recent reading : november 2024

 

— Romance in the Library. The Romance Novel in English. Gallery Guide. [Cover title]. Illustrated. [64] pp. The Lilly Library, [2024].
Curated by Rebecca Baumann, this remarkable exhibition, Romance in the Library, likely the first of its kind, charts a revisionist history of English literature, with emphasis on women as readers of novels from the eighteenth century to the present, and claims an oft-scorned modern-day marketing genre construct — the romance novel — as a badge of honor. In the heyday of the gothic, which included the sentimental as well as the historical and supernatural, writing novels was an economic activity open to women even while the reading of them by women (especially young women) was viewed as unsuitable. Baumann’s retrospective claim is an assertion that works pretty well, but one has to abandon one’s preconceptions to find more than superficial kinship between The Wild Irish Girl or Pride and Prejudice and modern formula fiction. The shift from novels aimed at a genteel readership to a vast popular appetite for novels of romantic entertainment is rooted in greater educational opportunities for women at all economic levels and the nineteenth-century achievement of near universal literacy. A welcome and provocative exhibition.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is in original boards, untrimmed. The stylish yellow and red dust jacket for Boy Crazy by Grace Perkins (1931) is spectacular (and it’s inscribed to Upton Sinclair)! I wish I had taken a picture.
[lightly edited for clarity 16 Nov.]

— — —

— Kasper van Ommen. Joseph Scaliger. His Oriental library, and the meaning of scholarship. [Cover title]. Illustrated. Brill, [n.d.].
——. Josephus Justus Scaliger. Sieerad van de Academie. Ornament of the Academy. [Cover title]. Text in Dutch and English. Illustrated. [Universiteit Leiden, 2020].
Two illustrated monographs on the great sixteenth-century polyglot and polymath Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609).

— — —

— The Dagon Collection. Auction Catalogue of Items Recovered in the Federal Raid on Innsmouth, Mass. Edited by Nate Pedersen. Cataloguing by Rebecca Baumann, with assistance from Jonathan Kearns. Illustrations by Liv Rainey-Smith and Eduardo Valdés-Hevia. Layout and Design by Andrew Leman. [PS Publishing, January 2024].
A catalogue of imaginary objects, rigorously described, with their history in vignettes by a wide variety post-Lovecraftian authors. Lot 13, The Geometry of Nowhere, is a dizzying book; and lot 33, the Tiffany Lamp, is an unsettling piece.

— — —

— Michael Connelly. City of Bones. Dennis McMillan, 2002.

Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic ; or, Bound for the South Seas 

 

Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic ; or, Bound for the South Seas

Prologue

This is a crackpot theory with a kernel of truth. It requires some minimal familiarity with the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Herman Melville. It took shape as I re-read Moby-Dick for the first time in decades in January 2016, and I expounded it at the California Antiquarian Book Fair in February 2016, to my friend Bill Reese, a supreme Melville collector and the greatest Americana dealer of his generation. Great reader though Bill was, he had never read any H. P. Lovecraft and so he greeted my geste with a glazed look that means, as any performer will attest, you have lost your audience. On another occasion, an eminent Melville scholar responded with a Jupiterian frostiness. So you have been warned. I performed early versions of it with impromptu embellishments a few times in the interim in bar-rooms and one evening on the patio at Readercon in Quincy, Mass., for Jim Morrow and a few others, in July 2017. This final text was read at Readercon in July 2023. As you will see later, it is necessary to give this chronology.

[All citations from Moby-Dick are to the University of California paperback with the illustrations from the Barry Moser Arion Press edition.]


Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic ; or, Bound for the South Seas 

Ernest Hemingway was only half-right : American literature springs from one book, but that book is Moby-Dick (1851).

