Category: Time

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)

— — —

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)

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.

The Book Blinders by John Clute

— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. Norstrilia Press, [forthcoming 2024]. [Seen in proof state].
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 between The Wind in the Willow (1908) to What Not (1918/1919) to In Our Time or 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.  The 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.

Peak Machen II : ‘I have not had to wait until I am dead !’

One hundred years ago, on 11 December 1923, Arthur Machen wrote a letter to a young American fan. The letter becomes more interesting with  a little context. In the autumn of 1923, New York bookseller Harry F. Marks issued his catalogue 11* and sent out invitations to a display of manuscripts and books of Arthur Machen. The background to this exhibition is notable. In 1922, Machen’s old friend and publisher Harry Spurr had brought manuscripts, proofs, and unpublished materials over to America and sold them to Harry F. Marks, who ran a well-established business for the New York carriage trade, and to Walter M. Hill of Chicago, another book dealer of national reputation. As John Gawsworth notes in The Life of Arthur Machen, “Marks who sold the pick of his collection by private treaty before issuing his 1923 catalogue still had some forty priced items to dispose of there at a total price of some $3,000. [. . .] the ‘boom’ was on”. **

The Life of Arthur Machen transcribes a letter dated 15 October 1923 that had been reproduced as pages three and four of the invitation :

Dear Mr Marks,
You tell me that you are holding an Exhibition of my books and manuscripts at your place in Broadway, New York. I hope your citizens will be interested.
But I cannot help thinking of a visit that I paid this last summer to my old home Llanddewi Vach Rectory in Monmouthshire. I left in September 1887; and had not been there since. The orchards that my father planted had grown into a wood; nothing else was much changed. But the old place brought back to my mind the old days, the days when, quite unknown and solitary, I worked night after night at The Chronicle of Clemendy in the room that looked out on those orchards and above and beyond them to Bertholly on the slope of Wentwood.
It is a far cry from the room at Llanddewi Vach to the Broadway Exhi­bition.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Machen
12, Melina Place
London N.W.8

Machen was characteristically diffident about what New Yorkers would make of his work, but the letter from Machen illustrated above shows that the exhibition resonated with some visitors. The recipient of the letter was New York lawyer and bibliophile George Franklin Ludington (1895-1949, Johns Hopkins 1916, Harvard Law 1920), who had written a wistful fan letter to the author after his visit to “a little book dealer (but by no means an inconsequential one) of this city”.  Ludington retained a draft or fair copy of his letter, in which he mentions that in his youth in rural Maryland he had “climbed through the brambles that foot of the Hill of Dreams”, and then concludes with a supplication for the secrets bestowed upon Machen by A. E. Waite or others.

Machen’s response is gracious and tricky and illuminating, and then takes a curious meander into the literary undergrowth. I know the name Coventry Patmore, and so do perhaps a half a dozen others, too; but it is a curious recommendation :

Transcribed in full:

12, Melina Place
London NW8
Dec. 11, 1923

Dear Mr Ludington

Many thanks for your kind letter of appreciation. I am glad to hear that you were interested in the Marks Exhibition. I am more fortunate than many writers. I have not had to wait until I am dead!
There is no initiation from without ; that is, there is no secret society that can impart anything worth hearing. The only initiation is from within, so that you have almost as much as I do, having read “Things Near & Far”.
But I would recommend to any one whose mind is within these lines to read Coventry Patmore’s “Religio Poetae” & “Rod, Root, & Flower”.
With my thanks & best wishes
Yours sincerely

Arthur Machen

“The only initiation is from within” is prime Machen, a generous and spontaneous response to a young worshipper. Ludington seems not to have attempted to continue the exchange and just this one glimpse remains from a century ago.


* Catalog of rare and choice books, first editions of modern authors, etc. Charles Dickens first editions including the renowned Lapham-Wallace copy of the Pickwick papers. Also the most important collection of first editions and original manuscripts of Arthur Machen ever offered. New York: Harry F. Marks, 1923. Goldstone & Sweetser 76b.
Not seen, but noted from the bibliographer’s copy held at HRC (Call no. Z 8230 H355 1923). The Machen items are nos. 202-248. [Images courtesy of HRC.]


