Billy Budd Symposium : 9 October 2024

In conjunction with the Grolier Club exhibition “Melville’s Billy Budd at 100”, a symposium will be held on Wednesday evening 9 October, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., at the Grolier Club, 47 east 60th street, in New York City. RSVP required (hybrid event with separate registration for virtual attendance, see link).

A panel of prominent Melvillians will address Melville’s masterpiece, each of them commenting on the centennial exhibition and its implications. This will be followed by a discussion on such topics as textual history, biographical context during Melville’s years of writing his “prose and poem concoction”, the text’s cultural journey in the 20th and 21st centuries, and its adaptations into theater, opera, film, and the visual arts, as well as areas for potential future exploration. The symposium will be moderated by Richard Brodhead, who taught English and American literature at Yale for 32 years before becoming president of Duke University. Brodhead’s writings on Melville include Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel, The School of Hawthorne, and New Essays on Moby Dick. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and chaired the Academy’s 2013 commission on the humanities. The speakers will be John Bryant, David Greven, and Grolier members G. Thomas Tanselle and Henry Wessells.

Dr. Bryant, Professor Emeritus of English at Hofstra University, is a leading Melville scholar. Founding editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and director of the Melville Electronic Library, he received the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2015. He has contributed several books and numerous essays on Melville, American literature, and scholarly editing, including Melville and Repose (Oxford) and The Fluid Text (Michigan). He is currently working on the last volume of his three-volume biography, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley). Dr. Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His books include All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence (The University of Virginia Press, 2024), and a study of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Intimate Violence (Oxford University Press, 2017). Tom Tanselle, a Past President of the Grolier Club, is a bibliographical scholar who for many years was the vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. He was also one of the three primary editors of the fifteen-volume Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville, and he has published many other books. Henry Wessells is a writer and antiquarian bookseller in New York. He is the author of A Conversation larger than the Universe (2018), a catalogue accompanying his Grolier Club exhibition of the same name, The Private Life of Books (2020), and A Melville Census, John Marr & Timoleon (in press, forthcoming 2025).

A Melville Census. John Marr & Timoleon

the next book from Temporary Culture is now ready :

A Melville Census. John Marr & Timoleon. With a note by Henry Wessells.

Edition of 52 copies, designed and printed by hand by Jerry Kelly, forthcoming late autumn 2024 (dated 2025 on the title page)

This is just what it sounds like : a report on the location of all known copies of Herman Melville’s John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891), the two last books of poems (each printed in editions of 25 copies), with a note about Maurice Sendak, Bill Reese, and others. Of the copies printed, 26 lettered copies are for presentation (one copy for the author, printed on blue paper, can be glimpsed at left above). Subscription details available here.

 

commonplace book : early September 2024

Your correspondent will be attending  Armadillocon in Austin this weekend (6-9 September). I will be at the Howard Waldrop memorial on Saturday afternoon, and at other events. Say hello if you see me.

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Tartarus Press have announced publication of a fifth collection of essays by Mark Valentine, The Thunderstorm Collectors, 29 recent pieces, some previously unpublished, on authors of the supernatural, book collecting, and some lesser-known byways of English life and letters. I look forward to seeing it.

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“Melville’s Billy Budd at 100”, a new exhibition, opens next week at the Grolier Club in New York City. It will be worth a look.

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recent reading : may to july 2024

— Mark Valentine. Lost Estates. Swan River Press, 2024. [From the author].
Collection of a dozen stories, four unpublished, including the excellent title story

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— John O’Donoghue. The Servants and other strange stories. Tartarus Press, [2024]. Edition of 300.
Collection of nine stories and novellas ; including “The Irish Short Story That Never Ends” : though its title reveals how it must end, this is pitch perfect and evocative and finely executed. Michael Swanwick —himself a master of concise, brilliant short stories — notes, “John O’Donoghue knocks it out of the park . . . I’m Irish, so this goes to the heart of a lifetime of reading for me.”

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— John Buchan. The Three Hostages. Houghton Mifflin, 1924.
Re-read this for the first time in more than forty years, for an essay appearing in Wormwoodiana on the centenary (1 August).

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— Anthony Powell. A Question of Upbringing (1951) ; A Buyer’s Market (1952) ; The Acceptance World (1955) ; At Lady Molly’s (1957) ; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960) ; The Kindly Ones (1962) ; The Valley of Bones (1964) ; The Soldier’s Art (1966) ; The Military Philosophers (1968) ; Books Do Furnish a Room (1971) ; Temporary Kings (1973) ; Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975).

I have been working at the ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ over the past several months, mostly reading the dozen novels out of sequence, which seems a reasonable enough approach, since the narratives flit and somersault across time and the parade of characters is intermittent and recurring by design. The humor is dry and Powell’s principal strategy, “the discipline of infinite obliquity”, will not be to every reader’s taste, but things do happen, often as sudden surprises punctuating a circumspect, even evasive, chronicle. And of course the sentences and paragraphs sometimes turn in midstream to undermine or contradict the initial idea or perspective expressed. Or how about this : “She had the gift of making silence as vindictive as speech.”
Powell’s cycle was described by several of his contemporaries as an English Proust but  that now seems to me to be a reductive statement : there is attention to art, music, and aesthetics, and a complex, intertwined cast of artists, hacks, critics, businessmen, elegant and not-so-elegant family members, and even Venice makes an appearance, but Nicholas Jenkins is, by temperament, energy, and accomplishment, about as far from the “Marcel” narrator as can be and so is the overall tone. I like The Military Philosophers (which does have a direct nod to Proust) and At Lady Molly’s most of all, but this is maybe saying  “poached” or “over easy”.  Certainly the outcomes of Hearing Secret Harmonies are a long way from the schoolboy memories of 1921 in the first volume.