I

Melville gives for the first time voices to the voiceless, to those who had heretofore been mere furniture of narrative. It is Tashtego, the “unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard” (122), who first names the object of the Pequod’s quest :

“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.” (166)

The cabin boy Pip dances at midnight in the forecastle until a squall arrives and the “jollies” are sent aloft to reef the topsails. “It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t.” (179)

Stubbs berates the elderly Fleece for overcooking his whale-steak and bids him preach to the sharks worrying the carcass alongside the ship. Fleece concludes with a mutter, “I’m bressed if he aint more shark than Massa Shark himself.” (306)

II

Moby-Dick also marks the point where English poetry becomes American literature. To take three examples, here is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” transformed :

An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea. (320)

Melville had earlier named Coleridge and the albatross to assert Nature’s precedence over the English poet. (191)

Chapter 93, the episode of Pip’s loss overboard, takes its title from William Cowper’s poem of madness, “The Cast-away”, and its substance from these verses : “We perish’d, each alone: / But I beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.”

By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him [. . .] Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. (424)

And, of course, it is the “Sea-change / Into Something Rich and Strange” from Ariel’s song in The Tempest, that echoes in Ahab’s words :

This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring in it [. . .] when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! (445)

So far so good, nothing extraordinary or particularly new about these citations. They are excellent passages. Moby-Dick is also a great and influential novel of cosmic horror.

III

To go ahead for a moment. The revival of interest in Melville during the 1920s is well documented, including a standard edition of his works, and the discovery of the manuscript of Billy Budd (first published in 1924). In France, Jean Giono read Melville and began a translation of Moby-Dick into French, eventually issued in 1939. When the translation was to be reprinted by Gallimard, Giono declined to write the biography his publishers wanted and instead produced a remarkable fantasia, Pour saluer Melville (Paris: Gallimard, 1941). It is a fictional interlude during Melville’s visit to England in 1849 that bears directly upon the impulse leading Melville to write Moby-Dick. Giono evokes a continual struggle within Melville :

Depuis quinze mois qu’il est dans le large des eaux, il se bat avec l’ange. Il est dans une grande nuit de Jacob et l’aube ne vient pas. Des ailes terriblement dures le frappent, le soulèvent au-dessus du monde, le précipitent, le resaisissent et l’étouffent. Il n’a pas cessé un seul instant d’être obligé à la bataille [. . .] s’il saute dans la balinière, s’il chevauche des orages de fer [. . .] il se bat avec l’ange. (38)

Melville’s unceasing fight with the angel, in the momentous night of Jacob where dawn does not come, is Ahab’s struggle. Ahab can recall the domestic joys and tenderness of fatherhood, but once the Pequod sails he is intent and unwavering in his quest of the supramundane real, that which is beyond the barrier. He tells Starbuck :

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by striking through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. (168).

And elsewhere :

How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; and standing there in thy spite? (480-1).

IV

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a native-born Rhode Islander, a cosmic materialist by philosophical inclination, and a writer of fantastic fiction. He lived for some years in exile in New York City. In August 1925, Lovecraft wrote down the plot outline for a story based on a dream from years before, and recasting an earlier tale.

In early 1925 Lovecraft dwelt in an apartment house in Brooklyn, and a neighbor was George W. Kirk, whom he had known since 1922. Kirk was a bookseller who later owned the Chelsea Book Shop on West 8th street in Manhattan. Sometime in the middle 1920s, Kirk gave a copy of Moby-Dick to Lovecraft, who recorded the gift on the book’s fly leaf, and signed his name: H. P. Lovecraft, Esq., Providence, Rhode-Island. 

I have examined that copy at the American Antiquarian Society. It has Lovecraft’s fine fanlight window bookplate and bears a pencil accession note on the pastedown: Purchase S. Clyde King, Jr. Aug 8 ’41. (Lovecraft’s Library was dispersed after his death; King was a Providence bookseller). Moby-Dick was rediscovered at A.A.S. in November 2017 (note that date) during a shelf read in the stacks. The book is otherwise unmarked. And yet, and yet.

