ranch some time in the 1920s, is a great, and greatly neglected, work of art, because it contains one of the most complex and fully realized, if utterly loathsome, characters I have ever encountered in a work of fiction.”

[Editor’s note: The Power of the Dog was also cited as an unfairly neglected book by Roger Sale way back in 1979 in his American Scholar article on “Neglected Recent American Novels”.]

The Right to Heresy: Castellio Against Calvin, by Stefan Zweig

Cover of the first U. S. edition of 'The Right to Heresy'

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


The town had assumed a morose visage like Big Brother’s own, and by degrees had grown as sour as he, and, either from fear or through unconscious imitation of his sternness, as sinister and reserved. People no longer roamed freely and light-heartedly hither and thither; their eyes could not flash gladly; and their glances betrayed nothing but fear, since merriment might be mistaken for sensuality. They no longer knew unconstraint, being afraid of the terrible man who himself was never cheerful. Even in the privacy of family life, they learned to whisper, for beyond the doors, listening at the keyholes, might be their serving men and maids. When fear has become second nature, the terror-stricken are perpetually on the look-out for spies. The great thing was–not to be conspicuous. Not to do anything that might arouse attention, either by one’s dress or hasty word, or by a cheerful countenance. Avoid attracting attention; remain forgotten. The people, in the latter years of Big Brother’s rule, sat at home as much as possible, for at home the walls of their houses and the bolts and bars on their doors might preserve them to some extent from prying eyes and from suspicion. But if, when they were looking out of the window, they saw some of the agents of Big Brother coming along the street, they would draw back in alarm, for who could tell what neighbour might not have denounced them? When they had to go out, the citizens crept along furtively with downcast eyes and wrapped in their drab cloaks, as if they were going to a sermon or a funeral. Even the children, who had grown up amid this new discipline, and were vigorously intimidated during the “lessons of edification,” no longer played in the debonair way natural to healthy and happy youngsters, but shrank as a cur shrinks in expectation of a blow. They flagged as do flowers which have never known sufficient sunlight, but have been kept in semi-darkness.

Editor’s Comments


No, this is not a passage from 1984. I did replace three words–“Calvin’s” and “the Consistory”–to confuse things, but aside from that, one could believe the time and place described was that of 1984 or of Poland under Soviet occupation. In fact, Zweig is describing Geneva in 1553, under the rule of John Calvin.

Raised a Roman Catholic, Calvin underwent a spiritual conversion as a young adult and took up the emergent reformist (Protestant) faith. His book, Institutio Christiane Religionis, was the first serious attempt at a Protestant theology and proved enormously successful and influential. Stopping in Geneva one night in 1536 on his way out of France, he was convinced to stay by a fellow reformist, Guillaume Farel, and he soon became the leading spiritual leader in the city. Although exiled for several years due to a dispute with the city fathers, he was eventually invited back.

Calvin seized the invitation as an opportunity to exert political as well as spiritual control. Within a short amount of time, he was able to establish a religious state to parallel the civil one, with officers, rules, and enforcers–wardens and the Consistory mentioned above. Calvin’s state quickly eclipsed that of the Genevese city government, and his rule was uniform and severe:

Two burghers played skittles: prison. Two others diced for a quarter-bottle of wine: prison. A man refused to allow his son to be christened Abraham: prison. A blind fiddler played a dance: expelled from the city. Another praised Castellio’s translation of the Bible: expelled from Geneva. A girl was caught skating, a widow threw herself on the grave of her husband, a burgher offered his neighbour a pinch of snuff during divine service: they were summoned before the Consistory, exhorted, and ordered to do penance. And so on, and so on, without end. Some cheerful fellows at Epiphany stuck a bean into the cake: twenty-four hours on bread and water. A burger said “Monsieur” Calvin instead of “Maître” Calvin; a couple of peasants, following ancient custom, talked about business matters on coming out of church: prison, prison, prison.