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— (MELVILLE, HERMAN). Melville’s Billy Budd at 100. A Centennial Exhibition at the Grolier Club and Oberlin College Libraries. Introduction and Descriptions by William Palmer Johnston. Frontispiece portrait of Melville by Barry Moser, color plates. The Grolier Club, 2024. Edition of 375 copies printed by Bradley Hutchinson in Austin, Texas. [Gift of the author].
Advance copy of this concise, elegant catalogue for the show (12 September to 9 November  in NYC) : 49 entries, 1843-2024, including some legendary Melville rarities and new work by an American master. A symposium on Billy Budd will be held at the Club on 9 October in connection with the exhibition.
The catalogue is distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

— (MELVILLE, HERMAN) Bound to Vary. A Guild of Book Workers exhibition of unique fine bindings on the Married Mettle Press limited edition of Billy Budd, Sailor. New York: Guild of Book Workers, 1988.
A superb copy of this edition of Billy Budd (one of the unique bindings) will be on view at the Grolier.
/ file under : chronicle of an obsession

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— Michael Swanwick. The War with the Zylv. Cover illustration by Ariel Cinii. Dragonstairs Press, 2024. Edition of 100.

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— Anuj Bahri and Aanchal Malhotra. Bahrisons. Chronicle of a Bookshop. [New Delhi :] Tara India Research Press, [2024].
Seventieth anniversary memoir and keepsake from this New Delhi bookshop established by an enterprising young refugee couple displaced during Partition : ‘we were not just in the business of selling books, but rather, building relationships’.

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— Bob Rosenthal. Fifth Avenue Overhead. Edge Books, [May, 2024].
“Stories of Poetic Survival” by the author of Cleaning Up New York. This is a fun book!

— Arthur Machen. A Reader of Curious Books. [Edited by Christopher Tompkins]. Darkly Bright Press, [2024].
Expanded second edition (originally issued in 2020) of this annotated compendium of early work by Machen, reviews and literary miscellanies from the pages of Walford’s Antiquarian in 1887 [cf. Goldstone & Sweetser, pp. 141-3], some using the pseudonym Leolinus, and often containing in miniature some of the author’s later interests and motifs.

— John Masefield. Sard Harker. Heinemann, 1924.
For a forthcoming essay.

— Matthew Needle, Bookscout. An Appreciation by His Friends. Cambridge, Mass.: Charles Wood, Bookseller, 2012.
Reminiscences by Gregory Gibson, Adrian Harrington, Robert Rubin, Marcus McCorison, Roger Stoddard, Charles Wood, Stephen Weissman.

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— Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wall-Paper. Afterword by Alice Walker. Illustrations by Chris Daunt. Suntup Editions, 2024. Edition of 376 copies, signed by Walker and Daunt.

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— Francis Spufford. Cahokia Jazz [2023]. Scribners, [2024].
A Prohibition novel, a jazz novel, and an excellent novel of an alternate America, a narrative organically rooted in language and anthropology. I really liked this one.

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/

 

seventeen years of the Endless Bookshelf

Today marks seventeen years of reports of messing about in books under the sign of the Endless Bookshelf. I’m still at it, and glad to be reading and thinking about books, and occasionally writing or publishing them. What a delight to discover new books and writers or to find that a book published a century ago is fresh and nimble. I have a few essays in the works, either scheduled for publication or due this spring, and other things in progress. To my few readers, it is always a delight to hear from you, keep sending me your news.

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current reading :

— Marcel Proust. Le temps retrouvé [1927].

— Herman Melville. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Constable, 1924. This was Melville’s last book, unpublished at the time of his death and closely connected to his book of verse, John Marr and other sailors (1888). Billy Budd grew out of a note to “Billy in the Darbies”, the poem that concludes the book. The manuscript re-emerged in the early 1920s and first published by Constable as vol. 13 in the Standard Edition of the Works, a landmark in the rediscovery of Melville.  There will be an exhibition on Billy Budd and Melville at the Grolier Club in September and I am celebrating the centenary by reading the book. For now:

In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main path, some by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned by the genius of Nelson I am going to err into such a by-path. If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad.

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[In September 2023, I left Twitter after nearly 15 years of marginal glosses and other ephemeral notes. I don’t miss it for an instant, though I do remember the days when it was a fun mode of quick communication. I post occasional announcements at @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.iriseden.eu and send out semi-annual newsletters.]

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recent reading :

— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue [1925].
— Michael Swanwick. Phases of the Sun [bound with:] Phases of the Moon. Dragonstairs Press, 2020 [i.e., 2024]. Text printed dos à dos,  leporello binding of yellow and blue boards. Edition of 19. Swanwick at his bleakest and most romantic in these two sequences of short short stories about writing and love.
— Howard Waldrop. The Ugly Chickens. [Old Earth Books, 2009].
— Ron Weighell. The Mark of Andreas Germer. Quire 13. The Last Press, 2022. Edition of 100. Original short yarn from the estate of Ron Weighell (1950-2020), moving nimbly from a thoughtful citation of Milton to the tale of a book with a dreadful effect upon its reader.
— Arthur Machen. The Three Impostors or the Transmutations [1895], in The House of Souls. Tartarus Press, [2021].
— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].

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I am looking forward to receiving the Conway Miscellany, a collection of four books by John Crowley from Ninepin Press in varying formats, comprising: The Sixties, A Forged Diary; Seventy-Nine Dreams; Two Talks on Writing; and Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle.

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.