“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons.” (483). In this passage from chapter 109 of Moby-Dick, I hear the origins of a phrase in a later story of Lovecraft’s describing terrible events in rural Massachusetts, “The Dunwich Horror” (written 1928 and published 1929): “some day yew folks’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-calling its father’s name on the top of Sentinel Hill” (in Tales. New York: Library of America, 2005, page 375).

The horror in question is one of a pair of twins conceived by Lavinia Whateley in congress with Yog-Sothoth, an interdimensional being. Wilbur Whateley, uncouth and stinking, took after his human parent. The other twin did not.

After his return to Providence in April 1926, Lovecraft eventually completed the story he outlined a year earlier. “The Call of Cthulhu” was published in Weird Tales in early 1928. It is a globe-spanning tale of malign influences, primitive cults, and the resurgence of an ancient extraterrestrial being, Cthulhu (pronounced “khlul’-hloo”). In the subsequent decades, Cthulhu has stepped out of the pages of Lovecraft’s story and, like Mary Shelley’s monster, taken on a life of its own.

V

And so to the next step, the ambiguity of pronouns: “There she blows!” Invariably, throughout Moby-Dick. Elsewhere whales are “he”, grammatically male by default, as buttressed by Melville’s cetology and lore of the sperm whale fishery. And yet.

Moby-Dick is the intrusion of these terrible interdimensional forces into the ordinary. So ordinary cetology does not apply, and the white whale is a she-whale. In his last speech, Ahab proclaims, “Toward thee I roll [. . .] still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!” (574-5).

The fated rendez-vous is a hot date in the South Seas : Cthulhu is the spawn of Ahab and Moby-Dick.

Q.E.D.


Author’s Note:

I had written an early version of this essay in the summer of 2017; and then in December 2017, I learned that the American Antiquarian Society holds H. P. Lovecraft’s copy of Moby-Dick (an edition published in Boston after Melville’s death: the copyright notice is in his widow’s name).

Moby Dick or The White Whale / by Herman Melville author of “Typee,” “Omoo,” “White Jacket,” etc.
Boston : Dana Estes & Company publishers, [1892]. American Antiquarian Society copy has bookplate of H.P. Lovecraft. Inscribed: From George Willard Kirk, Esq. H.P. Lovecraft, Esq., Providence, Rhode-Island. Catalog Record #144128.
https://catalog.mwa.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=144128

They wrote about the discovery:

14 November 2017

Fun fact: AAS has a copy of Moby Dick once owned by H. P. Lovecraft! A source of inspiration for him, perhaps?

It’s a nice-looking copy too! [with illustrations]

Jean Giono. Pour saluer Melville. Paris: Gallimard, 1941. The passage cited above is from p. 38:

For the fifteen months since he has been at sea, he has been fighting with the angel. It is for him the momentous night of Jacob and the dawn does not come. Hard terrifying wings strike him, raise him above the world, tumble him, seize him again, and smother him. Not for a single instant has the struggle relinquished him. [. . .] when he jumps in the whale-boat, when he rides iron storms [. . .] he is fighting with the angel.

[This is my own translation; in the fall of 2017 (!) it was issued as a NYRB Classics paperback in an English translation by Paul Eprile.]

For George Kirk, see S. T. Joshi & D. E. Schultz, An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2001; Hippocampus Press, 2004), pp. 137-8.

Moby-Dick was not listed in the first two editions of S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s Library (Necronomicon Press, 1980; Hippocampus, 2002), but is recorded as item 651 in the fourth edition (Hippocampus, 2017), “Gift of George Kirk,” with citations to Lovecraft’s letters and essays.

[This essay was first published in Exacting Clam 12 (Spring 2024). All rights reserved]

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/

 

I was looking for a street

— Jonathan Lethem. Brooklyn Crime Novel. Ecco, [2023]

Brooklyn Crime Novel is a fun and tricky book. Let’s get right to the metaphor: a city street with its posse of fungible boys is the whaling ship Pequod with its disparate crew. These are two worlds that seem self-contained but are not, for each is an economic construct in the service of a global market and deeply entangled with the world outside its confines: the City is the Ocean. The cataloguer of Brooklyn childhoods is blood-brother to the sub-sub-librarian compiler of cetology. So is the Brazen-Head Wheeze. This means I got right to Melville, who (like H. P. Lovecraft) shows up at this block party.