“Most savagely of all were punished any offenders whose behaviour challenged Calvin’s political and spiritual infallibility,” Zweig continues. Calvin resorted to punishments equal to the Inquisition’s worst to maintain his supremacy over all religious matters: flogging, pilloring, racking, red-hot irons stabbed through tongues. So when Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician and theologian living in France, wrote a tract questioning the principle of predestination, one of the pillars of Calvinist belief, Calvin vowed that if Servetus ever set foot in Geneva, he would not leave alive.

Unfortunately for Servetus, his escape route after being jailed for heresy in France took him right through Geneva, where he was spotted, thrown into prison, and quickly tried and convicted of “execrable blasphemies.” The only point of debate was just how he should be killed: Calvin called for chopping his head off; his council held out for burning at the stake. On October 27, 1553, he was put to flames with a copy of his book chained to his leg.

In itself, given the times, the event might have gone relatively unnoticed. As Zweig writes,

In a century disfigured by innumerable acts of violence, the execution of one man more might have seemed a trifling incident. Between the coasts of Spain and those of the lands bordering the North Sea (not excepting the British Isles), Christians burned countless heretics for the greater glory of Christ. By thousands and tens of thousands, in the name of the “true Church” (the names were legion), defenceless human beings were haled to the place of execution, there to be burned, decapitated, strangled, or drowned.

Servetus’ killing, though, was, in the words of Voltaire, the Reformation’s first “religious murder.” It demonstrated that Protestantism was just as susceptible as Catholicism to dogmatism and orthodoxy. Which, Zweig points out, illogical at least: “In and by itself, the very notion of ‘heretic’ is absurd as far as a Protestant Church is concerned, since Protestants demand that everyone shall have the right of interpretation.” Calvin, however, tried to show that his act could be justified with the same cold logic by which he structured his theology, writing a “Defence of the True Faith and of the Trinity against the Dreadful Errors of Servetus”. To eradicate all those who held opinions subversive to authority was a “sacred duty,” Calvin argued; only those who, for the sake of doctrine, are willing to suppress “tout regard humain“–all regard for things human–that can be considered truly pious.

Calvin’s attempt to establish his right to act as an agent of divine judgment that moved Sebastian Castellio, a Reformist theologian and teacher in nearby Basle, to write an eloquent rebuttal, “De haereticis”, which cut it to shreds with a logic even colder and sharper than Calvin’s. The very notion of heresy was not only contrary to Protestantism, but wholly absent from Bible. Heresy is man’s invention, not God’s: a relative, not absolute concept: “When I reflect on what a heretic really is, I can find no other criterion than that we are all heretics in the eyes of those who do not share our views.” Given that this one statement effectively condemned “a whole era, its leaders, princes, and priests, Catholics and Lutherans alike,” it demonstrated “immense moral courage.”

But Castellio not only punctured the pretense of heresy as an excuse for authoritarianism, he went on to claim that “freedom of thought had a sacred right of asylum in Europe.” “De haereticis”, Zweig shows, stands as a milestone for civilization for not just defending the right to think and speak freely, but for asserting that tolerance is the state to which we should all aspire: “We can live together peacefully only when we control our intolerance. Even though there will always be differences of opinion from time to time, we can at any rate come to general understandings, can love one another, and can enter the bonds of peace….”

Perhaps those words seem mild today, but they inflamed not just Calvin but many others who understood how directly Castellio’s argument undermined the very basis of their political and religious power. Although nominally protected as a citizen of the free city of Basle, Castellio was forced from his university post, ostracized, and driven into poverty and sickness. His death in 1563 prevented Calvin from orchestrating his return to Geneva (Castellio had lived there and even worked alongside Calvin for a time) and trial. Still, Calvin’s followers dug up Castellio’s body, burned it on a bonfire, and scattered the ashes as a post-mortem retribution.

