Author: Henry Wessells

commonplace book : April 2024

Bookselling and, for that matter, book collecting, are in my blood. Soon after I joined my father at Bertram Rota Ltd. we came across a sophisticated copy of a modern first edition (in fact, first edition sheets removed from a soiled binding and put into an immaculate binding case from a slightly later printing in a crude and misguided attempt to increase the value). Even now, thirty-seven years later, I still remember the intensity of my father’s anger as he explained to me what had happened and why. Speaking perhaps of private rather than institutional collecting, he said that we booksellers made the rules and also acted as referees. If we cheated, everything became meaningless.

— Anthony Rota, on The Texas Forgeries, in : Forged Documents (1990)

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I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those for whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

— Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (1964)

The Story Prize, 2024

— Paul Yoon. The Hive and the Honey. Stories. Marysue Rucci Books, [2024].
Just back from the twentieth annual Story Prize award ceremony honoring the author of a short story collection published in the U.S. in the receding year.  It was an excellent literary evening of readings by the three finalists with interviews by director Larry Dark. The winner of the Story Prize this year is Paul Yoon, for The Hive and the Honey. Stories (Marysue Rucci Books, 2023). The other two finalists were Yiyun Li, for Wednesday’s Child. Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); and Bennett Sims, for Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio, 2023).

À la recherche du temps perdu

at a forest crossroads where paths converge
— Marcel Proust. À la recherche du temps perdu.  Édition publiée sous la direction de Jean-Yves Tadié. 4 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, [2019].
I. Du côté de chez Swann [1913]. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Première partie) [1918].
II. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Deuxième partie) [1918]. Le Côté de Guermantes. [1920-1].
III. Sodome et Gomorrhe [1921-2]. La Prisonnière [1923].
IV. Albertine disparue [1925]. Le Temps retrouvé [1927].
[The picture below is the first page of the text of the second edition of Du côté de chez Swann.]
Yesterday 23 March 2024 at 21h07 I finished reading À la recherche du temps perdu, with a mixture of awe and admiration, glee and sadness, exasperation and wonder. And no regrets whatsoever : these characters will kick around in my head for years, and I now see traces and hear echoes of Proust in many books read earlier. I began reading Du côté de chez Swann on 30 October 2021 and at first made steady progress, even writing a preliminary essay, “Monocles, Hawthorn, and Memory, or, A Short Despatch on a Long Book”, for the final issue of Wormwood in the spring of 2022. The third volume was slow going for me at times, as the narrator’s spinning thoughts and whining self-involvement were sometimes too much. Part of the pattern, of course, and often leavened with flashes of humor. The fourth volume is a page-turner, and wrenching. The last 75 pages of Albertine disparue are filled with travel, diplomacy, weddings, deaths, deceptions : a whirl of exterior incident after the cycles of involution of the first two chapters ; and the movement across time, narrative time and historical time, when (for example)  the narrator suddenly glimpses Albertine’s Fortuny coat in a painting by Carpaccio in Venice. And then in Le temps retrouvé, the slow motion urgency is compelling. Proust runs up and down the scale from micro to macro, not quite Rudy Rucker transrealism but busy, and even veering toward cosmic materialism. The concluding metaphor of the forest crossroads  is a delight, and the transversales connecting all the rides, all the persons of the novel, are a glimpse of Borges’ garden of forking paths decades before that story. There are so many things to say about À la recherche du temps perdu, and I am sure that most of them have already been said elegantly by distinguished scholars. I would re-read this book endlessly if had no other obligations or were a tenured professor, But I am not, and I do have books to write and, like Proust’s narrator, I wonder if there is time or sufficient competence to complete them.
And yet there is one observation I have that might be worthy of relating.  In the descriptions of the air raids over Paris and the aeroplanes rising to the skies, Proust assimilates Wagner and the Walkyries into military aviation : « c’était à demander si c’était bien des aviateurs et pas plutôt des Walkyries qui montaient » [one might well ask if it were aviators or in fact the Walkyries who took off]. The book was published in 1927, years after his death, but those passages seem to have been composed close to the time of the events in 1916. Earlier in the passage, the doomed marquis de Saint-Loup talks to the narrator of the beauty of the planes flying in fixed formation (‘faire constellation’ in French), and the greater beauty when the engagements begin, “the moment when they ‘make apocalypse’ and even the stars no longer keep their place”. There was something in the air, certainly : in Images of War (1919), Richard Aldington, who was an early English reader of Proust, has a poem entitled “Barrage”, which begins : “Thunder / The gallop of innumerable Walkyrie impetuous for battle”. My observation is that Proust is the true antecedent of the helicopter cowboys blasting Wagner in Apocalypse Now! And that smell of napalm on the morning is a dark, diabolical, ironic madeleine.
I had better stop there.