If this were a fantasy novel, one would expect a map at the endpapers or frontispiece. Instead, one can turn to a nonfiction cognate of Brooklyn Crime Novel, “A Neighborhood, Authored”, published by Lethem in the New Yorker a couple of months before his novel appeared (28 August 2023). This is a metatextual examination of the geography and sociology of his childhood as charted in “The Making of Boerum Hill”, a  New Yorker article  by Jervis Anderson (14 November 1977). Very helpfully, for readers outside the Neighborhood, there is a map:

This is an agglutinative tale (124 numbered sections): a catalogue and “an infinite regress” of life on the brownstone blocks of the Brooklyn neighborhood: the brownstoners, the Screamer, Milt the Vigilante, the millionaire, and others.  The boys leave the false oases of family life and the safe parts of the block every time they go out to school. They are taxed by kids from rougher streets and projects, and learn the expected behavior of an urban dance of confrontation, what is said, and the gaps and silences of what is unspoken. “The dance is a dance because no one can tell you in words. The dance is a dance because you have to learn how to do it.”

At first I had wondered about just who might be complicit in this editorial or authorial “we” that began sneaking into the text, but Lethem soon confronts this unease and incorporates it into the narrative. There is a collective voice of the neighborhood, and “we” sometimes means “Everybody”; and sometimes again, that universal consciousness seems to concentrate itself into a single person:

using in each realm his special talents to ingratiate himself to his friends’ parents, too, to get inside all their houses and say a political ma’am to somebody’s mother like he was trained to do, thus enabling him to conduct his serial investigations, C. felt he was the only person who knew everything about this place. He was stretched like a bridge across worlds.

One funny thread is the recurring notion that H.P. Lovecraft’s library has survived in a basement somewhere in Brooklyn (he did live there in a one-room apartment for a few miserable months in 1925-1926), and this gets tangled up with the chronicle of the apprentice bookseller. Some people barely survive their childhoods, and Brooklyn Crime Novel steps into that territory for a while. Cruelties are enacted unflinchingly; and the boys of the neighborhood disperse into adulthood. Sometimes their paths cross again. Lethem shows considerable courage in revisiting childhood terrain, gently mocking versions of his younger self. The narrator says, “Me? I’m just a character in this novel, the one who happens to be writing it. But someone like me surely existed.” He and the Brazen Head Wheeze are scathing about “the novelist”. “He’s the same kid, the kid we knew. He’s only a bigger kid.” When they track “the novelist” to another bar, the Brazen Head Wheeze lets him have it, “You’re our prodigal collective mouthpiece. Our bard, if I may [. . .] Let me take you to the bridge, you said, and you did. You took me to the bridge, and from that soaring span I beheld the city whole and entire.” Jonathan Lethem knows you can’t go home again but in Brooklyn Crime Novel he deftly enables the rest of us visit the neighborhood for a while.

 

commonplace book : fall 2023

W. B. Yeats. The Wind among the Reeds, 1903. One of a few copies in a special vellum binding.

— — —

an example of the bookplate of H. P. Lovecraft (designed by Wilfred Talman, 1927).

— — —

Francis Grose. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785. The author’s interleaved copy, with his additions for the second edition. Now at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.

— — —

page 5 of a manuscript by Charles Baudelaire, 1848Charles Baudelaire. Manuscript essay on Edgar Allan Poe, as an introduction to Révélation magnétique, the first story by Poe translated by Baudelaire, 5 pages, Paris, 1848. Now at Firestone Library, Princeton University.

— — —

Cyril Connolly, The Modern Movement (1965), author photo by Otto Karminski. What is going on here?