** John Gawsworth. The Life of Arthur Machen. Edited by Roger Dobson. Friends of Arthur Machen / Reino de Redonda / Tartarus Press, 2005. Pp. 286, 300, 304.

The chapter endnotes record some of the prices in those far off days, including the manuscript of The Three Impostors at $775. By way of comparison, Marks Catalogue No. 4 (1919), presenting an abundance of curiosa, had listed a finely bound set of Casanova’s Memoirs, now for the first time translated into English (1894), at $250 without mention of Machen as the translator; a similarly bound set of the twelve volumes, with addition of the note [by Arthur Machen], appears in the 1923 catalogue at $200, where a fifteenth-century Flemish manuscript Book of Hours was priced $140. In 1925, Marks  moved from lower Broadway to west 47th street and was the U.S. agent or distributor for the Black Sun Press.

Thanks to William Hutcheson who offered me the letter earlier this year.

N.B. This account picks up some threads from an earlier post, Peak Machen : 1923.

Addendum, 14 December: sometimes serendipity brings forth new information. Here is a clipping from the New York Tribune for a Thursday in December 1923 (likely 6 December):

This is a report of the exhibition at the Marks bookshop that prompted Mr. Ludington to write Machen. One can infer that Marks had sold most of the Machen manuscripts by this date. The Charles Parsons collection is now at Yale : it includes the manuscript of “The Garden of Avallanius”, known to us as The Hill of Dreams (Beinecke GEN MSS 256, Series I).

Little, Bigs

Four copies of the Incunabula edition of Little, Big by John Crowley, hand bound by an old friend for the author, artist, publisher, and one other. The special binding was commissioned to honor a pledge made long ago, and also as a gesture to mark the many hours of readerly delight that the book has given me (see here, 2001; here, 2007;  an entire chapter in my Conversation, 2018; or here, 2021). John Crowley is also a friend of many years, and so it is a pleasure to know that the author’s copy — note the discreet initials at the foot of the spine — had reached him well in advance of today, this his eighty-first birthday.

Happy Birthday and all good wishes to John Crowley !

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.

 

recent reading : October & November 2023

— Howard Waldrop. H’ard Starts. The Early Waldrop. Edited by George R. R. Martin and Bradley Denton. [Subterranean Press, 2023]. Edition of 750 copies.
Collects nearly two dozen pieces described by Waldrop as “What I Wrote Before I Could Write” which is of course nonsense. “Lunchbox” was his first professional fiction sale, a Mars landing. “Onions, Charles Ives, and the Rock Novel” (an early piece written for Crawdaddy!), extrapolates from the posthumous production of Ives’ Fourth Symphony what would later become known as the “rock opera”. The four-part interview by Bradley Denton is great fun.

— — —

Max Beerbohm, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden’

— Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner. Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity. New York Public Library, 2023.
This handsome little book presents the exhibition labels for the Beerbohm show drawing on the NYPL collection, Lasner’s collection at the University of Delaware, and other lenders. The book (96 pp.) is rich and instructive, the exhibition is fabulous: Max’s drawing of the Devil proposing the bargain with Enoch Soames; a superb portrait of his wife Florence Kahn in six dancing poses like a Greek frieze; Rossetti’s courtship of Elizabeth Siddal; caricatures of Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and the red-headed Aubrey Beardsley; and “Mr. Beerbohm reading Mrs. Woolf”, a little sketch of himself falling asleep, in perfect imitation of the Vanessa Bell cover for her sister’s book; and more. The effect is a dense studio style hanging of drawings in a tiny room, and it works.

Max Beerbohm’s ‘improved’ copy of Zuleika Dobson

Go see it : https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/max-beerbohm (through 28 January 2024)
The guide is available online: https://drupal.nypl.org/sites-drupal/default/files/2023-10/MaxBeerbohm_PrintedGuide.pdf

— — —

— Kenneth W. Rendell. Safeguarding History. Trailblazing Adventures inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History. Foreword by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Whitman Publishing, [2023].
Memoir by the eminent autograph expert and bookman, from humble origins to international success. The accounts of uncovering forgeries are case studies of self-delusion by those who wanted to believe, and of Rendell’s clear thinking and basic skepticism. To read the book is to hear the author’s cadences and manner of speaking, very nicely done. The chapter on forming the library of Bill and Melinda Gates (and the logistics of its installation) is really something.

