simply messing about in books
Very Few Letters
— [T. E. Lawrence]. To tell you that in future I shall write very few letters. T. E. S. Printed card, [February 1935], sent by Lawrence to his correspondents in early 1935. O’Brien A161. An uncommon piece of ephemera.
/ from the archives
— Peter Straub. Wreckage [Introduction by Susan, Benjamin, and Emma Straub]. What Happens in Hello Jack [Introduction : Linkages, by Gary K. Wolfe]. 447 ; 141 pages. 2 vols., Subterranean Press, 2025. Edition of 500 numbered copies. [Dust jackets after photographs by Jenny Calivas].
‘party to some larger, less explicable understanding’
WRECKAGE, the unfinished final novel of Peter Straub, is the best book I have read this year. “It was to be a near perfect interweaving of Jack the Ripper and Henry James, two of Peter’s abiding interests : a timeless unsolved murderous mystery with the ultimate stylist and artist” (from the introduction by his family). The book is in two parts : the long sustained narrative of Wreckage is as fine and subtle and tricky (and funny) as anything Straub ever wrote, and What Happens in Hello Jack is a succinct, complete linear outline and summary of Straub’s plans for the novel (prepared in 2103), with extensively detailed and even polished vignettes. Why wouldn’t a modern master of horror grapple with the conceits and sources of The Turn of the Screw, that masterpiece of American imaginative prose ?
incidents in the life of Henry James
Wreckage is nineteen chapters (most with multiple episodes) chronicling events in the life of Tilly Hayward, whose activities as a serial killer in Milwaukee are masked by the deep and undetectable cover of his life in Columbus, and his sister Margot Mountjoy, whose married life in one of the richer suburbs of Minneapolis was one hell of an American Dream, the anatomy of which is charted as she begins her new life as a wealthy widow. These two lines are deeply rooted evocations of midwestern America in the late 1950s, even as they are connected to The Gathered Clan, a painting stolen from the ancestral home, Blane, by an English great grandfather as he fled to America, and to other events of seventy years before, when Henry James accepted an invitation to a country house weekend and encountered uncertainty. The “interlude” early in the novel, a vignette of Henry James in Monte Carlo (published last year in Conjunctions) makes explicit one of the transtemporal narrative threads. The Archbishop’s Tale, recounted in slightly different form in The Process, takes on new implications in Wreckage when a sinister group of three persons, that “larger, less explicable understanding”, recurs in odd variations throughout the novel (in the 1950s as well as the 1880s). The settings and minor characters are as accomplished as anything Straub has written. And the conversation between Tilly Hayward and one of his victims after her death, and more precisely, how and where the narrative runs with this, where the ghost of Lori Terry leads Tilly — “Ridiculous, he knew, yet . . .” — are quite simply spectacular, and a key to understanding the psychogeography and chronology of the narrative. Wreckage is, of course, a gripping headlong race to the cliff of incompletion, but the reader, this reader, goes willingly.
What Happens in Hello Jack offers pleasures of a different order. It dates to 2013 and Straub continued to work on the book for a decade beyond that fixed moment in time, so that the two volumes are sometimes usefully at odds with each other. I have no issue with fragmentary or even contradictory narratives, and the summary carries the several arcs through to the end. The prose is accomplished even as the terrain remains inherently unstable : “as James watches, Ayling seems briefly to vibrate in and out of sight [. . .]. James thinks he may have tricked himself into seeing this, but Ayling appears to waver in front of his canvas”. And then, in the space of a few pages, Straub thrusts Henry James into primal territory and a scene unlike any other in any fictional account of Henry James. Following this encounter, Straub has James draft two letters unknown to scholars, along with the explanation of how what we have just read is not preserved. The insightful and provocative Henry James set pieces are inseparable from the entangling narratives, and both volumes resonate with elements from A Dark Matter and The Skylark and The Process (a short novella which I loved), and offer variant riffs on earlier, teasing pieces presented at Readercon and in accounts of the artistic movement Das Beben. All of this amplifies the stories nested within Wreckage.
WRECKAGE is facinating in so many ways, chief among them the way in which the main narrative Wreckage demonstrates how Straub repeatedly altered and reworked the lines laid down in the Hello Jack summary. It is a gripping tale. The matter of Jack the Ripper is addressed and is made new. The playfulness of the novelist, is found everywhere, too, with stray shots at a country house partridge shoot (in equal measure homage to Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party and riff on an incident in the life of Dick Cheney, I think) ; the imaginary books, especially “that dreary children’s book”, The Distant Land, and what ripples out from it ; the episodes in the life of painter Hugo Ayling gleaned from a fourth volume of the Autobiography of Francis Frith ; and in the cameo appearances by Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and “Little Alex C.”, a depraved juvenile Aleister Crowley ready to embark upon mischief and worse.