Today, Calvin’s name is far better known and remembered than Castellio’s. Yet it is Castellio, not Calvin, Zweig argues, whose views were ultimately to win the greater number of converts. Both the American and French revolutions recognized freedom of religion and speech as fundamental rights, and “the notion of liberty–the liberty of nations, of individuals, of thoughts–had been accepted as an inalienable maxim by the civilized world.”

Controversies such as those over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Danish cartoons, wear of the hijab in French schools, and the political power of the religious Right in America all show that this acceptance may be inalienable, but it’s hardly unshakable. The words Zweig wrote in 1936, when stories of Nazi book-burnings, Stalinist mock trials, and Mussolini’s bombing of Ethiopian tribesmen were everyday news, are just as worth repeating now:

Since, in every age, violence renews itself in changed forms, the struggle against it must continually be renewed by those who cling to the things of the spirit. They must never take refuge behind the pretext that at the moment force is too strong for them. For what is necessary to say cannot be said too often, and truth can never be uttered in vain. Even when the word is not victorious, it manifests its eternal presence and one who serves it at such an hour fas given proof that no terror holds sway over a free spirit, but that even in the most cruel of centuries there is still a place for the voice of humaneness.

Locate a Copy

The Right to Heresy, by Stefan Zweig
New York: The Viking Press, 1936

Amazon’s Kindle brings a few neglected books back to e-life

I’m still a die-hard, old-wave real-book reader, but I was pleasantly surprised and impressed to find that there are a few titles still out of print but now available in e-print thanks to Amazon’s Kindle. And I’m not counting the many freely-available public domain texts Amazon repackages at a mark-up.

Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, for example, which is consistently recognized as one of the finest SF novels of the 20th century–and is actually, if we can be so adult as to free ourselves from the bounds of genre apartheid, one of the finest novels of the last century, period. Thirty-some years after I first read it, Dying Inside remains one of the most touching human tragedies I’ve ever read. Yet it’s been out of print for years and doesn’t show up that often in the SF shelves of your local used bookstores.

It’s a classic tale: a man with extraordinary gifts wastes them for most of his life and only begins to appreciate his error when those gifts are clearly and rapidly on the wane. The fact that the gift is telepathy in no way diminishes the power of Silverberg’s narrative. Indeed, it gives the story an elegant and ironic twist: David Selig’s tragedy is that he must come to grips with life as an ordinary human.

So, if you’re a Kindler, I encourage you to download a copy for a mere $5.75. Or you can make do with a used paperback edition for a little as 96 cents plus shipping.

Harper Perennial to reissue Jetta Carleton’s “The Moonflower Vine” in 2009

Robert Nedelkoff just passed along the news that Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine, which has easily generated more responses from readers of this site than all other featured books combined, will be reissued by Harper Collins under their Harper Perennial label in April 2009. I’m sure there are many who hope that this time Carleton’s fine novel will get the critical and popular attention it deserves.

Michael Frayn’s “Sweet Dreams” on OneBook

Gary Smailes invited me to nominate a neglected book for his OneBook blog. Gary set up OneBook as a living project to which he invites a variety of writers to discuss the book they’d recommend to others–the desert island book, if you will–if they could only recommend one.

It was easy for me to pick my OneBook: Michael Frayn’s Sweet Dreams (featured here on this site). There are so many delightful and wise things to be found there that I find myself turning to it again and again–reading it five times now since I first discovered it back around 1978. Sadly, it remains out of print in the U.S., but Gary’s graciously included links to the UK paperback edition still available through Amazon.co.uk.