The Silverberg Business : the Endless Bookshelf book of the year – 2022

‘I can’t explain it and I don’t try’

— Robert Freeman Wexler. The Silverberg Business. [vi], 269, [1, blank], [1, about the author], [5, blank], [4, ads]. Small Beer Press, [2022]. Wrappers with illustration by Jon Langford.

The Silverberg Business follows Shannon, a Jewish private detective who has come to Victoria, Texas, in late October 1888, in search of information about a missing man and the large bank draft he carried, representing funds raised on behalf of a Romanian Jewish refugee settlement plan. Shannon, a Galveston native with a talent for finding bodies, uncovers fraud and murder, and indications of concerted sinister activity in and around southern coastal Texas. We get a clear sense of the “feel of a frontier town” in Victoria, and the people living there. Shannon gets knocked over the head on several occasions. He works for a Chicago agency and has considerable autonomy. The detective talks, and listens to people from all walks of life, bankers and bank clerks, railroad conductors and bartenders, laundresses and rooming-house owners, marshals and horse dealers, gamblers, whores, and rabbis. In the course of his narration, Shannon drops elements of his own history and character. His tenacity of purpose leads him into strange places, and the reader goes with him, out into sparsely populated terrain, and elsewhere.

August Miller Store, Victoria, Texas. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.

Shannon’s first-person narrative voice is matter-of-fact, smart and aphoristic, and keenly observant of his surroundings. He is Hammett’s Continental Op on the ground in 1880s Texas, which would be interesting enough, but Wexler also reappropriates the Western as a literary domain,  and goes farther even than William S. Burroughs did in The Place of Dead Roads. Wexler’s achievement is to have created a formally innovative fiction that moves seamlessly, and beautifully, from dream to waking to sensory hallucination and then back to the mug of coffee the waitress has set before Shannon in the dining room at the Delmonico Hotel. He soon discovers that Silverberg, an Easterner, was seen in the company of a well-dressed Westerner with bad teeth and a gambler named Stephens. A conductor describes Stephens: “whitish hair, somewhat taller than average, red-brown eyes, a tendency toward fancy dress.”

Shannon muses:

Was Stephens the man who walked past the hotel restaurant and stared in at me? White . . . blond . . . storm of white-capped waves gouged the coast . . . an oak that had stood for centuries screamed and gave up its life . . . nothing remained, nothing but naked earth twisted into shapes of the dead and dying. I cried for the land, but what use are tears?

Stephens wears an onyx ring with a Greek god carved into it, and demonstrates a capacity to come and go as he pleases. There is often a stench of sea rot as the mark of his passage.

Indianola, Texas after the August 20, 1886, hurricane that destroyed the city. The residence of Peter Clement showing driftwood against it. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.

Pursuing the gambler, Shannon saddles up his horse, Blue Swamp, and rides out of Port Lavaca towards the  ruined town of Indianola, which had been flattened by an earlier hurricane. He spends a couple of  nights camping, fishing and shooting ducks for his meals, befriending a one-winged bald eagle, and has strange dreams. The next day as he gets near Matagorda Bay, the noon sky turns dark. “Reddish light washed the salt-cedars and cactus.” When his Blue Swamp refuses to move further, Shannon goes ahead on foot and finds an unexpected sand hill on the barrier island.

Sand hills form, blow apart, re-form, eventually becoming immobilized by growth of sea oats, goateed, and other plants. This one was crusty, bare, more like sandstone than sand, and the front looked sculpted, carved into features . . . curl of lip, open mouth, deep eye holes. A rotting animal festered in the mouth.
Then I found the body.

It is the murdered Silverberg. When the weather turns inclement, Shannon passes the night at the  farm of Ratface Conroy. Out  in the tumble-down barn, “a lean-to strung together from broken parts of other structures,” Shannon’s sleep is interrupted when his hosts attempt to murder him. Shannon shoots the husband and goes after Mrs. Conroy, who is armed. Pushing through a curtain in the sod farmhouse, Shannon enters a giant, ruined stone mansion. He shoots her dead, and returns to find a zombie “skull-head” Conroy armed and awaiting him. Shannon is faster at the draw, and sets the house ablaze as he leaves. This is not the last of the skull-heads Shannon will encounter.