When, deep in the labyrinth of story, when Henry James tells Tilly Hayward : ‘It is in the nature of this place, which is not real except in the mind’, it is Peter Straub who has led the reader there.
The Endless Bookshelf book of the year.
— Charlotte Brontë. A Book of Ryhmes. [Introduction by Patti Smith.] Brontë Parsonage Museum / Tartarus Press, [2025].
Photographs and transcription of the small book of poems written by Charlotte Bronte October to December 1829. Samantha Ellis in the TLS : “it is amazing to read a young writer loudly, exultingly, exploring her ideas on the page.” [Also includes “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Blue Profound’” by Barbara Heritage, and my essay, Travelling with Charlotte.]
— Brendan C. Byrne. Another World Isn’t Possible. Stories. [Melbourne :] Wanton Sun, [2025].
Dark, tricky, and often formally innovative stories from the hybrid digital interface of present and future, including “a Stone and a Cloud”, about two perilously immersive video games ; the oh so deftly choreographed bar room encounter of “There Is No Comte de St. Germain for I Am He” ; “reviews” of nonexistent stories ; tales of artists making art in media that may someday exist ; and the surprisingly touching arc of “The Ideal and the Actual”.
“Ruthlessly hip, transreal surreal. Worth your time.” — Rudy Rucker
Available in U.SA. from Barnes & Noble or bookshop.org.
— Tom La Farge. THE CRIMSON BEARS [and] A HUNDRED DOORS. [Introduction by Wendy Walker.] Tough Poets Press, [2025].
This is delightful news ! This two-part novel of talking animals of all kinds (only the human animal is irrelevant and absent) was first published by Sun & Moon in 1993 and 1995. Its cult readership included your correspondent and Austin mage Don Webb who each discovered the work independent of the other.
Tom La Farge was a very tricky writer whose erudition was never ostentatious. Wendy Walker knew the book from its origins as bedtime story and illustrated letters for Tom’s son Paul La Farge, who grew up to be a novelist ; her introduction is deeply personal and touching and also charts the many layers on which Tom was playing with words. Glimpses of the earliest manuscript adorn the inside of the covers.
READ THIS BOOK, you won‘t regret it.
— 100 Years 100 Voices. The Chapin Library. [Edited by Anne Peale. Photography by Nicole Neenan]. Williams College, [2025]. A beautiful and richly illustrated celebratory catalogue, presenting selected items from the Chapin Library at Williams College, established with gifts from Alfred C. Chapin in 1923. This is an important publication, a concise and compelling testimony about why books and libraries are central to education.
— Patti Smith. Bread of Angels. Random House, [2025]. Excellent and touching memoir of a rock ’n’ roll heroine, a great artist, uncompromising in matters of language ; and what a reader.
— Mark Valentine. Borderlands and Otherworlds. Tartarus Press, [2025].
Collection of 32 essays on books and reading, with an emphasis on the fantastic and supernatural in the interwar years and into the 1950s. The hardcover edition sold out, but it is now available in paperback.
— —. The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things. Tartarus Press, [2025].
New edition, expanded from the 2018 Zagava printing, with nine additional stories and vignettes. Includes “Vain Shadows Flee”, which was included in Best British Short Stories 2016.
— Michael Zinman. The Critical Mess. 2025. [Distributed by Temporary Culture].
I was involved in its production, yes, but it is really one of the most original books to appear this year.
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far fetch :
— Mark Tewfik. Two Weeks in Ecuador and the Galapagos [drop title]. [8] pp. Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands : Lanterne Rouge Press, 2025. Printed self wrapper with ornamental headpiece.
Fun travelogue with a truly exotic imprint, even for this peripatetic press.
the imprint, below :
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— Raymond Chandler. Killer in the Rain. With an introduction by Philip Durham. [1964]. Ballantine Books, [1972].
This book collects eight early pulp stories Chandler which had refused to reprint in his lifetime, because he had “cannibalized” them and transformed the raw material into the substance of three novels : The Big Sleep ; Farewell, My Lovely ; and The Lady in the Lake. Reading it was an education and single dose corrective to prose excesses rooted in obsessive teenage readings of H. P. Lovecraft. This copy, bought for 50 cents at the State Street Book Mart, a paper back exchange shop in New Orleans, has stuck with me for many years.