The Prophets of Israel, by Edith Hamilton

Cover of the first U. S. edition of 'The Prophets of Israel'

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

Excerpt


In the eighth century before Christ, all over the civilized world form had taken the place of substance in men’s creeds. The splendors of worship grew more splendid, the multitudes of priests and devotees perpetually greater; ceremony followed upon ceremony; but the spirit that had informed the temples and the shrines was gone. The old terror was dying and all but dead. Behind the magnificence was emptiness. And then something happened, one of the most important events that ever happened, which was to result in nothing less than a completely new idea of religion, an altogether different relation of men to God. In a little country of no consequence whatever to the ruling powers, to the two-thousand-year-old mother of civilization, Egypt, to the fearful, irresistible war-machine, Nineveh, to the caravans and fleets of Babylon the great, a man arose, one man, all alone, to set himself against the force of the whole world’s conviction; and after him another and then another, each always by himself against the nations, in all a mere handful of men, who had a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, a new motive-power for mankind and a new road to God, and who proclaimed this strange conception with a passion and a power never surpassed in the three thousand years that stretch out between their day and ours.

Editor’s Comments


Edith Hamilton’s books on classical Greece and Rome and their mythologies–particularly The Greek Way–have remained in print and are still used as basic texts in hundreds of high school and college courses each year. Far less well known are the three books she wrote about Biblical history–The Prophets of Israel, Spokesmen for God, and Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters. This is unfortunate, because as fine as her more popular books are, they are about cultures and religions of the past. Prophets, Spokesmen, and Witness deal with religions and issues that have remained active and current for almost 3,000 years now, and deal with them in a manner that brushes away so many cobwebs of history and interpretation that, for me at least, it is like seeing them clearly for the first time.

The Prophets of Israel was the first of the three books to be published, in 1936, and unlike the others, is out of print today. In contrast to the Greek and Roman books, for which she was deeply familiar with the source languages and texts, Hamilton’s Biblical books relied on various English translations, and principally on the King James version. She does not apologize for this, however, arguing that the leading English translations have not only proved largely faithful to the source texts but are the basis for the practice of Christianity in the English-speaking world.

Even in English, though, the prophets of the Old Testament, she acknowledges, “are really exceedingly difficult reading.” Their relentless exhortations and denunciations leave the mind “deafened and dulled”, their invocations against “the treachery of Edom”, the pridefulness of “Rabbah of the Ammonites”, or the other hundreds or thousands of utterly forgotten people cause many of us to see great swaths of the Old Testament as monotonous bouts of who smote who. And leads us to miss something truly wonderful:

They [the prophets] must not be allowed to become the possession of the few. They are not only men of towering genius, they are unique: there is nothing resembling them in all the literature of the world. They were prophets, but in a sense peculiar to themselves: their words still embody men’s ideals. They say, What out to be shall be, and the assertion seems not an expression of an unreal optimism, a dream of happy impossibilities, but a prophecy, a demand which commands our allegiance, an obligation we must struggle to fulfill.

Hamilton begins with the prophet Amos. Amos is one of the shortest books in the whole Bible, and seems a most unpromising one at first. By line four we see God threatening, “I will send a fire into the house of Hazael, which shall devour the palaces of Ben-hadad,” and the text soon becomes a litany of places and peoples He promises to “send fire into.” But Amos, she argues, is the first book in the Bible that can be dated with any accuracy, to around 750 B. C..

At that time, religion, as it was practiced by the Jews, Egyptians, Assyrians, and pretty much everyone else we have record of, had become highly dogmatic and ritualized: “Codes of complicated performance grew up…. Ritual became fixed; it could not any more be used to express this or that immediate need. Life means change, and ritual ceased to keep step with life.” It came, in fact, to be “seen as something altogether superior to life.” “Fear of the gods begets favour,” she quotes from a Babylonian text of the time; “Offering increases life.”

Into this world of rituals, priests, and offerings steps Amos. Steps right into it, in fact, interrupting an elaborate ceremony in the town of Bethel. An otherwise ordinary shepherd, he has heard God speak and is compelled to bring God’s message. “Come to Bethel, and transgress;” he tells the priests and pilgrims there. “Bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three years.” What God wants of man is not rituals and offerings, says Amos: “Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.”