— — —

Though I wasn’t playing poker, the same rules applied — watch, wait, calculate the odds.

There’s a lot of poker in The Silverberg Business, stud poker where only the first card is dealt face down to each player, and all the other cards are visible upon the table as they fall. This is emblematic of Wexler’s narrative method, for the reader sees what Shannon sees, and patterns are deduced from evidence visible and from inferences about what remains concealed.

Time is a hill, a hill that grows as you climb, grows to mountainside. Wind and rain alter the mountain, exposing rock, minerals. Looking back the way you came gets harder. Sometimes, all you can see is the rising path ahead of you. You get to the top. Everybody does. Sometimes sooner than we expect. The journey is what matters. Here in skull-head land, time means nothing.

These fugues and hallucinations and strange dreams are integral to the way Shannon gains knowledge of the strange world he enters. And the reader  enters with him, for his voice is supple enough to take in this space outside of time, poker-playing zombies, and a daring escape in the Flying Kestrel, a contraption from the Sonora Aero Club, across a landscape of perpetual intertemporal war. Abandoned in a Louisiana swamp by the pilot of the Kestrel, he finds that months have passed.

Schultz tank at the O’Connor Ranch on Copano Bay. Courtesy of Victoria Regional History Center.

The measure of Shannon’s persistence is seen in the way he makes his return to Victoria and resumes his investigation of the gambler, no matter the cost. Among further clues are strange manuscript account in Spanish recording the indigenous culture of the region, and a pattern of inexplicable land purchases on barrier islands. On a visit to the prison in Huntsville. Shannon finds the prisoner he expected to interview has been murdered.  Chasing Stephens down a stairway that couldn’t exist, Shannon finds himself again in the land of the skull-heads, and the poker-playing begins in earnest. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

— — —

In a review of an exhibition of paintings by J. M. W. Turner, critic Jackie Wullschläger usefully articulates the notion that Turner’s work began to push “beyond realistic description”. As readers and writers, all we have are words, but sometimes that is sufficient. The Silverberg Business is a book that demonstrates what fiction is all about.

Continuity is a convenient illusion. The discontinuities of Shannon’s subjective experience — dream, beautiful maritime interludes, fugue states, hallucination, or return to consciousness after getting clobbered on the head — are as cut-up as anything from Burroughs, and the psychological and geographical terrain of the novel are vast spaces, but Shannon is unflappable, no matter how weird it gets. The Silverberg Business is linear and direct in its narrative line even as the words dance across time and space from sentence to sentence within a single paragraph.

I wasn’t sure I would be able to function . . . I . . . Stephens, looming gigantic , his red eyes roasted my flesh. Shriveled strips floated on the waves, adhered to the sides of the boat, and the ocean, all its weight above, squeezing me into nothingness. I swam into a cave, a cavern so vast it held the world, and beyond, the sparkling Mediterranean of Salonica’s harbor. Captain Bellis gave the order “Moor ship!” and our boat thumped into the remnants of a Galveston pier.

Wexler’s prose is shocking, funny, and vivid, and can go anywhere, and he goes to some very strange places (the summary above leaves off about halfway through the book, so buy the book and read it).

Galveston beachfront after the 1900 hurricane. Courtesy of the Galveston and Texas History Center, Rosenberg Library.

In The Silverberg Business, there are also countless playful allusions to elements of American literature high and low, among them Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo; Dashiell Hammett and William S. Burroughs, as noted earlier; and, though his name is nowhere mentioned, H. P. Lovecraft, especially in the sense of menace and the notion that human actors would be serving malign powers and non-human entities. The Silverberg Business is also a notable evocation of Jewish life in late-nineteenth century Texas. Wexler’s narrator unifies all these many fissiparous elements, and the concluding passages are tragic, deeply earned, and very moving. An outstanding work, the best book I’ve read this year.