After re-reading parts of MacShane’s Life of Chandler, I pulled down Killer in the Rain to look at some of the stories, and it will not survive this reading. I will save the browned flyleaf and title page for a bookmark in a copy of the original Houghton Mifflin printing I bought last month : so I still havea copy of Killer in the Rain ; and I will wait for a stormy day to say farewell to Killer in the Rain in the rain ; but the small gap on the paperback shelf will stay open for a time.
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from the Epigrammata of Martialis (Epigrams of Martial)
Lucanus
Sint quidam qui me dicunt non esse poetam :
Sed qui me vendit bibliopola putat.
Lucan
[Some say I am no poet : but the bibliopole* sells me as one]
* – bookseller, for you moderns, sez Old ‘Pole
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Sonnet 151 with initial L by Edward Johnston, in the Doves Press edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1909.
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‘Pardon this intrusion’
The first words the monster speaks, in vol. II of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Philadelphia : Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833.
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recent reading :
— J. I. M. Stewart. Myself and Michael Innes. A Memoir. W. W. Norton, [1988].
— Charles Willeford. Everybody’s Metamorphosis. Dennis McMillan, 1988. Edition of 426 copies signed by the author.
— Dorothy L. Sayers. Whose Body ? A Lord Peter Wimsey Novel [1923]. Harper & Row, [n.d., ca. mid-1950s]. Dust jacket design by Shirley Smith.
— Hilary Spurling. Invitation to the Dance. A Guide to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Little, Brown, [1977].
— Margery Allingham. The Case of the Late Pig [1937]. Penguin Books, [1957].
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Cat and Girl in Oz
Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat and Girl are somewhere in Oz. They started on the yellow brick road here :
https://catandgirl.com/were-off-to-see-the-boss-class/
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read this
Erin Kissane’s remarkable essay on the geophyics of the 1964 tsunami at Valdez, Alaska, and her extrapolations to articulate a brilliant, useful metaphor for the post-information age :
https://www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-ghost-story/
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“Two sculptural titans are thus now fittingly face-to-face, Rodin the culminating figure of an ancient representational tradition that was revived during the Renaissance and Calder the initiating figure of a modernist reconception that took the medium off its pedestal.”
— Martin Filler, from his review of the Calder Foundation gardens in Philadelphia, in the New York Review of Books .
[what a sentence ! 2,500 years of art history in a single swoop]
Andromeda
Now Time’s Andromeda on this rock rude,
With not her either beauty’s equal or
Her injury’s, looks off by both horns of shore,
Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon’s food.
Time past she has been attempted and pursued
By many blows and banes ; but now hears roar
A wilder beast from West than all were, more
Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.
Her Perseus linger and leave her tó her extremes ? —
Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs
His thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems,
All while her patience, morselled into pangs,
Mounts ; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,
With Gorgon’s gear and barebill, thongs and fangs.
from : Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems (Oxford, 1918).
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‘a Bloomsbury ghost story’
This month marks sixty years since publication of The Modern Movement 100 Key Books from England, France and America 1880 – 1950 by Cyril Connolly and the anniversary prompted me to look into my copy again, to see how many titles from this perpetual argument I have read. There are a few clippings from contemporary reviews in London newspapers tucked in the back, with comments ranging from bilious persnickety objections about the “crazily unsuitable title for such a very personally conducted excursion” (Tour d’Horizon, in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 December 1965) to complaints of omission of works from central and eastern and southern Europe (let alone non-western literatures !). The funny thing about this “kind of Michelin Guide to the 100 key resorts of modern literature” (Anthony Curtis, Knocking up a Century, in the Sunday Telegraph, 12 December 1965)* is that all of the praise and criticisms of the book are still true, and the passage of time has made the omissions only more evident.
And yet it does not matter. “Connolly’s list had to be judged within his own terms of reference. They were meticulous” (Oliver Edwards, Talking of Books, in the Times, 9 June 1966). He did not aspire to universality : his hundred comprises books in English and French (languages Connolly read with facility) and constituting “a revolt against the bourgeois in France, the Victorians in England, the puritanism and materialism of America.” Some of the choices seem at first glance a bit old-fashioned and nostalgic in 2025 (“Nostalgia, nostalgia” was a complaint of reviewers at the time), but when reading Connolly’s summaries and the context he offers, the relevance becomes clear.