No, what God wants of us, Amos says, is something much simpler–and much harder: to “let judgment [justice] run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Amos, as Hamilton describes it, was the first to distinguish ritual from righteousness, to tell his people that it was less important to follow the right steps in making an offering or reciting a chant or prayer and more important to demonstrate righteousness through one’s actions towards others. “The worship of God,” Amos was saying, “had no connection with pilgrimages and sacrifices, but only with what men did to each other.”

With Amos and the other prophets who followed him–Micah, Hosea, and Isaiah–religion appears for the first time split between two paths: “worship desirable for its own sake, an end in itself, and worship as a means, good only when it results in practical good, its aim to do away with evil.” “His worship,” in fact, “had no connection whatever with anything done in a temple. It had to do entirely with men’s actions toward each other.”

I am always extremely reluctant to say or write anything about religion. I consider myself a Christian, but perhaps with just a small “c”. I see Jesus Christ as the most remarkable human to have ever lived on this planet, someone who set the highest ideals we can ever attempt to reach, but no more or less miraculous than the sun rising each morning. Not everyone shares this belief or any other that I might write down, which is why writing anything about religion is just asking for trouble.

And while I find just about everything Edith Hamilton wrote about the Old and New Testaments rings deeply true to me, I know there are others for whom virtually every sentence in The Prophets of Israel probably seems like a willful poke in the eye.

Take her view of fundamentalism, for example. For her, the Bible is very much the word of man–of many men, in fact, adding, subtracting, adapting, and reinterpreting over the course of many years:

There was no idea in those days that a piece of writing should remain as the original author had composed it. The author was always anonymous; he did not matter at all. It was a reviser’s duty to make improvements if he could, especially to introduce a moral or point one more sharply. The process of growth of the Old Testament, with pious men perpetually striving to make it more edifying, is a curious contrast to its later condition when it became inviolably fixed, each letter holy and never to be altered.

This view enables her to brush past much of what leaves many readers of the Bible scratching their heads: “Direct contradictions in the prophets which occasionally trouble the reader can be so explained,” Hamilton argues. Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters is even more willing to ascribe inconsistencies in some of the things Christ is recounted to have done or said to the need of later writers to shape the text to meet the needs of the early Church.

This is not at all because Hamilton plays fast and loose with the truth. She is utterly undogmatic and her loyalty lies only with the message she finds in the text. If anything, she has far too much respect for the truth to believe it can be found in fixed formulae. Early in The Prophets of Israel, she writes something that resonates so deeply with me as a person who values knowledge as a limitless quest that I’m amazed it is not etched over the entrance to every school, library, and laboratory:

There is no foe so deadly to the truth as complete intellectual assurance. It substitutes an easy and shallow certainty for the deep loyalties of faith. It puts an end to thought, which can live only if it is free to change. Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well. Greater knowledge does not mean greater certainty. Oftenest the very reverse is true. We are certain in proportion as we do not know. We seem, indeed, so made that intellectual certainty is not good for us. We grow arrogant, intolerant, unable to learn and to attain to better grounds of certainty precisely because we are certain. The right attitude for the mind would seem to be humility.

For this quote alone, I would place The Prophets of Israel on the shelf of books I hope to keep with me for the rest of my life. But I would recommend it and Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters highly to anyone with a Judeo-Christian upbringing who is interested in being reminded of what we can most prize and respect in our teachings. It’s like that line from Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “… to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” After reading Hamilton’s books about the Bible, I feel like I am finally beginning to understand what I learned in Sunday school.

Other Comments

Alfred Kazin, The New York Times, 19 April 1936

Mrs. Hamilton has seized the core of the prophet’s thought; from Amos to Malachi the yea-sayers exemplify the Hebrew mind in its blend of earthiness and lyricism…. For the most part, her book carries an excitement that is communicated to the reader. One feels the intensity that once shook a narrow earth.