recent reading : late march 2024

— Anne Varichon. Color Charts. A History. Translated by Kate Deimling.  Princeton University Press, [2024].
The French title of this beautifully illustrated book is Nuanciers [2023], a subtle and elegant term. After a brief nod to medieval knowledge with an illustration from a fifteenth-century manuscript Hortus Sanitatis (BnF Ms. Lat. 11229), the historical range of the book is from the late seventeenth century to the present. Fascinating, gorgeous and interesting. One very curious editoral decision was to give the titles of the sources of the illustrations in English translation, usually omitting the original title, which would make it next to impossible to cite or consult these works. A shame and a disservice to the reader.
The illustration above is from the second edition of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, with additions . . . by Patrick Syme (London, 1821).

— Sylvia Townsend Warner. T H White [1967]. With an introduction by Gill Davies. Handheld Classics 31. Handheld Press, [2023].
An exemplary biography (and great notes by Kate Macdonald in the Handheld press edition). Here she is suggesting the appeal of flying in the mid-1930s: “You went faster than in any car, you rose more dangerously than over any fence, and the people who flew, who had machines of their own, who arrived for lunch removing furred helmets and unbuckling quantities of little straps, spoke of it with phlegm, as though it were nothing to them to have come down from heaven.”
N.B. It is reported that Handheld Press will cease trading later this year. As of the present writing, the books are readily available in the U.S. from bookshop.org .

— Jonatham Lethem. The Collapsing Frontier plus Calvino’s “Lightness” and the Feral Child of History plus In Mugwump Four and much more. PM Press, 2024.
Funny tricky tricky funny stuff, and a great interview by Terry Bisson. Outspoken Authors series, no. 30. Just out!

— Michael Z. Lewin. The Enemies Within [1974]. Harper & Row, Perennial Library pbk., [1984].
——. The Silent Salesman [1978]. Berkley pbk., [1981]
——. Out of Season [1984]. Mysterious Press pbk., [1991].

— Michael Connelly. The Black Box. A Novel [2012]. Grand Central pbk., [2013].
——. The Dark Hours [2021]. Grand Central pbk., [2022].

— Bill Griffith. Three Rocks. The Story of Ernie Bushmiller the Man Who Created Nancy. Abrams ComicArts, [2023].

The Book Blinders by John Clute

Millions More Missing
— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. 499, [1, errata] pp. Norstrilia Press, [2024].
There has been a steady production of scholarship on the history of the publisher’s dust jacket in the past fifty years. These ephemeral pieces of paper encode all manner of information about the moment in time and both how publishers perceived their wares and how they wanted the reading and book-buying public to receive the newly published books. Much emphasis has been on nineteenth-century jackets in recent research, including in G. Thomas Tanselle’s Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (2011), which updates work he first published in 1971, and Mark Godburn’s Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets (2016). And yet it is really in the early twentieth century that jackets proliferate and assume the form and function we now understand. Vast conceptual leaps in design and presentation of information occur in the interval between The Wind in the Willows (1908) and What Not (1918/1919) or In Our Time and The Great Gatsby (both 1925). And yet this is not solely the province of literary high spots. Across all types of literature, the dust jacket functions as the outer face of the book.  Clute’s title, The Book Blinders, is descriptive of the practical effect for the reader of a long-standing institutional policy of discarding dust jackets or separating the jacket from the book and storing them elsewhere, uncatalogued. This policy prevailed at the British Museum (later British Library) and at other depository libraries from the emergence of the dust jacket and continued for most of the twentieth century. With more than 100 examples of dust jackets not in BL (from the years of the first world war through 1990), John Clute documents the importance of the dust jacket and considers the implications of this vandalism from within. How about these three or four: Rose Macaulay, What Not (1918), a tale of eugenics and privilege, suppression of a libellous passage delaying actual publication until 1919 (Clute’s copy is Michael Sadleir’s own, saved from the memory hole); C. E. M. Joad, Priscilla and Charybdis (1924), “undeterred by the gruelling wordplay of the title, [I] took a look, and found found this this on pages 206-207; a seductive Joad-like protagonist is addressing a young woman on a train ride they are sharing: ‘Darling [he purrs], have you ever travelled without a ticket?’” (this one alone is worth the price of admission); or Ezra Pound, Make It New (1934):