— John Howard and Mark Valentine. Possessions and Pursuits. Sarob Press, 2023.
Short novel by Howard, Fallen Sun, and two short stories by Mark Valentine, “Masque and Anti Masque” and “The Prospero Machine”. Third volume of tributes to the metaphysical novels of “Inkling” Charles Williams.

— — —

— Maureen Kincaid Spiller. A Traveller in Time. The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Spiller. Edited and with an introduction by Nina Allan. [Foreword by Paul Kincaid]. Academia Lunare | Luna Press Publishing [i.e., POD printed in U.S.A., 8 September 2023].
An excellent memorial volume assembling essays and reviews from her website Paper Knife and from Strange Horizons (chiefly 2010-2022, with a handful of earlier pieces), arranged thematically. The section on British author Alan Garner is fascinating as it shows her thinking about his work over decades (the earliest is from 1987; and the most recent is the last piece she published, in 2022). From the preface: “It was this notion, I think, this sense that everything we read is part of an ongoing and unending exploration, that convinced her to start reviewing. It was certainly the guiding principle behind the criticism she did write.”

— Jean-Claude Izzo. Chourmo. Une enquête de Fabio Montale [1996]. Gallimard [Folio policier, 2022].
Marseille crime novel.

— Sarban. The Doll Maker and other tales of the uncanny. Peter Davies, [1953].

— Cyril Connolly. The Modern Movement. One Hundred Key Books from England, France and America 1880-1950. André Deutsch / Hamish Hamilton, [1965].

— Charles Renouvier. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, qu’il aurait pu être. Bureau de Critique Philosophique, 1876.

— Alexander Ames and Mark Samuels Lasner. Grolier Club Bookplates Past & Present. With contributions by William E. Butler and Molly Dotson. Illustrated. The Grolier Club, 2023.

current reading : October 2023

current reading :

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

/ tricky and fun ! even as a reader might wonder about just who is this editorial or authorial ‘we’ sneaking in as parenthetical notes. A posse of all the Jonathan Lethems of the past ?
/ file under : the courage to revisit childhood

— Sarban. The Doll Maker and other tales of the uncanny. Peter Davies, [1953].

— Charles Renouvier. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, qu’il aurait pu être. Bureau de Critique Philosophique, 1876.

Utopia & Uchronia

— [Charles Renouvier]. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’Histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être. Paris : Bureau de la Critique philosophique, 1876.

A recent glimpse of a copy of Uchronie  prompted me to start reading this landmark of speculative history. It’s a tricky book, a work of ideas that employs several layers of apparent estrangement devices (somewhat like the original Castle Rackrent). I will report further.

I saw Uchronie in a display case not far from a nice copy of Utopia (Louvain, 1516) in La science-fiction à la Sorbonne, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne. Truth be told, the BIS copy of  Uchronie is a little nicer than the one I’m reading :

The exhibition, which had just opened, is part of an ongoing Année de la science-fiction and is on view in the salle Jacqueline-de-Romilly (BIS, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris) through 20 December. Non-university folks must register to visit, details here : http://www.bis-sorbonne.fr/biu/spip.php?rubrique537 . There are author events announced through March 2024 and joint initiatives with the scholarly journal ReS Futurae. 

The exhibition, which includes books from More’s Utopia through contemporary paperbacks of French science fiction and works in translation, with an interesting visual component. The case of early works contains these:

Also of note was a bibliographical item : Régis Messac. Esquisse d’une chrono-bibliographie des utopies. Lausanne : Club Futopia, 2962 (sic). The title page carries an epigraph from Leconte de Lisle : “Ton coeur est dévoré d’un songe indestructible”.

The checklist of the displays of more recent books in the reading room is available here : https://www.calameo.com/read/005807300bb9b578a61e7

P.S. Glare from the overhead lights meant I couldn’t take a picture of the BIS Utopia, but here is a snapshot of the copy at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal :