The Neglected Books Page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Casing the Promised Land, by Caleb Carr

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

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

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

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

• Invasion of the Space Invaders, by Martin Amis

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

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

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

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

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

Since 2005, Nextbook magazine, which focuses on Jewish literature, culture, and ideas, has published a regular feature on “Lost Books”, in which writers such as Meg Wolitzer and David Rakoff discuss the lives and works of neglected writers.

Among the fascinating pieces to be found in the “Lost Books” archive are:

· Earl Ganz’s account of Myron Brinig

Brinig was once mentioned alongside Thomas Wolfe as a rising American literary star, but he suffered a triple whammy sales curse of writing Western novels from the perspective of a gay Jewish man. But who can resist Ganz’s teaser for Brinig’s novels Singermann and This Man is My Brother (which not even AddAll lists a copy of): “Prostitutes, Christian Scientists, cross-dressing teachers—just a few of the temptations faced by the Singermanns in Myron Brinig’s frontier saga”?

[Don Napoli reviews another of Brinig’s novels, the 1939 Anne Minton’s Life on his Reading California Fiction site.]

· Neal Pollack on Ben Hecht

Pollack celebrates A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, a collection of Hecht’s impressionistic newspaper pieces about one of the great American cities at its liviest times: “The book still holds a kind of magical sway over me, because it showed a kind of American life that seems to have disappeared, a time when public eccentricity didn’t merely feed the appetite of cable TV and when cities could be slightly unsavory without feeling overwhelmingly dangerous.”

· Jennifer Weisberg on Stefan Zweig

Zweig, one of my favorite neglected writers, embodies one of the great tragedies of the 20th century: the destruction of enlightened European Jewish culture at the hands of fascism and violence. Weisberg writes that Zweig’s 1938 novel, Beware of Pity , which was reissued by New York Review Classics in 2006, “is in many ways a micro-portrait of life in the late Hapsburg Empire, capturing the overweening attention paid to ritual, detail, and order, and the occasions it afforded for self-transformation.” She also quotes a New York Herald Tribune obituary, which wrote tellingly that Zweig took his own life because he was “overwhelmed by the past, and by the realization that all he had held most dear had been wantonly destroyed.”

· Chloe Veltman on Israel Zangwill

Zangwill’s The Melting Pot was celebrated by President Theodore Roosevelt as a “great play” when it debuted in 1908, but Veltman admits that now it seems a “ham-fisted” melodrama “made worse by Zangwill’s didactic tone.”

· Lawrence Levi on Melvin Shavelson’s “How to Make a Jewish Movie”

In How to Make a Jewish Movie, director Shavelson recounts his diligent and ridiculous efforts to make “Cast a Giant Shadow”, the story of Mickey Marcus, a Jewish American Army colonel who helped jump-start the Israeli Army in 1948. Levi concludes that Shavelson “seems to have learned, as an entertainer, that the story of a nice Jewish filmmaker who finds himself while shooting a $5 million flop has more potential in the hands of a comedy writer than the story of a Jewish general who gets killed.”

I look forward to further installments in this excellent series and encourage neglected book fans to check out all the articles.

Don Napoli has created a wonderful site, Reading California Fiction, devoted to his admirable quest of reading his way through the archives of fiction set in California.

Don’s work so far has led him to books good, bad, and indifferent. Among the first are some long-forgotten but worthy titles as David Duncan’s The Serpent’s Egg, of which he writes,

A labor arbitration case? Am I going to tell you that someone could produce a great novel about a labor arbitration case? Yes, I certainly am. A skilled writer can present complicated characters and an interesting story against even the most unpromising of backgrounds. And David Duncan is a terrific writer. Here he cuts back a bit on the usual energy of his prose to tell his tale in all of its complexity. I like this book a whole lot. When I get around to compiling a list of favorite California novels, The Serpent’s Egg will be near the top.

Don’s also honest in admitting that his journey sometimes leads to a dead end. Of Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Play the Game, he writes, “Sometimes the only nice thing you can say about a book is that you’ll never have to read it again.”

Reading California Fiction is well-conceived, attractively presented, well-organized, and full of books you’ve never heard of but may want to pursue, thanks to Don’s literary archaeology. It’s among the very small number of sites I’d care to browse through in entirety.

Robert Nedelkoff forwards an article by Larry McMurtry from the 23 June 1975 issue of the Washington Post titled, “Two Novels: One a Find, One Better Lost.”

In it, McMurtry lambasts the Lost American Fiction series from the Southern Illinois University Press for floundering “into an area of dry holes, of which the present volume [Janet Flanner’s The Cubical City] is certainly one of the driest.”

“It is in view of the rich possibilities offered by the ’90s, the teens, the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s, etc., that it seems to me time that the series stop futzing around trying to breathe life into ’20s artifacts….”

McMurtry offers some candidates of his own for rediscovery:

· The Aging Boy, by Julian Claman

“Julian Claman’s fine novel The Aging Boy was published in the ’60s, but it is already as lost as The Cubical City, and far less deservingly so.”

· Go in Beauty, by William Eastlake

“William Eastlake’s Go in Beauty is an unknown book, already….”

· No Pockets for a Shroud, by Horace McCoy

“Horace McCoy has a vivid novel that has so far been published in America only in paperback — it’s called No Pockets for a Shroud.”

McMurtry also cites Caroline Gordon, John Sanford, David Stacton [him again!], and Calder Willingham as examples of writers with “lost novels that deserve revival.”

Ironically, the other novel McMurtry reviewed in this article, Maurice Edelman’s Disraeli Rising — the second of an unfinished tritypch that started with Disraeli in Love, both of which he described as “highly readable, well-handled narratives, in which the great and near-great figures of Victorian England appear and disappear” — has also been pushed into a dark corner of neglect.

A post on the NYRB Classic blog led me to the 23 December 1996 issue of the National Review, which featured two articles, by Florence King and Terry Teachout, about favorite reads — forgotten ones, in particular.

Florence King’s picks and comments:

· The Valley of Decision, by Marcia Davenport

This novel has everything: sex amid the Johnstown Flood, labor-union strife, an expatriate adventuress, a playboy turned monk, a society wife who goes mad, a Czech violinist fleeing the Nazis. And if all this weren’t enough, the author even keeps us glued to the page when she describes the operation of the open-hearth furnace, a tour de force of “writing like a man” that won her high praise from male reviewers in that benighted pre-feminist age.

· The Cardinal, by Henry Morton Robinson

The Cardinal opens in 1915 and traces Steve’s [Stephen Fermoyle] rise from Boston parish priest to prince of the church. My favorite parts are the behind-the scenes accounts of how the Vatican works, and the descriptions of the Roman contessa’s salon: a hierarchy of ecclesiastical guests, their rank denoted by the colors of their flowing capes and birettas (the book answers all the Protestant questions about vestments), soignee women kissing rings, learned Jesuits swapping bons mots, and Cardinal Merry del Val capping quotations from Horace while juggling oranges. That’s what I call a party.

· Jubilee Trail, by Gwen Bristow

Sisterhood eludes feminist novelists, but it fairly leaps off the pages of Gwen Bristow’s Jubilee Trail, a good girl/bad girl western in which the male characters are all satellites.

· Maggie-Now, by Betty Smith

Maggie Moore (her childhood reprimand, “Maggie, now,” becomes her nickname) is a simple Irish-Catholic girl who wants only to marry a good man and have children. But along comes Claude Basset, a Protestant-agnostic college graduate with an ironic wit that goes over her head and a wanderlust she doesn’t find out about until after she marries him. The O. Henry-like twist here is the blissful marriage of this mismatched pair. Under normal conditions they would grow to hate each other, but their strange modus vivendi inadvertently keeps the dew on the rose.

· Kings Row, by Henry Bellamann

Suffice to say that Kings Row is immensely satisfying to read during political campaigns when the Trad Vals pile up too high.

[The movie version of Kings Row gave Ronald Reagan the title of his 1965 autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?; as King notes, the novel was a bloodfest of medical malpractice, insanity, and small-town vice. — ed.]

· Katherine, by Anya Seton

Another favorite Anya Seton novel is Katherine, about the love affair between John of Gaunt, the ambitious younger son of Edward III, and Lady Katherine Swynford, whose four bastard children became the progenitors of the York and Tudor lines in fulfillment of the ancient prophecy, “Thou shalt get kings though thou be none.” Richly descriptive of medieval life, the story dramatizes major events of late-fourteenth-century England — the Black Plague, the Lollard heresy, the storming of the Savoy palace in the Peasants’ Revolt — and presents a brilliant fictional portrait of Katherine’s brother-in-law, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Terry Teachout’s picks and comments

· The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy

Anyone capable of marrying Kenneth Tynan must have had a sense of humor, and Elaine Dundy’s first book, originally published in 1958, proves the point. It’s the stock Wanderjahr plot, transposed into a female key: Sally Jay Gorce, young, fairly innocent, and full of beans, heads for Paris in search of romance and adventure, gets more of both than she bargained for, and in the process makes modest headway toward maturity.

[Teachout provided the introduction to the forthcoming NYRB Classics reissue of The Dud Avocado. You can also find more about Dundy at her website, www.elainedundy.com.— ed.]

· Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell

This savage satire of life at a progressive women’s college circa 1954 is so good, it made Whittaker Chambers laugh. Some characters are drawn from life (Mary McCarthy among them), but you don’t need a scorecard to get the point, for every liberal fallacy of our time is here made as flesh.

· Father Malachy’s Miracle, by Bruce Marshall

This lovely, all-but-forgotten book tells the story of what happens when an easily exasperated priest, vexed to the utmost limits of his endurance by the invincible ignorance of the heathen multitude, requests God to confound them all definitively and simultaneously by working a jumbo miracle in broad daylight — and God obliges, leaving the world agog.

· The Locusts Have No King, by Dawn Powell

Long a fixture on short lists of Most Underrated American Novelists, Dawn Powell finally got lucky last year when Steerforth published her diaries and started reissuing her wicked novels. This is the best of the lot, a caustic tale of frustrated love and inadvertent success in postwar New York.

· Max Jamison, by Wilfrid Sheed

Speaking of critics, here’s a minor miracle: a comic novel about a famously ferocious drama critic for a weekly news magazine who awakes one day to find himself athwart a five-alarm spiritual crisis.

Robert Nedelkoff forwards a link to “The Sustaining Stream”, a Time magazine article from February, 1963 that provides “a recommended reading list of American novelists whose first work has appeared within the last few years.” As with any “best of” list from decades past, the names discussed are a mix — those whose works are now accepted into the canon of university curricula, academic studies, and regular reissues, and those whose works merit the dubious distinction of requiring rediscovery and mention on this site.

Among the well-known and established names are Walker Percy, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and John Updike. But the article also mentions several novelists worth noting here:

• David Stacton, of whom it writes,
  

  David Stacton, 37, is a Nevadan who wears cowboy boots, is fond of both Zen and bourbon, and is as nearly unknown as it is possible for a writer to be who has written, and received critical praise for, 13 novels (all have been published in England, five in the US.). His books, most of which have historical themes, are masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood. Mostly they resemble themselves, but something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London.

  Stacton’s story is as interesting as any of his books. He managed to produce 28 books in roughly the same number of years, including 22 novels. Most of these were historical novels, but Stacton shared the same kind of arch omniscience that makes Gore Vidal’s historical novels so entertaining. In addition to these, however, he also produced a number of pulp fiction titles such as Muscle Boy aimed at gay readers, using the pseudonym Bud Clifton, and westerns such asNavarro as Carse Boyd. Stacton rated Sir William, an account of the affair between Lord Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, as his best book. Back in 1992, Thomas Disch picked it as his book of the year in a roundup in The Nation magazine, saying he’d intended to read Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, but read Stacton’s account instead when he found a copy in his shelves. Disch said of the book,

  It’s wonderful, paced and cut like an MTV video, so epigrammatic I could extract an enticing quote from almost any page, and, as Sontag’s readers already know, one of the great Believe-It-Or-Not sex scandals of all time. For those who relish Boito’s “Mefistofele” all the more for having enjoyed Gounod’s “Faust”, Stacton should be the perfect complement to Sontag, not an alternative. Seek him out, or if you’re in the book business, republrsh hrm. He’s too good to be gathering dust.

  I bought a copy of Stacton’s Tom Fool, a 1962 novel about Wendell Wilkie, and read it recently, but I have to confess that it’s in the queue for a post under the justly neglected tag. Stacton was just a bit too clever to be tolerable and Wilkie seemed more a bit of flotsam carried off on the tide of history than an effective protagonist.

• Richard Dougherty. Dougherty’s 1962 novel, Duggan, was described by Time’s reviewer as a “nasty, low, mean and excellent novel.” The book tells the story the friendship and then the betrayal and mutual cuckolding of an honest politician and his more cynical campaign manager. Dougherty’s later novel, The Commissioner was perhaps the first of a wave of grittily-realistic police nobels that Joseph Wambaugh later surfed to success on, and was made into a fairly good movie, “Madigan”, starring Richard Widmark.

• Richard Bankowsky. In 1958, Time wrote of his first novel, A Glass Rose, which centers on the wake of the scion of a Polish-American family:
  

  In unfolding this grim tale, Novelist Bankowsky is thoroughly convincing as he enters successively the minds of a tormented religious fanatic, a furtive, greedy storekeeper, a mentally retarded girl. In each character’s rambling recall, his own weaknesses are laid bare and another’s motivation is made clearer.

  On the other hand, Norman Podhoretz, writing in the New York Times, called it “an embarassingly naked imitation of The Sound and the Fury.” In more recent years, however, Thomas Gladsky called A Glass Rose “perhaps the best novel about Slavic immigration in all of American literature.” Bankowsky has put a number of excerpts from his work on the web under his Cal State Sacramento page, including the first dozen or so pages of A Glass Rose.

The article also mentions several names neither too famous nor too obscure: Richard Condon, who will never fade completely away as long as people watch “Prizzi’s Honor,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” and my favorite, “Winter Kills”; John Knowles, whose A Separate Peace rates its own Cliff Notes; and William Gaddis, who may still have a tough time finding casual readers, but who’ll continue to provide raw material for PhD dissertations for many years to come.