Locate a Copy

The Prophets of Israel, by Edith Hamilton
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1936

One Neglected Writer on Another: Stefan Zweig, Great European, by Jules Romains

Cover of U.S. edition of 'Stefan Zweig Great European'Stefan Zweig: Great European reprints a lecture given by Jules Romains, poet, dramatist, and author of the lengthy series of novels, Men of Good Will, a few months before the start of World War Two. For the book, Romains added a preface, written in exile in New York in 1941. This book’s timing, therefore, is exceptionally poignant. As Romains delivers his original lecture, Europe is still at peace–if barely. A few threads of hope remain intact in the cultural fabric of Europe as he, Zweig, and others had come to know and define it: “I was going to say: ‘All that is over and done with,'” Romains writes of this cosmopolitan era, “but it would be an exaggeration. Rather: ‘All that is completely changed–greatly endangered.'”

When he writes his preface some months later, that hope has been shattered by blitzkrieg and the relentless stream of German victories and conquests that began in September 1939 and continued till Stalingrad in early 1943.

At the moment Romains wrote his preface, though, Zweig still lived, and that was enough for him to hold on to a slim faith in the future:

We who since 1914 have passed through one of the worst periods in human history can say to one another that we shall perhaps know a better, a slightly better period, if we get through this one and live long enough. It will last as long as it can. May it last longer than we do!

He did not know that Zweig was already descending into a black depression that would lead, in early 1942, to his committing suicide, along with his wife, in a small town in Brazil. “…[T]he world of my own language having disappeared for me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself…. I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labor meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on earth,” Zweig wrote in his last note. How this knowledge might have altered Romains’ outlook, we cannot say. But in saluting a contemporary he greatly admired and respected, Romains was, in effect, writing an obituary of a unique generation. These men saw themselves as Europeans–advocates of western culture and the faith of Enlightenment and human progress rather than as French, German, Austrian, or Italian. Despite the inevitable bumps along the way, the jolts and jags from xenophobes, racists, and fundamentalists, the progress of progress itself was, or so they thought, destined to plow forward.

Above all, they were believers in what Romains calls “the critical sense,” which was the antithesis of the political movements then reaching their crescendos:

Of what does human misfortune now consist, and above all what horrible things are threatening mankind? What is the chief danger? Is it an excess of composure, of reason, or the critical sense? God knows it is not! On the contrary, it is the rapid development throughout the masses of the new fanaticisms: fascism, racism, nationalism, and communism, or mixtures of them in different proportions…. [I]t is the unbridled proscription of all critical sense, all lucid play of reason….

No wonder that men such as Zweig were the first to be singled out and sent into exile. It was a technique dating back to the days of the Tsars (viz. E. H. Carr’s The Romantic Exiles). Lenin adopted it early in his revolution (viz. Lenin’s Private War), and Hitler applied it to both artists (viz. Exiled in Paradise) and scientists (viz. Hitler’s Gift). The result, as Romains notes, is that,

…[O]ne of the extraordinary things about the days we are living through is that undoubtedly for the first time in the history of civilization more than half of the great men of the present, of those who have done the most for the honour of their respective countries, of Europe, or humanity, are fugitives and exiles. And the majority of them were in no way involved in politics, Yes, this will be the subject of hundreds of essays in the schools of the future, an inexhaustibl theme for orators: the disgrace of an epoch–our own–when Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Guglielmo Ferrero, Stefan Zweig, Emil Ludwig, Ivan Bunin, and others were all of them at once exiles, men driven from their countries.

Thanks in large part to NYRB Classics, Stefan Zweig’s work seems to be emerging finally from decades of neglect, at least in the English language. Clive James recently summed Zweig up as “The Incarnation of Humanism” in the final biographical essay in his wonderful collection, Cultural Amnesia. Whether Romains will have the same good fortune has yet to be seen (I was going to write remains, but that looked like a pun). The whole idea of Europe and humanism has itself been taking a bit of a beating lately, so it’s worth taking a moment to consider this little book and remind oneself of what that idea has meant to others when it was under a much greater threat.