Faber (which is to say Eliot) clearly thought it sagacious to wrap in sheep’s clothing the already notorious Ezra Pound’s new publication with its incendiary title: a ticking bomb that needed no bush. But the underlying message cannot be missed: Pound’s title, a modernist wake-up slogan he’d been using offhandedly since 1928, is manifestly inflammatory, once grasped; a challenge to his various enemies who (he maintains) clog the literature pews: an up-yours bombination clearly audible through the enfant-sauvage mask Pound wore until it was too late. This bomb needed to slip through the gates before exploding.

or Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), Tom Eliot again; or Lawrence Leonard, The Horn of Mortal Danger (1980); or London Tales (1983), edited by Julian Evans. Clute’s selections are fascinating testimony to the breadth of his reading and collecting and his critical range; the text sparkles with his crunchy and apt vocabulary. It seems almost a homoeopathic distillation: “I’d reckon that out of every 8,000 or so books to arrive at the British Library complete with dust-jacket, I’ve commented here on a maximum of one”. (Excessive candor moment: John Clute is a friend of more than twenty-five years; I am the source for the images of the only jacket not from his own collection.) This is an important book.

———

Addendum (3 May): I wrote the notice above after reading digital proofs of the book. Today I have a copy in hand (a print on demand product manufactured in Tennessee on 19 April), and it is nice to see the book in the wild. In the U.S. the book is available from bookshop.org and elsewhere. Oh, yes : The Book Blinders is issued with a dust jacket (designed by Judith Clute). Here is the back panel :

Comicosmics : Dragonstairs Press

— Michael Swanwick. Comicosmics. Philadelphia: [Forthcoming from] Dragonstairs Press, 2024. Edition of 50, signed by the author. Stitched in gilt celestial decorative wrappers.

Michael Swanwick is the trickiest and most prolific of writers, egged on by the binder and publisher of Dragonstairs Press; and I am the luckiest of readers, regularly granted an earliest glimpse of the productions of Dragonstairs Press. Discerning readers of the Endless Bookshelf will have noticed the sly hommagio to Italo Calvino in this title. The book is an entire intergalactic philosophical novel within the compass of near infinity, and six printed pages. It is one of the several things that Michael Swanwick does best. You saw it here first.

Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic

 

“Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic; or, Bound for the South Seas”, an essay by your correspondent, “a crackpot theory with a kernel of truth”,  appears in Exacting Clam 12 (Spring 2024).

Also of note in the issue is a matched pair by Richard Kostelanetz, “Two Single-Sentence Stories”.

https://www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-12-spring-2024/

 

The Wrong Girl by Angela Slatter

‘unstringing my rage with quick fingers’

The Wrong Girl by Angela Slatter (cover image)

— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023 : POD 8 January 2024].