Any list is an invitation to argument, of course, that is half the fun. Attempts to define a canon by their very nature invite readers to form their own opinions, to determine positions of resistance or opposition, and to propose alternative or transgressive views. There is long tradition of these lists of key or influential works in literary history and in collecting : think of the Grolier Club hundreds in English and American literature, science, medicine, typography, and children’s books. In the category of superlatives, there have been Best Book hundreds in science fiction, fantasy, and horror (the Horror volume edited by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock elicited some very acute contributions from contemporary writers). Even in adhering strictly to 100 titles, Connolly still manages to cram in allusions to dozens of other “key” writings from Leaves of Grass and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Sartre (H. R. F. Keating did much the same in his detective fiction hundred).
— The Modern Movement 100 Key Books from England, France and America 1880 – 1950. Chosen by Cyril Connolly. Bibliography of English and French editions [by] G. D. E. Soar. Andre Deutsch | Hamish Hamilton, [1965].
Back cover photo of The Modern Movement by Otto Karminski, 1965. [What the hell is going on there ?]
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In “Apotheosis in Texas”(Sunday Times, 6 June 1971) Connolly recalled how his book was “marred by misprints, savaged by critics and immediately followed up by a polymath compendium which included scientists and film stars as if to prove how mine should have been done. Only in booksellers’ catalogues did my own selection and phrasing — fruit of years of love and worry — begin to make headway.” No surprise, really, lists are useful for collectors as well as for readers and booksellers — and the ambivalence of academic critics was water off a duck’s back to him, particularly after 1971, when the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, mounted an exhibition of books and manuscripts based on Connolly’s hundred, The illustrated catalogue continues to dazzle, with manuscripts, inscribed books, letters, and more.
— Cyril Connolly’s One Hundred Modern Books from England, France and America 1880 – 1950. Catalog by Mary Hirth with an introduction by Cyril Connolly. An Exhibition : March – December 1971. The Humanities Research Center – The University of Texas at Austin, [1971].
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* Curtis has one of the best observations about The Modern Movement : “Anyone who thinks it is impossible to say anything significant in under 800 words ought to read some of these brilliant compressions ; if this is ‘instant criticism”, let us have more of it.”
And I still have a fair bit of reading to do.
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recent reading :
journey into metaphor
— Mélissa Bonin. Lorsque les Bayous Parlent. When Bayous Speak. Poésies et Peintures. [2023]. Bilingual illustrated collection of evocative « voyages» into the bayou as “métaphore de la vie et du féminin”.
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— Thomas Pynchon. Shadow Ticket. Penguin Press, 2025.
‘an outward and visible expression of paths not taken, personal and historical’
The first hundred so pages are dazzling paranoid fun set in end of Prohibition Milwaukee, with zany incidents and songs and gross-out confections and drinks. After Hicks McTaggart is encouraged to leave town for New York City and then fed a Mickey Finn and loaded aboard a transatlantic steamer, the pyrotechnics continue. The transition from Tangier to a Budapest-bound train is abrupt and, a bit cheesy at times, the book wobbles for a few a pages before returning to the deftly choreographed espionage play of language and fashion and color along the Danube. Plus a Moto Guzzi with a side-car, vacuum tubes, a theremin sextet, paranormal incidents, philately, Versailles-compliant golems, atrocious acronyms, and more.
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— Frank Macshane. The Life of Raymond Chandler [1976]. Hamish Hamilton, [1986].
Excellent and sympathetic chronicle of Chandler and his struggle to get his novels written to his satisfaction. Plucked off the shelf to look up a date, gripped immediately and anew by the way MacShane allows Chandler’s own words (letters, essays, etc.) to tell the story. Chandler on style is not that far removed from Ruskin.
— John Ruskin. Letters on Art and Literature. Edited by T. J. Wise. Privately printed, 1894.
To J. J. Laing, 1854 : “If you are to do anything that is really glorious, and for which men will for ever wonder at you, you will do it as a duck quacks — because it is your nature to quack — when it rains.”
— Suave Mechanicals. Essays on the History of Bookbinding. Volume 9. Julia Miller, editor. Legacy Press, 2025.
— Patti Smith. Bread of Angels. Random House, [2025].
— Ellen Datlow, editor. Night. Dreadful Dark : Tales of Nighttime Horror [bound dos à dos with] Day. Merciless Sun : Tales of Daylight Horror. Saga Press, [2025].
— Paul Muldoon. Rising to the Rising. Gallery Books, [2016].
Now the world’s been brought low. The wind’s heavy with soot.
Alexander and Caesar. All their retinue.
We’ve seen Tara buried in grass, Troy trampled underfoot.
The English ? Their days are numbered, too.
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— Margery Allingham. The Beckoning Lady [1955]. Penguin Books, [1961].
— Edmund Crispin. Buried for Pleasure [1948]. Penguin Books, [ca. 1980].
——. Love Lies Bleeding [1948]. Penguin Books, [1954].
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commonplace book :
from The Deep Blue Good-By (1964) by John D. MacDonald, a list poem, with attitude (line breaks added) :
And I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as
plastic credit cards,
payroll deductions,
insurance programs,
retirement benefits,
savings accounts,
Green Stamps,
time clocks,
newspapers,
mortgages,
sermons,
miracle fabrics,
deodorants,
check lists,
time payments,
political parties,
lending libraries,
television,
actresses,
junior chambers of commerce,
pageants,
progress,
and manifest destiny.
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
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Your correspondent will be in Boston this weekend for the Boston international Antiquarian Book Fair (Fri. 7 to Sun. 9 November), and I will have copies of Another Green World, The Elfland Prepositions, and The Critical Mess. Come say hello (Cummins booth 213).
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current reading :
— Peter Straub. Wreckage [and:] What Happens in Hello Jack. 447; 141 pages. 2 vols., Subterranean Press, 2025. [Dust jackets after photographs by Jenny Calivas].
— Ellen Datlow, editor. Night. Dreadful Dark : Tales of Nighttime Horror [bound dos à dos with] Day. Merciless Sun : Tales of Daylight Horror. 171, [5] ; 147, [7] pp. Saga Press, [2025].
Anthology of 18 original stories by Jeffrey Ford, Brian Evenson, Pat Cadigan, and others.
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I am really looking forward to the new edition of The Crimson Bears by Tom La Farge, forthcoming from Tough Poets press with an introduction by Wendy Walker. The novel was first published in two volumes, The Crimson Bears (1993) and A Hundred Doors (1995), and found a small and appreciative group of readers. It is well worth reading.
http://www.toughpoets.com/la_farge_crimson_bears.htm
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[updated 5 November]
I bought a book today at my local book shop, Watchung Booksellers :
— Patti Smith. Bread of Angels. Random House, [2025].
The dust jacket photo is a Mapplethorpe portrait of Patti from the Wave session.
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In Memoriam : Nancy H. Wessells
18 February 1934 – 28 October 2025
current reading :
‘It’s wonderful, Margot thought, Tilly always tells the truth, but it never means what you think it does.’
— Peter Straub. Wreckage [and:] What Happens in Hello Jack. 447; 141 pages. 2 vols., Subterranean Press, 2025. [Dust jackets after photographs by Jenny Calivas].
I am a few chapters into Wreckage, the first publication of the substantial novel left unfinished by Peter Straub, intended as an “interweaving” of Henry James and Jack the Ripper. My understanding is that What Happens in Hello Jack is a detailed summary of the intended arc of the novel. I’ll leave that for later : I dove right into Wreckage. It is wonderful to read passages of Straub’s prose and see connections unfold to certain parts of his late work : the Das Beben movement, Tilly Hayward, the invented memoir of an overheard conversation in the life of Henry James*. “An Incident at Monte Carlo”, extracted from Wreckage, appeared last year in Conjunctions. I don’t know where this is going : off the cliff of incompletion, perhaps, but I am on the road. Straub’s interest in Henry James was of very long standing, but he was also always true to his midwestern roots, and that deep America is everywhere in his books.
* “Beyond the Veil of Vision : Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement” by Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza ; The Process (is a Process All Its Own) ; A Dark Matter, readings at past Readercons, etc.
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recent reading :
— Michael Innes. Operation Pax [1951]. Penguin Books, [1964].
— —. Silence Observed [1962]. Penguin Books, [1964].
— — . The Ampersand Papers [1978]. Penguin Books, [1980].
— —. A Night of Errors [1948]. Penguin Books, [1966].
— —. The Appleby File. Detective Stories [1975]. Book Club Associates, [1975].
— —. Appleby Talking. Twenty-three detective stories [1954]. Penguin Books, [1973].
— —. Appleby Talks Again. Eighteen Detective Stories [1956]. A Four Square Book, [1966].
— —. The Bloody Wood [1966]. Penguin Books, [1968].
— —. The Daffodil Affair [1942]. Penguin Books, [1968].
— —. The Open House. [1972]. Penguin Books, [1973].
— —. The Long Farewell.[1958]. Penguin Books, [1971].
I have now read through most of the box of Innes, and always with pleasure. I found the three collections of Appleby short stories witty but lacking in the digressions and piled up absurdities and extended word play that are at the heart of the novels. I particularly enjoyed The Ampersand Papers and The Long Farewell. I have even started notes toward a Note or Essay.