The Endless Bookshelf book of the year 2022.

recent reading : september to december 2022

current reading :

— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue [1925]. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

James Joyce
James Joyce in the garden, 1904. Courtesy of UCD Special Collections, CUR P1.

— C. P. Curran. James Joyce Remembered. Edition 2022. With essays by H. Campbell, D. Ferriter, A. Fogarty, M. Kelleher, H. Solterer. Collection presented by E. Roche & E. Flanagan. Illustrated. x, 224 pp. UCD Press, 2022.

— — —

recent reading :

— Stephanie Feldman. Saturnalia. A Novel. Unnamed Press, [2022]. A dark celebration of the mysteries in the streets of a Philadelphia shattered by climate change, epidemics, and political manipulations. Not since In the Drift by Michael Swanwick has the threatening power of the city’s social clubs been summoned so palpably. Though the novel treats with matters of alchemy and magic, the narrative strategy is strongly anchored in mimetic realism.

— George Sims. The Rare Book Game. Holmes Publishing Company, 1985. Collection of essays by English bookseller and mystery novelist George Sims. With the companion volumes, More of the Rare Book Game (1988) and Last of the Rare Book Game (1990). Sims had remarkable access to archives of  A. J. A. Symons, Oscar Wilde, Eric Gill, and others, and his discussion of the authors and the materials he handled makes for fascinating reading.

— — —

Beardsley translation of Catullus— Margaret D. Stetz. Aubrey Beardsley 150 Years Young. From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. 44 illustrations, 69 items. 85 pp. Grolier Club, 2022. Excellent record of the fabulous, witty, and nimbly erudite descriptive labels from the Beardsley exhibition (8 September to 12 November 2022). The translation from Catullus illustrated above suggests that a classical education was not without its rewards. Not being a Latinist, your correspondent is glad that Beardsley could knock out such a poem.

— Rick Moody. Surplus Value Books. Catalog Number 13. Illustrated by David Ford. Unpaginated, [40] pp. [Santa Monica]: Danger Books!, [2002]. Edition of 174 copies signed by the author. An acerbic jeu d’esprit, a pitch perfect catalogue of imaginary books  compiled by an obsessive romantic stalker. Originally published in wrappers in different format in 1999.

— Adam Roberts. The History of Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

— George Pelecanos. The Night Gardener. Dennis McMillan, 2006.

— Marcel Proust. La Prisonnière [1923]. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. I have been reading my way through Proust for the last year, slowed down  but still going. One thing that has emerged, to my surprise, is how funny the narrator is at times.

— — —

— Mark Valentine. Arthur Machen. Seren, [1995]. Concise biography with an excellent account of the Gwent landscapes of Machen’s youth and their influence upon him.

— Kij Johnson. The River Bank. A sequel to The Wind in the Willows. Illustrations by Kathleen Jennings. Small Beer Press, [2017].

— — —

— The Bart Auerbach Collection. Dedication Copies; Books, Letters & Manuscripts; The Book Trade; Poets, Philosophers, Historians, Statesmen, Essayists, Dramatists, Novelists, Booksellers, Humorists, &c., &c., &c. Riverrun Books, [2022]. An illustrated memorial catalogue of the private collection [500 items] of the dean of New York antiquarian book appraisers.

— — —

— H. P. Lovecraft. Fungi from Yuggoth. An Annotated Edition. Edited by David E. Schultz. Illustrated by Jason Eckhardt. Hippocampus Press, [2017]. [re-read].

— Francis Brett Young. Cold Harbour. Collins, [3rd ptg, 1926].

— Giuseppa Z. Zanichelli. I codici miniati del Museo Diocesano “San Matteo” di Salerno. Lavegliacarlone, 2019.

— Curzio Malaparte. The Skin. [La Pelle, 1949]. Translated from the Italian by David Moore. Introduction by Rachel Kushner. NYRB paperback.