Angela Slatter’s work is now well known. She won the World Fantasy award for The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings (Tartarus, 2014), and has picked up several several others along the way. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings demonstrates a range of tones and geographies and narrative structures, among them a dark Sherlock Holmes incident interrogative of late Victorian assumptions and preoccupations, tales set in the town of Mercy’s Brook that seem almost cozy until the sharp steel appears, and a Miltonian settling of scores with a hypocrite priest. The title story is really something, a deft, wrenching account of the entangled lives of two sisters. Slatter sets this one up concisely and beautifully, the artist narrator and her improvident, carefree sister : “the butterfly departing on a whim, taking my favourite jeans and earrings, and leaving roughly the same devastation in its wake as a tornado”. When the butterfly image recurs a few pages later, it is the opening of the final act.

“The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne” is a ghost tale firmly anchored in a rural Welsh setting where the weight of past deeds erupts into the present. Slatter’s American locations are sometimes a bit generic but the struggle against ambient misogyny is real enough. This is a collection worth reading.

The last three stories are brief, previously unpublished retellings of classical motifs, with something of the same intensity found in the work of another Angela, Angela Carter ; and the same upending of the received versions. “Pomegranates” is Persephone’s tale retold ; “Lyre, Lyre” is Eurydice’s account, in which the artistic temper tantrums of Orpheus are noted. The last one, “Loom”, is best of all. Penelope’s terse review of the twenty years’ separation, and her knowledge of errant Odysseus (“all the things the birds left out”), just plain sings ! And then there is this swift phrase at the hinge of the story : “unstringing my rage with quick fingers”! My friend Michael Swanwick agrees with me : “This brilliant burst of fury makes the story”.

“Loom” is Slatter’s Homer : all the Odyssey in the span of a couple of pages and a worthy counterpoint to Avram  Davidson’s Homer, the yarn of Odysseus in 1970s American vernacular, found in the pages of Peregrine : Primus.

recent reading : february 2024

Surtees at the End of the World

— White, T. H. Gone to Ground Or The Sporting Decameron [Cover title]. London: Collins, 1935. A remarkable book in a stylish pictorial dust jacket by J. Z. Atkinson.

Nominally a sequel to White’s Earth Stopped (1934), this collection of linked stories is indeed a Sporting Decameron as the dust jacket announces above a graceful line drawing of a fox descending. There are further allusions to the book as a Sporting Decameron throughout the text, but the title page reads simply : Gone to Ground. A Novel.

White briskly and offhandedly charts a descent into global war. Just like that! A small party of foxhunters (with a gardener and an old Etonian tramp) takes refuge in a well-appointed bomb shelter, built by the suspicioously wealthy and long-lived Soapy Sponge and Facey Romford, who had absquatulated to Australia and formed a bank. Members of the party tell a succession of fantastical tales of foxhunting and fishing, channelling Surtees and Norman Douglas and M. R. James, with nods to Buchan and Dunsany and jeers at Kenneth Grahame. Gone to Ground voices many of the predilections and literary preoccupations that would occupy White throughout his career (from The Sword in Stone to The Book of Merlyn). The world outside the storytelling party is left behind.

— — —

— Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire [1962]. Vintage pbk.

— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. Norstrilia Press, [forthcoming 2024]. [Seen in proof state].

— Kingsley Amis. Every Day Drinking. Illustrated by Merrily Harpur. Hutchinson, [1983]. Collected columns from the Daily Express, by a past master and a fun chronicler of his thirsts.
— Mark Tewfik. Gelatine Joe. Privately Printed, Lantern Rouge Press, 2024. Vignette of combat in Afghanistan, a “tissue culture” from a longer work in progress.
— Howard Waldrop. Flying Saucer Rock and Roll. Cheap Street, [2002].
— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023, but POD 8 January 2024].
— Ron Weighell. The White Road. Illustrations by Nick Maloret. Ghost Story Press, 1997.
— Gary Phillips. Perdition, U.S.A. John Brown Books, [1996]. Intense, hard boiled L.A. novel, a close third person narrative of the adventures of Ivan Monk, Black businessman and private eye.

— Rex Stout. Three Men Out [1954]. A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Bantam pbk., 9th ptg.
——. A Family Affair [1975]. Introduction by Thomas Gifford. Bantam pbk., 4th ptg.
— Dorothy Sayers. Murder Must Advertise [1933]. A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery. Harper pbk.