Stefan Zweig: Great European, by Jules Romains
New York City: Viking Press, 1941

An Interview with John Seaton, editor of Faber Finds

Serendipity has always played a large role in my experiences with neglected books, and serendipity today led me to pass a very interesting and enjoyable hour with John Seaton, editor of the new Faber Finds series. When I learned of Faber’s new venture into republishing a large and diverse list of out-of-print titles, I took up their public invitation and sent them an email offering my perennial nominee, W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks. A few days later, I got a reply from John himself, expressing interest and asking for help in locating a copy.

As it happened, I was scheduled to come to London for a project management conference a few weeks later, so I offered to drop off a copy of my own photocopy while in the city. John invited me to stop by for a chat. So after a day full of project management methods and practices, I headed to Faber and Faber’s offices on Queens Square. Along with discussing Tilsley’s book, I took the opportunity to interview John about the series in general.

Faber Finds is both bucking a trend and setting one. Most mainstream British publishers, John explained, have become focused on their front list (the new releases) and near backlist–the recent releases–and allowed much of their deep backlist–the titles that sell a few copies a year for a decade or more–to evaporate. In the same way, most major booksellers devote their shelf space to these titles, leading to something of a tunnel vision effect.

At the same time, however, print-on-demand technology has matured to the point where new models of production and distribution become possible. Faber Finds is among the most innovative applications of print-on-demand to emerge to date. The idea came from Stephen Page, CEO of Faber and Faber, who brought John into the firm specifically to launch the venture. Faber’s target is not the High Street retail customer, but what Chris Anderson referred to as “the long tail.” Publishers with extensive backlists have long been challenged to balance the steady, if undramatic revenue from sales of older titles with the expensive of storing and managing the physical stock. With print-on-demand, publishers now have the opportunity to continue offering their backlists while limiting their costs to the initial “capture” and as-ordered printing of the books.

Part of the “long tail” argument is based on the diminishing unit costs of involved in digital production. Although it costs Faber roughly £4 pounds to print a book of some 300 pages, this is considerably less than that of printing and holding a physical stock of several hundred or several thousand copies for years or decades. And the print-on-demand unit cost is, if anything, bound to go down, while the warehousing costs can only go up.

At the same time, the Internet has opened up a sales channel that makes it far easier for customers to locate and buy lesser-known titles. I can remember, for example, looking up the publishing information about Michael Frayn’s slim book of philosophy, Constructions; going information in hand to my local bookstore and submitting the special order; then waiting months for my copy to arrive. If Constructions were available through print-on-demand, on the other hand, I could find it, order it like any in-print title, and have a copy delivered to me in about the same time as any in-print title. The availability of a new discovery and ordering capability courtesy of the Internet, combined with print-on-demand, is a perfect example of the “long tail” effect.

Print-on-demand has been around for years. Companies such as Kesslinger offer a rich catalog of out-of-copyright titles on this basis. But most of these companies merely scan in and reprint images taken from old editions. Faber and Faber has always been a press known for its high standards of culture and style, and Faber Finds is very much in keeping with this tradition. They scan to text, proofread the result, and then integrate any black-and-white images into the text. Then they print the text on good-quality stock in an attractive typeface, and bind it into a sturdy trade paperback format featuring a unique computer-generated graphic for each title. John was somewhat apologetic for the design of the books, but I think he should be proud. There is a big difference between minimalist and generic. And there is nothing generic about the look of Faber Finds titles.

In keeping with the “long tail” model, Faber Finds is not starting out with a modest list, gingerly testing the waters. Instead, the series debuted with 100 titles and John has managed to clear the rights to another 300 titles. Faber plans to announce 20 to 30 new titles each month. If the business case proves sound, the list could grow into a thousand or more, which would easily surpass any other venture into republication of neglected books to date.

John and I discussed some of the potential effects of this new approach to publishing titles well in the margins from the standard canon of great books. I’ve long felt that the tendency to view literature as the exclusive domain of a few great authors and books rather than a broad, varied, and wonderfully unpredictable melange of the great, the good, the respectable, the near-misses and glancing hits, and even the occasional utter failure is reinforced by the tendency of non-“great book” titles to go out of print. A professor can hardly teach a lesser-known book if a student can’t buy a copy in the college bookstore or check out copy 23 of 37 from the library. With the Faber Finds model, Angus Wilson has a chance of keeping a spot on a modern English novelists syllabus alongside William Golding and Doris Lessing

Angus Wilson, in fact, is one of the authors John takes some personal satisfaction in having rescued. John came to Faber after spending three decades at Penguin. Penguin had stood by Wilson, keeping many of his novels in print through the 1970s and 1980s, when realistic novels were languishing in the critical doldrums, but they finally tossed in the towel over a decade along. Ever since, Wilson, inarguably one of the most significant English writers since World War Two, has been essentially out of print and out of circulation. Faber Finds will bring all of Wilson’s novels back in print–as it will those of P.H. Newby and, if negotiations go well, Joyce Cary.

At the far end of the spectrum from Angus Wilson and Joyce Cary stands another writer Faber Finds will bring back to print in August 2008. Roy Horniman’s novel Israel Rank has kept a small place in history for being the inspiration for one of the finest of all British comedies, the 1949 film, “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” Even though the novel sold a respectable number of copies when first published in 1907 and was republished in 1948 while Graham Greene was working for Eyre and Spotiswoode, printed copies have become as hard to find as skeletons of the dodo. John was finally able to locate a copy though a distant relative of Horniman’s, and this sly satire of Edwardian mores and anti-Semitism will finally be available for a price quite a bit less than that of a mid-sized car.

Not that Israel Rank is a lost masterpiece. The point of Faber Finds is not to rescue a few great books that have become forgotten, but to make available–at a reasonable price for both consumer and publisher–a large number of fine books that merely fell victim of a bad business case for a few decades. Children’s books are coming as well, says John, as well as color images in a year or two. Altogether, Faber’s expedition into the “long tail” of the publishing business is one of the most exciting “mash-ups” I’ve heard of, and it was a genuine pleasure to get a chance to get an insider’s view of what I hope will be history in the making.

SUNY Press added to Publishers List

Susan Petrie from the SUNY Press kindly pointed out a number of little-known and forgotten titles they’ve released in recent years. In particular, their Women Writers in Translation series has brought out such books as:

• The Ravine, by Nivaria Tejera

“Set in the Canary Islands at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, The Ravine is the provocative, disturbing account of a child’s experience with war.”

• Become Who You Are

“… [A]bout a woman, Agnes Schmidt, whose husband has died and who is grappling with finding an identity for herself as an aging widow—reflecting the restrictions imposed especially on aging, widowed women who often yearn for a life and identity of their own.”

• The Education of Fanny Lewald

” … [T]he autobiography of the most popular and prolific German woman writer of her period (1811-1889). The author of more than fifty books of fiction, travel memoirs, and articles about current events, Lewald was a friend or acquaintance of many of the prominent intellectual, artistic, and political figures of nineteenth-century Europe.”

And, for you James Fenimore Cooper fans, if there are any, there’s also a dozen-plus of his books, including such long-forgotten titles as Lionel Lincoln: or, The Leaguer of Boston, which the SUNY website tells us was, “… [A] radically new experiment in historical fiction. To recreate its events with the utmost accuracy, Cooper visited Boston in person in 1824 to study buildings and terrain, examine battlefields, read affidavits, consult records of the weather, and compare primary sources. George Bancroft declared in 1852 that Cooper had ‘described the battle of Bunker Hill better than it is described in any other work.'”